CHAPTER 7

The Poetics of Play and Devotion

‘His Hand Unstained’

After beginning his MA studies in Michaelmas Term 1629, Milton’s imagination seems to have increasingly become under the sway of an image of the epic poet as a man who must not only master universal learning, but his own carnal appetites and desires, if he is to become a mediator between heaven and earth. If the true poet is to become attuned to the music of the spheres, become daemonic, then he must possess a heart ‘as pure, as chaste, as snowy’ as the Pythagoras invoked in the second Prolusion. It is hard to be sure how much this conception of the poetic vocation as an alternative priesthood, with fastidious requirements of fleshly restraint, is a self-dramatizing role to which Milton light-heartedly plays up in his correspondence with friends and interactions with peers at Christ’s—young Milton as the latter-day Domina who must rise above the petty indulgences of those without his vast, Virgilian ambition. There is, as we shall see, an element of this playfulness in exchanges with his friend Charles Diodati over the different kinds of lifestyle a poet might adopt.

At the same time, the equation of higher insight and poetic ambition with moral purity, and particularly with the sexually unsullied body, is a notable feature of the poetry after 1629. In poetic terms, this equation manifests itself in some askance looks at the Ovidian elegiac tradition that had so influenced Milton’s Latin poetry in his undergraduate years—to the point where he had even alluded to well-known moments of Ovidian erotic play in the funeral elegy for Lancelot Andrewes—and which had been translated into English by authors such as Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Among his contemporaries, the Ovidian style had been cultivated by various of those who styled themselves as ‘sons’ of Ben Jonson, including Thomas Randolph, one of whose most popular poems circulating in manuscript at the time Milton began his MA was ‘On 6 Cambridge Maids bathing themselves by Queen’s Coll: Jun. 15th. 1629’.¹ In early modern England Ovid’s works were ‘at the centre of debates on erotic desire, debates on poetry itself, and, especially debates on the relation between desire and the imagination’.² There is a self-conscious distancing by Milton of his poetic ambitions from the Ovidian erotic tradition and its vernacular off-shoots after 1629, even while the engagement with that tradition is incorporated into the texture of major works of the 1630s, including the Maske and ‘Lycidas’ and, eventually, into the arrangement of the 1645 Poems. This structuring element in Milton’s verse from 1629, both Latin and English, is not simply a Christian subordination of the pagan ethos, however, for Milton’s very notion of the poet as a type of priest derives from pagan, Virgilian example.

FIGURE 7. Portrait of a young man identified as John Milton, by an unknown artist (c. 1629).

The recantation of love elegy as a youthful indiscretion was a conventional gesture of the poet who wished to represent himself as having left behind childish things as he progressed up the hierarchy of poetic genres, following the route of the Virgilian cursus, literally ‘running track’ and metaphorically the course of the competitive literary career. Virgil’s career offered a vocational pattern to the poet of ascent from lyric through pastoral and georgic to the most complex and encyclopaedic genre of epic.³ In Elegia sexta, the Latin verse letter addressed to Diodati and composed just after Christmas 1629, Milton makes a distinction between the sociable, festive, sensually indulgent life of the poet of lyric and love elegy and the obscure, frugal, self-denying existence required of the prophetic poet or vates, the term Virgil used of himself in the Aeneid (7. 47) and which Virgil associates with Apollo, the god of poetry, and his priests (e.g. 3. 245–52). ‘Song loves Baachus, and Baachus loves songs’, Milton knowingly informs Diodati, and he goes on to display his mastery of the elegiac form that he has outgrown by describing a dance where ‘girls’ eyes and girls’ fingers playing will make Thalia dart into your breast and take command of it’ (lines 14, 47–8). Thalia is the muse of lyric poetry in Horace’s Hymn to Apollo (Odes, 4. 6) but the Roman spirit presiding over this elegiac tradition is Ovid, who could not write good verse during his exile on the Black Sea because ‘they did not have banquets or cultivate the vine there’ (lines 19–20), and from whom Milton takes his invocation of the ‘Thracian lyre’ (line 37; Ovid, Amores, 2. 11. 32) and of Erato, muse of love poetry (line 51; Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 2. 16).

In this display of his control of Ovidian style, Milton recalls the earlier verse letter to Diodati, published in 1645 as Elegia prima, but also the most sensual of his Latin elegies, Elegia quinta and Elegia septima—the latter likely composed in summer 1628 and so chronologically prior to Elegia sexta, despite the order in which they were printed in 1645. In Elegia quinta, headed ‘On the arrival of Spring at the age of 20’, ‘the wanton Earth breathes her amorous desires, and all her children haste to follow her example’ (lines 95–6), and the poet is given privileged insight into the sexual adventures of the Roman gods such as Faunus, spotted pursuing a nymph who ‘as she runs is anxious to be overtaken’ (lines 129–30). In Elegia septima, written ‘in his nineteenth year’, the speaker admits his ‘whole being was aflame’ after Cupid made him fall instantly in love with a girl whom he saw fleetingly in a crowd in London, and the poem is full of references to the force and ubiquity of sexual desire in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But while poets like Diodati who stick to experimenting with love elegy ‘can get drunk on old wine as often as they like’, the poet who writes about wars, ‘pious heroes and semi-divine commanders’ (‘Heroasque pios, semideosque duces’), and ‘a heaven ruled over by Jove’ must ‘drink soberly from a pure spring’, ‘his youth must be chaste and free from crime, his morals strict and his hand unstained’ (‘Additur huic scelerisque vacans, & casta juventus, / Et rigidi mores, & sine labe manus’; lines 53–4, 55–6, 62–4). The phrase sine labe manus has been interpreted as a prohibition even of masturbation from the regime of the aspiring epic poet.⁴ This poet of sacred and epic song is rather an Apollonian ‘priest’ (sacerdos) who, ‘bathed in holy water and gleaming in . . . holy sacrament’, is in direct contact with the divine. Such sacral imagery of the poet is similarly found in Ad Patrem, where the power of poetry is associated with sacrificial ceremonies of the ancient priests who tended the pagan oracles: ‘It is with poetry that the sacrificing priest composes before the ceremonial altars, whether he is lying low a bull tossing its gilded horns or whether in his prophetic skill he is consulting destiny buried in the reeking entrails and seeking out Fate within the warm innards’ (lines 24–9).

