IV
We have asserted the total effortlessness of Milton's complicated and deliberate-looking poetry. However, in asserting this, we must not imply that he did nothing to make such effortlessness possible. A hint of what he did is found in the mention in Book III of his mighty poetic outpouring - the passage from which we have already quoted some lines. It throws light on several matters. We shall first dwell upon its bearing on that effortlessness itself and, through the aspects disclosed by it in this connection, we shall proceed to the power behind Paradise Lost, as distinct from the power beyond the poem - what makes it, in spite of not being composed by Milton at all, so thoroughly Miltonic.
After telling us of his blindness, he speaks of yet not ceasing to wander
where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song,1
and he speaks of the haunts of his mind as being more Hebrew than Hellenic:
but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowering brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow
Nightly I visit.2
Next, he puts together the names of four ancient personages, all famous but all blind like himself, and the first two of them poets whose fame he would wish to equal as he has equalled their fate:
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.3
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After naming these men, he continues what he started saying with "Nightly I visit":
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note.4
Observe what Milton has said. One thing is that he compares himself with the nightingale. This is perhaps the most unexpected comparison an epic poet could have made. We hardly conceive of Homer's Iliad or Vyasa's Mahābhārata or Dante's Divina Commedia as a nightingale's song. Least of all would we normally associate this song with Paradise Lost. The nightingale reminds us of Catullus and Campion, Sappho and Sarojini Naidu. It is a symbol of lyricism. And in a very evident sense the grandioseness of Milton's chant is at the opposite pole to the lyrical. But Milton the epic poet par excellence has a special purpose in making the comparison between himself and night's "wakeful bird". It is in relation to the essential formative spirit of lyricism that we must understand him. He makes the comparison not merely because both he and that bird get their musical expression in the dark hours. The comparison extends, in the first place, to the spontaneous - that is effortless - nature of expression in either case, for he does not omit to emphasise this nature of his poetry: he says, "thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers". Milton does not have to force his thoughts to make music: the music comes naturally from the very act of thinking, with an immediate movement that has all the look of the lyrical. No doubt, lyrical poetry is believed to spring from the act less of thinking than of feeling. But thinking is never absent from it - and, though acute reflection does not usually go with it, the intellectual gesture towards things and even the intellectual seizure of them are not ruled out, provided there is, as it were, a thinking with one's organic self, with one's living senses, a warm and
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concrete turn of the being towards the intellectual act. And this turn is precisely what Milton tells us to be his practice.
Consider the word "feed". He says that at night he would feed on a certain kind of thoughts. The word he employs is at once a piece of inspired art and a disclosure of his psychology. He refers to "harmonious numbers", verbal music, issuing from his mind; and music is primarily associated with the mouth. So he suggests the mouth beforehand by the mention of feeding. That is the artistic touch. But the poetic psychology too is here. The picture of poetry as being produced by the lips because the poet has taken strange unearthly food is a recurrent one in literature: we may cite Coleridge's line in Kubla Khan about the bespelled singer:
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
And in this picture we have two implications: the poet has taken into himself the stuff of a spiritual Ananda, a mysterious divine delight, and he has done so with a turn as warm and concrete as eating and drinking, he has brought his organic self and his living senses into play. Milton, when he speaks of feeding on thoughts, discloses to us his way with them. It is the way of all true intellectual poetry and most directly the way of the lyricism of the intellect. Thus Milton presents us with two characteristics of lyricism in the poetry of his thoughts: absolute spontaneity and the warm concrete turn.
