In order to become an epic poet, Milton believed he must also refuse “lustral waters.” In other words, aspiring artists must remain chaste.
As an undergraduate, “Lycidas” left me cold. Paradise Lost was a total turn-off. In the margin near Book IV’s characterization of Adam and Eve, I took a single note: so misogyny begins. Not exactly the revelation of the year, but what do you expect from a nineteen-year-old Dance major enrolled in a 17th C. Brit Lit survey course? I read the assigned passages and studied those I thought would be on the final exam. Soon after, I dismissed John Milton as another dead-white-male-canonical-poet among endless-dead-white-male-canonical-poets, and then readied myself for the next semester.
Much has changed. There’s a lot more pleasure in learning. Several times each year, I immerse myself in a poet’s life and works. In the past, I’ve selected those whose poetry I admire. This winter, I decided to choose a poet whose writing I resist. Standing in my office, I scoured the shelves for the least appealing prospect:
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him…
I’ve always pictured Milton as a self-righteous conservative, some self-appointed Moses figure parting the Biblical seas with his metrical staff. Biographical accounts contrast such assumptions; turns out, Milton was more rebellious and politically left than I realized. He was a risk-taker. He was arrested and imprisoned. Thanks, in part, to Andrew Marvell, he barely escaped a death sentence. He was, by all accounts, one of the best educated English citizens of his time, (re)inventing not only the story of Genesis, but his own grammar, as well as the history of British culture and religion. While in Italy, Milton spent time with Galileo. Areopagitica (a must-read on the subjects of licensing and censorship) influenced our Founding Fathers. Milton liked to wear his hair long – so long, in fact, his tresses helped inspire a nickname: friends and foes at Cambridge called him “The Lady.”
The more I study Milton, in fact, the more appealing he becomes. Although filled with classical allusions, his poems don’t seem nearly as icy as I initially found them. His quirks are amusing; his many contradictions, more so. If you don’t have the extra hours to submerge yourself in Milton’s oeuvre, following are a few tips I’ve gleaned from recent study.
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Memorize, Memorize, Memorize: Milton started to lose his eyesight in 1646. He never saw his son, John Jr., nor did he know the faces of his second and third wives. By 1652, he was completely blind and, according to his nephew, composed Paradise Lost in his head during overnight sessions that lasted well into early morning. By day, he dictated the text to whomever could write down the words.
Writing an epic in your head and then reciting it from memory? Consider the difficulties of tracking scansion and enjambment! Milton’s power to plot and then recall was remarkable. It was also the result of intense self-discipline. As a student (like many of his peers) Milton kept a “Commonplace” book. He filled its pages with poetry, quotations, practical information, political and rhetorical strategies. In essence, the book was a personal anthology of ancient and classical literature. By recording such material by hand Milton not only observed and absorbed a variety of linguistic strategies, he also practiced the art of memorization. Such training, one imagines, only aided the elderly man’s epic task of blind literary invention…
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The Allies of Ambition & Arrogance: Although Milton didn’t foresee the physical obstacles he’d overcome while composing Paradise Lost, he did predict his own greatness. While in his early 20s, the poet announced that his epic (still unwritten for another twenty-five years) would become an unforgettable work of English literature. It’s in “Ad Patrem (To His Father)” Milton clearly articulates his belief in having been “born a poet” whose destiny it is to “walk, crowned with gold, through the temples of the skies and with the harp’s soft accompaniment…sing[ing] sweet songs to which the stars shall echo and the vault of heaven from pole to pole.” According to Frank Kermode, we’ll “never find it possible to match Milton’s self-esteem, or share his estimate of the vast work he felt he had been called to do.” Whether ambition or arrogance (a little of both?), Milton obviously saw the writer’s life not only as a vocation, but a calling – presumably from God. Once this self-prophecy was articulated, Milton dedicated himself to those daily practices he believed would bring his vision to fruition.
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Calling All Virgins – Go Vegan! According to “Elegia Sexta” (Milton’s fascinating letter to John Diodati), a person with high poetic aspirations must “let herbs furnish his innocent diet.” He must also “drink sober draughts from the pure spring.” No baby-back ribs with sweet sauce. No tipping back booze. What twenty-one-year-old Milton advocated was unyielding temperance, his theory being that the artistic product is shaped by physical purity. And speaking of purity, watching his diet wasn’t enough: in order to become an epic poet, Milton believed he must also refuse “lustral waters.” In other words, aspiring artists – those whose names are destined to survive throughout the ages – must remain chaste.
I know what you’re thinking. A twice-widowed husband who fathers five children? Obviously, he gave up the goods at some point! Enter Milton’s evolving personal philosophy. Apparently, “appropriate” sexual activity within marriage was itself a form of “chastity,” something Milton practiced throughout his adult life. Needless to say, the poet’s ideas about marriage, as well as women, divorce and polygamy are complicated. His central point, however, isn’t: emerging poets shouldn’t be afraid of self-discipline. Should you cut pleasure completely? The choice is yours – Milton isn’t exactly known for his erotic sonnets, after all. Taking the work seriously is key, however, as is a steadfast commitment to the art.
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Write Your Own Music: Milton separated himself from the pack from the very beginning. In “L’Allegro,” the poet characterizes “sweetest” Shakespeare as “…fancy’s child, / warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild” (lines 133-134). Suggests Milton, imagination inspires Shakespeare’s rowdy lyrics. Milton’s creative acts, in contrast, result from exacting labor and unwavering intellectual pursuit. Whereas Shakespeare is a poet of pathos, Milton (via his commitments to reason and restraint) shapes himself as a poet of logos.
After mastering sonnets, translating Psalms, and spending years writing political treatises, defenses and pamphlets, Milton eschewed tradition while writing Paradise Lost. In lieu of fashionable heroic couplets, he wrote his epic in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Was blank verse a model of freedom for a people struggling with the presence of tyranny? Did the form suggest Milton’s vision of Paradise Lost as epic drama, as well as a poem? In 1668, the poet concedes that his metrical choice attempted to liberate the “Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Rhyming.” If this seems hyperbolic, consider the fact that John Dryden “translates” Paradise Lost into an opera complete with rhyming couplets, in order to make the epic more accessible to the general public. Simply stated, Milton’s commitment to blank verse – the closest verse imitation of ordinary speech – placed him outside the literary trends of his day. By embracing a form usually reserved for theater, he may have compromised his initial readership. However, he also laid the foundation for future poems as diverse as Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and Frost’s “Directive.”
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Don’t Rush to Publish: This may be the most difficult example Milton provides aspiring poets. Although a youthful Milton recognized his potential, he made a point of delaying the publication of his first collection until he was thirty-six or seven. It’s presumed he wrote the book’s opening poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” shortly after his twenty-first birthday. Why the wait? Milton hoped to make his entrance into print remarkable. A man with such ambition wouldn’t be satisfied unless his published poems lived up to his very high expectations. He had, after all, already declared himself a genius!
While it’s not always easy to withhold the work, Milton’s postponement afforded time for further study. He spent six years at his father’s house poring over literature, religion, science, history and politics, among other subjects. He read and read and read. He perfected eight or so languages, a variety that without question influenced the rhythm and syntax of his future writings. When his work finally emerged, it proved he had the goods.
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Granted, there are plenty of ways in which Milton missed the mark. For your safety, I’d avoid blood-letting, penning pamphlets on regicide, public verbal spars with well-known rhetoricians from the Netherlands. When confronted by warring soldiers or other threats of bodily harm, the best defense probably isn’t to tack a sonnet to your front door, promising poetic immortality to those willing to spare your life.
But all things considered, who can argue with this?