In Elegia sexta, Milton does not explicitly identify himself with this type of the Apollonian priestly poet, whose ‘innermost heart and mouth are full of Jove’, but he turns directly to discussion of his recently composed poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, which ‘the first light of the dawn brought’ to him on Christmas Day 1629 and which he encloses with his verse letter to Diodati (lines 65–6, 78). The implication in Elegia sexta is that a virginal, priestly life has been a precondition of Milton’s inspired achievement in ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, the devotional ode that he would later choose to place at the head of his 1645 Poems. But the life described in Elegia sexta is not that of the Christian ascetic, whether of Catholic or Protestant varieties, but of the devotee of Apollo whose physical and intellectual dedication to articulating a poetry of cosmic praise turns him daemonic, into an instrument of communication between the heavens and the earth such as is imagined in Ad Patrem, where Milton represents himself—in images of the heavenly flight and semi-divinity of the true poet that we have seen to be pervasive in his early writing—as a ‘fiery spirit [spiritus] which whirls around the hurtling spheres’ and ‘flies among the starry choirs’, singing ‘an indescribable song’ (inenarrabile carmen; lines 35–7).

This inenarrabile carmen invokes the Christian context of the heavenly song prophesied in Revelation 14: 2–3, the apprehension of which is limited to those who have remained virgins on earth: ‘I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps. And they sung as it were a new song before the throne . . . no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women: for they are virgins.’ This biblical prophecy of privileged access for male virgins to the divine truths in celestial song seems to have assumed particular resonance for Milton. The idea of song that is indescribable or ‘unexpressive’ in normal human terms recurs in key poems of the later 1630s, beginning with ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, where the ranks of the angels unite ‘in loud and solemn quire, / With unexpressive notes to heaven’s new-born heir’ (lines 115–16); the later funeral elegies for Edward King and Diodati also feature, as we shall see, the association of the post-mortem understanding of this ‘unexpressive’ song with virginal purity on earth.

Yet the jocular tone and sociable and familial contexts in which these elevated notions of the poet are proposed in Elegia sexta should not be forgotten, and they relieve some of the pomposity that might otherwise accumulate in rendering this visionary self-image. In Diodati’s two extant letters to Milton, composed in Greek and undated—though usually assigned to the period before Diodati matriculated at the Calvinist Academy in Geneva in April 1630, and more precisely to the years between his departure for Geneva and his MA graduation from Oxford in July 1628—he adopts a merry, carefree epistolary persona that he juxtaposes with the stiff and scholarly one that he ascribes to his friend. The first letter urges Milton ‘to cheer up’ and ‘put on a holiday mood’ in advance of their planned excursion together, which has been delayed by the stormy weather, ‘before you turn your mind to other things, despairing of sunshine and recreation’. Diodati looks forward to their walk in which the ‘air, sun, river, trees, birds, and earth and men will laugh and (I mean no offence) dance with us as we make holiday’. In the second letter Diodati writes from the country and again wishes his friend would join him among the flowers and birds leave aside his ‘poring over books and papers all day and all night without excuse’. He urges Milton to ‘live, laugh, make the most of Youth and the hours as they pass; and stop studying the activities and recreations and indolences of the sages of old, wearying yourself out in the process’—although he ends by cautioning that such play should not lapse into the laxity of Sardanapalus, the Assyrian king who in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics personifies sexual abandon.⁵ In the first letter there seems to be some teasing about Milton’s ability or inclination to dance, and the concluding reference in the second letter emphasizes, in the comic extremity of its contrast, the fastidiousness of Milton’s character. One wonders if, with Diodati’s early death in 1638, Milton lost the one person whom he would allow to get away with pricking the bombast of his intellectual and literary pretensions.

Melancholicus

The companion poems ‘L’Allegro’ (the joyful, merry man) and ‘Il Penseroso’ (the melancholy, pensive man) bring to vernacular poetic life aspects of the personalities that Milton and Diodati had liked to adopt and ascribe to each other in their affectionate, playful, and archly literate Greek prose and Latin verse correspondence. Milton’s choice of Italian titles suggests Diodati may have been in his mind as an ideal reader. There is reason to think that the poems were written in the period between Elegia sexta and completion of the MA in the summer of 1632. They do not appear in his notebook of literary ideas, the Trinity manuscript, which he began after he left Cambridge. While there is no evidence of scribal circulation of ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ before they were published in the 1645 Poems, a likely model for Milton were two lyrics that were extremely popular among compilers of manuscript verse miscellanies in the universities in the early 1630s. ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ was originally a song in the The Nice Valour, a Jacobean play (c. 1622) first printed in the 1647 edition of the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, but most recently ascribed to Thomas Middleton.⁶ The song appears in an unusually large number of verse miscellanies associated with Oxford and Cambridge in the Caroline period, under various titles including ‘Upon Melancholy’, ‘Song in the Praise of Melancholy’, ‘In Laudem Melancholie’, and ‘Melancholicus’. In several of these extant university miscellanies, the song is copied alongside ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’, by William Strode (1601?–45), a prolific poet at the heart of the scribal verse culture of Caroline Oxford—he was Canon of Christ Church and held the university position of Public Orator—who specialized in such ‘answer poems’.⁷ The song and Strode’s answer, which probably dates from the late 1620s, appear beside each other in a manuscript miscellany associated with Oxford that includes nine poems by Milton’s Cambridge contemporary Thomas Randolph— another illustration of Randolph’s great popularity—and that appears to have been completed by 1634–5; the earliest date for a manuscript in which both poems are transcribed on successive pages is another Oxford miscellany from around 1630.⁸ There are also extant university miscellanies compiled in the mid-seventeenth century in which ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ is transcribed in a column faced on the right by another, unattributed answer poem, which begins ‘Come all my deare delights’, or ‘Come, come all you deere delights’, to form a diptych. One of these latter manuscripts is the miscellany compiled by Elias Ashmole that includes the early version of Milton’s ‘On Time’, headed ‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’.⁹ ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ and ‘Come all my deare delights’ are copied line-for-line into the manuscript, both in Ashmole’s hand, four pages after Milton’s poem.

‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ may not themselves have been part of the scribal poetic culture of the universities, but one element in their composition was likely the familiarity of Milton (and Diodati) with the mode of companion and answer poems that characterized this culture. ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ made ‘a spectacular entry into the culture of manuscript transmission and publication’ in the Caroline universities: ‘few lines . . . can have engaged seventeenth-century minds so actively and vigorously’.¹⁰ The song itself was first printed in 1635 in the peculiar, anonymous compilation A Description of the King and Queene of Faeries, indicating an association of such verse with the fairy world invoked in ‘L’Allegro’, which refers to ‘Faery Mab’ and the ‘drudging Goblin’ Robin Goodfellow and has a particular debt, among numerous Shakespearean echoes, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (lines 102, 105). The opening line of ‘Il Penseroso’, ‘Hence, vain deluding joys’, would immediately have reminded a reader familiar with the lyrics popular in the Caroline universities of ‘Hence, all you vain delights’, or ‘Melancholicus’, as one copyist entitled it. The latter comprises only 19 lines compared to the 176 of ‘Il Penseroso’, which is evidently a poem of a quite different degree of linguistic, metrical, and intellectual complexity; yet its personification of melancholy bears some comparison with Milton’s ‘pensive nun’, whom the poet encounters with ‘rapt soul sitting in thine eyes’ and calls on to ‘[f]orget they self to Marble, till / With a sad Leaden downward cast / Thou fix them on the earth as fast’ (lines 41–3):

Welcome, folded Arms and fixed eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,
A look that’s fastened to the ground,
A tongue chain’d up without a sound.¹¹

The two poems have here in common a metre of tetrameter couplets and, while the rhyme scheme of ‘Melancholicus’ is varied, it juxtaposes blocks of lines including octosyllabics and heptasyllabics, the ‘eights and sevens’ that Milton employed to great effect in his companion poems.¹² ‘Melancholicus’ dreams of

Fountaine heads, and pathless Groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walkes, when all the fowles
Are warmly hous’d, save Bats and Owles;
A mid-night Bell, a parting groane,
These are the sounds we feed upon;
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley,
Nothing’s so daintie sweet as lovely melancholy. (lines 12–19)

It is a similar world for which ‘Il Penseroso’ yearns, where he can

    walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven Green
To behold the wandring Moon,
Riding neer her highest noon,
Like one that had bin led astray
Through the Heav’ns wide pathles way;
[ . . . ]
Where glowing Embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,
Far from all resort of mirth,
Save the Cricket on the hearth,
Or the Belmans drousie charm
To bless the dores from nightly harm:
Or let my Lamp, at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely Towr,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear
The spirit of Plato[.] (lines 65–70, 79–89).

What is distinctive about the melancholy of ‘Il Penseroso’ is its connection with the personal illumination derived from scholarly contemplation. This is the ‘pleasing fit of melancholy’ in which the Attendant Spirit would later describe being ‘wrapt’ in Milton’s 1634 Maske as he prepared to ‘[m]editate my rural minstrelsy’ (lines 546–7). The connection of this sort of melancholy with poetic creativity is suggested by the echo of Virgil’s musam meditari (Eclogues 1. 2), ‘to be occupied with the muse’. The ‘high lonely tower’ at the centre of ‘Il Penseroso’ is a site identified with the spiritual apotheosis of the scholar-poet in Platonic language familiar from Milton’s Cambridge writing, with devotion to contemplation and study obtaining privileged insight into the elemental worlds of ‘those Daemons that are found / In fire, air, flood, or under ground (lines 93–4). Melancholy is not merely a condition of mind to be experienced in and of itself, as in ‘Melancholicus’, but a Hermetic process of spiritual and intellectual refinement that the scholar-poet must undergo out of desire to ‘attain / To somthing like Prophetic strain’ (lines 173–4). ‘Il Penseroso’ is in this respect not really an ‘answer’ to ‘L’Allegro’ at all, but offers a creatively inspired version of melancholy that is quite different from the condition that ‘L’Allegro’ seeks to dispel.

Strode’s eighteen-line answer to ‘Melancholicus’, ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’, has less in common with ‘L’Allegro’, although it is also written in tetrameter couplets (but for the concluding couplet) and offers a catalogue of pleasures brought by the poet’s returning joys:

Returne my joys and hither bring
A heart not taught to speak but sing,
A jolly spleen, an inward feast,
A causeless laugh without a jest[.]¹³

Strode’s lyric, as with ‘L’Allegro’, does not so much argue for the superiority of mirth as describe its qualities. Those attuned to the literary culture of the Caroline universities would again have recognized the poetic fashion with which ‘L’Allegro’ was aligned. Those who had seen Thomas Randolph’s Cambridge comedy Aristippus, or The Jovial Philosopher (published 1630) might also, when they read the description of the goddess Euphrosyne as a ‘a daughter fair, / So bucksom, blith, and debonair’ (lines 23–4), have recalled the wise words of Randolph’s philosopher: ‘A bowl of wine is wondrous boon cheer, / To make one blithe, buxom, and deboneer’ (18). Strode was a poet who actively encouraged textual variety in the scribal circulation and reception of his work, and he issued his ‘Opposition to Melancholy’ in different versions, restraining the invocations of joy in later revisions and moderating the opposition to pensiveness: he altered the penultimate line, for instance, from ‘Then take no Care but only to be jolly’ to ‘Now take no Care but to be wisely jolly’.¹⁴

