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 Master of Arts
ENGLISH (MAEG)

MEG-01
BRITISH POETRY

Block –4
Studying Milton

UNIT-17 THE LATE RENAISSANCE

UNIT-18 MILTON: THE LIFE
UNIT-19 A SURVEY OF MILTON’S LESSER POEMS
AND PROSE
UNIT-20 ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST’S NATIVITY’
AND LYCIDAS’
UNIT-21 ‘L’ ALLEGRO’, II PENSEROSO’ AND THE
SONNETS
UNIT 17 THE LATE RENAISSANCE

Structure

17.0 Objectives
17.1 Introduction
17.2 A Brief Review of the Renaissance
17.2.1 Classical Learning
17.2.2 The Reformation
17.2.3 The Emergence of Imperialism
17.2.4 The New Cosmology
17.3 The Political and Social Context
17.4 Literary and Cultural Influences on Poetry
17.5 Let's Sum Up
17.6 Revision Questions
17.7 Additional Reading

17.0 OBJECTIVES

The primary intention of this unit will be to situate the writer in his literary, social and
political context. It will be argued that:

 Milton does not belong strictly to the period conventionally identified as the
Renaissance.
 Nevertheless, the diverse strains of thought and practice that are labelled as
the Renaissance had a lasting impact on Milton, and may be seen in his work.
 Some of the main political and social transformations o f the period, which
will be identified in broad terms also influenced Milton's work significantly.
 Milton's writings thus indicate a confluence of diverse factors, in which not
just Renaissance elements but emergent trends in literature aid culture are all
woven together.

The unit will thus prepare the student for the more detailed examination of the life of
Milton and the analyses of his poetry that follow in the remaining units.

1
17.1 INTRODUCTION

This unit will begin with a review of the key features of the Renaissance, which will
help in identifying and locating the discursive context of Milton's writings. It will
then briefly cover the period in which John Milton wrote, focusing specially on the
literary, political and religious factors influencing his thought and work. We will
explore some of the key issues relating Milton's poetry Lo the period, including the
political and social context leading up to and running through the Civil War, literary
and cultural developments of the period, and the role of religious upheavals in
political and cultural transformations. A primary question that must be addressed is
the question of periodisation, i.e., why we term the period when Milton was writing
the Late Renaissance, and in what ways, if any at all, does that label aid our
understanding of Milton's work.

17.2 A BRIEF REVIEW OF TWE RENAISSANCE

'The Renaissance' is the tern1 commonly used by historians to refer to the period in
European history dating from the late fourteenth century in Italy, spreading to other
countries through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and probably reaching its
culmination in seventeenth century England with the work of John Milton, often
referred to as the last great Renaissance poet. It is difficult to briefly encapsulate the
many, sometimes contradictory, historical trends that constitute this period, and even
more difficult to identify commonalities that would justify their inclusion under a
single period label like 'the Renaissance'. But if we were to attempt a broad sketch,
with our focus especially on the upper and learned classes of the different places and
on their intellectual and cultural productions and developments, some running themes
may be recognized. These suggest a porous but identifiably coherent period, that may
be considered singular if only for the sake of convenience in arriving at an intellectual
history of the period. Some of these themes are as follows:

17.2.1 Classical Learning

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Renaissance was the revival and
popularization of classical learning. This began with the discovery of and a new
interest in the writings of ancient Greece, producing scholarship that added to the
widespread Latin scholarship of the Middle Ages. It was aided in its popularization to
no small extent by the advent of the printing press (circa 1450?), which was to
transform the range and reach of the intellectual and cultural world subsequently.
This scholarship led to the development and centring of intellectual attention on
human rather than divine objects, celebrating the virtues and potential of the human
individual, or the discourse of Humanism and consequently of Individualism both of
which we shall return to later.

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17.2.2 The Reformation

Another important factor in determining the course of the European Renaissance was
the upheaval in Christianity that is referred to as the Reformation. This began as a
series of attacks on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church and the proliferation
of breakaway sects and cults. Marlin Luther's (1483-1546) was probably the most
influential in the efflorescence of such rejections of the Church during this period.
The many ecclesiastical schools it generated within Christianity are together referred
to as Protestantism. Most of these were premised on the fundamental observation that
the path to salvation did not lie through the Church, which stood accused of
substantial corruption in its beliefs and its institutional practices, but through the
individual's acceptance of and adherence to the Holy Scriptures. Salvation was thus a
matter of the individual's direct, unmediated relation to God. The Reformation and
the consequent Counter Reformation within the Catholic Church led to several
extended wars, political turmoil, and inter- and intra-state conflicts that lasted well
into the seventeenth century, across Europe and Britain. While battled as religious
wars, these conflicts were frequently about political power and control of the state,
with Protestant ideologies finding special appeal with emerging bourgeoisies across
Europe seeking a weightier political say, and greater autonomy in trade und usury,
traditionally frowned upon by the Catholic Church.

17.2.3 The Emergence of Imperialism

The emergence of European, specifically British imperialism though not often

considered integral to understanding the Renaissance, may actually be seen as its
economic underpinning. Commensurate with the expansion of intellectual discourses
was the European discovery of various new continents and countries on the globe,
one of the most significant of these being the Americas. Trade and the settling and
exploitation of these places substantially enriched the European nations, besides
opening out the horizons of the imagination to new geographic and peoples. Both
these forms of enrichment - of the economy and of the imagination- provided the
necessary prerequisites for the flourishing of arts and culture that is characteristic of
the period in Europe.

17.2.4 The New Cosmology

The cosmology of the Middle Ages had been firmly Ptolemaic, envisioning the earth
at the centre of several concentric celestial spheres. With the publication of the
Copernican theory in 1543, proposing a heliocentric universe with the earth as one
among many planets in orbit around the sun, this became deeply controversial.
Though its real impact as felt only several decades later, it was sufficiently
controversial for Milton to refer to it in his own work, and even at that time indicated

3
the increasing inroads made by scientific discourses and methods into domains of
knowledge traditionally held by religion.

Certainly all these factors are still evident at the time Milton was writing. However,
his period is also marked by the simultaneous presence of several new historical
trends that actually come to define the following age, the Age of Enlightenment,
which spans the latter part of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth
century. Chief among these are the celebration of reason, of scientific method in the
pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit of a discourse of civic rationality that attempted
to explore and outline the relations of' individual to society. The last was manifested
largely through a relatively new popularization of the genre of political and cultural
criticism, of which Milton was an early and powerful exponent. In his poetry too,
these elements of an emerging age are engaged with, albeit circumspectly. The power
of reason is explored for instance in Book I of Paradise Lost, in Satan's attempt to
rationalise his fall from Heaven and the consequences for him. The engagement with
science is evident in Milton's metaphors and similes more than through any actual
employment of the new scientific discourses and methods. And while the whole of
Paradise Lost may be read as an early attempt to grapple with the complexities of the
relations between individual and state, individual and God and individual and society,
the possibilities of a civic rationality we inevitably renounced in favour of the more
Renaissance trait of the celebration of the human as divine being rather than as
rational being. In the poems we will be examining, it is this theme that appears to
preoccupy Milton more than rationality, as in poems like 'L’Allegro' and 'II,
Penseroso'.

Milton may thus be seen to occupy a transitional period in history between two ages,
bearing in his world the defining intellectual and cultural traits of both. Nevertheless
it appears to be more appropriate to associate him with the Renaissance - in fact to
identify him as the last major Renaissance writer - than with the Enlightenment,
because of his own leaning towards the intellectual preoccupations and positions of
that earlier period. To speak of him as representative of the late Renaissance - Which
we can now identify as approximately the period from the early to the middle decades
of the seventeenth century - would thus be reasonably accurate. The peculiar position
he occupies nevertheless needs to be further understood in the light of the political
and historical circumstances of his writing, which we will now explore.

17.3 THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

Following the death of Elizabeth in 1603, the English throne passed from Tudor
hands to the Stuarts of Scotland with the Scottish King James IV, who took the title
James I of England as well his reign, lasting till 1625 is referred to as the Jacobean
period in English history. It was witness to several major transformations in English
society, perhaps the most important being the gradual alienation of the court from its

4
increasingly insistent and demanding subjects, and of the Icing from an increasingly
Puritan Parliament. Population increased sharply, almost doubling in this period, an
increase that was commensurate with steeply rising prices and rents and a
concomitant fall in real wages. Poverty was widely evident and at a new high, leading
to social unrest and the rapid dissolution of traditional forms of social relations
between classes and ranks. English society even under Elizabeth had began seeing
the emergence of a new trading middle class and a landed gently that began to invest
more and more in bade and commerce. These sections aggressively challenged
existing orders of social rank and hierarchy with strong Puritan support. The nobility's
increasing financial dependence on social sections outside their own ranks rendered
the crown politically dominant but vulnerable. Charles I who followed James I in
1625 established a reign of decadent opulence and arbitrary power that was intended
to reflect great power and glory but succeeded only in gradually eroding his moral
and political authority, feeding accusations against him of Catholic sympathies and
then demands for substantial curbs in royal power especially from the increasingly
powerful Puritans who dominated the House of Commons in Parliament.

By 1641, civil war had erupted between the Royalists and the forces owing allegiance
to the leaders of the House of Commons who had challenged the King's power. Under
Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, the New Model Army of the Commonwealth,
successfully gained superiority, eventually leading to the capture and subsequent
execution several years later of Charles in 1649, and to the declaration of England as
a republic named 'the Commonwealth'. This did not end civil war in England,
however; mistrust and antagonism amongst the members of the Parliament eventually
led to Cromwell's use of his army to disband Parliament on charges of corruption. He
then took over direct rule of England, Ireland and Scotland as Lord Protector of the
realm in 1653, ruling till his death in 1658. The regicide of Charles I - an event that
had shocked both Catholic and Protestant sentiments across Europe - however had
had a lasting impact, resulting in repeated challenges to the legitimacy of Cromwell's
government. The Commonwealth reign he established was eventually dissolved and
Charles II, who had ceaselessly fought Cromwell from exile in France, was invited to
re-assume power in England in 1660 by the remaining members of the Parliament.
But it was only with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that it was finally established
that Parliament would be the supreme political authority, to whose mandate even the
king would have to submit.

This period of deep strife and civil unrest in England may be seen then as essentially
a moment of political and social transition in which the power of' the king became
subject to examination and regulation by an increasingly powerful civil body, the
Parliament. These changes were welcomed by the new trading and mercantile
sections, who fought in the name of religion for greater political and economic
autonomy. Alongside these changes at the level of the visible political structure,
English society was also witnessing radical transformation. With the gradual

5
colonisation of the Americas and the expansion of trade, towns and cities became
major centres of concentration of finance and labour, permitting the quick
popularisation of various strands of Puritanism like the Diggers and the Quakers
espousing radically new proto-socialist ideas, and consequently fomenting civil
unrest. In different ways, these religious ideologies challenged the existing orders and
conventions of rank, ecclesiastical and political authority, attitudes to private property
and very importantly, to the relations between the sexes. Women took an active part
in the civil unrest, with several emerging as powerful Puritan preachers. Their
presence in an until-now male dominated public space was a powerful challenge to
patriarchal dispensations, even if this was not their specific intent. Much literature of
the period steins from these diverse challenges to a still dominantly feudal-patriarclial
worldview, often taking the form of pamphleteering and political treatises and tracts,
like some of Milton's works, that sought to influence public opinion and thereby bring
about political and social change. That these were set essentially in terms of a
religious debate should not blind us to the deeply political intentions and implications
of the debate itself. The dominant theme was the question of the autonomy and rights
-political, religious, economic - of the individual in relation to existing forms of
authority-whether state, church or social conventions - and in its formulations drew
heavily on both Renaissance and Reformation discourses of humanism and
individualism. In many ways, this question is at the heart of Milton's Paradise Lost
too.