SONNET XXIII
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But O, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
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Milton gives us hell breaking loose (line 918, Book IV of Paradise Lost). His dramatic mask, Comus, introduces “a sable cloud / turn[ing] forth her silver lining.” Vacillation between these poles – silver-lined heaven and hell split apart at the seams – seems to me a summary of the writer’s life. Granted, some people find John Milton a “bore and a prig.” Others find him superior to Shakespeare. I doubt I’ll find myself craving Milton’s work the way I do his contemporary John Donne’s, for example. But now that it’s four hundred years past the anniversary of Milton’s birth, perhaps it’s time to reconsider former assumptions. Who knows, the old man may surprise us yet.
12 responses
Shara,
That’s a fine piece. Thanks for doing the legwork! I confess I’m still a Milton-hater, but I don’t deny his intellect, influence, or rhetorical skill. Not to mention that refreshing sense of vocation which probably made him impossible to deal with but reminds me, oddly, of Baudelaire, promising everyone that his revolutionary poetry collection (which at one point he wanted to call “The Lesbians”) was going to appear Real Soon Now. This went on through his twenties and into his thirties. When the Flowers finally appeared, he was 36.
But unlike Baudelaire, who seems to be channeling some kind of transfiguring intelligence which summons unseen-before symbols and visions from ridiculously few words — a trick that distinguishes him even in translation, if we think of how those 16 lines of The Albatross stick in poets’ heads in dozens of languages — Milton seems to be typesettting his epic out of the language he was born into. Certainly he gave us Satan, and that was something new and transfigured, but I can’t point to any line or passage in his characterization that I’d put in my own commonplace book (by which I mean my manila folder of photocopies).
Probably no point in going further, since from here on it’s a subjective call. The Romantics loved Milton, and I do love much of them. But my gut is closer to T.S. Eliot’s when he said Milton “writes English like a dead language.”
OK, let the comment war begin!
Jim
Oh, Jim, you’re too good a reader of poetry to quote such silliness.
Dead language?
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day labour, light denied,
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
“fondly” means “foolishly” here.
Surely this is one of the greatest sonnets in the English language.
And as for memorable lines from PL, how about, describing Adam and Eve: “these two / Imparadised in one another’s arms”?
Gretchen
Hmm. I grant you “imparadised” — a rare moment of word creation — but I think Eliot’s essays on Milton hit the mark in their main points. I’ve never forgotten how he quotes Shakespeare’s lines,
Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.
His question was, where in Milton do we see two words enlarging the meanings of the individual words joined, as we do here in “rooky wood”?
I don’t see it happening in On His Blindness, though it’s true every word furthers the argument in some way. There’s also a lot of sonnets I’d place higher than Milton’s, mostly Shakespeare’s, even that Donne holy sonnet you turned me onto a few months ago.
Oh, Shara? Meet my mother-in-law, Gretchen Mieszkowski.
Gretchen, meet my fellow bard Shara Lessley.
Gretchen’s a Chaucer scholar and author who teaches at University of Houston – Clear Lake. She’s also a pretty excellent reader.
Jim
Eliot hated Milton because Milton was anti-Anglican.
Excellent essay. But allow me one small comment. You write, “Apparently, “appropriate†sexual activity within marriage was itself a form of “chastity,†something Milton practiced throughout his adult life.” This isn’t some weirdo concept restricted to Milton’s time: it’s Christian doctrine to this very day. In Christian doctrine, to be chaste is to refrain from sexual activity *outside the four corners of marriage*, not to refrain from sexual activity altogether: the latter of which would be “abstinence”.
Indeed, it is precisely the notion that “chastity” means the same as “sexual abstinence” that has (erroneously) led to the notion of Christianity (and especially Catholicism) as “anti-sex”. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth, as one could readily discover by digging a bit: as an example, the late John Paul II wrote a number of essays and books on “theology of the body” that are relevant.
Milton’s angels! This last line takes my breath away every time:
But see the Virgin blest,
Hath laid her Babe to rest.
Time is our tedious Song should here have ending:
Heav’ns youngest teemed Star
Hath fixt her polisht Car,
Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending,
And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.
