The Countryside and Greek Mythology: The Legacy of “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensoroso”

The Countryside and Greek Mythology: The Legacy of “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensoroso”

SAPTAK CHOUDHURY

PG-I

ROLL NUMBER-39

COURSE-MILTON

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

What I intend to discuss here is not a minute analysis of the intricacies of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”. Rather I would want to investigate how these two poems become a sort of beacon for future poets, as regards the simultaneous invocation of countryside images and their appropriation to Greek mythology; keeping as it were, these two poems at a crossroads between their precedents (in the idylls of the Classical era) and their successors (in a number of poems of the Romantic and Victorian eras). I would also like to investigate the ‘complementary’ nature of the poems, against the backdrop of a mental dilemma, and how this systematic arrangement is replicated in future ‘poetic couplings’ (especially in Keats’ odes and some of Tennyson’s poems).

To begin with, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” start on contradictory terms- while the poet in “L’Allegro” wishes to shun “loathed Melancholy”, the poet in “Il Penseroso” wishes to shun “vain deluding Joys”. It is interesting to note the use of ‘black and white’ imagery here. In “L’Allegro”, the poet welcomes Euphrosyne, a “Goddess fair and free” while in “Il Penseroso” the “sage and holy, divinest Melancholy” is described as having a “saintly visage that is too bright” for human sight, hence our “weaker view” gets “o’erlaid with black”. The ‘complementarity’ in these descriptions lies, thus, not in the colors of white and black, but the effect these have on the human sight- suffice to say that the ‘fairness, freeness, and brightness’ of these divine visions have the effect of ‘clouding’ or ‘dazzling’ the human view. Whether this ‘clouding’ or ‘dazzling’ hides the ‘true’ nature of the visions, is a different matter altogether.

It would be needless here to indulge in a minute description of the details of the numerous stories and details of Greek legends and deities that Milton presents in the course of the two poems. Rather, I am more interested in two significant ‘movements’ or ‘tendencies’ exhibited here- that of otherworldly  beings or deities to ‘move’ or ‘tend’ towards and associate themselves with something ‘human’ or ‘natural’; and that of the human mind to associate with and aspire towards something ‘cosmic’ or ‘superhuman’.

A close inspection of the poems would certainly provide instances of these movements- the stories of Aurora and Tithonus, Orpheus singing for Eurydice, reviving her by moving Pluto, Proserpina, and all of nature to tears (a superhuman feat) only to see his all too ‘human’ nature deprive him of Eurydice towards the fag end of their quest. Also worth mentioning (in “Il Penseroso”) is Philomel being restrained by Silence lest she sing a song sweet and sad enough to smoothen even “Night’s rugged brow”. Besides, ‘nature’ Gods and beings like Gaia, Sylvan, Dryads, Nymphs, find significant mention in both these poems, in close association with the places of their all too ‘natural’ habitation and representation- mountains, seas, forests.

But more significantly, Melancholy’s ‘saintly visage’ (in “Il Penseroso”) is compared to the visage of Cassiopiea (wife of the Ethiopian king Cephalus) who boasted that she was more beautiful than nereids, and who, ironically, was ‘translated’, after her death, into a ‘cosmic constellation’. The balance is thus restored- while divine beings tend to move towards the human, humans aspire or tend towards the ‘inhuman’, with the ‘countryside’ as the battleground and ‘nature’ as the restoring mechanism between these two opposing tendencies. This is yet another instance of ‘complementarity’ these two poems show by displaying the conflict between two opposing tendencies- ‘complementarity’ through a study of contrasts, so to say.

As regards the similarity between the descriptions in these two poems and later poems, the list is vast. Personally, I think that certain images in these two poems are beautifully replicated in some of Keats’, Shelley’s, and Tennyson’s poems (to name a few). The images of “the laboring clouds resting on the barren breasts of mountains” (in “L’Allegro”) and “the wandering moon” moving “through the heaven’s wide pathless way” and peering through clouds (in “Il Penseroso”), are rendered vividly in Shelley’s poem “The Cloud”. Similarly, the poet’s hearing of the “far-off curfew sound over some wide watered shore” reminds one of Tithonus recollecting the song of Apollo giving rise to Ilion, in Tennyson’s “Tithonus”. Besides the imagery of the countryside- cottages with smoke rising over them, the meadows, rivers, batllements, towers, people, young and old, in “L’Allegro” is very similar to Tithonus’ view of the human world from Aurora’s palace, in “Tithonus”, as well as Keats’ description of autumnal images in “Ode to Autumn”. 

