"Il Penseroso" Джона Мильтона: Меланхолия и Поэтическое Вдохновение

Poem by John Milton

Il Penseroso ("the thinker") is a poem by John Milton, first found in the 1645/1646 quarto of verses The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, published by Humphrey Moseley. It was presented as a companion piece to L'Allegro, a vision of poetic mirth. The speaker of this reflective ode dispels "vain deluding Joys" from his mind in a ten line prelude, before invoking "divinest Melancholy" to inspire his future verses. The melancholic mood is idealised by the speaker as a means by which to "attain / To something like prophetic strain," and for the central action of Il Penseroso – which, like L'Allegro, proceeds in couplets of iambic tetrameter – the speaker speculates about the poetic inspiration that would transpire if the imagined goddess of Melancholy he invokes were his Muse. The highly digressive style Milton employs in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso dually precludes any summary of the poems' dramatic action as it renders them interpretively ambiguous to critics. However, it can surely be said that the vision of poetic inspiration offered by the speaker of Il Penseroso is an allegorical exploration of a contemplative paradigm of poetic genre.

It is uncertain when L'Allegro and Il Penseroso were composed, as they do not appear in Milton's Trinity College manuscript of poetry. However, the settings found in the poem suggest that they were possibly composed ca. 1631 shortly after Milton left Cambridge in 1629.

During the eighteenth century, both Il Penseroso and L'Allegro were popular and were widely imitated. The poet and engraver William Blake, who was deeply influenced by Milton's poetry and personality, made illustrations to both L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato is a pastoral ode by George Frideric Handel based on the poem. In an attempt to unite the two poems into a singular "moral design", at Handel's request, Charles Jennens added a new poem, "il Moderato", to create a third movement. Stella Revard believes that Milton, in his first publication of poems, "takes care to showcase himself as a poet in these first and last selections and at the same time to build his poetic reputation along the way by skillful positioning of poems such as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso." The poem features in the Oxford Book of English Verse as edited by Arthur Quiller Couch.