As I was reading the dual poems I found myself more drawn to
“Il Penseroso.” I began reading the introduction
to the two poems with the thought, “Why on earth would you want to be
melancholy?” My reading for “Il
Penseroso” ended up being colored by the first footnote from “L’Allegro” concerning
the word Melancholy. In the footnote, they mention a connotation
for melancholy: “Aristotle remarked briefly that all
extraordinary men in the arts and sciences were melancholic, thus associating
melancholy with genius” (1929). In the
opening lines of “Il Penseroso,” Milton banishes the opposing Mirth calling it
“vain deluding joys” that “Dwell in some idle brain” (l. 1, 5). He then goes on, saying of Melancholy, “Hail
divinest Melancholy, / Whose saintly visage is too bright / To hit the sense of
human sight; / And therefore to our weaker view, / O’erlaid with black, staid
Wisdom’s hue” (l. 12-16). With
melancholy comes experience and with experience comes wisdom, a far more
valuable thing for mankind than a bit of pleasure (as nice as that is at
times). I think Milton’s point is that
the pleasures of experience (or melancholy) are not instantaneous, but require
time. Certainly this is a viewpoint that
appeals to me from an LDS perspective (2 Nephi 2: 15: “…it must needs be that there was an
opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one
being sweet and the other bitter.”).
I don’t believe that Milton is absolutely writing off Mirth,
but his point in “Il Penseroso” is that we can’t live in it all the time. The greater light and wisdom comes from our
daily experiences.
