III
The usual picture of Milton composing Paradise Lost is constructed from the testimony of a number of contemporary biographers.1 Milton frequently composed lying in bed in the morning. It is supposed that this was his practice during winter. At other times we have to think of him as getting up early and, since he was already blind, impatiently waiting for his amanuensis to come and take dictation. At times he would have as many as thirty lines ready and, if the amanuensis arrived late, he would complain, saying "he wanted to be milked". When he was dictating, "he sat backward obliquely in an easy-chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it". The dictation of poetry was during part of the morning, for he had divided the day into several portions for his various works. Only one piece of evidence appears to be ambiguous on this point: it says that the poem got composed in a parcel of ten, twenty or thirty verses at a time, which were written down by whatever hand was next available. And there is a curious fact of general import to be added: during each of the five years from 1658 to 1663 when Paradise Lost was composed, the poetic vein flowed happily from the Autumnal Equinox - about the close of September - to a little after the Vernal Equinox of March 21, but during the remaining months, however much the old poet courted his fancy, he could not produce anything to his satisfaction.
This interesting picture is helpful both subjectively and objectively, but fault can be found with it on three scores. It tells us nothing about the inner process of Milton's composition. It omits one important detail about the time when the process went on. It does not clarify a certain point with regard to composition and dictation. What is not clarified is whether during the dictation Milton added to the lines already composed. We are left to imagine that he might have
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done so. But really we have no ground to think of any addition as a rule. If we attend to Milton's own evidence in his poem itself, as distinguished from that of his biographers in their books, we should believe most of his composition, if not all, to have been done before the arrival of his amanuensis in the early morning. His evidence also tells us that his poetry came to him not only in the early morning: it came even more at another and earlier time. And for this we have confirmation in some of the biographers themselves. Finally, we learn from him that the process of composing Paradise Lost was the exact opposite of what we should guess from the characteristics of his packed and polished, learned and Latinised style.
In the invocation to Urania, the Heavenly Spirit, at the beginning of Book VII, after referring to the solitude no less than the adversity into which his life has fallen, he adds about himself that he cannot really be lonely while Urania pays him her visit.
... nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East.2
This establishes two times for his composition - night and daybreak - and indicates nothing beyond them on either side. Neither before nightfall nor after sunrise did Milton compose Paradise Lost. If parcels of ten, twenty or thirty lines were found written by several hands, it must have been by different amanuenses on different mornings. Or else, if some other part of the day served for dictation, the poet may for his own reasons have postponed dictating his verses com-posed at night or early morning. His personal statement leaves no room for the supposition that he composed any-thing during the rest of the day, and the rest includes even the time of dictation when his amanuensis first arrived. The period beyond a part of the morning is all the more ruled out since his epic was not the only thing he was busy at from 1658 to 1663. The various works to which the several portions
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of the day were allotted comprised many undertakings of a very different nature, and for them a lot of daily reading and research was needed besides the literature he might have thought necessary as an aid to his poem. He was construct-ing a Body of Doctrine from the Scriptures, compiling a History of England, collecting materials for a Thesaurus or Dictionary of the Latin tongue. Every day he pursued his tasks with the use of several assistants whom he kept near him. Each afternoon he also made it almost a fixed practice to hear music, vocal or instrumental. And in the evening he got choice poetry read out, as an anonymous biographer related, "by way of refreshment after the day's toil and to store his fancy against the morning".
The mention of morning here also as the time of his poetic composition is in line with most of the biographical matter. But, while it has authentic relevance, the night-time which the poet pairs with it in the lines we have cited seems the more productive; for, in the three other passages in Paradise Lost about his composition, he points only to night-time. One of the three is in the Third Book of the epic, the remaining two in the Ninth. These two we may quote at once. In speaking of the need to change his "Notes" now to "Tragic" because he has to deal directly with Man's sin and Fall and Heaven's anger, he maintains that his "argument" can be even more "Heroic" than the old epic subjects,
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated Verse...3
Again, he affirms that there is no reason why he should not succeed and that certain circumstances of time and place may defeat him only
... if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.4
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It would appear that since the Third Book and the Ninth refer exclusively to hours of night, the morning hour mentioned in Book VII applied in some measure to the period when the middle parts of the poem were composed, whereas the initial and final parts to which the other two Books belong - that is, two-thirds of the poem - were done exclusively before Morn purpled the East.
