ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
As the marginal gloss in the Geneva Bible makes clear, Protestants regarded the
scaly dragon as a symbol of the tyrannical Catholic Church. For Milton, the bliss
of a final battle is often imagined but also always deferred in favor of mastering
a sense of spiritual readiness in this life, as the concluding stanza emphasizes:
But see! the Virgin blest,
Hath laid her Babe to rest.
Time is our tedious Song should here have ending;
Heav’n’s youngest-teemed Star
Hath fixt her polisht Car,
Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending:
And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harness’d Angels sit in order serviceable.
I think a poet less sure of his own talents might have risked the apology in the
third line but not a final rhyme that seems so patently ordinary, so “serviceable”
a finish.
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”
If the Nativity Ode aptly participates in what one historian has called “the
structure of a prejudice” whereby “for many, if not most, educated Protestant
English people of the period popery was an anti-religion, a perfectly symmetrical
negative image of true Christianity,” 12 it would be a mistake to think of the
collection in which the poem appears as a template for an emerging “Protestant”
poet. (I think Milton would have resisted almost any adjective that would have
narrowed his sense of the poet’s office.) The psalm paraphrases that follow the
ode might encourage this identification, but a little further down the line appear
those marvelously elusive, undated poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” So
different in subject matter and execution than the ode, they are also
substantially longer—328 lines—if read together, and Milton has so subtly
intertwined the two as to make it almost impossible to read the one and not the
other. Although these “companion” poems, indebted in part to Robert Burton’s
recently published Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, 1624, 1628), are often traced
to Milton’s later days at Cambridge and therefore dated around 1631, Milton
chose to leave this issue—and much else in these poems—debatable: a matter
for speculation. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are the only long poems in the
volume to stand free and clear of any specific historical occasion.
As most readers admit, whether first-time students or seasoned scholars, these
deceptively simple poems are fundamentally “resistant” to criticism, or rather,
they seem endlessly open to interpretation. Indeed, in this regard, it would be
difficult to get further from the Nativity Ode, their complicated inclusiveness
inseparable from their temporal evasiveness. Instead of an aural explosion that
fragments outward in the stellar-like burst of individual stanzas, instead of a
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