Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the nature of events 0823263487, 9780823263486

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Lyric Apocalypse

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Verbal Arts :: Studies in Poetics series editors :: Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy

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Lyric Apocalypse Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events

Ryan Netzley

Fordham University Press

New York 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Netzley, Ryan, 1972– Lyric apocalypse : Milton, Marvell, and the nature of events / Ryan Netzley. p. cm. — (Verbal arts : studies in poetics) Summary: “How can one experience the apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues that John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event. In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events, the modern question of what it means for something to happen in the present” — Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6347-9 (hardback) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Marvell, Andrew, 1621–1678— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Apocalyptic literature—History and criticism. 4. Apocalypse in literature. 5. Revelation in literature. 6. Change in literature. 7. English poetry—17th century—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Title: Milton, Marvell, and the nature of events. PR3592.P64N48 2014 821'.4—dc23 2014029450 Printed in the United States of America 17

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time, and the Possibility of Endings Apocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets What Happens in Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event of Ending in “Upon Appleton House” Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis Notes Bibliography Index

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A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Thomas P. Anderson and Jason Kerr read every single word of this manuscript. I am grateful for their generosity, their patience, and, most of all, their intellectually provocative responses to the argument. Their comments, interest, and insight have made this a more nuanced and interesting book. Daniel Shore and Greg Colón Semenza commented incisively on the sonnets chapter and helped me to improve it substantially. Brendan Prawdzik did the same for the chapter on “Upon Appleton House.” Finally, Yasuko Taoka gamely responded to a series of questions about New Testament Greek. I owe all of them. Numerous interlocutors at the following conferences helped to shape this work: The Andrew Marvell Society meetings at the SouthCentral Renaissance Conferences in 2013 and 2012; the International Milton Symposium in Tokyo in 2012; the British Milton Seminar in 2011; the 2011 Conference on John Milton, sponsored by Middle Tennessee State University; and the Philosophical Collaborations Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 2011. In particular, I would like to thank Nicholas von Maltzahn, Gabriella Gruder-Poni, Nigel Smith, Blaine Greteman, Brendan Prawdzik, Lauren Shohet, Daniel Shore, John Creaser, Thomas Corns, and Don Beith for provocative questions and extremely helpful comments at these venues. I would also like to thank the students in my seminar on lyric and events, especially Brian Cook and Jay Simons, and in my senior seminar on the

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definition of poetry, especially Rosalind Whitley. They grappled enthusiastically and earnestly with the issues discussed in this book. At Fordham University Press, Thomas Lay has been an encouraging and enthusiastic champion of this project. I also thank the two manuscript readers, whose comments helped me to improve and clarify the argument and offered some pivotal objections. I am very grateful for the meticulous care that they brought to the task of reviewing the project. During the course of this book’s composition, Alison Erazmus was always game to celebrate moments of provisional triumph. It is dedicated to her not only because she suffered through many, many harangues about the end of days, but also because of her indefatigable willingness to imagine not only a better future, but also a more intense and a more beautiful present.

Lyric Apocalypse

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Introduction Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time, and the Possibility of Endings

“What happens now?” in modern parlance often means “What happens next?” This is not so much an error as it is a recognition of the centrality of a conception of the future, even an apocalyptic one, for any notion of the present.1 We are accustomed to the notion that the present is always fleeting into the past or yearning for a better tomorrow, a nodal point defined via negation and ungraspable as such. This intuitive, geometric model of temporality is precisely what Milton and Marvell seek to unseat with their lyric presentations of an immanent apocalypse. To treat an eschatological revelation as a live, hopeful possibility—instead of as a restful end to pain or struggle or an ultimate vengeance on one’s enemies— requires more than empty wishfulness or even a commitment to revolution’s promise of a purified return to the past and the overturning of existing structures. The lyric, with its penchant for immediacy, enables precisely this attempt, insisting that a real event occurs within a poem and that this event is not reducible to the mere archaeology of hermeneutics or the daydreaming of fancy. Milton and Marvell attempt nothing less than to present change, concrete, substantive transformation, as an affirmative possibility in the present, not something we merely recognize after the fact or confidently explain away as having been there all along. As a result, teleology, typology, dialectic, and chance disruption all fail as viable understandings of events. Teleology and typology treat occasions as nodes in a cloaked providential design, ultimately uncovered belatedly by a wise and 1

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penetrating reader. Although the dialectic describes the motor of change as an auto-generated difference instead of a transcendent narrative, it too insists that events have always already happened, that the new is merely an actualization of what was already the case, in potentia. Chance singularity, finally, turns events into little more than a fetishistic, selfdeluding surprise: We pretend not to know what we already know, that the event is really coming. So we are left with neither a world-weary exasperation that everything has already been written nor an idle faux naïveté that awaits the ludic, liberating arrival of the other. These poets use lyric forms, particularly pastoral and its country-house variant, Petrarchan and occasional sonnets, and encomia, to reconceive the nature of events, what it means for something to happen. For Milton and Marvell, ultimately, novelty and change are more than political or even epistemological concepts, represented in verse but occurring elsewhere. These poets turn to lyric because it allows them to conceive the new as operating immanently in the present. Lyric, in this sense, is not just the safe containment of events inside an aesthetic object, the representational narrative or dramatic doubling of the world’s more important turning points. In Marvell’s and Milton’s hands, at least, it is a genre that insists on the immediate temporality of its own poetic, formal, and aesthetic events—that poems, their reading, and the changes within them are happening right now. This study focuses on a small portion of each poet’s lyric work: for Milton, the composition of Lycidas in 1637 to the sonnets of the 1650s (with a brief discussion of the choral sonnet at the end of Samson Agonistes); for Marvell, the trilogy of Cromwell lyrics, as well as the early royalist encomia, and “Upon Appleton House.” These poems testify to their authors’ lifelong obsessions with the power and possibility of immanent political transformation. Although the regicide undoubtedly intensifies these concerns, this pivotal event does not cause them. In fact, Lycidas and Marvell’s elegies for Hastings and Villiers exhibit the same concern with apocalyptically transformative potentials and forces that we see in poems written after Charles’s execution. Milton and Marvell are not unique in attempting to imagine revolutionary change in this period, but they do embrace political positions different from those of defeated, nostalgic cavaliers, Nicodemist loyalists, parliamentary republicans, or radical sectarians. They neither conceive of events as a species of loss, as do cavalier poets such as Herrick and Lovelace, nor do they cheerlead for occasional victories as the sign of political virtue or God’s favor. They also do not consider a purified political structure

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an adequate guarantee of transformative change, as loyalists or structuralist republicans would, precisely because guaranteeing structures necessarily betray change. Milton and Marvell, then, are not fighting the tide of change in beleaguered defense of justice and virtue against modern encroachments, and they are not comfortable members of a vanguard targeting and reacting against monarchical tyranny—and this is so precisely because such movements always risk blindness to their own perpetuation of previous political models, the very thing that they seek to unseat. They have, in short, an understanding of ends, revolutions, and events that differs from that of their defeated compatriots or zealous fellow travelers, one that is intimately concerned not with looking back or mapping the future New Jerusalem but with the present of apocalyptic transformation.

I Although the regicide is certainly a pivotal occurrence for both Milton and Marvell, it remains one event in a century of pivotal events. After all, the hundred years between 1588 and 1688 are a period rife with national turning points—the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, the Restoration, the Great Fire, the Glorious Revolution—and may well inaugurate our modern bourgeois notion of significant historical happenings.2 Yet as Steve Pincus notes, it is only at the end of this period, with the not-so-bloodless revolution of 1688, that we witness something like our modern conception of revolution. For Pincus, this means a contest between two competing plans for modernization, as opposed to a conflict between traditional and modern values or classes: In contrast to both the classical modernizing and class struggle perspectives, I suggest that revolutions occur only when states have embarked on ambitious state modernization programs. Revolutions do not pit modernizers against defenders of an old regime. Instead revolutions happen when the political nation is convinced of the need for political modernization but there are profound disagreements on the proper course of state innovation. . . . State modernization, as political aim and as political process, is a necessary prerequisite for revolution.3 In this account, the events of the 1640s and 1650s fail as revolutions primarily because Charles I is able to present himself as a defender of

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a traditional, conservative order, in opposition to the newfangled ideas of Parliament. In addition, Pincus maintains that historians have mistakenly characterized the 1688 revolution as an unrevolutionary return to primordial rights and principles, at least in part because of their projection of an earlier apocalyptic conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism onto the later period. By 1688, he avers, most of the English “knew that the early Protestant worldview, the view that Protestants and Catholics were locked in a final eschatological struggle for religious hegemony, was no longer tenable.”4 Reinhart Koselleck offers a similar account of the demise of apocalyptic expectation effected by the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. When the war ends with a political settlement and not Armageddon, the stage is set for the abandonment of eschatological thinking. Yet this abandonment is not total, naturally, because the modern world of political prediction and prognostication shares with eschatology the notion that there is nothing new under the sun, that there are structural limits that enable legitimate and reliable prognostication.5 In fact, I contend that this new modern phase is not just the demise of a closed cyclical sameness, Koselleck’s frequent characterization of an outmoded eschatology, but one in which the apocalypse enters into immediate experience, as opposed to receding into an imminent future. If Roman Catholicism harnesses the apocalypse in support of institutional imperatives, the Reformation challenge to such sublimation begets an eschatology with immanent and not just future force: The unknown Eschaton must be understood as one of the Church’s integrating factors, enabling its self-constitution as world and as institution. The Church is itself eschatological. But the moment the figures of the apocalypse are applied to concrete events or instances, the eschatology has disintegrative effects. The End of the World is only an integrating factor as long as its politico-historical meaning remains indeterminate. The future as the possible End of the World is absorbed within time by the Church as a constituting element, and thus does not exist in a linear sense at the end point of time. Rather, the end of time can be experienced only because it is always-already sublimated in the Church.6 I take Koselleck to be intimating here that the disordering force of a post-Reformation desublimation of apocalyptic figures stems, at least

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in part, from these figures’ new immediacy and application to history. That is, they now can be experienced without this institutional sublimation: One can experience an event and even an end in the present. In contrast to Koselleck, this book maintains that when the end times cease to be a matter of allegorical combat between Christ and antiChrist, one does not abandon eschatology as a backward fetishization of sameness and closure.7 Rather, Milton and Marvell participate in a rethinking of apocalypticism at the moment when revelation ceases to be a matter of allegorical decoding, when we begin to consider the end of time happening within an historical or empirical temporality. In this sense, they are trying to conceive apocalypticism in a world where the reassuring constraints of an unfolding plan are no longer present as the boundary of the future. So what would a revolution look like in a period during which this apocalyptic framework had not yet disappeared and during which the conflict with a purportedly anti-Christian papacy was not the only or even the primary content of apocalyptic thought? Instead of defending the honor of 1649 against Pincus’s challenges to its radicality or effectiveness, I propose that we take seriously the proposition not that the revolution failed but that it was not really a revolution at all. Regardless of the accuracy of Pincus’s and Koselleck’s characterizations of the demise of eschatology (and whether its ends are simply pursued by other means after 1660 or 1688), what matters most in their narratives is the future-oriented nature of all revolutionary change. For Pincus, all revolutions “constitute a structural and ideological break from the previous regime. . . . And revolutionary regimes bring with them a new conception of time, a notion that they are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and its society.”8 The problem, almost needless to say, with this model of transformation is that there’s very little new about this conception of time as a series of radical breaks. Novelty remains a dialectical differentiation from the past. The future remains an ever receding promise. In Koselleck’s account, this promise is not just receding but fundamentally betrayed: That which was conceived before the Revolution as katechon itself became a stimulus to revolution. Reaction, still employed in the eighteenth century as a mechanical category, came to function as a movement which sought to halt it. Revolution, at first derived from the natural movement of the stars and thus introduced into the natural rhythm of history as a cyclical

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metaphor, henceforth attained an irreversible direction. It appears to unchain a yearned-for future while the nature of this future robs the present of materiality and actuality; thus, while continually seeking to banish and destroy Reaction, it succeeds only in reproducing it: modern Revolution remains ever affected by its opposite, Reaction. This alternation of Revolution and Reaction, which supposedly is to lead to a final paradise, has to be understood as a futureless future, because the reproduction and necessarily inevitable supersession of the contradiction brings about an evil endlessness.9 Although Koselleck ultimately presents this oscillatory dynamic as itself a motor for progressive and revolutionary movement, his diagnosis accurately, I think, describes Milton’s and Marvell’s suspicion of the possibilities of revolutionary change, precisely because such change is hopelessly tethered to a reactive present. For Milton and Marvell, at least, 1649 is not a successful revolution precisely because it is not a modern revolution. Or rather, it is a revolution conceived through the lens of an apocalyptic present, not a promise of a modern state and all the future rewards that it entails—power, success, efficiency, law. Such a model of change remains fundamentally conservative insofar as it preserves a system of tension, struggle, and reward that remains the root of monarchical tyranny, both for ruler and for ruled. As a result, the Civil War and Commonwealth period pose different, more fundamental questions about the nature of change—what it means for the new to occur, in the present, and what it means for something to happen. Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics, bridging as they do the pivotal event of 1649, demonstrate that even our cherished notion of an event as a singular crisis that demands a faithful response is in play within these poems.10 In fact, as we will see, it is precisely the model of an external call for reaction, the turning of events into an imagined speaker’s hailing, that their works consistently challenge. Although Milton and Marvell are intent on presenting an apocalyptic change, they do not characterize it as a unique, unknowable rupture within historical continuity. In this sense, a poststructuralist account of events, in which the incalculable nature of an interruption requires an ethical response and a radical responsibility from subjects, cannot do justice to their presentation of revelatory moments.11 For Milton and Marvell, the problem with revelatory change is not its surprising break with continuity, but the difficulty of presenting and conceiving an

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absolute end. As a result, even critical work that describes the event in terms of an immanent break, like that of Alain Badiou, cannot accommodate their insistent evocations of a present and possible revelatory ending. Badiou, for example, maintains that poetry is a mechanism for preserving unknowable irruption: If poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because it is able to devote the latter to Presence; on the contrary, it is because it trains language to the paradoxical function of maintaining that which—radically singular, pure action—would otherwise fall back into the nullity of place. Poetry is the stellar assumption of that pure undecidable, against a background of nothingness, that is an action of which one can only know whether it has taken place inasmuch as one bets upon its truth.12 Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics fundamentally challenge this conception of poetry as the wagered maintenance of a singular event that occurs elsewhere. For them, revealed presence is not gambling on a hopeful future but a confident and hopeful rendering of an immanent occurrence. Such leaps of faith amount to a desperate confidence, the desperate faith of a zealous negative theology that takes human epistemological limitations as evidence of something other than human frailty. Milton and Marvell try to present and imagine a hoped-for end, not merely predict, judge, or know it. Whatever skeptical reserve they demonstrate in the face of religious enthusiasm does not, then, amount to faith in a secure rational procedure of prospective or retrospective evaluation. In fact, for both of them, a blind zeal conceptually mirrors a rational skepticism in that neither can truly understand an earnest commitment to the possibility of God’s immanent presence. In this sense, their work escapes the epistemological and subjectivizing traps in a formulation like Badiou’s. For Badiou, the event is a rupture that is fundamentally outside knowledge. This is because his ontology of multiplicity requires that there be no self-belonging, no set that includes its elements and itself as a set.13 This notion of the event, for all its mathematical complexity, ultimately issues in a system of subjective recognition in which novelty has only a retroactively recognized being. In this system, events are never, at this time, in the present, taking place: “It is the event which belongs to conceptual construction, in the double sense that it can only be thought by anticipating its abstract form, and it can only be revealed in the retroaction of an interventional practice

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which is itself entirely thought through.”14 Badiou’s account remains tethered to a logic of retrospective rupture, the arresting interpellation of a crisis demanding the careful attention and singular fidelity of the true revolutionary. As Daniel Smith notes, Badiou’s set theory, which describes events as lacking existence, must then turn to a disturbingly powerful subjectivity to account for occurrences: The event thus appears in Badiou’s work under a double characterization. Negatively so to speak, an event is undecidable or indiscernible from the ontological viewpoint of axiomatics; it is not presentable in the situation, but exists (if it can even be said to exist) on the “edge of the void” as a mark of the infinite excess of the inconsistent multiplicity over the consistent sets of the situation. Positively, then, it is only through a purely subjective “decision” that the hitherto indiscernible event can be affirmed, and made to intervene in the situation. Lacking any ontological status, the event in Badiou is instead linked to a rigorous conception of subjectivity, the subject being the sole instance capable of “naming” the event and maintaining a fidelity to it through the declaration of an axiom (such as “all men are equal,” in politics; or “I love you,” in love). In this sense, Badiou’s philosophy of the event is, at its core, a philosophy of the “activist subject.”15 In this respect, the auto-generated immanent breaks that amount to events in Badiou have the same result as the internally generated antitheses of the Hegelian dialectic: a recognition that aggrandizes the subject.16 Just as importantly, such a model transforms the apocalypse into a problem of human perception—just like every other historical event— and fundamentally denies its status as the heralding moment of a new world, one in which the mediating, sinful subject no longer exists. It denies, in other words, the immediacy of face-to-face revelation and the possibility of a radical conversion entailed therein. Despite all their talk of irruption and revolution, models of events like Badiou’s effectively prevent change by turning events into unreachable, transcendent impossibilities: In this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence

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that a breach is expected. . . . The Judeo-Christian word replaces the Greek logos: no longer satisfied with ascribing immanence to something, immanence itself is made to disgorge the transcendent everywhere. No longer content with handing over immanence to the transcendent, we want it to discharge it, reproduce it and fabricate it itself. In fact this is not difficult— all that is necessary is for movement to be stopped. Transcendence enters as soon as movement of the infinite is stopped. It takes advantage of the interruption to reemerge, revive, and spring forth again. . . . The reversal of values had to go so far—making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism) from which the Transcendent will save us.17 Deleuze and Guattari insist on a mechanism for thinking about movement without the arrogation of authority to a transcendent ruling, and saving, subject. Just as important, though, is their anatomization of the incapacity entailed in such models. As Smith notes, for Deleuze, an irruptive event requires a subject with decidedly narrowed capacities: The ethical themes one finds in transcendent philosophies such as those of Levinas and Derrida—an absolute responsibility for the other that I can never assume, or an infinite call to justice that I can never satisfy—are, from the point of view of immanence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my capacity to act. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence represents my slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point.18 Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics require an immanent understanding of events precisely so as to avoid this reassuring impotence in the face of revelatory transformation. As we will see, even waiting for and recording apocalyptic change requires that we transmute the entity doing the recording and waiting. If we do not, then it becomes difficult to imagine the apocalypse as anything more than the settling of old scores, the final victory of a slighted, resentful subject. Milton and Marvell, in contrast, try to show how this revelation could be desirable as such, and not because it promises compensation for past injuries or inadequacies. Milton’s and Marvell’s verse also demonstrates that there is something more disturbingly fanatical about the measured retrospection of recognition than the most futuristic of prophecies or calls for zealous

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political violence. That is, violent rupture becomes the only possible motor for transformation in a recognitional system. One always performs this recognition from the standpoint of a triumphant victor after combat and conflict, requiring, then, the very sorts of retrospective (and prospective, it should be said) triumphalism that seem anathema to a transmutation of all worldly values. As Jonathan Goldberg notes, it is around the value of rupture as a foundational instance that Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul diverge: More to the point would be Giorgio Agamben’s argument about figura, his claim that Pauline theology is deeply rooted in the double nature of typological figuration, in which any figure is at once historically real and yet anticipatory of a messianic futurity. . . . His reading of Paul claims that various forms of non-self-sameness are the Pauline legacy and contrasts with Badiou, who treats Paul’s declaration of faith in the resurrection of Jesus as a founding moment, an event that marks a rupture with everything that has come before.19 Agamben’s notion of poetic temporality, and its relationship to present events, is correspondingly alien to Badiou’s postulation of a singular rupture faithfully maintained. In Agamben’s account, a poem has an eschaton, an end toward which it tends, but also has its own time, a time encapsulated in rhyme. This is not the eternity of holism or unity but rather a different order of time still within time: “It is not that there is another time, coming from who-knows-where, that would substitute for chronological time; to the contrary, what we have is the same time that organizes itself through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in order to make place for the time of the poem.”20 The messianic time that Agamben limns amounts to a time contracted into the moment when it begins to end and stands as a rejection of a theoretical emphasis on the singular promise of futurity. Messianism is not, then, a transcendent rupture that can also masquerade as a transition: “What is at risk here is a delay implicit in the concept of ‘transitional time,’ for, as with every transition, it tends to be prolonged into infinity and renders unreachable the end that it supposedly produces.” Instead of this model of deferral, or even a notion of eschatology that would transcend chronological time, messianism entails a transformation of the experience of operational time: “What matters to us here is not the fact that each event of the past—once it becomes figure—announces a future event

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and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by this typological relation. . . . The messianic is not just one of two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself.”21 On the one hand, this is nothing more than the insistence that fulfillment or telos is not enough for understanding, that one must march through the experience of a thought for understanding to occur. That seems innocuous and uncontroversial enough. However, the contention that messianism is relation and that this relation is discernible in its own right ultimately entails the suggestion that retrospective tension and subjective recognition play no part in an apocalyptic transformation that reorients temporality.22 In this case, the experience of thought cannot be the dialectical one of internally generated breaks, reversals, and sublative re-relations. But it can also not be the radically open responsiveness to the other that requires aleatory interruption in order to function. The messianic, then, is not a punctual, spectacular rupture, arriving from inside or out to disrupt our historical continuity. Rather, Agamben implies that we achieve continuity or relation, as such, only through messianism. The apocalypse does not intervene to upset our retirement plans and then force us to evaluate and then reorder everything as a result of disruptive energies: That remains the Badiouian model of revolutionary events. Instead, revelation means the presentation and transformation of relation, so that we no longer imagine the weak papering over of gaps as the proper characterization of connection. Badiou represents the logic of the present that Milton and Marvell attempt to escape: His emphasis on recognition results in a notion of the present as a spatial network of connections perceived and operated by the same disturbingly powerful subjectivity that we already know. The disruptive break, then, is not an end. It is, in fact, the very condition of events imagined as a relational sequence, narrative or otherwise. Thus, as Badiou often avers, events, even apocalyptic ones, have no being.23 Neither, likewise, does relation. In contrast, Agamben’s account of messianism insists on the thickness and presence of relation and relational events, what Deleuze describes as “positive distance.”24 At the level of poetry, what this means is that rhyme transforms chronos into messianic time, not by promising an ideal regularity or unity that supersedes the present but rather by transmuting expectant hope into a present event: The sestina—and, in this sense, every poem—is a soteriological device which, th[r]ough the sophisticated mēchanē of the

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announcement and retrieval of rhyming end words (which correspond to typological relations between past and present), transforms chronological time into messianic time. Just as this time is not other to chronological time or eternity, but is the transformation that time undergoes when it is taken for a remnant, so too is the time of the sestina the metamorphosis that time undergoes insofar as it is the time of the end, the time that the poem takes to come to an end.25 So the poem does not overcome but rather transmutes chronos, in this case through an insistence on rereading and anticipation as part and parcel of the present. In turn, rhyme is the vehicle for treating hope as something more than wishful thinking, the vehicle for making hope happen in the present as a moment of apparent, and not merely analogous or deduced relation. Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalypticism arrays itself against the hollowing out of the apocalyptic present that appears in critical work like Badiou’s, because the eschatological event is the only present that, for them, actually has something like substance or value. The apocalyptic lyric, then, is the presentation of a future with being in the present, in opposition to the comforting evasions of deferral, mediation, and subjective impotence. It is in this sense that it also unapologetically and unironically wants what it wants: a revealed end. Most of the subjective projections into the future with which we are often besieged do not want this at all. They prefer being able to look back, after the end, on the end. Lyric demolishes precisely this fractured, temporally transcendent subject, the same one that desires its own self-undermining postulations of Archimedean points of view. This subject wants to be caught out in its pretensions and errors, so that it can return to doing what it always does: lamenting the impotence of its own epistemological structures and reason and, in so doing, turning all problems into problems of knowing. In heralding the end of this subject, Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics promise that there is in this world, finally, not only novelty and change but also conversion, hope, and even, dare one say it, learning.

II Prior to the waning of millenarian sentiments that Koselleck and Pincus describe, the early portion of the seventeenth century witnesses a consolidation of English apocalyptic thought and its influence. The

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earlier work of John Bale and John Foxe certainly participates in the broader Reformation tendency to apply the Book of Revelation to historical events and lays the groundwork for later appropriations of apocalypticism as a theological, polemical, and political tool. From the commentaries of Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede to radical publications from Fifth Monarchists and Ranters, seventeenth-century England experienced an increase in the amount and influence of apocalyptic writing. Certainly, the millenarian fervor of the Civil War, Commonwealth, and Interregnum added to the sense of an imminent upheaval, as did, paradoxically, the concerted attempt to domesticate or repurpose such disruptive revolutionary sentiments after 1660. Yet we mistake the sincerity of early modern English apocalypticism if we imagine it solely as a politically revolutionary tool, whether duplicitously or earnestly deployed. As we have already noted in the context of Koselleck’s work, despite the influence of Bale’s The Image of Both Churches and its portrait of a mortal contest between a papal Antichrist and Reformation Protestantism, there is more to the apocalypse than decoding whom God favors in the conflict between royalists and parliamentarians or when the final battle will be waged and won. The very allegorical decoding that would make of history such a planned narrative appears under suspicion in Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics. Although their suspicions rest on different foundations, each poet backs away from treating the apocalypse as a hermeneutic of history, a way to access the subterranean providence that structures apparently chance events. It is not that eschatology does not matter to history or that the apocalypse is really a parable about the internal combat with sin but rather that the way that it matters is different and more complicated than the layering of an allegory implies. For example, Marvell treats the apocalypse as an intensely forceful event fundamentally different in kind from mere developments, causes and effects, or historical and political decisions. It is certainly not another expository or hermeneutic layer that better or more fully explicates another plane of action. These lyrics, then, consistently defy attempts to treat their own evocations of apocalyptic transformation as phenomenal expressions of a broader narratival understanding of the Book of Revelation.26 For Milton and Marvell, the apocalypse is not identical to revolution, either the world turned upside down or a return to a more primitive purity. Revolution, as the prefix implies, preserves what is overturned, in effect requiring that the new retain what it has disavowed. In addition, revolution imagines the relationship between the new and the old as

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either a narrated duel, a cyclical purification, or an exposition of causal relationships, none of which can do justice to the unprecedented, uncaused nature of revelation. God does not win a fight with Satan and then get to give a victory speech; and revelation is not a countdown machine, whose occurrence can be hastened or slowed by human actions, Fifth Monarchists’ claims to the contrary. Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalypses are not interested in causation or combat. This is not to suggest that each is secretly a pacifist—neither is—but rather that we cannot conceive transformation as an accomplished goal or victory and still preserve its status as a novel event. Contests necessarily harmonize and render equivalent the contestants. Causes contain and presage their effects in a way that precludes the new. It is precisely these limitations on the conception of novelty that Milton and Marvell seek to overcome by turning to apocalypticism. Although there is much talk of revolution in seventeenth-century political theory and polemic, Milton, Marvell, and their fellow travelers also tend to view pivotal, catastrophic events through an eschatological lens, which, in turn, allows them to consider the apocalypse as simultaneously foreseeable, meaningful—both now and in the future— and radically disruptive. Decoding signs of an imminent upheaval postulates a world that at least appears to possess a purposive order, but an apocalyptic end must also occur as a radical disruption of the narrative march of history. If Jesus returns like a thief in the night, the signs that herald his arrival must be correct, but cannot present the event as the result of a progressive, causal, or meaningful process. Apocalyptic signs must be accurate and knowable, but presage a new order that is unprecedented. This tension between singularity and signification, between the advent of a radically new world and the interpretive detection that heralds it, replicates modernity’s conflicted understanding of events, but it also reflects the essentially literary concerns of apocalyptic thought in the period. That is, in what sense do signs happen in the same way that events do? If signs are even to represent, let alone present events, would they not have to occur in a manner at least analogous to the occasions of which they are the linguistic doubles? Revelation entails the occurrence of signs as an immediate, pure transparence, as the immanent presentation of an icon, even. Representation’s systems of deferral, which tend to insulate the sign from such temporal problems, disappear at this eschatological moment and leave us, then, with a sign tantamount to occasion itself instead of the commemoration of occasion.27

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15

The apocalypse has more than a retroactive or proleptic effect on the present. Certainly, the promise of the messiah’s apocalyptic return has immanent consequences that are distinct from those of a foreshadowed, calculated aim. This is a future promise that has effects now, before it actually occurs, thus disrupting a simplistic conception of cause’s relationship to effects. More importantly, the apocalypse also promises us an end to the feeble roundabout of representation, oppositional and situational knowing, structure and its discontents—in short, the entire panoply of mediation that dominates modern critical discourse. It instead promises us presence face-to-face, without negation or re-presentation. Milton and Marvell attempt to create such an apocalyptic sign, one that is simultaneously an immediate revelation. They seek to advance the potential and force of apocalyptic imaginings, their ability to issue in a real, even utopian transformation, instead of confirming yet once more the planned and promised ends that everyone confidently and quite rightly expects. In holding out the possibility of a real present that is not always fleeting, the apocalypse does not just problematize a linear conception of time—every narrative already does that, after all. It also challenges the preeminent value of one of our most cherished modern concepts: relation. Relation promises us a consoling causal or contextual network, a definitional system of dependency in which past, present, and future are situationally determined by syntactical shifters, the self recognizes itself in opposition to some other, and the entire world extends its interdependence in perpetuity. It is this intertextual, interconnected interdependency that constitutes eternity or is it least our mechanism for conceiving it. This would be the consoling version of God’s ultimate eternal presence, Paul’s eternal “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28),28 one that curiously, and self-servingly, mirrors our own modern conceptions of networked ecology, information, and even the interdisciplinary symbiosis of the university. Yet this Pauline revelation of the “all in all,” or the alpha and omega, first and last of the Book of Revelation (1:11, 22:13), is also an end, including an end to all of these interdependent relations, most notably the temporal ones in which a future follows a present, which in turn transforms into a past. The apocalypse is an end to all of this and, as such, threatens to terminate our most comforting of epistemological mediations and reassuring signifying structures. It is the end of mediated, relational meaning, but also the end of the arrival of imminent meaning—because an immanent meaning without deferral or difference is right here, now. The apocalyptic event, then, is the

16

Introduction

occurrence of what linguistics and literature always claim to want: a full presence currently absent and deferred by the representational structures of language, human epistemological limitations, or the voraciousness of a subject’s desires. But these mediated absences are actually much more attractive than we make out, as our attempts to tame endings within mediation reveal. Closure, synthesis, release, and resolution—all of these critical concepts that make of the world a hermeneutic problem to be solved or a chaos wishing for order—are not up to this task of accounting for an ending that would also amount to presence.29 The end is neither an answer to a question, a solution to a problem, nor an effect of a cause. Such a present terminus, as we will see, is more difficult to conceive than we usually imagine. Ultimately, the apocalypse is a way of thinking about change and ends, one that does not reduce to a logic of cause and effect, deliberation and action, reason and resolution. It is not that it was not used as a political bludgeon during this period—it certainly was—but Milton’s and Marvell’s uses do not conform to such a pattern. “Apocalypse,” for these poets and in this book, does not mean the entire panoply of images and signs from Revelation. Milton and Marvell think this sort of prophetic representation is precisely the enemy of change in the present, the lurid fantasies that actually arrest the imagination in a projected vengeance or suffering.30 Instead, they employ the tools of lyric in order to imagine revelation as something more than a fantasy of or for the future. For example, Lycidas and “Upon Appleton House” emphasize the temporal occurrence of symbols, that they happen within time within the poem, so as to challenge notions of signification and structure that treat the present as inaccessible, as nothing more than a relational dependence on historical pasts and imagined futures. Milton’s formal experiments with the sonnet and Marvell’s generic alterations of the encomium each seek to unseat the futural orientation of poetic forms designed to curry favor, either in cravenly mercenary or in sincere fashion. Their revisions strip these traditions of their implication in a system of future rewards, not out of a principled moral objection so much as out of a commitment to a more basic question of the ontological nature of temporal change. We are in the land of Milton’s “reforming of Reformation itself.”31 Of course, the milieu in which Milton and Marvell write is not just one among others in literary history. The same century that witnesses a proliferation of climactic national events also witnesses a flowering of lyric poetry in English, unparalleled until the Romantic movement.

Introduction

17

The lyric, as numerous critics from Jonathan Culler to Hegel maintain, bears an intimate relationship to immediacy and temporality. In fact, Hegel contends that the lyric is more concerned with history and temporality than is the more narrative genre of epic: For the outpouring of lyric stands to time, as an external element of communication, in a much closer relation than epic narrative does. The latter places real phenomena in the past and juxtaposes them or interweaves them in rather a spatial extension, whereas lyric portrays the momentary emergence of feelings and ideas in the temporal succession of their origin and development and therefore has to give proper artistic shape to the varied kinds of temporal movement.32 The lyric, as a genre, is then, like revelation, a present presentation of immediacy, not its promise in the future or its declension into the past. Culler’s account of the new lyric studies proceeds similarly, defining lyric primarily in opposition to narrative, instead of to epic: “It is deadly for poetry to try to compete with narrative—by promoting lyrics as representations of the experience of subjects—on a terrain where narrative has obvious advantages. If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line—and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.”33 Yet in what does this now consist, other than its opposition to next, then, before, after, and other temporal and spatial shifters? Culler’s definition, and others like it within literary criticism, essentially make of immediacy both a restful self-presence and a dialectical combatant. But what would it mean to write or even think about temporal presence without recourse to all of these dialectical mechanisms and reversals, many of which often border on a via negativa? Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics, I contend, use the apocalypse and all that it entails— the face-to-face of revelation, the end of temporality in its sinful variant, a really present and not merely deferred showing—so as to offer the possibility of presence outside these reactive circuits. Lyric is neither a commemoration (as opposed to a narrative re-counting) of past events nor the wishful promise of a better future. It is that future or past rendered immanent, as something that happens in the present of the poem. “Now” is not a weak grammatical shifter, representing a fleeting experience in some other temporality. Now is an event that occurs inside poems, not the representation of events.

