The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

I

Milton's Spaciousness of Soul and Sound

Paradise Lost - here we have an epic which would seem almost to make paradise worth losing, since without that loss Milton could not have sung so sublimely and almost regained Paradise for poetry-mad people like the present writer. But more than three hundred years after its composition, years during which a lot of poetry-mad people have had their say about it, it is difficult to avoid making just a rehash of past critical comments. Yet, difficult or no, if one feels that the last word has not yet been spoken, one must make the attempt to bring new aspects forward or at least to present certain shades of old aspects with a new emphasis.

Difficulty is a thing no lover of Milton can shirk without being false to the Miltonic spirit, the spirit of one who, blind and lonely in his old age, amidst a political regime hostile to him and his hopes, kept on fashioning the greatest poetic work by any Englishman, outside the dramas of Shakespeare. The quintessence of this spirit are the words put into the mouth of Satan while that Archangel admonishes one of his despairing followers:

"Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,

Doing or suffering..."¹

But while the admonition has tremendous power, it does not convey the Miltonic spirit's expansive sweep. It is power pared down to the bare bone of heroism. Power widely and richly deployed in a thunder of the whole heroic body's manifold movement is also Milton's. And, as he somewhere says, "if great things to small may be compared",² then apropos of the difficult attempt I am going to make of finding Miltonic matters not yet fully explored, I may illustrate the poet's expansive sweep by quoting some lines about a most difficult attempt from a speech of Beelzebub, the next in

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strength to Satan among the rebel Angels.

After a long debate in Hell, Beelzebub suggests that the best way to continue war is not so much by direct action against Heaven's King as by a subtle attack on the soul of God's latest creation, Adam. But far indeed from the depths of Hell is the starry universe which in Milton's Cosmology hangs by a golden chain from God's Empyrean and at whose centre is the Earth where Adam is placed in the garden of Eden. Between Hell and Earth, in the Miltonic Cosmology, is the realm of Chaos and Old Night surrounding the starry universe as an enormous ocean a tiny island. So Beelzebub, when his strategy is accepted and his plan of entering Earth endorsed, raises the great question:

"But, first, whom shall we send

In search of this new world? Whom shall we find

Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandering feet

The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,

And through the palpable obscure find out

His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight

Upborne with indefatigable wings

Over the vast Abrupt, ere we arrive

The happy Isle? What strength, what art, can then Suffice...?"³

Face to face with such a passage we ourselves may well employ the words: "What strength, what art!" Take the line:

The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss.

It is not so much the intrinsic quality of the adjectives that constitutes the strength of the art here: the adjectives are not novel, at least not at all to us and not quite to Milton's contemporaries, but mark the apt combination of their grand commonplaces in just this order. It creates not only an impression of length beyond length baffling the sight: it creates also what I may term a downward crescendo, a

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mounting sense of hollow after hollow heaped on each other. And the total effect of the three adjectives is that of two particulars and one generality. "Dark" is a defining word, so too is "unbottomed": they both have a concreteness, but "infinite" has a mysterious abstract neutrality about it, giving the two preceding qualities an immense continuation as if into nothingness, a void continuation borne out in sound by the three consecutive short i's, the first of which gets its shortness specially enforced by a stress while the remaining vaguely carry on to meet - across the unstressed opening syllable of the next word "Abyss" - the closing syllable of it, which is again a short i-sound heavily stressed. This word, after the adjectival trio massed before it, comes as a most natural climax that is - to borrow an expression from sub-marine warfare - an explosive depth-charge hissing into an unimaginable horror. And the horror is all the more vivified at the line's close by the phrase standing at the close of the line preceding this: "wandering feet". It is feet unpractised and fumbling that have to dare an empty profundity which supplies no ground for support, no slightest foot-hold. The contrast between small substantial things and a vacuous amplitude renders our line doubly dreadful: a keen dramatic quality, with a tinge of pathos, is infused into the picture. The dramatic quality is increased by the arrangement of pauses in the passage. Each of the lines prior to the one about the Abyss has a break somewhere. There is in them a tentative movement pressing on; now this movement is taken up and, without being annulled, it is assimilated into a full line-long phrase - a phrase holding with each of the three epithets a sort of pause yet forming one indissoluble whole with which both the significance and the rhythm reach a forceful fulfilment.

