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The Myth of Orpheus in Milton’s “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “Lycidas.”

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá

8. The recreative powers of the Orpheus myth in "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas"

The Orpheus myth has either helped Milton order his poetic cosmos, or has been recreated in his writings. Milton, the Renaissance poet, received this myth as myth. The figure of Orpheus represented the extent to which poetry could outfight death, outwit fate, and aspire to life in its completeness. By his initial success-and his initial failure-the archetypal poet seems to have conjured the forces upon which human art and life draw their existence: dream of creation, illusion of creation, and true creation. Inserted in the dialectics of creation, the Orpheus myth was recreated in Milton's "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas," and pointed towards the only true creative power: generative transformation, or recreation. The tragedy of human life was on its way to being reassessed in terms of the two orders of existence: the divine and the human.

In "L'Allegro" the Orpheus myth is the thesis: a "quite set free" Eurydice is a dream, mirth in poetry is dream-like, and as such, poetry is dream-like, art is also dream-like. The apparent symmetry of this poem is based on Allegro's glance outward, and on his static equilibrium. Allegro's world is on the threshold between light and darkness, and he is idle to the point of being unproductive and static. The only time Allegro is deeply touched by external phenomena is when he realizes that the power of his song and art is like that of Orpheus in golden slumber, when the musician himself would raise his head to hear the strains that would have quite set free his Eurydice. At the exact moment Orpheus is recreated in Allegro's song, however, he seems to have discovered that his act of writing with mirth was but a dream, and his poem ends half-told, with a half-regained Eurydice. The hesitancy in face of such a revelation, or dream, and the inconclusiveness of the whole poem is heightened by the intrusion of the speaker of the coda that resumes the vision by underlining it. As in the beginning of the poem, when light was perceived through its absence, the speaker of the coda conditioned his choice to mirth as if it were the final absence of light, and against which Allegro's provisionally epiphanic vision could be measured.

Every thesis has an antithesis, for it depends on the eyes of the beholder and on how much light is subjected unto an object. "Il Penseroso" is the antithesis of "L'Allegro." The innocent (lacking or deprived of something), dream-like, and unambitious figure of Allegro is opposed to the inquisitive (as for something that has been lost), illusive, and ambitious figure of Penseroso. Again, the apparent symmetry of this poem is based on Penseroso's inward glance and on his static equilibrium. Penseroso is everywhere looking for something, but his glance is always turned towards the inner darkness of the soul. The equilibrium of Penseroso rests on his projection of darkness onto the world of phenomena together with his technique of creating an absolute inner light. With the help of his attending muse, Penseroso forges darkness in the surface and a bright light in depth. His epiphany too happened with the help of Orpheus, and it took him some time to be aware of it. Only when he summons the figure of Orpheus, does Penseroso start his temporary process of vision, for iron tears are not what love seeks, but they are all hell may grant. By the time Penseroso links his song with those songs left half told, with those songs with much left untold, and with the high and clear music that would bring forth dissolution, it is then that the speaker discloses his illusion: he finally realizes that a prophetic strain he is to attain in an old age, and that his song was like the pleasures melancholy give. Again, the speaker of the coda intrudes, for it is not the right time to conclude with "These pleasures," but those pleasures, the ones Penseroso had been intellectually misled by before he cited Orpheus. At the time Penseroso starts to emerge towards the true light, the speaker of the coda concludes the poem by bringing it back again to the depths of melancholy.

In relation to melancholy, Penseroso had first seen that it brings about illusion when he summoned Orpheus, and that as such, poetry is illusory, art is illusion. The ambitious Penseroso wanted to intersperse his song with the silence of darkness, as if it would bring about serious and solemn answers. Nevertheless, "the robe of darkness grain worn by Melancholy is the physical emblem of the poetry that absorbs silence into song," the poetry of veiled illusion that, hoping to climb to a prophetic strain, finally "stands in self-conscious awareness of limitation in sight of the paradise beyond" (Brisman 1973:92). Both Allegro and Penseroso have been fully and coherently dedicated to their poetry, and this outspoken dedication to poetry is what makes the invocations to Mirth and Melancholy be preceded by the invocation to Orpheus, the voice who wraps both muses in a mantle of wisdom's hue; "and the sign that such a voice has been heard is the wrapping-up of the revelation of 'Lycidas'" (Brisman 1973:93). In this sense, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" find their synthesis in the revelatory process of the elegy.

