[Milton-L] L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

[Harold Skulsky]

Dear Louis,

Thank you for your highly nutritious queries. Unfortunately, I won't be up for air for several weeks. I hope you will be interested in my answers when they finally arrive. Meanwhile, let me just remark that at this juncture I see no evidence of a dialogue in which one interlocutor is listening to (much less misconstruing) another; Milton's literary act of juxtaposiing two poems with parallel forms, far from being evidence of a debate, strikes me as evidence of the contrary. As for the banishment-summons sequences in the respective poems, it seems to me to be provable from the context, and from the specific terms used, that l'Allegro could consistently second Penseroso's banishment-cum-summons if he heard it, and vice versa.

But at the moment (with apologies) I have been reduced  to dogmatizing with wild abandon about the meaning of the poems, and about the availability of evidence to establish that meaning. When I clear my desk, I hope to atone for this misbehavior. It may turn out, of course, that I find myself in the wrong here; your remarks are quite cogent, and in due time I hope to do them the justice of either a rebuttal or a capitulation.

All the best,
Harold