[Milton-L] L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

[Harold Skulsky]

A dialectic exchange ("debate") requires a pattern of claims by one party that are challenged by the other. The challenges will be either (a) brute demands for justification or (b) demands for justification backed up by counterclaims. The process of justification and challenge will end with a claim by one of the parties that the rules of the dialectic game define as unchallengeable by the other; otherwise the exchange will either abort or go on to infinity.

Does the juxtaposing of the two poems significantly resemble this pattern? 

More generally, are the principles respectively grounding the two ways of life fundamentally inconsistent (except in the sense that nobody can stay up all night and all day for many days at a stretch, much less for a lifetime)? Are the world views respectively on display formally antithetical?  Are the similarities (if any) decidedly less important than the contrasts? 

On the other hand, can the contrasts be reconciled? Can the two poems be read in such a way as to describe one and the same life, lived by reference to one and the same moral and intellectual ideal?