(Harold Bloom) John Milton

Blooms Modern Critical Views
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JOHN MILTON
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction 2004 by Harold Bloom.
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John Milton / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7657-1 (hardcover) ISBN 0-7910-7824-8
(pbk.) 1. Milton, John, 1608-1674Criticism and
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Contents
Editors Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Miltons Minor Poems 23
F.T. Prince
Heaven 33
William Empson
Milton 55
Thomas Greene
The Transcendental Masque 97
Angus Fletcher
Echo Schematic 109
John Hollander
Milton: Lycidas 121
Peter M. Sacks
The Majesty of Darkness 151
William Flesch
The genesis of gendered subjectivity in the divorce
tracts and in Paradise Lost 171
Mary Nyquist
The fathers house: Samson Agonistes
in its historical moment 203
John Guillory
vi CONTENTS
Miltons Prose: The Adjustment of Idealism 235

C.A. Patrides
Aristotle on the Pinnacle: Paradise Regained
and the Limits of Theory 261
Price McMurray
The Birth of the Author: Miltons Poetic
Self-Construction 275
J. Martin Evans
Gently Raised 295
Stanley Fish
Something ... Written to Aftertimes 319
Barbara K. Lewalski
Chronology 331
Contributors 333
Bibliography 337
Acknowledgments 345
Index 347
Editors Note
My Introduction is in two parts, the rst reviewing the High Romantic

reading of Paradise Lost, and the second an account of Miltons troping of his
precursors, so as to render them belated, and the poet of the Satanic epic (as
Neil Forsyth calls it) sublimely early.
The poet-scholar, F.T. Prince, much missed by me, gives a sensitive
and learned account of the Italian elements in Miltons Minor Poems, while
the great William Empson ercely assaults the dubious gure called God
in Paradise Lost.
A great Renaissance scholar, the recently departed Thomas Greene,
subtly locates the place of Paradise Lost in the epic sequence of angelic
descents.
Two dazzling Orphic critics, who study allegorizing and allusiveness,
Angus Fletcher and John Hollander, examine the role of echo in Comus and
Paradise Lost, respectively.
Peter M. Sacks illuminates Lycidas, the strongest shorter poem in the
language, by bringing together Freud and elegiac tradition.
In a superb essay, William Flesch keeps to a sophisticated version of the
Romantic interpretation, rightly saying of the heroic Milton that he had the
power to refuse the safest way.
Provocatively, Mary Nyquist suggests that Eves story takes priority
over Adams because of intimations offered by Milton in his divorce tracts.
John Guillory, with true originality, nds Miltons relation to his own
father to be postgured in the power of Samson Agonistes.
The heroic pattern of Miltons prose is traced by C.A. Patrides, after
which Price McMurray celebrates the counter-sublimity of Paradise Regained.
Miltons Incarnation of the Poetical Character is analyzed by J. Martin
Evans, while the essential Stanley Fish shows us action and risk fusing in
Miltons unique splendor.
vii
In her radiant epilogue to her biography of Milton, the best ever
published, Barbara K. Lewalski reminds us that the extraordinary strength of
the greatest poet in the language, after Chaucer and Shakespeare, resists the
reductions of all the modes of our current criticism.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
By 1652, before his forty-fourth birthday and with his long-projected major
poem unwritten, Milton was completely blind. In 1660, with arrangements
for the Stuart Restoration well under way, the blind poet identied himself
with the prophet Jeremiah, as if he would tell the very soil itself what her
perverse inhabitants are deaf to, vainly warning a divinely chosen people
now choosing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little,
and consider whither they are rushing. These words are quoted from the
second edition of The Ready and Easy Way, a work which marks the end of
Miltons temporal prophecy and the beginning of his greater work, the
impassioned meditations upon divine providence and human nature. In these
[meditations] Milton abandons the eld of his defeat, and leaves behind him
also the songs of triumph he might have sung in praise of a reformed society
and its imaginatively integrated citizens. He changes those notes to tragic,
and praises, when he praises at all, what he calls the better fortitude of
patience, the hitherto unsung theme of Heroic Martyrdom. Adam, Christ
and Samson manifest an internal mode of heroism that Satan can neither
understand nor overcome, a heroism that the blind Puritan prophet himself
is called upon to exemplify in the England of the Restoration.
Milton had planned a major poem since he was a young man, and he
had associated his composition of the poem with the hope that it would be a
celebration of a Puritan reformation of all England. He had prophesied of
the coming time that amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of the saints some
one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures
to sing and celebrate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgements in the
land throughout all ages. This vision clearly concerns a national epic, very
probably on a British rather than a Biblical theme. That poem, had it been
written, would have rivaled the great poem of Miltons master, Spenser, who
in a profound sense was Miltons Original, to cite Drydens testimony.
Paradise Lost is not the poem that Milton had prophesied in the exuberance
Part of this introduction rst appeared as Milton and His Precursors in A Map of Misreading.
copyright 1975 by Oxford University Press.
1
2 Harold Bloom
of his youth, but we may guess it to be a greater work than the one we lost,
for the unwritten poem would not have had the Satan who is at once the
aesthetic glory and the moral puzzle of Miltons epic of loss and disillusion.
The form of Paradise Lost is based on Miltons modication of Vergils
attempt to rival Homers Iliad, but the content of Miltons epic has a largely
negative relation to the content of the Iliad or the Aeneid. Miltons one
greater Man, Christ, is a hero who necessarily surpasses all the sons of
Adam, including Achilles and Aeneas, just as he surpasses Adam or archetypal
Man himself. Milton delights to speak of himself as soaring above the sacred
places of the classical muses and as seeking instead thee Sion and the owry
brooks beneath, Siloam, by whose side the Hebrew prophets walked. For
Paradise Lost, despite C.S. Lewiss persuasive assertions to the contrary, is
specically a Protestant and Puritan poem, created by a man who nally
became a Protestant church of one, a sect unto himself. The poems true
muse is that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,
and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed re of his altar, to touch and
purify the lips of whom he pleases. This Spirit is one that prefers for its
shrine, in preference to all Temples of organized faith, the upright and pure
heart of the isolated Protestant poet, who carries within himself the extreme
Christian individualism of the Puritan Left Wing. Consequently, the poems
doctrine is not the great central tradition that Lewis nds it to be, but an
imaginative variation on that tradition. Milton believed in the doctrines of the
Fall, natural corruption, regeneration through grace, an aristocracy of the
elect, and Christian Liberty, all of them fundamental to Calvinist belief, and
yet Milton was no orthodox Calvinist, as Arthur Barker has demonstrated.
The poet refused to make a sharp distinction between the natural and the
spiritual in man, and broke from Calvin in his theory of regeneration. Miltons
doctrine of predestination, as seen in Paradise Lost, is both general and
conditional; the Spirit does not make particular and absolute choices. When
regeneration comes, it heals not only mans spirit but his nature as well, for
Milton could not abide in dualism. Barker makes the ne contrast between
Milton and Calvin that in Calvin even good men are altogether dependent
upon Gods will, and not on their own restored faculties, but in Milton the
will is made free again, and man is restored to his former liberty. The hope
for man in Paradise Lost is that Adams descendants will nd their salvation in
the fallen world, once they have accepted Christs sacrice and its human
consequences, by taking a middle way between those who would deny the
existence of sin altogether, in a wild freedom founded upon a misunde-
rstanding of election, and those who would repress mans nature that spirit
might be more free. The regenerated descendants of Adam are to evidence
that Gods grace need not provide for the abolition of the natural man.
To know and remember this as Miltons ideal is to be properly prepared
to encounter the dangerous greatness of Satan in the early books of Paradise
Introduction 3
Lost. The poem is a theodicy, and like Job seeks to justify the ways of Jehovah
to man, but unlike the poet of Job Milton insisted that reason could
comprehend Gods justice, for Miltons God is perfectly reasonable and the
perfection of man in Christ would raise human reason to a power different
only in degree from its fallen status. The poet of Job has an aesthetic
advantage over Milton, for most readers rightly prefer a Voice out of a
Whirlwind, ercely asking rhetorical questions, to Miltons sophistical
Schoolmaster of Souls in Book III of Paradise Lost. But Miltons God is out
of balance because Satan is so magnicently awed in presentation, and to
account for the failure of God as a dramatic character the reader is compelled
to enter upon the most famous and vexing of critical problems concerning
Paradise Lost, the Satanic controversy itself. Is Satan in some sense heroic, or
is he merely a fool?
The anti-Satanist school of critics has its great ancestor in Addison,
who found Satans sentiments to be suitable to a created being of the most
exalted and most depraved nature.... Amid those impieties which this
enraged spirit utters ... the author has taken care to introduce none that is not
big with absurdity, and incapable of shocking a religious reader. Dr. Johnson
followed Addison with more eloquence: The malignity of Satan foams in
haughtiness and obstinacy; but his expressions are commonly general, and no
otherwise offensive than as they are wicked. The leading modern anti-
Satanists are the late Charles Williams, and C. S. Lewis, for whom Miltons
Satan is to some extent an absurd egoist, not altogether unlike Merediths Sir
Willoughby Patterne. So Lewis states it is a mistake to demand that Satan,
any more than Sir Willoughby, should be able to rant and posture through
the whole universe without, sooner or later, awaking the comic spirit. Satan
is thus an apostle of Nonsense, and his progressive degeneration in the poem
is only the inevitable working-out of his truly absurd choice when he rst
denied his status as another of Gods creatures.
The Satanist school of critics nds its romantic origins in two very
great poets profoundly and complexly affected by Milton, Blake and Shelley.
This tradition of romantic Satanism needs to be distinguished from the
posturings of its Byronic-Napoleonic cousin, with which anti-Satanists have
loved to confound it. The greatest of anti-Satanists (because the most
attracted to Satan), Coleridge, was himself guilty of this confusion. But
though he insisted upon reading into Miltons Satan the lineaments of
Bonaparte, Coleridges reading of the Satanic character has never been
equaled by any modern anti-Satanist:
But in its utmost abstraction and consequent state of reprobation,

the will becomes Satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the
relations of the spirit to itself, and remorseless despotism
relatively to others; the more hopeless as the more obdurate by
4 Harold Bloom
its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and

pain and pleasure; in short, by the fearful resolve to nd in itself
alone the one absolute motive of action, under which all other
motives from within and from without must be either
subordinated or crushed.
Against this reading of the Satanic predicament we can set the

dialectical ironies of Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the
imaginative passion of Shelley in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound and A
Defence of Poetry. For Blake the Satan of Books I and II supremely embodies
human desire, the energy that alone can create. But desire restrained
becomes passive, until it is only a shadow of desire. God and Christ in
Paradise Lost embody reason and restraint, and their restriction of Satan
causes him to forget his own passionate desires, and to accept a categorical
morality that he can only seek to invert. But a poet is by necessity of the party
of energy and desire; reason and restraint cannot furnish the stuff of
creativity. So Milton, as a true poet, wrote at liberty when he portrayed
Devils and Hell, and in fetters when he described Angels and God. For Hell
is the active life springing from energy, and Heaven only the passive
existence that obeys reason.
Blake was too subtle to portray Satan as being even the unconscious
hero of the poem. Rather, he implied that the poem can have no hero
because it too strongly features Miltons self-abnegation in assigning human
creative power to its diabolical side. Shelley went further, and claimed Satan
as a semi-Promethean or awed hero, whose character engenders in the
readers mind a pernicious casuistry of humanist argument against
theological injustice. Shelley more directly fathered the Satanist school by
his forceful statement of its aesthetic case: Nothing can exceed the energy
and magnicence of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. Whatever else,
Shelley concluded, might be said for the Christian basis of the poem, it was
clear that Miltons Satan as a moral being was far superior to Miltons God.
Each reader of Paradise Lost must nd for himself the proper reading of
Satan, whose appeal is clearly all but universal. Amid so much magnicence
it is difficult to choose a single passage from Paradise Lost as surpassing all
others, but I incline to the superlative speech of Satan on top of Mount
Niphates (Book IV, ll.32113), which is the text upon which the anti-
Satanist, Satanist or some compromise attitude must nally rest. Here Satan
makes his last choice, and ceases to be what he was in the early books of the
poem. All that the anti-Satanists say about him is true after this point; all or
almost all claimed for him by the Satanists is true before it. When this speech
is concluded, Satan has become Blakes shadow of desire, and he is on the
downward path that will make him as big with absurdity as ever Addison
and Lewis claimed him to be. Nothing that can be regenerated remains in
Introduction 5
Satan, and the rift between his self-ruined spirit and his radically corrupted
nature widens until he is the hissing serpent of popular tradition, plucking
greedily at the Dead Sea fruit of Hell in a fearful parody of Eves Fall.
It is on Mount Niphates again that Satan, now a mere (but very subtle)
tempter, stands when he shows Christ the kingdoms of this world in the brief
epic, Paradise Regained. Brief epic is the traditional description of this poem
(published in 1671, four years after Paradise Lost), but the description has
been usefully challenged by several modern critics. E. M. W. Tillyard has
warned against judging the poem by any kind of epic standard and has
suggested instead that it ought to be read as a kind of Morality play, while
Arnold Stein has termed it an internal drama, set in the Son of Gods mind.
Louis L. Martz has argued, following Tillyard, that the poem is an attempt
to convert Vergils Georgics into a mode for religious poetry, and ought
therefore to be read as both a didactic work and a formal meditation on the
Gospel. Paradise Regained is so subdued a poem when compared to Paradise
Lost that we nd real difficulty in reading it as epic. Yet it does resemble Job,
which Milton gave as the possible model for a brief epic, for like Job it is
essentially a structure of gathering self-awareness, of the protagonist and
hero recognizing himself in his relation to God. Miltons Son of Man is
obedient where Miltons Adam was disobedient; Job was not quite either
until God spoke to him and demonstrated the radical incompatibility
involved in any mortals questionings of divine purpose. Job, until his poems
climax, is an epic hero because he has an unresolved conict within himself,
between his own conviction of righteousness and his moral outrage at the
calamities that have come upon him despite his righteousness. Job needs to
overcome the temptations afforded him by this conict, including those
offered by his comforters (to deny his own righteousness) and by his nely
laconic wife (to curse God and die). The temptations of Miltons Son of God
(the poets fondness for this name of Christ is another testimony to his
Hebraic preference for the Father over the Son) are not easy for us to
sympathize with in any very dramatic way, unlike the temptations of Job, who
is a man like ourselves. But again Milton is repeating the life-long quest of
his poetry; to see man as an integrated unity of distinct natures, body and
soul harmonized. In Christ these natures are perfectly unied, and so the
self-realization of Christ is an image of the possibility of human integration.
Job learns not to tempt Gods patience too far; Christ learns who he is, and
in that moment of self-revelation Satan is smitten with amazement and falls
as by the blow of a Hercules. Milton had seen himself in Paradise Lost as
Abdiel, the faithful Angel who will not follow Satan in rebellion against God,
defying thus the scorn of his fellows. Less consciously, something crucial in
Milton had found its way into the Satan of the opening books, sounding a
stoic deance of adversity. In Paradise Regained Milton, with genuine
humility, is exploring the Jobean problem within himself. Has he, as a Son of
6 Harold Bloom
God also, tried Gods patience too far, and can he at length overcome the
internal temptations that beset a proud spirit reduced to being a voice in the
wilderness? The poets conquest over himself is gured in the greater Son of
Gods triumphant endurance, and in the quiet close of Paradise Regained,
where the Savior returns to his mothers house to lead again, for a while, the
private life of contemplation and patience while waiting upon Gods will, not
the public life forever closed to Milton.
Published with Paradise Regained in 1671, the dramatic poem Samson
Agonistes is more admired today than the brief epic it accompanied. The
poems title, like the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, refers to the episode in
the heros life upon which the work is centered. The reference (from the
Greek for athletic contestants in public games) is to Samsons ordeal before
the Philistines at their Feast of Dagon, where he is summoned for their sport
to demonstrate his blind strength, and where his faith gives him light enough
to destroy them. Samson is Miltons Christian modication of Athenian
drama, as Paradise Lost had been of classical epic. Yet Miltons drama is his
most personal poem, in its experimental metric and in its self-reference alike.
Modern editors cautiously warn against overstressing the extent to which
Samson represents Milton, yet the representation seems undeniable, and
justly so, to the common reader. Miltons hatred of his enemies does not seem
particularly Christian to many of his modern critics, but its ferocious zeal ts
both the Biblical story of Samson and the very bitter situation that the blind
Puritan champion had to face in the rst decade of the Restoration. The
crucial text here is the great Chorus, ll.652709, in which Milton confronts
everything in the world of public events that had hurt him most. The theodicy
of Paradise Lost seems abstract compared to the terrible emotion conveyed in
this majestic hymn. The men solemnly elected by God for the great work of
renovation that is at once Gods glory and the peoples safety are then
evidently abandoned by God, and indeed thrown by Him lower than He
previously exalted them on high. Milton had lived to see the bodies of his
great leaders and associates, including Cromwell, dug up and hanged on the
gallows to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles
I. Sir Henry Vane, for whom Milton had a warm and especial admiration, had
been executed by order of the unjust tribunals, under change of times, / And
condemnation of the ingrateful multitude. Samson Agonistes give us not only
the sense of having experienced a perfectly proportioned work of art, but also
the memory of Miltons most moving prayer to God, which follows his
account of the tribulations of his fellow Puritans:
So deal not with this once thy glorious Champion,

The Image of thy strength, and mighty minister.
What do I beg? how hast thou dealt already?
Behold him in this state calamitous, and turn
His labours, for thou canst, to peaceful end.
Introduction 7
M I LT O N AND HIS PRECURSORS1
NO poet compares to Milton in his intensity of self-consciousness as an artist

and in his ability to overcome all negative consequences of such concern.
Miltons highly deliberate and knowingly ambitious program necessarily
involved him in direct competition with Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid,
Dante and Tasso, among other major precursors. More anxiously, it brought
him very close to Spenser, whose actual inuence on Paradise Lost is deeper,
subtler and more extensive than scholarship so far has recognized. Most
anxiously, the ultimate ambitions of Paradise Lost gave Milton the problem of
expanding Scripture without distorting the Word of God.
A reader, thinking of Miltons style, is very likely to recognize that
styles most distinctive characteristic as being the density of its allusiveness.
Perhaps only Gray compares to Milton in this regard, and Gray is only a
footnote, though an important and valuable one, to the Miltonic splendor.
Miltons allusiveness has a distinct design, which is to enhance both the
quality and the extent of his inventiveness. His handling of allusion is his
highly individual and original defense against poetic tradition, his revisionary
stance in writing what is in effect a tertiary epic, following after Homer in
primary epic and Virgil, Ovid, and Dante in secondary epic. Most vitally,
Miltonic allusion is the crucial revisionary ratio by which Paradise Lost
distances itself from its most dangerous precursor, The Faerie Queene, for
Spenser had achieved a national romance, of epic greatness, in the
vernacular, and in the service of moral and theological beliefs not far from
Miltons own.
The map of misprision move[s] between the poles of illusioirony as a
gure of speech, or the reaction-formation I have termed clinamenand
allusion, particularly as the scheme of transumption or metaleptic reversal
that I have named apophrades and analogized to the defenses of introjection
and projection. As the common root of their names indicates, illusio and
allusion are curiously related, both being a kind of mockery, rather in the
sense intended by the title of Geoffrey Hills poem on Campanella, that
Men are a mockery of Angels. The history of allusion as an English word
goes from an initial meaning of illusion on to an early Renaissance use as
meaning a pun, or word-play in general. But by the time of Bacon it meant
any symbolic likening, whether in allegory, parable or metaphor, as when in
The Advancement of Learning poetry is divided into Narrative, representative,
and allusive. A fourth meaning, which is still the correct modern one, follows
rapidly by the very early seventeenth century, and involves any implied,
indirect or hidden reference. The fth meaning, still incorrect but bound to
establish itself, now equates allusion with direct, overt reference. Since the
root meaning is to play with, mock, jest at, allusion is uneasily allied to
words like ludicrous and elusion, as we will remember later.
Thomas McFarland, formidably defending Coleridge against endlessly
8 Harold Bloom
repetitive charges of plagiarism, has suggested that plagiarism ought to be

added as a seventh revisionary ratio. Allusion is a comprehensive enough
ratio to contain plagiarism also under the heading of apophrades, which the
Lurianic Kabbalists called gilgul, as I explained [previously]. Allusion as
covert reference became in Miltons control the most powerful and successful
guration that any strong poet has ever employed against his strong
precursors.
Milton, who would not sunder spirit from matter, would not let himself
be a receiver, object to a subjects inuencings. His stance against dualism
and inuence alike is related to his exaltation of unfallen pleasure, his appeal
not so much to his readers senses as to his readers yearning for the expanded
senses of Eden. Precisely here is the center of Miltons own inuence upon
the Romantics, and here also is why he surpassed them in greatness, since
what he could do for himself was the cause of their becoming unable to do
the same for themselves. His achievement became at once their starting
point, their inspiration, yet also their goad, their torment.
Yet he too had his starting point: Spenser. Spenser was the soothest
shepherd that eer piped on plains, sage and serious. Milton has
acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original, Dryden testied, but the
paternity required no acknowledgment. A darker acknowledgment can be
read in Miltons astonishing mistake about Spenser in Areopagitica, written
more than twenty years before Paradise Lost was completed:
... It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the
knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together,
leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which
Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing
good by evil. As therefore the state of man is, what wisdom can
there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the
knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with
all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet
distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true
warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees
her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we
bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much
rather; that which puries us is trial, and trial is by what is
contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice
promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not
a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness; which was
the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare
Introduction 9
be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,

describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings
him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the
bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet
abstain....
Spensers cave of Mammon is Miltons Hell; far more than the descents
to the underworld of Homer and Virgil, more even than Dantes vision, the
pregurement of Books I and II of Paradise Lost reverberates in Book II of
The Faerie Queene. Against Acrasias bower, Guyon enjoys the moral guidance
of his unfaltering Palmer, but necessarily in Mammons cave Guyon has to be
wholly on his own, even as Adam and Eve must withstand temptation in the
absence of the affable Raphael. Guyon stands, though at some cost; Adam
and Eve fall, but both the endurance and the failure are independent.
Miltons is no ordinary error, no mere lapse in memory, but is itself a
powerful misinterpretation of Spenser, and a strong defense against him. For
Guyon is not so much Adams precursor as he is Miltons own, the giant
model imitated by the Abdiel of Paradise Lost. Milton rewrites Spenser so as
to increase the distance between his poetic father and himself. St. Augustine
identied memory with the father, and we may surmise that a lapse in a
memory as preternatural as Miltons is a movement against the father.
Miltons full relation to Spenser is too complex and hidden for any
rapid description or analysis to suffice, even for my limited purposes in this
[essay]. Here I will venture that Miltons transumptive stance in regard to all
his precursors, including Spenser, is founded on Spensers resourceful and
bewildering (even Joycean) way of subsuming his precursors, particularly
Virgil, through his labyrinthine syncretism. Spenserian allusiveness has been
described by Angus Fletcher as collage: Collage is parody drawing attention
to the materials of art and life. Fletcher follows Harry Bergers description
of the technique of conspicuous allusion in Spenser: the depiction of stock
literary motifs, characters, and genres in a manner which emphasizes their
conventionality, displaying at once their debt to and their existence in a
conventional climateClassical, medieval, romance, etc.which is archaic
when seen from Spensers retrospective viewpoint. This allusive collage or
conspicuousness is readily assimilated to Spensers peculiarly metamorphic
elegiacism, which becomes the particular legacy of Spenser to all his poetic
descendants, from Drayton and Milton down to Yeats and Stevens. For
Spenser began that internalization of quest-romance that is or became what
we call Romanticism. It is the Colin Clout of Spensers Book VI who is the
father of Miltons Il Penseroso, and from Miltons visionary stem the later
Spenserian transformations of Wordsworths Solitary, and all of the Solitarys
children in the wanderers of Keats, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson and Yeats
until the parodistic climax in Stevens comedian Crispin. Fletcher, in his
10 Harold Bloom
study of Spenser, The Prophetic Moment, charts this genealogy of

introspection, stressing the intervention of Shakespeare between Spenser
and Milton, since from Shakespeare Milton learned to contain the
Spenserian elegiacism or prophetic strain within what Fletcher calls
transcendental forms. In his study of Comus as such a form, The
Transcendental Masque, Fletcher emphasizes the enclosed vastness in which
Milton, like Shakespeare, allows reverberations of the Spenserian resonance,
a poetic diction richly dependent on allusive echoings of precursors. Comus
abounds in apophrades, the return of many poets dead and gone, with Spenser
and Shakespeare especially prominent among them. Following Berger and
Fletcher, I would call the allusiveness of Comus still conspicuous and so still
Spenserian, still part of the principle of echo. But, with Paradise Lost,
Miltonic allusion is transformed into a mode of transumption, and poetic
tradition is radically altered in consequence.
Fletcher, the most daemonic and inventive of modern allegorists, is
again the right guide into the mysteries of transumptive allusion, through one
of the brilliant footnotes in his early book, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic
Mode (p. 241, n. 33). Studying what he calls difficult ornament and the
transition to modern allegory, Fletcher meditates on Johnsons ambivalence
towards Miltons style. In his Life of Milton, Johnson observes that the heat
of Miltons mind might be said to sublimate his learning. Hazlitt, a less
ambivalent admirer of Milton, asserted that Miltons learning had the effect
of intuition. Johnson, though so much more grudging, actually renders the
greater homage, for Johnsons own immense hunger of imagination was
overmatched by Miltons, as he recognized:
Whatever be his subject, he never fails to ll the imagination. But

his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of Nature
do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to have
the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation. He
saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, through the spectacles of books;
and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance....
... But he does not conne himself within the limits of
rigorous comparison: his great excellence is amplitude, and he
expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which
the occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to
the orb of the Moon, he crowds the imagination with the
discovery of the telescope, and all the wonders which the tele-
scope discovers.
This Johnsonian emphasis upon allusion in Milton inspires Fletcher to

compare Miltonic allusion to the trope of transumption or metalepsis,
Puttenhams far-fetcher:
Introduction 11
Johnson stresses allusion in Milton: the spectacles of books are

a means of sublimity, since at every point the reader is led from
one scene to an allusive second scene, to a third, and so on.
Johnsons Milton has, we might say, a transumptive style....
Here is the passage that moved Johnsons observation, Paradise Lost,

Book I, 283313. Beelzebub has urged Satan to address his fallen legions,
who still lie astounded and amazed on the lake of re:
He scarce had ceast when the superior Fiend

Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Evning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast
Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand,
He walkt with to support uneasy steps
Over the burning Marl, not like those steps
On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire;
Nathless he so endurd, till on the Beach
Of that inamed Sea, he stood and calld
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intranst
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallembrosa, where th Etrurian shades
High overarcht imbowr; or scatterd sedge
Aoat, when with erce Winds Orion armd
Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves oerthrew
Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,
While with perdious hatred they pursud
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir oating Carcasses
And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,
Under amazement of thir hideous change.
The transumption of the precursors here is managed by the

12 Harold Bloom
juxtaposition between the far-fetching of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso,

Spenser, the Bible and the single near-contemporary reference to Galileo,
the Tuscan artist, and his telescope. Miltons aim is to make his own
belatedness into an earliness, and his traditions priority over him into a
lateness. The critical question to be asked of this passage is: why is Johnsons
adventitious image, Galileo and the telescope, present at all? Johnson,
despite his judgment that the image is extrinsic, implies the right answer:
because the expansion of this apparently extrinsic image crowds the readers
imagination, by giving Milton the true priority of interpretation, the
powerful reading that insists upon its own uniqueness and its own accuracy.
Troping upon his forerunners tropes, Milton compels us to read as he reads,
and to accept his stance and vision as our origin, his time as true time. His
allusiveness introjects the past, and projects the future, but at the paradoxical
cost of the present, which is not voided but is yielded up to an experiential
darkness, as we will see, to a mingling of wonder (discovery) and woe (the
fallen Churchs imprisonment of the discoverer). As Frank Kermode
remarks, Paradise Lost is a wholly contemporary poem, yet surely its sense of
the present is necessarily more of loss than of delight.
Miltons giant simile comparing Satans shield to the moon alludes to
the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, XIX, 37380:
... and caught up the great shield, huge and heavy next, and from
it the light glimmered far, as from the moon.
And as when from across water a light shines to mariners from a
blazing re, when the re is burning high in the mountains in a
desolate standing, as the mariners are carried unwilling by storm
winds over the sh-swarming sea, far away from their loved ones;
so the light from the fair elaborate shield of Achilleus shot into
the high air.
(Lattimore version)
Milton is glancing also at the shield of Radigund in The Faerie Queene,

V, v, 3:
And on her shoulder hung her shield, bedeckt

Upon the bosse with stones, that shined wide,
As the faire Moone in her most full aspect,
That to the Moone it mote be like in each respect.
Radigund, Princess of the Amazons, is dominated by pride and anger,

like Achilles. Satan, excelling both in his bad eminence, is seen accurately
through the optic glass of the British artists transumptive vision, even as
Galileo sees what no one before him has seen on the moons surface. Galileo,
Introduction 13
when visited by Milton (as he tells us in Areopagitica), was working while

under house arrest by the Inquisition, a condition not wholly unlike Miltons
own in the early days of the Restoration. Homer and Spenser emphasize the
moonlike brightness and shining of the shields of Achilles and Radigund;
Milton emphasizes size, shape, weight as the common feature of Satans
shield and the moon, for Miltons post-Galilean moon is more of a world and
less of a light. Milton and Galileo are late, yet they see more, and more
signicantly, than Homer and Spenser, who were early. Milton gives his
readers the light, yet also the true dimensions and features of reality, even
though Milton, like the Tuscan artist, must work on while compassed around
by experiential darkness, in a world of woe.
Milton will not stop with his true vision of Satans shield, but transumes
his precursors also in regard to Satans spear, and to the fallen-leaves aspect of
the Satanic host. Satans spear evokes passages of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Tasso
and Spenser, allusions transumed by the contemporary reference to a agship
(ammiral) with its mast made of Norwegian r. The central allusion is
probably to Ovids vision of the Golden Age (Goldings version, I, 10916):
The loftie Pyntree was not hewen from mountaines where it stood,
In seeking straunge and forren landes to rove upon the ood.
Men knew none other countries yet, than where themselves did
keepe:
There was no towne enclosed yet, with walles and ditches deepe.
No horne nor trumpet was in use, no sword nor helmet worne.
The worlde was suche, that souldiers helpe might easly be
forborne.
The fertile earth as yet was free, untoucht of spade or plough,
And yet it yeelded of it selfe of every things inough.
Ovids emblem of the passage from Golden Age to Iron Age is reduced
to but a wand, for Satan will more truly cause the fall from Golden to Iron.
As earlier Satan subsumed Achilles and Radigund, now he contains and
metaleptically reverses the Polyphemus of Homer and of Virgil, the Tancredi
and Argantes of Tasso, and the proud giant Orgoglio of Spenser:
a club, or staff, lay there along the fold

an olive tree, felled green and left to season
for Kyklops hand. And it was like a mast
a lugger of twenty oars, broad in the beam
a deep-sea-going craftmight carry:
so long, so big around, it seemed.
(Odyssey, IX, 32227, Fitzgerald version)
14 Harold Bloom
... we saw
upon a peak the shepherd Polyphemus;
he lugged his mammoth hulk among the ocks,
searching along familiar shoresan awful
misshapen monster, huge, his eyelight lost.
His steps are steadied by the lopped-off pine
he grips....
(Aeneid, III, 66066; Mandelbaum version,
84955)
These sons of Mavors bore, instead of spears,

Two knotty masts, which none but they could lift;
Each foaming steed so fast his master bears,
That never beast, bird, shaft, ew half so swift:
Such was their fury, as when Boreas tears
The shatterd crags from Taurus northern clift:
Upon their helms their lances long they brake,
And up to heavn ew splinters, sparks, and smoke.
(Jerusalem Delivered, VI, 40, Fairfax version)
So growen great through arrogant delight

Of thhigh descent, whereof he was yborne,
And through presumption of his matchlesse might,
All other powres and knighthood he did scorne.
Such now he marcheth to this man forlorne,
And left to losse: his stalking steps are stayde
Upon a snaggy Oke, which he had torne
Out of his mothers bowelles, and it made
His mortall mace, wherewith his foemen he dismayde.
(Faerie Queene, I, vii, x)
The Wild Men, Polyphemus the Cyclops and the crudely proud
Orgoglio, as well as the Catholic and Circassian champions, Tancredi and
Argantes, all become late and lesser versions of Miltons earlier and greater
Satan. The tree and the mast become interchangeable with the club, and all
three become emblematic of the brutality of Satan as the Antichrist, the
fallen son of God who walks in the darkness of his vainglory and perverts
nature to the ends of war-by-sea and war-by-land, Jobs Leviathan and
Behemoth. Miltons present age is again an experiential darknessof naval
warfarebut his backward glance to Satanic origins reveals the full truth of
which Homer, Virgil, Tasso give only incomplete reections. Whether the
transumption truly overcomes Spensers Orgoglio is more dubious, for he
remains nearly as Satanic as Miltons Satan, except that Satan is more
Introduction 15
complex and poignant, being a son of heaven and not, like the gross
Orgoglio, a child of earth.
The third transumption of the passage, the ction of the leaves, is
surely the subtlest, and the one most worthy of Miltons greatness. He tropes
here on the tropes of Isaiah, Homer, Virgil and Dante, and with the Orion
allusion on Job and Virgil. The series is capped by the references to Exodus
and Ovid, with the equation of Busiris and Satan. This movement from fallen
leaves to starry inuence over storms to the overwhelming of a tyrannous
host is itself a kind of transumption, as Milton moves from metonymy to
metonymy before accomplishing a nal reduction.
Satans fallen hosts, poignantly still called angel forms, most directly
allude to a prophetic outcry of Isaiah 34:4:
And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens
shall be rolled together as a scroll; and all their host shall fall
down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling g from
the g tree.
Milton is too wary to mark this for transumption; his trope works upon
a series of Homer, Virgil, Dante:
... why ask of my generation?

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the ne timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies....
(Iliad, VI, 14550, Lattimore version)
thick as the leaves that with the early frost

of autumn drop and fall within the forest,
or as the birds that ock along the beaches,
in ight from frenzied seas when the chill season
drives them across the waves to lands of sun.
They stand; each pleads to be the rst to cross
the stream; their hands reach out in longing for
the farther shore. But Charon, sullen boatman,
now takes these souls, now those; the rest he leaves;
thrusting them back, he keeps them from the beach.
( Aeneid, VI, 31019; Mandelbaum version,
40716)
... But those forlorn and naked souls changed color, their teeth
chattering, as soon as they heard the cruel words. They cursed
16 Harold Bloom
God, their parents, the human race, the place, the time, the seed
of their begetting and of their birth. Then, weeping loudly, all
drew to the evil shore that awaits every man who fears not God.
The demon Charon, his eyes like glowing coals, beckons to them
and collects them all, beating with his oar whoever lingers.
As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the
bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of
Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals,
like a bird at its call. Thus they go over the dark water, and before
they have landed on the other shore, on this side a new throng
gathers.
(Inferno, III, 100120, Singleton version)
Homer accepts grim process; Virgil accepts yet plangently laments,

with his unforgettable vision of those who stretch forth their hands out of
love for the farther shore. Dante, lovingly close to Virgil, is more terrible,
since his leaves fall even as the evil seed of Adam falls. Milton remembers
standing, younger and then able to see, in the woods at Vallombrosa,
watching the autumn leaves strew the brooks. His characteristic metonymy
of shades for woods allusively puns on Virgils and Dantes images of the
shades gathering for Charon, and by a metalepsis carries across Dante and
Virgil to their tragic Homeric origin. Once again, the precursors are
projected into belatedness, as Milton introjects the prophetic source of
Isaiah. Leaves fall from trees, generations of men die, because once one-third
of the heavenly host came falling down. Miltons present time again is
experiential loss; he watches no more autumns, but the optic glass of his art
sees fully what his precursors saw only darkly, or in the vegetable glass of
nature.
By a transition to the scattered sedge of the Red Sea, Milton calls up
Virgil again, compounding two passages on Orion:
Our prows were pointed there when suddenly,

rising upon the surge, stormy Orion
drove us against blind shoals....
(Aeneid, I, 53436; Mandelbaum
version, 75355)
... he marks Arcturus,

the twin Bears and the rainy Hyades,
Orion armed with gold; and seeing all
together in the tranquil heavens, loudly
he signals....
(Aeneid, III, 51721; Mandelbaum version, 67478)
Introduction 17
Alastair Fowler notes the contrast to the parallel Biblical allusions:
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened

himself against him, and hath prospered?
... Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon
the waves of the sea.
Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the
chambers of the south.
(Job 9:4, 89)
Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the
shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with
night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out
upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name....
(Amos 5:8)
In Virgil, Orion rising marks the seasonal onset of storms. In the Bible,
Orion and all the stars are put into place as a mere sign-system, demoted
from their pagan status as powers. Milton says hath vexed to indicate that
the sign-system continues in his own day, but he says oerthrew to show
that the Satanic stars and the hosts of Busiris the Pharaoh fell once for all,
Pharaoh being a type of Satan. Virgil, still caught in a vision that held Orion
as a potency, is himself again transumed into a sign of error.
I have worked through this passages allusions in some detail so as to
provide one full instance of a transumptive scheme in Paradise Lost. Johnsons
insight is validated, for the adventitious image of the optic glass is shown
to be not extrinsic at all, but rather to be the device that crowds the
imagination, compressing or hastening much transumption into a little
space. By arranging his precursors in series, Milton guratively reverses his
obligation to them, for his stationing crowds them between the visionary
truth of his poem (carefully aligned with Biblical truth) and his darkened
present (which he shares with Galileo). Transumption murders time, for by
troping on a trope, you enforce a state of rhetoricity or word-consciousness,
and you negate fallen history. Milton does what Bacon hoped to do; Milton
and Galileo become ancients, and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso,
Spenser become belated moderns. The cost is a loss in the immediacy of the
living moment. Miltons meaning is remarkably freed of the burden of
anteriority, but only because Milton himself is already one with the future,
which he introjects.
It would occupy too many pages to demonstrate another of Miltons
transumptive schemes in its largest and therefore most powerful dimensions,
but I will outline one, summarizing rather than quoting the text and citing
rather than giving the allusions. My motive is not only to show that the
18 Harold Bloom
optic glass passage is hardly unique in its arrangement, but to analyze more
thoroughly Miltons self-awareness of both his war against inuence and his
use of rhetoricity as a defense. Of many possibilities, Book I, lines 670798,
seems to me the best, for this concluding movement of the epics initial book
has as its hidden subject both the anxiety of inuence and an anxiety of
morality about the secondariness of any poetic creation, even Miltons own.
The passage describes the sudden building, out of the deep, of
Pandaemonium, the palace of Satan, and ends with the infernal peers sitting
there in council.
This sequence works to transume the crucial precursors again
Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Spenserbut there are triumphant allusions here
to Lucretius and Shakespeare also (as Fowler notes). In some sense, the
extraordinary and reverberating power of the Pandaemonium masque (as
John Hollander terms it, likening it to transformation scenes in court
masques) depends on its being a continuous and unied allusion to the very
idea of poetic tradition, and to the moral problematic of that idea. Metalepsis
or transumption can be described as an extended trope with a missing or
weakened middle, and for Milton literary tradition is such a trope. The
illusionistic sets and complex machinery of the masque transformation scene
are emblematic, in the Pandaemonium sequence, of the self-deceptions and
morally misleading machinery of epic and tragic convention.
Cunningly, Milton starts the sequence with a transumption to the
fallen near-present, evoking the royal army in the Civil War as precise
analogue to the Satanic army. Mammon leads on the advance party, in an
opening allusion to Spensers Cave of Mammon canto, since both Mammons
direct gold-mining operations. With the next major allusion, to the same
passage in Ovids Metamorphoses I that was evoked in the Galileo sequence,
Milton probes the morality of art:
Let none admire

That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane. And here let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wondring tell
Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings,
Learn how thir greatest Monuments of Fame,
And Strength and Art are easily outdone
By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour
What in an age they with incessant toil
And hands innumerable scarce perform.
Milton presumably would not have termed the Iliad or the Aeneid
precious bane, yet the force of his condemnation extends to them, and his
anxiety necessarily touches his own poem as well. Pandaemonium rises in
Introduction 19
baroque splendor, with a backward allusion to Ovids Palace of the Sun, also
designed by Mulciber (Metamorphoses II, 14), and with a near-contemporary
allusion to St. Peters at Rome and, according to Fowler, to Berninis
colonnade in the piazza of St. Peters. Mulciber, archetype not only of
Bernini but more darkly of all artists, including epic poets, becomes the
center of the sequence:
Men calld him Mulciber; and how he fell

From Heavn, they fabld, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer oer the Crystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th gan Isle: thus they relate,
Erring; for he with this rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught availd him now
To have built in Heavn high Towrs; nor did he scape
By all his Engines, but was headlong sent
With is industrious crew to build in hell.
The devastating Erring of line 747 is a smack at Homer by way of the

errat of Lucretius (De rerum natura, I, 393, as Fowler notes). The contrast
with Homers passage illuminates the transumptive function of Miltons
allusiveness, for Homers Hephaistos (whose Latin name was Vulcan or
Mulciber) gently fables his own downfall:
... It is too hard to ght against the Olympian.

There was a time once before now I was minded to help you, and
he caught
me by the foot and threw me from the magic threshold,
and all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset
I landed in Lemnos....
(Iliad, I, 58993, Lattimore version)
Milton rst mocks Homer by over-accentuating the idyllic nature of

this fall, and then reverses Homer completely. In the dark present, Mulcibers
work is still done when the bad eminence of baroque glory is turned to the
purposes of a fallen Church. So, at line 756, Pandaemonium is called the
high capital of Satan, alluding to two lines of Virgil ( Aeneid, VI, 836 and
VIII, 348), but the allusion is qualied by the complex simile of the bees that
continues throughout lines 76875, and which relies on further allusions to
Iliad, II, 8790 and Aeneid, 43036, where Achaian and Carthaginian heroes
respectively are compared to bees. One of the most remarkable of Miltons
20 Harold Bloom
transumptive returns to present time is then accomplished by an allusion to

Shakespeares Midsummer Nights Dream, II, i, 28ff. A belated peasant
beholds the Faery Elves even as we, Miltons readers, see the giant demons
shrink in size. Yet our belatedness is again redressed by metaleptic reversal,
with an allusion to Aeneid, VI, 45154, where Aeneas recognizes Didos dim
shape among the shadows (just as one who either sees or thinks he sees ... the
moon rising). So the belated peasant sees, or dreams he sees the elves, but
like Milton we know we see the fallen angels metamorphosed from giants
into pygmies. The Pandaemonium sequence ends with the great conclave of
a thousand demi-gods on golden seats, in clear parody of ecclesiastical
assemblies re-convened after the Restoration. As with the opening reference
to the advance-party of the royal army, the present is seen as fallen on evil
days, but it provides vantage for Miltons enduring vision.
So prevalent throughout the poem is this scheme of allusion that any
possibility of inadvertence can be ruled out. Miltons design is wholly
denite, and its effect is to reverse literary tradition, at the expense of the
presentness of the present. The precursors return in Milton, but only at his
will, and they return to be corrected. Perhaps only Shakespeare can be
judged Miltons rival in allusive triumph over tradition, yet Shakespeare had
no Spenser to subsume, but only a Marlowe, and Shakespeare is less clearly
in overt competition with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides than Milton is
with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso.
Hobbes, in his Answer to Davenants Preface (1650), had subordinated
wit to judgment, and so implied also that rhetoric was subordinate to
dialectic:
From knowing much, proceedeth the admirable variety and

novelty of metaphors and similitudes, which are not possibly to
be lighted on in the compass of a narrow knowledge. And the
want whereof compelleth a writer to expressions that are either
defaced by time or sullied with vulgar or long use. For the phrases
of poesy, as the airs of music, with often hearing become insipid;
the reader having no more sense of their force, than our esh is
sensible of the bones that sustain it. As the sense we have of
bodies, consisteth in change and variety of impression, so also
does the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of
words. I mean not in the affectation of words newly brought
home from travel, but in new (and withal, signicant) translation
to our purposes, of those that be already received, and in far
fetched (but withal, apt, instructive, and comely) similitudes....
Had Milton deliberately accepted this as challenge, he could have done

no more both to fulll and to refute Hobbes than Paradise Lost already does.
Introduction 21
What Davenant and Cowley could not manage was a complete translation to
their own purposes of received rhetoric; but Milton raised such translation
to sublimity. In doing so, he also raised rhetoric over dialectic, contra
Hobbes, for his farfetchedness (Puttenhams term for transumption) gave
similitudes the status and function of complex arguments. Miltons wit, his
control of rhetoric, was again the exercise of the mind through all her
powers, and not a lower faculty subordinate to judgment. Had Hobbes
written his Answer twenty years later, and after reading Paradise Lost, he
might have been less condent of the authority of philosophy over poetry.
F. T. P R I N C E
Miltons Minor Poems
W ith the exception of the mature sonnets and some of the translations
of the Psalms, Miltons minor poems belong to the rst thirty years of his life
and represent for the most part a sustained effort of self-education in writing
English verse. It is not impossible, however, to distinguish between those
which are predominantly deliberate exercises in poetry and those which have
drawn also upon deeper sources of inspiration. Thus LAllegro and Il Penseroso
and Comusto take examples from the nest poems of this sortare clearly
written in what Keats called an artful or rather artists humour; while the
hymn On the Morning of Christs Nativity and Lycidas seem to mark, not only
stages in Miltons acquisition of technical skill, but also important advances
in imaginative power.
It is natural that, in a process of self-improvement such as the minor
poems represent, the poet should produce some work of a kind which he
does not repeat, and that much should appear which does not appear in quite
the same guise in his later verse. So, to examine the minor poems in order to
trace the ways in which Milton assimilated the Italian poetry he admired, is
to nd that many of them more obviously illustrate other things. If one
considers Miltons English verse as a whole up to 1638, it shows that his chief
purpose was to assimilate as much of the English poetic heritage as he found
From The Italian Element in Miltons Verse. 1954 by Oxford University Press.
23
24 F.T. Prince
worthy and capable of being turned to his own use. The poetry of this period
attempts less to absorb Italian technique (except in a few important cases)
than to plunder Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson of treasures
with which Milton could build a more lofty, polished, and condensed poetic
style than had yet been achieved in English.
Spenser and Jonson are taken by Milton as his masters in the earliest
English poems. The inuence of Spenser prevails in the specically religious
pieces: On the Death of a Fair Infant, On the Morning of Christs Nativity, and
The Passion. Jonsons inuence is stronger in the more secular or courtly: At
a Vacation Exercise, An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, On
Shakespeare, On the University Carrier. Miltons cultivation of English verse
begins appropriately under the joint auspices of these two poets, for they
alone among the great Elizabethans and Jacobeans held the lofty Renaissance
ideal of a learned poetry; and they alone upheld and applied critical theories
which Milton could respect.
Miltons direct recourse to Italian poetry for technical lessons is,
however, apparent even among the rst group of his youthful poems. It is
possible to trace the workings of this idiosyncrasy and to distinguish the
results from those of the more diffused Italian inuence which comes
through Spenser and his school. The hymn On the Morning of Christs
Nativity illustrates this reection of Italian form in the Spenserian tradition;
the lines Upon the Circumcision show that at the same time Milton was willing
to go directly to Tuscan poetry; and the lines On Time and At a Solemn Musick
show the interplay of the two inuences: they could not have been written as
they were without Italian exemplars, but they indicate that Milton will
henceforth prefer to follow only those Italian lyric forms which he can
modulate in his own way.
In all the early poems, except the early sonnets, the following of Italian
verse affects the prosody rather than the diction. Indeed, Miltons adaptation
of devices of Italian diction, which is all-important to the understanding of
his mature verse, does not begin until Lycidas, the last poem of his youth.
II
A glance at the hymn On the Morning of Christs Nativity will show that what
Italianisms we nd in these youthful poems may be ascribed almost wholly
to Miltons following of Spenser. The Spenserian quality of the language and
the rhythms of the hymn is a commonplace of criticism. It appears in nothing
more clearly than in the management of adjectives; and such usages as dark
foundations deep, owre-inwovn tresses torn, and Timbreld Anthems
dark, which Spenser derived from the Italians, Milton accepts as proven
elements in English poetic diction. The stanza itself reveals the same origins.
The concluding alexandrine seals its Spenserian character, and both this and
the preceding octosyllable would be impossible in any strict adherence to the
methods of the Italian canzone. Yet the pattern and movement of the stanza,
and the very notion of employing such a stanza for a solemn ode of this sort,
could only derive from the tradition of the canzone. Spenser himself took
similar liberties in the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion, which nevertheless
remain his tribute to the power of the canzone form. Milton may well have
considered that such variations as alexandrines and octosyllables, as well as
occasional rhythms such as
And then at last our bliss

Full and perfect is,
were desirable in an English adaptation of Italian prosody. And perhaps he

was right, and may have been conrmed in his instinct by mature experience;
for there is reason to believe that the much greater licence of the choruses of
Samson represents his later version of the rhythmic complexity of Italian
verse.
The condence of the hymn On the Morning of Christs Nativity is often
contrasted with the relative failure of two experiments which must have closely
followed it: the lines Upon the Circumcision and The Passion. There can be little
doubt that the young Milton, red by the sense of self-discovery and of poetic
power conferred by his celebration of the birth of Christ, set out to hail in the
same way those feasts of the Church which recorded the chief events in the
scheme of Redemption. The poets acceptance of defeat in this plan came with
his relinquishment of the poem on The Passion, which has nothing to tell us of
his technical progress. But this unsuccessful experiment must have been
preceded in the New Year by the lines Upon the Circumcision, which, within
their narrow limits, provide interesting evidence of the poets methods.
It has never yet been noticed that these two stanzas, each of fourteen
lines, reproduce as closely as possible the stanza used by Petrarch in his
canzone to the Blessed Virgin. The only modication Milton makes, and it is
a modication only for the eye, is to make two lines out of the two sections
into which Petrarchs last line falls. Petrarchs last line is linked to its
predecessor by rimalmezzo (medial rhyme); Milton follows the rhyme-
pattern, but changes the accepted Italian way of setting out the verse, no
doubt because he decided that it would be unfamiliar and unpleasing to
English readers.1 A comparison between the rst stanzas of the two poems
makes the relationship clear and brings out other points.
Petrarch writes:
Vergine bella, the di Sol vestita, a

Coronata di stelle, al sommo Sole b
26 F.T. Prince
Piacesti s chen to sua luce ascose; c

Amor mi spinge a dir di te parole, b
Ma non so ncominciar senza tu aita a
E di Colui chamando in te si pose. c
Invoco lei the ben sempre rispose, c
Chi la chiam con fede. d
Vergine, sa mercede, d
Mseria extrema de lumane cose c
Gi mai ti volse, al mio prego tinchina; e
Soccorri a la mia guerra, f
Benchi sia terra,e to del ciel regina.2 (f) e
And Milton:
Ye aming Powers, and winged Warriours bright, a

That erst with musick, and triumphant song b
First heard by happy watchful Shepherds ear, c
So sweetly sung your joy the clouds along b
Through the soft silence of the listning night; a
Now mourn, and if sad share with us to bear c
Your ery essence can distill no tear, c
Burn in your signs, and borrow d
Seas wept from our deep sorrow, d
He who with all Heavns heraldry whileare c
Enterd the world, now bleeds to give us ease; e
Alas, how soon our sin f
Sore doth begin f
His Infancy to sease! e
The lines Upon the Circumcision have the distinction of being Miltons only
attempt to follow an Italian model in exactly this manner: that is to say,
copying a complex stanza which must be repeated throughout the poem.
Petrarchs canzone is 137 lines long, the fact that Milton, taking a stanza
designed for a poem of this length, repeats it only once, may be a mere
accident. There is nothing to indicate that his poem was intended to be
longer than it is. But the brevity of the poem, and its unique delity to such
a stanza-form, may well suggest that Miltons talent did not function easily
on such a basis. The only stanza-form he continued to use was that of the
sonnet, and then only in a manner which very considerably modied its
stanzaic character.
The comparison between Miltons and Petrarchs stanzas shows also
that Miltons are not articulated in the traditional manner. In the rst stanza
he does not observe the pause at the end of the sixth line which in Petrarch
marks the end of the fronte of the stanza and the beginning of the sirima or
coda.3 Either Milton at this time had not appreciated the signicance of these
divisions (which had indeed been blurred in many canzoni of the sixteenth
century), and when he came to do so, decided against the attempt to imitate
such complexities in English: or he found the attempt in this poem
uncongenial and unsuccessful, and forswore such metres for ever.
For the two other pieces of this period are indeed sufficiently
Italianate, but they take as their basis an Italian form, the madrigal, which is
less exacting than the canzone, and which Milton can develop with
characteristic power. On Time and At a Solemn Musick have a sonority, a
sustained emphasis of statement, and a rhythmic weight which give an
assurance that Milton is again on the right track, nding means of expression
which will bring out his full powers. On Time, which the Trinity manuscript
tells us was conceived as an inscription for a clock case, derives from a branch
of Italian poetry much cultivated in the later sixteenth century by Tasso,
Marino, and others: the madrigal, used to reproduce the Greek epigram.
Like many of their originals, these madrigals drew their subjects from
pictures or statues and preserved the link between epigram and inscription.
Drummond of Hawthornden was the only poet writing in English who had
closely imitated the madrigals and epigrams of Tasso and his followers;
Milton was not likely to be impressed by his pedestrian versions of these
witty tries. Yet his own more ambitious use of the form follows its essential
features. In both these poems he builds up a triumphant epigrammatic close,
which is marked by an alexandrine; both have an element of wit-writing,
though this is outweighed by a religious gravity and fervour.
The madrigal in its origin was as it were merely one stanza of a
canzonea stanza which was not repeated; and it shared with the canzone the
metrical basis of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables which had proved useful
in English verse. Milton preserves the general nature of the form, but
modies it signicantly, not only in his concluding alexandrines, but in his
handling of the shorter lines. The Italian heptasyllable had found its
theoretic equivalent in English in a line of six syllables and three stresses.
Milton experiments, not only with this accepted equivalent, but with lines of
four stresses. These are slightly tentative in the lines On Time:
With an individual kiss;
and
Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,
but provide the rst magnicent climax of the second poem:

28 F.T. Prince
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,

Hymns devout and holy Psalms
Singing everlastingly; ( At a Solemn Musick, II. 1416.)
These modulations are indicative of a feeling on Miltons part that full

sonority in these Italianate forms could not be attained by pedantic imitation,
and that he for his part could achieve the effect he wanted rather by a certain
disciplined improvisation. The signicance of the two poems is increased
when we notice how this disciplined improvisation has enabled Milton to
develop the long and elaborate sentence which is to be a structural element
in all his mature poetry. At a Solemn Musick in particular shows his resources:
That we on Earth with undiscording voice

May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportiond sin
Jarrd against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayd
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In rst obedience, and their state of good.
The poet who can draw upon such a syntax and rhythm as this has little need
of intricate rhyme or stanzaic form; at this point the poem slips into what we
can scarcely call couplets, but what the Italians would call rime baciate, which
are seldom used lavishly in Italian lyrics except as a sort of dizzy climax or
conclusion (as in the sonetto caudato). The importance of On Time and At a
Solemn Musick is that they point forward to Lycidas and the choruses of
Samson Agonistes, and foreshadow Miltons exploitation of syntax as a
structural element both in those later lyrics and in his blank verse.
In these youthful poems may be seen the deliberation with which
Milton sets himself to learn what he needs from Italian verse. This
deliberation is very marked also in his rst sonnets, that is to say the Sonnet
to the Nightingale, the sonnets in Italian, and the Sonnet on his twenty-third
birthday. But these must be considered with the sonnets as a whole. Here it
need only be remarked that after this rst phase of serious imitation of Italian
verse Milton turns to English poetry and drama, and makes a thorough
investigation of what they have to offer him.
III
The poems we associate with Miltons period of study at Horton display the
results of this deliberate saturation in Elizabethan and Jacobean verse.
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher are Miltons chief literary inspiration in

LAllegro and Il Penseroso; the titles are there to remind us of his special
leaning towards Italian, but the metre and diction of these poems owe little
to Italian verse, except perhaps a certain solidity and resonance which might
equally well be attributed to Miltons cultivation of Latin.
Jonson is the presiding inuence in Arcades, and determines the
fundamental structure even of Comus, though Comus draws impressively on
so many other sources. In its plan and in the texture of its verse Comus is
based rmly on English masques and dramas; its relation to Italian pastoral
drama, to Tassos Aminta and Guarinis Il Pastor Fido, is indirect and
subordinate. That Milton knew Aminta and Il Pastor Fido goes without
saying; but his own poem owes more to Fletchers Faithful Shepherdess, to Ben
Jonsons masques and Shakespeares plays, and to Spensers blend of chivalry,
pastoral and Renaissance philosophy.4
Comus is by virtue of its length and the variety of its verse one of the
most important illustrations of Miltons art before his visit to Italy. In the
blank verse dialogues there is much that remains apparent in his mature epic
verse. But there is a distinction to be made between this blank verse and that
of Paradise Lost, which may help to bring out the specically Italian element
in the latter. Dr. Johnson remarks in connexion with Comus that
Milton appears to have formed very early that system of diction,

and mode of verse, which his maturer judgement approved, and
from which he never endeavoured nor desired to deviate.
But the diction and the versication of the blank verse of Comus are not in
fact identical with those of the great epics. Miltons feeling for the English
language, the peculiar weight of his verse, these are of course fully present.
We nd his skill in constructing elaborate and extended verse paragraphs,
and his delight in an overwhelming fullness of expression. Many passages
convey a sense of discovery as well as achievement, a reaching out towards a
new style:
Within the navil of this hideous Wood,

Immurd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels
Of Bacchus and of Circe born, great Comus,
Deep skilld in all his mothers witcheries,
And here to every thirsty wanderer,
By sly enticement gives his banefull cup,
With many murmurs mixt, whose pleasing poison
The visage quite transforms of him that drinks,
And the inglorious likenes of a beast
Fixes instead, unmoulding reasons mintage
30 F.T. Prince
Characterd in the face; this have I learnt

Tending my ocks hard by ith hilly crofts,
That brow this bottom glade, whence night by night
He and his monstrous rout are heard to howl
Like stabld wolves, or tigers at their prey,
Doing abhorred rites to Hecate
In their obscured haunts of inmost bowres.
(Comus, II. 52036)
This has Shakespeares plenitude and weight, invaluable in dramatic verse.

But it has these qualities to excess, because Miltons prime purpose is not
dramatic but literary, and he is working towards the creation of a style
essentially unsuited to drama. It is a drama in the epick style, inelegantly
splendid, says Dr. Johnson. Miltons special preoccupation here is clearly to
extend the limits of the sentence, as he is to nd means of doing, more
appropriately, in his epic verse.
Yet it is worth observing that the wonderful elaboration of this blank
verse style in Comus is achieved with out making use of many of the devices
of Paradise Lost. Astonishing periods are constructed almost entirely without
the Miltonic inversions to be derived later from Virgil and the Italian
experiments in epic diction. Lines and sequences of lines may be found
almost everywhere which could occur also in the later blank verse; there is
no consistent difference in the prosodic basis, though certain liberties
appear, both here and in the dialogues of Samson Agonistes, which suggest
that Milton distinguished between dramatic blank verse and blank verse in
narrative poetry. It would be difficult to demonstrate that the blank verse of
Comus is a different metre from that of the epics. But it is sung to a different
tune, as it were; it has a different movement and pitch; it has behind it a
different pattern. Paradise Lost has the movement and tone of Virgil, and it
has the pattern of Italian versi sciolti of the sixteenth century. Comus observes
the tone and movement of Shakespeares blank verse, adapting also inexions
from lesser dramatists.
The lyrics of Comus, like those of Arcades, are related primarily to
Jonson and Fletcher; if any affinities could be traced with contemporary
Italian lyrics, they would probably be found to be due to the common
musical tradition.
The importance of Comus for our study of the development of Miltons
verse is that it illustrates copiously his relation to the Elizabethans and
Jacobeans. It shows him consciously assimilating what he could of these
native beauties. He had no Italian models in mind on this occasion; if he had
had any idea of reproducing in English the special qualities of the Italian
pastoral dramas, the result would assuredly have been very different from
what we have.
IV
Lycidas follows Comus and immediately precedes Miltons Italian journey; its
formal signicance is worthy of separate treatment. After its composition
Milton abandons the study and assimilation of English poetry which he
undertook, among many other labours, in the Horton period. Henceforth
his poetry is to be planned entirely under the inuence of the two classical
literatures and of Italian, the authority of which he considers equal to theirs.
This settled view of his is reected in the tractate Of Education, which he rst
printed in 1644, and which was written after his return from the Continent.
In this plan of a complete intellectual equipment, Italian is the only
modern language to be set beside Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (whereto it
would be no impossibility to add the Chaldey, and the Syrian Dialect). Italian
and classical poetry are to be studied in the light of sixteenth-century Italian
criticism and its classical sources, Aristotle and Horace. Miltons imaginary
pupils would thus learn what the laws are of a true Epic Poem, what of a
Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece
to observe. And they would thus know what to think of their native
literature: Thus would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures
our common Rimers and Playwriters be, and skew them, what religious,
what glorious and magnicent use might be made of Poetry both in divine
and humane things.
This is where Milton stands at the end of his long experience of
education and self-education; and from this point of view he conceives and
nally carries out his mature work.
NOTES
1. The last two lines are written as one in the Trinity manuscript, the reading of
the printed text being proposed in a marginal correction.
2. Il Canzoniere (Milano, 1925), No. CCCLXVI.
3. See p. 84 (in orginal publication) for the signicance of these terms.
4. Professor Mario Praz exaggerates when he writes: Si molto parlato del
carattere spenseriano del Comus, ma nessuno sembra essersi accorto che il modello
reale lAminta del Tasso. Rapporti tra la letteratura italiana e la letteratura inglese
(Milano, n.d.), p. 169.
WILLIAM EMPSON
Heaven
W e are often told nowadays that Miltons attitude to Satan must have
been perfectly simple, but it is clear that when writing Paradise Lost he had
plenty more evidence for Gods connivance with Satan which he chose not to
use. The reason why this game can be played, of course, is that the Old
Testament is a rag-bag of material from very different stages of development;
one would think Milton after his thorough study must have understood that,
but his main allies were committed to relying on the text, to oppose the
traditions of Rome. The furthest he went in writing was to conjecture that
God allowed the text of his Word to become corrupt so as to force upon our
attention the prior importance of our own consciences (De Doctrina, Chapter
XXX).
No scholastic philosopher, said Sir Walter Raleigh, could have walked
into a metaphysical bramble-bush with the blind recklessness that Milton
displays; he seems to have been the rst to make this very central point. But
I do not think anyone who has read the De Doctrina will regard Miltons
treatment as due to ignorance or stupidity. The effect is that of a powerful
mind thrashing about in exasperation. Perhaps I should have recognized
earlier a scholastic position which he would consider elementary; we are not
to think that God forces the will of individuals merely because he foreknows
what they will do. Gods foreknowledge was universally admitted, even by
believers in free will, such as Milton had become when he wrote the epic.
From Miltons God. 1961 by Chatto and Windus, Ltd.
33
34 William Empson
The idea in itself is not remote from common experience; many a mother has
felt with horror that she can see her son is going to take to bad courses. We
nd a greater difficulty in the case of a Creator, as was said in lapidary form
by Aquinas:
Knowledge, as knowledge, does not imply, indeed, causality; but,

in so far as it is a knowledge belonging to the artist who forms, it
stands in the relation of causality to that which is produced by his
art.
This too is not beyond our experience, especially if we rmly regard the
Creator as a Father; who will often fear, without even blaming Mother, a
recurrence of his own bad tendencies or perhaps those of the wicked uncles.
Besides, an ancient tradition allows us to say that an author may be too
inspired quite to foresee what he is producing by his art. But a parent who
foresaw that the children would fall and then insisted upon exposing them
to the temptation in view would be considered neurotic, if nothing worse;
and this is what we must ascribe to Miltons God.
Waldock, I think, rst remarked that he seems anxious to prove he does
not cause the Fall; indeed, never to the end of the poem does he succeed in
living down this particular worry. I had perhaps better document this
argument. God says in his rst speech:
So without least impulse or shadow of Fate,

Or aught by me immutably foreseen,
They trespass, Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formed them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves. (III. 120)
All this upbraiding of them is done before they have fallen, and God again
protests his innocence as soon as they have done it:
no Decree of mine
Concurring to necessitate his Fall,
or touch with lightest moment of impulse
His free will, to her own inclining left
In even scale. (X. 45)
Can it be the uneasy conscience of God or of Milton which produces this

unfortunate metaphor of the scales, actually reminding us of the incident
when he forced his troops to expose mankind to the tempter? Before the
Creation, he gives what is perhaps a slightly different account of his power:
Heaven 35
Boundless the Deep, because I am who ll

Innitude, nor vacuous the space.
Though I uncircumscribed myself retire,
And put not forth my goodness, which is free
To act or not, Necessity and Chance
Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate. (VII.170)
This is one of the main bits used by M. Saurat to show the profundity, or the
impersonality and pantheism, of Miltons God; and Gods claims do feel
better if we identify him with Fate and the Absolute and the primeval matter
of Chaos. But surely the story we are reading inspires a simpler reection.
Chaos is also a person, and though he acts out of resentment, so that God
would not need to tip him off about the situation, he does exactly what God
wants of him; he lets Satan pass for the corruption of mankind. As for making
Sin and Death the guardians of Hell Gate, Sir Walter Raleigh remarked with
casual elegance:
No one has plausibly explained how they came by their office. It

was intended to be a perfect sinecure; there was no one to be let
in and no one to be let out. The single occasion that presented
itself for a neglect of their duty was by them eagerly seized. (p.
108)
though later he approves of the absurdity, because they are the only
creations of English poetry which approach the Latin in grandeur (p. 238).
Surely the explanation is very simple; God always intended them to let Satan
out. Critics somehow cannot bring themselves to recognize that Milton does
this steadily and consistently, after announcing that he will at the start. As a
believer in the providence of God, Milton could not possibly have believed
in the huge success-story of Satan ghting his way to Paradise. The chains of
Hell, Sin, Death, Chaos and an army of good angels hold Satan back, but all
this stage machinery is arranged by God to collapse as soon as he advances
upon it, just as the re cannot harm Siegfried when he has courage enough
to walk through it to Brunhild. Chaos makes little of the heroic piece of
space-travel when he directs Satan to the newly created world:
If that way be your walk, you have not far. (II. 1010)
(By the way, Yvor Winters could not have called this line meaningless
ination.) We have thus no reason to doubt that Milton also intended the
nal paradox of the series, after Satan has reached Eden, when God cheats
his own troops to make certain that the Fall occurs. As to what God means
by saying that none of his busy activity affects their free will, I suppose he
36 William Empson
means that he does not actually hypnotize them, as Svengali did Trilby;
though he lets Satan do to Eve as much as a hypnotist really can do.
A particularly impressive example of this poetic technique is given by a
detail about the chains, which I think must have made Mr T. S. Eliot decide
that the treatment of the chains is not sufficiently imagist. The rst words of
God in the poem insist that he cannot control Satan, and mention these
chains as among the things that Satan has escaped from. We might indeed
suppose that Milton has made a slip, forgotten his story and his theology,
whether from lack of imaging or not. The reason why this will not do, I
think, is that he is writing so frightfully well; his feelings are so deeply
involved that the sound effects become wonderful. Wide interrupt can hold is
like the cry of sea-mews upon rocks; it has what I think is meant by the term
plangency. We have to suppose it meant something important to him.
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage

Transports our adversary, whom no bounds
Preseribd, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains
Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desperate revenge, that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way
Nor far of Heavn, in the Precincts of Light,
Directly towards the new created World,
And man there placd ... (III. 80)
The only consistent view, after the rm statement at I. 210 for example, is that
this is the rst of Gods grisly jokes. The passage, I think, is the strongest bit
of evidence for the view of C. S. Lewis, that Milton intended Satan to be
ridiculous; but even so it does not feel very like a joke. Milton might have some
wish to confuse his simpler readers, and God to confuse the loyalist angels,
who have been summoned to hear him; one might think God could not want
to look weak, but he may be wanting to justify his revenge. Nobody says that
it is a joke, as the Son does after God expresses fear of losing his throne; but
there is no opportunity, because what God goes on to say is so lengthy and
appalling. His settled plan for punishment comes steadily out, and the verse
rhythm becomes totally unlike the thrilling energy of this rst sentence. In his
rst reply to the Son, we nd him talking in rocking-horse couplets, using the
of rhymes which were re-invented by Wilfred Owen to describe the First
World War, with the same purpose of setting a readers teeth on edge:
This my long sufferance and my day of grace

They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;
Heaven 37
But hard be hardened, blind be blinded more,

That they may stumble on, and deeper fall. (III. 200)
This is also where we get the stage-villains hiss of Die he or justice must.
God is much at his worst here, in his rst appearance; but he needs to be, to
make the offer of the Son produce a dramatic change. I do not know what to
make of his expressing the Calvinist doctrine that the elect are chosen by his
will alone, which Milton had appeared to reject (185); it has a peculiar impact
here, when God has not yet even secured the Fall of Adam and Eve. One
might argue that he was in no mood to make jokes; and besides, the effect
here is not a sardonic mockery of Satan, which can be felt in the military joke
readily enough, but a mysterious and deeply rooted sense of glory. A simple
explanation may be put forward; Milton felt that this was such a tricky bit to
put over his audience, because the inherent contradictions were coming so
very near the surface, that he needed with a secret delight to call on the
whole of his power. This is almost what Shelley took to be his frame of mind;
and it is hard to accept, with the De Doctrina before us, without talking about
Miltons Unconsciousness. But we may be sure that there is a mediating
factor; if he had been challenged about the passage, he would have said that
he was following the Old Testament scrupulously, and allowing God to mock
his foes.
This has often been said about the jokes of Miltons God, or at least
about the one which cant be ignored because it is explained as a joke (V.
720); and you can make a rough check from the Concordance at the end of
a Bible. The only important case is from Psalm ii; here again we meet the
ancient document in which the King of Zion is adopted as the son of God:
Why do the heathen rage ...? The kings of the earth set
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the
Lord, and against his anointed.... He that sitteth in the heavens
shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.
This is echoed in Psalms xxxvii. 13 and lix. 8, and perhaps in Proverbs i. 26,
where Wisdom and not God mocks the worldly rather than a powerful
aggressor; but after trying to look under all the relevant words I do not nd
that the Concordance ever ascribes the sentiment to the Prophets. It was
thus an ancient tradition but one treated with reserve, as Milton would
understand. Naturally his intention in putting so much weight on it has been
found especially hard to grasp.
The views of M. Morand about the divine characters have been
neglected and seem to me illuminating. In the same year as De Comus A Satan
he published a pamphlet in English, The Effects of his Political Life on John
Milton, concerned to show that a certain worldly-mindedness entered
38 William Empson
Miltons poetry after his experience of government, politics, and propaganda.

He thus accepted, as typical of the sordidness of such work, the story that
Milton himself arranged the presence in the Eikon Basilike of the prayer,
altered from one in Sidneys Arcadia, for which he then denounced the King
in Eikonoclastes. Much of this, though lively, has been made out of date by an
important book which claims to refute the story, F. F. Madans New
Bibliography of the Eikon (1950). He tries to refute it so hard that he becomes
absurd.* But his information does I think prove that any foisting, whether by
Milton or not, must have been done before Milton got the official
appointment. Sad and funny though it is for the denouncer of censorship to
become a propaganda chief, Milton deserves respect, as Morand points out,
for rejecting brutal methods in favour of guile (not only here). So I dont feel
that the action is too bad for Milton; he would think the divine purpose
behind the Civil War justied propaganda tricks, and need not have thought
this a particularly bad one. The King was dead, and the purpose of the cheat
was merely to prevent the people from thinking him a martyr. Also he hadnt
written much of the book, and Milton suspected that at the time, so it was
only a matter of answering one cheat with another. Milton must in any case
have been insincere in pretending to be shocked at the use of a prayer by
Sidney, given in the story as that of a pagan, but so Christian in feeling as to
be out of period (it assumes that God may be sending us evil as a test or tonic
for our characters, which even if to be found in Aeschylus or Marcus Aurelius
is not standard for Arcadia). Milton might comfort himself with the
reection that he wasnt even damaging the mans character in the eyes of t
judges, only making use of a popular superstitionas Shelley expected on
another occasion. However, M. Morand nds that this kind of activity
brought about a Fallen condition, as one might say, in the mind of the poet,
and such is what De Comus A Satan examines throughout the later poetry.
There is an assumption here that to do Government propaganda can
only have a bad effect upon a poets mind, and I feel able to speak on the
point as I was employed at such work myself in the Second World War,
indeed once had the honour of being named in rebuttal by Fritzsche himself
and called a curly-headed Jew. I wasnt in on any of the splendid tricks, such
as Milton is accused of, but the cooked-up argufying I have experienced. To
work at it forces you to imagine all the time what the enemy will reply; you
are trying to get him into a corner. Such a training cannot narrow a mans
understanding of other peoples opinions, though it may well narrow his own
opinions. I should say that Miltons experience of propaganda is what makes
his later poetry so very dramatic; that is, though he is a furious partisan, he
can always imagine with all its force exactly what the reply of the opponent
would be. As to his integrity, he was such an inconvenient propagandist that
the Government deserve credit for having the nerve to appoint and retain
him. He had already published the Divorce Pamphlets before he got the job;
Heaven 39
well now, if you are setting out to be severe and revolutionary on the basis of
literal acceptance of the Old Testament, the most embarrassing thing you
can be confronted with is detailed evidence about the sexual habits of the
patriarchs; it is the one point where the plain man feels he can laugh. Milton
always remained liable to defend his side by an argument which would strike
his employers as damaging; his style of attack is savagely whole-hearted, but
his depth of historical knowledge and imaginative sympathy keep having
unexpected effects. He was not at all likely to feel that he had forfeited his
independence of mind by such work. M. Morand therefore strikes me as
rather innocent in assuming that he was corrupted by it, but I warmly agree
that it made his mind very political. Professor Wilson Knight has also
remarked that Milton wrote a political allegory under the appearance of a
religious poem, though he did not draw such drastic consequences from the
epigram.
On the Morand view, God is simply a dynastic ruler like those Milton
had had to deal with; Cromwell had wanted his son to inherit, no less than
Charles. M. Morand does not seem to realize it, but the effect is to make
Miltons God much better. His intrigues and lies to bolster his power are now
comparatively unselsh, being only meant to transfer it unimpaired to his
Son, and above all he feels no malignity towards his victims. His method of
impressing the loyalist angels will doom almost all mankind to misery, but he
takes no pleasure in that; it simply does not bother him. The hypocrisy which
the jovial old ruffian feels to be required of him in public has not poisoned
his own mind, as we realize when he permits himself his leering jokes. This
does, I should say, correspond to the impression usually made by the poem
on a person not brought up as a Christian, such as my Chinese and Japanese
students. The next step is to regard the debate in Heaven, where the Son, but
no angel, offers to die for man, as a political trick rigged up to impress the
surviving angels; the Son is free to remark (III. 245) that he knows the Father
wont let him stay dead, so that the incantationary repetition of the word
death comes to seem blatantly articial. (We nd in the De Doctrina Chapter
XII that Milton includes under the head of death, in Scripture, all evils
whatsoever ...). Nobody is surprised at the absence of volunteers among the
good angels, whereas Satan, during the parallel scene in Hell (II. 470), has to
close the debate hurriedly for fear a less competent rebel put himself
forward. Otherwise the two scenes are deliberately made alike, and the
reason is simply that both are political:
Ce qui frappe, cest le parallelisme des moyens employes,

conseils, discours. Mme souci de garder pour soi tout gloire. (p.
145)
On reaching Paradise Regained, M. Morand is interested to learn how the Son

40 William Empson
grew up. In Paradise Lost he often seems half ashamed of the autocratic
behaviour of his Father, because his role is to induce the subject angels to
endure it; but when he is alone on the earth-visit which has been arranged
for him we nd he has merely the cold calculating pride which we would
expect from his training. However, we already nd this trait, decides M.
Morand, at the early public moment when he offers his Sacrice; he is unable
to avoid presenting himself as solely interested in his own career (p. 169). As
the Creation for which he was the instrument has already happened, he
might at least speak as if he could tell a man apart from a cow, but he says
that his Fathers grace visits all his creatures (III. 230). Satan, on the
parallel occasion, was at least genuinely concerned to get the job done,
whoever did it; and. M. Morand decides that the ringing repetition of ME in
the speech of sacrice of the Son is a little too grotesque, however perfectly
in character. Milton
net pas pens ce que peut contenir de ridicule ce martellement

du moi.
De personnages extra-terrestres, le moins loign de la
modestie est encore Satan. (p. 171)
This is at least a splendid reply to the argument that pride is the basic fault
of all the characters who fall.
The Morand line of argument can be taken an extra step, to argue that
the Son too is being cheated by the Father; and this excites a suspicion that
there is something inadequate about it. He says nothing of the means of his
death, and speaks as if he is going to remain on earth till the Last Day:
Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life

I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;
Account mee man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleasd, on me let Death wreck all his rage;
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquisht; thou hast givn me to possess
Life in my self for ever, by thee I live,
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due
All of me that can die, yet that debt paid,
Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted Soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue
My Vanquisher, spoild of his vaunted spoil;
Heaven 41
Death his deaths wound shall then receive, and stoop

Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmd.
I through the ample Air in Triumph high
Shall lead Hell Captive maugre Hell, and show
The Powers of darkness bound. Thou at the sight
Pleasd, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While by thee raisd I ruin all my Foes,
Death last, and with his Carcass glut the Grave:
Then with the multitude of my redeemd
Shall enter Heaven long absent, and return,
Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assurd,
And reconcilement; wrath shall be no more
Thenceforth, but in thy presence Joy entire. (III. 240)
Our chief impression here, surely, is not that he is too little interested in
mankind but that he does not know what is going to happen, except for a
triumph at which he can rejoice. If the Jews had not chosen to kill him, he
would presumably have remained on earth till the Last Day, making history
less bad than the poem describes it as being; and what they will choose can
be foreknown by the Father only. The Son expects to nd no frown upon the
face of God on Judgement Day, the Dies Irae itself, so we can hardly doubt
that he expects things to turn out better than they do. His prophecy appears
to be a continuous narrative: not long lie ... rise victorious ... then ... then,
as if he will lead the blessed to Heaven very soon after the Resurrection.
Among human speakers lastly die is a natural way to express pathos, though
a tautology; but a meaning which would make it a correct description of the
career of the Son is hard to invent. It may be possible to interpret the whole
speech as a true forecast, and Milton may have planned to leave this
alternative open; but it is a more natural reading to suppose the Son
ignorant, and Milton denies him foreknowledge in De Doctrina Chap. V.
We must compare the speech to what Michael tells Adam at XII. 410,
not long after hearing it. The angel has now been told of the Crucixion, and
explains that soon after it, while ascending to Heaven, Christ will surprise
Satan in the air and drag him in chains, then resume his seat at Gods right
hand till the Second Coming. This clears up part of the Sons narrative; and
if he is to remain on earth after the Second Coming for the Millennium,
nally returning with his Saints, that explains long absent. Milton seems
rather doubtful about this doctrine, as Michael says that Christ will receive
the faithful into bliss whether in Heaven or Earth. De Doctrina Chapter
XXXIII says that the glorious reign of Christ on earth will begin at the start
of the Last Judgement and extend a little beyond its conclusion; then the
chapter goes on to name the thousand years, then it gives a still grander
42 William Empson
interpretation. Only the blessed will be revived for the Millennium

(Revelation xx. 5), which might explain why the Son expects no frown when
he leads them to Heaven after a thousand years. At any rate, if he expects to
labour so long for mankind, we can hardly agree with M. Morand that he
betrays lack of interest in them.
It often happens with a formative piece of criticism that one needs to
consider why it seemed so true, after apparently refuting it. The mere
repetition of me when offering oneself for sacrice cannot be enough to
prove self-centredness, even in the style of Milton, because Eve does it in a
speech of splendid generosity. Surely the reason why Miltons treatment here
seems cold, compared to a Good Friday service which is the natural
comparison, is that no one throughout the long scene in Heaven ever
mentions that the Son is to die by torture. Even Michael does not describe
the Cross to Adam as painful, only as shameful and accurst. Death for a day
and a half any of us might proffer, but we would nd slow torture worth
mentioning even given a doctor in attendance who guaranteed recovery after
unconsciousness had nally supervened. I do not know whether there is a
standard explanation for this lack in the poem, and do not remember to have
seen it noticed. The reason for it, surely, is that Milton would not dirty his
ngers with the bodily horror so prominent in the religion. We need not be
surprised, because all his heroes ercely refuse to let the prospect of pain so
much as enter their minds while deciding what they ought to do; his devils
are so superior to pain that we actually cannot remember they are all the time
in bodily agony. This steady blaze of moral splendour must I am afraid be
called unreal but at least makes the religion feel a good deal cleaner. The son
regularly talks like a young medieval aristocrat eager to win his spurs, and
like him is not expected to mention pain. No doubt the singing angels (III.
375) would mention the Crucixion if they had been told of it, but it could
mean little to them as they have never experienced pain; God has only just
invented it, and only applied it to rebels. Clearly God has given at least
Michael further information before he speaks to Adam. But there is no
dignied enough procedure by which God could tell the angels that he has
made a huge increase in his demand upon the Son after accepting the Sons
offer. To cheat his own Son into death by torture would be too bad even for
the God of M. Morand; it would be bad propaganda. Thus I think we should
apply here too the principle of Mr Rajan, that the correct interpretation is
always the sublimest one: Milton considered death by torture such a trivial
sacrice that he thought the Son must have offered a longer mission than the
Father decided to require of him. Even if the Son does not know about the
Crucixion, he knows a good deal about the consequences of his offer; if we
suppose the Father to have told him this beforehand we must still picture
them, as M. Morand does, hammering out in private the scene of propaganda
dialogue which they will present to the assembled angels. But their
Heaven 43
background is impossible for us to envisage, and the Father may simply put
into the mind of the Son as much foreknowledge as he chooses on the
instant, so that the Son acts, as we would call it, spontaneously. The process
might let the Son presume the happier alternative for mankind, out of a bold
condence in his power to convert them; but, even so, he must be above
feeling wronged when he nds that the Crucixion has been incurred. We
need not after that join M. Morand in blaming him for hoping to deserve
praise. Milton if he intended this high detail would have to regard it as visible
only to very t readers, such as could cross-question his text like M. Morand;
the broad literary effect is rather one of tactfulness in keeping the Crucixion
out of sight. The motive of the Father in crucifying the Son is of course left
in even deeper obscurity.
Milton did however I think mean to adumbrate a kind of motive by his
picture of the Last Things. Professor C. S. Lewis once kindly came to a
lecture I was giving on the half-nished material of this book; and at question
time, after a sentence of charitable compunction, recognizing that the
speaker wasnt responsible for this bit, he said Does Phelps Morand think
God is going to abdicate, then? I tried to explain that M. Morand regarded
this as the way Miltons dramatic imagination worked, after it had been
corrupted by his patriotic labours, not as part of his theological system. The
answer felt weak, and soon afterwards another difficulty drove me back to the
book of M. Saurat, which I had probably not read since I was an
undergraduate; I thus suddenly realized, what M. Saurat was not intending
to prove, that Milton did expect God to abdicate. At least, that is the most
direct way to express the idea; you may also say that he is an emergent or
evolutionary deity, as has been believed at times by many other thinkers, for
example Aeschylus and H.G. Wells.
There has been such a campaign to prove that only the coarsely
worldly Victorians would even want the world to get better that I had better
digress about that, or I may be thought to be laughing at Milton. We are
often told that In Memoriam is bad because Tennyson tries to palm off
progress in this world as a substitute for Heaven. But he says in the poem
that he would stop being good, or would kill himself, if he stopped believing
he would go to Heaven; it is wilful to argue that he treats the progress of the
human race as an adequate alternative. Indeed, he seems rather too petulant
about his demand for Heaven, considering that Tithonus, written about the
same time (according to Stopford Brooke) though kept from publication till
later, appreciates so nobly the hunger of mankind for the peace of oblivion.
But the underlying logic of In Memoriam is rm. The signs that God is
working out a vast plan of evolution are treated as evidence that he is good,
and therefore that he will provide Heaven for Tennyson. To believe that
Gods Providence can be seen at work in the world, and that this is evidence
for his existence and goodness, is what is called Natural Theology; it is very
44 William Empson
traditional, and the inability of neo-Christians to understand it casts an odd

light on their pretensions. Tennyson has also been accused of insincerity
about progress because in another poem he expressed alarm at the prospect
of war in the air; but he realized the time-scale very clearly; while
maintaining that the process of the suns will eventually reach a good end, it
is only sensible to warn mankind that we are likely to go through some bad
periods beforehand. At present, as mankind looks almost certain to destroy
itself quite soon, we cannot help wincing at a belief that progress is
inevitable; but this qualication seems all that is needed. I think that
reverence ought to be aroused by the thought that so long and large a process
has recently produced ourselves who can describe it, and other-worldly
persons who boast of not feeling that seem to me merely to have cauterized
themselves against genuine religious feeling. The seventeenth century too
would have thought that so much contempt for Providence verged upon the
Manichean. Milton claimed to get his conception of progress from the Bible;
but, he would have found corroboration, one would think, in the Prometheus,
which was well known. There is only one reference to the myth in the epic,
and it is twisted into a complaint against women (IV. 720); but Mr R. J. Z.
Werblowsky, in his broad and philosophical Lucifer and Prometheus (1952),
may well be right to think that Milton tried to avoid direct comparison
between Prometheus and his Satan.*
At the point which seemed to me illuminating, M. Saurat was calling
Milton the old incorrigible dreamer (p. 165, 1944 edition), apparently just
for believing in the Millennium on earth, though that only requires literal
acceptance of Revelation xx; but he was quoting part of Miltons commentary
in Chapter XXXIII of the De Doctrina, Of Perfect Glorication, and no
doubt recognized that Milton was somehow going rather further. Milton
says:
It may be asked, if Christ is to deliver up the kingdom to God

and the Father, what becomes of the declarations [quotations
from Heb. i. 8, Dan. vii. 14, and Luke i. 33] of his kingdom there
shall be no end. I reply, there shall be no end of his kingdom ...
till time itself shall be no longer, Rev. x. 6, until everything which
his kingdom was intended to effect shall be accomplished ... it will
not be destroyed, nor will its period be a period of dissolution,
but rather of perfection and consummation, like the end of the
law, Matt. v. 18.
The last clause seems to recall the precedent of an earlier evolutionary step,
whereby the New Dispensation of Jesus made the Mosaic Law unnecessary;
it is clear that the nal one, which makes even the Millennium unnecessary,
must be of an extremely radical character. The Father, I submit, has to turn
Heaven 45
into the God of the Cambridge Platonists and suchlike mystical characters;
at present he is still the very disagreeable God of the Old Testament, but
eventually he will. dissolve into the landscape and become immanent only.
The difficulty of tting in this extremely grand climax was perhaps what
made Milton uncertain about the controverted time-scheme of the
Millennium. The doctrine of the end of time, if one takes it seriously, is
already enough to make anything but Total Union (or else Total Separateness
from God) hard to conceive.
The question which Milton answers here is at least one which he makes
extremely prominent in the speech of rejoicing by the Father after the speech
of sacrice by the Son (III. 320). The Father rst says he will give the Son all
power, then in the present tense I give thee; yet he had given it already, or
at least enough to cause Satan and his followers to revolt. Without so much
as a full stop, the Father next says that the time when he will give it is the
Day of Judgement, and the climax of the whole speech is to say that
immediately after that God shall be All in All. The eternal gift of the
Father is thus to be received only on the Last Day, and handed back the day
after. This has not been found disturbing, because the paradox is so clear that
we assume it to be deliberate; nor are interpretations of it hard to come by.
But Milton would see it in the light of the passage in the De Doctrina; there
God shall be All in All ends the Biblical quotation which comes just before
Miltons mystical reply:
Then cometh the end ... but when he saith, all things are put
under him, it is manifest that he is excepted which did put all
things under him; and when all things are subdued unto him,
then shall the Son himself also be subject unto him that put all
things under him, that God may be all in all. (I Corinthians xv.
2428)
St Paul is grappling with earlier texts here in much the same scholarly way
that Milton did, which would give Milton a certain condence about re-
interpreting his results even though they were inspired because Biblical.
After hearing so much from M. Morand about the political corruption of
Miltons mind, one is pleased to nd it less corrupt than St Pauls; Milton
decided that God was telling the truth, and that he would keep his promise
literally. At the end of the speech of the Father, Milton turns into poetry the
decision he had reached in prose:
The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring

New Heavn and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell ...
Then thou thy regal Sceptre shalt lay by,
For regal Sceptre then no more shall need,
46 William Empson
God shall be All in All. But all ye Gods

Adore him, who to compass all this dies,
Adore the Son, and honour him as me. (III. 340)
I grant that the language is obscure, as is fitting because it is oracular; and,

besides, Milton wanted the poem to be universal, so did not want to thrust
a special doctrine upon the reader. But the doctrine is implied decisively if
the language is examined with care. St Paul presumably had in mind a
literal autocracy, but Milton contrives to make the text imply pantheism.
The O.E.D. records that the intransitive use of the verb need had become
slightly archaic except for a few set phrases; the general intransitive use
required here belongs to the previous centurye.g. stopping of heads
with lead shall not need now 1545. But a reader who noticed the change
of grammar from shalt to shall could only impute the old construction:
Authority will then no longer be needednot, therefore, from the
Father, any more than from the Son. There is much more point in the last
two lines quoted if the Father has just proposed, though in an even more
remote sense than the Son, that he too shall die. All is rather a pet word in
Miltons poetry but I think he never gives it a capital letter anywhere else,
and one would expect that by writing All in All he meant to imply a
special doctrine, as we do by writing the Absolute. Then again, this is the
only time God calls the angels Gods, with or without a capital letter. He
does it here meaning that they will in effect become so after he has
abdicated. The reference has justly been used as a partial defence of Satan
for calling his rebels Gods, but we are meant to understand that his claim
for them is a subtle misuse of the deeper truth adumbrated here. Taking all
the details together, I think it is clear that Milton wanted to suggest a high
mystery at this culminating point.*
There was a more urgent and practical angle to the question; it was not
only one of the status of the Son, but of mankind. You cannot think it merely
whimsical of M. Morand to call God dynastic if you look up the words heir
and inherit in the concordance usually given at the end of a Bible. Milton was
of course merely quoting the text when he made the Father call the Son his
heir (as in VI. 705); but the blessed among mankind are also regularly called
heirs of Gods kingdom and suchlike. The word heir specically means one
who will inherit; it would be comical to talk as if M. Morand was the rst to
wonder what the Bible might mean by it. The blessed among mankind are
heirs of God through their union with Christ; Miltons Chapter XXIV is Of
Union and Fellowship with Christ and the Saints, wherein is considered the
Mystical or Invisible Church, and he says it is not conned to place or time,
inasmuch as it is composed of individuals of widely separated countries, and
of all ages from the foundation of the world. He would regard this as a blow
at all priesthoods, but also regard the invisible union as a preguring of the
Heaven 47
far distant real one. We can now see that it is already offered in the otherwise
harsh words by which the Father appointed the Son:
Under his great Vice-regent reign abide

United as one individual Soul
For ever happy (V. 610)
As a means of achieving such unity the speech is a remarkable failure; but

God already knew that men would be needed as well as angels before the
alchemy could be done. When the unity is complete, neither the loyal angels
nor the blessed among mankind will require even the vice-regency of the
Son, still less the rule of the Father; and only so can they become heirs and
inheritors of Gods Kingdom.
The texts prove, I submit, that Milton envisaged the idea, as indeed so
informed a man could hardly help doing; but the poetry must decide whether
it meant a great deal to him, and the bits so far quoted are not very good.
Milton however also ascribes it to God in the one really splendid passage
allotted to him. This is merely an earlier part of the same speech, but the
sequence III. 80345 is full of startling changes of tone. The end of the
speech happens to let us see Miltons mind at work, because we can relate it
to the De Doctrina, but the main feeling there is just immense pride; Milton
could never let the Father appear soft, and, his deepest yielding must be
almost hidden by a blaze of glory. Just before advancing upon thirty lines of
glory, he has rejoiced that his Son:
though thrond in highest bliss,

Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By Merit more than Birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being Good,
Far more than Great or High; because in thee
Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds,
Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne;
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,
Anointed universal King; all Power
I give thee, reign for ever, and assume
Thy Merits; under thee as Head Supreme
Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions I reduce: (III. 305)
It is a tremendous moral cleansing for Miltons God, after the greed for
48 William Empson
power which can be felt in him everywhere else, to say that he will give his
throne to Incarnate Man, and the rhythm around the word humiliation is like
taking off in an aeroplane. I had long felt that this is much the best moment
of God in the poem, morally as well as poetically, without having any idea
why it came there. It comes there because he is envisaging his abdication, and
the democratic appeal of the prophecy of God is what makes the whole
picture of him just tolerable.
I may be told that I am simply misreading; the Father is not giving Man
his own throne, but the Sons, and Milton has made this clear just previously
by recalling that the Son too is throned; indeed I think this is the only place
in the poem where he is said to be throned at the right hand of God. (When
the Father tells the Son to rise and drive out the rebels, Milton mysteriously
says that he addresses The Assessor of his Throne VI. 680; but I can deduce
nothing from that.) But the grandeur of the position of the Son needed
emphasizing here in any case, and Milton is inclined to plant a word in this
way soon before it is used especially sublimely. The effect of repeating the
word throne is not so obtrusive as to exclude the more tremendous meaning.
Besides, the Father could not say that the Son will be exalted as a reward to
the throne which the Son already occupies; and the sequence is this throne
... here ... here ... Head Supreme, very empty rhetoric if it does not refer to
the supreme throne. I grant that the meaning is not obvious unless one
realizes how much support it is given later in the speech.
Wondering where to stop my quotation, I was struck by how
immediately the passage turns from generosity to pride of power. The
distinction is perhaps an unreal one; all the lines are about pride. God is
generous to give his throne, but Milton exults in the dignity given to Man.
The last line of my quotation, except that it omits the Virtues for
convenience, gives the same roll-call of the titles of the angels as Satan does
in his rabble-rousing speech; no doubt this was the standard form in Heaven,
but the effect is to make the reader compare the two offers. One must agree
with M. Morand that it is all weirdly political; temporary acceptance of
lower-class status is what the Son is being praised for, a severe thing in his
mind, just as it is beneath Satans class to become incarnate as a snake. As to
torture, that might come your way in any class, and would only be a minor
thing to boast about afterwards. But one dare not call this mode of thought
contemptible, if it elevates, or makes proud enough to act well, all classes of
the society in which it operates.
I can claim that this account gives the thought of the epic a much
needed consistency. Thus it may be objected that Miltons own
temperament, because of the pride so evident in his style, would be quite
unattracted by an ideal of total union. But certainly; he presents it as very
unattractive even to the good angels. Abdiel can only translate it into terms
exasperating for Satan; and the blushing of Raphael now acquires
Heaven 49
considerable point, which after all one would expect so bizarre a detail to
have. Though capable of re-uniting themselves with God the angels do not
want to, especially because this capacity lets them enjoy occasional acts of
love among themselves. It is fundamental to Miltons system that angels, like
all the rest of the universe, are parts of God from which God willingly
removed his will; these highest forms of life, he nds it natural to suppose,
have an approximation to the divine power among themselves, so that they
can love by total interpenetration. Presumably God can gobble them up as
soon as look at them, which would make him an alarming employer, and
perhaps they are relieved that he never expresses any affection for them
though even interpenetration with God would not actually mean death; the
Son, like Satan, doubts whether any life can be totally destroyed, III. 165; so
does Milton, De Doctrina Chapter VII. Thus they put up a timidly evasive but
none the less stubborn resistance to dissolving themselves into God, like a
peasantry under Communism trying to delay collectivization; and here too
the state has the high claim that it has promised eventually to wither away.
God must abdicate, in the sense of becoming totally immanent or invisible,
before the plan of Total Union can seem tolerable to them; and it is bitter for
them that this transcendence cannot be achieved without stirring into the
brew the blessed among mankind. Exactly why the angels are so inadequate
that Gods programme is necessary remains obscure; Milton quotes in De
Doctrina Chapter VII from Job iv. 18 he put no trust in his servants, and his
angels he charged with folly, which perhaps he felt to give authority to his
picture. But it is intelligible that a stern period of training may be required
before transcendence, and at any rate the story is a great boast for ourselves;
we are not inclined to blame God for deciding that he needed us before he
could abdicate conscientiously.
Thus, by combining the views of M. Saurat and M. Morand, the one
attributing to Milton thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls and the other
a harsh worldliness, we can I think partly solve the central problem about the
poem, which is how Milton can have thought it to justify God. I think the
internal evidence of Miltons own writing enough to decide that he meant
what I have tried to describe, because it makes our impression of the poem
and indeed of the author much more satisfactory; but, even so, external
evidence is needed to answer the objection that Milton could not have meant
that, or could not have thought of it. I had best begin by saying what I
learned from M. Saurat and where I thought his view inadequate. His chief
interest, as I understand, was to show that the European Renaissance could
not have occurred without an underground inuence from Jewish mystics
beginning two or three centuries before Milton; the main reason for
supposing that Milton had read the Zohar, even after textual evidence had
been found, was that he was a man who habitually went to the sources of the
ideas which he had already found oating about. The doctrine that matter
50 William Empson
was not created from nothing but was part of God M. Saurat considered
fundamental to the Renaissance, because it allowed enough trust in the esh,
the sciences, the arts, the future before man in this world. Milton
undoubtedly does express this doctrine, but it does not strike me as
prominent in other poets of the time, except for the paradoxes of Donnes
love-poetry. However, I want to answer a rebuttal of the Saurat position
which I happened to come across in an informative and strictly philological
work by G. N. Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton, 1949. He says
that Milton could not have been inuenced by the Zohar, or by the mystics
around him in the Commonwealth such as Fludd either, because he was a
Puritan, a logician, and, whatever else, assuredly no theosophist, and
furthermore that it is mere justice to admit that Milton extracted his beliefs
from the ancient texts of Holy Writ by scientic philological techniques, as
he steadily claimed to do. Thus his crucial decision that matter was not
created from nothing turned simply on an analysis of the Biblical words for
create, chiey but not only in Hebrew. Admittedly, this is what Milton claims
in Chapter VII of De Doctrina, but he was accustomed to defend a position
rhetorically, so as to convince other people, after arriving at it himself by a
conscientious assessment of the evidence. The philological argument here is
only, and could only be, that previous uses of the word had not meant this
unique concept before the attempt at expressing it was allegedly made; thus
the word in the Bible does not have to mean what theologians say, and is
never redened by the Bible in a phrase or sentence as meaning that. Milton
goes on to give other reasons for his conclusion that create in the Bible does
not mean from nothing, and by doing so he has in effect enough sense to
admit that his negative argument does not make a positive one. These
problems about sources are often very subtle, because a powerful mind grabs
at a hint of what it needs; admittedly, the Zohar was not the only possible
source of these large mystical ideas; and one could explain the verbal
correspondences found by M. Saurat by supposing that Milton got some
other learned man to answer his questions about the Zohar, and read some
crucial bits out to him, after he had become blind.
All the same, such ideas undoubtedly were oating about. The trouble
with M. Saurats position, I think, is that he welcomes the liquefaction of
God the Father, making him wholly immanent in his creation, and argues
that Milton intended that in his epic, without realizing that Milton and his
learned contemporaries would think the liquefaction of all the rest of us a
prior condition. The idea of the re-absorption of the soul into the Absolute
does get hinted at a good deal in the literature, if only in the form of
complete self-abandonment to God; whereas the idea that God himself is
wholly immanent in his creation belonged mainly to the high specialized
output of the Cambridge Platonists. Marlowes Faustus, in his nal speech,
desires to return his soul like a rain-drop to the sea rather than remain
Heaven 51
eternally as an individual in Hell, and this is a crucial image for grasping the
Far-Eastern position; the same idea is quite noisy in the supposedly orthodox
peroration of Urn-Burial: if any have been so happy as truly to understand
Christian annihilation ... liquefaction ... ingression into the divine shadow.
When Lovewit at the end of The Alchemist rebuffs a superstitious fool by
saying Away, you Harry Nicholas (the founder of the mystical Family of
Love which maintained that any man can become Christ), the now remote
gure is presumed to be familiar to a popular audience. The ideas which
Milton hinted at in the bits of his epic which I have picked out were therefore
not nearly so learned and unusual as they seem now; indeed, he probably
treated them with caution because they might suggest a more Levelling,
more economic-revolutionary, political stand than he in fact took. But the
Cambridge Platonists were not dangerous for property-owners in this way;
they were a strand of recent advanced thought which deserved recognition in
his epic; also they allowed of a welcome contrast to the picture of God which
the Bible forced him to present, and gave a bit more body to the mysterious
climax of the Fortunate Fall. The abdication of the Father was thus quite an
important part of his delicately balanced structure, and not at all a secret
heresy; and of course not unconscious if it needed tact. At bottom, indeed,
a quaintly political mind is what we nd engaged on the enormous synthesis.
Milton knows by experience that God is at present the grindingly harsh
gure described in the Old Testament; after all, Milton had long been
printing the conviction that his political side had been proved right because
God had made it win, so its eventual defeat was a difficult thing to justify
God for. But it was essential to retain the faith that God has a good eventual
plan; well then, the Cambridge Platonists can be allowed to be right about
God, but only as he will become in the remote future. It seems to me one of
the likeable sides of Milton that he would regard this as a practical and
statesmanlike proposal.
M. Saurat, on the other hand, wanted Milton to use the Zohar to drive
the last remnants of Manichaeism out of Christianity, and therefore argued
that God in the epic is already an ineffable Absolute or World-Soul dissolved
into the formative matter of the universe. After a timid peep into one volume
of a translation of the Zohar, I am sure that Milton would not nd it as
opposite from the Gnostics as black from white, which is what the eloquence
and selection of M. Saurat lead us to suppose. Milton would regard it as
further evidence that the Fathers had slandered the Gnostics, as he had been
sure when he was young, just as Rome had behaved very wickedly to the
Cathars; all these heretics probably had something to be said for them,
though of course one must expect most of their stuff to be dead wood. And
the Gnostics are re ported as believing, no less than the Cabbalists of the
Zohar, in an eventual reunion of the many with the One. The Saurat
interpretation of the epic makes nonsense of most of its narrative, but that is
52 William Empson
better than giving it an evil sense; the point where one ought to revolt comes
when the interpretation drives poor M. Saurat into uneasy brief expressions
of bad feeling. He praises Gods jokes (p. 192, 1944 edition) because the only
relation of the Absolute to its creation which a poet can present is irony, and
here the protean word has to mean mean-minded jeering. M. Saurat deserves
to be released from this position; the idea of God as the Absolute is genuinely
present in the poem, but only when God is adumbrating the Last Things.
The well-argued view of M. Morand, that the purblind Milton
described God from his experience of Cromwell, also allows of an
unexpectedly sublime conclusion. Miltons own political record, as I
understand, cannot be found contemptible; he backed Cromwell and his
Independents in the army against the Presbyterians in Parliament because he
wanted religious freedom, but always remained capable of saying where he
thought Cromwell had gone wrong; for example, in refusing to disestablish
the Church. However, on one point Cromwell was impeccable, and appears
to be unique among dictators; his admitted and genuine bother, for a number
of years, was to nd some way of establishing a Parliament under which he
could feel himself justied in stopping being dictator. When Milton made
God the Father plan for his eventual abdication, he ascribed to him in the
high tradition of Plutarch the noblest sentiment that could be found in an
absolute ruler; and could reect with pride that he had himself seen it in
operation, though with a tragic end. Miltons God is thus to be regarded as
like King Lear and Prospero, turbulent and masterful characters who are
struggling to become able to renounce their power and enter peace; the story
makes him behave much worse than they do, but the author allows him the
same purifying aspiration. Even the lie of God Die he or Justice must, we
may now charitably reect, is partly covered when Milton says that Satan
with necessity
The Tyrants plea, excused his devilish deeds. (IV. 395)
It must be added at once that we cannot nd enough necessity; the

poem, to be completely four-square, ought to explain why God had to
procure all these falls for his eventual high purpose. Such is the basic
question as it stood long before Milton handled it; but he puts the mystery
in a place evidently beyond human knowledge, and he makes tolerably
decent, though salty and rough, what is within our reach.
This I think answers the fundamental objection of Yvor Winters, with
which it seemed right to begin the chapter; Miltons poetical formula for
God is not simply to copy Zeus in Homer but, much more dramatically, to
cut out everything between the two ends of the large body of Western
thought about God, and stick to Moses except at the high points which
anticipate Spinoza. The procedure is bound to make God interesting; take
Heaven 53
the case of his announcing to the loyal angels that he will create mankind to
spite the devil. God must be supposed to intend his words to suggest to the
angels what they do to us, but any angel instructed in theology will realize
that God has intended throughout all eternity to spite Satan, so that when he
presents this plan as new he is telling a lie, which he has also intended to tell
throughout all eternity. No wonder it will be far happier days after he has
abdicated (XII. 465). Milton was well able to understand these
contradictions, and naturally he would want to leave room for an eventual
solution of them.
Perhaps I nd him like Kafka merely because both seem to have had a
kind of foreknowledge of the Totalitarian State, whether or not this was what
C. S. Lewis praised as his beautiful sense of the idea of social order. The
picture of God in the poem, including perhaps even the high moments when
he speaks of the end, is astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin; the same patience
under an appearance of roughness, the same ashes of joviality, the same
thorough unscrupulousness, the same real bad temper. It seems little use to
puzzle ourselves whether Milton realized he was producing this effect,
because it would follow in any case from what he had set himself to do.
NOTES
p. 94. A reviewer objected that the rebel angels fell solely because they had a
duty of obedience towards Satan, so that I had no ground for imagining them to feel
a grudge against God. To realize the basic unscrupulousness of a worshipper of the
Father, the sordidness of what he calls his morality, always comes as a shock. Raphael
does at times try to tell the story like that, as my critic showed; but it would make God
too unjust even for Milton. When God views the angels on parade and estimates how
many have fallen (my p. 174) he cannot merely note the total absence of the Northern
Command.
p. 121. See Appendix.
p. 132.
I pitied mortal men, but being myself not thought
To merit pity, am thus cruelly visited
A sight to x dishonour on the name of Zeus.
(Prometheus Bound, I, 240; trans. P. Vellacott)
Whom I could pity thus forlorn / Though I unpitied (IV. 375) is certainly an echo
of this, because it echoes the whole situation as well as the words. My own mind often
produces irrelevant echoes, so I am not sure that Milton meant a great deal by this
one; but it helps to show that the speech was not merely a hurried attempt to make
Satan adequately villainous.
p. 135. Milton would have been indignant if told that he believed God would
abdicate. It had occurred to him that, after perfection was attained, God would never
54 William Empson
issue another order; this would be a great relief, but in a philosophical sense God
would be in power as never before. The text from I Corinthians is quoted again in
D.D. chapters 5 and 15 and P.L. vi. 730; we may be sure that it had interested Milton,
as indeed it had all the Radical Reformers. I am still sure I was right about the
direction which Miltons thought was following, but I grant that in this case my
phrasing is likely to be unhelpfully remote from what the author would have said
himself, in his last years, if he had spoken out. But I have found no better way to
phrase it; and maybe what he said would have been surprising.
THOMAS GREENE
Milton
I.
M ost of the important epic poetry of the sixteenth century was written
by Humanist authors working at a court or, like Spenser, under the long
shadow of a court. Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso wrote for the dukes of Ferrara
as Pulci had written for Lorenzo de Medici. Ronsard, the very model of a
court poet, received not only the encouragement of Charles IX and the
benece to afford him leisure, but found himself obliged to follow the royal
preference for a decasyllabic line. DAubign spent several years at the court
of Henri III and remained the condant of Henri IV until the latters
conversion. Even Sannazaro and Vida wrote with the patronage of the papal
court. Camoens, to be sure, wrote much of Os Lusiadas in the Orient, but part
of his youth was spent at court, and he received a small royal pension after
his epic was published. In all these sixteenth century courts, with the possible
exception of the papal, a balance of sorts was maintained between soldiering
and learning, the camp and the library, a balance which naturally led the
Humanist poet to subjects involving warfare. The ancient duality of sapientia
and fortitudo was perpetuated, as Curtius has shown,1 by the Renaissance
coupling of arms and studies. The courtly interest in epic action was thus
not simply antiquarian. The immediate audience of the epic pursued an
equilibrium of valor and renement not utterly unlike the equilibrium
From The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. 1963 by Yale University.
55
56 Thomas Greene
reected in the Odyssey. The nest Christian epics of the sixteenth century
those of Tasso, Spenser, and dAubignmostly eschewed Biblical subjects
in preference for those of interest to an educated professional soldier.
In seventeenth century France the military caste tended to detach itself
from the court, although the separation never became complete. As early a
poem as Marinos Adone, written at the court of Louis XIII, signaled the taste
for subjects which had nothing to do with violence. But Marinos
mythographical eroticism was not inuential. Epic poetry in the succeeding
decades was divided, as we have seen, between tired perpetuations of the
quasi-military epic (Scudrys Alaric, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlins Clovis,
etc.)poems which really betray the growing gap between courtier-poet and
soldierand on the other hand, bourgeois Biblical epics in the tradition of
Sannazaro, Vida, and Du Bartas. The Pliade had experimented with Biblical
poetryas in Du Bellays Monomachie de David et de Goliath, but had only
shown spasmodic interest in it. Now, with the growth of a middle class reading
public, a bastard form of Biblical epic enjoyed a wide popularity.2
The socio-literary development of England was very different. There a
Humanist literary movement comparable to the continental explosion
gathered force only after the court ceased to be a literary center. This fact is
of great importance. The rst thoroughgoing neoclassical epic in England
Cowleys Davideiswas not published before 1656, although it was probably
written a decade or more earlier. In 1656, continental epic poetry was
expiring, and there existed in England no audience devoted to arms and
letters, no audience as variously accomplished as the court for which
Spenser wrote. This meant that the nature of heroism represented in the
English epic was obliged to change, to idealize the efforts of will
comprehensible to a devout bourgeois public. In 1656, moreover, the wind
of prosaic rationalism was beginning to blow strong, that wind which was
soon to wither epic poetry. Gusts of it utter the pages of Cowleys poem,
and its steady draft altogether blights the decorous quatrains of Davenants
Gondibert. Given this milieu, great epic poetry in seventeenth century
England was an historical anomaly. Paradise Lost is only less anomalous than
the Arthurian epic Milton planned to write. That poem would have had no
raison dtre, no t audience at all. Paradise Lost still had the dwindling core
of an audience, but only the massive, proud, and isolated independence of a
Milton could have brought even this poem into being.3
In sixteenth century England a movement had arisen which opposed
the imitation of classical modes in all genres, and which substituted in each
case sacred subjects and modes. Rather than attempt the mlange coupable of
classical and Christian, this program enforced a strict segregation which, in
epic poetry, broke down completely only with Cowley and Milton.4 It is not
remarkable that the pious and pedestrian Quarles betrays so little classical
inuence in his Biblical narratives (Job Militant, The Historie of Samson), but
Milton 57
it is perhaps a little odd that a poet like Drayton (in his Moses, David and
Golia, Noahs Flood) should not betray a great deal more. Giles Fletchers
underestimated Christs Victorie and Triumph (1610), a poem somewhat more
allegorical than Biblical, contains a celestial descent of sorts, in the passage
of Mercie into Christs breast (Christs Victorie on Earth, 116), but for an
extended conventional descent to represent the English epic before Cowley
one would have to search out a forgotten poem by Thomas Robinson, The
Life and Death of Mary Magdalene (1569).5 In any case, the important
landmark, historically if not artistically, is Cowleys Davideis.
The angelic descent in that poem is memorable chiey because of the
criticism by which Dr. Johnson singled it out. It appears oddly at the very end
of a bookthe second of the twelve Cowley planned and of the four he
completed. David, while still a young man and before taking the throne, has
been vouchsafed a prophetic dream by heaven, a dream which summarizes
Jewish history from his own lifetime to the advent of Christ. The account of
this dream, which occupies over three hundred lines, is tedious. But if the
reader concludes it with pleasure, David awakes with doubt about its import,
and Gabriel must descend to explain and reassure:
When Gabriel (no blest Spirit more kind or fair)

Bodies and cloathes himself with thickned ayr.
All like a comely youth in lifes fresh bloom;
Rare workmanship, and wrought by heavenly loom! 795
He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,
That ere the midday Sun pierced through with light:
Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spred;
Washt from the morning beauties deepest red.
An harmless aming Meteor shone for haire, 800
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care.
He cuts out a silk Mantle from the skies,
Where the most sprightly azure pleasd the eyes.
This he with starry vapours spangles all,
Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall. 805
Of a new Rainbow ere it fret or fade,
The choicest piece took out, a Scarf is made.
Small streaming clouds he does for wings display,
Not Vertuous Lovers sighes more soft then They.
These he gilds ore with the Suns richest rays, 810
Caught gliding ore pure streams on which he plays.
Thus drest the joyful Gabriel posts away,
And carries with him his own glorious day
Through the thick woods; the gloomy shades a while
Put on fresh looks, and wonder why they smile. 815
58 Thomas Greene
The trembling Serpents close and silent ly,

The birds obscene far from his passage y.
A sudden spring waits on him as he goes,
Sudden as that by which Creation rose.
Thus he appears to David, at rst sight 820
All earth-bred fears and sorrows take their ight.
In rushes joy divine, and hope, and rest;
A Sacred calm shines through his peaceful brest.
Hail, Man beloved! from highest heaven(said he)
My mighty Master sends thee health by me. 825
The things thou sawest are full of truth and light,
Shapd in the glass of the divine Foresight.
Evn now old Time is harnessing the years
To go in order thus; hence empty fears;
Thy Fates all white; from thy blest seed shall spring 830
The promisd Shilo, the great Mystick King.
Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound,
And reach to Worlds, that must not yet be found.
The Southern Clime him her sole Lord shall stile,
Him all the North, even Albions stubborn Isle. 835
My Fellow-Servant, credit what I tell.
Straight into shapeless air unseen he fell.6
I fear that nothing can be said for the atness of Cowleys unheroic
couplets; his use of them is reminiscent of the uninspired Joshua Sylvester,
from whom he may well have taken his lead. One must equally regret the
bland coyness of his manner:
Of a new Rainbow ere it fret or fade ...
the pleasantness substituted for energy:
Where the most sprightly Azure pleasd the eyes ...
the empty neoclassical generality of the vocabulary:
All like a comely Youth in lifes fresh Bloom ...
the gloomy shades a while

Put on fresh looks ...
when, as in the use of obscene (817) to mean ill-omened, his vocabulary is not
pedantically mannered. But it is graceless to belabor a dead author for the
Milton 59
immature failures of his youth, and I shall not dwell long upon those of
Cowleys shortcomings which were peculiar to himself alone. Dr. Johnsons
strictures on lines 796807 can scarcely be improved upon:
This is a just specimen of Cowleys imagery: what might, in

general expressions, be great and forcible, he weakens and makes
ridiculous by branching it into small parts. That Gabriel was
invested with the softest or brightest colours of the sky, we might
have been told, and been dismissed to improve the idea in our
different proportions of conception; but Cowley could not let us
go, till he had related where Gabriel got rst his skin, and then
his mantle, then his lace, and then his scarf, and related it in the
terms of the mercer and tailor.7
Cowley could not remember that epic poetry requires the subordination of
part to whole; he constantly diverts the reader from his poems main business
by ornaments (like the fading rainbow or the lovers sighs) for which, were
they more truly witty, a lyric might nd organic place, but which only clog
heroic action.
This shortcoming is related to Cowleys lack of structural intelligence.
For it is difficult nally to ascertain the main business of the poem at all,
so divided is it into unlike episodes. In its unnished form the plot has no
shape or outline, and one wonders whether the completed poem would have
acquired them. The poet explains in his preface that he intended to write the
life of David only up to his elegy upon Saul and Jonathan, but it is evident
from the text that he wanted to incorporate into his account most of Old
Testament history. In this disastrous intent he was probably misled not so
much by the older English history poemsDaniels Civil Wars and Draytons
Barons Warsas by Vida and above all by Du Bartas Judit,8 a poem of
undistinguished literary merit but great historical inuence. Cowleys vast
design was further weakened by his lack of dramatic sense, a shortcoming
which led him to introduce this anticlimactic and superuous descent of
Gabriel with extended description. The account of the angels preparations
and the miraculous sudden Spring which attends him (inspired perhaps by
Sylvesters Fracostoro9) would have betted an event of high moment, but
the effect of this descent is dissipated in its pointlessness.
Apart from Cowleys personal failings, the Davideis betrays other
shortcomingsor as it seems to me, confusionswhich are almost endemic
to the Christian epic and with which Milton would also have to come to
terms. The rst of these involves the question of truthfulness. In the preface
to his Poems (which included the epic), Cowley dwelt enthusiastically upon
the Scriptures unmined riches for poetry, and indignantly upon mythologys
meretricious falsity:
60 Thomas Greene
When I consider this, and how many other bright and

magnicent subjects of the like nature, the Holy Scripture affords
and proffers, as it were, to Poesie, in the wise managing and
illustrating whereof, the Glory of God Almighty might be joyned
with the singular utility and noblest delight of Mankind; It is not
without grief and indignation that I behold that Divine Science
employing all her inexhaustible riches of Wit and Eloquence,
either in the wicked and beggerly Flattery of great persons, or the
unmanly Idolizing of Foolish Women ... or at best on the confused
antiquated Dreams of senseless Fables and Metamorphoses.
There is not so great a Lye to be found in any Poet, as the
vulgar conceit of men, that Lying is Essential to good Poetry.10
In the invocation to the Davideis he underscores his poems veracity as its

highest originality:
But Thou, Eternal Word, hast calld forth Me

ThApostle, to convert that World to Thee;
Tunbind the charms that in slight Fables lie,
And teach that Truth is truest Poesie.
[I.39-42]
But in practice Cowley departs from the truth, or from his own beliefs
regarding the truth, and records the departures in his exhaustive notes. Thus
he follows a debate on the location of the Queen of Shebas realm with the
tell-tale confession: In ne, whatever the truth be, this opinion makes a
better Sound in Poetry.11 And on the question of the harmony of the
spheres he writes
In this, and some like places, I would not have the Reader judge
of my opinion by what I say; no more than before in diverse
expressions about Hell, the Devil, and Envy. It is enough that the
Doctrine of the Orbs, and the Musick made by their motion had
been received very anciently.12
The issue of epic truthfulness which troubled Cowley can be related to

issues which had been subject to international critical controversy for
decades when he penned these various opinions. Critics were not agreed as
to whether the heroic action should be based on actual history, or how
closely it should follow history, or with how much of the marvelous it might
be colored. Despite continuing debate, the cause of historical delity was
markedly gaining ground on the continent by the mid-seventeenth century,
at the expense of the imagination. During Cowleys years in France with the
Milton 61
exiled Royalist party there appeared Scudrys Alaric (1654) with its
inuential preface advocating a non-Biblical subject drawn from true
Christian history. Four years earlier, the exchange between Davenant and
Hobbes prefacing Gondibert laid stress on realism at the expense of
machinery, fables, and fantasy.13 The greater zeal for truth in Cowleys
preface, as compared with his poem and notes (probably composed earlier),
may reect his tendency to change with his age. In the poem itself he is far
from proscribing machinery, but his treatment of it is so cool, so detached,
so manifestly lacking in awe, that it already represents a step toward realism.
There are ulterior difficulties. The preface patronizes the poems of
Quarles and Heywood.14 as misguided efforts to write sacred poetry, but the
imputed reasons for their failures are not altogether clear. Cowley has been
speaking of the books of the Bible:
Yet, though they be in themselves so proper to be made use of for

this purpose; None but a good Artist will know how to do it:
neither must we think to cut and polish Diamonds with so little
pains and skill as we do Marble. For if any man design to
compose a Sacred Poem, by only turning a story of the Scripture,
like Mr. Quarless, or some other godly matter, like Mr. Heywood
of Angels, into Rhyme; He is so far from elevating of Poesie, that
he only abases Divinity. In brief, he who can write a prophane
Poem well, may write a Divine one better; but he who can do that
but ill, will do this much worse.15
Quarles is guilty of having turned Scriptural stories into rhyme with too bald
a simplicity. What should he have done? Evidently he should have mastered
rst the skills of his mtier, the skills one can learn from profane poetry.
Among other things, presumably Quarles should have imitated the classics.
Cowley himself imitated them on every page and employed all the epic
conventions; his notes are stuffed with allusions to Virgil and other antique
poets, allusions intended to justify his own poetic procedures. But in the
same preface he refers to those mad Stories of the Gods and Heroes which
seem in themselves so ridiculous, and numbers himself as one of those
who deride their Folly, and are wearyd with their Impertinences.16 Thus
Cowleys whole relation to antique poetry constitutes a second crucial and
symptomatic confusion. He refers in his poem to a revolt of giants against
Baal and is obliged to annotate this mysterious mythology by appeal to
comparative mythology:
For Baal is no other than Jupiter. Baalsemen Jupiter Olympius. But

I like not in an Hebrew Story to use the European Names of
Gods.17
62 Thomas Greene
Elsewhere the poem alludes to Fates and the note must turn about in the
contrary direction:
The Fates; that is, according to the Christian Poetical manner of

speaking, the Angels, to whom the Government of this world is
committed.18
If the notes to Gabriels descent contain a reference to Revelation and to

Aquinas, they contain as well three references to Virgil, two to Homer,
others to Ovid, Servius, Pliny, Strabo, to the Rabbies, and to certain
unnamed magical Books. To the Christian poem which may well have
contributed to the descent (Sylvesters Fracastoro), there is no reference at
all. How Christian should a Christian epic be? Quarles must have seemed an
amateur indeed.
The third of Cowleys confusions we have already encountered in
Marino and Hojeda;19 perhaps it can be found less strikingly in Tasso as well.
This is the confusion exemplied by these lines of Gabriel:
The things thou sawest are full of truth and light ...
Evn now old Time is harnessing the years
To go in order thus; hence empty fears ...
The problem lies in the dream of which Gabriel is speaking; truthful it may
have been, but scarcely orderly and scarcely lled with light, scarcely
calculated to banish all fears. However the poet lays emphasis on the virtuous
successors of David, however he rejoices in conclusion at Marys conception
of Jesus, he cannot conceal the patternless violence and suffering of the
history he chooses to retail. He wanted to assert a pattern, and assert light
and victory and joy, because he thought they were demanded by the genre
and exemplied by the Aeneid. But he failed to make comprehensible
poetically the Sacred Calm he meant to inspire. I fear that he inspires
rather secular indifference. Perhaps we may thank the Davideis most
cordially for having fullled its authors valedictory hope:
Sure I am, that there is nothing yet in our Language (nor perhaps
in any) that is in any degree answerable to the Idea that I conceive
of it. And I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and
imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the
courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better
able to perform it throughly and successfully.20
The report has survived that Cowley, with Shakespeare and Spenser, were
Miltons favorites among the English poets.21
Milton 63
II.
The convention of the celestial messenger is here concluded with the

majestic descent of Raphael to Adam in Book Five of Paradise Lost. There is
a propriety in this, since Milton concludes so very much more; the clangor
of his high style sounds the closing of an immense door within the temple of
history. His poem is the more moving because it seems almost to glimpse at
instants its own momentous nality.
Miltons earlier poems contain fragmentary rehearsals of Raphaels
descent: in the Attendant Spirits soliloquy that opens Comus:
Swift as the Sparkle of a glancing Star,

I shoot from Heavn to give him safe convoy ...
[8081]22
in the ight of Fama concluding the Quintum Novembris,23 and in the

charming stanza of the Nativity Ode which pictures Peace descending to
comfort Nature:
But he her fears to cease,

Sent down the meek-eyd Peace,
She crownd with Olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphear
His ready Harbinger,
With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,
And waving wide her mirtle wand,
She strikes a universall Peace through Sea and Land.
[45-52]
The outlines for projected tragedies in the Cambridge manuscript also

contain at least two scenes involving the descent of an angel,24 reecting
perhaps the inuence of the Italian sacre rappresentazioni which commonly
contained angelic epiphanies.25 Milton alludes to the descent convention
moreover in Book Three of Paradise Lost; when Satan feigns therein an
appearance to deceive Uriel, he makes himself up to resemble the messenger
we have encountered so frequently:
And now a stripling Cherube he appeers,

Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smild Celestial, and to every Limb
Sutable grace diffusd, so well he feignd;
Under a Coronet his owing haire
In curles on either cheek plaid, wings he wore
64 Thomas Greene
Of many a colourd plume sprinkld with Gold,

His habit t for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a Silver wand.
[III.63644]
Miltons own messenger is to be less carefully described, but will possess a

maturity and presence beyond the reach of the conventional, Tasso-esque
stripling. Is there a faint touch of scornful pride in the bedecking of Satan
in these worn lineaments of literary tradition?
Satans pretty disguise misleads Uriel only for an hour; he is driven
from paradise, and on the morrow Eve is quickly restored from the painful
dream he has authored. Adam and Eve proceed to pray and to work, and so
engaged attract the eye of God:
Them thus imploid beheld

With pittie Heavns high King, and to him calld 220
Raphael, the sociable Spirit, that deignd
To travel with Tobias, and securd
His marriage with the seavntimes-wedded Maid.
Raphael, said hee, thou hearst what stirr on Earth
Satan from Hell scapt through the darksom Gulf
Hath raisd in Paradise, and how disturbd
This night the human pair, how he designes
In them at once to ruin all mankind.
Go therefore, half this day as friend with friend
Converse with Adam, in what Bowre or shade 230
Thou ndst him from the heat of Noon retird,
To respit his day-labour with repast,
Or with repose; and such discourse bring on,
As may advise him of his happie state,
Happiness in his power left free to will,
Left to his own free Will, his Will though free,
Yet mutable; whence warne him to beware
He swerve not too secure: tell him withall
His danger, and from whom, what enemie
Late falln himself from Heavn is plotting now 240
The fall of others from like state of bliss;
By violence, no, for that shall be withstood,
But by deceit and lies; this let him know,
Least wilfully transgressing he pretend
Surprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarnd.
So spake thEternal Father, and fullld
All justice: nor delaid the winged Saint
Milton 65
After his charge receivd; but from among

Thousand Celestial Ardors, where he stood
Vaild with his gorgeous wings, up springing light 250
Flew through the midst of Heavn; th angelic Quires
On each hand parting, to his speed gave way
Through all thEmpyreal road; till at the Gate
Of Heavn arrivd, the gate self-opnd wide
On goldn Hinges turning, as by work
Divine the sovran Architect had framd.
From hence, no cloud, or, to obstruct his sight,
Starr interposd, however small he sees,
Not unconform to other shining Globes,
Earth and the Gardn of God, with Cedars crownd 260
Above all Hills. As when by night the Glass
Of Galileo, less assurd, observes
Imagind Lands and Regions in the Moon:
Or Pilot from amidst the Cyclades
Delos or Samos rst appeering kenns
A cloudy spot. Down thither prone in ight
He speeds, and through the vast Ethereal Skie
Sailes between worlds and worlds, with steddie wing
Now on the polar windes, then with quick Fann
Winnows the buxom Air; till within soare 270
Of Towring Eagles, to all the Fowles he seems
A Phoenix, gazd by all, as that sole Bird
When to enshrine his reliques in the Suns
Bright Temple, to Aegyptian Thebs he ies.
At once on th Eastern cliff of Paradise
He lights, and to his proper shape returns
A Seraph wingd; six wings he wore, to shade
His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling ore his brest
With regal Ornament; the middle pair 280
Girt like a Starrie Zone his waste, and round
Skirted his loines and thighes with downie Gold
And colours dipt in Heavn; the third his feet
Shaddowd from either heele with featherd maile
Skie-tincturd grain. Like Maias son he stood,
And shook his Plumes, that Heavnly fragrance lld
The circuit wide. Strait knew him all the Bands
Of Angels under watch; and to his state,
And to his message high in honour rise;
For on som message high they guessd him bound. 290
66 Thomas Greene
Thir glittering Tents he passd, and now is come

Into the blissful eld, through Groves of Myrrhe,
And ouring Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme;
A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wantond as in her prime, and paid at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss.
Him through the spicie Forrest onward com
Adam discernd, as in the dore he sat
Of his coole Bowre ... 300
The verse of Paradise Lost, and pre-eminently such a passage as this,

manifests as spacious and grandiose an imagination as we are privileged to
know. If, as I have suggested, a perpetual expansiveness is the habit of the
epic sensibility, then Milton was supremely endowed for epic. His most
typical arrangements of space do not contain the crowded complexity typical
of Virgilare not, as it were, so busy, but they compose an immensity which
shrinks the cosmos of Virgil by comparison. This immensity is effected here
partly by the play of perspective and the stress on seeing, by the
inconspicuous tininess of earth to Raphaels sight, and his loftiness from the
vantage of towering eagles. The immensity is also effected by a certain
careless disposal of the astral spheres, here not arranged according to the
Ptolemaic system, nor catalogued in order as they are by Dante or Tasso.
The earth is
Not unconform to other shining Globes ...
The randomness of Miltons heaven, the lack of tidy symmetry, somehow

extends further its limits. We know as readers that his heaven is orderly in the
fundamental respects, but when he writes
Down thither prone in ight

He speeds, and through the vast Ethereal Skie
Sailes between worlds and worlds ...
or when he writes earlier of Satans descent
Down right into the Worlds rst Region throws

His ight precipitant, and windes with ease
Through the pure marble Air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable Starrs ...
[III.56265]
Milton 67
Miltons cosmos expands to a greater, more intractable vastness, wild like

paradise above Rule or Art.
The immensity of the poem moreover is not simply physical; that
vastness is complemented by the learning which has wearied some readers
and to others has wrongly seemed matter in itself for praise. No praise is due
to pedantry, and pedantry there is occasionally in Paradise Lost. But on the
whole it is conned to a few loci molesti; the wonder is that so much breadth
of knowledge is saved from pedantry, so much history introduced with the
natural ease of genius, so many allusions brought together without any
yoking by violence. The grim, categorical, and narrow version of human
history in Books Eleven and Twelve is supplemented by scattered allusions in
the rest of the poem to a fuller, more various historylike the allusions
above to Galileo and the pilot of the Cyclades.
If we consider only the Judaic-Christian elements in these eighty lines,
their range is impressive: the original myth from Genesis; Isaiahs vision of
the six-winged seraphim;26 the homely and charming story of Tobit; echoes
of the pseudo-Dionysius angelology;27 the late Latin poem De Ave Phoenice
ascribed to Lactantius; the theology of Augustine, among others; the
Christian epic of the Renaissance, and particularly Tasso. All of these
elements appear without strain in this episode of classical derivation, because
they seem to have co-existed harmoniously in Miltons sensibility with the
fruit of his classical education. Lesser poets avoided the comparison with
Mercury at all costs because they were too self-conscious and uncertain of
their Christian Humanism. But Miltons sensibility was at peace with itself,
and the uncomfortable divisions of his predecessors did not touch him. Like
Maias son he stood, he writes of Raphael, just as he puts the Graces in
Eden, and we read on untroubled. If the superb description of the angels
wings (27785) imitates Isaiah (with a glance at Ezekiel 1, in the treatment
of the second pair), the eccentricity and Asiatic remoteness of the Old
Testament have been suppressed. The uppermost wings do not, as in Isaiah,
cover Raphaels face, but come mantling ore his brest with regal
Ornament. In describing the angels wings, Milton describes more than
wings; he endows his creature with a grace and energy and poise and beauty
beyond the concern of the prophetqualities reminiscent rather of antique
and high Renaissance sculpture. His speculative intellect may not have
remained as serene, but his intuitions of antiquity and of Hebraic culture were
so spontaneously ne that he achieved for once that miraculous fusion
denied to the culture of England or of Europe as a whole.
The style of Paradise Lost is a product of analogous fusion. Intervolved,
hypotactic, and compressed as it generally is, the style is still more exible
than it looks at rst acquaintance, and while one critic may praise its classical
simplicity, another speaks of its verbal cleverness, grotesqueness and
obscurity, its primitive ... zest.28 Both kinds of style, as well as others, can
68 Thomas Greene
be found in the poem. Their diversity springs not only from Miltons acute
sense of decorum but from the several conceptions of language which had
once lain in incipient conict within his mind.
The rst of these was the rhetorical conception Milton learned as a boy
at Saint Pauls and from his tutor Thomas Young. The training in classics
given at a Renaissance school was based upon the idea, descended from
Isocrates and Cicero, that the perspicuous and accomplished use of language
fosters the dignity, wisdom, and even the moral elevation of men. If, as I
suggested in Chapter Two, the use of language always involves an implicit
confrontation with the magical or demonic powers in words, then Humanist
rhetoric took a middle position toward them. By stressing clarity and
precision, and by systematically cataloguing tropes, rhetoric tethered the
demonic elements with rm bonds while still not altogether paralyzing them.
Language, according to this position, is a creature of the human mind which
remains its docile but immensely productive servant.29 The rhetoricians
lived by the faith that language employed with discipline and study was an
instrument for attaining truth, and the younger Milton bears witness in a
score of passages to his participation in that faith.30
But he was also inuenced by divergent conceptions of language less
compatible with that faith than he realized. On the one hand, certain
passages of his prose reect sympathy with that current of Puritanism which
distrusted all rhetoric or ornamentation, a current which professed to nd
Scripture bare of tropes and which sought to quell the demonic elements
with a strait jacket of stylistic purity.31 Thus Milton in an early pamphlet
refers to the sober, plain, and unaffected stile of the Scriptures, and
ridicules the prelates who seek refuge in church tradition from Scriptures
accusing clarity:
They feare the plain eld of the Scriptures ... they seek the dark,
the bushie, the tangled Forrest, they would imbosk ...32
As he was forced to penetrate the tangled forest of controversy, forced to

recognize the abuses of language by which his opponents (to his thinking)
muddied truth, he became increasingly aware of the insidious deceptiveness
of language, and lost a little of his rhetorical faith. In passage after passage of
his prose, and even of his sonnets, he thunders against those perverse and
barbarous manipulators of words who prostitute language for unworthy
ends.33 The preface to his Art of Logic warns with disillusion that art may
blunt as well as sharpen nature when it is employed too anxiously and too
subtly, and especially where it is unnecessary.34
This conservative conception was at variance with still a third, which
Milton entertained in his hopes of becoming a Christian poet-priest. This
conception led him to a truer understanding of Old Testament language,
Milton 69
with its dense orchestration of imagery, its poetic abandon, its visionary re,
not more restrained, as some Puritans thought, but less restrained than
classical poetry. The implicit theory of Hebrew prophecy was
inspirationalist; it denied study and rational control; it regarded the poet as
a man possessed or driven by God to speak things his rational will resisted;
it released the demonic powers within the word and made of it a searing,
blazing, uncontrollable thing, an antisocial explosive. Milton played with
that conception when in The Reason of Church Government he spoke of his
intention to write a great sacred poem; he quoted Jeremiah:
His word was in my heart as a burning re shut up in my bones.
and he alluded to the calling of Isaiah when he prayed to
that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed re of
his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases ...35
He was moved by the same ideal when he pictured the sacred poet soaring
in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about
him.36 Other passages in the same tract make clear that he was far from
rejecting many of his Humanist-rhetorical beliefs, but the phrases I have
quoted show him radically modifying or extending them.
All of these conceptionsthe rhetorical, the Puritan, the
inspirationalcontributed to the style of Paradise Lost and were there
harmonized. Of these the rst is the most commonly recognized. The debt
of Miltons style to classical Latin has become a truism, but the truism is
meaningless if it fails to distinguish the effect of Latin poetry from the effect
of latinate poetry in English. Milton enriched many English words by
restoring to them their Latin meanings (like his use of enormous, in line 297
of Raphaels descent, to mean exceeding the rule), but in thus roughening
his language he did not imitate Virgil. Virgil allowed his language a certain
shadowiness when he chose, but never so much as to dim its continuous
clarity. Virgils language is seldom so thick as Miltons. Moreover the
deliberate rearranging of normal English word order may remind you of
Latin, but it creates an effect quite unlike Latin. English does not commonly
permit the rearrangement Milton attempted, so that he arrived at something
very unlike the Virgilian style. By adopting Tassos theory of asprezza or
roughness as a means to stylistic magnicence, Milton moved away from
the correctness which a later generation would associate with Virgil. His
liberties with language in Paradise Lost are actually far greater than those
authorized by antique precedent or by his education. He did not surrender
rational control to inspirational abandon, but he allowed the demons in his
70 Thomas Greene
language at least as much room as he allowed to those in his dramatis personae.

He had not, for all this, lost his conservative distrust of language, which
had rather been deepening with the years. It affects both that style Milton
accommodated to heaven and the other he accommodated to hell. In heaven
it is reected in the abstract and colorless speeches of God and the decorous
choral hymns of the angels which aim at stark simplicity. Miltons own style
in describing heaven (but not Raphaels style in describing the war) virtually
eschews similes and his language, if elevated, is markedly less dense than
elsewhere. Comparison is out of place in heaven, and even when poetry is
descriptive, as in lines 2476 of Raphaels descent, the visual brilliance is
simply reported without ambiguity or metaphor or ulterior signicance. We
see few physical things in heaven, but those we seesuch as the gate which
opens to Raphael, or the angelic crowns strewn on the sea of jasper before
Gods throne (III.349 ff)are shining and pure-colored and incapable of
similitude to earthly copies. The style Milton used to describe heaven might
well have pleased John Calvin.
In hell the distrust of rhetoric is reected in just the opposite way. For
the speeches of Satan and the other devils are brilliant textbook models of
illogic, demagoguery, wrenched syllogisms, false conclusions, sleight-of-
phrase, malicious abuse of words. The impressive description of Beelzebub
at the Great Consult:
... with grave

Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemd
A Pillar of State; deep on his Front engraven
Deliberation sat and publick care;
And Princely counsel in his face yet shone ...
[II.30004]
is a misleading portrait of the ideal Ciceronian orator-statesman which

anticipates the pose of Satan at the climax of his temptation of Eve, like som
Orator renound in Athens or free Rome (IX.67071). Both deceptive poses
are successful.
If the style which describes heaven is pure, that which describes hell
is murkily accommodated to the darkness visible. We make out the dim, grey,
physical forms through a fog of jagged syntax, deceptive similes, confusions
of physical and abstract,37 straight-faced but withering irony. In heaven
Milton would have us see face to face the truth that makes us free, but in hell
darkly the confusion which enslaves us. This is why the syntax of Satans
opening speech resists parsing, and the first statement about Death
(II.66670) is no statement at all but a noun followed by conditional clauses
trailing off to leave the sentence incomplete. This is why Satan and Belial
begin to pun during the war, scoffing in ambiguous words. It is this style
Milton 71
which leads Prince to speak of cleverness, grotesqueness, and obscurity in

Paradise Lost.
Miltons third style, that which is accommodated to earth, represents
something of a mean between his celestial and infernal manners. Terrestrial
vision after the fall is obscured by the:
sideral blast,
Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot,
Corrupt and Pestilent ... [X.69395]
and a pall of infernal confusion hovers correspondingly about the worried

syntax of Adams soliloquy:
O miserable of happie! is this the end

Of this new glorious World, and mee so late
The Glory of that Glory, who now becom
Accurst of blessed, hide me from the face
Of God, whom to behold was then my highth
Of happiness: yet well, if here would end
The miserie, I deservd it ... [X.72026]
All of Adams posterity will be pursued by that Evning Mist, curling up in

the poems closing lines, which
Risn from a River ore the marish glides,

And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel
Homeward returning. [XII.63032]
Human vision after the fall is dimmed; the mist will darken the glass of
Galileo when it,
less assurd, observes

Imagind Lands and Regions in the Moon ..
and so the pilots sight is blurred when he
from amidst the Cyclades

Delos or Samos rst appeering kenns
A cloudy spot.
The pilots uncertainty is imitated by the uncertain grammar, which leaves

the reader peering to make out the construction. Spot might be considered as
an appositive after Delos and Samos, taken as objects of kenns, but one could
72 Thomas Greene
also consider spot the object, and Delos or Samos rst appeering a
parenthetical absolute phrase.
Such clouded vision is the effect of the fall. But even before it, the
appearances of this world are capable of misleading, and the style is a little
less transparent than in heaven. Raphaels own vision, to be sure, is faultless:
From hence, no cloud, or, to obstruct his sight,

Starr interposd, however small he sees,
Not unconform to other shining Globes,
Earth and the Gardn of God, with Cedars crownd
Above all Hills.
The detail of the cedars convinces us that he really does see the garden. But
the syntax puts a strain on the act of vision, as soon as Raphael passes the gate
of heaven, by confusing us momentarily with the absolute construction, no
cloud or ... starr interposd, and by separating the adjective small so far from
the nouns it modies, Earth and Gardn. But this strain is slight in
comparison to the logical ambiguity surrounding the phoenix. Does Raphael
literally take the form of this bird?
till within soare

Of Towring Eagles, to all the Fowles he seems
A Phoenix, gazd by all, as that sole Bird
When to enshrine his reliques in the Suns
Bright Temple, to Aegyptian Thebs he ies.
If one stopped reading here, there would be no difficulty: Raphael is not ying
to Thebes; he is carrying no relics; one could only read this passage as a simile
in which the angel is tenor and the bird vehicle. But Milton continues:
At once on thEastern cliff of Paradise

He lights, and to his proper shape returns
A Seraph wingd ...
If Raphael returns to his proper shape then he has assumed literally the form
of a phoenix, however lacking its burden and destination. Or has his ight
simply deceived the Fowles who take him mistakenly for a superior bird?
The text seems rather to support the former reading, and it appears that we
must accustom ourselves to a phoenix both within and without the simile.
Milton in any case has been less than ingenuous with his readers, and the
more one reads him, the more disingenuous he appears.38 Why introduce a
phoenix here at all, gurative or real? That too is unclear, but we remember
at least the purpose of the angels descent:
Milton 73

But by deceit and lies; this let him know ...
This world is vulnerable to deceit, and Milton subtly underscores the passage
from heaven to earth by heightening the demonic insidiousness of his
language. The fallen readers imperfect reason must strain to make out
relations as the pilot strains with his physical eyes, as Galileo strains with his
telescope, as the fowls gaze with mistaken recognition on the angel, as Adam
and Eve will fail to strain and so blur all our vision.
Thus if Milton enriched the classical style with unorthodox and
audacious liberties, he also passed judgment in a sense upon those liberties,
and in his most exalted scenes attempted to dispense with them. This latter
procedure he carried even further in Paradise Regained, where the poetic
treatment of Christ is comparably bare, and only the temptations make
lovely but intermittent demands upon the senses.
III.
Paradise Lost is the only epic to incorporate the celestial descent into a larger,
and indeed a comprehensive pattern of imagery, a pattern which includes the
poems two major eventsthe falls of Satan and of Adam. Milton interweaves
those events into a fabric of multitudinous references to height and depth,
rising and falling, which appear on virtually every page and bind every
incident of the narrative into a closer unity. Sometimes witty, sometimes
ironic, sometimes simple and transparent, appearing now in an epithet, a
phrase, a simile as well as in the sweeping lines of the action, the subtle
workings of this pattern turn incessantly a moral or metaphysical mirror upon
objective events, and conversely translate moral events into spatial terms.
Milton seems to have regarded this patternit might be called vertical
imageryas one of two patterns basic to his poem. The other is the
ubiquitous imagery of light and dark. He couples themand thereby
associates his own creative act with the dramatic actionat the close of his
rst invocation:
What in mee is dark

Illumin, what is low raise and support ...
[I.2223]
He couples them again in describing Satan during the temptation of Eve:
Hope elevates, and joy

Brightns his Crest ...
[IX.63334]
74 Thomas Greene
And he seems to balance them in constructing Books Two and Three. Book
Three is saturated with light imagery as Book Two is with vertical imagery.
The hymn to light which opens Book Three is balanced by the opening of
Book Two:
High on a Throne of Royal State ...

Satan exalted sat, by merit raisd
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiat to persue
Vain Warr with Heavn ... [II.1, 59]
Book Two ends with the punning verb hies as Book Three ends with the
punning lights. In the rest of the poem the two patterns are mingled
indiscriminately as they are in the rst book, but the vertical imagery is
perhaps the denser throughout.
Underlying this imagery is a paradox which had become a Biblical
commonplace. Its most familiar forms are the prophecies of the second
Isaiah:
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low.39
and of Christ:
Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall

humble himself shall be exalted.40
But it takes many other forms: in the command to Ezekiel:
Exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high.41
in Marys hymn of gratitude to God:
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them
of low degree.42
in the admonition of Peter:
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that

he may exalt you in due time.43
and in many other passages.44 The paradox appears in the poetry of men as
Milton 75
different as Vaughan (O let me climbe when I lye down) and Du Bartas,45

and it recurs in the prose of the paradox-loving Donne.46 But it found its
most sophisticated expressionand the most relevant to Miltonin Saint
Augustine:
There is, therefore, something in humility which, strangely

enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.
This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should
debase and lowliness exalt. But pious humility enables us to
submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us
than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God,
exalts us. But pride, being a defect of nature, by the very act of
refusing subjection and revolting from Him who is supreme, falls
to a low condition; and then comes to pass what is written: Thou
castedst them down when they lifted up themselves. For he does
not say when they had been lifted up as if rst they were
exalted, and then afterwards cast down; but when they lifted up
themselves even then they were cast downthat is to say, the
very lifting up was already a fall. And therefore it is that humility
is specially recommended to the city of God as it sojourns in this
world, and is specially exhibited in the city of God, and in the
person of Christ its King; while the contrary vice of pride,
according to the testimony of the sacred writings, specially rules
his adversary the devil.47
Paradise Lost plays continually with the paradoxical duality of lowness

the lowness of humility and of moral degradation or despairand with the
duality of heightof spiritual eminence or exaltation and of pride. It plays
also with the paradoxes of rising and falling, the abasement that exalts and
the pride that abases. When Adam and Eve fall prostrate to the ground,
confessing their sin with tears in humiliation meek, their prayers rise
successfully to heaven. When the Son offers to descend to a mortal body, he
is correspondingly elevated:
because in thee
Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds,
Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne ...
[III.31114]
But when Satans ambition leads him to rebel, he enters a state of perpetual
pride and thus continuous, progressive degradation. The bitterest ironies in
hell are reserved for the devils attempts to deny their fall, to build up their
76 Thomas Greene
downcast pride and by so doing unwittingly to deepen their abasement. Here

they are cheering themselves up:
hee his wonted pride

Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore
Semblance of worth not substance, gently raisd
Thir fainted courage, and dispelld thir fears.
Then strait commands that at the warlike sound
Of Trumpets loud and Clarions be upreard
His mighty Standard; that proud honour claimd
Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall:
Who forthwith from the glittering Staff unfurld
ThImperial Ensign, which full high advanct
Shon like a Meteor streaming to the Wind ...
At which the universal Host upsent
A shout that tore Hells Concave ...
All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand Banners rise into the Air
With Orient Colours waving: with them rose
A forrest huge of Spears ...
Anon they move
In perfet Phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as raisd
To highth of noblest temper Heros old
Arming to Battel ... [I.52753]
When earlier Satan cries:
... in this abject posture have ye sworn

To adore the Conqueror? ...
Awake, arise, or be for ever falln.
[I.32223, 330]
his irony is swallowed in a greater irony. Each of the speakers at the Great
Consult is really concerned with regaining his former height by various
means: Moloch by armed invasions; Belial, whose thoughts were low, by
appeasement; Mammon, by attempting to raise Magnicence;and what
can Heavn shew more?; Beelzebub, by corrupting man that the devils may
Joy upraise in Gods disturbance. This venture, says Beelzebub, from the
lowest deep will once more lift us up (II.39293). And Satan as he
volunteers is one whom
now transcendent glory raisd

Milton 77
Above his fellows, with Monarchal pride

Conscious of highest worth ...
[II.42729]
The consult disbands with its leaders raisd by false presumptuous hope,
some of them to celebrate past deeds in song but others to retire to a hill, in
thoughts more elevate, there to reason high of fate and freedom. The
symbolic answer to all this is the metamorphosis in Book Ten:
They felt themselves now changing; down thir arms,

Down fell both Spear and Shield, down they as fast,
And the dire hiss renewd, and the dire form
Catchd by Contagion, like in punishment,
As in thir crime. [X.54145]
The descent of Raphael typies that celestial condescension which is

opposed to demonic aspiration. It is a minor instance of the solicitous
compassion for man whose major instance is Christs sacricial redemption.
The episodes opening words:

With pittie Heavns high King ...
implicitly express the paradox of divine generosity. The epithet high is not
perfunctory; it makes the necessary quiet contrast with pittie, Gods affective
descent to earth which precedes the angels literal descent. Raphael is chosen
in turn for that gracious mansuetude toward men which he will display again
toward Tobias. That he deigns now to descend to extended conversation with
Adam implies as well the height of man upon the scale of creation. When
after the fall Michael descends to Paradise, Adam immediately remarks the
severer aspect of his mien:
yet not terrible,

That I should fear, nor sociably mild,
As Raphael, that I should much conde,
But solemn and sublime ... [XI.22336]
The fallen Adam will not be worthy then to receive the angel in his shape
Celestial but as Man clad to meet Man. Raphaels prelapsarian sociable
mildness betokens both heavenly charity and human dignity.
That this height of dignity is threatened we are reminded by Gods
references to
78 Thomas Greene
what enemie
Late falln himself from Heavn is plotting now
The fall of others from like state of bliss ...
But for the moment the threat is muted; man remains the felicitous enjoyer
of Gods garden, with Cedars crownd above all hills, for whose welfare
celestial emissaries post with zealous speed.
Down thither prone in ight

He speeds ...
The adverb is stressed by its position. Raphaels magnanimity is further

underscored by the revelation of his eminence in the angelic hierarchy. He is
one to whom the lesser angels pay homage warranted both by his rank and
his errand:
Strait knew him all the Bands

Of Angels under watch; and to his state,
And to his message high in honour rise;
For on som message high they guessed him bound.
Adam too will pay homage, although not such as to compromise his own
rank:
Mean while our Primitive great Sire, to meet

His god-like Guest, walks forth, without more train
Accompanied then with his own compleat
Perfections; in himself was all his state ...
Neerer his presence Adam though not awd,
Yet with submiss approach and reverence meek,
As to a superior Nature, bowing low,
Thus said ... [V.35053, 35861]
Both the rising of the angels and the bowing of Adam demonstrate the true
and cheerful humility which, for Milton, remained consonant with self-
respect and freedom.
The height of Adams dignity before the fall is balanced by his
abasement afterwards: rst after Eves sin when he the Garland wreathd for
Eve down dropd (X.89293); then in the false humiliation of pride-
concealing despair, when
On the ground
Outstretcht he lay, on the cold ground, and oft
Milton 79
Cursd his Creation ... [X.85052]
and later in the true humiliation of repentance, when husband and wife
Repairing where he judgd them prostrate fell

Before him reverent ... [X.1099100]
Despite the mercy earned by that act, they must leave Paradise, and the
closing lines show them led down the Cliff ... to the subjected Plaine of
suffering and death. This to be sure is not the ultimate conclusion; that will
come only when
New Heavn and Earth shall to the Ages rise,

Or down from Heavn descend. [X.64748]
That is the conclusion the poem glimpses hopefully, but it remains in the
distance. The true curve of the poems major action follows the fallen couple
down into the valley of humiliation.
In thus ending with a downward movement, Paradise Lost reverses the
visionary ascent with which Milton almost habitually concluded his earlier
poems. The youthful optimism of his Christian Humanism is reected in the
soaring visions of redemption which conclude On Time, At a Solemn Musick,
Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester,
Manso, Damons Epitaph, Lycidas, and Comus. The same optimism informs the
visionary conclusion of his rst published prose work, Of Reformation in
England. We can contrast that period of hope with the pessimism of twenty
years later by noticing the downward movement with which The Ready and
Easy Way concludes. The nal words of that tract warn against the precipice
of destruction to which the deluge of Royalist epidemic madness would
hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and abused
multitude.48 At the time these words were written, Paradise Lost was already
well begun. The descent with which the epic concludes has none of the tracts
desperate alarm, but their common movement downward is signicant. In
both works the poet strugglesas indeed he does in all the later worksto
reconcile the high potentialities of man with his fallen perversity. The vertical
imagery in Paradise Lost registers the progress of that noble and fearful struggle
within a great mans moral imagination.
I V.
The richness of Miltons similes is unique in epic poetry. The nest of them
are marvels of compression, and their relationship to their respective tenors
80 Thomas Greene
seems almost inexhaustible. They form thus a sharp contrast with the similes
of the Iliad which, as we have seen, tend to provide relief from the narrative
rather than commentary upon it. Virgils similes do comment, in broad and
generally moral terms, but they do not imitate the tenor in specic point
after point; no ingenuity or wit has gone into their making. Miltons similes
are immensely ingenious; they are little Chinese boxes of meaning. His
conception of the simile may have been inuenced less by the classical epics
than by the theory and practice of George Chapmans translations. Chapman
believed in the detailed correspondence between Homers similes and their
tenors, and tried to demonstrate his belief with desperate ingenuity in his
translation as well as his notes.49
Certain of Miltons literary and historical allusions are in themselves
incipient similes, like the Tobias allusion which precedes Raphaels descent:

With pittie Heavns high King, and to him calld
Raphael, the sociable Spirit, that deignd
To travel with Tobias, and securd
His marriage with the seavntimes-wedded Maid.
Milton is implicitly comparing the two descents. The ostensible point of

comparison is the sociability of Raphael discussed above, that quality by
which he deigns half this day as friend to friend to converse with Adam just
as he will deign to travel with Tobias. This is the ostensible point in common,
but here as in most Miltonic similes, the ostensible point is not the most
important. The purpose of Raphaels visit is to warn Adam against Satan, and
we remember that in the Tobias story Raphael succeeds in bilking Satan. If
we had forgotten it, an earlier allusion would have reminded us:
So entertaind those odorous sweets the Fiend

Who came thir bane, though with them better pleasd
Then Asmodeus with the shie fume,
That drove him though enamourd, from the Spouse
Of Tobits Son, and with a vengeance sent
From Media post to Aegypt, there fast bound.
[IV.16671]
Asmodeus or Satan has sexual designs upon Sara, the spouse of Tobias, just
as Satan designs to seduce Eve. Raphael appears in Tobit as the protector of
a marriage (securd his marriage with the seavntimes-wedded Maid.), the
role which he is about to play here. When God considers Adam and Eve
thus imploid ... with pittie, they stand as patterns of a perfect marriage.
Milton 81
They have rst manifested their conjugal harmony in the morning hymn,
and now their cooperative labor involves a second kind of wedding:
they led the Vine

To wed her Elm; she spousd about him twines
Her mariageable arms, and with her brings
Her dowr thadopted Clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves. Them thus imploid ...
[V.21519]
They deserve pity because they exemplify marriage threatened by the devil.
Raphaels solicitude in Tobit for the uniquely human institution also graces
the domestic scenes in Adams bower. But this spouse he cannot protect.
The phoenix similesince it is at least partly a simileremains more
difficult to elucidate because the history of the phoenix legend is immensely
complex, and because Milton helps less to focus his meaning by qualifying
particulars. The meaning of such an image really has an open end, and no
one can know precisely at what point to delimit it; we cannot even be
absolutely sure how much comparative mythology Milton knew.50 The texts
most obviously in the background of the simile are Tassos description of
Armida (Ger. Lib., 18.35), his beautiful canzone, La Fenice, and the simile from
Vondels descent which we noticed in the last chapter. All of these passages
use the bird as an image of brilliance and beauty and clat, qualities which
Milton is at pains to confer upon his angel and which may in themselves have
led him to the image. From the Odyssey and Aeneid downward, the descent
convention involved a bird simile, and what more natural than to choose for
Paradise Lost the most fabulous of birds, the unique, indeed the legendary
king of birds?51
Behind the Renaissance allusions lie the manifold descriptions in
antique prose and verse. Among the fullest of these are the poems on the
phoenix by Claudian and Lactantius, if the attribution to the latter is correct.
In both of these poems much is made of the excitement engendered by the
birds arrival in Egypt, so precious and sacred was it considered to be. Not
only is it greeted joyfully by men, but the very birds acclaim and escort it.
Claudians poem specically names the eagle as a member of this escort, and
the same poet returns to the image elsewhere in a passage strikingly close to
Miltons:
So when by that birth in death the Phoenix renews its youth and
gathers its fathers ashes and carries them lovingly in its talons,
winging its way, sole of its kind, from the extreme east to Niles
coasts, the eagles gather together and all the fowls from every
82 Thomas Greene
quarter to marvel at the bird of the sun; afar its living plumage
shines, itself redolent of its fathers fragrant pyre.52
A reader familiar with such a passage as this would recognize in Miltons

allusion the note of religious and joyful momentousness.
Neither the poets of antiquityOvid, Claudian, Lactantiusnor the
prose authorsHerodotus, Pliny, Tacitus, etc.who speak of the phoenix
describe it as a celestial messenger, but this role was anciently assigned to it,
or a bird like it, in the Orient and Egypt. An English scholar writes as follows
of Egyptian beliefs regarding birds:
The bird, of whatever kind, is the obvious choice for a messenger

since it is essential to the whole idea of the reservoir of power that
it should be unattainable by mere mortals. The traffic is both
ways, the bird is the messenger from men to gods or, more
exactly, the soul of the departed who traverses the boundary
between the two worlds and the angel of the gods who comes
from the divine numinous regions of power. In the latter case the
message from the gods is the announcement of ineluctable fate,
the reappearance of some temporarily absent physical
phenomenona star, a season, an inundation of the Nile, or it
can be the declaration of a new age or phase of good or evil
luck.53
One bird singled out particularly for the role of messenger was the Bn.w bird,
which seems to have been a mythographic ancestor of the phoenix.
On the whole the Bn.w bird is an angel, announcing stellar events

or dates and, by an extension, the fate of mankind.54
Milton could not have known this belief in anything like its original form,
but some derived version of it may conceivably have reached him. In any case
the phoenix became an obvious symbol for a new age and for collective or
individual renewal. Just as Vida had applied it to the resurrected Christ,55 so
Milton would use it as a great climactic symbol of Samsons regeneration.56
It is suggestive that in his other verse reference to the phoenix, in the
Epitaphium Damonis,57 he represents it watching the dawn arise. And when
in Paradise Lost God predicts the end of the fallen world, he uses language
which recalls the phoenix legend:
The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring

New Heavn and Earth ... [III.33435]
Milton 83
Raphaels discourse to Adam will record the end of that earlier age which was
closed by the angels revolt, as well as the beginning of the new in the
majestic allegresse of creation. His descent is vitalized by the sense of fresh
and hopeful life springing from a great cosmic renewal. Perhaps it does not
strain excessively the subtlety of Miltons imagery to associate the phoenix
reliques with the history Raphael is charged to communicate.
The reference to these relics introduces another curious element of the
legend. Most antique writers repeat that version by which the bird dies not
in re but in a ball of spices. This ball it is which the offspring bears to the
temple of the sun in Heliopolis (or as Milton has it, Thebes). The offsprings
plumage is itself fragrant with spices; this detail appears both in the above
quotation from Claudian and with more emphasis in his poem on the
phoenix.58 It can be no coincidence that Raphaels wings also effuse
fragrance:
Like Maias son he stood,

And shook his Plumes, that Heavnly fragrance lld
The circuit wide.
What are more curious are the subsequent references to spices in Paradise,
references which Professor Bush also associates with the phoenix material:59
Thir glittering Tents he passd, and now is come

Into the blissful eld, through Groves of Myrrhe,
And ouring Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme;
A Wilderness of sweets ...
All four of the plants named here appear in Lactantius De Ave Phoenice, and
three of the four in Ovid.60 The resemblance is the more interesting when it
is remembered that Lactantius and Claudian situated the birth and death of
the phoenix in an oriental paradise protected from all evil. In this paradise
Lactantius places the spices which also ourish in Miltons Eden. A favorite
site for this other paradise was Arabia Felix, whose spicy fragrance has been
compared to the odors of Eden in an earlier simile:
now gentle gales

Fanning thir odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmie spoiles. As when to them who saile
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at Sea North-East windes blow
Sabean Odours from the spicee shoare
Of Arabie the blest ... [IV.15663]
84 Thomas Greene
I am far from sure that these tantalizing parallels can be tted into a
single coherent interpretation. It is possible that we have left interpretation
behind and blundered into the psychology of poetic creation. But one
unpretentious conclusion is surely justied. To the instructed reader, the
phoenix simile intensies the imagery of storied remoteness and oriental
lushness with which Milton saturates his Paradise. If his story is the true,
original, archetypal story which later history and myth fragment and distort,
the poet must nonetheless employ those distorted fragments to reconstruct
for us a living experience of the true.61 Milton would have regarded the
phoenix paradise as such a distortion of the true, and he edges as much of it
into his poem as he needs to enrich the great arch-image of the garden.
The spices contribute, quite apart from any legend, to a certain lulling
heaviness in the atmosphere of Paradise, a Keatsian excess of pleasure which
the ensuing lines intensify:
A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here

Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss.
The scented air and tangled owers are not calculated to permit hard work
much relevance. Thus the Sabean Odours of the Arabia Felix simile invite
the sailors to interrupt their work:
with such delay

Well pleasd they slack thir course ...
[IV. 16364]
In Paradise as well the fragrance seems an invitation to indolence. It even

suggests an incipient sexuality. Adams account of his rst sexual union with
Eve will mention the same fragrance:
fresh Gales and gentle Aires

Whisperd it to the Woods, and from thir wings
Flung Rose, ung Odours from the spicee Shrub,
Disporting ... [VIII.51518]
and as early a poem as the Elegia Quinta associates odorous breezes with
seductiveness.62 Indeed that poems great central imageof Earth inviting
and yearning for the embraces of Apollolooks forward to Nature
wantoning in Paradise.63
But the nature of Paradise, redolent with a slightly drowsy sexuality, is
not quite the nature of the rest of Miltons earth. From its rst description,
Paradise is a little enervating:
Milton 85
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves

Of coole recess, ore which the mantling Vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her crystal mirror holds, unite thir streams.
The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of eld and grove, attune
The trembling leaves ... [IV.25766]
The waters murmur; the leaves tremble; the mantling vine creeps gently. One
understands the artistic logic of this drowsiness. The loveliest paradise of our
deepest fancy is of its essence dreamy. But Miltons nature as a whole, the
nature without the garden, is not dreamy, before the fall or after it. The
nature is vital, energetic, robust, dynamic, possessed of a Baroque joy in
living movement. Such is the nature of the world whose creation is described
in Book Seven. The creation is the setting in movement of a dance, the dance
of jocund universal praise, wherein nothing is inert or heavy and nothing
seems to rest. Its poetry is a poetry of verbs. The same vital dance is
evokedwith what consistency is uncertainby Adam and Eve in their great
morning hymn:
Moon, that now meetst the orient Sun, now ist

With the xt Starrs, xt in thir Orb that ies,
And yee ve other wandring Fires that move
In mystic Dance not without Song, resound
His praise, who out of Darkness calld up Light.
Aire, and ye Elements the eldest birth
Of Natures Womb, that in quaternion run
Perpetual Circle, multiform, and mix
And nourish all things, let your ceasless change
Varie to our great Maker still new praise ...
[V. 17584]
Miltons language is a magnicent reservoir of heroic energy which, when he

chooses, charges the world with the grandeur of God.
But Adam and Eve and the garden about them are not so charged. To
man is given the life of reason and love gratied by a wilderness of sweets,
but not the life of robust energy dancing in praise. Milton was concerned,
perhaps too concerned, with dramatizing the loss of Eden; he wanted to
overwhelm us with all that we might have had. And so he conceived his great
arch-image to resemble the gardens of Alcinous in the Odyssey, the court of
86 Thomas Greene
Alcina in Ariosto, the island of Cupid in Camoens, Armidas garden in Tasso,

Spensers Bower of Bliss. But in these other poems the garden is represented
as a place where heroic activity is interrupted or forgotten. None of those
poets would have considered it dignied to remain forever there where
Nature wantoned so wildly. But Milton represents it as dignied.
Raphael as he alights is brimming with divine vitality; it ows from
Messiah as he wages heavenly war; Satan too retains it before it gradually
drains from him in the later books. But to Adam, by art or accident, Milton
denies this more potent glory. Adams life is circumscribed by the walls of his
garden, and his strength is not of that mobile or questing temper which
would lead him beyond.
This limitation remains with him and his posterity after his fall. The
heroism required of fallen man involves less active energy than the passive
strength of fortitude and patience. The heroes in Michaels foreview of
historyAbel, Enoch, Noah, Christare men whose wills govern nothing
beyond themselves. The heroic will is no longer ambitious to extend its
control. Miltons sarcastic dismissal of those heroic poems which dissect
with long and tedious havoc fabld Knights in Battels feignd (IX.3031)
nds reinforcement in Michaels explanation of the Israelite itinerary after
leaving Egypt:
the Race elect

Safe towards Canaan from the shoar advance
Through the wilde Desert, not the readiest way,
Least entring on the Canaanite allarmd
Warr terrie them inexpert, and feare
Return them back to Egypt, choosing rather
Inglorious life with servitude; for life
To noble and ignoble is more sweet
Untraind in Armes, where rashness leads not on.
[XII.21422]
Milton betrays something like contempt for human military prowess,

although he admires angelic prowess. Perhaps it is also signicant that the
vigor of his language ags, for whatever reason, in just these two concluding
books where human history is related and heroism exemplied. In the
poignant last lines of the poem, exceptionally tender for Milton, the courage
of Adam and Eve is qualied by an almost childlike hesitancy which the
faltering verse rhythms underscore. The quietness and pathos of the close
make a pointed, self-conscious contrast with the traditional epic.
This separation of energy and human heroism seems to me one of the
most distinctive qualities of Paradise Lost. In part it has led to the Satanist
misunderstanding. Satan is unquestionably more vital than Adam, but in the
Milton 87
end it is clear that he is less heroicas the poem denes heroic. The only real
question is whether such a denition, excluding the expansive, questing
impulse of the ego, suppressing vital zest in favor of dogged, self-contained
integritywhether that denition is consonant with ones idea of epic
heroism or even of moral elevation. The great paradox of Paradise Lost lies in
Miltons withholding from his human characters that spacious power which
ennobled his own imagination.
V.
There is no need today to stress the heterodoxy of Miltons belief in the

goodness of matter, the belief which led him to the mortalist heresy and the
denial of creation ex nihilo.64 It is more useful to examine the tensions which
that belief heightened within his own mind. For he attempted to straddle,
both theologically and artistically, two forms of religious experience which
generally tend to oppose each other. The two forms have been described thus:
[Puritanism] was a return to the Augustinian tradition in which

the relation between the individual soul and God is all that
matters. This relationship has too often been taken as a purely
intelligible affair to the exclusion of the senses. In this regard,
Puritanism was what we might call a religion of the ear, i.e., the
hearing and understanding of the Word and of doctrinehence
the profusion of great Puritan preachersand not a religion of
the eye, i.e., the seeing of the sensuous aspect of the world and
the physical passion of Christ.65
Milton was typically Puritan in his neglect of the physical passion, but he
was un-Puritan when he evoked the sensuous aspect of the world. His
religion of the eye, however, did not really diminish the greater importance
he laid upon the inner ear.66 This latter emphasis becomes immediately
apparent if we think of the real purpose of Raphaels descent: to expound the
truth. In this respect Miltons celestial messenger represents a unique
departure from the convention. For he is dispatched neither to prod nor to
encourage nor to punish but to explain, almost indeed to lecture. The success
or failure of his mission will lead to visible, objective consequences, but these
are actually secondary; they serve only to manifest the crucial consequences
which are interior. Milton welcomed the triviality in the act of eating an
apple because that triviality demonstrates the primacy of interior action. For
that action all the visible imagery serves mainly as metaphorical equivalent.
We have already seen how easily the transference is made by such devices as
the vertical imagery.
88 Thomas Greene
Miltons artistic withdrawal from the visible world is implicit in

Michaels scorn for physical heroism (a scorn which several passages
conrm),67 as perhaps it is implicit in Gods phrase to Raphael:

But by deceit and lies ...
But the withdrawal is carried further than this. The poets prayer must be
taken seriously when he invokes the Celestial Light to shine inward
that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.
[III.5455]
The blind consciousness is drawn nostalgically to the beautiful sensuous

world denied it, but driven back thence to the world of things invisible.
Adam will allude uncategorically to the inferiority of outward things:
For well I understand in the prime end

Of Nature her thinferiour, in the mind
And inward Faculties, which most excell ...
[VIII.54042]
and Raphael later assures him that Eve, rightly governed, will to realities
yield all her shows (VIII.575). More telling than these is the impatient
remark of Michael which betrays Miltons imaginative weariness:
Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceave

Thy mortal sight to faile; objects divine
Must needs impaire and wearie human sense:
Henceforth what is to com I will relate ...
[XII.811]
Henceforth almost to the very end the eye is neglected for the ear. Michaels
discourse moves, the whole poem moves, as Barker tells us all of Miltons
thought moves, toward the Paradise within thee happier far, the paradise
one cannot see.
If all epics are concerned with cosmic politics, Paradise Lost is pre-
eminently concerned with them, but like other lesser poems of its century, it
alters the traditional form of political struggle. God is impervious to violence,
but to disobedience he is not so obviously impervious; his victory has to come
in the long run. The struggle works itself out in those terms which have
meaning for a devout, sedentary, urban public. In thus fullling the
Milton 89
seventeenth-century tendency to shift the political medium from violence to

morality, Milton implicitly rejected, it seems to me, part of the basis of epic
itselfthe balance of objective and subjective action, the balance of executive
and deliberative. In the closing books of Paradise Lost, the books which dene
human heroism, the executive episodes almost disappear. This rejection need
not in itself involve grounds for criticism. But it is important to see how the
last of the great poems in conventional epic dress contained within itself, not
accidentally but essentially, the seeds of the genres destruction. One of these
seeds was the internalization of action, the preference for things invisible. A
second was the questioning of the heros independence; a third was the
detaching of heroism from the community, the City of man in this world.
Both of these latter procedures need more comment.
Heroic independence in Paradise Lost is weakened by Miltons juggling
with the theological categories of grace and merit. If we were to grant the
better fortitude of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom as a proper notion of
epic heroism, we should still want to feel that fortitude to be the painful
achievement of the hero. But Milton in more than one passage suggests that
this fortitude is the gift of God. It is a little anticlimactic for the reader, after
following tremulously the fallen couples gropings toward redemption in
Book Ten, to hear from the Fathers lips that he has decreed itthat all of
this tenderly human scene, this triumph of conjugal affection and tentative
moral searching, occurred only by divine at. One might have been tempted
to alter his ideas of heroism to include Adams contrition, did he not
encounter Gods own curt dismissal of it:
He sorrows now, repents, and prayes contrite,

My motions in him: longer then they move,
His heart I know, how variable and vain
Self-left. [XI.9093]
And so the later exemplary gures in Michaels discourse lose most of their
prestige from his prefatory warning:
good with bad

Expect to hear, supernal Grace contending
With sinfulness of Men ... [XI.35860]
It is true that we need not regard Adam and the Hebrew patriarchs as
necessarily elect above the rest, recipients of that peculiar grace which
ensures salvation, although Milton very likely did so regard most of them.
Even if we choose to ignore that doctrine, the remaining ambiguity of grace
and merit to which Miltons language leads effectually destroys the dramatic
clarity and force which epic heroism requires. The interplay at the heart of
90 Thomas Greene
the epic between individual excellence and limitation falters because so little
ground is left for excellence. The announced intent, to turn the note to
tragic, risks failure because tragedy implies a standard of human greatness
surviving in spite of misfortune and even corruption. Milton maintains that
standard only shakily and intermittently after the disaster of the fall. And he
makes clear that man can do nothing to achieve the one thing worth
achievingnothing at least beyond the act of faith:
his [Christs] obedience

Imputed becomes theirs by Faith, his merits
To save them, not thir own, though legal works.
[XII.40810]
This weakening of heroic prestige is abetted by the severing of the

traditional bond between hero and community. It is true that the Son
considered as hero is a benefactor of the widest possible community, and
even Abdiel speaks in a sense for all the loyal angelic community in his
deance of Satan. But if we agree to limit heroic awe to the human sphere,
then we must speak only of individual heroes, lonely men who mount the
current of common perversity. Their goodness, as Milton describes them,
stands over against the universal evil; no, more than this, it outweighs the
evil. Adams comment on the deluge is offensive and immoral but Milton did
not so regard it:
Farr less I now lament for one whole World

Of wicked Sons destroyd, then I rejoyce
For one Man found so perfet and so just,
That God voutsafes to raise another World
From him, and all his anger to forget.
[XI.87478]
By the standards of Miltons arrogant moral aristocracy, the damnation of the

community matters less than the salvation of the few.
Although the anatomy of evil in the poem is so brilliant as to be
unsurpassed in its kind, the dramatization of goodness fails. When Michael,
anticipating Saint Paul, refers to charity as the soul of all the rest of the
virtues, we can only protest that we have seen little of it in the poem. We miss
it chiey in those places where Milton asserts it to exist. When it is
scrutinized, Gods generosity in dispatching Raphael turns out to be not at
all a true magnanimity but a petty legalistic self-righteousness. Adam must
not be allowed to pretend surprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarnd. The
majesty of Raphaels descent can only be appreciated if the awkwardness of
its motive remains half-forgotten.
Milton 91
The aristocratic doctrine which prefers the few to the many leads
directly to Adams felix culpa speech and Gods imputed victory over Satan.
The meaning of that victory is contained in Satans lines at the outset:
If then his Providence

Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to nd means of evil ...
[I.16265]
Satan has perverted the good of the angelic creation by revolt; out of that evil
comes the good of the human creation. Satan will pervert that too, but he
still loses the poem, Milton tells us, through the good accruing from the
Incarnation and Atonement. It matters not, from this viewpoint, if the great
mass of souls are damned, since for the saints
the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, farr happier place
Then this of Eden. [XII.46365]
It is possible doubtless to share Adams joy at this outcome, but ones

participation is increased if he can personally look forward to that felicity. In
this respect, I fear, by the poets own doctrine, his audience is few indeed. For
the rest of us, Michaels depressing recital of our forebears tribulations mars
the perfection of Gods victory. At this point Paradise Lost, like so many other
Christian epics, falls into that ambivalence of joy and pain which plagued the
genre, as it now seems, almost inevitably. Theologically its conclusion asks us
to applaud, but dramatically it brings us to tears.
This conict nds a local solution in the concluding expulsion which I
have already had occasion to praise. Here for once Miltons compassion is
unmixed, and all the constituent feelingsnostalgia, resolution, remorse,
bewilderment, timidity, and hopethese make a peace which owes its
harmony to the poets wise pity. These last twenty-ve lines go far toward
saving the great uneasy poem they conclude. But the mending is the work of
image, rhythm, tone, and mood, instruments of local efficacity; as soon as we
free ourselves of their atmosphere to reect on those more abstract planes
which the poem also embraces, we rediscover its profound and destructive
divisions.
Perhaps however in the last analysis it is pedantic to dwell too long
upon those divisions. Even if one chooses, with Sir Walter Raleigh, to regard
Paradise Lost as a monument to dead ideas, or contradictory or even offensive
ideas, one need not return to it out of wonder alone for its magisterial and
insidious art. Miltons enlightened reverence for the Bible permitted him to
92 Thomas Greene
entertain the possibility that his story was something like a myth. If we too
consider it as that, in the fullest sense, if we read it with the detachment we
bring to the myth of the Iliad, then we need not follow unmoved and
unedied Miltons search for a measure and denition of human existence.
The work in its plenary wholeness makes a richer denition than any one of
its dogmatic parts. And just as Swift betrayed his concern for mankind by
railing at it, Milton persuades us of his humanity even in his moments of
passionate severity.
NOTES
1. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard
Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 17879.
2. These poems are described at length in R. A. Sayce, French Biblical Epic.
3. J.B. Broadbent, in Some Graver Subject (London, 1960), pp. 4765, discusses
more fully the unpropitiousness of mid-century England for Christian epic.
Broadbent remarks (p. 55) that Miltons genius was irrevocably bent on a divine epic
which the public no longer wanted.
4. This movement has been studied by Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and
Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1959).
5. Thomas Robinson, The Life and Death of Mary Magdalene, ed. H.O. Sommer
(London, 1899), pp. 2528.
6. Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905), pp. 304305.
7. Works of Samuel Johnson, Literary Club Edition, 3 (Troy, 1903), 330.
8. Translated by the indefatigable Sylvester as Bethulias Rescue (1614).
9. The Italian Girolamo Fracastoro was a neo-Latin poet who left uncompleted
a work entitled Ioseph, rst published in 1555 and translated by Sylvester under the
title The Maidens Blush. In the rst book an angel descends to comfort Joseph after
his brothers have thrown him into a pit. The passage which seems to have attracted
Cowley reads thus in Sylvesters version:
Such was the speed of this Celestiall Bird
(To prosecute, and execute the Word
Of his great Master) towards Dothan Down,
Alighting rst upon Mount Tabors Crown,
Amazd to see his Groves so sodain green,
And Lawns so fresh, with owry tufts between.
The Hill-Born Nymphs with quavring warbles sing
His happy Well-Come: Caves and Rocks doe ring
Redoubled Ecchoes; Woods and Winds withall,
Whisper about a joyfull Madrigall.
Complete Works of Joshua Sylvester, ed. A.B. Grosart, 2 (Edinburgh, 1880), 108, ll.
34352. Cowleys apparent debt to Sylvester was rst pointed out by J. M. McBryde,
A Study of Cowleys Davideis, JGP, 3 (1901), 2434. It is of course conceivable that
Milton 93
Cowley knew Fracostoros Latin poem, but given his unquestionable familiarity with
Sylvester, his indebtedness to the English version is much more likely.
10. Poems, pp. 1213.
11. Book II, note 53.
12. Book I, note 24.
13. Thus Davenant, for example: Though the elder poets, which were then the
sacred priests, fed the world with supernatural tales, and so compounded the religion
of pleasure and mystery, two ingredients which never failed to work upon the people,
whilst for the eternity of their chiefs, more rened by education, they surely intended
no such vain provision; yet a Christian poet, whose religion little needs the aids of
invention, hath less occasion to imitate such fables as meanly illustrate a probable
Heaven by the fashion and dignity of courts, and make a resemblance of Hell out of
the dreams of frighted women, by which they continue and increase the melancholy
mistake of the people. Preface to Gondibert, reprinted in Spingarn, Critical Essays of
the Seventeenth Century, 2, 5. See also Hobbes Answer to Davenant in the same
volume, especially pp. 6162.
14. Cowley was referring to Thomas Heywoods Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels,
published in 1635.
15. Poems, p. 1416.
16. Poems, p. 13.
17. Book III, note 45.
18. Book II, note 60.
19. See above, chapter 8, pp. 2378, 251.
20. Poems, p. 14.
21. This report appears in Bishop Newtons edition of Paradise Lost (1749) and is
there ascribed to hearsay conversations of the long-lived third Mrs. Milton. It is
quoted in The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson, et al., 18 (New York,
193138), 390. All quotations from Miltons prose will be taken from this Columbia
edition, hereafter referred to as C.E.
22. The text of all verse quotations from Milton is from The Poetical Works of John
Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire, Oxford Standard Authors (1958).
23. Lines 20419. Milton may have remembered one line in this passage:
Nec mora, iam pennis cedentes remigat auras ...
when he wrote of Raphael:
then with quick Fan
Winnows the buxom Air.
An archaic meaning of buxom was equivalent to cedentes. A. W. Verity compares the
latter phrase to a line in Fairfaxs Tasso: With nimble fan the yielding air she rent
(18.49). The Italian original is not so close.
24. The fourth draft of Adam Unparadizd opens: The angel Gabriel, either
descending or entring, shewing since this globe was created, his frequency as much
on earth, as in heavn, describes Paradise. C.E., 18, 231.
94 Thomas Greene
In the notes for Sodom Burning: In the last scene to the king & nobles when the rce
thunders begin aloft the Angel appeares all girt with ames which he saith are the
ames of true love & tells the K. who falls down with terror his just suffering ... Ibid.,
234.
25. George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre (Chicago, 1944), p. 66.
26. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered
his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did y. Isaiah 6:2.
27. The word Ardors in line 249 refers to the seraphim, the highest of the nine
angelic orders, associated by the pseudo-Dionysius and later angelologists with a
fervent and burning love of God.
28. F.T. Prince, The Italian Element in Miltons Verse (Oxford, 1954), p. 129n. B.
Rajan, in his Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London, 1947), is a
recent critic who lays particular stress on the classicism of Miltons style.
29. Io ho per rmo, the le lingue dogni paese ... siano dun medesmo valore, &
da mortali ad un ne con un giuditio formate; the io non vorrei the voi ne parlaste
come di cosa dalla natura prodotta; essendo fatte, & regolate dallo artitio delle
persone & beneplacito loro. Sperone Speroni, Dialogo delle Lingue, in Dialoghi
(Venice, 1596), pp. 12223.
30. One might cite the Areopagitica virtually passim in illustration, as well as large
parts of the Seventh Prolusion and Of Education. Consider for example Miltons
remark after sketching his proposed study of the trivium: From hence, and not till
now, will be the right season of forming them to be able writers and composers in
every excellent matter, when they shall be thus fraught with an universal insight into
things. C.E., 4, 286.
31. Haller cites the following passage as typical: Whereas men in their writings
affect the praise of owing eloquence and loftiness of phrase, the holy Ghost ... hath
used great simplicities and wonderful plainness, applying himselfe to the capacities of
the most unlearned ... and under the vaile of simple and plaine speech, there shineth
such divine wisdome and glorious majestie, that all the human writings in the world
though never so adorned with the owers of eloquence, and sharpe conceits of wit
and learning cannot so deeply pearce the heart of man. John Downame, Christian
Warfare, pp. 33940. quoted by William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York,
1957). p. 130. This Puritan attitude toward language resembles in certain respects the
attitude of scientic rationalists like Hobbes and Sprat, although the two attitudes are
based on very different presuppositions.
32. C.E., 3, 35.
33. C.E., 3, 34; 5, 5; 14, 5; etc. Compare Sonnets XI, XII, XV, and On the new
forcers of Conscience.
34. C.E., 11, 3.
35. C.E., 3, 241. The quotation from Jeremiah appears at 3, 231.
36. C.E., 3, 235. Milton echoes the conventional classical expression of a
comparable, but less sincere, inspirationalist attitude in the opening of his Elegia
Quinta.
Milton 95
37. See Maynard Mack, introduction to Milton volume of English Masterpieces

(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961).
38. Compare the following passage in Book Four, where Satan as tiger seems to
stray into a simile while still remaining outside it:
Down he alights among the sportful Herd
Of those fourfooted kindes, himself now one,
Now other, as thir shape servd best his end
Neerer to view his prey ...
... about them round
A Lion now he stalkes with erie glare,
Then as a Tiger, who by chance hath spid
In some Purlieu two gentle Fawnes at play,
Strait couches close, then rising changes oft
His couchant watch ...
(IV.39699, 40106)
39. Isaiah 40:4.
40. Matthew 23:12. Compare Luke 14:11; 18:14.
41. Ezekiel 21:26.
42. Luke 1:52, 43.
43. I Peter 5:5-6.
44. Job 24:24. Ezekiel 31:1018. Micah 7:8. Matthew 11:23. James 1:910.
Ephesians 4:910. Philippians 2:510.
45. La Premiere Sepmaine, Premier Jour, 55774; 66970. The line from Vaughan
is from The Morning Watch. Compare Miltons line from the verses At a vacation
exercise: Yet being above them, he shall be below them (l. 80).
46. See Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation #21: I am readier to fall
to the earth, now I am up, than I was when I lay in bed ... Even rising is the way to
ruin! Now I am up, I am ready to sink lower than before. See also Sermon XV,
Folio of 1640, preached at Whitehall, March 8, 1622.
47. City of God, Book XIV, chapter 13.
48. C.E., 6, 149.
49. See for example Chapmans Iliad, 2.72 ff., and his commentary on this
passage.
50. I am indebted to my colleague Geoffrey Hartmann for valuable
bibliographical information on the phoenix in antiquity. The most useful single study
is by J. Hubaux and M. Leroy, Le Mythe du Phnix dans les Littratures Grecque et Latine
(Liege, 1939).
51. Milton may have taken a hint from Marino who, in his Gerusalemme Distrutta,
compared all the angels in heaven to phoenixes (Zirardini, ed., p. 493). Another
extended description of the bird can be found in Du Bartas (Premiere Sepmaine,
Cinquiesme Jour, 55198), although Milton did not follow the common association
of the phoenix with Christ found there.
96 Thomas Greene
52. Claudian, On Stilichos Consulship, trans. M. Platnauer, Loeb Classical

Library, 2 (London and New York, 1922), 41420.
53. R.T. Rundle Clark, The Origin of the Phoenix, Birmingham Historical
Journal, 2 (194950), 132.
54. Ibid., p. 133.
55. Cranwell edition, pp. 354-55.
56. Samson Agonistes, 1699 ff.
57. 185 ff.
58. divino spirant altaria fumo
Et Pelusiacas productus ad usque paludes
Indus odor penetrat nares completque salubri
Tempestate viros et nectare dulcior aura
Ostia nigrantis Nili septena vaporat.
59. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 281.
60. The fourth, Balme or balsam, is related to the fourth plant, cinnamon, in
Ovid. The three in Ovid also appear in Du Bartas.
61. See Isabel MacCaffrey, Paradise Lost as Myth (Cambridge, 1959). Mrs.
MacCaffreys book seems to me one of the freshest and most seminal studies of
Milton in many years, and I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to her.
62. ll. 5760, 6769.
63. The coincidence may be worthy of note that in both the poems of Lactantius
(l. 34) and Claudian (l. 62) as well as in the passage from Du Bartas (l. 581), Nature
is semi-personied as she is in Milton. This appears to be additional evidence that the
passage following the phoenix simile was inuenced by memories of the phoenix
literature.
64. Miltons faith in the goodness of matter underlies not only the profusion of
Paradise but also the unconventional refusal to follow Tasso, Marino, and Cowley in
dressing up his angel with a temporary body. Raphael needs to make no elaborate
toilette like Cowleys Gabriel because he already has a material body. We see him
in his proper shape. Apparently Michael must assume a feigned appearance because
the fallen Adam is no longer privileged to see him as he looks in heaven.
65. John E. Smith, Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, 9
(1955), 260.
66. Allen is surely in the right when he refutes the aspersions of Macaulay and
Eliot upon Miltons visual imagery. Paradise Lost makes a great and subtle appeal to
the eye, as I myself have argued. When I speak of Miltons greater emphasis on the
ear, I am not of course thinking of his verbal music or any such thing, but of his
appeal to the inner ear of understanding.
67. VI.817 ff.; XI.689 ff.; XII.386 ff.
ANGUS FLETCHER
The Transcendental Masque
T hat Comus is no ordinary masque has long been felt. In dedicating the
published work to John, Lord Viscount Brackley, Lawes said that although
Comus was not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate
offspring, so lovely, and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath
tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction, and brought me to a
necessity of producing it to the public view.1 These friends found an
excellence posterity has conrmed. Yet beyond the eloquence of the series
of lines, to use Johnsons phrase, Comus has presented a problematic aspect
in both theme and form.
The extraordinary bulk of critical commentary on the Miltonic
treatment of chastity, a critique as subtle as it is learnedmuch if not all of
it leading into the mysteries of Christian or Neoplatonic theologywill bear
witness to the ambiguity of themes in Comus. We may perhaps be impatient
with the questions, proofs, and counterproofs of thematic criticism. But we
cannot dismiss the crisis implied in this lore. No simple way out of tangled
Miltonic image and theme will be forthcoming, and if a formal approach to
Comus is proposed, it should be constantly attuned to the complications of
theme which have made the work so tantalizing to its readers.2 What needs
to be done, following Robert M. Adams lead,3 is to explain the doubts of
critics about Comus, yet without explaining them away. Generations of critics
are never, taken as a whole, wrong. They are responding to something, and
From The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Miltons Comus. 1971 by Cornell University.
97
98 Angus Fletcher
the historical critic in his turn should respond to this continuity of critical
awareness. In dealing with Comus there is no need to deny its dramatic force.
Comus, naively viewed, is a markedly dramatic piece. But how so? Perhaps it
would be useful to take Dr. Johnson seriously and ask if, as he called it, Comus
is not a drama in the epic style.
Woodhouse wisely referred criticism of Comus to the remarkable
passage of An Apology for Smectymnuus where Milton recounts the progress of
his almost obsessive concern with idea of chastity.4 Among several striking
personal reminiscences there runs a key motif: Milton set the problem of
chastity in the context of a largely literary experience. He began his
education in purity in the poetic world of the two famous renowners of
Beatrice and Laura, and proceeded in due time (whither my younger feet
had wandered) to those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn
cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and thence
from the laureate fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of
study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy, but chiey to the
divine volumes of Plato and his equal, Xenophon. Throughout the account
we sense not only the pursuit of the abstracted sublimities of knowledge
and virtue, but in the course of this pursuit, the sublimation of thought into
character, so that we can well believe the poet when he announces his early
won creed: that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well
hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a
composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things; not presuming
to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself
the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy. This is not
hermetic pretension, though there is a smell of the magus about the poet as
sublime poem; Milton here betrays that characteristically total involvement
of his whole self with his thought, an involvement mediated by his poetic
vocation. For through the poetic second voice, he would discover the self
dened by all the prior patterns and compositions of the best and most
honorable things.
The Johnsonian epithet comes into focus. A drama written in epic
style would rst of all ow like a narrative poem, and secondly it would be
a drama raised above the requirements of realistic decorum to a level of
inspired, prophetic, or epic voice, that is, raised to the vehement level of
style described in Longinus famed treatise. Johnson did not clarify the
distinction between the usual dramatic genres and the epic drama, but
Thomas Warton did, when in his edition of Milton (1791) he said that
Comus is a suite of Speeches, not interesting by discrimination of character;
not conveying a variety of incidents; not gradually exciting curiosity; but
perpetually attracting attention by sublime sentiment, by fanciful imagery of
the richest vein, by an exuberance of picturesque description, poetical
allusion, and ornamental expression. The prime mover of the drama in epic
style would seem to be the sublime sentiment, with its usual picturesque
accompaniments.
In Comus, therefore, Milton is unfolding those chaste and high
mysteries which, in conjunction with the Holy Scriptures, veil and reveal
the secrets of divine wisdom. In the terms of Pico della Mirandola the poet
is at once both magus and interpres. Chastity must be envisioned in the most
sacred languages, and, by conversion, the language of the poet, arising in the
devotion to the ideal of the chaste, must achieve sublimity if it is to equal the
transcendental challenge. Milton writes about chastity continuously, in tracts
on marriage, love, and divorceeven on freedom of speech and thought
and in his major poems, all of which deal with virtue as an effluence of
chastity. The Apology suggests something even more radical about the
Miltonic career: that it was the literary enactment of one vast, many-sided
personal struggle for the comprehension of the idea of the chaste mystery, and
therefore that as a career the life of Milton indeed has the prime requisite of
a poem: namely, it has a hero. Milton becomes a poet-poem in this heroic
manner. The idea of chastity is for him a burning, luminous, radiant core of
energy, and the recurrent theme of temptation, on which Frye has
commented so eloquently, is but the dramatic trial of the chaste vision.5 For
chastity, like grace (if that is in any ordinary sense a virtue), metaphorically
permits only perfect motion: that is, motion which redeems the wandering,
mazy, labyrinthine error of ordinary life. Chastity nds its model of
movement in the circular form of the Ptolemaic universe; it is perfect, like a
sphere, with no beginning and no end. How then express its forms and
implications? This is the mystery that Milton wished to suggest, and went so
far as to describe, in the Apology.
Milton imagines himself living and acting on heroic lines. Frye has
pointed out the difference between his radical, revolutionary temperament
and the conservative temperament of Spenser.
The radical or revolutionary artist impresses us, rst of all as a

tremendous personal force, a great man who happened to be an
artist in one particular eld but who would still have been a
remarkable man whatever he had gone into. His art has in
consequence a kind of oratorical relation to him: his creative
persona reveals his personality instead of concealing it. He does
not enter into the forms of his art like an indwelling spirit, but
approaches them analytically and externally, tearing them to
pieces and putting them together again in a way which expresses
his genius and not theirs. In listening to the Kyrie of the Bach B
Minor Mass we feel what amazing things the fugue can do; in
listening to the nale of Beethovens Opus 106, we feel what
amazing things can be done with the fugue. This latter is the
100 Angus Fletcher
feeling we have about Comus as a masque, when we come to it

from Jonson or Campion. Because the art of the revolutionary
artist follows a rhythm of personal development external to itself,
it goes through a series of metamorphoses: the revolutionary
artist plunges into one period after another, marking his career
off into separate divisions.6
The continuous revelation of a giant personality behind the mask is

crucial to the work of an artist like Milton. But in assessing the work itself,
we need a notion like the transcendental. The formal peculiarity of this
style of work is again nely suggested in Fryes distinction between the
conservative and revolutionary aspects of poetry.
The revolutionary aspect of Milton also comes out in that curious

mania for doing everything himself which led him to produce his
own treatise on theology, his own national history, his own
dictionary and grammar, his own art of logic.... Both kinds of
genius may seek for an art that transcends art, a poetry or music
that goes beyond poetry or music. But the conservative artists
ndsif this metaphor conveys anything intelligible to the
readerhis greatest profundities at the centre of his art; the
radical artist nds them on the frontier.... Milton, like Beethoven,
is continually exploring the boundaries of his art, getting more
experimental and radical as he goes on.7
Comus ts into this radical experimentation; it transcends by formal pressures

on the normal boundaries of the masque. It transcends art in this sense
precisely, and I would hold that the other transcendence, of which Frye
rightly speaks, is only the fulllment of the more limited possibilities of
classical selectivity and repose. There is, perhaps, a further distinction to be
made, though it does not really contradict Fryes notion, between the
transcendence of the radical style and the perfectionism of the conservative
style. The former issues, as Frye suggests, in a revolutionary attitude toward
tradition, the latter in a neoclassic piety toward rulesat least if the energy
of creation is not coequal with the energies of self-expression.
Comus, should it t this broad view of Miltonic creativity, can be only
partially illuminated by historical sources which are supposed to explain its
power and its complexity. To argue that Milton had various models is to
repeat the obvious, unless one further asks, What was his experimental
attitude toward those models? For the transcendental re-creation of an
inherited form is always so new and revolutionary in feeling and form that it
will yield none of its secrets to the critic who is, at bottom, unconcerned with
the radical mentality bringing such a work into being. In the case of Comus,
as we shall see, the obvious use of a whole, range of magic devices, persons,
and scenes provides the setting for the radical encounter with masque as
genre. Milton picks exactly the theme and variations which will permit him
to exercise a virtuoso control over his masque.
( ... )
THYRSIS: THE ORPHIC PERSONA
Orpheus had been a central character in Campions The Lords Maske (1613)
where he served a purpose rather similar to the Daemons purpose in Comus.43
Both gures command the powers of song and can summon the agents of
perfect incantation. But while the singing magician is the happier version of
Orpheus, he has another, less happy side, in line with other myths of the
culture bringer. Besides building the lofty rime he can suffer the Orphic
death, and Adonis-like, become the sacricial victim whose highest parallel is
Christa similitude Milton draws upon for Lycidas, which he signicantly
designates a monody. The Orphic persona thus has a double valence, which
complicates and deepens his use for the utterance of the poets second voice.
In commenting on the importance of the Orphic legend for Virgilian
creativity, Berger has stressed the phrase from the Aeneid, Book IV, describing
the loss of Euridice: Orpheus respexit (Orpheus looked back). Here respicere
means to look back unguardedly, in longing, toward the object of love. The
poet must learn to look back at the beloved past without destroying its life, or
his own happiness and control. Respicere can also mean to look back, in the
sense of reecting on, or, to look again, in the sense of revising.44 In Comus
we nd a parallel situation: here the looking back, is conveyed, as we shall
see, in sonorous form, in the resonating mirror of the echo song. In both cases
we are dealing with a deep irony in the culture bringers passion. What he
values is never to be directly his, since to possess the loved object would be to
destroy it; it can only be his if it is reected, recreated, resonated. The Orphic
design is, in this light, a myth of resonance. Fulllment is an echo.
The mystery of repetition is the secret of the Virgilian respicere.
Kierkegaard asked, Is repetition possible? The myth of Orpheus embodies
one set of answers to that question. It is thus signicant that Orpheus was the
hero of heroes for early opera, that most expressive art form. John Arthos has
recently argued for an affinity between Monteverdis operatic work and
Samson Agonistes.45 Gretchen Finney has shown operatic analogies between
Comus and the Catena dAdone.46 These parallels are haunting chiey because
in the Orphic aspect of Thyrsis, Milton seems to be projecting a mythic
meaning that was strongly projected by the rst operas. Kerman has
described their mythic basis:
102 Angus Fletcher
The myth of Orpheus, furthermore, deals with man specically

as artist, and one is drawn inevitably to see in it, mirrored with a
kind of proleptic vision, the peculiar problems of the opera
composer. Initially Orpheus is the supreme lyric artist. In the
classic view he is the ideal of the prize-winning kitharistaor, in
Christian allegory, the evangelical psalmist who charmed the
melancholy Saul. To the fourteenth century, he is the minstrel
who exacts his boon from the Fairy King; to the sixteenth,
perhaps, the madrigalist; to the nineteenth, proud Walther who
persuades the German pedants. The eighteenth century painted
him, tremulously, as the amiable singer of Metastasios faint
verses who entranced the King of Spain. But for Orpheus the
lyric singer, the crisis of life becomes the crisis of his lyric art: art
must now move into action, on to the tragic stage of life. It is a
sublime attempt. Can its symbolic boldness have escaped the
musicians of 1600, seeking new power in the stronger forms of
drama? Orpheus new triumph is to fashion the lament that
harrows hell out of his own great sorrowing emotionthis too
they must have specially marked, wrestling as they were with new
emotional means, harrowing, dangerous to manage. But the
fundamental conict of the myth transcends that time and this
medium, and extends to every artist. It is the problem of emotion
and its control, the summoning of feeling to an intensity and
communicability and form which the action of life heeds and
death provisionally respects. All this Orpheus as artist achieves.
But as man he cannot shape his emotions to Plutos shrewd
decree; face to face with the situation, he looks back, and fails.
Life and art are not necessarily one.
Kerman goes on to show that the mythic failure of Orpheus is by no means

clear or self-evident in its signicance. Yet the failure is a great operatic crux.
To be sure, this problem of control is an abstraction; few artists, and
certainly not Monteverdi or Gluck, have drawn so clean and scientic an
issue. Nor did Orpheus, in the simple, unelaborated myth. It is the
dramatists task to clarify the issue for Orpheus.47 And we can say, with
Milton in mind, it is the masque makers task to clarify the Orphic failure by
treating the masque as defense and resource.
Barber has said that if Comus fails, it fails by a failure of rhythm ...
mere vehemence, mere assertion ... and where our imagination is allowed to
rest on the merely literal or merely intellectual contest, the defense of
chastity lacks the nal cogency of pleasure. Barber nds this vehemence in
Collins himselfperhaps according to Miltons design. Barber would seem
to support the view of song as liberating spell: It is notable that the images
which suggest a benign sexual release refer to song.48 Milton has accorded
success to his benign magician, the Attendant Spirit. But evidence of the
Attendant Spirits power is not apparent in a mere reading of his imagery. We
have to scan his rhythms, and besides, we have to make use of our surviving
musical manuscripts of Comus in order to discover the metrical style Milton
and Lawes together created. For here will be the antidote to all false
vehemence and spurious assertiveness. To restate Barbers question, the
masque has to achieve the natural grace of its own chosen metron. Compared
with the use of verse and music, the use of dance is minimal, even negligible.
It may even be misleading to suggest that Comus has much in common
with the earlier dance-drama of the typical court masques. Unlike them,
Comus could be presented without dancesa loss which would obliterate
many earlier masquesalthough the spectacle and the meaning do in fact
prot, in due measure, from the two dances that Milton did allow. Whereas
the earlier models, Jonsonian especially, carried a weight of meaning in their
dances and spectacle, Miltons work has displaced this burden and given it to
the imagery of the speeches and the recitative music of their declamation.
Seeking the source of this musical style in the mythography of the
work, we would associate expressivity with the Orphic voice. Orpheus sings
in suffering. The music he makes is not instrumental: in Ad Patrem, Milton
praises to his father the true Orphic bard (the vates), who sang at ancient
festal occasions. He asks: In brief, of what use is the idle modulation of the
voice if it lacks words and sense and rhythmical speech? That kind of music
suits woodland singers, not Orpheus, who by his song, not his lyre, held back
rivers, gave ears to the oak trees, and by his singing drew tears from the
shades of the dead. Such fame he owes to song (ll. 5055). This distinction
Ficino had made.
In his treatise on divine madness, he states that the human soul

acquires through the ears a memory of that divine music which is
found rst in the eternal mind of God, and second, in the order
and movements of the heavens. There is also a twofold imitation
of that divine music among men, a lower one through voices and
instruments, and a higher one through verse and metre. The
former kind is called vulgar music, whereas the latter is called by
Plato serious music and poetry.49
Milton was to espouse the higher music in his own works, where he
forged willing chains and sweet captivity. At a Vacation Exercise makes
perfectly clear the equation in Miltons mind between music and the verse of
his native language, which remains independent of any strictly musical
accompaniment. Even when he praises the singing of Leonora Baroni, the
great Roman singer, he does so in terms that place the standard of beauty in
104 Angus Fletcher
a celestial frame. God or the Holy Ghost, he tells her, moves with secret
power in your throatmoves with power, and graciously teaches mortal
hearts how they can insensibly become accustomed to immortal sounds. But,
if God is all things and interpenetrates all, in you alone he speaks, and in
silence holds all else (ll. 510). The second epigram to Baroni confers on
her the power of reanimating the dead Pentheus, the archetypal victim of
maenadic bacchic rage. To give Pentheus life is to make harmony the means
of salvation. Milton imagines this sublime sacricial act in ambivalent terms,
for it was Orpheus whom the maenads tore to pieces.
Perhaps only in Samson Agonistes and its choral inventions did Milton
control the full ood of this ambivalence. There the Orphic voice is
committed equally to salvation and self-destruction. An unwitting yet half-
chosen suicide rewards the singer who descends into the underworld. It is
not clear how much of a sense of this descent in left in Samson Agonistes; this
is a skewed myth, but Samsons doom elicits pure outcries. Samson is the
ultimate Orphic hero; his blindness drives him into a totally auditory world
of hearing and speaking. As for persona, it is not unwarranted to question the
parallels between the hero and his poet. The choice of Samson as tragic
voice, for all its risk of dramatizing the stasis of tragic energy rather than its
motions, is still the most daring of Miltons choices. Now he can fully utter
the drama of an entangled self-consciousness; now it is proper for the hero
to be in part the poet himself, and equally proper for the poet to voice his
absolute command of the poetic medium. The nal twist in this triumph of
a rational self-awareness (and its mystery) is the invention of the Chorus, for
this Chorus is planned on the principle of echo, to give resonanceto
provide a resonating surface and mirrorto the second voice of the poet.
The particulars of every Miltonic work differ, but common to them all
is a penchant for enclosed vastness. That the poet understood his own will to
encompass may be seen throughout his writings, since he is generally so
conscious of what, as a writer, he is attempting. No better example could be
given than the encomium upon Cromwell in The Second Defence of the People
of England, where, expanding on a traditional rhetorical topic, Milton uses
the terminology of enclosure and expansion:
It is not possible for me in the narrow limits in which I

circumscribe myself on this occasion, to enumerate the many
towns which he has taken, the many battles which he has won.
The whole surface of the British empire has been the scene of his
exploits, and the theatre of his triumphs; which alone would
furnish ample materials for a history, and want a copiousness of
narration not inferior to the magnitude and diversity of the
transactions.50
Later, observing that the title of king was unworthy the transcendent
majesty of your character, Milton denes the problem of naming the
surpassing glory: Actions such as yours surpass, not only the bounds of our
admiration, but our titles; and, like the points of the pyramids, which are lost
in the clouds, they soar above the possibilities of titular commendation.
Cromwell had to let himself be called Lord Protector because it was
expedient, that the highest pitch of virtue should be circumscribed within
the bounds of some human appellation. In Tetrachordon, Milton describes
the practical problem of the abundance of argument that presses to bee
utterd, and the suspense of judgement what to choose, and how in the
multitude of reason, to be not tedious.51 It is the trial of superabundance, of
genius conscious that it generates.
Johnson was right. It was in Miltons character always to choose
subjects on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his
fancy without censure of extravagance. Inheriting a large literary capital,
Milton put this imagistic wealth to work. The capitalistic analogy is hardly a
metaphor here. Milton treats literary tradition like an entrepreneur,
investing one work in another, continuously making mergers. This
parodistic takeover particularly colors the Ovidian elements of Comus, which
show that myth is a currency convertible from one generation to another.
Comus the seducer replays Leanders sermons of love to Hero. Suddenly, the
poem of Hero and Leander rises like an apparition, staring Comus in the face.
We shall need to speculate further on this mirroring.
Then, too, Milton has the power of extreme concentration. He holds a
whole tradition of exegesis suspended in the little speech on haemony, where
Thyrsis knowingly refers to that Moly / Which Hermes once to wise
Ulysses gave. It was to this moly that the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes
applied an early allegorical gloss, perhaps about 200 B.C. (and in transcribing
Cleanthes view, Apollonius the Sophist made what may be the earliest use of
the term allegoria): Cleanthes the philosopher says that Reason is indicated
allegorically, by which the impulses and passions are mollied.52 Haemony
is more than moly, as scholars have labored to show. It acts magically in the
framework of a dramatic action. But it has the effect of a logical power as well.
It is entangled in a kind of witchcraft, the verbal spell, for as Milton would
know from the Remedia Amoris, Ovid had said: If anyone thinks that the
benecial herbs of Haemonia and the arts of magic can avail, let him take his
own risk. That is the old way of witchcraft; my patron Apollo gives harmless
aid in sacred songs. One can no longer tell if haemony is a drug or a word.
Comus is full of such terms. Extravaganza without extravagance results. The
richness of commentary on the Maske itself suggests that wealth is one aim
of transcendental form.
106 Angus Fletcher
NOTES
1. As in the 1645 edition, in Douglas Bush, The Complete Poetical Works of John
Milton (Boston, 1965), 113. This work is hereafter referred to as PW.
2. A wealth of allusion to learned articles, and so forth, in John Demaray, Milton
and the Masque Tradition, should not obscure the limits of Demarays argument, which
seems to depend upon the notion that dance denes the masque as Milton evolves its
genre in Comus, an assumption that would force one to equate Arcades with Comus, or
even to argue that Arcades is the more perfect masque. Yet the most obvious thing
about Comus is that it has almost no dances; they have none of the formal
iconographic import and intricacy usually given to court-masque choreography. They
sufficed on the occasion of the original performance, but since a printed libretto can
also, if its author chooses, yield a dance-drama, we should begin with the fact that this
libretto fails to do so.
3. Milton and the Modern Critics (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), repr. from Ikon: John Milton
and the Modern Critics (Ithaca, 1955).
4. A. S. P. Woodhouse, The Argument in Miltons Comus, University of Toronto
Quarterly, II (1941), 46; the passage will be found in John Milton, Prose Selections, ed.
Merritt Hughes (New York, 1947), 156159. Bush (PW, 110) says, That all-
important passage ... needs to be read and reread, and quotes George Sandys
commentary on Ovids Circe: Men whose appetites revolt from the sovereignty of
reason (by which we are only like unto God, and armed against depraved affections)
can never return into their country (from whence the soul deriveth her celestial
original) unless disenchanted and cleansed from their former impurity.
5. Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Miltons Epics (Toronto,
1965), 9, 126 ff. Most problematic is the Miltonic idea of temptation to premature
action.
6. Ibid., 9091. Speaking of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Frye observes
that, as a revolutionary thinker, Milton will appeal to precedent only with the
greatest reluctance.
7. Ibid., 9192.
43. The Lords Maske includes the gure of Entheus, or Poetic Fury, whom
Orpheus (l. 84) identies with Phoebus Apollo.
44. Berger, Archaism, Vision, and Revision, 32.
45. Milton and the Italian Cities (London, 1968), Part II, Milton and
Monteverdi, 129206. See also Arthos, On A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1954).
46. Musical Backgrounds, 175194.
47. Opera as Drama, 2728.
48. A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in Summers, ed., The Lyric and
Dramatic Milton, 65. This essay is reprinted in Diekhoff, A Maske at Ludlow, with an
interesting response to questions which Summers had posed in the earlier book.
49. P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, II, 157158.
50. Selected Prose, ed. Hughes, 349. See also Douglas Bush et al., eds., Complete
Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven and London, 1966), IV, 668.
51. Complete Prose Works, II, 614.
52. Quoted by R. P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event (London, 1959), 37, from The
Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, ed. A.C. Pearson (London, 1891).
JOHN HOLLANDER
Echo Schematic
W e might dwell for a moment on one of the most famous fragments of

broken refrain in our literature, the nonce burden in Keats Ode to a
Nightingale following the mention of the perilous seas in ery lands
forlorn (70). The next strophe begins Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self! (7172). The echoing repetition
returns, as has often been observed, another sense of the word forlorn, as if
some of the perils of the seas lay in the fragility of the vision which they
helped compose. The word is, even here, Miltonic, with its resounding of a
literal and a gurative meaning. It recalls Adams sense of life without Eve in
Paradise: To live again in these wild Woods forlorn (Paradise Lost IX, 910),
where the last word trails away in a cloud of sad prophetic irony: these wild
Woods forlorn are not the wilderness of fallen nature. Adam thinks he
means Eden guratively, but he is, alas, literally invoking both the fallen
world and the lost unfallen one: his trope of the place of loss is an unwittingly
literal designation of the loss of place. Keats forlorn is like a very echo
from within his text, but it reaches back to another voice behind it.
The scheme of refrain is likewise linked to the echo of affirmation and
acknowledgment that we have already remarked in Hesiod, pastoral
tradition, and so forth, in the mythopoeic account of its origination in
Paradise Lost. The First Hymn (V, 153208) invokes heavenly powers for aid
in amplication of its praising voice, even as the Lady invokes Echos
From The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. 1981 by The Regents of the
University of California.
109
110 John Hollander
amplication in Comus. But the unfallen hymn of praise transcends the

anaphora and catalogue of its precursor Psalm 148 by seeming to generate its
refrainindeed, the very idea of refrainduring the course of its unfolding.
Before moving on from echoing schemes to ad hoc tropes of echo, we might
examine the Original Refrain in detail.
Adam and Eve (V, 147-52) are in Paradise
to praise
Thir Maker, in t strains pronounct or sung

Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence
Flowd from thir lips, in Prose or numerous Verse,
More tuneable than needed Lute or Harp
To add more sweetness
or, as we might continue, to add more of the signicance which

Schopenhauer felt, and Nietzsche quoted him as feeling, accompanying
instrumental music gave to utterance and action. Adam and Eves language,
we are implicitly told, needed no supplementary ethos or pathos, and
certainly none of the logos which, for romantic thought, purely instrumental
music came to embody as well.
In this total a capella song, classical and unfallen, the original pair rst
observeechoing, sotto voce, Psalm 19that even Gods lowest works
declare / Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine (V, 15859).
Then they move into the imperative, hortatory mode of the hymn which
follows. They call for the Sons of Light to speak, thus reversing the great
pattern of fallen praise (in Pindars rst Pythian Ode, and in the myth of the
statue of Memnon) in which light strikes a gurative echo in literal sound
from a body, instead of merely casting a shadow: Thou Sun, of this great
World both Eye and Soul, / Acknowledge him thy Greater, sound his praise
/ In thy eternal course (V, 17173).
This is the hymns own primary voice. Its rst Nachklang is picked up
tentatively, across an enjambment which cuts the amplifying echo, the distant
epistrophe, in half:
Moon, that now meetst the orient Sun, now ist

With the rst Stars, xt in thir Orb that ies,
And yee ve other wandring Fires that move
In mystic Dance not without Song, resound
His praise, who out of Darkness calld up Light.
(V, 17579)
Adam, who will soon himself call up Sound out of Silence, then establishes
Echo Schematic 111
the formula / (verb) + his praise / in the second half of the signicantly
varied end-stopped lines that grow into the refrain of the remainder of the
hymn:
Air, and ye Elements of eldest birth

Of Natures Womb, that in quaternion run
Perpetual Circle, multiform, and mix
And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change
Vary to our great Maker still new praise.
Ye Mists and Exhalations that now rise

From Hill or steaming Lake, dusky or grey,
Till the Sun paint your eecy skirts with Gold,
In honor to the Worlds great Author rise,
Whether to deck with Clouds thuncolord sky,
Or wet the thirsty Earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.
His praise ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,

Breathe soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave.
Fountains and yee, that warble as ye ow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
Join voices all ye living Souls; ye Birds,

That singing up to Heaven Gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise;
Yee that in Waters glide, and yee that walk

The Earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep;
Witness if I be silent, Morn or Even,
To Hill, or Valley, Fountain or fresh shade
Made vocal by my Song, and taught his praise.
(V, 180204)
This is not glossed by the narration as the First Refrain, but such,
indeed, it is. Like the famous cras amet qui numquam amavit, quiquam
amavit cras amet line of the Pervigilium Veneris (tomorrow those who have
never loved will love, and those who have will love tomorrow), the broken
echo concludes, and builds up, stanzas of various lengths, summing up the
essential qualities of the different choral voices. The elements vary the
praise, as the rest of the hymn will vary the refrain. Thus, the Mists and
Exhalations, Rising or falling still advance his praise (with an echo of
112 John Hollander
still from line 184); then the lovely anadiplosis of line 192, where the winds
pick up the motion of the clouds, transmit it to the visible waving of the trees,
and complete a traditional symphony of the locus amoenus with the warbling
of the waters eloquence, followed by the bird song.6
The nal stanza (200204) returns to the singers themselves. A tornata
that, like the conclusion of Lycidas, frames as well as completes, it is self-
referential. Its self-reference is like that of the prayer, which concludes in a
kind of caudal or meta-prayer for its own efficacy (and which, in Herberts
poems in The Temple, is frequently disposed throughout the main text in a
constant gurative undersong). In addition, it invokes the primary world of
pastoral. The sounding landscape is made vocal by poetry by means of that
primary animation which, for Vico, is the most luminous of tropes, in that
it makes fables of the inanimate by giving sense and passion to things, here
both embodied in voice. The authenticity of the hymn itself is here avowedly
conned to a realm of gure: all that can bear witness to unfallen mans
praising voice are the stock ctions of pastoral fable, taught his praise. This
echoes Virgils rst eclogue, formosam resonare dotes Amaryllida in silvas,
even as they are both reechoed, in fallen modulations, in Adams forlorn cry
in Book X (86062):
O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales and Bowrs,

With other echo late I taught your Shades
To answer, and resound far other Song.
Adam here is already like Virgils Tityrus and the starvd lover of Book IV,
line 769. Even the Original Song is full of echoes, although in Paradise Lost,
an internal Nachklang frequently generates a proleptic Vorklang, or preecho.
In the poems pattern of unfallen organization, we must take this hymn to be
the true locus amoenus (Miltons locus classicus) of pastoral echo, and its rhetoric
to be that of pastoral praise, not loss.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the scheme of echoing
refrain here is that it is employed tropically. The rst echo of the series
which increases, rather than diminishes, in signicatory volume is itself a
metaphor of the reection of light. The sun (as Conti says, author of light
to the other stars) sounds / His praise; the other heavenly bodies resound
/ His praise in echo, and in conceptual parallel to their return of solar light.
The Original Hymn, then, manifests not only the First Refrain, but the
First Echo.7 Even the angelic choirs sacred Song in Book III (372415)
has no refrain, nor indeed any other echoing schemes. It is like sung
doctrine, and requires the accompaniment of Harps ever tund, that
glittering by thir side / Like Quivers hungthat is, aside from the shade of
pun on quaver as musical ornament, harps with strings like the glittering
arrows of erotic putti. It concludes with the neoclassical lyric formula never
Echo Schematic 113
shall my Harp thy praise I Forget. The only natural acoustical echoes
occurring previously in Paradise Lost are in the demonic regions of Book II,
where they are used in carefully turned gures to describe the nature of
damned assent. The fallen angels agreeing with Mammon after his speech
produce a sound likened to that of winds stored in hollow rocks, played back
later with hoarse cadence to lull anchored ships (28490). But we must
remember that this concord will only lead to the full disclosure of its own
acoustic nature in the transformed hisses later on (Book X). And so, too, with
the assent given to Satans words further on:
If chance the radiant Sun with farewell sweet

Extend his evning beam, the elds revive,
The birds thir notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest thir joy, that hill and valley rings.
(II, 49295)
(Here, too, light strikes forth sound, and herds half-echo birds.) But this
very simile, his epic need to use it, and its lamentable success in the poem
cause Milton to interject, in one of those rare moments of intrusion, his
revulsion. In Book IV, he cries out Honor dishonorable in disgust at the
notion that postlapsarian pudeur about nudity was present in Paradise. Here
in Book II, he cries out: O shame to men! Devil with Devil damnd / Firm
concord holds, men only disagree. Both this damnable echoing and the
unechoing, ungured music of the heavenly choir in Book III, then, are
recalled and transcended in their echoes in the First Hymn. They are
cancelled and transformed in a process analogous in Milton to what Hegel
calls Aufhebung.
The Original Hymn not only originates refrain, but interprets the
scheme as a trope of echoas assent, consent, concert, consonance,
approval, and witness. Moreover, its relation to older utterances of the trope
is itself resonant. This affirmative aspect of echos gure completely
obliterates a negative, mocking one, which appears in a starkly literal way
earlier, again in the demonic milieu of Book II. Sins account to Satan of her
parturition of Death concludes as her son, he my inbred enemy, forth
issud, brandishing his fatal Dart / Made to destroy. The following lines are
strongly Ovidian: I ed, and crid out Death; / Hell trembld at the hideous
Name, and sighd / From all her Caves, and back resounded Death (II,
78789).
This is an instance of a negation more profound than even the
reductive mockery which Milton draws upon, and Sin anticipates for fallen
human poetry. She cries out her sons name in a blend of erotic fear and
mother love; she names him directly and screams out the general human
alarm (as in Murder!). Hells return of the word is the sound of revulsion
114 John Hollander
from caves whose hollowed emptiness has now for the rst time been (1)
employed as a physical locus of echo, and (2) guratively identied with
negation, nonbeing, and death. And yet the whole event uses the materials of
pastoral affirmative echo, perverted in the Satanic mode of eternally twisted
tropings. The forest wide is tter to resound / The hollow Echo of my
carefull cryes says Spensers Cuddie in his sestina (Shepheardes Calender,
August, 15960), thus importing the hollowness of the nymphs abode into
the sound of all the body she has left.8 But most poetic echoes are far from
hollow; rather are they crowded with sound and rebound or, like Miltons
echo of Death, with dialectic. Never again would negative echo resound so
immediately and so clearly. In American poetry from Emerson through
Whitman, Frost, and Stevens, the seascape or landscape will only be able to
utter the word death in a barely decipherable whisper.
The comic or satiric echo song depends for its force, then, on the
dramatic irony sustained by the primary voices not hearing, as it were, the
nasty synecdochic echo (else it would surely, we feel, shut up after a couplet
or two). An even stronger dramatic irony is generated when the speaker is
made inadvertently to echo a prior voice: dramatic form is an implicit echo
chamber in this respect. (One has only to think of the role of words like
natural and nature in King Lear or honest in Othello, whose reboundings dene
the tragic contingencies of those who give them voice. The operation of the
trope of dramatic irony in such cases seems dialectical. Is it because of the
anterior enunciations of such words that a tragic hero is known to all but
himself as an echoer, rather than as a propounder? Or does the classical
analysis of the dramatic irony as an inadvertent foreshadowing, an un-self-
comprehended prophecy, reveal the more central twisting of the ironic
machine?) In the narrative realm, such instances abound in Paradise Lost. Or
when we lay, argues Belial, invoking recent pains (II, 16869), Chaind on
the burning Lake? that sure was worse, unaware that he is echoing the
narrators previous description of the nature of Satans vastness: So stretcht
out huge in length the Arch-end lay / Chaind on the burning Lake (I,
20910). The echo, which includes the enjambed lay, is of a voice Belial has
never heard, an epic narrator possessed of some Foreknowledge absolute.
The reader is reminded again how Belial is limited by his ignorance of the
script written for him (once he has surrendered his freedom by choosing
Satan and the ction of self-createdness). Even as the modern reader hears a
secondary echo, in this and other instances of repeated phrase throughout
Paradise Lost, of the classical formulaic epithet, he implicitly surveys the
distance between fallen angels such as Belial and the Homeric personages
who are both his poetic forbears and, in the remodeled mythological history
of Paradise Lost, his historical descendants.
In general, when Miltons poem echoes itself, whether from nearby or
at a great distance, there is no ironic shift of voice, as in the previous case. In
Echo Schematic 115
its wordplay, for example, Paradise Lost favors the echoing sort, rather than
the compact form of the single word: antanaclasis rather than strict pun. In
the rhetoric of wit, this is usually the weaker form (imagine, for example,
Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of
Yorks / Own son), where the repetition has the plonking quality of self-
glossing in the worst way. In many cases in Shakespeares sonnets, or in lines
like Donnes When thou hast done, thou hast not done, the antanaclastic
repetition embodies a compact pun (so that in order to gloss itself, the line
would have to end thou hast not done [Donne], and it is only the second
done which is being played upon). It is likely that the excessively unfunny
antanaclasis with which Satan sneaks into Paradise, when in contempt, / At
one slight bound high overleapd all bound / Of Hill or highest Wall (IV,
18182), is mimetically badeven if Satans leap is as graceful as that of the
winner over the tennis net, the epic voice, in describing it, must change its
notes to corny. At such close range, echoing repetition controls the ironies
that inhere in the relation of the punning meanings, rather than those
dramatic ironies that change of time and place will make literal.
More typical in Paradise Lost is the slightly deformed antanaclasis which
Abraham Fraunce in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) reserved for the usual
term paranomasia (which he also calls allusion, interestingly enough, from
the ludus of wordplay): thus Satan in Book I sneers at the benign rule of the
King of Heaven (whom he has just accused of being tyrannos rather than
basileus anyway), who still his strength conceald, / Which tempted our
attempt, and wrought our fall (I, 64142). Milton has given Satan the
advertent wordplay here, as Adam is given the gentler and more loving wit,
the beautiful and beautifully complex invocation to Eve in Book IV (411):
Sole partner and sole part of all these joys. (Here, as Alistair Fowler points
out, the two meanings of soleonly and unrivalled are also at work.) But
love commands more intricate wit than hate does, and the way in which we
are reminded that part is part of partneran echo of stem rather than of
suffixis one worthy of George Herbert.
Closely related to Belials echo of the voice of the narrationindeed, a
kind of antitype of itis Satans echo of an earlier formula in his speech on
Mt. Niphates (IV, 4245). At a strange moment of inadvertent admission of
a truth about his relation to God that he had previously (and publicly)
denied, he avers that
he deservd no such return

From me, whom he created when I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none ...
This is the Satan who, enthroned at the beginning of Book II in a erce but
116 John Hollander
inauthentic splendorits description may itself echo Spensers

representation of the throne of Lucifera (Faerie Queene I. iv. 8)exalted sat,
by merit raisd / To that bad eminence (II, 56). The memory of the bright
eminence echoes the readers earlier apprehension of the bad one, but the
dramatic irony is softer here than it was in the case of Belial. An even more
poignant echo of the inexorable narrative voice occurs in Book IX, where
Satan is at one of his most moving moments in the poem.
He has just made his second mistake about Paradise. (The rst is in
Book IV, 5058, where he attributes to the unfallen Adam and Eve, as they
make love in a sight to him hateful and tormenting, the necessity for the
consolations and errors of fallen eroticism. He says of them that they were
Imparadist in one anothers arms / The happier Eden. Satan is wrong
because they are imparadist indeed in Paradise; the notion that an erotic
embrace is a bower of bliss is a desperate, lovely ction of fallen humanity.)
A complementary mistake also results from Satans being smitten with beauty
in Paradise: addressing Earth (IX, 99ff), Satan praises the scene before him,
feels the need of rhetorical elevation, then rationalizes the hyperbole: O
Earth, how like to Heavn, if not preferrd / More justly, Seat worthier of
Gods, as built / With second thoughts, reforming what was old! Then
comes a second order of rationalization: Earth is better because it is the
newer model, For what God after better worse would build? Again, le
pauvre, Satan can only respond in fallen human terms of work, enterprise,
and progress. It reciprocates for the mistake about love in Book IV. From the
beauty of Earth and the nobility of its inhabitants (Growth, Sense, Reason
all summd up in Mana purely humanist notion), Satan moves to the deep
pleasure yielded by landscape, pleasure unfallen yet, for humanity or for the
seventeenth century, into the declensions of Beautiful, Picturesque, and
Sublime, but summing them all up:
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange

Of Hill and Valley, Rivers, Woods and Plains,
Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forest crownd,
Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge ...
(IX, 11519)
Rocks, Dens and Caves ... Satan nds no refuge in these, and particularly
in the dialectic of array and design in pictures and spectacles of them. The
reader will remember that the adventurous Drakes and Magellans of
Pandemonium in Book II passed Oer many a Frozen, many a Fiery Alp, /
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of Death (II, 62021).
That famous line of monosyllables over which the steps of prosodic theorists
have for so long tripped is immediately echoed in the next line, A Universe
Echo Schematic 117
of death.... Not only is Satans longing catalogue of the joys of contemplated

landscape bound to conclude in the places of retreat and darkness,
preguring the meaning of shadiness that will eventually become attached to
dark places after Adam and Eve rst guiltily hide themselves there. He is,
moreover, echoing the narrations understanding of the proleptically fallen
relation, in Book IIs prophetic vision of human culture, of rocks and dens
and caves with death.
Adams reex of this kind of Satanic echoingechoing of what has
already, and in just those words, been propoundedcan be heard in his
patently rhetorical antanaclasis at IX, 1067. The rst words he says to Eve
after they awaken, as from unrest, from their rst fallen fucking in a shady
bank, / Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowrd (IX, 103738) are: O
Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear / To that false Worm... (IX, 106768).
This is the same rhetorical Adam of the sole partner and sole part,
affirming the new fallen phenomenology of Eves name: it no longer echoes
even, eve, evening, but now, as henceforth, evil. In addition, he, like
Satan, is echoing the narration. Less than three hundred lines before, Eve
had stretched out her hand in evil hour I Forth reaching to the Fruit (IX,
78081). Adam speaks almost with a tone of indeed, Milton was right in
saying that it was in evil hour that this occurred, a tinct of wisdom never
given to Satan. It is only the poetry of fallen man that will need to employ
tropes and fables, similes, echoes, and allusions, in order to represent Truth.
We somehow know that Adam is far less mocked by the dramatic irony of the
narrative echo than Satan is, tortured ironist though he may be.
The chorus of echoes which accompanies the scenes of loss and regret
surrounding the Fall is completed by the narrations own playback of an
already resounding phrase. It occurs in the digression on the nature of the g
leaves with which human nakednessthe fallen form of nudity, ever to
require clothing, as nudity itself, if concealed, is always to be veiled by
visionary draperyrst hides itself (Honor dishonorable!). The g tree is
associated with a benign primitive role in a Rousseauian nature: the Indian
Herdsman shunning heat / Shelters in cool (IX, 11089). It is this exotic
tree, benevolent and protective in the more exotic and childlike of human
cultures, that
spreads her arms

Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow
About the Mother tree, a Pillard shade
High overarcht, and echoing walks between.
(IX, 11037)
Shade in Paradise is a lovely variation from sunlight; this Pillard shade,

118 John Hollander
and that of the shady bank / Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowrd
have already been imprinted with the shadowy type of death. In Book I,
3013, the famous and heavily allusive image of the fallen legions of the rebel
Angel Forms shows them as lying Thick as autumnal Leaves that strow
the Brooks / In Vallombrosa, where th Etrurian shades / High overarcht
imbower (my italics). The specic verbal echo accompanies the shadows
cast by the earlier text on the futurity of all shady places. And, as elsewhere
in Milton, the rhetorical echo calls up the literal acoustical event: echoing
walks between.
There is something like a dramatic irony in a characters inadvertent
echo of the narrative voice by which even his own utterance is recounted.
There is also, as we have been seeing, a kind of allusive typology in the more
possibly self-aware echo of an earlier moment in Miltonic narration by a later
one. We might compare these two conditions with the different kinds of
irony revealed by the sense of unwitting literalness. In a phrase like Mirandas
O brave new world ..., the audience recognizes an allusion to a literal
hemisphere, of which the speaker is ignorant. Much more like Miltonic
allusive irony is Abrahams remark to Isaac, in response to the boys question
about what lamb will be used for the sacrice. God will provide his own
lamb, replies the Kierkegaardian religious hero; the dramatic irony is again
generated by the unwitting literalness of what had been propounded as a
trope, here a trope of evasion. But the Christian reading of this episode (not
the akeda of the Hebrew Bible, but the rst gurative sacrice foreshadowing
the trope of Christ as lamb), gives the literalness another dimension. What
Abraham offers guratively, the narrative literalizes when the ram is
discovered entangled in the thicket. But the literalization is only a movement
into the fullness of antitype: the foreshadowing will be literally fullled in the
typological completion of the episode in the New Testament when the Lamb
of God is nally provided by, and of, him.
It is this kind of dramatic and typological irony that is at work in so
many of those highly charged rhetorical moments in Paradise Lost. It lurks in
the contortions of Satans manipulations of the literal and the gurative, the
local and the general (Evil be thou my Good completed by the whining of
All good to me becomes / Bane in Book IX, for example). Indeed, we might
learn from the shadows of the unwitting in Satans rhetoric, and in that of
Adam when he echoes Satan in syntax and tone (as in IX, 75575), how
central to dramatic irony this question of inadvertent literalness can be.
(Kafkas great parable On Parables also sheds erce light on this.) Dramatic
irony is often a matter of an utterance striking an unwitting Vorklang, as it
were, of an eventual echo, of a situation to which it will turn out to have
alluded. It might be redened in terms of manifest rhetorical guration
turning out, horribly, to have been literal. Certainly, Satanic rhetoric
provides an origination of this.
Echo Schematic 119
One kind of self-echo in Milton occurs in the almost leitmotivic

reappearance of phrases and cadences in Paradise Lost to which sophisticated
critical attention of the past few decades has been so attentive. These form a
subclass of their own. As echoes, their voices do not come from afar, or from
absent places, so much as from a memory of the poems own utterance. Their
region of origin is usually schematically related to that of the echoic answer:
thus, in Book V, the Son sits Amidst as from a aming Mount, whose top /
Brightness had made invisible (V, 59899); the reversal of No light, but
rather darkness visible (I, 63) points up the radically different character of
the aming. But such patterns are quite basic to the fabric of Paradise Lost,
and might be considered as elements in what seems to be the poems memory
of itself.9
NOTES
6. A historical origination of literary refrain is to be found in that locus of echo,

pastoral tradition. Theocritus Idyll I generates a refrain which, in its successive
versions, grows self-reexive: Begin a country-song, dear Muses, begin to sing
changes to Begin a country-song, Muses, again begin to sing and, nally, to Leave
off your country-song, Muses, leave off your singing. For the role of repetitive form
in pastoral, see the excellent discussion in Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1969), 9395.
7. But not the rst mocking echo: see Paradise Lost II, 789. The blending of echo
into refrain or refrainlike repetition can be seen in the strange hexameters of
Abraham Frauncess The Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1592).
Here is part of the metamorphosis of the nymph Echo:
Yea, very bones at last, were made to be stones: the resounding
Voyce, and onely the voyce of forelorne Eccho remaineth:
Echo remaineth a voyce, in deserts Eccho remaineth,
Eccho noe-where seene, heard every where by the deserts.
(Eiv)
8. The sestina is, as we have seen, a most resounding form, and Cuddies
expressly so; consider how the lines quoted above (from strophe 2) echo the opening
lines of the rst strophe: Ye wastefull woods beare witnesse of my woe / Wherein my
plaints did oftentimes resoundas those plaints indeed just have resounded in the
alliterations of the previous lines: Ye careless birds are privie to my cryes / Which in
your songs were wont to take a part. Spenser continually glosses his echoes by
identifying them with meaningful sound.
9. Like the deferred naming of the muse Urania, this whole pattern of self-echo
in Paradise Lost probably derives from The Faerie Queene. Whether in the immediately
repeating punning gures (e.g., Mercillas sword, Whose long rest rusted the bright
steely brand) or the long-ranging memories (e.g., Poore Colin Cloud, (who knowes
not Colin Clout?) of VI. 10. 16 and Of Arlo-hill (Who knowes not Arlo-hill?) of
120 John Hollander
VII. 6. 36), Spenserian echoing is a most complex matter. Where, and why, this sort
of thing happens in Spenser is worth studying.
PETER M. SACKS
Milton: Lycidas
I n reading Lycidas, one might well begin by recognizing how many

different yet mutually reinforcing works the poem performs. Admittedly, a
great many circumstances converged on the genesis of the poem; but it was
Miltons extraordinarily ambitious imagination that so thoroughly amplied
the complexity of his occasion. At least two characteristics of Miltons
temperament, apart from his ambition, tted him for seizing the occasion in
this way: his combative spirit, in which the desire to write was never more
strongly aroused than by some obstacle or challenge; and his closely related
fascination with loss, where, again, his desire and imagination seemed to stir
most powerfully against deprivation or constraint. Indeed, Miltons motto
might have been So much the rather.... I shall speak of this more concretely
during what follows, but for the moment we may agree that another way of
inquiring into the occasion of Lycidas is to ask what adversaries in addition
to deathwhat circumstances, powers, even traditionsMilton chose to
range himself against, and to surpass.
We have already remarked on the decline of the pastoral elegy during
the three decades preceding Lycidas, a decline conrmed by the fact that
Milton was conspicuously alone among more than a score of elegists in his
choice of what by 1637 was regarded as an unconvincing, even trivial, form
for a poem of mourning. Milton was no doubt excited by the opportunity to
reconquer the ground lost by the genre and to carry the tradition onward to
From The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. 1985 by the Johns Hopkins
University Press.
121
122 Peter M. Sacks
unprecedented greatness. Here occurs one of the convergences that so

distinguish the creation of this poem. For Milton himself was at this time
straining to herald his future career as an epic poet by mastering and
surpassing the pastoral mode. The historical needs of the declining genre
thus interlocked with the personal needs of a rising poet.
This interlocking is, however, far more profound, for Miltons
ambition was not merely to write a consummate pastoral poem but to secure
immortality. In the often-cited letter to Diodati, written in September, two
months before Lycidas, Milton wrote, You ask what I am thinking of? So
may the good Deity help me, of immortality!1 Now what could agitate that
desire for immortality more urgently than death itself, which in the year of
Kings death had already carried off not only Ben Jonson, the reigning poet,
in whose wake men spoke of poetrys demise, and not only numerous victims
of the plague (some even in Miltons village of Horton), but also, in April,
Sara Milton, mother of the poet? And what could appease that same desire
for immortality more fully than a work that was itself not merely a promise
of approaching fame but a poem designed precisely to create a gure for
what surpasses death?
None of Miltons earlier elegies are strictly pastoral, and it was not until
Kings death that Milton had a subject truly suited to that form. An obvious
suitability is the fact that Milton and King both had been nursed upon the
self same hill of Cambridge. This allowed the pastoral ction of a shared
locale and common pursuits. The convention of mourning a fellow shepherd
was now legitimate, and what is more important, Miltons relative closeness
to King (compared to his remote relation to previously elegized gures)
provoked the poets defense against his own mortality more strongly than
had hitherto been the case.
Furthermore, King died at an age (25 years) that lent itself to an
association with the martyred vegetation deities, an association augmented
by Kings having been both a poet and a clergyman, two roles well suited to
the allegorical conventions of the genre. Here was a set of circumstances that
permitted Milton to attempt an elegy, which, unlike his earlier exercises,
could be measured against a denable and hence surpassable series of works.
Joining company with Theocritus, Virgil, Sannazaro, and Spenser, Milton
was now where he felt most at home and most inspired: in the arena with and
against the tradition he had so carefully absorbed.
By reflecting on the abrupt death of a young clergyman (who had in
fact died en route to his first parish, in Ireland), Milton also saw his chance
to exploit fully the pastoral elegys potential for theological criticism or
political satire. This tradition was not new, having had strong practitioners
in Mantuan and Spenser, to name only two of whom Milton was aware. But
no elegy had ever mounted an attack so magisterially swingeing and so
menacingly prophetic as the speech of Saint Peter in Lycidas. Here
Milton: Lycidas 123
again, we face a convergence of personal and historical forces in Miltons

poem.
What, then, was the historical context in which Milton mourned the
death of a young member of an oppressed minority of good clergymen?
While most critics have noted Miltons antagonism toward Roman
Catholicism, and more especially toward the tyranny and corruption of the
high Anglican clergy, few have examined the situation as closely as they
might.
During the years preceding 1637 the courts of James I and Charles I
had severely increased their repression of Puritanism. Archbishop Laud,
Primate of England since 1633, had extended the power of the High
Commission Court and had added that vigorous instrument of nationwide
surveillance and suppression, the Metropolitan Visitation. At the same time,
the church exercised absolute rights of censorship, preventing or punishing
the publication of any seditious works. To clinch his reactionary campaign,
Laud prescribed certain elements of ceremony in all services and proscribed
the Puritan practice of sermons or lectures, hence denying Milton a potential
source of income, leaving him church-outed by the prelates (and shove
away the worthy bidden guest).
It was partly in reaction to this dramatic extension of church tyranny
that the nation began to reassert liberty of conscience and expression; and a
reader of Lycidas should be aware that 1637 was indeed the rst year of the
so-called revolutionary epoch. In this year, Scotland rebelled against the Book
of Common Prayer, Hampdens ship-money case drove in a wedge against
authority, and in June, in the presence of vast numbers of outraged
sympathizers in the palace yard at Westminster, the Puritans Prynne,
Bastwick, and Burton were cut and branded for sedition.
These men had written and circulated an outspoken attack entitled A
Breviate of the Prelates intollerable usurpations, both upon the Kings Prerogative
Royall, and the Subjects Liberties. In this work they decried the abrogation of
the rule of law and the perversion of the entire fabric of justice by churchmen
who had crept up above all. They denounced the wolsh clergy for preying
upon instead of nourishing their congregations, and they prophesied the
vengeance of God upon the nation. The language and the stance pregure
part of Miltons poem, and the fate of the three men must have harshly sealed
their inuence on the poet.
Milton may actually have been in London in late June on one of the
periodic visits he is known to have made from Horton. Even were he not
among the crowds at Westminster, he would certainly have heard of the
events and of the eloquent orations made from the pillory, since a
sympathetic Relation of the entire procedure, together with a report of the
speeches, was rapidly circulated. What is signicant for us is the manner in
which the victims and their supporters perceived the event. For the Relation
124 Peter M. Sacks
is marked by a combination of denunciatory, vengeful anger, together with a

sense of martyrdom, ceremony, and grace.
The account speaks of the three Servants of Jesus Christ ... having
their way strawed with sweet hearbes from the house out of which they came
to the Pillory, with all the honour that could be done unto them.2 They
might have been the subjects of an elegy or of a funeral procession. And their
own language on the pillory has a ring that we hear again in Miltons poem
written only ve months later. Here is Dr. Bastwick, moments before his ears
were hacked off: If the Presses were as open to us, as formerly they have
beene, we would shatter his Kingdome about his eares. And here is Prynne
after he had been cut and branded: The more I am beate down, the more
am I lift up.3 These phrases happen to coincide with words and gures in
Lycidas,4 but beyond them, the entire drama, with its currents of wrath
and resilience and its fervid revolutionary appeal to a retribution and
consolation that derive from beyond this world, is part of what we must
recognize as Miltons chosen occasion.
Kings death was an accidentthere was no one to blame. And yet
Milton, no doubt realizing that he needed some actual target for his anger,
chose to rage against the conspiracy of those perdious forces that strike
down the good while leaving the wicked in triumph. It is this channeling of
wrath outward to revenge that contributes so fully to his resolution of the
question of justice, and to his completion of the work of mourning. Our
appreciation of this should be especially keen after the study of revenge
tragedies above, and we shall recognize how Milton stages a displaced, verbal
revenge, while also managing to conjure a transcendent context in which
such vengeance is sanctied.
We have not yet quite exhausted the complex nature of the occasion.
Another set of problems was provoked by Kings having died so young and
so abruptly, just as he was literally making his passage from years of diligent
preparation to what may have been years of fruition. Miltons preparation for
his own work and for his future claim to immortality was even now just
coming to an end after several years of ascetic self-discipline. In a letter to
Diodati, Milton spoke of his undistracted labors: Whereas my genius is such
that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside
until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great
period of my studies.5 The very rhythm and balance of his phrasing suggest
the dogged purposiveness of his drive, while the goal is expressed in a
conventional gure of sublimation. As he writes in his next letter, And what
am I doing? Growing my wings and meditating ight; but as yet our Pegasus
raises himself on very tender pinions. Let us be lowly wise.6
It is clear, therefore, that before writing Lycidas, Milton had already
made a rather decisive deection of desire, channeling it not into such
enjoyments as the blithe Diodati suggested but rather into projects of a more
Milton: Lycidas 125
spiritual elevation. Not a little energy must have been bound to this pursuit,
and the effect of Kings sudden death was, therefore, to cut the entire knot of
Miltons intended transaction. He would now have to question and
renegotiate the supposed exchange by which renunciation buys its own
reward and self-sacrice defends against mortality.7 At the same time, he
would have to retain control of the energy itself, which must have threatened
to come unbound as the justication for its constraint was so abruptly
threatened. As we have seen, these are tasks crucial to the work of mourning.
By confronting them at their most pressing, Milton forced his poem to its
particular intensity.
Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more

Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forcd ngers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
(17)
I have already said much about the elegiac Yet once more, so I will
not repeat the earlier account of the various functions of repetition. In
Miltons case, the statement has an obvious literal as well as rhetorical
meaning in that he is writing yet another elegy within his own career, as well
as within the career, so to speak, of pastoral elegy itself. (It is typical of
Milton to associate the careers in this way.) One may be sure, therefore, that
the repetition itself deliberately repeats such usages in Theocritus, Virgil,
Sannazaro, and others, this being but the rst of many indications that
Milton is not only adding to but recapitulating the tradition. As one reads on,
one realizes how fully the assembly of allusions and echoes in this poem
allows the poet to gather up the genre as though to carry it forward in his
own poem.8
The mention of laurels, myrtle, and ivy is another obvious use of the
conventional symbols, and Miltons phrasing, too, recalls a specic line from
Virgils Eclogue II. Et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proxima myrte. But in
these lines Milton already extends what he inherits. At least two elements
should be dwelt on briey: (1) he contrives both to quicken the original
meaning of the old symbols and at the same time to widen their reference;
and (2) he begins immediately to exploit the rhetorical power of the vocative
mood, which so distinguishes this poem.
Laurels, myrtle, and ivy are of course ancient tokens of poethood, but
by using them as gures for poetic offerings, Milton adds his personal
urgency regarding the question of his own ripeness as a poet. Related gures
126 Peter M. Sacks
had marked his anxiety previously in sonnet 7: But my late spring no bud or
blossoms showth ... inward ripeness doth much less appear. It is a common
device, but Miltons real achievement is to associate the prematurity of the
unmellowed Kings death with the possibly premature verse of the elegist,
thereby confronting the possibility that he himself and his career may be as
mortally vulnerable as King.
Furthermore, by subjecting the gures to a curious literalization,
Milton allows a reemergence of latent symbolic meanings. We are shown not
the immutable, conventional tokens but leaves and berries, which may be
shattered or pluckedthe action is jarringly physical, as though the
gurative status of these plants were itself breaking in the poets hands. We
recall Spensers similar literalization of the Astrophel ower, his rejection of
its traditionally consoling symbolism, allowing the ower to be untimely
cropt. And it is interesting to note that Miltons original version of these
lines in the Trinity Manuscript reads and crop your young in place of the
later shatter your leaves. Miltons effect is similar to Spensers, for it, too,
literally breaks the traditional gures of compensation in order to prepare a
substitution of more spiritualized plants. He shatters the brittle signs of a
merely earthly fame in order to make way for the higher variant that lives
and spreads aloft in heaven.
The harsh, emphatically physical violation of the plants evokes a
further meaning, one whose implications are underscored by the language of
reluctance and compulsion (Forcd ngers, constraint, compels me).
As previously suggested, the work of mourning involves a castrative moment
of submission to death and to a necessary deection of desire. The way in
which the poet here is being forced to a bitter shattering and plucking of
leaves and of berries harsh and crude is not unlike the compulsion to an act
of symbolic castration, which the subsequent images of the decapitated
Orpheus and the abhorred shears conrm. And it is against the cluster of this
and other related imagery that the consolation of a resurgent yet displaced
and spiritualized sexual energy will have to triumph.
In addition to his revision of the familiar plant symbols, I mentioned
Miltons intense use of the vocative mood, which extends throughout the
poem, and it is important to see how the energy of the poem is braced from
the outset by being directed to some kind of addressee. The poem is thus
tautened by a sinew of address, a compelling tone of engagement. The near-
magical manner in which Milton keeps changing ctive addressees is also
crucial to the development of the poem, for the long passage from the
personied laurels to the Genius of the shore may be read as an intensifying
exercise in making up or evoking a presence where there is nonea
fundamentally elegiac enterprise. So, too, the repeated vocative mood not
only palliates the solitude of the bereaved but grips the reader as though he,
too, were being continually addressed.
Milton: Lycidas 127
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not oat upon his watry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.
(814)
I referred earlier to the repetitive calling of the dead by name.

Certainly the ceremonial practice of invocation and the psychological
anklisis, or propping, are at work here, but in a exible and unobtrusive way.
The mourner calls, but his call is worked into his discourse, and once again
Milton reveals his nuance and control, his way of allowing the conventions
to function even as he subordinates them to his personal manner.
The opposed images in lines 1114 initiate the contrast between entire
clusters of images throughout the poem. While individual elements of this
contrast have been noted by several critics, the cluster aspect, the close
relation between apparently different kinds of images, has not been stressed.9
This is largely due to the neglect of the more original meanings of such
gures and of their relation to the energy and consciousness of the griever.
For example, the purposeful, ultimately consoling elevation of the lofty
rhyme opposes the random and desolate horizontality of a watry bier, a
contrast repeated in several versions and culminating in that between the
guarded mount and the risen soul on the one hand and the whelming tide
and far-ung corpse on the other. But what is the relation of this contrast to
that between a consoling, invigorating liquid and a barren, parching wind, or
between reward and an almost punitive neglect?
What does a cluster such as that of elevation, poetry, liquid, and reward
imply? We have spoken of consolation as the achievement of a deected
sexual assertion, of a trope for a procreative force that outlasts individual
mortality. The erection of tombs or stelae or indeed of a survivors verse may
be seen, therefore, as understandably associated with images of an
invigorating liquid. The dew that Colin Clout sought to inherit from the
dead Tityrus was such a liquidan originally sexual power allegorized as
poetic creativity. In Lycidas the imagery of a saving and surviving liquid,
the gure for ongoing desire and creativity, hence of successful mourning, is
even included in mythological form in the Arethusa-Alpheus legend (also
present in Virgils Eclogue X), as well as in the form of the swift Hebrus
who bears the gory visage of continuing song to the Lesbian shore. These are
the liquids that, unlike the barren diffusion of the sea, retain a direction and
a continuing force, associated as they must be with the melodious tear and
128 Peter M. Sacks
the lofty rhyme. It is in no way surprising, therefore, that Milton

immediately associates his inspiration with the sacred well.
Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse,
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favor my destind Urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
(1522)
Signicantly, the sacred well springs (reinforcing the suggestion of

lofty rhyme and of an originally seminal power) from Joves seat, as though
this were somehow his liquid power. The line alludes not only to the opening
of Hesiods Theogony:
With the Heliconian Muses let us start

Our song: they hold the great and godly mount
Of Helicon, and on their delicate feet
They dance around the darkly bubbling spring
And round the altar of the mighty Zeus.10
It also alludes to the barely Christianized version in Revelation 22: And he

showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the
throne of God and of the Lamb.11 Almost like Alpheus, this liquid will
surface again at the end of the poem in images of those other streams and
that Nectar pure.
Furthermore, the presence of the Sister Muses deepens our
recognition that the poet is asserting a residually sexual poetic power,
particularly as he urges, Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse, as though
this were indeed an erotic relationship. We notice how the vocative has
shifted to an imperative mood, a clue to Miltons desire to control the
personages of his poem. Nor is this imperiousness a matter of chance as he
addresses the Muses. The very echo in somewhat loudly of Virgils paulo
maiora alerts us to the fact that Milton has his eye on Virgils Eclogue IV,
with its move from pastoral to prophetic utterance.
After this summons, the poet suddenly confesses much of his
motivation, his desire for a defense against his own obliteration, in short, for
immortality, a power that, after death, may yet compel a later poet to turn to
him in homage and benediction. Milton seems to wrestle with the timing of
this statement. The urgency of his need is, I think, at odds with his tact.
Milton: Lycidas 129
What results is an uneasy compromise: on the one hand the undeniably

abrupt admission, as though the expressed intention could not be restrained
a moment longer; on the other the clever ambiguity of the so may, which
tempers the boldness of purpose (so meaning in order that) by the more
neutral possibility of a mere analogy (so meaning just as).
The expression of personal motive and anxiety increases the urgent
intimacy of the poem, carrying us forward into the prolonged identication
of the mourner with his lost friend and predisposing us to recognize the
degree of self-mourning that gathers in the following lines. The past and its
landscape, together with the gure of the dead shepherd, are, after all,
versions of a lost self.
For we were nurst upon the self-same hill,

Fed the same ock, by fountain, shade, and rill.
Together both, ere the high Lawns appeard
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove aeld, and both together heard
What time the Gray-y winds her sultry horn,
Battning our ocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the Star that rose, at Evning, bright
Toward Heavns descent had slopd his westering wheel.
Meanwhile the Rural ditties were not mute,
Temperd to thOaten Flute;
Rough Satyrs dancd, and Fauns with clovn heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long,
And old Damaetas lovd to hear our song.
(2336)
Only a few features of these lines need be remarked here. The gure of
nursing suggests the benevolent, nourishing mother, the loss of whom I have
claimed to be an inescapably recapitulated element of any mourning. By
attachment to the mother I mean attachment to a unity that seems to precede
a sense of individuation and of separate mortality. Figures for this matrix
could be the owery lap of Nature or the Muse. In this poem, written a mere
seven months after Milton had lost his own mother, that grief is
overwhelmingly important, as we shall see. In keeping with the evocation of
life in the presence of the mother, time and place are described as strangely
seamless, both encompassed by an unbroken circle of natural routine, a kind
of rhythmic browsing. The poems larger temporality (a days song) will
enlarge and repeat this particular gure of the diurnal round, healing, in fact,
the heavy change which suddenly comes to rob the inset, recollected
pastoral of its perfection.
The high lawns repeat the motif of elevation, which is brought into
130 Peter M. Sacks
signicant association now with eyes and morning, both guring the virile,
watchful sun, a symbol of paternal power and of totemic immortality. Here
the young sons set off before that power has fully risen. They are still close to
a nursing nature, as yet evading, one might say, the fathers fully opened eyes,
the pure eyes of all-judging Jove which the poet will come to know more
intimately through loss.12
While the songs of this idyllic day are equally unmarked by loss or even
by a more than momentary absence, Milton does contrive to insinuate the
idea of loss, as the double negatives allow the possibility of deprivation to
surface in consciousness: were not mute ... would not be absent long. The
effect is reminiscent of Spensers almost subliminal warnings in Astrophel:
Both wise and hardie (too hardie alas!) ... He vanquisht all, and vanquisht
was of none, signals preparing and cushioning the mind against a sudden
loss. Miltons narrative timing, like Spensers and like that of many elegists in
the tradition, is carefully designed to situate the recollected idyll after the
mere statement of loss but before the fuller narration and elaboration of that
loss. The reader is, therefore, somehow both prepared for loss and yet forced
to reexperience its reality. The mourned subject is made to die again.13
Even were the idyll not explicitly framed by loss, it has an unmistakable
air of unreality, a vulnerable, ctive quality, as though the recollection were
a wish-fullling dream. Hence the curiously self-englobed temporality, a
perfect wheel of time made to revolve within the larger narrative. Hence,
too, the way in which the idyll concludes with an unobtrusive clue to its own
ctionality. For while the conventional pastoral ction (shepherds for poets,
the hill for Cambridge) can be reduced to its literal referents, the mention of
satyrs and fauns introduces a further, less reducible level of ctionality; and
from here the entire idyll seems to be retrospectively illuminated by the
brightened light of unreality. It is a subtle version of the poets later, more
explicit admissions of fond dream or false surmise, and it is difficult to
imagine a more superb and gentle manner of both indulging and yet
distancing ones recollections of the past and of the dead.14
The idyll concludes with a mention of Damaetass approval, and it is
tting that this period of innocent nursing, of small rural ditties, and of
proximity to nature, should be unthreatened by any truly powerful gure of
authority. Unlike that of all-judging Jove, Damaetass approval is not
contingent upon sacrice or loss. Yet old Damaetas does, however mildly,
pregure the later judge. And our understanding of the genre and of the
work of mourning makes us appreciate why a mention of this gure
terminates the recollected idyll. So, too, we are less unprepared to follow this
rst mention of an older gure of authority by what might otherwise, despite
the ctionality of the idyll, appear to be a surprisingly abrupt turn to the
confrontation of disastrous loss.
Milton: Lycidas 131
But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone, and never must return!
Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves,
With wild Thyme and the gadding Vine oergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
The Willows and the Hazel Copses green
Shall now no more be seen,
Fanning their joyous Leaves to thy soft lays.
As killing as the Canker to the Rose,
Or Taint-worm to the weanling Herds that graze,
Or Frost to Flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,
When rst the White-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to Shepherds ear.
(3749)
Here is the harshly elaborated loss of that ideal, recollected world,

whose images of freshness and nurture have given way to those of insidious
disease and of a specically premature ruin. While Miltons use of the
pathetic fallacy is conventional, he nevertheless modulates the passage away
from fallacy into extended simile, thereby adding a measure of sophistication
(he declares the gurative nature of such comparisons) and control (he uses
the similes to dene the precise nature of the loss). In fact, as though it were
moving toward a single destination, the entire passage accumulates and
converges upon a center of loss, the shepherds ear. This emphatic focus
deserves more interpretation than it has received, and some elements of our
theoretical approach may be of help.
It is not enough to say merely that the ear has been deprived of what it
used to hear. That is not the exact nature of its loss. Rather, as the tenor of
the similes urgently suggests, the ear is itself an object of ruin as Canker
(cankerworm, a caterpillar that destroys leaves) kills the rose, as Taint-worm
invades the weanling herds, and as frost destroys the owers, so this loss
assaults the ear. The worm imagery is especially well chosen, the worms
motion being so perfectly menacing to the labyrinth of the ear.15
We may, therefore, regard the loss as not only to but of the shepherds
ear. At a simple level we can point, as anthropologists and psychologists
might, to the practice whereby a mourner isolates a part of his body as the
locus of painthe synecdoche allowing him to localize an otherwise diffuse
hurt. But beyond this is the crucial practice of symbolic self-injury or
castration in relation to the work of mourning. Just as the child performs a
voluntary symbolic castration to avoid death or what he fears as actual
castration, and just as the vegetation deity suffers a particularly castrative
martyrdom so that the phallic principle of fertility may be renewed, so, too,
the griever wounds his own sexuality, deecting his desire, in order to erect
132 Peter M. Sacks
a consoling gure for an ongoing, if displaced, generative power. We have

already seen how an act of shattering and plucking will eventually, by the
power of Jove, yield the immortal plant of heavenly praise. Similarly, the
wounded and trembling ear will yet be touched and more than repaired by
the ministry of Apollo. The ear that loses its capacity to hear the songs to
which it was attached is granted the power to hear strains of a higher
mood. We recall the refrain of Saint John: He that hath an ear let him hear
what the spirit saith. The movement is from a physical to a spiritual organ.
It is what happens visually in Paradise Lost, where the poets blindness to the
external world yields a higher, inner vision: So much the rather thou
Celestial Light / Shine inward. In each case, a castrative loss or curbing
yields a higher, almost always immortalizing strength.16
Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep

Closd oer the head of your lovd Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old Bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream:
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye been therefor what could that have done?
What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself, for her enchanting son
Whom Universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
(5063)
We may recall how such conventional questioning is in large part

designed not only to avert potential self-accusation but also to create the
ctive addressees, substituting the pretence of temporary absence for the
suspicion of nonexistence or permanent neglect. At least three features of
Miltons personal use of the conventions deserve notice. First, Milton revises
Virgils own revision of Theocritus. In his First Idyl, Theocritus had
Thyrsis ask where in Sicily (i.e., his own recollected locale) the nymphs had
been. Virgils Eclogue X, however, shifts the scenario to Arcadia, a realm
quite remote from himself or Gallus. Milton follows Theocritus in using his
own national localeBardsey, Anglesey, and the river Dee. The effect is an
added immediacy, as well as the vigor of an achieved rather than received
transguration of geography.
Second, the imagined locations of the nymphs share aspects of the
positive, consoling images in lines 1114 noted above. They are associated
Milton: Lycidas 133
either with elevations (the steep ... the top of Mona high) or with a special,
purposeful liquid force (Where Deva spreads her wizard stream). Yet now
these haunts are empty and remote. Their associated images of protection
and strength are brought into question.
The third and more signicant feature of this address is Miltons
characteristic, self-critical rejection of an indulged ction. As usual, Milton
curbs in order to surpass himselfan essentially elegiac maneuver. The wish
fulllment is renounced in deference to reality, and the loss is more fully
confronted. Here the realization is that of the Muses inefficacy, and it
precipitates the most complicated crisis in the poem.
The poet has to mourn the loss of Lycidas and his own loss of belief in
the Muses protection in particular that of Calliope, the mother of
Orpheus.17 This loss is made especially catastrophic by being cast in terms
that recapitulate Orpheuss violent death. We are thus brought to that crux
in mourning: a recapitulated loss of the mother, together with a scenario of
castration. Lycidas confronts this with such unparalleled force in part
because Milton always seems to renovate conventional images and myths.
But it is difficult in this case to exclude additional, biographical factors
Miltons obsessive sense of his own career (his relation to the Muse) and the
death, ve months previously, of his mother. A full discussion of the issues
involved here carries us at least into the immediately following section of the
poem.
Alas! What boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted shepherds trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaeras hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last inrmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to nd,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with thabhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,
Phoebus replid, and touchd my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistening foil
Set off to thworld, nor in broad rumor lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
134 Peter M. Sacks
Of so much fame in Heavn expect thy meed.

(6484)
The cruel cutting short of a career arouses the poet to question his own
defense against mortality and to redene the possible regard, if any, for his
own ascetic pursuits. In discussing the occasion of this poem, I noted that
one of the tasks facing Milton was that of controlling the energy that is
suddenly released once the object or rationale of its binding attachment is
threatened. Not surprisingly, therefore, Milton questions the value of his
asceticism, wondering whether an unsublimated eroticism is not worth
indulging after all. Presumably the justication for strictly meditating the
Muse was a promise of fame, and a special relation to that motherly gure,
the Muse. By curbing desire, diverting it into poetic ambition, he could
retain the close relationship. Or so he might have thought had he not
abruptly discovered that the Muse may not be interested, may be quite
thankless, and may, after all, show an alarming ability to give way to a kind
of anti-Muse, one who mocks at and even causes martyrdoman Atropos
malevolently wielding the shears. By dwelling with horror on the
decapitation of Orpheus, Milton not only reenacts the harsh event but does
so with a bitter momentary ignorance of what it may achieve. It seems to be
a loselose situation, one that may remind us of Titus sacricing his hand for
the severed heads of his sons. The economy of sacrice and reward has
collapsed. Or is it that the notion of reward must be revised, a revision
somehow earned more fully, after all, by this very submission?
Immediately following this cry of outrage, therefore, the poem turns to
what the harsh fate does in fact secure: not an earthly fame, which is made to
seem an insufficiently displaced or sublimated object of desire, but rather a
more spiritualized versionthe divine approval granted by an otherworldly
judge. We have seen the attendant imagery of reward prepared earlier, in the
gures of shattered foliage and of the shepherds blighted ear. The damage
to these is now repaired as they, too, make way for more spiritual versions
and functions.
There is, however, a residual cautioning in Apollos gesture, as any
reader of Virgils Eclogue VI will recall: in Virgils poem the gesture
signied Apollos rebuke to the poets premature ambition. In Lycidas the
criticism takes the form of a more extended chastisement, preparing us,
surely, for a Christian reading of this entire episode. From that perspective,
achieved more clearly later in the poem, the fate of Orpheus represents the
chastening of mans soul in submission to a divine father. Pauls epistle to the
Hebrews spells out the Christian version of the oedipal transaction:
My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint
when thou art rebuked of him:
Milton: Lycidas 135
For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every

son whom he receiveth.
If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for
what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
........................................
Furthermore we have had fathers of our esh which corrected
us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in
subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?
(Heb. 12.59)
Miltons focus on the authority of the father is marked in the dramatic

movement from female to male gures, a movement that is itself part of the
work of mourning: the separation from the primary object of desire
associated with the mother and an identication with the father and his
symbols of power. Hence the movement away from the sisters, the nymphs,
and Calliope toward Apollo and Jove, with particular attention to the
powerful, even seminal, inuence of Joves eyes. Eyes are the emblems of
virility and of a fathers gaze. Here, the spiritual version of that virility still
has the power to raise aloft, and its totemic prestige is rmly linked to a
judging power.
With these ideas in mind, we are now in a position to return to Miltons
biography, where we discover not only that Sara Milton died in April 1637
but that this death left the poet with a father who happened at this very time
to be as powerful a gure of judgment as Milton could possibly have faced.
Since 1634, Milton had in fact struggled with his fathers distrust of a poetic
career. He had devoted himself primarily to the study of Church history and
was at least partly trying to accommodate his fathers directive, namely, to
engage the clerical issues of the time in sermon and debate. Certainly, he was
biding his time, preparing for epic pursuits, but the fact remains that
Lycidas was probably the rst poem Milton wrote following his nal
revision of Comus. The poem therefore had to bear a heavy burden of proof
if Milton were to convince his father that poetry could in fact engage serious
concerns. Milton writes a poem not only affected by the loss of his mother
but also designed for the eyes of his father.18
There is still the unanswered question of why, on a clear summers day, a ship
mysteriously foundered and sank in the Irish sea, carrying to his death a
twenty-ve-year-old clergyman and poet.
O Fountain Arethuse, and thou honord ood,

Smooth-sliding Mincius; crownd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood:
136 Peter M. Sacks
But now my Oat proceeds,

And listens to the Herald of the Sea
That came in Neptunes plea.
He askd the Waves, and askd the Felon winds,
What hard mishap hath doomd this gentle swain?
And questiond every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked Promontory.
They knew not of his story,
And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon strayd,
The air was calm, and on the level brine,
Sleek Panope with all her sisters playd.
(8599)
The poet modulates back to the more strictly pastoral mode

symbolized by Arethusa and Mincius, doing so in a way that deliberately calls
attention to the manner in which he has surpassed this mode. The stage-
managing device is thus inseparable from a continuing act of self-
commentary.
Triton learns from Hippotades (Aeolus) that neither had there been
any disturbance nor had the waves and winds so much as heard of Lycidass
fate. While maintaining the opposition between male constraint (his
dungeon) and feminine pleasure (the sport of Panope), the lines present
further, disquieting separations, not only between man and nature but
between man and the mythological presences he may once have cherished.
The poem is indeed moving, in a typically Miltonic manner, to a Christian
distancing or revaluation of Classical myth. There is no sympathy here
between the nymphs and a drowning man. Worse yet, they play while he
sinks. It is precisely this blend of remoteness and suspected triviality that
characterizes the merely pastoral world that Milton is even now so
thoroughly undertaking to surpass. The play of Panope thus becomes
associated with the dance of fauns and satyrs to the rural ditties, glad sounds
that we now seem to have heard so long ago.
As if to increase this remoteness, the following three lines move to a
blend of harsh diction with religious rhetoric:
It was that fatal and perdious Bark

Built in theclipse, and riggd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.
(100102)
The Orphic gure is already undergoing the kind of Christianizing that we

studied in chapter 1. Perhaps it was with a view to this that Milton carefully
Milton: Lycidas 137
revised the Orpheus episode in such a way as to delay until now the Christian
revision: for example, he began with goarie scalpe, then altered it to
divine head, then divine visage, but then, signicantly, went back to
gory visage, deleting mention of the divinity.19 So, too, the rout of savage
maenads is now replaced by a suggested agent of Sin, associated with
perdiousness and with the eclipse. The eclipse evokes both the crucixion
(hence moving the subject yet further from a pagan to a Christian
martyrdom) and the original Fall. We recall how in Paradise Lost the rst sign
of Eves sin is precisely an eclipse.
The catastrophe thus begins to nd its place more securely within a
Christian context of sin, Fall, and redemption, as the later sections of the
poem will elaborate.
Next Camus, reverend Sire, went footing slow,

His Mantle hairy, and his Bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with gures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine ower inscribd with woe.
Ah! Who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
(1037)
Camus, personication of the river Cam and of Cambridge University,

recalls the mild gure of old Damaetas. But Camus has an added dignity: he
is a reverend Sire, his footing slow is different from the light steps that
accompanied Damaetass well-loved songs, and his attire enhances his
majestic sadness. We have already studied how the imagery of weaving and
embroidery is so frequently associated with the work of mourning; I shall
therefore merely note its careful contrivance in these lines. Apart from their
customary connotations, and their allusion to prior elegiac weavings, the
lines seem to achieve a close yet unobtrusive metaphorical blending of the
natural and the human worlds: the garments and embroidery are also the
actual margins of the stream, where, amid dim reeds and sedge, one may
discern apparent gures, brighter growths inscribed into the fabric like
Apollos words of grief, ai, ai, inscribed upon the hyacinth. It is as though the
differing worlds can overlap only by metaphor and artice occasioned by
loss. Camus himself seems to pace at the borders of the pastoral world, a
world now ineradicably embroidered with mortality. His single utterance is
that questioning cry of deprivation, which can be answered only from
another realm, in a dread voice.20
Last came, and last did go,

The Pilot of the Galilean lake.
Two massy Keys he bore of metals twain
(The Golden opes, the Iron shuts amain).
138 Peter M. Sacks
He shook his Mitred locks, and stern bespake:

How well could I have spard for thee, young swain,
Enough of such as for their bellies sake,
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold?
Of other care they little reckning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest;
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learnd aught else the least
That to the faithful Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and ashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw.
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
(10831)
For the physical appearance of Saint Peter we are given only two items,
but they are rich in signicance. The keys have been amply glossed, but our
understanding of the sexual economies of loss and consolation, together with
our sense of more primitive totemic representations of authority and
resurrection, should alert us to a wider range of connotation than is
customarily evoked.
So, too, the Mitred locks deserve a fuller interpretation. The gure
of the abhorred shears had certainly emphasized the castrative nature of loss,
and the emphasis will be repeated by Saint Peters mention of the shearers
feast. Hair is a traditional symbol of sexual power, and Saint Peters locks
represent an immortal version of that power. We notice that the locks are not
merely worn but shaken like an instrument, and their power is sanctied by
the totemic headdress that they support. The association between locks of
hair and a resurrected vitality will be reinforced by the gure of the rising
sun tricking his beams and aming in the forehead of the morning sky and
ultimately by that of Lycidas, whose oozy locks are laved in heaven with
nectar pure. It is with a sense, then, of Saint Peters particular totemic
attributes that we hear his speech.
What is the real signicance and function of Saint Peters opening
words? I do not think that the purpose of his How well could I have spard
thee ... Enough of such has been adequately noted. He is making an
Milton: Lycidas 139
equation, and it is important in the light of what follows to recognize this as

the essential equation of the revenger. One Lycidas is worth enough of such,
and it is against that numberthat tallythat the entire speech unrolls like
a single act of vengeance. Here is the controlled release of rage that we have
seen to be so crucial to the work of mourning. Once again, it involves the
locating of a target for a wrath that must be turned outward; the shifting of
the burden of pain; the reversal from the passive suffering of hurt to the
active causing of it; and above all, the assumption of the power to hurt, a
power that we have studied in its relation to the totemic force associated with
a metaphoric sexual immortality. This may well account for the penumbra of
mystery and awe surrounding the two-handed engine. Its strangeness and
apartness is surely an aspect of its power as a totemic instrument, and as such,
it must be associated with the two keys and with the miter, which we know
to be tall, conical, and two-peaked.21
So much of the poets energy pours into Saint Peters tirade that it is
difficult and articial to separate its elements. We can at least point to the
following: the accumulated frustration of the questions, Where were ye?
What hard mishap? Who hath reft?; the energy bound to years of laborious
preparation and self-denial (here, whatever energy could not quite be
rededicated to the pursuit of divine praise could be marshaled into a
legitimized rage); the anger against those who had prevented Milton from
the possibility of church lecturing; the bitter fury against those who had
punished Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne; the anger against a mother or Muse
who deserted the son she should have protected; the anger at having to
mourn, at having ones rude ngers forced to their shattering work; the
anger, nally, of any ambitious poet against his own thus far (to him, and to
his father) inadequate work. The last-named element nds its way, I think,
into the contempt for those who grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched
straw.
Before leaving this speech, we may admire Miltons resolution of the
revengers problematic sense of separation from the agents or source of
justice. We have seen Titus and Hieronimo petitioning the gods in vain and
receiving only neglect or scorn from the human courts. For them, language
loses its efficacy; their grief itself is mocked. Milton heals the breach by the
radical device of summoning Saint Peter in persona summons enabled
only by Miltons extremely Protestant internalization of divinity. That is to
say, whereas Titus and Hieronimo regard divine power as impossibly remote
and external, withdrawn somewhere beyond a diamantine wall, Milton
regards it as potentially within the self. So much so that he can give it voice.
Miltons words become Saint Peters. They give him presence. In a sense,
they create him. If we balk at supposing that Saint Peter is somehow within
Milton, we have no choice but to conclude that Milton is somehow within
the saint.
140 Peter M. Sacks
Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past

That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bells and Flowrets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamelld eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal owers.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jessamine,
The white Pink, and the Pansy freakt with jet,
The glowing Violet,
The Musk-rose, and the well-attird Woodbine,
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every ower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffadillies ll their cups with tears
To strew the Laureate Hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
(13253)
When well expressed, wrath itself is sweet, like honey; and Milton, as
he turned from the diatribe of Peter to the sweet yield of the valleys, must
have felt something of what Homer and Plato meant.22 Milton coaches
Alpheus to renew the current of his desire. As we know, Alpheus, the stream,
is a gure for an already once-deected passion: the youth underwent a
transformation in order to continue his pursuit. The stream is a gure, in
other words, for the mourners sexuality, and for its necessary willingness to
accept not only a detour but a sacricial change. And despite the great beauty
and apparent relaxation in this so-called interlude, the work of sacrice is
minutely continued.
It is important to view the present offering in contrast to the bitter
plucking of the poems start. Now, the anger has been purged, and the
rewards (the undying owers of praise) have been established. The process
can be repeated in a sweeter, more decorative manner, even while the clues
of sacrice are unmistakable: the offering of quaint enamelld eyes (the
white Pink, incidentally, also connotes a little eye, pink meaning eyelet);
the hanging, pensive heads (not only of cowslips but of pansies too); the
owers chosen as emblems of frustrated or forlorn young love (the rathe
Primrose that forsaken dies); or owers like the tufted Crow-toe (orcus
Milton: Lycidas 141
mascula) or the amaranth, here explicitly urged to shed his beauty (the
amaranth is, literally, the unfading ower, the never-quenched life ame. Its
tiny red spires revive in water long after pluckingperfect emblems for a
sacriced but resurrected power).23
While essential to the poems development and to its high level of self-
awareness, the recognition of false surmise reects not only on the ctive
presence of the dead in Lycidas but on the gurative action that underlies
any such ceremonial offering, any such imagining that the dead person
someone addressed as he or thou rather than itis actually in the mourners
presence. In this sense, the interposing tribute is any elegy, any invention of
farewell addressed to one who has already gone. And in the turbulent lines
that follow, however much one feels a certain harsh confrontation with the
unadorned ugliness of death, the ction of address is being maintained, even
as the exact locating of that address is forcibly bewildered.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas

Wash far away, whereer thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visitst the bottom of the monstrous world,
Or whether thou to our moist vows denied,
Sleepst by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayonas hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
(15464)
The movement away from the ctive hearse to the great diffusion of
the rolling sea denitely accelerates the withdrawal of attachment from the
dead. And the distance opened up by those whethers and ors prepares, as it
should, for the necessary reattachment of love to a substitute. That substitute
is, as we know, a transgured version of the lost Lycidas, and it is fascinating
to note how Milton actually combines the movement of detachment with a
subtle premonition of the apotheosis to come. For the diffusion of place
hints, in however painful a voice, at the kind of omnipresence of a deity. The
hint is strengthened by the orotund language (the bottom of the monstrous
world) and by the possible suggestion of Christs visit to harrow hell. It is
furthered by reference to Bellerus, Saint Michael, and the legendary gure
of Palaemon.
Palaemon was the drowned youth whom dolphins carried to the shore.
A temple was erected in homage to him as the guardian of sailors, a role to
be accorded Lycidas. Bellerus is the fabled giant who will arise from his
142 Peter M. Sacks
slumbers as though from death. And Saint Michael is not only the patron of
mariners (hence again preguring the Genius of the shore) but also the
agent of Justice, wielding a sword that should remind us of the two-handed
engine of divine vengeance. Tradition has it that men of faith could see the
apparition of Michael on the mountain at Lands End. There Milton places
him, on his fortied elevation guarding against the Spanish strongholds
across the sea. The image of consolidated defense surely reects on the poets
own increasingly assured defense, his conviction that a concentrated power
(be it his lofty rhyme, his praise aloft, or even the power of his reinforced
repression, his rededication to an ascetic quest) will stand erect against less
high desires and against death itself.24 It is because these lines so brilliantly
effect that distancing of the lost object, the relic of the actual Lycidas, and so
fully pregure the new object of attachment, the resurrected Lycidas, that
the poem can now nally move to the lines that follow.
Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more,

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry oor,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas, sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walkd the waves,
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With Nectar pure his oozy Locks he laves, And hears the
unexpressive nuptial Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now Lycidas, the Shepherds weep no more;
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous ood.
(16585)
Here, then, is the act of substitution, without which no work of

mourning is complete, the reattachment to a new object of love, in this case
a troped, indeed apotheosized, version of the physical Lycidas who had sunk
beneath the watry oor. The turn to the mounted Lycidas thus necessarily
reects a spiritualization of the poets own attachment, a rened reassertion
Milton: Lycidas 143
of desire evident in the accompanying imagery (the emphasis on mounting,

on repairing a drooping head, on laving the oozy locks, and nally on the
nuptial song in the kingdom of joy and love). We discern not merely the
mourners reinvestment of desire but the conclusion of the archaic funeral
rites for the vegetation godthe retrieval or establishment of an emblem of
renewed fertility and the celebration of a reunion that regenerates the
natural world. Here, of course, in a Christianized version we have the
elevation of the soul (still imaged, however, by the sun) and its entry into a
spiritually raised, rather than physically renewed, natural world, a world now
of other streams and groves, where the nuptial song celebrates the marriage
of the Lamb, or of the human spirit, to God. The pastoral world is
reinscribed in heaven.
As for the gure of the sun, apart from its totemic power and its history
as a crucial elegiac trope, it has been carefully contextualized in Lycidas,
situated in relation to so many other images and pregurations that it now
gathers up a vast range of meaning in its nal, triumphant rise. It recalls the
opening eyelids of the morn; it fullls the aborted sudden blaze of fame; it
sheds the eclipse; it raises all those fallen, pensive, sunk, or severed heads.
Yet it is intriguing to notice how the poet, even while he exploits this
gure of the sun as a simile for the rising soul, manages to supersede it by the
Christian force that according to Milton makes that simile possible. Lycidas
rises like the sun but does so through the dear might of Christ. We are
invited to see how this power, as a force that can cause a sunlike rise, exceeds
that of the sun. We may even be reminded that in a Christian cosmos God is
the creator or cause of the sun itself. This set of ideas is important to the coda
of the poem, and it is stressed further by the motif of an enabling or positing
power manifested in the poets at: Henceforth thou art the Genius of the
shore. The accent is very nearly that of command. Is the poet himself now
playing a Christ-like role?
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to thOaks and rills,

While the still mom went out with Sandals gray;
He toucht the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the Sun had stretcht out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitcht his Mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.
(18693)
The mourners act of self-distancing and self-surpassing, so essential to

mourning, is here taken one step further. Even the successful mourner is
suddenly superseded, in a way that reminds us of the place of this poem in
144 Peter M. Sacks
the context of Miltons developing career. He has written his consummate

pastoral, and has achieved within it instances and proofs of epic power. Not
only is this coda written in ottava rima, the form for Italian epic, but it reads
precisely like those moments in epic poetry when the narrator follows the
speech of a protagonist with Thus sang.... It is as though Milton, in ending
and describing his elegy, has already entered an epic.
The line He toucht the tender stops of various Quills is surely meant
to counterpoint, in a gentle fashion, the forced ngers rudely shattering the
leaves. And toucht the tender stops ought, too, to recall toucht my
trembling ears, thereby suggesting a development that the poet has now
made, an assimilation of the Apollonian, epic touch within the Doric
warble. Once again we admire the mourners absorption of the gestures of
authority, which culminates in the assimilation of the elegist to the guiding
gure and power of the poem, the sun. Assimilation and yet, as always,
surpassal.
First, there is the power deriving from an accelerated description of the
suns motion, as though the poets act of description were hurrying the sun,
somehow even causing tenses to collapse into the timeless now of eternity, or
indeed of poetry: And now the Sun ... And now was dropt. Following this
is the master stroke of replacing the sun by the elegist, sliding from one to
the other via a deliberately ambiguous pronoun, he. That ambiguity is even
prepared for by the attribution to the elegist of a Mantle blue, somehow
part of the same attire as the Sandals gray; and by the brilliant succession
And now was dropt ... At last he rose. The physical Lycidas had sunk; his
spirit has mounted high. The sun sinks; the poet rises.25
The Mantle blue calls for a few comments. It is perhaps only the
coventry blue cloak of a shepherd. But how to distinguish it now from the
blue sky surrounding the sun? What is more interesting, it is a consoling
revision of the mantle black that surrounded a disconsolate Colin Clout at
the end of January. It is the last and perhaps most pointed of Miltons
allusions to the tradition he has overgone.26
The way in which the elegist preempts the rising of the sun reects
back on Christs power to effect a spiritual sunlike rise for man. But Milton
has calmly assumed that power himself: he makes the uncouth swain rise, and
he himself has risen, as though he were another sun. We nd it hard to avoid
the recognition that it is, after all, the poet who has Christ raise Lycidas. The
frame of ctionality encompasses even that supreme action; which brings us
to the disquieting region of conjecture, so important to Milton, of whether
Christianity may be no more than a superior product (superior to Classical
mythology, for example) of mans imagination. What we have already seen to
be the poems repeated questioning of its own ctions cannot entirely be
escaped. (The accelerated temporality of the suns motion is no more real
than the rhythmic circle of the idyll. And the sun, in order to behave as a
Milton: Lycidas 145
symbol for resurrection, has to appear to have a nocturnal demise, another of

mans ctions. And how is he who walked the waves so different from
Palaemon? Is he more real? or is he simply more powerful?)27
Near the end of Revelation, a text we see alluded to and even quoted in
Lycidas, there is a verse that reads:
And the city had no need of the sun, neither of

the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God
did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
(21:23)
Johns highly rhetorical imaging of God as the light of the new Jerusalem
depends on substituting God for the original solar gure. But Lycidas,
moving as it does from submissive gestures of compulsion and loss to an
internalizing counter-usurpation of totemic power, has substituted the gure
of the elegist for both the sun and God. As we see the rising poet
imaginatively projecting, as no sun can, the landscape of the future, we may
think ahead to Ruskins statement regarding invention spiritual:
Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun.
The re of his ... heart is the only light
and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is,
are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.28
NOTES
1. Quoted in Scott Elledge, ed., Miltons Lycidas: Edited to Serve as an

Introduction to Criticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 174.
2. Ibid, 208.
3. Ibid, 213.
4. Shatter is certainly the strongest verb in the opening of the poem, and Milton
has placed it in such a way as to reinforce its effect. The fate of the men, and
Bastwicks threat, should raise the question of the symbolic importance of the ear, so
prominent in Lycidas. Finally, we may recall Prynnes words in Miltons sunk low,
but mounted high.
5. Trans. from the Latin by David Masson, in The Works of John Milton, ed.
Frank Patterson, Vol. 12 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 19.
6. Ibid, 27.
7. Let him live sparingly, like the Samian teacher: and let herbs furnish his
innocent diet.... Beyond this, his youth must be innocent of crime and chaste, his
conduct irreproachable and his hands stainless.... By this rule it is said that the wise
Tiresias lived after the loss of his eyes, and Ogygian Linus, and Calchas when he was
146 Peter M. Sacks
a fugitive from his doomed home, and Orpheus in his old age.... For truly, the bard
is sacred to the Gods and is their priest. His hidden heart and his lips alike breathe
on Jove (Milton, Elegy VI, in The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed., Merritt Y.
Hughes [Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957, reprint ed, 1975], 52. Subsequent
quotations from Lycidas are from this edition).
8. For the allusive echoing within Miltons Yet once more see John Hollander,
The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1981), 12729, and Louis Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study
of Miltons Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 3.
More generally, for the relation of Lycidas to the traditional pastoral elegy
see James H. Hanford, The Pastoral Elegy and Miltons Lycidas, PMLA 25
(1910), 40347; Thomas Perrin Harrison, Jr. The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1939), Ellen Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral
Elegy from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1976); and Richard Mallette, Spenser, Milton, and Renaissance Pastoral (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981), chap. 4.
For the most recent, and in many respects the most subtle, study of Miltons
use of generic conventions see Paul Alpers Lycidas and Modern Criticism, ELH 49,
no. 2 (Summer 1982), 46896. This essay also contains a thoughtful response to
previous studies of the poem, such as those by Abrams, Friedman, and Fish (M.H.
Abrams, Five Types of Lycidas, in Miltons Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.
A. Patrides, rev. ed. [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983], 21635, Donald
M. Friedman, Lycidas: The Swains Paideia, ibid., 281302, Stanley Fish, Lycidas:
A Poem Finally Anonymous, ibid., 31940. Patrides collection contains other
essays, which I will refer to later. It also offers an excellent bibliography of studies on
the tradition and the poem).
In the course of Lycidas and Modern Criticism, Alpers seeks to rebut Fishs
contention that the energy of the poem derives not from the presence of a
controlling and self-contained individual, but from forces that undermine his
individuality and challenge the ction of his control (Fish, 322). Where Fish
suggests the obliteration of personal voice, Alpiers points to that voices careful
convening of the antecedent voices of the genre. My own argument offers the view
of an eclogic, self-surpassing voice composed, as Alpers demonstrates, of
conventional strands but submitted to a process similar to that which Fish describes.
Fish, however, does not intergrate his perception with a psychological view of self-
suppression as a crucial element of the work of mourning. I believe that there is
considerable self-abasement and self-suppression in the poem, but I see this as a
phenomenon that is suffered and worked through by an individual mourning mind.
Elegies are in large part about this kind of self-chastening, just as they require the
elegists personal accommodation to the impersonal code of language and the
symbolic order. In the following chapter, I shall be looking closely at the ways in
which a mourner seeks precisely to merge his personal voice with the inherited voices
of the dead. The difficulty in such moments is to distinguish self-denition or even
self-aggrandizement from a more strictly submissive gesture. Indeed, the elegy as a
genre shows how a necessarily intertwined such seemingly antithetical elements must
remain.
Milton: Lycidas 147
9. The most comprehensive reading of the imagery of Lycidasis still that of

Rosemund Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1957). See, too, essays by Wayne Shumaker, Josephine
Miles, and Richard P. Adams, in Patrides.
10. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Dorothea Wender (London: Penguin, 1973), 23.
11. Rev, 22.1.
12. The sun itself is not sighted during the course of this ideal day: predawn
appearances give way to midday sounds, and sight returns only with the view of the
descending evening star.
13. Cf. the earlier discussion of narrative repetition in mourning. In Miltons
case, this is played out with greatest scope in Paradise Lost. Milton even inserts his
own warning cry, or rather his desire for such a cry (O for that warning voice), a
perfect instance of a combined preparation for, yet refreshing of, loss. We are told
that it is about to happen, but it happens as if for the rst time.
14. The passage is thus a brillant accomplishment of what Freud calls the
mourners recalling yet undoing of remembered bonds. As Karl Abraham and others
have stressed, this recalling is usually done once the memories have been introjected,
and it is interesting to relate what we noticed as the oddly englobed quality of the
idyll to the phenomenon of introjection. Also, the ability to catch or roll up time in
this way is a crucial heralding of the poems later perspectives on mere time,
perspectives gained s though from the vantage of eternity.
15. Of. the relation between the serpent and the ear in Paradise Lost, or the
extensive imagery in Hamlet: Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent
stung me (1.5.3536). Claudius is the serpent who, like Satan, pours his leprous
distillment in the porches of the ear. Similarly, the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a
forged process of my death / Rankly abusd (1.5.3638).
16. While the association of blinding with castration is familiar, Jonathan Swift
reminds us of the similar association with injuries to the ear. His meditation,
interestingly enough, begins with reference to such victims as Bastwick, Burton, and
Prynne. After speaking of the many loppings and mutilations, to which the ears of
our fathers, and our own, have been of late so much exposed, Swift continues: It is
held by naturalists, that if there be a protuberance of parts in the superiour region of
the body, as in the ears and nose, there must be a parity also in the inferior....
Hippocrates tells us, that when the vein behind the ear happens to be cut, a man
becomes a eunuch (The Tale of a Tub, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swit, ed. Herbert
Davis, 9 vols. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939], 1:129)
17. Calliope is, of course, the muse of epic poetry, to whom Milton had been
dedicating and, in a sense, sacricing himself. The threat of her removal or
helplessness is, therefore, particularly devastating.
18. He has had to face what Adam will express as perhaps the harshest aspect of
his and therefore of all human loss:
... how glad would I lay me down
As in my Mothers lap! There I should rest
And sleep secure, his dreadful voice no more
148 Peter M. Sacks
Would thunder in my ears....

Paradise Lost 10.77780
The words dreadful voice of course echo the dread voice in the elegy.
19. Leslie Brisman has discussed this delay in his comments on the poem in
Miltons Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973).
20. The shift from Camus to Saint Peter is appropriate. They are like two border
gures, ushers from one realm to the next. Camus at the edge of his river and the
idyllic world, Peter at the gates of heaven. Each is a quasi-deity of water-the Cam and
the Galilean lake, respectively.
21. As we shall see, the two-handed engine invites reference to the sword of
divine vengeance in Hebrews, Revelation, and Psalm 149, but it is worth speculating
on this curious trait of doubleness in the keys, the engine, and the miters form. We
know doubling to be a sign of castration, and it is not unlikely that these totemic
objects somehow bear the sign of their status as products of castration.
22. Socrates: And shall we not nd them replete with immense pleasures? Or
need we remind ourselves of that feature of passion and anger-of the lines: Wrath
that spurs on the wisest mind to rage, / Sweeter by far than stream of owing honey,
or of the pleasures mixed up with the pains in lamentation and longing (Philebus 47e
in Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen
Series, 71 [Princeton: Princton University Press, 1961], 112829).
23. On the amaranth and other ower imagery see Tuve. Alpers, too has excellent
comments on this entire passage.
24. Of. the similar status of Peele Castle, in Wordsworths Elegiac Stanzas
Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle. Notice even the emphasis of the look:
And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armor of old time,
The lightning, the erce wind, and trampling waves.
(Poetical Works, 453)
25. As mentioned in chapter II, n. 9, Lycidas bears a signicant relation to
Spensers July. Apart from the several verbal echoes and repeated motifs, Lycidas
revises the earlier eclogues unresolvedly opposed attitudes toward the sun.
26. The Mantle blue also recalls a line in a poem of George Herbert, published
four years before Lycidas. From The Temple, a lyric entitled The Bag describes
Christs descent to earth and itemizes his simultaneous disrobing. We are told that the
sky his azure mantle gaind In Lycidas it is the swain who seems to gain the
mantle.
Furtherlight on the signicance of the mantle could be shed by a section of
Yeatss Autobiography, quoted and commented on by Avrom Fleishman. Yeats writes of
having opened at random a copy of Burkitts Early Eastern Christianity and nding a
Gnostic Hymn that told of a certain Kings son who being exiled, slept in Egypta
symbol of the natural stateand how an Angel while he slept brought him a royal
mantle.... Fleishman remarks, If the image of him who sleeps is only tentatively to
be identied as the kings son or Emmanuel, it is surely the soul awaiting
Milton: Lycidas 149
resurrection, just as the angelic gift of a higher form of clothing is clearly redemptive
(Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England
[Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983], 33031).
27. This question haunts the entire history of religious beliefs, from the violent
succession of deities in Greece to the contests of different nations gods. In Miltons
work, it is particularly and consistently problematic, extending from the Nativity
Ode to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.
28. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library
Edition, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 190312), 7:262.
WILLIAM FLESCH
The Majesty of Darkness
Thou art immortal and this tongue is known

But to the uncommunicating dead.
P. B. SHELLEY
Abyss is its own apology.

DICKINSON
T his essay undertakes to urge what I only half-jokingly call the novel view
that Milton is of Gods party in Paradise Lost. Novel, because axioms of
philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon the pulse, and most
readers, on both sides of this vexed issue, have had to go elsewhere even for
the terms of an argument about Gods justiability (for example, to
theology). On my reading, Paradise Lost dramatizes a series of more or less
mistaken interpretations of God in order to claim a terric prerogative for
poetry as the only human endeavor pitched high enough to be adequate to
the God the poem imagines. The poem may load the deck in poetrys favor,
then, but it still must convince you to play with that deck: that, I argue, is
what Milton conceived of as his task. Justifying the ways of God to men
becomes equivalent to proving poetry upon the pulse: making the reader go
the same steps as the author, till she or he reaches the point where God is his
own apology. It will become clear, I hope, that this is not a claim for the vatic
fullness of poetry, a fullness which would attest to the presence of God.
From John Milton: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom. 1986 by Chelsea House
Publishers.
151
152 William Flesch
Rather, Miltons God is justied through poetry, and one way of putting this
is to say that he derives his own authority from poetry. For poetry, I shall
argue, is the only thing that Milton conceived of as being inherently
antipathetic to idolatry.
People are agreed on Miltons hatred of idolatry. Christopher Hill is
most succinct on political implications: Idolatry is a short summary of all he
detested: regarding places as holier than people; interfering with the
strongly-held convictions of Christians about how they should and should
not worship God; use of nancial and corporal punishments in spiritual
matters; all the sordidness of church courts progging and pandering for
fees. The concept of idolatry does mucheven allof the work of
coordinating the poetical, political, and religious dimensions of Miltons
thought: readers of all stripes agree to nd Eves worshipping of the tree the
clearest sign of her degradation, a degradation to nd its latest avatar in what
he calls, in Of Reformation, the new-vomited Paganisme of sensuall
Idolatry which was the target of the Puritan revolution. Idolatry makes the
soul forget her heavenly ight (1.520, 522). For Milton it was the exact
antithesis of freedom, the alienation of ones own free will. Even Calvinism
becomes a mode of idolatry; the Arminian rejection of Calvinist
predestination in the Christian Doctrine is couched in the terms of
iconoclasm:
It seems, then, that predestination and election are not particular

but only general: that is, they belong to all who believe in their
hearts and persist in their belief. Peter is not predestined or
elected as Peter, or John as John, but each only insofar as he
believes and persists in his belief.
(6.176)
Determining which party Milton was of, then, depends on deciding

which is the party of the iconoclasts. Percy Shelleywho can represent the
radical tradition from Blake to Empsonsees Satan as a forerunner of his
own explicitly revolutionary hero Prometheus, and its hard to quarrel with
him that even for Milton Satan was on the side which saw itself as resisting
oppression. I agree that there are problems with SatanIll insist on itbut
certainly he spends a lot of time defending his attempted regicide in terms
like those of Miltons defenses of the English people. If we are to admire
Miltons refusal to idolize the name of kinga name then which there needs
no more among the blockish vulgar, to make it wise, and excellent, and
admird, nay to set it next the Bible, though otherwise containing little els
but the common grounds of tyranny and popery, drest up, the better to
deceiv (3.339)it is difficult not to admire much of what Satan says to the
same purpose. Throughout the rst two Books Satan denounces what he sees
as the Tyranny of Heavn (1.124), or what Mammon calls a state / Of

splendid vassalage (2.25152). His incitement of the rebel angels can couch
itself as a plea for liberty from servile pomp, whose ceremonies seem to be
important in heaven. Satans objection to Gods command about the Son that
to him shall bow / All knees in Heavn, and shall confess him Lord
(5.6078), seems perfectly justied since the Son has not yet demonstrated
his worth. While Milton wants us to admire the Son because he volunteers
to redeem humanity through his sacrice, this reason for exaltation comes
after Satans rebellion (although earlier in the poem). Satans objection to the
Son stems, at least in part, from the same impulse that caused Milton to
inveigh against arbitrariness in law-giving. It wouldnt be out of character for
Satan to urge, with Milton, that In the publishing of humane lawes, which
for the most part aime not beyond the good of civill society, to set them
barely forth to the people without reason or Preface, like a physicall
prescript, or only with threatnings, as it were a lordly command, in the
judgment of Plato was thought to be done neither generously nor wisely.
The judgment Milton is approving is about human and civil laws, it is true,
but Miltons heaven (and at this point, Miltons God) doesnt seem
fundamentally different in quality from civil society. If Gods purpose is to
evoke love in the angels, one would think hed do better to use persuasion
which is a more winning and more manlike way to keepe men in obedience
than feare, since it would so incite, and in a manner, charme the multitude
into the love of that which is really good, as to imbrace it ever after, not of
custome and awe, which most men do, but of choice and purpose, with true
and constant delight (1:746). But God doesnt give Satan any persuasive
reason for the law proclaiming the Sons glorication; to Satan it does seem
an arbitrary and lordly command:
... by Decree
Another now hath to himself ingrosst
All Power, and us eclipst under the name
Of King annointed.
(5.77477)
And there is no reason to doubt that Satans expectations were encouraged by

a genuine belief that God ruled only through what Milton scornfully calls
custome and awe and Satan calls old repute / Consent or custom
(1.63940). Satans grandeur, even if it is the grandeur of archangel ruined,
comes from his iconoclasm, from his desire for liberty.
Obviously, though, there are problems with Satan. His superiority to
his conception of God may consist in his perseverance in some Purpose
which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture as
Shelley put it in his Defence of Poetry (498), but it is not at all clear how
154 William Flesch
excellent his purpose is. Empson and Bloom see Paradise Lost as chronicling
Miltons struggle with the nobility of his own conception of Satan, a struggle
which forced him into debasing or rotting his own noble conception as
Satans grandeur threatened to get out of hand. But Shelleys analysis of Satan
in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, that he is not exempt from the taints
of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement (133),
seems as true of Satan early (both in the poem and in the time frame) as later.
Satan desires to conquer God so that he can reign in Gods place: the liberty
he would achieve would be for himself alone. His rejection of Christs
authority comes ultimately from his sense that his own power is being
diminished. He refuses to worship the name of king in God: yet for himself
and his crew he claims that their Imperial Titles assert / Our being ordaind
to govern, not to serve (6.8012). He will not acknowledge as true of
himself what he argues against God, that titles of nobility are merely titular
(6.774). Satans revolt is not against tyranny. It is against a tyrant whose place
he wishes to usurp.
We should admire, then, the iconoclastic traits that urge Satan to revolt
against a gure who does look and act very much like a tyrant, but we should
not overlook his own similar tendencies. Satan never sustains the iconoclasm
which makes him admirable, since side by side with it exists a desire to be the
worshipped icon. I think this accounts for our ambivalent feelings about
Satan: heroic in his rebellion against idolatry, he never gets nally beyond it
himself.
Even his analysis of his fall reies the dubious battle. The rebels (with
the partial and hypocritical exception of Mammon) all follow Satan in
ascribing Gods victory only to the superior degree of his power, a degree they
might hope to match. Beelzebub articulates their idolatrous conception of
the true God (and yet it is this idolatrous conception that allows them to
imagine themselves iconoclasts) when he anticipates Satans claim that God
has overcome them by force. His name for God is our Conqueror:
... whom I now

Of force believe Almighty, since no less
Than such could have oerpowrd such force as ours.
(1.14345)
As in Satans speech about testing Gods traditional kingship, the

idolatrous strain subverts the speakers iconoclasm. Beelzebubs pun echoes
Miltons objections to imposing laws by force instead of reason, but at the
same time it takes the term Almighty to refer only to superior force. For
the rebel angels, the war in heaven was a war to determine who was rst in
strength. Their rejection of traditional power offers nothing but a new power
in its place. So that their conception of God is that he is great because of his
power; he is the victor whom Thunder hath made greater (1.258).
To be fair to Satan, he is different from the other rebels by being the

only one of them who seems really (if inconsistently) to be outraged by the
equation of greatness with power. He is most noble when most stoical, when
least impressed by the force that has vanquished him. His claim that thunder
made God greater misconceives God, but it also rejects such a conception of
greatness. Although he ends up by repeating it, Satan deplores what he takes
to be Gods idolatry of force:
Hail, horrors, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be changd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heavn of Hell, a Hell of Heavn.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than bee,
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free....
(1.25059)
Satan is the only one of the rebels whose character is complex, and that
complexity manifests itself in almost all his speeches. His irreconcilable
impulses towards self-sufficient iconoclasm and towards his own iconic glory
besiege him with contraries. We feel the authentic power of his affirmation
of self-reliant freedom, independent of place: he anticipates Michaels
doctrine that God attributes to place / No sanctity ... (11.83637). But that
freedom too often resolves into meaning nothing more than freedom to
attempt to regain only the lost place, once more / With rallied Arms to try
what may be yet / Regaind in Heavn ... (1.24971).
We do get a sense of the nobility of Satans rebellion when we hear that
one of its results was to have his name blotted out of the book of life. There
is unintended pathos in Raphaels sneer, Nameless in dark oblivion let them
dwell (7.380). Satans willingness to give up his name stems from that part
of him which scorns terms of honor, what Milton, writing as Charles
iconoclast, calls the gaudy name of majesty. All the angelic names double
as titles, deriving their glory from God, who appears in all of them (via the
el suffix) except Zephons. In the Christian Doctrine Milton says that
angels take on Gods name to image him:
The name of God seems to have been attributed to the angels

because they were sent from heaven bearing the likeness of the
divine glory and person and, indeed the very words of God....
Angels or messengers, even though they may seem to take upon
156 William Flesch
themselves, when they speak, the name and character of God, do

not speak their own words but those specied by God, who sent
them.... Exod. xxxiii. 20: no one can see me and live. Also John 1.18:
no one has ever seen God, and v. 37: you have never heard his voice nor
seen his shape; I Tim. vi. 16: dwelling in unapproachable light, whom
no man has seen or can see. It follows, then, that whoever was heard
or seen was not God....
(23637)
Although this is primarily about the identity of the messengers who

speak to humans, I think that for Milton the names of all the angels implied
their conditions as images of God, just as Adam is created in Gods image. (I
will insist, however, on the importance for Milton of the interpretation that
Adams name alludes to the ground he comes from.) Satans rebellion entails
the loss of his Godlike name, and this loss would mean two things to him. It
would rst of all signify his own kenosis, his refusal to bear the name and be
the image of God, in favor of a radically unidolatrous freedom. Following
Althusser and Deleuze, I see the act of namingof calling by nameas
forming and xing the subject, and, as Foucault says, the moment of
subjectivity is also the moment of subjection, of the insertion of a link in the
great chain of power relations; if this claim has any intuitive force to it theres
no reason to deny that intuition to Milton. But for Satan this freedom would
also come to mean supplanting God.
By giving up a title which invests him with Gods image, Satan comes
to attempt to rival Gods invisibility and inaccessibility. This attempt is
double-edged. It proceeds out of a less iconic and more admirable
understanding of God than the other angels (both fallen and unfallen)
possess (as Ill claim later, even the unfallen angels think that they can see
God); but it erroneously and idolatrously considers a visible, accessible,
irremediably subjective being like Satan capable of rivaling God. Pride
engenders Satans fall, but I think that that pride is not accurately described
as pride of place alone. Satans nobility does, for many acute and powerful
readers, rival and even exceed Gods. As a projection of Miltons repressed
pride in his own insightfulness, an insightfulness which tempts him (if
Sandler is right) to reject the authority of the Bible, Satan can be understood
to be imagining himself to know more about Godlike inaccessibility than any
of the other angels, and perhaps even than God himself. But Satan is
idolatrously proud of his own unidolatrousness. I think this is the feeling
behind Satans scorn at Gods being made greater by thunder. Satan (or
Milton in Satan) thinks, and not without some very good evidence, that his
conception of Godliness is poetically superior to Gods. He certainly speaks
better poetry than God is allowed to. I am going to argue that not only is
Satans conception of God inadequate, but also his conception of Godliness;
nevertheless Satan comes closer than any of the other angels to the
understanding of Godliness which was Miltons.
The loss of his name indicates Satans nobility, and his reaction to it
distinguishes him, for a time at least, from the rest of the fallen angels.
Miltons scorn for the other rebels is boundless. Not complex like Satan,
their only desires are gluttonous: to be feasted and adored as idols. Satan
sustains for a time (and only partially) his noble and impossible condition of
namelessness, a truer image of Gods invisible glory than are the idols. But
the other rebels seem avid to get themselves new names, avid to be idolized
in their own names:
... of their Names in heavnly Records now

Be no memorial, blotted out and rasd
By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life.
Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve
Got them new Names, till wandring oer the Earth,
Through Gods high sufferance for the trial of man,
By falsities and lies the greatest part
Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake
God thir creator; and thinvisible
Glory of him that made them, to transform
Oft to the Image of a Brute, adornd
With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold,
And Devils to adore for Deities:
Then were they known to men by various Names,
And various Idols through the Heathen World.
(1.36175)
This passage catches one of the profoundest contrasts in the poem

that between the puerile, cartoonish infestation of these ridiculous deities
and Gods high sufferance which inects all our woe with the sense that
it is Gods as well (otherwise why high sufferance?). To the extent that the
rebels nd their greatest delight in gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold
theyre ridiculous. And yet, Satan does differ from them. Milton arouses our
disgust at these lesser rebels. But in large part we are disgusted because they
contrast with Satan. They are parasites, ready to swarm in when hes done his
job, for the rewards only. But no reader can see this passage as referring to
Satan, and Milton explicitly aligns himself with Satans distrust of names
when, at the beginning of Book 7, his invocation of the Muse is to the
meaning, not the Name (7.5).
But Satan is not able to maintain his impossible namelessness. To be
like God he would really have to be unchanged by place or time, but his
response to his fall is too often close to the obsessive concern with outward
158 William Flesch
show that characterizes the pervasive idolatry of the fallen angels. For the
most part, Satans actions are ultimately reactions, and so are based, however
indirectly, on the exterior constraints that Satan as iconoclast wants to think
himself entirely independent of. Even in Book 1 he spends a lot of time
playing the adolescent inverter that Harold Bloom nds he has become by
Book 9. His rst speech to Beelzebub asserts his desire for revenge, a reactive
passion (1.107), and fty lines later he takes up his adversarial role decisively:
To do aught good will never be our task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight,
/ As being contrary to his high will / Whom we resist (1.15962). This
resolution nally leads to his ultimate degradation, in which he wholly
accepts the adversarial name that heaven has given him, and revels in its
meaning: Satan (for I glory in the name, / Antagonist of Heavns Almighty
King) (10.38687). The Son ultimately manifests himself as Satans better
when he refuses this reactive, adversarial role in Book 10; his willingness to
clothe his Enemies (10.219) enriches the possibilities of human life instead
of turning the world into the silly theatre of antagonism that Satan wants it
to be.
At the end of Book 2 Milton provides an objective correlative to the
fallen angels idolatrous overestimation of names. Many readers echo
Johnsons discomfort with the allegorization of Sin and Death, as being
unworthy of the grandeur that has come before. But this unworthiness itself
allegorizes the idolatry of the rebels. They never learn, what it will be Adam
and Eves burden to discover, that sin and death are something more than the
names of horrid personages. For Satan, the words sin and death become
the names of exterior beings, instead of being felt as interior states. The
externalization of sin and death allegorizes Satans refusal to understand the
pertinency of a gurative understanding of allegory. He takes the image for
the essence, and he worships the image. According to Sins accountthe
force of which neither of them understandsSatan full oft / Thyself in me
thy perfect image viewing, / Becamst enamored (2.76365). He falls in love
with sin as a narcissistic self-image, and so evinces his sinful idolatry of
himself. That he could nd a sufficient, a perfect, idol for himself within so
decayed an allegory shows how debased his self-idolatry has become.
Idolatrous narcissism is on one level the cause of all the falls in the poem.
Abdiel interprets it as the opposite of real liberty, when he upbraids Satan,
echoing Sin, as being Thyself not free, but to thyself enthralled (6.181).
Satan tempts Eve, who has already manifested her narcissistic tendencies in her
attraction to her reection at the pool (4.46066), with the promise of what she
might become; Adams reproach to her, that she insisted on going off alone
because she was longing to be seen (10.877) doesnt seem unfair. But Adam
consents to eat when he nds that Eve has fallen because he feels The Link
of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh, / Bone of my Bone thou art (9.91415),
and that to lose thee were to lose myself (9.959).
Commentators often try to distinguish Satans narcissistic attraction to

Sin from what looks like a similar trait in God by calling it a parodic version
of the Fathers glorication of his Son. The Son is supposed to be worthy of
Gods surpassing love because he is The radiant image of his Glory (3.63);
God praises him as thou, in whom my glory I behold / In full resplendence
(5.71920), and when he addresses him O Son, in whom my soul hath chief
delight, / Son of my bosom, Son who art alone / My Word, my wisdom, and
effectual might (3.16870), the Son seems to have sprung out of Gods
bosom as Sin will spring out of Satans head and Eve from Adams side.
Obviously Milton did feel a difference between Gods love for his Son and
Satans desire for Sin, but the difference doesnt ilable for the heavenly
audience, except by decree.
In fact, its impossible, from a heavenly perspective, to distinguish
between Satan and God except as different in degree. I have been arguing
that one of the signs of the rebel angels idolatry is their belief that might
makes right, that only force raties the pretension to sovereignty, and so that
the only difference between Satan and God is one of degree (except that
Satan sometimes imagines himself as deploring this state of things). A less
vicious version of the rebels doctrine manifests itself in the idea of the great
chain of being, in which every link has its place in a hierarchy. A defense of
hierarchy can of course be mounted: Orders and Degrees / jar not with
liberty, but well consist (5.79293)but this is Satan speaking. His initial
objection is not to the chain but to having his position as its second link (after
God) usurped by the Son. Abdiel is exceptional among the angels in
perceiving a radical discontinuity between the highest of the angels and the
Son (5.84145), who is himself, according to the Arian Christian Doctrine,
only the rst of all created beings (Part 1, Chapter V and passim). But Abdiels
interpretation isnt the one encouraged in Heaven, since the Fathers
prediction that God shall be All in All (3.341) seems an easy induction
from the continuous version of the chain that Raphael explains to Adam.
Thus his repetition of all enforces a continuity in beinga continuity
which does seem to attribute sanctity to place:
O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depravd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one rst matter all,
Indud with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more rend, more spiritous, and pure,
As nearer to him plact or nearer tending
Each in thir several active Spheres assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
160 William Flesch
Proportiond to each kind....

time may come when men
With angels may participate ...
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your body may at last turn all to spirit,
Improvd by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee....
(5.46999)
Empson notices some of Raphaels unwitting echoes of Satans dream

temptation in this passage (147ff). I want to build on his insight by arguing
that Raphael sounds so much like Satan because they have very similar ideas
about God and heaven. Raphael and Beelzebub both seem to have the same
conception of what it means to be almighty. For Beelzebub, in his claim that
God demonstrated himself to be almighty by defeating a force next in power
to his (1.14445), almightiness implies a position at the top of the scale of
power, commensurable with lesser might. Raphael takes a similar view when
he describes Michael and Satan battling with next to Almighty Arm
(6.316). For both of them, God is a Platonic form: if he is the origin of
ontology, he is likewise approachable through ontology, with being
becoming purer (or mightier) as one is placed or tends nearer to him.
Again, Raphael doesnt seem far from the lesser rebels in his
conception of Gods invisibility. Milton subscribes to the Arian tenet that the
Father is absolutely unknowable. He is radically different from all created
beings, even the Son, who is the voice we hear and the sight we see when we
imagine that we are seeing God: The Word must be audible, but God is
inaudible just as he is invisible, John v. 37; therefore the Word is not of the
same essence as God (6.239). The rebels, with (as I have argued) the
intermittent exception of Satan, possess a debased notion of this doctrine.
Gods inaudibility and invisibility get parodied when the rebels corrupt
human beings thinvisible / Glory of him that made them, to transform /
Oft to the Image of a Brute (1.36971), which is to have the unknown
degenerate into the monstrous. Mammons attempt to persuade the fallen
angels that they can make a material heaven of hell also presents Gods
invisibility in material terms:
This deep world

Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heavns all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his Glory unobscurd,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne, from whence deep thunders roar
Mustring thir rage, and Heavn resembles hell?

(2.26268)
But this somewhat literal-minded conception of Gods hidden state is

not restricted to hell. Raphael always presents God as either within a
covering cloud (e.g. 6.28 and 5657), or hidden by a dazzling brightness. It
is worth comparing Miltons conception of Gods dazzling invisibility with
Raphaels. Ones impression is that Raphael believes his inability to tolerate
the direct sight of God comes merely from his being too far down on the
chain of being. God is dazzling, yes, but his inaccessibility is nally relative.
Raphael and the other angels cant see God, but they take this invisibility as
proceeding from the weakness of their own sight (a weakness Satan refuses
to acknowledge), not as one of Gods fundamental attributes. Adam echoes
Raphael when he laments the weakness that the fall has produced in him:
How shall I behold the face

Henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy
And rapture so oft beheld? those heavnly shapes
Will dazzle now this earthly, with thir blaze
Insufferably bright.
(9.108084)
For Raphael, God speaks as from a Flaming Mount, whose top /

Brightness had made invisible (5.59899), whichat rstlooks like
Miltons hymn in Book 3 to:
... thee Author of all being,

Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitst
Thrond inaccessible, but when thou shadst
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
Yet dazzle Heavn, that brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil thir eyes.
Thee next they sang of all Creation rst,
Begotten Son, Divine Similitude,
In whose conspicuous countnance, without cloud
Made visible, thAlmighty Father shines,
Whom else no Creature can behold....
(3.37487)
I think that after reading the whole of Paradise Lost a reader coming
162 William Flesch
back to these lines should understand Gods invisibility in the second line as
fundamental, as preceding the glorious brightness he expresses, not
proceeding from it as an effect. We can infer from the last three lines that,
far from hiding God, clouds make him visible, like the clothes the invisible
man wears in Wells, since it is only in the Son that God is visible without
clouds. The reference to the brightness of the Seraphim invites the reader to
see in this hymn another allusion to the great chain of being, since there is
an implicit comparison of their brightness with Gods. But in addition to the
difference between Gods invisibility and his dazzling light, Milton
introduces another discontinuity when clouds shade the full blaze. It is this
doubly distanced expression of God that the angels nd insufferably bright,
and it appears that Raphael mistakes this tertiary inaccessibility for Gods
invisibility. Milton, on the other hand, would see this attenuated brightness
as the end of the great chain of being (or even already beyond it, since
brightest Seraphim shade their eyes). Beyond that is Gods fundamental
inaccessibility.
My claim is that the Platonic doctrine which Raphael speaks for is
mistaken and that it is this same mistaken doctrine that ultimately tempts the
rebels attempt. Following Deleuze, I want to argue for a Gnostic (but not, I
hope, Bloomian) alternative to Platonic doctrinean alternative which
focuses the drama of Paradise Lost not on the staged opposition God/Satan
but on the complex relationship of a different kind of God with human
beings. Deleuze underlines a kind of idolatry in Plato when he contrasts the
Timaean god Chronos (who represents the moving image of eternity) with
the temporality of human beings as actors. The task of the actor, says
Deleuze, is intensity: he or she must concentrate in the most eeting of
presents the weight of the entire past and future of the character represented.
The ephemerality of the means of representationits inadequacy to what it
representsbecomes itself an intensity which gures the charge of time
more adequately than any more leisurely present (that is a present whose
inherent evanescence is not at issue): Instead of going from the most ample
present towards a future and past which can only be expressed by a present
more transitory than they are, you go from a future and past become limitless
to the most transitory presenta pure instant which ceaselessly subdivides
(my translation). The actor, then, is anti-Platonic, since the soul of acting is
that it should be only ctional (which is not the same as third-rate being). It
should have the poignancy of what is only ctional, the poignancy that
belongs to Calliope when she turns out to be an empty dream. Deleuze is
good at relating that poignancy to temporality, in a way that could gloss
Proust, but which I want to make gloss Paradise Lost:
The actor is not like a god, but like a counter-god. God and the
actor are opposed to each other in their reading of time. What
humans grasp as past or future, the god lives in his eternal

presence. The god is Chronos: the divine present is the circle in
its entirety, while the past and the future are dimensions relative
to some highlighted segment of the circle. But for the actor, the
present is the narrowest, tightest, most ephemeral, most punctual
point on a straight line, never ceasing to divide that line, and
dividing itself into past/future. The actor has the essence of the
Aeon: instead of the fullest, profoundest presenta present
spreading out like an oil stain, embracing past and futurehere
arises a limitless past/future reected in an empty present with no
more thickness than a mirror. (my translation)
Ill want to argue that Miltons true God was the Gnostic Aeon, not
Raphaels debased and serenely self-present manifestation of complacency.
Raphaels understanding of Gods secrecy and invisibility is pretty tame. He
resolves his uncertainty about how to relate / To human sense thinvisible
exploits / Of warring Spirits; how ... unfold / The secrets of another World
by concluding that they really arent so different from the common
knowledge of this world. The hint to Adam indicates his Platonism fairly
strongly, with its allusion to the allegory of the cave: what if Earth / Be but
the shadow of Heavn, and things therein / Each to other like, more than on
Earth is thought? (5.56476). In Books 7 and 8 he thinks of God as guarding
only state secrets from the angels, by a sort of divine executive privilege,
suppressing what apparently could be revealed. He tells Adam not to inquire
too closely about the nature of the universe, nor let thine own inventions
hope / Things not reveald, which thinvisible King, / Only Omniscient, hath
supprest in Night.... (7.12123). This makes it sound as though invisibility
were an accidental, not an essential, feature of the things that are closest to
God. Near the beginning of Book 8 Raphael praises God for doing wisely
to conceal the mechanism of his astronomy, and not divulge / His secrets
to be scanned by them who ought / Rather admire.... (8.7375). This God
comes out of Machiavelli, deriving his power not so much from what he
keeps to himself as from the fact that he keeps things to himself, which allows
him to be the only omniscient one. As a representative of the angels
conception of God, Raphael unwittingly explains how the rebels could have
thought themselves capable of replacing him. The angels dont really
understand God to be entirely different from themselves. For none of them
are secrecy and invisibility inherent attributes of the things they do not know.
One gets the feeling that, like Bentley, they would emend secret to
sacred in the secret top of Horeb (except that at least Bentley feels theres
a possible difference there, which they do not).
Adam and Eve start off with an understanding similar to the angels.
They believe that their inability to see God is a function of their place, and
164 William Flesch
their morning hymn in Book 5 conceives of him as being to us invisible.

They think that higher up on the chain they would be able to see him; thus
they praise the angels, for yee behold him (5.157 and 161), and Raphael
conrms what Milton surely considered an error. Raphael claims that it is the
angels happy state to stand / In sight of God enthrond (5.53536).
What does this do but ratify Satans dream temptation of Eve? There she was
encouraged to equate high exaltation with the ability to see / What life the
Gods live there, and such live thou (5.90 and 8081): thus visibility would
mean commensurabilityand so susceptibility to being equalled (and, as
Satan continues, overthrown). Again, in Book 9, Satans temptation
encourages Eve to attempt the clearer sight that Raphael has already told her
belongs to the angels:
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,

Why but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers; he knows that in the day Ye
Eat thereof, your Eyes that seem so clear,
Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then
Opnd and cleard, and ye shall be as Gods,
Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.
That ye should be as Gods, since I as Man,
Internal Man, is but proportion meet....
(9.70211)
Eve is receptive to Satans argument here because it is based on the

Platonic conception of proportion meet. Raphael has described the
possibility of moving up on the great chain of being; he promised the humans
that they could eventually attain to the angelic vision that does have sight of
God. Satan exploits both Raphael and Eves naive notion that God is within
the possible reach of sight in order to encourage her to attempt that reach.
One of the immediate consequences of Eves disobedience is a further
degradation of her understanding of secrecy and invisibility. She thanks
Experience because it opnst Wisdoms way, / And givst access, though
secret she retire. / And I perhaps am secret; Heavn is high, / High and
remote to see from thence distinct / Each thing on Earth.... (9.81014).
Already she senses that eating the fruit does not provide an easy way up to
heaven, which is high and remote; what momentarily sounds like a claim to
God-headI perhaps am secretimmediately reduces to the hope that
what she has done will be overlooked. (But the expression of that hope is
wonderful: already shes speaking great poetry.)
There is, then, something seriously decient about the angelic and
unfallen conception of God. Empson remarks that Book 6 reads like bad
science ction, which seems a good way of summing up our discomfort with
heaven according to Raphael. Therefore, I want to suggest that the fall of

humanity turns out to be fortunate (to argue that its not, as Danielson does,
is inevitably to prefer Gods poetry in Book 3 to Miltons) because it enables
a much deeper understanding of God. Satan verges on such an
understanding when he is closest to Milton, when he is thinking most
poetically, most like an Arian. If the angels are Arians at all, it is in a trivial
way; for them God is only unknowable and inaccessible because hes just the
other side of knowledge and accessibility. But for Adam and Eve the fall
produces a sense of drastic discontinuity between nite intelligences and the
unknowable God. This sense of discontinuity is at rst primarily negative (as
when Adam asks how he will be able henceforth to tolerate the insupportably
dazzling sight of God or Angel, or when Eve feels that heaven is high and
remote), but even in its negative aspect Milton equates it with poetic power.
His dismissal, in his invocation to Book 9, of Raphaels account of the war in
heaven seems every bit as imperious as Empsons. It is for the sad task of
describing the fall that Milton requests answerable style (9.13 and 20); this
seems a bit odd at rst, since hed shown very little anxiety about whether
hed be able to ventriloquize a seraphic description of the war in heaven. But
he goes on in the invocation to reject poetry about tilting Furniture (9.34),
and thereby himself voices our half-suppressed embarrassment about the
silliness of whats gone on in heaven. Hes not interested in the standard
topics that give Heroic name / To Person or to Poem (9.4041):
Mee of these
Nor skilld nor studious, higher Argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or Years damp my intended wing
Deprest; and much they may, if all be mine,
Nor Hers who brings it nightly to my Ear.
(9.4147)
More interesting than the implication that Raphaels narrative is not up

to the poetry Milton nally aspires to is the contrast with twilit Eden
presented by the opening of Book 9. There is more poetic affect in Miltons
intense apprehension of his mortality in these lines than in any of the
descriptions of the events in heaven. Even the cautious optimism of the last
two lines is suffused with a sense of loss. Perhaps hell live to nish the poem,
but hell still be susceptible to all the dampening inuences of his mortal
condition. These lines feel rather like The Tempest: the island is magical, but
when you leave it every third thought will be of death. I think this passage is
so moving because of the contrast between Uranias radiance and Miltons
mortal blindness. We get a sense of her radiance, but also a sense that its
166 William Flesch
power is not a saving but a consoling one. Nightly seems to be the key
word. For Urania, night is like the nights in Paradise before the fall,
illumined by the stars, planets and moon, or like night in heaven: grateful
Twilight (for Night comes not there / In darker veil) (5.64546). But for
Milton it ultimately means the night of Sonnet XXIII, forgotten for a
moment but returning after his nightly muse has ed. The radiance which
illuminates him also intensies his sense of loss, as when Caliban wakes and
cries to sleep again.
In the invocation to Book 9, Milton both asserts and demonstrates that
loss of Eden, the fall into mortality, produces poetic affect. Of course, this is
a position that he cannot be comfortable with. One feels that the choiring
angels hymning praise to the works of God provide the model of poetry that
Milton is least anxious about. But the affect actually derives from the
impossibility of sustaining the apparent radiance of that poetry in a fallen
condition. For a long time, I think, Milton felt ambivalent about his sense
that poetic power is enabled by loss, and at least twice before he tried to
dissipate that ambivalence by splitting its antinomies into paired poems:
LAllegro / Il Penseroso and On the Morning of Christs Nativity /
The Passion. But in Paradise Lost he combines celebration and
lamentation. This combination reects Miltons ambivalence about the
poetry he nds himself writing most powerfully; but this ambivalence also
produces the most powerful moments in that poetry. As an evil rhetorician
whose language is sublimely intensied in hell, Satan represents the negative
side of that ambivalence. But the Romantics seem right in thinking that
Milton couldnt avoid, through much of the poem, feeling a strong identity
with Satan, an identity which he understood as a real problem: as I have
argued, the identication seems to stem from their both having a deeper
conception of Godliness than the rest of heaven. And this conception seems
indissolubly linked to ambivalence. Satan and Milton are both suspicious of
the origins of their poetic power, but Satans nal response is to get rid of
ambivalence by reifying that origin, by making it either an icon to be rejected
(if the icon is God) or worshipped (if it is himself). Milton, on the other
hand, had a lot invested in not identifying poetic and iconic thinking. If he
calls books the image of God in Areopagitica (2.492), by the 1660s he was
very careful to explode the notion that one could call idols the laymans
books (6.693). Satan cannot sustain the drastically iconoclastic sense that his
poetic power springs from something radically unknowable, from
unknowability itself. He does not have the negative capability that would
enable him to accept ambivalence itself as a condition of power. This is not
just another way of saying what the angels say, that his overweening pride
made him reject an invisible God who nevertheless should obviously be
obeyed. Satans deep sense that the origin of power is inaccessible far
outdoes, in its deep and powerful sublimity, the angels conceptions of God.
But it nally founders, while Miltons does not.
Empson and Bloom see Miltons response to his ambivalence as being
nally to cut the Gordian knot by scapegoating Satan, by making him
despicable (or, more subtly, by recounting how unjust rebellion necessarily
makes the highest nobility vile). But Paradise Lost seems ultimately to
respond to this problem positively too, which is I think its greatest strength.
In giving up Satan it doesnt give up God or its ambivalent conception of
God. Early on, Milton was ambivalent about a poetry based on loss, in
Paradise Lost he bases his poetry on the very loss that that ambivalence
entails, the loss of angelic certainty about the origin of power.
II
It is a version of the abyss as somehow Gods element, in the same way that
night is Miltons, that Adam will eventually learn. The way he learns it is via
his learning that his own element is really dust, that his name images, not
Platonic forms, but the formless, the scattered. His lamentation in Book 10
recognizes dust as our nal rest and native home (10.1085) when he speaks
the lines Mary Shelley used as her powerful epigraph: Did I request thee,
Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness
to promote me ...? (10.74345). The knowledge that we are dust, / And
thither must return and be no more (11.199) is the knowledge of death that
the fruit of the tree instilled. Milton insists on the quality of this knowledge,
altering Genesis to have Adam and Eve know but not appreciate their
origin before the fall. So when God climaxes his judgment with the phrase
know thy birth before the line from Genesis, For dust thou art, and shalt
to dust return (10.2078), there is a strong implication that this knowledge
is incommunicable to the immortals. Adam and Eve did not know what this
meant, even though they were acquainted with its content, when they were
immortal. Knowledge has come to mean something different to them now.
The power of the judgment is not available to the unfallen. The judgment is
powerful because it reveals the dark nativity of life as being the abyss. The
knowledge available to human beings of their natural element produces the
poetic affect that Milton associates with Godliness. Humans go beyond the
fallen angels in this knowledge, since the rebels keep asserting that in our
proper motion we ascend / Up to our native seat (2.7576). The rebels
reject the apprehension of the abyss that establishes poetic power, and in this
refusal of the unknowable they prove themselves as ultimately not like God.
But Adams nal statement that the fall was fortunate doesnt refuse the
unknowable. He goes beyond the foreknowledge vouchsafed to Michael
168 William Flesch
when he sees beyond the end of time. Here he as last speaks Miltons words,
achieves Miltons insight into the unknowable:
How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest,

Measurd this transient World, the Race of time,
Till time stand xt: beyond is all abyss,
Eternity, whose end no eye can reach.
(12.55356)
One of the consequences of my argument is the claim that God does

not ever appear in Paradise Lost: whoever was heard or seen was not God.
That claim seems to be worth making since it saves God from sounding
ridiculous. As I read the poem, the gure of God is an emanation constructed
for the dwarsh understandings of the angels. In the Christian Doctrine
Milton tells us:
It is safest for us to form an image of God in our minds which

corresponds to his representation and description of himself in
the sacred writings. Admittedly, God is always described or
outlined not as he really is but in such a way as will make him
conceivable to us. Nevertheless, we ought to form just such a
mental image of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits
of our understanding, wishes us to form. Indeed he has brought
himself down to our level expressly to prevent our being carried
beyond the reach of human comprehension, and outside the
written authority of scripture, into vague subtleties of
speculation.
(6.13334)
The safest way is the way taken by the loyal angels, who are content
to form an image of God in their minds. H. R. McCallum uses the injunction
in this passage to argue that Milton wants us also to take the safe way out. I
agree that part of Milton very much wanted to repress his Satanic sense that
his idea of God was deeper than that of the Scriptures. But Paradise Lost is
most powerful when Milton allows that sense full rein. Bloom remarks on
the outrageousness of Miltons pursuit of Things unattempted yet in Prose
or Rhyme (1.16), since one of the prose attempts of the story narrated in
Paradise Lost is the Bible (Vessels, 83). Milton at his most powerful refuses the
safest way. He calls his song adventrous (1.13), and I think we feel some
surprise when Adam gives Eve the same epithet after the fall (9.921). We
could read this either way: the angelic reading would be that Milton is
casting suspicion on his own enterprise by comparing it with Eves sin; but
more interesting (or adventurous), I think, is the idea that Eves adventurous
deed ultimately results as Satan has predicted; results in enlarging human
apprehensions of God.
Milton certainly would not countenance an image of God which went
beyond the received images. But the important point is that he doesnt
countenance them either. The extreme Puritanism of his denition of
idolatry in the Christian Doctrine cuts against an unadventurous
literalism: Idolatry means making or owning an idol for religious purposes,
or worshipping it, whether it be a representation of the true God or of some false
god (6.69091, my emphasis). Milton at his darkest and most powerfulat
his most mortalgoes beyond received images, not to another image, but to
meditations on loss and exile which share the inessential essence of what
Valentinuswriting against Raphaels hero Platocalled the forefathering
abyss.
M A RY N Y Q U I S T
The genesis of gendered subjectivity

in the divorce tracts and in Paradise Lost
I t appears that one can now speak of third-wave feminism as well as

post-feminist feminism. Like other labels generated by the historical
moment to which they refer, these await a lengthy period of interrogation.
But if they should stick, their signicance will be associated with the variety
of attacks mounted against Western bourgeois or liberal feminism over the
past decade and a half. Now, as never before, what has to be contended
withprecisely because it has been exposed in the process of contestation
and critiqueis the historically determinate and class-inected nature of the
discourse of equal rights. The questions, equal with whom, and to what
end? have been raised in ways that have begun to expose how, ever since the
early modern period, bourgeois man has proved the measure. They have also
shown how the formal or legal status of this elusive equality tends by its
very nature to protect the status quo.
Because much academic criticism on Paradise Lost, especially that
produced in North America, has been written within a liberal-humanist
tradition that wants Milton to be, among other things, the patron saint of the
companionate marriage, it has frequently made use of a notion of equality
that is both mystied and mystifying. The undeniable emphasis on mutuality
to be found in Paradise Lostthe mutual dependency of Eve and Adam on
one another, their shared responsibility for the Fallis for this reason often
treated as if it somehow entailed a signicant form of equality. Differences
From Re-membering Milton: Essays on the texts and traditions, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W.
Ferguson. 1988 by Mary Nyquist.
171
172 Mary Nyquist
that in Paradise Lost are ordered hierarchically and ideologically tend to be

neutralized by a critical discourse interested in formal balance and
harmonious pairing. To take just one, not especially contentious, example,
Milton is said to go out of his way to offset the superiority associated with
Adam in his naming of the animals by inventing an equivalent task for Eve:
her naming of the owers. In this reading, Milton, a kind of proto-feminist,
generously gives the power of naming to both woman and man.1 The
rhetorical effectiveness of this point obviously depends in important ways
upon the suppression of features suggestive of asymmetry. Left unquestioned
must be the differences between Adams authoritative naming of the
creaturesan activity associated with the rational superiority and dominion
of Man when it is presented by Adam, who in Book VIII relates to Raphael
this episode of the creation story in the second chapter of Genesisand
Eves naming of the owers, which is revealed only incidentally in her
response to the penalty of exile delivered in Book XI. In a speech that has the
form of a lament for the garden she has just been told they are to leave, Eves
naming in Book XI appears in such a way that it seems never to have had the
precise status of an event. It is, instead, inseparably a feature of her
apostrophic address to the owers themselves: O owers / ... which I bred
up with tender hand / From the rst opning bud, and gave ye Names
(XI.2737).2 Here Eves naming becomes associated not with rational
insight and dominion but rather with the act of lyrical utterance, and
therefore with the affective responsibilities of the domestic sphere into which
her subjectivity has always already fallen.
In recent years, a remarkably similar critical current, intent on
neutralizing oppositions, has been at work in feminist biblical commentaries
on Genesis. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, claims for the spiritual
equality of the sexes have very often had recourse to Genesis 1.27, So God
created man [ha- a- da- m, ostensibly a generic term] in his own image, in the
image of God created he him; male and female created he them.3 This
verse, which is part of what is now considered the Priestly or P creation
account (Genesis 12.4a), has always co-existed somewhat uneasily with the
more primitive and more obviously masculinist Yahwist or J creation
account in chapter 2, where the creator makes man from the dust of the
ground (thereby making ha- a- da- m punningly relate to ha- a- da- m, the word for
ground or earth) and woman from this mans rib. Within a specically
Christian context, the relationship between the two accounts has beenat
least potentiallyproblematical, since I Timothy 2:1114 uses the Yahwist
account to bolster the prohibition against women taking positions of
authority within the Church: Let the woman learn in silence with all
subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the
man, but to be in silence. For Adam was rst formed, then Eve. And Adam
was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
Gendered Subjectivity 173
Recently, in an effort to reconcile feminism and Christianity, Phyllis Trible

has tried to harmonize the differences between the Priestly and the Yahwist
creation accounts. Trible holds that the exegetical tradition alone is
responsible for the sexist meanings usually attributed to the Yahwist creation
story, which she renarrates using methods that are basically formalist.
More specically, Trible argues that the second chapter of Genesis tells
the story not of the creation of a patriarchal Adam, from whom a secondary
Eve is derived, but the story of the creation of a generic and androgynous
earth creature or man to whom the sexually distinct woman and man are
related as full equals. Throughout, Tribles retelling is strongly motivated by
the desire to neutralize the discrepancy between the P and the J accounts
by assimilating J to P, which is assumed to recognize the equality of the
sexes and therefore to provide the meaning of the two creation accounts
taken together as one. Because P suggests the possibility of a symmetrical,
non-hierarchical relationship between male and female, J is said by Trible
to tell the story of the creation of a sexually undifferentiated creature who
becomes sexed only with the creation of woman. The simultaneous
emergence of woman and man as equals is signalled, she argues, when
Yahweh brings the newly fashioned partner to the previously
undifferentiated ha- a- da- m or man, who responds with the lyrically erotic
utterance: This is now bone of my bones, and esh of my esh: she shall be
called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:23) (in Tribles
reading taken out of means differentiated from).4
Tribles revisionary and profoundly ahistorical reading is signicant in
large part because it has been so widely inuential. Among feminist
theologians it would seem to have established a new orthodoxy. And it has
recently been ingeniously elaborated for a secular readership by Mieke Bal,
who assumes with Trible that the commentator can, by an effort of will,
position herself outside the traditions of masculinist interpretation; and that
Genesis bears no lasting traces of the patriarchal society which produced it.5
Yet it is far too easy to adopt the opposing or rather complementary view that
Genesis is a text inaugurating a transhistorically homogeneous patriarchal
culture. This is, unfortunately, a view that is frequently expressed in
connection with Paradise Lost. For in spite of the existence of scholarly
studies of Genesis in its various exegetical traditions, the view that the
relationship of Paradise Lost to Genesis is basically direct or at least
unproblematically mediated continues to ourish. And so, as a result, does an
entire network of misogynistic or idealizing commonplaces and free-oating
sexual stereotypes, relating, indifferently, to Genesis and to this
institutionally privileged text by Milton, English literatures paradigmatic
patriarch.
The notion of a timeless and ideologically uninected patriarchy is
of course vulnerable on many counts, not least of which is its capacity to
174 Mary Nyquist
neutralize the experience of oppression. I would therefore like to attempt to

situate historically Miltons own appropriation of the Genesis creation
accounts. In the process, I hope also to draw a preliminary sketch, in outline,
of the genealogy of that seductive but odd couple, mutuality and equality. It
is certainly not difficult to recognize the reading given Genesis by Trible and
Bal as a product of its time. Especially in North America, the notion of an
originary androgyny has had tremendous appeal to mainstream or liberal
feminism. Taken to represent an ideal yet attainable equality of the sexes,
androgyny is often associated metaphorically with an ideal and egalitarian
form of marriage. A passionate interest in this very institution makes itself
felt throughout Miltons divorce tracts, in which his interpretation of the two
creation accounts rst appears. Miltons exegesis, too, is the product of an
ideologically overdetermined desire to unify the two different creation
accounts in Genesis. Not surprisingly, at the same time it is representative of
the kind of masculinist mis-reading that Trible and Bal seek to overturn.
By emphasizing its historical specicity, however, I hope to show that it is so
for reasons that cannot be universalized.
II
Milton appropriates these two texts, rst in the divorce tracts and then in
Paradise Lost, by adopting the radically uni-levelled or this-worldly Reformed
method of reconciling them. For leading commentators such as Calvin and
Pareus, the two accounts do not correspond to two stages in the creation of
humankind, the intelligible and the sensible, as they do in an earlier, Greco-
Christian tradition. Indeed there are not in their view two accounts in this
sense at all but instead one story told in two different ways, once, in the rst
chapter of Genesis, in epitome, and then, in the second chapter, in a more
elaborated form. Simplifying matters considerably, and using terms
introduced into the analysis of narrative by Grard Genette, one could say
that in the view articulated especially cogently by Calvin and then
elaborated, aggressively, by Milton, the story consists of the creation in the
image of God of a single being supposed to be representative of humankind,
Adam, and then the creation of Eve; the narrative discourse distributes this
story by presenting it rst in a kind of abstract and then in a more detailed
or amplied narrative fashion. More specically, the rst two statements of
Genesis 1:27, So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him, are thought to refer to the creation of the representative
Adam, told in a more leisurely and graphic fashion as a creation involving the
use of the dust of the ground in the second chapter; while the concluding
male and female created he them is taken to refer to the creation from this
Adam of his meet help, Eve.
Echoing similar statements by Pareus, Milton writes of the second

chapters narrative of Eves creation for Adam: This second chapter is
granted to be a commentary on the rst, and these verses granted to be an
exposition of that former verse, Male and female created he them. 6 Yet the
second chapter can have the status of a commentary in part because of the
gaps, ambiguities, or troublesome suggestions to be found in the rst.
Commenting on the blessing of fertility in Genesis 1:28, for example, Calvin
says that it is actually given to the human couple after they have been joined
in wedlocke, even though this event is not narrated until the following
chapter.7 As this indicates, for Protestant commentators, in so far as the
rhetorically amplified second version is capable of interpreting and
completing the account that comes before it in this way, it is the last creation
account that tends to take precedence over the rst.
If the Protestant exegetes Milton cites in his divorce tracts nd the
meaning of male and female created he them in the narrative of the
creation of a help meet for Adam, they do so by reading that narrative
ideologically, as proving that marriage, far from being what in their view the
Roman Church would have it, a remedy prescribed for the spiritually weak,
is divinely instituted, indeed recommended. That woman was created solely
or even primarily for the purposes of procreation is the low-minded or
crabbed (Miltons adjective) opinion the Protestant doctrine of marriage
sees itself called to overturn.8 Emphasizing, eloquently, the psychological
needs sanctioned by the deitys words instituting marriage (It is not good
that the man should be alone, Genesis 2:18), the Reformers enable an
emerging bourgeois culture to produce what has the appearance at least of
an egalitarian view of the marital relation. The very phrase meet for him is
said by Calvin to suggest in the Hebrew keneged, the quality of being like or
answerable unto (quia illi respondeat) the man and to indicate vividly that
psychological rather than physical likeness founds marriage as an
institution.9 Milton endorses this view when he takes the untranslatably
expressive Hebrew originall to signify another self, a second self, a very self
itself (T 600), and also when he has the divine interlocutor promise Adam,
Thy likeness, thy t help, thy other self, / Thy wish, exactly to thy hearts
desire (PL VIII.4501).
As has often been pointed out, in the divorce tracts Milton raises to
unprecedented and undreamt of heights this early modern tendency to
idealize the marriage bond. The extent to which he relies upon an implicit
privileging of J over P (indeed, over the other texts he treats, as well) in
order to do so has, however, not been commented upon. Miltons advocacy
of a more liberalized interpretation of the grounds for divorce proceeds by
countering the mean-spirited misinterpretations of scripture promulgated by
scholastics and canonists.10 On its more constructive front, it seeks to
harmonize different and radically conicting scriptural texts. The most
176 Mary Nyquist
taxing exegetical feat Milton has to perform is the reconciliation of Matthew

19:311, which suggests that remarriage after divorce is forbidden on
grounds other than fornication, and Deuteronomy 24:12, which Milton
reads as sanctioning divorce for reasons of what we would now call
incompatibility. Tetrachordon, the tract in which Miltons skills as exegete are
most on display, announces in its very title his determination to establish
unity and sameness in the place of seeming difference and contradiction.
Meaning four-stringed, and thus referring to the four-toned Greek scale,
Tetrachordon attempts to harmonize what on the title page are referred to as
the foure chief places in Scripture, which treat of Mariage, or nullities in
Mariage. The rst text given on the title page is Gen. 1.27.28 compard
and explaind by Gen. 2.18.23.24 (T 577; my emphasis).11
The explaining of Genesis 1 by Genesis 2 is of multi-fronted strategic
importance to Miltons polemical attack on existing English divorce laws,
which dont properly recognize the spiritual nature of marriage. First and
foremost, it permits Milton to exploit rhetorically the sexual connotations of
male and female, essential to the divorce tracts central, most tirelessly
worded argument, which is that neither sexual union in and of itself nor
procreation is the primary end of marriage as originally constituted.
Commenting directly on Male and female created he them in Tetrachordon,
Milton states it has reference to the right, and lawfulness of the mariage
bed. When relating this text to its immediate context, he claims that sexual
union is an inferior end to that implied by the earlier So God created man
in his own image, in the image of God created he him (Miltons detailed
exegesis of which Ill be coming back to later on) (T 592). As this suggests, a
bi-polar and hierarchical ordering of the spiritual and physical dimensions of
experience structures many of the exegetical moves in these tracts. The
following commentary on male and female is fairly representative, and
illustrates, in addition, the important role played by J:
He that said Male and female created he them, immediately before

that said also in the same verse, In the Image of God created he him,
and redoubld it, that our thoughts might not be so full of dregs
as to urge this poor consideration of male and female, without
remembring the noblenes of that former repetition; lest when
God sends a wise eye to examin our triviall glosses, they be found
extremly to creep upon the ground: especially since they confesse
that what here concerns mariage is but a brief touch, only
preparative to the institution which follows more expressely in
the next Chapter....
(T 592)
The divorce tracts seek to persuade the mind that doesnt want to creep upon
the ground that it should be duly impressed with the fact that in Genesis 2:18
God himself speaks, revealing in no uncertain terms what the end of
marriage is: And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be
alone; I will make him an help meet for him. Expounding the true meaning
of the earlier verse, Male and female created he them, this verse declares
by the explicite words of God himselfe that male and female is none other
than a t help, and meet society (T 594). Milton is willing to put this even
more strongly. Its not just that we have here the words of God himself,
expounding the meaning of an earlier text. God here actually explains himself:
For God does not heer precisely say, I make a female to this male, as he did
briey before, but expounding himselfe heer on purpos, he saith, because it
is not good for man to be alone, I make him therefore a meet help (T 595).
In Miltons exegetical practice, then, Js narrative makes possible a
spiritualized interpretation of the more lowly and bodily male and female.
Indeed, Js narrative, understood as instituting a relationship primarily
psychological, provides the very basis for the passages emphasizing mutuality
to be found throughout the divorce tracts. The above citations dont begin
to convey the eloquence with which Milton can celebrate the pleasures of a
heterosexual union that is ideallythat is, on the spiritual plane intended by
its divine institutiontting or meet. And there are numerous other
moments in these works where without rhetorical ourish mutuality is
clearly asserted or implied. The woman and man of the marriage relation
can, for example, be referred to as helps meete for each other.12 On a more
practical level, and of direct relevance to the legal reforms he is proposing, is
the statement Milton offers of his position when opening the rst chapter of
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: That indisposition, untnes, or contrariety
of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangable, hindring and ever likely to
hinder the main benets of conjugall society, which are solace and peace, is a greater
reason of divorce then naturall frigidity, especially if there be no children, and that
there be mutuall consent (DDD 242). The explicit reference to mutuall
consent here is matched or perhaps even deliberately introduced by the
opening words of the subtitle appearing in both the rst and second editions
of this work: Restord to the Good of Both Sexes, From the bondage of
Canon Law, and other mistakes....
Yet much as the dominant discourse of the academy might like to
celebrate this praiseworthy attention to mutuality, there are very few
passages of any length in the divorce tracts that can be dressed up for the
occasion. For over and over again, this laudable mutuality loses its balance,
teetering precariously on the brink of pure abstraction. And the reason it
does so is that it stands on the ground (to recall the play on ha- a- da- m) of a
lonely Adam who is not in any sense either ungendered or generic. It
becomes clear, nally, that the concluding phrase of Miltons position-
statementand that there be mutuall consentis not expected to stand up
178 Mary Nyquist
in a court of law. In the penultimate chapter of the second edition of The

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton states his view that the absolute and
nal hindring of divorce cannot belong to any civil or earthly power, against
the will and consent of both parties, or of the husband alone (DDD 344; my
emphasis). Even if this could, improbably, be attributed to a moments
forgetfulness on the part of an author busy revising and enlarging his
original, it still wouldnt be able to pass itself off as an instance of simple self-
contradiction. For as I hope to show, this particular assertion is also the self-
consistent outcome of the deeply masculinist assumptions at work in Miltons
articulation of a radically bourgeois view of marriage.
Time and again, the language of the tracts passes through the use of
plural forms potentially inclusive of both sexes only to come to rest with a
non-generically masculine he. As the discussion up to this point has
indicated, in so far as the story of Eves creation from Adams rib is thought
to articulate the Protestant doctrine of marriage, it is not her creation after
Adam per se that is so signicant but her creation for him, to remedy his
loneliness. The egalitarian sentiments expressed, sporadically, throughout
the divorce tracts therefore cannot nally obscure Eves secondary status as a
gift from one patriarch to another. Created for Adam, Eve is, as Adam puts
it in Paradise Lost, Heavns last best gift (V.19). Yet Eve is also, of course,
created from Adam, as well as for him. And in Miltons view, as Adams
likeness Eve does not even have the statusto use Satans description of
man in Paradise Lostof the Fathers latest, meaning most recent,
image (IV.567). For by unifying the two creation stories in the way
Reformed principles permit him to, Miltons exegesis makes possible the
production of two ideologically charged and historically specic readings,
contradictorily related: on the one hand an interpretation of male and
female that psychologizes heterosexual union and dignies marriage, and on
the other an explication of created man in his image that tends to restrict
the meaning of man to an individual Adam, from whom and for whom the
female is then made.
It is important to put this exactly, for of course biblical commentators
always claim that woman is also in some sense made in the image of God.
Calvin, like Milton, however, locates the generic sense of man directly in
the rst and gendered mans representative status. Commenting on Genesis
2:18, I will make him an help meet for him, Calvin responds to the
question, why isnt the plural form Let us make used here, as it was in the
creation of man?:
Some think, that by this speach, the difference which is betweene

both sexes is noted, and that so it is shewed, how much more
excellent the man is, then the woman. But I like better of another
interpretation, which differeth somewhat, though it be not
altogether contrarie: namely, that when in the person of man,

mankinde was created, the common worthinesse of the whole
nature, was with one title generally adorned, where it is said, Let
us make man: and that it was not needful to be repeated in the
creating of the woman, which was nothing else but the addition
and furniture of the man [quae nihil aliud est quam viri accessio].
It cannot be denied, but the woman also was created after the
image of God, though in the seconde degree. Whereupon it
followeth, that the same which was spoken in the creation of the
man, perteineth to womankind.13
Miltons stridently masculinist, Hee for God only, shee for God in him in
Paradise Lost obviously goes much further than Calvin in drawing out the
masculinist implications of this hermeneutical practice, which forges an
identity between the generic and the gendered man. In Tetrachordon, too,
Milton pursues the logic of this exegesis with a maddening and motivated
precision. In his commentary on in the image of God created he him, the
intermediate statement of Genesis 1:27, he states that the woman is not
primarily and immediately the image of God, but in reference to the man,
on the grounds that though the Image of God is common to them both,
had the Image of God been equally common to them both, it had no doubt
bin said, In the image of God created he them (T 589).
So it continues to matter that Adam was formed rst, then Eve. As a
further means of taking the measure of Miltons interest in this priority, I
would now like to discuss three seventeenth-century texts more favourably
disposed towards an egalitarian interpretation of Genesis. Although research
in this area is still underway, it is safe to say that Milton could not but have
known that questions of priority gure prominently in the Renaissance
debate over woman we now know as the Querelle des Femmes. In A
Mouzell for Melastomus, the cynicall bayter of, and foule mouthed barker against
Evahs sex, for example, one of the feminist responses to Joseph Swetnams
The Araignment of lewd, idle, forward and unconstant women, Rachel Speght
appeals several times to the privilege assumed to be a property of rstness.
Speght mentions that although it is true that woman was the rst to sin, it is
also woman who receives the rst promise that God makes in Paradise; she
argues that the dignity of marriage is proved by Jesus honouring a wedding
ceremony with the rst miracle that he wrought; and that the spiritual
equality of the sexes is shown when after his Resurrection Christ appeared
unto a woman rst of all other.14
In the restricted intellectual economy of the Querelle, orthodox
views of male superiority are frequently countered by paradoxical assertions
of female superiority. Lastness is therefore placed in the service of
overturning rstness, as in Joan Sharpes poetic defense of women against
180 Mary Nyquist
Swetnams Araignment, where it is claimed: Women were the last worke,

and therefore the best, / For what was the end, excelleth the rest.15 Speght,
however, deliberately avoids the use of this kind of paradox. Like other
Renaissance and Reformed commentators, preachers and courtesy-book
writers, Speght places a strong emphasis on marriage as involving the
mutuall participation of each others burden. And this emphasis is sustained
rhetorically throughout the tract. For example, while accepting the
conventional view that woman is the weaker vessel, Speght supplies a
subtly polemical reference to man as the stronger vessel.16 In deploying a
linguistic stress on balance and mutuality to neutralize hierarchical
oppositions, this young, early seventeenth-century Protestant may very well
be the most important unsung foremother of modern liberal feminist
commentators on Genesis and on Paradise Lost.
Speght does not offer any programmatic statements on the relation of
P to J, nor does she attempt systematically to assimilate one to the other.
But like all feminist participants in the Querelle des Femmes, she assumes
that Genesis 1:26 and 27 provide a clear statement of the spiritual equality of
the sexes. The passage in which she briey explicates Genesis 1:27 is
distinctive, however, in its provisional but decidedly revisionary
reconciliation of the two creation accounts: in the Image of God were they
both created; yea and to be brief, all the parts of their bodies, both externall
and internall, were correspondent and meete each for other.17 By referring
to both woman and man, and in relation to one another, the terms
correspondent and meete (correspondent being, as modern
commentators point out, a good translation of the Hebrew keneged) deftly
unite the male and female created he them of the P account with the
account in J of Eves creation for Adam, which here, momentarily, loses its
narrative identity. Speghts brief exegesis carefully preserves an emphasis on
bodily tness, while pointedly ignoring questions of chronology that might
threaten the egalitarian statement.
At one point Speght refers to marriage as a merri-age, and this worlds
Paradise, where there is mutuall love.18 The same celebratory word-play
(the very name whereof should portend unto thee merry-age) appears in a
work published just two years before Swetnams provocative tract, Alexander
Niccholes A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving. Interesting for, among other
things, its citation of lines from the Player Queens speech in Hamlet,
Niccholes Discourse eulogizes the special pleasures of marital friendship in
one of the very phrases used in Tetrachordon: the wife is such a friend, which
is to us a second selfe.19 Niccholes brief commentary on the two creation
accounts differs signicantly from Miltons, however. Appearing in the rst
chapter, Of the First Institution and Author of Marriage, Niccholes
exegetical remarks follow the citation of Genesis 2:18 (It is not good for the
man to bee alone):
so the creation of the woman was to be a helper to the man, not

a hinderer, a companion for his comfort, not a vexation to his
sorrow, for consortium est solatium, Company is comfortable
though never so small, and Adam tooke no little joy in this his
single companion, being thereby freed from that solitude and
silence which his lonenesse would else have bene subject unto,
had there beene no other end nor use in her more, then this her
bare presence and society alone: But besides all this, the earth is
large and must be peopled, and therefore they are now the
Crowne of his Workemanship, the last and best and perfectest
peece of his handiworke divided into Genders, as the rest of His
creatures are, Male and Female, t and enabled Procreare sibi
similem to bring forth their like, to accomplish his will, who thus
blessed their fruitfulnesse in the Bud: Increase and multiply, and
replenish the earth.20
In this passage, as in the divorce tracts, the two different creation accounts,
presented in their real order of occurrence, are discussed as if each revealed
a different end or benet of the rst institution. And Js narrative of the
creation of a meet help for Adam, given a strictly psychological and social
interpretation, is given priority over Ps. But Niccholes signicantly omits
any discussion of the creation of man in Gods image. This absence permits
the plural they easily to take over, so that it is the (now happily united) rst
man and woman alike who are the last and best and perfectest peece of his
handiworke. Although Niccholes mentions that woman was made both
for and out of man, he maintains his emphasis on mutuality by erasing
any explicit or evaluative commentary on her having been made after man, as
well.
The commentary I would like to examine next is one produced during
the same period as the divorce tracts, that is, at the very time when
egalitarian issues of all kinds were being hotly contested, and when women
in the sectaries not only laid claim to their spiritual equality with men on the
basis of Genesis 1:27 and other texts, but publicly proclaimed the extra-
textual signicance of this equality by preaching and prophesying.21 Unlike
Speghts and Niccholes, the text I turn to now belongs, officially, to the
commentary genre. Issued in association with the Westminster Assembly and
published in 1645, the annotations on Genesis in Annotations Upon All the
Books of the Old and New Testaments have not, to my knowledge, ever been
studied.22 Yet they shed an extraordinarily clear, not to say glaringly bright,
light on the distinctive and motivated features of Miltons exegesis.
An annotation on 1:26 takes up directly the question of the meaning of
the signier man or Adam. With reference to the phrase let them (in
And let them have dominion over the sh of the sea, etc.), the annotation
182 Mary Nyquist
states: The word man, or the Hebrew, Adam, taken not personally or
individually for one single person, but collectively in this verse,
comprehendeth both male and female of mankind: and so it may well be said,
not let him, but let them have dominion. Here the generic sense of haadam
is made completely to override the gender-specic sense. To this end, the use
of the plural pronoun in the latter section of Genesis 1:26 is privileged over
the singular pronoun, used with reference to the image (in the image of
God created he him). This annotation alone therefore reveals a process of
interpretation diametrically opposed to that at work in Tetrachordon, where,
as we have seen, Milton seizes upon the difference between singular and
plural forms in Genesis 1:26 and 27 to argue that only the gender-specic
Adam is made immediately in the image of God.
What makes comparison of the Annotations with Tetrachordon possible
and of crucial importance is that both accept the Reformed view of the
relationship between the two creation accounts. Adam and Eve are said to be
formed on the same, that is, the sixth, day, but their creations are presented
rst in chapter 1, where their creation in the generall was noted with other
creatures, and then again in chapter 2, where in regard of the excellencie
of mankind above them all, God is pleased to make a more particular relation
of the manner of their making, rst of the man, vers. 7. and here [vers. 22]
of the woman. Yet as these words suggest, the story assumed by the
Annotations is slightly different from Miltons, which starts unabashedly with
a man taken personally or individually. The difference is ne, but
extremely signicant. Like Milton and other Protestant commentators, the
Annotations rejects the view that male and female were created
simultaneously, together with the view that both sexes were originally
embodied, hermaphrodite-like, in a single being. Js narrative ordering is
respected, which means that woman was indeed created after man. But this
is how the gloss on verse 27s male and female puts it:
Not at once, or in one person, but severally; that is, though he

united them in participation of his image, he distinguished them
into two sexes, male and female, for the increase of their kinde:
their conformitie in participation of Gods Image is clearely
manifest by many particulars, for in most of the respects fore-
mentioned, Annotation in ver. 26, the image of God is equally
communicated to them both, and Eve was so like to Adam (except
the difference of sexe which is no part of the divine image) in the
particulars fore-mentioned, that in them, as she was made after
the image of Adam, she was also made after the image of God: as
if one measure be made according to the standard, an hundred
made according to that, agree with the standard as well as it.
By associating differences between the sexes solely with reproduction, this

comment seems to hearken back to a Platonically inected division between
the spiritual and the physical. The concluding analogy, however, shows this
truly remarkable text grappling with hierarchically ordered notions of
secondariness. Working with reference to the production of things in the
form of commodities, the analogy attempts to take on the difficulties
resulting from the view that man and woman were made severally. And it
tries to effect, on its own, an egalitarian synthesis of P and J. That man
was rst made in the image of God is implicitly conceded. But that woman
was made after man becomes a statement referring not so much to an order
of temporality as to an order of materiality. Woman is made after the
image of Adam in the sense of being made according to the standard of the
image of Adam. The analogy argues, by ellipsis, that since Adam was himself
really created after the image of God, which is the original standard,
being created after Adams image, Eve is equally created after the image
of God. Thanks to this highly ingenious and polemically motivated analogy,
Eves being created after Adam loses its usual sense of secondariness.
Read in the context of other learned Protestant biblical commentaries,
this analogy has a jarring effect since, in exceeding by ninety-nine the
requirements of logic, it seems to testify to the contemporary phenomenon
of the growth of mercantile capital. For the sake of an egalitarian synthesis
between P and J, this workmanly analogy tries to undermine not only a
hierarchically inected logic of temporality but also the generally Platonic
logic whereby original is privileged over copy. It is true that man is still, quite
literally, the measure. And to give the analogy its force, woman is placed in
the position of being not the rst commodity made after this measure but
rather the hundred that can be produced on its basis. The logic deployed
by the analogy from production insists, however, that it is not really possible
to measure any residual differences between the image of God, man, and
woman. Of the great variety of attempts made in the Renaissance and
seventeenth century to come to Eves defense, this must be the least
chivalrous in content, the most lacking in conventional grace or charm. But
it denitely does the job. And it certainly establishes, dramatically, the
possibilities open to Milton, which he rejected.
In rejecting a position like that of the Annotations, Milton implicitly takes
what would seem, from another perspective, though, to be a progressive
stance, namely that the difference between woman and man is not a simple
matter of biology; that it is not a difference of sex per se. In both Tetrachordon
and Colasterion Milton rejects the view that Adam would have been given a
male not a female partner had companionship been the end of marriage. The
following passage from Tetrachordon, which comments on the all-important It
is not good for man to be alone, suggests why Milton would not want to imagine
Eves being created according to the same standard as Adam:
184 Mary Nyquist
And heer alone is meant alone without woman, otherwise Adam

had the company of God himself, and Angels to convers with; all
creatures to delight him seriously, or to make him sport. God
could have created him out of the same mould a thousand friends
and brother Adams to have bin his consorts, yet for all this till Eve
was givn him, God recknd him to be alone.
(T 595)
By specifying a desire that only woman can satisfy, and by associating that
desire with a transcendence of sexual difference as vulgarly understood, the
divorce tracts seem almost to open up a space for the category of gender.
Yet that this space is in no sense neutral can be seen in the language with
which friendship between men gets differentiated from the marital relation.
In Colasterion Milton opposes one society of grave freindship to another
amiable and attractive society of conjugal love.23 Elsewhere Milton can
associate the marriage relationship with the need man has for sometime
slackning the cords of intense thought and labour (T 596); or he can refer
to the seeking of solace in that free and lightsome conversation which God
& man intends in mariage (DDD 273). It should go without saying that man
can have this need for companionship remedied, can intend to enjoy
lightsome conversation as opposed to grave freindship, only if woman is
constituted as less grave, more attractive, more lightsome and more amiable
than her male counterpart; and if both she and marriage itself are associated
with a world apart.
III
As has already been suggested, the priority bestowed upon Adam in Miltons
divorce tracts is not associated directly with the order of creation. It tends,
instead, to be inscribed in the divine words instituting marriage, It is not
good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him
(Gen. 2:18). These words, which Milton frequently refers to simply as the
institution, are in turn often taken to gesture towards a prior loneliness or
rational burning experienced by the rst man, Adam. I have already argued
that the priority Milton gives J over P is inscribed indelibly in every one
of his major rhetorical and logical moves. In concluding this discussion of the
divorce tracts, I would like to show how consistently or systematically this
priority is associated with the deitys instituting words and thus, by
implication, with Adams needs.
It has not yet been mentioned that Matthew 5:31, 32 and Matthew
19:311, which together constitute one of the four texts treated in
Tetrachordon, and which appear unequivocally to forbid divorce except for
fornication, are susceptible to Miltons polemical appropriation of them

precisely because in chapter 19 Jesus is represented as quoting from Genesis.
The relevant verses, cited by Milton, are the following, verses 36:
The Pharisees also came unto [Jesus], tempting him, and saying
unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every
cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read,
that he which made them at the beginning made them male and
female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and
mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one
esh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one esh. What
therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
The two texts cited here are the now-familiar male and female created he
them in Genesis 1:2,7 and Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one esh (Gen.
2:24). Miltons strategy in commenting on the verses from Matthew is to
subvert their literal and accepted meaning by referring the citations back to
the divine words of institution, which, he points out, are not, signicantly,
quoted. Although the tempting Pharisees, his immediate interlocutors, arent
worthy of receiving this instruction, Jesuss intention, Milton argues, is to
refer us back to the uncited words of institution in chapter 2, which all
Divines confesse is a commentary to what [Jesus] cites out of the rst, the
making of them Male and Female (T 649). The instituting words are thus
made to govern the manner in which those cited by Jesus from chapter 1 are
to be interpreted.
Also cited is Genesis 2:24, which Milton regards as spoken by Adam. Yet
Miltons exegesis has already determined that Adams speech too has meaning
only with reference to the words of divine institution. In the rst part of
Adams speech (This is now bone of my bones, and esh of my esh: she shall
be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man, Gen. 2:23), Milton
nds Adam referring to and expounding his makers instituting words,
regarded as constituting a promise now fullled (T 602). By establishing a
dialogic relation between Adams words and those of his maker, Milton can
argue that anyone who thinks Adam is in these words formulating the
doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in the meet esh is not only sadly
mistaken but guilty of using the mouth of our generall parent, the rst time
it opens, to an arrogant opposition, and correcting of Gods wiser ordinance
(T 603). It is the next part of Adams speech, however, verse 24, which is
commonly thought to be the great knot tier, as Milton correctly points out:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto
his wife: and they shall be one esh. In Miltons view, by opening with
therefore, this verse clearly indicates that Adam connes the implications of
186 Mary Nyquist
his utterance only to what God spake concerning the inward essence of
Mariage in his institution (T 603). With reference to both parts of Adams
speech, Miltons position thus is that the deitys words are the soul of Adams
and must be taken into Adams utterance if it is properly to be understood.
This is not, interestingly, the reading given these verses by Calvin, who
assigns verse 23 to Adam, but draws attention to the interpretative choices
open with regard to 2:24, for which three different speakers are eligible:
Adam, God, and Moses. After a brief discussion Calvin opts for Moses,
suggesting that, having reported what had historically been done, Moses in
this passage sets forth the end of Gods ordinance, which is the permanence
or virtual indissolvability of the marriage bond.24 For reasons that are
obvious, Milton would want to reject this reading. By making Adam the
speaker of this passage, Milton weakens its authority as a text enjoining the
indissolubility of marriage. Since this is the very text cited by Jesus in
Matthew, such an assault on its status as injunction is a decisive defensive
move. But it is also more than that. For by assuming Adam to be its speaker,
Milton also strengthens the contractual view of the rst institution his
exegetical practice implicitly but unmistakably develops.
That Miltons understanding of the rst institution is implicitly both
contractual and masculinist can perhaps be seen if his exegetical practice is
compared with that of Rachel Speght. Towards the beginning of A Mouzell
for Melastomus, Speght argues that Eves goodness is proved by the manner
of her creation:
Thus the resplendent love of God toward man appeared, in

taking care to provide him an helper before hee saw his owne
want, and in providing him such an helper as should bee meete
for him. Soveraignety had hee over all creatures, and they were
all serviceable unto him; but yet afore woman was formed, there
was not a meete helpe found for Adam. Mans worthinesse not
meriting this great favour at Gods hands, but his mercie onely
moving him thereunto: ... that for mans sake, that hee might not
be an unit, when all other creatures were for procreation duall,
hee created woman to bee a solace unto him, to participate of his
sorrowes, partake of his pleasures, and as a good yokefellow beare
part of his burthen. Of the excellencies of this Structure, I meane
of Women, whose foundation and original of creation, was Gods
love, do I intend to dilate.25
Were Milton to have read Speghts tract, I suspect that midway through the
rst sentence here he would have discovered himself a resisting reader. The
notion that God acted on Adams behalf before hee saw his own want
would have seemed highly provocative, if not downright offensive. Speght
draws strategically on orthodox Protestantisms doctrinal emphasis on divine

grace as radically transcendent, as an active principle utterly unconnected
with human deserts. In the process, Adam becomes a passive recipient of a
gift, meetness abounding, while Eve is subtly positioned in relation with her
true original, divine love.
By contrast, in the divorce tracts and, as we shall see, in Paradise Lost as
well, Milton foregrounds an Adam whose innocent or legitimate desires
preexist the creation of the object that will satisfy them. But this is to put it
too abstractly. In Miltons exegesis, the signicance of the giftwoman
passed from maker to man is determined by two speeches, rst the makers
and then Adams, precisely because these speeches are construed as a verbal
exchange that is basically contractual. In Genesis 2:18 Adams maker
promises him that he will assuage his loneliness and provide him with a meet
help; in 2:23 and 24, Adam accepts this gift by acknowledging it is exactly
what was promised him, and then promises to honour it on these very
grounds. Eves status as a divinely bestowed gift is exploited polemically by
both Speght and Milton. But unlike Speghts transcendent lord of love,
Miltons veiled but systematic insistence on the contractual form of the rst
institution is produced by a Protestantism pressed into the service of an
historically specic form of individualism, an individualism paradigmatically
masculine, autonomous, articulate, and preternaturally awake to the
implications of entering into relations with others.26
IV
One of the questions concerning Paradise Lost that this discussion of the
divorce tracts has, I hope, made it possible to address is: why does Miltons
Eve tell the story of her earliest experiences rst, in Book IV? Why, if Adam
was formed rst, then Eve, does Adam tell his story to Raphael last, in Book
VIII? An adequate response to this question would require a full-scale
analysis of the ways in which Paradise Lost articulates a putative sequential
order of events or story with the narrative discourse that distributes this
story. As a genre, epic is of course expected to develop complicated relations
between a presumed chronological and a narrative ordering of events. But
Paradise Lost would seem to use both retrospective and prospective narratives
in a more systematic and motivated manner than does any of its predecessors,
in part because it is so highly conscious of the problematical process of its
consumption. I would like to argue here that Paradise Losts narrative
distribution of Adam and Eves rst experiences is not just complexly but
ideologically motivated, and that the import of this motivation can best be
grasped by an analysis aware of the historically specic features of Miltons
exegetical practice in the divorce tracts.
188 Mary Nyquist
This practice is crucially important to Paradise Losts own use of the

Genesis creation texts. In the case of the passage it most obviously informs,
Raphaels account of the creation of man on the sixth day of creation in
Book VII, certain features are intelligible only in the light of this historically
specic context. If commenting on this passage at all, critics have tended to
suggest that Raphael gives something like a heavenly, as compared with
Adams later more earthly, account of creation.27 This doesnt, however, even
begin to do justice to the intricately plotted relations of the P and J
accounts in the following:
Let us make now Man in our image, Man

In our similitude, and let them rule
Over the Fish and Fowl of Sea and Air,
Beast of the Field, and over all the Earth,
And every creeping thing that creeps the ground.
This said, he formd thee, Adam, thee O Man
Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils breathd
The breath of Life; in his own Image hee
Created thee, in the Image of God
Express, and thou becamst a living Soul.
Male he created thee, but thy consort
Female for Race; then blessd Mankind, and said,
Be fruitful, multiply, and ll the Earth,
Subdue it, and throughout Dominion hold
Over Fish of the Sea, and Fowl of the Air,
And every living thing that moves on the Earth.
Wherever thus created, for no place
Is yet distinct by name, thence, as thou knowst
He brought thee into this delicious Grove,
This Garden, planted with the Trees of God,
Delectable both to behold and taste;
And freely all thir pleasant fruit for food
Gave thee, all sorts are here that all th Earth yields,
Variety without end; but of the Tree
Which tasted works knowledge of Good and Evil,
Thou mayst not; in the day thou eatst, thou dist;
Death is the penalty imposd, beware,
And govern well thy appetite, lest sin
Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death.
Here nishd hee.
(VII.51948)
Genesis 1:268 is here given in what is virtually its entirety. But the principal
acts of Genesis 2:717 are also related: Yahwehs making of Man from the
dust of the ground (2:7), his taking of this man into the garden of Eden
(2:15), and his giving of the prohibition (2:16,17). One could argue that even
Miltons artistry here hasnt received its proper due, since this splicing
economically makes from two heterogeneous accounts a single one that is
both intellectually and aesthetically coherent.
Yet it does more, far more, than this. For Raphaels account removes
any trace of ambiguitythe residual generic dust, as it werefrom the
Priestly account of the creation of ha- a- da- m or man in the image of God.
This it does by a set of speech-acts unambiguously identifying this man
with Raphaels interlocutor, Adam. The direct address in he formd thee,
Adam, thee O Man / Dust of the ground has what amounts to a deictic
function, joining the representative Man to Raphaels gendered and
embodied listener, who is specically and repeatedly addressed here, while
Eve (though still an auditor) very pointedly is not. It is clearly signicant that
these very lines effect the joining of the Priestly and Yahwistic accounts. By
placing thee O Man / Dust of the ground in apposition to the named
Adam, it is suggested that this individualized Adam actually is ha- a- da- m
or representative man and the punning ha- a- da- m ground, an identity that
only the joining of the two accounts reveals.
The impression this joining creates is that the two accounts have always
already been one in narrating the creation of Adam. The same cannot be said
of Raphaels account of the creation of Eve, however. For in contrast (I would
like to say something like in striking contrast, yet it has not really been
noticed) to the ingenious joining that takes place for the sake of Adam,
Raphael refers to Eves creation only in the statement immediately following,
which is again, signicantly, addressed to Adam: Male he created thee, but
thy consort / Female for Race (52930).28 Outside of this meagre but thy
consort / Female for Race, Raphaels account does not otherwise even allude
to the creation of Eve, although, as we have seen, other details of the
narrative in the second chapter are included in it. Indeed, if we examine the
matter more closely, it appears that the Yahwist account is made use of only
up to and including Genesis 2:17 (the giving of the prohibition) precisely
because Genesis 2:18 inaugurates the story of the creation of a help meet for
Adam.
But of course the story of Eves creation is not excised from Paradise
Lost altogether, which is, presumably, why readers have not protested its
absence here. It is told later, by another narrator, Adam. One of the effects
of this narrative distribution is that in Miltons epic Adams story comes to
have exactly the same relation to Raphaels as in the divorce tracts and in
Protestant commentaries the second chapter of Genesis has to the rst: it is
an exposition or commentary upon it, revealing its true import.29 Yet the
second telling can have this status only because it is Adams. As my discussion
190 Mary Nyquist
indicates, Miltons argument in the divorce tracts rests on a radical

privileging of J over P in the specic form of a privileging of the words
of divine institution in Genesis 2:18. Had Milton interpolated the story of
Eves creation into Raphaels creation account, he would have had to record
these words in the form of indirect speech (as he does the words of
prohibition in lines 5427) or else to have reproduced both the creators
speech and Adams. In either case, the instituting words would have been
displaced from their centres of authority. By transferring the entire narrative
to Adam and by interpolating a dramatic colloquy into this narrative, Paradise
Lost ensures the coincidence of narrator and auditor of the instituting words,
of narrator and of the rst mans instituting response. By dramatizing this
commentary, this necessary supplement to Raphaels account, in the form of
a colloquy narrated by Adam, Paradise Lost makes sure that the doctrine of
marriage is both produced and understood by the person for whom it is
ordained, just as in the divorce tracts it is the privileged male voice, Miltons,
which expounds the true doctrine of divorce.
As the divorce tracts never tire of insisting, the true doctrine of
marriage relates only to the satisfaction of that which the wanting soul
needfully seeks. In Paradise Lost this doctrine is co-authored by Adam and the
Presence Divine, who work it out together. It is also communicated,
formally, by the extraordinary emphasis placed on Adams subjectivity, on his
actual experience of desire. As Milton has masterminded the exchange, the
divine instituting words come after Adam has been got to express his longing
for a tting companion (VIII.44451), so that this longing has the kind of
priority that bets the rst man. Yet the longing is also clearly a rational
burning. With its strong liations to the disputation, the very form of the
colloquy establishes that this desire is rational, and that merely reproductive
ends are certainly not what Adam has in mind. Although procreation is
referred to, it is presented as a kind of necessary consequence of the
conjunction of male and female, but for that very reason as a subordinate
end. Adams language cleverly associates it with a prior lack, a prior and
psychological defect inherent in his being the first and only man
(VIII.41525). The way Miltons Adam responds to the deitys formal
presentation to him of his bride, Eve, is just as motivated. The Genesis
2:234 speech is cited, but only after it has been introduced in a way that
joins it explicitly to the causes implicit in the deitys instituting words:
This turn hath made amends; thou hast fullld

Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair, but fairest this
Of all thy gifts, nor enviest. I now see
Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self
Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man
Extracted; for this cause he shall forgo

Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere;
And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soul.
(VIII.4919)
This speech is presented as a species of spontaneous lyrical utterance (I

overjoyd could not forbear aloud (490)) and according to Adam is heard
by Eve. Yet it is obviously addressed not to her but to her maker, who is
thanked for the gift itself, but not until he has been praised for having kept
his word. Before letting Adam commit himself to the project of becoming
one esh with Eve, Milton has to make it clear that Adam does so believing
that the Heavnly Maker has done what he has promised, that is, created a
truly t help.
Not only the placement of Adams narrative after Raphaels but also its
most salient formal features can thus be seen to be motivated ideologically,
and to illustrate the causes joining the divorce tracts and Paradise Lost. Before
turning to Eve, I would like to summarize the discussion so far by
emphasizing that these causes are joined, and to mans advantage, both when
P and J are united and when they arent. By joining P and J as it does,
Raphaels account species the gendered Adam of Paradise Lost as the man
who is made in the divine image. By disjoining them, Raphaels account lets
Adam himself tell the story of the creature made to satisfy his desire for an
other self.
We can now, more directly, take up the question, why does heavens last
best gift tell her story rst? One way of approach might be to suggest that
had Eves narrative of her earliest experiences appeared where naturally, in
the order of creation, it should have, that is after Adams, Paradise Lost might
have risked allowing her to appear as the necessary and hence in a certain
sense superior creature suggested by what Jacques Derrida has called the
logic of the supplement, undeniably set in motion by Adams self-confessed
single imperfection. Paradise Losts narrative discourse would seem to want
to subvert this logic by presenting Eves narrative rst. And it seems to want
to subvert it further by placing immediately after Adams narrative a
confession in which Eves completeness and superiority is made to seem an
illusion to which Adam is, unaccountably, susceptible. In this part of Adams
dialogue with Raphael, the language of supplementarity as artificial
exteriority seems curiously insistent: Eve has been given Too much of
Ornament (VIII.538); she is Made so adorn for thy delight the more
(VIII. 576) and so on.
Yet a displaced form of the logic of supplementarity may nevertheless
be at work in the place of priority given Eves narrative. For if Eve is created
to satisfy the psychological needs of a lonely Adam, then it is necessary that
Paradise Losts readers experience her from the rst as expressing an
192 Mary Nyquist
intimately subjective sense of self. From the start she must be associated in a
distinctive manner with the very interiority that Adams need for an other self
articulates. Or to put this another way, Eves subjectivity must be made
available to the reader so that it can ground, as it were, the lonely Adams
articulated desire for another self. Appearing as it does in Book IV, Eves
narrative lacks any immediately discernible connection with the Genesis
creation accounts on which the narratives of both Raphael and Adam draw.
Its distance from Scripture as publicly acknowledged authority is matched by
Eve the narrators use of markedly lyrical, as opposed to disputational, forms.
Set in juxtaposition to the rather barrenly disputational speech of Adams
which immediately precedes it in Book IV, Eves narrative creates a space that
is strongly if only implicitly gendered, a space that is dilatory, erotic, and
signicantly, almost quintessentially, private.
In a recent essay, Christine Froula reads Eves rst speech thematically
and semi-allegorically, as telling the story of Eves (or womans) submission
of her own personal experience and autonomy to the voices (the deitys, then
Adams) of patriarchal authority. As the very title of her essayWhen Eve
Reads Miltonindicates, Froula wants to nd in Miltons Eve if not a
proto-feminist then a potential ally in contemporary academic feminisms
struggle to interrogate the academic canon together with the cultural and
political authority it represents. Miltons Eve can play the part of such an ally,
however, only because for Froula the privacy of Eves earliest experiences and
the autonomy she thereby initially seems to possess are equivalent to a
potentially empowering freedom from patriarchal rule.30 Given the liberal
assumptions of the feminism it espouses, Froulas argument obviously does
not want to submit the category of personal experience to ideological
analysis.
In attempting to give it such an analysis, I would like to suggest that
Eves speech plays a pivotal role, historically and culturally, in the
construction of the kind of female subjectivity required by a new economys
progressive sentimentalization of the private sphere.31 It is possible to
suggest this in part because the subjective experiences Eve relates are
represented as having taken place before any knowledge of or commitment
to Adam. That is, they are represented as taking place in a sphere that has the
dening features of the private in an emerging capitalist economy: a sphere
that appears to be autonomous and self-sustaining even though not
productive and in so appearing is the very home of the subject. In Book
VIII Adam recalls having virtually thought his creator into existence and
having come up with the idea of Eve in a dialogue with his fellow patriarch.
By contrast, Eve recalls inhabiting a space she believed to be uninhabited,
autonomous, hersbut for the Shape within the watry gleam. It is,
however, precisely because this belief is evidently false that it is possible to see
this space as analogous to the private sphere, which is of course constituted
by and interconnected with the public world outside it. Illusory as this
autonomy is, inhabiting a world appearing to be her own would nevertheless
seem to be the condition of the subjectivity Eve here reveals.
It has long been a commonplace of commentaries on Paradise Lost that
a network of contrasts is articulated between Eves narration of her earliest
experiences and Adams, the contrasts all illustrating the hierarchically
ordered nature of their differences. Yet it has not been recognized clearly
enough that while shadowing forth these bi-polar oppositions, Eves
narrative is supposed to rationalize the mutuality or intersubjective basis of
their love. For by means of the Narcissus myth, Paradise Lost is able to
represent her experiencing a desire equivalent or complementary to the
lonely Adams desire for an other self. It is not hard to see that Adams own
desire for an other self has a strong narcissistic component. Yet Adams
retrospective narrative shows this narcissism being sparked, sanctioned and
then satised by his creator. By contrast, though in Book IV Eve recalls
experiencing a desire for an other self, this desire is clearly and
unambiguously constituted by illusion, both in the sense of specular illusion
and in the sense of error. Neo-Platonic readings of the Narcissus myth nd
in it a reection of the fall of spirit into matter. Milton transforms this
tragic tale into one with a comic resolution by instructing Eve in the
superiority of spirit or, more exactly, in the superiority of manly grace and
wisdom over her beauty. But because this happily ending little
Bildungsroman also involves a movement from illusion to reality, Eve is made
to come to prefer not only manly grace and wisdom as attributes of Adam
but also, and much more importantly, Adam as embodiment of the reality
principle itself: he whose image she really is, as opposed to the specular
image in which her desire originated.
To become available for the mutuality the doctrine of wedded love
requires, Eves desire therefore must in effect lose its identity, while yet
somehow offering itself up for correction and reorientation. As has often
been noted, Eves fate diverges from that of Narcissus at the moment when
the divine voice intervenes to call her away from her delightful play with her
reection in the waters. We have seen that in Book VIII Adams desire for
an other self is sanctioned by the divine presences rendering of It is not
good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
When the divine voice speaks to Eve, it is to ask that she redirect the desire
she too experiences for an other self:
What thou seest,

What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee
194 Mary Nyquist
Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy

Inseparably thine.
(IV.46773)
Unlike the instituting words spoken to Adam in Book VIII, these have no
basis in the Yahwist creation account. Yet they are clearly invented to
accompany the only part of that account which Milton has to work with here,
the brief and brought her unto the man (Gen. 2:22), which in Genesis
immediately precedes Adams words of recognition. Marked inescapably by
literary invention and uttered by a presence that is invisible to Eve, the
voices words have a curiously secondary or derivative status, at least
compared with those spoken to Adam. They seem indeed, ttingly, to be a
kind of echo of the divine voice.
In so far as it effects a separation of Eve from her physical image, this
word in a way echoes what Milton calls the creators originary divorcing
command by which the world rst rose out of Chaos (DDD 273). But the
separation of Eve from her image is not the only divorce effected here. Before
this intervention the Smooth Lake into which Eve peers seems to her
another Sky, as if the waters on the face of the earth and the heavens were
for her indistinguishable or continuous. The divine voice could therefore
much more precisely be said to recapitulate or echo the paternal Words
original division of the waters from the waters in Genesis 1:67. Before
describing her watery mirror and her other self, Eve mentions a murmuring
sound / Of waters issud from a Cavemurmurs, waters and cave all being
associated symbolically with maternality, as critics have pointed out. When
the paternal Word intervenes, Eves specular auto-eroticism seems to become,
paradoxically, even more her own, in part because it no longer simply reects
that of Ovids Narcissus. And when Eve responds to the verbal intervention
by rejecting not only his advice but also Adam, hee / Whose image she is,
preferring the smooth watry image, an analogical relationship gets
established between female auto-eroticism and the motherdaughter dyad.
Butand the difference is of crucial importancethis implicit and mere
analogy is based on specular reection and error alone. Grounded in illusion,
Eves desire for an other self is therefore throughout appropriated by a
patriarchal order, with the result that in Paradise Losts recasting of Ovids tale
of Narcissus, Eves illusion is not only permitted but destined to pass away. In
its very choice of subject, Miltons epic seems to testify to the progressive
privatization and sentimentalization of the domestic sphere. That this
privatization and sentimentalization make possible the construction of a novel
female subjectivity is nowhere clearer than in Eves rst speech, in which the
divine voice echoes the words originally dividing the waters from the waters,
words which in their derived context separate Eve from the self which is only
falsely, illusorily either mother or other.
This takes us to the very last feature of Eves story-telling to be

considered here. As has been suggested, Protestant exegetes consider Adams
declaration in Genesis 2:24, This is now bone of my bones, and esh of my
esh, to be part of the rst wedding ceremony. A version of this ceremonial
utterance appears in Adams narrative and (highly abridged) in Eves. In
Genesis, this declaration follows and brought her unto the man, a verse
which is translated into action in both of Paradise Losts accounts. Calvin,
when commenting on this phrase, views the action from Adams point of
view, as involving the exchange of a gift: For seeing Adam tooke not a wife
to him selfe at his owne will: but tooke her whome the Lord offered and
appointed unto him: hereof the holinesse of matrimonie doeth the better
appeare, because we know that God is the author thereof.32 Yet Milton is
not alone in seeing this moment from Eves point of view as well as from
Adams, for Diodati, commenting on And brought her unto him, says: As
a mediator, to cause her voluntarily to espouse her self to Adam and to
conrm and sanctify that conjunction.33 In Paradise Lost, the story Eve tells
stresses with remarkable persistence both the difficulty and the importance
of Eves voluntarily espousing herself to Adam. Many years ago Cleanth
Brooks mentioned that Eves speech in Book IV seemed to anticipate Freuds
observations on the comparative difficulty the female has in the transition to
adult heterosexuality.34 But if it does so, it is in a context that constitutes
female desire so as to situate the process of transition within competing
representational media, within what is almost a kind of hall of voices and
mirrors.
This entire discussion of the relation between Paradise Losts
retrospective creation narratives and the divorce tracts can therefore be put
in the following, summary terms. If in Book VIIIs recollected colloquy
Adam is revealed articulating the doctrine of marriage, in Book IVs
recollected self-mirroring Eve is portrayed enacting its discipline. Or to
formulate this somewhat differently, by associating Eve with the vicissitudes
of courtship and marriage, and by emphasizing her voluntary submission
both to the paternal voice and to her author and bridegroom, Adam,
Paradise Lost can rst present the practice for which Adam then, at the epics
leisure, supplies the theory. In doing so, Paradise Lost manages to establish a
paradigm for the heroines of the genre Miltons epic is said to usher in. In
the Yahwists creation account, Adam may have been formed rst, then Eve.
But Miltons Eve tells her story rst because the domestic sphere with which
her subjectivity associates itself will soon be in need of novels whose heroines
are represented learning, in struggles whose conclusions are almost always
implicit in the way they begin, the value of submitting desire to the paternal
law.
Of course the female authors and readers associated with the rise of the
novel are not always willing to submit to this discipline. And in what is
196 Mary Nyquist
perhaps the most strongly argued critique of the institution of marriage to be

written by a feminist before this century, Milton is prominently associated
with the very ideological contradictions that get exposed. In Reections upon
Marriage, Mary Astell submits the notion of subjection to an analysis that
is devastatingly sharp and in certain ways deconstructive, since she wants to
undo the notion that subjection is synonymous with natural inferiority.
Arguing, even if with heavy irony, by means of the very rationalist and
individualist principles that came to prevail during the Civil War period,
Astell urges women who are considering marriage to become fully conscious
of the liberties they will have to surrender if they are to enter into this state
of institutionalized domestic subjection. Her wry reference to Milton is fairly
well-known: For whatever may be said against Passive-Obedience in
another case, I suppose theres no Man but likes it very well in this; how
much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislikd on a Throne, not Milton
himself would cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the
Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny.35
As I have suggested, the appearance, at least, of Active-Obedience is far
more important to Paradise Lost and to Miltons rationalism than this remark
would suggest. Might an awareness of this be registered in Astells reections
on Genesis in the supplementary Preface? Like other feminists writing
from within the Christian tradition, Astell nds I Timothy 2:1114, with its
unambiguous assertion of the Genesis Adams priority over Eve, exceedingly
troublesome: she offers a rather laboured allegorical interpretation, and then
adds the caveat that if the Learned dont accept it, it will be because
Learning is what Men have engrosd to themselves.36 Though less
defensive, her remarks on Genesis itself are no less acerbic. After
mentioning, approvingly though tentatively, the opinion that in the
Original State of things the Woman was the Superior, Astell proceeds to
this brilliantly savage rebuttal of the notion of womans inferior
secondariness:
However this be, tis certainly no Arrogance in a Woman to

conclude, that she was made for the Service of GOD, and that
this is her End. Because GOD made all things for Himself, and a
Rational Mind is too noble a Being to be Made for the Sake and
Service of any Creature. The Service she at any time becomes
obligd to pay to a Man, is only a Business by the Bye. Just as it
may be any Mans Business and Duty to keep Hogs; he was not
made for this, but if he hire himself out to such an Employment,
he ought conscientiously to perform it.37
Like other feminist commentators, from participants in the Querelle des

Femmes to Phyllis Trible and Mieke Bal, Astell here implicitly privileges
P over J. In overturning the view that woman was created for man,
Astell, however, applies to the domestic sphere the historically determinate
notion of contractual relations that Milton helps to articulate in his divorce
tracts, political treatises and in Paradise Lost. With dazzling, Circe-like
powers, Astells analogy works to disabuse bourgeois Man of his delusions
of grandeur. But in exploiting, however archly, a contractual notion of
Service, it also illustrates some of the hazards involved in the project
ongoingof trying to call a spade a spade.
NOTES
1. For this, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton and womenyet once more
(Milton Studies, 6, 1974, 8). Other defenses have been written by Virginia R.
Mollenkott, Milton and womens liberation: a note on teaching method (Milton
Quarterly, 7, 1973, 99102); Joan M. Webber, The politics of poetry: feminism and
Paradise Lost (Milton Studies, 14, 1980, 324) and Diane K. McColley, Miltons Eve
(Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1983). Generally speaking, an apologetic
tendency is a feature of much North American academic literature on Milton.
2. Quotations from Miltons poetry are from John Milton: Complete Poems and
Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, Odyssey, 1957)
3. Biblical quotations are from the King James version.
4. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1978),
10011. The discussion in chs 1 and 4 of this work revises and extends the inuential
Depatriarchalizing in biblical interpretation ( Journal of the American Academy of
Religion, 16, 1973, 3048). For a fuller discussion of some of the exegetical issues
touched upon here, see an earlier version of this essay, Genesis, genesis, exegesis,
and the formation of Miltons Eve, in Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the
Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 147208.
The present essay is part of a full-length study on Genesis, gender, discourse and
Milton to be published by Cornell University Press and by Methuen.
5. Mieke Bal, Sexuality, sin, and sorrow: the emergence of the female character
(a reading of Genesis 13) (Poetics Today, 6, 1985, 2142).
6. Tetrachordon, ed. Arnold Williams, in vol. II of The Complete Prose Works of
John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1959), 594.
Subsequent references to this edition of Tetrachordon will appear parenthetically
introduced by T. See David Paraeus, In Genesin Mosis Commentarius (Frankfurt,
1609), 267, 293.
7. John Calvin, A Commentarie of John Calvine, upon the rst booke of Moses called
Genesis, tr. Thomas Tymme (London, 1578), 47.
8. Margo Todd argues persuasively for the importance of relating Protestant to
humanist views in Humanists, Puritans and the spiritualized household (Church
History, 49, 1980, 1834). For a discussion of the distinctively Puritan development
of this ideology see William and Malleville Haller, The Puritan art of love
198 Mary Nyquist
(Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 5, 1942, 23572); William Haller, Hail Wedded

Love (English Literary History, 13, 1946, 7997); see also John Halkett, Milton and the
Idea of Matrimony: A Study of the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1970), and James T. Johnson, A Society Ordained by God: English
Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Nashville,
Abingdon, 1970). For a negative evaluation of the impact on women of the
development of bourgeois marriage doctrine, see Linda T. Fitz, What says the
married woman?: marriage theory and feminism in the English Renaissance
(Mosaic 13, Winter) 1980, 122. For a wide-ranging, comparatist discussion of these
socioeconomic and ideological changes as they affect the relations of the sexes, see the
introduction to Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen
Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),
xvxxxi.
9. Calvin, op. cit., 74. Latin cited from Mosis Libri V, cum Johannis Calvini
Commentariis (Geneva, 1563), 19.
10. The political, legal and social contexts for Miltons tracts are discussed by
Chilton L. Powell in English Domestic Relations, 14871653 (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1917), 61199, and by Ernest Sirluck (ed.), vol. II of Complete Prose
Works, 13758. Miltons rhetorical strategies are examined by Keith W. Stavely, The
Politics of Miltons Prose Style (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975), 5471, and by
John M. Perlette, Milton, Ascham, and the rhetoric of the divorce controversy
(Milton Studies, 10, 1977, 195115). A relevant and illuminating study of the
crossing of rhetorical, judicial and other discursive codes can be found in Pat
Parkers Shakespeare and rhetoric: dilation and delation, in Othello, Shakespeare
and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London,
Methuen, 1985), 5474.
11. For a discussion of the title, see the preface by Arnold Williams, Tetrachordon,
571.
12. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ed. Lowell W. Coolidge, vol. II of
Complete Prose Works, 240. Further references will be introduced by DDD.
13. Calvin, op. cit., 71; Mosis Libri V, 18.
14. Rachel Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus, the cynicall bayter of, and foule
mouthed barker against Evahs sex (London, 1617), 6, 14, 16. Joseph Swetnam, The
Araignment of lewd, idle, forward, and unconstant women (London, 1615). For further
discussion of this controversy, see Coryl Crandall, Swetnam the Woman-Hater: The
Controversy and the Play (Lafayette, Purdue University Studies, 1969), and Linda
Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of
Womankind, 15401620 (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1984). The Querelle
des Femmes has recently been studied by Joan Kelley, Women, History and Theory
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), 65109. See also Ian Maclean, The
Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980), as well
as the discussion of feminist polemic in First Feminists: British Women Writers,
15781799, ed. Moira Ferguson (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985),
2732.
15. Joan Sharpe, chapter VIII of Ester Hath Hangd Haman: A Defense of Women,
Against The Author of the Arraignment of Women by Ester Sowernam, reprinted in First
Feminists, 81.
16. Speght, op. cit., 4, 5.
17. ibid., 11.
18. ibid., 14.
19. Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving: and of the greatest
Mystery therein Contained: How to Choose a good Wife from a bad ... (London, 1615), 5.
20. ibid., 2.
21. See the inuential discussion by Keith Thomas, Women and the Civil War
sects (Past and Present, 13, 1958, 4262). Phyllis Mack examines some female
prophets and the ways in which their activities were limited by traditional beliefs
about womans passivity, her low social position, and her basic irrationality, in
Women as prophets during the English Civil War (Feminist Studies, 8, 1, 1982, 25).
For a discussion of more overtly political interventions, see Patricia Higgins, The
reactions of women, with special reference to women petitioners, in Politics, Religion
and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Stuart Manning (London, Edward Arnold, 1973),
177222.
22. Annotations Upon All the Books of the Old and New Testaments ... By the Joynt-
Labour of Certain Divines ... (London, 1645). For its insistence on the generic sense of
Genesis Man, the Annotations would seem to be indebted to the text ordered by the
Synod of Dort and published in 1637, later translated as The Dutch Annotations Upon
the Whole Bible..., tr. Theodore Haak (London, 1657).
23. Colasterion, ed. Lowell W. Coolidge, vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John
Milton, 73940.
24. Calvin, op. cit., 778.
25. Speght, op. cit., 2, 3.
26. Catherine Belsey examines the development and representation of liberal-
humanist Man in The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama
(London, Methuen, 1985). Francis Barker suggestively locates in the seventeenth
century the emergence of a distinctively bourgeois subjectivity; see The Tremulous
Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London, Methuen, 1984). Jean Bethke Elshtain
critiques the rise of liberal ideology in Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1981), 10046. For a discussion of the divorce tracts that
sees them expressing an alienated bourgeois individualism, see David Aers and Bob
Hodge in their very important Rational burning: Milton on sex and marriage
(Milton Studies, 12, 1979, 333).
27. J.M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (London, Oxford
University Press, 1968), 256.
28. If commented upon at all, the emphasis on procreation here is naturalized so
that it becomes an expression of Raphaels character or situation. Aers annotates these
lines by suggesting that Raphael is revealing a typically distorted view of sexuality,
John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book VIIVIII, ed. David Aers and Mary Ann
Radzinowicz, Cambridge Milton for Schools and Colleges, ed. J. B. Broadbent
200 Mary Nyquist
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974), 99. Halkett (op. cit., iii) points out
that Raphael later (VIII.22946) reveals that he was not present the day of Eves
creation. But since both are supposed to take place on the same Day, Raphaels
absence obviously cannot explain the different treatment given Adams creation and
Eves in his account. I would argue that such character- and situation-related effects
are part and parcel of the ideologically motivated narrative distributions examined
here.
29. In emphasizing the lines of continuity between the divorce tracts and Paradise
Lost, I am questioning the position developed by Aers and Hodge, who see Paradise
Lost gesturing towards a more adequate view of sexuality and the relationship
between women and men (op. cit., 4). Like other readers, Aers and Hodge stress the
importance of the following speech, suggesting that in it Adam makes the equation
Milton did not make in his prose works, the crucial equation between mutuality,
equality, and delight (23):
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Givn and receivd. (VIII.3836)
In my view, however, this produces a mystifying view of equality, since what Adam
is here rejecting is the society of creatures belonging to a different species; Eve is
equal only in the restricted sense of being a member of the human species.
Although I do not here explore the various tensions and contradictions of Miltons
views on gender relations in Paradise Lost, I make an attempt to do so in Fallen
differences, phallogocentric discourses: losing Paradise Lost to history, in Post-
Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and
Robert Young (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987).
30. Christine Froula, When Eve reads Milton: undoing the canonical economy
(Critical Inquiry, 10, 1983, 32147). That Derridas Supplement can productively
expose motivated contradictions in the not unrelated eld of Renaissance rhetorical
theory is demonstrated by Derek Attridge in Puttenhams perplexity: nature, art and
the supplement in Renaissance poetic theory, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed.
Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986),
25779.
31. For a sharp analysis of the ways in which, among the upper classes, the
development of an affective domestic sphere served to reinforce masculinist modes of
thought, see Susan Moller Okin, Women and the making of the sentimental family
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, II, 1981, 6588).
32. Calvin, op. cit., 767.
33. Annotation on Genesis 2:22 in John Diodati, Pious and Learned Annotations
upon the Holy Bible, tr. (R.G.), 3rd edn (London, 1651).
34. Cleanth Brooks, Eves awakening, in Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry
(Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), 2835. Brooks says that to the student
of Freud, Eves psychology may seem preternaturally convincing; he also remarks
that Eve is charmingly feminine withal!
35. Mary Astell, Reections upon Marriage, The Third Edition, To Which is Added A
Preface, in Answer to some Objections (London, 1706), 27. Ruth Perry examines this
works political discourse in her recent biography, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early
English Feminist (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15770. See also Joan
K. Kinnaird, Mary Astell and the conservative contribution to English feminism
( Journal of British Studies, 19, 1979, 5375); and see the discussion by Hilda Smith,
Reasons Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Chicago, University of
Illinois Press, 1982), 1319.
36. Astell, op. cit., Preface, a2, a3.
37. ibid., A2.
J O H N G U I L L O RY
The fathers house:

Samson Agonistes in its historical moment
Neque enim, pater, ire iubebas

Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri,
Certaque condendi fulget spes aurea nummi ...
(Ad Patrem)
L I F E - N A R R AT I V E S
T he argument of this essay takes as its point of entry the long-standing

conviction of Miltons readers that the narrative of Samson Agonistes does not
yield to interpretation unless it can be made to stand quasi-allegorically for
some other story whose constituent concerns and characters belong to the
time and place of the dramas composition. The difficulty of producing this
other narrative raises in an acute form the most general of theoretical
questions concerning the historical specicity of any literary text; yet it may
be that the very resistance to this specicity thrown up by the code-like
narrative of Samson (extending even to the date of composition, which has
never been xed) is an interesting arena upon which to engage the
theoretical question. I propose to read the narrative in its historical moment,
but I do not mean that I shall decode the drama by establishing once again,
From Re-membering Milton: Essays on the texts and traditions, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W.
Ferguson. 1988 by John Guillory.
203
204 John Guillory
or for the rst time, its proper historical context. I intend rather to argue that
the relation of text to context (as though to bring the historical background
a little closer) is a false problematic and has produced in this instance an
illusion of narrative intelligibility. The problematic I would advance in its
stead recognizes the text as itself a historical event, in the sense that Miltons
choice of the Samson story is a determinate choice, not the neutral vehicle of
meaning but an event whose signicance is enabled and conditioned by a
particular conguration of the total social formation.
The difference such a reading would make can be suggested by
glancing briey at the three contextual decodings of the narrative heretofore
governing criticism. These are, rst a political context, in which Miltons
redaction of the Samson story records a certain response to the failure of the
Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy. Second, an
autobiographical context, in which the life of Samson is identied with the
professional, literary, or domestic life of Milton. And third, a theological
context (currently the most favored), in which the narrative recapitulates the
stages leading up to the regeneration of the elect Protestant.1 None of
these contextual readings, or their many variant or combined forms, is
without explanatory power, nor are they mutually exclusive. Yet they produce
their intelligible translations of the Samson story at the cost of isolating the
dyad of text and context from the social formation within which both text
and context are signicant events. Here I would pose the question not of
context but of mediation (scarcely a new concept, but one seldom enough
employed in Renaissance criticism). The problematic of mediation, which
addresses the relation between a eld of cultural production and the whole
of social life, has been developed most rigorously within a materialist concept
of history and it is ultimately a materialist reading I shall attempt. I offer as
a useful and certainly not tyrannical formula for the materialist problematic
a sentence from Theodor Adornos critique of Benjamin: Materialist
determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the
total social process.2 Miltons choice of the Samson story signies as a
determinate choice within nothing less than this totality.
Nevertheless it will be necessary to begin with a rather more limited
and specic hypothesis about mediation between social levels in the early
modern period: Max Webers still crucial argument in his The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber differs on some signicant points with
what would presumably be a thoroughly materialist account of the relation
between religion and economy, but his work has provided the terms and
evidence for virtually every concept of mediation specic to the early modern
period and to Protestant Europe. For Weber the hinge of the social levels
represented by Protestantism and capitalism is the practice of vocation,
which operates as both a focus of theological controversy and as a discourse
of the working life. Weber traces this polyvalence to the early Reformation
Samson Agonistes in its historical moment 205
rejection of good works and the later emergence of a doctrine of election,

a doctrine which in practice imposed a structure upon life itself. Calvins God
demanded not single good works but a life of good works combined into a
unied system.3 Thus the Catholic organization of everyday life, wherein
every moment is referred to eternity as the potential moment of death, is
replaced by a narratable life, a structured life determined as elect or
reprobate only as a whole. There is good prima-facie evidence for situating
Samson as an intervention into this history in the very fact that current
contextual decodings of the narrative have invariably sought out a context in
which a life-narrative is at issue. Even the political reading of the drama is
contingent upon the conventional guring of the nations history as the life
of the heroic individual.4 Moreover, Milton seems to have designed the
narrative precisely in order to problematize the structured life, as the
conrmation of the providential plan governing the isolated episodes of
Samsons life is suspended until the crisis of retrospective validation in the
temple.5
At certain points Milton more openly attaches the life of Samson to the
history of Protestant election or vocation, as when the Chorus, addressing
God, says that Samson is
such as thou hast solemnly elected,

With gifts and graces eminently adornd
To some great work, thy glory.
(67880)6
Yet we know that in fact the sense of election in such a passage cannot be
strictly Calvinist because Milton himself was a believer in the Arminian
revision of Calvinist doctrine, which affirmed the freedom of the will over
predestination. If at this moment the history of election appears in the
margin of the drama merely as a problem of denition, or of the theological
context, that impression will be dispelled as soon as we measure what is at
stake in Miltons deployment of the received discourse. A better sense of
what such discursive maneuvers mean is given by Foucaults conception of
genealogy, a process he describes as the violent or surreptitious
appropriation of a system of rules ... in order to impose a new direction, to
bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a new game.7 Miltons
drama undertakes the surreptitious appropriation of that Calvinist system
or plan for the ordering of life whose cardinal principle is predestination.
This system of rules is given a new direction in the Arminian heresy, to which
Samson Agonistes lends its particular force. Such interventions take their place
and have their effects within the long sequence of discursive practices by
which the vocation is dislocated from the medieval ecclesiastical lexicon in
order rst to be identied with the radical Protestant concept of election,
206 John Guillory
and later, in equally critical circumstances, to be extracted from its

theological matrix. By the later eighteenth century the vocation functions as
the key term in the bourgeois ideology of industriousness Weber nds
exemplied in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The current sense of
vocation is therefore not the lineal descendant of some original discourse but
the fossil record of successive upheavals. Its very sedimentation makes it
capable of inecting the working life both positively and negatively, as the
dclass vocational training, or as the vocation which transcends the venal
motives of careerism.
The narrative of Samson belongs in another demonstrable respect to
the genealogy of Webers Protestant ethic, namely to that epistemological
crisis of proving ones election which racked the soul of the Calvinist. Just as
the dilemma of certitudo salutis, according to Weber, gave rise to an
identication of success with the proof of salvation, so Miltons Samson suffers
from a persistent doubt about his success, a doubt that cannot be reduced
only to a question of salvation or regeneration. The real historical dilemma
of election, the gulf between the private assurance of election and its public
exhibition, is carried over intact into Miltons drama, even though election
itself is drained of its Calvinist rigor. What remains of that doctrine is
precisely its ideological effect, its participation in the constitution of a new
subject with a new name: the individual. Only the individual can be saved
or damned, and in the same way, only the individual can succeed or fail at a
vocation. Current readings of Samson, if they remark just the problematic
relation between the inner narrative of conviction or doubt and the outer
narrative of success or failure in the struggle against the Philistines, tend to
privilege the internal narrative in a reduction of the drama to the operation
of a psychic economy, an economy in which the ebbing and owing of
Samsons physical strength can be correlated to the conviction of
providential vocation, the inner state Protestant theology calls faith.
From works of law to works of faith: the Pauline doctrine enables for
Calvinism the transformation of religious practice into a psychic economy, a
spiritual accounting that constitutes the individual in a new way, over against
the juridical constraints of the social, the law. Clearly the homeostatic
psychic economy of Calvinism permitted the achievements of the working
life, in a fatal slippage from works to work, to be entered as credits in the
ledger of the soul. Webers study documents the emergence of this psychic
economy, which he calls an ethic, and which for him mediates between the
major social structures of Protestantism and capitalism. I shall argue that the
putative homeostasis of the individual psyche is geared to a general economy
of social relations, an economy in which the vocation (in the sense of
working life) is not merely a redundant conrmation of a purely interior
certainty, nor the state of faith merely the warm glow of material success. If
the historical problem of the vocation can be conceived alternatively as the
relation between an inaccessible inner state and a narratable life, then the
problematic of mediation underlying Webers study can be addressed as the
question of how certain narrativesaccounts of individual livesemerge
and function within a specic historical conjuncture.
To be sure, this is a question of ideology and the means of its critique,
but here it would seem that the most readily available apparatus for
examining the narrative of the inner lifepsychoanalysisis itself another
version of the same kind of ideological discourse. There are nonetheless
good reasons for moving beyond Weber initially (if not nally) in the
direction of Freud, not the least of which is that ideology-critique (as it has
been developed from Marcuse to Althusser) is as yet dependent in its
formulations upon the very psychoanalytic vocabulary that is the latest and
nest product of ideology.8 Yet it may well be the case that ideological
discourses provide the means of their own critique in failing to erase their
genealogies; in this sense, the Protestant vocation belongs to what Foucault
calls the history of the present, the history of psychoanalysis itself.
In the nal section of this paper I hope to move beyond an ideology-
critique in psychoanalytic terms and onto the ground of materialism by
locating the point at which the homeostatic economy of the psyche
disintegrates and the vista of the general economy appears beyond the life of
the individual. With reference to the narrative of Samson, this point is the
moment of Samsons death, when his life becomes fully narratable, or when
that life-narrative begins to circulate. From this retrospective vantage, it can
be shown that the psychic economy generating the serial episodes of the life-
narrative has all along been determined by a contradiction between the
demands emanating from the poems two fathers, Yahweh and Manoa; the
distinction between these two fathers marks the difference between the
psychic and the social. The Hebrew God demands a great work, while the
earthly father demands, as I shall show, labor in a calling. Both demands
can be identied with the concept of vocation, but this is no longer an
instance of polyvalence so much as contradiction. Samson arranges the
disposition of his resourcesthe psychic, symbolic, or material capital
represented by strengthin order to satisfy the demands of both fathers;
and this he is able to do not by a labor of production, but by a single,
fantasmatic great work of destruction. The fact of a deviant labor of
destruction expending the whole of a capital endowment situates the drama
historically within a specic economic order, but signifying by its narrative
of destruction the antithesis of that order. To read Samson Agonistes in its
moment is to understand rst, its discordant relation to the normative
vocational narrative of the bourgeois Protestant, and second, the meaning of
such a counter-narrative, its capacity to circulate and to give pleasure, within
a social order exalting at every level the principle of production.
208 John Guillory
E X T R A O R D I N A RY CALLING
To begin with Webers question, then, is to set before us the task of xing the
typical thematization of the Samson story in Judges within the eld of
Protestant writings. Consider, for example, this text by the well-known
theologian, William Perkins, from A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of
Men:
And if we marke it well, the work of God shewes evidently to

what dangers they are subject, that doe anything either without
or against their callings. Sampsons strength lay not in his haire
(as men commonly thinke) but because hee went out of his
calling, by breaking the vow of a Nazarite, when he gave occasion
to Dalilah to cut off his Haire, therfore he lost his strength; for
God promised strength but with a commaundement, that hee
should be a Nazarite to the end.9
Judges provides an illustrative tale of what happens when a man falls away
from his calling; indeed, the calling is dened here by what diverges from it,
just as it would seem to be dened in Miltons redaction of the story. Yet this
denition does not distinguish Samson from any other follower in the
Nazarite path; he was called to much more than obedience to vows. In
Perkins text the story is partially depleted of its meaning in order that the
situation of Samson might be read as normative. The same tactic of
normalization is adopted by the marginal annotators of the Geneva Bible,
who also interpret the narrative from judges as a moral fable of vocation.
Such an allegory is developed during Samsons nal moments, as here the
uniqueness of his situation tends to escape the net of circumscriptive
thematization. Hence, Samsons coerced sport before the Philistine lords
(16:25) calls forth this comment: Thus by Gods iust judgements they are
made slaves to indels, which neglect their vocation in defending the
faithful. Not quite consistently, Samson between the pillars (16:29) is
glossed: According to my vocation, which is to execute Gods iudgements
upon the wicked, a statement that would seem to acknowledge a specic
rather than a general concept of Samsons task. The more disturbing suicidal
exclamation (Let me die with the Philistines) is accompanied by a
somewhat evasive return to a normative theme: He speaketh not this of
despaire, but humbling himself for neglecting his office and the offense
thereby given. Samsons suicide, which is conventionally explained away,
is least of all compatible with a vocational reading.
The texts from Perkins and the Geneva commentators, with which
Milton would have been familiar, record an incapacity to x a boundary
between the two senses of vocation, as calling and as work. Yet such a
distinction was frequently attempted, and it usually took the form adopted by
Perkins in the following passage:
The generall calling is the calling of Christianity, which is

common to all that live in the Church of God. The particular, is
that special calling that belongs to some particular men: as the
calling of a Magistrate, the calling of a Minister, the calling of a
father, of a childe, of a seruant, of a subiect, or any other calling
that is common to all.
(I.752)
Perkins category of the special calling is scarcely exclusive, but it is evident

from the remainder of the treatise that he is primarily interested in those
callings which we would call occupations. The relative poverty of Perkins
vocabulary reproduces the same paronomasia that is the subject of Webers
researches in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The discursive
problem to which Miltons version of the Samson story responds can now be
more narrowly dened and examined: it concerns the distinction between
general and particular vocation, as that unstable distinction conditions
subsequent deviations from Calvinism.
Weber initially addresses this problem by tracing the emergence of the
modern sense of Beruf, which undoubtedly goes linguistically back to Bible
translations by Protestants (207). His major example is Luthers translation
of the apocryphal book of Jesus Sirach 11:20 as bleibe in deinem Beruf,
where the Vulgate had opus. German Bibles had, formerly, Werk, or
Arbeit. The Latin term synonymous with Beruf was of course vocatio, but
that had referred to the religious life, particularly to the life of the cloister.
Luther also translates a similar crucial verse, I Corinthians 7:20, as Let each
man abide in that calling wherein he was called (translating the New
Testament kleesis as Beruf). More accurate translations would be, for the
Latin, status, and the German, Stand. The alterations are small volleys in the
polemics of Protestantism, aimed specically at the consilia evangelica of the
monks. The latter is replaced by a new valuation of the fulllment of duty
in worldly affairs (80), the Weberian ide reue that is in fact only a premise
of Webers argument. Protestant theologians such as Perkins, who condemn
the monks themselves for idleness, are able to say that the monks have no
vocation (I.755), impressive testimony to the effectiveness of the appropriated
term, if only as a device of polemic. However, several intervening
circumstances have to be remarked, and they are, according to Weber, even
more signicant than the revaluation of labor inaugurated by the early
Protestants.
According to Weber, the sanctication of work did not necessarily
imply its rationalization, which he associates with Calvinist rather than
210 John Guillory
Lutheran forms of Reformation. In fact, Luthers sense of labor is in some

ways thoroughly traditional; he believed, as Weber remarks, that the
individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which
God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits
imposed by his established station in life (85). Along with its newer
resonances, Beruf retained the meaning of status. Luthers innovation might
be simply irrelevant to any post-Calvinist conception of labor, were it not for
the fact that he uses Beruf frequently also to mean the call to eternal
salvation through God. Calvins sense of a call to eternal salvation is only
too clear; yet the machinery of predestination yields another distinction
authorized by the cryptic nal sentence of the marriage parable in Matthew:
For many are called (kleetos) but few are chosen (eklektos). This is the text
by which Calvin expounds his distinction between a general and a special
calling:
The statement of Christ Many are called but few are chosen
[Matt. 22:14] is, in this manner, very badly understood. Nothing
will be ambiguous if we hold fast to what ought to be clear from
the foregoing: that there are two kinds of call. There is the
general call, by which God invites all equally to himself through
the outward preaching of the wordeven those to whom he
holds it out as a savor of death [cf. II Cor. 2:16], and as the
occasion for severer condemnation. The other kind of call is
special, which he deigns for the most part to give to the believers
alone, while by the inward illumination of his Spirit he causes the
preached Word to dwell in their hearts. Yet sometimes he also
causes those whom he illuminates only for a time to partake of it;
then he justly forsakes them on account of their ungratefulness
and strikes them with even greater blindness.10
The general call is at best vacated of its meaning, and at worst it

becomes what Empson would have called one of Gods grisly jokes. More
important, the distinction is drawn entirely within the soteriological
problematic. Whereas Luther had dened a special calling as the particular
employment or labor of an individual life, Calvin identies the same
structural category with the elect. It might be supposed that the more radical
and powerful Calvinist scheme would simply displace the Lutheran
distinction, but that is not what happens. Weber shows that precisely the
problem engendered by the discrimination of the elect from the reprobate is
responsible for the retention of Luthers pun on Beruf: It was only as a result
of the development which brought the interest in proof of salvation to the
fore that Luthers concept was taken over and then strongly emphasized by
[the Calvinists] (210).
After Calvin, then, calling and vocation continue to be used

indiscriminately on both sides of the distinction between vocati and electi.
The indeterminacy of this conceptual complex is the condition for the
semantic link between Calvins election, which has nothing to do, after all,
with labor per se, and Luthers Beruf. Milton inherits these distinctions, along
with their instability. An irresolvable ambiguity of terms is especially
characteristic of the Arminian heresy, whose aim is scarcely to discard the
technical apparatus of Calvinism; on the contrary, the terms remain in place,
but their relations are altered, and another bifurcation appears. For Milton,
as an Arminian, the distinction between vocati and electi cannot have quite the
same force as it must for the Calvinist, since he no longer accepts a decree of
reprobation. More than that, De Doctrina undertakes to remove election
completely from its context of predestination; but then what content might
it have? Would it not simply be absorbed by the secondary meanings of
vocation, because, against its now conventional meaning, it would refer to
choosing rather than being chosen? Whence I infer, Milton writes, that the
elect are the same as believers, that the terms are synonymous (VI.180).
God chooses those who choose themselves. Milton has no need for a purely
soteriological distinction between a general and a special election. All
election is general: It seems, then, that predestination and election are not
particular but only general: that is, they belong to all who believe in their
hearts and persist in their belief (VI.176). Finally Milton is careful to
distinguish the general election from the idea of the particular, individual
task: nor do I mean the election by which he chooses an individual for some
employment [ad munus] (VI.172.).
But is the latter notion in any other way an example of election?
Elsewhere in De Doctrina Milton refers to a similar idea as special vocation:
Special vocation means that God, whenever he chooses, invites

certain select individuals, either from the so called elect or from
the reprobate [sive electos quos vocant sive reprobos], more
clearly and more insistently than is normal.
Certain selected individuals: he called Abraham, for example,
out of his house, when he probably had not the slightest idea that
such a thing would happen, Gen. xxi. 1, etc. and when, in fact, he
was an idolator.
(VI.455)
A distinction between election and vocation is very difficult to maintain, both

here and in the chapter on Predestination. Samson is unquestionably an
example of special vocation, like Abraham, called out of his house [domo
sua evocavit] to do the work of God; but a much larger point emerges from
this analysis: Miltons concept of special vocation is the return of election, the
212 John Guillory
return of being chosen rather than choosing. The now orthodox

interpretation of Samsons regeneration misses this point by attaching his
internal narrative to the general vocation, the spiritual progression Milton
adopts in his Arminian version of the Calvinist paradigm:
vocationregenerationrepentancefaithjustication. The application of
such a paradigm to Samsons story falsies precisely Miltons attempt to
suppress the Calvinist residue of his theology, which nevertheless returns in
De Doctrina with the nervous sive electos quos vocant sive reprobos, and in
Samson with every meditation, however nally exculpatory, on the justice of
God. Much as the Geneva annotators accommodated the violence of judges,
current advocates of Samsons regeneration have normalized Miltons
redaction, reducing the extraordinary call to merely typical status.11
U N P R O F I TA B L E S E RVA N T
Samson, Manoa, and the Chorus allude frequently to Samsons unique

calling, and it is these passages I hope to have located precisely within the
region of theological controversy. I would now like to consider in greater
detail the key passage from Samson quoted above, with the intention of
probing the limits of Webers conceptualization of the Protestant vocation.
The passage is excerpted from a longer rumination by the Chorus on what
must have seemed to Milton an affinity of the Samson narrative with the story
of job:
Nor do I name of men the common rout,

That wandering loose about
Grow up and perish, as the summer y,
Heads without name no more rememberd,
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adornd
To some great work, thy glory,
And peoples safety, which in part they effect:
Yet toward these, thus dignid, thou oft,
Amidst thir height of noon,
Changest thy countnance and thy hand, with no regard
Of highest favors past
From thee on them, or them to thee of service.
(67486)
If election seems here to be an ironic predestination, a grisly joke, it is in

this and several other ways a transformation rather than a transcendence of
the Calvinist scheme. As a solemnly elected individual, Samson stands
against not a spiritually reprobate majority but the nameless, the common
rout ... Heads without name no more rememberd. The antinomies of
election and reprobation are redefined as election and obscuritythe
invisible church has become, precisely, the most visible. These elect can
be gured as visibility itself; they are most conspicuous at thir height of
noon. The pressure of Miltons own obsession is evident here; certainly he
feared obscurity more than any discredited reprobation, but then he has gone
a long way toward identifying the one with the other. The obsession of the
drama with fame, itself an ethically suspect motive, compounds with the
Calvinist soteriology to produce a socially advanced valuation of individual
fate. We shall return to this notion when we follow Samson into the temple,
at his height of noon (noon grew high).
The homology of election and fame suggests a modication of election
to respond to a newly dened elite, one which emerged from the Calvinist
elect. Hence Milton is intent to dissociate Samson from a hereditary nobility
(171) just as much as from the common rout. In the biblical text these
discriminations are not made. At the same time, it is rather difficult to specify
any group to which Samson might belong as a representative gure. It is
easier to locate a referent for the obscure multitude in the egregious
interjection, That wandering loose about. Such wandering is not entailed
by the distinction between those who are elected to a conspicuous fame and
those who are not. Wandring loose implies a hypothetical antithesis, a
quality of xity in the character of Samson, but that idea is not to be found
in the passage itself. Rather it generates a series of oppositions from beneath,
operating as a covert thematic which is elsewhere openly acknowledged in
the phallic narrative of Samsons castration by Dalila, signifying among other
things a slackening of vocational rigidity. Resolute application to an ordained
task is demanded by the special vocation that Milton distinguishes from
mere labor on the one hand, and predestination on the other. If that ide xe
fails to maintain its distinction from Calvins predestination, I will now argue
that it also fails to remain uninvaded by the fact of mere labor.
Special vocation in the sense of the working life is signalled by
what is probably the most active subtext in the drama, the parable of the
talents (Matt. 25:1430). Milton has already linked both his blindness and his
one talent to this parable in Sonnet XIX, and it is unsurprisingly evoked by
Samson, who possesses the singular talent of strength. just as critical is an
unmistakable affinity with the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt.
20:116); both parables conceive of the relation between God and man as
that of a master-employer to a servant-employee. In Samson, any recollection
of the parable of the workers in the vineyard would seem to cancel the
elective assurance of the parable of the talents. Yet we hear in the protest of
the Chorus against the (apparently) arbitrary master who remunerates his
servants with ironic even-handedness (just and unjust, alike seem
214 John Guillory
miserable) the complaint of the workers in the vineyard. The contest of the
two parables occurs more familiarly in Sonnet XIX: Doth God exact day-
labor, light denied? When Samsons one talent which is death to hide does
not yield a prot, his labor is mere wage-labor; he merely gets what he
deserves. And getting what one deserves is of course the economic formula
for reprobation, which can only be transcended by the absolute gift of
election, the absolute transcendence of economy itself. The lament of the
Chorus, [Thou] throwst them lower than thou didst exalt them high, is
thus heavily charged with the same Calvinist irony that retroactively
contaminates the parable of the workers in the vineyard: So the last will be
rst, and the rst last. The psychic economy governing Samsons special
vocation can be described as an attempt to affirm the economy of the
parable of the talents against the economy of the parable of the workers in
the vineyard (as though the economic form of talent/prot were not in fact
mediated in the real world by the form of wage-labor).12
The logic of Miltons economy requires not the equal remuneration of
labor but the production of a prot. We will see that for Samson, if that prot
does not appear in the close, labor is degraded to day-labor, light denied,
or worse, to idleness, the condition of the common rout ... wandring
loose about. That is to say, Samson will have no vocation. In its contempt
for wandring, the Chorus speaks in unison with Perkins and his
colleagues, when they condemn rogues, beggars, vagabonds for idleness,
for not taking up a vocation in life.13 Their vagrancy is of course a
consequence of their mass expropriation, but the social fact of vagrancy is
volatilized in the crucible of Puritan ethics and rematerializes as a schematic
counterpart to the valorization of labor undertaken by all those theologians
from Perkins to Baxter who imported the categories of election and vocation
into the representation of everyday working life. Hence Samson prefers even
a degraded form of labor, the servile toil of the Philistine mill, to the
idleness that is the antinomy of calling:
To what can I be useful, wherein serve

My Nation, and the work from Heavn imposd,
But to sit idle on the household hearth,
A burdenous drone.
(5647)
Such a drone could not be distinguished from the summer ies dismissed
by the Chorus. Samsons calling, which has consisted hitherto of isolated acts
of destruction, is nevertheless an occupation. His vocational failure leaves
him with nothing to do, an unprotable servant (Matt. 25:30) who has
fallen out of his class and into the horde of the socially reprobate, the
expropriated, the unemployed.
I N T I M AT E IMPULSE
Labor is the shadow cast by all of Samsons actions; yet the objective form of
his vocation, his apparently random acts of destruction, prevents us from
nally assimilating his narrative to a normative ideology. This problem,
which is not accessible to a Weberian analysis, can be approached from
another direction as the problem of the discrepancy between the demands of
Samsons two fathers, God and Manoa. If Manoa disapproves of Samsons
nuptial choices, he also remains skeptical of those divinely inspired
intimate impulses which we know to be both the justication of Samsons
object choices and the form taken by his calling. What does Manoa want of
and for his son? The question might be rephrased to highlight Manoas
contemporaneity with Milton: What might the seventeenth-century
middle-class father want of his male child? Many things, of course, but at
the least he might claim the right to control both marital and occupational
choices. In his divorce tracts, Milton rejects the coerced choice of marriage
partners as a savage inhumanity (II.275). As for the second right, the
evidence (for example, of Ad Patrem) points to its rejection as well. On this
point Milton was as usual advanced for his time. The period of transition is
epitomized by one historian of the family, Jean-Louis Flandrin, as follows:
In the sixteenth century, the only recognized vocation had been

the religious one; apart from that, parents were left free to choose
the occupations of their children. By the end of the seventeenth
century, however, every estate had become a profession and
required a vocation, which parents were forbidden to thwart.14
It would be very difficult to believe that this reversal was effected without
trauma; we know that Miltons own father was perplexed by the occupational
vagueness of his sons life. If Samsons activity scarcely has the appearance of
an occupation, its structurally vocational features are determined by the
fathers demand for a certain regular activity, for rational labor. At the same
time, this activity must answer to the demand of the Father God, which
Milton rather coyly implies is quite beyond Manoas comprehension.15 This
contradiction is focused (if not resolved) by the repetition of the intimate
impulse, a paradoxical rationalization of an act itself anarchic and eruptive.
The problem of the iterability of the intimate impulse arises crucially
in the recounting of Samsons decision to marry a second Philistine woman:
I thought it lawful from my former act (231). The absence of any narrative
conrmation of divine guidance leaves the impulse stranded in the psyche,
reduced merely to a feeling. The possibility of doubt has the effect of
producing a fully Cartesian meditation on the privacy of thought. Samson
does not attempt to assimilate his second marriage to the earlier impulse,
216 John Guillory
which he knows to be from God, but rather elevates that impulse into a
principle of legitimation. The feeling remains inaccessible but the concept
of the impulse functions as a legal precedent, and so displaces the
epistemological problem of a private experience onto an already legitimized
social structure. In this way the act that needed to be justied because it
transgressed the law itself becomes the justication of future transgression.
The Chorus accepts this argument, after some vigorous attempts at self-
persuasion (He with his Laws can best dispense) that conclude at the
expense of a rational principle (Down Reason, then, at least vain
reasonings down). At this point Manoa enters, and the narrative sequence
makes explicit the antinomies governing the drama: the father, the law,
rationality, and iterability must be ranged against God, transgression,
irrationality, and a convulsive mode of action. Narrative repetitions in
Samson appear as singular, unstructured acts of impulsion, or as a
compulsion to repeat. Samsons marriages, his failures to contain his
several secrets, his acts of destruction; everything must be done at least twice.
Milton would have been sensitized to this pattern even by the current
etymology of Samsons name, there the second time. The narrative invokes
a pervasive polarity between the law, as representative of social relations, and
the impulse, as representative of an overruling psychic economy. At this
point we are prepared to consider the question of why Samsons vocation
takes the form of a compulsion to repeat, which is precisely a compulsion to
transgress the law.
That the question of the law arises here (and even more crucially at the
climax of the drama) has the effect of opening up the relation of the psychic
to the social just at the moment when the social seems to be disappearing
into the psychic. I would like to set this relation in apposition to several texts
of Freud, with the intention of reconstructing that recurrent structure of
ideology by which psychic economies, whether Calvinist, Freudian, or
anything in between appropriate and displace the mechanism of the
economic per se. A hypothetical psychic economy governing the internal
narrative of Samson therefore does not leave behind the prehistory of
election, its complicity with Calvinist ideologies of labor, but rather follows
the track of that ideology as it displaces the scene of action to the mind. If
Manoa can be seen to represent the familial interests of the contemporary
bourgeoisie, it is Samson who refuses the representative function, who offers
instead a unique and interesting internal drama. It will also be helpful to
observe in the typical strategies of psychoanalysis the analogue of Samsons
private justication of his public actions (founded upon a communication
between himself and God); election is here performing the quasi-analytic
function of inducing introspection, of displacing compulsion to a domain of
interiority. Samson exhibits what Freud calls a Schicksalszwang, a fate
compulsion, described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as being pursued by
a malignant fate or possessed by some daemonic power. The mythological

terms are then smoothly translated into analytic language: but
psychoanalysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part
arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile experiences
(XVIII.21). In order to translate the daemon into Zwang, Freud overleaps
several centuries, the whole period of the disenchantment of the world, in
which neither the daemon nor the Zwang are available terms of explanation.
For Miltons Samson, it is an open question whether his fate is determined
by an external agency or arranged by himself (Whether prompted by God
or by his own valor).16 Fixing upon one or the other alternative will depend,
precisely, upon whether and how external agencies are internalized, that is
upon a psychologizing move. In his metapsychology, Freud attempts to
demonstrate that the external Zwang is so transformed by the psychic
economy as to become virtually supernumerary to its operation, reduced, as
it were, from an agency of predestination to an impotent foreshadowing. I
propose, then, something more than an analogy to this metapsychology: that
if late Calvinist theology denes a psychic economy, the relation of economy
to psyche, or of labor to election, can be theorized in a preliminary way as
the relation of (external) Zwang to (internal) Schicksal.
Consider, for example, the analytic account of that external compulsion
known as the law given in The Future of an Illusion. In place of the Hebraic
etiology of law as God-given, Freud posits as the founding institutions of
civilization two forms of social coercion: But with the recognition that every
civilization rests upon a compulsion to work [Arbeitszwang] and a
renunciation of instinct [Triebverzicht], it has become clear that civilization
cannot consist principally and solely in wealth itself and the means of
acquiring it and the arrangement for its distribution (XXI.10). The
Arbeitszwang is soon left aside, since it is a universal necessity, and (at least at
this point in the argument) does not undergo internalization. Freud is
concerned only to explain the renunciation of instinct, and it is that external
compulsion [usserer Zwang] which gradually becomes internalized
(XXXI.11).
In the major study to follow, Civilization and its Discontents, work
appears again as a result mainly of the stress of necessity, but in addition an
attempt is made to articulate the two founding coercions of civilization in
relation to a single defense mechanism, sublimation. Still, the most
signicant comment is relegated to a footnote:
It is not possible, within the limits of a short survey, to discuss

adequately the signicance of work for the economics of the
libido. No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the
individual so rmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his
work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the
218 John Guillory
human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large

amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive
or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human
relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to
what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and
justication of existence in society. Professional activity is a
source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one if, that is
to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of
existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced
instinctual impulses.
(XXI.80)
It is only rarely in Freuds work that the economics of the libido

touches upon the economy in the restricted sense, here as the re-entrance of
libido into economy. Freuds note does not argue that work actually absorbs
a considerable quantum of frustrated erotic libidohe only adds a tentative
even erotic to his list of possible sublimations. In this formulation, certain
kinds of work, freely chosen activity, provide the opportunity of
sublimating aggression.17 The activity resulting from such a sublimation can
again be described as Arbeitszwang, but this would mean something new, an
internalized compulsion. Joan Rivire, the translator of this work in the
Standard Edition, gives us professional work for the word Berufsarbeit,
which should make very clear historically, what kind of work Freud has in
mind. The history sedimented in the word Freud employs recalls the same
contradiction discovered in the Protestant Beruf, work as freely chosen
activity (vocation) and as being chosen (election).
Nevertheless the implications of this sedimented history are only
ancillary to Freuds argument, which is concerned in the body of text with
accounting for the discontent of that instinctual renunciation which is a
consequence of aggression, the major derivative of the death-drive. The
subtleties of the theory are less pertinent at the moment than the central
thesis of an aggressivity placed in the service of the super-ego, which
becomes a kind of breeder-reactor of renunciation and further aggression. It
would seem that in this context the question of work would no longer be
problematic, that the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang), as the
major representative of the death-drive, would sum up every lesser example
of compulsion. Nevertheless, the compulsion to work does reappear later
in the book, having ascended from the footnotes to a very prominent place
in the argumentthis time as a mythological complement to the sexual
drive: The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a twofold
foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity,
and the power of love.... Eros and Ananke have become the parents of human
civilization too (XXI.101). The identification of Ananke with the
compulsion to work (der Zwang zur Arbeit) is surprising; why is there no

theoretical relation between this external necessity and the internal
aggression that is everywhere else in Freuds later work the complement to
Eros? Elsewhere the dyad is, as we know, Eros and Thanatos, the death-
drive. The relation between Thanatos and Ananke can be brought to the fore
by reconnecting the ligaments of the argument as follows: An internalized
Arbeitszwang is the sublimation of aggression, which is a derivative of the
death-drive, whose representative is the Wiederholungszwang. If work is
indeed the sublimation of aggression according to the later theory of the
drives, it is unfortunately also true that sublimation was never successfully
integrated into the economic scheme of the metapsychology. It is just this
failure of integration that allows Freud to idealize a certain kind of labor, the
Berufsarbeit, and in fact to model the psychic economy of labor on two quite
atypical examples, intellectual work and artistic creation (XXI.79). In
this kind of labor, an impossible psychic economy obtains, one in which
nothing is lost in expending energy.
If Calvinist theology can be said to function as a psychology, a system
for inducing and representing psychic events, this psychology, like Freuds,
also fails to represent labor except in idealized form, as extra-economic, as a
sublimation or internalized Ananke. Indeed it is the conception of a Zwang
subtending the ideology of the bourgeois vocationa compulsion to work
which is attested in myriad documents of the early modern bourgeoisie
that allows us to reconstruct something like a psychic economy of Calvinism.
The Berufsarbeit of the Calvinist is also a sublimation of aggression
(competition), which is a derivative of his fate (election), whose
representative is the compulsion to repeat (as we shall see, accumulation of
prot). Samson acts out the psychic economy of the Calvinist, but in a
deviant form: his vocation is a desublimation of aggression, a crucial difference
marking the discrepancy between the divine and earthly fathers demands as
the recto and verso of destruction and production.18
Like the bourgeois vocation, Samsons acts seem to escape the stress of
necessity when they are no longer compelled from the outside, and this is to
say that the individual is constituted as such (Samson hath quit himself like
Samson) at the moment when the vocation is proven, election conrmed. Of
course the constitution of the individual as an autotelic mind, free in its
interiority, completes a process of identication that is for Freud the original
determinism of psychogenesis. Individuality is a dialectical successor to the
law of the Father, and it is asserted (as we know in Miltons case as well as
Samsons) most conspicuously when the choice of vocation comes into conict
with the will of the Father. Clearly the choice of vocation can be made the
terrain of renewed Oedipal conict, but it is scarcely surprising that Freud has
so little to say about this second battle between fathers and sons. The
Berufsarbeit is always removed from the reductive reach of the metapsychology.
220 John Guillory
If the crucial point for Milton in placing Samson between the pillars is
precisely his freedom (Now of my own accord such other trial / I mean to
show you of my strength, yet greater), that freedom might nevertheless be
read by the demystifying theory of either Calvin or Freud as the
internalization of the law, the will of the Father. Milton is nally as
undecided as Freud about the extent to which he will permit such a
demystication, and thus the source of the rousing motions is itself left
undecided: And eyes fast xed he stood, as one who prayed, / Or some great
matter in his mind revolved. The distance that produces the indeterminable
option produces a fully privatized individual, who therefore acts of his own
accord, that is, in accord with his interiority. From the strategically
distanced position of audience to the messenger, we can only speculate that
inside the black box of Samsons mind there revolves a gyroscope of
motivation, whose external expression is a sudden, unpredictable motion, the
convulsing to and fro that brings the temple down. As the verse turns to its
second option, not of prayer but of constituting other minds, the Arminian
heresy assumes a larger ideological function of identifying freedom with
individuality. Such an identication is an unforseen consequence of the very
theology that administered so apparently nal a rebuke to human volition.
Late Calvinism, which typically weakens the doctrine of predestination to an
ethic of self-determination, is locked into place as one possible ideological
buttress of the bourgeois vocation. God wants us to do what we want to do.
Just as the impulse can signify both compulsion and volition, its
complex form, the compulsion to repeat, can be construed as the conjuncture
between the repetitional structure of social constraintnamely, the law
and the matter of what is repeated in the Samson narrativea transgressive
violence. The impulse both embodies and transgresses the law (I thought it
lawful from my former act). In this context, it is signicant that Samsons
rousing motions are preceded by the recollection that God has the power
to dispense whom he will from a strict obedience. There can be no doubt
that the idea of dispensation and the plan of destruction are linked in Samsons
mindbut what is a dispensation? Miltons discussions of the term are
mainly to be found in the divorce tracts, where dispensation is dened as
some particular accident rarely happning and therefore not specifyd in the
Law, but left to the decision of charity, evn under the bondage of Jewish
rites, much more under the liberty of the Gospel. He gives the example of
Davids eating the Shew bread ... which was ceremonially unlawful (II.299).
However, the dispensation does not abrogate the law. Samson claims that he
will do nothing scandalous or forbidden to our Law, yet he does what the
Philistines command, attend at their religious rites. Let us for the moment
refocus the instrument of the inquiry and ask what really was dispensed
when Milton displaced the action fully into Samsons mind, when it became
inaccessible to our perception. We confront immediately what appears to be
a contradiction, as the foregoing analysis would lead us to suppose that

Samsons nal act of freedom should be interpreted as internalization of the
law, whereas now we must regard the same moment between the pillars as a
dispensation.
The contradiction results from the projection of the former
complement of compulsionvolition upon the latter, of lawdispensation.
Of course any declaration of freedom can be understood as, and reduced to,
an internalized necessity, but I am inclined to take seriously the insertion of
Samsons act into a category of dispensation. For once Milton has not
dened freedom trivially as the alternative of obeying or disobeying the law,
but rather located it in those hypothetical moments when the law is set aside.
With this hypothesis in mind, we can be properly impressed that Samson is
dispensed rst from the law of endogamy (marriage within the tribe), and last
from the corresponding prohibition in the ritual sphere, of participation in
extra-tribal worship. He is dispensed from the constituting prohibitions of
Hebraic culture. Milton poses, in heterodox theological terms, a radical
question about the founding coercions of culture. It will not do, therefore, to
recuperate the law wholly as an internalized necessity, by however
sophisticated an articulation of an intervening third term, a primal or
symbolic father. There is an irreducible contradiction between the possible
meanings of Samsons nal act, as a determinate compulsion to repeat, and
as the free indulgence in the absence of the law, of what the law forbids to
the individualviolence.
By the latter alternative I mean to confront the fact of aggression
directly; it has for the most part been evaded in criticism of the drama, or
reduced to the merely contingent circumstance of Samsons regeneration.19
If the fact of legitimated aggression is as central to Samson Agonistes as it is to
any revenge drama, that assumption of legitimacy must be read in the
framework of a psychic economy as a fantasy of desublimation.20 Such a
fantasy is an exact inversion of the bourgeois ideology in which the
Berufsarbeit is the sublimation of aggression. The concept of desublimation
brings into focus that contradiction by virtue of which Samsons acts become
the labor of violence, that is, both rational and dispensed from what will
prove to be not the economics of the libido but a specic class rationality.21
The fantasized character of aggression in the drama must be insisted
upon, because the law is only temporarily set aside. Its representative,
Manoa, remains very much onstage, and his presence betrays the immanence
of very particular historical conditions. The transcendent Father-God, in
contradistinction, has the dogmatic privilege of a transhistorical potency:
He with his laws can best dispense. Samson is returned Home to his
fathers house in the recognition that the family is the agent of the law. Most
importantly for the operation of the psychic economy, the destruction of the
temple satises both Manoa and the Father-God, rather an unlikely
222 John Guillory
achievement. The extraordinary calling is much more likely to conict with

the fathers demand, as it did with Milton and his own father. Milton often
has it both ways, but never more exorbitantly than in the nal images of
Samson as both self-killed and self-begotten (Like that self-begotten
bird). If in dispensing with his law, the father absents himself, that absence
must be read as both punishment and reward (or in the imagery of the drama,
as the complex of blindness and a compensatory inward illumination). The
psychic economy dened by this complex is further condensed into the
complicatio of the phoenix, an image of maternal succession (from out her
ashy womb now teemed) and so of the absence of the father; but also a
Christian typological image, certainly threatening to Milton, of the
Fathers sacrice of the Son.22 It is not possible, it seems to me, to put these
images together, except in the sense in which Samson is tangled in the fold;
that is, the images can be laid atop one another along with the general
antinomian wreckage. Inasmuch as the phoenix achieves a genealogy that
evades the necessity of paternal succession, indeed, of the paternal
metaphor, the image embodies the paradox of the castrated male, who
becomes limitlessly powerful because beyond the law. The psychic economy
evinced by Samson eventuates in this paradox, however, only provided the
psyche is conceived to be autonomous and self-contained. That economy can
now be reinserted into a general economy of exchange by raising the
question of what prot accumulates, and to whom, when the agent of
exchange destroys himself, or offers himself in a total exchange. This
question concerns the economic relation between production and
destruction, within what we must now recognize as the historical regime of
a specific mode of production. The significance of the narrative of
destruction is mediated by nothing less than this total social process.
SYMBOLIC C A P I TA L
The destruction of the Philistine lords serves the immediate purpose of

seeming to overturn a relation of domination that has become structural in
the perception of the dominated. As Milton knew, Philistia continued to rule
until the period of the Kings. No national victory is claimed at the end of
Samson. Rather Milton asserts the exemplary status of Samsons life and
death, valued above even the providential history of the Israelites. The
disappointed millennialism of the major works is thus countered by the
consolation of the one just man, a theme frequently enough evoked by
collective failures. But what kind of consolation is this? How can it be said
that an image of destruction compensates for the renewal of domination?
The effective redress (an imaginary revenge) is possible because the image is
an image of excess, of what would be called in the lexicon of contemporary
ideology, terrorism. The political allegory in Samson Agonistes mistakes the

particular forms of domination (whatever they may be at the time of the
plays composition) for an immutable structural domination from which
there is no release except in fantasy. What emerges at the end of Samson is
thus an intersubjective exchange, bypassing the polis, between Samson and
the Hebrew youth who iname their breasts / To matchless valour, and
adventures high with the memory of Samsons deed. The political has the
status of an occasion for the individual agon, a narrative condition which
has successfully frustrated political interpretations of the drama, or opened it
to the most facile of allegories. The historical moment of the drama, if it is
indeed bounded by the failure of the Commonwealth, is also the moment of
that class victory consolidated by the alliance of aristocratic and bourgeois
property, when Webers ethic of individual success establishes ideological
hegemony.
The narrative of Samson Agonistes acknowledges the victory of this class
rationality by negating it in the fantasy of desublimation, of terrorism,
which is nothing other than an image of the abolition of all structural
domination, the whole of political economy, in the face of its actual
continuance.23 Hence the law is dispensed, not abrogated. Miltons rst and
still in some respects his subtlest critic, Andrew Marvell, recognized just this
terrorist hyperbole in his sly identication of Milton with the Samson of
Samson Agonistes: (So Sampson gropd the Temples Posts in spite) / The
World oerwhelming to revenge his sight (italics mine). Samsons act of
destruction extends beyond the Philistine temple to the world itself.
Disestablishment proceeds unchecked; all temples are demolished, all
states, all societies. At the threshold of a new social formation, the bourgeois
Canaan whose terrain can be mapped in the excesses and deformations of the
pseudo-biblical narrative-at the moment of this Pisgah vision, there appears
in the distance an apocalypse in which even the free relations of production
(which we know to be objectively the rule of discipline, of labor in a
calling) are utterly undone. This moment is folded back upon the
destruction of the temple and the obsolete order it represents, in a collapsed
temporality whose import is the possibility of destruction always present as a
complement to production itself.
That this complementary fantasy of destruction is itself a function of
the social economy is attested by the nal lines of the drama, where the
servants of the lord are dismissed, having drunk in the scene of destruction,
with a greater accumulation (acquist) of experience, that is to say, a kind
of usable talent as well as a vocational paradigm:
His servants he with new acquist

Of true experience from this great event
224 John Guillory
With peace and consolation hath dismist,

And calm of mind, all passion spent.
(17558)
The closing of the psychic account with both a surplus and an absolute
expenditure argues that Miltons deepest protest was not against the
Philistines (or the Stuarts) but against the very law of rational calculation,
against the ceaseless counting of prot and loss. That protest is voiced by
Peter in the rst gospel: We have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall
we have therefore? (Matt. 19:27). Calvin believed that Jesus answered
Peters question with the parable of the workers in the vineyard. This is of
course not the answer that Milton would have wanted; he would surely have
replied with the parable of the talents, by which he answered his own version
of Peters question, Doth God exact day-labor, light denied? And it is
surely the parable of the talents to which Milton returns in the Chorus nal
speech. I propose now to translate the concept of desublimation into a more
historically specic economic cognate, which would comprehend Miltons
transformation of Matthews talent into what Pierre Bourdieu calls
symbolic capital (preeminently, honor or fame).24 Such a translation is
intended not to reduce talent to capital but to recognize the specicity of that
capital which goes by the name of talent.
The concept of symbolic capital acknowledges the distance that has
opened up in theory between the economy in the restricted sense, and the
general economy of such practices as the religious, the erotic, the aesthetic.
Bourdieu does not describe the latter practices by analogy to the economy of
production and exchange; on the contrary, he argues that a restricted
denition of economic interest ... is the historical product of capitalism (177).
There are important consequences in thus shifting the perspective upon
economic interest from a restricted to a general economy of practices, not
the least of which is that the practice of Protestant vocation studied by
Weber can be made more fully legible as a practice. For Bourdieu, a general
theory of economic practice yields a concept of symbolic capital, which is
dened as credit, in the widest sense of the word, i.e. a sort of advance which
the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic
guarantees (181). The problem of the Calvinist certitudo salutis, of
justication by faith, in so far as it is surreptitiously appropriated in the
agon of Samsons election, is expressed as an operation of symbolic capital:
his nal act is the conspicuous guarantee of that credit which his group had
been holding in abeyance, and which conrms the meaning of the sign of his
election, his physical strength. Samsons symbolic capital is thus a complex
structure of reciprocal interests (or credit) owing between himself, his
society, and his two fathers, Manoa and God. The restoration of credit, the
actual regeneration in the narrative, produces an immediate (posthumous)
prot of honor and fame, and this prot is returned with Samsons body
to his fathers house. As a form of symbolic capital, this honor or prestige
might well be converted at some point into material capital. The
interconvertibility of capital is attested in the narrative, although in the mode
of denial, by a belated shadow plot of material capital, Manoas plan to
ransom Samson. Another kind of expenditure completes the circuit of
exchange, the expenditure not of money but of the body itself (dearly
bought revenge).
The signal feature of the transaction dened by the sacrice of the
body can be identied, in Bourdieus words, as the exhibition of symbolic
capital ... one of the mechanisms which (no doubt universally) make capital
go to capital (181). As an economic practice, Calvinist election is organized
in exactly this way; it has its mystery of primitive accumulation, a primal
decree of election, which is nothing other than the arrogation of symbolic
capital. Such capital is exhibited by the further accumulation of symbolic
or material capital. Calvins God declares, like the master of Matthews
parable, For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance (25:29). Samsons election shares this much with its Calvinist
precursor: strength returns to strength, election cannot be withdrawn.
Nevertheless, the formula capital goes to capital leaves out of the
accounting the great work itself, or the particular form of symbolic capitals
exhibition. The distinction of Miltons redaction of Matthews parable is not
that it conforms to an economic paradigm but rather that it makes of the
denial of rational calculation the most protable of economic practices. As an
economic gure for Samsons violent end, the image of the phoenix expresses
this impossibly calculating denial of calculation: everything is sacriced and
everything is returned. More precisely, the phoenix represents an unlimited
return (fame) upon an absolute investment (the body): though the body
dies, the fame survives. Here nally desublimation can be named for what
it is, spending, the expenditure of energy or libido or capital. Milton is
able to acknowledge this expenditure by invoking its negative reection in
the stream of the narrative, the theory of tragic catharsis (all passion spent).
Nevertheless the phoenix image, as the embodiment of that cathartic
expenditure, does not tell us why we need not count the loss of the body as
an absolute loss; rather, the innitude of expenditure works a kind of
mathematical magic: spending everything is getting everything.
At this point it becomes difficult, if also quite necessary, to distinguish
categorically between desublimation and sublimation, especially as the latter
is for Freud the patient, disciplined investment (Besetzung) of psychic capital
in the form of desexualized libido. Investment, of material or symbolic
capital, is also a mode of spending. The signicance of spending as such in
the history of economic exchange has been well established by Mauss and
Bataille; primitive economic exchange is founded on expenditures, gifts,
226 John Guillory
sacrifices, ritual destructions.25 Hence it is possible to figure the

transcendence of economic motives by recurring to the practice of the gift or
the sacrice, but this entails repressing the fact that these are economic
transactions. The rational economy of capital accumulation is shadowed
always by another, atavistic system of exchange. In Miltons Samson, the
atavistic economy appears in the form of the narrative itself, the narrative of
sacrice, while the rational economy falls to the level of subtext and
guration. Samsons sacrice is then both the repayment of a debt, his
original credit, and the overpayment of that debt. Only as such does it have
the power to produce a prot, either for himself or his creditor.
Like desublimation, expenditure occupies a realm of fantasy set against
the reality of rational calculation. The discipline of spending in the practice of
investment makes all the difference historically; it has made a different
world. That is not to say, however, that the fantasy of expenditure cannot be
acted out, or that the acting out does not have real economic consequences.
The transcendent economy of expenditure is not the survival of primitive
exchange within an uncolonized territory of the capitalist economy; it is an
atavism functionally integrated into the same economy. Just as investment
seeks to conceal the labor that transforms capital into prot (in such surplus
labor, energy is absolutely expended), sacrice denies that what is
absolutely lost or ritually destroyed can be expressed as an economic value.
Hence the very body that Manoa intended to purchase from the Philistine is,
when sacriced, the occasion for no grief at all, no accounting of loss
(Nothing is here for tears). Manoas position is that of spokesman for the
restricted economy. He will not recognize the secret table by which material
and symbolic capital are converted into one another, the body converted into
fame, or Matthews talent into Miltons. In this he makes possible a certain
mystication Bourdieu describes as follows:
Economic calculation has hitherto managed to appropriate the

territory objectively surrendered to the remorseless logic of what
Marx calls naked self-interest only by setting aside a sacred
island miraculously spared by the icy waters of egotistical
calculation and left as a sanctuary for the priceless or worthless
things it cannot assess.
(178)
That island has been for several hundred years the domain of art, but its
appearance was prepared for by the segregation of the sacred itself, the
religious life that Protestantism claimed to set apart not from everyday life
but from the economic domain of legitimate self-interest. In the doctrine of
election, the soul itself is beyond price, beyond any human effort to redeem
it, and so relegated logically to the domain of the priceless or the worthless.
At the same time Calvinism established a most rigorous program of psychic

accounting, which, if it did not institute the discipline of everyday life,
provided that discipline with its system of symbolic book-keeping.26 In
retrospect, it would seem that the logical relation between the priceless and
the worthless is the mechanism by which the concept of vocation is reduced
historically to the legitimation of the bourgeois vocation, the end of which is
the constant accumulation of material or symbolic capital. Milton enacts this
peculiar derivation not by idealizing productive labor, but by indulging a
fantasy of release from the calculus of economic rationality, a fantasy taking
the narrative form of violent expenditure or ritual destruction. The
interlocking laws of the psychic, domestic, and political economies project
into fantasy their undoing, as desublimation, expenditure, or terrorism. The
freedom constituting the individual as such is grounded in this fantasy; it is
freedom from the law.
Milton sets an image of the laws undoing at the end of his poetic
career, not as its telos but as its coda; the title page of his last book reads:
Paradise Regained, a poem in IV books, to which is added Samson Agonistes.
The drama stands in relation to Miltons poetic oeuvre as Samsons nal act
stands in relation to his life, a coda in which the life of creation is signied
by the life of destruction. The ambiguity of such a gesture has passed beneath
the notice of Miltons critics, who see, where Milton places the rubble of the
Philistine temple, the completed edice of his oeuvre. Nevertheless by means
of just such a narrative of destruction or sacrice Milton transforms a life
Perkins might have condemned as no calling at all into a vocation at once
rationalized in economic terms, and yet transcending economy because not
calculable in species. Self-sacrice, exceeding the motive of revenge, is no
less the meaning of Miltons identication with Samson than the ressentiment
of blindness or defeat. The suicide of Samson is the proto-typical self-
sacrice of the artist, a fantasy capable of realization when there comes to
prevail in late capitalism a relentless distinction between the worthlessness of
the artists life and the pricelessness of art.27 Post-artisanal artistic labor is
neither undervalued nor overvalued, but rather unvalued. In the life and
death of Samson a paradigmatic life-narrative emerges, founded no doubt on
the Christus Patiens Milton never wrote, but sliding over that narrative,
mutating into a new story, the life of the poet. In this important sense, as
Miltons readers have rightly intuited, Samson is a type not of Christ but of
Milton, the Milton who, in Marxs famous phrase, produced Paradise Lost as
the silkworm produces silk, the inverted image of the gure who destroys
the Philistines as an Eagle.
Lodged between the narratives of saint and artist, the narrative of
Samsons life records for Milton the transformation of the fathers talents, the
money-lenders material capital (Fathers are wont to lay up for their sons),
into talent, symbolic capital. The narrative that enacts this transformation
228 John Guillory
has its historical moment on the threshold of the new order; no other story
will do. In the determinate choice of the Samson story, the distinction
between material and symbolic capital is magnied, projected onto the
largest possible screen, in the distinction between the conicting demands of
the two fathers, earthly and heavenly. So Milton himself scorns the material
capital by which his career is made possible, while taking up as the deep
paradigm of his poetic calling that relation between investment and prot
which was his fathers business. The poet reappears in his own narrative as
the vocational double of the rational investor, the very gure with whom he
is thought to have nothing in common. But relation stands: the poet is the
son of the scrivener, the life of expenditure and sacrice is the complement
of investment and accumulation. Like Samson, Milton makes a return, with
interest, upon his fathers investment: to himself and Fathers house eternal
fame. But within the drama, with its fantasmatic doubling of paternal
gures, the nal recognition of talent is reserved for the heavenly father,
whose function is to foreshadow the accounting of those sacrices
constitutive of the artists life-narrative as he once reckoned the value of the
saints. Such value is supposed to be beyond measure, whether or not the
products of the sacred island are exchanged in an antithetical mainland
economy, at whatever price. By means of such narrative ctions, capital
marks off the boundaries of an aesthetic kingdom, within which it reappears
disguised as the opposite of itself.
NOTES
1. De Doctrina Christiana denes regeneration as follows: Regeneration means

that the old man is destroyed and that the inner man is regenerated through the word
and the spirit so that his whole mind is restored to the image of God, as if he were a
new creature. Moreover, the whole man, both soul and body, is sanctied to Gods
service and to good works. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe et al.,
8 vols (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973), VI.461. Further references to the
Yale edition of the prose works will be included in the text. The linking of this passage
to Samson Agonistes was made by William Riley Parker in Miltons Debt to Greek
Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937),
235ff., and elaborated in an essay by Arthur Barker, Structural and doctrinal pattern
in Miltons later poems, in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the
Victorian Age, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 1964), 116994. In the last several decades, Samsons regeneration has
become a given of criticism; it is assumed to structure the narrative even where the
context of De Doctrina is only distantly invoked.
2. Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London, New Left Books, 1977),
129.
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons
(New York, Scribners, 1958), 117. The distinction Weber is making is crucial to his
argument and should defuse the misunderstanding of his position on the question of
the specic relation between Protestantism and capitalism. The structured life is
rst of all an ideological practice, a retrospective or prospective working up of a life-
narrative out of life-experience. At the same time such a narrative represents a
genuinely material practice, since it comes to constitute a condition (not a cause) for
other practices as well. For an extended discussion of the Weber controversy, see
Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Webers
Protestant Ethic Thesis (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982).
4. This is Miltons typical use of the Samson gure in his polemical prose, for
example, in the First Defense (IV.402), in Areopagitica (II.558) and the Reason of Church-
Government (I.858).
5. Hence the perennial dissatisfaction with the construction of Miltons plot,
rst voiced in Dr Johnsons complaint that the drama has a beginning and an end,
but it must be allowed to want a middle.
6. All quotations from the poetry are cited from John Milton: Complete Poems and
Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, Odyssey, 1957).
7. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, genealogy, history, in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice, tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1977), 1511.
8. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
(Boston, Beacon Press, 1955), and Louis Althusser, Freud and Lacan, in Lenin and
Philosophy, tr. Ben Brewster (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971).
9. William Perkins, The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ, 3 vols
(London, John Legatt, 1612), I.751.
10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, tr. Ford
Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960), II.974.
11. That Milton tended to reserve the term election for what he elsewhere
called special vocation or special calling is supported by the usage in Paradise Lost
III.1834Some I have chosen of peculiar grace / Elect above the restwhere
the rest are then immediately dened as those for whom repentance is still possible.
Milton uses the term elect to make a distinction within the category of the saved or
within the category of the reprobate but not between the saved and the reprobate.
12. Milton works out such a poetic economy in the Preface to Book II of The
Reason of Church-Government (I.801ff.), again founding his economy on the parable of
the talents: remembering also that God even to a strictnesse requires the
improvement of these his entrusted gifts. Later in the Preface the economy takes the
specic form of a legal contract between creditor and debtor: Neither doe I thinke
it shame to covnant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go
on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted (820). It will be
worth noting in this context, the curious Letter to a friend, in which the young
Milton defends his leisurely years of study against a charge of idleness. The priority
of talent to labor is argued by the radical means of transforming the parable of the
workers of the vineyard, or the wage form of labor, into an allegory of investment (of
talent):
230 John Guillory
Lastly if the Love of Learning as it is be the persuit of something good,

it would sooner follow the more excellent & supreme good knowne &
praesented and so be quickly diverted from the emptie & fantastick chase
of shadows & notions to the solid good owing from due & tymely
obedience to that command in the gospel set out by the terrible seasing
of him that hid the talent. It is more probable therefore that not the
endlesse delight of speculation but this very consideration of that great
commandment does not presse forward as soone as may be to undergoe
but keeps off with a sacred reverence, & religious advisement how best
to undergoe not taking thought of beeing late so it give advantage to be
more t, for those that were latest lost nothing when the maister of the
vineyard came to give each one his hire.
(The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allan Patterson et al., 20 vols
(New York, Columbia University Press, 19318), XII.324)
Here Milton attempts to justify what appears to be his condition of idleness (his lack
of a credible employment) by linking himself both to the holder of the talent and
the latest of the workers in the vineyard. The design of the argument is clearly to
transform Miltons apparent idleness into an actual investment (an investment of time
as opposed to a hoarding of talent). Similarly, Samsons apparent idleness before his
nal burst of activity in the temple evokes investment, the quiet accumulation of
strength.
13. Perkins, op. cit., I,757: it is a Foule disorder in any Common-wealth, that
there should be suffered rogues, beggars, vagabonds.... Againe, to wander up and
downe from yeare to yeare to this end, to seeke & procure bodily maintenance, is no
calling, but the life of a beast.
14. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and
Sexuality, tr. Richard Southern (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), 139.
15. William Kerrigan, in The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983), discerns in the contradiction
between the natural and the heavenly fathers will a religious version of the Oedipus
complex. In the sacred complex, the wish to obey and the wish to disobey the father
are both gratied. At a later point, I will argue the relation of what Kerrigan calls the
sacred complex to what Milton perceives as the Fathers sacrice of the Son in the
Crucixion.
16. The quotation is from the First Defense and reads in full: [Samson] still made
war single-handed on his masters, and, whether prompted by God or by his own
valor, slew at one stroke not one but a host of his countrys tyrants, having rst made
prayer to God for his aid (IV.402).
17. All quotations from Freud are cited from the Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London,
Hogarth Press, 195374). Freud is speaking rather loosely in equating the narcissistic,
the aggressive, and the erotic as libidinal components, and I am both criticizing and
following this loose procedure in proposing a theoretical sublimation of aggression.
As the concept of sublimation is worked out in the earlier theory of the drives, it is
always closely allied to a process of desexualization in which, nevertheless, libidinal
instincts are satised. The deciency of that theory from an economic point of view
is manifest and has been frequently remarked (for example, by Jean Laplanche and J.
B. Pontalis in The Language of Psychoanalysis, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York,
W. W. Norton, 1973), 4313; and by Jacques Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York, W. W. Norton, 1977), 1656).
Evidently Freud found no real use for sublimation until the later theory of the drives,
when he was then able to nd a place for the concept in the theory of aggressivity. An
unexpected result of that revision of the metapsychology is the kind of marginal
suggestion about the libidinal economy of work quoted above. Professional work is
then conceived to sublimate aggressive instincts, no doubt by fusion with
desexualized libido or narcissistic ego-libido, because the death instincts are by
their nature mute. Hence the pleasure of certain kinds of labor, not unlike the
puzzling economy of sadism or masochism. Freud is very close here to recognizing
the legitimated competition (the actual and symbolic violence) of bourgeois labor,
where work is not only the reproduction of the material conditions of existence, but
the production of a prot (and the simultaneous production of a scarcity for others).
Despite the brief for sublimation in the service of Eros, even intellectual work is
agonistic, as Franois Roustang has shown so persuasively in the case of Freuds own
life work. See Roustangs Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, tr. Ned
Lukacher (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
I am much indebted to Marcuses discussion of the libidinal economy of labor in
Eros and Civilization, 81ff., although I am reluctant to take at face value, as Marcuse
seems to, the later theory of the drives, much less a dialectic of Eros and Thanatos.
A theoretical sublimation of aggression is signicant because only at this weak point
of the metapsychology and in this ideological way does Freud approach the social
reality of labor, either coerced or freely chosen.
18. In the following argument I extrapolate from Marcuses concept of
repressive desublimation, elaborated in One-Dimensional Man (Boston, Beacon
Press, 1964), and Jean Baudrillards similar use of the term in The Mirror of Production
(St Louis, Telos Press, 1975).
19. On this subject Kenneth Burkes discussion of the drama redresses the
balance of criticism. See A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1969), 3ff. It should nally be possible to take up the question of why
aggression, self or other directed, is so crucial to the drama as a motivated act of
writing (language for use, as Burke would say).
20. In deploying the concept of desublimation, I do not mean conversely to credit
the theoretical validity of sublimation in the Freudian metapsychology. On the
contrary, sublimation names the same specically ideological assemblage as Webers
rationalization; sublimation names the disciplining of the drives in the service of
what is ner and higher. The theory of sublimation is therefore perfectly adequate
to its ideological function, which is to prevent any form of the Berufsarbeit from being
assimilated into the critique of culture-as-repression. For Freud it is only important
that sublimation provide this area of shade, where the drives can be satised even
though aim-inhibited. Hence the concept of sublimation remains theoretically
unincorporated and functions liminally as a zone of legitimation between the more
critical elements of psychoanalytic and sociological theory.
232 John Guillory
21. The analysis of the psychic economy governing the narrative can be
generalized at this point to enclose the marriage of Samson and Dalila within the
purview of its terms. Samsons marriage is both a submission to the disciplining of
sexuality and a fantasized release from this discipline. The contradiction within the
domestic economy is resolved by the institution of divorce, which reinstates discipline
fully by dissolving the marital bond. Just as there would seem to be only a dubious
sublimation of erotic drives, so the domestic sphere offers only a limited possibility
of desublimation. Here we merely acknowledge a very mundane truth, that in the
bourgeois distinction of public and private, as that distinction co-operates with the
sexual division of labor, the private functions ultimately to block a complete
relaxation of discipline, to drive the male back into the public arena. What appeared
rst as the realm of seduction and desublimation, seems in the end to be a surface of
deection.
22. Miltons subordinationism has the effect of forcing him to reconstrue the
event of the Redemption as the Fathers sacrice of the Son, a consequence that
would not follow from orthodox trinitarian theology. While Milton was evidently
troubled by the primitive scene his theology placed at the center of Christianity (he
seems unable, from The Passion onwards, ever to envision poetically the scene of
the Crucixion), that scene is in another sense the engine of his life and work, since
it is the point at which his theology and his Oedipal conicts converged.
23. See Baudrillard, op. cit., 41: Although the concept of non-labor can thus be
fantasized as the abolition of political economy, it is bound to fall back into the sphere
of political economy as the sign, and only the sign, of its abolition.
24. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 171ff.
25. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies, tr. Ian Cunnison (New York, W. W. Norton, 1967), and Georges Bataille,
The notion of expenditure, tr. Allen Stoekl (Raritan, III, 1984, 6279), particularly
Batailles comment on the major unproductive value, glory.
26. The spiritual accounting metaphor is conventional, if also extremely
popular with Protestant writers. My argument is intended to show that such
accounting is not merely an economic metaphorit represents an actual, economic
practice, the disposition of symbolic capital. The nal account to which Perkins
refers, when the bill of our receipts and expenses is drawn out (I.777), thus has its
referent in practice not only in the Last judgment, but also the everyday accounting
to which Protestants subjected their souls in those diaries that were kept as faithfully
as business ledgers. In The Rise of Puritanism (New York, Columbia University Press,
1938), William Haller quotes the typical diary of John Beadle, published in 1656: the
godly man should keep a strict account of his effectual calling (96).
27. To summarize (very roughly) a condition prevailing after the decline of the
artist-artisan and the disappearance of the patronage system: When the work of art
(whether or not it is fully commodied, as are paintings and novels) no longer has
what Baudrillard calls the alibi of use-value, the artist cannot be remunerated for
labor whose value cannot be assessed. Without material capital, the artist faces as an
always dire circumstance the problem of reproducing the conditions of daily
existence. Conversely, the exchange-value (material or symbolic) of the artwork

becomes subject to extreme uctuation, the mark of its pricelessness. Should the
artist become famous the worthless life of unremunerated labor can be recuperated
in narrative as sacrice, that is, as the priceless correlative of the artwork itself.
(Hence the material worth of artifacts such as manuscripts and letters, artifacts of the
life-narrative.) Such a sketch is necessarily very rough, but it is intended only to throw
into some relief the conguration of life, labor, and art which seems rst clearly
visible in the seventeenth century. On the function of aesthetic values in the fully
developed capitalist system, see Jean Baudrillard, The art auction, in For a Critique
of the Political Economy of the Sign, tr. Charles Levin (St Louis, Telos Press, 1981),
11222.
C . A . P AT R I D E S
Miltons Prose:
The Adjustment of Idealism
Presume not that I am the thing I was

2 Henry 4
I. T H E V E RY V I S I B L E S H A P E A N D I M A G E O F V E RT U E
H as there been a vast conspiracy uncritically to foster on us Miltons

prose? Do we not feel at times much as Dr. Johnson felt about Congreves
novel, that we would rather praise it than read it?
To be more precise: would we have read Miltons prose works had he
not been the author of Paradise Lost? True, we are fully aware of the intrinsic
merits of Areopagitica; but what comparable claim can be advanced for the
embarrassing histrionics of the ecclesiastical tracts, the apparent narrowness
of outlook in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the laborious
defensiveness of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, or the depressing
dullness of the Latin treatise on Christian doctrine? Keats may have thought
that Miltonan active friend to Man all his Lifehad written much
delectable prose.1 But might not Dr. Johnson have been more perceptive in
his austere judgment on Miltons political convictions? In his words,
Miltons republicanism was, I am afraid, founded on an envious

hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in
From Figures in a Renaissance Context, eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. 1989
by The University of Michigan.
235
236 C.A. Patrides
petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of

superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the
Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to
be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather
than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as
repugnance to authority.2
Dr. Johnson did not necessarily regard Milton as an active friend to Man all
his Life.
Shelley, on the other hand, praised exactly what Dr. Johnson had
elected to denounce: the sacred Milton was, let it be remembered, a
republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion.3 Wordsworth
generalized even more. In 1802, adversely affected by the vanity and
Parade of England in contrast to the revolutionary zeal of France, he
composed the celebrated sonnet beginning
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this-hour:

England hath need of thee.
He continued:
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.
So didst thou travel on lifes common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
But to be aware of Miltons activities is to realize the extent to which

Wordsworth like everyone else created Milton in his own image. Whether
Miltons voice during the revolutionary period of the seventeenth century
was consistently majestic is debatable; and whether always pure, doubtful.
Cheerful godliness was in evidence only spasmodically, whenever he
managed to rise above the smoke and stir of passionate controversies.
Perennially embattled, he would have found Wordsworths notion of his
apartness like a Star a travesty of his total commitment to the causes he had
espoused throughout his life.
Shelleys view of Milton as a bold inquirer into morals and religion
likewise denes tendencies latent not so much in Milton as in Shelley; while
Dr. Johnsons judgment on Miltons republicanism is descriptive less of
Miltons actual sentiments than of Dr. Johnsons obsessive partiality to the
established order in Augustan England. To have hated monarchs in the State
and prelates in the Church may have appeared dangerous to Dr. Johnson; but
uncritically to have accepted either was, for Milton, unworthy of the dignity
of man. As in Paradise Lost the Son of God reigns not so much by right of
birth as by merit (III.309), so in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
sovereignty is reserved for the individual who is worthy of the consent of the
governed. Variations on this theme abound, yet the ethical orientation of the
central concept was never surrendered by Milton: queen truth ought to be
preferred to king Charles (p. 74). Equally, however persuasive the rhetoric
that claims Milton felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to
authority, it is imperative to recognize how insistently Milton held that
nothing is of more grave and urgent importance throughout the whole life
of man, than is discipline. I quote from the paean to discipline at the outset
of The Reason of Church-Government (1642). It continues:
What need I instance? He that hath read with judgement, of

Nations and Common-wealths, of Cities and Camps, of peace
and warre, sea and land, will readily agree that the ourishing and
decaying of all civill societies, all the moments and turnings of
humane occasions are movd to and fro as upon the axle of
discipline. So that whatsoever power or sway in mortall things
weaker men have attributed to fortune, I durst with more
condence (the honour of divine providence ever savd) ascribe
either to the vigor, or the slacknesse of discipline. Nor is there
any sociable perfection in this life civill or sacred that can be
above discipline, but she is that which with her musicall cords
preserves and holds all the parts thereof together. Hence in those
perfect armies of Cyrus in Xenophon, and Scipio in the Roman
stories, the excellence of military skill was esteemd, not by the
not needing, but by the readiest submitting to the edicts of their
commander. And certainly discipline is not only the removall of
disorder, but if any visible shape can be given to divine things, the
very visible shape and image of vertue, whereby she is not only
seene in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces
as she walkes, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to
mortall eares. Yea the Angels themselves, in whom no disorder is
feard, as the Apostle that saw them in his rapture describes
[Revelation 7:1], are distinguisht and quaterniond into their
celestiall Princedomes, and Satrapies, according as God himselfe
hath writ his imperiall decrees through the great provinces of
heavn. The state also of the blessed in Paradise, though never so
perfect, is not therefore left without discipline, whose golden
survaying reed marks out and measures every quarter and circuit
of new Jerusalem. Yet is it not to be conceivd that those eternall
effluences of sanctity and love in the gloried Saints should by
238 C.A. Patrides
this meanes be connd and cloyd with repetition of that which

is prescribd, but that our happinesse may orbe it selfe into a
thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kinde of
eccentricall equation be as it were an invariable Planet of joy and
felicity, how much lesse can we believe that God would leave his
fraile and feeble, though not lesse beloved Church here below to
the perpetuall stumble of conjecture and disturbance in this our
darke voyage without the card and compasse of Discipline.
(Columbia ed., 3:18486; Yale ed., 1:75153)
Yet Miltons celebration of discipline at the cosmic level does not terminate
here. It reverberates across his prose and poetry, vesting man with that
majesty of responsibility which is commensurate to his dignity as the favorite
of God.
II. R E C E I V D WITH WRITTEN ENCOMIUMS
The best account of Miltons life and work is in the three interpretations
composed by himself: the idealistic account of his aspirations to contribute
to Gods glory by the honour and instruction of my own country in The
Reason of Church-Government (1642); the extension of the same view in terms
of the poet as himself a true Poem in An Apology for Smectymnuus (1642);
and the detailed exposition of his visit to the Continent and of his eventual
commitment to the republican cause in the Defensio Secunda (1654).4 The
rest is commentary.
But commentary should suggest in particular the cumulative
impressions registered by the more recent activities of our scholars. Yet as it
is no less perilous to be categorical than impossible fully to represent the
diversities of opinion, one development may be cited as providing testimony
to the conclusions now laboriously arrived at. It concerns Miltons visit to the
Continent from the spring of 1638 to the late summer of 1639, and the
presence especially of ve names among the numerous individuals he
befriended: Hugo Grotius, Lucas Holstein, Pietro Frescobaldi, Antonio
Malatesti, and Francesco Cardinal Barberini.
Grotius at the time of Miltons visit to Paris was Queen Christinas
ambassador to the French Court. Among his achievements he could already
count Adamus Exul (1601), a play in Latin on the Fall of Man, but also a vast
reputation as the founder of international law in De jure belli ac pacis (1625).
Later, in Rome, Milton also befriended the learned Lucas Holstein, secretary
and librarian to Cardinal Barberini, and later librarian of the Vatican.5 Might
Milton have discussed with Grotius the problems inherent in the literary
treatment of the Fall of Man, and with Holstein the visual representations of
the same subject by Raphael in the Stanze della Segnatura and especially by
Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel? Of these possibilities Milton himself is
silent; yet his contacts with Grotius and Holstein are certainly signicant,
immediately because of their ready acceptance of Miltons company, and
mediately because of the evolutionary nature of his plans for a major poem.
To credit the conventional view of Milton as a grim Puritan is to expect
him fanatically to have eschewed the company of the representatives of the
Antichrist in Rome. On the contrary, however, his Florentine friends
included the devout Frescobaldi, soon to become a prince of the Catholic
Church; while in Rome he not only dined at the English Jesuit College but
even entered the circle of the one man certainly to have been regarded as
anathema by any committed Puritan, Cardinal Barberini, prime minister and
chief counselor to his uncle, Pope Urban VIII. Milton was impressed as
much by Barberinis submissive loftiness of mind as by the musical
entertainments which, performed at the theater recently completed (1632) in
the Cardinals palace, evinced those exuberant elements that constitute the
grandiosit monumentale of the baroque. It was the period of Romes
transformation by Borromini and Bernini.6
No less instructive is Miltons friendship with the Florentine Antonio
Malatesti, author of La Tina, a cycle of fty amusingly obscene sonnets in the
baroque idiom. La Tina was dedicated to Milton. Yet the expected strictures
of that grim Puritan never materialized; instead, on his return to England, he
sent Malatesti his warm regards.7
What do Miltons encounters on the Continent reveal? Above all, I
think, a developing catholic taste, since the ve men referred to represent
achievements not so much incompatible as mutually exclusive: Milton in
France and Italy had been studying the nature of multiform reality. But even
more signicant is the authority with which Milton on his return home
articulated his future expectations:
In the privat Academies of Italy, whither I was favord to resort,

perceiving that some trifles ... were receivd with written
Encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men
of this side the Alps, I began thus farre to assent both to them and
divers of my friends here at home, and not lesse to an inward
prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and
intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joynd
with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave
something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly
let it die. (P. 54)
Thus inspired, Milton extended the range of his activities spectacularly. For
the rst time he set down detailed outlines of several subjects for a major
240 C.A. Patrides
poem, even if, mindful less of Renaissance critical theory than of the practice
of Grotius in Adamus Exul, the preferred form in each case is not an epic but
a playand in one particular instance a play on the Fall of Man under the
title Adam Unparadisd.8 Shortly, too, Milton commenced writing in prose a
number of works which by the end of his life were to include treatises on a
vast range of subjects. He himself described them as labors of his left hand,
yet they remain the most complete program actually carried out by any of the
equally ambitious universal men of the English Renaissance. Reduced to
its essentials, the program involved three species of liberty: ecclesiastical,
domestic, and civil (p. 71).
III. T H E B E S T WAY T O B R I N G M E N T O T H E I R S E N S E S
By the middle of the 1640s royalists tended increasingly to lament the plight
of poore, miserable, distracted, almost destroyed England.9 But to others
were they the majority?the Civil War offered the opportunity to conrm
the self-evident truth that England was favored of God. In a sermon
delivered less than a year before the execution of Charles I, Paul Knell
upheld the widespread persuasion that
we may compare with Israel for a fruitfull scituation, being

neither under the torrid nor the frozen Zone, neither burned
away with parching heat, nor benummed away with pinching
cold, but seated in a temperate climate & a fertile soile; our folds
are full of sheep, our rallies stand so thick with corne that we may
laugh and sing. God hath also fenced us about, like the Israelites
in the red sea with a wall of water, the waters are as a wall unto us
on our right hand, and on our left. But especially God hath
fenced us by his protection, salvation hath the Lord appointed for
wals and bulwarks. He hath likewise gathered the stones out from
us, he hath cast out the Romish rabble, and hath planted our Land
with the choicest Religion, that of Protestants.10
Yet the Reformation was far from complete. The process initiated a century
earlier by Luther was now threatened by the episcopalian or prelatical form
of ecclesiastical government whose hierarchical structure and elaborate
church services were in appearance, and plausibly in fact, extensions of
Roman Catholicism. In the early 1640s one of the most vociferous attacks on
episcopalianism was mounted by a group of ve Presbyterians improbably
signing themselves Smectymnuus (from the initials of their names:
Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen,
William Spurstow). Arranged on the other side were in the main Archbishop
James Ussher of Armagh and Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich. Milton was
perhaps drawn into the controversy by one of the Smectymnuans, Thomas
Young, who was once his tutor. Five pamphlets later, in any case, Miltons
initially enthusiastic commitment was displaced by wary disenchantment,
even acerbic disquiet.
Miltons experience parallels that of several of his contemporaries, for
example, Henry More the Cambridge Platonist. More was in the 1650s to
engage in a bitter controversy with Thomas Vaughan, the poets brother; but
his ambitious effort to curtail his antagonists preposterous and fortuitous
imaginations resulted rst in Vaughans abusive counterattack in The Man-
Mouse taken in a Trap, then in Mores bitingly satiric Second Lash, and nally
in Vaughans virulent attempt at a Second Wash, or the Moore scourd once more!
A badly shaken More sounding retreat concluded ruefully: if ever
Christianity be exterminated, it will be by Enthusiasme.11
Idealism adjusted in the face of brutal reality was also the lesson that
embittered controversy impressed on Milton. His rst tract, Of Reformation
touching Church-Discipline (1641), combines a serene assurance that an appeal
to reason would prove decisive, with an apocalyptic persuasion that the
Primal Reason could hardly fail to intervene on behalf of so just a cause as
Miltons. The tract ends with a prolonged prayer that looks back to the
denunciation of the corrupt clergy in Lycidas (1637) and ahead to the
celebration of the eventual triumph of goodness in Paradise Lost (1667):
Thou therefore that sitst in light & glory unapproachable, Parent

of Angels and Men! next thee I implore Omnipotent King,
Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature thou didst assume,
ineffable and everlasting Love! And thou the third subsistence of
Divine innitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and solace of created
Things! one Tripersonall GODHEAD! looke upon this thy poore
and almost spent and expiring Church, leave her not thus a prey
to these importunate Wolves, that wait and thinke long till they
devoure thy tender Flock, these wilde Boares that have broke into
thy Vineyard, and left the print of thir polluting hoofs on the
Soules of thy Servants.... (P. 108)
The fervent prayer concludes rst with the consecration of Miltons personal
aspirations to the service of the Divine Purpose, and nally with the
celebration of the beatic vision beyond the connes of time.12
But Miltons opponents were not impressed; and as their replies lled
the air with barbarous dissonance, he tried again with a scholarly study Of
Prelatical Episcopacy as well as with some satirical Animadversions (1641), and
next with the rational and patient discourse entitled The Reason of Church-
Government urgd against Prelaty (1642). Frequently able to ascend from the
242 C.A. Patrides
immediate controversy to general principles, Milton relates once more his

personal aspirations to the larger pattern by outlining his expectations and
dening the role of the poet within a narrowly partisan society. Yet already
Miltons reasonable tone is decreasingly in evidence. Enthusiasmthe
enthusiasm of the fanatic which Henry More would soon learn to fear
has intervened to sacrice principles on the questionable altar of ephemeral
abuse. Miltons opponents have now grown into a whippe of Scorpions,
else a continuall Hydra of mischiefe, and molestation, or unctuous, and
epicurean paunches.13 However, Miltons abusive vocabulary and
devastating scorn was common to any number of his contemporaries who
likewise opposed the Anglicans lukewarm via media by the language of
zeal. The justication was apparently Biblical: because thou art lukewarm,
and neither cold nor hot, I will spew [lit., vomit] thee out of my mouth
(Revelation 3:16).14 Equally, however, the justification was broadly
traditional, witness in particular Pascals lengthy exposition of the way in
which mockery is sometimes the best way to bring men to their senses, and
in that case is a righteous action.15 Miltons view is not unlike Pascals:
Although in the serious uncasing of a grand imposture (for to

deale plainly with you Readers, Prelatry is no better) there be
mixt here and there such a grim laughter, as may appeare at the
same time in an austere visage, it cannot be taxt of levity or
insolence: for even this vaine of laughing (as I could produce out
of grave Authors) hath oft-times a strong and sinewy force in
teaching and confuting; nor can there be a more proper object of
indignation and scorne together then a false Prophet taken in the
greatest dearest and most dangerous cheat, the cheat of soules.16
Later, in Paradise Lost, Milton would conne blind Zeal to the Limbo of
Vanity (III.452); yet he retained scorn, boldly asserting that it is deployed by
God in his derisive attitude towards the vain pursuits of Satan (II.18891;
V.73537; VIII.7579). Biblical precedent was again not far to seek: The
kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord.... He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall
have them in derision (Psalm 2:24). Embarrassed by the implications,
Biblical commentators often tried to evade the issue (God laughs
guratively, Alexander Ross suggested nervously in 1652).17 But the ever-
memorable John Hales of Eton perceptively concluded that
It is a sport, and as it were a kind of recreation to God to discover

false play, to wash off the colour and paint from disguised actions,
and openly expose them to the laughter and scorn of Men and
Angels.18
Another Biblical precedent often invoked (answer a fool according to his

folly) was annotated by a commentator in 1638 thus:
Answer therefore such a foole lest hee thinke himself victorious,

because there appeareth no one in the eld against him. But if
thou doe answer him, let it be according to his folly, and in such a
manner as that it may declare his error and folly unto him, and
that as it doth reproove him, for it may teach him the truth.19
Here as elsewhere, the consideration of Miltons activities in the light of

seventeenth-century assumptions and practice should restrain our indecent
haste to misconstrue as personal bias attitudes in fact widely upheld. More
important aspects would then be readily apparent: that Miltons wary
disenchantment after his last contribution to the controversy meaningfully
testies to vital experience gained; that such experience contributed greatly
to his subsequent activities; and that it was a richly endowed poet who nally
turned to Paradise Lost. To learn to temper enthusiasm and exorcise zeal are
no mean achievements.
IV. A COMMAND ABOVE ALL COMMANDS
Milton in the ve antiepiscopal tracts is increasingly emotional, even

hysterical; yet he should have lapsed into insensate incoherence after his next
experience, when, far more personally involved, he lifted his pen in defense
of divorce. Married to Mary Powell in 1642, he was abandoned by her before
the year was out; and faced with the unlikelihood of a divorce unless adultery
was proved, he launched four treatises including in particular The Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce (1643, rev. ed. 1644). The four treatises should have
been hastily prepared, ill considered, and highly partisan. Yet they are fully
scanned, carefully wrought, and exceptionally liberal.
The background to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is partly the
vast Puritan literature on domestic conduct, partly the innity of courtesy
books, but especially the liberal tradition of Christian humanism emanating
from Erasmus.20 Had Milton been chained to the emotions that Mary
Powells departure must have aroused, he should have argued for divorce on
the grounds of desertion. But he consciously chose the far more difficult and
controversial task of pleading for divorce on the basis of mental
incompatibility. Its rst protagonist in Christendom,21 he anticipated the
more compassionate laws of our own day by three centuries. But the price he
paid for this distinction was certainly high. Instantly denounced by a number
of his shocked contemporaries, he remained tarnished in reputation until the
end of his life.22
244 C.A. Patrides
The violent reaction of Miltons contemporaries is understandable. For

centuries the single valid ground for divorce had been adultery; and as this
was taken to be the attitude of Christ himself (Matthew 19:9), its at
contradiction by Milton naturally horried his contemporaries and obliged
them to protest against his defense of divorce for many other causes besides
that which our Saviour only approveth, namely, in case of Adultery.23
Milton rested his case in part upon an appeal to the often used (and as
often abused) fundamentall law book of nature (p. 147). Here as elsewhere
the basic premise was the well-known idea that the rst and most innocent
lesson of nature [is] to turn away peacably from what afflicts and hazards our
destruction (Tetrachordon, Columbia ed. 4:117). But existing laws of divorce,
Milton protested, violate the reverend secret of nature by frequently
forcing a mixture of minds that cannot unite. Surely the spiritual aspect of
marriage ought to take precedence over the physical? In marriage, St.
Thomas Aquinas had written, the union of souls ranks higher than union of
bodies. Humanists agreed. According to the widely respected Juan Luis
Vives, There canne be [no] maryage or concorde where man and wife
agree not in wyll and minde, the whyche twoo are the beginning & seate of
all amitie & friendship.24 Therefore, as in Paradise Lost, Raphael insists that
where there is no love there can be no happiness but only gratication of the
senses, mere bestiality (VIII.579ff., 621), so The Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce maintains that where love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock
nothing, but the empty husk of an outside matrimony; as undelightfull and
unpleasing to God, as any other kind of hypocrisie (p. 140). God did not
institute marriage to remedy a sublunary and bestial burning, to have man
and wife grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation (pp. 144,
141).
God in the rst ordaning of marriage, taught us to what end he

did it, in words expresly implying the apt and cheerfull
conversation [i.e., association] of man with woman, to comfort
and refresh him against the evill of solitary life, not mentioning
the purposes of generation till afterwards, as being but a
secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity. (P. 124)
The generous compass of Miltons thesis was widened as he went on to

comprehend his belief in the potentialities of the divine and softening
breath of charity. Our Saviours doctrine, he affirmed in Tetrachordon, is,
that the end, and the fullling of every command is charity; no faith without
it, no truth without it, no worship, no workes pleasing to God but as they
partake of charity (Columbia ed., 4:96 and 135). Charity is a command
above all commands, the supreme dictate, whose grand commission is to
doe and to dispose over all the ordinances of God to man; that love & truth
may advance each other to everlasting (pp. 180, 135, 168). As the
concluding sentence of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce has it, God the
Son hath put all other things under his own feet; but his Commandments hee
hath left all under the feet of Charity.
Miltons treatises on divorce have twice reappeared in English
literature, rst in the unexpected context of Farquhars The Beaux Stratagem
(1707), and later as the tragic machinery of the tale in Hardys Jude the
Obscure (1895).25 But we read The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce not
because of its inuence on Farquhar or Hardy, much less as an excursion in
autobiography. It is above all a remarkable testimony to a mans ability so to
transcend his towering passions as to formulate principles of universal
validity. At once a plea for liberty and a protest against institutionalism, it
warrants also Miltons right proudly to claim: Let not England forget her
precedence of teaching nations how to live (p. 120).
V. A C C O R D I N G T O C O N S C I E N C E A B O V E A L L L I B E RT I E S
A year later, in 1644, the precedence was further conrmed in Of Education

and Areopagitica. The obvious differences between the two works forcefully
remind us how impossible it is to generalize on Miltons style. Each work
possesses a style appropriate to the given occasion. Of Education, in assuming
the readers familiarity with humanist educational theories, does not argue; it
posits. But Areopagitica, in professing a thesis contrary to received opinion,
displaces assertion by argument, and mere allegation by cogent analysis. The
stylistic consequences cannot possibly be missed. Of Education is
authoritative in appearance, categorical in manner, and almost entirely
devoid of rhetoric since its thesis is, as it were, self-evident. But Areopagitica
advances cumulatively in a series of waves, until the gathered force of
argument and rhetorical patterns overwhelms our reservations and
commands our assent.
Of Education was, like the treatises on divorce, the direct result of
Miltons experience. The experience was two-fold: on the practical level, the
education and instruction of his sisters two sons; and on the theoretical, the
extensive discussions then under way concerning the methods of Comenius,
the great Czech educational reformer who had visited England in 1641
possibly at the invitation of Parliament and who numbered among his
English friends Samuel Hartlib, the recipient of Miltons address. Miltons
participation in these discussions signicantly assumed the form of a
reiteration of the great ideals of Renaissance humanism. The vast compass of
the educational scheme he endorses is by no means peculiar to himself but
displays the humanist aspiration to create the universal man. The countless
precedents include the idealistic vision which in Rabelais informs
246 C.A. Patrides
Gargantuas famed letter to Pantagruel (bk. II. chap. 8); the all-encompassing
nature of Vives treatise De disciplinis in 1531; and, in England, Sir Philip
Sidneys outline of a course of studies which extends from the Scriptures
(the foundation of foundations, the Wisdome of Wisdomes) to works on
moral philosophy as on the art of war, and on geography as on historythe
latter including all the major historians of ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium,
and Renaissance Europe! Milton like every humanist would have agreed with
Sidneys disarming remark: To me, the variety rather delights me, then
confounds me.26
The program of studies outlined in Of Education is placed in
Areopagitica within an even broader framework, the necessity of unlimited
access to reading in order to exercise mans talents and issue in
discrimination. The talents themselves, and mans ability to exercise them
properly, are not called into question. Firm in his faith in man, Milton
reserves the full weight of his ire against those who hubristically tamper with
the individuals right to decide for himself. The emphasis is humanistic in
general even while it is Protestant in particular: Give me liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties (p. 241).
It is noteworthy that fteen years later, in A Treatise of Civil Power in
Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), the plea was voiced yet again, on that occasion
more particularly on behalf of religious liberty.
Originality of argument need not be sought in Areopagitica for it will
not be found. Commonplaces, indeed, abound; but they are commonplaces
raised to the level of great literature. Bishop Joseph Hall, Miltons antagonist
in the antiepiscopal tracts, rephrased a familiar notion thus: Ther can be but
one truth: and that one Truth oft-times must be fetcht by peece-meal out of
divers branches of contrary opinions.27 But Miltons restatement is a
touchstone of English prose:
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and
was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he
ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then strait
arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the
gyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the
good Osiris, took the virgin truth, hewd her lovely form into a
thousand peeces, and scatterd them to the four winds. From that
time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear,
imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangled body of
Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they
could nd them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and
Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second coming; he
shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them
into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. (P. 234)
The style is the work. It looks beyond Miltons other worksand other
stylesto the only other classical oration in English literature, Sidneys
Apology for Poetry. Areopagitica like the Apology weds style and argument in
such a manner that while style and structure reect the practice of classical
rhetoricians, the thesis appeals to the most liberal instincts in man. Milton
has appreciated by now what he would later transmute into poetry, that
rhetoric by itself may be put to perverse uses, witness its deployment by
Satan in Paradise Lost. But rhetoric exerted on behalf of truththe truth of
moral precepts immemorially upheldcould so imprint a cause upon the
consciousness of men as they should not willingly let it die.
VI. P U R E Z E A L E TO THE L I B E RT Y OF MANKIND
The liberty of the individual, threatened in Miltons time as in ours by

societies militantly bent on conformity, was further defended by Milton in
his several expressly political works. Whatever their nominal subjects, their
one constant theme coincides with Blakes visionary denunciation of each
and every effort to curtail the prerogatives of the individual (One Law for
the Lion and Ox is Oppression). The fundamental principle of Miltons
thought is lucidly stated: No man who knows ought, can be so stupid as to
deny that all men naturally were born free (p. 255).
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), published within two weeks
of the execution of Charles I, could be read as a straightforward justication
of regicide. As with the treatises on divorce, however, Milton ascends beyond
the immediate episode to formulate general principles, in this instance that
free men having once entered into a voluntary contract with their governors
may terminate it whenever tyranny is palpably in evidence. But The Tenure is
also concerned with a development that was becoming increasingly apparent
ever since the abolition of episcopacy in 1646: the tendency of the victorious
Presbyterians to sit the closest & the heaviest of all Tyrants, upon the
conscience, and fall notoriously into the same sinns, wherof so lately and so
loud they accusd the Prelates (p. 284). In the memorable words of a poem
Milton wrote at this time, New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large (On
the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament, I. 20).
As The Tenure was followed by the two Defenses of the republican
regime (165154), and they by The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth (1660), Miltons thinking appears to have become less exible
until his endorsement in the latter work of government by a self-
perpetuating grand council of the worthiest. But wildest undulations in
Miltons stated attitudes cannot obscure either his insistence that sovereignty
may never be transferrd, but delegated only, or his consistent and even
exclusive opposition to rule by any single person, whether Charles I or
248 C.A. Patrides
Cromwell.28 On the very eve of the monarchys restoration he warned: that

people must needs be madd or strangely infatuated, that build the chief hope
of thir common happiness or safetie on a single person, corruptible by the
excess of his singular power and exaltation (pp. 336, 348). The sage
conclusion of John Aubrey in his brief life of Milton is apposite:
Whatever he wrote against Monarchie was out of no animosity to

the Kings person, or owt of any faction or interest, but out of a
pure Zeale to the Liberty of Mankind, which he thought would
be greater under a free state than under a Monarchiall
government.29
Not that the consistency of Miltons opposition to rule by any single person
should mislead us into thinking that his political views remained static.
Development there was, partly in the inevitable disillusionment when his
great expectations for a radical reformation were shattered, but especially in
the increasing realization that his apocalyptic entreaties for an external
reformationthe rule of the saints exorcizing malefic prelates and
authoritarian monarchsshould be preceded by an internal reformation, a
paradise within.30
Miltons political thought may also be approached by way of its
opposition to that of Hobbes. After the appearance of Salmasius royalist
apologia in Defensio regia (1649) and Miltons reply in the rst Defensethe
Pro populo anglicano defensio (1651)Hobbes wrote:
I have seen them both. They are very good Latin both, and
hardly to be judged which is better; and both very ill reasoning,
hardly to be judged which is worse.31
Miltons judgment of Hobbes was equally generous. It is reported by Aubrey:
His widowe assures me that Mr. T. Hobbs was not one of his
acquaintance, that her husband did not like him at all, but he
would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts, and a learned
man. Their Interests and Tenets did run counter to each other.32
Hobbes was a materialist, Milton an idealist. Hobbes upheld determinism in

a universe obedient to inexible laws, Milton maintained that the liberty of
man is an inalienable right granted by God in perpetuity. Hobbes endorsed
absolute authoritarianism, Milton vehemently rejected any doctrine that
deprived man of his independence. The power of kings, argued Milton, is
derivative, transferrd and committed to them in trust from the People, to
the Common good of all (p. 257). Hobbes would have agreed but for the
crucial qualication in trust. It measures the abyss dividing two mutually

exclusive responses to the predicament of man.
Milton also divides from Hobbesand indeed from every other
political philosopher of the seventeenth centuryin terms of style. The
magniloquent voice of the epic poet is heard throughout the two Defenses
beginning with the preface to the rst:
I shall relate no common things, or mean; but how a most

puissant king, when he had trampled upon the laws, and stricken
down religion, and was ruling at his own lust and wantonness,
was at last subdued in the eld by his own people, who had served
a long term of slavery; how he was thereupon put under guard,
and when he gave no ground whatever, by either word or action,
to hope better things of him, was nally by the highest council of
the realm condemned to die, and beheaded before his very palace
gate. I shall likewise relate (which will much conduce to the
easing mens minds of a great superstition) under what system of
laws, especially what laws of England, this judgement was
rendered and executed; and shall easily defend my valiant and
worthy countrymen, who have extremely well deserved of all
subjects and nations in the world, from the most wicked
calumnies of both domestic and foreign railers, and chiey from
the reproaches of this utterly empty sophister [i.e., Salmasius],
who sets up to be captain and ringleader of all the rest. For what
kings majesty high enthroned ever shone so bright as did the
peoples majesty of England, when, shaking off that age-old
superstition which had long prevailed, they overwhelmed with
judgement their very king (or rather him who from their king had
become their enemy), ensnared in his own laws him who alone
among men claimed by divine right to go unpunished, and feared
not to inict upon this very culprit the same capital punishment
which he would have inicted upon any other.
As always in Milton, however, an apparently secular event is promptly placed

within a metaphysical context. The preface to the rst Defense continues:
Yet why do I proclaim as done by the people these actions, which

themselves almost utter a voice, and witness everywhere the
presence of God? Who, as often as it hath seemed good to his
innite wisdom, useth to cast down proud unbridled kings,
puffed up above the measure of mankind, and often uprooteth
them with their whole house. As for us, it was by His clear
command we were on a sudden resolved upon the safety and
250 C.A. Patrides
liberty that we had almost lost; it was He we followed as our

Leader, and revered His divine footsteps imprinted everywhere;
and thus we entered upon a path not dark but bright, and by His
guidance shown and opened to us. I should be much in error if I
hoped that by my diligence alone, such as it is, I might set forth
all these matters as worthily as they deserve, and might make such
records of them as, haply, all nations and all ages would read. For
what eloquence can be august and magnicent enough, what man
has parts sufficient, to undertake so great a task? Yea, since in so
many ages as are gone over the world there has been but here and
there a man found able to recount worthily the actions of great
heroes and potent states, can any man have so good an opinion of
himself as to think that by any style or language of his own he can
compass these glorious and wonderful worksnot of men, but,
evidently, of almighty God?
(Pro populo anglicano defensio, trans.
Samuel L. Wollf, Columbia ed., 7:3f)
The two Defenses like the ve antiepiscopal tracts are intimately related to the
point of view which, as we shall see, also pervades The History of Britain.
But the two Defenses and especially the third Defense of Himself (1655)
are considerably marred by the frequently intemperate language which
readers have often remarked, and as often deplored. Miltons earlier
treatment of the bishops, indeed, pales before his personal attacks both
against Salmasius, the author of the Defensio regia, and Alexander More, the
presumed author of the Regii sanguinis clamor (1652). But here Milton
appears to have relied not only on the weapons furnished by the traditional
forms of mockery we noted in Pascal; he also depended on classical
precedents, particularly the vituperation which in Cicero among others is
intimately related to the ethical orientation of ones opponents.33 The resort
to abuse, at any rate, never propelled Milton towards distortion. Whether
immersed in the broad argument of The Tenure or the narrow attacks on
Salmasius and Alexander More, he remained throughout remarkably faithful
to his sources.34
VII. A C C O R D I N G TO HIS DIVINE R E TA L I AT I O N
We do not know when Milton composed The History of Britain or the

controversial theological treatise De doctrina christiana. The former was
published for the rst time in 1670; the latter, following its discovery a
century and a half after Miltons death, in 1825.
The History of Britain may well have been written in the early 1640s.
Edward Phillips, Miltons nephew, appears to have thought so, and at least
one modern scholar places it even earlier.35 But the work bears the mark of
substantial revisions prior to its publication in 1670, most obviously in
connection with the parallels Milton frequently and pointedly drew between
the past and the present. Such parallelism was far from unknown during
the Renaissance in England. Historians were adequately conditioned by
Plutarchs Parallel Lives to agree with Thomas Heywood that If wee present
a forreigne Historyor indeed the history of Britainthe subject is so
intended, that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the vertues of
our Countrymen are extolled, or their vices reproved.36
Miltons endorsement of the same approach resides partly in his
account of the usurpation of Britain by William the outlandish
Conquereran obvious parallel to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660
but also in his more emphatic representations of sovereigns with a moral
authority entirely lacking in Charles II, for instance that mirror of Princes
Alfred the Great, whose life advanced not idely nor voluptuously, but in all
vertuous emploiements both of mind and body (Columbia ed., 10:315, 223,
220; Yale ed., 5:402, 292, 289). But the lessons of history also
comprehended the traditional belief that historical events are a record of
divine mercies and judgments. This expressly Christian view of history
reappears in Miltons work mostly in connection with the periodic invasions
of Britain, now rmly interpreted as so many judgments on a wayward
nation:
When God hath decreed servitude on a sinful Nation, tted by

thir own vices for no condition but servile, all Estates of
Government are alike unable to avoid it. God hath purposd to
punish ... according to his Divine retaliation; invasion for
invasion, spoil for spoil, destruction for destruction.
Even while embracing traditional beliefs, however, Milton pursued truth

in accordance with the highest ideals of humanist historiography. Fables like
Britains mythical origins were not eschewed, be it for nothing else but in
favour of our English Poets, and Rhetoricians, who by thir Art will know,
how to use them judiciously; yet even then Milton drew the line, rmly, at
Arthur (who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reignd in Britain, hath
bin doubted heertofore, and may again with good reason [Columbia ed.,
10:3, 12728; Yale ed., 5:3, 164]). On the other hand, Britains documented
past since the Roman invasion was so diligently and constructively
researched that Milton is now generally regarded as a judicious and
conservative scholar.37 Style was made subservient to truth. I affect, he
wrote in opposition to no less an authority than Thucydides,
252 C.A. Patrides
I affect not set speeches in a Historie, unless known for certain to

have bin so spokn in effect as they are writtn, nor then, unless
worth rehearsal; and to invent such, though eloquently, as some
Historians have done, is an abuse of posteritie, raising, in them that
read, other conceptions of those times and persons then were true.
The pursuit of truth also led Milton boldly to question widely held
beliefs, and even sacrosanct dogmas, in De doctrina christiana. As observed
earlier (p. 217), Milton tampered with the doctrine of the Trinity, denying
the equality of the Father and the Son; he argued that the soul dies with the
body; and he claimed that polygamy is not contrary to divine law.
De doctrina christiana began to be compiled sometime after Miltons
return from the Continent in 1639, as Edward Phillips testies; but there is
evidence to suggest that it was being amended well into the 1650s, and
possibly into the 1660s. Yet Milton never published it. Did he hesitate
because aware of the furor its controversial arguments would have
generated? Where totally committed, however, Milton utterly disregarded
the possibility of the publics disapprobation, witness his bold publication of
the treatises on divorce and the perilous reaffirmation of his republican
convictions mere weeks before the restoration of the monarchy. It may be
that he simply regarded De doctrina as incomplete, still seeking on his death
a way out of the labyrinthine mazes he had entered in pursuit of truth.
Stillborn though the treatise may be, it merits our scrutiny because
Miltons achievement in prose cannot be divorced from his sporadic failures
in the same medium. Moreover, the opportunity to compare the ideas
expressed in De doctrina and Paradise Lost may not be bypassed. Obvious
differences in mode of expression, and more subtle ones in intent, will not
lead us to regard the treatise as a gloss upon the poem but ought to clarify
those vital issues which, boldly explored in De doctrina, were nally resolved
only through the poetry of Paradise Lost.
VIII. T H E S E R I O U S A N D H E A RT Y L O V E O F T R U T H
Miltons literary criticism is severely circumscribed, for he remarked on

prose and poetry only occasionally, and sometimes almost accidentally. His
brief remarks, extracted from their context, make an impressive if misleading
collection;38 but lengthy statements are extremely rare, except where called
for by the immediate occasion. Instances include his views on the aims of
scorn (quoted on pp. 25556), the well-known passage in The Reason of
Church-Government on his personal aspirations and the nature of poetry
generally, and of course the preface to Samson Agonistes.
The passage in The Reason of Church-Government and the preface to

Samson are alike meaningful in the light of Renaissance thought. Implicit in
the rst is the widespread fear that the abuse of poetry by inconsequential
poet-apes (to borrow Sidneys term in the peroration of the Apology for
Poetry) threatens not simply the art of poetry but, given Miltons idealistic
view of the poets mission, the very ber of national life. Should the personal
terms of Miltons utterance irritate us, it is well to remember that other
Renaissance humanists display much the same vaulting pride in their
achievements. But the personal I may also be regarded as an assumed
persona expediting the transition from the particular to the general, from the
merely personal to the expressly universal. In such a reading, the concluding
statement on the office of the poet (p. 57) appears as a pronouncement of a
poet-prophet, not unlike the dramatic peroration in Sidneys Apology for
Poetry.
The preface to Samson Agonistes is similarly comprehensible within the
context of critical opinion in its time. In appearance but a personal defense
of Miltons practice, it is in fact a highly compressed treatment of complex
critical problems involving the major issues of English neoclassical
criticism.39 Incidentally, however, the preface also highlights the difference
between Miltons poetry and Miltons prose; for while the preface censures
the mixture of the tragic and the comic, the play itself reaches its crisis in the
introduction of the giant Harapha whom we earlier discerned to be a distant
relative of the braggarts in Continental comic literature (see the previous
discussion).
The discrepancyif indeed it is a discrepancyhas far-reaching
implications. If Miltons engagement with prose differs in kind from his
engagement with poetry, we would be well advised to hesitate before
accepting the preface to Samson as entirely relevant to the play itselfor,
further aeld, before equating the prose of De doctrina christiana with the
poetry of Paradise Lost. Miltons prose is after all unremittingly multiform, as
noted in connection with Of Education and Areopagitica. Vastly different in
style because vastly different in intent, Of Education and Areopagitica disarm
any effort to generalize on Miltons prose. The total effect of this prose has
been said to depend more on an accumulation of convictions gained from
individual sentences than on the logical progress of the argument through
the complete work.40 But however accurate an observation on Miltons
polemical pamphlets, the statement misrepresents the method and effect of
the eminently logical Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the fully sustained
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the relatively unemotional Treatise of Civil
Power, the serenely progressive History of Britain, or the relentlessly
unrhetorical De doctrina christiana. Only one generalization pertains to
Miltons multiform prose, that it is distinguished by its impressively variable
tonal range.
254 C.A. Patrides
The multiformity of Miltons prose can best be dened negatively.

Eschewing Senecan laconisms, it is not given to Sentences by the Statute, as
if all above three inches long were conscat.41 At the other extreme, it
avoids also the stylistic extravagances that Milton enumerates in Of
Reformation as
knotty Africanisms, the pamperd metafors; the intricat, and

involvd sentences of the Fathers; besides the fantastick, and
declamatory ashes; the crosse-jingling periods which cannot but
disturb, and come thwart a setld devotion worse then the din of
bells, and rattles.
Miltons own prose advances along the path marked by Cicero and his
imitators. I cannot say, he once wrote in a rare understatement, that I am
utterly untraind in those rules which best Rhetoricians have givn, or
unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence
have written in any learned tongue ( An Apology for Smectymnuus, Columbia
ed., 3:362; Yale ed., 1:94849). Yet the best precedent for the multiformity of
his own prose Milton discovered not in the prime authors of eloquence but
in the Bible. His claim deserves to be quoted at length:
Our Saviour who had all gifts in him was Lord to expresse his
indoctrinating power in what sort him best seemd; sometimes by
a milde and familiar converse, sometimes with plaine and
impartiall home-speaking regardlesse of those whom the auditors
might think he should have had in more respect; otherwhiles with
bitter and irefull rebukes if not teaching yet leaving excuselesse
those his wilfull impugners. What was all in him, was divided
among many others the teachers of his Church; some to be severe
and ever of a sad gravity that they may win such, & check
sometimes those who be of nature over-condent and jocond;
others were sent more cheerefull, free, and still as it were at large,
in the midst of an untrespassing honesty; that they who are so
temperd may have by whom they might be drawne to salvation,
and they who are too scrupulous, and dejected of spirit might be
often strengthnd with wise consolations and revivings: no man
being forct wholly to dissolve that groundwork of nature which
God created in him, the sanguine to empty out all his sociable
livelinesse, the cholerick to expell quite the unsinning
predominance of his anger; but that each radicall humour and
passion wrought upon and correct as it ought, might be made the
proper mould and foundation of every mans peculiar guifts, and

vertues. Some also were indud with a staid moderation, and
soundnesse of argument to teach and convince the rationall and
sober-minded; yet not therefore that to be thought the only
expedient course of teaching, for in times of opposition when
either against new heresies arising, or old corruptions to be
reformd this coole unpassionate mildnesse of positive wisdome is
not anough to damp and astonish the proud resistance of carnall,
and false Doctors, then (that I may have leave to soare a while as
the Poets use) then Zeale whose substance is ethereal, arming in
compleat diamond ascends his ery Chariot drawn with two
blazing Meteors gurd like beasts, but of a higher breed then any
the Zodiack yeilds, resembling two of those four which Ezechiel
and S. John saw, the one visagd like a Lion to expresse power,
high authority and indignation, the other of countnance like a
man to cast derision and scorne upon perverse and fraudulent
seducers; with these the invincible warriour Zeale shaking loosely
the slack reins drives over the heads of Scarlet Prelats, and such
as are insolent to maintaine traditions, brusing their stiffe necks
under his aming wheels. Thus did the true Prophets of old
combat with the false; thus Christ himselfe the fountaine of
meeknesse found acrimony anough to be still galling and vexing
the Prelaticall Pharisees.
(An Apology for Smectymnuus,
Columbia ed., 3:31214; Yale ed., 1:899900)
The close relationship here said to exist between rhetoric and truth is
emphasized throughout Miltons prose and poetry. In the Apology for
Smectymnuus, for instance, Milton maintained that
true eloquence I nd to be none, but the serious and hearty love

of truth: And that whose mind so ever is fully possest with a
fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity
to infuse knowledge of them into others, when such a man would
speak, his words (by what I can expresse) like so many nimble and
airy servitors trip about him at command, and in well orderd
les, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.42
The principle, applied in Paradise Lost, issues in Miltons invitation that we

discriminate sharply between Satans seductive eloquence and his ambition to
ruin man, a discrepancy amply conrmed in the harrowing episode involving
the infernal trinity (II.648ff.). Satans eventual reappearance in book IX as the
256 C.A. Patrides
representative of corrupt eloquence (ll. 66576) links with the Christs

pointed contrast in Paradise Regained between the orators of Greece and the
prophets of Israel:
Thir Orators thou then extollst, as those

The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed,
And lovers of thir Country, as may seem;
But herein to our Prophets farr beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of Civil Government
In thir majestic unaffected stile
Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt,
What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so,
What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities at;
These onely with our Law best form a King.
(IV.35364)
The possession of a kingdom within that Miltons last poems persistently

celebrate had been the aim of the poet himself many years since. As he wrote
in 1642, he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter
in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem (p. 62).
To what extent the poem has been realized will continue to be debated.
But the aspiration itself commands respect.
NOTES
Earlier versions of this chapter served as the introductions to John Milton: Selected
Prose (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1974), pp. 1545; rev. ed.
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), pp. 1546. Copyright 1974, C. A.
Patrides; copyright 1985, the Curators of the University of Missouri. Reprinted with
permission. Miltons prose is here quoted largely from the revised edition of Selected
Prose. It is additionally quoted from Works, gen. ed. Frank A. Patterson (New York,
193140), 20 vols., and Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven,
195382), 8 vols., hereafter abbreviated as Columbia ed. and Yale ed.,
respectively.
1. Letter to James Rice, March 24, 1818.
2. Lives of the English Poets, Everyman ed. (London, 1925), 1:9293. Edgar Allan
Poe in 1845 rmly separated Miltons subject from Miltons style: independently of
the subject-matter, his treatises are among the most remarkable ever written (in
Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. T. O. Mabbot [New York, 1951], 362).
3. Preface to Prometheus Unbound (181819).
4. The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London, 1932, reprint 1965),
is also an indispensable collection.
5. See Miltons letter to Holstein in the Columbia ed., 12:3845, and the
holograph discussed by J. McG. Bottkol in PMLA 68 (1953): 61727.
6. On Frescobaldi, see the account by Roland M. Frye in Milton Quarterly 7
(1973): 7476; on Miltons visit to the Jesuit College, Leo Miller, Milton Quarterly 13
(1979), 14246; and on Barberini, John Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities (London,
1968), pp. 55f., 69ff.
7. Columbia ed., 12:53; Yale ed., 2:765. La Tina has been translated by Donald
Sears in Milton Studies 13 (1979): 275317.
8. The outlines are in the manuscript now in the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge (reproduced in the Columbia ed., 18:23132).
9. John Harris, Englands Out-cry (London, 1644), p. 1.
10. Israel and England Paralelled (London, 1648), p. 15. The sermon was delivered
at Grays Inn on April 6, 1648.
11. See the account of this controversy in the introduction to my edition of The
Cambridge Platonists (London, 1969; reprint Cambridge, 1980).
12. The imagery of warfare in Of Reformation, often present in Miltons more
militant prose works, has been noted frequently. See Theodore H. Banks, Miltons
Imagery (New York, 1950), pp. 7692; James H. Hanford, John Milton: Poet and
Humanist (Cleveland, 1966), chap. 5; and Joan Webber, The Eloquent I (Madison,
Wis., 1968), pp. 204ff. Consult also the broader contexts provided by Robert T.
Fallon, Captain or Colonel: The Soldier in Miltons Life and Art (Columbia, Mo., 1984),
and James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and European
Traditions of War (Princeton, 1980).
13. These are only three of the phrases rather lovingly collected in the Yale
edition (1:113) as testimony to Miltons bitter hatred. But they should be judged in
the light of the periods vocabulary in controversy. Well into the Restoration, for
example, Andrew Marvell, having written The Rehearsal Transprosd (1672), was
denounced in Samuel Parkers Reproof as Thou Rat-Divine! thou hast not the Wit
and Learning of a Mouse....
14. See the excellent study by Thomas Kranidas, Milton and the Rhetoric of
Zeal, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6 (1965): 42332.
15. The Provincial Letters, trans. A. O. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, England,
1967), p. 165 [letter 11, dated August 18, 1656].
16. From the Preface to Animadversions (Columbia ed., 2:107; Yale ed.,
1:66364). Miltons grave Authors are fully set forth by Pascal (in Provincial Letters,
164ff.). Elsewhere Milton sought support in the origin and nature of satire: a Satyr
as it was borne out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high,
and adventure dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons
( An Apology for Smectymnuus, in Columbia ed., 3:329; Yale ed., 1:916).
17. Arcana Microcosmi (London, 1652), p. 177.
18. Sermons preachd at Eton, 2d ed. (London, 1673), p. 36. The rst edition
appeared posthumously in 1660.
258 C.A. Patrides
19. Proverbs 26.5; as annotated by Michael Jermin, Paraphrasticall Meditations, by

Way of Commentarie, upon the Whole Booke of the Proverbs of Solomon (London, 1638),
p. 598.
20. The Puritan literature is emphasized by Chilton L. Powell, English Domestic
Relations 14871653 (New York, 1917), pp. 14748, and William and Malleville
Haller, The Puritan Art of Love, HLQ 5 (194142): 23572; the courtesy books, by
John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven, 1970); and the Christian
humanist tradition, by V. Norskov Olsen, The New Testament Logia on Divorce: A Study
of their Interpretation from Erasmus to Milton (Tbingen, West Germany, 1971).
21. Edward A. Westermarck, Christianity and Morals (London, 1939), p. 385. One
of the best studies of the treatises on divorce is Halketts Milton and the Idea of
Matrimony to which I am indebted; but I have also drawn liberally on my own
remarks in Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford, 1966), pp. 17886.
22. See William Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (New York,
1934), vol. I, appendix B, and the passages collected by William R. Parker, Miltons
Contemporary Reputation (Columbus, Ohio, 1940), pp. 73ff., 170ff. Cf. Miltons two
sonnets, XII (I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs) and XI (A Book was
writ of late calld Tetrachordon).
23. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, 3d ed. (London, 1647), p. 150, and Daniel
Featley, The Dippers Dipt, 5th ed. (London, 1647), sig. A4.
24. St. Thomas, Summa theologica III.lv.1, trans. by the English Dominican
Fathers (London, 191125), and Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband, trans.
Thomas Paynell (London, 1550?), sigs. K8K8v.
25. See M. A. Larson, The Inuence of Miltons Divorce Tracts on Farquhars
Beaux Stratagem, PMLA 39 (1924): 17478. Miltons inuence on Hardy has not yet
been studied.
26. John Buxton, An Elizabethan Reading List: An Unpublished Letter from Sir
Philip Sidney, TLS, March 24, 1972, pp. 34344. Vives treatise is available in
English, trans. Foster Watson (London, 1913, reprint Totowa, NJ., 1971). The
humanist burden of Miltons Of Education is most ably expounded by William R.
Parker, Education: Miltons Ideas and Ours, College English 24 (1962): 114.
27. Holy Observations (London, 1607), p. 52.
28. The thesis is persuasively argued by Merritt Y. Hughes, Ten Perspectives on
Milton (New Haven, 1965), pp. 26768. See also his essay Miltons Eikon Basilike,
in Calm of Mind, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland, 1971), pp. 124. 29. Brief Lives, ed.
Oliver L. Dick, 3d ed. (London, 1960), p. 203.
30. Paradise Lost XII.587. For an interpretation of Miltons development along
the lines suggested, see Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London,
1964). See also my discussion of the nature of Miltons apocalyptic emphases on pp.
181214.
31. English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1839), 6:368; quoted by
Don M. Wolfe, Milton and Hobbes: A Contrast in Social Temper, SP 41 (1944):
41026.
32. Brief Lives, p. 203.

