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2. Milton: The Infant Cry of God
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Professor John Rogers:
It's fitting that the first
poem of Milton's that we study
in this class is "On the Morning
of Christ's Nativity."
In a number of ways,
it's both a first poem and it's
a poem about firsts.
It isn't exactly,
though, the first poem that
Milton wrote.
As you can see from your --
from actually any -- edition,
any modern edition,
of Milton which arranges the
poems more or less
chronologically -- you can tell
that the young Milton had
actually written quite a few
things before he wrote what we
call colloquially the Nativity
Ode,
but most of these early
pieces are written in the Latin
that Milton had perfected at
school and these earliest of
Milton's Latin poems are lyrics.
They're of an incredibly
impressive technical proficiency
and they are absolutely soaked
with the references to the
classical writers that Milton
had been ingesting from his
earliest youth.
Milton had also written a
couple of very short poems in
English.
But there's an important and,
I think, a very real sense in
which Milton wanted to make it
seem as if the Nativity Ode
were the first poem that he
had written.
There's also an important and,
I think, a very real sense in
which Milton wanted to make it
seem -- and obviously this is a
much more difficult feat --
wanted to make it seem as if the
Nativity Ode were the
first poem that anyone
had written.
Now Milton was born in 1608 and
he wrote the Nativity Ode
along with the Sixth
Elegy,
the Elegia Sexta,
that we read for today in
December of 1629,
a couple of weeks presumably
after he turned twenty-one.
It wasn't until 1645 at the age
of thirty-six or thirty-seven
that Milton would publish his
first volume of poems,
which he titled simply
Poems.
And it wouldn't be another
twenty-two years after
that until Milton
actually published Paradise
Lost.
Now I am mentioning these
dates here because the dates on
which Milton wrote and published
his poems,
the temporal sequence of these
publications,
have a peculiar and particular
importance for the poet.
As early as 1629 (that's the
date we're in now) Milton is
thinking of himself as a poet
who has not yet
published.
He delays for an unusually long
time his poetic entrance into
print, and he's musing almost
continually on what it means to
be a poet who has delayed his
publication: to be a poet who's
waiting for something,
to be a poet who's always
looking to the future to the
poem that he hasn't yet written,
to the future and to the
readers he hasn't yet attained,
and maybe most gloriously,
a poet who's looking to the
future to the fame that he has
not yet successfully secured or
secured at all because no one at
this point knows John
Milton.When in 1645 Milton
finally publishes that first
volume of poetry,
the first poem that he places
in this volume is the Nativity
Ode, our poem today.
And under this title,
"On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity," appears -- as you can
see from your text -- appears
the subtitle,
"composed 1629."
Milton's taking pains here,
and he does this with very few
other poems, to let us know
precisely when it is that he's
written it.
"Composed 1629" -- whether or
not that's actually true,
and there's some controversy
about that -- but nonetheless,
the subtitle announces to all
who know John Milton that the
poet was twenty-one years old at
the moment of its composition
and that he had therefore just
reached his majority.Now the
subject matter that he's chosen
for this poem,
for this so-called first
poem, couldn't possibly be more
appropriate.
With this first poem treating
the subject of the nativity of
Christ, Milton is able
implicitly to announce something
like his own nativity as a poet.
It goes without saying that
there is something outlandish,
to say the least,
about this.
We're struck by the arrogance
implicit in Milton's active
identification here.
What could possibly be more
presumptuous than the
association of the beginning of
one's own career,
one's own literary career,
with the birth of the Christian
messiah?
Milton's implicit connection
between his own birth as a poet
and the birth of the Son of God
is an act of hubris that I think
a lot of his contemporaries
would feel more comfortable
actually calling
blasphemy.John Milton will
remain unique in English letters
for the degree of thought that
he gave to the shape of his
literary career,
or actually to the notion of a
career at all.
No English poet before Milton
ever suggested that he had been
chosen by God at birth to be a
poet.
None of England's pre-Miltonic
poets -- Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare --had
dared to suggest -- and it would
never have occurred to them to
suggest --that theirs was
actually a divine
vocation.
I think it takes your breath
away to think of the unspeakably
high hopes that John Milton had
for his career.If you have a
chance,
you might want to take a look
-- I think this is in the Cross
Campus Library -- at the
facsimile version of the very
first edition of Paradise
Lost.
