The Columbia History of British Poetry (60 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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metaphor of the shepherd for specifically biblical themes to define the epic poet as a priest in touch with divine secrets, now because of his ascetic life and sexual abstention; by the end of the poem he announces he is writing a pastoral Nativity poem, as if to commence a personal narrative that will fulfill itself in epic.
Above all, the Latin elegies show that for Milton poetry is a vocation; it is successfully practiced only as part of the total design of one's life. And while the imperative to settle on a vocation most certainly stems from Milton's urban, Protestant, middle-class background, the poet-priestly vocation unfolds for Milton according to the pattern that was believed to describe Virgil's poetic development, beginning with an apprenticeship in pastoral lyric and ending in a heroic poem.
Significantly, all of Milton's models for the Christian poet in the Latin elegies are classical pagans, including Pythagoras, Tiresias, Orpheus, Homer, and Virgil. The Latin elegies are a vivid example of a fundamental ambivalence in much of Milton's workthe Greco-Roman tradition as both an antithesis to, and a historical foreshadowing of, Christian revelation. But if Milton's early poems reveal his need to construct a poetic voice by identifying with one or another strand of an entire culture, his choice of persona is also related to an intensely personal issue as well: Milton aspired to be a poet against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to be a priest in the Anglican Church. In his early career, Milton experimented with a wide variety of poetic forms, in several languages, both ancient and modern, but the poems in which Milton both establishes and tests his vocation as poet-priest are three: the Nativity Ode,
Comus
, and
Lycidas
.
"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629), commonly known as the Nativity Ode, is Milton's first ambitious poem. The design of the poem indicates Milton's understanding of his priestly role. The poem explicates a central icon in Milton's culture, the birth of Christ, by showing its relationship to the larger narrative of Christian salvation. But in addition to this doctrinal function, the poem also has a performative dimension: it integrates present time into sacred time by poetically reenacting salvational moments in biblical history in the manner of a liturgical performance. Through the manipulation of tenses it treats events in the life of Christ as if they were ongoing, and thus Milton inserts "us" into the history of redemption.
The poem achieves both its explicative and performative function by recreating passages of biblical narrative understood typologically, that
 
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is, as prophetic prefigurations or foreshadowings of the ultimate redemptive fulfillment. But the poem has also to be read as a celebration of Milton's own nativity, his poetic birth. It begins by attributing itself to the "heavenly Muse" and ends by naming itself "our . . . song," as if its audience had become a congregation led by the poet through the complexities of worship. That the Nativity Ode was written in the month of Milton's nativityand his majoritymay not be accidental. Milton's boldness in staging his poetic ambition in a religious lyric contrasts sharply with other religious poets, like George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, who were troubled by the conflicting interests of divine praise, on the one hand, and self-projection inherent in the very act of writing poetry, on the other.
However, almost as soon as Milton triumphantly stepped into the role of poet with the Nativity Ode, he ceased to write more poetry of the same caliber. Throughout the early 1630s he did not sustain the momentum of his first attempt to embody his sense of vocation in another ambitious poem. In the early 1630s he further pursued the theme of redemptive time only in short lyrics such as "On Time," "Upon the Circumcision," and "The Passion,'' this last left unfinished, and as he noted in 1645
Poems
, "above the years he had." During this time Milton also wrote "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," about the contrasting moods of poetic inspiration.
Milton himself was painfully aware of the discrepancy between his avowed poetic vocation and his meager poetic output. In a letter written at age twenty-three to an unknown friend, who had apparently chided him for spending too much time studying to be a poet instead of actually writing poems, Milton defends his belated poetic production as the result of a God-given desire to write well rather than early. Included in the letter was his seventh sonnet, "How soon hath time," which recounts just how profoundly the crisis of poetic output threatened his sense of vocation. Lamenting the passing of his youth without the fulfillment of his poetic promise, he concludes that he cannot, solely on his own, control the unfolding of his poetic development, which can evolve only within God's time.
The poet-priest thus turns in upon himself, applying the notion of redemptive time to his own career and vocation. Milton makes it clear that poetry is for him, not only a profession, but also a religious vocation as understood in Protestant thought as a religious calling to a particular form of work. And indeed, by 1637 Milton seems to have sus-
 
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tained enough of the assurance expressed at the end of sonnet VII to promise his father, in "Ad Patrem," that he will repay his support with the fame he will accrue from his future priestly epic and that will guarantee his poetic immortality.
To this point in his life Milton's notion of poetic vocation was an almost entirely private fantasy, known mainly to his father and his classmates.
Comus
(1634) is a court masque that represents Milton's first foray into the world of professional poetry. The masque, a genre given literary prominence by Ben Jonson, was a lavish dramatic entertainment produced at court and at aristocratic houses usually to celebrate its patron, an ironic beginning for the professional career of a future revolutionary. After
Arcades
(an earlier and less important entertainment)
Comus
is Milton's first attempt to exercise his vocation publicly and professionally by writing for a courtly patron, presumably for material compensation. Both works were produced by the court musician and friend of Milton's father, Henry Lawes, who asked Milton to write the text for each. The specific occasion of
Comus
was the inauguration of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as Lord President of Wales.
The narrative begins as the Lady and her two brothers (played by the Egerton children themselves) get lost in a dark wood; Comus, a wild satyrlike figure representing sensual excess, attempts to seduce the Lady, who represents reason and sexual restraint. Struck paralyzed by Comus, she is finally rescued by the river goddess Sabrina; the Attendant Spirit, the masque's internal narrator played by Lawes himself, then presents the children to their father and mother, Lord and Lady Egerton; dramatic and real time and place converge. The masque is a ritual initiation of the children, who, upon successful testing of their virtue, are ceremoniously presented to their parents, the rightness of whose rule is signaled by the purity of their heirs and issue. Milton thus uses the Platonic doctrine of chastity to legitimate Egerton's dominion.
Not surprisingly, Milton once again marks the relation of sexual restraint to poetic vocation and epic power in a complex series of associations linking Sabrina to Aeneas, his nephew Brutus (the legendary founder of Britain) and Spenser. The glance towards epic in this pastoral masque places it on a trajectory guided towards a British heroic poem. However, the primary poet figure in the work is not Milton, but the Attendant Spirit, uniquely identified with Lawes, the shepherd-singer, the unveiler of truth through fictional fabrication. Lawes the musician rather than Milton the poet is associated with Spenser when,
 
