by John Milton
But peacefull was the night
Wherin the Prince of light
His raign of peace upon the earth began:
The Winds with wonder whist,12
65
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joyes to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While Birds of Calm13 sit brooding on the charmed wave.
VI
The Stars with deep amaze
70
Stand fixt in stedfast gaze,
Bending one way their pretious influence,14
And will not take their flight,
For all the morning light,
Or Lucifer15 that often warn’d them thence;
75
But in their glimmering Orbs did glow,
Untill their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.
VII
And though the shady gloom
Had given day her room,
The Sun himself with-held his wonted speed,
80
And hid his head for shame,
As his inferiour flame,
The new-enlight’n’d world no more should need;
He saw a greater Sun appear
Then his bright Throne, or burning Axletree16 could bear.
VIII
85
The Shepherds17 on the Lawn,
Or ere the point of dawn,
Sate simply chatting in a rustick row;
Full little thought they than,
That the mighty Pan18
90
Was kindly19 com to live with them below;
Perhaps their loves, or els their sheep,
Was all that did their silly20 thoughts so busie keep.
IX
When such musick sweet
Their hearts and ears did greet,
95
As never was by mortall singer strook,
Divinely-warbled voice
Answering the stringed noise,
As all their souls in blisfull rapture took:
The Air such pleasure loth to lose,
100
With thousand echoes still prolongs each heav’nly close.21
X
Nature that heard such sound
Beneath the hollow round
Of Cynthia’s seat,22 the Airy region thrilling,
Now was almost won
105
To think her part was don,
And that her raign had here its last fulfilling;
She knew such harmony23 alone
Could hold all Heav’n and Earth in happier union.
XI
At last surrounds their sight
110
A Globe of circular light,
That with long beams the shame-fac’t night array’d,
The helmed Cherubim
And sworded Seraphim
Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displaid,
115
Harping in loud and solemn quire,
With unexpressive24 notes to Heav’ns new-born Heir.
XII
Such Musick (as ‘tis said)25
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
120
While the Creator Great
His constellations set,
And the well-ballanc’t world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the weltring waves their oozy channel keep.
XIII
125
Ring out ye Crystall sphears,26
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
130
And let the Base of Heav’ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort27 to th’ Angelick symphony.
XIV
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
135
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,28
And speckl’d29 vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell it self will pass away,
140
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering30 day.
XV
Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orb’d in a Rain-bow;31 and like glories wearing
Mercy will sit between,
145
Thron’d in Celestiall sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stealing,
And Heav’n as at som festivall,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.
XVI
But wisest Fate sayes no,
150
This must not yet be so,
The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
So both himself and us to glorifie:
155
Yet first to those ychain’d in sleep,32
The wakefull trump of doom must thunder through the deep.33
XVII
With such a horrid clang
As on mount Sinai rang
While the red fire, and smouldring clouds out brake:34
160
The aged Earth agast
With terrour of that blast,
Shall from the surface to the center shake,
When at the worlds last session,
The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne.
XVIII
165
And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th’ old Dragon35 under ground
In straiter limits bound,
170
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And wroth to see his Kingdom fail,
Swindges36 the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail.
XIX
The Oracles are dumm,37
No voice or hideous humm
175
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
180
Inspires the pale-ey’d38 Priest from the prophetic cell
XX
The lonely mountains o’re,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;39
From haunted spring, and dale
185
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting Genius40 is with sighing sent;
With flowr-inwov’n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
XXI
In consecrated Earth,
190
And on the holy Hearth,
The Lars, and Lemures41 moan with midnight plaint;
In Urns, and Altars round,
A drear, and dying sound
Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;
195
And the chill Marble seems to sweat,42
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.
XXII
Peor,43 and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twise batter’d god of Palestine,
200
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heav’ns Queen and Mother both,
Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn.
XXIII
205
And sullen Moloch fled,
Hath left in s
hadows dred
His burning Idol all of blackest hue;
In vain with Cymbals ring,
They call the grisly king,
210
In dismall dance about the furnace blue;
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis hast.
XXIV
Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian Grove, or Green,
215
Trampling th’ unshowr’d44 Grass with lowings loud:
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud;
In vain with Timbrel’d Anthems dark
220
The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark.45
XXV
He feels from Judas Land
The dredded Infants hand,
The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside,
225
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe to shew his Godhead true,
Can in his swadling bands46 controul the damned crew.
XXVI
So when the Sun in bed,
230
Curtain’d with cloudy red,
Pillows his chin upon an Orient wave,
The flocking shadows pale
Troop to th’ infernall jail,47
Each fetter’d Ghost slips to his severall grave,
235
And the yellow-skirted Fayes
Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their Moon-lov’d maze.
XXVII
But see the Virgin blest,
Hath laid her Babe to rest.
Time is our tedious48 Song should here have ending:
240
Heav’ns youngest teemed Star49
Hath fixt her polisht Car,
Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending,
And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest50 Angels sit in order serviceable.
(Dec. 1629)
* * *
1 The theme is the celebration of Christ’s harmonizing of all life by becoming mortal man. This gift of praise for the birthday of Christ has been divided into a pattern of creative sun or silence (I–VIII), the concord which is the essence of music (IX–XVIII), and the conquest and reconciliation of discordant paganism (XIX–XXVI). The return to silence in the last stanza rounds out the pattern drawn by Arthur Barker in UTQ, X (1941), 167-81. Don C. Allen (The Harmonious Vision) emphasizes the conflict between Milton’s aesthetic and intellectual daemons (p. 25), but concludes that the timelessness, immutable Nature, and harmony of God unify the poem (p. 29). The symbolic darkness in the later stanzas, seen against the intermingled and identified light and music of the earlier ones, is dispersed, as Rosemond Tuve reminds us in Images and Themes, p. 71, by the heavenly love, described in XXVII in images of brightness, which will work a perpetual peace. The fullest annotation will be found in Albert S. Cook’s notes on the ode in Trans. of the Connecticut Acad. of Arts and Sciences, XV (1909), 307–68. See Maren-Sofie Røstvig’s numerological analysis in The Hidden Sense and Other Essays (Oslo, 1963) for the contrast between the earthly concepts of the proem and the regenerative aspects of the hymn itself.
