The poem is like the nymph whom he addresses,
Buxom, blithe, and debonaire.
The Penseroso is a tribute to tender melancholy, and is designed as a pendant to the Allegro:
Pensive nun devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train.
We fall in love with each goddess in turn, and find comfort for our varying moods from "grave to gay."
Burke said he was certain Milton composed the Penseroso in the aisle of a cloister, or in an ivy-grown abbey.
Comus is a noble poem, philosophic and tender, but neither pastoral nor dramatic, except in form; it presents the power of chastity in disarming Circe, Comus, and all the libidinous sirens. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were written at Horton, about 1633.
Lycidas, written in 1637, is a tender monody on the loss of a friend named King, in the Irish Channel, in that year, and is a classical pastoral, tricked off in Italian garb. What it loses in adherence to classic models and Italian taste, is more than made up by exquisite lines and felicitous phrases. In it he calls fame "that last infirmity of noble mind." Perhaps he has nowhere written finer lines than these:
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed.
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
Besides these, Milton wrote Latin poems with great vigor, if not with remarkable grace; and several Italian sonnets and poems, which have been much admired even by Italian critics. The sonnet, if not of Italian origin, had been naturalized there when its birth was forgotten; and this practice in the Italian gave him that power to produce them in English which he afterward used with such effect.