“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632what Love did seek” (l. 108). Finally, il Penseroso turns to Christian music that
produces ecstasy and vision:
There let the pealing Organ blow
To the full voic’d Quire below,
In Service high, and Anthems clear,
As may with sweetnes, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into extasies,
And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes. (ll. 161–6)The title personages of both poems are drawn with some playfulness, as ideal but
exaggerated types. Yet through them Milton again contrasts kinds of art and life and
sets them in some hierarchical relation. A progression is implied from the genres
l’Allegro enjoys to the higher kinds il Penseroso delights in – from folk-tales to
allegorical romance, from comedy to tragedy, from Lydian airs to bardic and Chris-
tian hymns. More important, the eight-line coda of Il Penseroso disrupts the poems’
parallelism by opening to the future:
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell,
Of every Star that Heav’n doth shew,
And every Herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To somthing like Prophetic strain. (ll. 167–74)The coda makes Milton’s poetic strategy clear. He does not, obviously, plan a
monastic retreat for himself nor hold it forth as an ideal, but he makes those images,
appropriate to the medievalizing, romance mode of the poem, figure his aspiration
to prophetic poetry. In Il Penseroso, age has its place, bringing true knowledge of
nature and the ripening of “old experience” into “somthing like Prophetic strain.”
L’Allegro portrays the lifestyle of youth as a cyclic round, beginning with Mirth’s
man awakening from sleep and ending with the drowsing Orpheus. Melancholy’s
man begins with the evening and ends in waking ecstasy, the vision of heaven, all-
embracing scientific learning, and prophecy. In these poems Milton stages an ideal
solution to his youthful anxieties about slow development, lifestyles, and poetry – a
natural progression from L’Allegro to the higher life and art of Il Penseroso, which
offers to lead, after “long experience,” beyond ecstatic vision to prophetic poetry
that can convey that vision to others.