What, however, is of the utmost importance is not the mere fact of night-time composition. The quotations from Book IX bring out the way Milton composed Paradise Lost at night, and the phrase already culled from Book VII is within a context that points to the same way, although now including dawn in the period of inspiration: what Milton in his apostrophe to Urania actually says about himself is:
Yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East.
If words have any meaning, our passages state, to begin with, that Milton received his poetry during his night's sleep. Now what would such reception imply? It would imply that he was perfectly passive in the process of composition: indeed Milton the man was as good as non-existent in the role of poet and only some power beyond him made him the hearer of its voice. But, if that was so during the night's slumber, may we not suppose that, when he was not asleep in the night and yet composing and when he composed wakefully in the early morning, the same phenomenon occurred?
The first quotation from Book IX not only makes the Celestial Patroness come "unimplored" in both the sleeping and the waking conditions at night. It also uses equivalent phrases for either condition. The Celestial Patroness "dictates" to Milton slumbering and "inspires easy" the non-slumbering Milton with verse which is "unpremeditated". Milton gets his song as a sheer gift: he is nothing except its hearer or transcriber.
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The second quotation does not at all distinguish the two conditions and, fusing them by means of the one word "nightly", suggests that in either condition all the poetry is brought to Milton's ear by the Celestial Patroness instead of being fashioned in any respect by the poet himself.
The full phrase from Book VII gives us the words "night-ly" and "when Morn purples the East" as both qualifying "visit'st" adverbially. Therefore, the same act of Urania - her visit - which presented Milton with poetry at night in a condition where personal initiative was impossible is spoken of as applying to him at dawn. Urania's visit at dawn should be taken to have repeated in the waking state what it had done in the sleeping - namely, to have used Milton as a medium.
Grammatically, it would even seem that the verb "visit" is used transitively in relation to "when Morn purples the East" no less than to "nightly", so that "slumbers" which is the object of this verb goes with both the adverbial expressions: the sense would be that the slumbers which were visited by Urania took place not only at night but also at daybreak.
The usual construing is intransitive where daybreak is concerned: "when Morn purples the East" does not get joined up with "slumbers". But the transitive possibility of "visit'st" in both instances should serve to strengthen the "mere-medium" state we have deduced for Milton at dawn as well as at night. And, when we remember that Milton was blind and stayed in "ever-during dark,"5 with eyes "that roll in vain... and find no dawn",6 we may see very little essential distinction between his Urania-visited sleep and his wakefulness visited by the same Celestial Patroness.
Keeping in mind their similarity and mutual shading-off, we get the right view of the passage in Book III which we have not yet quoted. There he tells how each night he would absorb himself in meditation on Hellenic and Hebrew poetry, visiting in imagination the old founts of inspiration, and
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
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Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note.7
Although here he seeks out the Muse and it is not the other way round, the result is the same: the "harmonious numbers" come of their own accord to the blindly brooding poet in the dark hours, just as to the "wakeful" nightingale comes its song.
Out of the two states in which Milton received inspiration, the sleeping one - for all the closeness of the waking to it - is certainly the more remarkable. Milton's slumber must have been the most extraordinary phenomenon in any poet's life. Coleridge's Kubla Khan was composed during a dream. But it is a wonder of brief spell and Coleridge never met with a repetition of the experience, though we may be right in viewing The Ancient Mariner and Christabel as resulting from a sort of prolongation or projection of the dream-state into the waking consciousness. If Milton is to be believed, he had a Kubla-Khan experience night after night from the Autumnal to the Vernal Equinox during several years. Might we not suggest that not only was his ear active but also his eye? Kubla Khan, we may remind ourselves, was seen as well as heard. And Milton, at the end of his famous invocation to "Holy Light" at the beginning of Book III, speaks of the compensation open to him from that Light for his blindness to physical Nature:
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.8
Might not the final statement be more than figurative? No doubt, Milton was not properly a mystic and in fact his mind was on the whole more powerful than subtle, too self-dependent in its judgment to let itself go in spiritual self-
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transcendence, it was strongly religious and not intuitively ecstatic; but his blindness, charged with a high degree of poetic aspiration, could very well have induced a kind of abnormal absorption so that his sleep might have grown a dream-vision accompanied by a direct audition of the rhythmically revealing word.
