SUBHASISH BARUA

PG-2, ROLL-22

Ultimate Certainty in Il Penseroso: Useful and Purposive

Scholarly reading, Il Penseroso(1848) by Charles West Cope

It is known widely that there is a difference between an established classic having genuine culture and a simple household name. Distinguishing oneself with a particular type of model with the help of tremendously effective external qualities is obviously a praiseworthy task. The utmost endeavour on the part of the person has to be measured in order to vivify the actual context of the text proper and the influence of the periphery on the centre, that is to say, the content of that text. That’s exactly what Milton does taking participation in tradition and individual talent as well.

Now, the interesting fact is what was school for Shakespeare is also for Milton. In fact, in Milton we encounter words or phrases, fraught with classical or Latin or Italianate importation, that make his poems linguistically and syntactically complex and variegated. What is more striking is Milton’s awareness of particular genre. Perhaps no other poet in Renaissance period is more conscious of genre than Milton, the result being one English pastoral elegy, one masque, one epic and divers others. This is not an accident, rather conscious outcome of his intellectual labour and diligent perusal. He was writing at the end of Renaissance when certain literary genres are losing their clutch. That’s why Paradise Lost is the last descendant of the epic genre. We have no more of it.

In case of pastoral tradition, apart from Lycidas, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso have also something to do with this setting. Now reading of the poems reminds me of Georgic fashion invented by Virgil in his poem bearing the same name. It’s locus classicus is the poem itself. Georgic, we may say, means a poem that is discursive, didactic, concerned with the agricultural foundation of a nation, the motto of which was purposefully taken up in Phyllips’s Cyder, Dyer’s Fleece. One traditional boundary is that which separates Georgic from pastoral and the distinction survived among Renaissance English pastoralists. Whereas the pastoral tradition concerns the relatively carefree world of shepherds, exemplars of the world of leisure or otium, the Georgic tradition concerns the more active world of farming, and the life of negotium, work, employment, occupation. Now the basic question comes up. Do L’Allegro and Il Penseroso qualify as emblems of pastoral poetry and Georgic literature? Another important thing regarding this enigmatic faculty is developed by Anthony Low in The Georgic Revolution pointing to the fact how poets of the seventeenth century concerned themselves with a world in which labour, even physical labour, was not simply the curse of Adam- but was a basis human dignity and the foundation of a healthy society. Milton, perhaps, is the first to shift the attention of English gentlemen from the aristocratic code of honor to the opposite ethic of duty, responsibility, religious dedication.

Now have the doctrines in the texts quoted above, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. ‘Nothing sweats in the world of L’Allegro’- Rosemond Tuve commented denoting the framework of the poem save ‘how the drudging Goblin sweat,/...His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the corn/That ten day-labourers could not end’, though it occurs in a tale. Now this comment summarily rejected the quality of Georgic in L’Allegro. We see going the characters to work, but not at work-

“While the ploughman, near at hand,

Whistles o’er the furrow’d land,

And the milkmaid singeth blithe,

And the mower whets his scythe,

And every shepherd tells his tale

Under the hawthorn in the dale.”

But the interesting point is that within the poem pastoral and Georgic are fused, the best evidence of which can be traced in the lines-

“Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,

Are at their savoury dinner set...

Which the neat-handed Phyllis dresses;

And then in haste, her bower she leaves,

With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;”

It is quite natural that L’Allegro, a poem about a cheerful man, hardly has anything to do with laborious work, save enjoying the moment with eating, travelling, watching. The person of the poem roams about the pastures, landscape, city, theatre almost behaving like a modern traveller. This flaneur-type quality of the character gives him the moment to note down everything that he sees in his mind happily. As opposed to it, we have the pensive man who turns ‘inward for meditation’. He does not wander, rather prefers to be within his solitary cabin (“lonly Towr”). It can rightly be said that Il Penseroso is more philosophical having earthly constructs. The character or the pensive man looks within not without for philosophical, or psychological, basis for understanding of basic human nature collaborated with setting. It has been just in saying that L’Allegro seems to be more extrovert and less exclusively cerebral in disposition than Il Penseroso, and that Il Penseroso celebrates more personalised, even private, experience. It seems to be interesting to me that a statistical chart having the list of possessive pronouns in the two poems shows the hierarchy- L’Allegro has seven possessive pronouns(pronouns-I,me,my, mine, us, our) and its counterpart has seventeen. L’Allegro stresses the object of perception, whereas Il Penseroso emphasizes on the process of that perception in the mind of the persona. Therefore it is more introspective, more egotistical. Now the poetic debate between these two poems has a corollary explanation to the opposition of day and night, to the contrariness between pleasure and wisdom, as one is driven to pleasure almost having a Utopian landscape and the other to duty (isn’t it plausible to have Freudian differentiation between Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle side by side?), to Milton’s struggle to become a great poet and a complete man.