It's in ten books rather
than twelve.
It's a modest thing,
the 1667 volume,
and the text looks perfectly
ordinary until you realize that
in the margin alongside the
lines of the poem are printed
the line numbers for the poem.
just like the line numbers in
any modern edition of Milton
that's been produced for the
likes of you,
for the consumption of college
English majors.
As far as I know -- I know of
no exception,
although someone may well be
able to produce one -- no
original poem in English had
ever been published with line
numbers in the margin in its
very first printing.
And it may well be that no poem
has ever been since Paradise
Lost published with line
numbers in its very first
edition.
Any right-thinking printer or
any right-thinking publisher
would scoff at the presumption
of a poet who demanded such a
thing.
The only precedent Milton would
have had even for the
idea of line numbers
would have been the great
ancient classics,
the magnificent Renaissance
editions of Homer and Virgil.
They would have appeared in the
seventeenth century with line
numbers because line numbers
obviously facilitate the
production of scholarly
commentary and facilitate the
study of those texts in the
classroom.
And I can only assume that that
is precisely the point,
that Milton would -- later in
1667 when Paradise Lost
is published,
he would make his poem
canonical just like The Iliad
and just like The Odyssey
and The Aeneid
before anyone had actually
read it.
Milton would insert into the
printed text of his poem his own
anticipation that his epic would
receive the same universal
approbation as Homer's and
Virgil's.
It's a daring way to jump-start
one's own literary
celebrity.Milton was
continually in a state of
anticipation.
And it's this rhetoric of
anticipation,
this language of looking
forward, that structures all of
Milton's own narratives about
his own literary career.
And this is exquisitely visible
to us in the Nativity Ode.
At a very early age,
Milton brooded on his poetic
vocation as if it were an actual
calling from God.
But the problem of one's being
called to be a great poet is
that one may have an inkling or
some sense of a promise of
future greatness but nothing
really to show for it yet.
And he knew this.
He had obviously been a
successful student at St.
Paul's School in London and
then later in college at
Cambridge University.
He had written a large handful
of college exercises and
assignments in Latin,
and he had obviously made a
favorable impression on his
teachers, one of whom,
at least, he stayed in touch
with for years.
Even when he was a young boy
Milton's Latin seems to have
been impeccable,
and he was quickly establishing
himself as one of the best
Latinists in the country.
But Milton's calling --
this is what John Milton knew --
his calling was to be a famous
English poet,
a famous English poet writing
in English: a calling that he
holds despite the fact that he
appears to have written next to
nothing in English verse.
All Milton has at the beginning
of his poetic career is the
promise of greatness,
the anticipation of a luminous
body of English poetry.Now
in the first original poem that
Milton wrote in English,
titled "At a Vacation
Exercise," Milton -- and you
will come to recognize this as
so unbelievably Miltonic --
Milton doesn't write about love
or about death or about any of
the subjects that typically
engage the youngest
practitioners of poetry.
Milton's subject in his first
English poem is -- we can guess
it: it's his future literary
career.
You can look at page thirty-one
in the Hughes edition.
So Milton begins by addressing
not a fair mistress or a
blooming rose or -- he doesn't
even begin by addressing God.
He addresses instead the
English language:
"Hail native Language," Milton
begins,
and then he proceeds to set out
in his heroic couplets of iambic
pentameter a map for his future
career as a famous poet.Now
when Milton publishes this poem,
he makes it clear that it was
written at age nineteen.
That's important to him.
Milton claims that he will one
day use the English language to
express what he calls "some
graver subject,"
some more important subject
matter, and he proceeds to
characterize what that graver
subject will look like.
I'm looking at line
thirty-three here.
Such where the deep
transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles,
and at Heav'n's door
Look in, and see each blissful
Deity
How he before the thunderous
throne doth lie…
Now the graver subject that
Milton is intending at some
point to expound upon is clearly
an epic one.
Like Homer and like Virgil,
Milton intends to soar above
the wheeling poles of the
visible world and describe the
otherwise invisible comings and
goings of the gods.
And, of course,
this is what he would go on to
do in Paradise Lost.
