Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (23.1982)

tower and of its resident which, though subject to secularisation, Was not totally foreign to the
multi-layered symblism of the tower, the origin of which dates back to the usurpatory building
described in Genesis.

The image of the tower with a candle lit by II Penseroso keeping his night watch was to return
in an increasingly conventional and rigid form. in the works of the artists of the coming gene-
rations, thus justifying T.S. Eliot's criticism of Milton28.

The light which was to burn at the top of the tower from then on was not to regain its po%ver
of unearthly briOiance penetrating through a gap in the clouds above BriFs lighthouse. At the very
most, its intensity would reach that of candlelight to which Quarles had compared human life
in Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (London 1638). In 1675, John Wilmot, in his Satire against
Mankind compared Strict Reason to a will-o'-the-wisp which leads one astray, fades and
f inally vanishes. Similarly, there is a barely perceptible light at the top of the tower in Palmer's
illustration to II Penseroso, The Lonely Tower (fig. 7). A similar distrust can be sensed in what
W.B. Yeats wrote about the poet watching at night and later putting out the light, having
failed to penetrate the secrets of mysterious wisdom:

„... a bat rose from the hazels

And circled round him with its squeaky ery,

The light in the tower was put out"23.

28. An analogiiGus process of the stereotypisation of Milton's poctry by the elghteenth and nineteenth century authors is
discussed by L. Sage, ,,Milton in Literary History", in: J. Milion: Introduclions, op. cii., e.g. pp. 310, 324.

29. W. B. Yeats, „The Phases of the Moon", in: W. D. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. by A. Normann Jeffares, London, 1974
p. 85.

55