The desire to have that completeness is voiced forth from the very beginning through a set of binary opposition. The progression of the poem happens to be through dialectical opposition. It begins with Mirth-Melancholy contrast. The delight is valued and the pensive mood is invoked respectively. The invocation of Melancholy has a body of sources having a number of allusions in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The source of melancholy is attributed to Aristotle- while black melancholy was responsible for severe depression , Aristotle’s gold melancholy was the concern of poets. And its products were the highest of man’s artistic achievements. The kind of joy in L’Allegro is not the joy exorcised in Il Penseroso. The mention of Morpheus has two connotations. It is the source of weakness, marks a kind of progression to disease and then into madness in Classical theory. In Milton it turns out to be madness of Platonic bard. Both Melancholy and Morpheus are attributed to Genius. The idea of Genius forms itself later on in Romantic period. Classical concept of sublimity and Romantic conception of Genius merge and keep on changing from age to age. Morpheus’s name actually meant “dark”, Melancholy is associated with black and overall the setting is dark- it is night. Not only the setting but the mythical characters, such as Prince Memnon’s sister, Hemera, “starred Ethiop queen”, Cassiopeia, are elevated as beautiful because of their blackness. On the contrary, L’Allegro condemns Melancholy to be the offspring of Darkness and Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the gate of Hell. It should live in the dark region where Styx flows and where sinners live and shriek with pain. Dantesque Inferno portrays the same hellish picture vividly. The pleasure of L’Allegro is of that kind which takes one out of oneself; whereas the pleasures of Il Penseroso are much more brooding and solitary. The happy man visits theatre in the city. Now the concept of city at that time is inevitably related to courts. Basically indoor performances took place in courts having limited audience. Many of Shakespeare’s late plays were performed as indoor performance in courts. But later it extended into theatre with a larger audience as soon as the city became economic source and the centre for cultural and political development.

But exploring the poems en masse, I think that Milton had intended to exploit mere contrast, L’Allegro would have been sociable, Il Penseroso solitary; L’Allegro happy-go-lucky, Il Penseroso sober. The “Mountain Nymph sweet Liberty” presides over L’Allegro, and the “Cherub Contemplation” dominates Il Penseroso. But the fact is, “Mountain Nymph sweet Liberty” and “Cherub Contemplation” have much in common and tend to merge in the same figure. The happy man is the detached observer, gliding through his world, a mere spectator, turns “outward for observation”, and certainly keeps an aesthetic distance between him and the object. The speaker in L’Allegro moves quietly behind the infinitives, “to live”, “to hear”, “to come”, thereby making his experiences public. Milton’s technical phrases are, what John Carey says, “only hazily connected with any specific agent.” The lark of L’Allegro is perfectly juxtaposed with the nightingale, Elizabethan comedy against Greek tragedy, Lydian aires to “Such notes as warbled to the string/Drew iron tears from Pluto’s cheek.” But an interesting point about the music passage is that it occurs in both poems. In L’Allegro, we have an Orphean strain which would have won Eurydice; in Il Penseroso it deals with the sad monody when Orpheus lost her. The intended objective of Milton in the famous Orpheus-Eurydice-Pluto trio is to have music, or Art, in either case; this is, to me, sine qua non of the two poems, that is to say, the immortality of Art. Artist may undergo a certain number of problems, ups and downs, but the creation lasts forever as is evident through the desire of the persona of Il Pensoroso to “attain/...somthing like Prophetic strain” and to become “The trumpet of a Prophecy” like Shelley.

Now, in Il Penseroso, the aesthetically enriched passage is that in which Milton describes his Platonist reading:

“Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely Towr,

Where I may oft out-watch the Bear.”

