The Poetry of John Milton

Gordon Teskey

• Editore: Harvard University Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674286764
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria nella poesia

John Milton is regarded as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. Yet for sublimity and philosophical grandeur, Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe: poets who achieve a total ethical and spiritual vision of the world. In this panoramic interpretation, the distinguished Milton scholar Gordon Teskey shows how the poet's changing commitments are subordinated to an aesthetic that joins beauty to truth and value to ethics. The art of poetry is rediscovered by Milton as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can be.Milton's early poems include the heroic Nativity Ode; the seductive paired poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; the mythological pageant Comus, with its comically diabolical enchanter and its serious debate on the human use of nature; and "Lycidas, " perhaps the greatest short poem in English and a prophecy of vast human displacements in the modern world. Teskey follows Milton's creative development in three phases, from the idealistic transcendence of the poems written in his twenties to the political engagement of the gritty, hard-hitting poems of his middle years. The third phase is that of "transcendental engagement, " in the heaven-storming epic Paradise Lost, and the great works that followed it: the intense intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the tragedy Samson Agonistes.

I

TRANSCENDENCE

1

On the Early Poems

IN THE FOURTEEN YEARS between 1624 and 1637, Milton composed some fifty-two poems in four languages. The obvious watershed is “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the poem Milton composed little more than two weeks after his twenty-first birthday and shortly before dawn on Christmas morning, 1629. It is likely he was home in London from Cambridge, in the family home on Bread Street, which was situated on the high ground of Ludgate Hill to the west of the city center, near Saint Paul’s Cathedral.¹ He would say later that the first light of dawn brought the poem to him. At the hour in which he wrote, on that particular morning, there would have been very few lights and very few sounds—no torches or candles, no carters’ cries or street vendors’ songs. Despite the air pollution, which was already a serious problem, the stars would have been visible and bright, especially from the hill and especially toward the east, for the city fell away in that direction onto lower ground toward London Bridge. He was waiting for dawn, which seemed, as it does when we are watching for it, to hesitate before it arrives. The stars seemed reluctant to leave and the first light of dawn hadn’t touched the horizon or the dark overhead. Perhaps he began at the beginning and said to himself, “This is the month and this the happy morn.”

Some days later, when he was still working on the poem, or at least polishing it, Milton described this scene in a Latin verse epistle addressed to his friend Charles Diodati:

I am singing of the peace-bearing king of Heavenly origin, of the happy ages prophesied in Scripture, of the infant God born in a poor stable who with his Father dwells in the Kingdom of Heaven, of the new star born under the cosmic vault, of the hosts of angels singing in the air, and of the pagan gods surprised in their various shrines and banished to Hell. I gave this gift to Christ for his birthday. The first light of dawn brought it to me.

(“Sixth Elegy,” lines 81–88)

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” or the Nativity Ode, is Milton’s first work of genius and his first contribution to the canon of English poems that will last as long as the language is spoken. It is therefore interesting to see how Milton prepared for this achievement, which may well have surprised him, as much as it astonishes us. But it is also interesting to consider how the very brilliance of that achievement may have been an obstacle to further development. Such obstacles are not unheard of in the annals of poetry. Some poets overcome them, often after considerable artistic and psychological struggle. Other poets do not and are ever after in pursuit of the glory of early promise. The young poet who finds himself or herself in these circumstances—happy to be met by unexpected success but perhaps not fully aware how this success poses a danger—has to stop trying to repeat what has already been done and accept the challenge of thinking about poetry in a new way.

The sudden brilliance of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” left Milton supposing that the purpose of poetry is to unite heaven and earth, the divine and the human—or, as Milton would express it almost three decades later, “to justify the ways of God to men” (PL, 1.26). But this particular purpose for poetry, entailing a vertical movement from earth toward heaven and from heaven toward earth, is at odds with something in the nature of poetry itself, something characterized, at the level of figurative language, by the lateral movement of metaphorical and metonymic substitutions. The union of the human with the divine may be attempted by a transcendental projection of the human in the direction of the divine, by “regaining to know God aright” (YP, 2:367), whether by prayer, learning, or poetry, which Milton commonly imagines in terms of flight. Or the union of the human with the divine may be initiated by a movement in the opposite direction, from heaven to earth. The most important example is the Incarnation, when God, in the person of the Son, descends into the world and experiences everything a human being experiences, except, of course, sin. (One may be forgiven for thinking that is a lot to leave out.) One of the great scenes of Paradise Lost is the descent from Heaven of the angel Raphael to give warning and counsel to the parents of the human race.

In biblical terms, the condescension from the divine to the human is a covenant, an effort by God to establish a working relationship with humanity. The first covenant was the simple command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. With the breaking of this covenant, however, human nature is so vitiated by sin, by the Fall, that future efforts to restore the relationship between the divine and the human are rendered ineffectual by the inability of humankind to keep its side of the covenant. Yet God is determined that his relationship shall be restored. History, biblical history, is the story of his efforts to do so. Up to the time of the Incarnation, God’s method of doing so is synecdochical: he lets one part of humankind stand for the whole, Noah and his family for the rest of humankind; Abraham and his descendants for the rest of humankind; Moses and the keepers of the Law, the Hebrews (later, the Jews), for the rest of humankind; David and his kingdom for the rest of humankind. As descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the Jews are themselves a part or, to use the prophetic word, a remnant of the Hebrews, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel having been lost. There is a suggestion in the prophets that with the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of his kingdom on earth, the Jews will be a priestly people, ministering to the rest of humankind, so that it is not only the Jews who will be saved.