"Lycidas" encompasses, to a certain degree, the dialectics of ending and ongoing process. The many voices within the swain's song, and the framing voice of the persona of the coda may be viewed as refrains. Every time a new voice is introduced, or the swain reinstates his own voice, it seems as if this formal device would both mark "the closure of individual strophes," and provide "a regular focus for memory and anticipation in the temporal unfolding of the poem as a whole" (Gross 1983:24). The unfolding of "Lycidas" is definitely temporal, but it is also provisional, for its internal process participates in the dissipation of previous voices, in the dissolution of insights that have been left behind, to the point the speaker realizes the two orders of existence, and is dismissed as uncouth. As in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," the coming to terms of these two orders is such a heavy change of perspective that it must be balanced against another standpoint, otherwise it fails to be seen. It is at this crucial moment that the speaker of the coda intrudes and proposes that the swain be seen as uncouth, and his song as an eagerly warbling of a Doric lay. In this sense, the speaker of the coda appears to retrocede, and it was as if Orpheus were looking back and his Eurydice were again becoming a shade; revealed, but unseen, known, but uncouth (unknown), the processional revelation carried through the swain that wept for Lycidas is asymmetric. The asymmetry of this procession/process is not related to ill-proportioned closures of the individual strophes, nor is it related to the use of rhymed and unrhymed lines, it is rather due to the process being bonded to different and progressive perspectives.

If the asymmetrical use of language and voices that Milton makes of the pastoral in "Lycidas" is situated where the ecphrasis of pastoral poetry and revelatory insights interpenetrate, then, asymmetry of voices and text breaks the antinomy of relations of equivalence. The voices of Allegro and Penseroso do reverberate in the text and in the voices of "Lycidas:" if Allegro is the one "to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Naera's hair" (68,60), Penseroso is the one supposed "To scorn delights, and live laborious days" (72), because of "That last infirmity" of the so-called "Noble mind" (71). Their voices lose any possible contradiction, even though they are two equally correct inferences upon the poetic choice. The apparently unresolved conflict between the twins does not override death, and thus, their apparent symmetry gives way to the asymmetry of "Lycidas." When the recreation of a pre-established and settled convention enters the scene, mediation by a third element yields to "neither this nor that," or "not both this and that." Milton pushed the sign of death-and-rebirth in "Lycidas" toward its irreversible completion: its interpretant-the myth of Orpheus-is analogous to Lycidas's death to the same extent poetic transcendence acquires the status of myth; the sparagmos of the poet gives rise to the possibility of true recreation; and the fragments of the myth of Orpheus are scattered in every symmetric strophe of the elegy. This mediating thirdness, the myth of Orpheus as interpretant of the poems, is negation of the pastoral ethos, since the ideal and real worlds are not sharply separated in the poem, and is also aperiodicity-the irregular handling of parts of the myth, or the use of different mythologemes as devices. That is, generative transformation is dissipative because in order to stay alive, it must dissipate entropy and static equilibrium (maximum entropy) that destroy life. "Lycidas" is an asymmetric synthesis in prospect out of the dialectics entertained by the twin poems. "Asymmetry is more general and more fundamental than symmetry," in other words, "symmetry within asymmetry, we meet again and again" (Merrell 1994:185,186), and for this reason, the elegy is dissipative, symmetric, and asymmetric above all.

Where the elegy dissipates outward and inward visions, the approaches of Allegro and Penseroso, the pastoral speaker asserts that Lycidas has been saved through the dear might of Christ. "Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more" (165), for Lycidas and King are not dead, they not only live on in the elegy, but they also acquired a kind of livelihood in another order. This supervening order is one where they "sing, and singing in their glory move" (180), for, as Fowler (1970:175) puts it,

It is fitting, therefore, that the mourners, broken in their grief at the dismemberment of King in reenactment of the archetypal dismemberment of Orpheus, should be made whole-and with them the form of the ode itself (...) . The 8-line total of the commiato (...) may symbolize either the octave of harmony or the eternal life beyond mortality (...).

In this representation of death and dismemberment, symmetry and asymmetry are dialectical principles in a shifting and infinitely correctable form of observation that alone conducts heroes and readers in a new direction: not up a preestablished ladder of signs into a static revelation, but down and out into a variable course of existence in which they participate not only by reading and interpreting, but also by recreating. In "Lycidas," Milton warbles his Orphic lyre to link heaven with earth, and to express the resolution its content describes. The revelation the swain reports is not the harmony of the commiato with its eight lines rhyming abababcc, the harmony of the spheres is here forever changing, it represents instead eternal life through recreation beyond the mortality of static symmetry.

