ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
sheep-and-goats seismic divide occurring at a particular moment in the history
of mankind, we have not one but a pair of elongated poems, each written in a
continuous, sinewy octosyllabic meter, each recounting an ideal “every day”: two
poems virtually symmetrical in appearance, nearly opposite in point of view or
“content,” and yet as performances equally inviting, as Milton takes some care
to suggest at the end of each:
These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.
These pleasures Melancholy give,
And I with thee will choose to live.
168
(“L’Allegro”)
(“Il Penseroso”)
“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are “doubles” without being identical, reflections
with no “Duessa,” two substances or two shadows, but not, like the Nativity
Ode, a substance and a shadow, at least once Milton moves beyond the
archaically described, parallel acts of banishment that initiate each poem:
Hence loathed Melancholy
Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,
In Stygian Cave forlorn
’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,
Find out some uncouth cell…
(“L’Allegro”)
Hence vain deluding joys,
The brood of folly without father bred,
How little you bested,
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys;
Dwell in some idle brain…
(“Il Penseroso”)
and invokes his particular inventions in newly-minted tetrameter verse:
But come thou Goddess fair and free
In Heav’n yclep’d Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
(“L’Allegro,” ll. 11–16)