The nineteen-year-old
Milton hasn't yet imagined that
his own epic would take for its
subject a story from the Bible,
but the poetic ambition is
clearly identifiable to us as
epic in scope.We will hear
again of Milton's intention to
write an epic in a versified
letter that he writes to his
best friend,
Charles Diodati.
This is the letter to Diodati
which Milton publishes as the
Sixth Elegy. That's the
Latin poem that was assigned for
today's class.
So take a look at page
fifty-two in the Hughes.
Milton naturally wrote his
friend letters in impeccable
Latin verse, and this one he
seems to have composed almost
immediately after having
written,
having completed,
the Nativity Ode. The
letter to Diodati gives us
another glimpse of the
anticipatory narrative that
Milton is sketching for his
career.
Milton claims that epic poetry
is the highest ambition for a
poet and then he goes on to
explain how it is that the epic
poet should comport himself.
I love this.
So this is Milton to his best
friend:But he whose theme is
wars and heaven under Jupiter in
his prime,
and pious heroes and chieftains
half-divine…
let him live sparingly like the
Samian teacher;
and let herbs furnish his
innocent diet…
and let him drink sober
draughts from the pure spring.
Beyond this,
his youth must be innocent of
crime and chaste,
his conduct irreproachable and
his hands stainless.So
Milton is explaining to Charles
Diodati that if you're going to
become an epic poet,
you have to start acting like
one.
You have to remain celibate
and, as we will see in the
coming week, this is important
to Milton.
You have to remain sober,
and you must eat vegetarian
("let herbs furnish his innocent
diet").
And then Milton goes on to
explain that this is exactly
what Homer did.
This is how Homer prepared
himself to be the greatest and
the first of all epic poets.
It's not uninteresting,
I think, to note that there
appears to be absolutely no
evidence whatsoever available to
John Milton that Homer was
either vegetarian or a lifelong
celibate.
By all accounts,
Milton has just made this up in
his letter to Diodati.
Clearly, this is something that
he wants to believe or that he
needs to believe,
but there does seem to be
evidence that at least at this
early point in Milton's life
he's intending to remain
sexually abstinent forever.
He would remain a virgin in
order to prepare for and to
maintain this incredibly
important role as an epic poet.
And, as I mentioned a moment
ago, we will return to this
question of what has been
interestingly called the young
Milton's "chastity
fetish."So Milton implies to
Diodati that he isn't yet up to
the task of epic,
but as he describes the
Nativity Ode that he's just
written, it's almost as if he
considers it something of
a mini-epic.
This is page 198 in the Hughes:
"I am singing the starry sky
and the hosts that sang high in
air,
and the gods that were suddenly
destroyed in their own
shrines."Now we have the
trappings here of epic grandeur
and epic subject matter.
The poem on the morning of
Christ's nativity serves as
Milton's preparation for
something greater than itself.
It's a poem on which this very
young poet is cutting his teeth.
The nativity of Christ,
as you can imagine,
was a popular subject for early
seventeenth-century poets -- for
pious early seventeenth-century
poets.
Nearly all of the poets that we
come now to recognize as the
major religious literary figures
of the period like John Donne,
whom you may have read in
English 125, or Robert Herrick
or Richard Crashaw -- all of
these poets had tried their hand
at the poetic celebration of the
birth of Christ.
And actually it's instructive.
You can learn a lot by
comparing Milton's poem to those
of so many of his
contemporaries.
His contemporaries are doing a
kind of thing with their
representation of the birth of
Christ that Milton seems
carefully to have avoided.
And you can actually imagine
without even having read them
what a lot of these poems are
like.
Most poets who write nativity
poems are interested in the
miracle of the virgin birth,
emphasizing the Virgin Mary and
the tender mother-son
relationship between Mary and
Jesus.Milton shows unusually
little interest in the
miraculousness of the conception
or anything like the domestic
details of the manger scene.
The focus of the Nativity
Ode isn't even really on
the Incarnation -- that's the
theological doctrine of
divinity's descent into
humanity,
how God becomes a mortal.
What Milton is primarily
interested in in his Nativity
Ode is the
redemption,
the promise of what Christ's
Nativity will do at some
future point for mankind.