17.4 LITERARY AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON POETRY

We have already noted the emergence to prominence of the genre of the essay and the
(usually political) tract. Much of this literature - and of other literary forms of the
period - was focused on religious issues; nevertheless, the humanist influences, ideas
and concerns of the High Renaissance left a lasting impact. Many of the genres that
became prominent in this period - the verse satire, the epigram, the essay, the
meditation, the masque, the tragicomedy, the pastoral play - were imports from
Europe as part of the baggage of Renaissance influences in England. Another feature
of the period with a bearing on the kind of literature it produced was the proliferation
of schools and the promotion of education in the classical languages, literatures and
disciplines like logic and rhetoric, with all emphasis on memorising. Writers could
thus draw extensive allusions to earlier works knowing their readers would recognize
them, indicating a highly restricted but homogeneous culture. Much of this writing
was in Latin, and writing in English was either largely experimental or translations of
Continental writers, at least in poetry. While Elizabethans like Spenser, Sydney and
Raleigh did write very successful English verse, they remained substantially indebted
to Continental, specifically Italian and French writing. It is in the verse of John Donne
(1572-1631) that an entirely different, particularly English sensibility became evident:
playful, even irreverent, sometimes deliberately shocking but always retaining a
degree of seriousness and close attention to poetic craft. Later literary historians were

6
to label the kind of writing practiced by Donne and some of his contemporaries and
successors - Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, Andrew Marvell -
'Metaphysical poetry', alluding to its often abstract and strikingly unlikely figures of
speech. Milton too explored the short lyric in poems like 'L'allegro' and 'Il Penseroso',
before he essayed the epic Pczrncli.se Lost, although his own style tended towards the
classical forms and themes. 'The dominant poetry of the period was thus the short
lyric.

In theatre, the Jacobean reign saw the peaking of popular theatre and its waning
following repeated Puritan attacks on it as licentious and promoting vice. The
tragedies and the masques of the Caroline court were the most common forms that
were performed, and both employed metrical verse in dialogue. With the closure of
the theatres and the strength of the Puritans, prose in the form of meditations,
pamphlets, essays and tracts became a major literary vehicle by the mid seventeenth
century. Much of this as we have noted centred on issues of religion and the state.
The literature of the period was also influenced by the new scientific method of
inquiry propounded by Sir Francis Bacon, by the pursuit of scientific knowledge that
it accelerated and by scientific discoveries like those of Copernicus and Galileo. It
makes an often playful appearance in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, but its lasting
influence was in the challenge it was to throw to religious perceptions of the world.
Milton's famous lines in the invocation to paradise Lost - asserting that his epic was
to 'justify the ways of God to Men' -- may thus be understood in terms of either the
legalistic discourse of the conflict between the king and Parliament or that of
answering the challenge of scientific inquiry, or both. The sentiments of, Jacobean
tragedy and its vehicle of metrical verse also had a lasting impact on poetry, judging
from the prolific number of now little-known attempts to write the first English epic
in metrical verse. While several poets attempted the long narrative or the epic forms -
Patrick Hannay's Sheretine and Mariana, D'Avenant's Gondibert (1650), W
Chamberlayne's Pharonnida (1659), to name just a few – none really succeeded till
Milton. It is reasonable to argue that one reason for Milton's success was his use of
the epic form to represent the contemporary struggle between religion and the state as
itself an epic struggle, rather than confining himself to simply reconstructing the form
and its conventional classical themes in English, for its own sake. That is, Milton
rendered the epic topical and contemporary, while retaining its formal classical
moorings. One dimension of the epic's contemporaniety is its negotiations with
current debates on gender. A problem that was thrown up for Puritan patriarchy in its
promotion of individualism was that it opens up the question of women's
individuality and autonomy. The resolution of this demanded an engagement with
Biblical notions of free-will and of the culpability of women in the Fall from Grace.
Milton engaged in his poetry with these issues in some detail in the speeches between
Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.

7
17.5 LET'S SUM UP

In this unit we identified some of the main features of the phenomenon known as the
Renaissance, and proceeded to examine their relevance to understanding Milton. Our
aim was to by and locate Milton historically, as constituting a transitional moment
between the Renaissance and the period that followed. We have also seen how the
seventeenth century was a period riven by civil war, political and religious turmoil,
and by large scale transformations in the composition of English society. Along with
this, we noted how various changes took place in the literary climate of the period,
and suggested that these changes owed partly to the spread of Renaissance ideas and
to the consequences of the Reformation, in the form of the growing power of various
kinds of Puritanism. We noted how these inflected the kind of literature that emerged
as well as explored the debt that Milton's own writing owed to these changes.

17.6 REVISION QUESTIONS

1. From your readings in Milton's social and cultural context, do you agree with
the view that Milton is the last of the great Renaissance writers'? Give reasons
for your answer.
2. Identify some of the main features of the English Renaissance that were to
influence Milton's poetic work:
3. To what extent was the Reformation transformative of the Renaissance in
England?
4. What were some of the cultural and political facto1.s that led to the making of
Milton as the first major English epic poet?

17.7 ADDITIONAL WADING

1. Albanese, Denise. New Science, New World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.
2. Danielson, Dennis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge UP, 1989.
3. Evans, J. Martin. The Miltonic Moment. Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1998.
4. Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism
in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991.
5. Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton:
Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998.
8
6. Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York, 1977
7. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century
Religious Lyric. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979
8. Marcus, Leah S. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton.
New York: Routledge, 1996
9. Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the
Age of Milton. Ithaca, NY: Comell UP, 1996
10. Shifflett, Andrew Eric. Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton:
War and Peace Reconciled. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998.
11. Snider, Alvin. Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon,
Milton, Butler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994
12. Wilding, Michael. Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.

9
UNIT 18 MILTON: THE LIFE

Structure

18.0 Objectives
18.1 Introduction
18.2 An Account of Milton's Life
18.2.1 Childhood and University Life
18.2.2 Religion and Propaganda
18.2.3 Public and Political Life
18.2.4 The Restoration and its Impact
18.3 An Appraisal of Milton's Poetic Career
18.4 Let's Sum Up
18.5 Revision Questions
18.6 Additional Reading

18.0 OBJECTIVES

This unit aims to

 Offer a brief but comprehensive view of the main features and circumstances
of Milton's life.
 Identify the various phases in his life when he wrote the different poems we
will study.
 Suggest ways in which some of the main events of Milton's life impinge on
his work.
 Present an overview of Milton's poetic career that will bring out some of the
salient features of his work.

18.1 INTRODUCTION

The importance of examining a writer's life is sometimes forgotten in the necessary

insistence on close textual interpretation. We forget that such an interpretation can
often gain in richness from a knowledge of the writer's own life and times. This need
not necessarily be through directly correlating the writer's life and his/her works; it
may simply be a matter of bearing in the back of one's mind the circumstances and
events of the writer's life as a sort of backdrop to the oeuvre. Such a backdrop would
draw attention to some of the less easily evident significations of the oeuvre, and may
sometimes serve explanatorily as well. To this end, this unit will explore the

10
momentous events in Milton's life as the personal and political stage on which his
ambitions toward a poetic career were enacted. It will also glance briefly at some
personal issues from his life in relation to his work, as for instance his marital
relations and his blindness.

From your reading of the previous unit you would already have an idea of the
importance of the historical events that Milton was observer of and participant in.
What is of further significance is that Milton's personality was such that he could not
but be a key player in the events of his day. Even a cursory reading of the accounts of
his life is sufficient to confirm that he was a passionate thinker, committed to the
causes he chose to espouse, yet never determined by them to the extent of becoming
rigid in his ideologies. His refusal to follow any single Protestant school, while
maintaining a lifelong commitment to Protestantism is clear indication also of his
individuality of thought and integrity of vision. We shall now examine some of these
in greater detail.

18.2 AN ACCOUNT OF MILTON'S LIFE

18.2.1 Childhood and University Life

Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608. When his father, John Milton Sr.
was disinherited by his Roman Catholic grandfather for turning Protestant, he moved
to London and established himself successfully as a notary and moneylender who
paid a great deal of attention to his son's education. Milton is supposed to have led a
rather pampered life at home. He studied at St. Paul's School, London, from some
time between 1615 and 1620 till 1625, when he joined Christ's College, Cambridge.
At St. Paul's, he followed the regular curriculum of Latin, Greek and Hebrew; but he
also learnt several modem languages from private tutors at home. Milton was known
to have been an h i d reader, to the extent that it probably caused the blindness of his
later years, and to have decided early in his life that he would be a poet and a
humanist scholar. He went on to Cambridge and received his Bachelor of Arts degree
in March 1629 and subsequently his Master of Arts in July 1632. Here he was
nicknamed 'the Lady' for his fineness of features; he was by all accounts a handsome
youth who, by his own account, was throughout his younger days drawn to a life of
sensuality, but forswore it in the pursuit of the higher ambition of becoming an epic
poet. The chaste Lady of the masque Comus that he was soon to write, who refuse to
succumb to the temptations offered by Comus, appears to embody these sentiments to
some degree. There is some suggestion of conflict with his tutor at Cambridge, and of
a degree of unpopularity which later gave way to respect and even reverence among
both, his peers and his professors, indicative of a proud nature that was not given to
bending to popular opinion.

11
His Cambridge years display little love for scholastic logic; he preferred and
celebrated instead the ideas and literatures of Renaissance humanism, blending a '
firmly rooted Christianity with Platonism. According to him he was first taken up by
the sensuality of Ovidian and other Roman poetry, but later took greater interest in
the idealism of Dante, Petrarch, and Edmund Spenser. This was to lead to a
fascination with Platonic philosophy and finally to the mysticism of the biblical 'Book
of Revelations'. During these years he also honed his poetic craft in Latin, writing
poetry that was highly sensuous in style. Two of his English poems survive from this
period: 'On the Death of a Fair Infant' and 'At a Vacation Exercise', both written in
1628. His first great poem in English, 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' which we
will shortly examine in detail, was written in the Christmas season of 1629-30. It
reflects the maturation to fullness of his poetical craft and, its innate tendencies, its
religious theme and its hold over form as well as meter anticipating the work of his
later days. 'L'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' (both written in 1631?) though less ambitious
than the 'Nativity' poem and more reflective, in a pastoral vein, continue to reflect this
mastery, as we shall see,

18.2.2 Religion and Propaganda

On leaving Cambridge, it was assumed he would join the Church, given his scholarly
and literary gifts; but he rejected this outright, staying by his intention to become a
poet and scholar and deprecating the tyranny of the Church. This raised the problem
of financial means, which he solved by staying with his parents, first at Hammersmith
and then at Horton, for six years until 1638. 'Ad Patrem' ('To Father'), is his
expression simultaneously of gratitude to his father and a defense of the career he had
chosen: During these six years, alongside writing Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1637),
he was to also study intensely the Greek and Latin writers and read extensively in
diverse disciplines like religion, politics, philosophy, geography, history, astronomy,
mathematics and music - a liberal scholarship that was unavailable to him in
Cambridge and that he was to later deploy even in his poetry with subtlety and power.
Comus was a masque that first dramatized his favoured theme of the grand conflict
between good and evil, while Lycidas, employing the form of the classical pastoral
elegy, may be seen as his first attempt to justify God's ways to 'men'. Following his
mother's death in 1637, a year later Milton travelled to Italy, winning some
recognition for his early Latin poetry. He also visited the imprisoned astronomer
Galileo Galilei, a meeting he considered significant enough to mention in the
Areopagitica. News of growing civil and political strife at home forced him to cut
short his tour and return home the next year, to settle in London and work as a tutor.