The descriptions set us thinking. It made the pensive man more erudite person as opposed to the whimsicality of the happy one. The pensive man possesses some kind of meditative, ascetic life having ‘calm of mind/All passion spent.’ But what is spellbindingly beautiful is to connect Lamp with Literature. Is it the Lamp that bears resemblance to Baudelaire’s Le Voyage (The Voyage) or Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) or Tagore’s Sonar Tori (The Golden Boat) as all of these have something to do with new learning, undertaking a voyage to Modernity?

Now why the Tower? To me, it encapsulates poetic loneliness drawing conclusion or ultimate result from particulars to general. Milton’s ‘Lamp at midnight hour’ is echoed in Shelley’s lines in Prince Athanase-

“Then saw their lamp from Laian’s turret gleam,

Piercing the stormy darkness ,like a star,”

Both poets allude to Plato. Milton has ‘The spirit of Plato’ and Shelley has ‘Plato’s words of light’. This Tower gradually changes and becomes ‘the sacred dark of religious contemplation’ in Yeats. Is it the invocation to mysticism and old ritual cult? Perhaps that’s why Il Penseroso seems to me to be the tour de force as it is constructed with excellent jewellery and technical ornamentation. Another important thing is the cultivation of hermeticism associated with Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice great Hermes”), traditionally the author of Corpus Hermeticum, a body of mystical writings. Neo Platonists of the Renaissance regarded him as the source of all knowledge. The study of esoteric philosophy in the lonely tower is once again mutually reinforced.

The apparent blackness of the goddess ends in brightness, as black Cassiopeia became a constellation, or is born of brightness- Saturn and ‘bright-haired Vista’; the black of night, ‘staid Wisdoms hue’ is a necessary veil to conceal a brightness in reality too intense for human kind. This is the point which Milton later uses in Paradise Lost addressing the Celestial light: “Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/...Of things invisible to mortal sight.”

The moot point for which Il Penseroso remains one step ahead is the inevitable connection of the life of contemplation with a sort of Higher Life and the shades of Melancholy with the brightest vision that brings ‘all Heav’n before mine eyes’. This highly evaluated construction has no parallel programme in L’Allegro. Here the secular life passes over into the religious. Can it be viewed as a hope to turn towards religion, as for most of the eighteenth century Milton was esteemed as religious poet? This fact further gets attested by the transformation of the almost semi-pagan “Genius of the Wood” into the Christianity which is faintly suggested in the invocation to Melancholy as “pensive Nun”. Keatsian idea of self-forgetfulness in “Forget thy self to Marble” is enhanced to hermit’s forsaking of the secular world altogether.

Suffice it to say that the pensive man is fit to endure the intellectual light sparked off from the Lamp. At the end an overwhelmingly interesting point comes from comparative study of the concluding couplets of the two poems:

“These delights, if thou canst give,

Mirth with thee, I mean to live” (L’Allegro)

and

“These pleasures Melancholy give,

And I with thee will choose to live” (Il Penseroso)-

the instrumental and governmental key word is ‘if’. The conditional ‘if’ is not present in Il Penseroso which reaffirms the final verdict that Milton chooses Melancholy over Mirth. But can it be read as the triumph of Christian contemplation and ascetic orientation practiced in ‘lonely Towr’ over pleasures enjoyed in L’Allegro? Interpretations seem abound.

Of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, I think opinion is uniform. Every man that reads them, reads them with pleasure. What Johnson says is just, “They are two noble efforts of imagination.” The characters of these poems are not necessarily kept apart, but the circumstance has been productive of greater excellence. Of these two exquisite poems, I think the last one is the most taking, which is owing to the subject. The mind, practically, delights most in these solemn images, and a genius delights most to paint them with personal disposition.

Simply put, the pensive man is philosophically more enriched going through a comparatively more enigmatic set of oppositions. The ultimate victory of his unending toil is akin to the heightened ethical and philosophical status of the Wedding-Guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for both returned “sadder” and “wiser”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stanley Fish, What It’s Like to Read L’Allegro and Il Penseroso

Cleanth Brooks and John E. Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton

Rosemond Tuve, Structural Figures of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism

Charles Dexter Cleveland, The Poetical Works of John Milton