Locus amoenus

A locus amoenus is usually a beautiful, shady lawn or open woodland, or a group of idyllic islands, sometimes with connotations of Eden or Elysium.

[7] Matthew of Vendôme provided multiple accounts of how to describe the locus amoenus,[8] while Dante drew on the commonplace for his description of the Earthly Paradise: "Here spring is endless, here all fruits are.

[12] A mysterious and dark, feminine place, as opposed to the rigid masculine civil structure, the green world can also be found featured in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Titus Andronicus.

[citation needed] In the 20th century the locus amoenus appears in the work of T. S. Eliot, as in the Rose Garden of Burnt Norton[13] and in J. R. R. Tolkien's Shire[14] and Lothlórien.

[15] The split-off obverse of the locus amoenus is the apparently delectable but in fact treacherous garden, often linked to a malign sexuality, as in Circe's palace or the Bower of Bliss in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene.