The Miltonic Moment

J. Martin Evans

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813120607
• eBook ISBN: 9780813188287
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as "the Miltonic Moment."

This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus)," and "Lycidas." These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning.

The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical.

Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age.

1

THE POETRY OF ABSENCE

It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt. It is these silences which the critic must make ‘speak.’

—Terry Eagleton,
Marxism and Literary Criticism, 34-35

IN AN INFLUENTIAL ARTICLE published in 1940, Arthur E. Barker argued that the Nativity Ode records an experience in Milton’s life “which corresponds to the conversion of his Puritan associates.”¹ Amplifying on Barker’s point, A.S.P. Woodhouse claimed two years later that “taken together, the Nativity Ode and How Soon Hath Time give evidence of an experience that stands to Milton in place of what the Puritans called conversion.”² Despite Rosemond Tuve’s cautions against “over-personal” readings of the poem, this view of the Ode as “the testimony of Milton’s religious experience” has gained wide currency in more recent critical discussions.³ According to Patrick J. Cullen, for instance, the Nativity Ode “is structured so that the meditator himself experiences a conversion from pagan illusion to the new Christian truth of the babe in the manger.”⁴ In much the same vein, I.S. MacLaren argues that the poem enacts “the process by which the narrator gradually perceives the significance of both God’s offer of grace through the Son and man’s responsibility for response entailed in that offer.”⁵ And Georgia Christopher defines Milton’s subject as “the revolution that grace makes in the consciousness of the poet.”⁶

All these readings of the poem as a kind of confessional autobiography seem to me to be based upon a patently false assumption, namely, that there is an individualized human presence in the text to be converted—whether Cullen’s “meditator,” MacLaren’s “narrator,” or Christopher’s “poet.” In fact, I want to argue, the Nativity Ode is the most rigorously depersonalized of all Milton’s nondramatic works. It is a poem that faces not inward but outward, a poem that casts the reader rather than the poet in the role of the convert.

To begin with, the very form in which Milton chose to compose his poem militates against an autobiographical interpretation. For whether we follow Robert Shafer, George N. Shuster, Carol Maddison, and Paul H. Fry in identifying the poem as an ode, or Philip Rollinson in reading it as a hymn, the genre of the Nativity Ode automatically implies a choric rather than an individual speaker.⁷ In the performance of Pindar’s odes, Shafer reminds us, “the chant of the chorus still held undisputed the place of first importance,” while the hymn, Fry remarks, is almost by definition “a choir-poem that harmoniously effaces the individual.”⁸ Sensitive as he always was to generic expectations, Milton created accordingly a voice that is essentially choric in nature. As the final lines of the proem make clear, the “hymn” (17) is sung by the heavenly muse in concert with “the Angel Quire”—hence the insistently plural pronouns in the latter part of the poem: “our” ears, “our” senses, “our” fancy, “our” song (126, 127, 134, 239).⁹ Far from belonging to an individualized poet or his surrogate, the voice we hear performing the “humble ode” (24) is public rather than private, communal rather than personal, celestial rather than human.¹⁰

In this respect, it is instructive to compare the Nativity Ode with its intended companion piece, The Passion. The latter poem is almost literally suffocated by the poet’s self-consciousness:

Befriend me night best Patroness of grief,

Over the Pole thy thickest mantle throw,

And work my flatter’d fancy to belief,

That Heaven and Earth are colour’d with my wo;

My sorrows are too dark for day to know:

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,

And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white.

[29-35]

During the course of this one stanza, Milton refers to himself no less than six times, and the poem as a whole is obsessively self-referential. The Nativity Ode, on the contrary, contains not a single “I,” “me,” or “my” in its thirty-one stanzas. If Lycidas is “a poem nearly anonymous,” in John Crowe Ransom’s famous formulation, the Nativity Ode comes as close as a poem can to being wholly anonymous.¹¹

This lack of personal involvement stands out in marked contrast to most literary representatives of the Nativity tradition. If we compare the Nativity Ode with almost any other celebration of Christ’s birth written in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, what strikes us immediately is the absence of any reference in Milton’s poem to the effect of Christ’s birth upon the poet himself. At the end of “New Heaven, New Warre,” for example, Robert Southwell turns from the manger scene to exhort his own soul to remain loyal to his savior:

My soul with Christ join thou in fight,

Stick to the tents that he hath dight;

Within his crib is surest ward,

This little babe will be thy guard;

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from the heavenly boy. [43-48]

In the sestet of his sonnet on the Nativity, John Donne, after addressing the Christ child throughout the octave, suddenly shifts his attention to his personal spiritual concerns:

Seest thou, my soule, with thy faiths eyes how he

Which fills all place, yet none holds him doth lye?

Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,

That would have need to be pittied by thee?

Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,

With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe. [9-14]

And in similar vein, Ben Jonson, in the concluding lines of “A hymne on the Nativitie of my Saviour,” meditates upon the significance for himself and his readers of the events he has just described:

What comfort by him doe wee winne,

Who made himselfe the price of sinne

To make us heires of glory.