The generation of different forms of answer poem in this culture of scribal exchange and imitation is illustrated by the anonymous ‘Come all my deare delights’, which relishes the sexual pleasures that are conspicuously absent from both Strode’s lyric and ‘L’Allegro’:

Come all my deare delights
As pleasing as the Nights
Consum’d in Bacchus drenches
[ . . . ]
A wench that’s prostrate on the ground
A Tongue that yields a pleasing sound,
Maiden heads, & deedes of love
[ . . . ]
Theis are our free Delights.¹⁵

The sleazy libertinism celebrated in this version of ‘Come all my deare delights’ draws attention to the purpose of erotic play and persuasion to which the sort of lyric language in ‘L’Allegro’ was usually put. The debt of Milton’s companion poems to Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (composed before 1593) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s sceptical response, ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (composed before 1600), is evident in their form as catalogues of pastoral delights but is also more explicitly signalled in their opening and concluding lines. The conclusion of ‘L’Allegro’—‘These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth with thee, I mean to live’ (lines 151–2)—echoes the conclusion of ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, better known as ‘Come live with me, and be my love’: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me, and be my love’ (lines 23–4). One of the most popular of Elizabethan lyrics, it was printed, followed by Raleigh’s response, in the collection England’s Helicon (1600) and prompted further answers from John Donne, among others. In Marlowe’s lyric, the speaker offers his love ‘all the pleasures’ of a wholly sensual life, while in ‘L’Allegro’ the speaker will live with Mirth on the condition that she can give him such pleasures. Earlier the speaker in ‘L’Allegro’ had asked Mirth to ‘admit me of thy crue / To live with her [Liberty], and live with thee, / In unreproved pleasures free’ (lines 37–40). This imitates the opening lines of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’—‘Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove’ (lines 1–2)—with the verb ‘prove’ cleverly turned into the condition of being ‘unreproved’, or ‘unblamed’. Even Milton’s slight, ten-line vernacular lyric ‘Song. On May Morning’, likely written in the same 1628–9 period as the fifth and seventh elegies and included in the 1645 Poems, hails May for inspiring ‘Mirth and youth, and warm desire’ (line 6). But the pleasures celebrated by ‘L’Allegro’ are pretty much unreprovable compared to the pleasures Marlowe’s shepherd wants to offer his nymph. The comparative lack of sexuality in ‘L’Allegro’ suggests Milton’s reconsideration by the early 1630s of Ovidian poetic formulae—it was Marlowe who was the first to translate Ovid’s Amores into English—in his own experiments with vernacular pastoral.

Marlowe’s pastoral love lyric is again present in the concluding couplet of ‘Il Penseroso’ (‘These pleasures Melancholy give, / And I with thee will choose to live’; lines 175–6) but the echo now seems more obviously ironic. Melancholy is a ‘sage and holy’ goddess, inspiring ‘great Bards’ who ‘In sage and solemn tunes have sung, / Of Turneys and of Trophies hung’—likely a reference to the chivalric epic verse of Spenser, whom Milton would later describe in Areopagitica as the ‘sage and serious’ poet (lines 11, 116–17).¹⁶ ‘Il Penseroso’ hails Melancholy as the ‘pensive Nun, devout and pure, / Sober, steadfast, and demure’, and looks to the opposite of what Marlowe’s speaker offers: a life of virginal retirement in ‘the studious Cloysters pale’ and ‘the peacefull hermitage’ (lines 31–2, 156, 168). The sincerity with which Milton advocates a Roman Catholic mode of celibacy must be open to question, and just before the appearance of Melancholy personified as a nun, Milton invents a genealogy for Melancholy from the incestuous union of Saturn and Vesta (anticipating the origins of Death in Paradise Lost from the union between Satan and his daughter Sin). Yet celibacy was also a requirement of a university career, which Milton may still have had in mind as a possibility; moreover, the nun in ‘Il Penseroso’ is, as Northrop Frye once observed, ‘less explicitly Christian than a vestal or pagan saint . . . like the ideal poet in the Sixth Elegy’.¹⁷ We would do better to think of Marlowe’s description, ironic though it is, of Hero in Hero and Leander as a ‘nun’, or virgin priestess, in the temple of Venus than of this figure signalling Milton’s Laudian affection for ‘medieval contemplative monasticism’.¹⁸ Plutarch in the Moralia, as translated by Philemon Holland in 1603, refers to ‘the vestall virgins or nunnes votaries at Rome’ and to how ‘in the citie of Ephesus every one of those maidens vowed to the service of Diana, was at the beginning called Melliere, which is as much to say, as a Novice to be a priestresse hereafter’. The attraction of cloistered devotional life in ‘Il Penseroso’ appears to lie in its isolation from pastoral sexuality as much as the ‘ecstasies’ brought on by devotional music and intellectual solitude at the end of the poem. Chastity is the not the same thing as celibacy, and ‘virginity’ was sometimes defined by Protestants as chastity within marriage in the period: Eve is described as possessing ‘Virgin Majestie’ in her marital debates with Adam in the ninth book of Paradise Lost (9. 270).¹⁹ Nonetheless there is little room for doubt when it comes to nuns, cloisters, and hermitages, whether Christian or classical, that what is being invoked is celibacy; and such sexual abstinence is apparently a requirement in ‘Il Penseroso’, as it is in the Cambridge Prolusions, of the priestly poet who would seek spiritual apotheosis through scholarship and contemplation.

