Happy Birthday, Milton

John Milton (1608-1674) is read mostly in university courses (that’s by the priestly caste) and by novelists and poets. Unlike the Bible, or Blake, or Dickinson, Paradise Lost is not amenable to paraphrase. There’s no graphic novelization, no stage or movie treatment even of his life, much less of the (relatively) simple Paradise Regain’d. The greatness of his art is its difficulty, its intransigence, its irreducible material. All Milton’s settings and actions occur in the mind. Even Samson Agonistes, patterned on Greek tragedy, was not intended for performance. Whatever the virtues of the Handel oratorio based on Milton’s text, it is something other (and less) than the original. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes were dictated by a blind poet; they were not written. When Milton says “Sing,” he’s invoking more than literary convention. He couldn’t proof his last works, never saw the books in print or read them to himself.

Unless the epics are read aloud, it’s impossible to hear them, no matter how developed the inward ear. This presents a daunting task for a generation taught to read to itself without moving the lips. But it’s the basic requirement for a reader (or at least for me) to discover what one thought one knew but does not know.

The pressure of speaking about events and forces prior to language required Milton to straddle both sides, to admit the impossibility of what he attempted and still do it. He includes everything he knows, throws everything into his poems, everything he can remember. Memory is the mother of the Muses. It’s also the second duty enjoined by the Hebrew Bible. (“Hear, O Israel” would be the first.)

Learning may be a prerequisite to reading John Milton’s poetry, but that learning is not impossible. The poems were not opaque to his contemporaries, who shared an English education, urgent political choices, and premessianic unease. The iambic pentameter metronome ticking inside the head of a Renaissance reader kept time for the first line of Paradise Lost–“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit”–and marked disobedience’s metrical betrayal.

Likewise, an auditor of the fallen angels’ council and debates in Hell did not require academic commentary to connect either the defiant spirit in defeat, or the perils of despair, with the recent Rebellion, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the Stuart Restoration. It was an age when even theology had consequences.

Creation, the War in Heaven, Chaos, Sin and Death, Satan, Adam and Eve in the Garden and their Fall, Redemption: Even the grandest and remotest of Milton’s themes is informed by intimacy struggling with diffidence and guilt. Adam’s passionate attachment to (and disappointment in) Eve banks the embers of Milton’s three marriages. Jesus’ renunciation of gentile poetry and philosophy in Paradise Regain’d must have tasted strange in the mouth of the classical scholar. Then there’s that howl, Samson lamenting his blindness: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse / Without all hope of day.

Coming from anyone else, these lines might be bombast. From the lips of one with mortal voice, unchang’d / To hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes, / On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude .  .  . they are overdetermined. And too true.

It’s tempting to think of Milton as all learning and intensity, with no nature. His Cambridge classmates dubbed their long-haired, sober scholar “Our Lady of Christ’s College.” And from youth, the poet devoted himself to what he only got around to accomplishing in the last decades of his life: writing a sacred epic that reconciles the course of divine history with a journey of the solitary soul.

In the last 15 years of his life, Milton openly proclaimed himself an anointed prophet. It was 2,000 years after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, when prophecy ceased in Israel. The pagan oracles fell silent at Jesus’ birth. Such large claims, and his conviction that he possessed an upright and pure heart, however honestly come by, do nothing to soften resistance. The man and his works seem indissoluble, with the density and gravity of matter.

In 1673, one year before his death, Milton added his translation from the Latin of “The Fifth Ode of Horace, Book I” to the last edition of his minor poems. Here’s the whole thing:

The first half of this 16-line poem asks a series of questions without question marks: What slender Youth bedew’d with liquid odours / Courts thee .  .  .; O how oft shall he / .  .  . complain; the “thee” being Pyrrha, erotic other with golden hair.

But the thought doesn’t stop there. Milton’s sentence continues through line 12: Who now enjoys thee .  .  . / Who alwayes vacant, alwayes amiable / Hopes thee .  .  .

Depending on where the reade stresses the “whos,” who can be heard as “he who,” enjoying present bliss, or as “who?” the poet remembering love now disenchanted. This cuts-both-ways/all-purpose love lyric (in English) belongs to the same tradition as Ben Jonson’s tavern song with Latin roots, “To Celia” (Drink to me, onely, with thine eyes) which can be delivered, depending on where the stress falls, as a blessing or a curse.

Up to line 12, the ode is a comrade also to the urbane, disenchanted John Donne of “Go, and catch a falling star .  .  .”

But where men of tarnished hopes distance themselves through knowingness or doubleness or irony, Milton’s lover takes a different turn: Hapless they / To whom thou untry’d seemst fair. Pyrrha’s beauty, real or illusive, must be tried, or nothing happens: no desire, guilt, or virtue. I have no idea about the last sentence, those last four lines, which I can’t parse, or assemble, yet unnerve me nonetheless.

Laurance Wieder is the author of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms.