“Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show / Of touch or marble” (Lines 1-2). You, the poet says to a building, are not designed to show off like all the other buildings around you. The poet talks to a building. Under any other circumstances surely the poem sets up a comic premise or makes ironic the poet as some kind of unsettling delusional loner determined to hold a conversation with a pile of stones. The opening line establishes that sort of curiously intimate relationship with a structure by using an apostrophe, a poetic convention in which the poet speaks directly to a person, a lover perhaps, usually absent, sometimes dead, as a way to give solace to the great absence the poet is feeling and to bring the absent one to life to make that absence a reassuring presence. In using that device to address a building that is very much there, the poet introduces the dilemma central to his poem.

The more he addresses the grand manor, the more that same grand manor— despite its imposing edifice, extravagant plenty, and imposing vastness—seems threatened, isolated, like some grand lady in distress as if the poet speaks words to console it.