by John Milton
Deriving from the Greek word for “story” or “story-related,” epic seems to have been a broader category for the early Greeks, virtually indistinguishable from what is now meant by narrative in general. Aristocratic martial and amorous encounters are undeniably the stuff of Homeric epic, and of mock epic (Homer is supposed to have composed one of those, too), but Hesiod’s overtly didactic narratives also qualified, as did Orphic poems celebrating religious mysteries. In each case, the bard tells a story meant to epitomize and even justify the supernaturally shaped course of human events. Milton observes the familiar trappings and formal insignia of epic: invocations, extended similes, catalogs, epithets, and the rest. But he does so idiosyncratically, in line with his highly individual Christian faith. The invocations exemplify this characteristic willingness to interpret the “laws” of epic according to his own situation. Embracing and expanding on a liberty asserted previously by Tasso, he uses the invocations as occasions to speak not simply in his own voice but to an unprecedented extent of himself and his anxious situation, “in darkness, and with dangers compassed round” (7.27).
When Aristotle described epic as an inclusive, composite form, he was distinguishing it from drama, the genre that shows rather than tells and brooks no authorial narration. By contrast, the authorial voice in epic sometimes withdraws in favor of storytelling characters involved in dramatic dialogue or lyrical self-expression. Aristotle thought drama the nobler genre, not only purer in mode but also more disciplined in plot than sprawling epic (26). Early modern theorists, however, focused on the magnitude of solitary authorial effort rather than on the purity of the form or concentrated efficiency of the action. The actors in a drama, furthermore, “share the poet’s praise,” as Dryden says (1800, 1:436). Such critics were nearly unanimous in accounting epic, precisely because it is vast, complicated, and solitary in execution, as “the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform” (Dryden 1800, 1:425). Milton, of course, as if to satisfy classical as well as modern standards of preeminence, composed both a capacious epic and a stringent classical tragedy (one never designed for staging or actors’ shares). Still, the most momentous and defining artistic decision he ever made came down to a choice between these two great genres.
When he originally conceived the story of the Fall as the subject of a tragedy, Milton honored the long-standing critical consensus that unhappy events are best reserved for dramatic presentation—an affinity of form and subject acknowledged in the epic’s most genre-conscious moment, the invocation to Book 9. As if to signal this anomaly formally, the same invocation fails to do what invocations by their very name promise they will do: invoke. Acknowledging his dependence on the Muse only in the last line, Milton devotes this “invocation” instead to justifying his deviation from mainline epic into tragedy. For, despite his concessions, Milton clearly thought that in choosing to tell this sad story in the grandest narrative genre, he had made a good trade-off. The story of the Fall allows him, as he indicates in the invocation, to redefine heroism in accordance with his Christian faith (9.13–41). More important, if “an epic poem must either be national or mundane,” as Coleridge claimed, once an author has chosen the mundane, the goal must be to tell a story “common to all mankind” (1886, 240). This is a tall order, but in a Christian culture, the story of Adam and Eve, though tragic, more than fills the bill. Not simply the greatest story ever told, it is every story ever told: Milton’s “Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively,” as Coleridge observed (240). If he could not claim to invent the epic mode, as Homer had, Milton could reinvent it in light of Christian revelation and aspire to include all other epics, all other narratives of any kind.
The other main advantage of arranging the story of man’s first disobedience as a narrative and not a tragic drama was the chance to exploit the single most definitive formal requirement of an epic narrative—that it begin in the midst of things. Milton made much of this opportunity: a titanic Satan and his followers, first rolling in hellfire and then debating revenge, followed by the farsighted judgment of a Zeus-like God and his obsequious adherents in Heaven. Indeed, the opening books are so striking that they have largely determined the poem’s reception in modern times. These books address received traditions of heroic poetry overtly and extensively, and they also contain, according to many readers, the most poetic energy and the thematic designs crucial to the work as a whole.