But for Christians this promise is never fulfilled—or at least not in this way. The Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ is therefore the next, and the most extreme, effort at making one part of humanity stand for the whole. Jesus stands for all. As the Son says in Paradise Lost when proposing to atone for the sins of mankind: “Account me Man” (PL, 3.138). Jesus is for a time the only human being about whom God cares and thus the only human being who stands condemned of original sin and under a sentence of death: “Account me Man.” But once Jesus has undergone the sentence and died on the cross, atoning for original sin on behalf of humanity, humanity is included in this atonement. What was formerly the tactic of the separated part, of the remnant, has become something like the figure of synecdoche, where the part stands for the whole, a figure otherwise known as the symbol. No longer does “Account me Man” mean “forget the rest of mankind and focus your wrath on me.” The phrase now means “include the rest of mankind in me, and impute my merit to them.” That is the meaning of the Incarnation. The downward motion of the Son from Heaven to Earth is repeated in the figures of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, who return to earth because he does:

Yea, Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

Th’enameled arras of the rainbow wearing,

And Mercy set between,

Throned in celestial sheen,

With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,

And Heaven, as at some festival,

Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

(“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” lines 141–48)

Making poetry becomes for Milton a shamanistic art involving movement up and down on a vertical axis, or ladder, between Earth and Heaven and between the Earth and Hell or, as he called them in the Latin poems, Olympus and Tartarus. In keeping with this view, he continually associates poetry with flying. But a great imaginative turning point in Milton’s career is the moment, at the beginning of book 7 of Paradise Lost, when he relinquishes soaring and says he will now speak “Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole.” (For Milton, the pole is not one of the terrestrial poles, our North and South Poles. The pole is the highest point on the orb of the universe. To be “rapt above the pole” is to soar above the stars into Heaven.) To the extent that poetry is concerned with the world that is spread out around us horizontally, our environment, this world is for Milton not the natural world but rather the world God created. All relations between beings in the natural world—competitive, cooperative, and metamorphic relations—are reinscribed by Milton onto the relation between the Creator and his creatures. Poetry itself is inspired not from springs in the earth but from above: the proximate cause of poetry is the poet, but its ultimate cause is the Creator. For the Christian poet who claims inspiration from God, the poem is a secondary revelation of what God has created—or of what God has done, especially at the Creation. This makes it difficult for the poet to be a creator in his own right, which he does by drawing inspiration—material inspiration—from outside Christian culture: from the classical pagan tradition.

A figure of poetic vision is offered to us at the beginning of the twelfth book of Paradise Lost, when Adam stands with the angel Michael on the mountain above Paradise, learning what is to come in the future. Whereas poetic vision is comparable with flight, with transcending the earth, the most frequent image of poetry in Milton’s later verse is associated with articulate sound, with narrative. Adam has already learned of this future as it extends from the moment, shortly to come, when he and Eve will be led out of the garden and human history will begin. In an astonishing series of pageants, with much anthropological speculation on primitive humans, Adam actually sees this history up to the time of the great deluge, which covers the entire earth with water and then, like an aging face, wrinkles as it is blown upon by the north wind and dried by the sun. Michael pauses here, “betwixt the world destroyed and world restored” (PL, 12.3). Up to this moment, that is, through most of the second half of book 11, Adam has not merely heard but seen, in visions, what is to come in the future. How does he see them? Milton tells us three things Michael did: he removed the cataract-like film from Adam’s eyes that had grown on them since he ate the fruit; he cleansed the visual nerves extending back from the eyes; and he instilled in the eyes themselves drops of water from the Well of Life:

But to nobler sights

Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed

Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight

Had bred, then purged with euphrasy and rue

The visual nerve (for he had much to see)

And from the Well of Life three drops instilled.

(PL, 11.411–16)

His spirits overcome by these attentions, Adam sinks down, unconscious and entranced, as he sank down before, dazzled and overpowered by God’s presence, “as with an object that excels the sense” (PL, 8.456), in the moment before God created Eve by taking a rib from his side. But he is soon raised and told to open his eyes to the visions of the future, visions he is to be shown by the angel Michael, whom he calls, “True opener of mine eyes” (PL, 11.598). It is important that all these things be seen, until they are swept from Adam’s sight by the great Flood, or “Deluge,” from which Noah and his household are saved in the ark. The rainbow is set in the heavens as a covenant that the earth shall continue to the end of time through the course of its cycles, of sewing and harvest, summer’s heat and winter’s frost, until the Apocalypse—“till fire purge all things new” (PL, 11.900). It is important that Adam himself see the rainbow that Noah and his family—“the ancient sire … with all his train” (PL, 11.862)—shall see: “over his head beholds / A dewy cloud and in the cloud a bow / Conspicuous with three listed colors gay / Betok’ning peace from God and cov’nant new / Whereat the heart of Adam erst so sad / Greatly rejoiced” (PL, 11.864–69).

What Milton had to learn after “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” and despite that poem’s success, is that while poetry would remain for him oriented to the divine, poetry is fundamentally, and in the broadest sense of the term, an ethical art, one that concerns itself with lateral relations between the proper self and the other. With empathy, poetry crosses the boundary of our seemingly irreducible difference, body to body and mind to mind. It is like what I hear of quantum entanglement or action at a distance. We s...