“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” XXVII
I enjoyed this essay. I read Paradise Lost when I was in high school — not as an assignment, but on my own, mostly during a ridiculous required computer class (hey kids, here’s how you add numbers on a spreadsheet). The contrast between Milton’s ornate classicism and the spare banality of the room I was sitting in was remarkable. It was his syntax that I liked best: I didn’t know he was modeling his sentences on the Latin period, but I liked how I had to puzzle out the connections between words separated from one another, and I liked the architectonic feeling the verse had for me once I was fluent enough in his style to read whole passages at a time without stopping to mentally diagram the sentences.
I did find the reference to “lustral waters” confusing, though. “Lustral” means “purifying,” not anything to do with lust or sex. Surely Milton of all people wouldn’t have used the word as if it had anything to do with the English word that happens to share its first four letters?
Wonderful essay. Thank you.
Excuse me, but these comments are as inapposite as the post.
Let’s take the cited passage in the post. Sonnet 23 has a slightly irregular scheme, ABBA ABBA CD CD CD. Hercules rescued Alcestis from Hades, but only after Admetus f’d up for the second time, and only after she had had to sacrifice herself for him AT THE WEDDING. Milton’s wife, OTOH, left him shortly after the wedding. This is not to condemn Milton, but it’s typical of both Milton and Blake to break off pieces of a mythological cookie (even of their own baking, as with Blake) and leave the rest on the floor.
Someone expresses admiration for Milton’s rhetoric. Find another example, because we could hardly expect to find a better example of what Pound said about Milton: that his mind was “chock-a-block with Latin”. It’s not even a rhetorical problem, but a syntactical one. The first “period” ends with the comma before “And such…” It is twisted by the need to cram mythological details into the relative clause (suspended from “Whom…etc.”). This causes the meter to come apart in lines 5 and 6, where “Mine, as…” requires a tiny pause for the line to scan, and Line 6 not only requires torsion of “Purification…”, but we have to endure yet another relative pronoun (“whom” again). Perhaps “And such, as yet…” made sense to Milton (= and as such did I dream her), but it is very awkward. In fact, lines 8-14 would read much more naturally if the first 6 words of line 7 were simply omitted. However, if we do this we see more clearly that the material of the poem, stripped of its mythological overlay, is rather banal. The only piece that hints at some deeper significance is the beginning of line 10, “Her face was veiled…” Why? And how did he see all the rest of her qualities through the veil? But this mystery turns out to be a throwaway, and Milton finishes with the most common oxymoron.
In comments, someone says this is one of the greatest sonnets in English:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day labour, light denied,
I fondly ask; but patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Despite the fame of the final apothegm, this sonnet is hardly readable, indeed, it is hardly English at all. The personification of patience is awkward because it is his own patience that reproves his own impatience. The “who best…” clause is another example of that bent Latinate syntax Pound rolled his eyes about.
The best way to criticize this one is simply to rewrite it.
When I consider how my light is spent,
My days half gone in this dark world and wide,
My talent hidden that is death to hide,
Though for so much the more my soul’s intent
To make it serve my Maker, and present
A fair account, lest he returning chide,
I ask: does God ask true eye of the blind?
My mind’s strength answers the weakness of my mind:
Who bears his yoke most willing bears it best;
He biddeth one to hasten, one to rest;
To one the way of wandering, one the strait.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
And finally – dear miltonista – I do hope to serve in the angelic host, but not in the harness of a coach horse.
@plemochoe
Whatever I say against Milton, I’d never say I couldn’t understand him.
Jim
No, Jim; you’d never say you CAN’T understand him, because two conditionals in one sentence is about as bad as a double negative.
Where did you say you studied literature again?
And anyway, the point I was making is that overtly, there isn’t that much to understand; while really understanding Milton is like cooks discussing why a cake fell.
Are all of you very young, and have not outgrown you egoism? But I am enchanted by the idea of so much reading of poetry…you have given me hope in the hellish politics of the present.
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