Between 1641 and 1645, he was also to write various trenchantly argued tracts on
church reform, divorce and censorship that participated directly and passionately in
the debates of the day. The picture that emerges by this time is that of a poet deeply
engaged with and participating in the major issues of his day with a weighty

12
erudition. By 1660, the culmination of the civil wars in England, Milton had written
at least eighteen major prose works defending the Puritan rebellion and attacking its
enemies, including some supporting the regicide of Charles I. It was evidently a
period when he suspended his poetic ambitions in order to serve through his prose the
Puritan cause in the political upheavals of the time. The exceptions were the
versification of a few psalms and the writing of seventeen sonnets, ranging in subject
from the deeply personal to the political. All of Milton's prose works reflect a stern
and ardent concern with the protection of individual freedom of speech and dignity,
and condemned tyranny of any kind, whether by church or state. He repeatedly and
insistently demanded the separation of the separation of religion from politics (in
terms that, it may be noted, have high relevance to our own current Indian context),
advocating a republicanism and an almost heretical view of the Bible that were highly
controversial and brought both suspicion and notoriety. His Areopagitica, a speech
for the liberty of unlicensed printing, to the parliament of England (1644) is a classic
among his writings on these issues, as also his Doctrine anti Discipline of Divorce
(1643) and Of Education (1644), an almost typically Renaissance humanist text on
the ideal Christian education for young boys. The divorce tract was probably the
result of his own disastrous marriage to Mary Powell in 1642. Mary, half his age, was
the uneducated daughter of an Oxfordshire royalist squire who owed his father
money. The incompatibility was evident, and six weeks after the marriage Mary went
back to her family, refusing to return to Milton. For Milton the marriage was
obviously a tragic mistake, and he argued in the Doctrine that the sole existing
justification for divorce - adultery - was perhaps a lesser evil than a fundamental
incompatibility that forced the maintenance of a loveless union. Mary and Milton
were reunited in 1645 by friends. He went on to take in the entire Powell family of
ten members for almost a year, when they were impoverished by the civil war. Before
Mary died in 1652, Milton had three daughters by her. What is of consequence fir us
is that this strange union led to a highly controversial tract that developed on Milton's
own personal crisis and presented it as a fundamental social issue, framing it in the
discourse of the oppressive laws of the church. But in doing so, he also opened the
question of women's role in marriage, proposing an equality of relation and even the
(albeit theoretical) possibility of female superiority, even if he did not practise this in
his own family, in relation to either his wife or his daughters. These opinions throw a
great deal of useful light on the figuring of Eve in Book IX of Paradise Lost.

18.2.3 Public and Political Life

By 1649, Milton had been invited by Cromwell to be a secretary for foreign

languages to the Council of State. Though it was not a policy making position but
rather a public relations one, in which he was expected to defend and support the
government, Milton accepted it, eager for a more hands on participation in the politics
of his time. As part of this task, he wrote his first defence of regicide, Eikonoklastes,
in October 1649 and was to follow it with several others. The success of these was

13
tempered by the realisation of his failing eyesight, which turned to complete
blindness by the end of 1652, which was also the same year his wife Mary died.
Despite the blindness, he continued to write the political tracts of defence he was
employed to - several of them in Latin, addressing a European audience - although his
duties were substantially reduced. In 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock and had a
daughter by her, only to see them both die in 1658. He was also at this time working
on the important A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, finished some time around 1659-
60, that offers many of the theological arguments that were to form the core of the
debate in Paradise Lost. Like most Anglicans of that time, Milton was raised in a
Calvinist tradition, and considered himself one for a very long period. By the time of
the writing of Paradise Lost however, he had begun to accept the Arminian doctrine
which asserted the salvation of all believers, unlike popular Calvinism which
pronounced the salvation of just a select few, and strove continuously to reconcile this
theologically to the idea of the freedom of the individual to rational choice. The
figuring of Satan in Paradise Lost is a brilliant embodiment of the ideological
tensions of this position. Toward the end of his life he had renounced affiliations to
all Christian sects, claiming a theological independence that was quite radical for the
time.

18.2.4 The Restoration and After

The Restoration of 1660 was a deeply disillusioning moment for Milton, although his
last political pamphlet written that year continued, very courageously, to argue for the
Commonwealth form of government that he had so arduously supported, and
condemned the English people for being slavish. With the return of monarchy,
Milton's life was in danger, and he had to go into hiding for some months, The
passage of the Act of Oblivion granting clemency to the supporters of the
Commonwealth eventually made it safe for him to emerge, but even then only with
the support and intervention of friends like the poet Andrew Marvel1 and the
playwright William Davenant, and probably because his complete blindness
suggested he was now completely harmless too. He lived the years from then till his
death in straitened financial circumstances. From 1660 to 1665, Milton concentrated
on further study with the aid of his third wife Elizabeth Munshell, whom he married
in 1663, and his daughters, who also took the dictation of his magnum opus, Paradise
Lost. It was published finally in 1667, to be followed in 1671 by the publication of
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton did not survive long after this, and
already severely ill, he died on 8 Noven~be1r 674 of gout.

18.3 AN APPRAISAL OF MTLTON'S POETIC CAREER

Milton is considered by many to be the most important and influential poet in the
English language after William Shakespeare. He was to have a lasting impact on the
work in particular of poets like William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and William

14
Butler Yeats. From his early precocity in learning and interest in poetry it is evident
that he was not only gifted but aware of his gifts, and willing to hone them through
years of reading and writing. It is also clear that Milton's understanding of the poetic
vocation was, from the very beginning, an exalted one. He saw himself as the true
successor of Spenser, in that he wanted to ruse the classical heritage of the
Renaissance with the Christian spirit of the Reformation, while remaining a
quintessentially English poet. It is in this sense that Milton is also an intensely self
reflexive poet, whose poetry is suffused with the awareness of its own ambition and
vocation. When we examine some of the shorter poems, this sense of self-awareness
in the poetry will become clearer, but for immediate reference for the student, it may
be worth looking at Milton's 'Lycidas', a poem in which the poet explicitly poses the
question of the worth of poetry and of the poetic vocation. The important point to
note is that the answer for Milton was always a religious one, in the sense that he saw
his poetry as always at the service of Christianity. In this sense, poetry was a spiritual
vocation, divinely inspired by a religious muse and therefore in continuation with his
religious interests, rather than a means of self aggrandizement. However, it is also
clear that for Milton the religious was not divorced from the political. This political
sensibility manifested in several ways: in his intense conviction in religious
autonomy, in his belief that the only true rejoinder to classical literature and
philosophy would have to be an elaborate Christian one, and in the concomitant need
to espouse contemporary Protestant English culture as the true Christian one. The
consequence was inevitably a strongly English-nationalistic sensibility which was
worked out in both humanist and Protestant-religious terms in his poetry.

In addition to the strongly political dimension of his poetic work, almost all of
Milton's poetry is suffused by a musicality that underscores his singular attention to
enhancing the poetics of the English language specifically. That is, the rhymes and
rhythms native to English are explored and exploited with lyrical skill in all his
poems, whether in the lighter mode of the shorter poems or in the more weighty and
sonorous tones of Paradise Lost. The following lines from ‘L’Allegro’ illustrate this
point:

While the Cock with lively din,

Scatters the rear of darknes thin,
And to the stack, or the Barn dore,
Stoutly struts his Dames before,
Oft list'ning how the Hounds and horn,
Chearly rouse the slumbring morn,
From the side of som Hoar Hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill. (11.49-56)

This ear for sound and the consequent enhancing of the musical potential of the
English language was one of the lasting legacies of Milton to succeeding poets, many

15
of whom remained envious of him in these abilities. The musicality of his poetry was
sometimes conjoined with a striking sensuality of imagery, as in the following lines
from 'Lycidas' :

That on the green terf suck the honied showres,

And purple all the ground with vernal flowres.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies.
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Gessamine,
The white Pink, and the Pansie freakt with jeat,
The glowing Violet.
The Musk-rose, and the well attir'd Woodbine.
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive hed,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:'
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed…. [ll. 140-91]

What is interesting is that this was to grow into an important dimension of his poetry
especially after his blindness set in, and is especially in evidence in the early parts of
his epic Paradise Lost.

18.4 LET'S SUM UP

In this unit, we undertook to examine some of the key events and circumstances of
the life of John Milton, beginning with his childhood years and the years as a student
in Cambridge, in which he had an early inclination to a poetic career. We went on to
explore in some detail Milton's involvement in the political and religious turmoil of
his age, focusing especially on the importance of religious politics to his public and
personal life. We noted how his poetic career was temporarily put on hold by his,
involvement in the civil war and the twenty year Commonwealth reign. We explored
the impact of his blindness and his fall from political favour on his life, and the
subsequent return to his original vocation as a poet. We then had an overview of this
vocation and poetic career, examining Milton's chief achievements and contributions
as a poet. We shall now further elaborate on that overview, studying the matters that
came to be of concern to him in both his poetic and prose work, while also exploring
the factors that shaped them at the formal level.

18.5 REVISION QUESTIONS

1. Milton's life is largely a record of conflicts between diverse interests. Do you

agree?
2. Through your readings here and in other sources, give an account of the nature
and extent of the influence of Puritanism in Milton's life. To what extent is this
enhanced or countermanded by his classical learning?

16
18.6 ADDITIONAL READING

Brown, Cedric C. john Milton: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Campbell, Gordon. A Milton Chronology New York: Macmillan St. Martin's, 1997.

Danielson, Dennis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge UP, 1989,

Grose, Christopher. Milton and the Sense of Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Guillory, John. "Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-

Esteem." Critical Essay on John Milton, Edited by Christopher Kendrick. New York:
G.K. Hall, 1995, 165-193.

Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York, 1977

Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries:

Religion, Politics, und Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.

Low, Lisa Elaine and Anthony John Harding eds. Milton, the Metaphysicals, and
Romanticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Miller, David. John Milton: Poetry. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

Orgel, Stephen and Jonathan Goldberg, eds. The Oxford Authors John Milton.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

Shawcross, John T. John Milton: The Self' and the World. Lexington, KY: University
Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Spaeth, Sigmund. Milton's Knowledge of Music. Ann ARbor MI: University of

Michigan Press, 1963.

Zagorin, Perez. Milton: Aristocrat & Rebel: The Poet and his Politics. New York:
D.S. Brewer, 1992.

17
UNIT 19 A SURVEY OF MILTON'S LESSER POEMS AND PROSE

Structure

19.0 Objectives
19.1 Introduction
19.2 Early Works
19.2.1 'On the Death of a Fair Infant'
19.2.2 'At a Vacation Exercise'
19.3 Major Sources and Influences
19.4 Milton's Poetic Evolution and the Minor Poems
19.5 Milton's Prose
19.5.1 The Old Prose and its Conditions
19.5.2 Milton and the New Prose
19.6 Let's Sum Up
19.7 Revision Questions
19.8 Additional Reading

19.0 OBJECTIVES

 The unit is intended to familiarize the reader with the few extant early poems
of John Milton. While no extended analysis is offered, the poems are
examined in sufficient detail to enable the student to study them on his/her
own.

 It will attempt to identify the main currents that influenced Milton's thought
and work in the early part of his life. It will also identify the literary sources
that he picked up and that were to remain central to all his work.

 It will then move on to examine the next phase, in which his writings were
primarily political and consisted mainly of prose pamphlets. In this, it will
explore the relations between his prose and poetry.

 The overarching intent of this unit is to provide the student with a base from
which s/he can pursue further study of Milton's work, within and outside this
block.

18
19.1 INTRODUCTION

Any poetic career can show a wide variety of tendencies and inclinations. Milton's is
no exception. In the course of this unit, it will become clear that Milton's poetic and
literary life can be broadly divided into three phases: the early phase of idealistic and
artistic concerns; the middle phase of deep involvement in politics and religion,
marked in his work by a dominance of prose; and a late poetic phase, following his
blindness, when he dissociated himself from politics and focused entirely on the
writing of the two major epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Despite this
wide range of literary activity, all of Milton's work can be seen to carry some
recurrent themes, motifs and styles. In the course of this unit, we shall attempt to
identify and analyze some of these commonalities. Our concern in doing so is not so
much to relate Milton's life to his work in singular correspondences, as to locate and
examine the continuities and discontinuities that mark his literary career, and the
implications of these for our understanding of his work.