As regards images of the night, and the subject of ‘Melancholy’ itself, in “Il Penseroso”, the similarities I have noticed are majorly with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Melancholy”. Both “Il Penseroso” and “Ode to a Nightingale” share common themes- melancholy induced by ‘night-images’, worshipping of these images, as well as the ‘nightingale’ (reference to Philomel in both poems), and constant allusions to states of dreaming, sleepiness, and wakefulness. The two ‘states’- one of “youthful poets dreaming” (in “L’Allegro”) and the other of “old experience” attaining “something like prophetic strain” (in “Il Penseroso”)- can be exemplified in the final lines of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (if implied in this context, that is)-

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?                                              Fled is that music:-do I wake or sleep?”

Similarly some of the lines in Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” resonate brilliantly with the issue of the need for complementary and simultaneous existence of both “loathed Melancholy” and “vain deluding Joys” in the poet’s mind as addressed in Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”-

“She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die;                              And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips                                        

 Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,                                           Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:                                

 Ay, in the very temple of Delight                                                        Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,                                            …”

It is, thus, this sense of mutual co-existence- one existence being impossible without the other- that provides the answer to the mental dilemma experienced not only by Milton, but also by poets like Keats and Tennyson (“Tithonus” and “Ulysses” being a “poetic coupling” of similar nature). It is, of course, a selfish, one-sided relationship that the poet shares with the object of his fancy- after all, in both “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro”, after Milton speaks of his perceptions and visions regarding both Melancholy and Mirth, he ends both poems by saying that he will stay with either of them, if ‘they’ remain true to his personal visions and perceptions of ‘them’. Paradoxically, it is the solution of complementary or mutual co-existence, as evinced by the poems in question, that we observe that through the course of the two poems, Milton has neglected or completely ignored mentioning the role, tasks or sacrifices, he would have to undergo to consummate this relationship.

And the site to consummate this relationship, rather, these relationships (one-sided and selfish, though they may be), is the countryside. The context, themes, limitations, warnings, boundaries to these relationships- Milton finds these in the numerous anecdotes in Greek mythology, which has that curious property of incorporating both the supernatural and the natural in itself, and yet maintaining the balance between the supernatural and natural through self-imposed limitations and boundaries. As is often the case, Nature becomes the regulating or balancing mechanism for the restoration of ‘order’. In my opinion, this is another reason why Milton chooses the countryside to be the site of his relationship with either Melancholy or Mirth- in case, one of these relationships is consummated, the countryside in communion with Nature will ensure that Milton does not overstep the boundaries of ‘human nature’ and be condemned. A selfish purpose, no doubt; nonetheless this ensures that Melancholy and Mirth need to co-exist in Milton’s mind to prevent Milton from transgressing his human boundaries.

The countryside, in communion with nature, thus becomes a site for unification of a number of literary forms and eras. The precedent is in Greek mythology itself, with its descriptions of the two opposing ‘movements’ or ‘tendencies’ of ‘human nature’ and ‘divine nature’. The Classical era sees a ‘movement’ from the city to the countryside, in the form of idylls. Next we come to the ‘Miltonian cross-roads’ which though inheriting some of the ‘free’ nature of the earlier idyll, and the use of Greek myths, clearly marks an indication of the appropriation of these forms to mould analytic, self-introspective works of poetry- features that would represent the poetry of Romantic and Victorian eras.

In some ways, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” themselves signify ‘movements’- ‘movements’ within a literary tradition that shifts (during this period) from the demise of an earlier form, or forms, of representation, to signify the birth of a new one- in a literary tradition which itself constantly ‘moves’ and questions the very notion of a ‘human’ existence.