Yes, we may well suppose Milton's eye no less than his ear active in the course of his poetic sleep. But, while we stress the remarkable nature of this sleep as a recurring event over years, we must regard it as only different in degree and not in kind from the poetic wakefulness of the blind Milton. Even in the early stages of the epic, when the ever-during dark of the wakeful state frames his composition, we should speak of a dream-vision - a self-generating series of pictures, a sort of inward "movie" - just as we speak of a direct audition, the "harmonious numbers" flowing unforced. During sleep the poet would be cut off from the spur to memory's sight by the goings-on of the day-to-day world around: his dream-vision would be rapt, whereas the poetic wakefulness would be partly open to the suggestions of those goings-on. But owing to the abnormal absorption, what the eye would experience in the latter state would still be a dream-vision.
And what sign would confirm for us that a dream-vision was a constant feature of Milton's poetic process? In Kubla Khan we feel a certain vivid play of changing fantasy, apparently wanting in coherence yet conveying an impression of unity on some deeper level. Have we not the same sign in good portions of Paradise Lost - at least in the first two Books which are the best? Milton is a more tightly knit though less metaphysical mind than Coleridge, a mind more classically steady and less romantically tremulous in its general movement than his. So whatever quality it may have of dream-vision would not be quite the same. Only the essence of this quality would be recognised equally in both the poets. And we are struck by the complaint of several critics that there are various types of inconsistency in
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Milton's descriptions of Hell. "It is odd, for example," writes Kenneth Muir,9 "that the devils are doomed to dwell 'In admantine chains and penal fire,' and that Satan himself is chained on the burning lake, while a few lines later they are all able to fly to dry land, and before long they are engaged in all kinds of activities.... Waldock is right to point out that in other hells 'the damned have come to the end of their road'; but in Milton's, though it is a place of punishment, the damned are full of plans for the future. Milton (says Waldock) was trying 'to accomplish two incompatible things', namely, to depict a hell which was a place of perpetual torment, and one which was a base for military operation... It may be, as Mr. Eliot suggests, that we should 'not attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts'; the world to which he has introduced us does not require this kind of consistency. 'It should be accepted as a shifting phantasmagory.' Leavis and Waldock both feel that Milton's Hell is not 'consistently realized'; but to some readers the very inconsistencies give a nightmare quality which could not have been achieved in any other way."
Not that the nightmare quality runs riot. There is a method in the midst of the aberrancy. Milton gives us to understand about the devils that, as Muir puts it, "all-ruling Heaven has allowed them freedom so that they may heap further damnation on themselves..."10 Again, "as Hell had only just been founded and devils are different from human souls, we must not expect the same laws to operate."11 Also, "Milton makes clear that the tortures are intermittent, and there is no reason why we should not assume that they are not partly symbolic. The angels have been driven out from bliss, and that has always been the worst part of damnation."12 It is indeed possible to touch unity on a deeper level; and precisely this possibility wedded to the nightmare quality completes the Kubla-Khan affinity of Milton's work in many places.
Where the quality is not nightmarish, it is often still suffused with a strange species of vivid vagueness. Eliot13
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considers Milton lacking in sufficient visual power and he attributes in some measure the increase of the defect to his blindness. But the absence of fully realised visions may occasionally be due to the state of dream in which his poetry, according to his account, was frequently heard by him. Take his Eden. It has a certain indefiniteness, its flora and fauna do not display the details which would assimilate it to earth's landscapes. As Eliot14 has noted, the impression of Eden which we retain is that of light - "a daylight and a starlight, a light of dawn and of dusk". In Eliot's view, it is "the light which, remembered by a man in his blindness, has a super-natural glory unexperienced by men of normal vision". The "supernatural glory" could have been a product of the dream-state as well as of the heightened inward sensibilities of a blind man. The dream-state of a mind like Milton's could also be responsible for the imagery Eliot15 finds most memorable in him: "Milton is at his best in imagery suggestive of vast size, limitless space, abysmal depth, and light and darkness."