19.2 EARLY WORKS

The date of Milton's decision to become a poet cannot be determined with any
accuracy, but the decision was probably taken early. The verse paraphrases of Psalms
114 and 136 are the earliest extant poetic pieces and they date from his final year at St
Paul's School. They already show the poetic promise that Milton was to fulfill in later
years. These two English paraphrases, and four epigrams (three Latin and one Greek)
which have tentatively been dated to 1624, are the only surviving pieces from his pre-
Cambridge verse. In the subsequent undergraduate years (February 1625- March
1629) at Cambridge Milton wrote a lot of Latin poetry, which is not of any immediate
relevance to our study. Only two English poems (both belonging to 1628) remain
from this period: On the Death of a Fair Infant, written after the death of his little
niece in January 1628, and At a Vacation Exercise, written in July or August of the
sane year. Let us briefly examine these two poems, to get a sense of the kind of poetic
temperament the early Milton displayed. We need not study them in any detail to note
that both are already engaging in the lofty themes that characterize Milton's poetry.

19.2.1 'On the Death of a Pair Infant'

'On the Death of a Fair Infant', an Elizabethan-style elegy on the death of his baby
niece Anne Phillips, is the first of Milton's own English poems (as opposed to the
paraphrases of the psalms) still extant, written early in 1628. Addressed formally to
the infant for the most part, the poem follows an already well-established tradition of
the allegorizing and Christianizing of classical myth (Potter, 107). In the poem,
Milton allegorises the child's death as being at the hands of Winter (personified here
as a cold being seeking the warmth of love), who wishes to take her as bride and
involuntarily kills her with his touch. The child herself is transformed into a quasi

19
divine being who, in her death arid in her boundless innocence, will now serve as
medium between a sinful humanity and a wrathful God:

But oh why didst thou not stay here below

To bless us with thy heav'n-lov'd innocence,
To slake his wrath whom sin has made our foe
To tun1 Swift-rushing black perdition hence,
Or drive away the slaughtering pestilence,
To stand 'twixt us and our deserved smart
But thou canst best perform that office where thou art, (11. 64-70)

With that consolation, the poet then turns to address the mother in the last stanza, and
consoles her with the thought that if she bore this loss in this spirit, she would be
rewarded with another child, probably a son, who 'till the world's last-end shall make
thy name to live'. Already in this poem Milton's lofty themes and style are evident,
albeit in a somewhat immature manner (for evidently the original child being
mourned disappears under the weight of the classicisms that Milton loads the poem
with!) and his is true of his other surviving poem from this period.

19.2.2 ‘At a Vacation Exercise’

In 'At a Vacation Exercise', written in July 1628 he was to affirm his devotion to
English, a style free from eccentricity, and exalted themes concerning nature and
humanity. It was also the first instance when Milton was to make a public declaration
of his poetic ambitions. Tile poem is part of a Latin prose speech hat Milton delivered
to the festive assembly marking the end of the college year. He interrupts the speech
with the poem to 'hail [his] native Language', i.e. English, and goes on to declare how
he would use it:

Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,

Thy service in some graver subject use,
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound:
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven's door
Look in, and see each blissful deity
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings
To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal nectar to her kingly sire:
Then passing through the spheres of watchful fire,
And misty regions of wide air next under,
And hills of snow and lofts of piled thunder,

20
 May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves,
In heaven's defiance mustering all his waves;
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When beldame Nature in her cradle was;
And last of kings and queens and heroes old,
Such as the wise Demodocus once told
In solemn songs at king Alcinous' feast,
While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest
Are held with his melodious harmony
In willing chains and sweet captivity.

What is evident from this passage is the unique poetic vision that was to characterize
Milton's work even in his later and more accomplished verse. He sets forth here the
vocation of the poet that was to prove so highly influential. The unusual occasion
which he chose to announce his decision indicates the importance he gave his
intended poetic calling. Moreover, the patriotic announcement to write in English
clearly rejects the humanist emphasis on Latin. It also marks an important change in
Milton's poetic career, for in 1628 he had, written only three English poems (the two
Psalm paraphrases and 'On the Death of a Fair Infant'), with the majority of his poetry
in Latin. In the following decade he wrote mainly in English, with only three Latin
poems and some Italian sonnets. Clearly Milton had determined to become a serious
English poet, electing to follow Spenser and Sidney rather than Virgil and Buchanan.

19.3 MAJOR SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

From what we have already read of Milton's life and times, it should be clear that,
being a voracious reader, the sources that Milton drew on or alluded to in his work
would be many. Yet what is equally clear is that one lasting source of material for - as
well as influence on - Milton's thought was the Bible, and its imprint is evident
directly or indirectly in almost all his work. In the introduction to this Block, we
covered some of the basic narrative and mythic elements of the Bible that were to
emerge in Milton's writings. But for Milton the Bible was obviously much more than
just a storehouse of narratives, it was in fact the single most important explanation for
the existence of humanity. Its presence in his work is thus as much for its theological
as its mythological content, At times, Milton even evokes the style and tone of the
Bible in his work, especially of the Old Testament with which he was particularly
impressed. Biblical motifs and concerns are evident in his lesser poems as well as in
the epic Paradise Lost, as for instance in his first major lyric, 'On the Morning of
Christ's Nativity'.

Seventeenth century readers would have been intimately familiar with Biblical
themes like the Genesis story of the Fall of Man, which Milton picks up in Paradise
Lost. Besides being part of their religious education, it had already received much

21
attention by earlier writers and poets. But we tend to forget that part of any school
education in the seventeenth century was also readings in classical literature,
including writers like Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, Longinus and Horace, allusions to
whom would therefore be easily identifiable to Milton's contemporary readers. But
Milton was also often deliberately erudite in his work, ostentatiously displaying his
mastery of western learning and literature beyond that which would be familiar to the
average seventeenth century reader. For, if we add to the usual education Milton's
own voluminous studies in the classics, and in other disciplines like theology,
philosophy, astronomy, history, etc., along with the Bible, we find a monumental
corpus of writers and works that act as source material for Milton's own writings.
Milton drew on these for themes and ideas as much as for models of style: Virgil for
instance was the illode1 for the epic as well as the pastoral, which Milton used in
poem like 'Lycidas' and 'L'Allegro', and Cicero provided the illode1 for almost all
prose writers of the age. The Greek Aristotle and the Latin Longinus would have
offered Milton strong theories of genre to negotiate in his work. Likewise, Ovid's
Metamorphoses provided Milton with many allegorical situations and ideas that we
will find sprinkled throughout his poetry. But Milton was also familiar with the work
of the more recent sixteenth century poets like Bembo, Della Casa and Tasso, from
whom he may have derived the idea of writing an epic in blank verse. Among English
writers, Milton himself claimed Edmund Spenser as an important predecessor, while
his sonnets suggest the influence of Shakespeare, whom he celebrated in his poetry.
The influence of the former's The Shepherd's Calendar is especially evident in
Milton's more pastoral poems, while that of the latter may be found in the kinship
between Shakespearean figures like Macbeth and Milton's own Satan. He had
however, as we have noted in the previous Unit, little in common with the poets and
poetic fashions of his own age.

But while these sources and lines of influence are useful in understanding Milton's
literary craft and its context, as well as in tracing points of continuity and originality
in relation to a longer tradition, they cannot explain Milton's unique poetic
individuality. What is unique to Milton's poetic style is more than the simple
aggregate of these sources and influences on his writing. As we noted earlier, perhaps
the most remarkable quality of Milton's poetry is the importance of sound, rhythm
and music to the fulfillment of meaning in it, a quality that distinguishes his verse
more than any other. Its intensification in his later poetry may be partially explained
by the fact of his blindness, but its definitive presence even in his early work is
indicative of m affinity to music that precedes this condition, and suggests that Milton
attempted to fill his writing with the more ephemeral effect of music itself, This has
led some critics to remark, rather unkindly, that while Shakespeare's voice is hardly
ever evident in his own work, there is evidence or no other voice but his own in
Milton's (Legouis and Cazamian, 1954: 575). At all events, one can identify music as
a source and an influence on Milton's work that remains less easily detectable, yet
perhaps more important than it appears.

22
19.4 MILTON'S POETIC EVOLUTION AND THE MINOR POEMS

We had noted in the previous unit that Milton started his poetic career and had
decided to write an epic fairly early in his life. These ambitions took shape and were
realised over a poetic career that was in fact suspended for many years, during the
time of his (official and unofficial) service to the Commonwealth. We also noted that
the first major work in his adult life as a poet was 'On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity' (1629-30), when he was twenty-four years old. The poem is replete with
Studying Milton many of the themes and images to be found in Paradise Lost,
written more than forty years later. This in itself is the strongest indication of the
preoccupation with and the continuity of especially Biblical motifs and ideas in
Milton's poetic work. It also initiated a lyricism that was developed and continued in
the twirl poems of 'L'allegro' and 'II Penseroso'. These two poems were the last of the
major long poems that Milton was to write for some time, and his poetic work after
this period till the writing of Paradise Lost is confined to some hymns and sonnets, of
which we shall study two, Sonnets 19 and 23. What is interesting is that in all the
variety that Milton displays in his shorter poetic works, he remains aloof from the
'metaphysical' fashions of his age, with most of his shorter works serving as sketches
toward that final magnum opus, Paradise Lost. But between the writing of the shorter
poems and the two epics, Milton devoted himself to writing powerful, polemical and
influential prose tracts that concerned themselves with the major political and social
issues of his time.

19.5 MILTON'S PROSE

19.5.1 The Old Prose and its Conditions

The efflorescence of prose in the 17th century is a matter of some interest. While
prose as a style of writing had been popular for some centuries, it received a
tremendous boost in the invention of the mechanical press, the Gutenberg press, in
the 15th century. In the succeeding centuries, this invention was to transform the
world. But specifically with regard to prose, the press facilitated the quick and easy
transmission of information, pinion and knowledge. Besides freeing writers from the
patronage system and injecting them directly into a market system, by which readers
buying their books directly supported the writers, by the same token the mechanical
press also permitted writers greater freedom in what they wrote. Under the patronage
system, writers had to submit to the surveillance of their patrons. With the wide
ranging discoveries and concerns of the Renaissance, a host of new knowledges
entered the public domain through this freedom and efficiency offered by the
mechanical press. Part of the new intellectualism was an individualism that was in
harmony with the writer's need to break out of the patronage system; another part of it
was a secular and inquiring vision that demanded a more objective examination of the

23
world, unbounded by the subjective and highly emotive charges of religious or social
affiliations. The quest for alternative political orders and systems of authority
spawned a chaos of styles, and the new styles reflected the urgency of the quest itself,
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a compendious mixture of learning,
pseudoscience, and anecdote woven ostensibly into a study of human
psychopathology, is one example of the kind of, prose that marked the early
seventeenth century. In the 1620s with the first corantos, or courants (news books),
generated by interest in the Thirty Years' War, another style emerged, resulting from
a dramatic shift from an elite to a mass readership, and an efflorescence of popular
journalism that accompanied the political confusion of the 1640s. These two kinds of
styles may be seen as counterpoints to each other: the one polite, decent even when
highly intellectual and radical, maintaining the civilities of political debate; and the
other, like the tracts of the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, scurrilous, populist,
breaching every convention of literary taste and often considered vulgar and obscene.

