ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
And here is the finale from “Il Penseroso”:
And as I wake, sweet music breathe
Above, about, or underneath,
Sent by some spirit to mortals good,
Or th’unseen Genius of the Wood.
But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious Cloister’s pale,
And love the high embowed Roof,
With antic Pillars massy proof,
And storied Windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing Organ blow
To the full voic’d Choir below,
In Service high and Anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes,
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every Star that Heav’n doth shew,
And every Herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like Prophetic strain.
These pleasures Melancholy give,
And I with thee will choose to live.
In spite of Dr. Johnson’s famous demurral that “I know not whether the
characters are kept sufficiently apart”—Johnson confessed to always meeting
some melancholy in “L’Allegro”’s mirth 13 —the two experiences recounted here
overlap only in the exquisiteness with which Milton puts the case for each. With
“L’Allegro,” as Georgia Christopher remarks (unwinding Milton’s elaborately
imitative phrasing in the process), the speaker “wants nothing less than a poetic
power so exorbitant that it will win the girl, even if she be Eurydice in Hell.”14
With “Il Penseroso” he wants, we might say with equal candor, a wisdom greater
than Prospero’s: not even one thought, let alone every third, is to be of the
grave. As different as these requests are from each other, moreover, they also
differ in even more obvious ways from the Nativity Ode. “L’Allegro” takes an
erotic, if not pagan, delight in the sensuousness of the “soft Lydian Airs.”
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