The birth of Jesus doesn't
immediately effect the
redemption of fallen man but
it's the moment -- and this is
why it's so important to Milton
-- it's the moment at which that
promise is made.
The Nativity for Milton is
purely an anticipatory event.
It's less meaningful in itself
than it is for what it promises
for the future,
because it's not going to be
until after the Nativity that we
have the event of the
Crucifixion,
and after that the event of the
Resurrection,
and finally the terrible moment
of the Last Judgment which will
bring the narrative of Christian
history to its ultimate close.
So the satisfactions of the
moment are for Milton deferred
here;
and it's something like a
recognizable process of deferral
and postponement that you will
see beginning to form themselves
at the very center of Milton's
poetic imagination.Okay.
Let's look at the poem on page
forty-three in the Hughes.
As soon as Milton describes
for us the events in heaven that
lead up to the Nativity,
he begins the -- this is the
prelude of the poem,
it's broken up in to two
chunks: the prelude and then
what Milton calls the hymn -- he
begins the third stanza of the
prelude to his poem with a plea
to the Heavenly Muse for
inspiration.
This is line fifteen,
page forty-three in the
Hughes. The poet is
asking for help with the
composition of the poem.
Say Heav'nly Muse,
shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant
God?
Hast thou no verse,
no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome Him to this,
his new abode…?
We're struck,
I think -- or at least I'm
struck -- by what I find to be
the oddly negative,
almost scolding tone that
Milton is adopting,
really quite inappropriately,
I think, in this address to the
muse.
He seems less interested in
actually praying for divine
assistance than he is in
chiding the muse for not
having come to his aid
sooner.We might be able to
understand some of the weird,
anxious energy behind this
stanza if we think of the phrase
that Milton uses here:
the phrase "Infant God."
As someone who would quickly
establish himself as the most
talented Latinist probably in
all of England,
Milton is naturally -- how
could he not be?
-- highly attuned to the
etymological prehistory of the
English word infant.
Our word infancy comes
from the Latin word
infans,
which literally means "not
speaking."
Christ, whose Nativity Milton
is honoring, is still just a
baby.
He isn't speaking at this
moment yet.
He isn't yet producing language.
And in his role here as a mute,
as an infant,
Christ is serving,
I think, an important function
for Milton.
He serves as something like a
complicated double for the
young, unpublished,
and as of yet unproductive poet
himself.
Consider that even this early
on in his career,
Milton is harboring epic
ambitions, as we've seen.
He is very much an infant in
1629.
He isn't yet able or he hasn't
yet produced epic speech.
And I think it's possible to
see that one of the purposes of
this poem is precisely to
correct that situation.
It's one of the purposes of
this poem to allow Milton to
grow out of his infancy,
to incarnate or to put actually
into words the talent that he
believes himself to
possess.Now it's not until
the fourth stanza of the prelude
that we can fully understand the
magnitude of the strange
anxieties here.
We can't know exactly -- and
this is one of the wonderfully
unsettling things about this
stanza -- we can't know exactly
to whom Milton is addressing
this stanza.
It would appear that Milton has
stopped addressing the muse,
the Heavenly Muse,
and that he has begun
addressing himself -- although
that's unclear.
But it may be the case that
it's something like a situation
in which over the course of the
previous stanza,
Milton has actually usurped the
role of the muse and has begun
providing something like his own
inspiration.
So in the fourth stanza we as
readers have no idea where we
are or when it is the speaker of
the poem imagines himself to be
speaking,
and it's at this point that
something quite strange happens.
Milton tells the muse -- or is
he telling himself?
we don't know -- Milton tells
someone to hurry up --
think of this -- to hurry up
with the inspiration of the ode,
to hurry up with the
inspiration of the ode because
Milton can see the Three Wise
Men bearing their gifts as they
dutifully follow the Star of
Bethlehem to the manger.This
may seem to be a perfectly
reasonable vision for a poet
considering himself to be an
inspired poet to have,
but there's something peculiar
here.
Milton wants to beat the
Three Wise Men to the scene.
Milton wants to arrive in
Bethlehem to hand Christ his
poem before the wise men
are able to bring their gold and
their frankincense and their
myrrh.
Look at line twenty-two.