Early and late Milton seems to have had in mind the Orphean modeling power of recreation. In Paradise Lost, for instance, Milton summons the meaning of Urania, and not her name, to help him end his poem with the immortal voice. But as Milton himself made clear, Urania was not the muses nine, it was not even a name, it was a power to aid creation. It is not impossible to link the power of Urania, that of an immortal voice, with the power of Orpheus: true recreation. The following similes of Paradise Lost book 4 and "Lycidas" intrude "by pointedly emphasizing the inevitable disruption of pastoral 'mirroring' in a universe which has never, in either mythical or historical time, included only static reflections" (Martin 1993:171), but which is always already subject to an ample spectrum of ambiguity and dissolution:

(...) Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove

Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired

Castalian spring, might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive (PL 4:319).

And as Atropos has cut the threads of Lycidas's life:

(...) But not the praise,

Phoebus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies,

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes

And perfect witness of all judging Jove (76-82). 

This so-called digression on fame by Phoebus Apollo, one of the supposedly fathers to Orpheus, shows how, in spite of initial appearances, fair fields or fame mingle interchangeably in epical, pastoral, or historical worlds. The allegories of an edenical paradise, or an immortal fame can only be if they strive with other elements, or are transposed into the changing contexts of exemplar. The strife of allegory, and the efforts of the poet towards the attainment of a true poetic voice of recreation are "like Milton's later (and earlier) quiet endings, this testifies to order attained through struggle" (Bush 1965:66). The Orphean power of recreation, from the time of "Lycidas" and the twin poems, to the time of the epics is an ordering principle that has meant much debate, conflict, intrusion, and struggle.

John Shawcross believes that "Samson Agonistes marks the beginning of the artist's struggle to search God's unsearchable ordering and probe his uncontrollable intent" (Shawcross 1993:175). I would say that the brief epic shows Milton not only probing, but also rummaging God's intent. As to what concerns the struggle to search for God's superseding order, Milton has always assembled God's order in relation to the heavenly music of the spheres, to harmony, and to the mediating figure of Orpheus. "In the early poems particularly, Milton seldom refers to music without associating it with the original creative power of the Word of God, as a power that still works, partly through the musical arts, to recreate harmony in the soul of man. (...) Such a symbolism would most readily be focused on the figure of Orpheus" (Frye 1966:50). The change of addressers in all three poems account for his association of Orpheus with the true creative power, that is, at the exact time of a sustained vision and an almost epiphany, its existence had to be confirmed against the limina: darkness and light, static reflections and dissipation, symmetry and asymmetry, order and superseding (dislodge/depose)/supervening (follow/succeed) order. In "A Mask," for example, the Elder Brother resumes his preoccupation with mental states: "He that has light within his own clear breast / May sit i'th' center, and enjoy bright day, / But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts / Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun; / Himself is his own dungeon" (Milton 1937:238-239). Of course, this overflow of symmetry, (Light within - clear breast, center - bright day, hide - dark soul and foul thoughts, benighted - mid-day sun leaning to the dungeon within) may be problematized if one thinks it was delivered by a "reasonable" Elder Brother to an "unreasonable" Second Brother, and that the dialogue is part of a masque. Moreover, in the story of the Nativity, it seems Milton had already labored with the symbolic texture of the images of light and music (order) and darkness and noise (disorder). In any case, by the time Milton wrote the twin poems, and "Lycidas," he had already been aware that such symmetrical clear-cut divisions are not to be expected from the highly artificial worlds of the pastoral, nor from the unartificial world beside them.

Renaissance men have been haunted by the difficult and provisional divisions of an idealized world and the "real" world. They have been worried about the uncertainty, the impossible, and the inexpressible in human existence. The commonplace answer to these complex questions seems to have been in this fashion: "Learning is, after all, a mere tool for purging the sight; the vision of Truth is finally the only knowledge; and since faith alone can attain that vision for understanding" (Samuel 1965:129), Christian humanism preached faith in God above all things. In Milton's words, whereas learning would restore the ruins of our original forefathers, knowledge is the higher truth of knowing God aright: of knowing good through the agency of good. The contrast of the two orders-human and heavenly-may be thus dissolved by the transformational grace of "true" knowledge and faith. In Christian terms, transformational grace enables the medium of reason in man thus making him locate "perfect truth in infinity-one in a Second Coming, the other in a counterfactual situation of full communicative freedom" (Guss 1991:1.164-1.165): the dialogics of the twins that comprises no fixed synthesis; the dialectics between the twins and "Lycidas" that, although being open-ended, is framed by the speaker of the coda; and all their inner antitheses that recognize difference in a two-orderly world.

