Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton [2nd printing 1962. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674594647, 9780674594630

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IMAGES AND THEMES IN FIVE POEMS BY MILTON

IMAGES & THEMES in Five Poems by

MILTON ROSEMOND TUVE

H A R V A R D C A M B R I D G E

U N I V E R S I T Y ·

M A S S A C H U S E T T S

P R E S S ·

1962

© C o p y r i g h t 1957 by the President and Fellows of H a r v a r d College Second

printing

Distributed in Great Britain by O x f o r d University Press, L o n d o n

L i b r a r y of Congress C a t a l o g C a r d N u m b e r 57-7619

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA B Y THE W I L L I A M BYRD PRESS, INC., RICHMOND, VA.

To my three scientific,

contemplative

brothers

Contents

Explanatory Preface T h e Structural Figures of L'Allegro

3 and II Penser oso

15

The Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity

37

Theme, Pattern and Imagery in Lycidas

73

Image, Form and Theme in A Mask

112

IMAGES AND THEMES IN FIVE POEMS BY MILTON

Explanatory Preface*

T h e critic who attempts to consider the images of poems without considering their themes will find that his materials are at war with his endeavor. T h e activity is barely possible, though perverse, if one keeps no single particular poem in mind, but when it comes to actual images that are part of a structure the very act of grasping them means generally that we either see, or mistake, a theme. N o fact about imagery is more inconvenient, to one who writes of it. H e cannot deal with what is important about the character of an image without having the whole poem on his hands, and he cannot state a theme accurately and significantly if he cuts off too closely those tendrils and trails of imagery which distinguish for us its precise nature, and which must therefore be allowed to cling to his statement either in fragments of his author's phraseology or, worse, his own. It is none the less necessary, since images figure forth themes, to keep the delicate relation of mutual domination between them constantly in view. T h i s declaration does not mean that all poems have what these five poems show: great thematic figures at their centers, * T h e quotations from Milton's works are throughout from the Columbia Edition of The Works of John Milton, 1931-40, except that occasional phrases from the Latin poems use the translations of Merritt Y. Hughes. T h i s study was originally undertaken at the request of the editors of the Milton Variorum Commentary, but outgrew its intended confines.

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

whence much of the lesser imagery springs. However much we have appreciated Milton's gift for creating vast but unified structures, it is yet a surprise to see how early he came into a power possessed but uncertainly by many great poets even in maturity—that of imposing a unity intellectually severe and firm by means which work through the imagination almost solely. All poems use figurative language, and all say what they mean through images, but only certain kinds organize themselves with exquisite economy around great central figurative conceptions. It is interesting that all Milton's longer early poems in English have this character. L'Allegro and II Penseroso are simplest; in these, to name the central image is to indicate the theme. In the Nativity Hymn two or three great symbols slowly make apparent a vast theme; if we state it without these we must use some other symbol to express it. In Comus a central image holds the position which a plot would hold in a drama; described, it would sound simply like the outline of a plot, but its function is not narrative, or dramatic. In Lycidas the theme is much diminished if we state it without the pastoral imagery in which it is implicated, yet to indicate boldly in pastoral terms the great figure at this poem's center is to court disbelief. This is not because of disagreements about the poem, but because the center lies so deep that we seldom state such things even to ourselves, and are dissatisfied when we do so. Without the aid Milton had, that of an ancient and reticent figurative tradition—since weakened and trivialized—dissatisfaction is the more acute; who examines the imagery of Lycidas must run this risk. These considerations emphasize the fact that in Milton's poems we apprehend unity and meaning, as he imposed or saw them, through means which show their true character only if they are seen at work. Though all these relationships will stand up to the most rigorous intellectual scrutiny, ancL though his means were probably quite consciously chosen,

Explanatory Preface

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still naming and abstracting seems to do the poems a most extraordinary violence. This is quite as it should be, but it is not equally true of all great poems; it is pre-eminently true of those which are radically figurative. T h e depth and subtlety readers agree upon in Lycidas and fiercely defend from the oversimplifier is characteristic of the other poems, even the one which he wrote so young. Since I do not wish to do the violence, yet wish to look at the deep center, I shall not say more of what I think is to be found there, but prefer that a reader should go immediately to the essays. T h e y cannot indeed entirely circumvent the difficulties here admitted. T h e fact that Milton's poems are more deeply figurative than many has definable connections with the date of his birth. He was born in time to share a centuries-long habit of thinking in figures, and nothing is more striking in the examinations which follow than the way Milton's figurative habits melt indistinguishably into those of the modified mediaeval background against which we see him; innovations were not necessary for him to use symbols, personifications, mythologies, allegorical images, as he uses them. Most of what the Renaissance poets learned from the Middle Ages about literary method—and this is where they learned much of what they built upon with such inventiveness and such splendor—is in him, and every sea-change that it underwent. He is in the highest degree an original poet, and nothing we can call by a name in him but can be named in another; he differs from everyone, and in everything does what others had done. T h e final accomplishments are more mature and profound than experiment and innovation could produce, and oddly enough they awaken more astonishment. This last was the effect of Milton's verse even when the figurative means it uses were quite common; but an audience used to the kind of reading his figures demand is indeed partly responsible for the maturity and profundity. There should be room somewhere in literary criticism for rejoicing that all Milton's

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linages and Themes in Five Poems

minor poems were written for an audience accustomed to reading allegorically, habituated to a figurative structural plan for poems yet not given to considering this opposed to 'logic' and intellectual luminousness, used to fable as a body for truth to dwell in, durably if painfully stuffed with classical commonplaces, serious about beliefs but not averse to resting one upon a figure, unshocked by the universal habit of endowing unsentient nature with thoughts and affections, and as willing (if more slow) to see truth in a metaphor as in a proposition. These happy mediaeval and Renaissance habits are still the requirements for a reader of these five poems. Reasons for the figurative character of Milton's writing which attach to the date of his coming into the world could be said to include two other similar matters—his reading and his teachers. T h a t Milton had Spenser to learn from is good fortune in a superlative degree. One cannot think of any fact in literary history quite like it—that Shakespeare had Marlowe to learn from, and Eliot the French symbolists, seem like pale facts in comparison, and it is hard to think of any similar felicity that touches so fundamentally the concerns of this book. For Milton could learn from Spenser the variousness, the dangers, the attributes, and the functioning of large images that can take command of a structure; he could see in that huge corpus of finished and unfinished works, so excitingly near in time and so modern in interests, the peculiar powers of figures allegorically read, including their philosophical and sensuous ambiguities, and could observe the typical ways in which ancient images were Christianized or used to 'moralize' a poem or give a body to one of the Ideas. For Spenser is like a great speculum of all these traditional ways of reading images and writing them, of the great Continental developments and of how an Englishman who was poet and man of affairs should use them. Though what he learned from Spenser had a good deal to do with Milton's thematic use of large figures, it only serves

Explanatory Preface

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to remind us of what would come under the head of 'his reading' for a poet born in 1608 and at school and university during the 1620's, and of the richness, the scope, the ancient roots, and the seriousness of Milton's intellectual equipment. Much of the profundity of his use of images results from the extent to which, at his date, a man could be put in possession of a great heritage. His figurative language is not connected with the books he knew only in the way suggested by the famous epigram about the spectacles, although he would have believed with his age that such spectacles were nothing but a benefit to the sight of anyone who could wear them. But a profound figurative vision of the realities of man's life, which is what we find in Milton's five poems, belongs to a high order of imaginative achievement, and is only possible to those who have escaped from whatever in their own time and world 'binds T r u t h while she sleeps' and makes their vision mortal. Milton began early to live in more worlds than that which historical destiny provided for men to experience between 1608 and 1674. He read himself into the others, and in the poems he made we do likewise. His figures are learned; every great thematic image in the five poems we look at was born of books. This is in every way an advantage to a later reader. It is also a responsibility. T h e fact is not unconnected with the nature of this book, and with its unity. In each of the essays which follow a curious parallel fact is apparent: in the case of each thematic figure, some form of scholarly inquiry of the last forty or fifty years, though not usually pursued with Milton in mind primarily, will be seen to have uncovered things which peculiarly help us to apprehend the full figurative character of Milton's writing. T h e kinds of inquiries vary greatly, but all annihilate some of the years between Milton, or what he read, and us, and the result is always the same: when we have command of such findings, we read as metaphor or symbol what was so written, cease to literalize and hence confine a great figurative

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

device, and can be moved by impalpable allegories because we neither mistake the shadow for its substance nor deny that substance is there. My phrasings will later be seen to fit very accurately the adverse criticism which these poems have received, and it is far from inconsiderable. T h e reasons why several of these large central figures came in some times and places to be read as fictions, dead things, rather than as images, are as varied as the kinds of activity which contribute to their recovery. Sometimes later epochs have read Milton's sources—Homer or Virgil or Spenser—not only learnedly, as he did, but with the purist's jealousy, or with the antiquarian's or the geologist's sense of the past and interest in its fossils. Sometimes our own age merely put an earlier century's dead at last into a grave. Some images are always hidden less from some minds (and times) than others, and certainly not every modern reader of Milton needed what modern studies have done. However, this is less a matter of persons than of eras, and of movements of thought too massive and too unrealized for a reader to stand aside from, singly. T h e charting of such movements is no aim of this small book, which cares to observe them just enough to take steps against being worsted by them. Sensitivity, which does affect the life of figures, does not disappear and reappear in the race in these small cycles, and what our date puts us in need of lies pre-eminently in the area of knowledge. Not esoteric information is in question, but something much less consciously possessed. Here appears one of the advantages of Milton's sophisticated and learned and much used figures. When the great body of Milton's readers ceased to read often and devotedly the books he read, that was less cause than symptom of the break with the older world; plenteous numbers of persons still do read them and it does not mend the rent. It was rather what his period did with its knowledge of the past that became an alien thing to us; in this respect he belonged in

Explanatory Preface

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large part to an age that was closing, even while in most others he belongs to ours. T h e different use of a past is not an easy thing to come by, for it rests upon attitudes never described, but merely held. It is of that order of things which are consciously seen only after they have vanished, offering itself therefore to one of the most valuable of all kinds of human sight, but difficult to possess again without self-consciousness or strain. Yet when the old ways of using one's reading and knowledge were snowed over, turning the old figures into strange and cold shapes, much could not stay lost or even covered, since Milton's figures are not inventions. T h e y can be found out about, a sovereign thing in an image, and the ways in which they were commonly understood can gradually become part of our familiar experience, met time and again in the works of many men. This is a mere assistance to knowing how images work, for it tells not what they are but what they were—but where we must wear alien modes of thinking as if they were the sole garments of our own spontaneously responding minds we are much helped by this one constant, that the figures are of ancient birth. Milton chose no temporary, culture-bound symbols; he wrote in figures that had held men's feelings and their conceptions of good and evil for two thousand years, or in images that presented simplest desires and primary humane ideals, or in symbols that spoke through one of the world's great religions of mysteries and needs that all religions speak of. Nevertheless, the history of his figures is a fairly small though a necessary part of what we wish to find out about them. Men have not only always lost the past, but when they have dug it up have found it to be merely the past and buried it again. Milton (contrary to frequent declarations by his critics) did not use the images because they had a history. His power in the use of them is not that he picks us up out of our own time to set us down in Homer's or Augustine's, a process which seems to change men very little and cause them straightway

IO

Images and Themes in Five Poems

to refurnish an old time to their own ideas of comfort. It was not their genesis in a vanished time but their power to outlive change that commended the figures to Milton. T h e y had all shown that they had this power, surest evidence that they have it still. T h e shepherds of Lycidas, Circe daughter of the sun, the Graces, the harmony of the spheres and the primordial light and darkness, were not what they had been when they started, and Milton was entirely aware of it. In their capacity to change lay their permanence; they had kept through the vicissitudes of times and cultures something unchangeable at the center of their meanings. So Milton thought, but by no means all times or all readers have agreed with him. It is pertinent to remember, in the present heyday of favorable criticism or ardent defense of Milton's longer works, that all the poems I have just referred to by their chief images have had long seasons of being regarded as artistic failures, monuments of dead perfection. Some are so regarded in many quarters now. It seems to me that this occurs whenever, for any cause, their central structural figures are literalized; the poems die of it. Great metaphors, especially those which have a long and varied history, can always be raised from the dead, though great themes can not. I do not of course say in all this that meaning deserted Milton's minor poems, and that some fifty years back Lazarus began to stir (and now at a touch shall rise indeed). For one thing some of the poems' figures are rather Hermione than Lazarus, and I am sure than the writers whose studies I use would feel more comfortable as Paulina. It remains true that what we have been enabled to learn during recent years can make old images able once more to work upon us with truly figurative and therefore lasting powers. A consideration of the five poems' images is given unity by the similarities I have spoken of, in their structural use and in our approach to them. Also, in each poem the factor of genre is of extreme importance to the imagery's nature and

Explanatory Preface

way of working. T h e artistic consequences of the fact that the Nativity poem is a hymn, Lycidas a pastoral elegy, Comus a masque, can be seen only by the slow circumlocutory process of watching the images shape themselves to the needs of the form. T h e critical procedure followed has had to differ in each essay in response to the way Milton chose to reveal his poem's figurative center, for this may be flat announcement, or dramatic revelation, or slow discovery of symbolic depth upon depth. No developmental point ranges the essays in a necessary order; this modern preoccupation would indeed run counter to Milton's poetics, which would call for deliberate choice of figures according to the decorum of subject and genre—they might be kinds of figures chosen at any 'stage' of one's development. In any case, images as separable units inadequately mark either artistic growth or decay. Neither in form nor in function do some kinds 'lead to' others as by a process of necessary growth; their use represents rather an artist's decision, and chronology is but secondarily important — t h e youngest of these poems uses with great skill what may be the profoundest type of trope. Milton learned something, to be sure, but this is the aspect of our particular subject least susceptible of proof and least worth concern. No hierarchy of subjects or forms commands a particular order; the earliest and latest poems have equally elevated subjects, and none, not even the pastoral, is in the base style. In other words, the considerations which unify these studies go through them all horizontally; Milton did not build the poems on each other. I have arranged them in an order that chiefly regards a reader's pleasure, reserving the interwoven complications demanded by a long dramatic piece till the end, but taking up all the 'smaller' poems (despite the symbolic complexity of one of them) before asking of readers the sustained imaginative tension imposed on us by an examination of Milton's most consistently figurative poem, Lycidas. T h e most important unifying principle I have not yet

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

mentioned, for it could not be made use of in a valuable or even an honest and accurate way, save separately in the studies of the poems. I refer to the defining and differentiation of the kinds of great figures. T h e classification of small rhetorical figures is complicated enough, requiring minute critical judgements into which taste and knowledge both enter, but the classification of the great tropes often involves the whole purport of a work and both the author's and the critic's definition of reality. We see in these five poems the use of emblematic personification, of ironia, of symbol; we see form after subtle form which metaphor can take so that poets can use language to get past the limitations of language. We see one variety after another of the delicately differentiated ways which the Middle Ages and Renaissance found to profit by the fact that reading allegorically provides multiple and extreme extensions of meaning. Historical and moral allegory are but the best-known two of these ways; Milton uses both, and others. We can if we wish find the familiar mediaeval four-fold meanings; and though we shall be wise if we ape the Middle Ages in their unrigorous and sporadic application of these, I have used the scheme where I have thought a distinction could thus be usefully made or caught. Since we see figures in action in which writers and readers of the age itself would never have attempted to distinguish a 'symbolical' from an 'allegorical' working, since we see personifications change into allegories, and mythological narratives contract into metaphors, stand still and become emblems, and deepen into symbols, I have thought it the part of wisdom to watch these transformations first and name them after. T h e names are exceedingly useful in order to catch sight of what is happening in a work of art where these delicacies in the figurative use of language give trustworthy clues to meaning, as well as most extreme pleasure; they refer to things quite real. But it is better to put the name on where the flower is seen, or we shall only crowd the herbal with er-

Explanatory Preface

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rors. T h e niceties of a just and sensitive differentiation in purely theoretical terms would tax the patience of the most interested reader, and it is a question whether such terms can secure definitions sufficiently clear and reliable for tasks as delicate as that we have in hand. If one follows the period itself in its willingness to allow the metamorphosis of one figure into another, then the definition of their differing natures is very valuable. Indeed it is one of the few precise tools of practical criticism of imagery—precise, like all definitions that regard both function and form, whenever the functioning is under observation. These definitions and distinctions are made by example and by descriptive explanation in each of the essays which follow; they are designedly allowed to recur, for greater accuracy and significance. By the end of the work a reader will be in possession of definitions for all these greater variations in the figurative powers of language, sufficiently clear and tough that he can, if he cares to, apply them to works very different in date and kind from these; the only hope of such resilience lies in this slow and reticent way of defining. T h e conceptions are the same throughout, and make one endeavor of the four separate studies. But I do not consider that it is necessary to take unity in the present work with greatest seriousness. I have been equally at pains to make the several essays self-sufficient, for the reader they were meant to serve is not primarily my reader but the reader of Comus, or of Lycidas, or of the other three, and we are seldom all these on the one day, or in a procession. Therefore no essay depends for actual clarity on a precedent reading of the others. Some considerations recur in connection with several of the poems. T h e nature of pastoral, 'what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe' (as Milton says in Of Education), the term 'pathetic fallacy' which represents one set of reasons for the gulf between seventeenthcentury and modern reading of metaphor, the Johnsonian criticisms which have set the terms for much present-day dis-

Images and Themes in Five Poems

cussion of these poems, the question of 'conflicts' between pagan and Christian elements—these are made clear in whatever essay they occur, and actually the points differ sufficiently according to context that repetition, though intentional, is slight. In this, as in many things, I have regarded the needs of students, and written as one. T h e difference between the innumerable students of Milton and the few specialized students of him is not one of devotion but of time. Where I could, or knew how, I have outwitted Time—usually with a footnote. Notes of one special kind, though I hope unobtrusive, will be found more numerous and more exact than some readers will think necessary—they are notes which make it easy for a reader so inclined to consider great traditional images with long histories in other places than these five poems where Milton has made use of that tradition or history. Studies of imagery are not self-sufficient, but strictly and completely ancillary to the poems they discuss and the images whose continued life they attempt to support. For most students of Milton the sublimity Johnson spoke of remains a pre-eminent characteristic, and so also the attribute one comes to rest upon after long meditation upon the images of these poems is, once more, indefinable: their perfect fitness. One has never to turn an indulgently blind eye upon any, never to wish Milton had developed them, or wish he had curtailed them, never to make concessions—to youth, to fashion, to 'the form', to 'the age', to some personal exigency or not-yet-solid learning or human smallness in their author. Other poets' images have other characters, some more arresting, and even more imaginative, than the perfect suitability to their great subjects and to their lovely and familiar forms which is the character Milton sought and found for his. If what is said of him has often been immoderate it is because there are few whose eyes do not dazzle at that bright sight.

Structural Figures of L'ALLEGRO and IL PENSEROSO

There are good reasons why the images of these two poems have for centuries given pleasure to almost anyone who can read. They offer also certain sophisticated pleasures, but their first attractiveness results from the peculiarly direct and simple relation we feel in them between experience as lived through and as imagined, the experiences meanwhile typifiying what is universally pleasurable and universally desired by men. Every human mind has attempted the two allegiances Milton gives shape to, has felt both their differences and their compatibility. The poems are not taken care of by saying that Milton portrays two moods, or two lives, or two men, or two days and nights, or Day and Night, or Light and Darkness; all these, assigned by critics as subjects, are instrumental. It is not possible to state the subject of either poem without using his figure or another; he portrays not pursuer or pursuit but that bodiless thing itself which the freely delighting mind or the meditative mind tirelessly seeks to ally itself with. Thence comes part of the satisfactoriness of the images; contrary to common statement, we do not tire of pleasures or of thought but of the pursuing 15

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

without taking possession—and each of these slight images stands for a lived experience in the moment when we enjoy and know the quality of that for which we ran. T h e mind is insatiate of 'experience' thus defined. It has so little of it. We shall see presently that the secret of the images' decorum (the much-discussed problem of their generalness) lies here— where such secrets always lie, in the relation of images to poetic subject, to the raison d'être of the whole poem as completely as that can be grasped. For a reader, a decision about this last matter is the final decision to make, and images help him to it. Yet the critic of images finds a description of poetic subject the most economical single statement he can begin with, a necessary and practical substitute for a full analysis of the entire sequence of images, since any reader who will try out the critic's answer to this one question will himself supply such an analysis, very like the one no critic has space for. The imagery of L'A llegro and II Penseroso has been examined in more separate treatments, especially in recent years, than that of any of the other minor poems, and I shall mention all the important ones in one connection or another; anyone who will reread all these treatments will perceive that as soon as we can detect what each critic thinks to be the subject of the poems, we see that it not only determines how much and what parts of the imagery he notices, but that we can predict where praise and blame will fall. As is not unusual with youthful work, these poems are more implicated in the habits and aims of their period than some others of Milton's works; what follows from this is that the typical dissatisfied reader of their images is the reader (naive or sophisticated) who cannot forbear prescribing certain poetic aims, subjects, and habits (Romantic or modern, those of a Keats or those of an Eliot) as necessary ones. For my own definition of the subjects of the poems, which is not in the least revolutionary, I would claim only that it follows the text, that it would have occurred immedi-

Structural Figures of L'ALLEGRO

and IL PENSEROSO

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ately to any intelligent seventeenth-century reader trained in a grammar school, and that it will take care of every image and word, in context, in each poem. Milton says outright what he is doing in L'Allegro: 'And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crue'; 115 following lines honor her by showing her nature as it shines through a score of forms of 'unreproved pleasures free', and his conclusion is an election or statement of allegiance: 'These delights, if thou canst give, Mirth with thee, I mean to live.' Many a pastoral débat moves toward such a reply or choice; we are more familiar with those 'praises' of Love or of Virtue which take the related shape of 'the pastoral invitation'. T h e poet had given his first thirty-five lines, after banishing Mirth's opposite, to invoking her: 'But com thou Goddess fair and free'—in heaven she has her being as the Grace named Euphrosyne; men call her 'heart-easing Mirth'. T h e y have called her many similar names; since she laps them 'against eating Cares', all generations and societies of men have tried to be of her company. She is the subject of L'Allegro. But she is not a person; she is a personification, that is, she is a way of talking about the absolutely not the contingently real. She is one of those three Graces whom the mythographer Conti calls 'deesses de bienfaits', allegorized by Conti and Gyraldus and Ripa and Valerianus and Cartari, 'moralized' by being connected with Seneca's De beneficiis, spoken of or painted as free, liberal, like T r u t h naked or with untrammeled garments; and she is that one, Euphrosyne, who especially figures Gladness, as her sisters figure splendor, brightness, or majesty (Aglaia), and flourishing or bourgeoning (Thalia). She is no half-intended classical tag. Behind her significancy as the major image of Milton's poem there lies not only all that classical tradition, long-annotated, had made of the Graces, but this tradition enriched by the philosophising and symbol-making interpretations of neo-Platonic Ren-

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Images and T h e m e s in F i v e Poems

aissance writers like Ficino and spread widely by mythographers and commentators. T o this we must add a long literary tradition in other tongues and in English—Spenser's vision of these 'daughters of delight' dancing upon the Acidalian mount in his pastoral book (FQ VI.x), Ben Jonson's numerous masques. She is the Euphrosyne who 'figures' 'Chearfulnes, or gladnes' and appears both alone and with her two sister 'Charities or Graces' in Jonson's masques and the Coronation entertainment, his 'Laetitia' dressed in flowers like Ripa's Allegrezza, his 'Delight' who is accompanied by Sport, Laughter, Revel, and such others. She is indeed that Dame Gladnesse who dances with 'Sir Mirthe' (Déduit) in the garden of the Romaunt of the Rose, where all cares— Eide, and Sorowe, and Povert—are left outside, painted on the walls without. All sins as well, all heart-eating foes like Felonye, Vilainye, Coveitise. For the chiefest companion of the central figure has great importance in each of Milton's twin poems, and 'The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty', whom Milton's Mirth leads in her right hand, is an essential element in his conception of that free Grace, as she had been in dozens of others. 1 This is not to say that Milton wants the 'unreproved pleasures free' of his vision of delight to be like those transgressions that miraculously do not count as such, with which we are ι T h e phrase from N a t a l e Conti (Comes) comes f r o m Mythologie, iv. 1 5 (Lyons, 1 6 1 2 ) ; for the Jonson figures cited see A l l a n Gilbert, Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham, N . C., 1948), where the other mythographical writers mentioned can also be conveniently found, and for the neoPlatonic writers, E . Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939); on the trinity of Graces, aspects of the nature of the Platonized and allegorized Venus, see pp. 1 6 8 - 1 6 9 , their nudity, pp. 1 5 5 , 159. Even the definitions from handbooks used by an E . K . (in Shepheardes Calender, A p r i l ) for his gloss on these 'Goddesses of al bountie and comelines' can restore for us one significance possessed by Milton's figure—the 'free liberality' surely intended to accompany the equally traditional significance of pleasures freely enjoyed with a glad mind. See Starnes and Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Ren. Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, 1955), index.

Structural Figures of L'ALLEGRO

and IL PENSEROSO

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familiar in descriptions like Tasso's of the Golden Age, which Daniel translated as Ά Pastorali'. But such pleasures are like his 'unreprovable' ones in one special respect, and he indicates it by his wish to live with Liberty and with Mirth—they all have the flat absence of any relation to responsibility which we sometimes call innocence. T h i s is a primary ground of difference between the pleasures of Mirth's man and Melancholy's man, and recognition of that fact goes far to set aside the vexed question 2 of whether these two are 'opposites', 'contrasts', 'diagonally contrasted', 'balanced', 'merged', and the like, whether Milton is 'both' L'Allegro and II Penseroso. What man is not? W e need make no trouble about a division, no fanfare about a unification, that every man daily makes, within the bounds of his own personality. Not by the reconciling of things opposed, but by the comprehending of things different, and not in a pattern of the antitheses but in a living and experiencing mind. But 'some melancholy in Milton's mirth' there is not, if we abide by his own definitions; the differences remain differences, and the Cherub Contemplation who is 'first, and chiefest' companion in II Penseroso breathes another air than that in which 'youthful Poets dream O n Summer eeves by haunted stream' or contemplate Shakespeare's plays of fancy and Jonson's learned masques and comedies. Every pleasure in each poem is a pleasure of the mind, for that is where the subjects of his two poems have their being. T h e emphasis upon Milton as an unusually detached spectator in a world of cheerful or of melancholy ob2 T h i s point is discussed, sometimes as the central one, from Masson onward, and appears in several of the influential studies to which I refer in various connections in the ensuing pages: those by E. M. W . T i l l y a r d (in The Miltonic Setting, Cambridge, 1938), by Cleanth Brooks (as it reappeared in Brooks and Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton, New York, 1951), by A. S. P. Woodhouse ('Notes on Milton's Early Development', University of Toronto Quarterly, X I I I [1943-44]. 66-101). J. H. Hanford's early study set a good many of the questions ('The Youth of Milton', in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne, New York, 1925).

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jects and events, walking solitary and observant through a day's round, results (like Dr. Johnson's phrase quoted above3) from seeing the subject of this poem as 'Milton's mirth', not mirth. 'The cheerful man's day' is just a variant of this narrowing of subject; it is one which produces requests wrongly made of the images, and judgements of them falsely based. For the subject of L'Allegro is every man's Mirth, our Mirth, the very Grace herself with all she can include. Therefore its images are not individualized. Milton does not describe a life, or a day, but through images causes us to recall, imagine, and savor the exact nature of joy when it is entirely free of that fetter, care, which ties down the joys we actually experience in an order of reality that does not present us with essences pure. Therefore Eliot will not find here his 'particular milkmaid', for this one must instead be all milkmaids who ever sang; she must even be whatever fresh singing creature, not a milkmaid, does bring the same joy to the heart of him to whom milkmaids bring it not. T h e Plowman forever whistling, and the Mower who whets his scythe, do not exist thus simplified and quintessential in Nature, yet the fresh delight these catch for us lives in every such one we see—see with the eyes, that is, of one admitted of Mirth's crew. That is precisely the grace she confers. It is the first secret of this imagery that it does not speak only of what it mentions, rather provides a channel along which our perhaps barely similar experiences flow straight and full to a single meaning. A second secret is that they do this in despite of sorrow, like the lark which is just one of all the creatures of earth who in these moments seem to take man into a fellowship of ease and 3 Or like Masson's Horton-bound reading of the images, to which Tillyard objects—coming close to substituting one hemmed in by undergraduate capacities and the interests of Milton's Cambridge. But we are in debt to Tillyard's essay for having made readers again look at the poems as illuminating two 'generals' (howbeit, as I think, wrong ones: the Day and the Night), as well as for having recalled attention to connections with the Prolusions, which assuredly shed light on the imagery.

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innocence. It is a strength of pastoral imagery, especially that bordering upon the 'pathetic fallacy', that it conveys 'that mutual exchange of good will' which has been given as one definition of the late Renaissance allegorized meaning of 'the Graces'. 4 Milton's landscape of lawns and fallows, with its nibbling flocks and bare breasts of mountains, just so sets sorrow at naught. T h e reasons for it are too profound to examine here, but that which lies behind an earthly paradise archetype in terms of mountain-flowers-trees-and-birds, and that which made men connect freedom, the country, and holidays, long before they were penned in cities, operates to make us walk with secure well-being through the world of L'Allegro's images.® W e frame it meanwhile to the shape of our own minds and experiences. Various explanations have been given for this immediacy in the imagery. I do not believe 6 that it results either from simplicity of outline compelling us to fill in our own detail, or from an image-technique which though it chiefly generalizes is capable also of realistic 'individualizing' when the sensibility is awakened (for example, the dripping eaves of II Penseroso). Either these are not the factors which matter, or some other is unnoted. This can be tested by the generalized fourline figure of the Sun as king, or the genre-painting image of the Cock with its accompanying military metaphor, ' . . . with lively din, Scatters the rear of darknes thin' (two of the very few uses of metaphor within single images). W e are as obedient to participate in these more elaborate images as in Till4 See D. G. Gordon, 'Ben Jonson's Haddington Masque: the Story and the Fable', Modern Language Review, X L I I (1947), p. 186. s T h e landscapes and birds and groves of II Penseroso all point a different direction. Mere content (area providing the 'vehicle') determines the nature of no image save public symbols. Innumerable niceties of language, of rhetorical scheme and rhythm, of associated story, require us to see a different 'general' shining through II Penseroso's particulars (examples of these three ways of differentiating so-called nature images are: 'Heav'ns wide pathles way', 70; 'Swinging slow with sullen roar', 76; Philomel, 56-64). « W i t h Tillyard, or with D. C. Allen (see n. 15 below), both of whom cite the eaves image, II Penseroso 129.

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yard's cited case of the cottage with its mere 'two aged Okes'. Golden slumber on the 'heapt Elysian flowres' is as 'real' as the tanned haycock. What is real is the experience of pleasure we have through each of them. This experience is sporadically rather than necessarily connected with sensuous precision. Not one of all these is individualized. They are not 'individuals', unique sights seen by one man's eye, but particulars, irradiated by the 'general' which they signify: a fresh and vivid joy such as we take in living itself—or could, were it but care-less. This seems to me the answer to the much-discussed 'generalness' of the images of these two poems—a bad word for a great virtue. They have it because of the nature of the two subjects, and it is in no way at odds with particularity, only with individual ity. Perhaps it is this virtue which makes natural another effect, quite as unexpected (except in rhetorical theory, which directs us to both) as this conveying of 'reality' without the 'realism' of portraying single objects. We have a sense that Milton has covered his subject. Turning, our 'eye hath caught new pleasures'—and lo when we have walked through two or three meadows with nothing in them except a daisy here and there, and past the towers in the tufted trees and the cottage, we seem to have known all that the phrase can mean, 'the pleasures of the eye'. In the 'Towred Cities' which break the horizon line before us we approach all those we know or imagine, and hear the 'busie humm' of every festivity enjoyed in any of them; the feasts and revels so few and indistinct (to our senses) yet leave no such gaieties unincluded, just as all the innumerable variations which a lifetime can put into the phrase 'the pleasures of books' are taken care of by II Penseroso's little seventeenth-century list. One supposes that this sense of completeness is another result of the functioning of images when their subject is a 'general' or universal, and they are in decorous relation to it.

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T h e unindividualized character of the images is matched in the time-structure of the poems. It seems to be taken for granted by most recent writers on the imagery proper, and is necessary to the main theses of some of these, that Milton's major concern is to portray the full round of a day, the 'pensive man's day' beginning with evening, but both 'days' progressing straightforwardly through time and all but constituting the poems' subjects. This is surely not quite accurate. There are various days in L'Allegro; one of them lasts all through a Sunshine Holyday, when 'sometimes' in one of the upland hamlets there is dancing in the chequer'd shade until the live-long day-light fails and the tales begin—and we do not know for sure how much of this revel we join. 'Oft' the speaker listens to the hunt (he does not see, but thinks of, the way a hill still dew-covered looks hoar). Thereupon we hear of him 'Som time walking' on the green hillocks over against where the sun begins his state. Nor can we certainly tell whether we are to imagine as actually attended the pomps and feasts, at court, for they not only are set in citiei, but culminate in the dubious appositive, 'Such sights as youthful Poets dream On Summer eeves by haunted stream'. Surely, as we should expect from 'admit me . . . to live with thee', we do follow roughly through the most usual unit into which we divide the passage of time as we live it, but not nearly closely enough for this to indicate the significance of each whole poem's images, nor are the first thirty-seven and sixtytwo lines, respectively, thus to be set aside as extraneous to their pattern. Actions take place both in August and June; we watch each: Phillis leaves in haste to bind the sheaves, O r if the earlier season', to lead to the haycock in the meadow. T h e last image—the miraculous imitation of immortal verses so sung that Orpheus who hears them knows why his own music but half regained Eurydice—has no place nor time: 'And ever against eating Cares. Lap me in soft Lydian

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Aires . . .'. Where are we? and whence, and when, does the music sound? This is not the joyful man's day. It is Joy. 'And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crue'. These pleasures are of course not the 'vain deluding joyes' banished at the commencement of II Penseroso. Each poem begins with a banishing of the travesty of what is praised in the other, a common rhetorical device, not unrelated to the method of dialectic which is one ancestor of the Prolusions (of course) and of the whole long tradition of débats, conrictus wedded to eclogue, the pastoral 'choice', and the like small kinds. In each case, what is banished is quite real, not the subject of the other poem seen in a different mood, or moral temper. 'Loathed Melancholy', child of death and night, was (and is) the source of a serious mental condition. Serious but not solemn, both banishing-passages have the wit of contrast (with the companion poem, with the personage praised in the remainder of the exordium) and the wit of bringing out the paradoxical but quite true doubleness of that for which we have but one name. 7 For it is a Goddess, sage and holy, of Saintly visage—divinest Melancholy—who is indeed the true subject of all of II Penseroso, without qualification and without apology. Her nature is very exactly delineated in it, without waste or irrelevance; the leisurely economy of the images is a primary factor in making the poem what Johnson called it, a noble effort of the imagination. Nobility is a just term for its pre-eminent character, if we make room therein for the delicacy and spacious amplitude with which a sensitive mind grasps and presents a great conception, avoiding doctrinaire rigor and awake to the hair-thin variousness with which men conceive ideas. Melancholy is of 7 Obviously this disagrees with Tillyard's suggestion of a burlesque tone, and Brooks's of an ironical contrast, based on the exaggeration of the images. See note 9 for references that give evidence on the two melancholy's familiar to the period, also made clear in J. B. Leishman's valuable study of 'L'Allegro and 11 Penseroso in their Relation to Seventeenth-Century Poetry', Essays and Studies, 1951.

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course not the conception we call by that name. She presents to the imaging faculty, that the understanding and heart cannot but lay hold of it and desire it, a great humanistic ideal. It would be folly and presumption, and certainly eludes my competence, to describe with neat labels a conception which not only this poem but half a dozen moving expositions illuminate at length with ardor and care. It seems to me preferable to speak of places where those who read this essay may pursue such conceptions, usually places where Milton too had almost certainly taken fire from them. In accordance with what one begins to suspect is a universally applicable rule, an informed and deepened understanding of a poem's whole subject provides, more directly than analysis, a changed response to its images. Although Milton's poem stands to suffer more from the trivializing, than the vital mistaking, of its subject, its power and delicately touched seriousness can be so enriched by readings which go beyond what I can include here, that I shall not attempt to be more than a guidepost, nor present fully the philosophical ideas involved. Since the publication of Panofsky and Saxl's Dürers "Melencolia I" in 1923, and certainly since Panofsky's Albrecht Dürer in 1943, it has been conveniently open to us to see much more truly certain meanings Milton's major image indubitably has, though since covered over by time and semantic change. No doubt they have been seen and pointed out in a dozen classrooms, and we have simply not got around to a special study applying new knowledge in a critical analysis of the images of II Penseroso, but at any rate the only printed recognitions of a changed conception are the partial ones I mention below in specific connections. T h e important relevant points in Panofsky's book 8 are: that he brings to the fore the Renaissance popularity of Aristotle's Problemata, XXX, with its treatment of the necessary relation between β See the later study (and edition, Princeton, 1945), I, 157-171, and also Studies in Iconology, esp. pp. 209ft.

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melancholy and genius (philosophical, political, poetic); that he shows how Ficino was pre-eminent in revising (not inventing anew) the traditional conception of melancholy, leading the way in a humanistic glorification of the Melancholy Man as the type par excellence of the contemplative, the intellectual genius intent upon understanding hidden wisdom; and that he re-examines the connection (again traditional, but repointed) of these ideas with Saturn, the Saturnian man and the planet's influence. Knowledge of this particular strain of meaning for Melancholy was not esoteric or farfetched, and Milton could scarcely have been ignorant of writers such as Ficino, Vives, Fracastoro, Melanchthon, Bodin, Agrippa. 9 A student of mediaeval literature saw such connections with Milton's poem before these studies came out, for traditional conceptions have been modified and re-directed rather than quite changed. It still seems necessary to read some or one of the Renaissance treatments if one is to realize the artistic implications (on the level of minutiae in the images) of Milton's use of a figure like 'divinest Melancholy' daughter of Saturn; exact phraseology and total impression are important when the task in hand is to recreate a symbolic figure who has lost her earlier significancy, and worse still taken on an unfitting one with numerous distractions in the form of unscrutinized associations. This can be exemplified here. If one should choose, as accessible and widely popular in the late Renaissance, Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, one has only to read chapter 60 of Book i to learn that Saturn who governs the melancholy man is 'the Author of secret contemplation', who estranged from 'outward businesses' makes the mind ascend higher than these up to the knowledge of s Lawrence Babb in The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951) gives needed information and relates it (though briefly, pp. 178-180) to the two poems. This does not take the place of familiarity with some Renaissance treatment of the matter. G. W. Whiting's Milton's Literary Milieu (Chapel Hill, 1939) has some additional details, as does Leishman (n. 7 above).

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future things; that, as Aristotle says, by Melancholy 'some men are made as it were divine, foretelling things to come, and some men are made Poets'; that 'all men that were excellent in any Science, were for the most part melancholy'. 10 It is not by chance that Milton's poem on Melancholy ends with his hope finally to 'sit and rightly spell Of every Star . . . And every Herb', 'Till old experience do attain T o something like Prophetic strain.' The word 'divinest Melancholy' is quite accurate, so also the rapt soul, the holy passion; her visage is for good reasons 'too bright T o hit the Sense of human sight' (the intuitive mens is governed by melancholic Saturn, the discursive ratio by Jupiter, according to Ficino). 11 She of course wears Wisdom's hue which is that of the black humor, 11 and she is in truth both a daughter born to solitary Saturn by 'bright-hair'd Vesta' (celestial pure fire, not that of Venus and Vulcan) and a patron 'Saint* of those whose desire is to understand the mysteries of things, and who practise poetry as a high form of contemplative knowledge. Milton leaves out of his conception of prophetic poetry in II Penseroso none of the gentler and homelier elements we would wish poetry to retain; we walk also in known and simple places, and it is part of the unusual flexibility of his por10 See Book in. ch. 38 for the gifts of Saturn (sublime contemplation and profound understanding, solidity of judgement, firm speculation) and the related explanation of receiving from the 'chérubins' light of mind, power of wisdom, very high phantasies and figures, by the which we are able to contemplate even the divine things (the cherub Contemplation is chiefest companion of Saturn's daughter in II P. 54). I have quoted J . F[reake]'s translation (London, 1 6 5 1 ) , comparing it with the Latin edition of 1 5 3 3 ; ensuing quotations come from i. ch. 68, 66; ii. ch. 59; ii. ch. 24, 26; iii. ch. 5 5 ; ii. ch. 59. 11 See Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, I, 169. Saturn, lord of those governed by this humor, was Prudentia even to Ridewall (elemented of Memory, Intelligence, and Fore-sight; citation in J . Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques, London, 1940, p. 85, whose last chapter shows the accessibility and widespread ness of the usual manuals). T o Macrobius, Saturn (Plotinus's Cosmic M i n d ) has the power of 'discernment and thought' in his gift (contrasted with J u p i ter's gift of power to act; see Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 209 n.). Readers even of a book like Fraunce's Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1592) are to understand that Saturn affords a reaching wit and profound cogitations.

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trayal that for example the connection with dream's 'lively portrature' leaves room for many visions other than those we now label prophetic. T h e dream which the Goddess Melancholy is asked to bring rather reveals the mysteries of Fancy than the awesome secrets of prophecy; it is to come when the noise of bees and waters entice the dewy-feather'd Sleep, and is to 'Wave at his Wings in Airy stream, Of lively portrature' spread out and laid softly on the eyelids, while music 'Sent by som spirit' breathes above or about. This is like those visions of which Night sings in Jonson's Vision of Delight, calling upon Phantasie to spread her wings and 'Create of ayrie formes a streame' that will 'be a waking dreame; Yet . . . fall like sleep upon their eies, Or musick in their eare'. A l l such things are the province of a goddess of the Imagination, and there is no inconsistency. T h e ways are many by which the man favored with knowledge of hidden worlds is to be brought to it, and images suggest them. Spare Fast comes (much as in Elegy vi. 5gff.) to bring him where he hears what the Muses tell, and he knows the groves whence the nymphs have not yet been frightened by him who uses rather than contemplates nature—the Active Man. Melancholy is a pensive Nun because she is a votary, and her 'looks commercing with the skies' are those of the mind that searches out, rapt in contemplation, the secrets of the spheres; they are such secrets as the 'deep transported mind' soars 'Above the wheeling poles' to see, looking in 'at Heav'ns dore', in the Vacation Exercise passage of similar temper and imagery. T h e moonlit haunts and arched walks of twilight groves are not like the appurtenances of sentimental melancholy in intent, but like those places where the 'quietness and sadness' in which Saturn works open the mind 'opportunely' to celestial influences (Agrippa's phrases). Light as the usual symbol for knowledge (the figure of the Cherub Contemplation is light-filled) is never felt to be in opposition to these and the other darkened images—the dim

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religious light, the fire-lit gloom, the shadows brown, the lamp-lit high lonely tower—because it is not the darkness which is operating symbolically; it is the votary's retired, solitary hiddenness, 'Where no prophaner eye may look', where the mind seeing by a different light from that of Day's garish eye learns the things known to the Cosmic Mind, Melancholy's great father whom Agrippa calls 'a keeper of secret things, and a shewer of them.' T h a t musical harmony and its power should come into the imagery is to be expected because of the closeness of all these matters to the imagery of the cosmic harmonies. Agrippa too treats of music, marking the difference between the Lydian mode (Jupiter's, as are blood and air 12 ) and the 'mixt Lydian' that belongs to Saturn and melancholy. It is quite natural that Milton moves from the imagination's dream to yet deeper insight, from the music to which the dreamer wakes—'Sent by som spirit to mortals good' or by the Genius of the W o o d — o n to the music of that 'Service high' to which the student goes, and whose anthems clear bring, through his ear, all Heaven before his eyes. Religious music and imagery here no more surprise us than Agrippa surprises us with 'the chastity of a mind devoted to God doth make our mind (as Orpheus teacheth Museus in the hymn of all the gods) a perpetual temple of God'. Milton's 'But let my due feet never fail . . is in the temper of much of Agrippa's third book. This passage on the 'studious Cloysters pale', asking the goddess Melancholy never to let him fail to walk in those strait confines and love the vaulted chapel with its full-voiced quire 12 It would not be difficult to find connections between the 'Jov-ial' man and L'Allegro, and this commonplace of the 'Lydian Aires' is one of them. But Milton chose to use, in his Grace, a different symbol, chose even to close off this symbolism by ignoring what he knew from Hesiod and elsewhere— Jupiter as father of Euphrosyne; and it is a first law in the reading of images to seek out the author's chosen symbolism. If we will not plow with his heifer we shall not find out his riddle. Happily a good poet, like Samson, always tells where his strength is hid. These poems do not have for subject respectively the Active and the Contemplative Man, though the contrast cannot but enter; their subjects are those pointed to by the two great central figures.

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and liturgical service, is no wrenched interpolation or sudden Christianizing; neither, however, is it a mystic's experience in any proper sense, unless we would loosely call all contemplative experience 'mystical'. 13 These, like the cell and the tower, are all places where assistance to the knowledge of hidden mysteries can come to the contemplating mind looking upon the unknown and otherwise unknowable, and no cleavage is assumed (in the respect here noted) between natural and divine philosophy. Agrippa thinks of prophecies of Christ's appearance on earth, like Virgil's in the Fourth Eclogue, as coming to a mind governed by Melancholy. The basic element which harmonizes these varied but not inconsistent aspects of the imagery is that of Melancholy as daughter of one whose power was over the mind's perception of hidden cosmic harmonies, Saturn who was great, wise, intelligent, ingenious, 'of great profundity, the author of secret contemplation, impressing, or depressing great thoughts in the hearts of men, . . . a keeper of secret things, and a shewer of them, causing the loss, and finding of the author of life and death.' The modern researches that provide us with a better understanding of such conceptions regnant in Milton's day give us not a new poem but a more unified and sensitive one. Milton's diction and imagery corroborate the connection at every point, and other similar connections have been made. The quotation from Pico with which Woodhouse illuminates the figure of the cherub Contemplation, and his analysis of the range and relevance of II Penseroso's similar readings, fall 13 T h e ecstacies of apprehending relations and harmonies are not those of union with the divine. A t least, missing all evidence of the usual mystical imagery (and not forgetting Milton's lines on the power of sacred music to dissolve with sweetness and bring visions of heaven) I should prefer to read in the whole last section something resembling Agrippa's '. . . contemplation, the free perspicacity of the minde, suspended with admiration upon the beholding of wisdom' (iii. ch. 46). Milton's symbolizing of the honor to be paid and the allegiance vowed to the intellectual and contemplative pursuit of Wisdom (with all that includes) is clear; and contemplation leads to, not is, the mystical union.

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directly into place; we might add Dionysius on the cherubim, that glowing order in the angelic hierarchy who reflect the very light of God's own wisdom and can transmit it to his instruments below. 14 D. C. Allen is the first critic to comment fully on the images clustered around 'thrice great Hermes'15 ; they are entirely consonant with the materials and conceptions I have just pointed to, and I have of course intended Agrippa as convenient example rather than as special source. Milton's references to Musaeus and Orpheus, to Hermes, and thence of course to Plato, to studies touching the afterexistence of 'The immortal mind' and the planet-consenting power of the elemental Daemons, make the frame of reference within which he is speaking quite clear; his imagery evokes the major figures in that group of prisci theologi who were thought to have foreshadowed Christian revelation. T o name those who had endeavored to show this harmony (indeed even historical continuity) of thought would be to make a roster of famous Christian writers; it would include such celebrated and devout Christian apologists, known to all educated men, that Milton's similar harmonizing of pagan study with Christian worship, of Platonist with hermit, must be seen as but one more harmony among many. 16 W e are left with no supersubtle inconsistencies to explain away—the ι* See also n. 10. Woodhouse's study is cited in n. 2, and the essay on the Nativity Hymn in the present volume gives references to Pseudo-Dionysius. 1 5 See ch.i of The Harmonious Vision (Baltimore, 1954), esp. the quotations from the Poimandres, that much edited, annotated, and translated text; comments in E. C. Baldwin, Modern I.anguage Notes, X X X I I I (1918), 184— 185, are briefer; see further Hermetica, ed. Walter Scott, Oxford, 1924, vols. I, IV (Allen's references are to libelh¿s). A fairly good idea of the studies II Penseroso would carry on is gained from Jonson's satire upon a 'melancholic student' in The Fortunate Isles (printed 1624/5)—his natural affinities are with Hermes, Porphyry, Proclus, Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes. ir> D. P. Walker cites editions, translations, commentaries, Italian Renaissance scholars, and surveys the French writers (Mornay, the Pléiade, Lefevre) in ' T h e Prisca Theologia in France', Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, X V I I (1954), 204-259. See pp. 208-210 on the Pimandre, which a French bishop could praise as more pious than David, Hermes being thought either to precede or to derive his wisdom from Moses,

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complexities are instead quite intended and real—and with no oddities to excuse. The poem ends firmly, with a climactic last representative of those who taste Melancholy's pleasures in the pursuit of wisdom; for certainly the hermit who spells out the secrets of the physical universe in his solitary cell is no concession to religiosity but the very type of the withdrawn seer who experiences the last pleasure: to know things in their causes and see into the hidden harmonies of the cosmos. The 'Hairy Gown' is that of the Contemplative who is one of Saturn's children, in the pictures that illustrate that planet's influence. If Milton's hermit in his mossy cell had a caption it would be neither 'romantic Middle Ages' nor 'religious touch', but Platonic Ascent; we should read beside the herbs sprouting in the moss 'philosophia naturalis', on the cell's threshold 'philosophia divina' and upon its lintel vita contemplativa,17 It makes a true difficulty for us that such images no longer surround us. Readiness and pleasure in apprehending Milton's figure of Melancholy—both with ease and excitement, that is—come not from some point to be learned at second hand but from saturation in the phrasings and impressions of whole other treatments of the same fundamental ideal. The reason for this is a point about imagery, in both poems. The major figure in each poem is, in each, the one true use of symbol. The structural use of symbols in a poem is not a matter of the frequent appearance in varying connections of some great element—Light or Darkness or garden or underground place—in which we are accustomed to see symbolic meanings; these appearances result from, not cause, the symbolic unity of the work. We come out with a structure of i? See Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 78 and Fig. 48, and notes, also p. 138. We should remember that the terrifying aspects of Saturn's influence are not to be thought of as entirely opposed to the meanings I have been indicating, but that the connection of melancholy with genius was part of a total conception as complicated when seen by earlier ages as by ourselves. There is a special tie to natural philosophy in 11 Penseroso 173 (experientia: knowledge gained by experiment, trial).

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meanings, not a p a t t e r n of mentionings. Symbolism is always implicit, never explicit, for a poet like other h u m a n beings uses a symbol because there is no other way ('no earthly way', as we p u t it) to say what he means and all he means. N o r can we do better. Yet there is always something wrapped u p — t h e unstatable—in that foldedness; within us, w h e n we have taken it folds a n d all, it unfolds where not words b u t significances are the agents. It is the latter which make a pattern. Language being in a sense symbolic in its very n a t u r e , and man's m i n d a symbolizing instrument, there are of course moments w h e n darkness, a n d sunlight, a n d towers, a n d water, convey needed aspects of m e a n i n g f r o m one m a n t o another, by a c o m m o n consent built u p o n centuries of shared meanings. B u t if a great poet—or even a young b u t already competent poet—is truly using elements like these for their value as symbols in his poem, time and again, this way a n d that, t h e n something m u c h m o r e surely directed can be clearly seen to be taking place. T h e inescapable fact a b o u t symbols is that they are used to symbolize something, a n d verbal or object recurrence is of no symbolic i m p o r t unless a connection is perceived with that to which we inescapably attend when symbols are used, the p a t t e r n of the-something-symbolized. If a poet has such a shape or form, a pattern of the unseizable, to present, his symbols will fix o u r eyes u p o n it, a n d t h r o u g h them we step f r o m u n d e r s t a n d i n g to understanding at his bidding, c o n t i n u i n g in and ending with the same great basic significance that gave us o u r first hint a n d start. A n e m i n e n t singleness of m e a n i n g characterizes symbols, and they e n d as they began, immeasurably deepened b u t never split u p i n t o fussy or novel equations; this we can test by t h i n k i n g of any of Milton's (or another's) great uses of Light: Wisdom or Fire:Love, and m a n y to which we can p u t n o fitting abstraction (Garden, Shepherd) b u t which sit in o u r minds, great unverbalizable unities. For the two conceptions to which he has given a shape

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Milton found the names Mirth and Melancholy, inherited names for inherited figures. Just these shapes we shall find nowhere but in these poems, and uses of light and the things of day do not symbolically reveal the form of one conception, shadows and night the other. The two personages are truly figurative in their action, the sole important figures of any scope, and each is the 'dominant symbol' of her poem—not light nor darkness nor towers.18 They do not themselves act out their natures, and make no allegory (lack the 'continued' character of allegorical metaphors). After the habit of goddesses (or planets, or 'generals'), they govern—and their servants display the nature of that rule and its rewards, 19 themselves constituting a praise of her they serve. Each is 'in' every action or place, sight or sound, in her poem (especially in the landscapes; often these have only the meaning of expressing— sometimes quite temporarily—the universal which the goddesses symbolize)·, and Mirth's man gradually personifies the Personification, shadows forth the Grace Euphrosyne, not the other way around. This is the way metaphor acts; particulars declare significances. It is not because we look in these poems at symbols of whose force we remain quite ignorant without aid, that reading elsewhere about them makes the poems show as more exquisitely just—although there is a little of this in the case of Melancholy and the allegorized meaning of the Graces. It is rather because figurative writing is a hundred is T h e two discussions of symbolism in L'Allegro and II Penseroso here referred to are those of Cleanth Brooks and D. C. Allen (cited in n. 2, n. 15). Brooks's observation of recurrences and his precision in reading are often very revealing, in this influential essay as in all his criticism. I do not think his chief interpretation can stand up, largely for the reason given in the paragraphs discussing pattern and symbols, and also because some recurrences seem to depend on noting words while ignoring clearly intended major meanings. Some of Milton's towers have symbolic force; so do some uses of light. Few poems lack such uses of language, and they do not constitute 'a basic symbolism.' 19 Leishman calls this 'personification giving place to exemplification', but this view cuts the tie between the universal and all the particulars in which it inheres.

Structural Figures of L'ALLEGRO

and IL PENSEROSO

g5

times more pleasurable when we recognize every nuance o£ significance. Had we been born earlier we should have had one more help to the kind of pleasure some readers take in imagery: its perfect decorum, showing that astonishing artistry in the maker which awakens gratitude, a form of literary criticism. It is a help that the author himself had in creating the decorum. I refer to the fact that a seventeenth-century reader recognized immediately the rhetorical structure of these two poems. By virtue of that recognition he also apprehended immediately the fitness which is the great aesthetic attribute their images exhibit; it is what has made, as Leishman says, almost every phrase memorable. Each poem is 'a praise', the form of 'demonstrative oration' called encomium, taught to every grammar-school boy according to the rules in such a handbook as Aphthonius, the one Milton probably studied. T h e images flow directly out of this rhetorical structure, with its usual 'places', of exordium, of praise by 'what kind he came o f — w h a t nation, ancestors, parents—praise by his 'acts', his gifts of mind, of countenance or quality, friends, actions.20 It would not surprise one who had written dozens of these praises of this or that 'general', or virtue, or personage, to find certain parallels between Milton's two poems; I too would willingly miss this surprise for the informed amazement of recognizing the imaginativeness and disciplined command with which imagery builds the known but natural form. T h i s structure had a powerful influence upon the lyric, with its related aim of celebrating and praising. T h e reader I use here F. Johnson's reprint of Rainolde's Foundation of Rhetoric, 156) (New York, 1945; see f. 40). B u t see ch. 8 of John Milton at St. Paul's School (New York, 1948) by D. L. Clark; he of course notes the relation I make. T h e r e is some treatment of the connections of these matters with the character of 'amplifying' images especially, and with Renaissance lyric theory, in the present writer's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), section 1 of ch. v.

Images and Themes in Five Poems

who knew the structure (that is, every educated reader of its time) would not turn the great subject of II Penseroso into 'the pensive man's day', would take in the unity of each poem and something of its relation to the other with a single flash of recognition, and would understand and enjoy the very virtue of the images which has been so much rubbed and questioned—for long tracts of each poem consist of the rhetorical 'circumstances' which can justly and delicately limn out the unseizable through the seizable. Where it is suitable, this can produce images of peculiar power to catch the form of what men live for in the fleeting shapes of how they live; it is necessary to be critically alert to the suitability. There are good literary reasons for the omission of minor metaphors from these poems. Our sense that certain works will permanently charm is almost always connected with some structural excellence. T h e shapely perfection of L'A liegrò and II Penseroso depends most upon a central figurative conception at the heart of each, and these large formative images have been clarified to us as modern scholarship has cleared away obstructions present since the early 1700's. I have not meant by this emphasis upon modern researches and upon the importance of genre and structure to set aside the work from Warton onward which has annotated the images with sources and parallels. Any student of imagery who despises these cuts himself off from his main necessity: the understanding of the words of the text, made precise only thus through innumerable experiences with contexts. T h i s understanding is not always easy, given a lapse of some hundreds of years and considering certain other differences which separate a Milton from any one of us who look at him. I have ignored some criticism, chiefly modern, of thé images of L'Allegro and II Penseroso, which seemed rather dedicated to the critical principle that madness in great ones must not unwatched go. No willing student of these poems has been able to resist them.

THE HYMN On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Milton indicates the theme of this poem in the last four lines of stanza i of the Proem which he prefixed to the Hymn itself. At the heart of the three or four great figures which compose it (in the artist's strict sense of that word) there lies the concept which Milton phrases in his first stanza: 'That he . . . should . . . with his Father work us a perpetual peace'. Unlike many with which it is persistently compared, this poem's subject is the Incarnation not the Nativity; that is to say, Christ's Nativity is presented as event only insofar as that enters into its presentation as mystery. This fact controls the imagery. Milton's direction of this relationship between theme and imagery does not have that near perfection he was later to demand of himself and which we have come to expect in his poetry. Nevertheless, the nature and the use of the great basic figures, and hence the pattern or architecture of a poem constructed as this one happens to be, stem from this fact about its raison d'être. We find this out slowly; the figures are our way of realizing (perhaps they were Milton's) that the poem exists to celebrate a mystery rather than to describe and comment upon an event. Such operations 37

28

Images and Themes in Five Poems

of the great principle of decorum, never completely conscious in the work of a great artist, are less calculated than natural and necessary; conscious apprehension of them on our part is nonetheless a source of intense aesthetic pleasure, and often a sure guide to meaning. Encouraged to do so by Milton's own unifying use of great ancient images toward one thematic end, we could make shift to indicate the theme of this nativity hymn in two symbolic words: our peace. Only, however, if they are understood to carry all those wide and deep meanings he has gathered in, touching the redemption of all nature from guilty error, reconciliation and restored participation in the divine harmony, and final union with the divine light; traditional in poetry and liturgy of the season, these were to Milton most familiarly accepted and most natural in the form given them in the New Testament epistles. When he chose to make 'He is our peace' the burden of his Christmas poem, he at the same moment chose to admit as integral parts of its primary poetic subject, precluding a simple and uniform tone, such matters as these: 'our bliss Full and perfet' when the usurping darkness will, at last, be put to rout by the light which now but begins a reign among men; the Second Coming and Last Judgement; the 'bitter cross' by which the still smiling Child will restore us with Himself to that glory which He has but this moment laid aside as He 'chose with us a darksom House of Mortal Clay'; the joyful coming of perfect Truth, Justice and Mercy to earth, with sureness therefore due to return triumphantly 'down . . . ίο men' as the ancient breach is healed; and the process of that healing, slow but now sure, which this Christmas day inaugurates—the whole long slow binding, in the centuries to come, of 'Th'old Dragon' whose sway over human allegiances and human minds had been an 'usurped sway', as through the long history of false Incarnations the satanic power of the darkness had put on the kingly power of the Light. These are the necessary concerns of a

THE HYMN

on the Morning of Christ's Nativity

gg

poem which celebrates the meaning of the Incarnation not only in history but after history is over, an event both in and not within created nature, a peace both in and not within created time. Because Milton has chosen to convey conceptions beyond the reach of any but symbolic language, several helps to the understanding of that kind of language are of more than usual assistance. It is more than usually necessary, if we wish to take in the full force of his figures, to know what weight they carried in the places where he was most familiar with them and be made alert to similar possibilities in the Hymn. It is also more than usually profitable to be so saturated in analogous uses of similar figurative language in contemporaries and forebears that the functional rather than decorative elaboration of the imagery is apparent without strain. In writing this poem Milton embarks upon the broad current of writings that might be expected of a late Renaissance author, especially in continental Europe; Mantuan centered a long poem about the Nativity of Christ in his Parthenice Mariana, as did Sannazaro in his De partu Virginis. Milton's poem fits into a European tradition in conception of subject, in height of style, in quality of adornment (especially as this touches the admixture of classical and Christian connotations). A treatment of imagery may not interrupt analysis with sources and parallels, but it would be irresponsible not to remind ourselves that predecessors respected by Milton followed the lead of yet earlier predecessors in using the imagery of the marvelous Augustan peace, and Nature's silent worship, of the Golden Age, and the doomed Serpent, and the defeat of the usurping false gods. In any case these special parallels with men of similar purpose and a similar audience are but a drop in a great river. For in addition, Milton's structural use of some of the most ancient of symbols, supremely important in Christian religious writing but neither original with it nor confined to it—notably Light and Har-

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

mony—means that both information and sophistication are asked of us in the plain task of understanding. And as a long history of use has pre-determined certain meanings of the language and the images Milton uses 1 , so also long history is mainly responsible for the fact that the poems does not tell the story of the first Christmas night. Milton made outside the Hymn one other overt statement of its theme—in Elegy vi, and one should recall that his descriptions of the poet's life and of Tiresias, Orpheus, Homer, have just culminated in 'the bard is sacred to the gods and is their priest'. I am singing the heaven-descended.

King,

the bringer

of

peace,

and the blessed times promised in the sacred books—the infant cries of our God and his stabling under a mean roof who, with his Father, governs the realms above. I am singing the starry sky and the hosts that sang high in air, and the gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines. (Elegy vi. 81-86; to Diodati, December 1629)

Milton's deliberate choice—traditional, but far from conventional or taken for granted—to take Christ's working of our perpetual peace as his poem's center makes New Testament expressions of this mystery a better preparation for a full reading of his images than are the Gospel narratives of the Nativity. It is our perception of the unity of the poem which is affected by a full verbal recall of such presentations —impossible to cite, but typified by the discussion in Hebrews of the high-priest Melchisedec, King of Peace, as type of Christ, or Romans ν or i, or 2 Cor. iv, v, or Eph. ii, or iii, 1 T o w a r d all these ends our most important help is f u l l annotation, sixty pages of which were provided long ago by A. S. Cook, 'Notes on Milton's Nativity Ode', in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, X V (1909), 307-368. Because such comprehensive figures have a necessary relation to the whole stream of a man's thought as that develops, studies of the latter, by H a n f o r d , and especially by Woodhouse (cited in n. 2 of the preceding essay on L'Allegro) illuminate the imagery more than any direct consideration we have, except one: A r t h u r Barker, ' T h e Pattern of Milton's Nativity Ode', University of Toronto Quarterly, X (1941), 1 6 7 - 1 8 1 .

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on the Morning of Christ's Nativity

41

or v: 'at that time ye were without Christ . . . and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope . . . B u t now, in Christ Jesus, ye w h o sometime were far off are made nigh . . . For he is our peace . . .' (ii. 12); 'For ye were sometime darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light' (v. 8); or 1 Thess. v, or 1 John i, ii, v, or 1 Peter ii, or Col. i. 19: 'For it pleased the Father . . . , having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself . . . things in earth, or things in heaven. A n d you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your m i n d . . . yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh . . . '. It will become apparent that the thematic force of Milton's symbolic figures can be apprehended with more sureness and power when we come to them with a f u l l recall of the range, depth and exact phrasing of Scriptural and wholly traditional understandings of what was the promise of the Nativity. T o an age given to historical classifying, like our own, one other advantage lies in such a deliberate readiness to accompany M i l t o n into the traditional and orthodox Christian profundities of his theme. T h i s is, that we become able to take as naturally as he does the use of pagan mythological figures and diction, even classical symbolic images like the G o l d e n A g e and the harmony of the spheres, to the end of securing conceptual justness and structural control of his theme, though that is a Christian mystery. T h e poem is characterized by the same unself-consciousness in this respect as is shown in the Elegy, when the description quoted above of this 'gift for the birthday of Christ' is advanced as an example of the way a poet's 'hidden heart and his lips alike breathe out Jove' (spirat Iovem, 78). T h e r e is n o conflict between these realms of reference, whether or not they seem to us 'two', and this is because the power of Milton's basic theme of the redemptive promise of the Incarnation had centuries before h i m Christianized these and other classical images;

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

early and late mediaeval readers of Latin religious literature apparently accepted them without surprise. T h e poem's unity in this respect is mediaeval, whatever else about it may be seen as baroque 2 , and Milton—like a Prudentius, or a Sedulius, or an Alanus, or a Mantuan—is to use imagery in this way quite through his greatest poem, without a sense of conflicts to be reconciled. Such conflicts as the connotations of images can convey unaided melt away for modern readers also when their realization and their acceptance of the power of the symbolic meanings approaches that of readers to whom this stylistic habit was familiar. One stylistic choice Milton did consciously make when he chose to write a Hymn. It is not a Christmas carol, not a reflective poem, not a revealing of an individual's feeling, nor a lyric poem in any of our usual senses, but only in a far older sense. I doubt whether it would have been thought of as a pastoral by a seventeenth-century reader; though shepherds must appear in it, the basic metaphors of pastoral are absent, and there is no attempt at the base or middle style. It rather celebrates than commemorates, it does not narrate, or describe. Elegies commemorate, epics narrate and describe, and their images help them to it; the images of the Nativity poem function thus only as part of a further function. A hymn is not only a 'praise', but usually a liturgical act of praise, by definition usually written as Sidney says 'to imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God'. Figurative language is a chief aid to so flatly unachievable a task, as Milton later has Raphael state in Paradise Lost v. 571, and his consciousness of this task laid upon his images will become immediately evident when we scrutinize the figures used in his invocation. This own thrice-used word for his poem is 'gift' ('present', 2 Almost a cliché when the Hymn's imagery is spoken of, although it is sometimes now termed Mannerist instead. Compare the discussion in M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (New Haven, 1950), p. 174; her quoting of Fletcher is pertinent, but as will be seen we must be aware of a far longer history for all Milton's figures and habits.

THE

HYMN

on the Morning of Christ's Nativity

4g

'dona'). It is an offering, and he comments on its nature and end w h e n he compares it to those 'odours sweet' also to be laid lowly at the Child's feet at the Adoration, by the Magi, the 'Star-led Wisards'. T h e gift is not given by him but through him. H e was star-led too; he says in the Elegy that the first light of the rising sun of Christmas m o r n i n g brought these gifts, 'to me'; and the poem preserves, through all the language used in its figure of the Heavenly Muse, the meaning of a gift given back to its source, an offering. Milton's conception of the heavenly inspiration of sacred poetry is not simple (even at twenty-one), and it is not by chance that he says to the Heavenly Muse, Ό run' before those other Wise Ones with 'thy h u m b l e ode', 'Have thou the honour first, thy L o r d to greet', 'joyn thy voice'. T h i s is not a quibble. H e does not ask himself whether he has n o 'Present', n o 'verse . . . or solemn strein' to welcome the Infant G o d . As many other Renaissance poets had done, M i l t o n used classical figures for the life that was in them, and this of the muse is no tag of adornment but a necessary help to say that he could of himself have no offering to bring. M i l t o n commonly uses inherited figures when he wishes to make sure of some refinement within a conception, and his Heavenly Muse is already that Renaissance and Neo-Platonic Urania 3 who, as Wisdom, was present to k n o w the mysteries of the Creation when once before the W o r d came down. She has not yet as in Paradise Lost become one with the H o l y Spirit, w h o as God's Love or God's W i s d o m attends u p o n the bringing of poetry like all else from formlessness into formal being. B u t the whole conception is effortlessly Christianized with the reference from the chief prophet of the Incarnation, Isaiah: 3 For instance see the Commentary on Urania in Spenser's Teares of the Muses and Sapience in the Hymne to Heavenly Deautie, in the Variorum edition of Spenser. Earlier history of this figure, to which Milton was no stranger, is relevant to the ambiguity of poet's song: Muse's song; see ch. 13, ' T h e Muses', in Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by W . Trask (New York, 1953).

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Images and T h e m e s in Five Poems

And joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire, From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow'd fire. In Isa. vi. 5 'one of the seraphims . . . having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar', purifies Isaiah's lips to deliver his prophetic message, when he has in terror seen 'the King, the Lord of hosts'. T h e seraphs or ardors are the first and 'fiery' order of the angels whose faculty it is to abolish all obscuring darkness, burning flames who circle perpetually around the secrets of the divine, given power (closest as they are to the primordial Light of God Himself) to animate and purify lesser orders, according to their capacity, with the like flame. Pseudo-Dionysius, who so describes the seraphim, gives a whole chapter of the Heavenly Hierarchy4 to this verse in Isaiah. With mingled images of light and music he explains how the seer is purified to receive, and to transmit, a reflection of the light which the angels themselves reflect from the Divine Source of Light, for the prophet of the divine mysteries is initiated—by receiving knowledge thus—into the song of eternal praise which fills Heaven. Such are the meanings, familiar to Milton from many sources, of 'joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire'; the overpersonal readings which import self-consciousness and even youthful arrogance into these stanzas are quickly corrected by some attention to the history of these inter-acting figures. T h e connections and symbolic identifications which enable the few large figures to give so beautiful a unity to the poem begin early in its course. As the musical figure reveals more * Chapter 13; see M. de Gandillac, Oeuvres complètes de Pseudo-Denys (Paris, 1943), also chapter 7, on the agencies through whom the hymns sung by the angels are carried even to the inhabitants of earth—impressive chapters to one embarked on the task of the Hymn, especially one with Milton's interests at this date. It would be odd if Milton did not already know Dionysius. Compare also Reason of Church Government, book ii, Preface: 'that eternali Spirit w h o can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow'd fire of his A l t a r to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases.'

THE HYMN on the Morning of Christ's Nativity

and more of the ideas it carries, we are to learn fully what it means that the music from heaven has sounded only twice upon the created earth, at the Creation and now at the Incarnation, and why Nature, hearing, 'knew such harmony alone Could hold all Heav'n and Earth in happier union' (st. χ). But that Peace cannot come yet, and Milton will show why, when he presently allows the two great figures of heavenly Light and heavenly Harmony to become each in its turn the statement of his vast single theme: God's reconciling of all things in earth and heaven to Himself, principle of Light and principle of Concord. Milton's proem, then, indicates his theme (the poem as a whole is the sole statement of it), gives us to understand what is the raison d'être and the nature of the Hymn to follow, and puts the poet in right relation to his celestial subject. It does these things largely through the agency of images, and two others achieved through the same agency should be noted. First and simplest, it halts time—'This is the . . . morn'— just before dawn on the first Christmas morning, and yet by phrasings as of a liturgical and public celebration it leaves the way open for this morning to be both the first Christmas and all others, so that in the poem we move with ease from one kind of time to the other, from history (reading literaliter) to poetry, and even at the close to ritual, whose dramas are ceaselessly enacted. This greatly assists the normal power which metaphors have of timeless applicability, even for Milton's most historical figures like the roll of silenced false gods. The actual stopping of Time, which he will presently use to add a philosophical force to his figure of Natura creata facing her Creator, is to occur at the moment just before the sun (or the Sun) arises, when 'all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright'. The stars in squadrons both are and are not the heavenly host of quiring angels, and here Milton adopts an ancient habit that will affect various images I cannot mention and that comes to seem almost 'Miltonic'; like

46

Images and Themes in Five Poems

the nouns in these three or four lines, a great number of his narrative or pictorial words bear a half-hidden metaphorical sense, one reason for the excitement of his diction. Secondly, Milton uses his proem, as he is later to use early portions of all poems, to get us ready to understand certain symbols only later seen as basic to the argument of the piece, even as providing it. We have encountered some of these; some grow from others (as the Harmony and the natura figures grow respectively from those of Peace and Light), and it is also true that such preparation, detected when we look back, was not necessarily either deliberate on Milton's part or consciously discerned by us. Sometimes he states as concept that which he will figure forth with infinitely more complexity, as in the case of Peace—stated, introduced on the literal historical level with the Augustan seven-year peace, building up in front of our eyes from the lowest figurative level (personification) into a thematic symbol which uses all the others or embraces them (others are: the natural, and cosmic, and angelic Harmony; the Golden Age; the binding of 'Th'old Dragon'; the re-union of all things with the Light in the final perfection). The symbol of Light is presented with great beauty and perfect conceptual rigor. It will not do to forget for one single stanza that great opposition above which the Incarnation wrote its flaming promise: T o all this is set a certain end. Light as Power, as Love, as Wisdom, is drawn into stanza by luminous stanza: the Light of heaven with its starry and angelic inhabitants, of the entering of the 'Prince of Light' (v) into human affairs, the Light of 'a greater Sun' (vii) who is also that 'mighty Pan . . . kindly come' to his shepherd flock (viii), Light of the ordering Word at the Creation (xii), of the 'peering day' which finally will look into all the places where Hell was (xiv), Light of revealed Truth and perfect Justice at last united with perfect Mercy on the day when Heaven's palace gates 'as at some Festivall, Will open wide'

THE

HYMN

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(xv), the 'rayes of Bethlehem' before which all dark idolatrous error flees denuded of virtue (xix-xxv), the C o u r t of everlasting L i g h t established in the stable. W h a t this L i g h t has chosen to transform is set over against it: the darkness of our mortal clay and of the imperfect natural world, its deformities but momentarily covered and its bloody chariots of war b u t momentarily unstained (ii-iv), its very sun an 'inferiour flame' (vii), the darkness of discord, of 'leprous sin' and the 'dolorous mansions' of H e l l (xiv), of the bitter and necessary Cross (xvi) and of the 'smouldring clouds' of the Last D o o m (xvii), of the dim, the pale, the twilight, the midnight errors, masking as true religions, which have been the most ironically successful of the whole long list of h u m a n mistakings of the Darkness for the Light. A s in the rest of the poem, so when Milton first sets forth this symbol, it is not the war between these two principles to which w e must attend, but the seed of a peace between them in that the Light, being Love, took on the Darkness to b r i n g it back at last to His own nature: That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, . . . He laid aside; and here with us to be, Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day, And chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay. T h e large image of 'Nature' which occupies most of the first seven stanzas of ' T h e H y m n ' does not at first function in a way which brings out its full symbolic possibilities. It culminates in stanzas x-xiv, when it makes possible Milton's distinguishing between heavenly and natural-but-unearthly music, by means of the figure of the harmony of the spheres, and makes possible the linking of the sinless Garden with the final bliss after the Second C o m i n g of T r u t h and Justice, by means of the Golden A g e figure (and return of Astraea into the world of men). It will there broaden and extend into allegory, a vast continued figure, but here at the beginning it

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

remains so close to a simple form of personification that we find difficulty in taking in (that is, taking seriously) its metaphorical meanings. Y e t neither does Milton make much attempt to paint the Nativity scene. 'It was the W i n t e r w i l d e ' — a cold and windy line, but still clearly a part of the unpictorial conceit which follows: Nature in awe to him Had doff't her gawdy trim, With her great Master so to sympathize: It was no season then for her T o wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour. T h e vast natural universe, in awe and in accord with, has like Christ p u t off her p o m p and laid aside her power. Similarly in awe, the Sun himself 'with-held his wonted speed', and the ever-turning stars 'Stand fixt', as the momentary f u l l stop in T i m e itself is caught in stanzas vi and vii. T h i s pathos in Nature is to Milton no "fallacy'; such figures are universally used by his predecessors and contemporaries because they believed what the figures mean. M a n is given his place within, not outside, this vast framework of Natura creata, acknowledging her Creator's magnificence and power of which her o w n is but a shadow; in awe the Kings sat still, and in accord laid aside their imperfect glory for peace, just as winds, and waters, and m i l d Ocean forgot to rave when the Prince of light began 'His raign of peace upon the earth'. B u t at first sight it appears as if M i l t o n had wantonly trivialized the role of the Sun, that great source of creative energy, here given no more dignity than a 'lusty Paramour'. For the Sun had been type of Christ Himself through half a dozen mediaeval centuries and more. A s Cook remarks, the winter solstice is the birthday of the Sun, and lengthening days now begin to bring back abundance and the promise of an endlessly recurrent defeat of death, with the return of the life-giver, the Sol Invictus of Mithraic cults and of late alle-

THE

HYMN

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gorizings of the classical gods. Milton was familiar enough with such ideas, and with the Macrobian symbolic parallelings, and it was open to him to choose to allegorize the Sun as Christ-the-Light-and-source-of-life-and-love; many Christian poets had done so before him, notably Prudentius (in his Nativity Hymn) 5 and the writers of other Latin hymns which also became familiar anthology pieces and translation exercises. He did not choose to do this. A t first his reason appears to be his preference for rather pretty uses of the familiar magnifying figure, the little hyperbolical fiction used to 'amplify' a praise, and universally popular in Elizabethan poetry. Modest Nature seems to ask coyly through a whole stanza (ii) for a snowfall, a 'Saintly Veil of Maiden white' to fit her out with innocence for the occasion; the sun 'hid his head for shame', taken aback when he saw 'a greater Sun appear' (vii), and so on. But we have omitted an emphasis which Milton has made stronger than Nature's other reasons (in awe and in accord) for laying her fruitful glories by. When Peace is sent down, she is sent in pitying love for Nature 'confounded' that her Maker's eyes should look so near upon her deformities: 'But he her fears to cease, Sent down the meek-ey'd Peace'. What are the fears that are to be thus allayed? when a covering of chaste blamelessness is asked for, but Peace is sent, His harbingerf and that answer to Nature's fear an historical peace, when among men 'No War, or Battels sound' was heard, and when kings, not floods and earthquakes, gave over their power in presence of 'their sovran Lord'? Has such a form of reassurance anything to do with Nature's feeling it 'no s Cathemerinon xi; he was a set author in Milton's school. See Cook (cited in note 1) for citations and discussions of the sun-Sun parallel; his list could be redoubled from Christian Latin literature, published and much read in the Renaissance. T h e great traditional image was to become established in English religious poetry (like Donne's, Herbert's, Fletcher's; and see below n.i6). T h e turn Milton gives to the figure (a greater Sun—source of more real light and a different abundance) is not unusual.

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season then' to woo her paramour the sun, rather a time to woo only the gentle air to cover 'her naked shame, Pollute with sinful blame'? A n d if there is a connection, wherein lay her guilt? In all that wherein she is creature, mere nature. W h e t h e r or not nature rightly and fully understands her o w n flaw is not indicated, save merely that far more is sent than is asked for. M i l t o n has chosen to use the ancient figure of the fertilizing intercourse between earth and sky, parents of all things in the phenomenal universe, and it is certainly striking enough that he thus makes Nature, the great universal fabric of all created things, draw back from her universally natural impulse as the mother of forms to welcome impregnation, give b i r t h — a n d ask only that her de-formities be hid. T h i s is not the most famous guilt that was felt in terms of 'naked' shame, and not the first meeting with the Deity which 'confounded' creatures of the natural world w h o no longer understood either innocence or peace; those other two were the ones w h o first let in the fatal flaw which turned God-given creative love into the travesty of love—wantonness; and turned (this is precisely the same thing) concord into war. W h e n the very principle of creative love and power comes down, Nature abashed knows the insufficiency of her gaudy trim; creative she is, but marked with the blemishes that cling to all less than divine creation: lusts, coquetry, disproportion, wars, pride, impermanence. T h i s is why the actual human peace of stanzas iii-iv covers her deformity, gives her fears surcease. Some ineptitude there may be in Milton's first stanzas, but he needed the 'concept' of his 'conceit'—Nature's shamefastness before 'her Makers eyes', and there is no lack of architectonic command as he proceeds. T h i s first figure is developed in a way that prepares us for the dark power and discordancy of his last long figurative display of the unreconcilable evil against which Peace itself brought a sword. O n l y

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the Dragon usurps; only he must be bound because he will be nothing other than a god. Satan's proud usurpation is (already) unnatural; but Nature is redeemable, and though her music of the spheres can never alone bring back the Golden Age, it can consort with 'th' Angelike symphony'. So too the natural sun knows 'shame', thinking that 'his inferiour flame, T h e new enlightn'd world no more should need' (vii). T h e descending Light and Love of which he is mere copy is 'greater' not as a brighter rival, but 'greater . . . T h e n his . . . burning Axletree could bear'—he thinks it the end of the mere natural order. So it in truth was, of the mere natural order, or at least this is what Milton says in the rest of his poem. T h i s the false gods see too, as Lactantius and Augustine and the others said they did. T h e y know that the new enlightened world of man's mind will cease to see in them one special thing—and it is not their beauty (some retain it), not their realness—it is deity. T h e y see that what is wrong with them must now come to light: that they are creatures, and born of a Creature, of the first one who would not accept that station and who led all mankind to ape him in it. T h e y withdraw; some in mourning, some even piteous, some sullen, some rebellious like their Sire, all in unwillingness or fear. It is not the fear that Nature showed. For these do not worship. T h e y recognize, but they do not acknowledge. A l l Nature does. Milton makes much of the fact that 'nature' does not understand the Incarnation. W e are shown it by one figure after another—stars, sun, shepherds, natura in x; they would understand 'end' (three of them say so), they do not understand 'transformation'. This is the path by which we are led to the must not yet be so of stanza xvi (no rhetorical trick), and this differentiation explains what might seem caprice in xiv, when Milton appears to ask the spheres to ring out for fear we will listen too hard to the angels and have our sins untimely melted off. T h o u g h the un-mortal music has come

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down, the divine love entered the natural order, it is not the end of that order. T h e very stars 'with deep amaze' think it may be, and they, whose moving 'gaze' has for ages spelled out natural law for men, stand 'Bending one way' those flowing streams of precious influence, 'And will not take their flight'; they listen to no voice of delegated authority from the light-bearer in whose orderly train they had wheeled since the Fourth Day, but simply stand, wait upon 'their Lord himself—they 'in their glimmering Orbs did glow Untili' He should bid them go (vi). This acknowledgement, with the law-abidingness and the beauty themselves a form of praise, is traditionally of course—in Psalms, Benedicite omnia opera, liturgical language generally—the mode in which non-usurping Nature worships or glorifies God; it is deliberately set over against the long image of the false gods. Like these, the stars are dismissed too—and go with how different a departure. T h e obedient concordia betokened by nature's wondering if 'her part was done' and her reign fulfilled, betokened by the sun's shamefast thought that perhaps 'the world no more should need' his mere natural flame, stands out eloquently and quietly over against the false gods' regretful or sullen withdrawal as they realize the end of their reign over men's minds and imaginations. W e are not looking now at personification; only metaphor could enact these conceptually unstatable dramas. 'Nature' began as a straightforward personification, a simple re-naming, for greater inclusiveness and lustre, of abstractions which act and re-act. Abstractions from reality are 'real' enough, and anyhow the notion of 'fallacy' is precluded, for personification is a figure. It is easy, however, to come close to what it says by literal statement, and in the main I merely literalized what Milton said at first about the winter, and earth and her lover. If we kept on reading the figures as personifications we should miss much that Milton thought he was including (us, for instance). Few readers reach the stars

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and sun of vi-vii without sensing that these present the orderly concordia of the whole system of nature, more by synecdoche than by the personifications which suffice for the wondering Winds and Ocean of stanza v. T h e metaphorical sense of all the simply introduced images deepens progressively. We are not surprised to be present in xiii—Ring out ye spheres, 'Once bless our humane ears'—though it is only retrospectively that the shepherds with their busy-busy concerns, their loves and their sheep, seem so like humanity itself; the very difference from the rest of nature which made man its deceivable part is latent in the stanza. The 'Fate sayes no, . . . not yet' of xvi is not the affectation of dramatic artifice which synopses of this poem make of it, but the continuation of an idea already begun; and, as metaphorical writing must, it refers to undated Christmas Eves, including rather than confined to the first one or to Christmas 1629. The withdrawal of the false gods only 'begins'; all the other idols before which man will fall face the same ultimate destiny, as the music and the light slowly work with their intransigeant natural material—'but not yet'. The ideas Milton inherited and presented in the Hymn concerning the process through which the transformation hid in the Incarnation was to bruise the head of the Dragon, are complicated and profound, and they will be conveyed by images, with only occasional help from short and unobtrusive direct statements. Hence, as is usual, Milton has recourse to symbols, long established and well understood. T w o large and ancient ones, interwoven with the constantly present symbolic use of Light, pattern out the last two-thirds of the poem: Harmony, and the binding of the Dragon. We are made ready for what they mean, and for a metaphorical reading of the last—for it is only half-accomplished, Milton says—by a very beautiful gradual complication of the figure and the conception of Peace. T h e figurative use of 'Peace' overlaps the figures I have

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mentioned and gradually turns Natura herself into an alleg o r y — t h a t is, gives her the metaphorical dimension she largely lacks as a personification. T h e peace of stanzas iii and iv, the 'ready Harbinger' w h o comes dovelike d o w n from heaven, is (or was to Milton) an historical fact, the seven-year Augustan peace which preceded the coming of 'Peace* (Christ); it is a figure of Christ's own Peace—is it, in a sense, or a piece of it. T h e world does not understand Christ's Peace, can not conceive what it is or will be to have the ancient breach healed, but it can grasp particulars in which such universale inhere. T h e historical long imperial peace does not stand for Christ or for 'our bliss Full and perfet' metaphorically, quite, in the common modern use of the term; it is a shadow of these, and the shadow speaks of its source, and promises thence fulfillment. 6 Just so, in a second use of the figure, through the physical quietness of stanza ν the winds whisper new joys to the ocean, that forgets its nature to listen, and the silent 'wonder' and the kiss of the waters do not just resemble but are part of that harmony of worshipful gratitude and love to come—particulars that are Peace, as we fallibly grasp it. Y e t they are mere shadows of what is now sure to come, certain because this night 'the Prince of light His raign of peace . . . began', 'upon the earth'. T h i s is ads This, the narrower way to understand allegorical reading in Middle Ages and Renaissance, truly fits only religious materials; 'the historical peace speaks of its source Christ' is allegoria, and 'shadows our future bliss in the Heavenly Jerusalem' would advance this example to anagogy. These understandings were very early modified to suit secular figures, but the conception that a real thing is a shadow of a real other meaning remains, and is basic to Elizabethan metaphor. I suppose that the word 'metaphor' had to be retired to the position I speak of as now common, once the certainty vanished that the imperfection we have speaks of a perfection that exists. T h e halcyons do stand metaphorically, in the common sense of the word also, for peace, as the ocean is metaphorically, to many, turbulence mental and spiritual. Most modern readers accept this because they do not therefore have to assume that anything lies behind such significances except associations based on the observation of behaviour. T h e 'real bird' and the 'real ocean' must maintain an existence separable from any meanings; these 'we give' them, whereas they 'have' habits, properties, qualities—such are the assumptions in the audience to w h o m the modern critic speaks of 'metaphor'.

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mittedly a Sidneyan way to read the poem; we trivialize (and thence prettify) it if we modernize the assumptions underlying its images. T h e olive-crowned, meek-eyed figure of Peace who comes down loved of the very clouds she passes through, with a movement we cannot translate, being so like the actual sensation of peace 'descending' upon the heart, as we say—is not a painting. I see but one certain use of icon or picture in the poem: the shepherds on the lawn. They sit in the grey light, 'simply chatting in a rustick row', and with a marvellous trajection from one kind of reality to another we sit on the ground and see that sun come up whose deliberations we have just shared. T h e sudden simplification is one reason why icon, so sparsely used, is lovely and full of grace just here; another reason why most readers are drawn to this passage lies in the fact that for the first time in his poem Milton wants us to be present, in our bodies, at an event. Immediacy to the senses is the dictating aim of icon. (Not amount, but function, of detail counts). T h e earlier stanza, 'No War . . .', contains materials for several such, but none is undertaken. T h e silence is unnatural, and the concentration stunning, as blows are. N o 'Battels sound Was heard', the spear so seldom 'idle' now with the shield was 'high up hung', the hooked Chariot stood, for this once unstained, the trumpet spake not, 'And Kings sate still'. One salient sensuous detail follows another, 'the World around', and all through our bloody centuries— for they do not paint, they awaken our sense of the tragedy of history. Even our sense of guilt in relation to it, as a reader can test by noticing that he thinks of wars, not peace, of far other wars than Roman ones, and that he feels an extreme relief at the opening of the next stanza: 'But peacefull was the n i g h t . . .' Milton knew this, and intended to hold before us our pitiful human definition of peace (i.e., stopping a moment); he begins his second stanza describing Peace 'But . . . ' not 'And . . '.

Images and T h e m e s in Five Poems

Peace, coming down through the turning sphere, is neither like the shepherds we sit down beside nor like the stanza of rhetorical 'circumstances' which shows us ourselves halted for one poor instant from our bloody wars. T h e visual details of her accoutrements are iconographical (olive and myrtle have meanings we learn, not see); she is emblematic, and like those more static forms is allegorical in a confined and seemly way, with the power to grow in significance by relations that only later show up. T h e figure should not be silenced when the stanza ends. Of course, like the closing stanza of the Virgin laying the Child down in the 'Courtly Stable', she reminds us of paintings. This is because such publicly accepted visual signs for known meanings exist for both 'Christ's Birth' and for 'Peace' that many painters have tried to write something like Milton's stanzas in paint. W e should see more clearly this distinction, between painterly writing of images,7 and Milton's metaphors-or-speakingpictures made visually intelligible, if the poem made use of typology. T h a t is, for example, if Milton had used Melchisedec, the High Priest of 'Salem' (peace) who is type of Christ, for his figures of Peace, instead of the Spenserian secularclassical figure who always runs the risk of being read as simi In the absence of painterly images Milton's poem differs from the longer ones of Sannazaro and M a n t u a n ; pictorial vividness is the concern of both when dealing with the peace on land and sea, the silent starry night, and the scene at the manger (it is amusing that 'Lycidas' is Sannazaro's shepherd who sings there in Virgilian phrases of the Golden A g e and Astraea's return, haec virgo est . . .). Closer likenesses in theme link Milton to Mantuan, and details chosen seem influenced by his having visualized the latter's A n n u n c i a t i o n and Nativity scenes, with their descent of white winged peace upon a barren earth, the quiet when no trumpet sounds, time turning back to bring a new age of gold, the halcyons that dared now to trust the tranquil sea, the vast snowy landscape and whole frame of heaven silent and astonished, and many effects of shadow and brilliance. M a n t u a n (this poem included) was used as a school book, m u c h edited, and densely annotated by several commentators (I used a 1513 edition with running commentary by Jodocus Badius Ascensius); translated into French in 1523. Sannazaro too received commentary; translated into Italian in 1588. N e i t h e r poem has Milton's sure architectonic development of symbols.

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pie personification of abstraction. For it is impossible not to read, say, the Falling Manna juxtaposed to the Last Supper as profoundly rather than shallowly figurative. There is but one such image in the Hymn: Pan as a type of Christ in 'That the mighty Pan Was kindly come to live with them below' (with a pun in kindly:according to Kinde,Nature). But although used by Marot and Spenser, and recalling Pan:the Sun in Macrobius, this type is one which never became a widely accepted symbol in art, and the other hint of a type is not developed—Hercules:Christ, in the infant strangling the serpent, XXV. It is no accident that Peace as we first see her resembles certain smaller units in Spenser's allegorical technique, for the likeness of this whole poem's great structural images to those for instance of the Mutability cantos is still more striking and important. It is in the architectonic and inter-animating use of massive allegorical figures with wide symbolic import that Milton learned most from Spenser. This is 'allegory' as mediaeval poetry used it—vast 'continued metaphors'. Milton's Pan:Good Shepherd could have piped his new music of a greater love to his vast human flock if the poet had so chosen. He chooses to figure forth universal Concord differently. Music, Harmonía, Concord (Love, Reconciliation, Peace, Order, Unity in multiplicity) becomes the greatest and most conceptually necessary symbol of the poem, except for that of Light, and the two interpenetrate each other. Without it Milton quite simply could not express his meanings, to say nothing of moving us by their depth of significance. It enters straightforwardly, being the un-earthly music heard by the shepherds, 'never by mortal finger strook', enchanting the natural world, the very Air which seeks to prolong it with echoes (ix). We have been made alert to relations, contrasts, new connections, between an earthly and a heavenly order, and all words that point toward this are meant; mortal points to the disenablement which prevents man from sharing in

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the heavenly harmony as once he did. 8 From ix to xi the shepherds hear the angels as music (the sound is identified with the eternal order—harmonía, χ), and also see them as light: the cherubim, who are light-as-wisdom, as contemplation; and the seraphim, those flames who shine foremost with light reflected from God's own nature, love garbed with power. God is Light and Love, Knowledge and Power and Harmony, and these angelic creatures, primary in the hierarchical orders, reflect his attributes as nothing of sublunary kind can. But it was not always so—says stanza xii, and is not to remain so, say xiii to xv. 'Such Musick' as they make to the Only Begotten, Heav'n's Heir now new born into the world of nature, 'Before was never made', but once. T h a t once was when the loving creating Word made the harmony he now comes down to remake; they sang just so 'While the Creator great' hung the balanced world, set 'His Constellations' and cast the dark foundations, in love brought the formless into form, bid order be. This is happening again. T h e not yet of stanza xvi is an answer both to nature's misunderstanding, as in x, of when this restored harmony between earth and heaven shall be perfectly accomplished, and to the last section of this, human nature's vision of T i m e running back (instead of forward as when the constellations were first set) and restoring that golden order as by another fiat like the first. T h e relation order:concordia (or love, in Neo-Platonic and s T h e meanings of this figure as Milton later uses it in At a solemn Musick, Ad Patrem, Arcades, Comus, illuminate meanings in the Hymn, but distinctions must be noticed (and have been, in Woodhouse's long note in 'Notes on Milton's Early Development', p. 93); cf. also the obviously relevant Second Prolusion, 'On the Harmony of the Spheres', translated with commentary by P. B. and E. M. W. Tillyard. Milton knew a great many of the uses, and hence the extensions of meaning, to be followed in L. Spitzer's long study of 'Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony', Traditio, II, 409-564, III, 307-364 (1944-45). Precise connections with numbers of Milton's poems are made by J. Hutton in English Miscellany, ed. Praz, II (1951), 1-63; see the yearly bibliographies for briefer articles by G. Finney (1947, 1952, 1953), L. Stapleton (1954), and compare also A. Barker's article cited in note 1.

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59 Christian phrasings): music: the perfect circling of the spheres, is immemorially ancient. When Milton suddenly speaks out in our human voice, Ring out ye Crystall sphears . . . If ye have power to touch our senses so', he and all of us are aware that he asks to hear something that has not been able to 'bless our humane ears' since the Fall. The music we cannot hear is inextricably connected with the concord we do not fully join. Since the Fall, even to immortal ears the 'Base of Heav'ns deep Organ', the corruptible sphere, has not made up the ninefold harmony, the 'full consort to th' Angelike symphony'. If the concord were total, and we again heard it, it would mean that once again there obtained in fact that perfect harmony of nature under God which the 'holy Song' —of the angels—has made to seem to our imaginations already a reality. 9 T o the phantasia, sole faculty by which man can be rapt beyond man's mortal limits to see the perfection he can no longer see plain and hear the harmony as though it had never been spoiled, it is as though our sad history were wiped out, the golden Eden soon and inevitably to be reached and dwelt in again, leprous sin melted as by simple command from earthly mould, man repaired, and Hell·—the discordant dark principle his fault introduced here—ready to pass away, leaving her dolorous mansions open 'to the peering day'. This conquest of the dark by the Light is the same thing as the reinstatement of the once perfect music; Nature too, when she heard 'such' sound here in the corruptible spheres beneath Cynthia's seat, had thought the breach repaired, as 'a greater Sun' arises upon the 'new enlightn'd world'. It is ^ In At a solemn Mustek even earthly music can 'present' as type or figure 'to our high-rais'd phantasie' 'That undisturbed Song of pure concent' sung unceasingly before Him that sits upon the sapphire-coloured throne. T h e result of the vision (as in the Hymn) is to be 'That we on Earth . . . May rightly answer . . . As once we did' before 'disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against natures chime' and 'Broke the fair musick that all creatures made T o their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd In perfet Diapason'. T h e last italicized element in the figure is inevitably important in a poem on the descent of Agape in the Incarnation.

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because 'such harmony' (x) is the principle of peace and concord identified with Christ—heavenly Love10—that she thinks her part done, her derivative order 'fulfilled', since Love, now descending, is the music (concord) which 'alone'—of itself, and only—can unite the divine and the natural once again. In the second stanza (xv) which Milton gives to this reunification, this Peace, the fancy conceives it not as Time turned back but Time turned forward—the double look which has characterized the Golden Age figure since before Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. The Messianic interpretation of Eclogue iv, common since Constantine's time, made it of course the great locus classicus for the idea of the Nativity as birth of Him who is to bring back Saturn's Golden Age (as well as the idea of the Pax Augusta made into a truer harmony by the Pax Christi). Milton's Christian-classical figure of a golden past is extended like Virgil's into the related one of the return of Astraea, and both melt indissolubly into the language of two of the proper psalms for Christmas. Justice will now come back from the heavens to the earth she had been forced to leave; this joins with the Old Testament figure used as referring to the coming of Christ: the meeting of the Four Daughters of God, with the Kiss between Righteousness (iustitia) and Peace—that condition when, on earth, justice and peace can again be comprehended in a single word. Yea Truth, and Justice then Will down return to men, . . . Mercy will sit between, Thron'd in Celestial sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing . . . 10 Christ (Love): music is a figure used by both Herbert and Donne in just such ways; all had inherited this mediaeval allegorical image, which is a characteristically Christianized ancient figure (and conception). T h e 'Invention' (discovering) of music, as J u b a l stood by his brother T u b a l - C a i n ' s anvil, is a type of the revelation of love on earth, when Christ was nailed to his cross and spoke the divine words of forgiveness; for iconographical and other examples, see pp. 144(1. of the present author's A Reading of George Herbert, London, 1952.

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'Mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other. T r u t h shall flourish out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven', says Ps. l x x x v ; and Ps. l x x x i x : 'Righteousness and equity (iustitia et indicium) are the habitation of thy seat: mercy and truth shall go before thy face.' Generations of Christmas use had made both these passages seem like all but overt statements of the return of Justice (Sol iustitiae, Christ) to the earth at the Incarnation and of the parallel return at the Second Coming. T h e pattern of ideas about justice and evil into which M i l t o n draws his golden-age figure shines out of stanzas xiv to xviii more clearly through a reading of Lactantius, 'Of the coming of Jesus, and its fruit', in the Divine Institutes, than by extended exposition here. T h e relation to the displaced many deities is direct. Lactantius has been interpreting the pagan figures; true Justice is true brotherly love between men and the religion which alone effects it, and the poets sang half ignorantly of her flight; but G o d 'sent a messenger to bring back that old age', and bring back Justice, 'that the h u m a n race might not be agitated by very great and perpetual errors'. Justice was restored to earth with Christ, though but to a few, and the 'appearance of that golden time returned'; but the temple of true Justice is within man, not yet does a golden age exist 'because G o d has not yet taken away evil'. 1 1 i l For (as the famous Areopagitica passage also declares) on this earth after the Fall the only way we may know 'the quality of the good' is by evil; in the next chapter (v. 8) Lactantius sees the Golden Age as 'returning' to each man w h o lays aside evil and lives by the law of Christ; the final 'Golden Age' after the Judgement is described (Ante-Nicene Fathers, VII; the Div. instit., very commonly known in the Renaissance, is frequently quoted by Milton). For Christianized uses of the Ovidian Virgilian return-of-Justice figure, from Dante and Guevara to Spenser and Seiden, see F. Yates, 'Queen Elizabeth as Astraea', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, X(ig47), 27-82. The Four Daughters of God was a famous mediaeval theme also, of course; the early treatment of it by Hope Traver, 1907, has that title. T h e lengthily expanded ancient figure is attached to Annunciation and Nativity by Bernard in a famous sermon, by Lydgate, Pseudo-Bonaventura, Deguileville, and in many late mediaeval versions of the allegory (notably in numerous dramas). Deguileville explains Mercy's symbolic connection with the rainbow.

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Similarly Milton's vision of our golden bliss when T r u t h and Justice do indeed 'return to men' is not denied and interrupted by the mention of the bitter Cross in xvi or the Judge's spread throne, in xvii, but rounds to its close with the great final figure of the binding of old Leviathan. Milton has thus formed our understanding of the full import of the mystery he celebrates by a kind of orchestrated weaving of themes carried by great symbols traditionally used to present such meanings. It is highly original; no similar poem shows anything to match its peculiar combination of dignity with light and happy charm. T h e theme of how our peace is made, our darkness lightened, our harmony new tuned to the celestial music, our nature transcended—is played in key after key, repeated, varied, inverted, transposed. One magnificent figurative recapitulation he reserves until after the triumphant overt statement of xviii: 'And then at last our bliss Full and perfet is, But now begins'—for 'from this happy day' the Kingdom of evil begins its long sure journey toward ultimate failure. T h e figure which serves for this recapitulation, and for the additional statement of how the Light will conquer the Darkness, is again an inherited one with a long arid dignified history: the great procession of the doomed idolatries. It is to reappear in Paradise Lost i as the vast ironia which Satan's companion demons are to enact on the wide stage of human history, when they will successfully use man's new blindness to pretend a deity they know they do not possess, as with unimaginable pride they impersonate God, 'And with thir darkness durst affront his light'. There is an important difference in the conception, because these in the Hymn are not yet imaged as the hellish co-workers of Satan, were not his fellows in a rebellion begun in heaven and now continuing on earth; rather, they are used. It is proper, nevertheless, that Milton subsumes the defeated errors under the symbol of ' T h ' old Dragon', the prin-

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ciple of evil whose reduction to impotence and eventual annihilation Christ ensures by this First Coming, driving him now at least into the limitations of a King who rules and works 'under ground'. It is proper that visually 'the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail' makes our image that of the Serpent of the garden, for 'now begins' that bruise upon the Serpent's head, the un-understood promise. This is punitio Leviathan, the promise of the Advent lessons, with their constant reference to the double Coming; 'and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.' 12 Milton's conception of the nature of the conflict, present already in the Hymn, emphasized by all nature's inability to comprehend the promise of transformation hid in the Incarnation, and quite usual, was later to be stated with special clearness in Michael's words to Adam: 'Dream not of thir fight, As of a Duel . . . not therefore joynes the Son Manhood to God-head . . . nor so is overcome Satan . . . Not by destroying Satan, but his works In thee and in thy Seed' (PL xii. 386). T h e false gods are not fought with, not even triumphantly unmasked and routed before the eyes of their worshippers; they simply are, in this new true Light, what they always have really been—non-deities. And of their own motion they flee; are not destroyed, simply lose their power to impose upon man's credulity—man changes through the Incarnation, not they. It is Satan who used them as instruments to his 'usurped sway', and Satan's is a power over men's minds, and given him by man's own act. His usurpation consisted in seizing an empire within man that belongs only 12 Isaiah xxvii. 1, December 7, Matins; this was formerly combined with the 'iustitia et indicium . . ., mercy and truth shall go before thy face' of Psalm lxxxix. 15 as the Christmas Day offertory, hence given musical settings. 'In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan', serpentem vectem, serpentem torluosum. Augustine's comments (Enarr. in Ps.) on this verse on the coming of iustitia are preceded by commentary on Ps. lxxxix. 11 (Vulgate 88.11) as a reference to the bruising of Leviathan, the dragon in the sea (A.V. 'Rahab', Psalter 'Egypt'); Christ wounds him through His own wound; the wounding of Leviathan is not by piercing of the flesh. Milton probably recalled City of God, xx.8.

