With whatever qualifications, it is certainly one of the great English
lyrics, and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur of
conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly enough at twenty the
poet of 'Paradise Lost.' The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, further,
is known to almost every reader of poetry as the best short expression in
literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to God.
Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the growing predominance of
the High-Church party made this impossible for him, and on leaving the
University in 1632 he retired to the country estate which his parents now
occupied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for nearly six
years, amid surroundings which nourished his poet's love for Nature, he
devoted his time chiefly to further mastery of the whole range of approved
literature, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. His poems of these
years also are few, but they too are of the very highest quality.
'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' are idealized visions, in the tripping
Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed
in moods respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection.
'Comus,' the last of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masks, combines an
exquisite poetic beauty and a real dramatic action more substantial than
that of any other mask with a serious moral theme (the security of Virtue)
in a fashion that renders it unique.
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