This dramatic emergence of the genre of prose was not unrelated to the poetry of the
period. We must remember that the school of poetry subsequently referred to as the
Metaphysicals emerged alongside this popularization of prose. It was markedly
different from the courtier poetry of the previous century, characterized by wit,
playfulness, erudite and often obscure allusions, and perhaps most importantly, a
vision of the world [hat was broad, more inclusive and deeply contemporary. The
language was terse, staccato in rhythm, often colloquial and conversational, and
replete with unconventional rind sometimes shocking imagery. The effects and
influence of the popularization of prose is thus evident in this poetry. Milton's poetic
work, while distant from the Metaphysicals, is not without its own resonances of the
new prose styles. While he remained deeply rooted in Renaissance and classical
genres and styles, his poetry too often reflects the new inclusiveness and
contemporaneity of the Metaphysicals. Further, Milton's vision is sweeping, striving
to blend the historical with the mythic, and it is in this perhaps that the influence of
the new prose is most evident: for the attention to contemporary themes is intertwined
with a vast erudition of history, politics, mythology, geography and science,
attempting to weave the whole into a total system - a hallmark of the new prose.

19.5.2 Milton and the New Prose

While this appears to be more in consonance with the work of the more intellectual
and systematic thinkers like Burton and Thomas Hobbes, Milton's own prose work is
closer to the other variety of prose writing - perhaps as much because he wanted to
maintain poetry as a vehicle of the lofty and sublime, as because his concerns in his
prose were explicitly political and polemical. Yet these too are not without bearing
for his poetical work. In the years 1641-60 he was almost wholly devoted in his
writings to pamphleteering in the cause of religious and civil liberty. As his work
went on, he was sustained by the conviction that in his defenses of liberty he was, in

24
another way, fulfilling his epic and patriotic aspirations His early tracts were attacks
on the Episcopal hierarchy of the church, which he found to be too close to the
Roman Catholic Church. But it was in 1643, with the 'Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce' (which was followed by three more tracts in 1644 and 1645 on the same
theme) that he emerged as a highly controversial yet influential voice in England. In
these trenchantly argued tracts, Milton contended that adultery might be less valid
than incompatibility as the only reason for divorce. He argued that the coercive bond
of a loveless marriage was destructive of human dignity, and therefore as valid if not
more valid a reason for divorce. Milton's stand on divorce may have been
substantially influenced by his own unhappy marriage; whatever his personal reasons,
his open espousal of this new reason for divorce invited censure and even abuse by
royalists and Presbyterians equally, as a libertine stand, Rut what is significant for us
is that the vision of the circumstance of marriage that Milton lays out in these tracts -
as a union of love, a divinely gifted blessing, which is to be dutifully yet lovingly
honored and maintained, but not if either of the partners find the union itself
intolerable. For Milton, it then ceases to be a marriage, and is only a mutually
destructive bond. This vision of marriage is what is carried into his poetry and
reflected by Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.

In subsequent tracts like his most famous pamphlets, 'Of Education' and
'Areopagitica', Milton was to explore other themes that were lo reflect in his epic. The
first tract was a treatise on humanist education in the line of Erasmus. It advocated the
study of the ancient classics, but subordinated to the Bible and Christian teaching - a
balance of emphases that is evident in all his poetry. The second was written in
response to a Parliamentary decree demanding that all published work be licensed by
the official licenser. Milton's argument in this work, characteristically published
without a license, was that diverse and conflicting opinions ought to be allowed to
debate freely in public space, without the mediation of a censoring authority. He
argued that this was essential for moral and intellectual growth, and believed that
truth would triumph over falsehood in such debates. It is now considered a classic
work in defense of civil liberties, but probably had little impact in its own time. But
the reasoning at the heart of this tract was to pose a serious ideological and
theological problem for Milton in the creation of the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost,
Along with the politics of rebellion against the king and the advocacy of a more
egalitarian rule, Satan also almost comes to represent for Milton the suppressed and
censored voice that he writes of in the 'Areopagitica'. In fact it is arguable that Milton
never really manages to resolve completely the contradictions in the political and
religious representations of Satan in this epic. Another tract that reflects these
concerns but from different point of view was the 'Eikonoklastes', written in defense
of regicide, following the severe attacks on the Commonwealth from Catholic
quarters, for the execution of King Charles I. It is perhaps only to be expected that the
defense is based less on rational argument and more on scurrilously attacking critics

25
like Claudius Salmasius, discrediting him through personal abuse as a monstrous
enemy of a sacred cause.

In these years he had also busied himself with a monumental history of Britain and a
Defense of the People of England. 'A Treatise on Christian Doctrine', finished by
about 1658-60, indicated a certain centrality of themes in his work. In this work, he
spelt out some of his central differences from orthodox Christianity, primarily in his
rejection of the concept of the holy trinity and of the doctrine of predestination, and
his manifest belief in the humanity, rather than the divinity, of Christ. He continued to
write tracts espousing religious and civil freedom, like 'A Treatise of Civil Power in
Ecclesiastical Causes' down to his last political tract, 'The Readie and Easie Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth, published in March 1660. It was a patently a defiant
effort, considering that the tide was changing, and it was already clear that England
was returning to monarchy under Charles II. Milton's prose work may thus be seen as
an important bridge between his early poetic phase, when his concerns were primarily
aesthetic and idealistic, and his later epic phase, when he set about to realize his
ambitious project of creating a contemporary mythology.

19.6 LET'S SUM UP

In this unit we studied two phases of Milton's life, the early phase, when he began
writing poetry in English, and the middle phase, when he concentrated his intellectual
and creative energies in prose, in the cause of the Commonwealth. We examined
some of the more important influences on his writing and the sources that he turned
to. We noted his use of such sources and the significance in particular of their
amalgamation into an entire system of thought and vision, blending the classical and
the Christian in such a way that the former served the interests of the latter. We also
noted that this fusion of diverse traditions, far from rendering Milton a plagiarist,
serves to emphasise the uniqueness of his voice, in prose and in poetry. The unit also
attempted to draw out the relations between Milton's prose concern and his poetic
oeuvre. In doing so, it sought to lay the foundation for a comprehensive
understanding of the circumstances and factors involved in Milton's poetry. As we
noted in the Introduction, the longer epics are for reasons of space, outside our
immediate attention; but the study of this block should help the student pursue an
examination of the epics on his/her own. We may now continue to examine the more
well-known of Milton's shorter poetic works in the following units.

19.7 REVISION QUESTIONS

1. In your considered opinion, does Milton's early work bear signs of the poetic
ambitions that he later fulfils? Analyse any one poem to substantiate your
answer.

26
 2. From your study of this unit, and from other readings, identify the primary
influences and the main literary sources that are to be found in Milton's early
poetic work.
3. What in your opinion could be the reason(s) for Milton's emphasis on prose in
the middle years of his life?
4. Examine and discuss the relations between Milton's poetic and prose oeuvre.

19.8 ADDITIONAL READING

1. Brown, Cedric C. John Milton: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
2. Corns, Thomas N. "Milton Before 'Lycidas'." Graham Parry and Joad
Raymond, eds. Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002.
3. Evans, J. Marlin. The Miltonic Moment. Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1998.
4. Grose, Christopher. Milton and the Sense of Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP,
1988.
5. Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York, 1977
6. L,egouis, Emile and Louis Cazamian. A History of English Literature.
London: Dent and Sons, 1954.
7. Loewenstein, David and James Grantham Turner, eds. Politics, Poetics, and
Hermeneuties in Milton's Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990
8. Potter, Lois. A Preface to Milton. Preface Books. N. York: Longman, 1986.
9. Shawcross, John T. John Milton: The Self and the World. Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

27
UNIT 20 'ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY'
AND 'LYCPDAS'

Structure

20.0 Objectives
20.1 Introduction
20.2 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity'
20.3 'Lycidas'
20.4 Let's Sum Up
20.5 Revision Questions
20.6 Additional Reading

20.0 OBJECTIVES

 This unit, along with the next, will discuss some of Milton's more well known
lyrics.
 This particular unit will focus on two poems, 'On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity' and 'Lycidas'.
 In analyzing these two poems, it will examine the generic forms that Milton
employs and reworks to his own specific ends.
 Among the many complex issues involved, the unit will focus on the
relationship between classical and Christian traditions of thought in Milton's
work.
 The unit will also examine in some detail the musicality of Milton's poetry.

20.1 INTRODUCTION

These poems reflect a diversity of concerns and poetical techniques, which

complement each other, as well as reflect many of the concerns and styles that go into
the making of Milton's magnum opus, Paradise Lost. The unit will therefore focus as
much on the formal elements of the poems as on their explication. The first poem, 'On
the Morning of Christ's Nativity', explicitly displays Milton's early passion for
Christian lore as a source for poetic attention, as well as his persistent Lendency to
cast it as the overriding frame of signification and meaning in his poetry. While his
erudition and intimate familiarity with classical texts and culture is evident in both the
poems, both poems promote the Christian over the classical. The second of the two
poems, 'Lycidas' may also be seen as a struggle within his poetic self between these
two traditions for supremacy. While these issues will come up for discussion in the
course of the unit, we will also examine some formal dimensions to both the poems.

28
20.2 'ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY'

The poem consists of four opening stanzas of seven lines each, followed by the main
'Hymn' of twenty-seven stanzas of eight lines each, The opening four stanzas follow a
rhyme scheme different from the rest of the poem and the rhymes themselves are not
very consistently accurate, nor the meter evenly maintained through the poem.

For the most part the foot remains iambic, swinging between the rather rare trimeter
(line with six syllables alternately stressed) and the hexameter (line with twelve
syllables alternately stressed). The iambic is probably the foot closest to human
speech patterns. The inconsistency of the rhyme and meter, rather than reducing, add
to a musicality that is already evident in this poem, and that emerges with greater
clarity and power in the later poems. This musicality does not, as in Pope's verses for
instance, derive from the strict adherence to rhyme and meter. Rather, the rhythm that
Milton achieves have a more integral relation to the words themselves, as for instance
in the following lines (64-8) from stanza V of the 'Hymn':

The Windes, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joyes to the milde Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

The alliterative first line with its line-up of aspirative roundings - 'windes', 'wonder',
‘whist’ - followed by the sibilant 'smoothly' and 'kist', aspire to aurally and tonally
connote the sense of quiet wonder that the lines themselves denote. It must be noted
that the poem itself is substantially about sound and music, with stanzas IX through to
XIV specifically about tile rapturous celestial music that heralds Christ's birth. The
swinging, varying lengths of the lines further serve to 'perform' this music in the
reading of the poem itself.

Yet, Milton's thematic intent, it might be said, demanded a discursivity of tone

approaching prose, in almost all his poetic works. Hence the struggle evident in his
shorter poems to follow the dictates of rhyme and meter together. The rhyme scheme
of the four introductory stanzas, with their longer lines, and alternating rhyme
scheme, suggest the need to make extended statements that may not be contained by
the same rhyme. The hymn that follows, because of its affinity to music and its more
descriptive and narrative intent, attempts more successfully to perform a more
complex rhyme scheme. Yet even here, the last alexandrine (iambic hexameter) of
each stanza reverts to the discursive tone that Milton appears more comfortable with.
The success of the 'Nativity' poem in embodying the music of its content was not to
be recaptured in those later short poems which were weightier in their subject matter.

29
It is only in the writing of the epic later that Milton hit upon the form of the blank
verse as the ideal vehicle for a heavily musical and sonorous style that nevertheless
remained discursive in its intent.

