[Milton-L] L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

[Carl Bellinger]

    It's the "dim religious light" that stumbles me with Il Penseroso. What could be less *Milton?* 

_No light but rather darkness visible_ is pervasive in the second poem it seems to me. How very not nice  to return from your tutorial with the "saintly visage ore laid with black," to a sulfurous chamber whose embers on the hearth "counterfeit a gloom."  Wouldn't an unfeigned gloom be sad enough?
    
    But L'Allegro seems to me an unfeigned pervasive breezy sunshine. However the intellectual logic of the repartee is conceived, and however topic may line up with topic in apparently disinterested display across the two poems, it seems to me rather strikingly apparent that the one inhabits the Garden of PL, the other the Hell. 

-Carl





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