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to Godhead, and his 'Kingdom' that begins to 'fail' is that within the believing heart of man. T h e conception of idolatrous devotion as a perversion of good, native to this ancient figure, is central to many of Milton's later ideas (its Augustinian slant, as here, shows in those about Knowledge, and about Adam's sin). These distinctions and meanings are all in the images; theirs is a precise language, and not because Milton was so cunning a deviser but because images present conceptions with great sureness and complexity. It cannot be too much emphasized that this long section, xviii through xxv, must be read as figure. If one reads it otherwise, he will be caught into thinking that Milton stood on the brink of a Puritanical antipathy, to become worse later, toward pagan thought— nymphs, fays, Apollo and the rest. Worse still, he will forget what Milton did not—that idolatry did not die with the cessation of the oracles—and will thus remain in that 'half of the old Dragon's kingdom which Milton says is still held, unseeing, under his deceptive sway. This long figure of the abdicating gods is metaphorical in nature. It is 'continued', as allegory is, and depends all from the prior statement in xviii, where the Dragon is truly symbolic. It employs an important basic symbol—Light and Darkness—in ways which cannot be covered by equating these with the words 'Truth' and 'Error'. But each stanza (about particular forms of idolized substitutes for true Godhead) goes off on its own into an historical situation, and since each such situation has some metaphorical force, together they reach down to depths not grasped through the initial metaphor of xviii. Each situation differs; 'the devil is in it' in a different way in each case of false religion. But this phrase does not completely cover Milton's view of the historical situation in most of the cases, and of these sad errors many are more unhappy than gross. A l l alike show man's fatal proneness to idolatry, for each portrays the worship of some crea-

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ture as a God. The deceit and pride of this false assumption of divinity lies in the Serpent. One may read rigorously through each stanza, and look without success for hints of hybris in these false gods; some are ugly, "brutish', 'grisly', but they are not the authors of the deceit they symbolize( and historically record). They will be 'damned' (xxv) for the same reason we may be—because of whose 'crew' they have been in, having served his purposes and furthered his works. But their evil is derivative. This is why some of them are lovely. They are not the Serpent. They are but creatures—why should they not be lovely? T h e famous case is the stanza on the oreads and naiads, where the mountains stand lonely and the shore resounds with the naiads' weeping, and the nymphs mourn in their thickets with their garlanded hair piteously torn. There is no reason to suppose that Milton did not know what he was doing when he so wrote that the bewilderment, not the trickery, of the pale-eyed priest is felt in the stanza on Apollo (xix), when nothing but the human fright of the flamens at their intricate service is caught in xxi, when from haunted spring and dale the parting Genius must be with sighing exiled, when the Fays fly after the steeds of Night with something of reluctance, surely (for we feel chiefly a benign light in 'Moon-lov'd', though this may be because we have dropped the seventeenth-century ambiguities). It is not Milton's reluctance; he has no cherished worship of dryads to give up. The elegiac tone marks sadness of another sort. He has nothing against Geniuses; the one that Lycidas becomes is to linger near those waters where he died, to do men good. There is just one difference between him and those who haunted the poplar-edged dales of stanza xx: he is not going to be worshipped, as a god. T h a t is what Milton has against the pagan daemons, and that is all he has against some of them. His obloquy is saved for the author of the deceptions which lead men to make

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idols of what is not G o d — f o r each of these, beautiful or not, is used to make men repeat the archetypal error in the garden. Not that the false 'gods' are creatures like man, deceived and unaware. T h e y know what they are; they weep and sigh, but withdraw, forego their 'wonted seats', 'Forsake their Temples dim'. Some certainly are instruments fully like him whose ends they serve; some are vicious and savage—like grisly Moloch, worshipped with such slavish calls and dismal dance, and with that cruellest of rites described in Sandys and Ralegh and Vives and Purchas (we can expect items found in the glossed Lyra Bible to become every man's property). 13 His burning idol is black, and he is sullen as he flees. In some stanzas there is the ring of ridicule—of 'twice batter'd' Dagon (Ralegh again) and of Osiris—, in some the note of judgement upon falsehood rightly detected (the 'hideous humm . . . deceiving', xix). Dramatic stanzas in which we attend upon actual interrupted ceremonies are probably directly dependent for this quality upon Prudentius' Apotheosis; tone, point, and sensuous details are similar, and Prudentius' accounts are impressive—Apollo struck, stunned, the sighs, the crying out, the pale priest whose altar vessels and evoked shadows cannot support a new Presence, whose secret spells do not work (nil agit arcanum murmur), the extinguished fires in the cold urns, the flamen who fixed with astonishment watches the balm spilled by the nerveless hand and the laurels falling from head to ground. 14 In Milton the less gross deceptions 1 3 Purchas refers to Lyra; see George Whiting, Milton's Literary Milieu (Chapel Hill, 1939). ch.v. Milton and his readers knew this venerable and theologically important figure of the retreat of the false gods in many places; hence we too grasp its power and total import in his poem better with the help of Books vi, xi, and xviii of Augustine's City of God, Lactantius' Divine Institutes, ii. 1, 3, 15-19, iv.27, and Prudentius' Apotheosis, c. verses 400-500. See also Tertullian, Apology (ch. 22, 23), Minucius Felix, Octavius (ch. 27; both in the Ante-Nicene Fathers); Athanasius, De incarnatione (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; esp. sections 46ft.). ι* Milton's details (for example in xix, xxi) impress one with a new force after a reading of related sections of the Apotheosis (ed. Lavarenne, Oeuvres,

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come first and are gentlest, but even in the worst the tone is not that of the vindicatory triumph over Evil itself that sounds in stanza xviii where the Dragon, bound in straiter limits now, swinges his tail in wrath at his gradual but certain failure. A first reason for this difference in tone, and for the kinds of distinctions in attitude that I have indicated, lies in the fact that during a long history of use this ancient symbolic figure has always placed the responsibility for the idolatries squarely upon the Dragon's head. One could quote a dozen passages from Augustine and Lactantius, Tertullian and Minucius Felix, representing these errors as the devices of him whose business it is to ruin mankind, interminglings of false things with true under the directorship of that one ancient Adversary, for the sake of overthrowing man. 15 His is the campaign, he the opponent against whom Christ now enters the lists; so too in the figure as Ralegh also inherits it: 'All the Oracles wherein the Devil derided and betrayed mortal Men lost power, speech, and operation at the instant'; his is the punishable malice, as Purchas says of the mourning for Thammuz: 'Was not this mourning, think wee, sport to the Devili?' Where the identification enters, which Milton also uses later, between the founders of false systems of worship and those who under Satan had revolted from God's service in heaven, then the tone of opprobrium for these false gods in themselves enters also, and Milton too uses it later for the Devils who were adored for Deities (PL i. 373). At other times there is even a trace of pity for the irony that II, L a t i n with French parallel translation, esp. w . 402ft., 435ft., 469ft.). On his knowledge of Prudentius, Lactantius, Sedulius and Mantuan see D . L . Clark, John Milton at St. Paul's School (New York, 1948). is Mantuan's Annunciation angel tells Mary of Christ's fight to come ('. . . non ferro pugna: sed astu', not 'par fer . . . Mais par astuce') with those w h o audaciously 'usurp the honor' of deity, the spirits idolatrously worshiped. W h e n the falling Egyptian idols are described, the frightened servers are vividly seen, Anubis and Isis and the other usurpers fall like thieves before the L i g h t , whose gradual victory over Darkness is foreseen.

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God-sent spirits, intended for the protection and improvement of men, were enticed by Satan, 'thus from angels the devil makes them to become his satellites' (Lactantius, ii. 15). In Milton's Hymn, the accents of pity which often sound in the patristic accounts for the human victims of these deceptions, are left to our own imagining as the recounting of delusions continues—with no word of condemnation for the erring worshippers, only the reiterated 'in vain . . . in vain . . . in vain'. From the line 'In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn', the two reiterated words enter each stanza, the more impressive because they are dry and final rather than triumphant and condemnatory. This poem is not about paradise lost but about paradise made sure, and the ancient figure as here used emphasizes the vain usurpations more than the foulness of the great Deceiver. Prudentius fixes the guilt where Milton does with the same ring of victorious condemnation that we hear in stanza xviii, and he states outright the new Fact which must ultimately bring the Dragon's kingdom to failure: the voice which frightens the false gods says Fuge callide serpens—for him whom thou tormentest is mancipium Christi; he has been bought, the title is transferred, Christ has taken on flesh and inheres in this very humanity. T h e Hymn carries this triumph, our hope 'from this happy day'—very different concerns from those of the section in Paradise Lost where Milton uses the great figure again. Despite frequent parallels, a different tone would be expected even were his two uses not separated by many years and a mind changed by events in them. It is quite as it should be that the Hymn not only abstains from condemnation of some aspects of pagan myth but has in certain stanzas a tone of sadness agreeing with the laments of 'deities' Satan has used to his ends. Lactantius can show us reasons for this which fit better with the poem's theme, of the reinstatement of man in the divine harmony as 'worship' gradually displaces 'idolatry', than do theories about a wistful

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backward glance at paganism in Milton's early poems, to be displaced by a Puritanical repudiation. Lactantius says of some of those who have held false beliefs: For these worshippers of fragile images, however foolish they may be, inasmuch as they place heavenly things in things which are earthly and corruptible, yet retain something of wisdom, and may be pardoned, because they hold the chief duty of man, if not in reality, yet still in their purpose . . . (ii. 3) Such conceptions, of humanity deceived and erring b u t far from lost, of errors not only vile, and deceptions genuinely showing some of the loveliness of truth, yet not the L i g h t itself nor potent to bring the Harmony without flaw—such conceptions are proper to the poem's subject and supported by its tone. T h e y suit better with the f u l l functioning of the long image of the false gods than do theories which explain Milton's absence of hostility toward some of the 'deities' by supposing a conflict between pagan and Christian allegiances, at this date not quite settled, and producing unintended ironies. M i l t o n never had had any conflict over what this poem singles out as bad about the false deities—that they had men's w o r s h i p — a n d neither would the critics w h o deplore Milton's supposed later rigidifying of mind; these w o u l d be quite as u n w i l l i n g as M i l t o n if they f o u n d themselves expected to sacrifice seriously to A p o l l o , or believingly beat a timbrel to Osiris, or accept the deity of the nymphs w h o m o u r n in the thickets. T h e s e theories of conflict and gradually growing intolerance as the Christian in M i l t o n stifles the poet are always based upon evidence in the nature of the images, and objections to them here have been similarly based. T h e importance of careful thinking about these possible unconscious meanings lies in the fact that this poem is damaged appreciably by assuming without sufficient proofs that M i l t o n could not understand the very distinctions he is writing about. Many later poems are equally damaged if we do not perceive through the subtleties of this one that the

Images and Themes in Five Poems 7° kind of allegiance he here gives to pagan myth and thought and imagery was a kind he never had to repudiate. T o the end of his life he distinguishes thus between loveliness and sacredness. The 'darkness' shared by all the idols which deceived man rests himself upon is a figure; they have it in that they are not the light. All these books that Milton read on Satan's deception of men through false gods use darkness symbolically. This would be unavoidable given the constant Scriptural use of the symbol of light, in close relation to the theme of redemption and peace.16 But the impact of a powerful symbol is no less impressive because it is inevitable, and a curious penetration of actual history by metaphorical meanings results from all these repetitions in Milton's predecessors; 'to 16 In connection with Milton's innumerable suggestions, often barely caught in an echoed cadence or a connotative linking, we should emphasize one important way in which such uses were nourished and made powerful: the Scriptural lections for the season. For the life of symbols is very dependent on their being constantly met, and their depth is very dependent on constant reuse in varied contexts. Through five or more years of school and seven years of university we know exactly what Scriptural images Milton heard read, daily, December after December, and even the reader (now rare) to whom for similar reasons these large bodies of material are familiar to the point of rotememory will experience surprise if he reads with daily rigor the full seventeenth-century Calendar. Not exactly source-study, this concerns the apprehension of symbolic force, by Milton and ourselves; whole chapters count, not 'paralleí passages', as the mere reminders which follow will indicate. T h e reading of Isaiah complete began November 23 and continued through December; the familiar Advent Sunday lessons (Isa. i, ii, ν, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxx, xxxii) are but a few among the many showing the unceasing stress on peace and light (uncountable references like those to the light of the sun that shall be sevenfold in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people; the moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed), so also the December second lessons (Heb.; Peter; 1, 2, 3 John; also of course the Epistles, Gospels and collects for the season). Our peace is the theme of Isaiah lvii, lix (December 23, 24) and the theme is put in terms of Light, as we are so familiar with it in the Christmas lessons (Isa. ix: the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light . . . the Prince of Peace; and Luke ii), and in the Christmas Eve lesson from Isaiah lx (Arise, shine . . . T h e sun shall be no more thy light . . . but the Lord . . . T h y sun shall no more go down). So also St. John's Day, December 27 (Rev. i; xxii: and they need no candle, neither light of the sun . . . I am the bright and morning star), and Innocents' Day, December 28 (Jer. xxxi).

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involve men in darkness', 'perpetually to scatter darkness', 'draw on darkness, that men may not know their Lord', 'to blind the minds of men, lest they should see the light'. Movingly displayed against the earlier stanzas filled with light and music intermingled and identified, this symbolic darkness, now doomed, is picked up in stanza after stanza of the long figure of the gods' departures as that is set in opposition to the coming of heavenly Love to work men's peace. Often it but appears in descriptive epithets that suggest pictorially, or evoke bare half-notions, yet build up into desolation, uncertainty or gloom, as stanza succeeds stanza: nightly trance, lonely, twilight, midnight, drear, dim, shadows dread, blackest, grisly, anthems dark, sable-stoled. There is no light in these six stanzas except the tapers of mooned Ashtaroth and Moloch's blue-burning furnace, until in xxv the rayes of Bethlehem shine out to dazzle and to blind Osiris's dusky eyes. When this actual collision of powers, Light against Darkness, has once been expressly stated, the figure of the idols, all that which by gaining men's worship alienates them from their peace, comes to a close. T h e Child, who like Hercules can in his swaddling-bands control the Serpent and all his instruments named and unnamed, is (as Hercules was to the mythographers) the Sun. 17 T h e last comparison to the young sun at dawn is gaily rather than solemnly handled. T o o lightly perhaps; yet we are ingrates to quarrel with the mocking delicacy of this vision of the hurried obedient flock which now 'Troops to th' infernal Jail' where their great Jailer tastes his prison—and his grave, 'under ground' will he nill he in his own darkness. For the lightness of the ending is that of happiness, and the shadows pale and the yellow-skirted Fays are no last nostalgic farewell of Milton's to the beauties of a less Christian view of life; they are the airiest possible IT T o Ronsard in the Hercule chrestien, as to Denisot earlier in his Cantiques on the Nativity, or to John Davies of Hereford, and others, Hercules was a type of Christ. For some references see M. Y. Hughes, ' T h e Arthurs of the Faerie Queene', Études anglaises, V I (1953), 193-213.

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

reassertion of the completed long image—all that is but shadow shall disappear, when comes the reign of Light, pure and essential. It 'but now begins'. The close of the poem is very quiet and splendid. The images fill the stanza with light, new to this universe below ('Heav'ns youngest teemed Star') but fixed here at last; light waits upon Light in order serviceable. The stable is Courtly because it holds Him who 'with us to be, Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day'; created nature is now his Court.

Theme, Pattern, and Imagery in LYCIDAS

Lycidas is the most poignant and controlled statement in English poetry of the acceptance of that in the human condition which seems to man unacceptable. I do not of course refer simply to the calm ending of the elegy, but to its whole poem-long attempt to relate understandably to human life the immutable fact of death—the pain of loss, the tragedy of early death, the arraignment of the entire natural world that did not avert this unnatural concluding of what was unfulfilled, the passionate indictment of an order that sets a fatal stop upon even man's Orphean task and the good report that would crown it, the depositions one after another of those who carry out the higher commands in orderly fashion, the accusers who still press for an answer, and finally the center and heart of the matter: the questioning of a justice that would take the young and leave the ripe, take the devoted and leave the self-indulgent, so too would take the shepherd and leave the destroyer. What answer? What order? to what end a human life, struck down and ended by an immutable will even as it consecrates itself to God's own uses on an earth sick and famished under the hand of His enemy? 73

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Disorder, no answer, death is our answer; the slit life, the ravaged commonwealth. Indictments of the unfathomable total moral order, and answers to them, are matter of tragedy, not of pastoral, and Milton twice recognizes this and twice returns from that higher mode back into the different music of the pastoral. Each question has its answer before he makes this return. The questions are cognate. One is in terms of the folly of the poet's devotion (since Death ends it, irrelative of fulfillment), and one in terms of the flat impossibility of the priest's task, when an inscrutable power extinguishes those who alone would do its work here. The answers are not so much cognate as the same, that judgement is the Lord's. In each case the meaning of the answer transcends man's unaided wisdom, and it is properly spoken by an unearthly voice. This last is simply one aspect of the imagery which keeps each answer exactly suited to the nature and philosophical weight of the question. In the first climax of question and answer Milton moves unobtrusively through related types of images: from the pastoral images which can signify to us all that is care-less, not responsible for ends, in a life that sports with Amaryllis in the shade, all that is symbolized by 'Delight' in a Roman de la rose, on through images with a sure romance connotation, spur and guerdon. The guerdon which as tangible token marks a course run with honor at the tournament or at the end of an entire knightly life1 is not, I think, equated with the spur of honorable report (honor, not its by-product prestige) which impels to action. For a poet it impels to selfdiscipline and laborious days. Thence to the simpler figure ι For example, Malory's last book was called by him 'The Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthure sauni Gwerdon', and the reader will recall its import. Blaze in the next sentence is apparently an image from fire, not originating at any rate in the verb or noun blazon, blaze. The usual reading takes the blaze as the becoming famous. In support of my different one: the fire which smoulders or is tended in a poet bursts out at last in great poetry, only a smouldering reputation breaks forth into a blaze of fame.

Theme, Pattern and Imagery in

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used for what the care and labor bring forth, the sudden blaze of a poetic achievement worthy those years of fire tended and fostered; but instead of this comes the other suddenness, irretrievable, of Atropos' action. The terror that attends our powerlessness lies in the image, 'thin spun life'; the ease of this end is an ironic comment on our attention to ends. The secrets of the otherworld, of those who create and who judge, have been thought of as epic matters by Milton ever since Vacation Exercise 30-54. Yet it is fitting and necessary that the answer which enlightens his servant, and negates 'the thankless Muse', should be fully spoken out here by shining Phoebus,2 to whom the allegiance of all poet-shepherds is due, both him whose life is slit and the living ones who are left to write of it. In this answer, through the extended metaphor of the heavenly plant, which lives and spreads as the great final pronouncements echo through heaven, Phoebus extracts and throws away the irony and the powerlessness, reduces to instrument the inimical shears, re-defines the spur, promises due guerdon when all real guerdons are given, 'lastly'. Not ignoble, the other conception had yet not been truly a conception of Fame. Artifice and vulnerability are the character of all garlands where soil is mortal, witness imperfect, eyes impure; and 'Fame' is neither rightly understood by men, nor conferable by them, nor measurable by their imperfect faculties, nor at all touchable by death; ineffable, unwithered and immortal. It is a perfect instance of subtle literary judgement that Milton did not phrase this, as he might have done, in the imagery of 'And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away' (1 Peter v. 4). He saved for his second great answer the overtly Christian terms of St. Peter's speech, by which time the sudden 2 Milton's other uses of Phoebus, from Elegy i on, illuminate sense of a responsibility to Poetry apparent here comes out Manso 35: 'not profitless to Phoebus'; and the reminiscence of Eclogue is pertinent. Modern over-personal readings are to be

this one; the especially in Virgil's Sixth questioned.

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blaze and clear light of unequivocal terms is wanted. This is not a matter of 'Christian' and 'pagan' but of direction and indirection, of a less or a more figurative functioning in the language. Both are Christian. T h e question of Milton's pagan imagery in Lycidas here comes up in its first form, and we make the first answer to it, that such terms do not make images non-Christian. T h e additional element of indirection in the first question and answer was of a kind endeared to the Renaissance reader by long habit. Nor have Milton's Phoebus and Jove and amaranthine plant lost their classical suggestions to become exactly and solely what Peter and Paul talk about in God's conferred 'crown of righteousness'. T h e two terms of any metaphor both add meaning to that which is being given significance through its use. W e must turn later to the full importance of this, but the point that should be made before we leave Phoebus's first of the three overt 'consolations' in Lycidas is this one concerning the metaphorical weight of classical allusion and figure. T h i s does not deny the judgement that the unambiguously full statement of Christian consolation in Christian terms may shine out with a more splendid and luminous clarity, in Milton's own imagination and to us toward the end of the poem. St. Peter both makes evident and answers the second great question which draws Milton into the epic and tragic realm, where doubts raised by resentful human bewilderment ask for ultimate answers, secrets known only to a wisdom above nature. Camus, though he is a river god like the rest, wears the clothing of grief and stands like the song itself among the mourners who question rather than among the accused who state their innocence, and it is he that asks the forthright 'Who hath reft him?' which closes the inquiry; we hear no more of second causes, and nature is acquitted. T h e last personage is neither accuser nor accused, but the emblem of a just and final judgement, vicar of Christ. Peter speaks first as type, bishop, and head of all priests, of the living ones he

T h e m e , Pattern and Imagery in LYCIDAS

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could better have spared no less than of the faithful one cut off.3 From here onward the bitter, despairing and violent description, of 'our corrupted Clergie then in their height', of its own weight poses the further accusation which the situation in fact in November 1637 had certainly brought Milton to make. It is Job's outcry against incomprehensibility in the moral order and in the 'justice' of its Author; added, to turn the knife in the wound, is the irony of the death he here bewails, typifying all hopes cut off in the bud and all faithful devotion silenced. T h e indictment is expressed, not spoken; the very stones of these harsh facts cry out for reason and justice. After the rage and despair of the fierce 'and nothing sed', Peter's answer is the terrible one of God's final doom, when all that is to be said will be said. He speaks little more of the divine justice than this, that judgement of evil is the Lord's and that it will come; that is the answer, for man's question in the face of the riddle of allowed evil is: WILL it? It seems difficult to press the image, as many critics do, to answer also the question 'when will it?'; this is a vision of judgement, not a picture of it, and if it 'foretells the ruine' of evil men for whom an earthly fall is even now preparing, it also (or therefore) contains indubitable reference to the last and perfect judgement. As the first climactic resolution in the poem touched primarily the living greenness of an eternal justice accorded to faithful shepherds, heirs of Orpheus, by the perfect witness of all-judging Jove, the second embodies that other side of justice, when those upon the left hand shall know the power of the sword that issues from the mouth of God. 3 Milton does not use precisely Dante's symbolism of Peter's gold and his white key, but there are interesting connections with the way Dante uses them (Par. v) in condemning private inconstancy to vows made to the Church; cf. also Purgatorio ix.127. Paradiso x x v i i has Peter's own more famous diatribe, which also employs the common image of rapacious pastors as wolves, and also keeps to the tone of castigation that accompanies a stillanticipated judgement by the source of power that gave the keys.

yβ

Images and T h e m e s in Five Poems

These two apocalyptic lines 4 carry images, inseparable from the Biblical imagery whence they spring, which make them more than lines of triumph felt at the spectacle of just judgement, to be done at long last upon evil. Several considerations make this trumpet note of prophetic vindication necessary. But still—especially as we remember that we listen to Peter not Milton—that fear which shakes also the 'just' man when he confronts the perfect judge, is felt too, if only in the power of the image in the awful 'at the door, Stands ready' and in the dreaded finality: Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. This inner tremor of even the less guilty, of every natural creature, before the vision of doom, we know to be in the poem, for the lines following are 'Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past, T h a t shrunk thy streams . . .'. T h e end of all judging, when the sword shall smite no more, is the end of our world, when by the dread voice announcing a final justice even Alpheus' innocent streams shall indeed be forever shrunk, and all the living rivers of the earth be dried up, when 'the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up' (2 Peter iii. 10). T h e turn to the reviving sweetness of the passage in which all fresh and growing things give their loveliness to strew the hearse where Lycid lies, is of an extreme beauty. It is a turn from one kind of 'consolation' to another, for all that. Milton never does turn in this poem from a nonChristian sense that death may be the only answer given for the riddle of life to a Christian belief in eternal life. He turns, more than once, from what seems senseless in death to * E. S. LeComte's ' " T h a t Two-handed Engine" and Savonarola' contains the fullest discussion of this image, and the twenty-eight or so published interpretations of it (Studies in Philology, X L V I I [1950], 589-606); there are valuable additions by Leon Howard in Huntington Library Quarterly, X V (1951—52), 173-184, by H. F. Robins in Review of English Studies, V (1954), 25-36, and by R. E. Hughes and R. J. Shoeck in Notes ir Queries, n.s. II (1955), 58-59 and 235-237 respectively.

Theme, Pattern and Imagery in LYCIDAS

fjg

death made tolerable. Where he must go outside the h u m a n world to find what makes endurable an 'order' that commands the death of the unripe and the death of the consecrated, he leaves his chosen mode, but not his subject. Neither excursion is in the remotest degree digressive except in the first sense. There is no single 'Christian consolation' in the poem; the whole texture of it is replete with these, and the imagery is the major voice carrying that constant burden. If it seem a fantastic misuse of words to call Peter's 'dread voice' a consolation, the rest of the poem adds its witness to our own experience that the stab at the heart of loss is that it denies conceivable order. All that reaffirms order consoles. T h e image of life may seem to be more than balanced by the vision of death, the symbol of the mystical plant that lives and spreads to make a crown so different from the laurels and the myrtles brown may seem less adequate to its function than is the great engine of doom which metes out another due measure of 'meed'. However, not only is the poem a structure of cumulative, not contrasted, insights into the meaning of life and death, but also there is yet to come the vision of the nuptial union of the soul with the source of love, a third vision of judgement. Moreover, though it is notable that symbols are chosen at these three crucial points to convey great fundamental oppositions like growth and destruction, life and nothingness, union and sundering, fruition and annihilation, there is also the whole continuing web of the poem with its living and tender sense of imperishable sweetness in all moving and growing things. T h e affirmations of Lycidas begin with its first line. T h e imagery within the great speech of St. Peter is different from any other in the poem. It has a different purpose: denigration, an almost magniloquent diminishing ('depraving') of its subjects—the exact formal parallel and the exact evaluative opposite of the 'praise' or magnification which is the natural function of most images in Milton's as in any funeral

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elegy. This, combined with their satirical purpose and resultant 'roughness', lowers the style violently (within the great symbolic parent image), paradoxically enough considering the elevation of subject. But for the one factor of their dependence, this would be intolerable, and is indeed some excuse for those who have called it digression. The crowd of lesser images, being all of one kind rhetorically (meiosis) set going so strong a current of defamation that the one line where this movement halts ('The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed') derives thence an accent of most piteous blamelessness and vulnerability, and compassion converts to generosity what might have been arrogance. Comment can be spared on this group of images; their vitality, a series of direct shocks from a charged wire, is felt by any reader; the directness results from their pronounced logical simplicity (based on comparable quality: lean, flashy, scrannel; or compared manner of acting: creep, devours, scramble). The unifying pastoral figure which governs the passage gives their metaphorical depth and thence their universality to the terms within it. And this, not merely the type of particulars used, is the character of allegory. The passage would be allegorical even if there were no topical reference to the events of the late 1630's in England; that simply doubles its allegorical reference. Since other treatments of Lycidas' 'allegory' assume that it resides in these historical relationships, some general remarks are in order. They are best made with this passage under our eyes. T h e gradual figurative amplification of the Good Shepherd in scores of pastoral figures throughout the Old and New Testament, the constant liturgical emphasis in all centuries and all churches, the accretions and interpretations through centuries of use, Petrarch, Mantuan, Spenser's powerful satirical use in May of the Shepheardes Calendar (Milton quotes twenty-nine lines of it)5—these are what have given its al5 In Animadversions

upon the Remonstrants

Defence against

Smectymnuus

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legorical power to Milton's figure, that is to say, made a metaphor of it. This is why rereading them makes us see more than history in it. Like all metaphor, the figure is 'dark'; this results from one term being left open, its meaningfulness left to the experience and wit of the reader. Like all allegory, it is continued metaphor. That is, in Spenser's phrase, 'a dark conceit' in which profound conceptual meanings are gradually figured forth (to be read only in the figures), providing thus the deep-diving plunge into significance which the language of discursive reason cannot provide. Such figures carry conceptions not propositions, essences not phenomena, and shadows of that which we know the-substance-of only through its shadows. T h e allegorical (contrast the illustrative, the exemplary) aspect of the figure of shepherd as type of Christ we penetrate only through the figure's history, developing as it did in intimate connection with all else that happened to pastoral poetry; Milton does not provide its metaphorical senses but depends upon and uses them. A modicum of knowledge about the life of a sheep, with its needs, perils and protectors, will tell us what sort of things the bad clergy did in 1637; but only knowledge of what that allegorical figure was accustomed to carry will make to shine out before our eyes the enormity (to Milton) represented by what they did, and relate it to all the other issues and griefs and joys of the poem. T h e enormity because of the relation is Milton's point. Such possible changes in sensibility (that is, of the receiving mind in reading) can be pointed to but not really accomplished by explanations, and I shall dwell upon this figure only long enough to clarify these general principles about the working of allegorical imagery through the poem's simplest example. Powerful as it is, St. Peter's arraignment of those (see Columbia Milton III, 165-166) Milton quotes lines 103-131 of S. C.: May; he is speaking of one's learning 'to renounce the world and so give himselfe to God', and says that 'our admired Spenser' 'personates our Prelates, whose whole life is a recantation of their pastorall vow, and whose profession to forsake the World . . . boggs them deeper into the world . . .'.

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who by vow were Christ's shepherds pledged to lead his flock out of death into life, for their treacherous betrayal of the idea of Christ-like love, is not the most complex or moving use of the methods of allegory in the poem. One point which touches this passage primarily and two which will be important later may be made fairly swiftly. T h e first concerns the relation of historical allegory to the other figurative senses. Through its long Jewish and Christian history, this Biblical figure of the shepherd had come to command ways of reading which are variously fruitful. Rather simply parabolic sometimes, it was used in ways that ask a tropological reading (that is, the metaphor leads to moral insight and different conduct: quid agas); and an allegorical reading in the strictest mediaeval sense (typological, with Christ as the head of his hierarchical Church); and an anagogical reading (speaking, like the Shepherd's unfading crown in ι Peter, quoted earlier, of last things and eternal life). Milton's Lycidas asks for all three kinds of reading. In addition a less precise way of reading, which I believe may be included in what was loosely referred to as taking the letter spiritualiter, could open the way to ideas less homiletically moral or specifically Christian than metaphysical, Platonic or timeless. Milton early became a great master of the last (that is of writing that asks it of us), but save for his very largest figures in the long works, he is no match for his master Spenser in the first, the creation of vast and extremely complex figures which when read tropologically provide moral insight of unparalleled delicacy, and a universality unarrested by time. Historical allegory is a special offshoot, which habit he borrowed not only specifically from Spenser's May and its like but generally from the whole tradition of pastoral, to which it now seemed indigenous because of mediaeval practice. Not Dante's and Boccaccio's and Petrarch's eclogues alone (stemming ultimately from Virgil) but dozens of Carolingian and later pastorals enter the world of affairs thus, and give the lie

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to any notions we in later ages may have of Arcadian 'escape'. But historical allegory doubles the figure back upon itself to provide a second literal reading, a way of making the metaphor give birth to an intended series of historically true significances, factual and interpretative. Spenser of course used this, but only with the secondary importance of assisting clarity and inescapable convincingness in his universal meanings. This Milton too has done in the passage in question. As readers interested in all the workings of his images, we have two helpful courses to follow: when read not as sources but as pieces in their own right, other literary works using any allegorical figure widen and deepen for us its metaphorical possibilities, for these possibilities are a common heritage, and are often recognized through the merest color of specialized diction or familiar allusion. This will be exemplified presently. And secondly, because historical allegory is both literal history (put figuratively) and active metaphor timelessly applicable, we read history, in order that clear understanding of two sets of literal terms may make this activity large and free. T h e reading of ecclesiastical history during Laud's time reveals without our taking thought for it the universality, more than the historicity, of Milton's massive indictment.® T w o points touching the imaginative power of topical suggestions in allegorical figures are as relative to other parts of the poem as to that here discussed. Only experience as direct as possible of the second term of any metaphor provides both 6 Plentiful knowledge of contemporary events is not always so useful to image-study as in this case, but the eclogue is a compressed form in Milton's hands, requiring much inner particularization from a reader, and moreover no antidote to a too personalized way of taking Milton's vigorous style is easier to take than the old-fashioned specific: Book iii in Masson's first volume. (Strict correctness, in either writer, or our agreement, is not in question here.) Another seemingly but not truly paradoxical result accrues: a vivid sense of the parallels between Lycidas 108-131 and our contemporary history, in this case secular. T h i s is a normal result when reading historical allegory, unless of course it is not read as allegory but simply as history.