Nor does the curious truth hinted by Milton himself, that his epic is a peculiar form of lyricism, end with these two characteristics. There are two more, staring every reader of Paradise Lost in the face. In lyrical poetry, it is the person of the poet that gets expressed - the individual mind and heart come pulsing through the song. Lyrical poetry has for its main theme the author of it and his personal exultations and agonies. Now one of the things which strike us throughout Paradise Lost is the presence of Milton himself. Again and
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again he speaks in his own person. There are the elaborate introductions which precede the first, third, seventh and ninth Books. And everybody knows that in the figure of his Satan we have a strong dash of Milton the rebel against Charles I, the vehement defender of regicide who remained the unrepentant Republican even when the Stuart Monarchy was restored and who might have been the first to get hanged as Cromwell's bellicose foreign secretary and all-Europe champion. There is also the blending of himself with some of the attitudes and ideas in the great speeches made by Satan's followers: especially when Belial urges the preciousness of "this intellectual being" we feel Milton's own voice breaking out. There is further the gorgeous expenditure of Milton's learning and reflection - history, geography, astronomy, philosophical issues, political problems, social and domestic questions, all that interested or engaged the poet outside his immediate theme and filled his mind and life is poured out. We may characterise these outpourings as superfluities, as Johnson did the autobiographical introductions; but, as he was careful to add, "superfluities so beautiful, who would take away?" Everywhere in the epic we meet with the poet's individual presence and we seem to move within his many-sided richly-stored intelligence. Nor would Paradise Lost be the greatness that it is without this presence and this deployment of scholarship: they are of the very essence of its poetry.
The other epic poets are more or less submerged in their subjects. So little of Homer the man is in the Iliad that scholars have even hatched the silly theory that Homer is the name of half a dozen different hands that have pooled their works - silly because one Homer is already a mighty freak difficult enough in the economy of Nature. Virgil rarely intruded upon his story: once only he breaks out into a personal cry, a glorious passage all Latinists have by heart: "Fortunati ambo!..."5 Dante is more felt in his work and that is because the Divina Commedia is in the first person, a kind of autobiography: it tells of the poet's own journey through
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Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. But Dante fills his poem with so much of human interest outside himself, the stories of all those who suffer in Hell, all those who repent in Purgatory, all those who rejoice in Heaven, that he is just one human being amidst a multitude of men and women. In Paradise Lost there are no human beings except Adam and Eve and they by themselves have really little to bring home to us, for they have no experience, the world is quite virgin to them, their contacts with it are elementary and they are quite different from the dreaming, toiling, fighting, loving, suffering, aspiring mass of creatures we find around us and in the colourful history of six thousand years of splendour and folly. The only human being who breathes and passions and moves through Paradise Lost is Milton with his knowledge and his experience. Thus, before the Fall, Adam and his angel visitors talk as if to them, as to Milton, the world's processes were familiar matters. John Bailey6 well observes: " 'War seemed a civil game / To this uproar,' says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory... and, interesting as the passages are, it is difficult to forget the incongruity of Raphael and Adam discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the universe, or Adam moralizing on the un-happiness of marriage as if he had studied the divorce reports or gone through a course of modern novels. Yet few and foolish are the readers who can dwell on dramatic improbabilities when Adam is pouring out the bitter cry wrung from Milton by the still unforgotten miseries of his first marriage...." Adam we find also talking at times "like a weary scholar" or like a student of the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages or "like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation". Raphael once breaks in with a question proper to a Platonic philosopher; and Milton, the chronic sufferer from gout which is one of the most painful diseases, lets us hear his own voice speaking when Nisroch, a rebel angel, refers to wounds received in the battle in Heaven and singles out bodily pain as "the worst of evils" which, "excessive,
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overturns all patience". In all this personal pervasion Milton can be considered in spirit a lyric poet with an epic subject and style. And when he bursts into directly personal expression we have some of the most effective and appealing things in Paradise Lost, things like
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me -7
or else:
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude...8
The fourth characteristic showing the lyricism of Milton's thoughts is the celebrated Miltonic music. Criticism, from the beginning, has stood in admiration before the wonderful rhythmic properties of Milton's blank verse. The usual term for them is "organ-music", but that covers the total effect, the massive tone of the verse-paragraph which is the unit of expression in Paradise Lost. But within the verse-paragraph there are various movements of delightful sound, with a flux and reflux of words peculiar to the Miltonic composition. In the two quotations just made we may notice this play of forward and backward in
Day,
and in
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though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues...
