Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/66

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��POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��its genesis. The poems noted above un- doubtedly furnished an inceptive hint, and Marlowe's famous lyric, " The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," supplied a line or two. Of more interest to consider are the subjective conditions antecedent to or ac- companying the production of the poem. It was written in a transition period of the author's life, when the exuberance of youth was giving way to the soberness of man- hood, and when, too, the Elizabethan influ- ences in the immediate world about him were rapidly falling back before the ad- vancing shadow of Puritanism. We are apt to think of Milton only in his grimmer shape, after his character had hardened under the pressure of his gigantic will. One has but to read, however, among the early Latin poems, the first and the seventh elegies and the verses " On the Approach of Spring " (In Adventum Verts), to under- stand that his veins in youth were full of as heady a wine as the most radical hu- manist could wish for him. The " Sonnet to the Nightingale," ushering in his Horton period, is a pure troubadour song, eloquent of the longing for joy which is the intoler- able obsession of youth. All these centri- fugal tendencies, urging him out to seek the "joy in widest commonalty spread," were opposed by constantly growing in- stincts toward abstraction from the world of sense, a retiring upon self to find the elements of a more visionary and abiding happiness.

IS Allegro and 11 Penseroso are a kind of summing up of these two possible attitudes toward life. Milton was not prepared to champion either attitude in a partisan spirit. He felt the appeal of both in his own nature; they were the two sides of a balanced life. Yet he must have recog- nized the practical impossibility of combin- ing them in their perfect fullness, and have felt a certain personal satisfaction in setting forth clearly, though in a poetic guise, the rational claims of each upon his sympathy. The problem, if such it can be called, was

��of course still rather remote and unreal: he did not foresee the solution which circum- stance was soon to thrust upon him, in the shape of a life lived for ideal ends through days of dusty publicity.

A good deal of discussion on the part of commentators has followed Professor Mas- son's remark that the two poems each nar- rate the events of " an ideal day, a day of twelve hours." A brief analysis will make the points of the discussion clear.

U Allegro begins, after the preliminary verses in banishment of Melancholy and the invocation of Mirth and her compan- ions, with the lark's song at dawn. Then follow, in swift succession, typical glimpses of morning life in the country, the crowing of the cock, the baying of hounds, and the winding of the hunter's horn, the milkmaid singing across the sunrise fields, the shep- herd counting his sheep as they come from the fold. Through these sights and sounds the poet passes, himself " not unseen," i. e., greeted and greeting, toward the hillock whence he can view " the great sun begin his state." The landscape description which follows, of mountains, meadows, brooks, and battlemented towers, is without indi- cation of the time of day; but the picture of Corydon and Thyrsis at their dinner of herbs apprises us that the chronological or- der is still adhered to. The merry-making on the green of some " upland hamlet," whither the poet now strays, may very well fall in the late afternoon, and the nut brown ale and the goblin tales by the fire bring the " ideal day " to a close. Up to this point, only one circumstance disturbs the even development of the theme, namely, the mention of the " hoar hill " on which the hunters are heard, an autumnal detail irreconcilable with the midsummer picture.

Here, however, the development changes abruptly ; and with the words,

" Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men,"

the mind is led away to the more splendid

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