[12. Those Delphic lines:] lines so crowded with meaning as to seem the utterances of an oracle.
[13. our fancy of itself bereaving:] transporting us into an ecstasy, or making us rapt with thought.
[14. Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.] The concentrated attention required to penetrate Shakespeare’s meaning makes statues of us.
[15.] Make the word sepulchred fit metrically into the iambic verse.
L’ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.
The year in which the poems were composed is uncertain. Masson regards 1632 as the probable date.
The exquisite poems to which Milton gave the Italian titles L’Allegro,—the mirthful, or jovial, man,—and Il Penseroso,—the melancholy, or saturnine, man,—should be regarded each as the pendant and complement of the other, and should be read as a single whole. The poet knew both moods, and takes both standpoints with equal grace and heartiness. The essential idea of thus contrasting the mirthful and the melancholy temperament he found ready to his hand. Robert Burton had prefaced his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with a series of not unpleasing, though by no means graceful, amœbean stanzas, in which two speakers alternately represent Melancholy, one as sweet and divine, and the other as harsh, sour, and damned. Undoubtedly Milton knew his Burton. But if he got his main idea from this source, he made his poems thoroughly Miltonic by his art of visualizing in delicious pictures the various phases of his abstract theme. The poems are wholly poetical, equally free from obscurity of thought and from obscurity of expression.
Each poem is prefaced with a vigorous exorcism of the spirit to which it is hostile. This is couched in alternate three and five accent iambics, preparing a delicious rhythmic effect when the metre changes, in the invocation, to the octosyllable, with or without anacrusis.
In L’Allegro we accompany the mirthful man through an entire day of his pleasures, from early morning to late evening. The melancholy man moves through a programme less definitely and regularly planned. The scenes of his delights are mostly in the hours of the night: when the sun is up, he hides himself from day’s garish eye.