See how from far upon the
Eastern road
The Star-led wizards haste with
odors sweet:
O run, prevent them with
thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at His blessed
feet.
Think of what this poem is now
asking of us.
We're being asked to accept the
fiction that Milton is having
this very poem laid at the
blessed feet of the infant
Christ.
Milton, who is writing at the
present moment of December of
1629, is claiming the capacity
to arrive at a moment in history
that he has already described as
a long-completed one.
Milton tells himself to run,
and naturally he would have to
run fast indeed in order to
arrive at a moment in time that
had already occurred before he
even set out!
This weird temporal disjunction
is an important part of the
poem, and it not only gives the
poem its peculiar air of
something like a conceptual
time-warp,
but it's an important part of
Milton's profoundly anticipatory
imagination.So Milton is
struggling here to catch up with
the star-led wizards,
who -- as you can note -- are
already themselves hasting.
And he tries to "prevent" them
with his humble ode.
We'll talk about humble
in a minute, but I'm interested
now in the word prevent,
which for me is really the
central word of this remarkable
stanza.
Now, I don't know if Merritt
Hughes weighs in on this or not.
Most editors of Milton tell us
that the word prevent in
this line retains its original
Latin meaning as you can see on
your handout.
It means "to come before."
The Latin is praevenire;
it means "to anticipate."
Milton wants his ode to make it
to Bethlehem before the
Three Wise Men do.
Now, this is a form of
competitiveness with which we
are all familiar.
This is the straightforward,
perfectly understandable
competition to be first.Now,
it's Milton's annotators who
tell us that the word
prevent means "to come
before,
to anticipate," and on some
level it obviously means that
and that goes without question.
But I think this definition is
also limiting,
and this is a phenomenon that I
hope you will come to be
familiar with.
The good scholars of Milton
reveal their typical resistance
to anything even remotely
interesting or alive in the
text.
Surely this word prevent
also has a little bit of its
modern meaning.
I think it might actually be
the more obvious meaning,
which is "to hinder" or "to
preclude."
When Milton tells himself to
"prevent" the "Star-led
wizards…
with thy humble ode," he's also
saying that the wise men should
be prevented from making it to
the manger at all,
that somehow the wise men need
to be headed off at the pass and
precluded from presenting any
gifts to the Infant God that may
compete with the so-called
humble ode of John
Milton.Now this is a darker
form of competitiveness,
a competitiveness spawned --
think of our own environment
here in the academy -- spawned
by courses that grade strictly
on a curve: a type of
environment where one succeeds
not merely by doing well but by
doing better than other people,
and especially in addition by
preventing other people
from doing well.
It's an extraordinarily dark
way to characterize the
composition and the process of
the poem.We have a strained
image of the composition of the
poem at its very outset and we
have an image of someone writing
as if he were participating in a
race.
And we're reminded of the
etymological root of our modern
English word career.
Milton will only use the word
career once in his poetic
oeuvre and it comes -- it will
come pretty soon,
actually, in Sonnet Number
Seven.
The word career comes
from the French
carrière,
which means "a race course" and
etymologically "a career."
What we think of as a career
isn't simply the benign product
of the gradual development of a
certain potential.
That's how we generally think
of a career.
It's the outcome of a race --
one's running faster than all of
the other guys –
and it's as if to have a career
at all one has no choice but to
come in first.The desire to
be first is really central to
this poem and it continues in
this stanza:
Have thou the honor first
thy Lord to greet
And join thy voice unto the
Angel Choir,
From out his secret Altar
toucht with hallow'd fire.
As you may have guessed,
because you have this on your
handout, Milton is alluding here
to the famous words of the Old
Testament prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah in this passage is
describing a crucial moment in
his career, his career as a
prophet: the moment in which his
lips are cleansed and he is
empowered -- divinely
empowered -- to speak
prophetically.
These are the Old Testament
lines:
Then flew one of the
seraphims unto me [Isaiah tells
us], having a live coal in his
hand
which he had taken with the
tongs from off the altar:
And he laid it upon my
mouth, and said,
Lo, this hath touched thy lips;
and thine iniquity is
taken away, and thy sin
purged.
Also I heard the voice of
the Lord, saying,
Whom shall I send,
and who will go for us?
Then said I, Here am I;
send me.