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the peculiar pleasure derived from the 'translation' of terms and the capacity to follow out the suggestions other than sensuous which are thus drawn in. Even 'What time the Grayfly winds her sultry horn' remains a poorer thing if one has never heard a horn, and the carefree languor and peace that come with the music (metrical skill suiting) have changed the thermal quality of sultry. In figures where many suggestions enter, the avenues to such 'direct experience' may sometimes seem odd enough. A n example is in the passage which begins 'Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away'. It culminates in the headland where 'the great vision of the guarded Mount' looks (from the Celtic tip of Britain that Druids and giants had guarded before Michael) straight across the unbroken water to Spain; and it comes to an end with the unexpected figurative turn in 'Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth'. 'Direct experience' here involves not only the imagined wash and murmur of the cold seas down the whole western coast of Britain from the Hebrides to Land's End. It asks that we should have thoughts like those awakened in Milton by Drayton's Polyolbion, by legends of Cornish might and of Orphean druidic seers prefiguring Christianity, by Spanish strongholds seen on Ojea's map and recalling ecclesiastical tyrannies once escaped, by the events of the centuries during which the venerable unmoved Mount opposite had stood, guarded, with its angelic defender who looked only outward across the sea toward Namancos and Bayona's hold. It is with such reflections that we stand 'where' Milton stood, conscious of the ancient integrities and remembering the ancient threats, to see the fragile body which he has made to typify England's frail integrity against present threat, and see it 'sleep', inactive, unmarked and pitiable, 'by the fable of Bellerus old.' In highly allusive poetry books must become our five senses, to make our experience direct. 7 1 T h e r e f o r e the debt of the student of

metaphor

to the annotator is not

measurable, being an aesthetic debt. T h i s is a linguistic point, and has little

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T h e second point is this. T h e reader must have noticed that it has proved almost impossible to avoid considering the whole theme of the poem whenever discussion of the functioning of any topically suggestive image was attempted. Each, no matter how small, was enmeshed in a web—which I have cut by simply not finishing the treatment of the full metaphorical meaning of any. Even the gray-fly's horn we left as if it were a line describing noonday, which nowhere nearly covers the matter; we allowed the Phoebus image to seem primarily a discussion of the poet's reward, whereas Lycidas' death sans guerdon has meanings that flow out of the image of Orpheus's unpreventable death, just before; we all but ignored St. Peter's speech as lament while noting it as diatribe. It is the metaphorical force of each image which was slighted. A n d the omission in the Hebrides-St. Michael's Mount passage was gross. For Lycidas is not only Lycidas, nor not only our own Edward Kings who die young; the passage speaks of the whole crushing human isolation and fragility, of the unreachable dumb body that goes out alone as it came, and of the slender thread of belief—in the loving and pitying superhuman 'guard', in ideas of some meaningful harmony and order—which is all man has spun to secure him from the deep on which he wanders undefended and as much in peril while he lives as when he dies, unless the cry does indeed not echo back to mock his ideas of meaning and of powerful allies, 'Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye Dolphins . . . " A rephrased metaphor never keeps decorum, to do with a 'historical· attitude or a 'scholarly· reading. Full understanding of a poet's language is crucial for metaphor; diction affected by ancient conventions, and allusions no longer recognized as such, are words which are not quite in our vocabulary. T o be sure, historical and scholarly criticism is oftenest responsible for our fully understanding the second terms of metaphors, when they are not primarily sensuous, and hence catching the relations which are the secret of their power. Polyolbion, Song i, and Selden's 'Illustrations', discuss Christian use of a 'Genius', the Druids, a speech by St. Michael's Mount; compare, with Lycidas 53®., Songs ix, χ and Illustrations, and not 15 of this essay.

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and Milton's statement does not like mine seem to talk merely about whether angels and dolphins exist and listen; I have allowed the indecorum in order to point out the major fact about the imagery of Lycidas: that the entire poem is grounded in metaphor. It is figurative speech from first to last. This is the gift to Milton of the pastoral tradition. It means that every group of images functions as a large figure, these all within the largest; that each of the so-called pastoral conventions is, like any metaphor, open at one end to allow interpretations that go as deep as a man's knowledge of life will take him. It is time to see in a inore deliberate way how this operates. It cannot be seen very clearly (in our century) by reading Lycidas alone, since we have lost a once truly widespread sophistication able to catch allusions far more numerous and subtle than the references normally so designated, and we have lost the Renaissance and mediaeval and baroque habit of following the multiple senses of long-continued metaphors—for of course I am now speaking of the important kind of allegory in pastoral. T h e history of the criticism of Lycidas shows what happened as obscurity overtook first the habit (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticism) and later the knowledge (twentieth-century criticism). W e are just beginning to get them back together again. Several kinds of recently emphasized knowledge are involved, but all work primarily to change a reader's expectations and presuppositions, and thence his way of taking images rather than his capacity to construe them. T h e most important loss suffered by the general reader of Lycidas since Milton's time is the loss of pleasure taken in a familiar long procession of great pastoral elegies which preceded it. Study of sources and 'classical background' have always received attention, but scholars have had to restore (and chiefly to scholars) sympathetic knowledge of the great Italians and the prolific French and English writers of similar elegies, and the reader is rare who brings to Lycidas that nat-

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ural enjoyment of the form and immediate grasp of its modes of feeling which come with wide and sympathetic r e a d i n g — of Castiglione and Sannazaro as well as Virgil, of Ronsard and Spenser and Marot, of Petrarch and Boccaccio and non-elegiac pastoral. Y e t M i l t o n wrote Lycidas in a continuing tradition, for those to w h o m finding pleasure and emotional immediacy in the similar works of just such famous predecessors was a genuine and usual experience. It is more possible now than it was fifty years ago to be such a reader. 8 I refer to something considerably on the farther side of a mastery of parallels and borrowings. T h i s essay cannot discuss the images of Lycidas, seriatim, and that is not necessary or advisable. I should like instead merely to suggest slowly by example the kind of reading of pastoral imagery which comes naturally if we make use of its inheritance. T h i s inherited wealth was not created by T h e o critus or Virgil b u t very slowly built. Milton's poem is the supreme example of the fullest use of it; he misses nothing, he wastes nothing. H e fell heir to a way of reading as well as ways of writing, and though the chief point about both is the seemingly simple one that his poem moves entirely on a metaphorical plane, this will prove to be (I think) the secret of that mysterious attraction which has stirred readers of Lycidas throughout the vicissitudes of three centuries. It is through this power in the imagery that Milton can present, with the greatest reticence, tact, power and depth, certain great and moving conceptions, universally felt states of mind and meanings, not usually conveyable except in symbols; I point to this power at work in a few instances. His method is not primarily s See the f u n d a m e n t a l study by J. H . H a n f o r d , ' T h e Milton's Lycidas',

and

others

(for example, by Sir John Sandys, G. Norlin) listed in D. H. Stevens'

Refer-

Guide

to Milton.

XXV

Pastoral Elegy

(1910), 403-447, and some important

ence

PMLA,

The

anthology

of

texts and

T . P. Harrison and H . J. L e o n — T h e Pastoral

translations edited

by

Elegy (Austin, T e x a s , 1939)—is

a work of extreme convenience, partly because cross references, herein frequently images'.

noted,

are

one

of

the

most

ancient

guises

of

'commentary

on

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symbolic (differing here from that of the Nativity Hymn), and no archetypal symbol such as those of purgation, rebirth, love (water, fire, cave, garden, or the like) pervades or organizes his poem. It is necessary to get into the poem by some consideration of its first fourteen lines. T h i s is Milton's third English elegy, and all had put upon him the irony of 'well finished' to be said in the teeth of the fact of early death, the interruption seemingly rather than the conclusion of life. It is through the imagery of the preceding lines, not line 8 ('dead, dead ere his prime . . .') that we look at what bitter comment this death makes on human aims. With a lasting garland men show honor to immortal Poetry, crowning her mortal exemplar. But in this one shattered leaves displace those symbols long thought of as fit for Poetry because it, too, matures not to die but live on. It is Lycidas' garland which, like his poetic promise, is cut while it is still harsh and unready; everything in the image is disrupted, plucked before it can ripen, finished before it can beg i n — b u t finished, ended, this crown or none. I do not read in Milton's first lines the note of apology for his own unripe verses familiarly referred to in commentary and criticism. T h i s poem brings honors, does not constitute them; the garland is a symbol, and Milton does not pluck his own unripe honors. He says overtly why he is compelled to disturb the due season of leaves and berries destined thus never to r i p e n — 'For' the one whose poetic gift they exalt is dead ere his prime, and he does not leave his like, to ripen the crown for. 'Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies' (corrected from 'unwedded dies', 142) touches the same note; and throughout the poem there are shadows of such ironic connections. These symbols of 'immortal' honor are at once too incongruous and too suitable to the fulfillment they signalize, torn from the plant and made as mortal as what they crown. Unripeness— the flaw is in our entire condition, and to read it as 'my art as

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yet unready* seems too literal and too confined. All is unperfected still, one thing like another—but plucked, nevertheless. What can the unripe do but fade? 'Who would not sing for Lycidas?' who indeed? when he is all that sorry load of human hopes, every early death, every quietus said too soon upon promise? T h e title alone establishes certain delicate understandings with any reader even of English poetry, by Milton's time, and the chief of these is that Lycidas is both Edward King and all that he signifies. A death is one form of the whole danger; it is the principle of death in human life that is lamented. This is felt when, later, decay and disease, the worm that dooms the rose, all that destroys in the bud the promise of fruit, are 'such' as was the news of this loss, to Shepherds ear. T o the ear, that is, of the one who is guardian over 'the weanling Herds', who sings the beauty of the white-thorn when first it blows, whoever in that group of Cambridge men thought that Orpheus' lyre could tame, and move, and make immortal, but who in a sudden event saw youth and beauty and dedication powerless against the hidden worm. T h e pastoral figures for which so many critics apologize 9

9 Even for line 18. T h e Muses are entreated to lament 'loudly' even though it be for a stripling youth rather than for one ripe in their service, not 'deny' their aid when any of their shepherd servants lie dead. W h e n Milton hopes that so too some gentle Muse will remember him, it is no longer, in this second paragraph, of garlands and praises that he speaks, but of the 'good speed' of a companion, said where he in his turn will lie ready to be put from men's sight. T h e usual very different interpretation of all these images depends from an emphasis usual in Milton criticism since (roughly) the period of Coleridge's 'John Milton himself is in every line . . . ' . Perhaps it is we who intrude Milton's personality, not he; more than once this happens in criticism when we under-rate the largeness of reference that is an inherited virtue of pastoral language (human ears must tremble, not just Milton's, when Phoebus hears and answers our bitter accusation of the futility of serving him; with ' T o morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new' w e with Milton take up again not T h e Epic but our human hopes—he too had others). Possibly Tillyard's 'the abnegation of self by the great egoist' (Milton, p. 85) has been more influential during the last twenty-five years of criticism, and his careful reservations less so, than he intended.

go

Images and Themes in Five Poems

make it possible for Milton to engender in us the exact quality of feeling and the exact reference to universal realities with which men receive the first death that breaks rudely in upon any group, however loosely associated, who have lived together in youth. As Milton begins that pastoral day, 'Together both, ere the high Lawns appear'd . . .', we are not to make a one-to-one equation, detail by detail. T h a t is not the way allegory works (lines 25-49 are a pure though simple example of the rhetorical figure allegoria). T h e most which is made of this passage usually is that it describes, 'conventionally', a Cambridge association with King—unintimate to be sure but justifiably somewhat heightened for the occasion— in the borrowed cold pastoral terms of Greek, Latin and Renaissance poetry, borrowed but decorous. But the image was not read this way (certainly of course not written this way); its 'conventions' wake too many echoes to leave it so empty of passion. W e may if we like read it so that something resembling the full feelings that are in it can appear. If we choose we may read it as did those who, weeping with Iolas, had mourned for Alcon that had borne the cold and heat of the day with him, worked, sung, talked, only to be taken by the fates in the first flower of his youth. W e may read as one who with Simichidas has walked under the trees talking poetry with Lycidas; one who has seen how Astrophel piped and danced at the shearing feast, and has seen him untimely cropt, clean defaced; one who has remembered how the crowd of shepherds had sat carefree a long day in the shade by the great cypress, their craft of poetry protected by Argus, and how the cypress fell and they fled. Pastoral imagery did not remain a game of allusions in minds familiarly accustomed to read thus of Castiglione's friendship for a brother writer dead, of Theocritus comparing poems under an elm, of what English poets looked forward to when Sidney, chief hope in certain high endeavors, would never write again, of how storms, intrigue and murder, broke out for poets at the death

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of Petrarch's patron Robert, of a score of other 'shepherds' who had to leave the flocks they battened. T h e pre-eminent result was then as now that these figures for intellectual companionship fertile in life or interrupted by death became inescapably, habitually, movingly metaphorical in their operation. 'Battened their flocks' is not a synonym; it is a figure. Likewise all the rest. Not the direct experience of a metaphor's terms is in question here but the habit of reading figuratively, of reading not about history but about reality. (This is the habit the great Doctor did not have, when he read pastorals).10 Since all our experience of reality flows together, this has the further result that these pastoral figures are not only pregnant with the feeling and thought their own authors had and we experience with them; metaphor plunges the arrow of its very precise meaning into our own present selves and situations. I have called what Milton wrote in this typical passage an allegoria —not continued equations, but continued metaphor. Whether there were high lawns near Cambridge, an inn at Grantchester for cakes and ale after some village revel, is not of 10 Dr. Johnson, in the passage on Lycidas which made 'no flocks to batten' so famous, clearly thinks of allegory as a set of synonymous correspondences, and when he says 'the true meaning is so uncertain and remote that . . . it cannot be known when it is found' he marks as a vice what provides the strength of allegory as it does of metaphor; that which speaks of things in their universal consideration must of necessity present meanings not certainly limited. It is not the associations, connoted second terms, of a metaphor which are left free for a reader to assign as he fancies—hence the importance of scholarly criticism, for here we should follow the author's slightest indication —but the reality to which these point is necessarily undefined and limitless. Dr. Johnson said some of the wisest and truest things of Milton which have ever been said, but these are not they. It is idle to inflate into careful criticism (as has become customary) his remarks on the pastoral mingling of pagan 'trifling fictions' with Christian 'awful and sacred truths'; he indicates no pagan-Christian conflict (rather deplores the absence of one), no tensions, ambiguities—but quite simply does not realize that pastoral 'fictions' are metaphors in nature and function. They became thus through their history, and he has not sympathetically lived through that history. T h e sympathy again possible, if we add the history we may see again one of the faces of truth which was turned aside from the eighteenth century.

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

moment except as our knowing some real or fancied detail makes it all happen again, wearing its meanings in its face; and metaphor, by which we think about all real things together in the one thought, brings back to life as well our own picnics at our own Grantchesters. This is not the aim of the image, but only the way it works; metaphor no more imprisons one in one's own history than another's, but makes us look at the meanings which give experience its quality. All the adventure and freshness of Milton's morning, all the endless noons when the gray-fly's languorous horn stops only to start over—these all say with one voice life without time, man without his mortality, the rose without the thorn and the garden before what happened in it. Nothing so sentimental as that youth is this; only that in those moments, when with others 'upon the self-same hill' young poets saw in Orpheus' tasks and delights the highest use of a life, nothing in the universal framework of things spoke of the thorn, not on their rose. 'But O the heavy change.' It was spoken of. The monstrousness of death is stressed at first in the unnaturalness of this death, and stressed at first in the imagery alone. It appears in certain longer subtler images besides those mentioned of the unripe honors and the denial of nature's rhythm (frosts out of season, the young of the herd not the old poisoned where they fed). It is stressed also in all the multitudinous intimations of man's questioning in the face of every form destruction takes. Earlier in the poem this questioning has the shape of 'why must man go unready', and a man's fear that he may die too soon is surely no stronger than the fear and the pity for that which he loves and loses too soon. But the question is absent from few lines of the poem. It dwells in the cadences and inhabits the frail and lovely figures. We are shaken because we know the fear—by the shadow of the unsuspected death to come which darkens one figure among those who drove out under the opening eyelids of the morn, by the vine that overgrows the unkempt woods

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the shepherd meant to keep, by the blind hands which hold the abhorred shears. T h e monstrousness of the fact that death the unmanageable ('What could the Muse her self?') should be our single certainty is in the early part of the poem heightened by the wild incalculableness of this death at once early and by 'accident'. T h e subject of all this first portion of Lycidas is what King's death meant (still means); not 'King's death' nor 'Milton's fears of death' nor 'his poetic aspirations', but the pathos, unnaturalness, disorderliness, and impotence, hidden, and revealed, in the fact of all early death. A s M i l t o n pursues the subject, it comes closer to the tragedy than the pathos of the destruction of promise, for the poem almost defines this as the nature of h u m a n life. T h e pursuit will not only integrate this theme with all the tragic human questionings discussed in my first pages, but will arrive at them through poignant considerations of the nature of loss, considerations of the obscure reasons why tribute paid to the dead eases grief, of the scheme of nature which includes m a n — w h e t h e r inimical to him, indifferent, or loving, and of the relation of humane and natural; and finally will transform the questions into affirmations through a stronger opposing principle than that of d e a t h — a n d when this is stated we perceive it to be at one with that sweetness which has r u n underneath all the poem like a strong current, flooding these lines and those, now at the end running open and clear. It is a travesty thus to restate crassly what the poem says so delicately and fully, almost entirely through the metaphorical force of its figures. T h e y could not do this were they not pastoral figures. W h a t is the nature of the loss? Reserve, dignity, and full expression with neither risk of bathos nor slighting of personal intensity of feeling are but the first gifts of metaphor; greater still is its universalizing power. It is the pastoral tradition that allows Lycidas to be a lament for the death of Poetry. So stated, this frightens no man. B u t metaphor does

g^.

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not state it so. Again we see this for what it means when a particular stance of the mind is habitual. I do not refer only to the fact that we expect the theme when we recall Spenser's October and Theocritus 16, though our doing so restores to Lycidas a breadth it possesses but lost for a time in some eyes. I mean rather that (for example) we cannot miss the tragedy of what Milton says by looking at the point upside down, when we are told that King was but a poor poet; and that we cannot think the matter is esoteric, or see Milton as a selfconscious poetaster, managing his clashes and planning his ironies yet dismayed lest his own garland also wither. We cannot in fine read images without seeing the full depth and timelessness of the ancient themes they carry, if we have sorrowed for the death of song when music itself dies in the death of Bion its exemplar, known why Apollo left the fields and thorns grew in them when Virgil's Daphnis died, wept that with Adonis all things die (the beauty of Love herself becoming unfruitful), believed that order goes to wrack when the eddying flood washed over the man beloved of the Muses, the first Daphnis. This image has never meant that song stops, poets never sing more, creatures never couple again, meadows never become green—only that they do so in vain. It means that deathless poetry is not deathless, that nothing is. The death of any the humblest exemplar of that 'civilization' man has wrested from disorder tells us that Orpheus will die, and order with him; nothing is exempt, not man's dearest hope or highest achievement; the principle of death in the universe has worsted what he thought confirmed his immortality, and nothing can outwit, nothing negate, that dark power. 'What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore?'—not even the mother and source of that which allied him to the creating gods. All alike; down the swift Hebrus. 'Persephone', says Love out of whom all things spring, 'thou art stronger than I, and every lovely thing must descend to thee.' How, starting from all this, should Milton not go on to

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consider the mortality of Poetry, and the withering that awaits all its laurels? And when the Protectors themselves are powerless, and the Poets put to a check, and dozens of poems down the centuries point as does life itself to good that dies, and to evil, decay, all death's lieutenants that take over the flock and the fields, how should Milton not go on to the Bad Shepherds and the sheep that rot inwardly? Men could not have seen these as digressions except by not taking seriously the poets Milton read with an intensity that burns through his language. T h e pastoral images in Lycidas point to men's deepest trusts and despairs; time had got them ready to mean all Milton was able to say. No claims of a critic can thus get them ready. But when, re-accustomed to the old habits, we no longer think of all pastoral in terms of Arcadian 'fancy', a related late-born misunderstanding will likewise disappear. We remove from the images of Lycidas the obscuring distortions they have worn because a late Romantic separation of man from 'Nature' supplanted that living continuity in the fabric of all created things whence, in Lycidas as in its predecessors, spring the deepest pain of the lament and the noblest sublunar echoes of a final and divine consolation. Almost all pastoral elegies ask man's permanent question, 'Was this death Natural?' Sometimes with angry amazement, as of Petrarch's Argus, 'Did earth dare this?'; or with sad contrasts as in Castiglione's Alcon ('the rude husbandman does not pluck the unripe fruit'); sometimes obliquely as in Marot's accusation. 'Hà Mort fâcheuse! onques ne te meslas Que de ravir les excellentes choses.' It takes no poem to make a man ask these questions; he asks them of every death that touches him. But the answers are another matter. Milton has learned, and uses, them all, and it is all but impossible to tell some of the 'pagan' ones from the other Christian ones, as it had been for many hundreds of years. The answers are complicated, ranging from the merest color on an image to great

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figures occupying fifty lines. W e have noticed the simplest appearance of the question, the un-Naturalness of decay that is untimely. And in all those images the h u m a n death and the others were seen as like flaws, in the one fabric. One later image might seem to place man in a 'Nature' hostile or indifferent to him, until we remember that the sea beyond the stormy Hebrides is no more 'Nature' than the daffodils, the willows, or the singer himself. It is the h u m a n pain over the remembered body wandering untended and unstrewn that gives the sense of wild displacement to that image which most mixes grief with pity: 'Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away . . .'. T h e cold indifferent blows of 'where ere thy bones are hurl'd' are only less powerful to give this sense than are the two lines: Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world. T h a t underseas world is peopled by creatures which carry their primitive alienation in their names (monsters: outside nature) and the irony of the intimate communication in visit'st is less grim than piteous. T h e body comes, goes again, not even a prey, not 'at the mercy o f , but a thing with no place, unheeded, meaningless, and alone. This rightly appears just before the tenderness of 'And, O ye Dolphins, waft . . .', so that a flood of sweetness accompanies the double assurance of a non-human concern for man. T h e love and rescuing pity which had long been thought of as the beauty of Arion's story 11 are like in character to the saving heavenly Love that walk'd the waves; b u t with the allusion to Arion's enchanting song Milton puts a close to the lament for the death of poetry more specifically, and the consolation (paralleled in 'Look 11 I see little reason for excluding Palaemon from this reference but none for substituting him. Parallels in fact (Palaemon died and Arion did not) make less difference to poetry than parallels in significance; both the echo of Orpheus, and Arion's winning harmonies that won the dolphins' love, are too valuable for Milton to forego them; Arion's dolphin was familiar in graphic arts.

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homeward Angel') is that assurance of natural and supernatural powers on the side of those the Muses loved which is in every pastoral elegy, pagan or Christian. T h e ancient figures through which man's death is lamented as a great flaw in the fabric of nature are structurally used by Milton, by his attaching them to the other ancient motif fixing responsibility for a particular death. Because it is so familiar an echo, his 'Where were ye Nymphs?' 12 can and does carry all its old weight of a sympathy that extends throughout the great frame, and that connects natural powers specifically with poets. W e accepted the sympathy when we recognized the genre, for it is perhaps the greatest and most moving conception pastoral has borne down the ages. T h a t this is true in Lycidas will appear gradually; here we but notice how Milton can count upon this meaning and make double structural use of the lamenting natural creatures and powers. His procession is not quite, or not only, a procession of mourners, but of innocent underlings who make depositions that exonerate great Neptune, and exonerate Natura herself. Yet it is partly the long history of these and all aspects of the natural world as mourners (the rivers and woods and winds that weep and sigh, the spirits of all places that join shepherds in laments, the myriad fruitful creatures that will no longer bear nor blossom) that rules out here in Lycidas any sense of a framework of 'Nature' inimical or indifferent to 'Man' or from which he is separable; a pure gentleness like cool balm breathes through all these passages. That is, as usual, the acceptances to which pastoral has accustomed its readers allow Milton to speak all by indirection. He prefers not to say outright as does Spenser and many another, 'Ay me that dreerie Death should strike ι 2 Echoing Theocritus i, Virgil 10, Baïf 2, Alamanni 1, and others less exactly. I do not usually cite title or number of earlier elegies, since I confine my references to the great stream of well-known pastorals to which scholars have pointed as Milton's sources in articles I have cited; I have made them easily identifiable, in, for example, Harrison and Leon's anthology, cited in n. 8, whence I usually take translated phrases.

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so mortali stroke, T h a t can undoe Dame natures kindly course' (kindly: deriving from her own essential nature; Nov. 123). But twice his images state this: in the poet's death which 'Universal nature did lament'; in the perfidious Bark that sank where Panope in quiet played. T h e despairing sense of a whole powerful creation powerless before one ultimate threat is the ground of the final vision of love's conquest of death. Not truly sudden, or new, not opposed by but joined underneath to the image of the strewn flowers, this consolation—the only one Milton finds—has been shadowed throughout the poem. T h e ebb and flow of love and hostility in the universe is the secret of Lycidas' obscure and almost primitive power. Such conceptions and such poetic powers remind us that we do not deal with an author whose sole remaining testament regarding the meaning of human life lies in the single text before us. T h e complication and the restraint of the images we have now to speak of more fully suggest that it is well to speak first of certain other kinds of assistance, besides a deepened understanding of pastoral poetry, to a fuller comprehension of Lycidas. It is one result of the subtlety of Milton's organization and the restraint of his style that the imagery resists a consideration in separation from more general matters; we have repeatedly come to a halt before points which are so related to the rest of our knowledge about Milton, or so recurrent in general criticism of this poem and others, that they ought to be made with recognition of that background rather than with the seeming innocence of plain exegesis. Another kind of knowledge which like studies of the pastoral mode has received recent emphasis, is important to imagery for the steady balance it provides, hence for depth without waywardness in interpretations: the study of chronologically related poems of Milton's and of relations to some single other one, notably in this instance the Epitaphium Damonis.13 As in is See especially A. S. P. Woodhouse, 'Milton's Pastoral Monodies', in

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the case of the poet Yeats, M i l t o n himself w r o t e — i n his earlier and later poems—some of the most important commentary on the images of Lycidas. T h e r e is a marked present tendency to criticize by the analysis of imagery within the single poem, but when studies with this approach (including the present one) are allowed to supplant more general studies of the kinds I have mentioned, profound understanding of the figurative language of the poem is not a result. 1 4 Some exception must be made for studies of the history of single great images, such as that of Orpheus. 1 5 B u t only the large substructure of recent extensions of knowledge in general scholarship on M i l t o n and his period can protect the analysis of imagery from irresponsibility (both in its reader and its writer), or from turning into a mere 'reading the poem for one' in a sort of question-begging paraphrase embodying explication of image. Even the explication necessary in order to relate themes to the formal nature of figures can be the bane of a discussion emphasizing imagery, and this I also am not able to escape entirely. B u t the following points, like some earlier ones, deal constantly with images whose bases in Milton's thought and poetic habits have received comment in very many discussions; their wider genin Honour of Gilbert Norwood (Toronto, 1952). Studies of Milton's early development are referred to in n. 2 of the essay on L'Allegro and II Pettseroso. 1 4 J. E. Hardy on Lycidas in Brooks and Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton, contributes an occasional careful detail rather than a fully trustworthy reading, and at least three studies of the poem's imagery since 1949 base interpretations on over-reading 'lines concerned with water'. A n exception to these strictures is Barker's analysis in the study cited in n. 1 of the essay on the Nativity Hymn. D. C. Allen's chapter in The Harmonious Vision, which X read after this essay was written, avoids various abuses through critical use of many kinds of learning. is See particularly D. P. Walker, O r p h e u s the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, X V I (1953), 100-120 (the druids also belong to prisca theologia). C. W . Mayerson, in ' T h e Orpheus Image in Lycidas', brings together references from Sandys, Fletcher, Drayton, etc. and shows Orpheus as poet-prophet, symbol of civilizing order (in PMLA, L X I V [1949], 189-207). But Milton draws upon yet other connotations of Orpheus as a symbolic figure, such as the denial of death through soul or form (of civilizing forces or of individuals), and cf. the ascetic selfdiscipline of the 'aged Orpheus' in Elegy vi.

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eral concerns, and knowledge, underlie any reading of the imagery proper which wishes to avoid starved or capricious interpretations. I touch upon all the cruxes which have caused much debate, but generally incorporate answers to the questions thus raised without describing the arguments. Breadth of knowledge pre-eminently affects our sense of a poet's tone of voice, and with the point made in the last paragraph but one this factor began to show as crucial. The sensitivity to Milton's own suggested themes and patterns, with which we can come prepared through the help of recent comparative and chronological studies, aids especially our sense of direction, as we find ourselves carried unobtrusively along by certain hidden tides of comfort and of desolation which meet violently several times within Lycidas. One sort of imagery which persistently carries the consolatory stream of generosity, alliance and love is rather obscurely figurative. All the images that present tributes flow in one stream with the final vision of the blest kingdom of joy and love (this last a favored kind of figure in Milton's other elegies). Something more 'natural' than Death, in the universe of which man is one member, has been stressed since the first he must not float unwept. The poem is a tribute, is like some but not like all elegies in that it is not an object but an act, offered, and speaking allegiance; and a tribute to the dead is part of a rite that assuages and reaffirms. Milton calls his poem, by the time-honored metaphor, a 'tear', a public tear that goes down into the grave with the body, and signifies sorrow for a loss of something that body once signified which still deserves undying honor and receives unquenchable love; nothing more damaging than to read this image literaliter as 'water imagery', nor are tears water symbols, nor chiefly wet. They are chiefly salt and bitter; but this one is whatever the metaphor asks, and is what Milton calls it elsewhere, a 'vow'. Symbols do not

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work through mentionings, but through believed meanings. 16 Symbols that work naturalistically in this poem are few and simple, and archetypal significances working otherwise are generally so deep-caught in a web of historically understood meanings (classical and Christian) that these are the best way into them. This is early apparent, and the web itself is very moving. It is as poet, first, that Lycidas must not go unwept (unsung); the Muses must know their own, and all poets have drunk with those heavenly companions of the well whose source is Deity. But also, all images wherein Milton sees Lycidas' physical self (as here on his watery bier) are touched with a deep human pity, and that sense of human community by which our tributes deny the aloneness of the dead makes each such tribute by him an affirmation of love, of strong and responsible ties. The tribute is due (meed, 14) not as praise but as memorial is due; and the obscure consolation that is handed down from human creature to human creature by this ritual remembrance of the human tie is deliberately strengthened in 'So may some gentle Muse . . . And as he passes turn, And bid fair peace be to my sable shrowd.' Obscure' consolation—even primitive; and certainly both pagan and Christian. T o be sure, the classical clothing reminds us of particular songs born of special ties between poets, and certain echoes—'fair peace to Daphnis', 'peace to Gallus', fair peace to Alcon, to Astrophel—sound with sweetness in our minds to bulwark them against 'What boots it with unie On the other hand, line 175 ('With Nectar pure . . .') does seem to me a use of those symbolic meanings of water with reference to purification, rebirth, giving of life, of which we have heard so much in Lycidas criticism of the last ten years. Whether or not language is being symbolically used can often be detected by applying the principle: that such use always 'presents' something the poem, as written, can use, and in that precise place. Symbols do not get in the way, in great poets; the relation to stated meanings may be obscure, ironic or unexpected, but it is real. On the possibly connected sunsunk-beneath-water, see n. 21 of this essay.

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cessant care' when the hostile tide sweeps in. A simpler sweetness lies in the universal human act so directly phrased: and, as he passes—turn. T h e pause which the living make for the dead is made in tribute to what has not died. But they make it in sorrow; Milton's next image following without paragraph break—the reason why, like that other fellow-servant of the Muses later, he must turn as he passes—is pierced through with that poignancy which loss has when it breaks open earliest unities: 'For we were nurst upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock; by fountain, shade and rill.' These lines are completely and perfectly metaphorical; they touch all earliest human allegiances, and shared endeavors which bind even scarce-known men in unity, and they are at once so particular that a single speaking voice seems to dwell upon the alliterative and rhetorically intensified phrases, and yet so universal that the pastoral landscape comprises our human world. T h e affirmative force of these declarations of loyal relationship and responsibility (for there are others) flows on to the image of heavenly love seen not in shadow but in essence, where all the saints in paradise sing tributes of joy to the new soul, 'And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes'. T h e fountains, shades and rills of this incomplete and transient place have their transcendent counterpart in those 'other groves, and other streams'; the loving guardianship of heavenly beings which has appeared at intervals throughout the poem continues now secure and sure, and Lycidas' 'large recompense' is felt to be with no sense of dissonance or incongruity both the angel's propitious watch and the grateful love returned to earthly petitioner by Genius or Muse or any of Jove's sacred company. 17 " As with Sannazaro's Androgeo or Ronsard's Henriot. T h e latter is 'un Ange parfait' in heaven—un ange to whom green turf altars are to be built, on which 'comme . . . A u x Faunes, aux Satyrs, te ferons sacrifice'. If such 'fusion' is to be called 'Baroque' the term loses its m e a n i n g — f o r a Boccaccio, too, merely expects to be read as cultivated men of the Middle Ages had grown accustomed to reading, when he sings in Eclogue 14 of Christ sent

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I have dealt especially with human tributes. There is a more subtly tender feeling in certain other images with this same avowed function—of which we may take the so-called flower passage as typical—and the reasons for their consoling power lie more deeply hidden. T h i s passage is less accurately termed 'metaphorical' than simply a portion of the poem where the great metaphors that underlie the whole pastoral conception, as it developed more than as it originated, must govern our reading or we read with a most unhappy superficiality. Its place is deliberately just after the great vision of judgement upon human evil, the self-aggrandizing betrayal of the flock by those who were to have been the earthly types of the Good Shepherd himself, that is of love which throws itself away for the sheep. T h e reasons why our grief even for this is assuaged by the twenty-five lines which follow, 'Return Sicilian Muse, And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast T h e i r Bells . . .', are not so much complicated as deep. Pastoral has its ways of reasserting a fundamental and harmonious sympathy, and of proclaiming that not decay and death but life and creativity and love is the universal principle, one which is seen (especially, but not solely, as pastoral was Christianized) as having the strength of a divine intention. No person brings in tribute these heaped and countless flowers, but the fresh and shady vales bring them to make the same acknowledgement as the other tributes. T h e y are the precisesi possible counterpart of the offered-up verses which men strew upon a laureate hearse; all alike mourn for the death of a part (as poet, an Orphean part) of that fabric to which all belong, and all alike, reaffirming life, make an answer to death's power. T h e valleys are bid by the Muse (the Muses have always spoken through men of these harmonies f r o m O l y m p u s into the V i r g i n ' s w o m b to b r i n g back t h e G o l d e n A g e , and of t h e fields of E l y s i u m w h e r e M a r y , alma Iovis genitrix, is h o n o r e d b y v i r g i n s a n d martyrs, n y m p h s a n d f a u n s a n d A p o l l o himself (this is d e p e n d e n t o n D a n t e ' s E a r t h l y Paradise, of course).

