ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy,
Whose Saintly visage is too bright
To hit the Sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue.
169
(“II Penseroso,” ll. 11–16)
It is clear from these beginnings that balancing ideal (but not “idle”)
viewpoints, rather than subordinating one perspective to the other, is Milton’s
primary interest in these poems. He banishes from one what is only a corrupt
version of the experience he celebrates in the other. “Loathed Melancholy,”
we discover, is not the same thing as the meditative pleasures explored in “II
Penseroso.” Nor are “vain deluding joys” the equivalent of the “sweet Liberty”
requested in “L’Allegro.” The two “figures” or characters he chooses to create,
rather, are of “far nobler shape”—to evoke a key image from Paradise Lost
(4:288) that hints at their eventual evolution into the first man and first
woman in the epic. (“For contemplation hee and valor form’d,/For softness
shee and sweet attractive Grace,” Milton continues in the epic.) But in these
premarital “companion” poems, there is no gendered difference between
“L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso,” no hierarchy, no need felt by Milton to
subordinate one experience to the other. Both characters are “goddesses”
summoned by a fanciful male speaker-poet, who, in turn, imagines living
permanently with each creation—indeed even fantasizes about being seduced
by each in the separate climactic finale leading up to the Marlovian
conclusion quoted above (echoing “The Passionate Shepherd to his
Shepherdess”). Here is “L’Allegro”:
And ever against eating Cares
Lap me in soft Lydian Airs,
Married to immortal verse,
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning
The melting voice through mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;
That Orpheus’ self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heapt Elysian flow’rs, and hear
Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
His half-regain’d Eurydice.