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disguised as the Thyrsis, Lawes invokes the example of MeliboeusSpenser's pastoral nameto call upon Sabrina to save the Lady. Ironically, as the writer of the text of
Comus
, Milton is unable to identify authorially with the epic aspirations implied in its pastoral mode.
This displacement from authority over his own text, willing or unwilling, in a kind of aborted authorship is apparent even in the 1637 publication of
Comus
as
A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle
, the title by which the work was known in Milton's day. The publication of
A Maske
does not become the occasion for Milton to make an authorial claim, in contrast to the epic aspirations hinted at in the poem's text. Referring namelessly to the writer of the text, Lawes signs only his name to the dedication on the title page of
A Maske
. Not until the 1645
Poems
does Milton overcome this displacement of authorship and authority by claiming the masque for himself when he includes it in his collected
Poems
under his own name. Not until then does
A Maske
unequivocally authorize the association of Meliboeus with Milton as the progeny of the pastoral Spenser on his way to epic. For unknown reasons, Milton was not commissioned to write any more masques.
Anxiety over unfulfilled authorial vocation reached crisis proportions yet one more time in
Lycidas
, in which the literary connection between pastoral and epic becomes inextricably linked with Milton's sense of his own personal history.
Lycidas
is Milton's third ambitious poetic attempt, and certainly his most successful so far. Milton represents the internal crisis of vocation this time as a response to an external catastrophe, the death of Edward King, a Cambridge schoolmate who died when his ship foundered on his way home to Ireland. King's Cambridge classmates put together a volume of memorial verse, a volume to which Milton contributed, presumably because of his reputation as an aspiring poet rather than any close tie to King.
Lycidas
, a pastoral elegy, is the last poem in the volume and is signed simply "J. M."
In a highly self-conscious gesture, the speaker appears in his persona as a poet to announce that he is unprepared to deal with the momentous subject of mortality. The conventions of the pastoral elegy, the conventions in which the subject of mortality has been traditionally contained, form an obstacle that the poet feels compelled to overcome in order to legitimate his poetic mastery, but once those conventions are mastered, he experiences a breakthrough to new and abundant poetic output.
Representing his student relationship with Kingin accordance with pastoral conventionas that of two shepherds, Milton explores
 
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the traditional metaphor of the shepherd as both poet and priest. (King was in fact studying for the ministry, and he wrote verses, however undistinguished.) The death of the young poet provokes a set of existential questions: Why give up the pleasures of life (he refers to specifically sexual pleasures) to devote oneself to poetic fame if one can be so arbitrarily cut down? Why (the question is asked in the voice of St. Peter) do corrupt priests thrive while a good priest perishes so young? The poet is answered by voices that Milton identifies as breaking out of the pastoral genre to supply an otherworldly perspective: Apollo instructs the poet to consider fame from the viewpoint of celestial rather than earthly reward; and St. Peter himself answers by asserting that retribution is meted out only in heaven.
After each explanation the pastoral mood returns, but only with the admission that the genre on its own could not contain its own subjectcould not provide an adequate explanation for the death of Lycidas. And so when the poet returns to the conventional pastoral funeral procession in which all of nature mourns the death of a shepherd by strewing flowers on the hearse of Lycidas, he reminds himself that the body of Lycidas lies not in any sarcophagus, but beneath the sea. The poet finds himself on the verge of despair to discover once again that a pastoral conventionpoetry itselfhas failed.
However, the poem takes a sudden turn when the poet himself supplies a heavenly perspective: he announces that although Lycidas may be physically under the sea, his soul has been resurrected in heaven, where he inhabits a celestial pastoral world. Milton has rehabilitated his chosen genre by spiritualizing itby Christianizing the classicalthus rendering it capable of containing what it was meant to make intelligibledeath. In mastering death, he has mastered the genre that initiates the vocation of poetry. The poem, which begins with doubts about the poet's readiness and ability, ends by establishing the authority of the poet's own voice. Strangely introducing a new voice by switching to the third person in its final section, the poem now steps back from the experience it has described to portray the poet preparing to sing new pastoral songs with eagerness, tranquility, and ease. Milton has finally completed his own poetic initiation.
Lycidas
represents one of the rare moments in which Milton's sense of past promise, present achievement, and future hope come together with confidence.
Lycidas
is Milton's last, but most successful, endeavor to construct a beginning.

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