I think the Kubla-Khan affinity is too widely present in essence to be missed. And while we are about it we may recall that one of the many sources, from which Coleridge's dreaming imagination drew with the help of his profusely stored memory the materials of Kubla Khan, is Paradise Lost itself. Not only does the Xanadu of Kubla Khan, with its pleasance girdled by walls and towers, echo from Milton
the destined walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can,16
Cambalu which was actually a city built by Kubla Khan himself. Also Coleridge's sacred river which takes birth when, from a chasm slanting
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover...
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
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and which, before reaching "caverns measureless to man" and sinking to "a sunless sea", runs "meandering with a mazy motion" through "fertile ground" -
gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
and
... forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery -
even this river, in its strange setting, comes with Miltonic memories. Milton has "a river large" which belonged to his Eden's "fertile ground"17 (Coleridge's very phrase) and which
through the shaggy hill
Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown
That mountain, as his garden-mould, high raised
Upon the rapid current, which, through veins
Of porous earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill
Watered the garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now, divided into four main streams,
Runs diverse, wandering many a famous realm....18
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,
With mazy error under pendent shades....19
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gum and balm;
Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind,
Hung amiable - Hesperian fables true,
If true here only - and of delicious taste.
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed....20
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess...21
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Coleridge's poem closes with a passage at whose beginning is
... an Abyssinian maid,
Singing of Mount Abora,
and at whose end a mention of "Paradise". Milton, in the same context as the lines from him quoted above, deals with various places where the heavenly garden is not located and he concludes:
Nor, where Abassin kings their issue guard,
Mount Amora (though this by some supposed
True Paradise)...22
Finally, from Coleridge's "milk of Paradise" we hark back to the "milky stream"23 from which Milton's Adam and Eve in Eden got "nectarous draughts", while Coleridge's immediately preceding "honey-dew" echoes the "mellifluous dews"24 brushed off the boughs in Heaven by Milton's Angels for their repast.
Thus the Kubla-Khan affinity is there in more than one sense. And it is interesting to mark that Milton distinguishes two kinds of sleep with different kinds of dream or vision in them. One is the reverse of the waking state in which for the most part Reason joins or disjoins for its own affirmations and denials the "imaginations, aery shapes" formed by "Fancy" out of sense-impressions. This Reason, as Adam says,
"retires
Into her private cell when Nature rests.
Oft, in her absence, mimic Fancy wakes
To imitate her; but, misjoining shapes,
Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late."25
This is ordinary sleep and its dream-creation. The other, an
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extraordinary slumber, working with a power of perception exceeding the normal, is shown us in the account Adam gives of the sleep which he twice had on the first day of his life. The first occasion was when he started wondering who the good and powerful Maker of his being was. He strays about, inquiring but getting no answer; then
"On a green shady bank, profuse with flowers,
Pensive I sat me down. There gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seized
My drowsèd sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My fancy to believe I yet had being,
And lived. One came, methought, of shape divine,
And said, 'Thy mansion wants thee, Adam, rise...' "26
In his dream Adam is taken by the "shape divine" to the Garden of Bliss prepared for him:
"Whereat I waked, and found
Before mine eyes all real, as the dream
Had lively shadowed."27
Here "fancy" is no mimic creator of confusions in the sleep-state, and what comes as a dream is a revelation, a divinely given vision of things found to be true on waking, though the truth is of earth itself and not of any beyond. Similar is the second sleep of Adam after his contact and colloquy with God's presence in the garden to which he had been led. During this sleep God performed the operation of making Eve out of one of his ribs:
"Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight, by which
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Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the Shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood...."28
"Fancy" in this passage has a more explicit depth of meaning than in the previous one. It does not "wake" to do "wild work", as in ordinary sleep, while the rational man is unconscious: now it is an "internal sight" and the rational man is "awake" inwardly and witnesses the work of a superhuman agency. Of course, on this occasion too, as on the other, there is no vision of any beyond: Adam witnesses what is being done to his physical body by the glorious Shape. But the sleep that is like a trance can have many functions, and Milton's description of it can be a clue to the experience he was himself undergoing night after night.