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a n d these mysteries) to b r i n g all their flowers, to cast here every flower that can weep; this passage is f o r g o o d reason elaborate w i t h tiny particulars, as are all images w h e r e significance is n o t to be said outright, and the actual effect of assuagement depends m u c h u p o n tone. F o r the sense that there is such a t h i n g as l o v i n g pity in the n a t u r a l universe (of w h i c h evil m e n a n d g o o d are a part), seeping i n after the inimical v i o l e n c e w h i c h preceded, becomes a calm strong tide carried b y the generous a b a n d o n of these lines. T h i s sense, 'consolation' almost b y definition, is at its height w h e n M i l t o n writes a line w h i c h gives so q u i e t l y the sudden shock o f t e n p r o d u c e d by e x t r e m e beauty in music that one is t e m p t e d to use the w o r d 'occult': Bid Amaranthus

all his beauty shed . . .

T h e sudden d e p t h of the image is u n e x p e c t e d ; amaranth is the deathless flower, later to be used by M i l t o n as a symbol of the flaw-less w o r l d before the Fall, b u t l o n g k n o w n as the i m m o r t a l plant, that one blossoming t h i n g whose 'beauty' is never q u e n c h e d or w i t h e r e d 1 8 ; a n d he is b i d to g i v e over his e x e m p t i o n f r o m the mortality w h i c h all natural things share w i t h Lycidas, a n d lay his red spires in symbolic tribute o n the b i e r to g o d o w n w i t h it. 1 9 T h i s is not h y p e r b o l e of praise, is T l i e verb whence the flower's Greek name was formed appears to make it carry the sense not-quenched-light-or-flame, and the red spires revive in water long after plucking and last many years (as Pliny describes, xxi. 23, or Gerard's Herball, ii. 42: Floure-gentle or Floramor). T h e attendants of Persephone in Fasti iv. 39 picked amaranth. It should be stressed that consciousness of the kind of thing I speak of in these paragraphs is at a minimum (in writer and reader: these relations are nothing like so 'known' within the thinking mind as description of them must be) and there is much pleasure in these images for those who love at lower rate. I do not think Milton consciously related this line to the spreading heavenly plant which symbolizes immortal honor in lines 78ft., nor perhaps that he had yet the idea (image) in Paradise Lost iii. 353ff., where the angels cast down their crowns inwove with amaranth: Immortal Amarant, a Flour which once In Paradise, fast by the T r e e of L i f e Began to bloom, but soon for mans offence T o Heav'n remov'd where first it grew, there grows, A n d flours aloft shading the Fount of L i f e . . . Cf. also xi. 78: the blissful bowers 'Of Amarantin Shade, . . . By the waters of

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but a glint of light upon the subterranean river that runs under the long image making a connection between sacrifice and immortality born of death—in a way which my explanation travesties almost unpardonably, except that it may shed light on why and how these whole multitudes of plucked and offered flowers do indeed interpose the 'ease' Milton says they give. T h e y are to strew the bier 'where Lycid lies'—'Ay me!', where does he lie? This passage is very closely articulated with the next one, and that Lycidas is 'to our moist vows deny'd' is not a simple grief, as the pain of the following passage shows. How can we not come with tributes, though there is no place to lay them? T h e much-discussed 'For so . . . Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise' seems to me to have this clear reference, and not to be an indication that Milton repudiates the truth of preceding reflections—because he finds that his 'pagan' and his Christian comforts conflict and therefore asks us to throw away, as 'false surmise', solace we have all felt to be real as we read. There is not much evidence that Milton was a man to let even innocent counterfeit stand because he had once thought it provided 'a little ease'. T h e two contrasted passages of imagery work upon a very deep level of feeling. In the flower passage, it is indubitable that we respond, and that he did, to symbolisms immemorially ancient, not only feeling life in essence symbolized peculiarly by the moment of blossoming (promise of fruit, not fruit), but equally feeling the necessity of giving over to death these symbols of life-to-be-born-of-death. This is far from being Life' where sit the angelic Sons of Light. He was probably having the idea; symbolic images grow slowly, like all ideas involving complicated relationships of much experience. T h e relations hold so solidly, as with a kind of inner truth, that we can as it were see them coming—this characteristic I believe Milton would have referred not to his originating mind but to the structure of 'reality'; perhaps such revealing (Invention, uncovering) is what one asks for from a 'Heavenly' Muse.

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unrelated to the dear might of him that walk'd the waves. It is also indubitable that part of the valid sense of assuagement which human beings feel in symbolic actions that assert the continuity of life despite the fact of death does disappear when the action is not possible. This did not make nonsense of the symbol. It made another form of the assertion more consoling, and to that Milton proceeded. He proceeded by way of another of those passages—here, the body under the whelming tide—of imagery like direct experience of the reality of death( decay, evil, impermanence). Throughout the poem these bitter tides meet, and are drowned in, the fullflowing stream of symbolized life, faithfulness, creativity, eternal flowering, earthly and heavenly pity, aid, sacrifice and love. T h e vision in heaven, his last such answer to the inimical principle in all its forms—for that is the theme of Lycidas —touches the 'tender stops' of all these various Quills, and when the singer's 'eager thought' is closed in the tranquil light of an ordinary dying day human life is once again 'fresh Woods, and Pastures new', a harmony accepted, hopeful, and dear. It is now possible to see with more exactness and force that we disturb and nullify this entire design of images that discuss meaning and destiny in the universe when we import into pastoral even subconsciously that special and quite recent way of thinking which takes 'Man' out of 'Nature'. T h e very ground of the imagery in pastoral writing is the integrity of the great fabric of created nature, and a chief contribution of reading to saturation in Milton's predecessors and fellows is a posture of the mind, an immediate and unreflecting readiness to feel this assumption true. If Ruskin's term, 'pathetic fallacy', accurately represents our subconscious presuppositions, it is folly to expect understanding of this poetry except in ways which stand coldly outside it. T h e very simplest form of imagery which assumes a living tie between all creatures including man is used sparingly by Milton, but he uses com-

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plicated forms of it at every point in his poem. Such complications of structure and feeling as I have touched on are erected upon the same assumption that gives us the simple 'Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves, With wild Thyme and the gadding Vine o'regrown, And all their echoes mourn'. Why do the woods mourn for human deaths in pastoral poems? the vines lament in their untended wildness? Several accustomed meanings of such images provide for Milton the very conceptions of the universal order without which others of his great metaphorical figures could not move and work. I speak from examples. Other natural things mourn with men in pastorals for the death of the Orphean singer, of the order-bringer, the one who teaches men and quiets animals and prunes vines and moves rocks (all four the same thing), of the theologue who knows the nature of the creator and preserver of life—all those he delights and all those he instructed mourn; they mourn for the protector and helper, the Wise Shepherd; they mourn for the death of their peace, because thorns choke growth, and sterility and drought possess the land where death has intruded. 'The Shepherd' is poet and priest, certainly, but these figure forth, being shepherds, something more still. Especially this is true as Christian ideas transmuted the ancient ideas and extended them; man brought in death, as 'shepherd' he helps to mend it. We have not finished reading when we read how Marot's Loyse, la bergère de paix, had wisdom to protect 'Contre le temps obscur et pluvieux'—and see its reference to troublous persecutions. Or when we read Alamanni's 'Ahi quanto con ragion piangon . . . e greggi' for that if the shepherd had remained alive their young might be safe from rapaci pastor e feri lupi—and see therein a reference to why he mourned Cosimo Rucellai. T h e universal use of figurative terms from the pastoral life for these literal historical meanings makes our history itself present to us much profounder

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significances of storm and wild ravager, and we read constantly in pastoral of two worlds, both that of our particular human disasters and that which we can organize only through our symbols of a Waste Land, of Garden given over to thorns, Harmony become chaos—and, of the Garden of Adonis, the Earthly Paradise, and the perfect music of the spheres. When Boccaccio's Olympia says, 'All of us who are created in the woodlands are born to death', she speaks in the language of pastoral as well as in Dante's metaphor, and of the whole vast universe of created things. When Milton writes (PL ix. 782) how at the instant of Eve's deed 'Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, T h a t all was lost', and how the roses of Adam's garland faded as they dropped, he says what the pastoral woods mourn for. For the flaw, and mourn again for all who die mending it. T h e harmony among the creatures is by no means necessarily pagan even when its terms are so; the point around which the matter turns is rather whether the metaphors which express it are believed or not. Figures which adumbrate it use the so-called pathetic fallacy as their natural language, but they mean what they say. Such language neither denies a hierarchy among creatures nor a special tie between man and divinity; its giving man's form of sentience or will or pathos to other creatures is a metaphorical way of putting unity not identity. 20 T h e phrase that makes pastoral trivial is 'a mere metaphor'. For, as pastoral developed, all its greater figures clearly call for the kind of reading termed 'allegorical', and 20 Nor is the unity in a sympathetic harmony contradicted by the famous figure of the 'riddle' of man's short earthly life (his never coming again contrasted with the cyclical renewal of other creatures); Man is no more seen as outside 'Nature' because he does not sprout again like the tree than the tree is fallaciously made 'Man' when the metaphor of human responses (it sighs, mourns) is used. T h e conceptions really antipathetic to these ways of thinking and using language are nominalistic conceptions of metaphor, or naturalistic or positivistic conceptions of what meanings can be real. Milton did not share them.

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such reading is only possible to men who believe that metaphor does present the real. Milton of course did not 'write an allegory' in Lycidas. T h e phrase is f r u i t f u l of misconceptions; 'allegorically' refers primarily to a way of understanding, reading, a thing. Proof that this way had become habitual and secular lies in what men wrote, over several hundred years and extending well into Milton's time and to his own work. An allegoria is a figure asking such reading for its comprehension, and a whole poem can be one, b u t Lycidas is not. And we find in it few of the most usual sort—moral allegories; we have n o t been reading tropologically, and the chief wisdom in Lycidas has little directly to do with 'how men should act'. Much of the classical imagery of Christian pastorals asks to be read allegorically in the stricter mediaeval sense, for classical figures retain their truth in being read as types of a later revelation. T h e r e would be some truth in saying that the Middle Ages made of classical literature one great old testament, for the New Dispensation is with little sense of displacement read in the figures of an older shadowed truth; so read, man sees from it 'what to believe', as readily and truly as one could from reading the great book of the universe itself. And, one might add, as uncalculatingly, unself-consciously, and delightfully, for the forms in which we are meeting these habits of mind are only solemn because they are elegiac; no Planned Movement was needed to 'save the classics' in the eras we speak of, and a good deal of exuberant gaiety accompanies the mediaeval and Renaissance pleasure in plurality of meanings. Reading allegorically for moral meanings merged with the stricter kind, and as Dante pointed out in the Letter to Can Grande, all these functions fall together in the supreme distinction between literal and figurative ('allegorical'). Pastoral early isolated itself as a genre which by reason of a basic figure for presenting universal harmonies and discords was fundamentally and formally 'continued figure'; the largely

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mediaeval development toward historical allegory and satire in disguise was an expectable result, and M i l t o n builds images on all these accepted forms of indirection. T h e use of a n a g o g y — w h i c h is writing that when read figuratively yields ideas of ultimate destiny, of the eschatological, of the other w o r l d — i s equally natural to the form. Milton uses it for just the function it serves in his predecessors: to express in symbols the ultimate triumph of life over death. Such imagery is archetypal wherever we find it; the soul's home is that place where the conditions of our exile d o not obtain. T h e place where Harmony, Love, Peace (all the same) are not threatened by Discord or Mutability or Death (all one enemy) is an otherworld where the details of music and growing things and endless spring and living waters simply tell over and over the same tale of the conquest of that one unconquerable flaw whence spring all the others. In Milton's anagogical figure for the complete victory of that principle which he has shadowed forth in all the consolations throughout his poem, the terms are largely Christian, and one Christian symbol, a usual one, is basic—the marriage between the human soul and Heavenly Love. H e does not choose to use the symbol of L i g h t save in the reference to the saints 'in their glory', and his simile of the Sun (which like Lycidas rises from the waters to flame in the forehead of the m o r n i n g sky) is probably not to be symbolically extended. 2 1 A t any rate he 2 1 Of course it speaks metaphorically of resurrection, life born of death; but it is difficult in fact to tell whether it includes what we might well expect: that it rose again because it sank into the water. T h e r e are many difficulties with it as a naturalistically based rebirth symbol (familiar as this must have been to Milton, since natural-philosophy meanings offer one of the commonest forms of allegorical interpretation throughout Middle Ages and Renaissance). Among these difficulties are the emphasized literal meaning in line 167 ('Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar'; there is no special rebirth for the drowned); and the immediate other symbolic use of water in 'walk'd the waves'. T h e unextended simile (as ostensibly written) avoids what I should call a true incongruity otherwise present: i.e. that the only Sun-figure large enough for this context would have been God-as-Light. On these old and common images and on the language of other poets in the K i n g volume see

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does not choose to use the great numbers of Earthly Paradise details familiar from Dante, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Marot; in these as in Spenser or Sannazaro the homogeneity of classical and Christian details is assumed, and Milton had himself assumed it in those Latin elegies whose visions of paradise are among the best commentaries upon this in Lycidas. W h e r e symbols are archetypal these differentiating terms lose their meaning. Spenser is not baroque but simply nursed on old habits when he says his Dido 'raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes', but w h e n he calls his paradise the Elisian fields he is, more simply still, just in the right. T h e r e is no incongruity and certainly no surprise in the classical close of Milton's image. T h e close of the poem is properly kept strictly within pastoral bounds in language and imagery, even to the degree of a quite usual final realism in the Coventry-blue of the shepherd's mantle. Restraint and tranquillity are native possessions of writing which by definition shadows further meanings but does not say them. In one last quiet and delicate image of the shepherd, intentionally as well as deceptively pictorial, Milton makes the vast human world which pastoral writing can denote with so economical a pen seem to us that tranquil place which his vision of man's end makes of it. W h a t we call 'pastoral imagery' was a great achievement of the h u m a n imagination. In eighteen centuries no man used it with more power and grace than Milton in Lycidas. R . Wallerstein, Studies pp. 104-105.

in ijth

Century

Poetic

(Madison, 1950), for e x a m p l e

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Milton's own title for what we call 'Cornus' attaches it to a genre which has been dead nearly three hundred years. Dramas, odes, lyrics, sonnets, elegies, and even epics—all Milton's other forms are still written and still read; the masque is not a living form. It is true that students of the period have read a considerable number of masques, 1 but since masques were rather to be seen, and to be heard, even this is rather like saying that a limited number of persons have listened to several other ballets, or read several other operas. This reflection is one to give confidence a salutary shake, when it comes to authors of an era like the seventeenth century, when genre was a factor governing all manner of small and large points of decorum. What was a major factor in determining their style will be a major factor in our understanding it. W e cannot see court masques. But this need not cut us off ι T h a t Professors Percy Simpson and Allan Gilbert, Enid Welsford, D. G. Gordon and certain others have in recent years made something better than this possible and attractive is important to a reader of Comus, even if one mentions here only the superb essay on the form in the Herford and Simpson edition of Ben Jonson (vol. II).

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from quite all the pleasures which a taste for them adds to Comns. What we perceive through an awakened sympathy toward the form is—no small point—that the nature of the genre governs the kind of relation between abstraction and the concrete in a masque. This relation is the heart and secret of an image. Of course it is obvious that a masque has imagery which is visual in a special way, the element of spectacle being used as a component actually necessary to convey part of the figurative meaning of an action that is not acceptable literally. Although we might say with some truthfulness, 'less is lost by reading, instead of seeing, Lear, than Comus', we should rather say that something different is lost. Comus—who is an image, for this is not a play—is partly understood through the eye, the antimasque dancing is an important completion of images verbally commenced, the brightly lit banquet scene is part of the posing of light against darkness (op-position, not conflict). Usually we only read 'Noble Lord, and Lady bright . . .' with its image of 'triumph in victorious dance O're sensual Folly, and Intemperance', and no one now can be part of a function where the three children dance before their parents the continuation and conclusion of this Song—itself a musical image of the action's outcome, recalled in free and swelling cadences by the voice of the Attendant Spirit. If we have watched the motionless Lady as a 'prison'd soul', unable to make any movement other than speech, we are ready to see in these free dancing figures an image of what 'Heav'n it self has stooped to protect, the ordered Freedom conjoined with light of the many abstract statements concerning Virtue. But these are simple points, close neighbors to those additions made by the inward eye of any trained reader 'staging' any read drama, or related to our realization that no sung lyric may be quite understood without its music. This last reservation holds for all the songs, which are portions always rich in imagery, and especially for the Lady's

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Echo song. Since two large images are given to the effect of the latter, in speeches by Comus and by the Spirit, it is the more possible to be specific about some aspects of the music's contribution to the effect of images, with these for examples. It is chiefly hearing the music which makes us share the judgement and thence concur regarding the significance which these two hearers of the Lady's song point out. T h e y do so through subtly phrased images which differ only within their similarity; these are not concert-room flatteries of the Lady Alice's voice, but precise judgements of the song's qualities qua music. Even ill-managed, the young voice singing those words to that music would be for us an image of what the Elder Brother is to speak of: 'noble grace that dash't brute violence With sudden adoration, and blank aw' (450). W e should have seen the protection afforded by the armor of Diana work, upon Comus, before the Elder Brother ever proclaims his trust in the sacred rays of Chastity, and would have felt that no other armor could be so fitly eulogized for fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton. 2 It is musically accurate that even Circe's son sees the difference in her kind of music— lapping prison'd souls (even her victim Scylla) in a false Elysium, 'in sweet madnes' robbed of themselves. His words after the Lady's song, 'He speak to her And she shall be my Queen', show as Milton's usual (and very Spenserian) emphasis on the perverted, not the rejecting, response of the impure to the beauty of the pure. 'That might create a soul Under the ribs of Death' is the Spirit's phrase for this attracting 2 Under 'the circumstances'—which are to be forgotten in plays, remembered in masques—the unsubstantial strength of untouched purity is certainly a better vehicle for Milton's symbolizing of the strength to be trusted in by this endangered creature in the dark wood of the world than Fortitude's shield or Prudence's serpent, and a quality in the singer is re-enforced by a quality in the song, a pure clarity as of light. Commentary on the music may be found in the edition by Visiak and Foss, 1937, and in W i l l a Evans, Henry Lawes (New York, 1941), ch. v. See also E. Haun's 'An Inquiry into the Genre of Comus', with relevant citations I do not repeat (Essays in Honor of W. C. Curry, Nashville, 1954).

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power; 'smoothing the Raven doune Of darknes till it smil'd' is Comus's (560, 250; these are like another famous instant when a dark force is momentarily 'stupidly good', and Comus had that first moment too). This power, which here has little to do with sentiment but much with musical form, needs to be felt by us before it is described. Without the music, though affected by youth and beauty in straits, we are scarcely persuaded of certain ideas that are to become important, but with it we are; it is heard as integral part and completion of the second speech after the riotous antimasque, and stands out frail but clear against the ironic fact of the hidden listening Comus. In forgetting Lawes's part in Comus as an artistic whole we do not copy the masque's author. It is in subtler ways than these, however, that the genre of the piece has most affected the imagery of Comus. Masques, as a kind, are inescapably symbolical. T h e peculiar relation borne by the work of art to real happenings and meanings— symbolized, rather than described, or dramatically viewed— is borne by the action itself, by what we call in a play the plot. Masques do not have plots, but designs, 'devices'. Jonson's words are better than any: 'Upon this hinge, the whole Invention moov'd'. He concludes thus in his Preface to Chloridia, 1630. When Her Majesty had purposed a presentation to the King, 'It was agreed, it should be the celebration of some Rites, done to the Goddesse Chloris, who . . . was proclaim'd Goddesse of the flowers'; by a decree from Jupiter she 'was to be stellified on Earth', because he 'would have the Earth to be adorn'd with starres, as well as the Heaven'. This 'hinge' is a good example of the fact that a masque's device is (as its name emphasizes) itself a figure; here it is a large and simple, but metaphorical, identification of living persons with the symbolical personages of myth (the Queen of course comes down with her stars, her ladies the masquers, to adorn and fructify England). What corresponds to plot is thus provided, and largely out of the listeners'

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minds, for these symbolisms were familiar to the cultivated audience—the only kind masques had. Although both a morality and a masque dramatize an idea, in the device of the latter the datum is an idea comprised in a figure. Everyman to be sure becomes, as we read, a vast figurative statement about man's earthly sojourn and its end, but it is figurative in that, universalizing it, we read of ourselves and all men in a pure moral allegory (which I prefer to call by its ancient name, tropology, to avoid certain confusions we shall notice). Comus, like many other masques, shares this character of 'moral allegory', but initially by virtue of its device, a myth which is figurative in other ways though it also had come to have a certain moral-allegorical force to everyone. 3 Most masque devices are basically an extension or unanticipated exploitation of some myth; they use the great known figures—the Golden Age, the Isles of the Blessed, the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, Eros and Astraea and Venus and Hymen and Diana. T h e y start out as great Images or speaking pictures and are by definition figures given 'application'. This is the first respect in which the relation of abstraction to concrete vehicle is determined by the nature of the genre. Upon the great hinge of the Circe-Comus myth Milton's whole invention moves; out of its known connoted meanings the pervasive imagery of light and darkness springs quite naturally, and this is elaborated with the greatest originality by Milton, with conceptual refinements and extensions impossible to a lesser genius. Another aspect of the relation which obtains in masques between abstraction and the concrete is more peculiar; so 3 N o one looking at the history of sixteenth-century drama could deny a close relation between morality play and masque, but differences will become apparent as we proceed. W h e n Comus is too strictly related to the moralities, the sequel is usually either condemnation of or apology for Milton's narrow asceticism. T h i s word might fit Comus, read purely tropologically, but its allegory is so written as to ask a further reading, and it will not stay in the category.

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astonishing it is, in fact, that I do not believe it can be understood other than historically, for in this pure form it flourished and died with the court masque. One can think of no other genre that exhibits it, and pleasure in it is a learned response. Certain ones of the characters are not characters but masquers; they are not court personages acting parts in a play, but have, as themselves, been written into a dramatic piece, and play in it without ceasing to be themselves. In Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 1618, the twelve Masquers are the companions, literally as well, of the Prince of Wales, son of Hesperus, with whom they appear suddenly out 'from ye Lap o f the mountain Atlas who had bred them u p in all knowledge. When Virtue gives them entrance to the Garden of the Hesperides, and Daedalus instructs them in ways through the three Labyrinths of men's actions, of beauty, and of love (which three mazeful ways they dance out), they are at once these mythical persons and themselves as English courtiers, and when they enter the Garden (Hesperus the King looking on from his 'State') it is to dance with the ladies of the court who indeed did daily present them with the labyrinthine mazes of amorous intrigue for which they needed Daedalus' tutoring. T h e young courtiers who in Jonson's Vision of Delight are 'the glories of the Spring', sons of Favonius, not only personate but are, shining in favor, the glories of the spring of 1617, soon on its way. Or compare the pyramid of young men in Shirley's Triumph of Peace, dressed as silver 'terms' or pillars with heads; they are explained by 'a Genius or angelical person' who speaks to the King in person—Ί . . . here present you with your own'. Being created by the King's virtue they are without life until, at the moment the Genius says 'That very look into each eye Hath shot a soul', they break into movement, and dance before the King. These young men are their literal selves, Gentlemen of the four Inns of Court, and equally they are the King's means of

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'keeping' that very Law and Justice (Eunomia, Diche) who have just come down to his earthly realm and danced, and they are his way of 'ordering' that Peace (Irene) whose triumphant chariot we have just watched descend in a cloud.4 There is no jerk back to 'reality' when the Attendant Spirit turns from blessing the brimmed waves of Sabrina to 'Com Lady . . . not many furlongs thence Is your Fathers residence'. For the friends there 'met in state' are present for the same reason as the masquers who hasten to 'double all their mirth and chere' by joining them; all are met 'to gratulate His wish't presence'—that is, to share in the whole masque's 'occasional' raison d'être. And the perplex't paths of the drear Wood in which his children lost their way have been the enchanted woods in which men meet Evil without ever ceasing to be the woods of Shropshire. The odd but definite pleasure we take in the double reality of scenes and of persons in a masque is simply a variant upon the usual pleasure in metaphor, where two ways of seeing things to be 'true' are constantly and delightfully present, and yet seen as one. When Thyrsis answers 'my young Lord' and the Second Brother interrupts with "tis my father Shepherd sure', he says what every listener knew, that Lawes was musician in the Egerton household, and this does not in the least disturb the 'belief we and the listeners gave to the figure of an otherworldly guardian of endangered youthful innocence, who states that he takes the likeness of this same swain 'That to the service of this house belongs'. The three young people, 'nurs't in Princely lore' and on their way to * For economy and pleasure I use masques Milton surely knew, and throughout emphasize Jonson for reasons of accessibility (even to noncourtiers) and eminence. Evidence for Milton's knowledge and use of both these Jonson masques is given in Herford and Simpson's Commentary (vol. X) and in II, 305fr.; see also Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 307ft., 314ft. W. Evans, Henry Lawes, pp. 8iff., gives some details on Shirley's masque (with William Lawes's music), in which Henry Lawes took part, as did the Egerton boys, Milton's Elder and Second Brother; given twice in February 1633/4, printed 1633.

Image, Form and T h e m e in A

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wait upon their father's first court and 'new-entrusted Scepter' (36), had 'their youth, Their faith, their patience, and their truth' tried through hard assays, and proving themselves proved Virtue's strength, so that Heav'n has thought fit to 'send them here . . . To triumph' (971) in victorious dance over Folly—the 'device' is all one with the total purpose of the evening's celebration of virtue in her servants, from the 'noble Peer' who is holding his first 'state' as Lord President of 'An old, and haughty Nation' on down through all those whose 'revels' are an extension (after the manner of masques) of the full meaning of the piece. 5 When 'the Scene changes' from the wood to 'Ludlow T o w n and the Presidents Castle' we are not fetched back from this other world of ideas; we have been in both all the time. Sabrina was to everyone present the neighboring river they knew, which watered that westward-looking tract on the border of which the whole action is specifically set, and which, moreover, Lord Bridgewater has in charge from the god of all waters and island kingdoms. Hence she has not only maidènliness and that 'local propriety' Warton notes but with triple fitness joins her assistance to that of the other non-human or superhuman figures whose allegiance is given to such human creatures as share their virtuous nature. She is no less the actual Severn, for all that.® T h e Lady does not represent but presents virtue, and s T h e evening ball ('revels') is of course normally enclosed within the masque proper, with the final speeches kept until, after the listeners' dancing, they close at once both the action and the evening. Since a masque always honors someone, this peculiar unity of participating groups, one 'assisting' as at a ritual, bears resemblance to something we know chiefly in services of worship. Certainly it makes for differences from the ordinary play that the 'audience' should be thus within the image or device. β She has other meanings to be noticed later. T h e kind of pleasure given by Milton's mythologizing of the local landscape where his literal action is taking place is given amusingly in reverse in the antimasque added by Jonson to his Pleasure Reconciled, to Virtue, and called 'For the Honour of Wales' (the Prince was chief masquer). Here Welsh speakers produce comedy by taking the masque's figures literally. T h e y put forward a string of Welsh mountains as tall and of as good 'standing' and 'discent' as 'the prowdest Adlas christned', suggest that Owen Glendower would do 'very better, and

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presents it in that one of its aspects most suitable to her literal self, for she does not cease to be Alice Egerton though she is equally the human spirit partially in the power of insidious evil. Such a dramatic kind, in which some of the 'characters' are both their fictive and their literal selves, and in which imagery consistently functions to point this out, could not develop ripely, I suppose, except at such a period of history as this; an audience thoroughly accustomed to taking things allegorically occurred contemporaneously with a social situation that called for elaborate works of courtly compliment. 7 I have emphasized the topical references because it is so easy to forget the special piquancy of the pleasure they afforded; few literary genres provide poets with a situation in which double entendres are at every moment possible and expected. Some are moving, some gay.8 In these two ways, then—the central controlling figure as a 'hinge' upon which the whole invention moved, and the constantly possible double reference to two equally but differently real worlds—the nature of the genre strongly influenced the writer's choice and use of imagery. T h a t it is not a representative example of its form one would grant, but it came late. However, it is not only longer and more comprehensive twice as well' as Hercules, and maintain that there 'is a thousand place in Wales as finely places as the Esperides every crum of him'. 7 Unless the piece is simply a poor one, judgements on masques which take offense at the 'adulation' of their 'courtly flattery' show misreading of imagery. For masque devices do not just fasten sets of classical or abstract names upon James or Charles or Anne; they turn all the latter (as Milton turns his Lady) into figures for the virtues, powers or situations presented. Meanwhile the persons retained their literal validity and complexity. 8 Further examples are: Comus's 'Hail forren wonder', certainly not bred in 'these rough shades', 264; the Lady's thrusts at tapestry halls and courts of Princes, 323; Comus roving the Celtic and Iberian fields and at last betaking himself to the new Lord President's Welsh marches; Thyrsis-Lawes's pastoral tasks and Orphean powers; the Lady's condemnation of pampered L u x u r y ; the local description in the Sabrina scene. Serious meanings are merely salted by such fleeting double flavors. But Comus is not so bleakly grave a piece as some read it. It is deeply serious at its center.

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like other Caroline examples, but also deeper and more permanently intelligible. Milton touched no form that he did not remould, yet he did this from within, working on the basis of a profound and respectful knowledge of the essential nature—but also of the full capacities—of ode, elegy, epic or masque. Certain other influences I shall mention rather in the form of expectations which we form as readers of masques, each with its important corollaries touching the imagery of Comus. As one follows the other, we shall see most of the famous complaints about the piece fall away, for when the imagery is rightly read A Mask comes close to the perfection of Lycidas. Given the genre, we expect pastoral elements in the action, and the pastoral imagery is neither artifice nor falsity. We expect (indeed must demand) allegory, and images allegorically read are the heart of the piece. We expect debate, not 'drama'. We are meant to listen, which causes Dr. Johnson to complain, 'without anxiety'—but not 'without passion', for in each of the two major debates we see the figuring forth of clearly opposed mental positions which do not conflict in any stage personality because we ourselves are that personality; the Lady (though imperfect) does not here hesitate and 'choose', we do. So with the Elder as against the Second Brother; and this is the proper nature of a contest carried on by opposing image to image, which is neither opposing idea to idea, nor personality to personality. As 'personalities', these are the three Egertons, and Comus (unlike Iago, or Satan) is not given such being. We expect the instructive, and if we find that 'tedious' must avoid the form—yet surely it is tedious only to those who miss the figurative nature of the whole invention and, hence, mistake a revelation for a struggle and symbolic detail for splendor of decoration. We expect some great simple contrast between Vice and Virtue; we expect some such expositor and guide of the action as the Attendant Spirit, expect long speeches, expect mythological

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personages used to convey Christian ideas like that of grace, expect archetypal amplitude and simplicity in the basic figures, expect even stichomythia. W e experience the fulfillment of all these expectations in Comus with delight, excitement, and surprise. T h e pastoral aspect of Comus may seem at first not to have been structurally inevitable, a mere habitual varnish. It has been joined, in some critics, to certain petulant denigrations of Spenser. It is instructive to read Comus with an eye to what Milton could do only because Spenser had written. For one thing, he had as contemporary audience those only who had read and understood the great Spenserian images. It is in this area of the possibilities and use of the larger structural figures that we come upon one of Milton's greatest debts to his predecessor; his way of using the pastoral is a related but minor debt. True, it is in the most obviously pastoral section of Comus, on Sabrina, that he honors Spenser as the truest poet 'that ere pip't' (822), and he speaks of what he has learned from this 'Meliboeus' under the name of the noble old apologist for the shepherd's life in Spenser's pastoral Book, VI. T h e poetic habits shown in this whole complex of imagery—the river myth and the use made of it, the fit relation to the symbolical Neptune figure, the way of handling the conventional masque motif of a disenchantment, the quality of language and picture, the epithetic economy of the invocation with its charm-like succession of mythical persons recalled with a single 'tinsel-slipper'd . . . wrincled look . . . lovely hands'—these are pastoral and Spenserian habits, but others had them. In these and other connections it is the pastoral imagery and pastoral incident of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess which strike us, as do portions of Browne's Inner Temple Masque, as having the very tone and movement we hear in parts of Comus. Fletcher, dealing with the nature of chaste fidelity in a context which aims primarily at defining love (through the inter-action of those who impersonate vari-

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ous forms or deformities of it), can even furnish us with a touchstone by which to discern the very real differences of all these English pieces from Tasso's Aminta, though that has been declared 'the real model' for Comus.9 T h i s comparative exercise would re-emphasize a principle fundamental for study of imagery: that comparable images accompany comparable 'causes', themes, temper, conceptions of the range of a subject. Fletcher and Browne and Spenser (FQ III and II) all concern themselves with questions which are central in Comus. Accordingly, Milton's greater debt to Spenser is to these latter Books, though they are not pastoral. Milton's great controlling device, the Circe-Comus figure, is involved with pastoral by historical development not by origin (and is not pastoral in F Q II for example), and for the first 70 or 80 lines of his Attendant Spirit's opening speech we may think he is simply going to be Homeric-Christian, in good Renaissance fashion, moving from Jove's starry threshold to the seats where sit the crowned saints, from Neptune to Wales, from daemon to guardian angel, in the way to which his predecessors have accustomed both him and us. He does not choose to follow his main image into the companion figure of the Earthly Paradise (the Fortunate Isles, the Garden of Venus) to which it was so commonly allied, as in Spenser, Tasso, Ariosto, and of which Jonson's Hesperidean Garden in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue is a variant. What he does do is no more of a surprise than that would have been, for pastoral imagery had found a natural home in the masque. Nymphs, satyrs, Silenus, Pan, Flora, 'sylvans', graces, sea9 By Praz, in 'Milton and Poussin', Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), p. 202. These two pieces cannot but differ stylistically as they do, having such dissimilar subjects; neither takes up what is the chief issue in the other. Similarly, Peele's Old Wives' Tale cannot illuminate for us any character or image in Comus, and earlier emphasis upon it exemplifies how deceptively the noting of parallel situations or storymotifs can deflect 'source' study. Browne of course has the special similarity of a parallel in the initial metaphorical 'device'.

