The Penseroso Place

I'd better begin with a short introduction to Milton's poem "Il Penseroso." It's kind of unpromising on the face of it, 'specially in my anthology, which has the opening lines, "Hence vain deluding joyes/ The brood of folly without father bred," the invocation to the goddess Melancholy, and a description of her parents on the first page of the poem. There's interesting stuff in there, but at first read, thirty lines of it are a lot to stomach.

Perseverance, however, is rewarded. The speaker starts revealing more and more of his personality. First, he wants Melancholy to bring her buddy Contemplation along. And Silence can come along too, unless Philomel (a nightingale) will sing. But if Philomel won't show up, he wants to go for a walk:

And missing thee, I walk unseen

On the dry smooth-shaven Green,

To behold the wandring Moon (65-67)

I don't know about you, but I like this guy. Where's he want to go? Walking outside at night to look at the Moon. Good on! And he's equally okay with some dimly lit cottage, or a "lonely Towr."

The best thing about this poem is the spatial imagery. If the Penseroso represents a focused stance - one that eyes mirth, happiness and Joy suspiciously (like an old man might squint at a iPhone toting teen), then it isn't surprising that all of the places he mentions are framed and enclosed in some way. He mentions later that sometimes he stays up overnight til morning, but when the Sun starts chucking sunbeams around, he retreats to "arched walks of twilight groves." I think part of the reason for this is that thick groves of trees are protective. They sort of shrink the physical world (as in, you can't see as far as you could in a field) into a more manageable place. And then there's the dark, which works in the same way. When your light source is quite small, what you can see is suddenly intense and obvious, because all of the competing sensory input that was crowding in at your peripherals is replaced with black.

I know this smacks of literary analysis - in fact, I'm writing a paper on it right now - but I still find it an extremely interesting way of looking at things. We can examine spatial preferences in the imagery of other poems (Milton's "L'Allegro" and Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" and "The Poet's Mind" are great ones) and even in ourselves. What kind of places and spaces do you want to be in? What does that say about you?