33. See Diane P. Speer, Miltons Defensio Prima: Ethos and Vituperation in a
Polemic Engagement, Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 27783.
34. See Hughes, Ten Perspectives, chap. 9. Miltons charges against More have
been largely substantiated: consult the studies by Kester Svendsen in Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 1 (1959): 1129; JEGP 60 (1961): 796807; and Th Upright
Heart and Pure, ed. A. P. Fiore (Pittsburgh, 1967), pp. 11730.
35. As early as 163238, according to Lloyd E. Berry in RES, n.s. 11 (1960):
15056.
36. An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. F3v.
37. Harry Glicksman, The Sources of Miltons History of Britain, University of
Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 11 (1920): 10544.
38. Ida Langdon, Miltons Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts (New Haven, 1924).
39. See Annette C. Flower, The Critical Context of the Preface to Samson
Agonistes, SEL 10 (1970): 40923.
40. K. G. Hamilton, The Structure of Miltons Prose, in Language and Style in
Milton, ed. R. D. Emma and John T. Shawcross (New York, 1967), chap. 10.
41. That is, like the style of Miltons opponent Joseph Hall, the so-called
English Seneca ( An Apology for Smectymnuus, in the Columbia ed., 3:268, and the
Yale ed., 1:873).
42. The passage is crucial to the antiprelatical tracts because of Miltons insistent
censure of the bishops abuse of language. See Thomas Kranidass exposition of
Miltons decorum in The Fierce Equation (The Hague, 1965), chap. 2.
P R I C E M C M U R R AY
Aristotle on the Pinnacle:

Paradise Regained and the Limits of Theory
T he nal confrontation between Christ and Satan on the pinnacle of the

temple continues to be a problem for Miltons interpreters.1 Because Paradise
Regained chronicles both Christs role as the second Adam and his journey of
self-discovery, many readers have understood his rebuke as an illuminating
reduction to essentials of the poems thematic burdentemptation is
presumptionand as evidence that the Son has come into full self-
knowledge.2 This reading is not without its difficulties, of course, and
whether Milton means us to infer some hypostatization of the Son has been
debated. If Christs words are a declaration of godhead, the argument runs,
then Milton is guilty, either of allowing the dramatic texture of his poem to
obscure its theology or of endorsing a rather heterodox Christology.3 Thus,
most interpretations fall on a sliding scale between the obvious extremes,
attempting to reconcile the requirements of dogmatic theology with our
sense that, as Empson puts it on another occasion, Christ has nally and
deservedly gotten his spurs. While the situation is reminiscent of Paradise
Lost, in which epic heroism is weighed against the ideal of Christian conduct
and found wanting, the passage remains recalcitrant, if for no other reason
than that it pushes the minimalist or less-is-more logic of Christian heroism
to the breaking point. At the risk of giving short shrift to the interpretive
energy expended on the problem, one can hardly quarrel with Hugh
From Milton Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1998). 1998 by Roy C. Flannagan and the Johns Hopkins
University Press.
261
262 Price McMurray
MacCallums wry characterization of the pinnacle as an uneasy station for

criticism (313n32).
An adequate reading of the crux may require something like a
suspension of critical and theological belief. We need not make an extra-
textual detour to the pages of De Doctrina Christiana, where MacCallum nds
evidence of Miltons subordinationism in the analysis of Colossians 2.9, or
pretend to any sophistication with theology, to realize that if Christs rebuke
implies a hypostatization of the Son, then Miltons reference to the uneasie
station is a peculiar estimate of divinity indeed. By the same token, we
should not read the theology without the poetry. To do so would have been
troubling to Milton, and doctrinal interpretations of his poetry are often less
illuminating than obviously misplaced aesthetic accounts. Rather than
dismiss readings of Christs rebuke which deviate from an orthodox
Christology, might we not grant that Miltons text is unclear? This is at odds
with what most readers recognize as Miltons prodigious control over his
material, but perhaps the epiphany on the pinnacle of the temple is meant to
be puzzling. Perhaps Miltons praxis is in the service of a theory which aims
to point out certain expressive and cognitive limits.4
It bears recalling that the common-sensical if theologically problematic
notion that Christ declares himself God is not necessarily of modern or post-
Romantic derivation. In her discussion of Paradise Regained, for instance,
Irene Samuel uses two eighteenth-century commentaries to focus the
conicting readings of the nal temptation. One reader for whom Miltons
poem is not perplexing is Reverend Calton of Lincolnshire, who writes:
Here is what we may call after Aristotle the anagnorisis, or the discovery.
Christ declares himself to be the God and Lord of the Tempter; and to prove
it, stands upon the pinnacle (qtd. in Samuel 112). We may reject the good
Reverends gloss on account of its implications for Miltons Christology, but
it is a richly suggestive comment. While eighteenth-century readers were
obviously inclined to read poetry in Aristotelian terms, nding, for example,
that the authorial intrusions in Paradise Lost violated neoclassical principles
of literary decorum, Miltons work is anything but theoretically naive, and he
wrote in the wake of the great Italian commentaries to the Poetics. Caltons
designation of Christs rebuke as an anagnorisis, perhaps a banality for an
eighteenth-century reader, is provocative because it suggests that Aristotle
was a heuristic tool for Miltons reading of the Bible.
Such a possibility becomes more likely when we compare Miltons
narrative with its primary source, Luke 4.913.
And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle

of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast
thyself down from here;
Paradise Regained and the Limits of Theory 263
For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to

keep thee;
And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time
thou dash thy foot against a stone.
And Jesus, answering, said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not
put the Lord, thy God, to the test.
And when the devil had ended all the testing, he departed from
him for a season.
Turning from the gospel account to Paradise Regained, we cannot but think
that Miltons rendition of the nal conict between Satan and Christ is
tighter, more sharply focused in its drama, and more unequivocal in its sense
of closure.5 Indeed, Miltons procedure seems to reverse or repress the
enigmatic open-endedness of a phrase like all the testing. The point is not
so much that Milton distorted scripture, for he doubtless would have felt
justied in making good faith extrapolations from the narrative itself, as it is
that his modications of the story suggest a great deal about his habits of
mind.
If Milton in this instance seems bent on heightening the dramatic
interest and moral clarity of the scriptural episode, more than one critic has
described the larger shape of Paradise Regained in terms assimilable to an
Aristotelian logic. The dialogues between Christ and Satan, characterized by
Satans rhetorical range and sophistication on the one hand, and Christs
simplicity and increasing terseness on the other, are a case in point. More
than a dramatic expedient, the dialogues are part of a dialectical narrowing
which leads Satan to defeat and, Fish suggests, man to God: On the
dramatic level the denition of the relationship between man and God takes
the form of a progressive narrowing of the area in which the self is
preeminent.... On the verbal level there is a progressive diminishing
(Inaction 27). Regardless of whether the logic of a progressive
diminishing ultimately exposes plot as the main (literary) temptation of
Paradise Regained, the idea that the poem contracts into a climactic moment
of recognition and misrecognition would seem generally agreed upon.6
The principal source for Miltons understanding of recognition or
anagnorisis was, of course, Aristotles Poetics. Without digressing at length to
summarize the argument of the Poetics or its reception in the Renaissance,
suffice it to say that Aristotle rates highest those tragic plots which achieve
narrowness and concentration.7 Crucial to this effect of narrowness and
concentration are the moments of recognition and reversal. Because
recognition and reversal arrest events, turning them back upon themselves,
they shift the emphasis of drama from plot and the narrative of adventures to
the expression of character. In tragedy, and especially in Oedipus, Aristotles
prime example of the genre, the moment of recognition is wrenching
264 Price McMurray
because it reveals relations which might well have remained hidden. Thus,
recognition is the motive or raison dtre for tragic poetry, particularly to the
extent that it takes as its subject the transgression of familial boundaries.
Miltons description of Satans fall is suggestive in this respect. Evoking
a world of tangled and tragic relationships, it betrays an almost Aristotelian
concern for the vicissitudes of recognition.
But Satan smitten with amazement fell

As when Earths Son Antaeus (to compare
Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove
With Joves Alcides, and oft foild still rose,
Receiving from his mother Earth new strength,
Fresh from his fall, and ercer grapple joynd,
Throttld at length in th Air, expird and fell;
So after many a foil the Tempter proud,
Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride
Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall.
And as that Theban Monster that proposd
Her riddle, and him, who solvd it not, devourd;
That once found out and solvd, for grief and spight
Cast herself headlong from th Ismenian steep,
So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend.
(4.56276)
Inasmuch as classical heroism here consists of the ability to unravel riddles,

and Milton telescopes the oedipal and familial within the existential (i.e.,
Hercules triumphs because he knows the source of Antaeuss strength, while
Oedipus triumphs because he understands the nature of man), it does not
take a great deal of imagination to see that Milton is weighing one of the
major narratives of antiquity against a central mystery of Christian theology.8
Yet if Miltons point is presumably that Oedipuss insight into the human
condition, which hastens rather than forestalls his ultimate fate, is a poor
substitute for an understanding of what it means to be a Son of God, his
evocation of the Greek myth is oddly disruptive. Although the paired
classical allusions are likely to strike modern readers as sufficiently Freudian,
the narrative of Antaeuss defeat serving as a subliminal reminder of the
sexual content of Sophocles play, the comparison of Christ and Oedipus
startles and seems almost a contaminatio. Moreover, the second simile is an
awkward t, for Satan is less the speaker of a riddle than one driven to solve
a riddle, and what is most Sphinxlike about the events on the uneasie
station is the meaning of Christs rebuke. Without diluting Miltons
theology, one might wonder that the carefully-wrought formalism of Paradise
Regained should blur at this crucial moment. Unless we want to characterize
the similes as blunt instruments which serve only to illustrate the action of
falling, or rationalize the text with an appeal to some notion of artistic
clumsiness, it would appear that Milton is critiquing the logic of recognition.
Much as Oedipuss ability to see affinities both enables his triumph and leads
to his destruction, so too, one surmises, tragedy can replay but never
transcend its constitutive formalism.
Lest this seem abrupt, we might recall Satans elaborate rationalization
of his own conduct, for he is initially much the Oedipus of the piece.
Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view

And narrower Scrutiny, that I might learn
In what degree or meaning thou art calld
The Son of God, which bears no single sence;
The Son of God I also am, or was,
And if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are Sons of God; yet thee I thought
In some respects far higher so declard.
(4.51421)
Suffering from a theological version of sibling rivalry, Satan betrays his

familiar confusion with the assertion relation stands. While he probably
means that relation obtains or endures, Satans nal temptation of
Christ, the ironic exhortation to stand, is a wild and unwitting literalization
of his own trope, one which is turned against him when Christ stands and he
does not. Moreover, Miltons allusion to the riddle of the Sphinx, which
serves as a gloss on Satans fall, reveals that his quest was never more than one
of co-option. While Oedipuss mastery of the riddleone version of which
asks, What is it that has one voice, but becomes four-footed, and two-
footed, and three-footed, and is weakest when it has most feet? (qtd. in
MacKellar 243)would seem a vindication in extremis of the proposition
relation stands, it is Christ, or so Miltons simile suggests, who has this
knowledge. Implicit then in Christs rebuke, not to mention his balancing
act, is the idea that relation does indeed stand. Howsoever enigmatic the
phrase Son of God or the relationship between the Father and the Son,
Milton might have argued, these mysteries are the ultimate basis for reality.
More than a bit of peremptory one-upmanship, Miltons partisan
likening of Christ and Oedipus creates a textual double focus and enacts a
complex polemic. Because Oedipuss triumph, that of a mind supple enough
to reduce the ages of man to one term, is a gure for the transgressions of
incest and foreshadows his tragic fate, the wisdom of antiquity is found
lacking and the familial entanglements traced in tragic drama are exposed as
a demonic parody of the Trinity. If this parody is reenacted in Satans failed
attempt to make Christ reveal the mystery of his paternity, the issue is as
266 Price McMurray
much one of literary theory as theology, for Satan, as Miltons simile indicates,
is not Oedipus. What distinguishes Satan from the great tragic hero, with
whom he shares an eye for affinities and experience in the ways of incest, is
that his belief in his own powers looks decidedly like Aristotelian rationalism.
The assertion if I was, I am is the defensive gesture of an embattled logician,
and Satans condence in the power of narrower Scrutiny is the bias of the
formalist, an apparently ironic and tragic misappropriation of Miltons
larger strategy for investigating his biblical sources.
What I hope is clear by now is that the climax of Paradise Regained
skirts the territory of Oedipus and the Aristotelian construction of tragedy. If
Satans plight seems richly oedipal, perhaps it is only tting that an
Aristotelian structure of recognition and reversalalbeit anatomized
somewhat differently, for Satan falls without ever fully recognizing what he
has seenshould modulate to an allusion to the poem Aristotle took as the
model par excellence of the tragic mode. Nor does it seem special pleading
to see Miltons restyling of the biblical narrative as the product of a formalist
sensibility. The difficulty with this reading is what to make of Satans
Aristotelianism. Since Satan and Milton investigate the Bible in seemingly
similar fashion, what, one wonders, are the implications of Satans fall?
On the face of it, Satans defeat is consistent with the larger impulses of
Paradise Regained, for the poem is memorably antagonistic toward classical
learning and culture.9 Although a tradition at least as old as Augustines On
Christian Doctrine held that Christians might legitimately appropriate the
intellectual and rhetorical tools of antiquity in the battle of the faith, Milton
takes great pains to dramatize Christs rejection of the temptation of
learning. Personally and pointedly polemical, this conservatism reverses both
the argument in Miltons treatise Of Education and the defense of poetry in
the preface to the second book of The Reason of Church-Government. Given
the overt anti-classicism of Paradise Regained, it is not surprising that Satan,
who is at once an Oedipus manqu and a slightly baffled Aristotelian, should
be undone on the pinnacle of the temple. In effect, Satans fall recapitulates
the horrors of ancient tragedy and functions as a cautionary tale about the
dangers of rationalism in literary criticism.
Yet to say as much is not entirely sufficient. Not only does this
explanation make Miltons Aristotelian refashioning of the biblical narrative
more rather than less striking, but it discounts the difficulty which Christs
rebuke has posed for countless commentators as well. I want to insist on this,
for if the events on the temple pinnacle constitute Miltons recognition
scene, this recognition scene is almost disciplinary in its assertion of
conceptual and experiential limits. In simplest terms, readers of all stripes
have had to follow Satans lead and disentangle a riddle of paternity which is
presented at the poems climax. While we are likely to feel comfortable in the
knowledge that we trust dogmatic theology rather than narrower Scrutiny,
there is, pragmatically considered, little difference between Satans

determination to nd out what is meant by the phrase Son of God and our
own critical worrying over a possible hypostatization of the Son. Should we
be inclined to think otherwise, Miltons double-edged Aristotelianism would
seem to imply, we need to be prepared for a shock of recognition.
Miltons procedure may not intimate an anti-rationalist bias in his
theology, but it does suggest that his attitude toward ancient tragedy and
literary theory is more complex than Christs dismissive speeches indicate.
We might account for both the larger issue of Miltons apparently mixed
motives and the disruptions in his recognition scene by arguing that his text
recapitulates (at a critical distance) a problematic at work in the Poetics. In a
recent discussion of Aristotle, Paul Fry identies a crucial tension in the
formalist position:
Aristotles rage for order, the narrower and more

concentrated the better (ch. 26), leads to moments, primarily
though not entirely at the level of tragic plot, in which characters
who are too intimate overcrowd one another and threaten to
break out of their connes with violence. The pathos, or tragic
incident, that occurs in such close quarters is brought on by the
recognition of what could have been kept hidden in a less
constricting situation, the recognition, that is, of the kinship or
intimacy (philia) of antagonists. The irony of Aristotles critical
predicament is that his formalism, with its bringing to the fore of
likenesses and affinities ... tends to ensure the coming to light of
just the sort of unruliness that the observance of proportion is
meant to suppress. (12)10
Something like the unruliness Fry describes clearly inhabits the climax of
Paradise Regained, and it is not so much grudgingly admitted as actively
sought. Since Milton probably assumed readers who were theologically
literate and unlikely to be shaken in their faith by textual ambiguity, the
confounding of formal and categorical clarity on the pinnacle of the temple
may serve to indicate certain interpretive limits. If Aristotle acts as a
heuristic device for the scriptural account, perhaps this works both ways, and
the Bible is being used to interrogate Aristotelian formalism, exposing its
inadequacies and charting a transcendence which is as much aesthetic as
moral and theological.
Essential to this proposition is the debate between Christ and Satan
over the putative merits of classical tragedy and rhetoric. Satan:
Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught

In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best
268 Price McMurray
Of moral prudence, with delight receivd

In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life;
High actions, and high passions best describing:
Thence to the famous Orators repair,
Those antient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that erce Democratie,
Shook the Arsenal and fulmind over Greece,
To Macedon, and Artaxerxes Throne;
To sage Philosophy next lend thine ear. (4.26172)
In Satans hands, tragedy and rhetoric have a crucial proximity. Doubtless

part of the point of this is to underscore the Satanic distortion of classical
ideals, for Satans celebration of bellicose oratory reverses the fundamental
assumption of Ciceronian humanism, namely, that rhetoric civilizes man and
establishes the political order. Satans unwitting use of the word repaira
crucial and charged entry in the Miltonic lexiconsets up a complex relay,
simultaneously exposing his rejection of the civilizing potential of rhetoric
and reminding us of the gulf between antiquitys noblest imaginings and the
Christian promise of Paradise restored.
Yet there is more to it. In addition to marking the crossing between
tragedy and rhetoric, repair calls attention to the unstated proposition in
Satans account of tragedy. Specically, the formula moral prudence, with
delight receivd / In brief sententious precepts is puzzling and seems to
suggest that tragedy is not so much tragic as pleasurably didactic. Regardless
of Satans ultimate theoretical source, we would seem to be at some remove
from Aristotelian fear and pity. Yet Satans explanation is Aristotles, or at
least that of Miltons Aristotle, and his odd construction of tragic delight is
reminiscent of the preface to Samson Agonistes, where Milton writes that
tragedy is said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror,
to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and
reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight... (149). Without
insisting that Miltons discussion of catharsis is revisionary, we should not
ignore the way in which it reverses a common sense understanding of fear
and pity.
What distinguishes Satans account of tragedy from Miltons is that it is
even more optimistic. While Miltons equivocation (a kind of delight) in
the preface to Samson reects an uneasiness with the categorical juggling
needed to nd delight in fear and pity, we would be hard pressed to know
from Satan that tragedies have unhappy endings. To the extent that he
rehearses tragedy as the pleasures of didacticism, Satan is the mouthpiece for
a reductio ad absurdum of the Aristotelian gesture of evading or repressing the
unruliness of tragedy. That Satans bad faith optimism is not the same thing
as Miltons reconstructed Aristotelianism could be deduced from the

dramatic irony of the poems climax. Christs nal rebuke (Tempt not the
Lord thy God [4.561]) fullls the Satanic requirements of prudence, brevity,
and sententiousness, but does so in a fashion which refutes the affective
attening in Satans denition of tragedy. We may feel delight, but Satan is
treated to a double-dose of the Aristotelian medicine he would repress: So
strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend (4.576).
Satans fall, then, is meaningful as narrative and meta-narrative, for it
exposes both the limits of his power and the partiality of his critical position.
Casting Satan as a faux Aristotelian, one begins to suspect, is Miltons way of
intimating a solution to the contradictions in the formalist position. After all,
Satans unwitting use of repair is Miltons wilting or conscious strategy.
While the word marks the contradictions in Satans positionhe is a too
cheerful Aristotelian and deeply invested in the art of warit is also a
convenient shorthand designation for the motive behind the rigorous askesis
which is the Sons testing in Paradise Regained. An emblem of both the exilic
experience of post-lapsarian man and its typological redemption, repair is
the concept which allows Milton to absorb and transcend the contradictions
of history.
This crossing between tragedy and rhetoric, their suggestive proximity
in Satans defense of classical learning, raises several questions. Should we
assume that both arts are suspect and cannot transcend the downward spiral
of unredeemed history? Or does the strategic placement of repair imply
that rhetoric might be redeemed? If rhetoric can be retrieved, under what
terms is this possible, and what implications does this have for Miltons art?
To answer these questions we need to understand that Satans argument
depends on the supposition that rhetoric, in both matter and manner, is
sublime (e.g., fulmind). It is with this idea, arguably yet another
complication in Satans Aristotelianism, that Christ most directly takes issue.
A point-by-point refutation of Satans defense of oratory, Christs speech
reappropriates and dramatically recasts the constitutive (ontological) ground
of rhetoric.
Thir Orators thou then extollst, as those

The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed,
And lovers of thir Country, as may seem;
But herein to our Prophets far beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of Civil Government
In thir majestic unaffected stile
Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome.
(4.35360)
270 Price McMurray
If Christ underscores the moral ambiguity of rhetoric with a categorical ad

hominem attack (Statists ... as may seem), his response also describes a
counter-sublime, specically, the majestic unaffected stile. This version of
the sublime confounds classical distinctions between high and low styles, yet
the result, as the phrase solid rules of Civil Government would imply, is
anything but chaos. While Satans resistless eloquence energizes speaker
and hearer alike, with tragic consequences for the state, Christian rhetoric
devolves from and ensures a sort of politico-ontological stability.
Satans argument is of a piece with his performance in the rst two
books of Paradise Lost, for the common denominator in this account of
rhetoric and the sublime is that which characterizes Satanic activity
generally, mobility. Although the etymology of sublime implies that it is an
activity of standing, its liminality presupposes the sudden discovery of great
depths or heights. In this regard, the sublime is the experience of what
Emerson, projecting a poet for the matter of America, would call the
tyrannous eye, and its pleasures are of a piece with those provided by the
rhetors afflatus and the spectacles of epic heroism. Thus, just as Satans early
adventurism in Paradise Lost is instructively undercut by Gods irony (Onely
begotten Son, seest thou what rage / Transports our adversarie ...
[3.8081]), so too his celebration of the sublime sight of that erce
Democratie should be resisted, for it glamorizes both the demiurgic
pretensions of the demagogue and the transporting violence of war.
The crucial element in Christs reappropriation of the sublime
underscored by the fact that he triumphs by standingis the idea of stability
or solidity. Miltons aim is not so much to repropose the formalist gambit, a
partial or too cheerful version of which is the enabling assumption behind
Satans bad faith rehearsal of the power of eloquence, as it is to point a way
beyond the contradictions of tragic formalism. Marked by humility and lack
of pretense, the unaffected stile is untroubled by the unruliness of tragic
affect. Nor is this merely proscriptive, a thou shalt not which requires us
to be satised with less, for the humble style is majestic and speaks the
language of the prophets. While tragedy courts the sublime only by
disrupting its own formal order, rather the reverse is true of the Miltonic
ideal: anchored to prophecy and typology, its incursions into the sublime
necessarily presuppose faith in a formalism of the highest order.
Returning to the crux of the uneasie station, we might hazard the
assertion that Miltons Aristotelianism is to good purpose. While Christs
words are perhaps the supreme example of the majestic unaffected stile,
and carry with them a promise of Paradise regained which refutes all political
and aesthetic tragedies, their meaning, or so the critical debate would
suggest, is anything but clear. Perhaps Milton means to teach a negative
lesson, and his theorized restyling of the biblical narrative calls attention to
that which can barely be expressed, much less contained, in his text. We can
domesticate the crux and argue that the passage moves within the boundaries
of an orthodox Christology, but to do so diminishes Miltons poem. If we
must recognize our interpretive quest in Satans determination to understand
who is properly a Son of God, we need not share his condence in the power
of narrower Scrutiny. Skirting the unruliness of classical tragedy, the
climax of Paradise Regained maps a counter-sublime which is poetic, political,
and theological. Yet the eschatological promise of the brief epic, which
requires of us a commitment to the arduous work of reading and repairing,
is also a reminder of the limitations of theory and the necessity of faith.
NOTES
1. Interpretations of the crux constitute a cottage industry within the

voluminous and ever-growing scholarship on Milton and his work. Rather than try
and review all the studies in a note, I would refer the reader to the guides by Patrides
and Klemp.
2. For a recent refutation of the idea that the nal temptation should be
understood as an identity test, see Rushdy.
3. Stein, for instance, writes: What has happened? Surely not that Christ is
directly replying to Satans challenge by nally declaring himself, by saying: thou
shalt not tempt me, the Lord thy God! That would be to violate the whole discipline
... of Christs moral and intellectual example: the witness of whence he is by the
seeking of glory not for himself but for Him who sent him ... The esh becomes
word. Christ says it, and then becomes it. The full revelation occurs, the miracle of
epiphany, theophany, but not as an act of will, not from the self (12829). It might
be invidious to say that Steins insistent orthodoxy deconstructs itself, but epiphany
and theophany are not the same thing, and this terminological slippage, if not quite
sufficient to readmit a hypostatized Son, is testimony to the difficulty of Miltons text.
4. Somewhat differently, Pearce nds the Milton of Paradise Regained probing
the limits of humanist rhetoric.
5. Almost any interpretation of Paradise Regained must sooner or later consider
Miltons reading of the Bible. See, for example, Ades and Radzinowicz.
6. Fishs Things and Actions Indifferent is a provocative essay which pushes
the logic of a narrowed plot to its ultimate conclusion.
7. Weinbergs study of the development of critical theory in the Italian
Renaissance (and especially of the shaping presence of Aristotle) is still authoritative.
8. For a ne discussion of the Oedipus Complex, Freud, Miltons similes, and
the odd disruptions present in the poems climax, see Kerrigan, who has the
distinction of being one of the few commentators to note that Miltons description of
Satans fall, especially in the syntax of 4.58185, has the peculiar effect of making us
confuse Christ and Satan.
9. The temptation of learning has been a problem at least since the time of
272 Price McMurray
Popes study, which found that there were not signicant precedents for Miltons
procedure. More recent treatments include Rajan and Swanson and Mulryan.
10. Frys discussion of Aristotle and Longinus is situated in the context of
contemporary post-structuralist debates and meant to offer a way out of the impasse
of deconstruction. To oversimplify considerably, one of the theses of the book is that
the (Longinian) sublime, particularly in its capacity for disrupting formal order,
exposes the ground of being; thus, it is an alternative to the aporias which
deconstruction almost inevitably registers as absence or loss. Much has been written
about Milton and Aristotle. See, for example, the studies by Rees and Wood.
11. The problem of Milton and the sublime dates from the eighteenth-century
commentaries to Paradise Lost. A standard (albeit somewhat dated) reference for the
transmission of the sublime is Monk, who takes a dim view of the idea that Milton
was a theorized poet of the sublime: It is a strange paradox that the most sublime of
English poets should not have caught from Longinus the suggestion of the sublime
as the expression of the ultimate values in art, beyond the reach of rhetoric and her
rules. He did not; and it was left to the propounders of an adolescent aesthetic in the
next century to nd in John Miltons poems ... the supreme illustration of whatever
particular type of the sublime they advocated (20). While it is perhaps true that
Milton was not explicitly a theoretician of the sublime, he could have learned all he
needed to know from Tasso and Ariosto. Indeed, the description of Christ and Satan
ying through the air (and without wing / Of Hippogrif bore through the Air
sublime [4.54112]) is suggestive in this respect. If it seems late in the game to
remind us that Paradise Regained is not romance, the allusion nonetheless implies that
Milton means to reclaim the sublime for Christian poetry. For a recent and
illuminating discussion of Miltons negotiation of the romance tradition, see
Patterson.
WORKS CITED
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. Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise
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J . M A RT I N E VA N S
The Birth of the Author:

Miltons Poetic Self-Construction
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips
away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing.
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
F or a writer with such a notoriously strong personality, Milton was

surprisingly reticent about taking public credit for his poems. His rst
published work, On Shakespeare, was printed anonymously in the second Folio
(1632), his second, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637) was not openly
acknowledged by the Author, as Henry Lawes put it in the dedication, and
his third, Lycidas (1638), had affixed to it only his initials, J. M. Not until
the collected edition of 1645 was Mr. John Milton openly acknowledged as
the author of any of his published poems, and even there his identity was
immediately problematized by the Greek epigram that was printed under
what purports to be his portrait:
That an unskilful hand had carved this print

Youd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, nding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artists misattempt.1
No sooner does Milton appear in person, as it were, than we are told that it
From Milton Studies XXXVIII (2000). 2000 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
275
276 J. Martin Evans
really isnt him at all. Now you see him, now you dont. Even as late as 1667
there is some typographical hesitancy about affirming Miltons authorship.
On the rst two title pages of the rst edition of Paradise Lost, we are told
that the poem was Written in TEN BOOKS By JOHN MILTON, but Miltons
name shrinks visibly between the rst and second issues, and on the title page
of the third it has been reduced once again to his initials: The Author J. M.
The Author JOHN MILTON is announced for the rst time on the title page
of the fourth issue of the epic in 1668, and his name appears thus in all his
subsequent poetic works. It is almost as if the poet had gradually materialized
before our eyes during the course of his career. A similar progression from
initial anonymity to ultimate self-assertion, I will argue, takes place within
Miltons poems themselves. What we seem to be witnessing as we read his
non-dramatic verse is exactly the opposite of the process Roland Barthes
describes in the epigraph: the birth of the author.2
In an area as hotly contested as that of literary authorship a few
preliminary distinctions and caveats are in order. The rst and most
important is the distinction between what Patricia M. Spacks calls the poet-
as-creator-of-the-poem and the poet-as-imagined-presence-in-the-
poem.3 I will be concerned almost exclusively with the latter, with Miltons
author function, as Michel Foucault would have it.4 As a result, I will have
little to say about the vexed question of the relationship between the two
gures. In a sense, of course, they can never be the same person, for as C. S.
Lewis pointed out a long time ago, it is impossible for anyone to describe
himself, even in prose, without making of himself, to some extent, a dramatic
creation, and it is consequently quite impossible that the character
represented in the poem should be identically the same with that of the
poet.5 To take a concrete instance, the Milton who grieves for the death of
Edward King in Lycidas is not the same person as the Milton who put that
grief into words. Between the poet-as-creator-of-the-poem and the poet-
as-imagined-presence-in-the-poem yawns the unfathomable mystery of
composition.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Robert McMahon pushes this
argument rather too far when he insists that the speaker in Paradise Lost is a
purely ctional character whose intellectual and moral growth is one of the
poems major themes.6 Granted that it may be misleading to conate Milton
with his authorial persona, the fact remains that the correspondences
between the two gures are remarkably close, far closer than those between,
say, the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde and the still shadowy gure of his
creator.7 The characteristics that Milton the historical author attributed to
Milton the narrator of Paradise Lostblindness, old age, social and political
isolation, religious faithpositively invite us to identify the one with the
other. As Janet Adelman notes, it is clear that the narrator is a consciously
controlled character in the poem; but it is equally clear that Milton is anxious
Miltons Poetic Self-Construction 277
to ensure that we recognize him in the narrator.8 It is probably no accident

that, despite what Leah Marcus has called the vast interplay of
poststructuralist energies that has been brought to bear on the issue of the
writing subject,9 Milton for the most part remains Milton without the
deauthorizing bracket of quotation marks.10
Finally, the poet-as-imagined-presence-in-the-poem may present
himself to us in two quite different ways. On the one hand, he may simply be
the unidentied source of the voice that utters the poetic text. We know
someone is there because we can hear the words he is speaking, but because
he never talks about himself we have no idea who he is or what he looks like.
To borrow the cinematic vocabulary Herbert Phelan uses to analyse LAllegro
and Il Penseroso, he is an invisible off-screen presence, projecting a scene
which he either witnessed or imagined but in which he does not himself
appear. On the other hand, the poet may be an identiable character in his
own poem, an on-screen gure whom we can both hear and see.11 Using
the rst person singular, he presents himself to us as a self-referential reality,
an actor whose thoughts and deeds, feelings and appearance, are themselves
part of the poems subject matter. He no longer simply produces the text; he
actively participates in it. If the rst kind of poetic presence remains
steadfastly outside the poem, this second kind of authorial persona operates
inside it as well.
I. T H E 1645 P O E M S
Bearing these distinctions and qualications in mind, I propose to trace the

gradual emergence of an individualized poetic presence in the editions which
appeared in public under Miltons name, beginning with the 1645 collection
of his shorter works.12 According to Marcus, this extraordinary volume
presents us already with a full edged portrait of the artist as a young man, a
portrait which is constructed partly by the order in which the texts are
printed, partly by the poets running commentary on his own poems. No
other English poet, she points out, had so overtly inserted his own voice in
the text as a commentary on what he had achieved (and even the age at which
he had achieved it). His authorial interventions are quite unprecedented in
an English volume of poems and would have looked much newer ... to his
contemporaries than they do to us today. Their effect, she concludes, is to
inaugurate a new view of literary subjecthood, namely the invention of an
individual literary life.13 The Milton of the 1645 edition is a highly self-
conscious imaginative construct, the precursor of all those authors whose
lives and works furnished the material for the kind of literary biography
that became so popular in succeeding centuries.
So far as the volume as a whole is concerned, Marcuss argument seems
278 J. Martin Evans
to me to be entirely persuasive. As John K. Hale put it in an almost

contemporaneous article on Miltons Self-Presentation in Poems ... 1645,
the editorial acts of selection and grouping and sequential arrangement ...
add up to a major personal statement. They declare, so to speak, This is my
self; these are its powers. 14 But both critics base their arguments almost
exclusively on evidence that resides outside the poems themselves, the order
in which they appear and the external prefaces (In this monody the author
laments) and postscripts (This subject the author nding to be above his
years) that enclose but rarely, if ever, penetrate them. The new historical
subject that Marcus describes presides over the poems like a guardian angel,
but he does not appear inside them. His relationship to the texts themselves
is not unlike that between the portrait of Milton gazing out from the
foreground of Marshalls engraving and the youthful gures cavorting in the
pastoral background, inhabitants of a contiguous but separate world.
The texts of the poems themselves, free of the editorial apparatus that
surrounds them, tell a rather different story, and it is on this story that I
would like to focus. (All quotations are from Merritt Y. Hughes, editor, John
Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose [New York: 1957].) To begin at the
beginning, the rst poem in the 1645 volume, On the Morning of Christs
Nativity, has often been described as a kind of literary epiphany, either
heralding Miltons coming of age as a poet, or, still more egocentrically, using
the occasion of Christs birth to announce his own poetic nativity.15
Attractive as they may be from a purely historical point of viewMilton did
indeed reach the age of twenty one in December of 1629, when he composed
the poem, and he did place it at the front of his volume, ahead of several
earlier worksthese autobiographical readings begin to seem rather less
plausible once we start reading the opening stanzas. For Milton emphatically
disclaims any responsibility for the poem at all. The voice (27) that
welcomes the Christ-child, and the humble ode (24) with which it
celebrates his birth, both belong to the Heavenly Muse (15). No sooner do
we hear Mr. John Milton begin to speak than he abruptly silences himself
and consigns the rest of the poem to a third party, who begins a new poem
in a new verse form. Like the holy song that promises to run back and
fetch the age of gold in stanza fourteen, the authors speech is interrupted
and displaced by a stronger force which takes over the rest of the poem
this must not yet be so (150). It is almost as if Milton had made his entrance
too soon.
The hymn that follows consistently enacts the premise that it is being
sung by the Heavenly Muse, in concert with the angel choir (27), rather
than by the individual who spoke the proem. For the notion that the joyous
news of heavnly infants birth / My muse with Angels did divide to sing, as
Milton put it later,16 is powerfully reinforced by the fact that their song is
simultaneously an ode (24) and a hymn (17), both of which are
essentially choric in nature. As the insistently plural pronouns keep

reminding usour ears, our senses, our fancy, our song (126, 127,
134, 239)we are listening to a choir-poem that harmoniously effaces the
individual.17 indeed, the Nativity Ode is the most rigorously depersonalized
of all the poets nondramatic works, with not a single I, me, or my in
its entire thirty-one stanzas. If Milton ever wrote a poem in which the very
identity of the body writing is lost, as Barthes put it, this surely is it. In one
of the most recent studies of the poem to appear in print, Richard Halpern
argues that by putting off epic expansiveness to dwell in the humble ode
Milton enacts a kenosis or emptying out analogous to Christs decision to
forego heaven and lie meanly wrapt in the rude manger. Miltons kenosis is
even more radical than Halpern recognizes: he has effectively erased himself
from his own poem.18
Having withdrawn at the end of the introduction, he never makes his
presence felt again. One of the most striking features of the Nativity Ode is
the absence of any closing epilogue in which the poet might reassume the
authorial control he gave away in the prologue. The next time we encounter
him is not at the end of the Nativity Ode, as we might have expected, but at
the beginning of The Passion, where he emphatically asserts both his own
presence and his responsibility for the ensuing poem:
For now to sorrow must I tune my song,

And set my Harp to notes of saddest woe.
(89; italics mine)
The disembodied voice we heard in the opening four stanzas of the Nativity
Ode, still speaks to us in the same verse form, but it has now assumed a
concrete physical identity. In both grammatical and existential terms, the
speaker has become a person that we can see as well as hear. Yet despite the
bardic pose he attempts to strike, he looks and sounds like nothing so much
as a nervous young child performing for the rst time in front of an audience
of grown-ups, striving self-consciously to assume the right posture and to
compose his features into the appropriate expression:
Befriend me Night, best Patroness of grief,

Over the Pole thy thickest mantle throw,
And work my atterd fancy to belief,
That Heavn and Earth are colord with my woe;
My sorrows are too dark for day to know:
The leaves should all be black whereon I write,
And letters where my tears have washt, a warmish white.
(2935)
280 J. Martin Evans
In this stanza alone there are six rst person singular pronouns, and the
poem as a whole is so relentlessly self-referential that we can scarcely glimpse
its ostensible subject through the veil of the poets woe (32). In W. R.
Parkers words, Milton was writing a poem about himself writing a
poem.19 The passion that he describes is his own rather than Christs.
After this unsuccessful debut, in the following eight poems the poet
disappears from view almost entirely. With the exception of a eeting
appearance in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, where Milton
writes So have I seen some tender slip / Savd with care from Winters nip
(3536), we dont see him again until LAllegro and Il Penseroso. What is more,
in the rst three of the poems following The Passion, the odes On Time, Upon
the Circumcision, and At a Solemn Music, we hear not the voice of the poet
himself but a communal voice that sounds very much like those of the
Heavenly Muse and the angel choir in the Nativity Ode. For here, too, in
strict accordance with generic decorum, the rst person pronouns are
consistently plural:
For we by rightful doom remediless

Were lost in death, till he that dwelt above
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Emptied his glory, evn to nakedness;
And that great Covnant which we still transgress
Entirely satisd,
And the full wrath beside
Of vengeful justice bore for our excess.
(Upon the Circumcision, 1724; italics mine)
This is the voice of fallen humanity rather than that of John Milton; once
again the individual poet has been submerged in a multiple consciousness
that transcends any specic personal identity.
In a radical change from the Nativity Ode and The Passion, the three
odes are addressed, not to the reader, but to a series of superhuman entities:
to Time, to the angels who celebrated Christs nativity, and to Voice and
Verse. As a result, our relationship to the text is transformed from that of a
direct participant to that of an eavesdropper: we are no longer the recipients
of the speakers utterance but its overhearers, no longer the silent partners in
a potential dialogue but its auditors. And this shift from what we might call
the declarative to the dramatic lyric affects the speaker, too, for it opens up
the possibility that the voice we are listening to belongs not to the poet but
to a dramatis persona, a purely imaginary construct whose thoughts and
feelings do not necessarily correspond to those of the author any more than
the sentiments uttered by a character in a play correspond to those of the
dramatist.20 In the odes this possibility remains largely unexploitedin all
three cases, the feelings the voice expresses and the values it celebrates are
clearly Miltons ownbut as we shall see shortly it has a crucial bearing on
the way we interpret LAllegro and Il Penseroso.
The ve poems that follow the odes revert to the anonymous voice we
last heard in the proem to the Nativity Ode, but in the rst three of them it
is now directed to two quite different audiences, rst to the reader, and then
to the poets subject. In line 47 of Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, for
instance, the poet suddenly stops referring to the dead woman in the third
person and turns to address her directly in the second:
And those Pearls of dew she wears,

Prove to be presaging tears
Which the sad morn had let fall
On her hastning funerall.
Gentle Lady, may thy grave
Peace and quiet ever have;
After this thy travail sore
Sweet rest seize thee evermore. (4350; italics mine)
The same thing happens, albeit less dramatically, in line 5 of Song on May
Morning:
Now the bright morning Star, Days harbinger,

Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The Flowry May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow Cowslip, and the pale Primrose.
Hail bounteous May that dost inspire
Mirth and youth and warm desire! (16, italics mine)
And again in the short tribute to Shakespeare:
What needs my Shakespeare for his honord Bones

The labor of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallowd relics should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What needst thou such weak witness of thy name?
(On Shakespeare, 16; italics mine)
In each case, the sudden change of direction calls attention to the role of the
unidentied speaker by creating a second discursive coordinate by which we
can plot his position in the text. He acquires, as it were, an extra dimension;
we see him both bead-on and in prole.
282 J. Martin Evans
In none of these poems, however, whether they are declarative (like the
two Hobson elegies), dramatic (like the three odes), or both (like the three
works I have just discussed), does the poet appear in person, as he did, so
disastrously, in The Passion. Not until LAllegro and Il Penseroso, which
immediately follow the twin tributes to the university carrier, does he nally
reenter the text, albeit somewhat cautiously. When we rst encounter the
poet in line 37 of LAllegro, for instance, his presence is hedged about by a
condition that has not yet been completely fullled:
And if I give thee honor due,

Mirth, admit me of thy crew. (3738)
For most of the remainder of the poem he is a mere shadow, a generalized

receiver of shifting impressions, in Louis L. Martzs memorable phrase,21
whose participation is implied but never clearly affirmed by the repeated
innitivesto live (39), to hear (41), to come (45)and present
participleslistning (53), walking (57)that describe his various
activities. Indeed, the very process of seeing is described in terms so
depersonalizedStraight mine eye hath caught new pleasures (69)that it
can be narrated in the third rather than the rst person: it measures (70),
it sees (77). And when the speaker, for only the second time, refers to
himself directly in the nal lines, his presence is once again deprived of any
signicant impact by the surrounding conditional:
These delights, if thou canst give,

Mirth, with thee, I mean to live. (15152)
As Dana Brand has noted, the self of LAllegro lacks psychological as well as
physical substance.22
Initially, at least, the speaker in Il Penseroso is far more fully realized.
The walking and listening are now performed by a visible I who not
only receives impressions from without, but also actively addresses and
woos their action.23
Thee Chantress oft the Woods among

I woo to hear thy Even-Song;
And missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven Green,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I hear the far-off Curfew sound,
Over some wide-waterd shore. (6375)
But as the poem continues, this energetic presence becomes increasingly

passive as the mood shifts from indicative to hortativeOr let my lamp at
midnight hour / Be seen (8588), And let some strange mysterious dream
/ Wave at his Wings (14748), But let my due feet never fail / To walk
(15657), There let the pealing organ blow (162)and the speaker
becomes in turn the object rather than the subject of the desired actions
see me (121), me goddess bring (132), Hide me (141), Dissolve me
(165). After the last two requests, for concealment and dissolution,
respectively, it comes as no surprise when the speaker concludes with a
variation of the same self-effacing formula that his mirthful predecessor had
used to bring his address to a close:
These pleasures Melancholy give,

And I with thee will choose to live. (17576)
The consciousness presented in Il Penseroso may be more continuous than

that in LAllegro as Brand has persuasively argued,24 but it is ultimately just
as tentative in its self-assertion.
Which brings us to a question that critics have been debating since the
eighteenth century. Are lallegro and il penseroso, the same man as he is
differently disposed, in Theobalds words, or are they two different people,
as Dr. Johnson appears to have believed?25 To put the question in a slightly
different way, was Milton speaking in his own voice in both poems, or was he
impersonating two quite different ctional characters, neither of whom
represented his personal values and beliefs?26 The external evidence is
thoroughly ambiguous. Whereas the obvious similarities of phraseology and
verse form suggest the rst alternative, the titles themselves argue for the
second. For our purposes, however, it does not really matter how we answer
the question. For whether or not James Holly Hanford is right that there is,
of course, no question of two individuals. LAllegro and Il Penseroso are equally
Milton,27 we are confronted by an authorial presence that has split into two
competing selves. The poetic I we last encountered in The Passion has
become not the kind of unied we who sang the three odes but a radically
divided dual consciousness.
The process of reintegration begins in the rst of the ten sonnets that
follow the two companion poemsWhether the Muse or Love call thee his
mate, / Both them I serve, and of their train am I (1314)but it achieves
its most complete realization in sonnet seven on the poets twenty-third
birthday. This is by far the most deeply personal poem up to this point in the
volume. The nervous schoolboy of The Passion, who attempted
unsuccessfully to treat a topic above the years he had when he wrote it, has
given way to a steadfast young man, fully aware now of the lack of inward
284 J. Martin Evans
ripeness (7) that made the earlier poem a failure and determined to wait
patiently upon the will of heaven. The passiveness that undermined the last
part of Il Penseroso has become wise, as the poet declares that his growth:
shall be still in strictest measure even,

To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heavn.
(1012)
And the conditionality which qualied the self-assertions at the end of both
LAllegro and Il Penseroso has been transformed into a pious recognition of
human dependence upon divine providence:
All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great task Masters eye. (1314)
Yet powerful as it may be in comparison with the poems that preceded it in

the collection, sonnet seven is nally about a self that is still unformed and
unproductive. The poet is near his manhood (6), but he has not yet
arrived. His spring is late and the tree has not yet blossomed. The Author
John Milton is still a work in progress. Indeed, in the very next poem,
sonnet eight, he splits once again into two distinct entities, the condent
speaker issuing a series of orders to the military officer who has captured the
poets homeGuard them, and him within protect from harms (4)and
the silent (though potentially eloquent) occupant on whose behalf the
speaker has intervened as if he were quite literally another human being
He can requite thee (5), he knows (5), he can spread (7). With the
exception of the editorial comment at the end of The Passion, this is the rst
time Milton has referred to himself in the third person. It is almost as if he
had become simultaneously the magisterial reader who announced that the
poems topic was above the years [the author] had when he wrote it and the
youthful writer who actually left it unnished.
After two sonnets addressed to virtuous women and a masque
presented to the countess of Derby, the poet-as-imagined-presence-in-the-
poem makes his nal appearance in the famous elegy that concludes this
section of the volume. Referring to himself once again in the third person,
Milton informs us in the headnote that Lycidas is a monody sung by a single
author, and indeed the poem begins as if it were a species of personal
monologue delivered by an on-screen speaker in the dramatic present:
Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more

Ye Myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude. (13)
But as the authorial voice continues to speak, it gradually begins to shed its
initial identity. The rst hint that we are not in the presence of a stable and
unied self comes in line 56, when the speaker suddenly corrects the
question he has just posed:
Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep

Closd oer the head of your lovd Lycidas?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye been therefor what could that have done? (5057)
As I have noted elsewhere, the second thoughts open up a tiny ssure in the
poets consciousness between the self that interrogated the nymphs and the
self that subsequently realizes the pointlessness of doing so.28 The ssure
widens in line 76, when Phoebus Apollo intervenes to remind the rebellious
poet that true fame is to be found in heaven:
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to nd,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with thabhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise,
Phoebus replid, and touchd my trembling ears. (7377)
The unexpected preterite verbs create a temporal and epistemological gap

between the speaker who revolted against the Muses discipline (6476) and
the speaker who learns to submit himself to the authority of all-judging
Jove (7684).29 The two gures are still the same personPhoebus touches
my trembling ears not hisbut from this point on, his perspective has
been transformed by the revelations of the god of poetry.
What is more, Phoebuss interruptionadvice from a source outside
the speakers consciousnessmomentarily deprives the poet of his authorial
function. He heard these words, and recorded them, but he did not compose
them; for a few lines, the author has disappeared, just as he did at the end
of the proem to the Nativity Ode. The same thing happens on an even larger
scale when the Pilot of the Galilean lake (109) arrives on the scene to
condemn the hireling shepherds and predict the day of judgement. As
Stanley Fish has pointed out in a brilliant analysis of the rst person voice in
Lycidas, this rival speaker completely ignores the grieving swain and
addresses his diatribe not to the poet, as Phoebus Apollo had done, but to the
dead Lycidas.30 Milton has virtually ceased to be a presence in his own poem,
or, to put it slightly differently, he has so completely submerged himself in
the gure of St. Peter that he has left a temporary vacuum in the rhetorical
space he once occupied.
286 J. Martin Evans
By the time he returns to invoke the assistance of Alpheus (132), his

identity has been compromised to such an extent that it has apparently
disintegrated, for, as the plural possessive pronouns imply, the frail
thoughts that dally with false surmise (153) and the moist vows that are
eventually denied (159) belong not to a single but to a multiple personality.
For a few lines, at least, the choric voice we last heard in the ode At a solemn
Music has taken over a poem that began as a monologue. At line 165,
however, the poet suddenly reasserts himself by abruptly silencing the
speakers who had just displaced him:
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead. (16566)
So violent is this reentry that more than one critic has attributed these words
to a completely new character.31 But as the rhythmic and verbal echoes of the
opening line seem to insist, this is the same voice we heard addressing the
laurels and myrtles at the beginning of the elegy. The poem is starting all
over again.
No sooner has the speaker regained control of his authorial role,
however, than he undergoes a still more drastic transformation. Once again
the tense changes from the dramatic present to the narrative past, but this
time the author and the genre of Lycidas change with it:
Thus sang the uncouth swain to thOaks and rills,

While the still morn went out with Sandals gray;
He toucht the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay. (186189)
The historical author bewailing a learned friend has become a ctional

swain, and his Doric lay has become part of a larger meta-narrative, the
existence of which Phoebus Apollos earlier interruption had only hinted at.
Fish describes this phenomenon solely in terms of the speakers
disappearance from the scene of his own poem,32 but there is more involved
here than a disappearance. As the old speaker disappears, the poem acquires
a new author, who begins what is essentially a new poem in a new verse form.
As I have shown elsewhere, the unidentied voice that speaks the nal ottava
rima belongs to a speaker we have never heard before, either in Lycidas or in
the poems preceding it, a speaker who hails from the violent and erotic world
of sixteenth-century romantic epic.33 The elegy and the poet who sang it
fade away into the distance, together with the rest of Miltons youthful
creations, and we are left with the sense that for the second time in this
volume we have witnessed a nativity. A mysterious new self has been born
out of the speakers anguish, but we will have to wait until Tomorrow (193)
before we nd out who he is.
As even this brief analysis may suggest, Lycidas repeats in miniature
most of the evasive maneuvers I have traced in the poems that preceded it.
The shifts back and forth between a single and a multiple consciousness, the
recurring disappearances and reappearances of an authorial persona, the
unexpected changes of direction in the speakers discourse, and the pervasive
impression that these are the words of someone who is not yet too much of
a poet, as Milton put it in the verse letter to John Rouse,34 all combine to
create a poetic presence that is radically unstable, a tentative and hesitant self
whose position is nally usurped by the anonymous gure who invades line
186 of Lycidas. Far from painting a coherent portrait of the artist as Marcus
suggests, or telling the story of a rising poet steadily advancing towards
maturity, as Martz has argued, the constantly shifting forms of poetic
selfhood we encounter in the poems of the 1645 volume call into question
the very possibility of a unied and fully realized poetic consciousness.35
Like Montaignes Essays, the poems read like a series of experiments in self-
presentation, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, sometimes singular,
sometimes plural, sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, but always
inherently provisional in their efforts to construct the poet-as-imagined-
presence-in-the-poem. As the Virgilian motto on the title page seems to
imply, Milton is still only a future bard.
II. P A R A D I S E L O S T
A seventeenth-century reader familiar with The Poems of Mr John Milton

might well have expected to encounter a rather more fully developed and
mature authorial persona when he began to read Paradise Lost. A Poem
Written in Ten Books By John Milton (or J. M.) some twenty-two years later.
This expectation would be sadly disappointed, at least in the opening lines.
For the self-condent epic narrator who expelled the swain in the nal ottava
rima of Lycidas has disappeared, along with the verse form in which he spoke.
In his place we are confronted with a speaker who has adopted the verse form
associated with the one genre in which the gure of the author normally
plays no role whatsoever: drama. What is more, this speaker almost
immediately excludes himself from the poem he has just begun:
Of Mans First Disobedience and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,... (1.15)
288 J. Martin Evans
At this point of the epics opening sentence, as Janet Adelman has observed,
anyone with the slightest knowledge of either classical or Renaissance epic
would have expected the next line to begin I sing.36 Instead, the
unidentied voice invites an external force to assume the narrative burden:
Sing heavenly Muse (1.6). As in the proem to the Nativity Ode, a self-
effacing speaker has consigned the rest of the poem to a third party.
In this case, however, the poets abdication is less clear-cut, for shortly
afterwards he relegates the Muse to the role of assistant in an enterprise in
which he is still the prime mover:
I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle ight intends to soar
Above thAonian Mount
. . . . . . . .
Instruct me
. . . . . . . .
What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. (1.1226)
In the Nativity Ode the Heavenly Muse was asked to present thy humble
ode (24) to the infant Christ-child. Here she is only invoked as an aid to my
adventurous song. The burden of authorial responsibility has shifted
signicantly. Not for very long, though. Just two lines later the speaker once
again surrenders control of the poem to the Muse as he urges her not only
to assist him but also to take over the role of narrator herself:
Say rst, for Heavn hides nothing from thy view,

Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say rst what cause
Movd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favord of Heavn so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator
. . . . . . . .
Who rst seducd them to that foul revolt? (1.2733)
Strictly speaking, everything that follows is an answer to that question,

provided by the poets divine informant.37 Hence the repeated references to
Men, in lines 685 and 740 of Book One and in lines 49697 of Book Two;
the voice that describes human folly and corruption in these passages clearly
belongs to a higher order of being than the human.
The authorial persona here behaves in much the same way as the gure
of the poet in the 1645 edition, continually vacillating between self-erasure
and self-assertion as he struggles to nd a place for himself in his own text.
But as Paradise Lost continues, the speaker gradually begins to assume a
rather more stable poetic identity. In the proem to Book Three, for instance,
we learn that he himself has voyaged with Satan to the shores of hell and back
again:
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,

Escapt the Stygian Pool, though long detaind
In that obscure sojourn, while in my ight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes than to th Orphean Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heavnly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare, thee I revisit safe. (3.1321)
The Muse has served as his Sibyl, guiding him through the underworld, but
both the infernal experiences and the words that have described them have
been his, not hers. And from this point on the narrator writes consistently as
if he has been physically present in the various locales he portrays. In the
prologue to Book Seven we learn that the Muse has conducted him up to the
heaven of heavens where he has drawn Empyreal Air (7.14) and then back
to earth, his Native Element (7.16), where:
More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchangd

To hoarse or mute, though falln on evil days,
On evil days though falln, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compast round
And solitude. (7.2428)
A second-hand third-person narrative has turned into a rst-hand rst-

person account of a story in which the poet is himself involved,38 and in
which he turns from the reader to address his characters directly just as he
had done in the elegies for Shakespeare and the Marchioness of Winchester:
These lulld by Nightingales imbracing slept,

And on thir naked limbs the owry roof
Showrd Roses, which the Morn repaird. Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
(4.77175; italics mine)39
290 J. Martin Evans
The Author John Milton has nally taken charge of his own poem, with
the result that in the prologue to Book Nine he no longer prays directly to
the Muse, as he had in the prologues to Books One, Three, and Seven, but
delivers a literary manifesto to his readers:
No more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar usd
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblamd: I now must change
Those Notes to Tragic. (9.16)
He acknowledges his Celestial Patroness (9.21), but in the third person,

and no longer does he ask her for further information. Now the story
resumes on its own, without the customary act of interrogation: The Sun
was sunk, and after him the Star (9.48).40 By Book Ten, the mortal voice
that began the poem so diffidently has acquired almost superhuman
authority, scolding the fallen pair for their forgetfulness and bullying the
reader with strident rhetorical questions:
For still they knew, and ought to have still rememberd

The high Injunction not to taste that Fruit,
Whoever tempted; which they not obeying,
Incurrd, what could they less, the penalty,
And manifold in sin, deservd to fall. (10.1216)
The poet has begun to sound like his Muse.
III. P A R A D I S E R E G A I N E D
Four years later the evolution of Miltons literary persona reaches its climax
in the opening lines of Paradise Regained:
I who erewhile the happy Garden sung

By one mans disobedience lost, now sing
Recoverd Paradise to all mankind,
By one mans rm obedience fully tried. (1.14)
Here for the rst (and last) time in Miltons poetic career is a full-blooded
authorial presence, a self-assertive I who takes immediate responsibility
not only for the poem we are about to read but for the great poem that
preceded it as well. Shortly afterwards, to be sure, he pays tribute to the
Muses inspiring power. But even though his song may be prompted, it is
unequivocally my song (12). Unlike his previous incarnations, this speaker
is in total control of the poem from the very beginning, freely editorializing
in his own personAlas how simple, to these cates compard, / Was that
crude apple that diverted Eve (2.34849)41and on at least one occasion
turning his back on the reader in order to relate part of the story to the
character who actually lived it:
ill wast thou shrouded then,

O patient Son of God, yet only stoodst
Unshaken; nor yet stayd the terror there.
Infernal Ghosts, and Hellish Furies, round
Environd thee, some howld, some yelld, some shriekd,
Some bent at thee thir ery darts, while thou
Sattst unappalld in calm and sinless peace. (4.41925)
It is an extraordinary moment. For a few lines, at least, we are completely

excluded from the narrative scene while the poet engages in a private act of
reminiscence with his hero. The rhetorical device that gave an extra
dimension to the speaker in the elegies on Shakespeare and the Marchioness
of Winchester has been enlisted in the service of a narrator so powerful that
he can turn his protagonist into his audience. The birth of the author is
nally complete.
In Miltons literary career, Stanley Fish wrote, the poets erce egoism
is but one half of the story.42 The other half, I have suggested, is a long,
drawn out process of somewhat tentative experimentation which produced
an authentic and fully integrated poetic self only after a lifetime of false
starts, unexpected retreats, and detours into passivity and plurality. The
slowly evolving gure whose various twists and turns, entries and exits,
divisions and unications I have traced was anything but the self-condent
patriarch we have recently been taught to discern in his poetry. The Author
John Milton took a long time to be born.
NOTES
1. David Masson, The Life of John Milton (Gloucester, Mass., 1965), vol. 3, 459.
The relationship between the portrait and the Greek text underneath it has been the
subject of a good deal of critical attention in recent years. See, in particular, John
Hale, Miltons Self Presentation in Poems ... 1645, MQ 25 (1991): 3748; Leah
Marcus, Milton as Historical Subject, MQ 25 (1991): 12027; Gary Spear,
Reading before the Lines: Typography, Iconography, and the Author in Miltons
1645 Frontispiece, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance
English Text Society, 19851991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), 18794;
292 J. Martin Evans
and Randall Ingram, The Writing Poet: The Descent from Song in The Poems of Mr.
John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), in Milton Studies 34, ed. Albert C.
Labriola (Pittsburgh, 1996), 17997.
2. I do not treat either Miltons translations or his dramatic works, because, of
course, for these texts, questions of authorial presence would be irrelevant. For
reasons of length I omit any consideration of his poems in languages other than
English.
3. Introduction to Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams, The Author in His
Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism (New Haven, 1978), x.
4. Michel Foucault, What Is an Author, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V Harari (Ithaca, 1979), 148.
5. C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy (Oxford, 1965), 910.
6. Robert McMahon, The Two Poets of Paradise Lost (Baton Rouge, 1998),
especially the introduction and chapter 5.
7. See Robert M. Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge,
1965), ch. 2.
8. Janet Adelman, Creation and the Place of the Poet in Paradise Lost, in The
Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, ed. Louis L. Martz and Aubrey
Williams (New Haven, 1978), 65, n. 4. Cf. Annabel Pattersons comment in the
introduction to John Milton (London, 1992): Yet the fact remains that anyone
reading Paradise Lost ... runs up against the irreducible and insistent presence of
Milton the author, presence, Milton and author all, of course, being subject to our
inference that Milton was (carefully or anxiously) constructing them for us and for
himself (7).
9. Foucault, What Is an Author? 143.
10. Marcus, Milton as Historical Subject, 120.
11. Herbert J. Phelan, What Is the Persona Doing in LAllegro and Il Penseroso?
in Milton Studies 22, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh, 1986), 319.
12. A rather different pattern might emerge if the poems were treated in the
order in which Milton actually wrote them, and if my interests were psychological
and biographical that would no doubt be the appropriate way to proceed. My concern
here, however, is with the way in which Milton presented his authorial persona to his
readers, and for that reason I have focused on the poems as they appeared in print in
the seventeenth century. As Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy put it many
years ago, from the viewpoint of literary history there are clear reasons for
preserving and emphasizing [the 1645 edition] as a volume in its own right, keeping
the arrangement which Milton himself made (Poems of Mr John Milton: The 1649
Edition with Essays in Analysis [New York, 1951]), vi.
13. Marcus, Milton as Historical Subject, 121, 124.
14. Hale, Miltons Self-Presentation, 41.
15. Richard Halpern, The Great Instauration: Imaginary Narratives in Miltons
Nativity Ode, in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary
Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York, 1987), 6. See also C. W. R. D.
Moseley, The Poetic Birth: Miltons Poems of 1645 (Aldershot, U.K. 1991), 97114.
16. The Passion, lines 34.

17. Paul H. Fry, The Poets Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, 1980), 44. 18.
The Great Instauration, 4.
19. W.R. Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1968), vol. I, 72.
20. It is theoretically possible, of course, that the voice in a declarative poem
belongs to a persona rather than to the author, as I have argued it does in the hymn
in the Nativity Ode. The sentiments of the Heavnly Muse correspond so closely to
Miltons, however, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish them from each
other.
21. Louis L. Martz, The Rising Poet, in Poet of Exile: A Study of Miltons Poetry
(New Haven, 1980), 47. Cf. Dana Brands observation that Everything appears as a
pure, spontaneous experience, not as an experience had by a self-conscious
observer (Self-Construction and Self-Dissolution in LAllegro and Il Penseroso,
MQ 15 [1981]: 117).
22. Brand, Self-Construction and Self-Dissolution, 11619.
23. Martz, The Rising Poet, 48.
24. Brand, Self-Construction and Self-Dissolution, 11619.
25. Lives of the English Poets, ed. by George B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), vol. I,
16567.
26. The recurrent use of the term persona in recent discussions of the two
poems suggests that the latter alternative has come to dominate critical thinking
about them.
27. James Holly Hanford, The Youth of Milton: An Interpretation of His Early
Development, in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne (New York, 1925),
13133.
28. J. Martin Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Backwards in Lycidas (Victoria,
1983), 68.
29. John Crowe Ransom originally called attention to this anomaly in his essay
A Poem Nearly Anonymous, in The American Review 1 (1933), 179203, 444467.
30. Stanley Fish, Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous, Glyph 8 (1981): 12.
31. In The Dread Voice in Lycidas, in Milton Studies 9, ed. James D. Simmonds
(Pittsburgh, 1976), 238, W. B. Madsen argues that they are spoken by the archangel
Michael whose protective powers the shepherds had invoked in lines 16264. Fish,
too, believes that these are entirely new accents spoken by an entirely new voice
(Lycidas, 14), but he does not attribute them to Saint Michael.
32. Fish concludes that Lycidas is a poem that relentlessly denies the privilege of
the speaking subject ... and is nally, and triumphantly, anonymous (Lycidas, 16).
33. See Evans, The Road from Horton, 7172.
34. Ad Ioannem Rousium, line 6.
35. In a trenchant critique of Martzs argument, Randall Ingram points out that,
in order to read the 1645 volume as a narrative of poetic development, Martz is forced
294 J. Martin Evans
to discuss the poems themselves in reverse order, concluding rather than beginning
with the Nativity Ode. See The Writing Poet, 192.
36. Adelman, Creation and the Place of the Poet in Paradise Lost, 58.
37. The poet makes a brief reappearance in Book One, 376, to renew his
questions; Say Muse, thir Names then known, who rst, who last; / Rousd from the
slumber? The Muse replies in line 381ff.
38. Stanley Fish notes that the announcement I sing is in marked contrast to
the more deferential yielding of agency in the invocation to Book I (With Mortal
Voice: Milton Defends against the Muse, ELH 62 [1995]: 518).
39. In Book Nine, 404407, the narrator intervenes again: O much deceivd,
much failing, hapless Eve, / Of thy presumd return! event perverse! On neither
occasion, however, can Adam and Eve actually hear him.
40. Adelman contends that the prologue to Book Nine contains both the
strongest statement of the muses aid and the strongest statement of Miltons doubt
of the muses aid and that this radical combination of self-assertion and self-denial
is characteristic of Miltons stance throughout the poem (Creation and the Place
of the Poet in Paradise Lost, 57). It seems to me, rather, that as the poem continues,
the self-assertions become progressively stronger and the self-denials progressively
weaker, and that the prologue to Book Nine marks a key moment in this process.
41. See also Book Two, 264, 295; Book Three, 443; and Book Four, 67, 56364.
42. Fish, Lycidas, 17.
S TA N L E Y F I S H
Gently Raised
S E M B L A N C E N O T S U B S TA N C E
I t may have seemed that in stressing the indeterminacy and

indecipherability of Samson Agonistes I have moved far beyond the simple
picture of a Milton who rests condently in his knowledge of the truth and
in his ability easily to discern the one obligation that it would be death to
slight. But I intend no retreat from that picture, and if I complicate it I do so
only to foreground a difficulty present in it from the beginning. Discerning
the one true obligation is easy; it is the obligation to do Gods will. The
difficulty is to determine which of the many courses of possible action is the
appropriate location and fulllment of that obligation. Given the multiple
paths available to us as fallen men and women, how does one decide which
of them to choose? Milton cannot give us an answer to that question
cannot give us a formula or a set of criteriabecause by interiorizing the
landscape of choice, he has detached it from the realm of empirical evidence
and set us on a journey much like that of Abraham, who, in response to Gods
call, went out not knowing whither he went. The result is a life like Samsons,
made up in equal parts of certainty (My trust is in the living God [1140])
and radical hazard (I with this Messenger will go along [1384]). At times in
his prose and poetry Milton emphasizes the certainty; at other times he
confronts us with the hazard; but in either mood, the basic imperative he
From How Milton Works. 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
295
296 Stanley Fish
urges is the same: refuse external guides and work from the inside out. The
unpacking and exfoliation of this imperative has been the single aim of this
book from the outset, and here, in the concluding section, I return to it yet
again, beginning as I did in Chapter 1 with a single word.
More than sixty-ve years ago, F. R. Leavis charged Milton with two
crimes of which he has never been, and should not be, acquitted. The rst
charge is that his style does not sufficiently register the diversity and
complexity of human life, especially in comparison with the styles of Donne
and Shakespeare. The second charge is that he has an excess of character, by
which Leavis means that he is disastrously single-minded and simple
minded, ... reveal[ing] everywhere a dominating sense of righteousness and a
complete incapacity to question or explore its signicance and conditions.1
(This is the same charge leveled more recently at Milton by some New
Historicists and feminists.) The two charges t together perfectly: it is
because he is single-minded, and self-righteously so, that his style admits
variety only in order to either banish or condemn it. The result is something
akin to claustrophobia, and it is described by Leavis in terms that are justly
famous: In this Grand Style, the medium calls pervasively for a kind of
attention, compels an attitude toward itself, that is incompatible with sharp,
concrete realization; just as it would seem to be, in the mind of the poet,
incompatible with an interest in sensuous particularity. He exhibits a feeling
for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words (2122). That is,
Miltons language does not direct us to a referent outside itself, but, rather,
traps us within its own confines, demanding that we attend to the
connections it is itself forging; the reality of the medium privileges itself over
any reality that we might think prior to it. It is, in short, a jealous medium,
saying: Thou shalt not accept any truths I do not offer you. The experience
of reading such verse (or, more precisely, of being read by it) is, says Leavis,
like combat, a matter of resisting, of standing up against, the verse-
movement ... and in the end our resistance is worn down (16). Leavis names
this effect tyrannical stylization and says that it forbids (23), says no,
again and again, in thunder. Milton, he concludes, offers ... for our worship
mere brute assertive will (28); that will, which nds expression in the style,
has its origin rst in the will of the poet (I, John Milton, thus manipulate
you) and second (that is, nally, ultimately) in the will of God (I am the
Lord thy God). As J. B. Broadbent, another Cambridge Miltonist, put it,
Miltons learned vocabulary, with its demand for conscious construing and
his distant perspectives, represents the authoritative unintelligibility of the
parents speech as heard by a child.2
It is not my intention to dispute this judgment; instead I would expand
on it and turn it, perhaps, to Miltons advantage, and I will begin with a
passage from Paradise Lost that illustrates much of what Leavis and
Gently Raised 297
Broadbent have to say. In book I, Satan stands before the host he has roused
from its slumber on the ery lake:
he his wonted pride

Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore
Semblance of worth, not substance, gently raisd
Thir fainting courage.3
The key word here is raisd, a unit of sound that can bear several meanings;
in this case the relevant homonyms point in opposite semantic directions:
raisd, in the sense of elevated or honored, versus razedthat is,
destroyed, made into nothingwhich is itself closely allied to rasd, as in
erased or wiped clear of marks. Milton is always alert to the possibilities of
such puns, and this is in part what Leavis means when he speaks of the poets
feeling for words rather than through words. The self-consciousness of
Miltons feeling for this word cannot be doubted; one need only recall Satan
exalted sat, by merit raisd / To that bad eminence (PL, II, 56), where the
positive homonym is reinforced by exalted only to be undercut by bad,
which at the same time activates its negative opposite.
In both instances the wordplay is more than just that: it compels us to
acts of cognitive reection on crucial moral and philosophical issues; for
what the two readings of raisd alert us to is the equivocal nature of the
action we are being asked to visualize. What Satan is doing, after all, is
further encouraging his fellows in their rebellion against God; and in a
universe in which identity depends on ones relation to godhead, to be
alienated from deity is no longer to be, to be destroyed, to be razed. Once we
see this (as I believe Milton intends us to), we see also that the adverb
gently is precisely inappropriate, for gentleness and destruction are simply
antithetical. Indeed, the point is even deeper: since gentleness is a positive
virtue, and virtues cannot exist apart from the good of which they are the
extension, an agent who has broken union with God (the source and very
denition of the good) cannot possibly be acting virtuously, cannot be gentle
(or courageous, or compassionate, or trustworthy, or anything else, for that
matter). It becomes difficult to tell even what gently means here, or if it
means anything; the one thing it cannot mean is gently; at the very most, the
word refers to some surface features of Satans physical behavior; he may be
speaking in a low voice or extending his hands in a sympathetic or consoling
gesture; but beneath that gesture, that surface, is nothing, a hollow core.
This, in fact, is just what the verse says about gently even before the
word appears. Semblance of worth, not substance is a judgment that
anticipates the judgment we will make on gently once we are moved to
reect on the adverb by the pun in raisd. The effect is a complicated and
subtle one, and must be described carefully. As we rst encounter it, the
298 Stanley Fish
compound phrase Semblance of worth, not substance is read as referring

to the high words Satan will soon utter; but we never hear them, and the
energy of our anticipation is absorbed by gently, which, as we nally come
to understand it, is itself a high (lofty, honoric) word signifying nothing,
a mere verbal semblance that is unattached to any substance. Here is a prime
instance of what Leavis describes as the tendency of Miltons language to
value itself (26); rather than directing us to the world of concrete experience,
the words direct us to the experience of themselves, asking us to shuttle
backward and forward between locations that have a merely textual existence:
Raisd is a comment on gently, which is then seen to be glossed
(proleptically) by semblance of worth, not substance (two words not
sufficiently unalike), which is itself a retroactive gloss on high words, which
nds its true (and wholly textual) referent in gently raisd.
Self-reexive is almost too weak a word for this sequence, or rather
nonsequence; for one part of the effect is to retard forward movement, to
prevent us from going in a straight line and therefore from following a line
of story. Once the ambiguity of raisd is registered, there are at least two
stories occupying the same linguistic space, one in which a skilled and
empathetic leader rallies his weary troops (in the manner of Shakespeares
Henry V) and another in which a malevolent force (indeed, the malevolent
force) wreaks further havoc on those he has already led astray. Since one
cannot decide between the stories except on the basis of evidence provided
by one or the other of them, the readers efforts to make narrative sense of
what he or she is processing are frustrated. Moreover, this rupture of
narrative continuity is intensied by the fact that in response to the demand
of the verse the reader moves backward, stopped in his or her tracks by
raisd and then provoked to retrace steps that now point in different and
multiple directions.
This feature of the verses experience is answerable to the criticism of
still another British Miltonist. In a well-known essay, Donald Davie
complains that Miltons elaborate syntax is employed characteristically to
check narrative impetus.4 Most narratives, Davie observes, are built on the
recognition, by poet and reader alike, that language and therefore the arts of
language operate through and over spans of time, in terms of successive
events, each new sentence a new small action with its own sometimes
complicated plot (74); but in Miltons poem, the story, the narrative, is only
a convenient skeleton; its function is to provoke interesting and important
speculative questions (76). This seems exactly right, and for reasons that
Davie never quite tumbles to: the speculative questions the verse provokes
are not questions of the kind Davie nds slighted, questions like What
happened next? or This happenedyes, to whom? (76); rather, they are
questions that refer us to events that know no particular time and to issues
that are relevant not to a moment of suspense but to every moment, questions
Gently Raised 299
like: To what or to whom are you loyal? In what or whom do you

believe? How do you decide what is right? How is the universe
structured?
It is not merely that such questions are larger and more inclusive than
those raised in the course of a forward-leaning narrative that explores cause
and effect on the micro-level of quotidian experience; it is also that these
larger questions are obscured and overwhelmed if narrative considerations
are allowed to occupy the foreground of attention. The fact that Milton
often deploys his plot, the action of his story, in such a way as to frustrate
our interest in it (Davie, 83) points to a strategy by means of which the poet
would alert us to the dangers of what I have called plot-thinking, that form
of thinking which refers issues to the conguration of some accidental
convergence of opportunity, exigency, and crisis, rather than to the essential
and abiding configurations of a world presided over by an eternal,
omniscient, and benevolent deity. The question of whether Satan is gentle
cannot, Milton would tell us, be settled by examining the empirical
evidenceby looking, for example, at the present distress of his cohorts and
assessing his efforts to comfort them; rather, we must look at Satans
underlying relationship to the value that founds and grounds the universe,
and reason (if that is the word) from that relationship to the meaning of what
heor someone like him, someone who has broken uniondoes, no
matter what the particular circumstances of his doing it.
In plot-thinking, one proceeds from the observable features of local
contexts (who is doing what to whom, and for what apparent reasons) to the
drawing of general conclusions; in antiplot or antinarrative thinking, one
proceeds from general conclusions already assumed to the features of local
contexts. In one kind of thinking, the visible and measurable world gives us
our answers; in the other, answers antecedently derived and tenaciously
adhered to give us the visible world. When Milton rst provokes and then
frustrates our narrative desires and expectations in the manner described by
Davie, he is doing so in order to protect us from the limited perspectives that
time urges on us in succession (perspectival limitation is, in fact, a denition
of the temporal realm); and if this is in fact Miltons strategy, Leavis
strictures become less damaging. Although it remains true that the verse is
preoccupied with valuing itself, it is at the same time de-valuing itself, for it
is no less a temporal and corporeal medium than the mediums from which it
would wean us. If the answers to the great questions of life do not reside in
appearances thrown up by the shifting panorama of the visible world, neither
do they reside (in the sense of being embedded) in the formal features of a
poem, even of Miltons poem.
Where, then, do they reside? The answer is inevitable, given the
strongly antinomian cast of Miltons thinking. They reside in us, in each
reader who is asked to decide among the different scenarios projected by the
300 Stanley Fish
multiple meanings of raisd. The decision is not made for us; for even
though we are alerted to those meanings, nothing in the verse compels us to
choose any one of them. It is certainly true that in a God-centered universe,
a universe in which no value can exist apart from a commitment to deity,
gentleness is a virtue Satan cannot claim; but the thesis of a universe so
radically homogeneous is just thata thesis, a proposition; its truth is not
self-evident and universally compelling. Indeed, if it were, Satan himself
would not havecould not havethought himself into a state of rebellion.
That state, of imagining a place not yet occupied by the Omnic Word
(PL, VII, 217) is a possibility for anyone who (and I mean this literally) sets
his or her mind to it. The crucial act is an act of the will, the act of a
consciousness that must choose the story it is going to tell about itself, and,
in telling, constitute the self so told. The reader who moves from the
experience of raisd to a rejection of the claim made in gently will be
performing an act that not only structures (or rather unstructures) the
narrative, but structures the mode of perception, the way of seeing, that will
henceforth inform subsequent acts of reading; and the reader who grants
even the slightest share of gentleness to Satan will have fashioned quite
another narrative and quite another reading self. Again, nothing in the verse
necessarily tips the balance; one can go as easily in one direction as the
other.5
TELLING THE DIFFERENCE
Both the ease and the extraordinary difficulty of which it is the ip side are
on display in a single line, also from book I: And Devils to adore for Deities
(373). The line precedes the roll call of the fallen angels and follows the
narrators account of their having been blotted out and rasd / By thir
Rebellion, from the Books of Life (362363). Now their fame depends on
those whom they corrupted to forsake / God thir Creator (368369), those
who were induced to worship devils rather than deities. The tone is one of
incredulity: How could anyone be so stupid? How could anyone fail to tell
the difference between devils and deities? But even as the line implies these
questions, it answers them by blurring the difference it proclaims as obvious.
The supposed great opposites are linked together by alliteration, assonance,
and nal consonant; and these two verbal mirror images themselves frame an
internal duplication in the nearly identical sounds of adore and for. The
entire line breathes sameness at the same time that it insists on the
perspicuousness of a distinction.
What then is the line saying? The question is itself another form of the
question that provokes it: just as the line says both that devils and deities are
easily distinguishable and that they are not, so does it provide no sure way of
Gently Raised 301
determining which of these assertions it is really making. That is, the line
disclaims responsibility for delivering its own meaning and transfers it to
what the reader does or does not bring to its experience. The lesson is the
same one taught by gently raisd: the true signicance of an action or an
event or a text does not lie on its surface, waiting to be read off; rather,
signicance is conferredread inby the participant or observer, whose
vision does not passively receive phenomena but gives them their shape.
When Abdiel says of Satan and his cohorts, I see thy fall / Determind (V,
878879), he is not claiming a special insight into Gods future plans; it is just
that within the assumptions he holds (in fact they hold him) about the nature
of God and of the universe that God informs, the fate of the rebelscut off
willfully from the worlds only source of energyis a forgone conclusion.
Abdiel has no difficulty at all telling the difference between devils and deities,
not because they wear these labels on their respective faces, but because by
his lightsthe light of the beliefs that structure his perception and therefore
structure what there is to be seenthe labels literally apply themselves
(the things themselves conclude it).6 On the other side, Satan is himself no
less an extension of a set of beliefs, of assumptions that deliver to him a
landscape complete with distinctions and basic categories. He too can tell the
difference between devils and deities, but he tells it differently. He knows a
tyrant when he sees one, and because he knows a tyrant, he knows that the
struggle against tyranny will be an uphill one and that one must never give
up trying (courage never to submit or yield; And if one day, why not
Eternal days? [PL, VI, 424]). Telling the difference, then, is not an activity
in which one simply recognizes from the position of an observer distinctions
already in place, but an activity in which the distinctions one sees are
constituted by ones ways of seeing, by what is inside one. Telling the
difference should be understood in the strong sense of telling, as
stipulating the difference rather than merely noting it.
In that strong sense, telling the difference is for Milton the chief and
only form of action. Whereas in plot-thinking action has as many forms as
there are worldly circumstances (has therefore an innite number of forms),
in Miltons world circumstances are but the raw and ambiguous material
offered up by time for conguring by an inward disposition. What is
important on any occasion is not how things have turned out (as a historian
might determine it), but whether or not ones inner loyalties have been
maintained and strengthened. Success is measured not by the battles you
have won or books you have written, but by the strength of your testimony,
by the witness you give to what you believe. As we saw in Chapter 2, for
Milton the moral life is an endless succession of occasions for giving witness,
for testifying. That is why he declares in Areopagitica that what he is about to
write will be a certaine testimony, if not a Trophey;7 whether or not the
tract succeeds in its persuasive efforts and wins the day, it will already have
302 Stanley Fish
succeeded as an outward manifestation of Miltons inner commitment. Later,

in quite another mood, he attempts to dissuade his countrymen from
choosing them a captain back to Egypt, and while he knows how little chance
he has of success he nevertheless persists because he must say what is in his
heart, even though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and
stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to
tell the very soil it self what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to.8 In the
same period he proposes a reform in the nancing of church ministers, and
he does so with a similar lack of condence in the empirical results of his
efforts. If I be not heard nor beleevd, the event will bear me witnes to have
spoken truth; and I in the mean while have borne my witnes not out of season
to the church and to my countrey.9 The phrase out of season is a
(Miltonic) joke: any season is the season for bearing witness to truth, even if
the truth borne witness to is received as unseasonable by those to whom it is
directed. In The Reason of Church Government Milton identies with Jeremiah
as one whose inner promptings will not allow him to keep silent, no matter
how disagreeable or unhappy the event: when God commands to take the
trumpet and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in mans will what
he shall say or what he shall conceal.10 The man who resists the command
will nd himself reproached on the Day of Judgment for not having been
among the true servants that stood up in [the churchs] defence (805). In
Paradise Lost God himself praises Abdiel, who hast borne: for the
testimony of Truth hast borne / Universal reproach (VI, 3334), a stance
later assumed by Noah when, in response to the civil Broils of his people,
he of thir doings great dislike declard, / And testied against thir ways (XI,
718, 720721).
In each of these textual moments a voice testies to its ownership by
another, and the radical nature of the act is recognized even by Comus, in
words we have several times revisited:
Can any mortal mixture of Earths mold

Breathe such Divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hiddn residence.11
Here the aesthetic of testimony is displayed in both its positive and negative
aspects. The doctrine is positive in that it allies the testier with deity
(something holy) against the pressures of mere temporal (plot-centered)
appearances; it is negative in that the testier is so subordinate to the
something holy of which she is the residence that she, as a separate
individual, scarcely exists. Of course these are not really two separate poles,
but differing perspectives on the same conditionthe condition of being an
Gently Raised 303
incorporate member of Gods body; nevertheless the two perspectives are

real and correspond to the different relationships you can have to the notion
of an all-powerful God: you can affirm it joyfully, as the loyal angels do at a
number of moments, or you can murmur at it, experiencing it not as a
glorious promise but as an unbearable threat.
The one thing you cannot do is escape it, for there is nowhere to go.
This limitation on a creatures maneuverability follows from Miltons
monism, and the key formulation is to be found in the seventh book of the
Christian Doctrine. The subject is Of the Creation, and Miltons purpose is
to protect God from an account of creation in which either the matter of
creation preexists Him (for then he would not be God, but would be
secondary to the material he employs) or he creates matter out of nothing
(because it was necessary that something should have existed previously, so
that it could be acted upon by his supremely powerful active efficacy).12
There remains only this solution, concludes Milton, namely, that all
things came from God. Moreover, although there are ... as everyone
knows, four kinds of causes, efficient, material, formal and nal. Since God
is the rst, absolute and sole cause of all things, he unquestionably contains
and comprehends within himself all these causes (307308). That is, do not
imagine that there is any place where God is not, any effect that has a cause
other than him. The Latin word that is translated as comprehend is
complectatur, which means to encircle, to surround, to encloseall
verbs that bring home the point: there is no way out, God is on all sides, you
are inside him even when you think to contemplate him or oppose him
(Who can impair thee, mighty King? [PL, VII, 608]). This is containment
in the strongest possible sensenot an action directed at some recalcitrant
other, but a prior action (of creation) so total and preempting that no other
is ever allowed to exist.
This, after all, is what monism means: there is only one; variety is only
a surface phenomenon beneath which there is a single unchanging substance;
the many forms in which deity expresses itself reduce nally to one; in short,
there is nothing that is different. To be sure, the world will display the
appearance of difference, and that appearance will often be alluring, but in
the end it will always be countered and dissolved by the revelation of absolute
power, as it is in this sentence from the same chapter: It is, I say, a
demonstration of Gods supreme power and goodness that he should not
shut up this heterogeneous and substantial virtue within himself, but should
disperse, propagate and extend it as far as, and in whatever way, he wills
(Christian Doctrine, 308). The heterogeneity exists only in the cul-de-sac of
the sentences middle, hemmed in on one side by Gods power and on the
other by his will. The effect is even stronger in the Latin, where the world
translated as heterogeneous is omnimodam, which, while it means of
several kinds, has as its base omnithat is, all or wholly; the word itself
304 Stanley Fish
at once proclaims and denies diversity. Gods virtue is dispersed only so that
it can be called back to its origin, so that it can more strongly testify to its
containment.
This is in fact exactly the plan of creation, the production by God of
creatures whose every movement will redound to his glory. The account in
book VII of the creation of man makes just that point, and in a way that
mimes the power it celebrates. Man, says Raphael, is to be the Master work
(PL, 505), and while it seems for a moment that it will be mans work to be
master (endud / With Sanctity of Reason he shall Govern the rest
[507508, 510]), the point of his mastery will be to acknowledge its source in
the true Master: But grateful to acknowledge whence his good / Descends
(512513). Directed in Devotion, he will take it as his chief business to
adore / And worship God Supreme who made him chief / Of all his works
(514516). Technically the pronoun reference of his is ambiguous, but we
understand it immediately as Gods possessive which reaches backward to
include the work (of being chief) that man will supposedly be doing.
In the lines that follow, the prevenience of God, his prior occupation
of all realms and states that might appear to indicate freedom and genuine
difference, is insisted upon (one might say hammered home) again and again.
Here, for example, is Gods charge to mankind: Be fruitful, multiply, and ll
the Earth, / Subdue it (531532). At rst the command to multiply suggests
that God wishes the world to be diversely populated, but then the verb
Subdue reveals that diversity will not really be tolerated. A few lines later
the pattern is repeated: rst the promise of varietyAdam is given all sorts
... all th Earth yields, / Variety without end (541542)and then the
qualication that (quite literally) takes everything back: but of the Tree /
Which tasted works knowledge of Good and Evil, / Thou mayst not
(542544). The variety is always and already reined in by an interdiction
whose pressure is always being felt, even when the unfallen pair is on
holiday; the freedom they supposedly enjoy is bounded by a reference point
provided by another. In short, they enjoy it only by leave; no matter how
wide their choices seem, they live in a condition of constraint. They may be
Lords of the World except for one restraint (I, 32), but that restraint
casts its shadow over everything. The angelic chorus that greets the great
Creator sings the message, lest any reader miss it: anyone who would from
thee withdraw or seek To lessen thee, against his purpose serves / To
manifest the more thy might (VII, 612, 614615). The account of creation
ends with one more rehearsal of mans expansive yet straitened situation:
dwell / And worship him, and in reward to rule / Over his Works, on Earth,
in Sea, or Air, / And multiply a Race of Worshippers (627630). As before,
mans rule is hedged in on either side by the power that permits and that, by
permitting, negates it; the price of rule is worship, the acknowledgment that
the right of rule belongs to another. Line 630 says it all: multiplication (of
Gently Raised 305
difference) is allowed, even enjoined, but only if its product is more of the
same, an endless replication of the image imprinted on every living thing, a
succession of acolytes to dance and sing before the throne of the Lord.
DIFFERENCE AND WRITING
Paradise Lost is full of moments like these, moments that reassert the power
of omnipotence, moments that slam the door shut on those differences that
would, if they were allowed a genuine existence, threaten the homogeneity
of a monistic universe. Such moments can be brutal, as when Gods dreadful
chariot simply rolls over the would-be rebels, or softly indirect, as when
Raphael mildly explains that one Almighty is, from whom / All things
proceed, and up to him return (V, 469470). They can be extended, as in the
War in Heaven or as in Eves narration of the subordination of her own
image to Gods image in Adam, or they can be as brief as the realization that
gently is not an adverb Satan can truly claim. The entire poem on every
levelstylistic, thematic, narrativeis an act of vigilance in which any effort,
large or small, to escape its totalizing sway is detected and then contained.
Every movement outward from a still center must be blocked; every vehicle
of that movement must be identied for what it is and then stigmatized as a
form of idolatry.
And the forms of idolatry are innumerable; indeed they constitute
almost everything that lls up the poem. Narrative and plot are vehicles of
idolatry because they locate signicance in some insight to be generated by
time, rather than in the timeless, always present obligation to be aligned with
the will of deity;13 plot and narrative tell us that there is somewhere to go,
whereas the true question (posed by every indifferent moment) is: What way
shall one be? Drama is a vehicle of idolatry for similar reasons: it nominates
moments of crisis (will she or wont she? what shall he do now?) and therefore
presents a picture of the moral life in which crisis occurs only at special times
rather than at every and all times. Like narrative and plot (which are its
constituents), drama insists that some moments are different from others,
whereas in Miltons vision all moments are the same. Sameness is threatened
in a more general and pervasive way by any and all acts of representation; for
representationthe imaging of something not presentis by denition a
sign of distance from the real, and anyone who has recourse to it signies his
or her dependence on signifying, on secondhand knowledge, on the
inauthentic.14 In Paradise Lost the genealogy of representation is itself
represented with geometric precision: its birth is the birth of Sin.
a Goddess armd
out of thy head I sprung: amazement seizd
306 Stanley Fish
All th Host of Heavn; back they recoild afraid