So what are we to do with this
allusion?
What are we to make of Milton's
use of this striking and painful
image of prophetic preparation?
Milton can join his voice to
the angel choir and have the
honor of being first to greet
the "Infant God."
But before he can actually be
made present at the actual event
of the Nativity,
he has to endure something
painful and obviously momentous:
"from out his secret Altar
toucht with hallow'd fire."
The iniquity of his lips must
be burned off by a live angelic
coal, that the sinfulness of his
lips -- we could think of it as
the sinfulness of his voice,
his poetic voice -- will
have to be purged.
What exactly that purgation
will entail and why Milton's
voice needs to be purged at all
-- I think these questions are
really the subject of the entire
rest of the poem.
The hymn, what Milton calls the
"humble ode," that follows this
introduction is the poem that
Milton wants to present to the
Lord.
But the hymn at the same time
is something like the
process,
the process by which Milton is
attempting to purge and cleanse
his poetic voice and make it a
voice that will actually be
equal to the extraordinary
ambition that he has for
it.The hymn,
the large part of the poem,
can be divided roughly into
three sections.
First, in the first eight
stanzas you have Milton
describing the scene of the
Nativity and the effect that the
birth of this new infant has on
the natural world.
I don't have time here to
discuss this section right now,
but you've already had some
encounter with the incredibly
impressive level of ingenuity
and grotesquery in this
remarkable passage.
Nature, who is an effeminized,
personified being,
is shamed and humiliated when
she finds herself naked in the
presence of this new God,
Jesus.The second section
runs from stanzas nine through
seventeen, and it characterizes
the song that the heavenly choir
sings at the moment of the
Nativity.
But when Milton describes the
song of the angelic choir he
can't -- it's amazing –
he can't seem to focus on the
event at hand.
What we should,
I think, be witnessing here is
the nativity of Christ and all
of the events immediately
surrounding the actual birth of
the Infant God;
but no sooner has Milton
mentioned the singing of the
angelic choir at the Nativity
than he reminds himself of all
the other times that they've
sung.
It's something like liner notes
or a performance history of the
cosmos' greatest singing group
ever.Look at line 120.
Milton writes that this choir
had been singing at the moment
of creation.
Not bad.
While the Creator Great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanc't world on
hinges hung…
It's almost too much for this
poet.
He's already been playing
around with the temporality of
the poem.
as we've seen,
establishing a fiction that
works to place himself at the
scene of a nativity that
obviously occurs 1600 years and
change before his own birth.
But it's almost as if Milton
were tempted now to make himself
go even further back,
to write a humble ode that he
could place at the feet of the
Creator, the Creator at the
moment of the actual creation of
the entire universe.
The stakes of coming first seem
are getting higher and
higher.Before long the
speaker realizes that this
fantasy (and it is a fantasy
that he's been engaged in) is
starting to sound a little
extreme or maybe a little
dangerous.
In line 134,
Milton indicates that this holy
song has enwrapped his fancy,
that it has in some perilous
way absorbed his imagination:
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back,
and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from
earthly mold,
And hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions
to the peering day.
The holy song Milton has been
describing is beginning to look
almost too tempting even to
contemplate.
There's almost a danger here in
listening to it too long or
describing it in too much detail
and the danger seems -- or what
Milton thinks of as the peril
seems to involve the problem of
time.
"For if such holy Song / enwrap
our fancy long," then we'll
mistakenly convince ourselves
that time could actually run
backwards and that we've been
returned to the Golden Age,
the very first age of human
history according to classical
legend.We,
of course,
know as we read the prelude to
this poem that this is a work
consumed with questions of
temporal disjunction,
with that problem of temporal
discontinuity.
Milton clearly wants us to know
that this Nativity Ode
was written by a young
Londoner in 1629,
but it's a poem that is at the
same time deliverable to the
infant Christ by some
extraordinary violation,
of course, of all of the
established laws of temporal
sequence.
And when you reread this poem
and you look at it in your
discussion section,
you may want to think about the
tenses -- it sounds tedious but
I am convinced that it's not
tedious -- the tenses of the
verbs that Milton's using.