To revive a thesis that originated in the early eighteenth century and fell out of fashion in the twentieth, we think it likely that Milton’s inspiration for making Satan weltering in Hell his “midst of things” was the pre-Norman, English tradition of biblical poetry, especially the Old English Genesis B, long attributed to Caedmon. No one denies that Milton had opportunity to become acquainted with this and other works in the Caedmon manuscripts, discovered in 1651 by the philologist Franciscus Junius, then residing in London. If Milton was given access to the manuscripts while he was still sighted, he probably took note of the illustrations, including one of the rebel angels plunging headlong into the jaws of Leviathan (below). Scholars have argued, not without evidence, that Milton’s competency in Old English was at best slight and that any acquaintance he might have had with the Caedmon poems, whether in manuscript or in print, would therefore have been superficial and inconsequential. Yet even a superficial acquaintance would have left him aware that Genesis B begins, as Paradise Lost does, with Satan and his thanes rallying in Hell. Furthermore, as French Fogle’s introduction to Milton’s History of Britain observes, Milton’s access to freshly published Old English texts and translations was extensive (Yale 5: xxxvi–xxxvii). The conception of Christ prevalent in England until the Conquest, “which views the cross from the perspective of world history and emphasizes its victorious aspect, the conquest of Satan,” was far more amenable to him than the later emphasis on the sufferings of Christ (Huttar 242).
“Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (1.44–45). (illustration credit itr.1)
While Milton dismissed the monks who wrote the early history of Britain as “ill gifted with utterance” (Yale 5:288), it does not follow that he would have disdained the Anglo-Saxon language. His schoolmaster at St. Paul’s, Alexander Gill, was an advocate of the English vernacular and demonstrably knowledgeable about Old English (Fletcher 1:185). The common complaint that Paradise Lost is replete with Latinisms, an English estranged from its vernacular roots, is unjustified, as Fowler’s edition repeatedly observes. On the contrary, Milton’s English is generally idiomatic. When in 1807 James Ingram translated the first fifteen lines of Paradise Lost into Old English, he left the syntax virtually untouched and required substitutes for ten loan words only (47–48). We think it not only fitting but probable that the catalyst for Milton’s choice of epic subject once he had abandoned the British theme was the coincidental discovery in the 1650s of a native tradition of biblical poetry written before the Conquest.
PROSODY AND STYLE
Paradise Lost is written in unrhymed pentameter lines, or blank verse. Early in the sixteenth century, the Earl of Surrey adopted this form for his partial translation of Vergil’s Aeneid, and toward the end of that century it became the conventional medium of Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare’s plays are primarily written in blank verse. But Spenser had not used it. Milton’s choice of blank verse was a daring one, for at that time there was no long blank-verse poem of much distinction in English or any other language. It was largely because of Milton’s precedent that blank verse established itself as early as James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) as the preferred metrical form for long and ambitious English poems. Wordworth’s The Prelude; Keats’s Hyperion; Tennyson’s The Princess, Enoch Arden, and The Idylls of the King; Browning’s The Ring and the Book; Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna; the long narratives of Edwin Arlington Robinson; sections of Crane’s The Bridge; Stevens’s Sunday Morning and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction; Frost’s Home Burial; and Betjeman’s Summoned by B
ells are all written in blank verse.
Milton organized his narrative into verse paragraphs, within which he devised syntactical patterns famous for their length and lucidity. Having freed himself from the ancient bondage of rhyme, he created musical effects with consonance, dissonance, alliteration, repetition, and even the occasional internal rhyme. He particularly excelled in the “turn of words,” as it was called in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—repeating the same words in a reversed or modified order. Dryden tells us that he once looked for these turns in Milton but failed to find them (Essays 2:108–9). In fact the effect is everywhere, as in “though fall’n on evil days,/On evil days though fall’n” (7.25–26), which reminded Emerson of “the reflection of the shore and trees in water” (R. Richardson 318). When the Father announces the forthcoming creation in Book 7, “Glory they sung to the most high” (182), then “Glory to him” (184), the Son who has just defeated the rebel angels, and finally, with a turn of words, “to him/Glory and praise” (186–87). Through creation the Son will “diffuse” the glory of the Father “to worlds and ages infinite” (190–91), and in this very passage we feel that glory has been squeezed from the word glory and diffused from clause to clause. Some of the best-known turns include Eve’s initial infatuation with her image in the pool (“Pleased I soon returned,… Pleased it returned as soon”) at 4.460–65, and Eve’s great love lyric enclosed by the brackets of “Sweet is” and “is sweet” (4.641–56); inside them she lists the same natural beauties twice, once as sweet, once again as not sweet. Addison thought this last “one of the finest turns of words that I have ever seen” (Shawcross 1:142).
Distinguished achievement in sound effects is an excellence that no one has ever seriously denied to Milton. His verse has few rivals in what Hazlitt termed “the adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage” (Thorpe 104). Sometimes the adaptations are relatively simple, like certain film scores. As Satan struggles through Chaos, the verse also seems to have trouble making headway: “So he with difficulty and labor hard/Moved on, with difficulty and labor he” (2.1021–22). When he hears “a universal hubbub wild/Of stunning sounds” (2.951–52), it is clear that universal and wild are ways of defining what the word hubbub, all meaning aside, delivers to us purely through its sound. Stunning sounds echoes the chaotic crack of hubbub, as if sounds had indeed been stunned. Sometimes the adaptation of sound to meaning is wittier, more conceptual. When Satan departs from Pandaemonium, the philosophical devils “reasoned high/Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,/Fixed fate, free will, Foreknowledge absolute,/And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost” (2.558–61). Milton makes the catalog of philosophical concepts into a little semantic labyrinth in which “foreknowledge, will and fate” enough resemble “Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” to make us wonder how they are alike, how not alike. Have we really gone anywhere in moving from one line to the next?
When the poem introduces a distinction, the difference is likely to be taken up, explored, and often complicated by the verse. In Book 4, for example, the narrator reads gender differences from the naked bodies of Adam and Eve, and the result is the greatest politically incorrect passage in English poetry. “For contemplation he and valor formed,/For softness she and sweet attractive grace” (297–98). We can see immediately that alliteration serves Eve. The poetry is already indicating its willingness to interfere with the passage’s legalism, but for now there is no time to explore the bond between Eve and poetic beauty. The law must be pronounced. Adam is formed for God, she for God in him. His forehead and eye “declared/Absolute rule” (300–301).
At this point Milton begins to describe their differing hair treatments, Adam’s first:
Hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust’ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad. (301–3)
The two run-on lines imitate the fall of his hair (Hyacinthine implies that it is black), while the strong end-stop of line 303 puts a limit to its hanging down. But not has an almost corrective force, as if things might have been getting out of hand. They immediately do. Eve’s blond tresses introduce four straight run-on lines, followed by four more end-stopped lines:
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadornèd golden tresses wore
Disheveled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied
Subjection, but required with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (304–11)
He the cluster, she the vine. He words in their stable sense, words as law, words that set limits; she words as their sense is in transit, disheveled, drawn out variously from line to line, creeping and curling with wanton implication. Syntax flows across the unit of the line. Milton’s verse becomes femalelike in describing femaleness, then arrives at the key word Subjection in line 308, which mates with all the verbs to come. Enjambment stops. We have returned to the matter of the law, but in, so to speak, another semantic universe. Subjection is what is required, what is yielded, what is best received, and again what is yielded. It is their bond, and also their sexual spark. He requires and receives it; she yields and yields it. Lacking compulsion, it is no longer “subjection” in the usual sense but rather her free consent.
