The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution

SIX. Subjects of Change in L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and A Mask

131 SIX Subjects of Change in L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and A Mask In the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Milton represents students who are called to activate and improve academic subjects for their maturation and aid. The youthful narrators of the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso portray the ideal vision in Of Education that educational topics can be “charming” tools to repair the ruins of our first parents and that poetry can moderate individuals’ experiences for such reparation (RM 981). The curricular distinctions that differentiate Renaissance humanism from the English Scientific Revolution, however, are not at the fore of the companion poems. Instead, the narrators evince a delight toward all learning that is as characteristic of Renaissance humanism as it is of the English Scientific Revolution that emerged from it. Yet, significant to the focus of the latter movement is the representation of the arts and sciences as complementary but separate vocations. The presence of the innovative English Scientific Revolution is much stronger in Milton’s innovative A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. While there are numerous references and internal arguments about academic subjects at large in the work, we will look to Milton’s representation of language studies within the context of progressive educational reform. 132 The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution Companion Subjects in the Companion Poems From their very opening lines, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso express the comfort and beauty of learning and of moderating passions through curricular divisions. Inviting beloveds to “come” to them in octosyllabic couplets, the youthful and charmingly self-referential narrators of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso announce their literary descent from Christopher Marlowe’s famous seduction poem “Come Live with Me.” L’Allegro invites personified Mirth to “com thou Goddes fair and free, / In Heav’n ycleap’d Ephrosyne / And by men, heart-easing Mirth,” while Il Penseroso prefers the very “Goddes, sage and holy . . . divinest Melancholy” that L’Allegro rejects (L’Allegro 1, 11–13; Il Penseroso 1). He beckons, “come pensive Nun, devout and pure, / Sober stedfast, and demure” (Il Penseroso 31–32). The differences in Milton’s mock seduction poems from the seduction poem genre highlight the educational modality of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Marlowe’s and Milton’s poems utilize poetic invitation but with very distinct means and ends. J. Martin Evans notes the “intense presentness . . . created by the poet’s favorite mode of address, the dramatic monologue.”1 While Marlowe’s monologue constructs a presentness of erotic desire and the pleasures of the court — both in the sense of the social sphere of the wealthy narrator and of romantic pursuit — Milton’s poems construct a presentness of intellectual pursuit and its moderated passions. Marlowe’s poem is short, implying the narrator’s passionate impatience for his beloved’s consent. Also, its images are very accessible: valleys, groves, hills, and fields. These settings and others, like the “beds of Roses,” comprise the secluded natural environment in which Marlowe’s narrator offers his beloved gifts that ornament her eminently present body: the woolen “gown,” the “Fair lined slippers” for her feet, the “belt of straw and ivy buds” for her waist (9, 13, 15, 17). He takes nature into his hands to make items for an intimate, erotic relationship. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, on the other hand, saunter for 152 and 176 lines, respectively, and allude to myths, urbane experiences, and books associated with higher learning. Correlatively, the companion poems are much more populated and are set in both natural and artificial settings. Milton’s narrators woo the beloveds for what they will bring as dowries, dowries that significantly are not material or physical. Mirth is instructed not to come empty-handed but instead to bring “Jest and youthful Jollity, / Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles, / Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles” as well as “sweet Liberty” (27–29, 37). We can extend Herbert Phelan’s account of the persona of the poems as being “disembodied” onto the beloved and her dowried companions.2 Personified Mirth certainly lacks the present sensuality of Marlowe’s beloved. While Milton titillates readers by having the narrator suggestively ask Mirth and her companions to “admit me to of thy crue / To live with her, and live with thee, / In unreproved pleasures free,” he comically envisions quite moderated pleasures: “To hear the Lark begin...