L'Allegro and Il Penseroso Revisited

Though I am not accustomed to writing for the Milton Online Discussion List, I decided nonetheless to give an account of our reading - and how it developed from the question posed on the list. I'm copying my comment below. I will let you know if there are any interesting responses. Watch this space!

As I happened to be teaching the twin poems, I presented to my graduate students the alternative approaches presented on the list, that - as I understand them - either a. the sensibilities of the two poems represent complimentary personae (or as someone said 'avatars'), or b. Milton preferred one of these sensibilities, namely that of 'Il Penseroso.'

By the end of our class discussions, we found both of the approaches unsatisfactory in that neither takes into account the temporal aspect of the poems, or more particularly, the way the poems provide an implicit narrative of the life of the poet. This is not to read anachronistically and suggest that since Milton later wrote religious poetry, he obviously prefers the sensibility of the later poem (as I think our precocious List contributor suggested), but rather to attend to the way Milton's poems provide a conception of the shape of the life of the poet. 'L'allegro' self-consciously provides images of those 'sights as youthful Poets dream'; while the corresponding poem anticipates a poetry of 'weary age,' which approaches something like 'prophetic strain.' As Virgil could not write the Aenied without having first written the Eclogues (and Spenser not the Fairie Queen without the Sheperd's Calender), so Milton's twin poems both provide and anticipate the shape of a poetic career. In this light, the former poem's 'straight mine eyes hath caught new pleasures' may serve as Milton's affirmation that despite the exhausting of golden poetry with Marlowe and Raleigh, and it's dismissal in Donne, it still must serve Milton - in writing his own poetic career.

Such an argument, however, does not mean preferring the 'service high' of the latter poem. For it makes no sense to say that one prefers the insights of one's adulthood when it's the youthful poetry and sensibility which allows that latter perspective - and aesthetic - to emerge. True, the form of the companion poems leads us to think that Milton was thinking in terms of oppositions (and the metaphysics of the latter poem opposing the 'immortal mind' to the 'fleshly nook' shows Miltons still to be a dualist). Thinking of the poems as part of a process of both imagining and writing his poetic career, however, may find the latter sensibility to hold greater promise (yes, I'm avoiding the term preferable), but the earlier one is nonetheless indispensable in making that latter perspective possible.