This passage begins with the law of gender difference, yet by its end we find that law realized in amorous love and artistic excitement. Eve yields her subjection with “coy submission, modest pride,” both phrases being oxymorons, and the first of them of particular richness in Renaissance love poetry (Kerrigan and Braden 204–18). An oxymoron naturally requires two words, a plus and a minus, a point and a counterpoint. The last line, with Eve-like luxuriance, doubles the oxymoron quotient with four perfect words, oxymoronic in various ways: reluctant crosses amorous, amorous crosses delay, delay crosses reluctant. But all of them and their nest of contradictory combinations are sweet, the very word that Eve will turn so memorably a few hundred lines later, enclosing the couple’s love and their lapsing days of Paradise in its embrace. They will not make love until the end of the day. Eve’s sweet … delay is an oxymoronic union of desire and control, consent and refusal, passion and rule, profusion and limit, fusing the various contraries of the passage. Adam also participates in this knot of contraries. Gentle sway is the first oxymoron of the passage, and links to delay through a delayed rhyme. Of “Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,/And sweet reluctant amorous delay,” Walter Savage Landor remarked, “I would rather have written these two lines than all the poetry that has been written since Milton’s time in all the regions of the earth” (Thorpe 368–69).
Milton’s style marries male and female, “which two great sexes animate the world” (8.151). There is male law. There are requirements, fixed meanings, ripe clusters of sense. But there is energy as well, and the energy in this poetry is female, vinelike, curling here and then back, various in its repetition, paradoxical, nurturing underbrushes of implication that modify and even revise the abstract fixities of law.
DICTION
Johnson proclaimed that Milton “wrote no language, but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish Dialect” (Thorpe 86). Yet his strictures on Milton are almost always wrong or exaggerated. A recent study such as John Hale’s Milton’s Languages is from the outset friendlier toward the multilingual characteristics of Milton’s style than would have been possible in the confines of Johnson’s linguistic patriotism. Modern statistical studies have demonstrated that the style of Paradise Lost is neither as archaic nor as Latinate as some of its critics have imagined (Boone). Milton is a learned author, to be sure, but a student determined to appreciate at least some of the learning in his language will be not be led away from the genius of ordinary English. T. S. Eliot, writing in the Johnson tradition, emphasized “the remoteness of Milton�
��s verse from ordinary speech” (Thorpe 321). But in fact Milton’s poetry enriches ordinary speech in new and surprising ways.
Now and then Milton will use a word in its classical or etymological sense, waving aside its derived meaning in English. In “There went a fame in Heav’n” (1.651), fame has its Roman sense of “word spoken.” An imperial Milton banishes the English sense. Similarly, succinct in “His habit fit for speed succinct” (3.643) has the Latin meaning of “tucked under, tight-fitted.” Christopher Ricks has shown that Milton will sometimes insist on the etymological sense when naming an unfallen world in which words with definitions involving immorality are not yet appropriate (109–17). At their creation the rivers of the earth run “with serpent error wand’ring” (7.302), but error in the Latin sense of “wandering” contains no taint of crime or mistake. Words too have their original innocence. In order to grasp this last example, a reader must see that the Latin definition is in meaningful dialogue with the derived sense, and that the rejection of the ordinary English meaning, far from being arbitrary, belongs to the larger significance of the passage.
Milton “was not content,” Walter Raleigh observed, “to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word with two meanings at once” (1900, 209). When the hair of the angel Uriel falls “Illustrious on his shoulders” (3.627), Milton refers at once to the luster or brightness of the hair and the august reputation of the angel. As it approaches Eve in Book 9, the snake is “voluble” (436). In its classical sense, the word denotes the coiling motion of the snake, but in its newer English sense, it announces the serpent’s forthcoming talkativeness (Ricks 108). Beelzebub refers to Chaos as “the vast abrupt” (2.409), where abrupt seems first of all to retain its Latin sense of “broken off, precipitous.” The rebel angels have fallen through Chaos and have some idea of what it means to traverse this abyss of indefiniteness. Whoever enters Chaos breaks off from the stabilities of Heaven and Hell. But the English meanings seem also in play when we note that Milton has transformed an adjective into a noun. Chaos itself will be a constant sequence of abrupt changes, a place where interruption is not a surprise but the norm.