The Pensive Man

Il Penseroso is a poem of 176 lines in rhyming couplets, written by John Milton as a companion piece to L'Allegro. Both poems were composed in the 1630s, while Milton was a young scholar in his twenties living at his father's house in Hammersmith and Horton, and both were first printed in his Poems of 1645. The titles are Italian for "the cheerful man" and "the contemplative man." Each poem opens by dismissing a false parent of its opposite mood, then invokes its own muse and walks through a day and a landscape shaped by its temperament. The 1645 volume placed them side by side, inviting readers to weigh one against the other.

In Il Penseroso the speaker banishes the "vain deluding joys" of idle mirth and summons Melancholy, whom he calls "divinest," a figure of dark and grave beauty. Her company is stillness, and she leads him through a night of study and solitude: the nightingale singing in the dusk, the moon moving through cloud, a lamp burning late in a lonely tower where he reads Plato and the tragedians, and the tales of Chaucer and Spenser. Dawn brings no brightness but a woodland of oaks and a place of rest by a brook, and the poem ends in a hermit's cell where age, study and prayer meet. The speaker asks for the "peaceful hermitage" with its "mossy cell," and the closing lines turn from the world's pleasures to a vision of heavenly things.

The poem makes a quiet argument that contemplation is a way of attending to God and the world. Milton takes the older picture of melancholy as a sickness and reworks it into a disciplined seriousness of mind. The church of his imagination has "studious cloisters" and a "pealing organ," and the music "dissolves" the listener into ecstasy and "brings all Heaven before mine eyes." Sorrow here is neither despair nor performance. It is the soil of learning, poetry and prayer, and the poem implies that a serious life of faith needs hours of silence as well as hours of company. Milton does not declare a winner between the two companion poems, and he leaves the pairing open, though the later mind of the author, who devoted himself to learning and then to the great Christian epics, plainly leaned toward the pensive.

The poem has endured as one of the finest short lyrics in English, admired for its music, its images of night, and its portrait of the scholar's inner life. It remains a model for how poetry can give form to a temperament without moralizing about it.

Who should read this: Readers drawn to silence, study and the long hours of solitary prayer will find in it a rich and beautiful companion, especially if they read it aloud and alongside L'Allegro. It is also a good entry point to the young Milton before Paradise Lost. It is not for readers looking for doctrinal argument or devotional instruction, since it offers atmosphere and mood rather than teaching, and its classical and mythological allusions may require a good annotated text.