However, we are not allowed to stop. The sentence proceeds: the next phrase, at the same time that it is separate by means of the conjunction "and", gets interwoven with the earlier because of the understood "who shall". The syntax is just right for the theme of a lengthy yet uninterrupted

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journey. And in the new phrases we get two expressions joining up with the descriptions "dark" and "unbottomed". Either phrase has an adjective welded to another boldly used as a noun: "the palpable obscure", "the vast Abrupt". The first brings home to us the darkness all around by suggesting an oppressive overwhelming intensity of it: the darkness is such as may be physically felt. The second phrase makes the unbottomed character of the Abyss a nerve-shaking phenomenon: we get the sense as if an endless chasm suddenly broke open below what we had been led to believe was something solid. It is as though a precipice unexpectedly edged off into sheer space. The idea here of something solid ceasing and giving place to thin air is as natural as it is startling; for "the vast Abrupt" opposes no less than continues "the palpable obscure" - it suggests the disappearance of that which seemed dense like a solid. The suggestion of the same thing under two surprisingly opposed aspects is conveyed in terms of sound by the b and p repeated in "Abrupt" from the earlier phrase.

A further vivification is there of the menace of what we may call in the lingo of modern aviation a never-ending "air-pocket". A huge effort to counteract the menace is conjured up, as a vital necessity, in the words:

or spread his aery flight

Upborne with indefatigable wings...

That six-syllabled epithet catches up into a final heave of collected breath the difficult endeavour required of keeping afloat above instead of plunging helplessly into the nihil which all the time sucks down.

Several other points of poetic power may be elaborated. But as we shall meet similar ones in passages to be quoted later, we shall refrain here. The strength, the art we have appreciated must suffice - except that we should mention the sustained largeness of the sensitively modulated rhythm. This rhythmic largeness is unique to Milton among English

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poets. Several attain it, but never all through. Almost from the first line to the last of many thousands in Paradise Lost we have - though at varying altitudes - a spaciousness of sound which seems to be the echo of the very soul of Milton. Writers on Milton have justifiably found certain sides of his personality unsympathetic, even as they have done in the case of another poet who too dealt with a cosmic theme - the Italian Dante. But only sheer wrong-headedness, as in the modern poet-critic Robert Graves, can deny the spaciousness of soul which Milton's expressive rhythm indicates. When Wordsworth spoke of Milton he could not help saying in a line which is itself a piece of Miltonese:

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart.

When contemplating what an anomaly of nothing Man would be if his teeming purposes were declared a product of Nature's purposelessness, his life a brief flash ending in total gloom, Coleridge could not better bring to a head the enormous oddity of denying immortality than by exclaiming:

If even a soul like Milton's could know death...

When Sri Aurobindo wants to characterise the cause of the height at which move Milton's best outbursts - the opening Books of Paradise Lost - he points to "the greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and the greatness of its sight".⁴ Even in those parts where the supreme poetic vitality is missing, the soul-spaciousness haunts the language and rhythm: what does not live amply from within has still a fine external amplitude. As Sri Aurobindo, noting the absence here of the deeper fire, immediately adds: "Milton writing poetry could never fail in a certain greatness and power,... the method and idea retain sublimity."⁵

Perhaps the reader will ask: "What exactly is meant by Milton's soul when we call it great or spacious?" The word is

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here used in a certain general fashion. We do not mean just what in our Yoga we understand by the "psychic being", the secret spark of the Divine in the deep heart, which has to be realised by a spiritual discipline. Of course, whatever we may name as the soul must have something to do with this spark, but there may be nothing direct. Milton was far from practising Yoga. So, with the psychic being as the hidden support, his soul should be conceived as that in him which had a poise of selfhood within the processes of thinking, willing, feeling, sensing - his intellectual individuality which tended to rule the common nature in him and to dynamise this nature with its own vision. The true posture of this individuality is best caught in that phrase of his:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.⁶

And the core of this individuality's vision was powerfully religious. Indeed, at the centre of anything we can call the soul, there must be, in the broad meaning of the term, a religious position - religious inasmuch as it concerns the individual's relation to what he momentously confronts as the immense ultimate Reality by which alone himself and all things else are explicable and interrelated. One may confront this Reality as spiritual or as no more than physical: one may even hang in a final doubt over its true character. In each case one has exercised - positively, negatively or neutrally - the central life of one's soul and found a position that is, broadly speaking, religious.

