The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton

of course still rather remote and unreal: he did not foresee the solution which circumstance 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 Masson's remark that the two poems each narrate the events of "an ideal day, a day of twelve hours." A brief analysis will make the points of the discussion clear.

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 Veris), 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.

L'Allegro and Il 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 recognized the practical impossibility of combining 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

L'Allegro begins, after the preliminary verses in banishment of Melancholy and the invocation of Mirth and her companions, 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 shepherd 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 indication of the time of day; but the picture of Corydon and Thyrsis at their dinner of herbs apprises us that the chronological order 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

spectacles of court and theatre, the pageantry of princely marriages, with their accompaniment of masques and processions, or to such survivals of the medieval tournaments 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 literally as an abrupt transfer of the scene to the city, where L'Allegro, or "the cheerful 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 -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'Allegr delights, is supplemented by a description of the kind of music which especially appeals to him, songs full of lively trills and cadenzas, as opposed to the sylvan dreammusic, the organ peal, and the solemn an them, which Il Penseroso loves.

The second poem answers the first, part to part. There is the preliminary banishing of Joy, in the same measure of alternate pentameters and trimeters, followed by an invocation of Melancholy with her appropriate train of attendants. The "ideal day" opens here at evening. Il Penseroso,' "the meditative man," listens to the nightingale in the woods, hears the curfew roll across the water to the headland where he stands, or walks across the mowed hayfields 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 nightwatch, and the next in the lonely tower of a castle or moated grange, deep in Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. It is an incidental refutation of the more fanciful interpretation of the lines in L'Allegro beginping, "Towered cities please us then," that

here, in the midnight studies of Il Penseroso, 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 slumber. For him the airy stream of portraiture 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 passage 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 perfectly free to dispense with this framework wherever by so doing he could widen the meaning or intensify the beauty of his theme.

Milton was not a minute observer of nature. He does not picture her outward

aspects with that kind of fidelity which continually makes a new and surprising revelation of common things. He has not the delicate half-savage woodcraft by virtue of which some poets surprise her at her shy rites. His nature-pictures, if not conventional, are conventionalized. He paints, for the most part, in the broad typical way of the Dutch landscape school, — a style which is fatally dull in second-rate hands, but which, in the hands of a consummate artist, leads to a classical permanency and largeness of effect. It is because Milton's hand is consummate that we can read and re-read the Allegro and Penseroso, sure of a calm, renewed delight, when more thrilling poetry may have exhausted its power to charm after the first appeal.

"But come', thou God'dess fair' and free'." This metre (iambic tetrameter) was a favorite one with Milton's predecessors and contemporaries, but had shown itself to have two great weaknesses. It was prone to degenerate into monotony and into triviality.

Milton avoids the first danger by a liberal use of seven-syllable lines, with the initial stress falling on the first syllable:

Come', and trip' it as you go',

a variation which gives a buoyant lilting effect to the verse, and sends it on with elastic freshness whenever it is in danger of becoming spiritless. It will be noticed, however, that this tripping measure is ever introduced arbitrarily, for mere variety's sake, but always in answer to some brightening of mood in the thought itself, such as the quoted line illustrates. With this in

The language of these two little masterpieces has been the despair of poets. It is not that it is so beautiful, for others have equaled or excelled it in the mere conjur-mind, it will be instructive to compare the

ing power of suggestion; but that it is, as

a French critic has finely said, so just in its beauty. The means are exquisitely proportioned to the end. The speech incarnates the thought as easily, as satisfyingly, as the muscles of a Phidian youth incarnate the motor-impulse of his brain. Always fruition is just gently touched. To the connoisseur in language there is a sensation of almost physical soothing in its perfect poise and play.

The metre of these poems, notwithstanding its simplicity, will repay careful study. Disregarding the inductions, we perceive the metrical norm to be the line of eight syllables, the stresses falling on the even syllables,

L'ALLEGRO
(1633)

HENCE, loathed Melancholy,

Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn,

'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,

invocation of Mirth and her gay train with that of Melancholy and her sober attend

ants.

