Diagram of Two Sonnet Forms

In this post, I present a diagram of two popular sonnet forms.

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Milton’s ‘Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint’: Eros, Lust and ‘Writing a Prostitute’

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint…

Leo Spitzer, replying to a colleague’s claim that Milton is an inferior poet to Shakespeare, uses the sonnet “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint” to show that Milton is every bit as universal as Shakespeare. Spitzer counters the charge that Milton’s apparently “private” reference to a spouse limits his reach; instead, he argues that the poem embodies the Platonic Donna Angelicata ideal (Spitzer 21).

Spitzer’s article is refreshing because most scholarship across two centuries has obsessed over the identity of the “late espousèd saint.” Critics agree she must be one of Milton’s two wives (he married three times): Mary Powell or Katherine Woodcock. I favor Katherine—Occam’s razor applies here—for three reasons. (1)

First, Milton never saw Katherine’s face; he was already blind when they wed. In the sonnet she appears veiled, matching what we know of blind dreamers, who often envision unfamiliar people as faceless or shrouded (2).

Second, Katherine died soon after childbirth—the “spot of child-bed taint” evokes the Levitical purification law, fitting her story precisely. Debates over identity split scholars into camps, but my focus is the poem itself. I adopt a post-Spitzerian reading: treat the sonnet as a self-sufficient Petrarchan jewel (3).

Anyone who studies Milton faces an avalanche of criticism. Even after deleting every article obsessed with the saint’s real name, the secondary stack devoted to Spitzer-style textual readings is remarkable for a 14-line, 119-word poem (4).

Like Spitzer and Wheeler, I contend the poem is less about a historical wife than about eros and grief—love imaged, lost, and yearned for anew.

Milton is seldom labeled “sexy”; Puritan restraint seems to forbid it. Yet he wrote Paradise Lost, brimming with marital sensuality, and blank-verse passages on Adam and Eve echo Sonnet XXIII’s final line: “She disappear’d, and left me dark, I wak’d” (Schwartz 99). His divorce tracts dwell on the “burning need” for wedded conversation, and Comus teems with erotic imagery. Puritanism never barred Milton from frank engagement with desire.

In Areopagitica he cites Christ’s wheat-and-darnel parable: good and evil grow together; virtue comes from confronting temptation. That worldview is essential to feel the poem’s struggle between heavenly eros and earthly loss.

Yet the eroticism is implicit: a veiled figure glimpsed by the poet’s “fancied sight,” tantalizing precisely because she is unreachable. The veil is both fabric and fantasy—a Platonic image and a dangerously alluring blank.

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
  Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
  Whom Jove’s great Son to her glad husband gave,
  Rescued from death by force through pale and faint.
Mine as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint,
  Purification in the old Law did save,
  And such, as yet once more I trust to have
  Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
  Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
  Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
  But O, as to embrace me she inclin’d,
  I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

The saint is at once pure and tainted, rescued and fleeing, veiled and “seen.” She is no simple donna angelicata; she is fantasy plus fact, shimmering on the knife-edge between eros and loss. The poem’s turn—“day brought back my night”—exposes desire’s futility: the dream’s bliss collapses at dawn.

Notes

1. (1) Scholars backing Mary Powell: W. R. Parker, John Shawcross, Thomas Stroup, B. J. Sokol. Advocates for Katherine Woodcock: Fitzroy Pyle, Leo Spitzer, Maurice Kelley.
2. (2) Hurovitz et al., “The Dreams of Blind Men and Women,” Dreaming 9 (1999): 183–193.
3. (3) For identity arguments see bibliography.
4. (4) Alternative readings emphasize Euripides’ Alcestis (Williamson et al.) or Levitical purification rites (Schwartz).
5. (5) Mythic resurrections—from Orpheus & Eurydice to Persephone—exact a price.
6. (6) Pornē (Gr. prostitute) + graphein (to write).
7. (7) Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins, 2004.
8. (8) Freud’s eros = libido.

Selected Bibliography on Milton’s 23^rd Sonnet

• Bloom, Harold. John Milton. Chelsea House, 1999.
• Cheney, Patrick. “Alcestis and the ‘Passion for Immortality.’” Milton Studies 18 (1983): 63–76.
• Fiske, Dixon. “The Theme of Purification in Milton’s Sonnet XXIII.” Milton Studies 8 (1975): 149–163.
• Gregory, E. R. “Milton's Protestant Sonnet Lady.” Comparative Literature Studies 33.3 (1996): 258–279.
• Hall, R. F. “Milton’s Sonnets and His Contemporaries.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 98–112. Cambridge UP, 1999.
• …

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