“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632for innocent delight by excising any hint of licentiousness, or courtly Neoplatonism,
or idolatry.
L’Allegro’s essence, youthful mirth, is displayed in the activities and values of the
pastoral mode and the literary genres harmonious with it: rural folk- and fairy-tales
of Queen Mab and Goblin; court masques and pageants; Jonson’s “learned” com-
edy; romantic comedies in which “sweetest Shakespear fancies child / Warble[s] his
native Wood-notes wilde” (ll. 133–4); and love songs in the Greek Lydian mode.
Those soothing (or as Plato thought, enervating) songs are described in wonder-
fully mimetic lines:
And ever against eating Cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian Aires,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of lincked sweetnes long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running:
Untwisting all the chains that ty
The hidden soul of harmony.
That Orpheus self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heapt Elysian flowres, and hear
Such streins as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
His half regain’d Eurydice. (ll. 135–50)This music wakens Orpheus, the figure of the poet, though it seems rather to
charm than rouse him to any activity; and it promises, but only in the subjunctive
mood, power over Pluto. Lydian music and the life of Mirth are not in any way
tainted, only limited, as the conditional terms of the final couplet also indicate:
“These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth with thee, I mean to live.”
In Il Penseroso the romance mode presents the activities, pleasures, and values of
a solitary scholar-errant. He wanders through a mysterious gothic landscape with
a melancholy nightingale, a “high lonely Towr,” a drowsy bellman, a cathedral
cloister with “high embowed Roof,” storied stained-glass windows, “dimm reli-
gious light,” a “pealing Organ” and a “full voic’d Quire” engaged in “Service
high,” and a hermitage with mossy cells. These images are appropriate to the
medievalism and romance decorum of the poem. Melancholy’s devotee enjoys
the esoteric philosophy of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, romances like Chaucer’s
unfinished Squire’s Tale for their marvels and their allegory, Greek tragedies about
Thebes and Troy by Aeschylus and Euripides, and bardic hymns like that of
Orpheus, whose power here, more decisively than in L’Allegro, “made Hell grant