18

Introduction

The danger of such language—or really any claims to be writing about “time”—is not simply that it counters structuralist and poststructuralist orthodoxies but rather that it reeks of an anti-intellectual mysticism more fitted to bad readings of romanticism than to bad readings of Milton and Marvell. Mediation, of whatever stripe, promises a buffer against such naïve immanentism. Thus, Hegel maintains that the designation “now” cannot be immediately affirmative but must proceed through mediated negation: Sense-certainty thus comes to know by experience that its essence is neither in the object nor in the ‘I,’ and that its immediacy is neither an immediacy of the one nor the other; for in both, what I mean is rather something unessential, and the object and the ‘I’ are universals in which that ‘Now’ and ‘Here’ and ‘I’ which I mean do not have a continuing being, or are not. . . . But what has been, is not; I set aside the second truth, its having been, its supersession, and thereby negate the negation of the ‘Now’, and thus return to the first assertion, that the ‘Now’ is.34 Although Hegel’s procedure returns being to the present, in a fashion that would be a welcome counter to Badiou’s beingless events, it remains the case that the occurrence of “now” happens only as a very specific type of mediated relation: opposition and negation. Despite his acknowledgment that lyric is not a mystical liberation from feeling but rather a liberation in feeling,35 the black box of mysticism remains in Hegel’s account of an asymptotic approach to pure differentiation. The auto-generative oppositional structure of the dialectic that purports to resist such flights of fancy with mediation actually smuggles within itself a uniform notion of distance and differentiation that reduces both to an empty mystical void. This, at least, is Gilles Deleuze’s criticism of the Hegelian dialectic: It claims to provide a mediating bulwark against the naïveté of immanence but actually amounts to the mystification of all distance and distinction. There are more ways to do difference, even and including contradiction and opposition, than are dreamt of in Hegel’s philosophy: The idea of a positive distance as distance (and not as an annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it permits the measuring of contraries through their finite differ-

Introduction

19

ence instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infinite. It is not difference which must “go as far as” contradiction, as Hegel thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as it follows the distance corresponding to it.36 The idea, then, is to think distance, even Hegel’s dialectical difference, as not an empty vacuum to be overcome but an affirmative, substantive relation. For Deleuze, Hegel’s dialectic cannot explain novelty, precisely because it describes only an escalating conflict, in which difference must intensify into opposition and contradiction, which then topple over into a change. When difference reaches the point of antithesis, change miraculously occurs. Deleuze seems to consider such optimism hopelessly naïve and provides instead a model of change that requires an affirmative difference: We speak, on the contrary, of an operation according to which two things or two determinations are affirmed through their difference, that is to say, that they are the objects of simultaneous affirmation only insofar as their difference is itself affirmed and is itself affirmative. We are no longer faced with an identity of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a movement of the negative and of exclusion.37 Deleuze’s terms in this respect mirror Agamben’s description of Pauline messianism. For Agamben, messianism, which entails an imaginative “as not” that evades the logic of negation, also serves as the only temporal model for a revelation that would not amount to a mystical transcendence of the present: It [the Pauline hōs mē ] sets it against itself in the form of the as not: weeping as not weeping. The messianic tension thus does not tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the indifference between one thing and its opposite. . . . In pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end.38 Agamben’s and Deleuze’s assaults on dialectical negation matter for this study not simply so that we can beat up on Hegel, but rather because

20

Introduction

they insist on a notion of novelty that would be compatible with an apocalyptic revelation in which mediation ceases. For Deleuze, this concept is univocity, which is, however paradoxically, the only mechanism for distinguishing languages and beings: “Univocity means the identity of the noematic attributed and that which is expressed linguistically— event and sense. It does not allow Being to subsist in the vague state that it used to have in the perspectives of analogy. Univocity raises and extracts Being, in order to distinguish it better from that in which it occurs and from that of which it is said.”39 In other words, transcendent judgment or dialectical mediation do not preserve difference and distinction but rather liquidate being into a single, amorphous mass. It is only univocity that makes distinction possible and that can capture a face-toface revelation, a sign as event and sense simultaneously in the present. In this sense, Deleuze’s work allows us to treat an apocalyptic end as something more substantive than the indefinite eternity of the same daily life that we already know.40 Milton’s and Marvell’s appropriation of Reformation apocalypticism does not represent the naïve hope of the optimistic or the resentful despair of the failed revolutionary. Their poetic uses of revelation are not merely a peculiar Protestant historical novelty consigned to a benighted past of lockstep scriptural allegories and superstitious countdowns to destruction. Their lyrics’ emphasis on present occurrence requires concomitant revisions to our own understanding of repetition, finality, and the new. If poems do not report events after the fact or attempt to restore or compensate for a lost past, what do their repetitions and responses achieve? Moreover, when does repetition itself occur? When it is anticipated? Or after it occurs, in which case there can be no present repetition? If we insist that lyrics repeat events in a fictional present or produce an authentic immediacy or a virtual futurity, how does that poetic event interact with its presumed predecessor? Overcoming? Substitution? Incorporation? Destruction? Instead of treating lyric’s claims to immediacy as an excuse to reassert the fundamental problems and constitutive tensions of representation, this study proposes that Milton and Marvell are attempting nothing less than a reconceptualization of what it means for something to happen. No longer does it seem viable to consider an event as an accomplishment or a fulfillment. The very notion of poetic endings seems bound up in their experiments with apocalyptic time: Are poetic resolutions themselves events, or are they the end of events?41 For modern readers, I think, it seems obvious that recognition, retroactive or im-

Introduction

21

mediate, and response are what one brings to events. These early modern poets, embroiled in a revolutionary era, are interested in the much more basic, even metaphysical question of what it means for something to happen, even if that something amounts to a crisis of incompletion or catastrophic destruction. Milton’s and Marvell’s verse does not seek to escape the logic of tension and conflict because it suspects ideological duplicity, or because it naïvely imagines that willfully optimistic thinking can change the world. Their lyrics leave us with neither cynicism nor gullibility, precisely because both of these options ultimately harbor a final fantasy of rest, either in a hidden purpose (providential or malevolently conspiratorial) or in an accomplished, inexpropriable freedom. The revisions that each poet makes to the pastoral genre are designed to eliminate the hermeneutic presupposition that poems are coded transmissions of a more important secret content, that pastoral is really a means of obliquely critiquing court culture. Similarly, Milton’s revision of the Petrarchan sonnet’s contemplative mood escapes both those interpretations that would make of all love poetry a roman à clef about patronage and those that insist on its sincere evocation of a subject’s internal passional machinations. Marvell’s encomia perform an analogous revaluation, purging the purportedly mercenary logic of praise of both craven, self-interested social climbing and sycophantic blindness to the flaws of its target. The point, surely, is that the lyric genres that both poets use risk precisely this oscillation between cynical hermeneutics—everything is really a sign of some more important other thing—and solipsistic naïveté—we really are in Arden because the poem tells us that we are and we think we are. However, in each instance, their generic revisions focus on disavowing precisely this oscillation in favor of advancing a lyric that contains an immanent presence. After all, both cynicism and naïveté are orientations toward a future imagined as impossible. Each presents the future as unreal, cloaked behind misleading signs or present only as an imaginary fancy. Milton and Marvell think that the apocalypse, poetry, and even hope have considerably more present power and potential than that.

III This study’s first chapter explores Marvell’s reconceptualization of the target of praise, his propensity to praise apocalyptically transformative

22

Introduction

forces instead of persons. All of Marvell’s encomia laud an event as such, instead of the actor who would purportedly control this significant occurrence. They praise means instead of ends, goals, or plans. Even the titles of the Cromwell lyrics indicate that they are on or about specific events: Cromwell’s return from Ireland, the first anniversary of the Protectorate, or his death. Instead of amounting to a disturbingly proto-fascistic idealization of power, Marvell’s early elegies and his poems in praise of Cromwell attempt to wrest encomium away from its mercenary tendencies, insisting that only praise for force can make of encomium something more than the most retrograde of selfinterested, social climbing. As a result, these poems demand a fundamental rethinking of political engagement. More specifically, Marvell’s epideictic verse shows that one can pledge allegiance only to a force or movement, not to a person, and it is only this revised model of allegiance that allows for anything like political change. In addition, only allegiance to an apocalyptic force, acting in the present, can enable real novelty. Loyalty to persons always results in inertia, precisely because it amounts to nothing more than a restful and reassuring agreement. Chapter 2 explores the nature of imaginary potential in Milton’s sonnets. More specifically, what happens when one imagines an alternative future? And in turn, what constitutes an event within thought? These are pressing questions not only for Milton’s contemplative sonnets, “How soon hath time” and “When I consider,” but also for those praising Cromwell, Fairfax, and Vane, the occasional sonnet on the massacre of the Waldenses, the final sonnet recounting a dream visitation from his deceased wife, and even the sonnet-form conclusion to Samson Agonistes. The sonnet is important for Milton because it allows for an imagination of apocalyptic and poetic events outside a logic of resemblance. The volta and resolution of sonnets are formal means of incorporating occasions within verse without recourse to analogy or verisimilitude, or to a subtending providential narrative to be revealed in an imminent future. As such, they allow for an eschatological presence within poetry, but also translate the apocalypse into a paratactic rhetorical order, firmly rejecting the notion that apocalyptic events amount to an overwhelming contingency or surprise or to a logical or causal development. The concluding choral sonnet of Samson Agonistes applies this paratactic principle to an entire dramatic history, ultimately demonstrating that it is only lyric that can tell us what it means for

Introduction

23

something to happen, while still allowing us to do something about it in the present. In this sense, this dramatic poem that concludes with apocalyptic destruction is ultimately and perhaps counterintuitively an attempt to take seriously what a poetics and a politics of hope would entail. Chapter 3 explores Milton’s depiction, in Lycidas, of a potentiality that does not tend toward actualization. In an occasional elegy purportedly all about the finality of death and a poet’s response to it, Milton outlines a possibility that is free from the directive interventions of not only bossy prelates and hireling wolves but also authoritative speakers like Saint Peter, Apollo, the author himself, and even God. The poem’s famed evocation of apocalyptic justice for greedy prelates—the twohanded engine that threatens to strike once and no more—also shows, paradoxically, the limitations inherent in conceiving of the apocalypse as a final justice or fulfillment. By disavowing the imperatives to perfection and productivity within both teleology and typology, Lycidas attempts to advance an antinomian understanding of liberty, one that would no longer consider autonomy or self-regulation the pinnacle of freedom. As a result, the new revelation that the poem’s final line promises—“To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new”42—does not amount to the actualization of a positive program or lurking potential, precisely because such an understanding always devalues possibility, treating it as an unreality until it appears inside the very real world it hopes to change. Chapter 4 contends that Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” a poem rife with images of reversal, explores what it means for revolution itself to happen in the present. On their own, these reversals do not fundamentally change the world: An upside-down world remains the same; only a subject’s epistemological perspective has changed. “Upon Appleton House” attempts to revive the apocalyptic power of these symbols by focusing on their temporal occurrence within the poem. Marvell’s much ballyhooed penchant for a striking literalization of metaphor is essentially an exploration of what it means for a metaphor or symbol to occur in the present—what happens when mediation occurs immediately. The political effect is the replacement of revolution with apocalypticism, precisely because it is only the latter that can really end injustice, sin, or anything, for that matter. Reversal, in contrast, acts only as a false ending, preserving itself through inversion in perpetuity. The literary effect, however, is one in which the

24

Introduction

sequence of symbols and metaphors, when they occur temporally, matters more than the transpositional spatial network of which they form a part. Ultimately, Marvell turns the country-house genre, a genre already obsessed with the nature of poetic production and its architectural structure, into a tool for examining poetic occurrences, the events that happen now, within verse. As a consequence, “Upon Appleton House” becomes a brief for Marvell’s (and ultimately Milton’s) broader contention that political understandings of change will always fail because they assume a divide between contemplation and action and, in so doing, think that it is possible to describe political change, even revolution, without an ontological account of transformation. For Marvell and Milton, the apocalypse provides precisely this type of account: the postulation of fundamental alterations in the nature of temporality alongside a serious examination of meaning’s present occurrence, how something like real revelation could occur immanently. This study’s conclusion turns to the consequences of Milton’s and Marvell’s reconceptualization of events for our understanding of crisis, freedom, and learning. It explores what it means for change to happen in the present. What would happen if we ceased to think of change as reform, or even revolution, and imagined it as a present apocalypse? In this respect, many of the categories that have come to dominate our understanding of politics (critique, discussion, deliberation, resistance, allegiance, and resolution) and literature (irony, tension, allegory, conflict, climax, and resolution, again) seem dubious or even impotent in this verse. The apocalypse, after all, does not support the elaborate edifice of anxiety, conflict, and struggle with which we are accustomed to anatomize sociopolitical structures and their alteration. And this is primarily because the reversals of revolution are not the same thing as the events of revelation. The latter can certainly be domesticated within the former, but this verse consistently demonstrates the dangers of doing so. The lesson that these lyrics offer is that we have consistently put our faith in the wrong engine of change. Revolution looks attractive precisely because it can be made permanent and extend into perpetuity the endlessly roiling cauldron of history and politics with its revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The apocalypse, however, holds out the possibility of a real end, and the indictment that we have never really ended anything, that we are all grasping, acquisitive hoarders of history, no matter how catastrophic

Introduction

25

the event. The apocalypse, however, is the possibility—and the freedom— of an end, finally, to an endless dialectic, certainly, but also to the repetition of singularities. For it is precisely these punctual crises, with their demands for opportunistic response, that never end and never change.

Chapter One

Apocalyptic Means Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

One cannot pledge allegiance to a person, a position, or even a nation. One can declare allegiance only to a force or a movement. And it is lyric that allows one to locate and praise this present force, instead of reducing it to a wishful future or an inert past narrative. That, at least, is the lesson of Marvell’s Cromwell poems, as well as of his early royalist elegies. This chapter argues that “An Horatian Ode,” as well as his other political encomia, uses the apocalypse to reconsider the nature of allegiance, not just its ultimate object. If loyalism, in John Hall’s terms, requires that one “not . . . respect the power or place for the persons sake, but the person for the place and power[s] sake,”1 then the act of allegiance itself, the nature of this respect, changes as a result of this shift from person to place: Allegiance to a revelatory power means something different from allegiance to a place or person. After all, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” is not on or about Cromwell or about his promised political position. It is on or about the occasion of his return from Ireland. Even criticism that reads this poem as an ambivalent evaluation of Cromwell still imagines it as withholding from the man either allegiance or plaudits, not his triumphant homecoming. So how is praising Cromwell’s return different from just praising Cromwell? As Blair Worden notes, in 1650 it is not yet clear that Cromwell will become Lord Protector or even that the parliamentary cause will be successful.2

26

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

27

Marvell, then, praises this force before it has accomplished its goals and so does not merely justify an existing order or sycophantically butter up a victor. Just as importantly, the ode does not laud the eventual success of Cromwell’s political program, offering only a rational wager on its ultimate success. Mercenary calculations are absent from the poem. Marvell instead consistently depicts Cromwell as an immediate force without a plan. In so doing, he refuses to subordinate forceful means to overriding teleological, rational, or even providential ends. As a result of this attention to immediate means, the poem conceives of political change as an apocalyptic, face-to-face immanence, one not judged according to a transcendent logic of purposive programs or final causes. Marvell’s ode does not cheerlead for partisan triumph or revel in eliminationist fantasies in this respect but rather attempts to reconfigure the process by which we evaluate truly significant events. What does it mean to praise or condemn decisive, even revelatory events as such, instead of weighing their outcome, retroactively or proleptically? At the very least, it means that Marvell’s verse is not just cagy or elusive but rather reconceives the process through which political change occurs, wrenching it away from the purposive aims and declared allegiances characteristic of both parliamentarian and loyalist factions. It is for this reason that “An Horatian Ode” identifies Cromwell with apocalyptically transformative and irresistible natural forces, and not just an ultimate providential victory. “The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector” goes even further, describing these forces as requiring the allegiance of a public will in order to function and rejecting the notion that eschatology works like a narrative written elsewhere, in some transcendent realm or future. In Marvell’s hands, revelation does not discover a subtending providential narrative that has been ordering the world all along, but rather lauds the instruments that transform the world into something new. By praising means instead of ends, Marvell ultimately turns apocalyptic force into an immanent presence, instead of a narrative to which readers can only passively respond with acceptance or ultimately futile resistance. “An Horatian Ode,” as well as Marvell’s other more obviously epideictic lyrics, attempts to praise events outside of a system of mercenary self-interest and in opposition to a craven adoration for order. For Marvell, it is the postulation of teleological ends as a standard of evaluation that, paradoxically, prevents any present evaluative discrimination.

28

Apocalyptic Means

Teleology certainly defers resolution into the future, thus hobbling immanent judgment, but it also denudes action of any specificity by treating all ends as just another general form of accomplishment. As we all know, means do not matter if the ultimate evaluative test is nothing more than the achievement of a postulated goal. Marvell’s verse simply suggests that such a diminished view of force and potential results even from a teleology that claims to attend to individual elements in a broader purposive structure. In contrast, “An Horatian Ode” outlines a desire for and evaluation of apocalyptic force as such, without the unfolding of a scripted order or the shocking eruption of an epiphany that would retroactively ground such judgments. It is in this sense that the poem demonstrates an Horatian equanimity and, as Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker note, is decidedly free of anxiety.3 Its evaluation of immanent forces is not impatiently awaiting the arrival of an end that would buttress its judgments. As a result, the ode also poses fundamental problems for a revelation conceived as the hermeneutic deciphering of a providential script and for a politics that ties evaluation to the anxious achievement of goals. What would it mean to yearn for an apocalypse that does not promise a reassuringly planned New Jerusalem on the other side of upheaval, and one that does not even consider the apocalypse itself as a restful or joyful finality? In turn, what would it mean to evaluate and value transformative events in the present, without the reassuring futural orientation and endless deferrals of imminence? These questions are not unique to the ode but also occupy even those poems in which the evaluation of their subjects is much less ambiguous: the two other Cromwell poems, “The First Anniversary of the Government” and “A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector,” and Marvell’s royalist elegies for Henry, Lord Hastings, and for Francis Villiers.4 All of these lyrics are insistently occasional, responding to a series of punctual events—military victories, triumphant returns, anniversaries, deaths—whose ultimate significance resides in the future. In fact, this is the fate of all events, large and small, in a world where apocalyptic ends are endlessly deferred: Their significance is not present in the present of their occurrence, or even in a contemplative moment of retroactive recognition. Revelatory meaning, with all of its attendant transformations, never occurs in this model. In this respect, criticism that treats Marvell, throughout his work, as exhibiting a skeptical reserve mistakes the rationale for this apparent ambivalence.5 Whatever ambiguity exists in “An Horatian Ode” stems

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less from its author’s commitment to liberal pluralism than from his refusal to consider agreement with a person or party as a truly political action. Donald Friedman makes much the same point when he maintains that “An Horatian Ode” and “Upon Appleton House” reveal Marvell’s concern with revolutionary action itself instead of being declarations of partisan allegiance: “Neither ‘Upon Appleton House’ nor ‘An Horatian Ode’ tells us very much, I believe, about Marvell’s explicit political affiliations, for both poems are much more profoundly occupied with the question of the right course of action in a revolutionary time than they are with siding with one party or the other.”6 The final program, party, or cause ceases to be the primary means of evaluating events, in effect thwarting appeals to transcendent ends, teleological, eschatological, or otherwise, as the ground for judgment. Instead, we are left to evaluate actions within an immanent revolutionary time. Marvell’s verse challenges the basic logic of engagement and withdrawal, earnest commitment and ironic detachment, that dominates liberal and Enlightenment political theory. All of these mechanisms of political hesitation and recalcitrance disappear in a verse that refuses to consider agreement with a person or party as the primary political action. These poems, then, disavow the recalcitrant romance narrative at the root of modern political theory. They do not consider the self and its beliefs a cherished treasure withheld from an adoring suitor and relinquished only after a long, convincing, effective, and affective suasive process. As a result, these lyrics have little interest in shoring up a site of independent judgment or sociocultural identities. To put it another way, we have too readily assumed that Marvell’s elusiveness is a result of evasion and not a more fundamental disavowal of the political categories that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Taking positions, self-consciously defending them against opponents, and using the tools of rhetoric to sway opponents and wafflers seem decidedly too selfish and self-interested for Marvell. Moreover, such a model of politics assumes that a critical event, today or in 1650, is, at best, a mercenary opportunity for securing agreement; at worst, an excuse for extorting it. Marvell wants us to imagine the apocalypse, in contrast to consoling accounts of eschatological revolution that would turn it to respectable ends, as a sheer, potentially entropic force, one that does not reveal or promise a meaningful pattern within an encroaching chaos. His is not a chaos theory or the reassuring reordering of revolution that returns us to a new identity. Rather, we learn from both nature and

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historical occasions to desire the catastrophic event as a symbolic force that actually can produce ends in the present as opposed to deferring them endlessly in a series of metonymic associations. Marvell’s force does not reduce to a Machiavellian or Hobbesian adoration of power or to praise for an emerging state form.7 Yet in avoiding such structures, neither does it amount to the pulsing flux of a mystical vitalist connectivity.8 Rather, treating the event as force means imagining it as an action happening in a present time, and as one that does not prop up or develop an agential self or achieve a final aim to which we might bear witness. In this sense, these actions are not those of a more reassuring martyrdom, in which a prefigured apocalyptic force makes a rhetorical point like any other.9 Transformative, eventful forces, in short, are a-purposive, and not merely without purpose. Marvell’s verse appears elusive and ambiguous also insofar as it embraces the sort of dangerously conflated aesthetic politics that modern critics, at least since Benjamin, fear: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Yet Benjamin’s solution to fascism’s expressivist protection of existing property relations does not reduce to a clean separation of affective art and rational politics. Instead, “communism responds by politicizing art.”10 Marvell is neither a communist nor a fascist—or rather, I argue that it’s irrelevant if he’s one or the other. What does matter is that his work conflates the activities of aestheticizing and politicizing and, in so doing, insists that there is no structural guarantee that our acts are on the side of the angels, or even of a laudable Frankfurt School Marxism. In Marvell’s case, keeping these two domains separate is simply not an option, given that even such a modulated separation would amount not to a neutral act but to a royalist position. As Paul Hamilton notes, “this disengagement of art from politics, happily for Eliot, inescapably mimes Royalism when it consecrates a realm immune to political decision as the proper condition of poetry.”11 Marvell does not seek this brand of disengagement and, concomitantly, does not imagine aesthetic affect as merely an instrument to be exploited or tamed. Aesthetic passion is politics precisely because it embraces and revels in means and forces—the content, if not the goal, of politics. These lyrics resonate with an understanding of political movements decidedly fascistic and, simultaneously, refuse to postulate a procedural structure that necessarily and securely resists such dangerous tendencies.12 Although I share Michael Komorowski’s desire to move beyond critical discussions of Marvell’s “tortured political loyalties,” I do not

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think that the poem actually praises social or state structures or uncovers the economic issues buried beneath political phenomena.13 Such considerations remain too focused on “place” and not enough on “power,” to borrow Hall’s terms. Moreover, they postulate for signs the very sort of mediating role that Marvell’s verse seems intent on repudiating. Instead, “An Horatian Ode” presents symbols as forces whose substance and nature—their power to connect, link, and combine, as well as their ability to distinguish, sever, and destroy—are accessible as such. Poetry does not establish relationship or connectivity, making order out of disorder. And neither does it essentially resist prevailing structures with irony, critique, or ambiguity. Instead, Marvell’s verse praises, examines, and evaluates the forces that happen prior to or within the concretized nodes of a power—subjects, systems, architectures, etc.—precisely because there are no such guarantees, no automated procedures of judgment that run without constant vigilance and the exercise of force. For the future to exist, one must desire the force that makes this future, not just the secure outcome of its exercise. Although these formulations echo Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the rule of law is and should be undergirded by the rule of men, his insistence on the power of decision is incompatible with Marvell’s depiction of an a-subjective force.14 As Tracy Strong notes in her forward to Political Theology, Schmitt is interested in obstructing apocalyptic forces in defense of an existing order and praises both Hobbes and Hegel for doing so. Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet, for example, contrasts the emergent modern political state, bent on the rational eradication of religious fanaticism, with the forces of a disordering barbarous heroism, of which apocalyptic would form a part. Hamlet, in fact, is interesting precisely insofar as it stages this conflict during what Schmitt designates as “the century of the English revolution,” 1588 to 1688.15 For Marvell (and for Milton, it turns out), however, the apocalypse is not something one wants to neutralize, precisely because the preservation of order is not paramount. The apocalyptic exercise of virtue in Marvell differs from Schmitt’s apotheosis of decision in that, his overt claims to the contrary, Schmitt is not really interested in the exercise of force as such so much as in the halo of authority that results from it. Despite all of his discussion of decision, Schmitt is not really interested in the act of decision so much as in its effects: order or the illusion thereof. In this respect, Schmitt falls victim to the category mistake that Gilles Deleuze describes: He evaluates forces on the basis of abstracted results,

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assuming in advance the very possibility of equalization and comparability that is at issue. For Deleuze, garnering a patina of authority does not make you a master. Even if one wins, one can still be a slave: “We cannot use the state of a system of forces as it in fact is, or the result of a struggle between forces, in order to decide which are active and which are reactive”; “strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact.”16 Results and goals then betray any real evaluation of political forces to the safely congealed world of pragmatism and teleology. In contrast, Feisal Mohamed, in his critique of Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian politics, maintains that the focus on immanent force in Nietzsche and Philosophy results in an abdication of judgment: “The limits of their [Hardt and Negri’s] politics might arise in part from the limits of Deleuzean immanence, which takes affirmation and multiplicity as ends in themselves, rather than making discerning evaluations among various kinds of affirmation and negation.”17 Deleuze, though, does not describe a world where evaluation has disappeared in favor of joyous affirmation. Rather, we evaluate forceful means as such—we might call them relations—as opposed to the ultimate issue of such forces. Attention to means certainly risks falling over into fascism, but this is precisely the risk that Deleuze always anatomizes— how can we fight or evade the little fascist inside us all?—and that Marvell’s verse thinks necessary for political engagement. In treating politics as something other than a series of calculated programs, Marvell attempts a more thorough melding of aesthetic and political means than the communist solution to fascist aesthetics that Benjamin outlines. It is in this sense that Marvell reconceives what political change entails, wrenching it away from our familiar paradigms of allegiance and opposition to people, parties, and their various plans and positions and replacing it with a formal style and manner that would examine the event of transition itself.18 Deleuze’s notion of immanent force allows us to take seriously the political valences of Marvell’s aesthetic choices, because we need not reduce them then to more decorous rhetorical aims. Moreover, such a model allows us to treat revelatory change as something other than a mysterious eruption into a present continuum. As we saw in the introduction, in Deleuze’s estimation, modern models of the event, especially Alain Badiou’s, that treat rupture as its primary character are essentially recipes for arresting change.19 Marvell’s political verse does not present the future as such an epiphanic stoppage, a break that ap-

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peals elsewhere for judgment, meaning, or even being. Instead, it shows that desiring the future means desiring the means to that future, not just its achieved outcome. We, of course, have numerous concepts that describe outcomes: sublation, overcoming, determinate negation, revolution, performed identities. These are all aspects of reversal, the notion that force develops its own internal opposite or recoils from an external obstacle: in other words, dialectic or rupture. For Marvell though, events are not as recalcitrant as this model of a ruptured inertial continuity implies, and attending to them, even praising them, requires more than an attention to results. It requires, at least, considering the disturbing possibility that all execution is innocent, guiltless and motiveless, and that a politics that wants to resist monarchy or fascism errs when it seeks to judge effects instead of attempting to engage forces, even symbolic apocalyptic ones.

I “An Horatian Ode” often registers as the primary example of Marvell’s political elusiveness, which entails both his refusal to take the clear political positions of a Milton and the general ambiguity that seems a hallmark of his poetics.20 Thus, the sympathetic portrait of Charles I on the scaffold becomes evidence of reserved doubleness, or even evenhandedness on Marvell’s part, not a treasonous duplicity directed against eerily celebratory regicidal bloody hands: That thence the royal actor born The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armèd bands Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try. Nor called the gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed.21 This measured portrait of the king is pivotal for criticism that reads Marvell’s ambiguity as a cloaked indictment of the Commonwealth or

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Cromwell or as evidence of the poet’s moderate, rational reserve. Firmly in the former camp, Takashi Yoshinaka depicts Marvell as a secular skeptic unmoved by the Cromwellians’ ideological machinations, whereas Margarita Stocker characterizes this passage as evidence of both personal antipathy and neutral dispassion.22 Eliot, of course, sets the tone for the latter critical tradition, characterizing “An Horatian Ode” as exhibiting “an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones” and Marvell himself as “an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan.”23 However, this critical position does not spring fully formed from Eliot’s head but rather represents a distinct political position. As Nicholas von Maltzahn notes, its origins lie, at least in part, in the Whig rebranding project of the 1690s, designed to erase the party’s association with secrecy and polemic and to replace it with a more respectable public and civic identity.24 What is pivotal in each of these instances, in interpretations that focus on Marvell’s neutral reserve, as well in readings that insist on his antipathy toward the regicide or the Commonwealth, is that ambiguity and irony be translated into unambiguous political opinions, that they mean something after all. As Donald Friedman notes, despite the ode’s sympathetic portrait of the king and generally pathetic depiction of the regicide, the poem still displays Charles as an empty actor. Compassion in this instance does not necessarily entail allegiance or even ambiguity: Cromwell, in short, never comes to the stage, while Charles is seen as perfectly suited to his role. I think the underlying suggestion is that, whereas Cromwell’s actions blend the deed, the thought, and the power to effect both, Charles can only act out the gestures befitting a king, since he has forfeited the true foundations of this sovereign power. Cromwell acts, but Charles is the actor, because there is no substance in his actions any longer.25 In contrast to Charles’s status as an empty cipher, Cromwell appears as a figure with substance, one not subject to the hollow deceptions of performance. But as Harold Toliver notes, one cannot simply replace a monarchy and the entire evaluative system that attends it with the mercenary yardstick of political or military success, or even of mutual dialectical recognition. The risk in such a substitution is always that one will turn all evaluation into little more than self-interested flattery: “If in praising the good king, the poet could consider himself part of a

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‘consistent’ humanism celebrating the order of the universe, in praising the accomplishments of a good politician, he remains an arm of the state.”26 Hirst and Zwicker note that there is a more positive valence to such an alteration in political systems: A republic turns political participation into a matter of choice, not an aristocratic engagement to which one is resigned.27 In either case, what changes with the death of the king is not merely the object, but also the means of evaluation. Marvell’s praise for Cromwell’s combination of knowledge and will seems, in part, a response to this concern. The latter’s refusal to maintain any customary distinction between contemplative retirement and public engagement signals the sort of interconnected unity typically ascribed to a king within a system of networked resemblances: “So much one man can do, / That does both act and know” (75–76). But even in this passage we witness Marvell’s second approach to the problem of praising a politician: He changes the object of praise and its conceptual structure, refusing to align it with an architecture of accomplishment. This alteration stems less from the fact that the Commonwealth project is incomplete and uncertain in 1650 than from a basic commitment to rethink the act of valuing. The ode does not laud the man who accomplishes these feats, nor merely the “so much” that he can accomplish, the fact and event of the Irish victory. Rather, it celebrates the energy that achieves this particular success. “So much” is a decidedly ambiguous formulation that rejects the mercenary yardstick of the successful accomplishment of a purposed aim. After all, does “so much” mean “only so much” or imply that this “so much” is actually quite large and impressive? In addition, by insisting that there is a real and possible union between mind and will, knowing and acting, Marvell’s portrait of Cromwell unseats our modern presumptions about the constitution of subjects. Contrary to our understanding of the inevitably riven performative self, reacting retrospectively or proleptically to dialectical others, Marvell’s Cromwell is a force that does not require external counterpoints in order to function. Cromwell is an affirmative apocalyptic force, and not a revolutionary or reactive one. Modern accounts of self-conscious subjectivity might think this fantastical or impossible, but we should not pretend that Marvell does not present this fantasy, if for no other reason than that it strikes at the heart of the reserved, deliberative, reasonable subjects that we so often take ourselves to be. The bitterly ironic contention that the defeated Irish can best praise Cromwell certainly casts doubt on any reading of this poem as an

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unqualified celebration of the Lord General and stands as the other pivotal passage in arguments for Marvell’s reserved evaluation of political violence: They can affirm his praises best, And have, though overcome, confessed How good he is, how just, And fit for highest trust; 77–80

Yet the work of this irony is not merely a single inversion, one that would reveal a not so subtle condemnation of Cromwell’s bloody Irish massacres. One does not need irony to perform subtle condemnations, after all, and even when it is used in such scenarios it fundamentally changes the nature of condemnation. The notion that irony acts as critique assumes that one can simply arrest its reversals once they begin and turn them to respectable purposive account: resistance. For example, the figure of a defeated enemy offering praise for a conqueror is entirely conventional, certainly, but this convention is itself fundamentally ironic: The praise that the defeated offer is extorted, begrudging, and self-interested, and therefore insincere. This insincerity, however, on its own does not amount to a simple reversal of the panegyric, precisely because there is truth, and a testament to the power of a conqueror, even in the possibility of extorted, insincere praise. We have come to believe that praise, in order to be worthy of the name, must be independent, voluntary, and sincere, the gift of a free because reserved subject. But “An Horatian Ode” may well imply that there is something better, and even sweeter, about an extracted, forced encomium: It testifies to what one should value—force and movement. Moreover, in this passage, insincerity does not even amount to irony. The line does not indicate that the Irish do affirm Cromwell’s praises best, only that they can. Their confession of his justice and goodness is not the same thing as praise in the end. The false syntactical enjambment of “and have” reinforces this distinction. For a moment, “and have” seems to be connected to the preceding line about the Irish’s potential praise for Cromwell, as in “they can do this and have.” That initial connection disappears with the recognition that the succeeding line reads “have confessed.” The result of this sequence is then a distinction between the praise that the Irish can affirm and the confession they have offered of Cromwell’s various qualities. His qualities, then, traits or victories that he owns, are not the object of praise.

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The point of this traditional appeal to an enemy’s praise is not just to serve as a mechanism for openly hidden denigration of the lauded personage. Nor is it to throw the entire encomium tradition into disrepute, suggesting that there is no such thing as sincere, nonresentful, nonmercenary praise. Instead of trying to explain away this conventional gesture by pointing to its purportedly clear purpose, we should examine what it means for the vanquished to praise their conqueror, what exactly is being praised in this instance. Here, it means that the defeated Irish “can affirm his praises best” because they are witnesses to what encomium should address: not virtuous leaders or their noble political goals but the forceful, amoral execution of virtue. “Affirmation” and “confession” in this case do not amount to a sign’s correspondence to some other phenomena. The Irish testimony is the best affirmation not because it bears witness to some unique causes, qualities that Cromwell possesses, or effects, victories that anyone can see and then laud. Neither does the confession that they have already offered of Cromwell’s justice amount to nothing more than their own defeat. “Though overcome” indicates that they praise him despite defeat. The outcome or event of the conflict does not make them better witnesses. The Irish in this poem appear as the best witnesses to virtue because they witness the means, not the ends, of this action. Marvell’s aim here seems to be nothing less than the reconceptualization of the nature of encomium. Means and not ends are the object of panegyric, the ode claims, and, contrary to our cherished moral squeamishnesses, that is not a bad thing.28 The poem’s general conceit of casting the English Civil War in terms of Roman history creates its own ambiguities, which, just as was the case with irony, often ground critical attempts to read the poem as political reticence or disapproval. If irony was subtle condemnation, ambiguity is the curiously significant withholding of full-throated allegiance. Even though the poem insists that Cromwell does not arrogate power to himself, insofar as the poem portrays him as Caesar, he is always a threat to parliament. Thus, after noting the enemy Irish’s possible confirmation of Cromwell’s justness, the speaker reassures readers that his victories have not issued in a haughty, threatening despotism: “Nor yet grown stiffer with command, / But still in the Republic’s hand” (81–82). It is not just that these lines protest too much and, in the process, give away their surprise that Cromwell remains loyal to the Commonwealth.29 As Nigel Smith notes, Marvell’s allusions to Lucan’s Pharsalia at least imply a suspicion of Cromwell’s power.30 Yet such suspicion does not leave the mechanism of allegiance intact. If historical

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comparisons, with their continuities and discontinuities, can no longer signify or explain agreement, that is at least in part the result of an apocalyptically transformed present, one in which traditional analogues no longer apply. When Worden maintains that “the ode, rather than taking neither side, takes both,” he is describing neither apostasy nor apathy.31 Rather, he points to the fact that the ode undermines the notion that ambiguous elusiveness has a point or purpose, that it is really rhetoric or propaganda by other means. In this respect, “An Horatian Ode” shows that literary reversals and indeterminacy are not coded messages to be deciphered and that ambiguity and irony—these interesting formal instruments—are something more than the illusion of a reserved judgment, which can nonetheless transform itself seamlessly into a sincere, declared allegiance. In turn, politics must be something more than agreeing or disagreeing with a position hermeneutically deciphered, rescued from ambiguity. Certainly, there are risks in advancing an ambiguous politics. It would be aimless, without goals or recognizable constituencies. Yet for Marvell, that is precisely what is attractive about it. It would be pointless but ethical. After all, it is impossible to bribe or extort such a politics, because it would lack the very selfinterested identities that would always threaten to undermine political virtue. Naturally, a criticism that imagines justice as the determination and maintenance of relevant distinctions will demand the elimination of ambiguity, for uncertainty is tantamount to either anarchy or tyranny. For example, Thad Bower, citing René Girard, insists that indistinguishability is the hallmark of injustice in “An Horatian Ode” and evidence of Marvell’s reticence in offering enthusiastic admiration for Cromwell.32 Girard, writing about Greek tragedy, somewhat incongruously through the lens of Ulysses’ speech, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, about the dissolution of degrees, maintains that “the end of distinctions means the triumph of the strong over the weak, the pitting of father against son—The end of all human justice, which is here unexpectedly defined in terms of ‘differences’ among individuals.”33 Marvell, though, is no ambiguous, crafty Ulysses. The problem with Girard’s contention is not just a political or moral one: that it is a tacit argument for aristocratic despotism against egalitarian democracy. Nor is it that it is self-contradictory: strong and weak remain distinctions, even within Girard’s own condemnation. Rather, the limitation of Girard’s account resides in its inability to imagine order outside a hierarchically purposive system of power’s agential manipulation. Thus, the

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concluding portion of Ulysses’ speech, to which Girard alludes, evokes a voracious “universal wolf” whose destructive tendencies end only in self-annihilation: And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.34 Unlike Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, Marvell is not speaking to an Agamemnon mocked by a warrior Achilles, and he is certainly not indicting the latter for misunderstanding the role of wisdom in war. According to Ulysses, Achilles and his men “Count wisdom as no member of the war, / Forestall prescience and esteem no act / But that of hand.”35 Marvell, however, as we will see in our discussion of the falconer simile, offers a decidedly different portrait of the relationship between hand and wisdom, suggesting that the universal wolf is not consigned to self-destruction should he not be ruled by some external transcendent authority. There are more means of ordering the world than are dreamt of in Ulysses’ philosophy of hierarchical purpose. Thomas Greene in his reading of the ode mirrors Bower in contending that indistinction is the great threat to historical order. Yet he also acknowledges, in his use of the Freudian concept of the uncanny, that there is something attractive, even mesmerizing about such indistinguishabilities. What’s most curious about Greene’s interpretation is that, while he acknowledges that Marvell flirts with the possibility of a hyperbolic, even magical conflation in “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House,” he never considers the possibility that poetry itself might be precisely this sort of uncanny identification.36 As a result, Greene maintains that there are some types of conflation not all that dangerous to our sense of justice: prosodic ones that reaffirm the value of distanced reserve. He reads Marvell’s choice of an Horatian ode and even the length of the lines as an indication of the ode’s aversion to “crude violence,” a conflation of sense and sound uncanny but not unjust: The Horatian form of the ode, including the quiet formality, the brevity of the lines, the refusal of the incantatory, can be read as counter-apocalyptic. The poem resists that incantatory temptation as though it were crafted to remain aloof from the melodramatic and lurid mysteries it reflects upon. But this rhetorical reticence cannot disguise the fact of a subject which is radically,

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metaphysically ungovernable. The poetic problem cannot really be distinguished from the political problem.37 In this reading, Marvell does not so much tacitly condemn Cromwell as he withdraws from a political fray that requires such a clashing of forces. For Greene, the “cool perception” that opposes “crude violence” accomplishes a different type of political and poetic engagement, without the intervention of force.38 What is probably most striking about this interpretation, however, is its inability to acknowledge that cool stylistic and prosodic forces enable such a measured withdrawal. To put it more pointedly, why think that the brevity of the lines means clipped reserve and not enthusiastic, even incantatory, agreement, the rhythmic equivalent of a hammer’s punctual emphatic force? Even if there is something sententious and grave about the rhythm of these lines, why would gravity imply a cool negative judgment, and not a positive one? Here, as was the case with ambiguity, a poetic tool signifies in a very specific way. Gravity means a right-thinking Enlightenment aversion to violence. Yet this conclusion about the prosody is predicated on an understanding of the nature of violent force that seems incompatible with the poem’s own ending. The lines that precede the final couplet, as a consequence of their multiple fricatives, do tumble rapidly into the sententious conclusion, which slows down as a result of its monosyllabic words, rhetorical emphases, and multiple nasals: Besides the force it has to fright The spirits of the shady night; The same arts that did gain A pow’r must it maintain. 117–2039

Such prosodic deceleration cannot equate to the political reticence that Greene describes. His reading of the ode’s generic properties rests on the assumption that gravity cannot affirm a final affective enthusiasm for political violence, that the final meaning that we know controls the tool, that ends always govern and delimit means. Praise for force can only sound like words tumbling over each other into orgiastic chaos. There can be no slow, inexorable force. Such a reading ignores the very gradual deceleration that occurs in these lines. “Shady night” contains the nasal consonant and unrounded vowel that will be

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so central to the gravity of the final couplet. “Same arts” deploys the same speedy sibilants that accelerate the penultimate couplet into the conclusion. Just as the falcon simile, as we will see, unseats a safe containment of instruments, so too does the concluding rhythm show that gravity itself remains a force, not something different in kind than force. If we assume, as Greene does, that violence is only the product of precipitate passion and, at best, ill-considered planning, then we have already decided precisely what is at issue in these lines: whether one can have done with means after their ends have been accomplished, whether right controls, fulfills, and ultimately abrogates might. In this instance, though, the prosody doubles the sense and shows the limitations of this wish for a guaranteed transcendence above the terrain of forces, including prosodic and formal ones. The concluding lines aver that the same arts and forces are at work before and after an end is achieved, because there is no place of final accomplishment from which to adjudicate, retroactively, events and their meaning. Marvell does not violate modernity’s sacred commitment to justice by implying that might makes right. Rather, he suggests that the very evaluative system that grounds such notions of justice is misguided. This is what suspending judgment means for Marvell: disavowing the entire transcendent and teleological structure that makes evaluation a matter of prospective ends or retrospective reinterpretation. Subjects fundamentally misunderstand how evaluation works insofar as they imagine themselves either as having achieved a fulfilled end of history from which to adjudicate competing claims or as having predicted this end. Instead, we are always, as Deleuze insists, consigned to weighing forces in the present, on the basis of their immanent qualities.40 Even if we were to accept, ultimately, an equation of politics and agreement, such a critical approach ignores the extent to which allegiance with a force, especially an apocalyptic one that ends something instead of perpetuating it, is decidedly different from allegiance to a person, belief, or party. So if Cromwell, as a military or political actor, is not the object of encomium in this lyric, what does it mean to praise his actions as such, his means and not his ends? The pivotal passage in this respect is the falconer simile, when “An Horatian Ode” evokes sympathy for, even empathy with instrumental force itself. These lines do not desperately assure us that power is controlled by deliberate, legislative judgments but rather that instrumental tools are betrayed by such controlling forces:

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He to the Commons’ feet presents A kingdom, for his first year’s rents. And, what he may, forbears His fame, to make it theirs. And has his sword and spoils ungirt To lay them at the public’s skirt. So when the falcon high Falls heavy from the sky; She, having killed, no more does search, But on the next green bough to perch; Where, when he first does lure, The falc’ner has her sure. 85–96

The simile appears disjunctive in some respects. Although Cromwell willingly gives up his power to Parliament, the falcon must be lured, and perhaps even betrayed. The falcon understands when there is no more need for killing and “no more does search.” As a result, instrumental force does not need a secondary level of control, precisely because it appears to control itself. Power does not run on incessantly killing, provided there is no legislative or rational authority to rein it in: The universal wolf need not annihilate itself in an orgy of selfdestruction. Moreover, like Ulysses, the falconer seems in the simile to fancy himself in control of the entire process, the tricky master who thinks that he lures the falcon to the bough, when she really just rests there of her own accord. I do not wish to suggest that this simile is praise for Cromwell or condemnation of the Parliament that would tame him, that it asks us to reaffirm the entirely banal conclusion that political leaders overestimate their own power. Rather, the ode praises the falcon as an instrument of power’s execution and provokes suspicion of any moderating legislative faculty—whether Parliament or reason—because in its presumption it reduces force to nothing more than a tool that one either controls or fails to control through a series of deceptions and betrayals. Marvell’s political verse then praises a tool without an agent and presents reason as the corruption of a pure force. That propensity, and not some ideological propagandizing, explains the ode’s repeated metaphoric evocation of natural forces. In fact, the pointlessness of praising a falcon, which can offer neither patronage nor protection, demonstrates the mercenary duplicity of all praise for people. For Marvell, Cromwell’s virtues and victories are

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neither the excuse nor the reason for praising the man. Rather, the man is the excuse for praising the event of a force’s expression, the only object that would make of encomium something other than the most craven bribery. In a similar vein, the ode’s concluding comparison of Cromwell to Hannibal and Caesar emphasizes not so much the former’s ultimate loss or provisional successes, or the latter’s betrayal of the republic and assassination, as it does the forceful acts that they both perform in very specific milieux: What may not then our isle presume, While Victory his crest does plume? What may not others fear, If thus he crowns each year? A Caesar he ere long to Gaul, To Italy an Hannibal, And to all states not free Shall climacteric be. 97–104

Hannibal, of course, is a model of the conqueror praised by his defeated enemies, but without the extortive elements, purportedly, that characterize Cromwell’s victories over the Irish.41 What is important about this passage, however, is that the comparison revolves around “to,” what Caesar has done to Gaul, as opposed to Rome, and what Hannibal has done to Italy, as opposed to Carthage. Cromwell’s resemblance to these figures is not a function of prophecy, a prediction of what Cromwell will do to Italy, France, or some other nation, let alone his ultimate betrayal by his compatriots. Rather, the historical value of the comparison resides in the fact that these attacks are climactic or critical, independent of their ultimate consequences, Carthage’s defeat or Caesar’s assassination. In other words, “to” restricts the analogy to these acts, as opposed to serving as the ground for a not so subtle prophecy of Cromwell’s ultimate fall, either as the result of internecine treachery, à la Caesar, or as a consequence of military defeat, exile, and betrayal, à la Hannibal. Although the poem perhaps tempts us to read forward to the historical conclusions that we know, such an appeal to finality and final causes—that what Hannibal and Caesar mean is determined by their ultimate fate—seems precisely what is at issue in this poem. The ode attempts to confine the comparison to a narrow

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range of actions within these generals’ careers, thereby implying that analogies can compare acts in themselves, not just the achieved consequences of actions. Readers might chafe at the attempt to restrict their hermeneutic ambit, or even suggest that such interpretive restriction is impossible. I do not think that we should summarily dismiss Marvell’s gesture, however, mainly because this comparison mirrors the concerns of the falconer simile, which immediately precedes it: how to imagine an apocalyptic force in the present without betraying it to a logic of final results. This attention to activity itself also best explains those moments when Marvell aligns praise with fate, providence, or some other historical, natural, or elemental force. When “An Horatian Ode” describes Cromwell as an irresistible cosmic power against which it is pointless to plead, resignation appears to be the only option: ’Tis madness to resist or blame The force of angry heaven’s flame ............................ Though Justice against Fate complain, And plead the ancient rights in vain; But those do hold or break, As men are strong or weak. Nature that hateth emptiness, Allows of penetration less: And therefore must make room Where greater spirits come. 25–26, 37–44

Force seems to have a mercenary, instrumental value in this passage. Yet it is nature, not humans, who must make room for greater spirits and, moreover, it is not exactly clear how this making of room must occur. Does the greater spirit require elimination of some other entity to make this space, in which case the spirit takes this newly emptied space? Do these spirits substitute themselves for lesser spirits? And in this substitution, do they edge out, compress, or overcome their predecessors? Or does space defy a zero-sum logic of metonymic replacement and merely expand, “creating room” ex nihilo, as it were? Even if we assume that the ultimate result of this passage is an analogical injunction for readers, that we must simply accept how the world works

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and the necessary use of coercion for a greater goal, the nature of our resignation to force still requires explication. Resignation is not an easy passive response precisely because we do not await the arrival of another purposive narrative that will drive us to specific actions or order us around. Or rather, resignation to the way things are assumes that we know how things are. Marvell’s poem assumes nothing of the kind, as we have already witnessed in his treatment of politics as a repeatable style, conceived in opposition to a chiseling rhetorical content. In fact, the natural symbols in this poem are more complicated than their pedagogical or political message. Resolving ambiguity into a secure meaning is easy and always proceeds in the same transcendent fashion. Marvell’s poem is much more interested in exploring precisely what ambiguity is, the forces that comprise it. Marvell then is not the shifty, pragmatic company man to Milton’s principled republican. The comparisons with providential or natural forces in “An Horatian Ode” are not simply ideological justifications, placing Cromwell beyond judgment into a realm of amoral or extra-moral historical fact whose acceptance is an unproblematic act on the part of readers.42 And neither is Marvell merely resigned to the march of providential history, no matter how active that resignation might appear.43 When Marvell begins to praise means instead of ends, readers are no longer left with the same options— agreement, belief, resignation, resistance—because the poem is no longer asking for concurring declarations or rebuttal witnesses.44 In Marvell’s verse, allegiance and obedience are not laudable features of political action. But neither, for that matter, are transgression, subversion, and resistance.45 Marvell’s Cromwell lyrics disavow or are just uninterested in all the notions of faith, apostasy, and agreement that tend to dominate accounts that want to make of the Civil War and Commonwealth period a drama of subjectivity and sincerity. These poems shows us that a conscious, internal virtue, one based on choices made through reactive calculation and the rational weighing of options, is always suspect because it requires the division between conscience and force, virtue and its execution, that someone like Cromwell overcomes by ignoring it, disavowing it, or just bustling ahead. That is, Marvell imagines even the internal exercise of conscience as an exercise of force. For example, we might read the dismissal of Cromwell’s opponents in “The First Anniversary” as propagandistic bluster, but to do so mistakes the seriousness with which Marvell disavows punctual resistance as a viable activity for politics:

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The crossest spirits here do take their part, Fast’ning the contignation which they thwart; And they, whose nature leads them to divide, Uphold, this one, and that the other side; But the most equal still sustain the height, And they as pillars keep the work upright; While the resistance of opposèd minds, The fabric as with arches stronger binds 89–96 46

Significantly, “the most equal” means both the most moderate and the most similar. In the latter instance, opposed forces that are closest to equivalence are the foundation of all order. In the former, moderation does not overcome or erase the crossest spirits but rather is itself a force, not something that transcends force. In both cases, the order that results from opposition is not a function of an imminent telos, toward which competitors unconsciously work. Rather, order, even moderate order, results from an immanent interaction. Even if one insists on the ideological duplicity of this harmonious architecture, Marvell nonetheless maintains that one cannot simply put forceful dynamism on the side of progressive resistance and a lame architectural rigidity on the side of a conservative history. There is, in short, an immanent dynamism even in structure and already written historical narratives. A similar rejection of any facile celebration of resistance occurs in the conflation of enemies and allies in “An Horatian Ode”: And like the three-forked lightning, first Breaking the clouds where it was nursed, Did thorough his own side His fiery way divide. (For ’tis all one to courage high, The emulous or enemy; And with such to inclose Is more than to oppose.) 13–20

Courage, virtue, and force do not care about identification or resistance, but not because they have managed to transcend these mundane matters to a higher order of identity. Resignation and resistance are “all one to courage high” precisely because courage and virtue are

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not looking for agreement, because force does not woo a coy subject. In fact, this type of subject, one who wants to be seduced into agreement, appears only in these lines’ evocation of opposition. The lines do not read “And, with such [Cromwell], to inclose / Is more than to oppose,” but rather “And with such to inclose [the entire modified act of enclosing ‘with such’] / Is more than to oppose.” This passage, then, is not a parable about which type of agential restraint is more grating to Cromwell. Rather, “inclose” is not even a transitive verb in this instance, implying that Cromwell is enclosed within some type of structural limit. A transitive verb insists that these lines ask readers to discern what it means to contain such a courageous force, postulating another delimiting, transcendent entity that would do the enclosing. An intransitive reading, however, amounts to praising and participating in a force that closes in, but without the postulation of an external subject that would contain Cromwell’s actions.47 The transitive verb implies that we are engaged in a contest of opposition and containment, always acting on and reacting to some direct object, which paradoxically leads to the conclusion that there is nothing other than opposition—or “more than to oppose”—because all action amounts to reaction. The intransitive verb, however, maintains that there are affirmative forces in the world not always motivated by this dialectic. At the very least, the thorough evacuation and consistent disavowal of a controlling agent in these lines thwarts any recourse to critical conceptions of a reactive, deliberative subjectivity’s preeminence in the political realm. In Marvell’s hands, expressions of this ilk are not the ideological justifications or supercilious condescension of the victorious suitor but rather are an attempt to account for how power works. Instead of considering “thorough his own side” as a fanciful mystification of selfsufficiency, or as an allusion to Cromwell’s contested relationship with other army factions, we should consider it yet more evidence of the treatment of force as the object of praise. Or to put it another way, even substituting “Cromwell” for “courage high” does not do what critics often think it does. Such a substitution does not subsume the exercise of courage under Cromwell as an agent but rather reduces the agent to nothing more than another type of force, metonymically equating Cromwell and courage. Otherwise, he becomes nothing more than one more potentially treacherous falconer—in this case, one who thinks that courage is simply a mercenary tool that he can use at will, to put on or put off as needed. Needless to say, that’s not really courage

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at all. A brand of reading that reasserts the value of conscious deliberation and reserved choice on the part of an agent—that the equation of courage and Cromwell means the subsumption of the former by the latter—essentially transforms all virtue into an insincere shadow play on Charles’s scaffold. Marvell, in contrast, offers a portrait of virtue independent of all of the agential machines that seek to tame its exercise or threaten its purity.48 It turns out that even our interpretive principles of substitution—what metonymy itself means—are bound up in Marvell’s portrait of instrumental force and its poetic examination. Do substitutions preserve the original element replaced, supplant it, or incorporate it into an immanent, conflated unity? At what point do substitutions cease to be mechanisms for explication or elucidation, and threaten the very purposes and agents they purportedly serve? This is not just a resurrection of poststructuralist debates about metonymy, metaphor, and iteration but rather yet another permutation of Marvell’s consistent separation of means and ends within poetic and political encomia. Hamilton reads the concluding ambiguity of the poem and particularly the concluding lines as an attempt to grapple with, if not produce, a radically new political idiom: How can “the same arts,” a symbol of continuity, transform into the radically new political idiom that Cromwell’s elemental force appears to require? Hamilton instructively notes the fundamental problem of all this revolutionary radicalism and catastrophe: “How far can disruption go, before an apocalyptic or catastrophic language is called for to replace available idioms of historical continuity?”49 Moreover, what is a catastrophic language, and how would it be different from grave epigrammatic pronouncements? If we are to take seriously the claim that Marvell uses verse to engage politics, then part of that engagement must surely entail repurposing conventional forms and tools. But it also means asking if we have ever really known how encomium, ambiguity, and even sententious, slow couplets work. At the very least, “An Horatian Ode” shows that we should be wary of claims that deliberative political structures, and deliberation in general, can arrest dangerous forces. In fact, such a faith is precisely what the ode finds suspicious: that there is a structure of reasoning, opposed to the messy executions of force in the world, that guarantees results and transcends the events on which it passes judgment. In addition, despite the apparent determining power of aims, readings like Greene’s treat tools and means as having a secure meaning, in themselves, after all. Instruments have a limited number of uses, and humans,

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especially literary critics, have a pretty good bead on this range. Irony, prosodic slowness, and ambiguity all collaborate to mean deliberate, reasoned judgment. Insofar as such claims locate a laudable rationality and an essential significance in the tools of literary analysis, there is a peculiar risk for literary critics in assumptions of this sort. Literary criticism’s interest in purposive ends has a variety of explanations, all of them potentially laudable: an inheritance from Kantian aesthetics; a pedagogical and intellectual commitment to treating poetry as primarily a communicative or rhetorical medium; a right-minded suspicion of zeal, charism, and the tendencies therein toward anarchic political violence. However, one unintended consequence of this focus is a literary criticism that has abandoned the exploration of how something means in favor of the more readily assessable measures of what it means. In Marvell’s case, at least, these two fields of examination are not complementary, precisely because he attempts to imagine instrumental force in its own right—specifically, as the place where we can finally stop defending ourselves against accusations and really agree with something, as opposed to projecting ourselves imaginatively into the future, when we will know that we have won the wager and successfully backed the right horse. For Marvell, that means that we can pledge allegiance only to forces, because every other potential object mires us in the paradox of sincerity: In showing ourselves sincere, we necessarily cease to be so. When an apocalyptic force appears, we have to be willing, in short, to clap our bloody hands, earnestly, without irony. If we are not so willing, we will never be either loyal or subversive.

II Marvell’s verse upends the way that literary criticism imagines the activity of politics—sincerely declaring positions, expressing allegiances to the leaders who embody them, and then using irony, ambiguity, or prosody to resist or evade these authentic expressions.50 None of these are political actions in Marvell’s political lyrics. Obedience and resistance are not enough and do not really count as doing politics. Aesthetics might be many things, but it is not critique. Even when he writes from a political position diametrically opposed to his final two Cromwell poems, that of a royalist sympathizer wishing for Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s deaths, Marvell demonstrates the same obsession with a politics beyond agreement. These similarities do not explain away

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Marvell’s shift in allegiances. Neither do I wish to argue for a superior consistency in his politics. Instead, the critical disputes about Marvell’s partisan affiliations and beliefs—is he a shifty “company man” or a pragmatic republican?—reveal that allegiance, to person, party, or even principle, is not a particularly useful tool for conceptualizing his politics.51 Despite its similarities to the later Cromwell poems, the elegy for Lord Francis Villiers does seem more sanguine about the ability of force to translate into messages. It celebrates the pyramid of dead that Villiers leaves in his wake, in so doing praising violent force in a manner similar to that found in “An Horatian Ode.” Yet, Villiers’ vengeful valor also seems to replace sententious, commemorative messages with wounds. If, as we have already seen, criticism of “An Horatian Ode” has often tried to distinguish violence and the poem’s grave, measured seriousness, this is much less plausible in the elegy, which exhibits a decidedly optimistic portrait of the conflation of violence and reason, promising an equation of trophies and tombs, both erected out of a pyramid of dead: Yet died he not revengeless: much he did Ere he could suffer. A whole pyramid Of vulgar bodies he erected high: Scorning without a sepulchre to die. And with his steel which did whole troops divide He cut his epitaph on either side. ............................ And we hereafter to his honour will Not write so many, but so many kill. Till the whole Army by just vengeance come To be at once his trophy and his tomb. 115–20, 125–28

What is important about this passage is not just the customary appeal to the violence of inscription, an epitaph that entails slaying. Nor is it the speaker’s fantasy of substituting corpses for encomia in the future. Rather, most important is its unabashed praise for a force that destroys enemies but also transforms this very destruction into a substitutive, even metonymic unity: Tombs are simultaneously trophies, but are also merely associated with them; wounds and corpses replace sepulchers,

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but are also somewhat like them, and are also associated with, but not quite like, commemorative epitaphs that adorn them. Greene’s portrait of a justice built on distinction seems decidedly absent in a poem that gleefully promises such a series of substitutive conflations. As David Norbrook notes, the elegy offers virtually no plaudits for Villiers’ moral virtues and even presents its concluding revenge fantasy as a private matter, not a public event requiring rational justification.52 Yet Marvell’s very public withdrawal into a private, eroticized revenge only serves to obliterate the very modern distinction between a world of state reason and private irrationality, the notion that a serious, measured public deliberation necessarily or effectively arrests private passions, that there is a safer world, intellectual or literary, where thought and persuasion are not subject to the interventions of power. In fact, Marvell’s substitutions suggest that there is no such contemplative space that is not already populated by force. Trophies stand in for tombs, which in turn stand in for corpses, in turn standing in for the violence that produces them, the incisions of both wounds and epitaphs—and no amount of retroactive, deliberate interpretation is necessary to effect or decode this sequence. The poem’s fantasy of a private reactive vengeance shows that metonymic substitution itself is a product of force, not a sequence of associations written elsewhere by fate or providence. Just as “The Garden” insists that Apollo chases Daphne “only that she might laurel grow” (30), the elegy’s speaker does not deduce that Villiers’s victims are his epitaph. Villiers actively writes this epitaph himself, which then authorizes the similarly violent conflation of tombs and trophies in the final lines. These metonymic transformations are not retrospective explications of natural phenomena or poetic figures but rather are themselves the present work of the actors inside the poem. Villiers’s action is not explained in the imminent future of his own death but rather is the immanent transformative activity that he himself undertakes. What seems most important about this moment in Marvell’s early royalist elegy is its insistence that retroactive reinterpretation is inadequate to commemoration, and likely to praise as well. In this respect, the elegy participates in Marvell’s general propensity toward literalization, a tendency not so much designed to knock figuration as weak or to celebrate plainness but rather to consider metonymy, metaphor, and all of their results as events that happen in the present, not rewritings that intervene to remake history into a meaningful order.53

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One consequence of this penchant for literalization is that Marvell does not allow reserved praise or insulated hermeneutics to perform the work of political resistance. I would argue that the great danger, aesthetic and political, for Marvell is not idolatry or presence but the secure withdrawal promised by a skeptical, interpretive transcendence. In contrast, for Thomas P. Anderson, Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,” and Milton’s Eikonoklastes use ambiguity and hermeneutics to fight against the power of a pure or transparent sign, the literal iconicity that Charles’s Eikon Basilike achieves. The historical event of the regicide transforms metaphor into a sign of loss, precisely because theatrical metaphors are used so often to describe Charles’ execution: “I suggest that because the execution was so associated with metaphor, the medium itself imparts a residue of the loss that it is designed to mitigate. If theatrical metaphors for royal performance were commonplace before 1649, the execution was a limit event that literalized the theatrical metaphor.”54 In this reading, the king’s book thwarts interpretation via its appeals to a transparent, literal presence. The danger of such an aestheticized politics is its ability to render events univocal, beyond the purportedly free discussion and deliberation that interpretation would allow. Similar to and more successful than Milton’s point-by-point response, the ambiguities of “An Horatian Ode” introduce possibilities for resistant reinterpretation.55 Although I am sympathetic to Anderson’s account of literalization, it seems to evince precisely the faith in the resistant power of deliberative judgment that Marvell’s verse abandons. Hermeneutics cannot stop Cromwell in the present, not because it is the nonactivity of hoity-toity artsy types but because it continues to conceive itself as a reactive, compensatory, and ultimately retroactive project. Marvell’s revision of the sequence of mythology’s creation is dispositive again here. Daphne’s transformation is not a retroactive explanation for the laurel and its present significance. Its significance is a present and prospective product of Apollo’s action, however far removed to the past. If Marvell worries about an aestheticized politics, it is not because it prevents rational interpretation but rather because it reduces interpretation to a transcendent, removed, and ultimately impotent activity, as opposed to a driving force.56 Commemoration and interpretation are not, then, the compensatory reactions and identity defenses that we have often been led to believe. Marvell’s use of literalization and his concomitant reconceptualization of metonymy gives even to elegies something more than a backward-

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looking function. His political poems give flesh and substance to the cliché that funerals are for the living, presenting praise, persuasion, and the acts of evaluation and interpretation themselves as present forces, not a parasitic, impotent commemoration or interpretation that fancies itself beyond power or its immanent matrices. A hermeneutic judgment that retroactively explains what is the case ends up turning the past into a series of justifications for the status quo. Possibility becomes nothing more than the realization of an already given potential, a realization conceivable only as a brute eruption into the real of the potential: “Every time we pose the question in terms of possible and real, we are forced to conceive of existence as a brute eruption, a pure act or leap which always occurs behind our backs and is subject to a law of all or nothing.”57 Literalization, though, attempts to reanimate possibility as a present, optimistic power with the ability to generate the new. Force itself, then, evaluates in the present, and is not reducible to a brute instrument in need of rational ordering and principles of judgment. Such a model assures that order will always fail, precisely because it has only retroactive, compensatory force. Even when Marvell turns to commemoration and celebration of the Protectorate’s first anniversary, he uses the same immanent terms as “An Horatian Ode,” and presents Cromwell as a present natural force: While indefatigable Cromwell hies, And cuts his way still nearer to the skies, Learning a music in the region clear, To tune this lower to that higher sphere. 45–48

Echoing the tradition of praise from an enemy that we have already noted in “An Horatian Ode,” the poem concludes with an imagined opponent reprising this intelligences–spheres comparison. If anything, this rendering is even more eerily fascistic than its counterparts in its description of the sphere as moved by the dear leader’s munificent being, not just his learned skills: “The nation had been ours, but his one soul / Moves the great bulk, and animates the whole” (379–80). The totalitarian resonances of these lines are not merely the result of modern preoccupations, that ubiquitous disease of etiologizing fascism. Rather, they are the consequence of the poem’s attempt not only to present Cromwell as a pervasive influence but also to condemn opponents for a merely

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retroactive, and therefore weak, conception of freedom. Thus, “The First Anniversary” also presents Cromwell’s parliamentary opposition as advocating only a nostalgic, reactive conception of liberty: Such was that wondrous order and consent, When Cromwell tuned the ruling Instrument, While tedious statesmen many years did hack, Framing a liberty that still went back. 67–70

It is not that parliamentary opponents offer constraint instead of freedom but that their liberty is regressive, moving in the wrong direction. It does not move back to slavery, hypocritically or ironically erasing its status as liberty. Rather, it is liberty itself that goes backward. What would that mean exactly? Although this passage may well allude to republican interest in an unwritten ancient constitution,58 the lines describe freedom as something more complicated than an absolute good, threatened only by its opposite number: slavery. Instead, liberty itself can be misdirected, not via its own excesses—the distinction between liberty and the enslavement to passion that goes under the name of “license”—but via its direction. A liberty that looks to the past is still liberty, but it carries within itself a recalcitrant, hoarding acquisitiveness incompatible with present freedom. I do not seek to paint Marvell here as a naïve futurist or anarchist cheerleader but rather to note the thoroughness with which he insists on engagement with the present as the key aspect of Cromwell’s virtue, in a commemorative poem, no less. And that present freedom means something more than retroactive recognitions of past free actions or current republican safeguards against tyranny. It also means something more than a merely futural hope or rational planning on the basis of normalized predictions. In this sense, the apocalypse matters for Marvell because it enables ending, as opposed to the stringing out of freedom across a continuum of temporal deferral. For Marvell, then, liberty in the present is the collapse of ends into means, an alternative to a purposedriven life that always defers freedom to the future by imagining it as the accomplishment of its aim, whether that aim is the successful achievement of a goal or the acquisition of freedom as an object, commodity, or right or even its reception as God’s revealed gift. Even when “The First Anniversary” offers the traditional paternalist distinction between license and liberty to justify rule by a virtuous

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dictator, Marvell does not ask us to rest assured in the transcendent inevitability of a providential order or the unassailable internal virtue of a Lord Protector whose goodness flows seamlessly from private to public domains. Cromwell’s internal self-regulation is not a guaranteed substitute or reliable preparation for public order. In fact, there is no way for us to secure public events. Neither retroactive interpretation nor emulation will do the trick:59 ’Tis not a freedom, that where all command; Nor tyranny, where one does them withstand: But who of both the bounders knows to lay Him as their father must the state obey. ................................. And only didst for others plant the vine Of liberty, not drunken with its wine. That sober liberty which men may have, That they enjoy, but more they vainly crave: And such as to their parent’s tents do press, May show their own, not see his nakedness. 279–82, 287–92

It is not just that the mob displays its own excess. The allusion to Noah’s drunken exposure authorizes all sorts of ironic readings insofar as it presents the Lord Protector as secretly unrestrained. We could, of course, explain this allusion away as a pious expression of Cromwell’s very human sinfulness, a none too subtly veiled suggestion that he is a man just like other men, not a king who fancies himself purged of such embarrassments. The allusion is jarring because, precisely at the moment when readers should expect reassuring praise for a privately moderate patriarch, “The First Anniversary” offers its opposite, but then simultaneously inverts the charge of excess, ascribing it to viewers and not the disgraced patriarch. Certainly, this inversion complicates any attempt to conceive Noah or Cromwell as translating internal virtue, via analogy, metaphor, or some other literary device, into the public sphere. The same difficulty emerges when Marvell comes closest to presenting Cromwell as a man of reliably self-regulating virtue: “Therefore first growing to thyself a law, / Th’ambitious shrubs thou in just time didst awe” (263–64). We might well carve out an internal moderation in these lines—Cromwell becomes a law governing himself—but the passage also shows that even this purportedly innocuous self-control

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amounts to a disturbingly despotic appropriation of force. Cromwell, in the process of governing his own passions, becomes either a law unto himself, with all of the sinister implications of such a phrase, or cultivates a law that develops into the measure of his own person, growing into a standard that he has already set. The ambiguity of this passage, like those we witnessed in the ode, does not appear to be in search of resolution. Instead, the indeterminacy of what it means to become a law to oneself does not connote some broader message about the fundamental confusion of law. Ambiguity does not mean antinomianism here, giving us the comfort of treating ambiguity, yet again, as a subversive or oppositional element, as a figure for an apocalypse that reverses the requirements of the law. Instead, “The First Anniversary” disavows or thwarts the possibility of reaching precisely such a transcendent evaluative stance, from which one could then pass judgment on the original ambiguity. Marvell, then, does not use this occasion to justify Cromwell’s public power via recourse to an internal moderation. Instead, the internal law is identical to the public rule, not because humans are despotic or evil, but because force is force in both domains and, as a result, one domain cannot serve as a secure grounding for the other. In politics as in aesthetics, there exists no neutral plain on which to adjudicate competing claims, no transcendent surety that would reassure us that all conflicts will resolve into a final, meaningful unity.60 Marvell insists that even this dearth of surety does not amount to a restful resolution, whether the triumphant transcendence of law or the equally triumphant apotheosis, inherent to literary indeterminacy, of the reader. Instead, by focusing on the operation of force, he grants respect to the transformations that must attend an apocalyptic future. The revelation of the new in the present, after all, does not evaluate itself according to the established values of parliamentary democracy. “A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector” intensifies this praise for force by maintaining that even conscience needs arms to succeed. Internal virtue is definitely not enough to transform one into a king, even an imaginary shadow king: “He first put arms into Religion’s hand, / And tim’rous Conscience unto Courage manned” (179–80). These lines indicate that conscience is not secretly brave but lacking in means. Rather, it requires force to function in its own right. The lines do not assert that conscience can have public effects only when it acquires courage. Conscience remains timorous, even internally, without arms. Marvell’s denial of the internal power of

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conscience does not rest on a mercenary realism, in contradistinction to Milton’s idealistic portrait of internal virtue. Warren Chernaik serves as an example of this view, characterizing Marvell as the hard-nosed realist and Milton as a naïve, perhaps even petulant retiree.61 Of course, Marvell’s letter to a friend in Persia offers substantial support for precisely this position: “For in this World a good Cause signifys little, unless it be as well defended. A Man may starve at the Feast of good Conscience.”62 But the poetry is a different story, precisely insofar as it does not reaffirm the understanding of liberty and constraint that dominates accounts like Chernaik’s. In fact, for Chernaik, Marvell turns liberty into the recognition of a necessary constraint: “Freedom then is possible, according to Marvell, only after we have come to learn that ‘the world will not go the faster for our driving.’ ”63 The problem, of course, with such a model is not that it misjudges Milton’s commitment to public action or Marvell’s internally principled stands. Rather, Chernaik’s system of passive withdrawal and active engagement imagines liberty precisely as going backward, a retroactive recognition of constraint, not the ability to embrace action, force, or events in the present. Liberty is constraint and freedom is necessity. Marvell, however, consistently disavows or evades such reversals, refusing to present interiority as a retired reflection of the exterior world. By way of contrast, the Son in Paradise Regained maintains that virtuous self-regulation turns one into a true king, that this internal kingship substitutes for and is more authentic than public kingship. For Milton, though, substitution means a replacement that obliterates the original entity or concept, as opposed to Marvell’s consistent presentation of metonymy as a mechanism of present equation, and even conflation. Thus, the Son announces an aversion to external force, an aversion decidedly at odds with Marvell’s portrait of Cromwell: Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King; Which every wise and vertuous man attains: And who attains not, ill aspires to rule Cities of men, or head-strong Multitudes .................................. But to guide Nations in the way of truth By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,

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Governs the inner man, the nobler part, That other o’re the body only reigns, And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight.64 Marvell, frankly, does not distinguish private and public force in this fashion, creating an internal realm where the reign of a paternalistic conscience and its power is acceptable, but leaving the public world free from such interventions (it is also not clear that Paradise Regained ends by supporting this view; the Son may in fact learn his way out of this oppositional dynamic). And neither does he present the internal world as a replacement for the external, the place where one would be more a king. This difference occurs not because Marvell is a realist and Milton a retiring idealist but rather because they understand the operation of force within reason differently. Or rather, they estimate the power of interpretation and reinterpretation differently. Marvell does not engage in the sort of retroactive explanation and justification that is the hallmark of the Son’s account. Instead of postulating a separate domain for hermeneutic explanation and rethinking, Marvell’s political verse insists that deliberation, justification, and interpretation are immanent forces in their own right. Cromwell grows to himself a law; he does not reconsider what has occurred in the past. Substitution does not preserve a lost past entity but rather preserves that entity as a present, affirmative phenomenon, an immanent metonymy not imagined as a narrative sequence. Otherwise, there is no way to conceive of ending, because even an eliminationist replacement, like Milton’s, preserves the eliminated phenomenon. In Marvell’s verse, it is the conceptualization of interpretation as a withdrawn, contemplative activity, occurring in a secure transcendent locale, the mind or the garden, not the irresistible roiling power of chaos or passion or history, that actually renders judgment, deliberation, and reason impotent, precisely because there is no way to account for how all of these intellective or passionate decisions cross over into action. This is, in short, the problem of the event, the emergence or happening of the new in the world as something more than a mystified and mystifying eruption. Milton is not always so reticent about force, of course. As Anna Nardo notes, his sonnet to Cromwell praises the future Lord Protector’s physical might.65 Composed two years after Marvell’s “Horatian

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Ode” and almost three years before “The First Anniversary,” it lauds the general for his military success in terms that echo Marvell’s own accounts of Cromwell’s military victories:66 And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud Hast reard Gods Trophies & his work pursu’d, While Darwen stream wth blood of Scotts imbru’d, And Dunbarr feild resounds thy praises loud 4–8

Despite these similarities, Milton distinguishes peace and war in a fashion incompatible with the concluding lines of Marvell’s ode. The sonnet’s volta, in fact, revolves around this fundamental difference, that “peace hath her victories / No less renownd then warr” (10–11), instead of “The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain” (119– 20). Just as importantly, Milton’s sonnet imagines war as issuing in or producing trophies, instead of being identical to them. Here we should recall the tombs that are identical to trophies in Marvell’s Villiers elegy. And instead of Milton’s transformation of nature into a land that bespeaks Cromwell’s praise, Marvell insists that it is still the vanquished enemy that utters such praise, emphasizing less the world’s potential transformation into a laudatory monument than the continuous operation of this transmuting power. In this respect, Marvell is more of an iconoclast than Milton is. Marvell resists the urge to translate Cromwell’s victories into poetic monuments or tokens of his greatness, in part because monuments and tokens always reduce praise to a past event. In this model, even praise in the present relegates evaluation to the past, allowing a monument to stand in for a past evaluation, as opposed to going through all the work of a present one. As Victoria Kahn notes, such monument-mongering is precisely what Manoa does at the end of Samson Agonistes. He reduces Samson’s actions to an excuse for an inert, reactive, and decidedly aesthetic mourning.67 For Marvell, this is another reason why the Irish affirm Cromwell’s praises best: Victory is itself mute. Commemoration itself contains no real evaluation. It reduces the question of what happened to a question of who won. Rather than retracing the critical debate over Milton’s and Marvell’s competing political philosophies, or pegging this difference in sentiment to the different historical circumstances of May 1650 and spring 1652, I propose that the difference resides in the fact that Marvell and

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Milton are praising different things. That is, their conceptions of virtue, its relationship to distinction, and the nature of aesthetic substitution are substantially different. If Milton imagines virtue as independent potential that is valuable because of its evasion of and distinction from the slavery of actualization, as he does in Lycidas and the sonnets, Marvell ultimately imagines it as the erasure of the distinction between evaluation and act, will and force (as opposed to the substitution of one for the other, or the dialectical sublation of one by the other). Deleuze’s account of evaluation as an act of force, as opposed to the arrogation of transcendent independence to one’s own interpretive and deliberative powers, mirrors Marvell’s conflation of these two realms: Action and reaction are more like means, means or instruments of the will to power which affirms and denies, just as reactive forces are instruments of nihilism. . . . To interpret is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing. We can no more abstract values from the standpoint from which they draw their value than we can abstract meaning from the standpoint from which it draws its signification.68 For Deleuze, there is neither value nor force in general, which is precisely why these two elements are worthy of attention in the first place. Deleuze objects to the continued prevalence of transcendence within Enlightenment categories of judgment because such categories masquerade as drivers of transformation when they really leave values themselves untouched, as an ideal beyond examination, critique, or change: What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? . . . Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence.69

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An evaluation that can account for the new must be a practice of selecting among various forces, not forcing them to compete on a field that neutralizes their specificity and activity in a paean to measured evenhandedness. As Daniel Smith notes, it is the separation of evaluation and action effected by transcendence that poses the greatest threat to human possibility because, for Deleuze, ethics always revolves around human power and capacity: The ethical themes one finds in transcendent philosophies such as those of Levinas and Derrida—an absolute responsibility for the other that I can never assume, or an infinite call to justice that I can never satisfy—are, from the point of view of immanence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my capacity to act. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence represents my slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point.70 Immanence believes in the possibility of transformative revelation in the present precisely because it does not preserve a goal or realm of unreachable impossibility toward which all ethical or political activity aims. The conflation of evaluation and the capacity for action is Cromwell’s special genius in “An Horatian Ode”: “So much one man can do, / That does both act and know” (75–76). No more division between the execution of force and its decision, vita contemplativa and vita activa. Or to put it in political terms, terms that might explain Marvell’s dissatisfaction with parliaments without reducing him to a proto-fascist, there is no distinction between executive and legislative faculties. There is a sense, certainly, in which Milton performs a similar disavowal of distinctions, incorporating external events into a virtual model, but the direction of these incorporations or conflations is significantly different. Marvell’s disavowal of distinction drags contemplation into the domain of forceful action and, thus, issues in praise for the present execution of force. Milton’s, on the other hand, packs action back into potential and possibility, insisting that this is the domain of real occurrences. Like Milton, Marvell is wary of treating force as a matter of actualization, because this concept evaluates forces on the basis of their results, not their essential exercise. Hirst and Zwicker maintain that this aversion to depicting final fulfillments and reproductive fruition is characteristic of Marvell’s entire corpus, from “The Picture of Little

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T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” to the Villiers elegy, and stems from a basic discomfort with “the costly story of patriarchy.”71 Instead of explaining this aesthetic tendency via recourse to a primordial personal or political trauma, however, we should consider the possibility that this pervasive choice reflects a dissatisfaction with the prospect provided by achieved ends. Marvell evinces a consistent suspicion of such fulfillment precisely because it relies on the limiting perspective of retroactive judgment, bound as it is to the transcendent survey of what means have done or were supposed to do, as opposed to what they can or could do. By conceiving the execution of force in the present, its activity not reduced, after the fact, to manifestations or meaningful substitutions, Marvell’s political verse attempts to conceive of an event that includes imminent promise under the rubric of immanent power. For all of their attachment to specific past occasions, these poems all attempt to imagine an apocalyptically transformative future occurring in the present. For example, unlike the prolepsis that Milton always uses to enhance the immediacy of the future, and despite its reputation as a sycophantic encomium to Cromwell, “The First Anniversary” presents the apocalypse as conditional on a conjunction of Cromwell’s and the popular will.72 It is definitely not a providential narrative already written: Hence oft I think, if in some happy hour High grace should meet in one with highest power, And then a seasonable people still Should bend to his, as he to heaven’s will, What we might hope, what wonderful effect From such a wished conjuncture might reflect. Sure, the mysterious work, where none withstand, Would forthwith finish under such a hand: Foreshortened Time its useless course would stay, And soon precipitate the latest day. 131–40

Marvell does not just hedge his bets here, or deploy the conditional in consummate passive-aggressive fashion. Even in adducing eschatology as a justification for Cromwell’s rule, “The First Anniversary” in this moment refuses to make the obvious appeal to necessity, finality, or any other variant of a future already written. After all, the line reads “lat-

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est” and not “last” day, a choice that preserves the line’s meter, but also resists the hasty foreshortening of time evoked in the preceding line. In this respect, force is not simply another name for an abrupt, impatient terminus. Whatever power apocalyptic narratives have in the present is not then a consequence of their ability to herald or figure finality. In fact, it is a past or future finality that Marvell consistently strips from his depiction of apocalyptic events. As Annabel Patterson notes, when “The First Anniversary” turns to Cromwell’s coaching accident to justify his rule by evoking its possible loss, Marvell writes the description as present fact, not thwarted danger: “The poet becomes trapped in his own fiction, and begins to describe Cromwell’s death as if it had actually occurred. . . . Fiction has taken over, but only, paradoxically, to insist on another kind of truth.”73 This other truth, of course, is at least in part that even an anticipated apocalypse has immanent effects, whether one wishes to ward it off or hasten its arrival.74 What makes narrative, apocalyptic, providential, or otherwise, dangerous is that it ensnares readers in self-concern, dragging them back to the very subject that one would wish to transform, not because of some innate narcissism, but because even reading the future as an unfolding story means treating it as if it has already occurred, closed in its finality whether conceived as a past history or a future script. Thus, the imagined futural scenario of Cromwell’s death, of necessity, takes the form of an alternative past: Justice obstructed lay, and Reason fooled; Courage disheartened, and Religion cooled. A dismal silence through the palace went, And then loud shrieks the vaulted marbles rent. Such as the dying chorus sings by turns, And to deaf seas, and ruthless tempests mourns, When now they sink, and now the plund’ring streams Break up each deck, and rip the oaken seams. ...................................... We only mourned ourselves, in thine ascent, Whom thou hadst left beneath with mantle rent. 207–14, 219–20

These lines depict the present as a simile that happens now: “Such as the dying chorus sings by turns . . . When now they sink.” The poem

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does not caution us to avoid apocalyptic analogies but rather not to imagine them in the form of a transcendent narrative that, of necessity, has already or finally occurred. A resemblance that happens in the present, that even bleeds over into the events of the present, thwarts those subjects who arrogate to themselves the power of final causes, or at least their recognition. For Marvell, force does not amount to a unidirectional cause guided by telos, either pushing effects forward or rushing the story toward its ultimate conclusion: What since he did, an higher force him pushed Still from behind, and it before him rushed, Though undiscerned among the tumult blind, Who think those high decrees by man designed. 239–42

The blind tumultuous mob misunderstands causation, because it considers it only as a matter of final agency. Its error resides not just in thinking high decrees are the result of human choice instead of God’s plan but in considering God’s eschatological plan as remotely similar to our conceptions of human motives. Apocalyptic forces rush ahead certainly, but they also push from behind, “still”—as in “simultaneously.” Once again, Marvell’s verse attends to the independent means through which an end might occur, not the confident logic of a purpose already half achieved in the prospectus stage. Marvell certainly does not treat the future as written, but it is his verse’s rationale for this position that is most significant here. His political lyrics are neither a celebration of human agency nor an active resignation to a resentful apocalyptic destruction. In “An Horatian Ode,” when the speaker promises that Cromwell will “ruin the great work of time” (34), this is not a matter of destroying all that has been built: governments, structures, orders, spaces. Rather, it means disavowing time construed as work, the purposive overcoming of obstacles, causation as temporally precedent to effects, and the organization of all action into a structure of means and ends. It is not that one cannot assimilate eschatology to such a system of work and accomplishment. One certainly can. Marvell, however, maintains that one should not, because it is to mystify how events would ever occur, reducing them to a table of inert resemblances and reversal, however catastrophic. Paradoxically, for modern criticism, at least, these lyrics

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maintain that it is interpretation and the notion of a reserved judgment that makes violent upheaval necessary, precisely because they postulate a radical aporia between past and present, contemplation and action.75 If we read these panegyrics as unsettling, it is not just because Marvell is a partisan, praising the forceful virtue of his tribe’s chosen leader. Rather, it is because Marvell celebrates movement, with all of the danger, but also all of the hope, that that immanent term implies. The final couplet of “An Horatian Ode,” then, does not justify Cromwell’s past or future actions. It praises the exercise of the arts that gain and preserve power, the forceful execution, in short, of virtue: “The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain” (119–20). This does not mean that the journey is all that matters. Rather this couplet erases the notion of an end, a purpose or finality cordoned off from the instrumental force that would effect it: Order orders order; it does not tame a chaos fundamentally different in kind. As a result, this execution of force is not the same thing as the virtuous expression of a subject, the reserved knowing consciousness that would accumulate encomia by acting in the world and then retreat to its country estate. We should not read this moment as an instance of bowing, stoically or enthusiastically, to a proto-fascistic power, justified by the ideological window dressing of nature. Rather, the poem attempts to praise force as both an act and an event, and not merely its subjective exercise or withholding, so as to produce an affirmative account of allegiance. Means, and not ends, allow us, finally, to agree enthusiastically in the present, as opposed to awaiting, anxiously, a better deal that might arrive in the future. For Marvell, without attending to the ubiquitous and immersive presence of force, there is no way to do politics. He is not squeamish about force and its exercise, because that is all there is, in the social and political world, within reason, within conscience, and within nature. The trick, though, is refusing to reduce this position to yet one more version of a Hobbesian or Machiavellian nightmare, in which force amounts to little more than constraint or threat. In the end, force is the only concept that does not deceive itself by imagining itself as morally pure, in either its essence or its effects. Reason, rights, democracy, deliberation all imagine themselves as irrevocably on the side of the angels. In treating Cromwell as a natural force, “An Horatian Ode” ultimately maintains that we cannot abandon

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an instrument once its end has been achieved, that the tool continues to matter, not because of a pious commitment to fair play, or prosody, but because means, tools, force are the only way to conceive politically transformative events in the present. Everything else is just history.

Chapter Two

Hope in the Present Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets

Milton’s sonnets are political not because they praise and advise political figures, comment on historical events, or surreptitiously air concerns about aristocratic patronage, but because they strike at the heart of the Petrarchan tradition’s devotion to an absolutist theory of power predicated on the temporal deferral of fulfillment. They accomplish this revolt by insisting that sonnets contain events, instead of simply reporting on the already past happening of those events or advocating for or prophesying their future occurrence. In this sense, Milton’s sonnets attempt to treat events as free happenings in the present, as opposed to an impotent retrospective postulation of a choice among options or a prospective promise of future alternatives.1 They present the apocalypse as fundamentally paratactic, in contradistinction to a typological or otherwise hypotactic system of development. As a result, Milton’s sonnets imagine a non-resentful end of time, one that does not close with the resolution of problems or justice for the wicked. Milton’s rethinking of the sonnet tradition aims then not so much at the monarchical politics of the genre’s historical practitioners as at its conception of time, particularly its insistence that the event of union and fulfillment, and ultimately meaning and freedom, recedes into an inaccessible, even infinitely deferred future.2 Instead of this model of merely futural hope and immanent waiting, Milton’s sonnets attempt to locate an apocalyptically conceived transformation in the present

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and, in a permutation of Hebrews 11:1, to give substance to hope.3 In the end, these poems reconsider the relationship between contemplation and action, deliberative preparation and will, and insist that events and actions are something more than the successful accomplishment of an imagined, narrative plan. For Milton, thought is not merely the prelude to action or a retrospective hermeneutic commentary. Rather, Milton’s sonnets treat thought and the passional affects that attend it as events in themselves, for it is only this type of immanent happening that can wed both rational political persuasion and an apocalyptically conceived transformation. Milton’s sonnets then amount to a fairly grand claim for the power of poetry: that lyrics, because of their penchant for immediacy, overcome or thwart the futural orientations not only of narrative verse but also of hope itself.4 That is, Milton turns to the lyric for an anatomization of present hope, precisely because it is the form that insists on the immanent, and not imminent, effects of considering, waiting, use, and optimism.5 It turns out, then, that only lyric can tell us what it means for something to happen while we are still able to do something about it. Precisely because it serves as one of early modernity’s most sophisticated systems of meditation on temporality, as well as psychological motives and desires, the Petrarchan sonnet tradition requires something more than a hasty dismissal as so much royalist balderdash.6 Certainly this tradition in England often exhibits absolutist tendencies, imagining power as administered by an absent, despotic mistress, who nonetheless extracts from her devotees a delight in their own subjugation. What is most important for our purposes, however, is that the central mechanism for this ideological extraction is a logic of deferred signification: One can delight in one’s own subjection precisely because one’s suffering is a sign of a delayed or, what amounts to the same thing, inverted favor. Astrophil and Stella makes this logic explicit several times in the course of the sequence, but perhaps most transparently in sonnet 100. There is waiting here in the sestet, as there is in Milton’s meditative sonnets, but it is marked by paradoxical reversals: O plaints conserv’d in such a sugred phraise, That eloquence it selfe envies your praise, While sobd out words a perfect Musike give. Such teares, sighs, plaints, no sorrow is, but joy: Or if such heavenly signes must prove annoy, All mirth farewell, let me in sorrow live.7

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This sonnet maintains that the beauty that resides in a lover’s lament is a function of a promised temporal inversion, thus the conditional imploration in the final two lines. The speaker embraces sorrow in expectation of a reversal that leads to a more valuable fulfillment, either an immanent joy in sorrow’s beauty, an imminent reward of love, or the nobility of such endurance. In this respect, Astrophil and Stella presents deferral as characteristic not only of human temporal desire but of conclusions themselves. Even the sonnet’s resolution entails waiting— in this case, for the approval of an absent, indeterminate lord (even if that lord is merely an aspect of the speaker) who will allow the speaker to live in sorrow. Ultimately, Sidney’s entire sequence, which is typical of the Petrarchan tradition, serves as a brief for how one can be convinced to choose, freely, deliberately, and without ideological deception, to love an abstract and eternally absent tyrant. Deferral, then, is not a bug but a feature. Although the lacking Petrarchan subject seems to cordon off an interior realm separate from the political power of the sovereign, thus laying the groundwork for a possible resistance to it, lack so pervades this subject that, ultimately, even such resistance requires a deferred recognition from some other authority, one that can never finally be achieved.8 In the end, this speaker desires and joys in his own lack and his impossible quest for an unattainable transcendent fulfillment at the hands of a powerful despot. He does not want what he claims to want—the apocalyptic end always out of reach. Although I have written elsewhere of the incompatibility of this Hegelian and psychoanalytic subject with early modern religious verse, what matters most here is Milton’s assault on the temporal signature of this tradition: its orientation toward a future that will never arrive and, thus, its terrifying betrayal of hope, the apocalypse, and a hopeful apocalypse.9 It is against this structure of lack and power that Milton’s sonnets revolt, by refusing to adhere to a traditional sonnet sequence that would narrate the machinations of such a subject and by using the structural turns of the sonnet to conceive transformative events in the present— whether using, spending, considering, or waiting—in opposition to a merely narcissistic reflection.10 Milton’s revolt, then, is not merely an issue of subject matter but rather a rethinking and reuse of the form, one that treats the volta as a site for examining when an event really occurs, within the poem and within thought itself, and that employs revelation to reconceive the relationship between deliberation and political events. Numerous critics have described the sonnet tradition in England as a

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not so subtly veiled meditation on an author’s public career, patronage, and a host of other economic, social, sexual, and political issues,11 but Milton’s poems do not imagine politics as a matter of secrecy and revelation—that is, as hermeneutics. Thus, they do not present the political as the unveiling of a latent, more important content.12 Milton does not demystify sonnets, because sonnets do not consider thought to be a matter of mystified internal secrecy or privacy. Instead, he treats sonnets as occasional poems that present an apocalyptic event as usable and thinkable in the present. For his sonnets, then, revelation does not amount to ideological demystification but to a radically transformative and reorienting experience of the present. In this sense, they offer revelation and not revolution. For example, Milton’s most insistently occasional sonnet, “On the late Massacher in Piemont,” eschews mere reflection on a lost past.13 Instead, it affirms the possibility of immediate change in the present and, thus, evades the paradox of occasional verse that Angus Fletcher describes in his reading of A Mask: “The occasional poem displays a certain uncanniness, in this sense: it pretends to serve the purposes of a moment that comes, and is gone, whereas the poetic act itself calls the impermanence of that moment into question. There is a pathos in the occasional; by commemorating the moment, the poet insists on its loss. Every occasional poem is a tomb.”14 In Fletcher’s account, events are fundamentally kairotic, fleeting moments for opportunistic response that a poem can only lament. “On the late Massacher in Piemont,” however, situates a historical occasion within the broader contours of an apocalyptically conceived time. Although it opens with a plea for both vengeance and remembrance, the slaughter of the Waldenses is not really an opportunity grasped, an occasion within a teleological narrative of which readers or the speaker would be a part. However, the massacre still acts within the poem as an occasion with present possibilities: Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold, Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our Fathers worship’t Stocks and Stones, Forget not: in thy book record their groanes15 These groans have already been recorded and redoubled, meaning that their transcription is unnecessary: “Their moans / The Vales redoubl’d to the Hills, and they / To Heav’n” (8–10). The seeds of the martyrs’

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blood issue then not in vengeance or even remembrance. These are both the province of the divine addressee. Instead of these kairotic opportunities for retribution and justice, the final tercet offers escape, and one accomplished before its appropriate time: “that from these [the martyrs’ blood and ashes] may grow / A hunder’d-fold, who having learnt thy way / Early may fly the Babylonian wo” (12–14). Instead of waiting for an appropriate opportunity, learning from occasion means rejecting such passivity and escaping early. In other words, the present use of the occasion is temporally inappropriate. Contrary to Fletcher’s account of the paradox of occasional verse, the sonnet succeeds in making the past present insofar as it uses the past to evade the tyranny of narrative and narration. Learning the Lord’s way means escaping the need to wait for a kairotic opportunity, even an apocalyptic one. This sonnet certainly commemorates a massacre, but the event of the poem, what happens in it, is a present preparation for an early, untimely flight from woe. The apocalypse in this poem is not just a resentfully narrated fantasy of the future. Instead, Milton’s occasional sonnet takes a genre of endless deferral and waiting and makes of it a genre of considered, premature action and escape, not just desperate reaction, however dramatically appropriate. As several critics have remarked, Milton’s sonnets are rife with temporal indicators, emphasizing the extent to which the nature of the present is one of their central concerns. For example, Janel Mueller maintains that Milton’s sonnets utilize deixis in order to conjure an experience of the present in which political events occur: One device in particular, we will find, proves indispensable to Milton’s making of poetry from politics. He keys his use of the present tense within his text to a moment in present time outside the text, synchronizing the “now” of direct address with an occasion or event that is just “now” being experienced. In so doing, he seizes upon the immediacy of the political moment and makes poetry of its imperatives to action before these can either pass into the historical record or become objects of philosophical reflection.16 Although Mueller’s account jars with any attempt to explore the events that occur within poetry, opting instead to place them “outside the text,” it does nonetheless emphasize just how defeatist is the retrospective model of kairotic opportunity that Fletcher advances: All real

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opportunity happened in a lost past; ergo, hope can only project what is currently the case, with at best minor modification, into a homologous, unimaginative future. Instead of turning to an event outside the text as an imperative to action, we should imagine Milton’s transformation of the sonnet as a voracious formal incorporation, even cannibalization, of such an event, particularly given the form’s own obsession with pivotal turns, resolutions, and endings. As he does with other poetic forms, Milton foregrounds an immediate temporal experience within verse, not just a retrospective recounting. He adapts the sonnet form, a genre intent on exploring the immediate internal machinations of a rebuffed lover, so as to explore what it means for an event to happen presently, immediately, and potentially. Milton turns to the sonnet because its generic history and structure make it a privileged site for reconceiving the nature of contemplation and action and their relationship to the wider world in time. And these reconceptions, in turn, explore the possibility that present, apocalyptic, and transformative events happen right now, within poems. Samson Agonistes, via its sonnet conclusion, then takes this lyric potential and applies it to a dramatized narrative, showing how poetry can ultimately extricate us from seemingly endless debates about agency, subversion, free will, and determinism. The conclusion of the dramatic poem, like Milton’s freestanding sonnets, depicts lyric as the moment of a present, thoughtful, usable freedom, as opposed to the mournful monument of an irretrievable, inevitable loss of occasion. In this sense, a dramatic poem that concludes with apocalyptic destruction and a sonnet is ultimately, and perhaps counterintuitively, an attempt to take seriously what a politics of hope would entail.

I So what happens in a sonnet? The sonnet is a lyric machine that contains events. In either its English or Italian form, it obsesses over the nature of occasion, in the turn of the volta or the resolution implied by a rhyming couplet. The volta, for example, promises a pivotal turn, within the poem, that is neither identical nor reducible to a represented action in an external world. A couplet implies resolution of a crisis but poses its own formal problem for our processes of interpretation: namely, is the resolution of a sonnet an event or the end of events? This is not simply a reiteration of a theoretical conundrum about the nature

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of endings.17 Rather, it is central to the differing formal significance of the two sonnet forms. In contrast to its Italian counterpart, the English sonnet replaces events with epigrammatic resolutions. Even when it retains a traditional Italian volta, the concluding couplet implies, formally, a detachable completion not present in any of the traditional Petrarchan sestet schemes. Certainly, resolution also exists within the Italian structure, but each form presents a different understanding of the nature of resolution, what happens when problems are solved or conflicts overcome. Anna Nardo describes the differences between these sonnet forms in terms that make the English version more compatible with a series of occasions than is the Italian’s focused problem-resolution structure: Whereas in the Italian pattern, the asymmetrical, bipartite division into octave and sestet generally presents a problem and resolution, in the Elizabethan, the three quatrains and a couplet most often develop a theme in three stages and then clinch it in an epigrammatic conclusion—sometimes witty or paradoxical, sometimes grave or moral. Occasionally, Milton’s sonnets evince a tripartite structure in content, if not in rhyme, and the surprising, poignant, witty, and aphoristic endings to several sonnets may owe some of their punch to their Elizabethan predecessors.18 Like Nardo, Paul Fussell describes the English sonnet’s conclusion as marked by wit, even flippancy, but he also emphasizes its evocation of reasoned analysis. Fussell’s account of the Italian form is equally complex, describing it as both a structure of deliberation and a representation of passionate feeling: Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then “solve” problems, the Petrarchan form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then in its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more

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likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. . . . If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary” couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility.19 Fussell seems to have it both ways in his description of the English sonnet, presenting it simultaneously as a wryly dismissive form and as one that accords with the analytic movement of thought. Similarly, the Italian scheme accords with both deliberation and emotional experience. The point here is not to take Fussell’s or Nardo’s accounts of the meaning of sonnet forms to task but rather to show that the structure of the sonnet is intimately concerned with the nature of deliberation and resolution, whether it follows a methodical procedure or erupts as a flash of insight.20 Yet the form’s examination of the nature of thought does not simply stage one more battle between affect and reason. Instead, the sonnet form explores when thoughts, acts, and even ends occur and is, thus, bound up with the event and time of contemplation and its purported translation into action. The Italian and the English sonnet forms depict two different mechanisms for this translation. In the Italian system, the volta traditionally issues in a diffuse order without a self-reflexive capstone or retrospective metacomment that would turn all that has come before into a safely past artifact.21 Resolution develops out of a punctual crisis or problem, but does not announce itself as finally completed with a supernumerary signal. The English sonnet adopts a more retrospective attitude toward its internal moments, allowing for multiple occasions within the three quatrains, which then receive significance after the fact, after the couplet reacts on them to produce or reveal their meaningful unity. There is resolution here too, but it occurs via the intervening action of the couplet, as a free commentative and concluding apparatus that is more contemplative than Nardo’s account probably allows.22 Instead of the Italian sonnet’s emphasis on the event as a development of the problem toward resolution, the English sonnet imagines it as an ordering or reordering response, the event as a matter of completion and significance—of interpretation, in short. Milton’s sonnets, however, disavow both of these structures of resolution: the teleological, delib-

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erative, or dialectical unfolding of a problem toward solution and a contingent eruption that requires revision, recalibration, and kairotic, hermeneutic response. Instead, his verse attempts to preserve the value of possibility against resolution in either the Italian or English sonnet form. Yet if the possible is to do anything more than justify the status quo, it must be more than the discovery of a prior causal narrative. Possibility must mean something more than the extraction of past options from an existing state of affairs. It is for this reason that Gilles Deleuze develops the concept of the virtual in opposition to the more limiting concept of potentiality. For Deleuze, when the virtual actualizes itself, it creates the very principles of its own actualization. And these principles are not merely the readymade steps of a method. In contrast, the possible is extracted from the real as precisely this sort of readymade: We give ourselves a real that is ready-made, preformed, preexistent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given: all of the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible. . . . In fact, it is not the real that resembles the possible, it is the possible that resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double. Hence, we no longer understand anything either of the mechanism of difference or of the mechanism of creation.23 The paring down of the possible into the real is then incompatible with a transformative and revealed truth. In this respect, Milton imagines possibility as something more than a series of irredeemably lost choices made in the past. Although Deleuze’s notion of the virtual is closer to what Milton has in mind in describing possibility, I do not think that the terminological switch is as important as Milton’s modification of the Aristotelian concept. In fact, possibility, as Susan James notes, has a multitude of senses even in the Aristotelian tradition, including the passive ability to be acted on, the active receptivity to such impressions that the soul possesses, and even the ability to act.24 Throughout this study, I will be more interested in the ways in which Milton separates the concept of possibility from actualization, deferred or past, and not just the term he uses to describe this power.

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As we have already noted, sonnets are an important form for Milton because they attempt to take the power of thought itself seriously, as something more than a reflection on what is really important, action. Here too, Deleuze seems apropos. He insists that we have often mistakenly assumed that learning happens only through the automatic repetition of actions: Perhaps the reason [for our difficulty in understanding habit formation] lies in the illusions of psychology, which made a fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it to observe only that which moved. It asks how we acquire habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed—namely, whether it is through acting that we acquire habits . . . or whether, on the contrary, it is through contemplating? Psychology regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This, however, is not the question. The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.25 If habits are acquired only through contemplation, then thought has immediate, tangible effects. It does not act as a weak precursor to the more real, more important business that is action. These are certainly pressing questions for Milton’s contemplative sonnets, but they also influence the ways in which his encomiastic sonnets address their subjects, especially Cromwell. Instead of the bustling force of Marvell’s ode, Milton’s Cromwell appears laudable precisely because of his incomplete potential acts. The sonnet to Cromwell is the only one in English with a concluding couplet.26 It is important not just because of its unique conclusion or its choice of subject matter, but because of the contortions Milton performs in order to disrupt the concluding couplet’s status as a secure and separable resolution, retroactively imposed by an authoritative hermeneutic voice. The couplet requests assistance in defeating those ubiquitous hireling wolves that Milton has been on about since Lycidas: “Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw” (13–14).27 Such a plea certainly could be read as a self-reflexive, even transcendent resolution, but to do so

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demands that we imagine the couplet as a separate response to the preceding four lines—as not, in short, part of the plea that makes up the sestet. Although the couplet might imply that this is a distinct conclusion, it turns out that the speaker’s entreaty also forms part of the rest of the sestet. This confusion is only intensified by the fact that the poem follows an Italian scheme in the octave, offers a delayed volta, marked predictably by “yet,” but then offers another closed-rhyme quatrain before entering into the concluding couplet. Thus, despite the concluding couplet, this sonnet is not quite English, but neither does its sestet follow a more open Italian rhyme scheme. This closed-rhyme quatrain doubles the final couplet’s request of Cromwell, but also arrests any seamless logical transition into the resolving couplet. The implication of this sealed rhyme is that the couplet’s resolution amounts to little more than repetitive restatement and redundancy: . . . yet much remaines To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less renownd then warr, new foes arise Threatning to bind our soules wth secular chaines: 9–12

The problem that this sonnet poses, then, is whether the concluding request resolves the threat noted in this final quatrain or is merely the rendering explicit of the entire sestet’s suasive appeal. Does the manifestation of the appeal act as the effect or consequence of a problem— that much remains to be conquered? Or is the rendering of the appeal still part of the description of the problem? The sestet’s rhetorical organization unfolds from problem to an actualized appeal, but the exact character of this concluding, final appeal remains ambiguous. It might be a logical development from the sestet’s stated problem, an event of resolution at the end of an argument. Or it might be the manipulative rhetorical tactic of the encomiast, a repetition of the demand implicit in the first four lines of the sestet. Or it might be the hopeful plea of a speaker desperate for justice or succor, awaiting Cromwell’s intervention. In sum, this sonnet, more than the other sonnets of advice and praise, poses the problem of whether endings are acts of hypotactic development or of paratactic addition. That is, when one pleads, hopefully, for Cromwell’s help, does one await this help as an unfolding sequence in an external temporal world? Or does the plea of the couplet

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lock the arrival of such aid back into the time of the poem itself, by treating it as logical development or as epigrammatic resolution? Formally, this poem poses the problem of a detachable, even supplementary completion, a fulfillment that remains extraneous to the thing fulfilled. It is the same problem we will find in the case of Lycidas: How does one end something of which one is not a part? But it also turns this issue into an examination of that for which one waits. In this sestet, Milton sharply distinguishes waiting for a resolution and waiting for an event or an end. William McCarthy suggests that nothing really happens in this sonnet until the final clause, precisely because the statements in the first twelve lines are all subordinate to the final plea. Thus, he maintains that this sonnet, as well as the one addressed to Fairfax, praises incomplete acts: “To this unfinished work Milton subordinates their past achievements and their praise—subordinates them in the very syntax of the sonnets, especially of the Cromwell [sic], it being almost entirely a set of dependent clauses which resolve only at the last minute in the main clause, ‘helpe us. . . .’ ”28 McCarthy’s reading shows how this sonnet pegs virtue to potential, an as yet unachieved fulfillment. The sonnet’s volta, in fact, evacuates the novel finality of its own status as a pivotal event, unseating the disjunctive presupposition that grounds such critical disagreements. One should read “yet,” redundantly and emphatically, as synonymous with “still.” If much remains yet to do—as in “still much remaines / To conquer still”—then the event in the volta is not unique and these lines bend over backward, via this redundancy, to emphasize this lack of singularity. As such, even in a sonnet with at least the air of Englishness, whose formal properties might well imply a secure and separable resolution, Milton raises the question of whether there are any actual turns or events in poems, or the world, including those epigrammatic conclusions that would produce or reestablish a peaceful unity. McCarthy’s argument, in tethering praise to potential, maintains that what is valuable about possibility is not its ultimate actualization in the future but rather its immediate temporal occurrence. (As we will see in the succeeding chapter, Lycidas describes a similar independent potential that does not issue in actualization.) However, potential occurs in the present in a manner incompatible with our predominant notions of the event. It is neither a progressive unfolding, dialectical or typological, nor a contingent eruption. In addition, the future for which one hopes is not just potentially present, a category of being, but

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occurs in the present, a category of time. The result of praising incomplete acts is, ultimately, the disavowal of the value of completion as a model for events or endings. Thus, “yet,” because it is both a logical and a temporal operator, heralds the central division in the significance of sonnet form: Does it represent the deliberative procedures of thought, the temporal event of an argument’s transition into acceptance, the moment of commentative conclusion of a series of conflicts, or a continuity at odds with any notion of a dramatic volta? But “yet” also signifies the abrogation of the distinction between a static continuity and the eruption of difference or change: Potential ends occur all the time within continuity and are the only ways of conceiving our daily lives as anything more than pointless private dramas or, what amounts to the same thing, a useless, boring holding pattern. Potential, then, is not merely a retrospective category, one that reaffirms a distinction between past and present, complete and incomplete action. Instead, potential displays some of the “sense of immediacy,” to borrow William Riley Parker’s phrase, that attends the sonnets, particularly the immediate considering of Sonnet 19.29 Milton’s sonnets encase, even at the level of their form and order, an examination of continuity, climax, and resolution and refuse to take the transition from deliberative potential thought into final culminating action as the paradigm for events. For example, Sonnet 7 represents deliberation as a mental activity without pivotal turns, without even the developmental drama that one would expect from a rejection of the Petrarchan tradition. What is probably most striking in a sonnet often interpreted as a dismissal or transcendence of idle Petrarchan pursuits is the absence of any reversal, even an internal one, that could serve as the mark of an event: In the past, things worked this way, but now everything has changed and I have put away childish things. In fact, Sonnet 7 goes so far as to evacuate the very notion of pivotal occasions, placing all under the eye of the great taskmaster: Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure eev’n, To that same lot, however mean, or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n; All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great task Masters eye. 9–14

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As with the Cromwell sonnet, this poem worries over the relationship between “yet” and “still,” continuity and rupture, in the volta. Victoria Silver maintains that there is a radical formal break between octave and sestet, one that confirms the incommensurability of human and divine languages. This reading, though, threatens to ignore the ambiguity of “yet” and the poem’s more general tendencies toward the conflation of distinctions, even those between human and divine.30 In the sestet, in fact, “yet” means both “however” and “regardless.” It does not matter if his maturation is more or less, slow or fast. The ambiguity does not so much ask for resolution as show us the irrelevance of resolution, a maneuver that ultimately eliminates the ambiguity by disavowing it, not by resolving it. Either incommensurability does not exist or, if it does, it does not matter. This is not to argue that differences in general do not matter. It is only to maintain that the poem denies both the transitions between incongruous levels of language that Silver describes and the dialectical reversals, from indeterminacy to resolution, that govern her transcendental understanding of interpretation. “Regardless” indicates that the disjunctive turn marked by “however” or “but” is either not worth recognizing or nonexistent.31 Disavowal means that ambiguity is not a disequilibrium tending toward or wishing for stasis or rest, and neither is it a problem that must be overcome, solved, or transcended. This sonnet’s insistence that indeterminacy is inconsequential then shows, more generally, that the critical categories that we use to distinguish eventful turns inside a contemplative poem—the hypotactic orders of dialectical or typological unfolding or retrospective hermeneutics—are themselves undermined or, at least, rendered suspicious within and by the poem.32 Ambiguity in Milton’s sonnets is not a structural tension emanating from critique but rather a mechanism for disavowing the significance of distinctions—in this case, between contemplation and action. And this is, of course, a temporal problem, posed by the ambiguity of “still” in Sonnet 7—“It shall be still in strictest measure eev’n.” How can one discern change without the security of retrospection? Does “still” mean “continuity,” or “quiet and immobile”? In the latter instance, the inward ripeness will exist quietly in these even measures, the implication being that it does not exist there quietly quite yet, that a future change will finally produce this stillness. Of course, the former sense, “continuity,” has exactly the opposite implication, that maturation is now and continues to be in the future a matter of stable measure. As with the ambiguity of “yet” in the preceding line, this one too tacitly erases

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itself within its own semantic logic. If “still” denotes continuity, the inward ripeness to which the line refers maintains itself statically and quietly in the same measure that it has always occupied. “Continuity” contains “quiet” in the same manner that “regardless” contains “however.” Again, neither of these ambiguities calls for interpretive resolution, let alone the intervention of a reasoning reader. And neither do they enact a dialectical reversal, through which a higher synthesis is achieved. Instead, these are ambiguities without resolution, not because indeterminacy reigns and poems lack finality but rather because ambiguities do not need, want, or request the finality of solution, ending, or conclusion.33 Milton’s sonnets, then, do not present ambiguity as a crisis in need of solution and, moreover, do not present reaction to crisis as the primary process of contemplation. Instead, Sonnet 7 allows for a truly affirmative utopian possibility, one in which revelation can happen without having to proceed through the circuit of work and mediation. In Gilles Deleuze’s parlance, Milton’s sonnets imagine a model of change built on disavowal: “Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it.”34 Most important for Deleuze is the distinction between the escapes opened up by disavowal and the false argumentative contestations that characterize negation. Disavowal, at the very least, allows us to think of sonnets as something other than an oblique attempt at persuasion, allegiance, and agreement: politics by other, more artistic means. As we have already seen, this type of disavowal also characterizes Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of messianism: “In pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end.”35 Yet this is not an escape that takes refuge in resignation or wishful reveries. Ultimately, for Agamben the messianic as not is the engine of a free use of the world, a use without possession: “Use: this is the definition Paul gives to messianic life in the form of the as not. To live messianically means ‘to use’ klēsis; conversely, messianic klēsis is something to use, not to possess.” It also turns out that the word, a pure revealed word, is not the final epiphany that makes use unnecessary but the means of achieving this free use: “The experience of the pure word opens up the space for gratuitousness and use.”36 These other,

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non-apocalyptic words still work within a teleological, dialectical, or typological system, serving the purposes offered them by these various systems of significance. They are, then, already used and are not available for us. In Agamben’s reading, revelation is not a restful resolution to strife, itself a goal, but a transformation of the labor of historical time into the liberty of free action.37 And one of the central labors that disappears is that of overcoming distance between deliberation and action, the very distance that Milton seeks to abolish in his own account of contemplative use. In this respect, Milton’s sonnets participate in the seventeenthcentury philosophical obsession with the relationship between passion and action that James anatomizes. In particular, they respond to the difficulties of teaching an active virtue that haunt Augustinians and Cambridge Platonists alike: “Because reasoning itself does not engage the will and cannot create the ability to act on our understanding, the question of how to achieve the one is consequently no longer the same as the question of how to achieve the other. We face a new problem: how is the love that constitutes knowledge of virtue to be created and disseminated?”38 Mimetic knowing is, of course, inadequate, but so too is mimetic acting, as Milton’s indictment of liturgy makes clear. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, for example, insists, conventionally, on the value of practice: “For not only the body, & the mind, but also the improvement of Gods Spirit is quickn’d by using. Whereas they who will ever adhere to liturgy, bring themselves in the end to such a passe by overmuch leaning as to loose even the legs of their devotion.”39 Yet An Apology also insists that habit is a product of the contemplative actions of conscience, not merely rote work: “There will not want divers plaine and solid men, that have learnt by the experience of a good conscience, what it is to be well taught, who will soone look through and through both the lofty nakednesse of your Latinizing Barbarian, and the finicall goosery of your neat Sermon-actor.”40 “The experience of a good conscience” does not designate merely successful achievements or actions that result from virtuous thoughts. The experience of conscience is also these virtuous thoughts themselves. Here, Milton emphasizes the centrality of will and use to the event of thought and tries to escape the fantasy of an end to willing and thinking. After all, that is what the division between active and contemplative lives entails, the notion that a final manifestation ends all deliberation and returns us to the world of pragmatic reality and mechanical causation.41 For Milton, this gesture is either prideful or despairing. It assumes that we can

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reach a moment where we know enough or have achieved enough to stop thinking and to act, or that we have reached a level of hopelessness where desperate resignation is legitimate. Potential in the sonnets is the model for hopeful action, however paradoxically, precisely because it does not project this resentful future where one could finally be done with thinking, acting, and living. Sonnet 7, of course, concludes with the striking implication that God’s omnipresence is dependent on the use of a human actor: “All is, if I have grace to use it so, / As ever in my great task Masters eye.” Everything is under God’s gaze, as it ever was, but only if the speaker uses it.42 Now one might argue that the grace of use is itself a divine gift or that use means recognition of God’s omnipresent order and, as a result, that these lines do not mean what they seem to mean: that divine providence or even omniscience depends on human action and work. Such hasty apologies, though, ignore Milton’s attempt, especially in the meditative sonnets, to abandon accounts of action that reproduce the simplistic dichotomy of tyrannical agency and abject passivity, a mirror image of the equally simplistic dichotomous account of events as either erupting contingency or dialectical unfolding. Milton’s sonnets attempt, essentially, to disavow these dichotomies without overcoming them, without imagining their solution as the restful (or tense) suspension of dialectical or teleological completion. When Sonnet 7 affirms that “All is . . . As ever,” it evokes a continuity seemingly at odds with an apocalyptic revelation. But this is to mistake the very specific sense that Milton gives to an apocalyptic end. It is not a passively revealed status, a human purged of sin without any more will to act. We are not done thinking or considering or acting once we have achieved our purported goals, precisely because the apocalypse is not a goal, the restful accomplishment of which ends all acting. Instead, the apocalypse is the moment in the present when real ends occur, instead of their enslaved double, a manifestation not all that eventful. The “all” that “is” “as ever” is not a subtending ontology gradually or dimly revealed, tacitly assumed, or finally made explicit. “All is . . . As ever” does not mean that all is as it ever has been, affirming the secure ground of a divinely ordered universe. Instead, these lines insist on the grounding nature of potential. They mean that all is as if always under God’s gaze, if I have grace to use it so. This is not so much thinking making it so as an insistence that even what we mean by a foundation for divine providence is organized around possibility and its potential for use. Even God’s dominion over the world occurs only

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conditionally, in short, and that is not a denigration or diminution of God’s goodness or power. For both Agamben and Deleuze, negation preserves what is, the given, even as it promises transformation. It imagines a resolution of difference in which one recognizes the occurrence of change. But negation also maintains a very specific relationship to potential: Potential is imperfect or second-class being, on the way to its negation into actuality. The blossom is the refutation of the bud; the action is the abrogation of the thought, even as it is also its fulfillment. The sonnet form hobbles such an understanding of potential, however, mainly by presenting itself as a lyric structure that contains an event or multiple events, including that of recognition and persuasion. Events, even events of thought, happen inside sonnets. They are not performed or represented within them as potentialities that can be reactivated or reanimated. “It shall be still in strictest measure eev’n” is a prophecy that takes its authority not from a speaker’s ethos or illocutionary force. Rather, the moment when measure’s evenness occurs is right in the line, at the apostrophe that preserves the line’s meter, if not its rhythm: “Eev’n” is, in miniature, a disavowal of what is given—in this case, the extra, unwanted syllable of “even.” For Milton, these are not just the prosodic tricks of a high formalism but an attempt to present how thought happens in tandem with action. The problem with self-reflection and recognition is always that they cannot explain how their moments of transcendent reversal return to the immanent world in order to affect it, how possibility might enter the world other than by its own negation. Milton’s sonnets highlight resolution as the chief culprit in buttressing a distinction between action and thought. When the speaker of this sonnet disavows resolution, he is not being a coy hipster, holding out the possibility of multiple meanings so as to remain faithful to polyvocality. Rather, the sonnet seeks to evade the logic of solution, achievement, and concomitant deferral, which also amounts to evading the logic of persistent tension yearning for impossible release. Sonnet 7 concludes with an already present escape from precisely this model of anxious disjunction and reactive transformation, the very model that we often use to describe historical and personal change. Events are not moments of crisis overcome in a return to stasis, and neither are they the achievement of a final equanimity, potentially figured within contemplation. Such an account openly despises endings and the transformations that attend them, wishing to drown the event

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of ending in the most roiling and purportedly revolutionary of rivers: the dialectic of history. Perhaps we should be unsurprised by such a potentially selfaggrandizing gesture in a sonnet, or any lyric, for that matter. Paradoxically, it is the sonnet’s ingenuous narcissism, its almost vainglorious self-memorialization, that provides the most promising model for a thought interested in change, which explains, in part, Milton’s use of the form. The Petrarchan tradition, for all of its hyperboles, is one that takes the formative role of thought seriously, its ability to habituate and change the subject who is speaking. This is not quite the ex nihilo logic of thinking making it so, but it does consider thought to be itself a type of transformative action, not a mere reflection on external events, where the true transformation really abides. Milton’s revisions of the Petrarchan sequence are designed not to demystify sonnets, revealing their true political content, but rather to render them more embarrassingly earnest, without the ironic roman à clef tendencies of the Sidney circle. He also relies on the formal properties of the sonnet to conceptualize what it means for something to end hopefully but still be, in the course of this ending, an object for human use and contemplation. In other words, hopeful waiting is not a waiting for some deferred arrival but one that treats potential as simultaneously a present occurrence and a transformative end. “All is . . . As ever” occurs as an end to a very specific train of thought: the notion that time unfolds in a sequence of potentials leading to actualities—i.e., as a causal narrative. These lines mean that the end has already occurred and that its final arrival is not what we are awaiting. Rather, we are waiting for the end of the notion that hope must always be deferred into the future.

II How, then, does a poem make hope a present substance, and not merely a wishful dreaming? How would a poem go about imagining a present revelation, and not merely the promise of a future one? The meditative sonnets, Sonnets 7 and 19, do not append contemplation to an explicit or promised fulfillment. Thought is not merely preparation for action, an internal prelude whose real value lies in its actualization. As a consequence, consideration is not identical to deliberation, which implies a preparatory juridical proceeding. Yet Milton’s sonnets also eschew a world organized by a model of anticipated revelation, of aristocratic

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secrets or the end of time, the ultimate explicit showing of what is already so, somewhere in some other narrative. Instead, these sonnets treat thinking and imagining as eventful activities in the present that do not merely prime us for revelatory change. They are revelatory change itself. They challenge the notions of events with which we are most familiar—a dialectical sublation that preserves the old as the opposite of the new; an external, contingent eruption into continuity that one retroactively reinscribes within a causal system; a transcendent divine narrative that humans initially fail to recognize but ultimately uncover—because these all end up making revelation in the present inconceivable and impossible. In such models, the event of the present is the opposite of possibility. It becomes a limitation of a plethora of options down to a single, real now, the very sort of narrowing that Deleuze anatomizes and Milton rejects. The sense of immediacy that Parker, Mueller, and Margaret Thickstun all find in these poems requires a notion of events that does not depend on a surprising or reactive eruption into an immanent continuity, much less the constraining of imaginative potential into a logic of developmental, dialectical, or interpretive actualization.43 Milton’s verse is not satisfied with a mediated appeal to an external plan, one that would turn poetry back into illustrative hermeneutic commentary on this hidden narrative. Instead, his sonnets offer a continuity in which readers must live and think, day to day, but also one in which thoughtful considering—itself a type of use—amounts to more than mere anticipation and planning, all with the hope of an end to such planning. For Milton, thinking changes things and to believe otherwise is to turn the apocalypse into nothing more than a benighted fatalism hoping for an end equivalent to annihilation: one in which “When I consider how my light is spent” means that my light is wasted and exhausted, not that it is used. Milton, of course, is not alone in obsessing over the relationship between thought, passion, actualization, and action within the Christian and more general Western European literary traditions. We certainly witness a similar interest in passion’s activity within Richard Crashaw’s verse: “The Flaming Heart” avers, after all, that “Love’s passives are his activ’st part. / The wounded is the wounding heart.”44 The invocation to book 9 of Paradise Lost presents a similar reversal of passivity into activity. Instead of recounting the “long and tedious havoc” of war, the epic speaker presents patience as a triumphant heroism, “the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung.”45 Georgia Ronan Crampton contends that this inversion is entirely in keeping not only

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with the agere et pati topos that stretches at least back to Homer but also with the early Church’s solution to the paradox of the Incarnation. Leo the Great and the Council of Chalcedon ultimately divide Jesus’ life into an active ministry of miracles and preaching and a passive suffering on the cross.46 This division is a response to the conceptual contradiction between an impassible god and an obviously passible, suffering Christ. Yet Crampton also notes the ways in which the Passion becomes a model for individual, internal triumphs over, paradoxically, one’s own passions. Out of the division imposed on Jesus’ life comes the paradox of a victorious suffering: But the Passion of Christ did exert a powerful attraction as an alternative heroic ideal. It was a model transcendent but open to all, urged upon all, a prize for which mere Christian wayfarers, too modest to set out for a golden fleece, might compete. Patience, from the root pati, to suffer, took for its unique exploit not the deed but the ordeal. One crystallization of this modality, its relation to agere et pati obvious, was the victory of patience. In earliest exegesis, unaffected by the intimate identification with the passion of Christ just under survey, praise of patience might naively retain rather more of the spirit of the Old Adam than the New. Some commend a cheerful patience as that posture best calculated to set an enemy’s teeth on edge. So Tertullian notes what satisfaction the patient sufferer may glean in frustrating his oppressor.47 In addition to its appearance in Paradise Lost, this notion, or a permutation of it, makes an appearance in Paradise Regained’s evocation, discussed in the preceding chapter, of an internal reign superior to that of worldly kingship. Yet Paradise Lost ultimately corrects the Muse’s own presentation of patience’s superior strength. After all, Michael rebukes Adam’s request for the place and date of Jesus’ triumph because this is not a fight with winners and losers: . . . say where and when Thir fight, what stroke shall bruise the Victors heel. To whom thus Michael. Dream not of thir fight, As of a Duel, or the local wounds Of head or heel . . . 12.384–88

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The problem, in Michael’s estimation, is not just that Adam wants journalistic details, appointing the time and place of the end. He also continues to imagine the end as a matter of contest. In “The Flaming Heart,” Crashaw’s speaker does not exhibit the same aversion to the language of conquest, preserving it in the interior metaphorical space of a heart that contains even contradictory things: o heart! the æquall poise of love’s both parts Bigge alike with wounds and darts. Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame. Live here, great heart; and love and dy and kill; And bleed and wound; and yeild and conquer still. 75–80

Milton’s sonnets do not offer similar series of reversals that resolve into paradoxical unities. Moreover, even his contemplative sonnets exhibit a marked discomfort with locating conflict, let alone triumph in an interior, allegorical space. This discomfort stems less from a desire to act in the world than it does from an attempt to wrest even imaginative conceptions of patience and thought away from this dynamic of the duel. As the Second Defense notes, winning has little to do with virtue: “A cause is neither proved good by success, nor shown to be evil.”48 The great danger is precisely the one that Crampton here anatomizes: patience turns into just another way to win and reduces to little more than the pettiest passive-aggressive behavior. Sonnet 19 undoubtedly responds to the agere et pati tradition, as evidenced by its central conceit of an active patience, one that intervenes “to prevent / That murmur” (8–9), not just to endure it. However, this sonnet does not seek, as does the invocation to book 9, the inverting transformation of patience into a more valuable species of strength. Instead, Milton ultimately eschews both the visual spectacle characteristic of the Passion, a tendency also exhibited by the entirety of Paradise Regained,49 and the triumphant revelation that weakness is actually strength. Spectacularity and reversal encourage precisely the type of waiting that “When I consider” hopes to eliminate: the self-satisfied inertia of attentive worry enabled by kairos. Milton’s verse attempts to rethink the apocalypse so that we do not construe it as no more innovative than victory. Sonnet 19 seeks the erasure of these very categories, including the disavowal of the reversals inherent in a victorious or

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active patience. It presents the apocalypse as an immanent potential that overcomes precisely the distinctions—between action, suffering, and thinking—that ground a revelation imagined as a dramatically unveiled inversion. Such a model of apocalyptic immanence is necessary so that we can act in and attend presently to the world, and not just wish for it to all be over in a blaze of righteous glory. Sonnet 19’s depiction of service advises readers on how to act within a world of frustrating continuity, one in which a kairotic, spectacular apocalypse does not intervene to direct one’s actions. Often however, criticism of this sonnet attempts to locate such an epiphany inside the poem by treating Patience as a personified interruption of normal order. Such a maneuver is characteristic of those readings that revolve around determining whether the speaker accepts Patience’s dictates and, in turn, whether the politically engaged Milton would affirm the type of resignation that purportedly appears in the couplet: . . . God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and waite. 9–14

Perhaps unsurprisingly, arguments about these lines often insist that attentive waiting, patient, apocalyptic, or otherwise, is just not in Milton’s nature. For example, Carol Barton maintains, after quoting passages from the Second Defense and The Reason of Church Government, that “these do not strike me as the declarations of someone who could wallow in the kind of indolent self-pity that the last line of Sonnet XIX is historically assumed to portray.”50 In this instance, Milton appears as a striving actor, not the sort of person who would even create such an indolent, passive speaker, let alone be one. Regardless of the legitimacy of this interpretation of the sonnet’s final line, such readings—even those, like Barton’s, that wish to redefine the concluding resolution—always assume that the sonnet indeed ends in at least self-advisory, if not self-justificatory, resolution and that somewhere in the poem is an interrupting problem that requires resolution. The gnomic quality of the concluding sentence, though, masks what is really a paratactic concluding three lines. There is no “however” or “more

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importantly” that transitions into the final clause. The colon after “without rest” does not, cheekily or ironically, subordinate standing and waiting to the rushing thousands of the preceding line, and neither does it present waiting as an example of this hasty busyness. Instead, it silently and paratactically coordinates them, without fanfare. “Also”— “in addition,” “by the way”—those who do not receive such bustling tasks are of service. When the speaker maintains that God does not need human work or the return of divine gifts, the sonnet does not so much set up an instance of indistinction as it reaffirms the poem’s rejection of any model of hypotactic development, much like the disavowal of resolution that we witnessed in “How soon hath Time.” That is, “When I consider” denies the entire conceptual architecture of hypotaxis—logical dependency and causation, a problem-solution structure—that transforms all discussions of ethics into a determinism–free will debate whose ultimate goal is the determination of juridical responsibility. God does not use parataxis here to produce a befuddling indistinction. Busy activity and alert standing and waiting may well be the same thing in the eyes of God, but that does not mean that their difference has been erased, overcome, or resolved in a higher synthesis. “Only” in “They also serve who only stand and waite” emphasizes that these two approaches to one’s devotional service are fundamentally irreconcilable, that standing and waiting are themselves a type of disposition unconnected to some other aim. Parataxis, then, does not amount to the affirmation of indiscriminate identity, the notion that all difference is epiphenomenal, or to a lament about contingency, that addition means digressive disorder. Rather, in this instance, “also” emphasizes that something occurs in this moment that does not simply reduce to the unfolding of a plan, always already lodged within what looks to be a series of events. Even the event of God’s gifts is supernumerary in this sonnet. Gifts and work amount to the same thing insofar as they are equally irrelevant for conceptualizing one’s action in the world. God is not bound by necessity or chance—“Necessitie and Chance / Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate” (7.172–73)—and neither, for that matter, are humans. “When I consider” is, then, a poem that attempts to root out not just the overt appeals to necessity that dominate our understanding of ethical thought and action but also those that infect our basic conceptual architecture and, as a consequence, stunt any moral action. It is in this sense that parataxis offers a real immanent hope, in oppo-

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sition to the world-weary cynicism of a hypotactic structure, however narrativally or dramatically compelling. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, a teleological poem threatens not only to have seen everything before but also to put everything in the service of a conclusive self-annihilation: A “maximally closed” poem “would be a pre-eminently teleological poem and in a sense a suicidal one, for all of its energy would be directed toward its own termination.”51 In contrast, an apocalypse organizes history according to its end but does not bleed this end, as a principle of causation or closure, back into the paratactic unfolding of events. To do so turns revealed truth into nothing more than the hidden motor of history, cruelly cloaked by God. Smith’s description of the paratactic generation of poetry reflects precisely this challenge to narrative and structural orders. When repetition itself becomes the principle of generation, the coherence of the poem will not be dependent on the sequential arrangement of its major thematic units. In a nonparatactic structure (where, for example, the principle of generation is logical or temporal), the dislocation or omission of any element will tend to make the sequence as a whole incomprehensible, or will radically change its effect. In paratactic structure, however (where the principle of generation does not cause any one element to “follow” from another), thematic units can be omitted, added, or exchanged without destroying the coherence or effect of the poem’s thematic structure.52 Paratactic poems do not develop, logically, rationally, or otherwise, toward their conclusion, whether that conclusion is individual political action or the collective end of history. As a result, ends are not goals, but termini. As Smith’s analysis implies, it turns out that all apocalyptic ends are paratactic, precisely because apocalypticism is something more than a teleological undercurrent or providential narrative behind phenomenal history. The apocalypse is not the potential seed of revelation that matures over time. For Milton, it is not even the promise of a revealed and redeemed future but rather a potential that itself occurs in the present. Or rather, this revealed future must also occur potentially in the present. And “potentially” does not mean that it might, perhaps, occur but rather that it occurs as potential. “They also serve” is a surprise inside the poem that refuses resignation to inevitability or actualization as the paradigm for political action. It ultimately requires, as a result of

