Milton's Major Poems - L'Allegro & Il Pensoroso & Sonnet 19 & 23
Block 4 Unit-21 ‘L’Allegro’, ‘II Penseroso’ and the Sonnets by Milton
First published in 1645, the two poems are thus deliberately posed as dialectical opposites with a strong complementarity of structure and images.
L’Allegro
The poem opens with an address to Melancholy, rather than Mirth, which takes the first ten lines. Following this the poem changes rhythm. The first ten lines are of alternating length, itching from the iambic pentameter to the trimeter.
The poem essentially outlines the events of one day, spent for the most part in the countryside, where the pleasures of the country and the beauty of the rural landscape are explored.
After the rural scenes, with the close: of day, the poem shifts to the city, and dwells, on the pleasures and joys of' night in the city, focusing on the court, its masques and music, and the pleasure and the spectacular.
L’Allegro = "the cheerful man” in Italian
Il Penseroso
Il Penseroso' begins with a staccato derision of Mirth, and following the same metrical pattern, switches to the more consistent tetrameter couplet in the subsequent invocation of Melancholy.
COMPARATIVE DISCUSSION
The pair of poems we have examined could represent one or all of a series of tensions and oppositions: between Day and Night; between Mirth and Melancholy; or between opposing courses to follow (or sensuality and sludy) in the pursuit of transcendence and union with God; or yet, Milton's old personal struggle between the classical and the Christian traditions.
'L'Allegro' was about his friend, Charles Diodati, while 'Il Penseroso' was autobiographical in nature.
Both the poems open with brief introductory stanzas of ten lincs each, and in each case, the ~introduction is through the denouncement of the opposite emotion in the counterpart poem.
In both cases, the main bodies of the poems, after the introductory stanzas, follow the same fixed line and meter: rhyming couplets in the iambic tetrameter. The opening stanzas too, share an identical structure: a quatrain followed by a sestet. In both cases the rhyme scheme of the opening stanzas is a-b-b-a, followed by c-d-d-e-e-c.
SONNETS 19 AND 23
. Milton often understated his age and predated several poems in the 1645 Poems. He was anxious about his age and his personal attractiveness. He was also cautious about vocational belatedness. By 1652 Milton was totally blind. He had spent years fulfilling his duties to the Council of State. Now he was under ~malicious attack for defending Cromwell's gove~nmento the world and for his own advocacy of divorce, and even ridiculed for his blindness. He had always meant to write a great English epic, and now it must have seemed impossible. This brilliant sonnet is proof enough that his talent has not been rendered 'useless' by age and blindness.
Both sonnets follow the iambic pentameter of conventional sonnets as well as the octave-sestet pattern, and the octave in both sonnets follows the same kind of rhyme scheme, which is a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a. The sestets in the two sonnets however, differ slightly: where Sonnet 19 follows the scheme c-d-e-c-d-e, Sonnet 23 goes c-d-c-d-cd.
The difference in the rhyme schemes of the sestets between the two sonnets draws our attention yet again to the difference in theme and treatment. While Sonnet 19's cd-e-c-d-e scheme serves well to articulate the longish argument which constitutes the consolation to the blind poet, since it permits the elaboration of extended sentences, Sonnet 23's c-d-c-d-c-d pattern works to limit the length of the sentences and statements,
Both sonnets deal with Milton's blindness.
In contrast Sonnet 23 is more ambiguous. somewhat mysterious sonnet, the person who is the object of which is not very clear. Apart from (but consistent with) the thematic ambiguity, the imagery in the sonnet is striking in its employment of light and dark, visibility and invisibility.
The vision in the poem occupies 'almost all of it, and it is only in the final couplet that a reversal of perspective is effected, and we realise that the poet is talking about a fantastic vision rather than an actual one.
Block-4 Studying Milton
Other Poems of Milton - explained in Hindi on my YouTube channel
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