‘Melancholicus’ always appeared in Caroline poetic miscellanies before Strode’s ‘Opposite to Melancholy’ or ‘Come all my deare delights’; ‘Il Penseroso’ rather follows ‘L’Allegro’ in the 1645 Poems, but Milton’s sequence is not comparable to Raleigh’s negative response to the attempted persuasion of Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ in England’s Helicon. The rejection of sexuality in ‘Il Penseroso’ cannot be opposed to a tradition of eroticized pastoral celebrated in ‘L’Allegro’: Milton is not writing an ode of sexual persuasion to a mistress, as in the Marlovian catalogue of delights, but addressing an allegorical goddess. The companion poems should not be categorized as prescriptive, demanding a moral choice from readers: their subject is rather the difference between modes of poetic inspiration. The desire of ‘L’Allegro’ to go to the dramatic comedies of Ben Jonson and ‘sweetest Shakespear fancies child’ is hardly insincere or offered for moral judgement (line 133); but the ‘Gorgeous Tragedy / in Sceptr’d Pall’ which stages the epic material of the ‘tale of Troy’ in ‘Il Penseroso’ is nonetheless of a higher generic degree, with tragedy the dramatic equivalent of epic in the ranking of the genres (lines 98–9, 100). If there is a hierarchy written into the poems, it is not a moral one but the generic hierarchy familiar from the Virgilian cursus. Yet the contrast that is playfully but intently explained to Diodati in Elegia sexta between the behaviour required of the would-be epic poet and the poet content to practise lyric and love elegy is replayed in ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. This poetic difference, light-hearted as it is in its articulation to Diodati, is treated in Elegia sexta as self-descriptive for the poet ambitious of sacred and epic song, for whom the distinction is one of moral and intellectual, as well as generic, degree. But resistance to such sensual distraction is the burden only of those who aspire to the ‘prophetic strain’, with its pun on the arduous moral and physical effort required: Milton is not expecting anyone else to make this commitment. Lyric and elegy are associated in Elegia sexta with ‘the sirens’ song’ and ‘Circe’s hall’, but Milton has no qualms about recommending that his dearest friend Diodati continue to give himself to wine, song, and love poetry; and Milton is still writing in elegiac form even as he looks to ascend to a higher mode. It is telling, however, that the language of ‘L’Allegro’ will be restored to its original context of the carpe diem love lyric when it is given to the supernatural tempter Comus, offspring of Bacchus and Circe, in Milton’s 1634 Maske.

‘A Synchronism of Prophecies’

‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ show Milton taking vernacular modes of verse that were popular in the scribal cultures of exchange in the universities and the Inns of Court in Caroline England and shaping them into more complex displays of poetic skill, exploring in the process personal concerns with the character of the poet and the status of various poetic genres. For all the claim of divine inspiration implied in the reference to the origins of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ in the verse letter to Diodati, Milton’s first extended experiment with a vernacular form of devotional poetry also shares a range of motifs and images with the nativity poetry of his Caroline contemporaries. Milton opens his ‘Nativity Ode’ by signalling the longer vernacular tradition of Protestant poetics with which he wants his poem to be associated. In the opening four stanzas, which act as a proem to the main ‘Hymn’ and in which the poet invokes the ‘heavenly muse’ to assist him in composing a gift for Christ on his birthday, Milton recalls the stanzaic form of Edmund Spenser’s Hymn of Heavenly Beauty (1596)—an important influence, as we have seen, in ‘On Shakespeare’—by reproducing Spenser’s seven-line rhyme royal scheme in that poem; but, as he had previously done in ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, Milton substitutes a twelve-syllable alexandrine for the final decasyllabic line in the manner of the famous stanzaic form of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

The Spenserian attributes of Cambridge devotional verse were exemplified by Giles Fletcher’s brief epic, Christs Victorie, published in Cambridge in 1610 and dedicated to the then Master of Trinity College, Thomas Nevile. Christs Victorie is prefaced by a defence of the legitimacy of employing ‘prophane Poetrie to deale with divine and heavenly matters’, which cites Spenser’s example, and its opening stanzas bear close comparison with those of Milton’s ‘Ode’:

The birth of him that no beginning knewe,
Yet gives beginning to all that are borne,
And how the Infinite farre greater grewe,
By growing lesse, and how the rising Morne,
That shot from heav’n, did backe to heaven retourne,
The obsequies of him that could not die,
And death of life, ende of eternitie,
How worthily he died, that died unworthily;
How God, and Man did both embrace each other,
Met in one person, heav’n, and earth did kiss,
And how a Virgin did become a Mother,
And bare that Sonne, who the worlds Father is,
And Maker of his mother, and how Bliss
Descended from the bosome of the High,
To cloath himselfe in naked miserie,
Sayling at length to heav’n, in earth, triumphantly,

Is the first flame, wherewith my whiter Muse
Doth burne in heavenly love, such love to tell.²⁰

While there is no obvious or direct allusion to Fletcher’s popular poem in the ‘Ode’, the language and movement of Milton’s first sixteen lines have much in common with it:

This is the Month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherwith he wont at Heav’ns high Councel-Table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksome House of mortal Clay.

Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God? (lines 1–16)

In Fletcher’s fourth stanza, described in the margin as his ‘Invocation, for the better handling of it’, the poet similarly makes an apostrophe to the heavenly muse: ‘Say, what might be the cause that Mercie heaves / The dust of sinne above th’ industrious skie; / And lets it not to dust, and ashes flie?’ It has even been proposed, with some exaggeration, that stanza 82 of Christs Victorie ‘may have suggested to Milton the whole plan of his ode’:

The Angells caroll’d lowd their song of peace,
The cursed Oracles wear strucken dumb,
To see their Sheapheard, the poore Sheapheards press,
To see their King, the Kingly Sophies come,
And them to guide unto his Masters home,
A Starre comes dauncing up the orient,
That springs for joye over the strawy tent,
Whear gold, to make their Prince a crowne, they all present.²¹

However, we do not need to look back to the Jacobean era—nor to an Italian model such as Tasso’s ‘Nel giorno della Natività’ (1621), although Milton may well have known it, given his interest in Italian at the time—to find a host of devotional poems that share the images and idiom of the ‘Nativity Ode’. It was a conventional practice in Caroline Cambridge to ask students to write devotional verses in Latin and Greek on Sundays and to mark selected feast days and the liturgical seasons of the Church of England, and such verses could be posted up or performed in the college for general appreciation and judgement. The terms of Richard Crashaw’s scholarship at Pembroke College, where he matriculated in 1631, included the stipulation ‘[t]o make verses . . . Latin as many Greeks of [th]e same matter at Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification, Annunciation, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sun[day], All S[ain]ts, Good Friday . . . Written w[i]th theire owne hand, set on [th]e skreene before dinner’.²² Crashaw’s divine epigrams in Latin written in fulfilment of his scholarship were greatly admired by his contemporaries as exemplars of their kind: they were recommended by tutors to their students and issued by the University Press in 1634 as Epigram-mata Sacra. As with Milton, Crashaw was asked to contribute Latin ‘act verses’ to summarize the argument of the Respondent in formal disputations held in his college.²³ But there is no evidence that Milton’s devotional verse was held in anywhere near the same esteem as that of Crashaw.

Two other, briefer English devotional lyrics by Milton that likely date from 1630–32, ‘Upon the Circumcision’ and ‘The Passion’, were probably composed as part of a series on church festivals. It seems possible that they were originally composed in Latin and Milton then translated them into the vernacular in the conventional humanist method of composition and imitation across languages. (We might compare Andrew Marvell’s ‘On A Drop of Dew’, a devotional poem that seems to have been derived from his Latin poem, Ros.) The metre and rhyme scheme of ‘The Passion’ are those of the introductory stanzas of the ‘Nativity Ode’, and Milton refers to the earlier poem in the first stanza:

Ere-while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth,
Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring,
And joyous news of heaven’ly Infants birth,
My muse with Angels did divide to sing[.] (lines 1–4)

There is no evidence that the ‘Nativity Ode’ circulated in manuscript before it was printed but some evidence of how the poem was seen from within Cambridge is the transcription of the ‘Ode’ from the 1645 Poems by William Sancroft, a student and then Fellow of Emmanuel College from 1633–51, into a manuscript miscellany alongside religious verse by Crashaw and other nativity poems, including William Cartwright’s ‘On the Nativity’, placed immediately before Milton’s poem.²⁴ Thomas Philipot, who matriculated at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1634, placed two devotional lyrics next to each other in his 1646 Poems, ‘On the Nativitie of our Saviour’ and ‘On Christ’s Passion’, that were likely from his time at Cambridge. (A few pages earlier in the volume are verses entitled ‘A thankfull acknowledgement to those Benefactours that contributed to the re-edifying of Clare-Hall in Cambridge’.) They bear comparison with Milton’s poems on the same topics and suggest a shared vernacular, as well as Latin, idiom in the devotional verse of Caroline Cambridge:

Now Truths great Oracle it selfe was come,
The Faithlesse Oracles were strucken dumb.
No marvell if the Shepherds ran to see
Him, that should everie Shepherds Shepherd bee[.]²⁵

Two aspects of Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’ mark it out from other devotional verse on the topic in the 1620s and 1630s: its extended account of the cessation of the oracles and the departure of the pagan gods, which tends to be treated in a line or two in other nativity poems of the period, and its fascination with the apocalyptic collapsing of time in the fusion of the birth and second coming of Christ. Both these aspects of the poem can be related to the intellectual interests of Joseph Mede. As we have seen, Mede had published in 1627 his influential Clavis Apocalyptica, in which he proposed a new method of applying the Book of Revelation to an interpretation of human history. The work was an astonishing display of Mede’s facility in general learning, demonstrating that knowledge of languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and ‘Chaldee’ or Aramaic), history, and mathematics were all ‘vital preliminaries to divinity’.²⁶ Instead of attempting to impose a linear narrative on apocalyptic history, he argued the prophecies in Revelation should be grouped together in ‘synchronisms’: ‘By a Synchronism of prophecies I meane, when the things therein designed to run along in the same time; as if thou shouldst call it an agreement in time or age: because prophecies of things fall out in the same time run on in time together, or Synchronize’. While Mede made explicit in the expanded 1632 edition of Clavis Apocalyptica that his scheme identified the overthrow of Antichrist with the fall of the Roman Catholic Church, the ‘Apostatical Kingdom’, or ‘the Whore’s Beast’, he also insisted that the sounding of the seventh trumpet prophesied in Revelation 8 and which inaugurates the millennium—the thousand-year reign of Christ and his saints that constitutes the final phase of human history—was some time in the future. No date was specified for the beginning of the millennium, which was repeatedly said to be ‘yet to come’.²⁷ The Clavis Apocalyptica was greeted with European-wide interest and acclaim and gave Mede a high scholarly profile in Cambridge.²⁸

Milton’s idea of the millennium is more musical than visual: it is conceived as a recovery of the music of the spheres, the inenarrabile carmen or ‘angelic symphony’ that was lost to human ears with the Fall, and that so fascinated the young Milton as an articulation of regained paradise: ‘Ring out, ye crystal spheres, / Once bless our human ears’ (lines 125–6). The power of this heavenly song turns human time into something resembling Mede’s idea of ‘synchronism’, in which past, present, and future ‘run along in the same time’:

For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
         Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
[ . . . ]
And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. (lines 133–5, 139–40)

The ‘Ode’ celebrates the birth of Christ as setting in train the historical process that will lead to the Last Judgment—‘When at the world’s last session, / The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne’ (lines 163–4)—but Milton follows Mede in his clear insistence that the sounding of the seventh trumpet, what Milton calls the ‘wakefull trump of doom’ (line 156), is ‘yet to come’: ‘But wisest Fate says no, / This must not yet be so’ (lines 149–50). Linear time continues on earth, even if the birth of Christ has set an eventual end-point to its progress, and the poet’s images of the ‘melodious time’ of the millennium remain temporally bounded, ‘tedious’ or dilatory visions of an undated but certain future: ‘Time is our tedious Song should here have an ending’ (line 239). The song must end now, but time continues for the foreseeable future.

