Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/67

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��spectacles of court and theatre, the pa- geantry of princely marriages, with their accompaniment of masques and processions, or to such survivals of the mediaeval tour- naments and courts of love as England could show under the Stuarts. It would seem to be a forcing of the " ideal day " theory of the poem to take this, not liter- ally as an abrupt transfer of the scene to the city, where L'Allegro, or " the cheer- ful man," is an eye-witness of these high festivities, but fancifully, as something which he reads about after he has left the company of rustic story-tellers creeping to bed, and has himself retired to end his evening with his books. Either interpre- tation is possible, however, and the reader is free to choose for himself. It may per- haps strengthen the latter interpretation to notice that this indication, if such it is, of the kind of reading in which L'Allegro delights, is supplemented by a description of the kind of music which especially ap- peals to him, songs full of lively trills and cadenzas, as opposed to the sylvan dream- music, the organ peal, and the solemn an- them, which II Penseroso loves.

The second poem answers the first, part to part. There is the preliminary banish- ing of Joy, in the same measure of alter- nate pentameters and trimeters, followed by an invocation of Melancholy with her ap- propriate train of attendants. The " ideal day " opens here at evening. II Peuseroso, " the meditative man," listens to the night- ingale in the woods, hears the curfew roll across the water to the headland where he stands, or walks across the mowed hay- fields watching the midnight moon. Here, however, the 'temporal sequence breaks down altogether; for he is one moment in the city listening to the call of the night- watch, and the next in the lonely tower of a castle or moated grange, deep in Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. It is an inci- dental refutation of the more fanciful in- terpretation of the lines in L'Allegro begin- ning, " Towered cities please us then," that

��here, in the midnight studies of II Pense- roso, Milton gives prominence to romantic tales of chivalry which would be identical in mood with the sights which L'Allegro describes, provided both were seen only with the eye of fancy.

When the dawn comes it is ushered in, not with bird songs and cock crow, but with gusty winds and the sound of dripping eaves. The poet walks abroad, but not to note the bustle of the waking world, much less to mingle in it. Instead, he buries himself in a twilight grove, where the murmur of bees and waters invite to slum- ber. For him the airy stream of portrait- ure which dream displays is livelier than the vision of external fact. When he wakes, it is to seek the places where life comes nearest to dream, the cloister and the cathedral. The lines beginning,

" But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale,"

coming as they do in symmetrical contrast with the disputed passage of the Allegro,

" Towered cities please us then," etc.,

prove by implication that the latter pas- sage is to be taken literally. If anything more were needed to invalidate the strict application of the " ideal day " theory of the structure of the two poems, it would be supplied by the concluding passage of the Penseroso, where the poet looks forward to old age in a forest hermitage.

The result of the analysis seems to be that Milton did strive to give the poems continuity of development by following in some measure the typical happenings of twenty-four hours in two contrasted lives, or rather in two contrasted moods of a single life; but that he left himself per- fectly free to dispense with this frame- work wherever by so doing he could widen the meaning or intensify the beauty of his theme.

Milton was not a minute observer of na- ture. He does not picture her outward

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