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its formal intrusion, that we expand what the possible entails, treating it as something more than reverse-engineered potentiality. The conceptual structure of these final lines—hypotactic resolution or paratactic list—matters precisely because, as previously noted, this sonnet takes as its subject the way one acts in a world providentially ordered by God. Moreover, as the sestet insists, one’s acts are not the result of a divine need. Nor are they even a response to human need. The sonnet begins not with a kairotic response necessitated by an occasion but with a repeatable occurrence that the speaker can will into existence. As Tobias Gregory maintains, “when” comes to mean “whenever” as a result of the fact that both the first line and patience’s reply occur in the present.53 “Whenever” turns the poem’s thoughtful activities into everyday occurrences and as such denudes them of the opportunism that we too often ascribe to events. The poem begins, after all, not with the caused event of Milton’s blindness—thus the difficulties in dating its composition54—but rather with a present considering of this effect, a considering that itself is an event in the present and not merely an empty, timeless reflection on the past. “When I consider how my light is spent” (1) emphasizes that this considering happens in the present, “is,” and that it is a temporal occurrence, “when.” Thickstun is particularly compelling on this subject, showing how a simple alteration in tense could have transformed this poem into a consoling resolution located safely in the past: “By presenting his poem in the present, and as part of a continuing internal struggle, Milton frames Patience’s words as a ‘quotation’ and leaves his own assent unperformed.”55 That is, “When I considered how my light was spent” would locate both loss and contemplative reconciliation safely in the past, reducing “considering” to nothing more than acclimation to necessity. It would also incline the sonnet’s opening line toward reading “spent” as exhausted, as opposed to “used.” Although “When I consider how my light is spent, / E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide” (1–2) seems to suggest that light has been annihilated, the remaining lines in the opening quatrain imply that talent at least remains, even if unused: “And that one Talent which is death to hide, / Lodg’d with me useless” (3–4). That is, the sonnet’s first four lines close with the image not of extinguished talent but of talent present but currently (and only currently) unused. In the opening line, “spent” may have all the initial hallmarks of a final, irredeemable wasting (which we will witness again in Samson Agonistes’ concluding sonnet), but the poem itself drives us away from precisely

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this type of kairotic fatalism toward the possibility that impossibility does not inexorably rule our lives. In this sense, Sonnet 19 echoes Sonnet 7’s emphasis on the centrality of active use for one’s contemplative and devotional life and its challenge to a kairotic organization of time. The later sonnet’s presenttense considering is more a rejection of any punctual tension than it is a required response to a singular, unchangeable contingency. The goal is not to develop the constant vigilance against sin that Stanley Fish describes but rather to escape the endless oscillations that necessarily attend this model of ethical thought and action, something that the notion of kairotic crisis can never attain.56 After all, kairos means anticipating a problem and its solution, an orientation to the future that wishes for, if not manufactures, the crisis it will ultimately overcome. In this model, events themselves have no real effect in the present other than as excuses for one’s necessary actions. Milton’s sonnet, in contrast, maintains that a really present potential happens and has real effects in the present. In this respect, his portrait of potential mirrors Deleuze’s depiction of reverse causality, a concept that treats the future not as a withdrawn absence but as a force in the present world: Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that are without finality but testify nonetheless to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse causalities that shatter evolution. . . . It [the State] was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing. . . . To ward off is also to anticipate. . . . But in order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a “presentiment” of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence.57 Milton, of course, imagines the anticipation of the apocalypse as welcoming, instead of warding off, but does nonetheless offer a model of possibility acting within action. Possibility’s status in the present may not rise to the level of existence for Deleuze, but it certainly seems to for Milton. Future apocalyptic events do more than vaguely influence

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the present. Milton uses prolepsis to show that possibility exists in the present as well. I have written elsewhere of the significance of prolepsis in Milton’s early devotional poetry, particularly its rejection of lack as a determining factor in desire and reading.58 In this respect, prolepsis makes deferred ends present, packing them back into an immediate now. This is the case with “Upon the Circumcision,” which insists that the sign of obedience has power in the present moment, as opposed to the kenosis and atonement that have already occurred in the past: For we by rightfull doom remediles Were lost in death, till he that dwelt above High thron’d in secret bliss, for us frail dust Emptied his glory, ev’n to nakednes; And that great Cov’nant which we still transgress Intirely satisfi’d, And the full wrath beside Of vengeful Justice bore for our excess, And seals obedience first with wounding smart This day, but O ere long Huge pangs and strong Will pierce more neer his heart. 17–29

Yet even in instances like this, where the future appears to have already happened, prolepsis does not double for determinism, presenting the secret narrative telos that we ultimately recognize as governing the world. First, all of the events that the speaker narrates have already happened, meaning that the fiction of suspense implied by “but O ere long” is transparently hollow. Thus, the predictive value of prolepsis disappears. As a result, “this day” emphasizes the present of the speaker’s utterance and the value of this imperfect seal, an emphasis only accentuated by the phrase’s floating position at the beginning of a line: It is an enjambed conclusion to the preceding clause, but also a supernumerary deixis. Because of its place in the line, “this day” also acts as an emphatic period to the preceding discussion of atonement and, consequently, turns the concluding prophecy into an afterthought. “Upon the Circumcision” then shows that the inevitability of a narrative unfolding is less important than the immediate usefulness of the present seal of obedience. The work of the future in the present—the

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reverse causality that Deleuze describes—does not amount to the discovery of providence’s plan. Instead, prolepsis fundamentally alters the temporal character of action. It is neither a kairotic reaction to an opportunity nor the overcoming of a problem or tension, precisely because the future has being in and is packed back into the present. What one would anticipate, an eschatological or teleological end, must be already present in order to have any effect in this present. Its immanent effects, in turn, amount to more than the revelation of purposive order. There is, after all, nothing transformative about fate. Sonnet 19 casts similar suspicion on the compatibility of kairotic and proleptic anticipation. The volta, in which patience arrives prematurely and proleptically, nonetheless indicts kairos as a scheme for understanding events. That is, patience, of all qualities, does not wait for the opportune moment to intervene: . . . though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d, I fondly ask; But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts. . . . 4–10

Even in arriving early, patience fails to prevent a murmur that has already been reported in line 7: “Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d” (7).59 Indeterminacy is not the result here, or casting aspersions on the validity of Patience’s counsel. Instead, the premature volta asks readers to stop anticipating a climactic event that will dramatically alter one’s life. This seems the substantive point of the adverb “soon.” Even within a form as regular as the sonnet, one cannot rely on the appearance of pivotal turns to effect change, conversion, or novelty, precisely because one is still imagining events either as an external formal structure of unfolding significance or as the product of an agent’s free action that threatens such homologous systems. Both systems turn events into weak kairotic signs, of providential, developing order and a subject’s liberty, identity, or power, respectively. Under this system, an apocalypse can never occur, precisely because all ends are only signs of the end. In fact, nothing ever happens within a hypotactic poem, because its signs operate inside a developmental system

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that denies meaning’s possibility as a present occurrence. Whatever events do occur reaffirm the impossibility of a radical, immediate revelation, precisely because meaning itself happens later and only in the fullness of time. Literary criticism, insofar as it imagines meaning as a networked architecture or as an unfolding plan, seeks to ward off the apocalypse and replace revelation with revolution. The critical tendency to personify patience only demonstrates just how alluring is the temptation to imagine even an internal world of radical freedom as populated by allegorical personifications who will resolve our problems and tell us what to do. Typically, one reads these lines as “Patience, in order to prevent that murmur.”60 However, it is equally viable to treat the infinitive clause as a narrowing modifier, sectioning this particular patience off from a more general quality, not a universal plan of action directed by a personified virtue. In this case, the line would read, “the patience to prevent that murmur.” The former implies calculation and a goal-oriented plan, administered by an abstracted, bossy quality; the latter, a contingent, one-off quality without a teleological horizon—parataxis, in short. The murmur to which patience responds—“Doth God exact day labour, light deny’d”—appears, at least for a moment, as ambiguous. It is simultaneously the speaker’s impertinent complaint and the speaker’s imaginary rendition of God’s chiding of a lazy worker.61 In both cases, though, the speaker characterizes God as the sort of manipulatively cruel taskmaster who would demand not just obedience but acquiescence to the rationale for obedience. That is, God chides, “I don’t demand more than you can perform.” The next phrase is implied: “So shut up and quit complaining.” Yet despite this negative portrait of the divine taskmaster, the sonnet still allows one to escape the logic of necessity that the early volta threatens to impose. “The patience to prevent that murmur” does not demand that Patience, as an allegorical quality, manifest itself successfully, respond to an imagined drama acted out in one’s head (like an internalized juridical deliberation), and in so doing prevent “that murmur.” After all, in the poem itself, that murmur is not prevented but preserved. When we read the line as “the patience to prevent that murmur,” patience is a restricted quality that does not participate in such imagined internal contests, precisely because that is to allow actualization tyranny over the imagination. “The patience to prevent that murmur” is a potentiality, not a competing imagined actuality—as in “the patience that could prevent that murmur”—one whose occurrence, as a potential, does not hinge on the registered success of its promised

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action. The murmur can still occur and not contradict or undermine the occurrence of this more narrowly construed quality. It is for this reason that Milton attempts to present possibility as an independent occurrence, something that happens independent of actualization. Otherwise, God participates in the endless dialogue of accusation and counteraccusation that prevents any real change. In this moment, the hypotactic order implied by “in order to” disappears, and the patience to prevent that murmur replies soon, but not “in order to” accomplish something, in this case the goal of quieting an uppity speaker. On the one hand, the sonnet reveals that much criticism imposes on readers and the world the very system of teleological need that the poem itself explicitly rejects. On the other, and more importantly, it shows how the logic of even an internal struggle— the eruption of a personified quality within the self in order to chide the self—misunderstands how events happen and ultimately wards off such occurrences by turning all events into nothing more than the signification of struggle or its end, when someone wins or loses. Milton’s verse attempts to reconceive the apocalypse and its historical internalization around precisely this issue. Revelation matters for politics not because it offers us, at best, a rhetorical bludgeon or, at worst, eliminationist fantasies, but because it provides the paratactic paradigm for a truly free change in the world. If, as Reinhart Koselleck argues, the mid-seventeenth century marks the end of a closed eschatological conflict between Christian and anti-Christian churches, apocalypticism does not just disappear, cast into the ash can of history’s benighted primitivism.62 But neither does it simply return to the status of an internal allegory, a rhetorically powerful way of speaking about redemption, but one that doesn’t really alter the ways in which we think or act: Once modernity arrives, and the Book of Revelation retreats to a primarily parabolic or metaphorical status, thought does not proceed unchanged. Instead, in Milton’s hands, the apocalypse transforms into a way of thinking about ends and novelty outside struggle, tension, constitutive contradiction, and all of those other sacred categories that so inform literary criticism. The apocalypse that Milton reconceives in the sonnets is not then the spectacular end of history but rather an attempt to conceive of a truly transformative end in the present. This is not a rational humanist domestication of eschatological force so much as it is a thoroughgoing assault on the way we think about thinking, the ways in which modern accounts of thought’s fundamentally dependent character transmute conceiving and imagining into craven reactions.

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It is also for this reason that the meditative sonnets are pivotal for examining Milton’s notion of apocalyptic events: because events happen within thought. Considering, then, is not just an internalization of an external legislative deliberation or a dialogic weighing of options. The locus of events is inside this considering mind, but that does not amount to a simple containment of public happenings, let alone the solipsistic fantasy that thinking makes it so. Considering means something more than a prelude to actualization, in either its dialectical or its performative variants. This notion of the event of thought, what happens when one thinks, conceives, or considers, is not quite the same as Fish’s description of foundationless conceiving in Paradise Lost, including his own rejection of “thinking’s making it so.” Fish defends Milton against the charge of naïve idealism but nonetheless describes conceiving as an unprecedented, even apocalyptic eruption of thought: The fact that the visible world provides no firm (uninterpreted) basis for determining the shape of things (including the shape of God) does not leave us in a state of freedom as much as it leaves us in a state of almost unbearable responsibility. True, we are not constrained by independent evidence to a specific construction of the world, but this absence of (external) constraint is not the lifting but the imposing of a burden, the burden of hazarding (on the basis of insufficient information, without the support of the evidence of things seen) a construction which, once hazarded, will form the environment in which we thereafter live. . . . Our conceivings, even though they are grounded in nothing—in no brute empirical datum—produce grounds that one cannot simply wish away, if only because it is against their now-in-place background that wishes (or any other mental actions) could themselves be conceived. Our conceivings, in short, have consequences.63 Fish conceives of conceiving as an inexplicable, ex nihilo creation, or as an unprecedented, external apocalyptic intrusion into an otherwise static world of already conceived consequences. All originary thought amounts to an independent, surprising eruption. In contrast to Fish’s reading, “considering” in the sonnets amounts to an immanent process of weighing and valuing, one that does not despair of the prospect

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of persuasion and change, even for those with fundamentally opposed conceptions of the world. For that is what Fish’s account does here: It consigns us to a world where change is, if not impossible, at least inexplicable. Milton, of course, believes no such thing. The alternative to such autogenetic creation is not, however, the comforts of a retroactive hermeneutics or of dialogic reaction. Sonnet 19, for example, does not authorize treating events as already established interpretive problems unfolding toward or searching for consensus, or as a speaker’s dialectical reaction to another’s speech. This, again, is the significance of its paratactic end, that the additive is not supernumerary or unnecessary, or merely an expression of an already existent unity. The statement to which patience purportedly responds lacks the sort of definitive author who would call for such a direct retort. The very murmur that patience purportedly heads off at the pass is also ambiguously presented as the Maker’s chiding. As we have already noted, “Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d” is simultaneously the speaker’s impertinent complaint and the speaker’s imaginary rendition of God chastising a lazy worker. My point here is not to highlight, yet once more, an indeterminate ambiguity. Rather, the simultaneity of these possibilities asks not for an interpretive struggle that would end in resolution but for an abandonment of this very model of reading, one that imagines tension and struggle as events that must be resolved back into continuity, and statements as unfortunately necessary vehicles for the power and authority of their authors. Milton revises the sonnet here in opposition to Fussell’s model of tension and release, precisely because this notion of movement is a fundamentally conservative depiction of human desire as a yearning for stasis.64 A restful stasis, in itself, is not essentially valuable, particularly in a sonnet that describes the proper devotional disposition of those who seek to serve God. Service entails a present opening to apocalyptic change, which is not the same thing as the wish for a restful home. Unfortunately, I think that we have taken “openness” in critical theory to mean little more than cynical preparation for what happens after the event. Instead, in Milton’s case it connotes something closer to an active contemplation of possibilities that results in new habits and adaptabilities. If the sonnet’s complaint is simultaneously the desired fantasy of chastisement and the speaker’s own fond whingeing, then the speaker does not ask for a resolution to a problem, in this case the illusion of God’s unreasonable demands. Contrary to his own self-presentation,

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he is not engaged in a negotiation headed toward consensus. Resolving this indeterminacy entails endorsing a fundamentally reactive and mercenary understanding of the speaker’s model of action. He offers to serve and give a true account of himself only because God might come back and chide him. Deciding who speaks this chiding line means deciding who is responsible and, in so doing, reducing life to a trial. It also means that fear and embarrassment, not a freely given love, are the only possible motivations, as they always must be in a juridical system of resistance, response, and complaint. For Milton, considering means the transformation of thinking into an event instead of just a step in a formative process. His sonnets, then, revise a Petrarchan tradition of spectacularly performed obedience so as to maintain that the event of thought is not an audacious show, either of rebellion against or conformity with an existent narrative arc. This aversion to demonstration resonates with Deleuze’s concept of virtual events: The virtual preserves imagination’s being and, more importantly, its transformative, creative power. In this respect, it attunes with how Milton conceives of an independent possibility: The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation. . . . For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization—the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the difference between the complementary lines according to which actualization takes place.65 For Deleuze, the virtual allows us to imagine the new as different from the old, as opposed to becoming mired in a logic of similarity. The virtual itself is not ruled by actualization, a final cause or demonstration acting as the conditioning principle for any change. Instead, a virtually thinking nature is where a dependent possibility can be imagined and where one can approach transformative movement as such, whether that movement is imagined as conversion or as conviction. It is this

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notion of the virtual that comes closest to describing the possibility that Milton’s sonnets limn. This revised model of possibility matters, in part, because it begins to describe how persuasion itself might occur, how poetry might begin to move readers, and, finally, how sonnets might amount to something more than tedious navel-gazing. Milton’s sonnets show that it is only on this imaginative plain that minds can really meet and interact, and where the force of persuasion and reason could work on and move individuals, instead of always appealing to the higher authority or triangulated relay of an adjudicating, abstract plane. Contrary to Fish’s argument then, the absence of external, universal standards is precisely what makes an immediate, immanent interaction of considering persons possible. The secure fortress of subjectivity and the equally secure apathy of the patient instrumental object, untouched in its soul by its use, are fundamentally inadequate to the task of treating convincement as anything more than the result of extortion, fatigue, gambling, or chance.66 Poetry, at least, tries to conceive of how reason might interact with reason, how one would think with another, even God, as opposed to at or against her. It is in this sense that it tries to imagine revelation in the present. And this would be thought as a useful practice, as opposed to a mere imaginative internalization of public debate, a deliberative prelude to practice, or to a fanciful elaboration of a narrative telos residing elsewhere.67 What Milton’s sonnets achieve, then, is the explicit incorporation of events, as these possibilities, into poetry, the transformation of the occasional poem from a response to mere external contingency into a form where response is not required. Whatever valorization of contemplation we might remark in Milton’s theology, politics, or verse, the result is not simply allegorical internalization and its correlative, the attempt to deploy agential control over chance externalities. The apocalypse does not require domestication within the internal world of allegory and deliberation. It is not the emblem of political disappointment or despair, the resentful, lazy wish for a reversal of one’s experience of defeat. Concomitantly, the sonnet form, that bastion of narcissistic, aristocratic introspection and self-interest, does not serve as an impediment to action, the endless dithering of a conflicted speaker-lover or the fantasy of a completed and resolved totality. And neither is it deliberative preparation for ultimate action, political or amorous. Instead, Milton transforms the sonnet into what it already is: a site for the imaginative internal development and deployment of possibility, a site for

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considering, not planning or prophecy. In this light, we once again witness the fundamental duplicity of the Petrarchan tradition. The sonneteer does not want what he claims to lack, the beloved, but rather has precisely what he wants, in the present, immanently, right now: possible events (and these are really the only kind) that are not mere imaginary substitutes for the real thing. In Milton’s sonnets, potential is the real thing and manifestation an enslavement to cause, effect, actualization, narrativization, and the entire realm of reactive hypotaxis. Or, to put it in more militant terms, the possible is where ethical, because paratactic, relations and dispositions exist; the actual, where feasibility, calculation, bribery, and gambling reign. In contrast to hackneyed indictments of idealism, it turns out that manifestation and actualization will always be adolescent fantasies of liberation from the shackles of dependence, possibility, and thought. Milton fantasizes in his last sonnet about seeing his wife again in heaven. However, Sonnet 23 also closes with the real world breaking into what turns out to be a dream. “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint” does not indicate, prior to its final line, that this fantasy is the product of a distinct dream state. We might well cast this knowledge back to the beginning of the poem and then act as if we knew it all along, but it is not clear that this retroactively imposed telos is what the poem asks us to do (we will witness the same phenomenon in Lycidas). The reversal in this poem, if there is one, occurs in the final line: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night” (14). Smith contends that this final line does not perform the metapoetic or metanarratival comment that one might expect in a Renaissance tradition. Instead of securing the sonnet’s thematic closure by turning the poem into an artifact on which one might comment, the story of the dream and the speaker’s waking simply terminates.68 The cold-eyed recognition of this causal real world, however, does not even appear where the sonnet form requires: It is an afterthought, the tacked-on disruption of a more important virtual world. The eruption of the actual world into Sonnet 23 abruptly ends the sonnet and Milton’s sequence of sonnets. Yet this ending is not the result of development or transcendence. Actuality is not the result of a commentative or even metacommentative maneuver. If anything, Milton’s final sonnet does not so much break the fourth wall as it does incorporate the real world back into the poetic one. He awakens from his dream inside the sonnet, after all, and, as Smith maintains, does not offer a formal marker of the poet’s resolving mastery.

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For all of their celebration of the imaginary and potential as sites independent of manifestation and reaction, of possibility not subordinate to the actual, Milton’s sonnets nonetheless acknowledge the existence of the actualized world. Considering is not a withdrawal inward or a mystical reservation of the self. Instead, it entails a fundamental reconception of how one acts, what it means to act, in this world. At its most basic, this reconceiving requires that we rethink success, achievement, and resolution as categories of ends. Instead of being the culmination of a process or plan, even if that plan is God’s, Milton’s sonnets, including the sonnet that concludes Samson Agonistes, asks us to treat resolution, the solving or overcoming of problems, as itself an event, one not reducible to the deferred elimination of disordered tension. Milton’s sonnets rethink endings not because he desperately wishes for vengeance from on high but rather because he is attempting to conceive the promise of the apocalypse—a real ending as opposed to a false one—as a possibility that does not simply reflect the pragmatic world of problems and solutions. Only through such a reconception of the nature of events can we treat poetry as anything more than pious homilies about the past or delusional ideological window dressing promising a never present future. It is also only this reconception that allows us to treat apocalyptic change as a live possibility in the present—that is, as hope.

III The Chorus’s use of the sonnet form at the end of Samson Agonistes, a poem about the human attempt to act obediently in the world when divine orders and directives are not forthcoming, shows that the nature of considering events is not merely a retreat into privacy or interiority, a reaction to the world with little real effect. The retort that considering has no real effects in the public world—equivalent to Satan’s sarcastic question directed to the Son in Paradise Regained, “What dost thou in this World?” (4.372)—mistakes the extent to which Milton reconceives the relationship between world and thought. He does not imagine the Petrarchan tradition as an exercise in self-reflection, precisely because the bourgeois distinction between private interiority and public exteriority treats an apocalyptic end as nothing more than a place of rest and, simultaneously and incongruously, as the logical fulfillment of the self’s internal conflicts, suffering, and ultimate desert.

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The objections of pragmatism assume and actually thrive on this world of laborious suffering, appealing to a quite natural wish for release and comfort, a promise of future better days, for their suasive power. Milton’s sonnets, and particularly his sonnet conclusion to the dramatic poem, suggest that this world is a world of slaves enamored of their own victimhood (yet another dubious inheritance from the Petrarchan tradition), and that only an immanent account of thought can overcome this self-fulfilling, defeatist prophecy.69 Ultimately, once the dialectic of potential and actual, thought and act, private and public disappears, the ground of such pragmatic objections itself disappears.70 Just as importantly, though, the conception of an end as a brand of accomplishment disappears. We no longer recognize an end because of the release of tension and the return to a state of static calm. It is not just that the dramatic poem’s sonnet conclusion offers a lyric as opposed to a narrative resolution. A lyric conclusion does not dissolve tension because it does not imagine events or ends as a response to problems. The apocalypse is not a solution to the problem of sin. The end, of a poem or of time, is not an argument or a lure. It is a paratactic addition, an event that does not follow from a precedent hypotactic order. Samson Agonistes treats the sonnet itself as the very sort of paratactic and apocalyptic ending that occurs inside Milton’s freestanding sonnets. The Chorus’s final lines appear as a commentary on and summing up of the events of the poem. However, the sonnet itself, both formally and thematically, appears as supernumerary, and not just because of the Chorus’s famed unreliability. As such, the sonnet in Samson Agonistes, like the concluding couplet of the Cromwell sonnet, enacts a meditation on when it is that meaning occurs. In that respect, reconceiving events means reconceiving not only the nature of meaning’s own happening but also the nature of outcomes, that other nagging meaning of events in early modernity.71 When the dramatic poem evokes a great event from which one learns, it turns education and meaning into pivotal occasions within verse itself. Samson Agonistes, with its famously absent middle, shows that one learns apocalyptically, using the present ending that occurs in this temporal world as the acting out of possibility, not as the herald of an ultimate manifestation or deferred revelation. One learns from events only if they are possibilities, not finalities that are accomplished or anticipated, tied off, as it were, from the present. Reflecting on and resigning oneself to the world, either historical or futural, is not learning. Only using the

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apocalypse as a present, uncaused possibility issues in true experience from the great event. Samson Agonistes concludes with the unreliable, jingoistic Chorus offering what at first glance appears an ironic promise of order. The Chorus’s sonnet casts Panglossian eyes back over the events depicted in the poem: All is best, though we oft doubt, What th’ unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close. Oft he seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns And to his faithful Champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns And all that band them to resist His uncontroulable intent, His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind all passion spent. 1745–58

The Chorus concludes by offering precisely the same reassurance with which the sonnet begins: Someone has actually learned something from all of these dramatized events, which themselves reveal a providential order in their conclusion. The opening quatrain informs us that “in the close” one learns that things are ever best. The final four lines merely reiterate that this discovery issues in learning and consolation. Thus, there is no conventional thematic volta. Neither is there a formal break between octave and sestet. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern of an English sonnet with open-rhyme quatrains, until we reach the final distich. What break there is is primarily metrical, a shift from the symmetrical tetrameter of lines1 to 6, into the more asymmetrical pentameter of lines 7 and 8.72 The final four lines are even more conspicuous in this regard: Although the sestet’s rhyme scheme is cdcdcd, the last four lines act as a closed metrical quatrain, with two pentameter lines wedged between two tetrameter lines. Since the sonnet lacks a major thematic or formal turn, Gaza’s mourning seems merely a continuation

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of the glorious witness offered to Samson. Gaza mourns “whence,” from the place that, or as a consequence of the fact that, highest wisdom has borne witness for Samson gloriously. Thematically, in fact, it seems that the middle six lines of the Chorus’s sonnet are bookended by the ironic or naïve homilies of the resolving quatrains: “All is best” and “all passion spent.” The metrical symmetry of the opening six lines and the concluding closed metrical quatrain only reinforce this notion. In other words, no event occurs in the sonnet itself. It is merely a “single statement”73 that comments on past events, wrapping them up into a neat hermeneutic ball. It is relatively simple to dismiss the Chorus’s use of the sonnet in this context as so much irony. Namely, it uses the genre of the sonnet to signify resolution—specifically, the resolution of a pedagogical process— but this resolution is ironic, insofar as the sonnet gives an empty providential order to events in the poem that fundamentally defy such neat summation. In this respect, the Chorus’s sonnet is merely a mirror image of Manoa’s promised monument to Samson, the inevitable transformation of iconoclasm into idolatry that Daniel Shore notes.74 After all, Manoa does maintain that the monument will contain or be adorned with Samson’s “Acts enroll’d / In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song” (1736–37), a song that perhaps would not sound much different from the choral sonnet. In keeping with Shore’s argument, it is entirely possible that the Chorus here misunderstands, yet once more. This time it mistakes what sonnets are, treating them as commentary on events when they are really a means of encapsulating events within verse, or a means of presenting the nature of events, and not merely their meaning.75 But instead of dismissing the Chorus entirely as an emblem of ironized unreliability, it would probably be better to consider the possibility that the sonnet form does something other than merely signify rigid formalism at the end of the dramatic poem, that its discussion of events and experience does something more than reveal error. What happens if we read the Chorus’s sonnet as neither idolatrous error nor naïve resolution—in other words, outside a modern hermeneutics of suspicion and demystification—but as a successful attempt to contain the event of Samson in sweet lyric song? At one level, answering this question entails determining not so much the identity as the nature of the “great event” from which the Chorus learns. Certainly, “this great event” might be anything from God’s glorious witness to the Philistines’ own mourning. However, even once we locate the past happening to which the phrase refers, the sonnet still leaves open the question

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of how one gleans “true experience” from it, what even mediated participation in this event would entail. Just as important in this respect is the poem’s concluding evocation of catharsis: namely, whose passion is spent at the end of this poem and who does the spending? Do the servants acquire new experience and calm of mind, and then God dismisses them? Or is God the spender of passion? The ambiguous nature of this passionate expenditure—whether it is exhausted, wasted, or used—reproduces the concern with use that occupies “How soon hath Time” and “When I consider.” For Milton, an ending, the moment when conclusion happens within the poem, must be something more than merely a release of tension or an entropic winding down of energy. It must be something more than a moment when, purportedly, one comes to rest. The initial knock on the Chorus’s interpretation of events, of course, is that it imagines its own experience as decidedly passive, confirming Samson’s claims of Israel’s own slavish apathy. God does all the acting in the final four lines, according to this reading. It is his action through Samson that allows his servants to acquire experience, in the past, via this great event; he dismisses his servants as well; and both of these actions lead to his servants’ almost automatic catharsis. Yet it remains possible that these lines are not irony, that God’s servants can, in fact, acquire true experience from a great event that they do not directly witness. The Chorus has made precisely this point in its anatomy of active and passive heroism (1268–96). Despite all of the bustling of the active hero and the downtrodden’s admiration for his “invincible might,” it is actually patience that provides, if not victory, at least independence: But patience is more oft the exercise Of Saints, the trial of thir fortitude, Making them each his own Deliverer, And Victor over all That tyrannie or fortune can inflict, 1287–91

In keeping with Crampton’s analysis of the agere et pati topos, patience becomes a weapon in this passage. More importantly, unlike active heroism, it allows the saints to deliver themselves. In this respect, the poem’s aversion to spectacle reveals more than the classic Christian paradox of the low being made high, and the concomitant

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refusal to treat immediate empirical perception as a particularly privileged type of knowledge. Samson Agonistes also indicates that the patient contemplation of events, not the act of immediately witnessing them, is the avenue to knowledge. Yet it is even more interested in the temporal mechanism through which a thoughtful patience allows us to liberate ourselves. As Anthony Low notes, we might well infer that the victorious crowns of the apocalypse will ultimately accrue to these patient saints, but neither the Chorus nor the dramatic poem ever confirms this assumption.76 We should take the Chorus’s concluding sonnet seriously because it stages its own answer to this problem of autonomous deliverance, whether we can teach ourselves in the present to be free via contemplation—regardless of whether our learning ultimately issues in a final victory or recognition. It is for this reason that the identity of the agent who spends passion is such an important issue. There are at least two options in this respect. God could be the agent, the one who orchestrates every action in the final four lines: as in, “He hath dismist his servants with new acquist of true experience from this great event with peace and consolation and calm of mind, and all passion spent.” However, this reading seems less plausible than one in which the servants do the spending, particularly given that the concluding chorus itself performs an action within the poem: It reunites the divided semichoruses that comment, respectively, on the Philistines’ internal blindness (1669–86) and Samson’s virtuous illumination (1687–1707). The latter semichorus is, of course, the one that describes Samson’s action as that of a serpent-dragon (1692) feasting on “tame villatic Fowl” (1695). Yet this reunification is not a resolution of different perspectives or even an educative progress beyond petty tribalism, both of which describe the event of ending as a relatively simple moment of accomplished stasis or agreement. Instead, these concluding lines emphasize that reunification does not result from the discovery of analogies, either disturbing (the serpent-dragon) or reassuring (the second semichorus’s comparison of Samson to the phoenix [1699–1707]) and that even stasis itself is not so much a quality as it is itself an act or event in time, an echo, of course, of the standing service of “When I consider.” Even the Chorus’s concluding reunification of the semichorus only accentuates the final line’s interpretive conundrum: whether “all passion spent” is a quality, an appositive continuation of “calm of mind,” or a recounted action. “All passion spent” may only modify “calm of mind,” clarifying the nature of this calm, or even just reiterating it: as

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in, “His servants he with new acquist / Of true experience from this great event / With peace and consolation [and calm of mind, all passion spent,] hath dismist.” According to this reading, “spent” is a participial adjective and his servants do nothing more than receive calm, consolation, and catharsis from God. As a result, the servants are calm, purged of passion. Their nature has been modified by something else, and the description of their passion’s evacuation is merely a paratactic repetition. But “spent,” of course, is also a preterite verb, recounting what the servants did in the past. In this reading, which is buttressed by the metrical similarity of the middle lines of the sonnet’s concluding quatrain (they are both pentameter), God’s dismissal and consolation of his servants acts as a parenthetical appositive and it is the servants who do the spending of passion: “His servants (he with new acquist / Of true experience from this great event / With peace and consolation hath dismist, / And calm of mind) all passion spent.” This spent passion is simultaneously a quality that the servants receive, a supernumerary description of their already described state, and a recounting of their previous activities in the past. Certainly, these lines remain retrospective, in contrast to the more insistently present sonnets that this chapter has discussed. However, the Chorus’s lines meditate on how even retrospection happens in the present, whether our looking back on the past amounts to finding qualities that have always been there or recounting occasions that occurred. This problem is only further accentuated by the fact that the acquisition of a quality—“true experience from this great event”—is precisely what the concluding sonnet promises to describe. In the end, as with “When I consider how my light is spent,” the ambiguity of “spent” does not seek resolution but rather renders, in the present, the apocalyptic fantasy of use without necessity, pragmatism, and the debilitating cynicism of feasibility studies. Certainly, there is no point at which the inexhaustible mines of passion will be depleted, just as there’s no end of considering. But for Milton, that is not so much a recipe for deferral as it is yet one more insistence that use is not teleological, that whatever acts we perform in the world are tethered to an inexhaustible possibility, not to the finalities of purposiveness. Milton’s sonnets offer a theory of the event not because they reduce sonnets to a hermeneutic retrospection or because they embrace the flow of historical time or because they allow for the aleatory. Rather, sonnets, for Milton, are a site—not the only one, but certainly a privileged one—where one can explore the occurrence of meaning, the immediacy of mediation, the idea that meaning is not merely a possession, a

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being, or a quality, but that it too happens in the temporal world. But to happen does not mean to develop or to resemble, to emanate from something else, or even to participate in a series of causes. For Milton, sonnets are valuable precisely because they reproduce thought, the world, and each other not through an accurate, verisimilitudinous description of the world but through repeated formal structures. And it is this ability to present events without similarity or representational correspondence, necessarily retrospective procedures, that allows sonnets to be a window onto unprecedented and really present apocalypses, as opposed to the entire panoply of recounted and represented apocalypses, from Revelation to The Road. When Samson Agonistes compares its protagonist to a snake feasting on tame birds, this simile does not affirm that the apocalypse is analogical, that it can be understood via comparison. Instead, it shows precisely how futile is the attempt to comprehend eschatology within the domains of an already existing experience, metaphorical, imaginary or otherwise. Yet it also refuses the equally comforting bosom of negative theology and the ineffable, the affirmation of language’s weakness as the solution to and cause of our own lack of imagination. The result in the dramatic poem is then a demand for a resolution that would amount to something other than a reaffirmation of resemblance. The sonnet, as a formal structure, does not look like events and, just as importantly, and just like lyric in general, it does not represent them. The Chorus’s sonnet, despite its retrospective hermeneutic content, occurs as a conclusion precisely because it holds events and the experience of them within itself, simultaneously. “This great event”—another example of the deictic immediacy that Mueller describes—means the event happening right now, in the present. This event, unlike the ones on which the Chorus attempts to reflect, is not part of a plan. Yet this additive, paratactic event—in this case, the event of reading the poem, right now—is still ultimately useful and is actually the only type of event that is useful. A hypotactic order of occasions transforms eschatology into teleology and turns readers and devotees back into mere spectators to images of the end, at best active readers of a narrative already written. That is the revision of tragedy that this sonnet effects. Instead of a reactive passion wasted by witnessing a mimetic display, the sonnet describes the useful, pragmatic, prudent spending of passion. Passion, then, is itself an event, and a useful one at that. It is certainly not equivalent to black, cold, tartareous dregs. Passion well used is considering, not as Fish’s chaotic principle of ex nihilo creation and chance, but

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because the event of thought occurs in the same time and space as the event of passion. Passion is not a passive state that action or reason punctuates, with difference or order. Passion, passivity, patience happen too—spending themselves and preventing murmurs—and it is the ability to become receptive to this fact that all of Milton’s sonnets seek to inculcate. A passionate reception of an event and its experience, simultaneously in the present, is what happens in Milton’s sonnets. It is also what happens in a truly hopeful and transformative present apocalypse.