To see this babe, all innocence:

A martyr borne in our defence;

Can man forget this storie? [19-24]

There is nothing even remotely corresponding to these sentiments in the Nativity Ode; the poem does not contain anyone who could experience them.

The presence of a poet or his surrogate in the text of a poem does not, of course, depend exclusively upon the use of the first-person pronoun. It can also be implied by a direct, second-person address to the reader or to the subject of the poem. Thus, in the sestet of his sonnet on “Christmas,” George Herbert suddenly abandons his narrative stance in order to pray to the child whose birth he has been describing:

O Thou, whose glorious yet contracted light,

Wrapt in nights mantle, stole into a manger;

Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger:

Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have

A better lodging than a rack or grave. [9-14]

And Henry Vaughan, after celebrating Christ’s birth and its impact on the natural world, devotes the final two stanzas of “Christ’s Nativity” to informing the child of his own inadequacy and sinfulness:

I would I had in my best part

Fit rooms for thee, or that my heart

Were so clean as

Thy manger was,

But I am all filth, and obscene,

Yet if thou wilt thou canst make clean. [19-25]

Milton, on the contrary, never addresses the child directly. Jesus is consistently referred to in the third person: “Nature in awe to him” (32), “He her fears to cease” (45), “His raign of peace” (63). As a result, there is nothing in the Nativity Ode to parallel the agonized yearnings of Herbert or Vaughan for personal regeneration. It is difficult, therefore, to agree with Barker when he claims that the effects of the experience recorded in the poem “correspond in general to the effects of the puritan conversion,” for there is no one in the poem to register those effects.¹² In one of the most original articles on the Nativity Ode to appear in the last ten years, Richard Halpern argues that, by “putting off epic expansiveness to dwell in the ‘humble ode,’” Milton enacts a kenosis or “emptying out” analogous to “Christ’s decision to forego heaven and lie ‘meanly wrapt in the rude manger’.”¹³ My point is that “Milton’s parallel kenosis,” as Halpern calls it, is rather more radical: he has effectively erased himself from his own poem.

At first sight, this lack of any subjective presence might seem strange in the work of a Puritan poet, who might normally be expected to dwell at length on his own spiritual response to Christ’s redemptive mission, but I believe it is part of an overall strategy that is quintessentially Puritan. We may begin by noting that though the poet is the most notable absentee, he is by no means the only one. For whereas most representations of the Nativity in art and literature focus on the presence of the wise men and the shepherds at the manger, Milton sets the scene before their arrival. The Magi are still on their way to Bethlehem:

See how from far upon the Eastern rode

The Star-led Wisards haste with odours sweet,

O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;

Have thou the honour first, thy Lord to greet. [22-26]

And the shepherds are still in the fields with their flocks: “The Shepherds on the Lawn / Or ere the point of dawn, / Sate simply chatting in a rustic row” (85-87). The heavenly muse has “prevented” them all. When we encounter the child in the manger, there is no one standing between us.

What is more, Mary and Joseph have been effectively banished from their traditional positions. The former eventually makes a brief appearance in the final stanza; the latter never appears at all. As Blake failed to notice when he illustrated the poem, the only figures we encounter in the early stanzas are the personified abstractions of Nature, Peace, Truth, Justice, and Mercy.¹⁴ The entire scene, one could say without exaggeration, has been completely dehumanized. The space that in so many Nativity representations was crowded with observers is totally empty. Even the traditional ox and ass have been expunged. The Nativity Ode is truly a poem of absences.

Milton’s strategy of erasure is too consistent to be accidental. It reflects, I believe, the characteristically Puritan distaste for allowing any intermediary to intrude between the individual soul and its Maker. By purging the scene of all the traditional witnesses of the Nativity, Milton forces the reader to respond to the scene not vicariously, through the experience of the wise men and the shepherds, but directly. Nobody, not even the poet, stands between the reader and the babe in the manger. To a greater extent than in any other Nativity poem, we encounter the Christ child face to face.

As Lowry Nelson has noted, moreover, Milton heightens this sense of immediacy by collapsing the tenses of the poem in such a way that the events seem to be taking place in a kind of timeless present, both then and now.¹⁵ From the opening stanza of the hymn onward, the verbs alternate between past and present so frequently—“was” (29), “lies” (31), “was” (35), “woo’s” (38), “Sent” (46), “strikes” (52)—that the narrative finally seems to transcend chronology. We are simultaneously looking back at the Nativity across history and witnessing it as it happens. “This is the month and this the happy morn.”

Seen in such a temporal context, Milton’s choice of moments has theological as well as structural significance. For the narrative is organized so that, though the child has been born when the poem begins, he has not yet been welcomed or accepted by the world. The induction insists that the sky, “by the Suns team untrod, / Hath took no print of the approaching light” (19-20). Literally, of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Miltonic Moment
• 1 The Poetry of Absence
• 2 Virtue and Virginity
• 3 The Road from Horton
• Conclusion: The Poetics of Redemption
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index