The Hymn that follows the introductory stanzas and takes up the remaining 23, differs
marginally from them in its stanzaic structure. Where the introductory stanzas are
composed of seven lines each, following an a-b-a-b-b-c-c rhyme scheme, the
remaining stanzas are of eight lines each, using the rhyme scheme a-b-c-c-b-d-d.
Further, while the foot (or the combination of stressed and unstressed syllables)
remains more or less the iambic through the entire poem, the meter scheme in the first
four stanzas differs from that in the hymn. The first four stanzas use the tetrameter (or
four stresses) for the first six lines, with the concluding seventh line of each stanza
using six stresses or the hexameter; in contrast, the meter scheme in the hymn is more
complex. There the lines a-a and c-c use the terse trimeter, the b-b lines use the longer
pentameter, while the last d-d lines move from the tetrameter in the first line to the
even longer hexameter, 'The effect is remarkable. The first four stanzas being
introductory and therefore more discursive, the terse but consistent tetrameter serves
the purpose well, of projecting a solemn yet speech-like, almost oratorical effect - as
if the voice were discoursing rather than singing. In contrast, the meter and rhyme
scheme of the hymn achieves a more complex effect: that of the chant or the song.
The lines swing between short, terse stresses and extended statements, with the
concluding couplet in particular concentrating the almost pendulating effect of the
preceding lines in its large swing from the tetrameter to the hexameter of the closing
alexandrine, The final result is a lyrical, song-like quality that attempts to measure up
to both the poem's claim to be a hymn and to the celebratory nature of the subject of
the poem. It is fairly safe to say, however, that the hymn in the poem is, for all its
musicality, easier to read than to sing.

The first four stanzas introduce the poem's topic, the birth of Christ, and offer it as a
song in celebration of this event. The third stanza characteristically invokes the
'Heavenly Muse', in almost epic style, elevating the tone of the poem to suggest an
event of epic proportions. The epic that Milton eventually wrote, Paradise Lost,
discarded this event to focus on the prior event of 'Man's First Fall' from Divine
Grace. Yet this earlier poem bears within it many of the elements of that monumental
work. The sweep of the poem, covering the moment of Creation, leading on to and
through the 'pagan' civilisations of the past and looking forward to the Day of
Judgement, the invocation of the Heavenly Muse, the celebration of Christ as a hero
of epic proportions who will defeat Satan, the classical and Biblical allusions and
references - these are all important dimensions of Paradise Lost as well. In particular,
the theme of the old, classical gods being displaced and routed by Christ, so
extensively featured in Book I of Paradise Lost, is prefigured in this poem, as for
instance in stanza 22:

30
 Peor, and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice-batter'd god of Palestine

In this sense, one may see in the 'Nativity' poem a kind of preliminary sketch of the
later epic. Certainly the poem bears the intent of announcing the superiority of
Christianity to classical legends and beliefs - indeed, of condemning the latter - which
is shared and extended by the later epic.

20.3 'LUCIDAS'

This poem first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies entitled Justa Edouardo King
Naufrago, commemorating the death of Edward King, a college-mate of Milton's at
Cambridge who drowned in a shipwreck in 1637. Milton, who had not been very
close to King, volunteered or was asked to make a contribution to the collection, and
used the occasion to reflect on his own current emotional conflicts, specifically about
poetry. King, who like Milton, had apparently devoted his short life to poetry,
becomes the basis for Milton's searching questions on the worth of such a life, in the
face of the unpredictability of death. The two poets are imagined as shepherds in the
poem, following the conventions of the classical pastoral, tending the arts of poetry,
and Milton's lament is that such a profession is futile if the muses of poetry cannot
guard their shepherds.

What boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? (11. 64-9)

This lament goes on to line 76, when Phoebus interrupts the lament to console the
poet, that fame achieved through poetry lingers beyond the mortal life of the poet.

Phoebus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfet witnes of all judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed. (11. 77-84)

31
This then becomes the basis for consolation which ends with the poet's celebration of
Lycidas' life and fame. What is significant about the consolation is that it shifts
registers, from classical allusions to Christian mythology - as if Milton deliberately
used the former in the preceding part of the poem to discuss the death and the sorrow
that it brings, but finds life only in the latter:

Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more,

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves (11. 165-73)

The last line here is of course an allusion to the Biblical story of the miracle of Jesus
walking on water. The poem goes on to describe the heavenly bliss that is Lycidas'
fortune after death. Again here we see how Milton is clearly turning to Christianity as
the superior and more convincing form of belief, for the rewards of the after life. Yet
even this turn to Christianity is tightly interwoven with classical elements and
allusions. It is important that the moment of genuine consolation comes only when St.
Peter ('The Pilot' of 1. 109) speaks in wrath at the indulgent ways of those who live
life without either religion or poetry. Milton is here drawing on two traditions of
allegorisation of the shepherd: the classical, in which shepherds are poets, and the
Christian, in which shepherds are spiritual and religious leaders. The shepherds in the
poem thus represent both poets and religious guides, and it is in envisioning the poet
as a combination of these roles that Milton is most comfortable. There is nevertheless
a tension between the two allegorical frames, arising from their different discursive
and cultural histories. Milton uses this tension between the two cultures very
fruitfully, as ail index of the tension between worldly, sensual life and a spiritual
after-life in the poem, contrasting the values of a transient worldly existence with that
of the immortality and fame achieved through poetry.

Milton's old preoccupation with fame and the rewards of a poetic vocation are evident
here. This must be understood as a concern, even a struggle, with the possibilities of a
poetic vocation itself, even as it signals Milton's intensifying ambitions. The poem
thus weaves several themes together: mortality as inevitable, the futility of poetic
ambitions and the transience of worldly pleasures in the face of mortality, the
guarantee of spiritual immortality within Christianity, and the need to promote this as
a superior form of immortality to that offered by classical thought and literature; and
yet the persistent impulse in the poem is to many the two traditions, as if Milton's
struggle between the attractions of each was a perpetually unfinished one. This

32
tension is manifest formally as well, and helps explain the layered and complex
narrative style of the poem.

The complex themes and narrative movement of the poem render its structure
somewhat mysterious. There are two ways of understanding the movements in the
poem: one, as being comprised of two movements with six sections each that seem to
mirror each other; and two, as composed of three movements that run parallel in
pattern. We must remember however that in neither way do we see any clear
separation of the Christian and classical. Their elements are too intertwined to be
distinguished as individual structures or even structural movements in the poem. Yet,
some discernible distinctiveness is evident. Each movement begins with an
invocation, then explores the conventions of the classical pastoral, and ends with a
more or less comprehensively Christian conclusion to the emotional problem that
Milton negotiates in the poem.

Milton's epigram labels Lycidas a 'monody': a lyrical lament for one voice. But the
poem has several voices or personae, including the 'uncouth swain' (the main
narrator), who is 'interrupted' first by Phoebus (Apollo), then Camus (the river Cam,
or Cambridge University personified), and the 'Pilot of the Galilean lake' (St. Peter).
Finally, a second narrator appears for only the last eight lines to bring a conclusion in
ottava rima (a sestet + a couplet). The poem till this point is almost in free verse: the
lengths of the lines vary, the rhymes follow no fixed order, indeed the poem seems to
rely heavily on internal rhymes within the same line or set of lines, as for instance in
the repetition of the '-ier' (or '-ear) sound in the first few lines of the poem.
Additionally, there are neither couplets nor stanzas. In other words, the poem contains
the irregular rhyme and meter characteristic of the Italian canzone form. Canzone is
essentially a polyphonic lyrical form, hence creating a serious conflict with the
'monody'. Yet, this formal conflict does not detract from the poem; rather, it enhances
the complex elaboration of its equally complex themes. Further, the sense of sorrow
and bewilderment is intensified by the lines refusal to be confined to consistent
lengths and specific rhyme patterns. By referring to the poem as monadic then,
Milton may have meant that the poem should be regarded more as a story told
completely by one person as opposed to a chorus. This person would presumably be
the final narrator, who had apparently masked himself as the "uncouth swain" in the
poem. 'This concept of story-telling ties Lycidas closer to the genre of pastoral elegy.

The pastoral elegy is a genre initiated by Theocritus, also put to famous use by Virgil
and Spenser. It employs the irregular rhyme and meter of an Italian canzone. Lycidas
also exhibits the influence of Pindaric odes, especially in its allusions to Orpheus,
Alpheus, and Arethusa. The poem's arrangement in verse paragraphs and its
introduction of various voices and personae are also features that anticipate epic
structures. Like the form, structure, and voice of Lycidas, its genre is deeply complex.

33
20.4 LET'S SUM UP

A question that must occur after we have examined both the poems and their
implications is, why is Milton so intent on maintaining the superiority of the Christian
over the classical? The obvious answer is that he was a deeply Christian man, and
living as he did in times of politico-religious controversy and conflict, perhaps it was
inevitable that he would espouse his own vision of Christianity in his writings.
However, this answer has to be supplemented by another set of factors. For Milton, it
was not sufficient to just emphasize the Christian over the classical; paradoxically he
wanted to also celebrate the classical heritage as a powerfully influential and
attractive cultural discourse, extremely accomplished in its poetic and literary
achievements. Milton negotiated these dual and divergent impulses by inventing a
poetic style that was rich with classical allusions, tropes and formal and generic
elements, yet fundamentally English and Christian in sensibility. He cast the language
in a sonorous musicality that was appropriate to his weighty themes, deliberate and
measured in its cadences, and rich with the imagery of rural England. The effect is
poetry that measures itself against the classical greats, with an eye to transcending
them in both quality of form and scale of content. Evidently Milton was writing, even
in his shorter literary works, in the nationalistic shadow of Spenser.

20.5 REVISION OUESTIONS

1. In the 'Nativity Ode', the effect of Milton's use of classical and pagan mythology
is more distracting than enhancing of the poem's themes. Do you agree? Discuss
with reference to the poem.

2. The 'Nativity Ode' is less about the celebration of Christ and more about the
superiority of a Protestant English spirit. Analyse the poem in the light of this
statement.

3. What in your opinion is explored in 'Lycidas', a psychological conflict about the

vocation of poetry or a personal lament for a dead friend? Give reasons for your
answer.

4. Analyse with reference to the poem some of the personifications the poet employs
in 'Lycidas'. Do they add to the sense of lament or serve another purpose
altogether?

5. Both the 'Nativity Ode' and 'Lycidas' are poems that struggle to reconcile themes
that are posed as irreconcilable Identify some of these in each. Which poem is
more successful in its attempts to do so?

34
20.6 ADDITIONAL READING

1. Abrams, M.H. "Five Types of Lycidas." in Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition

and die Poem. Ed. C. A. Patrides. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1983: 216-235.

2. Corns, Thomas N. "Milton Before 'Lycidas'." Graham Parry and Joad

Raymond. eds. Milton and the Term of Liberty. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002.

3. Corns, Thomas N. Milton’s Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

4. Creaser, John. "Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell." Graham Parry
and Joad Raymond, eds. Milton and the Terms of liberty, Cambridge: Brewer,
2002.

5. Guillory, John. "Milton, Narcissism, Gender: 011 the Genealogy of Male

Self-Esteem." Critical Essay on John Milton. Edited by Christopher
Kendrick. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995, 165-193.

6. Hubbard, Thomas The Pipes of pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in

the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1998.

7. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century

Religious Lyric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.

8. Patrides, C, A. Ed. Milton's. Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1983.

9. Robertson, David. "Soliloquy and Self in Milton's Major Poems." Of poetry

and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World. Ed. P.G. Stanwood.
Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995: 59-77.

35
UNIT 21 'L’ALLEGRO', ‘I L PENSEROSO’ AND THE
SONNETS

Structure

21.0 Objectives
21.1 Introduction
21.2 'L' Allegro'
21.3 'II Penseroso'
21.4 Comparative Discussion
21.5 Sonnets 19 and 23
21.6 Some Additional Remarks
21.7 Let's Sum Up
21.8 Revision Questions
21.9 Additional Reading

21.0 OBJECTIVES

In this block, you will study some of the major poems and sonnets of Milton.