Now this position vis-à-vis the immensity of the ultimately real may be charged with different imaginative attitudes. The imaginative attitude may be oriented chiefly towards the multiform world-activity in which the ultimately real manifests itself. Shakespeare is the outstanding example of such an attitude and we rightly designate his genius as protean or myriad-minded. Dante exemplifies an attitude oriented in the main towards human life set in a wider complex scheme

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of an inhuman or superhuman Hereafter, created with a clear-cut diversity by a precise divine Wisdom and Grace. Hence Dante's forceful ranging across religious mysteries with an exact defining penetration of sight, a concentration upon keen details against a background of ultimate immensity. To Milton the ultimate immensity is itself the principal fact of both personal and poetic imagination though not of mystical intuition, much less of spiritual experience. Milton the man, Milton the poet, the whole individuality of him, his entire soul is charged with the boundless, the unfeatured, the supra-mundane which is ever losing itself into an infinity of the invisible. It is this that renders his soul spacious. No doubt, his vision seizes on particulars - he could not be a poet without a moved precision of sight in one way or another, but what his sight makes most precise is the fading of every particular's outlines into the indescribable and the shadowing of every particular's contents by that circum-ambience of the vast and vague. The thrilled sense of immensity that is natural to Milton has constructed for us in Paradise Lost a coherent story of world-wide significance within an all-enveloping cosmic picture whose magnitude overpasses any that the epic spirit of Europe has put forth.

Let us focus for a moment our minds upon this picture which we have already sketched. We may begin with our starry universe as seen distantly by Satan when at last he has traversed Chaos and reached this new creation, deep within which Man has been placed by Heaven's Lord. Satan beheld

Far off the empyrean Heaven extended wide

In circuit, undetermined square or round,

With opal towers and battlements adorned

Of living sapphire, once his native seat,

And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,

This pendent World, in bigness as a star

Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.⁷

The pendent World is not our earth: it is the entire collection.

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of stars including our solar system. This entire collection is also called by Milton the "orbicular World": it is a hollow globe of space spangled with constellations and enormous to human eyes but actually a mere pin-point in comparison to Heaven or the Empyrean, just as the tiniest possible star would be by the side of the moon - the under-side, we may say, if we are to make the moon stand in general for the Empyrean, below which the starry universe hangs. Stretched out above the World-drop is the boundary of Heaven, so wide a boundary that one could not say whether it was the straight side of a square or the curve of a circle. In fact, Milton has left it really "undetermined" whether the Empyrean was a circle or a square: in one place his Beëlzebub speaks of "Heaven's whole circumference",⁸ while in another the daughter of Satan, Sin, refers to God's "quadrature"⁹ as distinguished from the "orbicular World" which Satan succeeded in subverting. Perhaps Milton means to create a mystery about the shape of the Empyrean. But this Empyrean, though vast, is not boundless, as is evident from the fact that there are things beneath it. Beneath it is not only the sphere of stars: there is also the region of Hell, between whose roof and the bottom of the stellar sphere the distance is half of that which is between the bottom and the top of this sphere.¹⁰ Both the starry universe and the region of Hell are within the amorphous expanse of black Chaos - the expanse which originally occupied the whole lower half, as it were, of the infinity - the primeval circle of unlimited radius - whose whole upper half was occupied by the Empyrean. This infinite space is a state of God's eternal omnipresence, though He has His immediate and visible habitation in the midst of the Light, Freedom, Happiness and Glory that is spread out as Heaven.

Appositely does David Masson exclaim: "The physical universe of Dante's great poem would go into a nutshell as compared with that to which the imagination must stretch itself out in Paradise Lost..."¹¹ The extreme immensity of existence through which the poem sweeps with a living

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vision is a measure of the spaciousness of Milton's poet-soul. And the rhythmic thrill with which he communicates his vision constitutes the spaciousness of sound pervading all of his epic and especially the opening Books where the inner and the outer, the inspiration and the expression, are totally blended.

The few lines we have culled from Paradise Lost belong to these Books and we may say their strength and art are enough to relieve every fallen Cherub from the misery of weakness. To read Milton is to be energised, expanded, uplifted. For flagging and dwindling spirits there is no tonic finer than the poetry that is Miltonic.

Notes and References

¹.Bk. I, 157-8.

².Bk. X, 306.

³.Bk. II, 402-11.

⁴.The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, (Pondicherry, 1953), p. 120.

⁵.Ibid.

⁶.Bk. I, 254-55.

⁷.Bk. II, 1047-53.

⁸.Bk. II, 53.

⁹.Bk. X, 381.

¹⁰.Bk. I, 73-4.

¹¹.Introduction to Paradise Lost in The Poetical Works of ]ohn Milton (London, 1934), p. 32.

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