‘The Lars, and Lemures Moan’

As we saw in the previous chapter, in Apostasy of the Latter Times, likely composed by 1624 but first published in 1641—the same year that Parliament sponsored an English translation of Clavis Apocalyptica and two years after Mede’s death—Mede presented the idolatrous Roman Catholic veneration of angels, saints, and relics as a latter-day manifestation of the ancient Roman worship of ‘daemons’: he set out to show ‘the deifying and worshipping of Saints and Angels, with other parts of their Idolatry . . . to be as lively an image of the doctrine of Daemons as could possibly be expressed’.²⁹ We also saw the young Milton’s recurring attraction to the idea of the scholar-poet assuming the role ascribed to heroes and daemons, who were thought to act ‘as mediatours and agents betweene the Soveraigne Gods and mortall men’, as Mede puts it. In what was probably his final Cambridge prolusion in 1631, Milton presented, mostly unironically, the personal reward of attaining universal knowledge as a kind of semi-deification as an oracle or daemon, with insight into the supernatural realms obtained from perfect knowledge of the natural world. Mede, sitting in the audience of Christ’s chapel for the prolusion, would likely not have been impressed by this MA student’s delight in images of the daemonic that he had recently equated with Catholic idolatry. But if Milton had earlier showed Mede a copy of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, as he may well have done if he was seeking to impress the most famous of the Christ’s dons with his skill in devotional poetics, Mede would found much that would speak directly to his own confessional studies in comparative religion. The poem is distinguished from contemporary nativity odes by its lengthy account of the expulsion from earth of those oracles and tutelary deities with which Mede associated pagan daemon worship. If Milton’s notion of the priestly poet in Elegia sexta is derived from descriptions of the Apollonian priest in Virgil, in the ‘Nativity Ode’ it is specifically the Apollonian priest who is bereft of inspiration when the birth of Christ silences the famous Oracle at Delphi:

The Oracles are dumm,
No voice or hideous humm
          Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
          With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-ey’d Priest from the prophetic cell. (lines 173–80)

The language inverts the seemingly positive image of the melancholy scholar in his ‘mossy cell / Where I may sit and rightly spell’ at the end of ‘Il Penseroso’, striving to attain ‘something like prophetic strain’ (lines 169, 174). And while ‘Il Penseroso’ yearned for the company of ‘those daemons’ in the elements and of the ‘unseen genius of the wood’ (lines 93, 154), the ‘Ode’ explicitly imagines the genii and lares, the Roman deities of place and household that Mede connects with both pagan daemons and Catholic idols, departing the earth at the birth of Christ.

The tone of the lines in which the Greek and Roman spirits depart is, as has often been observed, less triumphalist than wistful, certainly compared to the scattering of the false gods of the Old Testament and their rituals of human sacrifice which follows:

The lonely mountains o’re,
And the resounding shore,
         A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edged with poplar pale,
         The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov’n tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated Earth,
And on the holy Hearth,
         The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,
In Urns, and Altars round,
A drear and dying sound
         Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill Marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.
    (lines 181–96)

The lares, one of the names that Mede tells us the Romans gave to ‘deified soules of men after death’, are here paired with the lemures, malevolent spirits not given proper burial rites. However, the nymphs with their ‘flowre-inwov’n tresses’—an early instance of a recurring fascination with tangled female hair as a synecdoche of temptation in Milton—are portrayed rather more sympathetically than in Mede’s account of the Pythia, the high-priestesses of the temple of Apollo who served as the mouthpiece of the Oracle of Delphi:

The She-Priests and Prophetesses of the Gentiles, when they served their Idols; as their Pythiae, Bacchae or Maenades, and the like . . . used, when they uttered their Oracles, or celebrated rites and sacrifices to their Gods, to put themselves into a wild and extatical guise, having their faces discovered, their hair disshevelled and hanging about their ears.³⁰

The ‘tangled thickets’ in which Milton’s nymphs mourn is both a negative counter-image of their ‘flowre-inwov’n tresses’ and an objective correlative of the temptation to sexual abandon that the pagan ethic can offer: the Maenads and the Bacchae, the crazed female devotees of Dionysius or Bacchus, will become an embodiment of threatening sexuality in the Maske and ‘Lycidas’.

Mede derives a good deal of his material in the Apostasy from Plutarch’s ‘On the Cessation of the Oracles’, an essay included in Plutarch’s Moralia, a commonplace textbook in humanist education, recommended by Milton in Of Education.³¹ Although it is habitually claimed that Milton relied on the demonology in the 1629 second edition of John Selden’s De diis Syris (1617) for the false Jewish, Syrian, and Egyptian gods listed towards the end of the ‘Ode’ (and for the catalogue of demons in the first book of Paradise Lost)—Baalim, Ashtaroth, Hammon, Thammuz, Moloch, Isis, Orus, Anubis, Osiris—he would also have known Plutarch’s famous essay on ‘On Isis and Osiris’ in the Moralia, a myth which inspires some of Milton’s most striking prose writing in Areopagitica. Plutarch writes of how he sides ‘with them who thinke that the things which be written of Typhon, Osiris, and Isis, were no accidents or passions incident to gods or to men; but rather to some great Daemons: of which minde were Pythagoras, Plato, Xenocrates, and Chrysippus’.³² Moreover Mede’s Apostasy gives an account of how

Baal, or in the Chaldee Dialect, Bel (for all is one) was the first King of Babel after Nimrod, and the first (as is written) that ever was deified and reputed a God after death; whence afterward they called all other Daemons Baalim . . . and here note a wonderfull mystery, that old Babel, the first pattern in the world of ambitious Dominion, was also the Foundresse of Idols.³³

The connection between tyranny, idolatry, and demonology would become a key structuring principle of Milton’s polemical prose and also of Michael’s account of post-lapsarian human history in the twelfth book of Paradise Lost, in which Nimrod will be the first to ‘arrogate Dominion undeserv’d / Over his brethren’, and whose ‘Empire tyrannous’ embodied by the Tower of Babel provides the foundation for the many subsequent nations ‘[b]red up in Idol-worship’ (12. 27–8, 115).