21.1 INTRODUCTION

It is impossible to fully understand and appreciate John Milton's 'L'Allegro' without

also reading its companion piece, 'II Penseroso'. 'L'Allegro' gives an account of 'the
happy person', imagined in the poem as spending an idyllic day in the country,
followed by a gay evening in the city. 'II Penseroso' repeats this but for the meditative
person' whose hours are passed in meditative, solipsistic walking in the woods and
studying in a ‘lonely Towr’. First published in 1645, the two poems are thus
deliberately posed as dialectical opposites with a strong complementarity of structure
and images. When reading them, the sense of dual impulses, of n poet being drawn in
two opposing directions simultaneously, is very strong. We may even read them as
explicitly posing the two attitudes to the vocation of poetry that so haunt Milton, and
that we have seen him striving to reconcile in our studies of the preceding units. Here
again, the poems do not individually embody any one strain alone, of either the
classical or the Christian, but weave the two together from two different standpoints.
Let us now examine the poems in some detail.

36
21.2 ‘L’ ALLEGRO’

The poem opens with an address to Melancholy, rather than Mirth, which takes the
first ten lines. Following this the poem changes rhythm. The first ten lines are of
alternating length, switching from the iambic pentameter to the trimeter. The staccato
effect of this reinforces the sense of anger and revulsion towards Melancholy that the
poem wishes to communicate. The switch to the more relaxed and consistent measure
of the tetrameter for the rest of the poem announces the poet's fixity of attention in
dealing with the theme.

The poem essentially outlines the events of one day, spent for the most part in the
countryside, where the pleasures of the country and the beauty of the rural landscape
are explored. Like with many of Milton's poems, there is a strong yet subdued
element of sensuality in his descriptions of the rural scenes. In this particular poem,
the sensuality is enhanced by the trope of the union or coupling that haunts the poem.

Mountains on whose barren brest

The labouring clouds do often rest:
Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers, and Battlements it sees
Boosom'd high in tufted Trees,
Wher perhaps som beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes. [11. 73-80]

Here the mountains and clouds are a pair, while the battlements 'boosom'd' with tufted
trees lead easily onto the figure of the beauty lying in wait within - almost as if the
battlements were the external manifestation of The beauty inside. This subtle
emphasis on sensuality and sexual union is never elaborated into a full-fledged theme
but remains a condition of the possibility of Mirth. We must also keep in mind that
sensuality and sexuality were and are conventionally all integral part of celebrations
of Mirth or gaiety, part of the discourse of the comic and ludic that Milton inherits
from the classicals. While Milton's own poem never itself becomes comic, it
celebrates comedy as inherent to Mirth or the condition of joy. One of the most
striking images ill the poem is that of the companions of Mirth:

Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee

Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;

37
 Sport that wrincled Care derides.
And Laughter holding both his side [11.25-321]

The comic dimension to the poem, like its sensuality, is never allowed to grow into a
full theme. Rather, along with the sensuality, it serves to dignify Mirth, to give it
credibility and honour as an attitude lit for the vocation of poetry. It thus leads on to
become part of Milton's favourite concern, that of poetry and its relation to the
attitude of the poet. After the rural scenes, with the close of day, the poem shifts to
the city, and dwells, on the pleasures and joys of' night in the city, focusing on the
court, its masques and music, and the pleasures the spectacular.

And ever against eating Cares,

Lap me in soft Lydian Aires
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes, with many a wedding bout
Of lincked sweetnes long drawn out
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning….. [11. 135-141]

It is telling that the poem eventually locales the happening, the occurrence of poetry,
only in the city. The countryside in this sense figures as an inchoate mass of
sensuality that is given definition and substance in the more cultured practices of the
artist in the city.

21.3 ‘IL PENSEROSO’

Like its companion poem, 'II Penseroso' begins with a staccato derision of Mirth, and
following the same metrical pattern, switches lo the more consistent tetrameter
couplet in the subsequent invocation of Melancholy.

But hail thou Goddes, sage and holy,

Hail divinest Melancholy,
Whose Saintly visage is too bright '
To hit the Sense of human sight;
And therfore to our weaker view, [ 15 ]
Ore laid with black staid Wisdoms hue.

It may be immediately noticed that the poet rejects the sensuality of the earlier poem,
at least thematically. Melancholy is perceived to be beyond the human senses, and
therefore associated with the colour black. This denuding of the senses becomes the
precondition for the development of wisdom. Again in contrast to the emphasis on
coupling and union in the earlier poem, this poem dwells on the pleasures of solitude

38
and renunciation of the world. Consequently, it is not surprising that Melancholy is
hailed as a nun:

Com pensive Nun, devout and pure,

Sober, stedfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestick train,
And sable stole of Cipres Lawn, [ 35 ]
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.

The last line above also indicates the asexuality that Milton wished to endow
Melancholy with. Much of the early part of the poem takes place in the night, but the
experience of the night is a solitary one, dominated by a sense of distance from
humanity and by the presence of philosophy and literature. The pleasures of
Melancholy are thus revealed to be essentially of the mind and soul rather than the
body. The paradox is of course that much of the poem remains replete with the
language of sensuality, even as that sensuality is rejected in favour of more cerebral
and spiritual pleasures:

But, O sad Virgin, that thy power

Might raise Musaeus from his bower,
Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing [ 105 ]
Such notes as warbled to the string,
Drew Iron tears down Pluto's cheek,
And made Hell grant what Love did seek. [11.103-108]

We will return to comment on this paradox when we discuss the two poems
comparatively in the next section; for now we must note that the affinity for
Melancholy in the poem returns the poet to the themes of art and literature - to the
ideal attitude for the vocation of poetry.

The dawn of day signals the time to retire and sleep. This inversion of routines is also
an inversion of the temporal sequence of the companion poem, suggesting that 'L'
Allegro' is a poem that addresses the everyday circumstances of life, while 'I1
Penseroso' works on the principle of distance from these.

Hide me from Day's garish eie,

While the Bee with Honied thie,
That at her flowry work doth sing,
And the Waters murmuring
With such consort as they keep,
Entice the dewy-feather'd Sleep;
And let som strange mysterious dream,

39
 Wave at his Wings in Airy stream,
Of lively portrature display'd,
Softly on my eye-lids laid. [ll. 141-501]

The contrast with the bee that works busily through the day is not accidental, but
emphasizes the distance that the poet - or rather his persona in the poem - seeks from
the activities of the day. Eventually, this persona turns to the cloister and 'the Hairy
Gown and Mossy Cell' as the final site of solitude and peace, as the true location of
Melancholy.

21.4 COMPARATIVE DISCUSSION

The pair of poems we have examined could represent one or all of a series of tensions
and oppositions: between Day and Night; between Mirth and Melancholy; or between
opposing courses to follow (or sensuality and study) in the pursuit of transcendence
and union with God; or yet, Milton's old personal struggle between the classical and
the Christian traditions. Setting aside his practiced Latin poetic hand, Milton chose to
write these mirrored poems in English, even as he retained Latinate titles for them.
Further, as with the poems examined in the previous unit, here too the poems are a
highly complex and subtle interweaving of classical and English folklore, as well as
imagery. The poems should be read aloud in order fully to appreciate their
complementary sounds; 'L'Allegro's' lilting pitch and images of crowing roosters and
singing larks deeply contrasts with 'I1 Penseroso's' somber tone and the 'Lamp at
midnight hour'.

Many critics have speculated that Milton prefers the pensive melancholy celebrated in
'Il Penseroso' because it represents the ascetic life of study, as opposed to 'L'Allegro's'
which emphasizes a Dionysian, pleasure-seeking lifestyle. Milton appears to make
this preference explicit in his sixth Elegy, written to Charles Diodati, when he tells his
friend that Apollo, 'Bacchus, Ceres, and Venus all approve' of 'light Elegy' and assist
poets in such composition but, poets whose ambitions reach higher to the epic and
heroic modes must eschew the dionysiac lifestyle for a more ascetic practice:

But they who Demigods and Heroes praise

And feats perfonn'd in Jove's more youthful days,
Who now the counsels of high heav'n explore,
Now shades, that echo the Cerberean roar,
Simply let these, like him of Samos live
Let herbs to them n bloodless banquet give;
In beechen goblets let their bev'rage shine,
Cool from the chrystal spring, their sober wine!
Their youth should pass, in innocence, secure
From slain licentious, and in manners pure,

40
 Pure as the priest's, when robed in while he stands
The fresh lustration ready in his hands. ('Elegy 6', 55-66)

The poet who seeks to attain the highest level of creative expression must embrace
the divine, which can only be accomplished by following the path set out in 'Il
Penseroso'.

Milton's invocation of the goddess Melancholy reminds one of his salutation to Mirth
in 'L'Allegro', and sets up the parallel structure of the two poems. It also suggests a
very specific body of sources, such as Robert Burton's comprehensive Anatomy of
Melancholy, John Fletcher’s song 'Melancholy', and Shakespeare's Hamlet Act 2, sc.
2. line 309. The concept of 'melancholia', however, has its origins in ancient Greece
with Hippocrates and his Humours theory' of the body, which was later revised by
Aristotle and Galen. Milton's choice of 'Penseroso' in the title, over 'Melancolico' or
'Afflitto' , indicates his emphasis on the positive and spiritual aspects of Melancholy,
While some critics argue that the two poems refer' equally to Milton, others believe
that 'L'Allegro' was about his friend, Charles Diodati, while 'Il Penseroso' was
autobiographical in nature.

Both the poems open with brief introductory stanzas of ten lines each, and in each
case, the introduction is through the denouncement of the opposite emotion in the
counterpart poem, locking the two poems into a necessarily dialectical reading. In
both cases, the main bodies of the poems, after the introductory stanzas, follow the
same fixed line and meter: rhyming couplets in the iambic tetrameter. The opening
stanzas too, share an identical structure: a quatrain followed by a sestet. In both cases
the rhyme scheme of the opening stanzas is a-b-b-a, followed by c-d-d-e-e-c. Again,
the understanding we arrived at earlier for the 'Nativity' ode holds here too. The
problem that Milton encounters in introductory passages, where he has to offer a
somewhat discursive account of what will follow, is negotiated by alternating the
rhyming lines to accommodate more complex sentences. This is abjured in the rest of
the poem, for the terser rhyming couplet, sufficient to the demands of descriptive
praise, as for instance in these lines from 'Il Penseroso':

Thee Chauntress of the Woods among,

I woo to hear thy eeven-Song;
And missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven Green,
To behold the wandring Moon,
Riding neer her highest noon,
Like one that had bin led astray
Through the Heav'ns wide pathles way;
And oft, as if her head she bow'd,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud. (11. 63-72)

41
As importantly, the rhyming couplet maintains the sense of discipline necessary to the
themes of the two poems, even as it permits an energetic, staccato rhythm to flow
through the lines. While this adds to the sense of their being companion poems, it also
indicates to us Milton's strong sense that both sensibilities - gaiety and melancholia-
possess the power to produce powerful, passionate, yet controlled poetry, and at least
on this criterion, there is little to choose between the two. If, as critics have suggested,
Milton finally favours Melancholia, it is more likely to be because of his own poetic
and thematic inclinations than because the one sensibility is in some way innately
superior to the other. In this light if we return to the paradox we noted earlier while
discussing 'Il Penseroso', we see that it emerges because the two attitudes are posed as
oppositional, when in reality they are not, they are merely extensions within a
continuum of human attitudes.

In terms of the similarities between the two poems, it is worth noting here that this is
one instance when Milton seems to have drawn as close as he possibly ever does to
the poetic fashions of his age. The poets we refer to as the Metaphysicals, like Donne
and Marvell, were particularly fond of writing poetry that used dialogic voices, as for
instance in Marvell's poem, 'A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body'. Just as in
that poem, the basic conflict expressed in Milton's twin poems is that between the
pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the mind or the spirit. The difference of
course lies in the fact that in Marvell's poem the schism between body and soul is
expressed internally, in the poem, as part of the same speaking voice, while the
schism in Milton's two poems is external to the poem itself, and is perceptible only
when the poems are read jointly. It is here that we identify a central humanistic
concell1 emerging, in the treatment of the human spirit as tom between two equal
forces, the call of the sensual world and the seductions of the intellectual and spiritual
one. The difference in this regard between Marvell and Milton is as important as the
similarity: where Milton is still able to externalise the schism, and present the voice
within the poem as an integrated whole, in Marvell's poem the schism is already
internalised and negotiated within the same poem, and the poetic voice itself splits in
two to accommodate it. In this Milton evidently remains closer to the older
renaissance humanism.

