Pemberley

When you read Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice, you can't help but be struck by Elizabeth Bennett's first view of Mr. Darcy's ancestral home, Pemberley. In Chapter 43 of the book, she describes it this way.

They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

Pemberley has always struck me as a metaphor for a hope, an aspiration, a dream life.

Pemberley
Christopher Bogart

All of us have our Pemberleys.
We dreams of stately mansions in our minds,
Lofty visions filled with imaginary landscapes,
Panoramas of rolling green hills,
Pleasant pastures where birds drift
Continuously overhead as they head
Toward their rendezvous with a setting sun.

These visions are idyllic, ethereal, transitory,
Metaphoric representations of a time we wish
We lived, a place that has no name,
No form, no boundaries except within
The boundaries of our own imagination.

Our Pemberely is pure fantasy,
Ready-made with everything that we wish
We were, or could yet be.
We see our grey lives like a fixed point
That disappears by distance
As our sight fixes on a new point,
On a new journey,
A new destination.

And the dreamer,
Deep within his dream,
Arrives with each rising sun,
At a place that has no name,
But waits in anticipation
Never quite the same.