Or take those lines on Hell:
A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all...9
We have not only alliteration and assonance: we have also direct repetitions of word or phrase, running key-notes, as it were, to link up the various parts, make the new turn reminiscent and resonant of the old. Perhaps the most effective as well as meaning-charged product of this musical recurrence is the description of the discoveries made by Satan's followers in the infernal depths:
Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of
death -
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good;
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras dire.10
Nor is the music of recurrence suitable only to high-pitched poetry in Milton's mouth. It is equally apt when the utterance is quietly firm, as in the opening sentence of the speech
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of Jesus after God has declared in Heaven that only a divine sacrifice can pay for man's disobedience. Jesus says:
Father, thy word is passed, man shall find grace;
And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy winged messengers,
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming!11
Bailey has commented: "Observe the peculiarly Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to word: the 'grace' of the first line giving the key to the 'Grace' of the second, the repeated 'find' of the second line and the repeated 'all' of the fourth, the 'comes' of the fifth line leading on to the 'coming' of the sixth."12 Bailey further writes of the "cunning variety in the rhythm of the verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line -
The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."13
Sometimes Milton concentrates into single lines a most memorable music of vowels and consonants, either staccato or fluent. An extraordinary hammering in of progressive halts, with even a rhyme in the midst of the skilful assonance and consonance, is the line already cited:
death.
An unimpeded movement, but with every word weighted with a sense of fate, is another practically monosyllabic
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masterpiece ending a passage descriptive of Satan's entry into Eden at night:
So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold.14
A vast crisis is solemnly expressed by means of an utmost simplicity that is yet crowded with the profoundest suggestions through the long vowels tolling, as Bailey15 has marked, bell-like into the silence of midnight. And, mind you, this is not what is commonly known as onomatopoeia, such as Milton gives us in
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.16
Paradise Lost has onomatopoeia in diverse forms, and that too is part of its music; but here is a phonetic manifestation of the rhythm of the inner vision-feeling. This sort of word-vibration on the one hand and on the other the sound-waves which it intersperses of what I have termed the flux and reflux of word and phrase, these constitute the music affining Milton's poetry to lyricism in spite of its epic strength and volume. For, a complete lyric is not only a welling up of poetry by its own inner force, not only a measured cry of excited feeling and seeing and musing, not only a rhythmic language suffused with the personal and subjective element: it is also a poem whose verse is especially musical and brings in a marked manner the appeal of melodic or harmonic recurrence which is essential to all poetic movement. Perhaps no better illustration of the complete lyric in a brief compass can be offered than Landor's two-stanza'd Rose Aylmer:
Ah what avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
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May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
Added to the alliteration and assonance, the music here has the Miltonic flux and reflux - "Ah" twice, "what" thrice, "every" and "Rose Aylmer" two times. In the second stanza we have also instances of the Miltonic enjambment, the running-over from line 1 to line 2 and from the third line to the fourth. The pauses everywhere are diversely disposed. There is, in association with the general directness of statement, a play of choice collocation: "sceptred race", "form divine" - the latter a half echo of Milton's "human form divine". The tone is sweetly grave - deliberation and delicacy fused, as in Milton. And at the end we have both a Miltonic inversion - the object-phrase preceding the subject and verb - and a touch of thoughtful uplifted emotion, which is a typical Miltonism, in the word "consecrate" meaning "to set apart perpetually for sacred uses". Of course the epic pitch of expression is wanting in Landor's lyric of love's wakeful night-vigil, but enough dignity is present to make us perceive that this kind of lyricism, comparable in several ways to the song of night's "wakeful bird", could be the seed-form of the musical elevation on which Paradise Lost moves.
In Milton's epic lyricism we have the second paradox about him. This paradox may be said to explain in general the first which is the spontaneity, the automatism of his artistically finished and learnedly loaded expression; for spontaneity is the characteristic movement of the lyric inspiration.
Notes and References
1.Bk. III, 27-29.
2.Ibid., 29-32.
3.Ibid., 35-36.
4.Ibid., 37-40.
5.Aeneid, IX, 446-9: "O fortunate pair!..."
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6.John Bailey, Milton (The Home University Library, Oxford, 1945), pp. 177-78.
7.Bk. III, 41-6.
8.Bk. VII, 23-8.
9.Bk. I, 61-6.
10.Bk. II, 618-28.
11.Bk. III, 227-32.
12.Bailey, op. cit., p. 159.
13.Ibid.
14.Bk. IV, 792.
15.Bailey, op. cit., p. 166.
16.Bk. I, 540.
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