21.5 SONNETS 19 AND 23

Dates ranging from 1651 to 1655 have been suggested for both Sonnet 19 and 23, but
1652 appears to be the best estimate. Sonnet 19's second line has often led readers to
assume an earlier date because no one in the seventeenth century would express
confidence about living much past 70, if that. If he wrote this line in 1652, he would
be counting on 86 years. Milton's own father lived to be at least 84. Milton often
understated his age and predated several poems in the 1645 Poems. He was anxious

42
about his age and his personal attractiveness. He was also anxious about vocational
belatedness. By 1652 Milton was totally blind. He had spent years fulfilling his duties
to the Council of State. Now he was under malicious attack for defending Cromwell's
government to the world and for his own advocacy of divorce, and even ridiculed for
his blindness. He had always meant to write a great English epic, and now it must
have seemed impossible. This brilliant sonnet is proof enough that his talent has not
been rendered 'useless' by age and blindness.

Both sonnets follow the iambic pentameter of conventional sonnet as well as the
octave-sestet pattern, and the octave in both sonnets follows the same kind of rhyme
scheme, which is a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a. The sestets in the two sonnets however, differ
slightly: where Sonnet 19 follows the scheme c-d-e-c-d-e, Sonnet 23 goes c-d-c-d-c d.
We will discuss these patterns in a moment; for now it is important to note that both
sonnets deal with Milton's blindness. But the way in which the sense of blindness is
experienced is different in each poem. In Sonnet 19 the blindness comes to represent
for the poet a blindness of purpose in life itself, since it suggests the inability to
practise his craft without which he feels he has

…one Talent which is death to hide,

Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account… (11. 3-6)

But having stated the lament, he is instructed by 'patience' to 'bear his milde yoak'
patiently, for as the famous last line of the sonnet states, 'They also serve who only
stand and waite.' The poet thus derives consolation from humility, the poem then
serving as a reminder to the poet and re-focusing his attention on the purpose of his
poetry, which is not just the exercise of the talent for its own sake, but in the service
of God. The sonnet is in this sense finally a religious sonnet. To this end, the octave
sestet scheme is adhered to in the progression of the poem itself, Tor the lament of the
poet takes up the octave, while the argument against the lament follows in the sestet,
which thus selves as a counter-point to the octave.

In contrast Sonnet 23 is a more ambiguous somewhat mysterious sonnet, the person

who is the object of which is not very clear. Apart from (but consistent with) the
thematic ambiguity, the imagery in the sonnet is striking in its employment of light
and dark, visibility and invisibility. The lady is presented to us as

…vail’d, yet to my fancied sight,

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight. (11. 10-12)

43
This effect is further and intensified by the wraith-like quality of the figure which,
Milton informs us, is like Alcestis, 'Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint'
(1. 4). Unlike the earlier sonnet which is fairly clear even in its articulation of an
essentially religious doubt, this sonnet seemingly simpler in its topic, yet far more
richly ambiguous in its treatment. It is further different from the previous sonnet in
being closer to the metaphysical style that we have noted of the other poets of the age,
especially in its brilliant yoking together of night and day in the last line. This is
perhaps inevitable, given the poem's rather peculiarly metaphysical subject, which is
the fundamental connection between vision and notions of reality - or in other words,
the way in which transformations in perception can transform one's understanding of
reality itself. A final difference between the two sonnets lies in the thematic refusal to
adhere to the octave-sestet division, in Sonnet 23. The vision in the poem occupies
'almost all of it, and it is only in the final couplet that a reversal of perspective is
effected, and we realise that the poet is talking about a fantastic vision rather than an
actual one.

The difference in the rhyme schemes of the sestets between the two sonnets draws our
attention yet again to the difference in theme and treatment. While Sonnet 19's c- d-e-
c-d-e scheme serves well to articulate the longish argument which constitutes the
consolation to the blind poet, since it permits the elaboration of extended sentences,
Sonnet 23's c-d-c-d-c-d pattern works to limit the length of the sentences and
statements, the pauses serving to enhance the sense of mystery. Further, in the latter
scheme, the repetition of the same rhymes also serves to draw together and integrate
the total experience of the poem as a singular one. In this sense at least, Milton's use
of the sonnet form, while conventional, even classical, in Sonnet 19, becomes slightly
unconventional with Sonnet 23.

21.6 SOME ADDITIONAL REMARKS

We have in this and the previous unit focused on Milton's evolution as a poet, through
a brief study of some of his more important short poems. We have seen how he
remains, in almost all his poetry, rooted in Biblical thought and imagery, which may
therefore be understood to be the single most important influence on his work. In
addition to this, however, we traced the influence of some earlier and classical poets,
like Virgil and Ovid, and Spenser among his immediate predecessors. We noted how
music plays an important role in Milton's poetry, both in theme and in form. We also
noted how these early shorter works prefigure to a lesser or greater extent the themes,
concerns and styles of his later epic, Paradise Lost. We focused primarily on
understanding some of the stylistic and formal issues involved in the poems, in the
course of the study. This is not to suggest that the poems are to be interpreted or
studied only in this way. Milton's writing is no exception from the general rule-of
thumb that all literature has fundamental roots in its historical context, and may well
be studied in these terms, alongside and integrating the more formal aspects of study.

44
This may appear a more difficult task with Milton than would normally be the case.
We have seen the extent to which his writing is steeped in classical allusions and
myths, and in the Bible. It can be deeply allegorical, as with the twin poems
'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', or highly personal as with the sonnets. There seems
little in his shorter poetry that alludes to the great social and political events of his
age, at first glance, and they seem to constitute a universe of their own. This however,
should not discourage the student from exploring the poems for their contextual
affiliations. Some of these may be found as oblique presences, in descriptive passage
in the poems, as for instance in these lines from 'L'Allegro’:

Towred Cities please us then,

And the busie humm of men,
Where throngs of Knights and Barons bold,
In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold,
With store of Ladies, whose bright eies
Rain influence, and judge the prise
Of Wit, or Arms, while both contend
To win her Grace, whom all commend.
There let Hymen oft appear
In Saffron robe, with Taper clear,
And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique Pageantry,
Such sights as youthful1 Poets dream
On Sumner eeves by haunted stream. [ll. 117-130]

While at first glance these lines may appear to be no more than part of the idyllic
setting that the poet paints for the gay speaker of the poem, a more thoughtful look
will suggest that what Milton is describing here is the court of Charles I, in all its
pomp and pageantry. Certainly through the description of the cities as 'towred' Milton
is drawing up a host of associations for his seventeenth century readers: that the city
is London, and is associated with the palace, the royalty and the nobility; this is
further associated with a moral and spiritual degeneracy that has an almost pagan air
to it; in implicit contrast is the country, and that invisible city of the commoners,
where such riches and pomp do not exist; which in turn would be associated by the
seventeenth century reader with a more clearly Puritan, and therefore Christian air.
When we read this poem then, as we must, with its companion poem, which we might
understand to emerge from precisely this latter social section, we realise that the two
poems actually embody - albeit in a coded and broad way - the values of the two
oppositional classes and political factions of the middle of the seventeenth century.

The other poems may be read in a similar vein. It is possible for instance, to read the
repeated invocation of the Muses in the different poems as epitomising the relations

45
between the sexes of' the age - the masculine voice retaining control and presence,
summoning the feminine voice to fulfil its aims, even as it projects the latter as
quasi- divine. Even if Milton was among the first to argue for the equal status of
women in society, his figuring of femininity remains deeply bound by the
imagination of his age, which is, that the role of women is essentially as support,
instrument and silent spectator (witness the figuring of Nature in the 'Nativity' ode) to
the operations of men. These are of course, very sketchy analyses, intended more as
directions for exploration than as complete statements. Closer analyses will reveal
more complex relations between the poetry and its social world, and especially to the
complex and multilayered processes of gender relations. Such analyses will first
demand that one study the complexities of the age itself, socially, politically and
culturally. In this sense, the above remarks are offered as no more than a very small
window to a very large prospect.

21.7 LET'S SUM UP

In this unit we examined four of Milton's shorter poems. We studied the relation
between the twin poems 'L'Allego' and 'Il Penseroso' as poems that deliberately adopt
oppositional attitudes to the vocation of poetry. We studied the poems individually
and in comparison. In the course of doing so, we noted that this led to certain
paradoxes that were inherent to understanding the poems in this light. The two
sonnets that we chose for study are from Milton's later literary phase, and revealed
other dimension to his writings like the preoccupation with blindness and its
implications, and with death. These are in this sense more personal poems than the
others we have studied so far. We then went on to discuss some aspects of the relation
between formal elements and the historical context in which the poems were written.
This we hope will serve as a preliminary guide to the analyses of poetry through the
location of its formal qualities within, rather than separated from, its contexts of
creation.

21.8 REVISION QUESTIONS

1. In the twin poems, 'L'allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', Milton seeks to offer not just
a vision of two moods but the two extreme sentiments of an extreme age. Do
you agree? Give a reasoned answer.
2. Which of the two poems 'L'allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', in your considered
opinion, would more accurately represent Milton's owl1 personal view? Why?
3. In both the two sonnets in your course, Milton reflects on his blindness. Does
that make them identical? Give a reasoned answer.
4. Analyse the similarities and distinctions between Sonnets 19 & 23. Which of
the two, in your considered opinion, more effectively employs the sonnet
form?

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 5. Milton's poetry is transcendent, in themes as well as style, rather than
historically rooted. Would you agree? Why, or why not?

21.9 ADDITIONAL READING

1. Allen, Don Cameron. Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan

Symbolism Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1970.

2. Benet, Diana Trevino and Lieb, Michael, eds. Literary Milton: .Text, Pretext,
Context. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1994.

3. Borris, Kenneth. Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic

Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.

4. Corns, Thomas N. Milton's Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

5. Easthope, Antony. "Towards the Autonomous Subject in Poetry: Milton's 'On

His Blindness"' in Machin, Richard and Christopher Norris, eds. Post-
Structuralist Readings of English Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
UP, 1987.

6. ' Fish, Stanley. "What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and I1 Penseroso." Is There a
Text in this Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980: 112-35

7. Robertson, David. "Soliloquy and Self in Milton's Major Poems." Of Poetry

and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World. Ed. P.G. Stanwood.
Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995: 59-77

8. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis,

and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992.

47
 APPENDICES

ON THE MORNING OP CHRIST'S NATIVITY COMPOS'D 1629

I
This is the Month, and this the happy mom
Where in the Son of Heav'ns eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing, [ 5 ]
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

II
That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherwith he wont at Heav'ns high Councel-Table, [ 10 ]
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us Lo be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay.

III
Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein [ 15 ]
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no vers, no hymn, or solemn strein,
To welcom him to this his new abode,
Now while the Heav'n by the Suns team untrod,
Hat11 took no print of the approching light, [ 20 ]
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?

IV
See how from far upon the Eastern rode
The Star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet:
0 run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet; [ 25 ]
Have thou the honour first, thy Lord to greet
And joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire,

48
From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow'd fire.

The Hymn
I
It was the Winter wilde,
While the Heav'n-born-childe, [ 30 ]
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in aw to him
Had dofft her gawdy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her [ 35 ]
To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour.
II
Onely with speeches fair
She woo's the gentle Air
To hide her guilty front with innocent Snow,
And on her naked shame, [ 40 ]
Pollute with sinfull blame,

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