Il Penseroso

The highly digressive style Milton employs in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso dually precludes any summary of the poems' dramatic action as it renders them interpretively ambiguous to critics.

Its rhythm of alternate lines of iambic trimeter and iambic pentameter is identical to that of the first 10 lines of L'Allegro: Hence vain deluding Joys, The brood of folly without father bred, How little you bested, Or fill the fixed mind with all your toyes; Dwell in som idle brain And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless As the gay motes that people the Sun Beams, Or likest hovering dreams The fickle Pensioners of Morpheus train.

... and, following the form of classical hymn, claims her heritage[2] with the Roman pantheon: 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); Having invoked the Melancholy goddess, the speaker imagines her ideal personification: ... pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestick train, And sable stole of Cipres Lawn, Over thy decent shoulders drawn.

The central action of the poem proceeds as poetic visions of Melancholy, imagined by the speaker: 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 wandring Moon, Riding neer her highest noon, Like one that had bin led astray Through the Heav'ns wide pathles way; ... let my Lamp at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely Tow'r, Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear The spirit of Plato to unfold What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold The immortal mind hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook: And of those Daemons that are found In fire, air, flood, or under ground... And if ought else, great Bards beside, In sage and solemn tunes have sung, Of Turneys and of Trophies hung; Of Forests, and inchantments drear, Where more is meant then meets the ear.

Thus night oft see me in thy pale career, Till civil-suited Morn appeer... And when the Sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me Goddess bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown that Sylvan loves Of Pine, or monumental Oake, Where the rude Ax with heaved stroke, Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt, Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt.

But let my due feet never fail, To walk the studious Cloysters pale, And love the high embowed Roof With antick Pillars massy proof, And storied Windows richly dight, Casting a dimm religious light.

As the final ten lines reveal, the speaker aspires to a revelation of divine knowledge to inspire his great poetry: And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every Star that Heav'n doth shew, And every Herb that sips the dew; Till old experience do attain To somthing like prophetic strain.

The final couplet issues an ultimatum to the Melancholy mood; the speaker will devote himself to the existence of a solitary hermit, staking his life upon the contemplative ideal he has illustrated throughout the poem, which he imagines will be rewarded by a vision of the divine.