[Milton-L] L'Allegro and Il Penseroso

[James Fleming]

What stumbles me is the ceaseless aestheticism of both poems. "Dim religious light" is a very good example. So is that picturesque monk's cell. But the first poem's survey of neutered nature -- all skips and frolics -- is full of them, too, it seems to me. Like Herrick without the wry shrug. Like paintings by that dreadful American artist of gnomes and puffing cottages whose name currently and happily escapes me. Very far, in my opinion, from the nature of _PL_. 

In short -- to stop being elliptical -- I think these poems are bad. (There. I'm sorry. I've said it.) I would put them with "The Passion" in the hierarchy of M's juvenilia. I hope it is valid or at least interesting to approach them in this way. The aestheticization of everything, from both "opposed" perspectives, seems to me key. Separate thought from the world and you get neither thought nor world. JDF


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Bellinger" <bcarlb at comcast.net>
To: "John Milton Discussion List" <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 2:35:35 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] L'Allegro and Il Penseroso



    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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