Milton is switching here from
present to past to future
incredibly rapidly and really
with a bewildering kind of
facility And it is at some point
impossible,
I think, for the reader to tell
whether the poet is discussing
something that's happening
now,
something that's happened a
long time ago,
or something that will happen
at the end of time.
The thematic problems that
Milton is attempting to tackle
are written into the very
grammar and the syntax of the
poem.Now,
Milton understands the problems
besetting what we could think of
as the poem's confused
temporality;
he understands this a lot
better than we do.
And there's a
self-consciousness about the
temporal strangeness of this
poem that leads,
I think, to its crisis moment.
Look at stanza sixteen.
This is the stanza that begins
with line 150.
Milton has just been
entertaining the glorious moment
of the apocalypse at the end of
time -- because he's always
looking further and further and
further ahead.
He's been doing that when we
get this.
Line 150:
But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so,
The babe lies yet in smiling
Infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
So both himself and us to
glorify…
"But wisest Fate says no,
/ this must not yet be so."
It's here that we have
something like a crystallizing
moment of reality-testing.
Milton, he checks himself.
Reality intrudes and the poet
has no choice but to say,
"No.
You've gone too far.
You've gone too far in your
anticipation of the future event
at the end of time.
Fate will permit no apocalypse
before its time,
before the necessary and
painful steps that have to lead
up to the Last Judgment.
Before the ecstatic fulfillment
of all of Christian history,
the great Christian narrative
-- Jesus actually,
of course, has to grow up and
lead his life and then sacrifice
that life on the bitter
cross."In alluding to the
prophet Isaiah in the prelude,
Milton suggested that the
iniquity of his lips had to be
purged off -- burned off,
with the live coal supplied by
one of the seraphim.
One of those sins,
I think, that needs to be
purged is clearly the sin of
eagerness or over-anticipation,
the drive to move ahead of
oneself and the drive to get
ahead of others (as we saw
Milton trying to do with the
Three Wise Men).
These are drives that the poem
seems to be struggling to keep
in check, or that Milton is
representing the poem as
struggling to keep in check,
or to purge in some way.But
there's something else that
needs to be purged,
and the poem recognizes that
even more profoundly.
The Nativity Ode is
continually presenting the
speaker with temptations,
with incitements to sin that
need to be purged from the
speaker's poetic voice.
The final section of the poem
presents us with the most
powerful temptation that John
Milton can confront,
and we will find that this is a
problem that continues for the
rest of his writing life.
He will have to do battle with
this temptation forever:
the temptation offered by
classical literature.
You remember that Milton had
vowed to his friend Charles
Diodati in the Sixth Elegy
that he would become an epic
poet some day,
and that he was taking all of
the necessary steps to transform
himself into an epic poet.
But it's strictly a
Christian epic poem that Milton
seems to imagine himself as
writing.
Now, he hasn't yet settled on
the topic of the Fall,
the fall of Adam and Eve from
their place of bliss in the
Garden of Eden.
But Milton knows that the
general feeling of the thing is,
of course, going to be
Christian,
and he's probably taking as his
model at this point the Italian
poet Torquato Tasso who wrote
Jerusalem Delivered,
a slightly earlier
Christian epic poem,
romance-epic poem,
that Milton greatly admired.
But Milton's also sensitive to
the fact that the very phrase
"Christian epic" is in some way
a contradiction in terms.
The epic form is a classical,
pagan form.
It's a poem structured around
the interaction between human
beings and an entire pantheon of
pagan deities.
To write any kind of epic at
all might very well seem to be
embracing an inappropriately
sensual paganism at the expense
of the higher discipline of
good,
old-fashioned monotheistic
Christianity.
And the ode,
too -- the form in which this
poem is written -- is a pagan
form invented by the Greek poet
Pindar to express the
sublimities of emotion arising
from a contemplation of the
actions of the gods.Now,
in writing in these genres,
Milton is, of course,
confronted with a dilemma.
He's a humanist scholar.
He is more steeped in the
sensuous beauty of classical
literature, the classical
tradition, than probably anyone
else of his generation.
Since he was an unusually small
lad, he had been mainlining
Greek and Roman poetry.
The language of Homer and of
Virgil and of Pindar and of Ovid
had become an inextricable part
of his literary imagination and
of his consciousness in general.
