"Happy Birthday, Milton"
WIEDER, LAURANCE
Happy Birthday, Milton The poet-prophet turns 500 BY LAURANCE WIEDER I wouldn’t recommend John Milton’s sacred epics, or even his short poems, to a newcomer to the English language. The...
...It’s also the second duty enjoined by the Hebrew Bible...
...And from youth, the poet devoted himself to what he only got around to accomplishing in the last decades of his life: writing a sacred epic that reconciles the course of divine history with a journey of the solitary soul...
...Such large claims, and his conviction that he possessed an upright and pure heart, however honestly come by, do nothing to soften resistance...
...And too true...
...Likewise, an auditor of the fallen angels’ council and debates in Hell did not require academic commentary to connect either the defi ant spirit in defeat, or the perils of despair, with the recent Rebellion, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the Stuart Restoration...
...they were not written...
...The man and his works seem indissoluble, with the density and gravity of matter...
...Learning may be a prerequisite to reading John Milton’s poetry, but that learning is not impossible...
...This presents a daunting task for a generation taught to read to itself without moving the lips...
...It was 2,000 years after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, when prophecy ceased in Israel...
...When Milton says “Sing,” he’s invoking more than literary convention...
...In 1673, one year before his death, Milton added his translation from the Latin of “The Fifth Ode of Horace, Book I” to the last edition of his minor poems...
...It’s tempting to think of Milton as all learning and intensity, with no nature...
...All Milton’s settings and actions occur in the mind...
...But the thought doesn’t stop there...
...In darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude . . . they are overdetermined...
...In the last 15 years of his life, Milton openly proclaimed himself an anointed prophet...
...of fl attering gales Unmindfull...
...Coming from anyone else, these lines might be bombast...
...Adamantine, hard from the start, Milton’s English poetry aspires to biblical Hebrew and, for good or ill, succeeds...
...Unless the epics are read aloud, it’s impossible to hear them, no matter how developed the inward ear...
...Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes were dictated by a blind poet...
...the poet remembering love now disenchanted...
...From the lips of one with mortal voice, unchang’d / To hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes, / On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues...
...John Milton (1608-1674) is read mostly in university courses (that’s by the priestly caste) and by novelists and poets...
...The poetry of Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson share his themes, is good to learn by heart, and can enter through many gates...
...The pagan oracles fell silent at Jesus’ birth...
...Memory is the mother of the Muses...
...He includes everything he knows, throws everything into his poems, everything he can remember...
...Unlike the Bible, or Blake, or Dickinson, Paradise Lost is not amenable to paraphrase...
...This cuts-bothways/ all-purpose love lyric (in English) belongs to the same tradition as Ben Jonson’s tavern song with Latin roots, “To Celia” (Drink to me, onely, with thine eyes) which can be delivered, depending on where the stress falls, as a blessing or a curse...
...Happy Birthday, Milton The poet-prophet turns 500 BY LAURANCE WIEDER I wouldn’t recommend John Milton’s sacred epics, or even his short poems, to a newcomer to the English language...
...Me in my vow’d Picture the sacred wall declares t’ have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern God of Sea...
...Laurance Wieder is the author of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms...
...The poems were not opaque to his contemporaries, who shared an English education, urgent political choices, and premessianic unease...
...Jesus’ renunciation of gentile poetry and philosophy in Paradise Regain’d must have tasted strange in the mouth of the classical scholar...
...But it’s the basic requirement for a reader (or at least for me) to discover what one thought one knew but does not know...
...It was an age when even theology had consequences...
...Hear, O Israel” would be the fi rst...
...Then there’s that howl, Samson lamenting his blindness: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse / Without all hope of day...
...Adam’s passionate attachment to (and disappointment in) Eve banks the embers of Milton’s three marriages...
...Milton’s sentence continues through line 12: Who now enjoys thee . . . / Who alwayes vacant, alwayes amiable / Hopes thee . . . Depending on where the reade stresses the “whos,” who can be heard as “he who,” enjoying present bliss, or as “who...
...O how oft shall he On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas Rough with black winds and storms Unwonted shall admire: Who now enjoyes thee credulous, all Gold, Who always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee...
...The greatness of his art is its diffi culty, its intransigence, its irreducible material...
...Pyrrha’s beauty, real or illusive, must be tried, or nothing happens: no desire, guilt, or virtue...
...the “thee” being Pyrrha, erotic other with golden hair...
...Hapless they To whom thou untry’d seem’st fair...
...The pressure of speaking about events and forces prior to language required Milton to straddle both sides, to admit the impossibility of what he attempted and still do it...
...Here’s the whole thing: What slender Youth bedew’d with liquid odours Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave, Pyrrha for whom bindst thou In wreaths thy golden Hair, Plain in thy neatness...
...His Cambridge classmates dubbed their long-haired, sober scholar “Our Lady of Christ’s College...
...He couldn’t proof his last works, never saw the books in print or read them to himself...
...I have no idea about the last sentence, those last four lines, which I can’t parse, or assemble, yet unnerve me nonetheless...
...Up to line 12, the ode is a comrade also to the urbane, disenchanted John Donne of “Go, and catch a falling star . . .” But where men of tarnished hopes distance themselves through knowingness or doubleness or irony, Milton’s lover takes a different turn: Hapless they / To whom thou untry’d seemst fair...
...There’s no graphic novelization, no stage or movie treatment even of his life, much less of the (relatively) simple Paradise Regain’d...
...The fi rst half of this 16-line poem asks a series of questions without question marks: What slender Youth bedew’d with liquid odours / Courts thee . . .; O how oft shall he / . . . complain...
...The iambic pentameter metronome ticking inside the head of a Renaissance reader kept time for the fi rst line of Paradise Lost—“Of man’s fi rst disobedience, and the fruit”—and marked disobedience’s metrical betrayal...
...It is written in the vernacular, maybe encrusted by the fashions of their times, but still alluring...
...Whatever the virtues of the Handel oratorio based on Milton’s text, it is something other (and less) than the original...
...Even Samson Agonistes, patterned on Greek tragedy, was not intended for performance...
...Creation, the War in Heaven, Chaos, Sin and Death, Satan, Adam and Eve in the Garden and their Fall, Redemption: Even the grandest and remotest of Milton’s themes is informed by intimacy struggling with diffidence and guilt...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 11
