John Milton’s Sonnet XXIII, which begins “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” is an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet—with a rhyme scheme of abbaabba cdcdcd—that offers an autobiographical dream vision of the poet’s imagined reunion with his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, whom he married on November 12, 1656. Woodcock died on February 3, 1658, not quite four months after giving birth to a daughter, Katherine, who survived her mother by only one month. Most scholars posit Katherine Woodcock as the subject of Milton’s dream in this poem, but some believe that the sonnet memorializes Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, who died on May 5, 1652—three days after giving birth to a daughter, Deborah—while others argue that the poem commemorates both wives.

Critics have also held the opinion that Sonnet XXIII is not an autobiographical poem, but an idealistic work that traces a movement from pagan legend to Christian doctrine, thereby enacting a drama of the poet’s personal salvation. Although the sonnet’s ambiguity permits all these possible readings, the strongest evidence in the poem supports interpretations of Katherine as the subject of Milton’s dream about a wished-for reunion with his “late espoused saint” as one who was “washed from spot of childbed taint.” While both Mary and Katherine died after giving birth, only Katherine lived until the end of the period of purification according to “the old Law” of Leviticus 12:2-8.

Sonnet XXIII confronts not only these losses of interpersonal relationship but also the poet’s own loss of the faculty of sight. Milton was totally blind at the time of his marriage to Katherine. His dream of her, which is the sonnet’s main subject, momentarily allows the poet what had been denied but so strongly desired in life: full sight of his beloved’s face. The work’s first twelve lines present five different apparitions of Katherine and three corresponding conditions for her possible return from death, all underscored by Milton’s conviction “yet once moreto have/ Full sight of her in heaven without restraint.” However, the sonnet’s concluding two lines, which shape a sixth vision of and fourth possibility for recovering the beloved, qualify the poem’s scenarios for reunion through the bittersweet image of Katherine who, upon reaching to embrace the dreaming poet, wakes Milton from his vision of “Love, sweetness, goodness in her person,” thereby hastening her own disappearance: “But O as to embrace me she inclined/ I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

In keeping with the conventions of most English poetic elegies written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Milton’s elegiac sonnet crafts relationships between three fundamental components of the mourning process: lamentation, praise, and consolation. Each of the poem’s imagined reunions with the beloved intertwines expressions of sorrow, love, and solace—though not necessarily in that strict order—thus achieving at each step a synthesis of those three emotional and rhetorical dimensions of grief. For example, in the fourth of these visions (lines 9-11) the poet fancies seeing his beloved once more in heaven, where she will appear “vested all in white, pure as her mind.” This articulation of praise and love for Katherine’s virtue quickly incorporates a qualification for their potential meeting in heaven—“Her face was veiled”—which implies lamentation and Milton’s sorrow for his physical blindness during their life together. Although emotionally ambivalent and rhetorically ambiguous, this semblance of the beloved as both luminous and shrouded hinges upon the consolation that the faculty of imagination may permit the poet to see beyond the veil: “yet to my fancied sight,/ Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined.” Milton’s solace at this particular moment in the sonnet thus...