But Milton was also beginning
to develop in this period a much
more strict, a much more
disciplined religious
temperament.
He was beginning to join ranks
with those early
seventeenth-century English
Protestants who imposed upon
themselves rigorous and strict
codes of behavior and
self-denial,
and who were increasingly being
called by their enemies
Puritans.
And it's possible that the very
idea of a Puritan poet presented
Milton with what may have felt
like an insoluble conflict.
It's possible that Milton would
continue -- well,
if Milton were to continue this
cultivation of a poetic career,
he would clearly have to purge
(this is the Miltonic logic at
this stage) he would have to
purge his poetic voice of the
sin and the taint of pagan
iniquity.
If he was going to become a
specifically Christian poet,
he would have to expel from his
system the sensual world of
classical learning that for him
was at the very core of his
being.And it's precisely a
silencing of classical
literature that Milton is
attempting to effect here.
With the scene of the flight of
the pagan gods at the nativity
of Christ Milton is also
depicting a scenario that,
I think, on some level he's
hoping will occur within
himself.
We have the silencing not just
of any literature here but of
pagan literature.
It's now the pagan deities who
have turned into "infant" gods.
Milton is narrating or
representing the process by
which they are silenced.
They're rendered speechless or
dumb, and the poem effects this
process in order to give someone
else an opportunity to speak.
Milton calls upon a whole range
of violent, exciting,
militaristic images,
and set-pieces to describe the
triumph of Christ over the petty
gods of paganism,
but this routing of the gods
brings with it a certain cost.
Something is lost here as well.
Look at line 181.
Hands down, these are,
for me, the best lines in the
poem:
The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard,
and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with
sighing sent;
With flow'r-inwov'n tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of
tangled thickets mourn.
It's here in this stanza,
filled with the resounding
voices of weeping and lament,
that we realize that something
more is going on than merely a
routing of the pagan gods,
something more even than
Milton's pious triumph over his
classical literary imagination.
Suddenly, the literary genre
that Milton is writing in is no
longer this triumphant classical
ode.
You have an elegy here,
a beautiful and plangent lament
for something or someone lost.
And we have to ask ourselves,
"Could this be a paradise
lost?"
We hear a clear mourning for
those pagan beings who are
forced to depart because of the
violent onset of Christianity.
When Milton writes that "the
parting Genius is with sighing
sent," he means the genius
loci or the local spirit of
the place,
the natural spirit of a place:
those beneficent beings that
pagans had believed inhabited
certain woods and streams.
But the parting genius is also
a part of Milton's own genius,
his literary genius,
that aspect of his literary
career and his literary
expertise that has been
nourished and fed,
lovingly fed,
by classical literature.
The conflictedness that
Milton is encapsulating here is
probably most intense in the
last lines of this wonderful
stanza: "With flow'r-inwov'n
tresses torn / the Nymphs in
twilight shade of tangled
thickets mourn."
This densely tangled thicket of
clustered consonants in this
amazing couplet is a signal to
us of the weight,
of the import,
of this terrible event.
These are difficult lines
physically to read,
and they may very well be the
most painful lines in the entire
poem from an emotional
perspective.
It's one thing for the evil
pagan deities like Moloch and
Peor to be forced in to hell by
the newly born Christ.
Who are they to us?
We find it difficult to bewail
their absence.
But the nymphs in all of their
sensuous beauty,
with "flow'r-inwov'n tresses,"
they have to experience the same
fate.
I think it's impossible not to
wince when we imagine the
painful tearing of the nymphs'
tresses.
Their hair gets caught on the
tangled thickets of the forest
as they abandon -- as they are
forced to abandon -- the
classical corners of Milton's
literary imagination.The
elegiac tone of this final
section of the poem should give
us some clues to the type of
victory over paganism that
Christ's birth is actually
heralding here.
How new will this new world
order actually be?
We may imagine that henceforth,
now that he has written his
Nativity Ode,
Milton has fully expunged
from his literary system that
youthful attachment to the pagan
classics.
But the expulsion of paganism
described in the Nativity Ode is
a scene that Milton will return
to and return to again and
again,
and in many ways it will be
Christianity's triumph over
paganism and all of the pain
that that triumph produces that
will become the hidden subtext
of many of Milton's greatest
works.
