Pensive

The word pensive is defined as suggestive of sad thoughtfulness or musingly dreaming thoughtful according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word pensive is an adjective used in the story, “The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery” by Margaret Sanger. On September 5th, 2018, I stumbled upon this word during a reading discussion we had. It was stated on page 107, “One by one worried, sad, pensive, and aging faces marshaled themselves before me in my dreams, sometimes appealingly, sometimes accusingly”. When I first came across the word, I was not sure what the word was saying. I used context clues and assumed it had something to do with dreaming, but, I had thought pensive meant in terms of speaking because the narrator was describing her thoughts being in her dreams as if they were speaking to her. After actually looking up the definition to the word I realized it did deal with dreams but, the dreams were sad and they were only thoughts, not actually people or things speaking. I understand the word more clearer now as it is a synonym of being sad as mentioned in the text. The narrator is basically describing her dreams in more ways than just sad by using the word pensive. She uses other words such as worried and aging to depict how she is feeling.