The clue-character of the passages is suggested further by another reference to an extraordinary sleep. This time it is Eve's. When the Archangel Michael takes Adam to a hill and shows him a wakeful vision of some things to come and then relates the rest, Eve is sleeping far away, but when they return to her bower she is found awake and she says:
"Whence thou return'st and whither went'st I know;
For God is also in sleep, and dreams advise,
Which he hath sent propitious, some great good
Presaging, since, with sorrow and heart's distress
Wearied, I fell asleep."29
Here too is a sleep-knowledge of physical events by internal sight. And it is the internal sight and its sleep-knowledge that are the central facts: whether what is seen is physical or not is a secondary question. May we not take Milton's recurrent resort to these facts as a sign of personal experience, his nightly seeing of things not of the earth though very much coloured by physicalities no less than by his own personal attitudes, and hearing the poetic word which conjured them up?
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Ordinarily we should find it difficult to recognise his seeing things not of the earth, so strong is the stamp of the man's mental conception upon his dream-sight. Kubla Khan is an unmixed glimpse of the beyond-earth. All the reminiscences from Coleridge's reading, with which it is full, have only triggered off a peep into the occult - or, rather, the occult has itself caught hold of those reminiscences and organised them in its own light. That is why Sri Aurobindo30 has pronounced about Kubla Khan: "it is a genuine supra-physical experience caught and rendered in a rare hour of exaltation with an absolute accuracy of vision and authenticity of rhythm." About Paradise Lost Sri Aurobindo31 has said that in it Milton expressed "in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had constructed out of his intellectual beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul". This means that his intellectual beliefs considerably deter-mined the working of his imagination: the latter, though vitalising the former, was mechanised by it in turn. Milton had already with a firm hand built up in his mind a general religious picture before it got translated into poetry: the poetry, therefore, could exert its transfiguring influence on what was resolutely preconceived and not use ideas and beliefs to fashion a glorious surprise all through. But we must not overlook the reviewing which Sri Aurobindo mentions of everything in the vision of Milton's soul. It is there that we have the secret of the stupendous success attained by him in certain parts of his poem, especially the opening ones about which Sri Aurobindo32 has written: "There is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he was born." A fiery fusion has here taken place of Milton's soul and poetic power: the soul's vision has wholly permeated the imagination and reduced the grip of the intellectual creed to the minimum. Elsewhere too in Para-
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dise Lost than its initial Books the permeation occurs, but it is intermittent and often allows a somewhat unsatisfying picturisation. Rightly does Sri Aurobindo33 declare: "Milton's heaven is indeed unconvincing and can be described as grotesque and so too is his gunpowder battle up there, and his God and angels are weak and unconvincing figures, even Adam and Eve, our first parents, do not effectively fill their part except in his outward description of them...."
However, none of these defects contradicts the possibility of mediumistic creation by Milton of his poetry: the grotesque, the weak, the ineffective in him only show how much his mind carried a superficial habit of imagination and the common colour of physicalities into the mediumistic state. If Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Christabel can be said to project part of the dream-consciousness into the waking world, Milton's inferior moments in Paradise Lost may be said to act the other way around. Even his superior moments are not free of this reverse process, but the process is not dominant, it is finely harmonised with the Miltonic version of the Kubla-Khan quality. If we do not mark that quality, it is because we have let his deliberate-looking and literary-structured style shape our judgment and because we have not stopped to attend to his unequivocal statements about the experiences he was undergoing night after night. "The vision of his soul", which Sri Aurobindo has included in the analysis of Milton's expression, was just the factor to bring about that experience, for right from the beginning of his life his soul was dedicated to the Muse with a profound prayer that he might be perfected some day for the achievement of a master-work. No other poet was born with so intense a sense of mission to do for England what Homer and Virgil had done for Greece and Italy, no other poet worked throughout his life with so deeply felt a direction towards a God-given poetic fulfilment. Well might his life be crowned with that extraordinary creative sleep.