Milton's poetic choice in the context of Renaissance culture and seventeenth-century England could not have been any other than dialectics and dialogics as a further development of the academic debate. His scholastic education relied heavily on rhetoric, and on the other classical discursive arts. In this account, no matter what culture is articulating its ideas by these practices, or when these practices are being worked out, it may be said that dialectics "aims at discovering the truth of ideas (...) rhetoric at determining the decisions of people, and dialogics at articulating the meaning of people's ideas" (Bialostosky 1986:789). It is in the aforementioned sense that the twin poems are not a piece of rhetorical exercise; that Allegro and Penseroso do not want to be eloquent to influence or determine any poetic choice; that they are much more entertained at giving birth to their genuine ideas, at always finding means to renew their verbal expressions, and at living them coherently in their many intersections. Brought together in "Lycidas," these two world views are articulated in the process of estrangement and encounter. The dramatic dialogues within the elegy may be thought of as projections of this process, and the progressive stance of the speaker as his and the whole pastoral landscape's strife to recognize the bearings of the diverse voices. Each voice seems to add a nuance of vision till the final revelation. The elegy, in the context of Renaissance critical theory as well, aims to discover the truth the Orpheus myth was portending all along.

There is no synthesis of views or hierarchical reconciliation; Milton simply left the opposition between the twin poems unresolved, but marked his awareness of this irresolution in view of the two orders Orpheus indirectly forebodes in the elegy as such: "Had ye been there-for what could that have done" (57)? The larger point in relation to the twins and "Lycidas" is that their texts are contradictory at times, and that multiple readings are suspended within them. Thus, the contradictions between proems and codas, inductions and central sections, commiato and proem are the "chaos" of the twin poems being resolved into a cosmos of two orders. "Orpheus' dismemberment and Christ's crucifixion, like Lycidas's drowning, are part of a divine plan accepted by the speaker but terrifying nonetheless in its inscrutability" (Watterson 1993:52). Terrifying indeed for those who are still searching for God's unsearchable order, but ineffectual towards those who have come to terms with not only the inscrutability, but also of the unaccountability of man's indefinite existence, his tragedy, and the disorder of the world of phenomena.

In Milton's time, the warring over religious dogmas, the strict rule of the Laudian clergy, and the misrule of political affairs may have caused the poet to think of this world as one of disorder, chaos, death, and sin. A world that may have appeared to Milton as a place where death was almost unredeemable, and sin reinforced. Yet, "one problem in understanding Milton's historical position has been the desire to mark off his lofty idealism from the vulgar polemics of more engaged figures" (Norbrook 1995:626) of his times. In any case, Milton was always very engaged in prose treatises, and his ideas were lofty but they were not simple, sterile idealism. For one thing, as to what concerns "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas," the framework of the poems is in the like of these fruitful contrasts: pure and impure, negative and positive, dark and light polarities that evolve out of the intertwined foundation of Milton's poetic language. Moreover, the polarities that are mirrored in his pastoral worlds in particular make his idealism open-ended because they appear to be part of a "repeated strategy of provoking allegorical interpretations while refusing to supply an unequivocal 'key' to the allegory" (Achinstein 1994:150). But such a "key" is not needed; in the same fashion of myth, criticism and interpretation are cultural practices that ineluctably construct the meanings they purport to analyze. Allegory, criticism, interpretation, and myth-in a world of provisional conclusions-share a degree of recreation.

The present conclusion is provisional insofar as the whole thesis has hopefully revved up the engine of Peirce's semiotics, reveled in Johansen's pyramid, and ultimately retrieved its own perspectives in terms of an interpretant. In relation to the three poems, the Orpheus myth has been viewed as their main interpretant. In the elegy, the power of Orpheus, his loss of power, and his lack of power have been problematized in terms of a look outward, inward, and Godward. Of course, the recreational powers of Orpheus are the expressive powers of poetry, the effectual powers of life, and the transformative powers of death towards the godhead, for the Orphic movement is one that conflates interiorisation and negation, subversion of representation and intensification of the indeterminate space between polarities. Milton recreated his medium; he recreated his voice in the particular space of "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "Lycidas;" he moved outwardly, and subverted the movement; he moved inwardly, and negated, renounced this seduction; he fragmented the voice of Orpheus, his voice, in asymmetry; he voided the filled, and he wrote on it. Milton intensified the indeterminate, the ineluctable, and the tragic through the recreative powers of Orpheus. The Orpheus myth as the interpretant of the three poems, their common denominator, is the attainment of the power of recreation proper: the maximum offices of poetry.

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