2 Tne reversed combinations “wedded Maid” and “Virgin Mother” create a chiasmus, or X, the sign of Christ.
3 Christ’s kenosis or emptying himself of his godhead (Phil. ii. 6-8).
4 the three Wise Men.
5 anticipate.
6 Isa. vi. 6-7: “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips.”
7 polluted.
8 Rev. iii. 18: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.”
9 The dove Peace (the “turtledove” of l. 50) brought an olive branch to the ark as a sign of harmony with nature; the reference suggests the descent of the dove (the Spirit of God) at Christ’s baptism. The myrtle wand, sacred to Venus, emphasizes the Love which has created Peace on Earth.
10 the heavens.
11 No war took place in the Roman Empire for some years before Jesus’ birth.
12 hushed.
13 the halcyons, which were supposed to breed only when the sea is calm; the waves are thought of as under a spell. The halcyon, or kingfisher, was a symbol of Christ. Compare PL I, 19-22; VII, 233-37.
14 The stars, shining toward Bethlehem, are exerting all their power of good fortune on the Christ-child.
15 the morning star.
16 the axle of the sun’s chariot.
17 Compare Luke ii. 8-20.
18 Christ, the Good Shepherd.
19 both “in kindness” and “in kinship” as man.
20 simple.
21 cadence.
22 orb of the moon.
23 in the union both of nature and of divine and human natures in the Incarnation.
24 inexpressible.
25 Job xxxviii. 6–7: “Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened?… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
26 The music of the nine spheres (the ninth being the Crystalline) resulted from the harmony of single tones uttered by each of the sirens as she traveled about the earth on her allotted sphere (Rep., X, 616–17). Pythagoreans believed that only the sinless could hear this “silver chime.”
27 concert, group.
28 the early age when Saturn ruled the world. It was an age of innocent happiness when men lived without strife, labor, or injustice.
29 polluted, abominable. The phrase may translate Horace’s “maculosum nefas” (Odes, IV, v, 22) with reference to Ecclesiastes.
30 appearing, scrutinizing, equalizing.
31 See Mask, n. 12. The collocation of Truth, Justice, and Mercy comes from Ps. lxxxv. 10; they are the so-called daughters of God, representing the three persons of the Holy Trinity (Father, Holy Spirit, and Son), who combined constitute the fourth daughter, Peace (see ll. 45-52).
32 death.
33 1 Thess. iv. 16: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.”
34 The giving of the ten commandments (Exod. xix. 18–19: “And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spoke …”) is related to Judgment Day when “The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat” (2 Peter iii. 12).
35 Rev. xx. 2–3: “And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up,.…”
36 beats, shakes (his coiled tail).
37 The birth of Christ begins the destruction of the pagan divinities, extending through XXV, by stilling the false oracles of the heathen.
38 perhaps “paled with fear,” derived from the Latin usage of “palleo.”
39 Matt ii. 18: “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning.…”
40 the spirit presiding over any particular place, such as a wood.
41 gods presiding over the home and spirits of the dead. “Flamins” l. 194, were Roman priests.
42 foreboding ill (see Georgics, I, 480).
43 The pagan divinities put to rout (XXII–XXV) are: Peor, the Phoenician sun god; Baalim, local Phoenician deities concerned with flocks; the Philistine fish god Dagon, whose statue was cast down twice be
cause the people of Ashdod had taken the ark of God (1 Sam. v. 3-4); Ashtaroth, a Phoenician female divinity, identified with Astarte and Venus; Ammon, the North African name for Jove, who as tender of flocks was represented as a ram; Thammuz, the Phoenician Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar and revered as a vegetation god (compare Ezek. viii. 14: “behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz”); Moloch, a Semitic deity, represented by a hollow idol filled with fire to consume sacrificed children whose cries were drowned out by cymbals and trumpets; the Egyptian deities Isis, the earth goddess, with the head of a cow (thus “brutish”); Horus, the hawk-headed sun god; Anubis, guide of the dead with the head of a jackal; and Osiris, the chief god and judge of the dead, identified with Apis, the Sacred Bull, which was buried in the temple of Serapis at Memphis; and Typhon, a hundred-headed serpent who killed Osiris, scattering truth to the four winds (Areo., p. 29).
44 referring to the aridity of Egypt.
45 Osiris’ “sacred chest” borne by his black-robed priests to a temple, accompanied by the sound of tambourines.
46 Compare Luke ii. 7. The line glances at the legend of the strength of the infant Hercules.
47 Evil spirits return at morning to their graves or to hell.
48 wearying (since lengthy).
49 The star of Bethlehem, latest born, has taken position to shine its light on Christ the King.
50 wearing bright armor.
Elegia sexta
AD CAROLUM DIODATUM RURI COMMORANTEM1
Qui cum idibus Decemb. scripsisset, et sua carmina excusari postulasset si solito minus essent bona, quòd inter lautitias quibus erat ab amicis exceptus, haud satis felicem operam Musis dare se posse affirmabat, hunc habuit responsum.
Mitto tibi sanam non pleno ventre salutem,
Quâ tu distento forte carere potes.
At tua quid nostram prolectat Musa camoenam,
Nec sinit optatas posse sequi tenebras?
5
Carmine scire velis quàm te redamémque colámque,