And well might the creativity of that sleep find during his waking hours its counterpart in the ease with which, as he
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tells us, he composed his verses under Urania's inspiration. He calls his verse "unpremeditated". We must not think this contradictory to our assertion that he had already with a firm hand constructed a mental picture in general of his religious story. Preconceived picturisation does not debar unpremeditated verse. The latter implies no more than a happy fluency of composition in which vivid word-arrangements get suddenly born. The fluency can gather together ready-made conceptions and endow them with new life both imaginative and verbal, even sweeping away some of them in spite of the intellect's watchful presence. And, in Milton's case, we may expect the intensest and most original vitality because his fluency rose from a state essentially akin to the extraordinary creative slumber he experienced again and again.
The fact of this slumber has hardly been noted by Milton-authorities and yet it is fundamental to the psychology of his inspiration. To my knowledge nobody has dwelt sufficiently on even the general aspect of this psychology. All that has been said amounts to nothing further than what David Masson affirms: "There can be little doubt that Milton believed himself to be, in some real sense, an inspired man." Apart from Blake,34 only Robert Graves has referred to the general aspect with a direct pointer, but he too does so just en passant.35 He comes to it in trying to clinch his contention that Milton was really "a minor poet with a remarkable ear for music, before diabolic ambition impelled him to renounce the true Muse and bloat himself up, like Virgil (another minor poet with the same musical gift) into a towering, rugged major poet." To take away from Milton the credit for what Graves is compelled to admit when he says: "the majesty of certain passages is superhuman" - to show Milton to be a minor poet on whom majesty was somehow imposed from outside himself, Graves obviously remembers the poet's own hints and writes: "There is strong evidence that he consciously composed only a part of Paradise Lost: the rest was communicated to him by what he regarded as a superhuman agency."
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One is not sure what Graves means by "consciously". To recover what was communicated" to him in sleep, Milton must have been inwardly conscious even when to all appearances insensible to outward touches. And since his poetry is said to have been communicated to him nightly and during his waking time as well, when he had the feeling of participating in its production, the point about being conscious should not in the literal sense arise at all. Graves most probably means Milton's individual labour as contrasted to the Muse's gift. That he could not merely mean waking creation is evident from his own statement about a poet's work: "The act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary more acute than normally.... Few self-styled poets have experienced the trance; but all who have, know that to work out a line by an exercise of reason, rather than by a deep-seated belief in miracle, is highly unprofessional conduct. If a trance has been interrupted, it is just too bad. The poem should be left unfinished, in the hope that suddenly, out of the blue, days or months later, it may start stirring again at the back of the mind, when the remaining problems will solve themselves without difficulty."36
Graves has the heart of the matter here, but he overlooks the experience of many poets that they often set themselves doggedly to draw the Muse by writing on their own, and succeed swiftly or slowly in getting inspired; they need not always wait for her to visit them. Milton in the period of his Paradise Lost was obviously not one of these. Whether asleep or awake, he composed in a conscious trance. He was the ideal poet as pictured by Graves and even out-idealled him by fusing trance and dream during certain watches of the night.
However, Milton's dream-vision and dream-audition - though facts psychologically curious in the extreme, and fundamental too since after them the easy and unpremeditated verse in the waking state becomes at once credible
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– stand on a par from the literary viewpoint with his expe-rience of poetry in the waking state. For here too we have the identical total effortlessness. And it is this total effortlessness that is the essential literary oddity to be accepted or rejected by us in connection with Paradise Lost.
