Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw my late espoused saint")

The poet John Milton was a widower twice, and he married a third time, a marriage that ended with his death in 1674. Yet he saw only his first wife with his own eyes, because by the time he married a second time, in 1656, he had become totally blind. His first marriage, to the seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, got off to a terrible start when the girl l…