To show by what means Milton avoided the second danger to which the metre is exposed, that of degenerating into triviality, would be to put our finger on one of the mysteries of the creative mind. great composer has recently employed the negro melodies and jigs of the southern states as the leading themes in an imposing symphony. In somewhat the same way Milton here raises a half-doggerel metre into dignity. The real artist never shows himself so well as when he works in a homely medium, communicating to it his own distinction.

Find out some uncouth cell,

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings;

There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks,

As ragged as thy locks,

In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. 10 But come, thou Goddess fair and free,

In heaven yelep'd Euphrosyne,
And by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as some sager sing)

The frolic Wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,

As he met her once a-Maying,
There on beds of violets blue,

And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,
Filled her with thee, a daughter fair,
So buxom, blithe, and debonair.

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity,

Quips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and wreathèd Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come, and trip it as ye go,
On the light fantastic toe;

And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty;
And, if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled Dawn doth rise;
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweet-briar or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine;
While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of Darkness thin;
And to the stack, or the barn-door,
Stoutly struts his dames before:
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumbering Morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill:
Sometime walking, not unseen,
By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
Where the great Sun begins his state,
Robed in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight;
While the ploughman, near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,

And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Straight mine eye hath caught new plea

sures,

Whilst the lantskip round it measures:
Russet lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied;
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some Beauty lies.
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met
Are at their savoury dinner set
Of hearbs and other country messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses;
And then in haste her bower she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;
Or, if the earlier season lead,

To the tanned haycock in the mead.
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocond rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holyday,

100

Till the livelong daylight fail:
Then to the spicy nut-brown ale,
With stories told of many a feat,
How fairy Mab the junkets eat:
She was pinched and pulled, she said;
And he, by Friar's lanthorn led,
Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat
To earn his cream-bowl duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end;
Then lies him down, the lubbar fend,
And, stretched out all the chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And crop-full out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings.

Thus done the tales, to bed they creep,
By whispering winds soon lulled asleep.
Towered cities please us then,

And the busy hum of men,

110

Where throngs of Knights and Barons

bold,

In weeds of peace, high triumphs hold, 120
With store of Ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit or arms, while both contend
To win her grace whom all commend.
There let Hymen oft appear
In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask and antique pageantry;
Such sights as youthful Poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
And ever, against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,

130

140

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 heaped Elysian flowers, and hear
Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto to have quite set free
His half-regained Eurydice.
These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

IL PENSEROSO

(1633)

HENCE, vain deluding Joys,

150

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,

And fancies fond with gaudy shapes pos

sess,

As thick and numberless

As the gay motes that people the sunbeams,

Or likest hovering dreams,

The fickle pensioners of Morphens' train. But, hail thou Goddess sage and holy! 11 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;
Black, but such as in esteem

Prince Memnon's sister might bcseem,
Or that starred Ethiop Queen that strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The Sea-Nymphs, and their powers of
fended.

Yet thou art higher far descended:
Thee bright-haired Vesta long of yore
To solitary Saturn bore;

His daughter she; in Saturn's reign
Such mixture was not held a stain.
Oft in glimmering bowers and glades
He met her, and in secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,
Whilst yet there was no fear of Jove.
Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of cypress lawn
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come; but keep thy wonted state,
With even step, and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:
There, held in holy passion still,
Forget thyself to marble, till
With a sad leaden downward cast
Thou fix them on the earth as fast.

And join with thee calm Peace and Quiet,

Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet,
And hears the Muses in a ring

Aye round about Jove's altar sing;
And add to these retirèd Leisure,

That in trim gardens takes his pleasure;

But, first and chiefest, with thee bring
Him that yon soars on golden wing,
Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne,
The Cherub Contemplation;
And the mute Silence hist along,
'Less Philomel will deign a song,
In her sweetest saddest plight,
Smoothing the rugged brow of Night,
While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke
Gently o'er the accustomed oak.

Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly
Most musical, most melancholy!
Thee, Chauntress, oft the woods among
I woo, to hear thy even-song;
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green,
To behold the wandering Moon,
Riding near her highest noon,

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