엘리시움의 오르페우스: 턴의 「쾌활한 사람」과 「우울한 사람」 연구

Abstract

As the Orpheus myth can be said to lie at the heart of Milton’s many important poems, it is essential to study how Milton, who wishes to be a serious poet surpassing the classic authors, casts Orpheus when he reflects on the vocation of poets and the role of poetry. In the youthful Milton’s works, such as the 7th Prolusion, “Elegia Sexta,” and “Ad Patrem,” the mythical hero appears as the perfect lover-artist of the pastoral life and the exemplar of the poet as the civilizer of mankind. In contrast to this ideal poet-priest, Orpheus in “Lycidas,” an Orphic lament promising the speaker’s leap into the dust and heat of politics and religion, is brutally murdered and dismembered. Even in Paradise Lost, a christian epic justifying the ways of God to men, his mother Calliope is expelled because of her being “an empty dream” and Urania, one of the nine Muses, inspires the speaker as “heavenly Muse” (the Holy Ghost). Between the characteristic duality of Orpheus embodying the ability of art to triumph over death and the failure of art in the face of the stark reality, the poet-singer in Elysium of the twin poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” shows both his past triumph and present lethargy. Just as the former’s final image is that of Orpheus dreaming of what he should have sung in order to completely recover his “half-regained” Eurydice, so the latter recognizes that we can never hear exactly what he did sing in Hades as long as he is only dreaming there instead of emerging from “the peaceful hermitage” and returning to the world of action. In short, throughout his whole life Milton seems to develop his own viewpoint on an ideal poet from the solipsistic and sentimental Orpheus who can’t show any forward-looking vision or social purpose because his song is merely moaning, to a true fighting Christian poet who is willing to minister to the edification of his people and the political and religious reformation of his country.