Should we not take Milton at his word? He was basically a truthful man. Sometimes he was very dangerously truthful, once even risking his neck by uttering what he deemed to be the truth. And details he has left of his private and public career in many of his prose works, especially at considerable length in his Second Defence of the English People, have all been accepted. Hanford, one of the Milton-authorities, attests apropos of Second Defence: "The general credibility of this and other utterances about himself cannot be questioned."37 The fact of overwhelming night-inspiration during the waking condition had been remarked by Johnson who, on the authority of Richardson's Life, relates that Milton "would sometimes lie awake whole nights... and on a sudden his poetical faculty would rush upon him with an impetus, and his daughter was immediately called to secure what came". Perhaps the most impressive confirmation is from one who lived with him and knew him most intimately in his last period. Newton in his Life says that the poet's widow, "being asked... who the Muse was, replied it was God's grace, and the Holy Spirit that visited him nightly". Here both the sleeping condition and the waking - under possession of Urania - seem to be implied. Weighing everything we may fully credit the poetic assertions we have quoted from Milton.
But just realise how startling they are. If any great poem strikes us as having been most studiously created, it is Para-dise Lost - a masterpiece of Art in the literal sense. No poem in the world bears so clearly the signs of skill in composition, an extreme utilisation of the value of every syllable and sound. The Miltonic blank verse, boldly enjambed, varied in its pauses, at once majestic and terse by the Latinised turns of its English, is something unique in sovereign craftsman-
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ship. And then there is the immense fund of diverse learning with which it is crowded. We should expect the poet to have spent hours and hours composing and recomposing, brooding over one mode of saying and another, deliberately building up sentences and paragraphs, with a suspended syntax full of subordinate clauses and their dependent elements. We should also expect him to rummage patiently his stores of memory, or halt again and again, calling for volume after volume to be opened and consulted. But the fact is exactly the reverse.
Milton created Paradise Lost with consummate facility. Not that poetry came to him in abundance at a time, but whenever it did come, the artist and scholar in him were one with the poet, and his many-sided chisel-strokes were delivered without a moment's hesitation, indeed with perfect automatism. Elaborate grammatical structure and intricate rhythmical order, ceaseless articulate passion but with a perfect polish, multifarious learning deployed in balanced organisation - all issued from him as Pallas Athene is said to have been born, leaping splendid-limbed and golden-armoured, sudden yet complete, from the head of Zeus, a complex grandeur of form and function manifested in the simplest manner, without strain, without even visible process. If we are minded to make Milton himself suggest this manner we may take the lines in which the Portress of Hell-gate describes to Satan her birth from him in Heaven:
"All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed,
Out of thy head I sprung. Amazement seized
All the host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid..."38
One of the phrases here we shall have to ignore. "Sudden
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miserable pain" does not seem to fit the Miltonic process of creation. If it ere the young Milton, the student at Cam-bridge and at his father's place at Morton, the phrase might be accepted as a description of the frequent headache to which he was subject. The old Milton suffered only from gout, which is not known to affect the head, not even to give a swelled head which Milton perhaps had. All the rest of the description is rather apt. The eyes dim and dizzy in darkness are what we may expect in the first seizure of the poetic fury, even apart from their partial relevance to Milton's blind state and his night-inspiration. We may also regard as appropriate the statement that the new birth resembled very much its source, for there is, as we shall note later, a very personal element in all that Milton wrote. "Shining heavenly fair" and at the same time somewhat terrifying the beholder - this too is rather accurate for Milton's work. As for the "left side opening wide," surely Milton hinted in connection with Satan something wrong and wry, something sinister, but for himself we may understand merely a physiological truth about the activation of speech: the speech-centre in the brain is on the left side and so Milton would be using that side for the composite of his poetry.
Anyway, the immediacy, the simplicity with which poetry like his got composed in a flawless fullness constitutes a psychologic and aesthetic paradox - perhaps the most surprising fact in literary history.
