Summary
The speaker in “L’Allegro” dedicates the first ten lines of his argument to banishing Melancholy, the goddess that guides “Il Penseroso,” from the poem. The speaker in “Il Penseroso” begins his own argument in a similar way, by banishing “vain deluding Joys,” the “crew” that guides “L’Allegro,” from his poem. Though each speaker is arguing against the other, the shared structure gestures to what the two poems have in common: Both “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” begin with ten-line introductions in which the speaker rejects the other speaker’s goddess. Even as the speakers insist that they share nothing, their arguments formally echo and reflect each other. In the poems’ first lines, Milton is already subverting his speakers’ arguments against each other by drawing attention to what they share.
After the introductory stanza, the speaker in “L’Allegro” goes on to celebrate Mirth as his chosen goddess throughout the rest of the poem. He begins by imagining how she was born. In one possible story of her birth, he suggests that she was conceived by Venus and Bachus, two Greek gods associated with love and fertility. In an alternative account, he imagines that she was instead born to Zephyr and Aurora, the Greek gods representing the wind and dawn. As the poem continues, the speaker continues to bounce between alternatives. He never lingers with one idea for long, because he doesn’t have the patience to sort through details. In contrast to the somber speaker of “Il Penseroso,” he’s barreling through his explanations before he can resolve all the particulars.
After giving a brief biography of Mirth, the speaker calls out to different attributes associated with her—Jest, Jollity, Sport, Laughter, and Liberty—which he imagines as a group of characters that join him in a dance.
The speaker then dreams of what his life would be like if he lived with Mirth and Liberty. He describes how a day in their company would begin: with the lark announcing the end of night and the rooster leading his hens out to begin the day. He goes on to imagine a morning hunt taking place in the woods and peasants coming out to tell stories and start work. After the speaker turns his eye across the landscape, he arrives at the cottage of two peasants, Corydon and Thyrsis, enjoying a meal.
The speaker then imagines how he could spend a completely different evening in the company of Mirth and Liberty, joining them in one of the country dances and staying up late into the night telling stories about fairies and goblins. The speaker imagines that he goes to sleep and dreams of castles and knights. His vision of the court takes the poem out of the pastoral and into the city, where he imagines going to the theater and seeing plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, both Milton’s contemporaries.
The poem ends with the speaker claiming that Mirth’s poetry could beat the song of Orpheus, a shepherd famous for attempting to lead his wife out of the underworld by singing a perfect song.
In the final lines of the poem, the speaker says once more that he means to live with Mirth.
Analysis
It is easy to read “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” as two extremes: one world all joy, the other all study. Milton’s speakers set us up to read them that way by framing their arguments in opposition to each other. Before the speakers say anything about their actual claims, they reject the points made by the other poem. The speaker in “L’Allegro” begins his speech on Mirth by banishing Melancholy, and the speaker in “Il Penseroso” begins his speech on Melancholy by banishing Mirth. The way the speakers frame their speeches makes it difficult to see the places where the two poems actually cross paths and mix. We search each poem for what the speakers have prepared us to find—two incompatible ways of living—because we assume their theses have given us an accurate roadmap for their arguments. However, the theses laid out by Milton’s speakers don’t necessarily match the argument Milton is making in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Though the speakers present the poems as opposites, they’re ultimately more ambiguous than their introductions make them appear.
Readers often think of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” as poems of day and night, because Milton’s speakers encourage us to read them that way in their introductions. The speaker in “L’Allegro” uses his introductory stanza to turn from the darkness of Melancholy to the light of Mirth. He means to banish darkness forever, but the poem that follows soon falls back into night. Darkness returns when the speaker describes the lark singing in the early morning, country dances in the evening, dinner with peasants, and dreams of castles late at night. If Milton’s “day” poem emphasizes light, it is because his speaker is constantly pulling Mirth out of the night and back into the day. Cleanth Brooks, who has drawn attention to the many ways in which “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” fail as day and night poems, suggests that it may be more appropriate to call them poems of “half-lights,” because Milton sets so many of his scenes at dawn and dusk. More than Milton is interested in describing day and night, light and dark, he’s interested in the points of transition, the moment the light changes, the space between the two extremes.
