milton

In L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Milton examines happiness in terms of melancholy. In L'Allegro, melancholy is essentially exiled in the first few lines of the poem and following lines start to create the image of a bunch of hippies on an acide trip frolicing through a field on a beautiful summer's day with music playing in the background. Ok, so maybe not this exact image, but you get the feeling that happiness is epitomized and the flow of the verse is almost melodic. Everything is filled with granduer; a sunrise is not just a sunrise, its "robed in flames and amber light,/the clouds in thousand liveries dight." He is personifying inanimate objects as well as emotion and by doing so, literally fills everything around with happiness. Simple, mundane tasks of ordinary people, like the mower whetting his scythe, seem to be enjoyable simply because melancholy has been banished. It is almost as if the world is being viewed through the eyes of someone who is heavily drugged. It is obvious that although he makes this world appealing, he does not fully support it. In the poem he alludes to the forest in a Midsummer Night's dream, a place where order is inverted and it becomes quite apparent that society is not meant to be in such an uphealved state. He then proceeds in Il Penseroso to describe joys as the "fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train," suggesting that they are dreams and should be left in that realm.

Il Penseroso on the other hand, he criticizes this immediately stating "hence vain deluding joys,/the brood of Folly without father bred." To me, the absent father is melancholy and these "bastard"children are not to be seen as wonderful products of "mother mirth," but rather as dangerous and sinful. His message here seems to be that both elements are needed and that true happiness results from the recognition of melancholy in the world. Everything needs an antithesis. In order to have compassion there must be suffering, in order to have love there must be hate, in order to have right there must be wrong, and in order to have mirth there must be melancholy. But this goes beyond needing sadness to appreciate what happiness is. It extends melancholy to to seriousness, not purely sadness, in order that pure mirth does not allow our minds to become idle. He wishes for a life where he can "sit and rightly spell/of every star that heaven doth shew,/and every herb that sips the dew;" a life where knowledge and religion lead to happiness.

The last few lines of each of the poems make it seem like he is choosing between the two states of being. Going back to the mother/father analysis, its like he is caught in the middle of a brutal custody battle. Does he live with mom who will spoil him and shelter him or does who live with the strict disciplinarian father who will push him towards a fulfilled life? He seems to favor the latter and with good reason. We can't all be on drugs all of the time, that would just be downright unproductive.