In the report about the restriction of his creative period to autumn and winter and the drying up of his powers during spring and summer we have a suggestive index to the nature of his later poetry. This poetry appears to be something over which in general he had no control: on the whole it came and went as it listed. But the report does not quite prepare us for its absolute "given-ness" in all particulars. If it was first-rate, this was thanks entirely to the Muse; if it fell below the mark, that too was not in the least his work. Ordinarily we should be inclined to speak of Milton artistically labouring over the second half of Paradise Lost and scrupulously keeping up the
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sublimity of style even when the inner life-breath was comparatively feeble. We would conceive of keen art mating with inspiration in the first half and acting almost alone in part of the second. But, though the two halves are unequal on the whole, it would be a mistake to think that when his work was not supreme in quality he padded out everything with the help of a sharp artistic conscience playing upon his mastery of the language. Milton created portions of Paradise Lost in an inferior strain because Urania did not visit him in full force, but it was still Urania who wrote through him. And as we have already said, even when he wrote at his best there was no chopping and changing in the manner that the packed and polished, as well as learned and Latinised, posture of his verse might suggest to us.
When we think of a supreme artist in verse on a colossal scale, we at once name Virgil and Milton together. Yet they are worlds apart in their methods. Virgil is indeed a magician of meaningful phrases in Latin, phrases of exquisite sense and sound, but he got his effects after long exertion. He made the rough draft of seven or nine lines every morning and spent the whole day revising and refining them. Surely this kind of labour has also the breath of the Muse behind it: only, it implies the arduous clearing of the passage in the brain through which that breath flows. With Milton there was no arduous clearing. At his best, the breath blew with such force that the brain opened up a passage and the wonderful words rushed out. At his second-best, the words were not wonderful, they were just adequate, but the blowing was still forceful and the brain-opening immediate, though the more superficial and not the deepest layers must have served as the channel. I do not aver that he never changed anything later: he must have revised at times, perhaps even entirely redone some portions. What we are talking of is the general situation. This situation differs from what can be affirmed about the early Milton who used to correct his work fairly often. We have no proof of a similar treatment of Paradise Lost. And we cannot say that the proof
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is lacking merely because the original manuscript, as distinguished from the one submitted to the Licencer, has failed to survive. Edward Phillips, who used to go over the manuscript under the poet's directions, reports his correcting nothing else save "the orthography and pointing" - that is, the spelling and punctuation. Hence we may hold that the bulk of Paradise Lost stood from the first as it stands now and was created in nightly gusts of massive spontaneity blowing from beyond the poet's individuality through his highly individual mind. Most of its 10,565 lines, though thoroughly Miltonic, were, in respect of personal initiative, not at all composed by Milton.
Notes and References
1.A Milton Handbook by J.H. Hanford, (1946), pp. 50-65.
2.Bk. VII, 28-30.
3.Ibid., 20-4.
4.Ibid., 46-7.
5.Bk. III, 45.
6.Ibid., 23-4.
7.Ibid., 37-40.
8.Ibid., 51-5.
9.John Milton (1955), pp. 146-47.
10.Ibid., p. 146.
11.Ibid.
12.Ibid., pp. 146-47.
13.Selected Prose (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 143-44.
14.Ibid., p. 144.
15.Ibid.
16.Bk. XI, 386-87.
17.Bk. IV, 216.
18.Ibid., 224-34.
19.Ibid., 238-39.
20.Ibid., 248-53.
21.Ibid., 257-58.
22.Ibid., 280-82.
23.Bk. V, 306.
24.Ibid., 429.
25.Ibid., 108-13.
26.Bk. VIII, 286-96.
27.Ibid., 309-11.
28.Ibid., 460-64.
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29.Bk. XII, 610-14.
30.Life - Literature - Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Revised and Enlarged Edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), p. 161.
31.The Future Poetry (Pondicherry, 1953), p. 116.
32.Ibid., p. 117.
33.Life - Literature - Yoga, p. 60.
34.Apropos of his own designs: "Tho' I call them Mine, I know that they are not Mine, being of the same opinion with Milton when he says that the Muse visits his slumbers & awakes & governs his soul when Morn purples the East..." (Letter, 16 August 1799, p. 1038 of G. Keynes, The Complete Writings of William Blake, London, 1957).
35.The Crowning Privilege (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1959), pp. 338-9.
36.Ibid., p. 99.
37.A Milton Handbook, p. 3.
38.Bk. II, 752-59.
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