"The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing
As he met her once a-Maying
There on beds of violets blue
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew"
There’s a subtle melancholy at the bottom of Milton’s description of Zephyr and Aurora conceiving Mirth. The image “violets blue” evokes a somber scene out of sync with the rest of the poem, and the “fresh-blown roses” add to that image the force of Zephyr, the wind god, blowing down Aurora as he impregnates her. In the original manuscript, Milton emphasizes the pun between “blue” and “blew” by spelling the phrase as “violets blew.” With that one ambiguous stroke, he injects the main action of the scene, Zephyr blowing, with all the melancholy of blue, a color Milton aligns with grief and moral danger in his other poems. (In “On The Morning Of Christ’s Nativity,” he calls Hell a “furnace blue.” In “Arcades,” he uses the same “blew/dew” rhyme to describe darkness threatening a forest scene. In “Lycidas,” he notes that a grieving shepherd wears a “mantle blue.”) With the word “blue,” Milton makes the birth of Mirth surprisingly grim and bleak. He brings the scene into the world of “Il Penseroso.”
"To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spight of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow,"
In these lines, the speaker imagines how a day in the company of Mirth would begin, with them listening to the Lark that announces morning. While it is clear that the speaker and Mirth are the ones listening to the Lark, it is unclear who comes to the window to announce that morning has come. It could be Mirth or the Lark. It’s difficult to determine who comes to the window because “to come” doesn’t have a subject. The line is one of many instances in “L’Allegro” where the speaker distances subjects from their verbs. He makes it easy to forget who is doing what, because his joy is about forgetting yourself. In his pursuit of “unreproved pleasures free,” he wants to lose himself in the verbs of the poem, the action of the dance.
“In unreproved pleasures free”
It’s unclear what Milton’s speaker means when he encourages a life of “unreproved” pleasures. He could mean that the pleasures he pursues are blameless, or simply that no one is there to blame him for them. The double-meaning of the word “unreproved” underscores the speaker’s many illicit innuendos in “L’Allegro,” and the sense that he’s encouraging the reader to break social and moral conventions in pursuit of pleasure.