In “L’Allegro,” a poem that claims to be only about joy, Milton embeds the suggestion of something more somber in the image of the “tower,” which interrupts his speaker’s joyful rambles through the meadows. The tower—with its connotations of war, defense, and the city—really belongs to “Il Penseroso.” It is the vantage point of that poem, the place where the speaker in “Il Penseroso” goes to study at night. Though “L’Allegro” never enters the tower, Milton keeps it in view as a reminder that his speaker’s world contains more than joy, whether or not his speaker chooses to acknowledge it.
The tower first appears in “L’Allegro” when the speaker describes a lark arriving to announce morning, singing in a tree he calls a “watch-tower.” The tower’s sudden appearance in the poem highlights the strangeness of the moment, the lark arriving to send night away moments after the speaker has banished darkness forever in his introductory stanza. Though the lark’s morning song echoes the speaker’s call to end darkness, night should already have gone by the time the bird arrives. The bird’s appearance implies that darkness has returned to the poem in spite of its earlier banishment. With the second call for morning, Milton suggests that the speaker has not succeeded in banishing the darkness of Melancholy, and that it may not be possible to summarily end night forever.
The tower appears again as the speaker scans a happy pastoral scene, letting his eye fall on the rivers, the flocks, the mountains, the clouds, and finally “Towers, and battlements.” Unlike the earlier “watch-tower,” which Milton uses as a metaphor for the tree where the lark sings, these are real towers interrupting the speaker’s description of the pastoral. For the moment, they’re still in the distance, “bosomed high in the tufted trees,” but by the end of the speaker’s argument, they’ve dominated the poem completely. “L’Allegro” ends within the “towered cities” suggested by the earlier allusions. Though the city scenes described by the speaker are still full of joy—knights courting lovers, evenings at the theater—the speaker is now surrounded by the setting for “Il Penseroso.” His poem of joy has mutated into something more complicated, a fusion of the two extremes.
In the final lines of “L’Allegro,” Milton’s speaker gives a useful roadmap for reading his poem through the story of Orpheus, a shepherd who tried to rescue his wife Eurydice by guiding her out of the underworld with his music. Just as Orpheus uses his song to lead his wife out of darkness, Milton’s speaker uses his poem to lead Mirth away from Melancholy. Like Orpheus, the speaker in “L’Allegro” is reaching for something just out of grasp, a world free of darkness. Though the speaker suggests that he will succeed where Orpheus failed, that his own poem is good enough “to have quite set free / His half-regained Eurydice,” his statement is one of faith rathan than fact. Moments after the speaker tells us he will succeed, his poem comes to an end, and “Il Penseroso” begins. In a sort of return to the underworld, Milton’s poetry plunges back into darkness.
The story of Orpheus is an all too perfect analogue for the moment when Mirth gives way to Melancholy, but it doesn’t map onto Milton’s poetry exactly. Orpheus loses Eurydice once and forever, but Milton’s speaker loses his grasp on his argument all the time. The speaker fails each time his poem slips back into darkness, and whenever a tower appears in his argument. He is constantly pulling his poem away from night, the tower, the world of “Il Penseroso,” and falling back into it again. The speaker loses his Eurydice, then regains her, then loses her again, long before his poem finally ends and gives way to “Il Penseroso.”
Together, the two poems enter into a broader cycle—day to night, happiness to melancholy—a life that can be no one thing always and forever. When the speaker of “Il Penseroso” begins his argument, he promises never to approach Mirth again, but of course his poem ends too, giving way to “L’Allegro” once more. Ultimately, Milton proves that it is impossible to forever save Eurydice or to forever lose her. His two poems are constantly charting and recharting the path Orpheus took from the underworld to the world outside, the space between the two extremes.