Chapter Three

What Happens in Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

Can we conceive of the apocalypse as something other than an ultimate compensation for defeat, loss, or weakness, as an event valuable and desirable for reasons other than the promised triumph of the godly? This is a particularly pressing question for a poem that promises (and, in its 1645 version, celebrates) the fall of its enemies and a future world of new pastures, all in the process of commemorating a friend’s death. Lycidas, instead of responding to loss with mourning, consolation, or revolution, imagines this temporal event as essentially apocalyptic, an immanently and immediately apprehensible revelation. Especially in its later, revised form, which adds a headnote emphasizing the lyric’s prophetic fantasy of an eschatological punishment for the English episcopate, the pastoral elegy explores the nature of radical change, the moment when an affirmative and desirable transformation occurs, instead of one to which we begrudgingly acquiesce. Lycidas, then, refuses to imagine change according to a logic of reaction, as the purifying returns or upending reversals of revolution. In this respect, the elegy is of a piece with Milton’s optimistic, if not utopian, pamphlets from the 1640s, political works that David Norbrook describes as intent on charting an apocalyptic novelty: “What was at hand was not a ‘revolution’ in the old sense of a return to a previous state of purity but something completely without precedent: the New Jerusalem ‘without your admired linke of succession descends from Heaven.’ ”1 An apocalypse, after all, is a revelation, not a revolution. 112

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For the Milton of the late 1630s and 1640s, the reactive and retrospective returns of revolution always risk undermining the “reforming of Reformation itself.”2 We can recognize a reversal after the fact, certainly, but in so doing we give to it a meaning that threatens to betray it, redomesticating it within an unfolding continuity, causal or otherwise. Yet these are not merely pragmatic political or rhetorical calculations, an attempt to wheedle agreement out of a parliament or a populace. The account of events in Lycidas is just as much ontological as it is a none too subtle Trojan horse for an anti-prelatical rebellion. The apocalypse, in this respect, is not merely a set of images that allows one to intensify one’s attacks on episcopacy or monarchy or an elaborate allegorical account of an individual subject’s conversion experience. It is also a fundamental challenge to how we conceive of significant events, political, historical, and otherwise. Ultimately, Milton’s pastoral elegy reveals that retrospection cannot do justice to an apocalyptic change, because it projects an immutable subject forward into the future, one who can look back, after this cataclysmic alteration, on all that has come before. If we are to understand events in the present, instead of simply reacting to them, we must abandon the retroactive, hermeneutic conception of what constitutes occasion and the desperately slavish subject—one very similar to the Petrarchan subject that we met in the previous chapter—that comes with it. Pastoral lyric, like the sonnet, is also very much the engine for producing that conceptual alteration. Both of these forms show how we misunderstand Milton’s career, and his conception of verse, if we imagine him as reacting to a past experience of defeat or loss, even after 1660.3 His poetic project is, even early in his career, an attempt to imagine what a present apocalyptic event would look like. There is no simple retrospection, at least not in a manner that we could imagine, after an unprecedented eschatological end, no projected political program whose success would be the measure of its truth. The apocalypse, in Milton’s hands, becomes a way of conceiving present potential without submitting this potential to a necessary teleological, typological, dialectical, or performative development toward final expression. To be a real potential, we must be able to experience it in the present, as potential, and not as a reverse-engineered possible choice in the past.4 The connection between potentiality and apocalypse does not amount, however, to a subject’s safe internalization of the Book of Revelation, essentially the reduction of apocalypse to a harmless allegory with no real historical or political force. Neither

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does eschatology amount to a determinate end of a subject’s relatively free action. Eschatological transformation does not issue in a constraining finality, precisely because the apocalypse is an end not to potential but to actualization as the model for events. As Paul Ricoeur notes, the finality implied by teleological plans, however providential, will always betray the hopeful possibilities inherent in apocalypticism: We should begin to see at what point the notion of God’s design—as may be suggested in different ways in each instance, it is true, by narrative, prophetic, and prescriptive discourse—is removed from any transcription in terms of a plan or program; in short, of finality and teleology. What is revealed is the possibility of hope in spite of. . . . This possibility may still be expressed in the terms of a design, but of an unassignable design, a design which is God’s secret.5 As J. D. Fleming notes, Milton chafes at the notion of esoteric secrecy,6 and never more so than in his presentation of revelatory potential. Thus, although Lycidas and the sonnets exhibit an aversion to teleology similar to Ricoeur’s, Milton’s lyrics also attempt to treat events and meaning as immanently contained within and even motored by a free, imaginative verse. This is so not only in the headily optimistic epideictic sonnets to Cromwell and Fairfax but also in his presentation of Edward King’s death. The hopeful possibilities of apocalyptic change do not disappear over the course of Milton’s career, precisely because the poems themselves stage these potentials independently of their manifestation in historical accomplishments. Lycidas attempts to describe a potentiality that is not actualized by a controlling or performative force and that does not prophesy a future, final actualization. The New Jerusalem is neither an impossible utopia nor an urban-planning document. Yet the elegy also does not allow readers to treat occasion as nothing more than a shocking, transparent self-evidence. An event is not pornography—we do not simply know it when we see it. Milton adapts the pastoral elegy, a genre intent on commemorating the loss of an idealized poet-friend, so as to explore what it means for an event to happen presently and immediately. If Milton criticism has obsessed over the relationship between poetry and politics, this is not because Milton infuses poetry with politics or continues his political commitments by other, more oblique means within verse.

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Rather, Lycidas shows how Milton, from early in his career, reconceptualizes the connection between apocalyptic events, political change, and poetry so that our traditional categories of political engagement— deliberation, resolution, consent, and action—no longer apply. Milton’s poem is not a withdrawal from the real world of politics into pastoral idealism or revenge fantasy but rather is a meditation on the event of possibility, what it means for a radically transformative, even apocalyptic possibility to occur in the present—as opposed to extinguishing itself within a final accomplishment. It is in this sense that the poem performs an embarrassingly sincere defense of pastoral escape, resisting the urge to treat it as either ironic commentary or romantic, escapist, implausible, nostalgic, irresponsible idealism.7 Even the latter, it turns out, remains too dependent on actuality to be of real political use. Lycidas ultimately maintains not that poetry helps politics, or can teach us something important about the real world, but that the valuable world where events—even political events—occur is within the domain of possibility, also known as poetry.8

I The apocalypse is not a conclusion, conceived either as a bare terminus or a resolving interpretation. Revelation does not arrive from elsewhere in order to tie off dynamic development in a now static continuity. Yet neither is it the hermeneutic unveiling of a more primordial narrative gurgling beneath the surface of phenomenal events. For Milton, it means neither history, nor allegory, nor dialectical unfolding. Each of these models of events assumes that what we are really seeking is a restful end, mastery over or protection from the roiling cauldron of an ever threatening entropic chaos. As we witnessed in the preceding chapter, such models produce the slavish brand of waiting that Milton finds destructive, if not outright sinful. Yet he does not just chalk this error up to an amorphous original sin, a predilection for sloth. Instead, he pegs it explicitly to the ways in which we conceive of endings, especially our propensity to treat them as the narratival or dialectical development of problems toward resolution. Problems are solved, potentials are realized, and this is how ends occur.9 Yet in each of these cases, ending amounts to supplementation, a translation from a world of incompletion to completion across a mysterious gulf, of either unknowing

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or nonbeing, ultimately sealed by a conclusion of a different order. Final resolutions are not part of the things they end.10 It is precisely this logic that Milton challenges, because it insists that revelation must always remain infinitely deferred or occur as only an inexplicable irruption of the transcendent. In neither case would we be able to conceive of an apocalyptic change in the present. It is that impossibility that Lycidas seeks to overcome via its treatment of potentiality and endings. The elegy begins, certainly, with an occasion of loss that is also a terminus: “But O the heavy change, now thou art gon, / Now thou art gon, and never must return!”11 The repetition of “now thou art gon,” however, highlights the indeterminacy of this change. Is it King’s death that is the heavy change? Or has a heavy change occurred at the time of King’s demise, “now that he is gone”? These early lines pose then a basic question about what it means for a final loss to occur. Does “now thou art gon” describe an event in the past from which change issues and to which one gives meaning and recognition: “O the heavy change now that thou art gone”? Or does “now thou art gon” repeat the fact of a heavy change: as in, “O the heavy change, which is that now thou art gone”? The first offers a sequence of hypotactic development. The change results from Lycidas’s death. The second is a paratactic repetition, the unguided reiteration of the ejaculatory lament, “O the heavy change.” The repetition of “now thou art gon” only intensifies the conundrum. Does repetition mean hypotactic development or paratactic addition, or even a fundamental sameness? These two lines tempt readers to treat “now thou art gon” both as a problem within a broader hypotactic structure and as a desperate reiterated cry. Yet simultaneously, the repetition of “now thou art gon” emphasizes that loss is an event that happens in the present, that it happens over and over, and that it is not a final fact recognized only in the past. That is the reason for the speaker’s odd declaration, which also has the mood of an imperative as a result of the end-stopped exclamation point: “and never must return!” One would expect here “and never will return.” The fact that the speaker enjoins his departed friend never to return reveals first that it takes real work within the poem to turn events into an inert past. Second, it reveals that even the declarative, retrospective comment on events is a present command and a desire that these events stay in the past as past: “And never must return!” indicates that this loss is desirable, something this speaker affirms and enjoins. The pastoral elegy then does not so much commemorate loss as it repeats the event of loss itself, now, in the present, insisting that we cannot understand it if

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we are always imagining it as a historical, narrative, or dramatic event requiring a mournful reaction and preservation. These lines, then, encode the problem of whether ends occur as agents of change, or whether change occurs independently of a final end. A similar problem haunts the poem’s mysterious two-handed engine: “But that two-handed engine at the door, / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” (130–31). It is not just that the engine and its agent remain ambiguous in this famous crux. The inevitability of this final, presumably apocalyptic smiting is itself in question. After all, Milton’s speaker notes with bitter irony that these clerical interlopers have already received their deserts: Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least That to the faithfull Herdsmans art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; 119–22

They do not need to reckon their ultimate fate, not just because they are careless but also because it has already been reckoned for them. Likewise, they are sped both because they have succeeded in their worldly endeavors and because they have finalized their own fate. In this respect, what could the always ready two-handed engine add to the equation? The enigma of this passage, then, is not just figuring out the nature of the tool but what it would mean to end something, once and for all, the purported hope of the poem’s opening line, “Yet once more” (1). In other words, are all endings redundant? Or are all endings doomed to failure? These are particularly pressing questions for an eschatology that would seek to be something other than a hidden teleology. If revelation really changes anything, then surely it must amount to more than the cynical, knowing decoding of final causes at work within a typologically conceived world. Instead of throwing up our hands in despair in anticipation of a contingent, unpredictable apocalyptic resolution, Milton tries to imagine an eschatological event occurring within verse, a potential occasion that is itself real and transformative and does not amount merely to an allegorical internalization of the Book of Revelation. That is, he turns to lyric and its imaginative possibilities because the conception of events as external eruption produces nothing more than passivity and because their conception as dialectical or typological unfolding thwarts any

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understanding of affirmative, transformative novelty.12 To put it in Frank Kermode’s terms, ends must be positively transformative, not reactively or retrospectively so: “Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent.”13 Here, we should emphasize Kermode’s adverb: “frankly.” Immanent ends do not resemble subjective agents, adopting the form of their actions, their performances or manifestations of transformation. Frank transfiguration is not ironic change or critique, the assumption of a reserved distance on the part of an actor. It means that ends must act in the present, and not merely as an endlessly deferred goal. Lycidas then attempts to treat both pastoral and apocalyptic imagination as something other than critical, ironic reactions against the real or as fanciful romantic dreams of a future idyll. It attempts to transform an actual act into a potential event while simultaneously resisting the compulsion to imagine possibility as a new goal, a thing that can itself be fulfilled as an aim or revealed retroactively as the motor for an accomplishment. In that sense, potential is the way to imagine something happening in the present, as opposed to reflecting on something having happened in a past present. The evocation of the two-handed engine demonstrates that the apocalypse itself, if we imagine it as a coming finality, does not and will not happen. The desire for finality ultimately turns the apocalypse into a metaphor. It is not a radical break from the world but is always proleptically figured in every terminus or telos. But the apocalypse can operate neither as a deferred finality toward which time tends nor as a revelation of what is already the case. Neither of these models amounts to novelty. The figure of the two-handed engine, smiting once and no more, reveals the limits of finality in this respect: And when they [the “blind mouthes”] list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw, The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing [little] sed,14 But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. 123–31

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These lines contain an ambiguous speaker, or nonspeaker: Who is it that said “nothing” or “little”? Does the grim wolf say little? Or do the “blind mouthes” (119) of the prelates say nothing? Or do the “hungry Sheep” (125) say little, in which case this line would indict the weak response of the godly to such encroachments? Similarly, does “but” mark a transition to the speaker’s triumphant authoritative threat, or does this statement about the engine come from the wolf or the blind mouths, indicating that the threat of apocalyptic justice belongs to craven bishops, not Milton’s chosen few? In the latter instance, “but that” means that the blind mouths say little except that the two-handed engine stands ready to strike, indicating that this is the revenge fantasy not of the poem’s speaker but rather of his opponents. The messy textual history of these lines accentuates precisely this ambiguity. In the Trinity manuscript, Milton writes “nothing sed” and then crosses it out, replacing it with “little.” Justa Edovardo King naufrago, the volume of elegies for Edward King published in 1638 in which Lycidas first appears, prints “little sed.” The 1645 edition returns to the original “nothing sed.” Roy Flannagan and John Leonard contend that “nothing” is less cautious and so represents a renewed political confidence in 1645, or at least a reaction to the fall of Laudian censorship.15 Yet 1645’s return to the original reading, “nothing,” does not completely settle the ambiguity of this utterance. After all, the hungry sheep could say nothing and suffer under an even fiercer indictment. However, Milton’s manuscript emendation indicates more than political caution in the late 1630s. “Little” implies an enjambment of sense, as in “Little sed, but that,” as opposed to “nothing,” which implies a full stop, as in “nothing sed. But that.” The former pushes readers to expect that the next lines will report the content of this little saying. It asks readers to anticipate that “but that” does not constitute a new authoritative voice but the small voice just evoked. In contrast, “nothing sed, / But that,” because it asks us not to expect more commentary, presents the two-handed agent as an inexplicable non sequitur. There might be an implied dialogue here, or at least a cry of despair to which the speaker responds between the lines. Yet the lines themselves do not offer such a causal link, leaving it to readers to concoct an explanation for the disjunctive transition. In either case, it is not just the indeterminacy of the engine that complicates interpretation of this eschatological smiting. Most important is that this line, which purportedly heralds finality, ultimately undercuts the very notion of a final, conclusive action, either by presenting this final threat as a weak, little saying or depicting it as

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a paratactic non sequitur. Thus, even within Saint Peter’s dread speech, Milton undermines the finality of apocalyptic justice. The unknowable engine does not so much ask us to decode mysterious signs in order to discover its secret as it does drive us to abandon waiting for finality to arrive. Even if we read these lines as the promise of the apocalypse, why should we think that, once the engine strikes no more, everything will be finished? Is it not just as plausible that striking once and then no more designates finality’s impotence or irrelevance, not its power? After all, Milton does not seem like the sort of figure for whom evil could be so easily extirpated, with one fell stroke. In fact, the reading of this line as a moment of final justice rests on the presupposition that “and” connotes sequence and not interchangeability. However, “stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” does not only mean “smite once and then smite no more.” It also carries the possibility that it reads “either smite once or smite no more.” In standing ready, that is, both options are available to it. Moreover, the event that these lines report is not the final act of smiting but rather the occurrence of the potential to smite. We have already noted, in Chapter 2’s discussion of the sonnets, the resemblance between Milton’s conception of possibility and Gilles Deleuze’s account of virtuality. The same concerns circle around the two-handed engine. If we treat the possible as something that resembles the real but without being, then it becomes difficult to discern what a final realization would add to potentiality: “That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it.”16 If the engine stands ready to smite, in Deleuze’s estimation, it is not clear what its final smiting, the realization of this potential, would accomplish other than redundancy. Even more provocative is the possibility that smiting once is the same thing as not smiting any more, that “and” links neither sequential nor alternative actions but identical ones. Such an imaginative “as not” is precisely Giorgio Agamben’s definition of messianism, one that is able to evade the annihilating sequences of negation: The Pauline hōs mē seems to be a special type of tensor, for it does not push a concept’s semantic field toward that of another concept. Instead, it sets it against itself in the form of the as not:

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weeping as not weeping. The messianic tension thus does not tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the indifference between one thing and its opposite.17 Agamben further maintains that the result of this proximity between weeping and not weeping—they are not antitheses facing each other across a wide gulf of contradiction—is that Paul rejects any permutation of the apocalypse that treats it as the intrusion of a transcendental outside. In fact, messianism erases this boundary inside time: “In this way, the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world.”18 This indiscernability is not the result of an unknowable break in temporal continuity, the sort of irruptive event that Badiou would describe.19 Instead, the boundary between immanence and transcendence disappears via a reworking of present time itself, the notion of use that we met in the preceding chapter on the sonnets. For Agamban, messianism erases this distinction because transcendental irruption cannot constitute a revealed end to immanent continuity. Transcendence can act only as a forceful deflection, negation, or dissolution of continuity. It is the end conceived as supernumerary and belated, yet again. The two-handed engine presents readiness as an event in the time of the poem. In this respect, we witness a problem with waiting and the nature of possibility similar to what we experienced in “When I consider”: They also serve who stand ready to smite once or no more. This problem is only accentuated by the echoes of the opening lines’ “once” and “more” in this moment of purported finality: “Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown” (1–2); “that two-handed engine at the door, / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” (130–31). The engine’s smiting, once and no more, implies that the opening lines require tying off, that “yet once more” means not “only once more” but rather “yet again.” The engine or, rather, its potential use must intervene to close off this endless repetition. However, because it is the possibility of smiting that here occurs, the apocalypse does not appear as a matter of reversal or revolution. As Norbrook notes, the two-handed engine is most likely the Word itself, the power of the scriptural message, an interpretation that would emphasize that an eschatological end is not so much a reversal as it is a literary incorporation of the apocalypse back into the present:

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An enormous amount of critical effort has gone into finding a precise referent for this ‘dark conceit’. But its most likely referent is yet another rhetorical figure, the two-edged sword of Revelation 1:16 and 19:15, which was commonly interpreted in the apocalyptic tradition as referring to the immense power of the prophetic Word. The threatening, almost surreal character of Milton’s ‘two-handed engine’ recalls the illustrations in Bale’s Image of Both Churches and in many Protestant New Testaments of Christ standing with his arms apart and the two-edged sword issuing from his mouth. In this sense the trope is selfreferential: its menacing indeterminacy, designed to inspire awe and repentance, embodies, as well as referring to, what Milton later called the ‘quick and pearcing’ force of the Christian message. Christ’s ‘reforming Spirit’, wrote Milton, mounts a ‘sudden assault’ on human traditions. Earlier in the 1630s he had felt himself to be ‘unweapon’d’, but Lycidas reflects a growing confidence in his linguistic powers.20 Ultimately, Norbrook claims a forthright, positive power for language, apocalyptic and pastoral, which follows from his contention that the apocalypse replaces revolution’s model of transformation, in which change requires a return to an earlier purity. The two-handed engine is not simply an arrival that one awaits but the symbolic embodiment and occurrence of the very transformative word that effects change. Even more important is the fact that this symbol is right here at hand, standing ready for use. The engine then presents revelatory change as something that is decidedly not a matter of waiting. This symbol requires neither the arrival of our hermeneutic decoding nor its own referent. Both of these arrivals amount to the same final fantasy, that apocalyptic ends need an interpretive intervention in order to proceed and that we cannot appropriately employ these symbols without the sort of self-reflection that preserves our selves into the future. The end is doubly deferred, both through an interpretive procedure that imagines meaning as coming from elsewhere and through a historical continuum that must await the arrival of this referent even after its decoding. In short, if we imagine the apocalypse as finality, there is no way to conceive of it or its meaning happening in the present, because the engine will always require a retrospective, supplementary interpretation of what it is in order to do what it can do.

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These notions of apocalyptic ending are mistaken, as Norbrook’s analysis implies, because the word is right here ready to hand and does not require reversal, the internal one of self-reflection or the external one of revolution, in order to function. It is for this reason that Lycidas, much like Milton’s sonnets, also challenges understandings of the apocalypse that treat events as a matter of kairos. Reaction to crisis or opportunity assumes the very negative moment of reversal that revelation rejects. In this respect, Norbrook’s emphasis on the utopian affirmations of Milton’s early verse seems particularly apt: “Milton’s early poetry is radical not only in its explicit political comments but in its underlying visionary utopianism. The joy of poetic composition is bound up with the exercise of the political imagination. The early poems in fact heralded a period of unprecedented utopian speculation.”21 The lyric then does not promise divine retribution but rather shows that the threat of such final justice in the future is nothing more than an empty, idle threat, regardless of its speaker: “little said, except that there’s an engine at the door to punish those wolves for their transgressions.” The engine is a symbol of scriptural power that thwarts its own decoding, not because signs are polysemous or meaning is impossible but rather because such hermeneutic deciphering treats meaning as something that can never happen. For Milton, however, a force is a symbol and a symbol is a force, in the present, and not as the derived product of an intellective rumination—a point to which we will return in our discussion of Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House.” When a symbol happens, of course, it is not as if a thought actualizes itself. The occurrence of symbols, as connected tokens of their referent, means the occurrence of potential as such. Lycidas then exposes the fancifully reactionary nature of our dreams of radical and revolutionary change. Even a future transformation imagined as reversal, whether the rise of the proletariat or the last’s being made first, harbors within its very conceptual form a fantasy of stasis, the future as the safe harbor from which one looks back on the roiling sea of change. The indeterminacy of the poem’s opening line presages the disavowal of reversal and finality present in Saint Peter’s speech. On the one hand, it promises an end to repetition. “Yet once more” (1) would then mean “only once more.” On the other, it connotes continuity and familiarity, as in “still one more time I do this.” Even if we read the latter utterance as exasperation, the fact of a speaker’s wishing for finality

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does not necessarily indicate that the poem endorses such a wish, let alone the inherent laziness of a speaker wishing to be done with the task of poetic production. The concluding line, “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” (193), promises novelty, but this new pasture might well be the same landscape in which the speaker plucks berries, harsh and crude, thwarting the very optimistic future that the opening lines prophesy. No matter what we might make of the conclusion’s promise, the wish for finality in these opening lines carries with it a basic resentment. “Only once more,” however sanguine it might be about the future success of its plans, loathes these reported poetic activities because they are merely means to a more important end. In part, the first line encapsulates this problem by offering two “once mores.” The call for repetition must itself be repeated: “Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy neversear, / I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude” (1–3). Yet reiteration, here, is not simply evidence of failure or exasperated impatience. Neither is this proximate repetition of “once more” a redundancy, a tedious tactic for delaying an act moving toward actuality. The repetition of “once more” marks not a resentful wish for completion but rather an affirmation of possibility, provided we do not assume that it must ultimately lead somewhere else, to fulfillment or finality. That is, repetition is a problem only if we have some other, more pressing engagement. Lycidas, especially in its final line, attempts to conceive of the apocalypse, optimistically and affirmatively, as something new within history, not merely the typological fulfillment of an incomplete sign or the unveiling of an as yet unknown truth. It treats revelation as an event of face-to-face encounter, an unveiling that also reveils, not in order to retain the deferrals characteristic of signification but so as to preserve signs as present temporal phenomena. Signs and meaning still occur in revelation, but they happen without the mediation of resemblance, anticipation, and reversal. In this respect, the pastoral elegy mirrors some of the early devotional verse in its deviation from an orthodox typological configuration of history. As we have already seen in Chapter 2, “Upon the Circumcision” uses prolepsis as a means to pack ends back into the present. In treating the future as already present, this rhetorical figure certainly thwarts attempts to imagine religious desire as always a matter of lack and deferral, a point that I have argued elsewhere.22 Yet prolepsis also thwarts the notion of a typological sequence that grounds accounts of a future finality. Prolepsis hinges on the notion that

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we can know and treat a future end as already present. In this sense, it runs the risk of replicating the reactionary version of potential that Deleuze describes. Yet in Milton’s devotional verse, this resemblance actually allows potential to function as an independent present occurrence. Thus, the Nativity Ode describes a final, salvational bliss as something that begins “now.” It might be full and perfect “then,” but it also happens in the present, and not merely as part of a charted developmental progress: And then at last our bliss Full and perfect is, But now begins. 18.165–67

“But now begins” calls attention to the present tense “is,” which appears where we might expect “will be.” Edward Tayler notes this surprising present-tense intrusion as well but argues that it evinces Milton’s interest in a transcendent eternal present. These future-tense lines are preceded by an evocation of the Old Testament judgment on Sinai, which Tayler reads as further evidence of Milton’s typological understanding of history: “With such a horrid clang / As on mount Sinai rang / While the red fire, and smouldring clouds out brake” (17.157– 59).23 Yet this stanza closes with a litany of future-tense inevitabilities that complicate such a reading of history’s essentially analogical character: The aged Earth agast With terrour of that blast, Shall from the surface to the center shake; When at the worlds last session, The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne. 17.157–64

A typological sequence ends, as Tayler maintains, with the antitype unmasking or enlightening the “shadowie Types.”24 The apocalypse, though, poses a very specific problem for a process whose end is simultaneously fulfilling and conclusive. Namely, its revelatory end is immediate and therefore not subject to the recognitional relays that ground typology. In answer to this problem, Tayler’s eternal present, nunc stans, or “standing now,” substitutes a transcendent timelessness

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for history. The apocalypse acts as the pivot into this alternative plane of temporality. However, Milton’s obsessive rendition of the now of standing, in the case of both the two-handed engine and “When I consider,” militates against such a leap out of history. Instead, prolepsis shows us the eternal acting and happening within time, not as a future destination of a soul finally liberated from care. Typology, in other words, assumes unjustly that what will be and what is do not happen precisely because they have already been written. The apocalypse escapes typology because any prefiguration betrays its most important feature: a present revelation that also ends the long sequence of signifying, shadowy resemblances on which typology relies. In short, it ends that of which it is a part, which means that it ends something, as Kermode puts it, immanently. For fulfillment to happen, and not just be promised, it must occur in time as the end of such an analogical sequence. Agamben describes this as a the erasure of those deferrals and distances characteristic of fundamentally conservative models of historical unfolding—typology, kairos, and the dialectic: What matters to us here is not the fact that each event of the past—once it becomes figure—announces a future event and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by this typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos and antitypos together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in an inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself. . . . Here, the past (the complete) rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfilled, and the present (the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfillment.25 Agamben here explores the transformative event of typological fulfillment, what happens when it occurs. Certainly, it cannot just perpetuate resemblances indefinitely. Yet what does it mean for the relation itself, in its immediacy, to occur? In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton describes this event as an eternal, repeated ending: “Thus his kingdom will not pass away, like something ineffectual, nor will it be destroyed.

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Its end will not be one of dissolution but of perfection and consummation, like the end of the law.”26 Milton’s analogy here is instructive. The end of the law is the arrival of an internal “law of liberty,”27 which is probably more aptly described as the rule of faith. Christian liberty in this context is not the final achievement of liberty but rather an immanent regulatory model that reflects the transformed disposition of the believer. Like Agamben’s messianism, which changes the nature of time, law’s fulfillment changes the nature of the acts that believers perform. Most strikingly, these revelatory actions repeat eternally and immediately, without the deferrals characteristic of purposiveness. They happen not as repeated preparatory moments but as unachieved ends, which happen over and over. They occur proleptically and repetitively. They also occur potentially, because they never reach the finality of a completed resolution or dissolution. This, in fact, is the only way for the apocalypse to work within typology. They are compatible organizations of time only if we allow for the possibility that a fulfilling antitype occurs prior to its ultimate, concluding occurrence. Milton uses prolepsis as a means of exploring such potential occurrences and of insisting on revelation’s immanent ethical and symbolic import. In the Nativity Ode, treating this final bliss as already having occurred turns out to allow readers to do something other than passively watch its inevitable analogical unfolding. If the end has already happened in the present, then the potential that attends this end occurs right now as well. Bliss or smiting is not an achievement, because its accomplishment has already been written and, as such, has already happened. Moreover, revelation in this case does not amount to showing what will happen. The facts of the future are not hidden, waiting to be uncovered. Instead, apocalyptic change amounts to the occurrence of novelty as an immediate, pure sign, a symbol that happens and does not require deciphering. That is perhaps why the two-handed engine is so important for an understanding of Lycidas: It stands as a symbol whose interpretive ambiguity is irrelevant to its forceful action or happening.28 Tayler describes the entirety of the poem in similar terms but characterizes the events within the poem as a brand of formal performativity: “The pastoral poem sinks in order to mount, just as the pastoral figure sinks in order to mount, with the result that structure reflects theme, structure mirrors meaning. . . . Lycidas endures, triumphantly, as a work of art that is what it says.”29 Yet such a performative

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model reproduces the very impulse to productivity that the poem seems to challenge. Moreover, the prospect of a text’s doing what it says is also the last outpost of the subject in any understanding of immanent action. That is, performativity, although resembling a presently occurring action, nonetheless always relies on a logic of demonstration that returns events to their recognizing and policing subjects. These repeated “once mores,” however, thwart our rush to a necessarily repetitive performative speech act that would give these words a future actual ground: the assumption, in other words, that they may have no foundation at present but are certainly trying to build, constitute, or manifest one in the future. Performativity ultimately cedes to the future—not just this future, but any future—the responsibility for change in the present. Instead of embarrassed self-justifications and self-constitutions, these lines hint that a truly transformative event is repetitively virtual, an unabashed and unapologetic potentiality severed from productivity, the evasion of the demand that use and imagination bow to the bitter constraint of pragmatism, telos, efficiency, manifestation, or success. Even within such a productive performativity, nothing new really happens, because revelation is just like the end of every other story that we know. Events in this model still require the supplementary fulfillment of either hermeneutic decoding or antitypical manifestation. In reducing the apocalypse to typological, hermeneutic, narrative resolution, Tayler ultimately domesticates Christianity into bourgeois storytelling. Yet if we already know the end of the story, what really happens other than the tedious repetition of these already written scripts? As Jason Kerr aptly notes, Milton stages precisely this problem in books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, which repeat both biblical history and biblical prophecy prior to the existence of their source. For Kerr, this temporal priority preserves for Adam the contingent possibility of these events: “Everything turns on our recognizing that there was no Bible in Eden, for otherwise the events it would eventually describe could not remain contingent, but would rather be imbued with a dull necessity that would make Michael’s educational endeavors both pointless and boring.”30 This is not quite the situation of the Nativity Ode, “Upon the Circumcision,” or “The Passion.” These poems do not dramatize a past before scriptural composition. And neither are the speakers in these poems in Adam’s position prior to a written scriptural prophecy or narrative. However, they do explore concerns similar to those that Kerr anatomizes—namely, when we know that history and its end are written, how do we act in that world? And just as importantly,

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how do events happen in a world in which their end has already been composed and determined? The notion that our job is to interpret the world or text or to recognize its unfolding plan assumes our participation in the very transcendent eternity that could behold such a final plan in its entirety. The hermeneutic response, in other words, grants us a vantage point at the end of history and time, after everything important has happened, except for our own antitypical comment on its meaning. It also assumes that repetition itself is not really an event, that the transition from scripture to historical actuality changes nothing. This would be the weakness of possibility that Deleuze describes: The possible resembles the real and, thus, realization is an unproblematic, epiphenomenal iteration of potential. Lycidas, as I have already suggested, treats possibility as an event that can happen independent of final manifestation, never more so than when it repeats scriptural prophecies themselves. The temporal machinations of scriptural prophecy matter in the case of Lycidas, of course, because the poem’s very first line, the one that promises one last repetition, is itself an iterated citation. “Yet once more,” as both Tayler and Michael Lieb note, alludes to Hebrews 12:26–29 and its promise of an apocalyptic purgation.31 Both Lieb and Tayler read the opening line as an evocation of finality, but, by its very repetition, “yet once more” shows that this signification has not been finally achieved. One has to reiterate Hebrews 12 in order to effect finality, an aim impeded, if not thwarted, by the fact that Hebrews 12:26 reiterates Haggai 2:7.32 To complicate matters even further, the Geneva gloss reads Haggai 2:7, “Yet a litle while, and I wil shake the heauens and the earth,” as an exhortation to patience prior to the completion of the restored temple, not as a mark of achieved finality.33 However, it is not just that the line lacks completion because of this citational repetition but that Hebrews itself reiterates “yet once more,” indicating that even here, within a divine promise, a secure ending does not occur: “Whose voyce then shouke the earth, and now hathe declared, saying, Yet once more wil I shake, not the earth onely, but also heauen. And this worde, Yet once more, signifieth the remouing of those things, which are shaken, as of things which are made with hands, that the things which are not shaken, may remaine” (Heb 12:26–27). God’s voice promises a final justice, a destruction that will ultimately also preserve. However, the very next verse maintains that this utterance signifies removal but is not the same thing as this renovating destruction. Shaking the earth in this passage is not a final event, because this voice that

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shakes the earth and heaven must then again receive its hermeneutic complement: an explanation, yet once more, of what this voice signifies. This explanation, though, tells us that the temporal expression itself, “yet once more” (eti hapax), means removal, not the shaking action that God’s voice promises.34 Certainly, the interpretation of the event is itself an event, bearing the same mark of meaning’s repetitive occurrence. But these verses also insist that repetition itself is removal, that formal temporal repetition itself is the mark of transformation. In maintaining that “yet once more” means change, the epistle shows that repetition can never amount to the uncovering of a static sameness. When Milton begins Lycidas with this phrase, he emphasizes precisely the temporal character of meaning’s, repetition’s, and even sameness’s occurrence. Even if the future is written, in short, its happening remains more than an uncovering and a realization. In this case, it means the possibility of an apocalyptically transformed present. This phenomenon in Hebrews and in Lycidas is not the selfaggrandizement of a resentful and paranoid poetic hubris, an attempt to co-opt and outflank any and all readerly autonomy and, thus, criticism. It is not merely reaction, in short. Instead of resorting to our familiar critical concept of the meta-poetic, a self-conscious, specular artificiality— look at me looking at you looking at me—we should treat the contained event of citation and interpretation as something other than an attempt at a subject’s mastery of its own message. A hermeneutic event inside the poem is not more securely univocal than one outside, precisely because meaning is no longer a search for synchronic correspondence or verification. Instead, Milton emphasizes that meaning is a dynamic temporal occurrence. In addition, this internal event is not merely a proleptic end, a poison pill designed to snuff out potentiality. In Lycidas at least, the point is not to treat the future as if it has already occurred but rather to treat potential as itself an occurrence and an occasion, precisely because its end has already been written. Paradoxically, a certain future allows possibility to occur as something other than progression. And just as importantly, it allows revelation to occur as an immediate event, without the retrospective interpretation that turns it into just another species of signs. Milton thus transforms a genre intent on commemorating the life of a lost friend into a poem intent on teaching us how to live while history and life itself are still happening.