The ‘Nativity Ode’ incorporates classical poetic models, in particular the choral ode to the birth of Apollo in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris— Euripides is an authority to whom Milton will increasingly turn during the 1640s in matters of moral and philosophical, as well as literary, complexity—but it does so in the fashion in which another of its classical models, Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, with its vision of the birth of a wondrous child who will restore Saturn’s golden age, was commonly interpreted as a prophecy of Christ’s nativity. Dante had placed particular significance on Eclogue 4 as exemplary of the Christian allegory that could be found in Virgil’s poetry.³⁴ The infant Christ assumes the role of Apollo in the twenty-fifth stanza of the ‘Ode’ by expelling Typhon, who in Greek myth was related to Python, the snake-like monster killed by the infant Apollo when he took control of Delphi. Again the temporal process is less straightforwardly linear than illustrative of Mede’s method of the ‘synchronism of prophecies’, but applied to Greek poetry as much as Scripture: Milton ‘inverts and runs backward the stories of the Homeric and Euripidean hymns to Apollo, in which the god killed the monsters at Delphi before instituting his oracle: here Apollo leaves his shrine before the Christ child overcomes Typhon with the rest of the damned crew’.³⁵ Classical, pagan poetics is a type or pre-figuration of the Christian revelation that simultaneously runs alongside it rather than an impure, anti-Christian element which needs to be expelled. The seventh trumpet has not yet sounded, as Mede cautioned, and history has not ended: pagan wisdom cannot yet be done without and the ‘Ode’ formally enacts that dependence. Something like this application of ‘synchronism’ to pagan as well as scriptural sources will become the structuring aesthetic of Paradise Lost, with difficult and equivocal effects for the reader.

The controversial religious views of the Neoplatonist friend of Mede, the Oxford don Thomas Jackson, again shed some light on Milton’s complex perspective in the ‘Ode’ on the relation between Christian truth and pagan knowledge. In a discussion of how divine truth can be revealed in pagan myth, Jackson cites Plutarch’s opinion that the oracles ceased because of ‘the absence of his daemoniacall spirits, which by his Philosophie might dye or flit from place to place, either exiled by others more potent, or upon some other dislike’. Jackson then suggests that ‘Plutarchs relation of his daemoniacall spirits mourning for great Pans death’ at the time of the crucifixion is ‘so strange’ that it ‘will not permit me to doubt, but that under the knowne name of Pan was intimated the great Shepheard of our soules, that had then layd downe his life for his flocke’. The identification of Christ with Pan was a Renaissance commonplace—in Spenser’s Shepherdes Calender (1579), Christ is called ‘great Pan’, and the line is glossed with reference to Plutarch’s essay on the oracles—so the ‘mighty Pan’ (line 89) of Milton’s ‘Ode’ is more likely to derive from Spenser than from a theological treatise such as Jackson’s twelve volumes of commentaries upon the Creed. But Jackson’s conclusion that even ‘this base and counterfeit resolution of these Heathens coyning, beares a lively image (for the exact proportion) of the divine truth, charactred out unto us in Scripture’ gets us close to Milton’s perspective on classical knowledge in the ‘Ode’ and indeed throughout much of his writing: divine truth can be revealed, as Jackson puts it, in the ‘untruths of poetical fables’. The pagan oracles were God’s revelation to the Greeks and Romans, ‘crumbs to fall unto them from his children’s table’. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue begins by announcing the last age of the Cumaean Sibyl, the Oracle at Cumae, and the beginning of a new golden age with the birth of a child to whom all of nature will do homage. Virgil might have thought the prophecy was of the birth of the emperor Augustus, but, for Jackson, he was really recording the Word of God and offers Christian readers:

a clearer view of many divine mysteries recorded by sacred writers, concerning our Saviours eternall generation, incarnation, nativity and propagation of his Kingdome; then wee can hope to approach unto by the perplexed Labyrinths of many moderne Interpreters, of divers Schoolemen, or by any tradition of the ancient Hebrewes as now they are extant.³⁶

The oft-made claim that the ‘Ode’ is the beginning of Milton’s own, long struggle with the place of pagan art and ethics in his Christian poetics—that the ‘Ode’ is, in John Carey’s powerful if mixed metaphors, ‘a piece of mind-cleansing’ that ‘amputates the pagan half of his poetic life’—misplaces a linear structure on both the poem and Milton’s career.³⁷ ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ was written, as were all Milton’s student poems, to compete with the efforts of other poets in the crowded generic field of nativity odes; and, as with many of his student poems, Milton adapted the generic template to aspects of his own personality and to areas of peculiar fascination to him: here the music of the spheres, millenarian time, the pagan gods and daemons. On this occasion he also incorporates elements of thinking about the millennium and pagan idolatry that students and Fellows at his college would have recognized as topics on which the venerable Mede had spoken and written with great erudition. There is no linear progression in Milton’s writing and thought in the Cambridge years so much as a series of experiments in poetic genres: for if Milton did hope to impress Mede with his devotional verse, then the prolusion that he likely performed in the College chapel about eighteen months later in autumn 1631, as well as the lyric ‘Il Penseroso’ from around the same time, show an intellectual enchantment with, not an expulsion of, notions of the daemonic apotheosis of the true poet.