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sons, Geniuses of woods and fountains, are there our expected companions, as they are also in the nearest neighboring small kind, the 'entertainment', where they often have more structural point. The way to praise James on his birthday is to write of Pan's Anniversary (by Jonson, 1620) and make him leader, singer, hunter, protector, shepherd par excellence. Arthurian or chivalric romance materials are pastoralized (see Jonson's Oberon, 1611), as they had long been in fiction and poetry; we think of such links in Drayton's Pastorals and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, or of Sidney's Arcadia, especially of the pastoral games which close the Books. T h e reasons for the affinity between masque device and pastoral imagery are not alone those of literary history, date, fashion, fitness for 'scene' and production, common classical origin. They are alike with respect to their metaphorical base. In the pastoral as a kind, that easy interaction between mythical or semi-mythical beings and actual human characters, noticed above as essential to the masque, had been maintained time out of mind. An Attendant Daemon is no stranger to a pastoral. The commingling of heavenly story and specific human situation is usual; topical reference is the very hallmark of the genre, and all the variations of allegorical double meaning are known to it. Pastoral's greatest hold upon the imagination of its users and readers proved to be that sense of unifying harmony between all creatures of 'Nature', human or not, which is the foundation of the socalled pathetic fallacies. When these are not vulgarized or ineptly parroted by insensitive poetasters, they are not fanciful 'humanizing' of unsentient things; they are figures of speech by which non-human things are meant to express a total natural sympathy, for which expression we sentient beings have no mode but the sentient. 10 T o such figures, and with them all the Geniuses of streams and places, the chaste 10 This metaphorical aspect of pastoral imagery is more carefully treated in the essay on Lycidas. It is not Wordsworthian.

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Sabrinas and mourning dryads, it is almost impossible to respond, with immediacy, at our moment of history; that Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth century felt their truth seems to me clear from their literature—and quite consonant with both their classicism and their theology. Pastoral figures could not stay pagan. Secular they often remained, yet, when a work takes on seriousness, nothing is more common than that the pastoral images begin to show as informed with Christian feeling; they need not be Biblical in order to work in a poem as support for Christian moral or ontological assumptions. Such remarks do not take entire care of the figure of the Attendant Spirit; he is pastoral as a disguise, ostensibly, and is many other things besides. But the pastoral element, perhaps initially brought into Comus for him, slips into it (by way of the imagery) the usual pastoral conception of a strong web of support provided for human goodness of various kinds by the very existence of a harmonious natural order. There is a kind of common front of all natural things; 11 all unperverted nature stands with the human creatures against the dark forces of unnatural, ¿ritemperate (tòharmony. T h e wood is 'hideous' because it is enchanted, taken over. T h e Lady calls upon Echo, the mountain and water nymph and favorite of pastorals, lover of human creatures and revealer of the lost. T o Echo is nightly addressed the nightingale's lament, that singer who is the type of all that have lost those they love ('And O poor hapless Nightingale', the Spirit is later to say of the Lady singing, 565); for answering, 11 T o avoid complications, I have not brought in here the uses made of disturbances to this harmony (see p. 147 of this essay). Obscure connections with unnatural evil are felt in such images—from the 'bleak unkindly' (against nature) Fog, that stops growth or the mere 'urchin blasts' and 'shrewd medling Elfe', to the ill-intentioned 'inchanted lies, And rifted Rocks whose entrance leads to Hell' (268, 845, 516). Though 'such there be', the malevolence is not ascribed to their nature, like the benevolence. One should note that the line is not sharp between 'pastoral' (real sheep) images and others which happen likewise to give beneficent sentience to natural things; use of the latter will give a 'pastoral' temper to works not in the genre.

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Echo will be 'translated' like the saints to echo forever as they do the songs of love in Heaven. The entire Sabrina scene, as well as the Spirit's prior explanations of her protective care and of the shepherds' grateful tributes thrown into Severn's smooth and healing stream, elaborates upon the same pastoral conception of a concord which makes both natural and heavenly protectors available to the virtuous human creature in misfortune or in danger. 12 Image after image has this function; nature, like heaven, watches over its own, and loves in all creatures the image of its own virtue. The answer to Comus's fraudulent 'naturalism' does not end with the Lady's speeches to him. That chastity should be a 'natural' virtue of the Lady presents in this respect no problem; Comus's stereotype of an Earth-mother or a Venus genetrix for great all-encompassing Natura (one he shares with some moderns who find him convincing) is shown to be as insufficient as his cliché of plenitude 'naturally' inviting excess is illogical. The Lady's plea to Echo for other-than-human (but natural) assistance is to be obliquely if too tardily answered by the following action. But it is part of the pattern of ironic disordering of things that her song brings to her 'aid' Comus, the sorcerer and disturber of nature's ordered ways. So also, the Spirit's assuming of 'the Weeds and likenes of a Swain' (best fitted to the task of safe convoy which high Jove has assigned him, 81) is given an ironic faked parallel a hundred lines later, by Comus's so distorting the Lady's vision that to her he appears in the weeds and likeness of a swain, whom she 12 This does not contradict or otherwise interfere with an interpretation of the symbolism of water as connected with divine grace; see p. 152 of this essay. One symbolism does not destroy another—that is, not unless the meanings they assist us to grasp are in conflict, and in such a case an author with a conscience will have muted one symbolic possibility and magnified the other. The necessity for this second kind of congruence is our chief brake against a tempting and very familiar abuse in the reading of symbolic imagery, but symbolisms may be very incongruent as to provenance without leading us to draw in meanings that injure or refuse to cohere with those clearly indicated.

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addresses as 'gentle Shepherd' and accepts as convoy—already partly blinded by the magic dust. 13 So also, Comus's definitions of Nature and of her manifest intentions constitute a travesty of the true unity that holds all creatures together interdependent within one harmonious order, so that it is a parody of 'Nature' that asks the Lady to substitute ravin, presumptuous self-love and indulgence for those 'sober laws' which she claims are the intent of 'most innocent nature'. Images play their part in this contrast between definitions of 'Nature', from the beginning. Of course particulars pinpoint the illogicality of definitions of the natural, in Comus's argument (the most amusing example being that eminently unnatural drink, 'the clear stream', indulged in by petulant man in a fit of priggish ungratefulness). But much more important is the fact that previous images (especially pastoral ones) have given us a different conception of nature, against which Comus's sophistical definitions appear as contrast, before the Lady ever speaks. T h e physical presence of the rabble—not beasts but perverted Men and Women, 'Monsters'—is not always felt, when reading, as a constant comment on the truth of Comus's lines about Nature; that visual presence goes some distance toward making 'sober laws' look rather more natural and attractive, more humanely dignified, than they commonly do. T h e strain Milton is later to sound so often, that evil works by assuming the very form and reasons of the good, charming first the eye and then the judgment, is sounded so clearly in is T h e irony was marked to the eye. Comus's 'quaint habits' were far from pastoral, and Milton has him comment on their suspiciousness. All the images that occur within the irony are affected by it—a quiet example is the Lady's remark about where true courtesy is less soon found and most pretended, made to a true 'Prince' himself, more's the pity. And there is some comedy in this unshepherd-like personage claiming that he is so early about as to anticipate the lark getting up from her thatch't pallat, considering his preceding lascivious descriptions of Night and Morning. With several images thus enacting a brazenly open deception, the Lady's five-times-repeated address shows her as partially giving herself into the power of evil.

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Comus that it is hard to see why there has been so much comment on the attractiveness of Comus, as if this were unintended. It is a deliberate part of the imagery's truth to life as we know it that Fraud acts as like Jove's messengers as it can —to start with. T h a t very pastoral disguise, so natural and so reasonable, which the Attendant Spirit took on that he might succeed, Comus takes on and does succeed—so long, that is, as hypocrisy is all he need add to the magic dust which is a masque's way of indicating delusions the virtuous reason could not counter. Men cannot be enabled by virtue always to see through to the true nature of that which, without other sign of evil, simply says it is other than it is; hypocrisy is a vice in the creature seen, not in the judgement behind the seeing eye—which is faulty b u t not guilty—and U n a could not recognize Archimago, nor Uriel Satan. Both 'shepherds' in Comus are followed. W h e n Thyrsis' and 'the Villager's' different ends begin to show themselves and give to Comus's advice (as well as to his 'cottage') a character which the virtuous reason is able to see the flaws in, then must the Lady see, by her own 'virtue', the Wolf in the pretended Shepherd she has followed. Thyrsis is a Shepherd. H e came down to be one, and his disguise is his meaning. Nothing could be more useful to Milton than this pastoral imagery which can move easily from literal to metaphorical sense and back again, and tacitly make these discriminations. They are not subtleties which ask for reflection, a turning back to study out, or analysis (until we attempt to restate them); they enter the mind, at least the mind accustomed to pastorals, through eye and ear, swift as the sparkle of a glancing star. But it is the mind they enter. Milton's structural use of the pastoral tradition has thus a quite magnificent economy, and it is this, not its occurrence, that gives surprise. One other delightful virtue should be remarked. It is so astonishingly neat. Now appears what a stroke of wit it was to put Lawes the Attendant Spirit into the disguise which, in its accepted metaphorical sense, was his

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actual position in respect to his interlocutors. T h e Orpheus image, comfortably domiciled of course in both pastoral and masque, is compliment to Lawes (86, cf. 493), and what lighthearted compliment! There is of course none of the easy condescension to his father's musician which one critic finds in the Elder Brother's talk of strayed sheep; Pan and Christ watched sheep. It causes trouble when one runs in and out of a pastoral metaphor's meaning thus. But part of the pleasure of metaphor is that meanings literally true remain as really part of the situation as what is being metaphorically said, and the Second Brother's ' 'tis my father Shepherd sure' is charming because the number of ways in which it was and it wasn't his Father's Shepherd both amuses us and startles us into insight. A similar pleasure in the mere suitability of the pastoral imagery to the actual setting of this masque, simpler than the double entendres we noticed earlier, frequently shows through the slighter traditionally pastoral touches: the telling of time by the 'swink't hedger', and the ox (a superlative Virgilian English ox), the brothers picking grapes (a likely story; Comus's), the loose unletter'd Hinds that 'thank the gods amiss' (these 'late Wassailers' of whom the Lady fears to ask her way are the Shropshire drunks of Michaelmas 1634, and that the voices of Comus's retinue can be mistaken for their 'swill'd insolence' is a wry compliment to Gryllus's lost letters), the benighted brothers' wish that they could see some rush candle's 'long levell'd rule of streaming light' from a shepherd's hut, or even hear the flocks in their wattled cotes. Seventeenth-century rural England, where their author expected these lines to be heard when he wrote them, was still pastoral, and still unlighted, and still wooded. But these are extra pleasures. T h e chief virtue of the pastoral figures in Comus is the special decorum with which their full metaphorical force works to carry out the great central device of Circe's powerful son. T h e hinge upon which Milton's whole invention moves is

χ go

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the great and famous allegorical figure of Circe, and he has caught and deepened every important phase of the significance she had borne in the many appearances which had made her one of the best-known symbolical figures of the Renaissance. Milton's originality in extending so many of the clustered multiple significances of Circe to her son we owe partly to the 'occasional' aspect of his piece, to such given conditions as the age and sex of his masquers, and so on. Of course he knew the earlier Comus figures, from Philostratus' Bacchus-like and delicate young man to Jonson's Belly-god and (probably) Puteanus's sensualist, and they are relevant but not limiting. Hence I shall save circumlocutions by speaking here about 'the Circe myth'. Comus, in being her son, is as much the son of Spenser's Acrasia and Ariosto's Alcina as of Servius' and Plutarch's and Gelli's and Vives' and Landino's and Bruno's and Pico's and Conti's Circe. For of course Homer is only the beginning. T h i s essay will provide no sketch of this ancient figure's development, nor yet of its 'meaning'. T h e first can be found elsewhere. 14 Tfee second of these is impossible; no form of paraphrasing poems is more outrageous in the eyes of a student of images, for a poet could himself have eschewed the precariousness of traditional figurative language if he had 'meant' such a capsule-summary as we might make apart from the discussion of his poem. What is possible and pertinent here, however, is an indication of how such knowledge of the history of Comus's central image applies as we read the masque. T h e r e is no doubt of the relevance of the knowledge. i l See Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, Minneapolis, 1932, ch. xiv and cf. ch. ii; Merritt Hughes, 'Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance', Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943), 381399; and such references as are relevant in the Variorum edition of F Q II. I omit direct reference to relations with Plato, to be found here and elsewhere. Bush chooses much the same material as I present from Sandys, and on the background of Renaissance development of mythological images see his first four chapters.

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T h e allegorizing of Circe took place early, 15 and such renowned texts as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy are concerned in it. It long antedates the mythographers of the Renaissance, whom recent researches have taught us to consult if we wish to understand any classical myths used metaphorically by a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century author— and this, not decoration, is commonly their use. But if I quote from two such Renaissance books, one certainly and both probably used elsewhere by Milton, we shall like the Brothers have a sprig of haemony in the hand enabling us to see into the nature of Milton's damned enchanter. Natale Conti's Mythologia16 has a long treatment of Circe (vi. 6), and his conception of her as nature, especially the generative principle in nature, is relevant to Comus's presentation of the usual arguments of Renaissance naturalism (these last are commonplaces, as Bush points out). Conti often, like Bacon, prefers natural-philosophy allegories to 'mystic' or even moral ones; Circe, daughter of the Sun and of Oceanus's daughter, of heat and moisture, which engender physical pleasure, allures men to the indulgence of all intemperate appetites. She tempts each human being according to the character of his special inclinations. I quote here only Conti's is For example in Heraclides Ponticus' Allegoriae; Milton owned this book (Columbia Milton, xvm, 577). T h e story is moralized in Holcot's Moralitates (no. xvi; there were many MSS., and I used the edition of 1586, PBasel). More important are the moralizations of Boethius' Consolation, iv. metre 3. The textual problem is tangled (see Histoire littéraire de la France, X X X V I I , 1936-38), but numerous commentaries, translations with 'gloses', a vast spread of MSS., plentiful editions, early made the Circe story as a Christianized allegory something to be quite taken for granted—with allegorizing of the moly, of Mercury's divine assistance, Ulysses as reason, wisdom, virtue, in the soul, and as man sailing the sea from the orient of his birth to the occident of his death. le This and the extreme numerousness of its editions is so well-known to students of the period that I merely refer to the citations in n. 14 above, adding J . Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940). T h e remarks about reason and the soul come from Conti, tiansl. Montlyard, Mythologie (Lyon, 1612), p. 591. On the use of Conti for the Circe story of the splendid Ballet comique de la reine (1582), see F. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947), esp. pp. 24off.

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definition of the 'beasts' who made up the rabble of Milton's antimasque: 'faculties of the mind conspiring [complottans] with the body's affections and breaking their harmony with reason'—and Reason he sees traditionally enough as the faculty that makes human beings approach the divine nature, being creatures with souls divine and immortal by the grace of God. Sandys's famous commentary (1632) on Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book xiv) refers to both Servius and Conti, in the three or four lengthy pages that are of special interest and convenience to the student of Comus. A f t e r his habit, he eclectically provides the 'naturall sence of this fable', the other 'philosophical!' senses, and gives authorities. . . . Ulysses could not loose his shape with the rest, who being fortifyed by an immortali power, was not subict to mutation. For the divine and coelestiall soule, subsisting through the bounty of the Creator, can by no assault of nature be violated, nor can that bee converted into a beast, which so highly participates of reason . . . [Circe is daughter of Sol and Persis in that lust proceeds from heat and moisture; and luxury, getting] the dominion, deformes our soules with all bestial vices, alluring some to inordinate Venus; others to anger, cruelty, and every excesse of passion . . . [Circe's charms] are not to bee resisted, but by the divine assistance, Moly, the guift of Mercury, which signifies temperance. So the fortitude and wisedome of Ulisses, preserves him in the midst of vices. . . [Some of his companions are destroyed, others are] converted into beasts by Circe: their headstrong appetites, which revolt from the soveraignty of reason (by which wee are onely like unto God, and armed against our depraved affections) nor ever returne into their Country (from whence the soule deriveth her coelestiall originali), unlesse disinchanted, and cleansed from their former impurity. For as Circes rod, waved over their heads from the right side to the left: presents those false and sinister perswasions of pleasure, which so much deformes them: so the reversion thereof, by discipline, and a view of their owne deformity, restores them to their former beauties, (pp. 480-481; my italics) Even this pedestrian summary shows the power of symbolical images to convey complexities not by any subtlety of story or

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'character' (the Circe story never lost its primitive simplicity), but by developing for us a multiple metaphor, some elements pulling in conceptions it would take a treatise to discuss. T h e complexities so introduced are not only psychological. What Sandys calls 'the Philosophicall sense o£ the fables' generally involves not only ethics but a conception of man's nature and destiny. Even here, we read the figure as something other than tropology; poetry based on it would go beyond the 'moralallegory' effect of swaying powerfully toward a right choice between the pleasures of sense and a virtuous temperance, for this has become a myth of temperance allied with God-given and celestial reason. (The Lady's holy dictate of spare Temperance eventuates in harmonious order throughout nature, justice to all, and due 'praise' rather than 'base ingratitude' to 'the giver', 766). T h e fable has got to this un-Greek destination by informing the notion of Wisdom with the traditional Christian interpretation of reason as that in which we are made in God's image—thus 'onely like' Him. (In the place where there was once a 'human count'nance,

T h ' ex-

press resemblance of the gods', Comus's drink 'the inglorious likenes of a beast age

Fixes instead',—'unmoulding reasons mint-

Character'd in the face', 68,527). In this myth about the

admixture of reason and unreason in the human psyche, her godlike nature is seen as armor against her depraved nature— it is a myth about what is 'natural', and what is 'deformity'— and indeed about the 'violation'

of the soul's chastity by 'na-

ture' in the Circean sense. It does not even stand far from a notion of the celestial soul as belonging chastely to God alone, admitting as it does in Christian terms the idea of the soul's return to that 'Country' whence she had her celestial origin. T h e return is by liberation from thralldom and by purgation —'disinchanted, and cleansed' —,'restoring

them to their

former beauties'. (When defilement is let in to the inward parts, the soul 'Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite loose

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T h e divine property of her first being'; whereas a soul 'sincerely' chaste has such converse with heaven that the outward shape, ' T h e unpolluted temple of the mind', is turned 'by degrees to the souls essence, T i l l all be made immortal', 453-468). In a 'classical' myth which has admitted the conception of a divine soul possessed through the gift of the Creator and 'subsisting through His bounty', the conventional Moly of T e m p e r a n c e has become so very divine an assistance, fortifying 'by an immortali power' the celestial soul, that we could scarcely find ourselves surprised if something 'yet more med'cinal then that Moly', as Milton says haemony is, could be none other than grace. I have interlarded these comments on Sandys's summary of a well-known image with references from Milton not because of any point about source (Sandys does not pretend to singularity, and w o u l d tell a falsehood if he did), but because it makes certain observations possible without discussion. O n e is that when images have taken on symbolical force they maintain a kind of integrity, and stubbornly go on meaning something similar from piece to piece. Idiosyncratic or eccentric meanings attached to them are suspect, because that w h i c h is symbolized takes command and transmutes a figure, and it is poets w h o wish to talk about that who choose such an image; they do not willingly waste its main energies, and they k n o w how it will be understood. O n e is wary, for example, of intricate psychological analysis of 'a character' which instead of deepening destroys the image at its center, and leaves us with a Lady worsted, and rightly, in the encounter of the cup. 1 7 Also it seems too late in the day for " See J. E. Hardy's essay in Brooks and Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton (New York, 1951). T h i s handles almost every image in the work, and is often acutely observant, b u t interpretations and general conceptions suffer, as here, from lack of historical sophistication (see for e x a m p l e also the points about a 'classical creed' or about 'condescension', infra pp. 137, 129). O n the other hand, R. M. Adams, criticizing over-analysis of Comus in an extremely amusing extravaganza, leaves us with a fairly thoughtless work for tired practical minds (Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics, Ithaca, 1955, re-using an essay from Modern Philology, LI).

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Milton to manipulate the Circe myth in order to show 'that both the Lady and Comus were wrong: that there was another meaning' in her gift of feminine beauty and that 'the meaning was marriage'.18 Even though the matter of chastity as fidelity is certainly in the piece, we are leagues away from problems of social or religious contract or some single human institution, are led by this image into questions that touch constantly every man's total moral life; nor could the great type of Heavenly Visitant19 come down to advise this or that girl to marry—such a one as he comes down to guard Jove's sheep. The same caveat, that the profounder meanings of traditional images have great staying power, is pertinent in connection with a general tendency in criticism to proceed as if Milton's entire presentation could be summed up as a chastity-test. We can hardly find a time when the Circe image has not figured intemperance very broadly conceived—'Lust' itself being almost figuratively used as a way of typifying every excess of passion. Certainly this is Acrasia's meaning, and it is partly because Spenser is our great instructor in the comprehensiveness of allegorical figures that one is ready to claim that Comus best opens itself to ardent readers of FQ II; everyone knows the famous sentence that proves it written by one such. It seems even more necessary and wise to call attention, against the background of all that Conti and Sandys represent, to the impossibility of watching 'pagan' and 'Christian' is E. M. W. Tillyard, Studies in Milton (London, 1951), p. 94. See the note on variant versions appended to this essay. Much turns on the 'marriage imagery' of the Epilogue, and Milton's changes in this respect. 19 Important to an understanding of the figure of the Attendant Spirit are: the Platonic elements confirmed by the name Daemon in the Trinity College MS.; the nature of his errand from Jove; suggestions that arise through use of Incarnation imagery (in the soiling by taking on flesh, 'this Sin-worn mould', 17); all the imagery of enthroned saints, Hesperidean Gardens, Adonis, and celestial Cupid, which describes the archetypal place whence he comes and goes. On Milton's various conversions of the idea of the Guardian Angel into a 'philosophical symbol of great speculative import' see J. H. Hanford, 'That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed', University of Toronto Quarterly, VIII (1938-39), 4°3"4»9·

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suggestions and meanings separately at work in such traditional symbols. 'There is little that is Christian about Comus', says Saurat; one must respond that 'there is the central figure and device.' No kind of writing, in the year 1634, could succeed in getting the Christian senses in which it was read out of the Circe myth, and could enable it to symbolize 'the strictly non-Christian character of this value given to chastity.' 20 Saurat is referring to chastity's 'magical' and 'supernatural' powers. But the conceptions of reason's origin and workings, even in the bare explanations I have quoted, Christianize the choosing soul's very nature as well as the 'immortali power' that assists it, and a super-Natural power granted to the chaste soul is the Christianized heart of the myth as it is read in Milton's contemporaries and himself. A. S. P. Woodhouse's reading of speeches and symbols that relate the doctrine of Chastity to conceptions of the Christian mind 'grounded in nature and illuminated by grace', is thus much more consonant with the whole development of the poem's imagery. 21 It is in the gradually developed emphasis upon that special meaning for 'chastity' which allies it to 'the sage And serious doctrine of Virginity' that Milton extends the traditional image, but he extends rather than remakes it. Chastity as in20 See D. Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York, 1925), p. 16. Nor is D. C. Allen's point that the poem's virtues and conceptions are 'Christian only by adoption' a tenable one (see ch. ii of The Harmonious Vision, Baltimore, 1954); if the Lady's stoic arguments exemplify how 'the characters in general speak like pagans', we shall be hard put to it to find historical Christians who do not, from John onward. It will be noticed that I do not say in the text above, 'Christian senses read into the Circe myth', but 'in which it was read'. T h e assumption we do not share with those readers is that truth is veritably in the pagan stories, veiled, but to be seen in its Christian shape when they are read as figure. 21 Many images are illuminated by Woodhouse's especially original point, the distinguishing of continence, chastity and virginity in the poem, relating the last to the order of grace, and chastity to both orders, of nature and grace. For connections also with FQ III, with the celestial Cupid, with 'Freedom', and for the interpretation of the Sabrina imagery mentioned below on p. i5if., see " T h e Argument of Milton's Comus' and 'Comus Once More', in University of Toronto Quarterly, X I (1941), 46-71, and X I X (1950), 218-283.

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violable 'fidelity to God' had already entered the symbol, as was unavoidable; it is the natural converse o£ Luxuria, when luxuria is not one vice but figures all—and this meaning is also inevitable, given the differing beasts Circe turns men into. There is no place in a masque with this 'device' for speaking of that fidelity to God in the usual imagery (of each soul seeking, and finally wedded to, its heavenly bridegroom), and the Lady is right in saying that to unfold the doctrine of Virginity, which would require the extreme of that language, is impossible in a debate with one who is the very type of appetitive natural man. Even man, who is not just a Comus, can barely understand the faithful chastity of the search, and presumes still less to comprehend the virginity of those mystically married. Milton openly used the traditional imagery only in his elegies. But the fervor of this passage, which has made the Lady so many enemies, is entirely proper to 'The sublime notion, and high mystery' that would have to be utter'd in order to unfold the doctrine—-for it is nothing less than that which the doctrine depends upon, the central Christian mystery of the soul's eventual union with the source of love. T h e Lady's rapt spirits are kindled by the 'worth Of this pure cause', but she makes no claim (nor anyone for her) to a place among those who, already symbolically joined to a Heavenly Bridegroom, vow virginity. That Milton does not examine this underlying connection (between the 'chastity' of all faithful souls and the virginity of the celibate spouse of the divine), and that he keeps primarily to the traditional purport of the Circe allegory—the reasonable soul's freedom from sensual enslavement—neither makes it 'less Christian' nor introduces a 'pagan-Christian issue' nor gives the Elder Brother a 'classical creed'. For in the figure, as that was a datum for Milton, reason and freedom and temperance and wisdom have all been converted to Christianity, and suiting both the figure's story and ordinary usage they all come under chastity: the chaste principle in man's total na-

ig8

linages and Themes in Five Poems

ture unseduceable by that which would alienate it from its celestial original, tempting it to substitute idolatries for the love of God. The key to these complications and distinctions is simple. It has to do with a firmer definition of what kind of figure of speech Milton has used. The whole myth had already become figurative, and in it chastity even as literal continence is a type of something, shadows forth meanings as they operate in another order. The terms for this other order can sound more, or less, specifically Christian. The faithful soul that for love of the supreme good keeps an unstained purity of devotion, at last to be perfectly reunited with that whence it came, is a commonplace of Platonized Christianity. T h e Elder Brother's long Platonic image, 452-468, speaks about a gradual, not single, loss of this purity, and speaks about the 'soul' being 'found' to have 'Saintly chastity' ('found sincerely so'); the image begins with the thousand liveried angels that attend the chaste soul and drive from her (she is of course anima in either sex) 'each thing of sin and guilt'. Chastity in our present limited meaning, which will not cover many seventeenthcentury uses of noun and adjective any more than it covers Spenser's, is of course frequently spoken of in a piece with this particular 'device'. Yet if each time the Elder Brother speaks about a state of the body and a quality in the soul which is as armor to protect virtue, and each time the virgin (and also chaste) Lady speaks about seeking the unblemished form of Chastity which will be a guard to her honor, we read solely about some literal condition, we of course will move in a world of meanings in which one brother is deluded, the other stupid, their sister self-righteous, and Milton's concern obsessive. So many have found them. But, among other things, this is very unhistorical of us. The very transmutation by which fidelity came to be a way of figuring all virtue is a thing which happened in history. Nor can we rip out of a figure the metaphorical meanings which history puts into it. Often

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this comes to pass by the mere development of new ideas (as 'His service is perfect freedom' has both changed from within and left in some ways unchanged the seemingly 'classical' statement, 'vertue is free'). No more rapid and subtle form of these transmutations can be found than that historical phenomenon, the allegorizing of classical myth. This phrase is technically precise, and so far as it goes accurate. T h e term 'allegorizing' goes beyond 'moralization'— if we may use our terms with as strict a historical care as possible, in order to define differences there is no other way of catching in a statement—to indicate a resemblance to that which happened to Moses and Samson. T h e y became types of a Christian truth, were Christianized—so was the Circe story. T h e long history of Comus criticism would not be so full of contentions if Milton had kept to moral allegory, but not even his master Spenser could do that; both perplex the ears of an unallegorical generation with nice speculations of divine philosophy. Hence we must observe that these 'classical' figures, in becoming metaphors (the nature of allegory) have taken on an additional way of being true, and that their new reference is to a Christian understanding—not of behavior but of the metaphysical structure that determines the meaning of actions. This is a point about both poetics and history. Phrases like 'the conflict of pagan and Christian ideas in the poem', 'intrusion of a Christian theme into a pagan context', 'the shock of the sudden juxtaposition', are historical observations, but insufficiently accurate as history. 22 Christianity had long ago planted the flag of its sovereignty within the mind of 'Ulysses'. 22 T h e s e phrases are Hardy's (see the book cited in n. 17), but the point of view is extremely common. W e should probably relate the frequency with which 'pagan versus Christian' springs up in Milton criticism of the last thirty years to the increased popularity of 'the approach through imagery'. T h e question of when an image is 'pagan' is not in the least a simple one, though discussion sometimes seems to use the assumptions which suffice for distinguishing a paynim in chivalric romance—one who says By Mawmet. T h e question of when an idea is pagan is not simpler.

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Happily, good poets use symbolic images with long histories just as they use others, that is, taking care for their integrity and clarity. Milton must keep to the terms supplied by that device upon which his invention moved, but they are truly figurative, one term happening to be confusingly literal in the case of his particular human Lady; she happens to have both kinds of chastity to lose. In a myth where a seduction has come to convey, metaphorically, seduction by one's own appetites, the non-desire which arms and protects the soul can easily take this form of her literal untouchedness. W e have to accept the literal terms, as well, of Milton's image in which the figurative chastity of the untoucha&Ze soul is to be read. But we may not rest in them. T h e Lady's virgin state is not defined as her virtue; it is the 'armor' which provides 'a hidden strength' against the particular kind of assault upon the virtuous soul that is made by a Circe-figure. It comes into the Brothers' colloquy when the Second Brother fears for her as 'helpless' against that theft to which the erotic image of the golden apples traditionally refers. T h e Elder Brother's denials of the word helpless, in the form of all the images of armed nymphs whose chaste austerity was that armor, only say of the Lady what is true, that she too has that defence and that it is a bow, a shield, and made Diana 'queen oth' Woods'—of those very dark places which in this masque figure forth all danger. A distinction is clear when he says (421) that she, like a quiver'd nymph, has 'Arrows keen' and can therefore go safely alone in the wilderness, where through the sacred rays of Chastity none will dare soil her virgin purity. What he says with such confidence turns out to be quite true. One of the thousand liveried Angels comes within forty lines to pursue his own way of driving off each thing of sin; the Lady perfectly typifies 'Vertue . . . assail'd, but never hurt', 'Surpriz'd' but not 'enthrall'd'—Comus never does 'touch the freedom of [her] minde', and it is exactly what he wishes to take possession of, as the whole myth clearly figures.

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He argues for interior consent—giving this is what would make her his thrall, and it is what the rest of the rabble have given. Were she to accept his claim that man is by nature intended for the sumptuous banquet instead of the clear stream and the pulse, this would be a rape, and her chastity would have succumbed to his temptation of voluptuous selfidolatry. Toward this rape of the mind every step in his argument is directed, the music and the banquet, every image that supports every form of sensuous gratification as nature's proven sole intention—the spawning seas, the silkworms at work, the ore and the gems, the beauty not to be hoarded, the vermeil-tinctur'd lip; and the sleight-of-hand image that makes wearing silk instead of frieze and eating cates instead of pulse into a form of gratitude to 'Th'all-giver' is as much a part of the seduction as is the attempt to make Virginity look — n o t pleasureless, but absurd. Each single step in the Lady's answer shows her 'chaste', and what this chastity keeps inviolate is her freedom, specifically her free and uncharmed judgement; her 'Temperance' is not a disjoined rational prelude to her impassioned acclaim of the 'Sun-clad power of Chastity' but constitutes a similar stand against 'Luxury' based on a parallel recognition of man's proper fealty. This is shown in her answer: that nature, innocent and herself law-abiding, means her provision only to those of her children who are thus also (excess being lawless, disproportionate, and unjust), that indulgence is ingratitude and intemperance blasphemy, and that praise is due to the giver because he is man's 'feeder'. This chastity, like this attempted rape, is what the traditional figure provided: a way of imaging the problem of man's freedom, within nature of which he is a part. T h e Lady's position is the completely Christian one (she takes one, not two): that Comus does not fully describe 'nature' and 'man's nature'. She acts according to another allegiance, and what she has that he cannot shake is fidelity. T h e consent Comus cannot get from

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her is an agreement with his postulate: 'Scorning the unexempt conditiori By which all mortal frailty must subsist, Refreshment after toil, ease after pain . . . (684). Her response to this 'you are by nature a body' is simply to act as if man's nature is to be a soul incarnate in a body. ('Subsisting through the bounty of the Creator', was Sandys's plain phrase for her very different postulate). There are those who think that the Lady should show some signs of being tempted. It would destroy the figurative device of the masque, and prevent it from enclosing these problems of the relation of virtue to freedom, of man's nature to 'nature', to reason and to the divine; these concerns furnish the intellectual interest of many another presentation besides Milton's of the meaning of Ulysses' stand.23 W e ought, I believe, to resist strenuously the idea that Milton, influenced by earlier understandings, states in Comus that 'the divine and celestial soul (Lady) can by no assaults of nature (Comus) be made to yield'. (Comus might say disgustedly that this unpenetrating half-truth is what Comus means). Allegory does not work this way at all. W e watch the Lady and Comus as they reveal to the understanding the meanings we try to capture in such rough statements. T h e value of such a great traditional metaphor, as a hinge upon which the total invention can move, is that it can allow of a revelation of the nature of the opposition between good and evil. It is not a matter of 'triumph over' after 'conflict with', for the myth has become rather a way of looking at what the human moral 23 In Iden's 1557 translation of Gelli's Circes, as Ulysses has his amusing series of dialogues with the 'Grecians' turned into oyster, lion, mole, goat and the rest, we are gradually shown that man's distinction and glory is his conceptualizing power, his capacity to 'understand the universale' not merely apprehend particulars. Hence his 'elective' temperance, freely chosen by a free will, and his self-awareness. A l l the distinctively human power (the 'very operation' of 'human nature') is seen as man's unique form of knowing and worshipping the first mover, now imperfectly known but later to be seen in perfection, who loved his creature m a n — t h e sole creature who is 'naturally bound' to give honor to God (see esp. dialogues 10 and 8, and the dedication to Cosimo de Medici).