At rst, and calld me Sin, and for a Sign
Portentous held me; but familiar grown,
I pleasd, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiey, who full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing
Becamst enamord, and such joy thou tookst
With me in secret, that my womb conceivd
A growing burden. (II, 757767)
Sin is born of a being who has broken unionborn, that is, out of a state of
distance; she is a derivation of a derivation, a further removal from the center
of reality; she is a sign rather than the thing itself, and the danger she
represents is described precisely: those who look on her for a time (familiar
grown) will forget that she is secondary, something that came after, and will
mistake the substitute for the genuine article. That is what Satan does when
he takes joy in an image of an image and thereby produces (conceives) still
more images (A growing burden); sign begets sign begets sign, all of which
are forms of sinthat is, of idolatry. Nor is it an accident that Sin is a
woman; for in the tradition Milton inherits and by and large accepts, woman
is the chief vehicle of idolatry, the very essence (or nonessence) of difference,
something created after, the rst signthe rst, that is, not intimately
related to the firstthe primary form of temptation, of erroneous
(wandering) worship, as the Son reminds Adam when he asks with
devastating brevity: Was shee thy God? (X, 145).
Plot, narrative, drama, crisis, movement, change, representation, sign,
womanif the poem is continually on guard against the pull of these material
and discursive forms, then it is continually on guard against itself, against the
impiety of writing, of adding to or covering over a truth that is self-declaring
and self-sufficient.15 No wonder Davie concludes that Paradise Lost never or
hardly ever prots by what is a fact about it as about any poemthat it exists
as a shape cut in time (84); the poems temporal existence, its desire to lean
forward, is precisely what must be resisted, lest the monism of which it is
intended to be the celebration be compromised. Resistance, however,
especially resistance continually required, cannot but give life and energy to
that which it pushes away. The very vigor with which the poem performs its
task of vigilance tells us that there may be something to be vigilant against,
that the eruption of difference may be an essential rather than an accidental
phenomenon; it is, after all, at least curious that a discourse proclaiming the
oneness of all life spends so much of its time fending off the challenges of
supposedly illusory others. Everywhere one looks in the poem something or
someone is trying to get away, set up a separate shop, escape to a private
retreat, break out of a suffocating homogeneity.
Gently Raised 307
One of those trying to break out, at least intermittently, is John Milton,

whose relationship to the official morality of his own poem is at the very least
ambiguous. The ambiguity surfaces now and then, but is always present
when the ownership of the poem is itself an issuewhenever, that is, the
poet is in dialogue with his muse. On those occasions (occurring famously in
the invocations to books I, III, VII, and IX) the poet seems to be engaged in
a paradoxical, even contradictory, effort to achieve humility, to lose the credit
for his action, the action he is even now performing, the action of writing.
He wants at once to leave his mark and have it erased; he wants at once to be
raised (with no middle ight ... to soar / Above th Aonian Mount [I,
1415]) and to be rasdthat is, erased (still govern thou my Song [VII,
30]). This double and impossible position is perfectly reected in the two
halves of line 25, book I: I may assert Eternal Providence. The line enacts
the pattern we see so often: the momentary granting of agential
independence, the I that stands alone and in relation to which assert is
less a verb than a repetition (I assert I), is followed immediately by the
assertion-dissolving assertion of Eternal Providence. No sooner does a
space open up for the emergence of individual initiative than it is closed, and
closed by an authority that leaves no room for anything or anyone else. The
single-mindedness of which Leavis accuses Milton turns back to claim the
poet as its victim; the Milton for whom everything is simply and absolutely
so is in danger of being silenced by that absoluteness; by offering for our
worship mere brute assertive will, he makes the (supposed) exercise of his
own will an act of impiety. By celebrating the Omnic Word (VII, 217), he
deprives his own words of a reason for being.
To put the matter as simply as possible: writing is itself an effect of
difference, a sign of distance from that which, if truly known, would obviate
the need for any addition, would make representation superuous. One
writes only if there is something that has not yet been said or someone to
whom the good news has not yet been delivered; but in a universe, a
homogeneous space in which all locations and all agents are occupied by the
same informing spirit, there is only one thing to sayGod is the creator and
sustainer of all lifeand everyone is already saying it simply by breathing out
what God has breathed into his creatures. In such a world communication
itself would be beside the point, since the circuit of knowledge would always
and already be established and no one would be outside it; there would be no
gap to be bridged, no secret to be revealed, no message to be completed. No
one would speak in order either to perform or persuade another, because
every other would already know what you know and be where you are.
Sounds would be produced not because they meant somethingmeaning,
after all, is always elsewhere, something to which ones words point,
something that emergesbut because they echoed the meaning already fully
present, the meaning of universal presence.
308 Stanley Fish
Such sounds would issue not from anyonefrom any isolated, free-
standing agentbut from everybody, from the incorporate beings that lived
in and through Gods body; and they would constitute the tautological,
circular sound of the world singing to itself, the sound of purethat is,
without purpose, design, or desiretestimony. This is the sound Milton
does not describe in the closing lines of At a Solemn Music: O may we
soon again renew that Song, / And keep in tune with Heaven.16 To keep in
tune is to avoid being heard in a way that could be identied; it is only when
one is out of tune that one is discordant and makes a harsh din (20), an
unharmonious note, a note that stands out, a note that can be measured, a
note that is noted. The ideal, then, is to be silent, to lose oneself in a chorus
that has been Singing everlastingly (16) and whose song originates
nowhere and everywhere.
THE POLITICS OF TESTIMONY
But is this really what Milton wants? Is it what anyone can want, especially
someone who conceives of himself (another phrase that should be taken
literally) as a writer? What is it that Milton is doing when he puts pen to
paper? He himself poses and considers that question endlessly in his prose
and poetry, but it may be that he gives a deeper answer when the issue is
displaced onto others. I am thinking of the participants in the War in
Heaven, none of whom are writers in the narrow sense, but all of whom are
engaged in an activity of which writing in the narrow sense is a mere token.
That activity is inscribing, the making of marks, the institution of divisions
and distinctions. The instrument is not the pen, but the sword; in the course
of the battle, many a warrior on either side raises his sword with the
expectation that with a single stroke (as is written of Michael) he might end
/ Intestine War in Heavn (PL, VI, 258259). The paradox is patent; the
divisions of civil waror, as Michael calls it, hateful strife (264)are to be
healed by another dividing gesture; the unity of heavens undifferentiated
surface will be restored by a stroke designed precisely to make a difference.
Exactly the same thing is true of the stroke of the pen. Just as Michael and
Abdiel (who lifts high a noble stroke [189]) and Satan hope to settle matters
once and for all by a single blow, by one stroke ... / That might determine,
and not need repeat (317318)an act so efficacious that it is both the rst
and the lastso does Milton hope to resolve all doubts, set the affections in
right tune, proclaim the rst and last word, justify the ways of God to men.
But over both projectsthe one military, the other discursivehangs
the reality acknowledged by Abdiel when he steps forward to challenge
Satan:
Gently Raised 309
Proud, art thou met? thy hope was to have reacht

The highth of thy aspiring unopposd,
The Throne of God unguarded, and his side
Abandond at the terror of thy Power
Or potent tongue; fool, not to think how vain
Against th Omnipotent to rise in Arms;
Who out of smallest things could without end
Have raisd incessant Armies to defeat
Thy folly; or with solitary hand
Reaching beyond all limit, at one blow
Unaided could have nisht thee. (131141)
These lines abound in ironies, some at the expense of their speaker. They
begin by stigmatizing the stance of reaching, of aspiring, of standing up, of
standing outthe stance of opposition to deity. Moreover, that opposition
(at least as Satan conceives it) takes the form both of arms and tongues, a
distinction without a difference. The uplifting of a sword and the extension
of a tongue are alike gestures of independence and aggression, and both,
according to the verse, are vain. How can any one Against th
Omnipotent ... rise, since by denition the Omnipotent is Himself at once
the cause and the location of all rising? If you rise against him, you are razed,
and if you rise within him, wholly subordinate to his will and agency, you are
also razed, as Abdiel is razed, when he rises to declare that he is one of those
smallest things conscripted into an incessant army. Incessant armies
perform incessant actions, actions without end, in two senses of the word.
Action as it is conventionally understood is discrete and punctual; it alters
circumstances, completes a project, brings something new into the world.
But in the world of Paradise Lost, only one agent is capable of discrete action,
of making a difference which, even as it is made, is reabsorbed into a new
seamless unity. Only He can reach beyond all limit and not be engaged in a
paradox, because limit is dened by where he has reached (I am who ll /
Innitude [VII, 168169]). As soon as He has reached beyond, beyond is no
longer, and since no one can reach beyond Him, beyond is not an operative
category. In the same way, his hand is the only one that can be solitarythat
is, efficacious with reference only to itself, Unaided because it is the aid
and support of all other hands, a hand whose one blow need not be
repeated because it is struck not in time but in eternity and therefore at all
times. At one blow, at one wordonly God can do or speak so decisively
that all other deeds and speeches are foredone and forewritten. The attempts
of other agents to be thus decisiveto make everything right, to say all that
need be saidis either unnecessary, as Abdiel acknowledges, or
presumptuous, as Satan illustrates with his every word and gesture.
310 Stanley Fish
Nevertheless, one must act and live in time, and the question is how.
One answer is given, at least in outline, in the description of the angelic
warriors (a description that signicantly applies to those on both sides):
each on himself relid, / As only in his arm the moment lay / Of victory (VI,
238240). Here is still another version of the ethic of testimony, with its
union of assertion and humility: one acts positively, but within the
knowledge that the effect (if there is any) belongs to another. The saving
qualication is contained in Asas if the arm of each warrior held the
balance of victory. But even as the formula is proffered, it reproduces the
problem it supposedly resolves: As can either indicate the reservation that
baptizes an otherwise presumptuous action (not me, but my Master in me)
or indicate a state of prideful delusion (each relies on himself, as if he could
be the architect of victory). Which is it? This is the same question that was
posed before by gently raisd and by the devils that some adore for deities
in the conviction (no more or less grounded than any other) that they are
deities. And the answer is also the same: it is impossible to tell; no surface
feature marks a difference that is supplied by an inner disposition that does
not present itself for inspection and may even be opaque to the agent who
lodges it. When the epic voice tells us that hypocrisy is an evil that walks /
Invisible, except to God alone (III, 683684), he includes in the group of
those who cannot see it those who practice it. No one can plumb the depths of
his own motives, know for certain that the gesture he proffers in the name of
humility is not in fact (a fact only God would discern) a reemergence of pride.
Nor does it necessarily help to be aware of the danger. When, within a
few lines of his stern lecture, Abdiel is said to lift a noble stroke ... high (VI,
189), is that stroke free of the ambitions of which he has accused Satan? Is it
noble in the sense of being delivered with no claim of individual efficacy
whatsoevernobly humbleor does noble (which is of course Raphaels
word; his presence as narrator further complicates matters) make precisely
that claim? Again, one cannot say; and indeed, the number of things about
which one cannot say or about which one can say too much, too variously, is
remarkable for a poem written in response to and in celebration of the
absolute, the One. If it is Miltons conviction, as it surely is, that the world is
everywhere informed by the same sustaining spirit, and if it is the case, as
Leavis, Broadbent, Davie, and countless others argue it to be, that Milton
relentlessly presses the totalizing claims of that spirit, why are so many
moments in the poem marked by a radical openness and indeterminacy?
Why at almost every juncture are important interpretive decisions at once
demanded and rendered radically indeterminate?
One kind of answer to this question posits a conict between the poets
republican politics and his repressive theology. Thus Herman Rapaports
account of a mind committed to the republicanism of Rome and to ideals of
freedom and liberty ... but a mind also harboring a darker fascination with a
Gently Raised 311
dictatorial takeover, with what amounts to another absolutism much bleaker

and more calculating than the foppery of Charles I.17 But while Milton may
indeed harbor a conicted consciousness (and who, aside from God, does
not), there may be a way of thinking about his project that accommodates
and even reconciles its diverse impulses. The key is to recognize the
relationship between his absolutismhis monismand his epistemology,
which is radically antinomian. That is to say, Miltons antiformalism, his
refusal to identify truth with any of its local and temporary instantiations, his
insistence on referring all decisions to the light of the individual conscience
rather than to any external measure or prepackaged formula, precludes him
from laying down the law even though he preaches the necessity of
conforming to it. The law is simply to do the will of God, to align ones
actions with His great design. The difficulty is in knowing, in particular
circumstances, exactly what that will is, a difficulty that would be obviated if
the task of identifying Gods will were given over to some authoritya
church, a king, a bookwhich one might then consult. Milton, however,
consistently inveighs against any such implicit faith, any turning over to
another ... the charge and care of ... Religion,18 and insists that one respond
to crisis by looking inward to the law written on the eshly tables of the
heart. The trouble, of course, is that not all hearts are similarly inscribed. By
rendering value wholly interior, a matter not of specic actions urged or
proscribed but of intentions holy or impious, Milton eliminates any basis for
adjudicating the differences that will certainly arise among diversely
energized agents. The downside of the privileging of the inner light over any
and all external compulsions is that ones convictions are supported (at least
as far as one knows) by nothing rmer than themselves. In response to a
challenge, one can only reassert what one believes; and in response to a
doubta challenge from withinone can only hope that what one believes
is answerable to a truth that withholds her full presence.
The resulting epistemological condition is eloquently described in
Areopagitica: once a perfect shape most glorious to look on, Truth now lies
in a thousand peeces and her sad friends are left with the task of
gathering up limb by limb the remnants of her body. The task, however, is
endlessWe have not yet found them all ... nor ever shall doe, till her
Masters second commingand therefore we can only continue seeking,
searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth
as we nd it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportionall).19 Here is a
concise formulation of the vision that unites monism and the proliferation of
difference: there is only one Truth and it is everywhere the same
(homogeneal), but its form is not available to us in our present state, and we
must rely on whatever state of illumination we may have reached while at the
same time resisting the temptation to identify that state with the fuller one
we shall know at our masters second coming.
312 Stanley Fish
The politics that follows from this vision is one of tolerance and the
welcoming of diversity, not because, as in some liberal traditions, tolerance
and diversity are valued for their own sake, but because, given the dimness of
our individual perceptions, one cannot be sure which of the paths we are
urged to go down is the right one. No insight can be automatically dismissed,
for if it come to prohibiting there is not ought more likely to be prohibited
than truth it self, whose rst appearance to our eyes bleard and dimnd with
prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many
errors.20 One must always be alert to the possibilities excluded by the limits
of ones present understanding. No situation wears its meaning on its face,
and thus every moment brings both the obligation to do the right thing and
the risk that is attendant upon imperfect knowledge. The world, in short, is
a place where the one thing needful (truth, God) is already known, yet access
to it is always veiled. Action is enjoined, and one cannot hold back, but the
grounds of action are always shifting and challengeable. From the vantage
point of eternity all is settled and in place, but in the temporal crucible of
human life one experiences only provisionality and the continual hazarding
of being. Crisis awaits us at every juncture even though, in the last (which is
also the rst) analysis, crisis will always be recuperated by a God who
effortlessly transubstantiates evil into more good (PL, VII, 616), taking
back into himself what he had originally produced.
One can see, then, that the supposed contradiction between Miltons
radical republicanism (the heart of his politics) and his equally radical
absolutism (the heart of his theology) is a function of his having joined the
ontology of monismthere is only one thing realto an antinomian
epistemologythe real is known only perspectivally, according to the
various lights of individual knowers. Milton is at once postmodern in that he
believes all determinations of truth to be local and revisable, and a hard-core
objectivist in that he believes truth to be independent, stable, and
unchanging. It is just that the objectivity and unchanging nature of truth is
of no immediate help to those who must apprehend her through lenses that
are limited and darkened, those who in the absence of direct access to her
glorious shape must produce her in the approximated shapes of
interpretive labor.
It is that labor which is enjoined on man by his epistemological
condition (again Areopagitica is the relevant text), and its requirements and
difficulties are anatomized in the rst chapter of the second book of The
Christian Doctrine. The chapter begins by declaring that What chiey
constitutes the true worship of God is eagerness to do good works (637) and
then proceeds to a denition: Good works are those which we do when the
Spirit of God works within us, through true faith, to Gods glory.21 In place of
the list of works we might have expected, we receive an account of them that
places them behind a double screen. First, works are removed from the
Gently Raised 313
empirical world and given a residence in the Spiritthat is, in the attitude
with which they are performed (this is a basic tenet of antinomianism). This
is bad enough, since in order to determine whether or not a work is good one
must look into the heart; but then it turns out that what one looks for is not
the spirit of the agent, but the spirit working within him. Behind the
observable work is an animating intention, and behind that intention is the
animation of another. It is only when that other is present that a work is good
and true, but the presence of that other leaves no palpable (formal, external)
mark on its issue. One cannot tell good works from bad except by an exercise
of faith that bears all the liabilities of its indeterminate object. Whether one
is judging the actions of another or the actions performed by oneself, the
same radical uncertainty obtains. If I keep the Sabbath, in accordance with
the ten commandments, when my faith prompts me to do otherwise, my
precise compliance ... will be counted as sin (639).
But how does one know whether the impulse to set the written law
aside stems from the prompting of faith or from some baser prompting?
How can one know, in the absence of required external laws, when ones
decision to act is based on the direction of Gods spirit dwelling in ones heart
and when on personal desire?22 How can one know that when one writes
to justify the ways of God to men, that one wholeheartedly intends
justify in a sense that yields all the glory to God (which would make the
writing of the poem a work of true faith, according to Miltons own
denition) and does not reserve at least part of that glory (that with no
middle ight intends to soar) to oneself? The answer to all of these
questions is that one cannot know and that the actions one performs must be
hazarded without any external conrmation of their rightness. Not only does
this mean that one cannot turn in moments of decision to a ready-made
calculation of moral value like the Ten Commandments, but that one cannot
infer with condence from what was done yesterday to what should be done
today. I rely once more on Northrop Fryes formulation: At each crisis of
life the important factor is not the consequences of previous actions, but the
confrontation, across a vast apocalyptic gulf, with the source of
deliverance.23
It isnt that previous actions dont matter (we shall see in our analysis of
the morning quarrel in book IX how they are at least partly constitutive of
present moments of choice), but that they are not determinative. In a crucial
sense each situation is a fresh one, not because the obligation it presents is
uniquethe source of deliverance with which we would be joined is ever the
samebut because the precise shape of that obligation is obscured, both by
the shifting theater of a variegated world and by the darkened sight of men
whose eyes are bleard by desires they can never fully know. Fryes
vocabulary helps us once again to understand the co-presence in Miltons
universe of absolute certainty and a pervasive indeterminacy. The deity is
314 Stanley Fish
omnipresent, but the apocalyptic gulf that divides us from him renders our
attempts to apprehend him provisional and fraught with danger. Nor can
that gulf be bridged, because the very efforts to bridge it are its consequences
and therefore reconstitute it in the performing. There is nothing we can do
but go on, in continual seeking, in perpetual progression, following a
light we are never quite able to see and are prone to misidentify, like
Abraham who in response to the call of God went out, not knowing where
he went (Hebrews 11:8).
FREEDOM AND RISK
I said earlier that representationalong with plot, narrative, movement,

womanis a vehicle of idolatry because it is by denition at a distance from
God and therefore stands between men and their primary obligation. The
implication was that representation should be shunned in favor of that which
it obscures; but in the light of Miltons mature views, rst fully emergent in
the Areopagitica, any such implication must be withdrawn because
representationthe interpretive conjecturing of what God is really like and
what he really wantsis all we have, until our masters second coming.
Although the prose and poetry are replete with exhortations to resist the
appeal of secondary forms and embrace the one true way, it is amid secondary
forms that Milton and his readers live, and the choice he and they face is not
between the one and the many but among the many that assert, with a
distressingly plural plausibility, the claim to be the ones authorized
representative. This is, if anything is, the plot of Miltons work, and
especially of Paradise Lostverse after verse, line after line in which
testimony takes the form of choosing between alternatives that are
indifferently authorized.
Nowhere is the pattern more perspicuously on display than when
Michael meets Satan and they exchange taunts. Author of evil, Michael
cries, and Satan replies, The strife which thou callst evil ... wee style / The
strife of Glory (VI, 262, 289290). That is to say, who is to say? In a world
of free agentsagents not programmed by nature to reach certain
conclusionsthere are an innite number of characterizations of any
situation or issue. It is a question, nally, of what one believes; and belief,
rather than being vulnerable to evidence, determines what will be recognized
as evidence. We are always stylingconstructing the details, small and
large, of our lives, on the basis of assumptions that are their own and only
supportand living as characters in the narratives we thus fashion. Satan and
his cohorts style the strife of glory and live in a world where a tyrant unfairly
armed with homemade thunderbolts seeks to restrict their freedom; they
heroically struggle against overwhelming odds, exercising their ingenuity in
Gently Raised 315
efforts to match his arsenal (thus the invention of gunpowder) and managing
at least to survive (And if one day, why not Eternal days? [424]). Michael
and his friends style a different strife, not of glory but of obedience; in their
world an all-powerful but inscrutable deity assigns them impossible tasks as
a way of testing their loyalty, and they respond joyfully to conditions others
might consider humiliating. It is not that Milton believes the choice between
these stylings to be indifferent; it is just that choosing (deciding, affirming,
testifying) is an action for which there are no guidelines and no guarantees;
it is just that the choice can be made only on faith, and that no one who
chooses is in a more secure position than anyone elsenot Satan when he
chooses to think himself impaired by the Sons exaltation, nor the Son when
he chooses to believe that God will not leave me in the loathsome grave
(III, 247), nor Adam when he concludes that he came ... here / Not of
myself but by some great Maker (VIII, 277278), nor Satan again when
he concludes (in direct opposition) that he was self-begot, self-raisd (V,
860).
Here of course is another (and, indeed, climactic) instance of the pun
with which this chapter began, and it encodes the same two scenarios: one in
which the agent pulls himself up out of nowhere by his bootstraps (self-
raised), and a second in which, by casting himself in the rst, the agent
destroys himself (self-razed). On its face (a face provided by Raphael), Satans
assertion is absurd: I am not a creaturesomething made by another
because I dont remember being created: We know no time when we were
not as now (V, 859). But in fact this is an assertion no more absurd (without
any grounds) than Adams, for Adam is in the same position, knowing
nothing before he was as he is now, constructing the reality of an inaccessible
past, and proceeding on the basis of what he has constructed. I cant
remember my own origin, thus I must have spontaneously generated
myself, or I cant remember my own origin, thus I must have been made
by a superior intelligence. The two stories are equally plausible and
implausibleand who is to say which is the true one? Not Adam or Raphael,
who in response to challenges can point only to signs that are a function of
the story to which they are precommitted. Not the reader, who is himself
already in a relation to some story and commitment when he arrives at
moments like this one. Not even Milton, whose editorial interventions (So
spake th Apostate ... / Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair [I,
125126], fondly overcome with Female charm [IX, 999]) have had the
effect not of clarifying matters but of producing new interpretive disputes,
disputes that began with the early commentary of Patrick Hume (1695) and
continue in the writing of William Empson, A. J. A. Waldock, Catherine
Belsey, and others. If the plot of the poem is one of testimonyof moments
in which various speakers either prove or betray themselves in wordsit is a
plot Milton does not preside over, but inhabits as one (and not a privileged
316 Stanley Fish
one) of many styling voices. The burden of his song is interpretive freedom,
the freedom of a will whose choices are unconstrained by a deity who will
nevertheless pass judgment on them. Interpretive freedom is therefore at
once a glory (because it accords the agent the dignity of self-determination)
and a burden (because it subjects the agent to the dangers of self-
determination). We must all raise ourselves by interpretive labor, at the risk
of razing ourselves should those labors be performed in the wrong spirit and
at the bidding of impulses rooted in self-love. Interpretive labor is what
Milton narrates in the persons of his characters; interpretive labor is what he
demands of his readers as they must make sense of the characters making
sense; and interpretive labor is what Milton performs with no more
assurance than anyone else that he is on the side of the angels when he sets
himself up as the architect of the conditions within which sense will be
fatefully made.
The rmness of his architecture is such that it has earned him the
hostility of readers like Leavis, whose judgment has been reaffirmed by Leo
Damrosch: Milton is the most imperial of writers, shaping every minute
element of his mighty tale, guiding his readers at all points and perhaps even
tyrannizing over them.24 Although this is certainly accurate as a description
of the verses mechanics and perhaps of Miltons intentions, the effect
thereby produced is almost the reverse. As many have observed, this is a
poem one cannot read without being provoked to argue back. The rst of
Gods speeches in book III is only the most egregious illustration of an
experiential fact: the more totalizing the discoursethe more it attempts to
ll every nook and crannythe more energetically will those at whom it is
directed struggle to escape it. Whether it is a part of Miltons design, or
simply an effect of the interpretive freedom he celebrates, the structure that
seems so monolithic and closed is at every point of its articulation productive
of challenges in the name of everything it tries to exclude.
The tendency to exclusion accompanied by a claim to interpretive
purity is especially pronounced in the early work. In the antiprelatical tracts
and in the poetry of the 1645 volume, Milton delineates a universe in which
an overriding truth embodied in a sacred text is embraced by one party and
rejected by another in favor of its own carnal imaginations. In that universe,
time is devalued as a medium of error and wandering; language is distrusted
as an impious addition to the sufficiency of Gods revealed word; and
historyor, as Milton labels it, custom or traditionis stigmatized as a
collection of corrupted texts or as a veil that obscures a reality easily seen by
those of a cleared and regenerate vision. As for those who dont see, they are
such as cannot be taught and one simply leaves them to the judgment they
will certainly face on the Day of Judgment.
This tidy, static, leakproof world is crafted and celebrated with a
sometimes unholy zeal until 16431645, when, without explanation (at least
Gently Raised 317
Milton doesnt give one), everything changes. Fallibility of vision is

predicated of everyone, not simply of the unregenerate. Consequently there
is no one for whom the meaning of Scripture is perspicuous, and
interpretation, rather than being forbidden as an unnecessary supplement to
a self-declaring word, is enjoined. This in turn means that time and history
are redeemed, since a skillful and laborious gathering is now required before
the body of truth can be reassembled (if it ever can be). Choice is no longer
a single moment of commitment which is clung to with all ones might;
rather, choice must be made again and again in circumstances that demand
ever new calculations and recalculations and bring ever new opportunities to
go wrong, to wander ... forlorn (PL, VII, 20). Contingency and difference,
once denied and pushed away with a fear bordering on the pathological, are
now acknowledged and embraced as the mediums of potential growth of
knowledge in the making. Women, previously stigmatized as the very
incarnations of the secondary and idolatrous (or turned into men, as is the
Lady in Comus), are now the bearers of regenerative and healing powers.
I do not mean to suggest that Milton simply woke up one morning to
nd his views wholly changed. Patriarchy and misogyny are hardly absent
from Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained is in many
ways a return to the inty exclusiveness of Comus and the antiprelatical tracts.
But the general point, I think, holds: the freedom that Milton once thought
unproblematically grounded in a text notable for its clearnesse25 is
reconceived as a trial, as an interpretive crucible, as a eld of opportunity
whose rewards are inseparable from its risks. Risk is not an important
component in the early prose and poetry, populated as they are by persons
who are already and irrevocably on one side or another of a great dividing
line; but risk is coincident with action when that line must itself be drawn by
those who would position themselves in relation to itthose who want to
feel that they know the difference between devils and deities and that, when
they raise a hand or a pen, they do it gently.
NOTES
1. F.R. Leavis, Miltons Verse, in C.A. Patrides, ed., Miltons Epic Poetry: Essays
on Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 28.
2. J.B. Broadbent, Miltons Mortal Voice and His Omnic Word, in C. A.
Patrides, ed., Approaches to Paradise Lost (London, 1968), p. 115.
3. Paradise Lost, book I, lines 527530, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose, ed. M. Y. Hughes (New York, 1957).
4. Donald Davie, Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost, in Frank Kermode, ed.,
The Living Milton (London, 1960), p. 83.
5. See on this point Regina Schwartz, The Toad at Eves Ear, in D. T. Benet
318 Stanley Fish
and M. Lieb, eds., Literary Milton (Pittsburgh, 1994), p. 20: Making reading an
activity in which the reader is engaged in choosing identications, [Milton] exposes
his work to the danger that the reader may identify with the wrong character at the
wrong juncture in his or her moral life.
6. The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol.
1, ed. D.M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953), p. 850.
7. The Prose of John Milton, ed. J. M. Patrick et al. (New York, 1967), p. 266.
8. The Readie and Easie Way, 2nd ed., in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol.
7, ed. R.W. Ayers (New Haven, 1980), p. 550.
9. The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, in The Prose of John Milton, p. 514.
1, p. 803.
11. Comus, lines 244248, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose.
12. Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6, ed. M. Kelley,
trans. J. Carey (New Haven, 1973), p. 307.
13. Cf. William Kolbrener, Miltons Warring Angels: A Study of Critical
Engagements (Cambridge, 1997), p. 144: Providential history resists the
temporalizing effects of narrative.
14. Cf. Ibid., p. 145: Representation in its very essence violates the promised
unitythe monistic identityof God with his creation.
15. As William Kolbrener observes, All discourse, irreducibly material, elicits
the temptation of idolatry (Ibid., p. 155).
16. At a Solemn Music, lines 2526, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose.
17. Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), p. 176.
18. Areopagitica, in The Prose of John Milton, p. 310.
19. Ibid., pp. 316318.
20. Ibid., p. 330.
21. Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6, p. 638.
22. J. Bennett, Miltons Antinomianism, in W. Hunter Jr. et al. eds., A Milton
Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (Cranbury, N.J., 1983), p. 14.
23. Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden (Toronto, 1965), p. 103.
24. Leo Damrosch, Gods Plot and Mans Stories (Chicago, 1985), p. 120.
1, p. 750.
B A R B A R A K . L E WA L S K I
Something ...
Written to Aftertimes
M ilton has probably had a greater inuence on major poets and writers
over a longer period of time than any other English literary gure except
Shakespeare. Later readers and writers looked to him for a powerful
formulation of the great biblical myths of Western civilization: the garden
state of innocence, Satan or the embodiment of evil, the Fall of humankind,
and, assimilated to them, the classical myths of the Golden Age, Pandora,
Flora, Prosperine, Scylla and Charybdis, Prometheus, and Creation out of
Chaos. Indeed, many readers virtually conated Miltons portrayal of Eden
and the Fall with the Genesis account. Also, Milton was seen to have
established literary norms and styles: Harold Bloom claims that English
poets from Dryden to T.S. Eliot looked upon Milton as a daunting father
gure, who set them a standard of imaginative force and eloquent expression
which they felt compelled to imitate or adapt or rebel against.1 Moreover,
subsequent writers sought in Milton their own theological, political and
cultural ideals, prompting conict from the outset between orthodox and
reformist versions of Miltons legacy.
His inuence soon spread beyond anglophone countries through
translations of Paradise Lost and some other poems and treatises into Dutch,
French, Italian, German, Russian, and Polish, and more recently, Chinese
and Japanese. Also, his poems inuenced artists in other media. From 1688
onward Paradise Lost and sometimes other Milton poems provided a stimulus
From The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. 2000 by Blackwell Publishing.
319
320 Barbara K. Lewalski
for distinguished illustrations, of which Blakes are masterpieces. Handel

composed an oratorio on texts from Samson Agonistes. He also composed a
three-part secular oratorio with texts from LAllegro and Il Penseroso and a
characteristically eighteenth-century conclusion, Il Moderato; in the late
twentieth century Mark Morris added a ballet to that Handel work. Miltons
epic also supplied inspiration, and the libretto, for an impressive opera
entitled Paradise Lost by the twentieth-century Polish composer Penderecki.
Miltons younger contemporary, Dryden, acknowledged his impact by
imitation, praise, appropriation, and ideological revision. Into The State of
Innocence, his dramatic version of Paradise Lost, Dryden imported couplet
rhyme and royalist politics, and his satiric brief epic, Absolom and Achitopel
(1681), written during the exclusion crisis, models the Whig Shaftesbury on
Miltons crafty Satan. The temptation scenes of Drydens Hind and the
Panther bear Miltons impress and verbal allusions abound in his translations
of Virgil. In a laudatory epigram to the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, Dryden
proposed Milton as Englands poet, surpassing Homer and Virgilthough
by locating all of them in a distant epic past he sought to neutralize Miltons
politics and literary inuence:
Three poets, in three distant ages born,

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The rst in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.
That handsome 1688 Folio with its commendations, striking illustrations by

John Baptist Medina, and subscription by over 500 Englishmen was a major
factor in returning Milton to the mainstream, repressing his radical politics
and theology, and presenting his epic as the pride of the English nation.
While several early readersamong them Defoe, John Toland, John Dennis,
and Isaac Newtonrecognized and sometimes complained of the Arianism
and republicanism in Paradise Lost, Addisons inuential series of essays for
The Spectator (1728) sidestepped such issues, emphasizing the poems classical
dimension, evaluating its literary excellence by neoclassical standards, and
proclaiming it as the national epic.
A few eighteenth-century poets like Richard Blackmore tried to follow
Milton in epic, but better poets recognized that he had exhausted that genre,
at least for a time, and engaged with the Miltonic legacy in other ways. Popes
brilliant mock epic, The Rape of the Lock, parodies passages and supernatural
machinery from Paradise Lost in recounting a rakes theft of a coquettes lock
of hair; and in his satiric epic The Dunciad Pope rises to a Miltonic high style
in evoking the image of Chaos and Night returned again to uncreate the
world. Also, Pope appropriated Miltonic language in his translations of

Homer and recast Miltons epic purpose, To justify the ways of God to
man, in dening the intent of his Essay on Man: To vindicate the ways of
God to man. Many lesser poetsamong them Thomas Gray, James
Thomson, Edward Young, William Collins, and William Cowper
attempted to imitate the blank verse and sublimity of Paradise Lost, or
wrote in Miltonicks, the tetrameter couplets of the very popular
companion poems, LAllegro and Il Penseroso; their poems were lled with
Miltonic allusions, poetic diction, and syntax. Milton came to be regarded as
the very type of the great poet, and a chorus of voices agreed with Edmund
Burke and Samuel Johnson that his characteristic quality was sublimity. Dr
Johnson underscored Miltons greatness but, prompted by his antipathy for
Miltons politics and by the neoclassical standards of his age, he also found
much to object to in Miltons poetry: the use of pastoral and the mix of
Christian and classical supernatural elements in Lycidas, the faults of
language and versication and the want of human interest in Paradise Lost,
and the lack of a middle/in Samson Agonistes.
Colonial and post-revolutionary Americans embraced Milton as a
model of sublime thought and expression, a major source of imitation and
quotation, and a valuable support for orthodoxy in several areas.
Schoolmasters illustrated points of grammar and rhetoric out of his poems,
moralists pointed to his Eve and his Garden of Eden for ideals of womanly
virtue and wedded love, ministers cited him to support their own positions
and appropriated his images to tell the Christian story. Miltons companion
poems prompted a rash of mostly pedestrian mood poems, and New England
poets celebrated the Puritan errand into the Wilderness and the New World
experience in an epic style derived from Milton and Pope. Philip Freneaus
The Rising Glory of America in blank verse (1772), Timothy Dwights The
Conquest of Canaan (1785) and Joel Barlows The Vision of Columbus (1787) in
heroic couplets reworked images, passages, and episodes from Paradise Lost
the Infernal Council, Michaels prophecy, Adam and Eve in Eden and their
Morning Hymnoften appropriating Miltons words. Both Milton and
Pope inuenced the rst African-American poet, the educated eighteenth-
century slave woman Phillis Wheatley. She often imitated Miltons syntax,
cadences, themes, and verse forms. In Phillis Reply she terms Milton the
British Homer and Europas Bard, affirming at once her debt to him, her
own insufficiencies in high poetry, and the end of his epic tradition: in him
Britanias prophet dies.
But if Miltons example was of little use to poets who made him into a
literary icon, reformist and radical statesmen in America, England, and
France found much to their various purposes in both his prose and his
poetry. In the buildup to the Glorious Revolution (1688) English Whigs
John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Toland, and Anthony Cooper, Third
Earl of Shaftesburydrew often unacknowledged support from Miltons

attacks on sacerdotal kingship and press censorship, and from his arguments
for Protestant religious toleration and the contract theory of government in
Areopagitica, Tenure, the Defensio, Of Civil Power, and Hirelings. In 1774 the
English Republican historian Catherine Macauley reprised the arguments of
Areopagitica in A Modest Plea for the Property of Copy Right; and her eight-
volume History of England (176383) defended the English revolution, the
regicide, and the Commonwealth by marshaling the contract theory
arguments of Sidney, Locke, the Levellers, and Miltons Tenure and Defensio.
Often reprinted in England, Areopagitica was the rst Milton book published
in America (1774), and its arguments have continued to echo down the
centuries in defense of liberal ideas of toleration and intellectual freedom.
Miltons other tracts also served revolutionaries in America, and his poetic
imagery and rhetoric was even more important for them. His agonizing pleas
to his countrymen in The Readie and Easie Way was used in 1770 to denounce
American backsliders; Benjamin Franklin damned British taxation policy as
reminiscent of Miltons description of Chaos; and John Adams described
British colonial rule in the imagery of Satanic pomp and foolish resistance,
citing Milton as one who helped convince him that a republic is the only
good government. Jefferson excerpted some 48 passages from Paradise Lost
and Samson Agonistes in his Commonplace book (many of them dealing with
Satans revolt), and in 1776 he called on the antiprelatical tracts in an
argument for disestablishing the Church of England in Virginia. In France,
Mirabeaus Sur La Libert de la Presse, which paraphrases or translates much
of Areopagitica, was published four times between 1788 and 1792, and an
anonymous treatise on which he collaborated, the Thorie de la Royaut
dauprs la doctrine de Milton (1789), undertook to justify the French
Revolution and its aftermath with arguments and extracts from the Defensio
and other Milton tracts. It was republished in 1792 with a preface calling for
the trial and execution of Louis XVI.
The English Romantics celebrated Milton as a prophet and a
revolutionary in his life and in his art; because they set themselves to take up
his prophetic mantle, they were able to respond creatively to his example.
Blakes engagement with Milton was both pervasive and profound: Blake and
his wife sat nude in their garden reading aloud Book IV of Paradise Lost;
Blake engaged in visionary conversations with Milton; and Blakes striking
illustrations of Comus, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained provide brilliant
commentaries on those poems. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell famously
claims Milton for the Devils party, understanding Miltons Satan as a gure
of energy and rebellion; and Blakes several long, epic-like prophetic poems
bear the impress of Paradise Lost and especially Paradise Regained. His poem
Milton makes that poet an epic hero, one of the angels of the Apocalypse who
fell into errors of selfhood by wronging his wives and daughters, his
emanations, and who returns to earth to redeem those errors; entering the
foot of his successor poet-prophet Blake, Milton is joined with him in the
work of building the new Jerusalem in Englands green & pleasant Land.
For Wordsworth, Milton was also a powerful inspiration. In his efforts to
revive the sonnet genre he looked to the lofty Miltonic modelin his hand
/ The Thing became a trumpet. He invoked Milton in his sonnet London
1802 as an exemplar of steadfast freedom of mind, noble ideals, virtue, and
duty: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need of
three. Wordsworth commented astutely and admiringly on many Milton
passages, read his poems aloud with his sister Dorothy, often invoked his
example in discussing issues of poetics, and in The Excursion expressed his
epic aspirations in Miltonic blank verse. In dening the Mind of Man as its
theme Wordsworths blank verse epic, The Prelude, takes off from the
promise of a paradise within at the end of Paradise Lost. It also nds
precedent in Miltons Proems to Books I, III, VII, and IX of Paradise Lost,
which treat the Bards heroic trials in writing his epic, for a new heroic
subject: Wordsworths development as man and poet. The Prelude is dense
with verbal and structural echoes and transformations of Paradise Lost:
Helvellyn recalls Eden, the ascent of Snowdon recalls Adams ascent of the
highest hill of Paradise, the French Revolution reprises the Fall.
The second generation of Romantic poets were also aided in realizing
their poetic visions through engagement with Milton. Byrons notorious
Byronic heroesManfred, Cainare descendants of Miltons Satan in
their dark passions, enormous nameless guilt, total alienation, and titanic
self-assertion. A deant critic of all sorts of orthodoxy who died ghting to
liberate Greece, Byron praised Miltons intellectual courage in facing down
tyrants, and in Don Juan wished him back to freeze once more / The blood
of monarchs with his prophecies and to convict time-serving poets of the
present. Strongly inuenced by Byron, the revolutionary Russian poet
Pushkin also looked to Milton as an embodiment of genius, integrity, and
amazing courage. Shelley honored Milton as a republican and a bold inquirer
into morals and religion who made his Satan far superior to his God in moral
virtue, giving him the best arguments and a character of unsurpassed energy
and magnicence. Miltons impress on Shelleys poetry is everywhere: in
Miltons Spirit he imagines that Milton might again sound his Uranian lute
to make sanguine thrones and impious altars quake; his elegy for Keats,
Adonais, invites comparison with Lycidas; and Prometheus Unbound, a poem in
four books about the regaining of Paradise, owes large debts to Paradise
Regained and Jesuss evolving denition of the kingdom within. Keats also
admired Miltons zealous liberalism, waxed enthusiastic about several
passages of sublimity, beauty, and pathos in Paradise Lost, and responded to
seeing a lock of Miltons hair with a poem promising to follow his example
and rise to nobler philosophic harmonies. His epic fragment Hyperion
portrays the fall of Saturn and the Titans sympathetically, but treats the rise
of the new gods and especially Apollo, god of the sun and of high poetry, as
necessary for progress. Miltonic elements range from the sinuous blank verse
to the debate of the baffled Titans, to many particulars of image and idiom,
but Keats came to believe the Miltonic mode to be antithetical to his own
genius, and began the poem over again in other terms. Mary Shelleys novel
Frankenstein, written at a period when Shelley was reading Paradise Lost aloud
in the evenings, is a strikingly original re-creation of Miltons central myth;
its epigram from Paradise LostDid I request thee, Maker, from my clay /
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me
invites association of Dr Frankenstein with Miltons God, the creature with
Adam, and both with aspects of Satan.
Romantic critics commented at length and often astutely about
Miltons poetry, and, like the poets, found his Satan powerfully attractive.
Coleridge honored Miltons republicanism and role in the English
revolution, characterized him as a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil, and
ranked him with Shakespeare. He admired the Miltonic Satans dark and
savage grandeur, but also observed that he displayed the egotism
characteristic of liberticides from Nimrod to Bonaparte.2 Hazlitt described
Miltons Satan as the most heroic epic subject ever chosen for a poem, and
praised Milton for portraying his nature and his rhetoric without any
recourse to cheap deformities, while also showing him to embody love of
power, pride, self-will, and ambition. And when Walter Savage Landor and
the poet laureate Robert Southey elaborated on and added to Dr Johnsons
criticisms of Milton, Thomas De Quincey offered a spirited defense of his
poems and prose works.
Victorian poets and critics were usually more restrained and more
selective than the Romantics in their responses to Milton. Some honored
him as a republican and a lover of liberty. Extracts from Tenure, Eikonoklastes,
and The Readie and Easie Way appeared in several Chartist tracts, new editions
of his prose praised his heroic patriotism, and David Massons six-volume
biography provided a richly detailed and sympathetic account of his life and
times. In 1825 Thomas Macauley produced a long panegyric essay on Milton
and his works, prompted by the shocked reactions of some Victorians to the
Arianism and other heterodoxies in the newly discovered De Doctrina
Christiana. Those, he declared, should not surprise any careful reader of
Paradise Lost. Macauley terms Milton the glory of English literature, the
champion and the martyr of English liberty, praising him especially for
recognizing, in Areopagitica, the horrors of intellectual slavery and the
benets of a free press in promoting the unfettered exercise of private
judgment.3 He honored Miltons personal triumph over the greatest
difficulties and saw the same qualities in his wonderful Satan, whom he
thought superior even to Prometheus in energy and noble endurance.
Ranking Miltons two epics above all subsequent poems, he valued especially
Miltons ability, despite age, anxiety, and disappointment, to adorn Paradise
Lost with all that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and in the
moral world. By contrast, Matthew Arnold deprecated Miltons character,
most of his prose works, and the subject matter of his epic as products of the
Hebraic spirit nurtured by Puritanism. But he thought that spirit often
countered in Miltons poetry by the Hellenistic inuence, making for a
patchwork of dazzling lines, splendid passages, and an unfailingly sublime
poetic style. He includes several short passages from Paradise Lost among his
touchstones of highest poetic quality, by which he would have readers form
their taste and critical judgment.
Among the Victorian poets, both Arnold and Tennyson at times
imitated Miltons blank verse and his diction. In an elegantly crafted poem in
alcaics entitled Milton, Tennyson paid tribute to Miltons sublime styleO
mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, / ... God-gifted organ voice of
England. Gerard Manley Hopkins valued Miltons art, and especially the
rhythm and metrics of Paradise Regained and Samson, above that of any other
poetry in any language: terming Milton the great standard in the use of
counterpoint, he pointed to the choruses of Samson Agonistes as a forerunner
of his own sprung rhythm.4 Among the Victorian novelists, George Eliot felt
his impress strongly. She thought his tractate on education and his divorce
tracts especially relevant for her own era, and her novels often refer to or
allude to Milton in treating issues of experience and moral choice. In
Middlemarch Dorothea Brooke compares herself to Miltons daughters when
she decides to marry Casaubon so as to assist him with a great intellectual
project, though unlike them she expects by doing so to gain wisdom herself,
the novel explores the disastrous consequences of her inexperience and
naivet in mistaking the pedant Casaubon for a Milton surrogate. In Great
Expectations Dickens presents Pips fall as a bourgeois parody of Adams, both
of them fondly overcome with Female charm; the novel ends with Pip and
Estella reprising Adam and Eve as they leave a wrecked garden with hands
joined.
Nineteenth-century Americans related readily to Miltons theology and
politics as well as his poetry, sensing, as R. W. Griswold declared in 1846,
that Milton is more emphatically American than any other author who has
lived in the United States.5 New England Unitarians were pleased to nd
Arianism and Arminianism in Miltons newly recovered De Doctrina
Christiana, William Ellery Charming proclaiming him a great saint and an
inspired master spirit. New England Transcendentalists encountered him
through Coleridge and other English Romantics, but also directly. Emerson
cited and paraphrased Miltons comments on poetic inspiration in The Reason
of Church-government, and proclaimed Milton the sublimest bard of all,6 a
judgment based on his belief that all of Miltons poetry is a version of his own
heroic life of bravery, purity, temperance, toil, self-reliance, and devotion.

Honoring especially his defense of the individual conscience in Areopagitica,
Emerson termed him an apostle of freedom in the house, in the state, in
the church, and in the press, asserting categorically that no man can be
named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and
America with an energy comparable to that of Milton.7 Emerson identied
with Milton the prophet, and took the title of his poem Uriel from Miltons
angel of the sun, conjoining in that gure Satans rebelliousness and Uriels
devotion to truth. Margaret Fuller, who read Milton at fourteen and
identied her own ambition with his, thought Miltons prose works deserve
to be studied beyond any other English prose for the exemplar gure they
reveal: If Milton be not absolutely the greatest of human beings, it is hard
to name one who combines so many features of Gods own image, ideal
goodness, a life of spotless nature, heroic endeavor and constancy, with such
richness of gifts. Like Griswold she thought him a peculiarly American
spirit, who understood the nature of liberty, of justicewhat is required for
the unimpeded action of conscience, what constitutes true marriage, and the
scope of manly education.8 During the buildup to the American Civil War
Paradise Lost supplied rhetorical force to denunciations of the Southern
revolt, which Edward Everett in an oration at Gettysburg likened to that
rst foul revolt of the Infernal Serpent. 9 And Lincoln, reading the rst
books of Paradise Lost, was reportedly struck by the coincidences between
the utterances of Satan and those of Jefferson Davis.10
In his short story Rappacinis Daughter Hawthorne presents a dark
version of Miltons Eden, in which a father creates a beautiful garden whose
fruit poisons his daughter and her poisoned body infects her lover. In his epic
novel Moby Dick Melville invests in Captain Ahab the indomitable will and
obsession with revenge of Miltons Satan, and embodies in his white whale
Satans (or Gods) titanic strength and seeming cosmic malevolence.
Throughout the novel the issues foregrounded are those at the core of
Miltons epic, debated fruitlessly by his fallen angels, and embodying,
Melville thinks, Miltons own profound questioning of theodicy:
Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, / Fixt Fate, Free Will,
Foreknowledge absolute.11 And Walt Whitman took on the mantle of the
poet-seer from Milton and Wordsworth as he sang a new, democratic epic
celebrating himself as the embodiment of everything in the universe.
In the earlier twentieth century, and especially in England, Milton the
poet was seen as an icon of the cultural and literary establishment, to be
embraced as such or vigorously rejected, whereas Milton the man was
repudiated as a dour Puritan, republican, and regicide. C. S. Lewis praised
Paradise Lost as a brilliantly realized epic of orthodox Christianity, while
William Empson carried on his battle against the God of that same orthodox
Christianity who disgured, as he thought, the text of Miltons epic. T. S.
Eliot admitted his antipathy toward Milton the man, arising, as he shrewdly
recognized, from the fact that the Civil War has never really ended in
England. In several essays beginning in 1922 Eliot launched the modernist
attack on Miltons poetry, warning his poet-contemporaries against imitating
the poet who had helped produce a dissociation of sensibility in English
poetry and whose convoluted poetic language violates English norms. He
recanted some of this in 1947, acknowledging that Milton had invented a
great though inimitable poetic language marked by musicality, long periods,
and imagery evoking vast size and limitless space, and that modern poets
might learn from him about freedom within form. While American New
Critics were echoing Eliots disparagement of Miltons poetry, American
scholars were producing painstaking editions of his entire oeuvre; in the
crisis years before and during World War II, that oeuvre was often held forth
as an embodiment of Christian humanism and American liberal values of
toleration, individualism, and personal freedom. Virginia Woolf s reference
to Miltons bogeyhis ideas of womans inferiority as a major obstacle to
women writers creativityin the nal chapter of A Room of Ones Own (1929)
shaped the response to Milton of many twentieth-century feminist readers.
A similar notion of Miltons repressive effect on women informs Robert
Graves novel imagining Miltons domestic life, The Story of Mary Powell Wife
to Mr Milton (1943). Some contemporary feminists, however, have been led
by Milton, as Catherine Macauley, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot had
been, to write themselves into his programs of reform and intellectual liberty.
In that appropriative spirit Malcolm X enlisted Milton for black liberation,
identifying his Satan with the popes and kings and other evil forces of
Europe, and so concluding that Milton and Mr. Elijah Muhammad were
actually saying the same thing.12
Miltons impress on twentieth-century literary texts is often a matter of
allusions that evoke his works to supply context or ironic contrast. A few
examples must suffice. Eliots Four Quartets contain allusions that incorporate
Milton among the many voices commenting on memory and history; Eliots
verse dramas, especially Murder in the Cathedral, owe a good deal to Samson
Agonistes; and Eliot played off Miltons title for his Sweeney Agonistes. James
Joyces epic novel Ulysses looks to Milton as well as Homer and Dante for
some elements of theme and style. Aldous Huxley evoked the poignant
description of Miltons Samson to set the tone for his novel, Eyeless in Gaza.
Clifford Odets used the title Paradise Lost for a 1934 play in which a family
is dispossessed from their little Edentheir homeby the forces of
capitalism and the Depression; it contains a very minor character called
Milton, who lisps and whose chief business is to dene the nature of man as
80 per cent alkaline and 20 percent acid. In his poem Skunk Hour Robert
Lowell imports Satans line to characterize the mood of his speaker: I myself
am hell. In his poem Adam and Eve Karl Shapiro alludes to Miltons scenes
of Adams longing and Eves creation to rewrite the story of their union. And
in the mode of tribute, Jorge Luis Borges poem entitled A Rose and Milton
voices a poignant wish that some rose Milton once held before his face, but
could / Not see might, for that association, be spared oblivion.
In the later twentieth century critics and theorists of every stripe
Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists, new historicists, psychological critics,
and morehave made Milton grist for their several mills. And as the new
millennium begins, he is still a battleground for our culture wars. On the one
hand, so strong is the impulse to reclaim him for orthodoxy that some
scholars are casting doubt on his authorship of much or all of his heterodox
theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana. On the other hand, critics
writing from a Marxist, cultural materialist, or historicist perspective are
interrogating all his poetry and prose to situate his complex texts more
precisely in their political and cultural milieu, and to examine how they relate
to some of the fraught issues of our time: gender roles, marriage and divorce,
imperialism, individualism, the artist in society. Postmodernist critics value
the dividedness and ambiguities of his texts, the fact that for him truth is not
a monolithic closed system but the dismembered body so graphically
described in Areopagitica. Ideological concerns and critical fashions have
changed over three centuries, but what endures is the response of generation
after generation of readers to Miltons superlative poetry and to his large
vision of the human condition.
NOTES
1. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Inuence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973).
2. Letter 164, to John Thelwell, December 17, 1776; and The Statesmans
Manual, 1816, cited in Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays
and Critical Asides (Cleveland, Ohio, and London, 2970), 157, 2289.
3. Milton, from the Edinburgh Review, August, 1825.
4. From a letter of Hopkins to Richard Walter Dixon, October 5, 1878, cited in
James Thorpe, ed., Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries (London, 1951),
372. In a letter to Robert Bridges, February 15, 1879, Hopkins states that he hopes
in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style.
5. R. W. Griswold, Papers on Literature and Art (New York, 1846), I, 35.
6. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William
Gilman, et al., 16 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), II, 1067.
7. Milton, North American Review, July, 1838.
8. In her review of R. W. Griswolds edition of Miltons Prose, New York Daily
Tribune, October 7, 1845; Fuller, Paper on Literature and Art, 2 vols (New York, 1846),
I, 36, 389.
9. Cited in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil
War (New York, 1973), 343.
10. Noted in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and M. H.
Thomas, 4 vols (New York, 1852), III, 368.
11. Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, contests of
Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, 1997), 21327.
12. Malcolm X (with the assistance of Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm
X (New York, 1965), 186.
Chronology
1608 John Milton is born December 9 in Cheapside, London.

1620 Enters St. Pauls School in London.
1625 Admitted to Christs College, Cambridge. (Receives M.A.,
1632.)
1634 First performance of A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle
[Comus], September 29.
163538 Period of further study at Horton, Buckinghamshire.
1637 Writes Lycidas, (published in an elegy collection for Edward
King, 1638).
1638 Begins Italian journey in May; travels abroad till July, 1639.
163940 Teaches in London.
1641 Publishes Of Reformation in England, Of Prelatical Episcopacy,
Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against
SMECTYMNUUS.
1642 The Reason of Church-Government Urgd Against Prelaty
published. Milton marries Mary Powell, but she soon
returns to her royalist family in Buckinghamshire.
1643 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce published.
1644 Publishes Of Education and Areopagitica.
1645 Tetrachordon published. Mary Powell Milton returns to her
husband. Poems of Mr. John Milton appears.
331
332 Chronology
1649 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates published. Milton

appointed as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Eikonoklastes
published.
1651 Defensio pro populo Anglicano published.
1652 Milton is almost completely blind. Death of his wife and
son.
1654 Defensio secunda pro populo Anglicano published.
1656 Marries Katherine Woodcock. She dies in 1658.
1660 The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth
published. Milton faces arrest in June but is released from
custody in December.
1663 Marries Elizabeth Minshul.
1667 Paradise Lost, A Poem in Ten Books published.
1670 The History of Britain published.
1671 Paradise Regaind published along with Samson Agonistes.
1673 Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, and Toleration published.
1674 Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books published. Death of
Milton on November 8. Buried in St. Giles, Cripplegate.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale

University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the
New York University Graduate School. He is the author of over 20 books,
including Shelleys Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blakes
Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and
Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The
Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Inuence
(1973) sets forth Professor Blooms provocative theory of the literary
relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most
recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998
National Book Award nalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic
of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited
(2003). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American
Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he
received the Catalonia International Prize.
F.T. PRINCE was Professor of English at Southampton University. Poet,

critic, and editor, he produced the Arden edition of Shakespeares Poems as
well as his own Collected Poems, 19351992.
WILLIAM EMPSON was one of the most eminent of modern poet-critics.

He taught for many years in China and later at Sheffield University. His
principal writings include his Collected Poems, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some
Versions of Pastoral, and The Structure of Complex Words.
333
334 Contributors
THOMAS GREENE was Professor Emeritus of comparative literature and

English at Yale University. His books include a study of Rabelais, The Light
in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, the essay collection The
Vulnerable Text, and Calling from Diffusion: Hermeneutics of the Promenade.
Poetry, Signs, and Magic, another collection of essays, is forthcoming.
ANGUS FLETCHER is Professor Emeritus of English at the Graduate

School of the City University of New York. He is the author of Allegory: The
Theory of a Symbolic Mode, The Prophetic Moment, a study of Spenser, and
Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature.
JOHN HOLLANDER, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale

University, is the author and editor of many books. The latest of his nineteen
volumes of poetry is Picture Window, while his critical works include Vision
and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in
Poetic Language, and more recently, The Poetry of Everyday Life and The Work
of Poetry.
PETER M. SACKS is Professor of English at Harvard University. His book

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats won the Christian
Gauss Award in 1985, and he has also written several volumes of poetry,
including Promised Lands, Natal Command, and Necessity.
WILLIAM FLESCH, Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University,

has published articles in Critical Inquiry, Studies in Romanticism, and Southwest
Review. He is the author of Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare,
Herbert, Milton.
MARY NYQUIST, Associate Professor of English at the University of

Toronto, is co-editor (along with Margaret Ferguson) of Re-membering
Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions. She has also published articles on
Phallogocentric discourses in Paradise Lost and The House of Mirth and the
Anglo-American realist tradition.
JOHN GUILLORY is Professor of English at New York University. He is

the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History and
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. His articles on
reading, ethics, and philosophy have appeared in The Turn to Ethics,
Rethinking Class, and other volumes.
C.A. PATRIDES was the G.B. Harrison Professor of English at the

University of Michigan and the author of Milton and the Christian Tradition;
Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature; and many other
Contributors 335
books. He also edited several essay collections, as well as editions of the

poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Milton.
PRICE McMURRAY, Assistant Professor of American Literature at Texas

Wesleyan University, has published articles in Milton Studies and Studies in
American Fiction.
J. MARTIN EVANS is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at

Stanford University. He has published a number of books on Milton,
including Road from Horton: Looking Backwards in Lycidas, Paradise Lost and
the Genesis Tradition, and Miltonic Moment. Most recently he has edited the
essay collection John Milton: Twentieth Century Perspectives.
STANLEY FISH is the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most inuential works are Surprised
by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost and Is There a Text In This Class? The
Authority of Interpretive Communities. Other books include Self-Consuming
Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, Professional
Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, as well as studies of Skelton,
Herbert, and legal theory.
BARBARA K. LEWALSKI is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and

Literature and of English Literature at Harvard University. Her books
include Miltons Brief Epic: the Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained;
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric; and more
recently, Writing Women in Jacobean England. She has also edited Renaissance
Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation and Polemics and Poems of
Rachel Speght.
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346 Acknowledgments
From The Majesty of Darkness by William Flesch. From Modern Criticial

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Index
Abdiel, angel in Paradise Lost, 5, 9, 48, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode,
5859 (Fletcher), 10
challenging Satan, 308309 Allusion, 78
deance of Satan, 90 the Golden Age, 13
on devils and deities, 301 Alpheus, character in Lycidas
Absolom and Achitopel, (Dryden), 320 the stream as a gure, 40
Adam, character in Paradise Lost Aminta, (Tasso), 29
courage of, 86 Anaphora, 110
creation of, 174, 189 Androgyny, 174
on evil, 90 Animadversions, 241
Felix culpa speech, 91 Annotations Upon All The Books of The
and inability to see God, 163164 Old and New Testaments,
on meaning of knowledge, 167 (Westminster Assembly)
the mourning hymn, 85 compared to Tetrachordon, 182
his Satanic echoing, 117 on Miltons exegesis, 181
his speech, 185 Answer to Davenants Preface, (Hobbes),
on weakness of the fall, 161 20
Adam and Eve, (Shapiro), 327 Antanaclasis, 115
Adams, John, 322 Anti-Platonic, 162
Adam Unparadisd Anti-plot thinking, 299
on the fall of man, 240 Apology for Poetry, (Sidney), 253
Adamus Exul, play, (Grotius), 238239 and style in, 247
Adelman, Janet, 276277 Apology for Smectymnuus, An, 98
on Paradise Lost, 288 and chastity, 99
Adone, (Marino), 56 having hero, 99
Adorno, Theodor, 204 Miltons aspirations to God and
Ad Patrem, 103 Country, 238
Advancement of Learning, The, (Bacon), 7 Arabia Felix Simile, 8384
Aeneid, 1416, 20, 62 Araignment, The, (Swetnam), 179180
Alaric, (Scudery), 56, 61 Arbeitszwang
Alchemist, (Jonson), 51 sublimation of aggression, 218219
347
348 Index
Arcades Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton,

Jonsons inuence in, 29 (Cronklin), 50
the lyrics of, 30 Blackmore, Richard, 320
Arcadia, (Sidney), 38 Blake, 247, 320
Arcadian Rhetorike, The, (Fraunce), 15 on Satan, 4
Areopagitica, 8, 13, 166, 235, 253, 326, Bloom, Harold, 158, 168
238 an introduction, 121
advances in series of waves, 245 on Milton as father gure, 319
epistemological condition in, 311 on Miltons response to his
as testimony, 301 ambivalence, 167
Arethusa-Alpheus legend, 127 on Satan in Paradise Lost, 154
Ariosto, 55 Boiardo, 55
Aristotle, 262 Book of Common Prayer, 123
on recognition, 263264 Borromini, 239
Armenian revision of Calvinist Doctrine, Bourgeois Vocation, 219220
205, 211 and accumulation of material capital,
Arnold, Matthew, 325 227
Art of Logic, 68 Bourdieu, Pierre
Arthos, John, 101 and capitalism, 224225
Artistic labor, 227 symbolic capital, 224
Asprezza, 69 Borges, Jorge Luis, 238
Astell, Mary, 196197 Brand, Dana
Attendant Spirit, 103 consciousness in Il Penseroso, 283
Aubrey, John, 248 on LAllegro, 282
Aufhebung, 113 Breviate of the Prelates Intollerable
Usurpations, both upon the Kings
Prerogative Royall, and the Subjects
Bah, Mieke, 173 Liberties, A,
Barber (Bastwick/Burton/Phynne), 123
on Comus, 102103 Broadbent, J. B.
Barberini, Cardinal, 238239 on Miltons vocabulary, 296297
Barlow, Joel, 321 Brooke, Dorothea, 325
Barons Wars, (Drayton), 59 Browning, 9
Barthes, Roland, 275276, 279 Burke, Edmund, 321
Bastwick, 123124 Burton, 123
Beaux Stratagem, The, (Farquhar), 245 Byron, 323
Bellerus Byronic heroes, 323
the fabled giant, 141142
Belsey, Catherine, 315
Berufsarbeit Calamy, Edmund, 240
and sublimation of aggression, 219, Calvin
221 on Adam, 186
Beyond the Pleasure of Principle, (Freud), difference between general and
216 special calling, 210211
Index 349
the elect, 210 tone of Shakespeare, 30

the generic man, 178 Congreve, 235
on God, 205 Conklin, G. N., 50
and vocation, 211 Conquest of Canaan, The, (Dwight), 321
Calvinism, 152 Conventions
ideologies of labor, 216 Miltons use of, 132
psychic accounting, 227 Cooper, Anthony, 321322
Camoens, 55 Court poets, 55
Campion, 101 Cowley, 21, 56
Canzone, 25, 27 failures of his youth, 5859
Charles I, 240, 247 his un-heroic couplets, 58
Charles IX, 55 Cowper, William, 321
Charming, William Ellery, 325 Cromwell, 52, 248
Chastity
envisioned in sacred language, 99
Miltons concern with, 98 DAubigne, 55
Christian Doctrine, 152, 159, 169 Christian epics, 56
of the creation, 303 Damons Epitaph, 79
on image of God, 168 Damrosch, Leo
all things come from God, 303 on Milton, 316
true worship of God, 312 Dante, 7
Christian Theology, 97 on the far-fetching, 1112
Christs Victorie and Triumph, Davenant, 21, 56, 61
(Fletcher), 57 David and Golia, (Drayton), 57
Christus Patiens, 227 Davideis, (Cowley), 5657, 62
Cicero, 254 invocation to, 59
Civil Wars, (Daniel), 59 shortcomings of, 59
Civilization and its Discontents, (Freud), Davie, Donald, 306
217 on Miltons syntax, 298
and compulsion to work, 218 Davis, Jefferson, 326
economics of the libido, 218 Death of the Author, The, (Barthes),
Claudian, 82 275
Clovis, (Saint-Sorlin), 56 Death of Bishop of Winchester, On the, 79
Colasterion, 183184 Death of a Fair Infant, On the, 24
Collins, William, 321 De Ave Phoenice, (Lactantius), 67, 83
Comic echo, 114 De Comus a Satan, 3738
Comus, 10, 2931, 63, 105 De Doctrina, 33, 37, 44, 50
ambiguity of themes, 97 the ignorance of the son, 41
blank verse in, 2930 on removing election, 211
Jonsons inuence in, 29 special vocation, 211
on looking back, 101 Defenses, 248249
lyrics of, 30 Defense of Himself, 250
Miltons relation to Elizabethans, 30 Defense of Poetry, A, (Shelley), 4, 153
as radical experimentation, 100 Defensio regia, (Salmasius), 248, 250
350 Index
Defensio Secunda authoritative, 245

and Milton and Republican cause, 230 and categorical, 245
Defoe, 320 result of Miltons experience, 245
De jure belli ac pacis, 238 Effects of his Political Life on John Milton,
Deleuze The, (Morand), 37
idolatry in Plato, 162 Eikon Basilike, 38
Dennis, John, 320 Eikonoclastes, 38
De-sublimation, 225226 Elegia Quinta, 84
De Quincey, Thomas. 324 Eliot, George, 325, 327
Dickens, 325 Eliot, T. S., 36, 319, 326327
Dickinson, 151 Elizabethans, 2830
Diodati Emerson, 325326
Miltons letter to, 122, 124 on the word death, 114
Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, A, Empson, William, 261, 315, 326
(Nicchole) the general calling, 210
and marital friendship, 180181 on Heaven, 3354
Divorce tracts, 174 on Milton and ambivalence, 167
on gender, 184 on Raphael like Satan, 160
on marriage, 175 and Satan in Paradise Lost, 154
and privileged male voice, 190 English Epic, 56
the Reformers view, 175 Epic Poem, 31
on re-marriage after divorce, 176 Epistemology, 311
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Epistrophe, 110
and charity, 245 Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester,
on divorce and civil power, 177178 21, 79, 280, 289, 291
and logic, 253 on the dead woman, 281
and Milton pleading for a divorce, Epithaphium Damonis
243 the phoenix reference, 82
narrowness of, 235 Equal Rights, 171
Don Juan, (Byron), 323 Essays, (Montaigne), 287
Drayton, 57, 59 Essay on Man, (Pope), 320
Drummond, 27 European Renaissance, 49
Dryden, 8, 319320 Evans, J. Martin
Du Bartas, 59 on the Birth of the Author: Miltons
Du Bellay, 56 Poetic Self-Construction, 275294
Dunciad, The, 320 on Milton slowly evolving, 291
Dwight, Timothy, 321 on Paradise Lost, 287290
on Paradise Regained, 290291
the 1645 Poems, 277287
Eclogue, (Virgil), 125 Eve, character in
Eclogue IV, (Virgil), 128 courage of, 86
Eclogue VI, (Virgil), 134 creation of, 174, 189
Eclogue X, (Virgil), 127, 132 her disobedience, 164
Education,Of, 31, 253, 266 the mourning hymn, 85
Index 351
her speech, 192 Frescobaldi, Pietro, 238239

Everett, Edward, 326 Freud, 219, 225
Excursion, (Wordsworth), 323 in Samsons freedom, 220
Eyeless in Gaza, (Huxley), 327 on Schicksalszwang, 216217
Frost,
on the word death, 114
Faerie Queene, The, (Spencer), 7, 9, 14 Froula, Christine
the shield of Radigund, 12 on Eves speech, 192
Faithful Shepherdess, (Fletcher), 29 Fry, Paul
Farquhar, 245 on Aristotle, 267
Feast of Dagon, 6 Frye, Northrop
Finney, Gretchen, 101 on Milton, 99100, 313
First Idyl, (Virgil), 132 Fuller, Margaret, 326327
First Institution and Author of Future of an Illusion, The, (Freud), 217
Marriage, Of the, (Nicchole), 180 and arbeitszwanf, 217218
Fish, Stanley, 285 and triebverzicht, 217
Difference and Writing, 305308
Freedom and Risk, 314317
Gently Raised, 295318 Genesis
on Miltons egoism, 291 creation of Adam, 174
The Politics of Testimony, 308314 creation of Eve, 174
Semblance not Substance, 295300 on the end of marriage, 177
Telling the Difference, 300305 relationship to Paradise Lost, 173
Flandrin, Jean-Louis, 215 Genette, Gerard, 174
Flesh, William Geneva Bible, 208
on The Majesty of Darkness, 151169 Georgics, (Virgil), 5
Fletcher, Angus, 9, 29 Gnostic Aeon, 163
his study of Spencer, 10 on Miltons true God, 163
on Thyrsis: The Orphic Persona, God
101107 his invisibility, 161162
on The Transcendental Masque, Gondibert, (Davenant), 56, 61
97100 Graves, Robert, 327
Fletcher, Giles, 57 Gray, Thomas, 7, 321
Foucault Great Expectations, (Dickens), 325
and genealogy, 205 Greco-Christian, 174
Miltons author function, 276 Greene, Thomas
the Protestant Vocation, 207 on Milton, 5596
subjectivity and subjection, 156 Griswold, R. W., 325326
Four Quartets, (Eliot), 327 Grotius, Hugo, 238,239
Fowler, 19 Guarini, 29
Frankenstein, (Shelley), 324 Guillory, John
Franklin, Benjamin, 206, 322 on the Fathers House: Samson
Fraunce, Abraham, 115 Agonistes in its Historical Moment,
Freneau, Philip, 321 203233
352 Index
Hale, John K., 278 Iconoclasm, 152

Hall, Bishop Joseph, 241 Idolatrous narcissism, 158
and Miltons antagonist, 246 Idolatry, 305
Halpern, Richard, 279 vehicles of, 314
Hamlet, (Shakespeare), 180 Iliad, (Homer), 12, 15, 19
Handel, 320 similes in, 80
Hanford, James Holly Il Moderato, (Handel), 320
on Milton in LAllegro and Il Il Pastor Fido, (Guarini), 29
Penseroso, 283 Il Penseroso, 9, 166, 277, 280
Hardy, 245 and artist humor, 23
Hartlib, Samuel, 245 consciousness presented in, 283
Hawthorne, 326 and passiveness, 284
Hazlitt on poet re-entering text, 282
on Miltons learning, 10 Interpretive Labor, 316
Hegel, 113 Invention Spiritual, 145
Henri III, 55
Henri IV, 55
Hero and Leander, 105
Jacobeans, 2830
Heroic Martyrdom, 1
Job, 5
Heywood, Thomas, 61, 251
John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Hill, Christopher, 152
Prose, (Hughes), 278
Hill, Geoffrey, 7
Johnson, Dr., 10, 122, 235, 324
Hind and the Panther, (Dryden), 320
on Comus, 30, 98
Historie of Samson, (Quarles), 56
on Davideis, 57
History of Britain, 250
parallelism in, 251 and Miltons political convictions,
and progressive, 253 235236
History of England, (Macauley), 322 Johnsonian Epithet, 98
Hobbes, 20, 61 Joyce, James, 327
as materialist, 248 Jude the Obscure, (Hardy), 245
Hollander, John, 18 Judeo-Christian, 172
on Echo Schematic, 109120 Judgment Day, 41
Holstein, Lucas, 238 Judit, (Du Bartas), 59
and Secretary to Cardinal Barberini,
238
Homer, 7, 9, 1718, 327 Kafka, 118
on the far-fetching, 1112 Keats, 9, 23, 235
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 325 his admiration for Milton, 323
Horton Period, 28, 31 Kerman, 101
Hughes, Merritt Y., 278 the mythic failure of Orpheus, 102
Humanist Poet, 55 Kermode, Frank
Huxley, Aldous, 327 on Paradise Lost, 12
Hyperion, 323324 King Lear, (Shakespeare), 114
King of Zion, 37
Index 353
Knell, Paul on Italian diction, 24

his sermon, 240 on Miltons optimism, 79
Knight, Wilson, 39 resurrection, 145
and self-mourning in, 129
and speech of St. Peter, 122123
Lactantius, 8283 the sun, 143144
LAllegro, 23, 166, 277, 280 vocative mood in, 126
on poet re-entering the text, 282
and self-assertions transformed, 284
Landor, Walter Savage, 324 Macauley, Catherine, 322, 327
La Tina, (Malatesti) Mac Callum, Hugh, 168, 261262
dedicated to Milton, 239 Madan, F. F., 38
Laud, Archbishop, 123 Malatesti, Antonio, 238
Lawes, Henry, 97 Malcolm X, 327
Leavis, F. R., 299, 316 Man-Mouse Taken in a Trap, The,
on Miltons single-mindedness, 296, (Vaughan), 241
307 Manso, 79
on Miltons style, 296 Mantle Blue, 144
Lewalski, Barbara K., Marcus, Leah, 277
on SomethingWritten to on Lycidas, 287
Aftertimes, 319329 and Miltons 1645 Poems, 277
Lewis, C. S., the new historical subject, 278
his idea of social order, 53 Marino, 56
on Satan, 36, 43 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,
Life and Death of Mary Magdalene, (Blake), 4, 322
(Robinson), 57 Marshall, Stephen, 240
Life of Milton, (Johnson), 10 Martz, Louis, L., 282
Lincoln, 326 on Lycidas, 287
Lincolnshire, Rev. Carlton, 262 on Paradise Regained, 5
Locke, John, 321 Marvell, Andrew, 223
Locus Amoenus, 112 Marx, 227
Lords Maske, The, (Campion), 101 Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, A, 275
Lorenzo de Medici, 55 McFarland, Thomas, 7
Lowell, Robert, 327 McMahon, Robert
Lucifer and Prometheus, (Werblowsky), 44 on the speaker in Paradise Lost, 276
Lucretius, 7 McMurray, Price
Lurianic Kabbalists, 8 on Aristotle on the Pinnacle: Paradise
on gilgul, 8 Regained and the Limits of Theory,
Lycidas, 23, 31, 101 261273
the authors voice, 284285 Mediation, 204
authority of the father, 135 Medina, John Baptist, 320
classical myth, 136 Melville, 326
conventional symbols in, 125 Memoriam, In, (Tennyson), 43
the corrupt clergy, 241 Metamorphoses, (Ovid), 18
354 Index
Metropolitan Visitation, 123 Morand, M., 3738, 42

Michelangelo, 239 on God, 39, 46
Middlemarch, (Eliot), 325 on political corruption of Miltons
Midsummer Nights Dream, mind, 45
(Shakespeare), 20 and the son and the father, 40
Millennium, 4445 More, Henry, 241242, 250
Milton, (Warton), 98 Morning of Christs Nativity, On the,
Milton, John 2324, 166, 278
his blindness, 1 Morris, Mark, 320
and combative spirit, 121 Mosaic Law, 44
conict between Republican politics Mount Niphates, 4
and his theology, 310, 312 Mouzell for Melastomus, A, (Speght), 186
Cowley his favorite poet, 62 Murder in the Cathedral, (Eliot), 327
on divorce, 175176
and fascination with loss, 121
on freedom, 221 Nachklang, 110, 112
his God, 3334, 37, 47 Narcissus Myth, 193
his humanity, 92 Nativity Ode, 63, 279280, 288
as idealist, 248 Natural Theology, 4344
idolatry, 152 Neo-Christians, 44
and inuence on Romantics, 8 Neoplatonic Theology, 97
his language, 296 New Bibliography of the Eikon, (Madan),
his minor poems, 23 38
his prose, 253 Newcomen, Matthew, 240
and Puritanism, 87 New Presbyter is but Old Priest Writ
reverence for the Bible, 9192 Large, 247
his Satan, 4 Newton, Isaac, 320
his similes, 7980 Nicchole, Alexander, 180181
and the sonnet, 26, 28 Nietzsche, 110
his style, 7 Noahs Flood, (Drayton), 57
and syntax, 28 Nyquist, Mary
Miltonic inversion, 30 on the Genesis of Gendered
Miltons Self-Presentation in Poems1645, Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts
(Hale), and in Paradise Lost, 171201
Miltons Spirit, (Shelley), 323
Mirabeau, 322
Mirandola, Picodella, 99 Ode to a Nightingale, (Keats), 109
Moby Dick,(Melville), 326 Odets, Clifford, 327
Modest Plea for the Property of Copy Right, Odyssey, (Homer), 56, 85
A, (Macauley), 322 Old Testament, 33, 3739
Monism, 303, 306, 311 and Cowley, 59
Monomachie de David et de Goliath, Omnic Word, 300, 307
(DuBellay), 56 Orphic persona, 101
Montaigne, 287 Os Lusiadas, (Camoens), 55
Index 355
Othello, (Shakespeare), 114 on Miltons Prose: The Adjustment of

Ovid, 7, 82 Idealism, 235259
the far-fetching, 1112 Penderecki, 320
the Golden Age, 13 opera on Paradise Lost, 320
Owen, Wilfred, 36 Perkins, William, 227
as calling, 208
condemning monks and beggars, 209,
Palaemon, 145 214
the drowned youth in Lycidas, 141 Pervigilium Veneris, 111
Pandaemonium, 1820 Petrach, 25
Parables, On, (Kafka), 118 his canzone, 26
Paradise Lost, 12, 20, 40, 109, 242243, Phelan, Herbert, 277
252, 322 Phillips, Edward, 251252
Christian heroism, 261 Phoenix simile, 81, 84
on conclusion, 79 symbol for New Age, 82
cosmic politics in, 88 Plagiarism, 78
epic heroism, 261 Platonic doctrine, 162
escape in, 306 Plot-thinking, 299, 301
Milton taking charge of, 290 Plutarch, 251
paradox in, 87 Poems of Mr. John Milton, The, 287
pastoral echo, 112113 Political context, 204
phoenix reference, 82 in Samson Agonistes, 204
power of omnipotence, 305 Pope, 320321
relationship to Genesis, 173 Post-feminist feminism, 171
on Satan, 4, 255 Powell, Mary
scheme of refrain, 109110 Miltons wife, 243
style of, 67, 69 Predestination, 205
wordplay in 114115 Prelatical Episcopacy, Of, 241
Paradise Regained, 39, 256, 322 Prelude, The, (Wordsworth), 323
and Christ, 261 Presence Divine, 190
on climax, 266267 Primary epic, 7
the nal temptation, 263 Primitive economic exchange, 225226
formalism of, 264 Prince, F. T.
the I, in, 290291 on Miltons Minor Poems, 2331
a subdued work, 5 Prometheus Unbound, (Shelley), 4, 154
Paranomasia, 115 Prophetic Moment, The, (Fletcher), 10
Parker, W. R., 280 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Pascal Capitalism, The, (Weber), 209
and mockery, 242, 250 and mediation, 204
Passion, The, 24, 166 Protestant Vocation, 224
Miltons presence, 279, 283 Prothalamion, 25
Pastoral echo, 112114 Prynne, 1123124
Pastoral ction, 130 Psalm 19, 110
Patrides, C. A. Psalm 148, 110
356 Index
Pulci, 55 Rose and Milton, A, (Borges), 328

Puritanism Ross, Alexander, 242
repression of, 123 Rouse, John, 287
Ruskin, 145
Qintum Novembris, 63
Quarles, 62 Sacks, Peter M.,
on scriptural stories, 61 on Milton: Lycidas, 121149
Querelle des Femmes, 179180 Saint Michael
patron of mariners, 142
Saint Peter
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 33 his anger, 139
on Paradise Lost, 91 hair as symbol, 138
on sin and death, 35 his speech, 138
Rape of the Lock, The, (Pope), 320 Salamasius, 250
Raphael, character in Paradise Lost Samson Agonistes, 6, 101, 295, 322
on being almighty, 160 aggression in, 221
platonic doctrine, 162 blank verse in, 30
on presenting God, 161 the bourgeois Protestant, 207
Rappacinis Daughter, (Hawthorne), 326 code-like narrative, 203
Rapport, Herman, 310311 and coral inventions, 104
Ready and Easy Way, The, 1, 247, 322 death in, 207
and pessimism in, 79 faith in, 206
Reason of Church Government, The, 69, preface to, 253, 268
241, 253, 266, 302 regeneration, 212
discipline in, 237 suicide in, 208, 227
Miltons aspirations to God and the two fathers in, 207, 215
Country, 238 Samuel, Irene
Reections Upon Marriage, (Astell), 196 on Paradise Regained, 262
Reformation in England, Of, 79 Sannazaro, 55, 122, 125
Reformation Touching Church Discipline, Satan, character in Paradise Lost, 4
241 brutality of, 14
Regii sanguinis clamor, (More), 250 and complexity of, 155
Remedia Amoris, 105 and defeat, 266
Reply, (Wheatley), 321 on devils and deities, 301
Revolutionary Artist, 99100 his disguise, 64
Revolutionary Epoch, 123 his echo, 115
Rising Glory of America, The, (Freneau), his fall, 264, 269
321 his mistakes about paradise, 116
Riviere, Joan, 218 and rationalization, 265
Robinson, Thomas, 57 and sin, 158
Romantics, 166 his spear, 13
Ronsard, 55 and tragedy and rhetoric, 268
Room of Ones Own, (Wolfe), 327 Saurant, M. 4951
Index 357
Schopenhauer, 110 Spurstow, William, 240

Scudery, 56 State of Innocence, (Dryden), 320
Second Defense of the People of England, Stein, Arnold
The, 104 on Paradise Regained, 5
Second Lash, (More), 241 Stevens, 114
Second Wash, (Vaughn), 241 Story of Mary Powell Wife to Mr. Milton,
Secondary epic, 7 The, (Graves), 327
Shakespeare, 20 Stuart, M.
the compact pun, 115 on Miltons God, 35
the prophetic strain, 10 Sublimation, 225
Shakespeare, On, 24, 30, 275, 281, 289 Sur La Liberte de la Presse, (Mirabeau),
Shapiro, Karl, 327 322
Sharpe, Joan, 179 Sweeney Agonistes, (Eliot), 327
Shelley, Mary, 167 Swetnam, Joseph, 179180
Shelley, P. B., 151 Sylvester, Joshua, 58
on Milton, 236 Symbolic Capital, 224
on Satan, 152
Sidney, Algernon, 321
Sidney, Sir Philip, 246, 253 Tasso, 7, 55
Sistine Chapel, 239 his Christian epics, 56
1645 Poems, 277287, 316 Tempest, The, (Shakespeare), 165
authorial persona in, 289 Temple, The, (Herbert), 112
Skunk Hour, (Lowell), 327 Ten Commandments, 313
Solemn Music, At a, 27, 280, 291, 308 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The, 250,
and choric voice, 286 253
on couplets, 28 on free man, 247
Song on May Morning, 281 defensivness of, 235
Southey, Robert, 324 and sovereignty, 237
Spacks, Patricia M., 276 Tennyson, 9, 4344
Special Vocation, 213 on imitating Miltons verse and
Species of Liberty diction, 325
civil, 240 Tertiary epic, 7
domestic, 240 Tetrachordon, 105, 184
ecclesiastical, 240 on charity, 244
Spectator, The, (Addison), 320 compared to Annotations, 182
Speght, Rachel, 181 and marriage, 176
and dignity of mariage, 179 on sexual union, 176
on Genesis, 180 on unity, 176
as liberal feminist, 180 Theobald, 283
and wordplay, 180 Theocritus, 122, 125
Spenser, 1, 55 Theorie de la Royaute daupres la doctrine
his Christian epics, 56 de Milton, (Mirabeau), 322
and conservative temperament, 99 Third Wave Feminism, 171
his inuence on Paradise Lost, 7 Thomson, James, 321
358 Index
Tillyard, E. M. W. Vives, Juan Luis, 244

on Paradise Regained, 5 Vocation, 204
Time, On, 280 historical problem of, 206207
rhythmic weight, 27 Vorklang, 112, 118
Tithonus, (Tennyson), 43
Toland, John, 320321
Tornata, 112 Waldock, A. J. A. 315
Totalitarian State, 53 on Gods innoncence, 34
Transcendental Masque, The, (Fletcher), Warton, Thomas
10 on Comus, 98
Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Weber, Max, 205, 207
Causes, A, 246, 253 his ethic, 223
Treatise of the Vocations, A, or Calling of on religion and economy, 204
Men, (Perkins), 208 vocation, 204, 209210, 212
Trible, Phyllis, 173 Werblowsky, R. J. Z., 44
Trinity Manuscript, 126 Westminster Assembly, 181
Troilus and Criseyde, 276 Wheatley, Phillis, 321
When Eve Reads Milton, (Froula), 192
Whitman, Walt, 114, 326
Ulysses, (Joyce), 327 William the Conquerer, 251
University Carrier, On The, 24 Winters, Yvor, 35, 52
Upon the Circumcision, 280 Woodhouse
Urban VIII, Pope, 239 on Comus, 98
Uriel, (Emerson), 326 Woolfe, Virginia, 327
Ussher, Archbishop James, 240241 Wordsworth
on Milton, 236, 323
Wordsworth Solitary, 9
Vacation Exercise, At a, 24
and music and verse, 103
Vaughan, Thomas, 241 Yeats, 9
Vertical imagery, 87 Young, Edward, 321
Vido, 55 Young, Thomas, 240
Virgil, 5, 7, 61, 117118 as Miltons tutor, 68
the far-fetching, 1112
and Paradise Lost, 30
Vision of Columbus, The, (Barlow), 321 Zohar, 4950

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Blooms Modern Critical Views

African American Samuel Taylor Jamaica Kincaid

Edited and with an introduction by

Introduction 2004 by Harold Bloom.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

John Milton / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Chelsea House Publishers

Contributing Editor: Brett Foster

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Editors Note vii

Miltons Prose: The Adjustment of Idealism 235

My Introduction is in two parts, the rst reviewing the High Romantic

But in its utmost abstraction and consequent state of reprobation,

its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and

Against this reading of the Satanic predicament we can set the

So deal not with this once thy glorious Champion,

M I LT O N AND HIS PRECURSORS1

NO poet compares to Milton in his intensity of self-consciousness as an artist

repetitive charges of plagiarism, has suggested that plagiarism ought to be

be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,

study of Spenser, The Prophetic Moment, charts this genealogy of

Whatever be his subject, he never fails to ll the imagination. But

This Johnsonian emphasis upon allusion in Milton inspires Fletcher to

Johnson stresses allusion in Milton: the spectacles of books are

Here is the passage that moved Johnsons observation, Paradise Lost,

He scarce had ceast when the superior Fiend

The transumption of the precursors here is managed by the

juxtaposition between the far-fetching of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso,

Milton is glancing also at the shield of Radigund in The Faerie Queene,

And on her shoulder hung her shield, bedeckt

Radigund, Princess of the Amazons, is dominated by pride and anger,

when visited by Milton (as he tells us in Areopagitica), was working while

a club, or staff, lay there along the fold

These sons of Mavors bore, instead of spears,

So growen great through arrogant delight

... why ask of my generation?

thick as the leaves that with the early frost

Homer accepts grim process; Virgil accepts yet plangently laments,

Our prows were pointed there when suddenly,

... he marks Arcturus,

Alastair Fowler notes the contrast to the parallel Biblical allusions:

He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened

Let none admire

Men calld him Mulciber; and how he fell

The devastating Erring of line 747 is a smack at Homer by way of the

... It is too hard to ght against the Olympian.

Milton rst mocks Homer by over-accentuating the idyllic nature of

transumptive returns to present time is then accomplished by an allusion to

From knowing much, proceedeth the admirable variety and

Had Milton deliberately accepted this as challenge, he could have done

Miltons Minor Poems