MiltonII

In this passage, taken from "L'Allegro", we find, as is often the case with Milton, an irrational wandering between fantasy and reality. It is irrational within poetic romance because Milton does not dwell on the melancholic sublime invited by the phrase line, "Till the livelong daylight fail". It is also irrational in the almost post-modern abruptness of the transition from daylight failing and the consumption of "nut-brown ale", which would move us, in this poem, from outside in the country to inside a tavern or home without any narrative bridge other than perhaps the meta-cognitive nature of Milton's sublime (what we are used to occuring regularly through both television and cinema).

Within the framework, then, of "L'Allegro" the poet has subtly introduced a meta-cognitive cue which is also meta-contextual because it forces the reader to question the viewpoint in both space and time of the author - it conveys creative authority to the audience in terms of authorship (as does modern tech/media). Thus, Milton has invoked the Muse in us, so to speak, the transition mentioned creating a retroactive dissonance which invites the reader to consider experientially the imaginative faculties intrinsic to all forms of perception. That is, is he standing in a fixed place and time viewing the countryside or is his only locatable position within the vast province of the human imagination where time and space dissolve into mere acts of being or both? Therefore, this invites the reader to participate in a mythology of self and, in so doing, find a discourse of absolute relevance to the time and place, in reality and gender, of the poem itself, which is a living thing if one subscribes to the notion that consciousness is not localized in time and space but is intermingled with time and space - matter, architecture, motion, and light.