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predicament is. W e do not watch a struggle-between but a discovery or uncovering-of; and in fact it is a great strength in the figure that its metaphorical base is not a fight but a seduction. W e have imaged before us in the entire piece the greater beauty, superior reasonableness, and the naturalness, of all that we can lodge within the insufficient word virtue (the figure castitas is better), and imaged also all the dark perversions that can betray it—disorder, intemperance, voluptuous self-love, libertin naturalism, the beast in its relation to the beauty. ' I m a g e d ' — t h a t is, we see what things look like; and see the real not behind the apparent but in the apparent. T h e masque as a genre is peculiarly suited to this unveiling or discovery of the true nature of things through images; its high moment is commonly a sudden disclosure of the masquers, when as in a vision the key to full meaning and application opens the image wide. T h e conditions precluded this, for Milton, b u t in his as in other masques the accoutrements, speech and behavior (properly kept stylized) of symbolic personages slowly open up his main image. 'Revelation' describes the functioning of the images from the very beginning of the poem. T h e y do not describe, and seldom argue. Comus is the incarnation of disorder, yet the ordered loveliness of his moonlit images is not a mistake. T h e woodnymphs are decked with daisies trim, the brooks dimple, ' T h e Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove N o w to the M o o n in wavering Morrice move', and he and all his followers merely join all fertile and amorous things, that worship what seems to be the cause of their being; this is order, he says, the order of Nature. T h e rout of monsters is there, and their noise is just as 'unruly' as it is to sound later w h e n the Spirit calls it that 'wonted roar' which fills 'the A i r with barbarous dissonance'. T h e difference is simply that it does not seem to us unruly, rather only 'merry' as Comus names it, the tipsy dance seems not uncontrolled or unattractive but

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merely more like life than ballet, the shout and the revelry seem to be what midnight asks for, as it also demands 'better sweets'; what hath night to do with sleep? Comus claims, 'We that are of purer fire Imitate the Starry Quire', and though every word of the five is an irony, what he says is true, they do; this is no time for us to notice that his 'we' is a crew of beast-headed yahoos, and that if their 'imitation' of the 'swift round' with which the dancing spheres roll Time endlessly away seizes the full meaning of that heavenly dance, then the vast skiey system is nothing but one grand and idiotic whirligig. Not 'purpose', but life and beauty, disappear. Making Time pass; round and round—'orderly' enough, if that is what one means by order. T h e dark ritual worship of lasciviousness does not look very beautiful, or even very free and pleasant, even as Comus describes it; but the distinction escapes our notice, for we know what he is saying when he says this is Pleasure. This secret flame is the very type, if that is what one means by pleasure. These are not persuasions; we merely see that what is said is true, while we are within this mind and seeing the world with its postulates (and of course consent to that kind of taking-possession is the rape the Circe-figure commits upon men). In the same way the Lady reveals a different total conception of what all things are and mean; the images she uses speak of the same objects and simply replace the way we have seen them with something quite different. T h e woods (Comus's 'dun shades' conniving at couplings) were 'kind and hospitable', and only the invasion symbolized by the raucous noises made them the 'blind mazes of this tangl'd Wood' which present to her and us the selva oscura in which the human creature is lost. Evening had been a gray-hooded Votarist, Phoebus's last dim attendant clad like one holy and devout. Long before Comus argues for exploiting nature's wealth of gifts we have seen him at it; before the Lady ever overtly sees in this self-indulgent exploitation a perversion of nature's

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own soberer plan, we have heard the drunken riot as her ears heard it—frightening insolence and grossness that is a skewed way of thanking the gods for abundance. For this image (176) she has often been called priggish; none in the piece turns out to be more accurate—the noises are being made by those who did believe Comus's later-given recommendations for the Forms of Thanksgiving. Before we hear any discussions about reasonable temperance, imagery of two kinds, one visual, reveals to us the exact case of the men-beasts: 'their human count'nance, T h ' express resemblance of the gods, is chang'd Into som brutish form', some 'inglorious likenes', 'unmoulding reasons mintage'. All but the psyche is still 'human'. Man's glory, the divine image that is part of Milton's definition of human, is what is at stake; loss of this is what loses them self-knowledge, so that they 'Not once perceive their foul disfigurement' (68, 527, 74). Seeing an image of this loss of freedom is quite as important as hearing of it from the Attendant Spirit; between his two descriptions we have seen the dance—not a cavorting, but T h e Measure's aped courtliness—of the ridiculously inglorious crew, so 'fair a herd'. Therefore we take in without analyzing it as such a converse demonstration of the same aspect of the central device; the Lady safely and chastely keeps the freedom of a mind which fully accepts alliance, but knowingly and only to 'that which is good'. It is the Elder Brother's prophecy come true—he had said, 'Yea even that which mischief meant most harm, Shall in the happy trial prove most glory' (590). That the unseduced virtuous reason, free to choose what it gives itself to, is man's most glory (and hence the very eye of the target) is part of what the traditional figure could reveal through, rather than despite, the emphasis on chastity. T h e Brother quite naturally goes on: 'But evil on it self shall back recoyl, And mix no more with goodness.' One could find great numbers of these echoes and patterns in which images again and again uncover

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rather than expound. As always such designs present (imitate) the coherence and integrity of that which is symbolized, and upon this, the true Pattern, all 'image-patterns' depend. It cannot be paraphrased. T h e nature of the issues has made one ancient symbol— Light—consistently important throughout the masque, and many subtleties and profundities are made open and powerful through Milton's supremely imaginative control of such symbolism. It is not possible to follow this with any completeness, for a reader or hearer knows the infinite variety and speed of that play of changing light over line after line of the thousand-odd, from the first 'Before the starry threshold . . ,' 24 to the last light at 'the corners of the Moon' melting into that wherein the sphery chime escapes a mortal ear and eye. I shall accordingly notice only some of the radical symbolical powers of this image, whence many lovely others are born. No analysis will catch the deep reasons for the way they stir us, and though we speak with gratitude of Milton's unearthly sureness touching all that makes verse like music, we have in the end to sit silenced. Some of the ways in which light's symbolic power is caught in form can be helpfully spoken of. First and simplest, this masque (like a dozen others) uses the ancient enmity between Jove and Night, physical darkness being used as symbolic of radical moral evil and protectress of its exponents. T h e thick lustful dark in which the lascivious goddesses move becomes that of a psychic and moral abyss: the dragon womb of Stygian darkness that spets gloom, the very upper element of air one blot, dark vail'd Cotytto worshipped with the sultry Or, of course, of the light-filled description of the world whence he comes, with which the Attendant Spirit opens the masque in the Bridgewater MS., and which reflects a cancelled original beginning in the T r i n i t y MS. I have placed at the end of this essay a note too long to include here, with the references most necessary to those interested in how differing versions of Comus affect study of its imagery. Some of the most important recent interpretations of Comus have been based on evidence of this kind.

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licking flames of lust, the ebony chariot of Hecate, all these moon images that give the lie to the seeming innocence of the earlier ones. Both the worship of evil and evil's envious hatred of good are put in terms of this symbolism: the 'nice Morn', 'the tell-tale Sun', and the marvellous spiteful denigration in 'the blabbing Eastern scout', all demote Light the ancientest of all figures for divinity to the only role Comus sees divinity as playing: " T is onely day-light that makes Sin.' Yet there is no plain equation of Comus with the dark and the good personages with the light—if we except perhaps the angelic and shining figure of the Attendant Spirit, who speaks of his own place and of all good things in the very language of light. His images always use dark in a pejorative sense, from 'this dim spot' of Earth to the cypress shades at 'the navil of this hideous Wood', 25 which he parallels with the storied rocks 'whose entrance leads to Hell' (real, though to their reality 'unbelief is blind'). But this consistency is unusual. T o be sure, the darkness is the consistent character of the enchanted wood (ominous, black, dun) and there is a related figure in the fogs and 'black usurping mists', for whatever prevents man illegitimately (as in 'usurping') from seeing his way is ranged among evils—again just part of the whole point. But not only is there much imagery of light in the speeches of Comus himself, there is also no indication that natural darkness is evil. The Lady says Ό theevish Night' because an unnatural 'single darknes', 'envious', had supplanted the starlit night in which a natural ally would give due light to the misled and the alone: Why shouldst thou, but for som fellonious end, In thy dark Lantern thus close up the Stars, That nature hung in Heav'n, and fill'd their Lamps With everlasting oil, to give due light.. . (ig8) 25 T h a t Comus is there immur'd, 520, though master, is only another example of the recurrent link between darkness and prison; this springs from the way in which the relations between virtue and freedom are concenred in the whole piece. Cf. note 26.

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T h e same moon that was Hecate to Comus makes the sable cloud itself become the Lady's help: 'Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud T u r n forth her silver lining on the night?' It was the eerie unnaturalness of finding no one and no lights in the place whence came the noise she had reluctantly followed that made the Lady fear she had stumbled into a darkness where unnatural things possess and use nature's night—beckoning shadows dire, and bodiless tongues, that can call by name and secure mastery over one. She has, of course. Hence it is the more ironic and courageous when, 'startled' but not 'astounded' (209; we hear always this note of the free mind in control), she calls on the ideas she thinks her champions. There is no mystery in their not being Faith, Hope, and Charity. Not only are Castitas and Agape-Caritas related, and certain Platonic conceptions entirely pertinent, but she is seeing the very form and essence of the only protection she has. It is, as is usual in allegorical images, seen in two ways, form in two ways, and protection in two ways, and all are equally true. A l l three guardians are imaged in words suggesting light, but the third ('And thou unblemish't form of Chastity, I see ye visibly') she sees also literally with her physical eyes. A n d when we see the literal moon edge into sight from behind the sable cloud, and see it as chaste Diana, and both as the type of the Platonic-Christian fidelity between the human soul and the 'Supreme good' who 'would send a glistring Guardian if need were', we feel not only the excitement of the poetry but the gratitude for light in this dark place which stirs the Lady's next lines. This is allegory. And I suppose that no reader who thus reads the passage can do so without some sense of his own darkness and light. T h i s does not turn the Lady into us, for she is what, when, and where she was; it merely takes care of everything at once, as profound metaphors always do. She 'did not err', the silver that lightens the natural dark 'casts a gleam' over the unnaturally possessed dark grove, and she has also seen, though not 'visibly', faith and hope; she can now

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believe, that is, that even 'all things ill' are but as unwilling officers that inescapably do the bidding of 'Him, the Supreme good'. W h e n she then sings to wake Echo, the irony of Comus's appearance in answer plays again on these strings of natural, supernatural, unnatural, and we take in complex notions of the relations between them long before any such are stated. T h a t the symbolic use of darkness is thus closely and firmly prevented from denying the Lady's later 'most innocent nature', and that it yet constantly raises the question what-isnature, is simply one case among many where analysis would show how images uncover the unified and consistent meanings presented to us later in other ways. If we had not already taken in through the symbolism the profundity of 'Light' as an issue in the action, we should not feel the strange beauty of "Unmuffle ye faint Stars . . .'; terror would not catch at us, unexpected and as if for no great reason, when the Elder Brother says 'Stoop . . . A n d disinherit Chaos, that raigns here In double night of darkness, and of shades' (332). It is not only the irony of the fact that we have just seen the very spirit of disorder take over full authority and that the speaker does not know what he is saying—his shades an unrealized pun, and his allusion to old Night's opposition to Cynthia a fable but no lie. But also, when it all happens over again—the stars, and 'thou fair Moon', and the traveler's benison, the pale visage through a cloud, the mists and the villagers and the rest of it, but happening now against the background of that previous scene with Comus which had ended with the Lady's prayer to Providence and the wild irony of her 'Shepherd lead on'—as we hear them again, the poignancy of all these innocent appeals for light becomes connected with a troubling sense that we are seeing in a mirror the whole human condition. T h e conversation that follows between the Brothers is kept very particular and local, and the symbolic use of light bears the whole burden of this symbolical extension, but it gives reality,

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fitness and power to the outburst of radiance accompanying the most famous image of light in the masque: Vertue could see to do what vertue would By her own radiant light, though Sun and Moon Were in the flat Sea Sunk. . . . (374) He that has light within his own cleer brest May sit i'th center, and enjoy bright day . . .

(381)

Certain powers which this symbol has always possessed will work more openly, from here on. An image especially moving used of good and evil becomes, also, one especially translucent used of wisdom and unwisdom, insight and blindness. We have already seen too many symbolic appearances of light to rate this trust in it as self-sufficiency, even if the passage on Wisdom and Contemplation were not there; moreover, the continuation, by contrasting the enslavement of the man of dark soul, clarifies the fact that this inner light which keeps the will free to elect virtuous action is scarcely to be confused with stoic pride. 26 This is made quite clear by the following development in Platonic and Christian terms of the imagery of light in the soul (the angels, the 'beam' cast on the outward shape by the 'oft convers with heav'nly habitants'; the 'souls essense' and 'divine property' passages re-emphasizing Christian conceptions of the soul's destiny, 454ft.). T h e radiance of this image, in which the Elder Brother 26 T h e image does not read 'He that has virtue within his own breast may sit and enjoy being virtuous.' Light is a symbol, virtue partakes of the nature of that which it symbolizes, has therefore her own light and can see and freely do what she would; and the man who has light within (still symbolic of the unstatable) enjoys day though he sit at the dark center of the universe. T h e man within whom is hidden a dark soul makes of his self a dungeon, in which, mock-free, he walks—under nature's high noon sun, yet overtaken (benighted) by the setting of the inner one. I can not embark on the history of the Light-as-wisdom aspect of the symbol though it would clarify some of these uses, as commentary (usually on PL iii) shows; I have chosen instead to scrutinize exactly in relation to the central figure those images which are read with wide differences, in interpretation after interpretation of Comus, with the result that evaluations of the poem show the most extreme disparity.

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gives virtue 'her own light', is not dimmed but strengthened by the fact that it shines within an irony; that we have just seen the virtuous Lady blind to Comus's real nature does not make nonsense of it. His sister has willed no evil, done or thought nothing unvirtuous, nor will she, and this image shines uncontradicted by the action through to the end, to 'Love vertue, she alone is free'. Yet as that end too shows, though virtue has her own radiant light, can teach man 'how to clime', virtue is not equated with all that Light symbolizes in the poem. T h e Lady did see, and do, what virtue would, but that she was, even so, insufficient and could be blinded by a charm that touched the outer sense if not the moral judgement or the rightly choosing will, is surely an intended part of the action and meaning. It does not take care of the situations man gets into in the dark wood that he can 'do what vertue would'. Light as his human wisdom and virtue manifest it is not enough illumination to see completely the nature of reality, still less to save himself from the consequences of blindness. Moreover, the Lady is not Virtue; one does not say of allegory 'The Lady is Virtue'—she figures it. W e therefore do not see her unvirtuous, but we do see her not 'free'—for we see a mortal and limited creature. W e see her in the common human state: '. . . this corporal rinde T h o u haste immanacl'd, while Heav'n sees good' (663). And in her incapacity to transcend such fetters (they can be worn by a soul however virtuous, living in nature), and in the incapacity of others to do this for her, we see figured what the Epilogue states: that if Virtue, that strength which teaches mortals how to climb toward the realms of light itself, should be feeble, Heav'n it self would stoop. T h a t Heaven must stoop to the aid of strength is far from being nonsense. T w o major images at least carry the burden of this idea, the Attendant Spirit and the Sabrina episode. Here Woodhouse's exposition of the relation of the Sabrina

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episode to the Lady's insufficiency as well as to the incapacity of the others for action seems exact and sound (see n.21 above). Not only is need shown in Comus for the greater illumination of grace, but the symbolic use of water suits with the demonstrated need for 'a new infusion of divine grace' before the Lady can be freed (as no human creature can free another) from what Comus represents, and from every resulting bondage. It is to be noted that haemony, carefully distinguished from the moly of temperance, protects the brothers from one aspect of the enchantment here in question; they know what Comus is and can therefore enter his spells and yet come off—as the Attendant Spirit promised: 'for by this means I knew the foul inchanter though disguis'd' (644). T h a t there is a relation between haemony and grace seems probable, 27 though another symbol bears (quietly; it is not to be labored) the burden of completing Milton's Christian argument and Christianized 'device'—the symbol of water, perhaps the most ancient and untranslatable of all, and here used with truly symbolic force. T h e most meticulous rereading will show that such use as Milton chooses to make of the old symbol of the rod or wand does not conflict but is fitted in with all this, for the cure of the rod waved in reverse—'by discipline, and a view of their owne deformities'—can be beyond the unaided reach and power even of virtuous human creatures, de-formed from their 'coelestiall originali'. T h e i r insufficiencies are circumvented. T o the student of imagery watching the operation of a symbol with manifold powers, like that of light, through a long and complicated work, no impression is more powerful than that he receives of a symbol's sureness and dependability. It does not lie, never has to be excused for inconsistency or incoherence, but retains a purity and translucence which This is E. S. LeComte's suggestion in Philological Quarterly, X X I (1942), 283-298, where it is presented with extreme care and very interesting detail. For phrases quoted from Sandys in the next sentence see above p. 132.

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make symbolic imagery the foe of obscurity. One's conviction grows that this is not the result of calculated subtleties on the part of an author, but of a true symbol's profound but stubbornly orderly relation to that which it presents. T h e logic of this relation varies from symbol to symbol, and its history usually uncovers this logic, but once grasped (the lines are generally large and simple, but plunge deep), it shows as capable of sustaining almost infinite complexities of meaning without ever producing confusing ambiguity. Multiple meanings and seeming ambiguity are on the other hand common. 'Who knows not Circe The daughter of the Sun?' T h a t Comus is the grandson of the very source of natural physical light is in perfect accord with the symbolic meanings of light just examined, with the ideas conveyed about wisdom, nature, man's relation to the rest of nature, and to the generative principle working throughout it, to chastity and desire, to fertility and fulfillment. T h e sentence rather illuminates than conflicts with that other, 'though Sun and Moon Were in the flat Sea sunk', and even the unsun'd heaps of miser's treasure (a seemingly opposed pejorative reference) falls into its dark and proper place. T h e translucent and flowing light seen through water, of the Sabrina songs and speeches, tinsel, golden, diamond, or glassy and cool, is loveliness itself; yet the earlier burst of light when the Scene changed to Comus's Palace (the first we have seen; all the good characters have moved hesitantly through darkness), glowing 'with all manner of deliciousness', presents a double meaning with perfect sureness and speed—through all the symbol remains entirely unambiguous and pure. One is only warned not to put 'good' or 'bad' beside any object or quality and then follow some 'pattern of symbols', but rather to watch the symbols infallibly develop before us complexities we had not suspected, in a pattern which they do not provide, but follow. These complexities bear an interesting relation to the nature and possibilities of the masque, as compared with the

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drama or play. T h e one is characterized by subtleties of idea, conveyable by images; the other by subtleties of psychological motivation and personality, conveyable by characterization. T h e first of these two is the ground for the second, though that statement does not describe the process of artistic creation. But in a masque psychological refinements are implicit in the meaning of the great images, not inter-acting before us in complete people. Welsford's generalization in another connection so suits Comus that it can direct us, providing both illumination and warning, to a central fact about the nature of that work: . . . For classical drama . . . is concerned with the final phase of a conflict, and the interest is concentrated upon the last few hours of uncertainty which must soon be terminated by irrevocable choice and decisive action: but the masque deals, not with the last phase of a conflict, but with a moment of transformation; it expresses, not uncertainty, ended by final success or failure, but expectancy, crowned by sudden revelation; and even when the opposition of good and evil is symbolized by masque and antimasque, this opposition is shown as a contrast rather than a conflict. (The Court Masque, p. 339) T h e damage done to Milton's A Mask by looking at it as a play (and the history of this aspect of Comus criticism is a history of damage done) is related to an essay on its imagery only at two or three points. We miss thus what is a chief pleasure in this as in any masque: the pleasure of watching the central image unfold, display itself, dance before us. Plot is simple, already known or guessed, surprise at a minimum, situations are slight, almost negligible, adventitious, unagitating because warmth is not the quality of the sympathies awakened; but the image which is the heart of this frail action slowly opens out one meaning after another, never disappearing, never standing still, looking at us with one face out of the long and leisurely speech of one stylized personage, with another face out of the

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songs and declarations of another, is seen in this position and in that. All is serene, tranquil, and slow; speakers do not push their personalities into the tone of their lines, as we can test by noticing the extreme vulgarisation that results from allowing it; there is time for whatever elaboration will reveal the nature and distant arising of the meanings which move as in orbits of their own, and only finally come together, posed, in contrast but still without struggle, and then fall away, one regnant and one vanished. T o roughen and tear this surface with fussy differentiation of personalities, with conflict beween heated and emotion-torn people, is to deny the true feeling that moves beneath it; polyphony rent and jagged by Wagnerian dynamics. Our involvement is of a different character; we do not respond to meanings by way of our sympathetic identification with living persons, but directly. For a masque imitates life differently, and we directly experience 'understanding something'; we do not as at a play re-live that whence understanding wells up or will accrue. Differences in the kinds of things understood are proper to each form. The transformation which 'crowns expectancy' may seem less sudden and less important in Milton's masque than in many. But Sabrina's release of the motionless central figure is not the climax of a suspense-filled action; it is the quiet completion of meanings which have slowly unfolded and shown themselves to us, mirrored in images. The gradual opening u p of the complete meaning of a symbolical device offers no single crisis. Though the cup scene is by far the most important posing of contrasts, the masque form would lose its figurative character, which is its great beauty, if such scenes, instead of uncovering without haste a radical opposition, were so written that we watched in anxiety and doubt for the question 'will she drink? or not?' to be answered by the act of a person herself in doubt which to choose. Over-emphasis upon the scene in Comus's palace as a 'con-

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flict' or 'temptation' scene has many sources; among the results of it are a hectoring but frigid Lady, and a discontent with the 'debate' character of the scene. This is the burden of very much early, and some present-day, criticism of Comus. The true Lady is in the lines, if we read them without intrusive 'drama', and have come to their overt statements prepared by the previous expression of these same profound concerns through imagery. The debate in a masque is expected and watched for, if two irreconcilable conceptions must meet. Some hint of this element enters any masque based on a device related to the 'triumph', Petrarchan or otherwise; the débat is so traditional and proper an element in all pastoral kinds that the word 'eclogue' all but calls for one (pastoral 'choice', pastoral 'invitation', and pastoral emulation in song, all take form as debates). The special sort of masque known as 'the Barriers' can be an outright debate; the second part of Jonson's Hymenaei, a debate between 'Truth' and 'Opinion', upholding and opposing marriage, is instructive concerning long speeches, their tone, the symbolism, the audience's expectations.28 Of all dramatic kinds, certain types of masque best suit our current phrase 'the dialectic of drama'. T h e date of the form's greatest successes is not an unrelated fact. Even that characteristic of the dialectical method, an independent statement of two positions each in its most impregnable form, will hold for a masque whose device makes this form of the expected 'contrast' feasible. This is not to say that Comus, in its character as a masque, is some sort of play in which ideas are the characters, and which we can sum up as the exposition of a philosophical 28 Some conventions which make the masque too little like drama to be congenial to modern taste arise from its history, for example from its connections with the tournament-like Challenge and response, and stylized apposition of tilting forces. Cf. also A Challenge at Tilt. Prince Henries Barriers (not a debate) has one speech of 200 lines for Merlin; the Lady of the Lake has begun with 63.

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doctrine. Because it is allegorical, it does not expound, but presents. This character it shares with all pre-eminently symbolical writing, and a masque has no being except as such a piece. That an audience expected to 'read' a masque allegorically goes without saying. Masques as well shallow as deep were written, by men of varying powers. But still the 'device', whether it be a story, a situation, a notion, an interpreted myth, symbolizes meanings uncapturable in exposition; philosophically slender these may well be, but falsely flat in plain statement. Likewise the meanings—in the piece—of personages are not caught by any name of an abstraction which may be our only way to refer to them (though indeed such naming is not to be disdained, as one of the few ways men have found to lay hold upon what is real). True of all allegory, and especially of Spenser's from whom Milton learned most, this suits Comus as well, and is the source of the excitement felt at seeing into the nature of things. It is not magnificence of spectacle but the sense of having viewed an image of life itself which kindles Jonson's words as he speaks of the 'Presentments' 'stealing away the spectators from themselves' in the first Hymenaei: Onely the envie was, that it lasted not still, or (now it is past) cannot by imagination, much lesse description, be recovered to a part of that spirit it had in the gliding by. (VII, p. 229) But it is an image of life; personages, story, action, and often scene,29 are metaphorical. 29 A n important though innocent-looking question is raised by D . C. Allen's remark: ' T h e r e is every reason to believe that Milton thought of the action as taking place in pre-Christian A l b i o n ' ( T h e Harmonious Vision, p. 38). It—not masque but action—took place in one important sense near L u d l o w as of 1634, also in more times and places than Milton could mention, taking place where all metaphors do, wherever universale exist. If the non-Renaissance-Platonist wishes to say, 'in the mind of man", this will do for a start. It makes the figure a little too purely psychological (too limited to a psychomachia eternally repeated) for one who believes Sidney's understandings historically more suitable, and it does not fit Milton's pronounced Platonism in the early poems.

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

This describes Comus, and denotes the relationship of its large images to reality. Metaphor, allegory, and symbolism are linked in respect to the nature of their relationship to the real, and such distinctions as we should make between the last two (not necessary for Comus) do not have this as ground. In its greatest days, an essential element in the definition of allegory, which rhetoricians call briefly a metaphor continued, was the reality of the first term. In typology or strict allegory, this could be understood as the literal historical reality of the types—of Moses the type of Christ, or of the Giving of the Manna, type of the Last Supper. When allegory is secularized, and when myths are allegorized, the first term is not an historical Circe or Red Crosse who existed (or was thought to have) like Samson, something which historically took place like the leading of the Jews through the wilderness. Nor is it a 'personality', Comus, encountering a 'personality', the Lady, whose realness consists in their being individuals, living and singular people. That is not metaphor, nor symbolism. T h e first term's historical and literal reality consists in its being a true account of every man's innumerable encounters with unregenerate natural man as he meets him in himself, every man's potential capacity to wed himself to Una, and his openness to despair, and need for release from whatever enchantment illusion leads men into. It resides in individuals, to be sure; we may call Belphoebe Elizabeth and the Lady Alice, and be right, as we may call Una Jane and Comus Alfred, if we know two such good enough and bad enough— but these are but one of the places of residence of a first term to which we would better attach the names of all individuals we know including ourselves. T o make these identifications in a given story, if we move from single event to endlessly recurrent meaning not merely from single event to endlessly repeated event, we use our minds as metaphor requires. 30 But 30 We are reading tropologically. I doubt if anyone ever read Comus without thinking it to have some moral-allegorical force. But in the era when these

Image, Form and Theme in A MASK

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allegory is not any series of little metaphors; it contains many such within a metaphor, which is 'continued'. And we have not yet arrived at what makes these allegorically figurative, in anything resembling the older sense, which though it did not suit all materials or artistic purposes lingered on where it did suit; we have not yet arrived at that reality which all these literally extant, real, first terms figure forth. Here readers part company according to their philosophical postulates, but there is no doubt of which company Milton belongs in. It has long seemed to me that profound allegory is written by (hence read sympathetically by) those who can look with the eyes of the mediaeval realist, or the Platonist (we must cover by our term the 'Plato' of later men). T h e deep-dyed nominalist (or positivist) can find no second term. H e is left with merely a series of recurrent psychological happenings, which his interpretation of one man's covetousness proliferates when he calls it Covetousness and sees it as resembling all other examples of men being covetous, or which his interpretation of one Lady's rejection of Pleasure's Cup proliferates when he sees it as like all other such refusals. For Sidney as for Spenser's greater figures, we must take out that last like. Both, like those I have opposed to the nominalist, figures were common, there was another element even in the 'moralization' (or Dante would not have conflated the three figurative senses). For all were based on similar metaphysical assumptions; a distinction was made, however, according to end (and thence nature) of the figures. When the Prodigal Son eating husks is seen as ourselves wasting all we are and have and eating our husks in tears, we think metaphorically in aligning all such bitter foods of error under one abstraction and seeing all in the first husk. When the Jews wandering in the wilderness are seen as a type of ourselves wandering in This Wilderness, the same process takes place, but we do not learn not to be prodigals, we see what to believe about the nature of the human state, fallen, lost and waiting to be led to its Promised Land. And that involves directly the beliefs and the Christian doctrines (quid credas) which the tropologically read figure, instructing us (quid agas) only assumed. Both secularization and certain philosophical changes mentioned below took place extremely slowly; of course not every extended metaphor could be, or ever was, read allegorically, and the possibilities surely varied with subject. T h e reader may test the difference for himself by saying, as he looks at the first example above, 'God the Father'—it will immediately become as strictly "allegorical' as the second.

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Images and Themes in Five Poems

w o u l d find a m e t a p h o r i c a l i d e n t i t y i n the refusals b y v i r t u e of their b e i n g significant of a second term real i n a n o t h e r sense than they. T h e reality w h i c h U n a a n d the L a d y

(and

a n y of us w h o can) m a k e manifest, w h i c h the dark offers of C o m u s a n d D e s p a i r a n d o u r o w n b e t r a y i n g m i n d s 'present', has its b e i n g as the 'forms' of things have b e i n g f o r Sidney, as the ideas have b e i n g f o r Spenser. T h e s i m u l t a n e o u s presentat i o n of the t w o modes of reality is the real e x c i t e m e n t of allegory. 3 1 W h e n Comus

is so read it has a date (1634), any date past

or f u t u r e , a n d n o date, b e i n g a figure f o r timeless realities. T h e term that is i n t i m e is real; this is o n e reason w h y the allegorical m o d e has always attracted the satirist a n d the wit, a n d can m a k e an e n t e r t a i n m e n t o u t of those d i s h e a r t e n i n g subjects, o u r virtues a n d o u r vices. N o t everyone w i l l read Comus

allegorically; nor is this disastrous. I t w i l l o u t f l a n k

o u r contentions; its i m a g e encloses t h e m . 31 Compare C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1938), ch. ii; distinguishing allegory from symbolism, he gives us to understand that our choice is between: invented visibilia to express the immaterial (which I should not find necessarily metaphorical), and sacramentalism, with some form of denial of the reality of the phenomenal world. There is a third possibility, and there allegory lies. No one in modern times has done brighter and ampler service to allegorical writers than this critic. But in this definition (though not usually, it seems to me, in application) he does take away from allegory that metaphorical dimension it has by definition and history, and less well-read followers have not been slow to literalize allegory, turning it back again into the nineteenth-century naming-game. T h e gross misdefinitions of allegory to which we are accustomed are far from Lewis's sympathetic reading, or deep understanding (see for example pp. 358ft., 329-339). They have been common in criticism since Coleridge took them over from German Romantic criticism, involve a complete misreading of Spenser, and fit no allegory by any master in the kind. They especially deny the nature of mediaeval and Renaissance allegorical reading and writing as readers and writers show that they understood it. A note on special problems (see note 24). I have not thought it wise to take cognizance throughout in text or notes of differing readings in the Bridgewater and Trinity College MSS. and the 1637 and 1645 editions. A different and interesting essay would concern the relation of Milton's changes to his full intentions as stages in the few images affected could disclose them. Some interesting suggestions appear in C. S.

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Lewis, Ά Note on Comus', Review of English Studies, V I I I (1932), 170-176. I believe no point of mine is changed by information in J. S. Diekhoff, ' T h e T e x t of "Comus", 1634 to 1645', PMLA, L I I (1937), 705-727; I have found it dangerous to draw conclusions by analyzing given single images without consulting his data and his analysis of Milton's composition of Comus. B u t the simplest way to keep one eye on the Bridgewater MS. (of the masque as produced) is to have Todd's edition by one (IV, i8off.). A famous large variation (the nonappearance in Br. of Comus's taunts about Virginity, 737-755, and the Lady's rejoinder about the 'doctrine of Virginity', 779-806), does not affect my point about Milton's extension of the main image touching chastity. T h e chief crux for a student of images which is affected by a comparison of the versions is that regarding the interpretation of the Epilogue-Prologue (especially the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, which to me seems an emblem, rather than a fully metaphorical allegory, of the fidelity between Platonic celestial love and the soul). I have stated that Tillyard's hypothesis in this connection, relating the imagery to conjugal love and involving a change in Milton's conception of the total action's meaning, seems to me suspect on other grounds (see n. 18 of this essay), and the special student may follow his arguments against other interpretations in Studies in Milton, pp. 97-99, where I find his answer to Woodhouse's interpretation of the celestial C u p i d unconvincing. Celestial C u p i d is too well established an image to allow of idiosyncratic wrenching of his meaning. See E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), ch. iv, v; a case in point is Jonson's assured use of the distinction between blind Cupid (' . . . him, which they fayne, caecum Cupidine') and the Cupids w h o are 'chaste Loves, that attend a more divine beautie' than Venus (Masque of Beautie, p. 192; the imagery of this masque is of interest to the student of M i l t o n — t h a t of the tree with gold apples which these chaste Loves pluck, of 'new Elysium' with its Orpheus and its fountains of ' Y o u t h ' and 'Delight', and so on). T h e r e is comment on Tillyard's point in A. E. Dyson, ' T h e Interpretation of Comus', Essays and Studies, 1955 (this appeared after the present study was written, and I find in it, besides differences, several similar defenses and observations, though general considerations are his concern, rather than my strict examination of one kind of evidence for Milton's intentions and meanings). I should also mention a study whose length and inclusiveness I did not suspect until too late, nor read until this one was in press, and which I therefore d o not try to include, thinking it unwise to interpolate comments from another full-length study of Comus into one completed and ready to appear (see John Arthos, On Ά Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle', University of Michigan, Contributions in Modern Philology, 1954). I have also not attempted references to notes etc. in editions of the poems, although my debt to them, especially to those of Merritt Y . Hughes, is of long standing.