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II The textual history of Lycidas spans pivotal developments in Milton’s political thought, however mysterious, and only further emphasizes the lyric’s focus on apocalyptic events. Most striking in this respect, of course, is the second sentence added to the headnote in the 1645 edition of Milton’s poems. It calls attention to the poem’s prescience, implying that the lyric’s prophecies about the imminent smiting of blind mouths have been verified: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height” (p. 74). The result of this addition, of course, is to transform events, retroactively, into a primarily hermeneutic endeavor and, apparently, a test of the authority of a speaker. The new subtitle intervenes, in 1645, to tell us what the poem did in 1638, and, in so doing, claims for its author the ability to prophesy. But what happens in the poem in 1638, before it becomes fodder for such retroactive interpretation?35 This is a problem not just of remaining faithful to the elegy’s original moment of composition but also of knowing whether the event foretold has already and finally happened. After all, the phrase does not read “And by occasion foretold” but rather presents its own prophecy in the present tense. Will this ruin happen in the future, after 1645? Or has it already occurred, with the episcopacy’s fall from power, or even with William Laud’s execution in January 1645? In addition to the problem of the prophecy’s tense, the added sentence itself poses an interpretive conundrum. What does “by occasion” mean? Does it just repeat “and,” standing in for a phrase like “in addition”? Does it mean little more than “next to,” in turn highlighting the incidental nature of the occasion?36 In this moment of apparent prophetic triumph, the phrase implies that this entire foretelling was an accident: “By occasion,” it just so happened. Even if we take this prepositional phrase to mean “through occasion” or “as a result of occasion,” we are left with a retroactive prophetic utterance emphasizing its own dependency, if not contingency. In this reading, “by occasion” would be not false modesty but rather an indication that prophecy is incompatible with an Archimedean finality, and that a poem that has recourse to such prophetic power must abjure the type of actualization that would allow faith to turn into nothing more than certainty. Such hedging on Milton’s part is not idiosyncratic circumspection. It is entirely in keeping with orthodox theological understandings of

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prophecy’s relationship to faith. For example, Luther maintains that prophecy must stem from a passive analogy, not the demonstrations or even signs of actual experience: So then, an analogy is an assimilation, not one that is produced by the intellect, but one that is contained in the matter itself, or, rather, it is neither of the two, but that in virtue of which one thing agrees with another in its peculiar characteristics and becomes like it. To be sure, one may prophesy something new but, in doing so, one must not transcend the characteristic nature of faith. In other words: what one prophesies must not be provable by experience; it must only be a token of things that are in no way apparent either by signs or other indications. Otherwise, faith will be destroyed by prophecy and become a plain kind of wisdom that any knowledgeable man can understand and comprehend and by which he can construe a similar prophecy.37 Yet Luther does not advocate mere passivity here, letting things be what they are until an irresistible grace intervenes to reveal the truth. Rather, a prophetic faith requires not only a poetic distinction between opaque tokens and apparent signs but also a distinction between types of “appearance,” a term that signifies both an entity’s perceived qualities and its temporal arrival. “By occasion” in the 1645 headnote renders ambiguous any final decoding of providential design or apocalyptic signs, but does so more through its portrait of a symbol’s occurrence than through the opacity or indeterminacy of its meaning. For Milton, certainty amounts to unfreedom, precisely because it depends on an ultimate external verification. Instead of such a search for external rules, one must read, interpret, and understand these tokens without an appeal to completion or actualization. In this respect, the analogies that ground an apocalyptic reading of history cannot issue in a countdown, the inevitable progress of a narrative already written, merely awaiting its revelatory actualization in time. Lycidas rejects the notion that the event of meaning awaits or occurs elsewhere, lurking behind or beneath the poem only to irrupt in a glorious epiphanic unveiling. It also eschews the final juridical authority of speakers, narrators, and even poets. Instead, the poem’s treatment of its own occasions, King’s death as well as its own republication in 1645, demonstrates an abiding concern with what it means to conceive and experience a reve-

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latory event in the present, instead of as a past retroactively represented. In this respect, it is also concerned with what it means to experience a present sign, one not always deferring its meaning to some later date. That, after all, is what revelation means: not simply an unveiling but a temporal moment that ends the entire mediated sequence of interpretation with face-to-face presence and radically alters the very nature of signs. Milton’s concern with the nature of events in Lycidas is then fundamentally literary, not because he is a callous, self-interested jerk— Samuel Johnson’s famous reading38—but rather because the operation of signs remains a pivotal theological question, even in 1637. As Brian Cummings has so thoroughly argued, if we hope to understand the confessional allegiances of early modern authors, we should start by looking at what their works do, not necessarily what their avowals say: Most accounts of religious writing are founded on an unacknowledged conceptual separation of the surface of discourse from the beliefs that motivate them. Religion comes first, writing follows after. This goes hand in hand with the attempted identification of a writer’s beliefs in terms of a doctrinal position or party. . . . It is at the surface of discourse that the nexus of grammar and grace is found. It is here that the anxieties and tensions of early modern religion are revealed.39 Although recent historical and biographical work on Milton has provided welcome nuance to the age-old portrait of a staunch, immutable puritan revolutionary, it continues to present politics as primarily a matter of represented positions and allegiances, whether with moderate anti-Laudians or with a longer tradition of ecumenical humanists. For example, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell have argued that, without the prophetic headnote, the pastoral elegy of 1637 is, at best, a tentative rehearsal of Milton’s more radical political positions. Although they read the poem as “the stirrings of a new direction,” as early evidence of Milton’s reaction against the Laudian church that at least begins during the Horton retirement, they also note the fundamental difficulty of pinpointing a radicalizing event in 1637, this period that “marks a turning point in his life.”40 Yet it is precisely this incomplete stirring, this unrealized potential, that makes Lycidas a politically radical document: not because it prepares the way for Milton’s later positions

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but rather because it does not present represented doxa as the site of political or ethical activity. Ultimately, the lyric shows that politics occurs not in the finally realized pronouncements and positions of authoritative speakers—like Peter’s digressive condemnation of the clergy or Milton’s thoughts about the Church of England in 1637 or 1645—but in such potential, unrealized stirrings, utopian or apocalyptic. In 1645, the poem “fortels” in the present the ruin of the clergy and, in so doing, refuses the certainty that would make Peter’s speech nothing more than a confirmed past accomplishment. In other words, the poem treats potential, preparatory, contemplative, and deliberative signs as events outside a developmental or tutelary narrative and, thus, holds out the possibility of a politics that would not always be asking for the approval of a juridical mechanism of recognition and reward. Milton does not here advance a subjective interpretive liberty, certainly, but he does offer reading itself, an encounter with pure, present signs, as the engine of change. In this, he is entirely in keeping with the broader Augustinian and Protestant understanding of conversion. As Cummings notes, Luther’s conversion, like Augustine’s, is a product of reading, not of pivotal epiphanic reactions to events in the world: “Luther thereby offers to replicate in his readers the reformatory powers he attributes to his own experience of reading. He presents a history of reading which demands of the reader a corresponding energy and patience in interpretation. By reading he was converted, and by reading he hopes to convert his readers.”41 For Milton, reading—and especially the reading of nonnarrative poetry— acts as a mechanism of change, even radicalization, precisely because it treats possibility as an independent event, as something that happens outside the bitter constraints of pragmatic actualization or typological resemblance. The treatment of events in Lycidas, then, registers Milton’s commitment to literature as the site of political transformation itself, a commitment that does not waver throughout his career and does not respond, in the later poems, to an experience of defeat at the Restoration. Even in its earliest version, without the confirming headnote, Lycidas, under the rubric of “occasion,” evinces an abiding concern with the temporal occurrence of revelatory events and signs: namely, when do events mean? When do they become significant? Milton, perversely, uses a commemorative genre to insist that events have an immediate, present power not reducible to their retroactive recognition. Although the poem begins by describing King’s death as a sad occasion that requires reac-

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tion, it also acknowledges that the poet values this loss as such. The first lines depict the occasion as a kairotic event, a loss and an opportunity, that necessitates and makes possible the poem’s own prematurity: Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc’d fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due. 1–7

In these lines, occasion seems a causal entity, not a singular accident. Unlike the headnote, this passage evokes an interlocking system of reactive necessity: The occasion seems to compel, buttonholing the speaker, just like bitter constraint. However, despite the elegy’s generic force, which would suggest that the speaker is reacting to loss, the occasion is “dear” not only in the sense that it is momentous or expensive, the cause of sadness and grief, but also because we should cherish it, in itself, regardless of the heavy expenditure of mourning. The poem does not present this estimation of the occasion as a crass, heartless careerism (the craven kairotic logic of never letting a crisis go to waste) but rather maintains that events are not valuable only insofar as they are scarce: “Dear” does not amount only to “dearth.” Scarcity as a principle of value is, of course, a principle of necessity: namely, we must value these events because they are so rare. We cannot choose to value them because they are valuable. Thus, the affirmative connotation of “dear,” the notion that something should be cherished in itself, does not amount merely to Milton’s unconscious revelation of self-interest. It also strikes at the heart of a system of value that could operate only reactively, in which the prospect of loss is the only thing that confers value on anything. Even in these opening lines that sound so much like elegiac reaction, Lycidas questions the legitimacy of kairos as an approach to the world, challenging the supposition that events are rare opportunities that compel reaction and that we recognize them only through a retrospective interpretive procedure. King’s death poses, in miniature, the problem that attends a positively valued apocalypse, or any non-dialectical account of change, for that matter: How could we conceive transformation outside a constraining

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reaction, dialectical or otherwise, that issues in or seeks a final resolution? How can one wish for a change in the present that does not amount to a backward-looking yearning for the solution to a problem? An apocalyptic desire, the devout wish for the elimination of a past world, often seems morally noxious, if not misanthropically sociopathic. Imagining the apocalypse as a reactive reward or just vengeance at least has the benefit of preserving the logical and moral progression of this world into the next and, in the process, maintaining a reverent respect for this lost past. Yet despite the risk of an anarchic utopianism that such a break from the past entails, Milton’s poem refuses to present the sad occasion of King’s death or the world’s destruction as a preservative resolution of problems or tensions. This is most apparent in the elegy’s final line, which eschews precisely this endless oscillation between circular sameness and unfolding difference: “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” (193). What’s most significant about this ending is that it does not herald or jump off from a finalized accomplishment, the completion that the opening lines seem to promise. As we have seen, the new pastures of the final line do not circle back to the promised completion of the first, “only once more.” Neither, however, does it promise the endless cyclicality of pastoral escape and return, “still once more.” Both of these readings turn repetition into resolution, treating the rereading that the final lines enjoin as safely contained within the poem’s unified structure of problem and solution. As J. Martin Evans notes, Lycidas does not authorize casting the swain’s appearance at the end of the poem back over everything that has come before: And while it is certainly legitimate to reinterpret the earlier sections of the poem retrospectively in the light of what we learn later—indeed, as we have seen, Milton’s method is to force us to do so repeatedly—it is not legitimate to read the poem as if we knew from the very outset that the uncouth swain was a fictional persona. If that is how Milton intended us to respond, he would have supplied a balancing prologue. To say, with Friedman, that “Milton chose a pastoral persona” through which to speak Lycidas is to be wise before the event.42 “Being wise before the event” is the quality of a reader who thinks that no events happen within reading. For such a reader, there is no surprise that is not always already contained by her own foresight. In turn, sur-

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prise amounts to nothing more than the thwarting of her own expectations. In a related vein, Isabel MacCaffrey notes the unique absence of any prospective prologue in Lycidas, compared to Milton’s other major poems, all of which offer some anticipatory foreshadowing: Let us recall, however, a curious fact: Lycidas, almost alone among Milton’s important poems, does not suggest at the beginning how it will end. . . . We are related to this poem’s action as eavesdroppers, ignorant, like the speaker, of where we shall finally emerge. Lycidas is, in short, a poem bound to the wheel of time, which is made to revolve before our eyes; we observe events as they occur.43 Evans’s and MacCaffrey’s analyses suggest the limitations of any appeal to cyclicality or the always already of the dialectic in readings of this poem.44 Even as it insists on its own status as a repetition, the pastoral elegy maintains that rereading and reinterpretation happen in the present, that they are not products of a masterful knowing subject surveying its domain—the poem—after the fact from the transcendent heights of a synchronic present. “To morrow” does not return us to the foundation of the poem’s opening line and, as a consequence, Lycidas does not reaffirm a circular consoling order by repeating a pastoral commonplace.45 Instead, the concluding promise of the future is an unprecedented line in an already unprecedented final eight lines. Evans notes that the “uncouth Swain” appears suddenly and curiously in a concluding stanza of ottava rima: Ottava rima was associated not just with narrative verse in general but with a particular kind of narrative verse. It was the standard vehicle of the sixteenth-century romantic epic, the stanza of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and of their English translations by Fairfax and Harington. . . . It invokes the turbulent world of heroic action and romantic love. The concluding stanza of Lycidas thus carries with it a set of values diametrically opposed to those associated either with the pastoral as a genre or with Edward King as a character.46 By making action the product of an intertextual literary tradition, Lycidas allows the literary to cannibalize action, certainly, but it also

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treats literary action as something other than the authoritative performativity in which words do what they say. However powerful and useful the concept in other domains, in Milton’s case, performativity risks not just reaffirming the value of the very sinful subject that the godly should mortify. It also subjects the activities of writers and readers to the laws of illocutionary force, the juridical structures of recognition and identity that, even when they are subverted, arbitrate meaning’s occurrence.47 Milton’s poem, and his political thought, resist categorization under the rubric of performativity precisely because of their persistent anti- or a-nomianism, the notion that law has already been fulfilled and, therefore, abrogated. Thus, when the elegy erases a key distinction between contemplation and action, it does so in order to validate reading and rereading, those purportedly more passive activities, instead of the power of speaking or speakers to actualize potential. In the end, performativity remains too enamored of the virtue of accomplishment for a pastoral idyll or elegy. It will always treat words as powerful and interesting only when they do or produce what they say, not when they say what they can do. Inside the ottava rima stanza, the final line appears even more abruptly than does the uncouth swain. This stanza that is purportedly all about the entrance into action recounts the swain’s preparation for action and, then, offers a final line that does not contain a demand, a performative act, an order, or even a verb: Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Okes and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray; He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills, With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay: And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, And now was dropt into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. 186–93

In this passage that transforms the poem into the retrospective reporting of the swain’s past singing, Milton twice insists that this past happening is still present. The anaphora—“And now . . . And now”—not only creates a temporal frisson in these concluding lines. It also deemphasizes the swain’s final action: “At last he rose.” In this respect, the final line does not connote a naïve optimism, the wishful thinking of a

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deluded speaker imagining that, this time, everything will be different and one will not need to begin poems “Yet once more . . .” Instead, the ending reveals the poem’s obsession with the nature of an apocalyptic potential and novelty, what it means for something to be or become new as an unprecedented break with historical continuity. After all, the swain suddenly appears to cast his authorial shadow back over the poem that we have just read, remaking the poem into his own speech. But this revision does not merely reveal to us what had already occurred in an occult fashion, suggesting that novelty is little more than a cynical recognition of what had always already been the case. The swain’s sudden appearance, of course, incites reinterpretation, but also treats the act of rereading as a novel event. One never reads the same poem twice, naturally, but that relatively tired mantra, in Milton’s hands, becomes something a bit more harrowing: the notion that signs themselves happen in the course of reading and that novel—because revelatory—events occur through rereading. In this case, Milton again insists that revelation amounts to more than a mining expedition. A sign does not unveil but discards the very mechanism of uncovering and re-covering that turns apocalyptic literature into a series of esoteric cryptograms. In doing so, it ceases to be the retrospective recognition of a hidden past or the prospective imagining of a scripted future and, instead, offers the occurrence of a present potential in which one might actually participate. After singing his song, the swain rises only “at last,” a belated, delayed, contemplative rising that certainly fits with the opening lines’ portrait of a sad occasion that compels. Even the reactive twitching of his mantle implies recalcitrance, a speaker prone to inertia and prompted to action only by external force. This unprecedented frame makes the final line even more unprecedented in its affirmative, and not merely begrudging optimism. Instead of a new speaker intervening to alter readers’ understanding of the entire preceding poem, the final line appears as an unspoken linguistic event. Although one might suggest that the uncouth swain is enjoining us or himself to “Go to the morrow,” such a reading assumes that the way to make sense of this line is to transform it into rhetoric, to determine the speaker and the addressee. But it is not clear that “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” is voiced by anyone in the poem, let alone whether it is hortatory or a mere statement of the most obvious of facts—that the poem is over and we will do something different tomorrow. This final line suggests that the point of reading the poem is not to figure out who has the

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power to make such a promise but to examine how meaningful resolution itself even happens in the present. The evocation of a possible future outside the poem is itself an internal event within the poem, one that affirms, contains, and advances possibility but does not then promise it, prophesy it, or assert its inevitable manifestation.48 This final line asks what it means for tomorrow to occur—for an anticipation is also an occurrence—which is not the same thing as tomorrow becoming today, for possibility itself to occur, and not just its actualization. If critics since Samuel Johnson have questioned the sincerity of Milton’s sorrow in the face of King’s death, this stems at least in part from the fact that the poem attempts to escape the obsessive rumination of loss that characterizes mourning and the dialectic and that fundamentally hobbles novelty as a result. If “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” marks a termination, it is the termination of reversal as the primary mechanism for understanding change. It is a termination, however fanciful, that ends without a final, resolving negation, the purportedly necessary transition from a lacking, dependent potentiality to actuality, preserving the past in the conclusion, as it were.49 The reactive consolations of the dialectic, like the productive actualizations of performativity, will always betray poetry’s attempt to present an independent potentiality, precisely because they imagine change as a masterful manifestation of potential. Regardless of its nature, whether it is a subject or a system, transformation happens at the behest of an authority shepherding possibility into actuality. And we know potential only from its effects, these actualizations that we witness and then use to track possibility back in time. For Milton though, it is not enough for an elegy to show that one has changed or to enact change in the present of its performance. It must also contain the unacted possibility of change, not because openness or incompletion are noble liberal values but because events happen in the present only as these potentials. Otherwise, events are consigned either to the past of inert recognition with, at best, an inexplicable mediate effect on the present and future or to the future of wishful thinking where an authoritative law or subject still verifies the real. For Milton, of course, poetic resolution can never amount to accepting the authority of a bossy speaker or an equally bossy performative law. As Paul Alpers notes, Lycidas stages the insufficiency of precisely such conclusions. For example, the poem continues after the very speech that we would expect to solve the problem of poetic voca-

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tion, Phoebus’s paean to a transcendent, eternal, and thus justificatory fame. For Alpers, this is because the lyric does not offer its own meaning as the elimination of problems, or even as an educative structure: If the point of the poem is to resolve the question about the worth of earthly, particularly poetic endeavor, is the answer not given in Phoebus’ speech? If the point of the poem is to educate the swain, has he not here been instructed? . . . I want to be a literalist myself here and say that the poem continues because its purpose is not to solve a problem or console the speaker or dramatize a situation but to “sing for Lycidas”— that is, properly commemorate the dead shepherd. . . . Divine, authoritative, final judgment is precisely what cannot conclude this poem. The questions of Lycidas are questions about this world and the value of our lives in it. Hence the appropriateness of pastoral elegy: what we need, and what we need to be assured of, are human voices, and what they must be able to sing is that life can continue despite the violent breach in it.50 Phoebus’s appearance and its aftermath challenge the concluding power of speakers not only because the poem itself continues but also because it is not clear that a transcendent eternity is even a more secure authority in Phoebus’s own speech. Contrary to Alpers’s reading, the speaker’s repetition of this divine intervention ends up questioning the authority of even human voices, individual or collective. After lamenting the premature death of Lycidas at the hands of a blind Fury that, incongruously, wields the shears usually reserved for the Fates, Phoebus intervenes with the consolation that praise, unlike life, is not such an untimely victim: Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise, Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears; Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

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Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies, But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes, And perfet witness of all judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed. 70–84

One might certainly ask after the source of this description of fame, whether the poem’s speaker recites Phoebus’s lines or whether this is Phoebus’s own intervention inside the poem. Yet even if we assume that Phoebus is the authoritative speaker here, what he says is at best ambiguous: namely, whose are those pure eyes? The “perfet witness of all judging Jove” presents the familiar double-genitive problem. Are these pure transcendent eyes that belong to Jove and thus judge and see true fame? Or do these eyes belong to a nameless fit audience, perhaps a group of the poem’s own readers, that itself witnesses and testifies to the existence of Jove? The ambiguity of this witnessing, then, already troubles the very resolution that Phoebus promises, blurring the lines between an immanent power and a transcendent, centralized, and reassuring erasure of problems. Phoebus’s speech shows how a focus on finding authoritative voices in the poem obscures the more basic questions of what it means for resolution to occur and, moreover, for one to be truly persuaded by the promise of the future. Again, as Alpers notes, this is not just a matter of multiplying possible authorities or challenging the autocracy within an individualized model of authority. Even at the very beginning of the poem, the shepherd does not sing the song. Songs just seem to occur: “The passage is full of sounds, but the human figures are represented as listening to them: ‘both together heard’ the grey-fly; ‘old Damaetas loved to hear our song’; ‘Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute’—no doubt sung by shepherds, but the locution suggests that they simply occur, like the sounds of nature.”51 This song that simply occurs, however, ends up acting as a fairly far-reaching challenge to a host of literary critical categories, from speaking subjects to typological resemblance. In addition, the temporal immediacy of a song that simply occurs unseats attempts to reduce such occasions—and decidedly lyric occasions at that—to examples of hypotactic, teleological, or typological development. For example, when the speaker asks,

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“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care / To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade, / And strictly meditate the thankles Muse” (64–66), the answer that Phoebus gives—“Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed” (84)—relies on the same logic of progressive accomplishment that the shepherd himself rejects: “Were it not better don as others use, / To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair?” (67–69). Sporting with nymphs treats the world in the same manner as does Phoebus’s advised quest for fame: as a place of moments to be seized, even if they are for trivial pursuits. Instead of the pragmatic worldly values implied by Phoebus’s promise of a heavenly reward, a song that simply occurs in a poem “occurs” only as potential but nonetheless exists as this potential prior to its actualization.52 Milton’s elegy utilizes this feature of lyric so as to advance an antinomian understanding of apocalyptic events that would no longer bow to one of these various rules of actualization. The poem continues after all of this sound, authoritative advice not because we’re still waiting for an authentically human voice to tell us what to do but because the poem attempts to provide an escape from all of these petty pedagogues and teapot dictators. Instead of examining the poem’s complex portrait of immanent occasions, modern criticism has often focused on the destabilization and reconsolidation of the speaking subject, a focus that replaces a consideration of events with attention to the nature of authority and sincerity.53 In fact, it often seems that literary criticism can conceive of events only as a species of speech, as if there were no sad occasion dear.54 However, the multiplication of speakers in Lycidas ultimately thwarts a literary criticism that always treats subjects as engaged in the same futile task: attempting and failing to achieve autonomy. How many different voices would it take for us to abandon an interpretive apparatus that always results in the same pragmatic, defeatist conclusion— that subjects assert and simultaneously undermine their own authority? Even if the multiplicity of personae in Lycidas does not parody this critical assumption, the sheer number of voices, at the very least, implies that we should consider possibilities other than a structurally inbuilt failure. Christopher Kendrick, for example, counters this critical focus on speaking subjects by contending that the multiple voices in the poem do not stage a dialogue—characterized by eventful interruptions and reconsolidating agreements—so much as they exhibit the subject-less pack behavior described by Deleuze and Guattari.55 Yet it is not only

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the number of speakers in Lycidas that upsets critical attempts to read it as dialogic. As Elizabeth Hanson notes, the elegy not only decenters and collectivizes the authoritative subject. It also abrogates the temporal logic of loss and reaction on which even multiple fragmented subjects are based: “If the consolation Lycidas offers is to be adequate in Milton’s own terms it must transcend the elegiac economy of loss and compensation.”56 The romance of subject formation tends to portray the heroic self’s attempt to order the world as a noble quest in conflict with contingent, unpredictable, entropic events. Even in its failures, its quest for mastery yields compensations that nonetheless allow it to persevere. Yet this dialectical model gives subjects too much credit, for it is they who desire and preserve this endlessly repeatable elegiac economy into the future. For Milton, this wry, knowing subject, however multifarious, who is always pretending to be surprised, jolted into recognition by catastrophe or the interruptions of another speaker, is also the one who, by definition, has no interest in possibility—because there is nothing new in this world—and is incapable of conceiving it as anything more than a Whiggish, reverse-engineered explanation of one’s present position. It is also the subject, unsurprisingly, who always dismisses pastoral as nostalgic, impractical, fanciful idealization—as impossibility, in short. What, then, would it mean to take the potential of pastoral escape or apocalyptic transformation seriously, as a possibility that occurs in time, and not merely as an interesting, critical, or thought-provoking flight of fancy? Certainly, the dialectic seems to provide one tantalizing option insofar as it offers the freedom of an auto-generated difference and, thus, the possibility of autonomy.57 However, autonomy still seems too tied to juridical analogies to account for the rule of faith that characterizes Milton’s notion of Christian liberty. Autonomy is not the repeated fulfillment of the law so much as it is the perpetuation of law as a deferred internal judgment. A dialectical vision of the world will, in addition to preserving the juridical, always treat potential as imperfection, insisting that action amounts to manifestation, the making actual of the “always already.” In Hegel’s formulation, “action alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed, is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as a unity in thought; and it is actual—this is its form as an existent unity.”58 At the most basic of levels, Lycidas challenges this presupposition by

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transforming imaginary possibilities into events on a par with Edward King’s death. This is not narcissism or the aggrandizement of poetry on Milton’s part so much as it is an attempt to incorporate events within verse, in the process treating poetry as something other than a Johnnycome-lately commentary on history. In this respect, “to morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” does not promise a future event that is outside the poem, one in which resolution or repetition would occur, but rather undertakes an immanent reordering of temporality such that potential does not unfold toward the actual or depend on it for its being. For Milton, contemplation and rereading, or the implicit unity of thought, to borrow Hegel’s terms, is where events happen, not their static transition into a competing “real” world. Most importantly, this occurrence cannot be conceived as the actualization of a potential, even in the imagination. It is in this light that we should consider the abrupt ending of Lycidas. It eschews a constitutive performance or promise, the commitment to produce the new in the future as a resolution of present problems. Such a future remains fundamentally reactive, which is precisely what the abrupt termination of the final line seems designed to escape. As a result, it is not delusional, ideological, or false because, or if, novelty does not occur tomorrow. Within poetry, the test is not the juridical one of successful accomplishment, the fulfilling of promises in the future. Instead, Lycidas advances a notion of change without self-reflective, self-motivated critique and, conversely, one that does not assume that inertia is the case and that only disruptive action intervenes to make change. Neither the poem’s concluding line nor the opening promise, “Yet once more,” signal a return to a dialectic that would preserve an overcome thesis in its ultimate resolution. Instead, Milton imagines possibility as a type of disavowal, one that seeks to escape precisely the resentful, but also the nostalgic, model of a bitter constraint in which it is impossible to value positively any occasion, sad or dear, let alone change oneself without the prompt of an external force.59 The eruption of an unspoken line at the end of the poem means, then, the end of a self and world imagined as inertial, as resentful preservation, or as potential always imperfect prior to its mediated manifestation. It means finally defanging the accusations of romantic utopianism that dog pastoral’s, apocalyptic’s, and even lyric’s steps. Possibility, in sum, is not the degraded escapism of a contemplative, alternative reality but an immanently possible imaginative and transformative escape. In Lycidas, then, the notion of an apocalyptic end, one that does not preserve what it

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ends, makes possible the thought of a real and present renovation, conversion, and change.60 The assertions of poetic power in Lycidas amount to something more than a merely mercenary careerism, an expression of Milton’s anxiety about his relative lack of fame in 1638 or 1645.61 Instead, the elegy’s intense focus on the nature of events offers nothing less than a radically a-nomian—and not just antinomian—account of the world in which freedom, including the freedom of the reader, does not amount to reaction, acting either in conformity with or in opposition to normative ideals. Potential events are valuable precisely because they do not participate in a system of actualization that is tyrannical in at least two senses. First, such a system postulates an authoritarian prime mover as the origin of all force insofar as every subsequent action amounts to a reverberating reaction to this initial autonomous decree. Second, it reduces possibility to nothing more than impotent, retrospective wishfulness, in the process lauding the ex nihilo creator of force for her ability to act out of nothing. Abandoning this system of interlocking reactions is not, itself, a reaction: to affirm otherwise begs the question by assuming the universality of such a reactive system. Affirming the inescapability of reaction amounts, ultimately, to accepting the tyrant’s plea of necessity as the ontological and not merely the political truth. Not reacting does not equate to inertial or caused passivity, precisely because that would be merely to accept as inevitable a logic of action that cannot freely and without precedent transform its own conditions.62 In this respect, we should also reconsider Milton’s personal motto, adapted from 2 Corinthians 12:9: “made perfect in weakness.”63 The full phrase is “my power is made perfect through weakness.” Weakness here is not simply a revolutionary Christian paradox, the last being made first or the meek inheriting the earth. Rather, it is power— potential and capability—that weakness perfects. In Milton’s hands, this perfected power serves as a refusal of the entire system of developmental stages and demonstrative successes and failures that would govern one’s actions, devotions, life. Lycidas presents events as potential happenings precisely so as to free them from a structure that would judge them by the entire panoply of worldly measures—objectives, goals, accomplishments, completion, actualization, outcomes—all of which are predicated on the limitation of possibility by ends. The future in Lycidas is a problem of free action outside a model of reassuring resistance, a free use of the world without the retroactive

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juridical evaluative systems that automatically translate potential into a moralizing, bossy “should” and a capability reverse-engineered from its manifestation. For Agamben, this challenge to the juridical vision of the world is precisely what is most valuable about Pauline Christianity: “The juridicizing of all human relations in their entirety, the confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do, what we are supposed to know and not know, not only signal the crisis of religion but also, and above all, the crisis of law.”64 “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” then is unprecedented in a very specific sense: It is a surprise that does not intervene as a reaction against what comes before, either in opposition or in fulfillment. Instead, as the capstone to a series of unprecedented and present events in the final eight lines of the poem, it conceives novelty as a free potentiality, without the constraint implied by a subjectivation process that reduces all action to agreement or disagreement, with a providential narrative or its authoritative author. Such potential events are then the paradigm for free action precisely because they do not respond to a motivating problem or require a suasive intervention in order to start their own transformative movements. They also do not submit to a performative system of evaluation still too tied to the logic of work: A potential saying has value perhaps especially when it remains undone or unacted. Lycidas, finally, asks us to imagine the new as something more and more interesting than the tired, slavish, soul-killing drive to be productive or the equally soul-killing drive to resist.65 This reading gives the lie to any attempt to imagine Milton’s major poems as a retreat from or an oblique engagement with the political sphere, a reaction to the experience of defeat. Already in 1638 he offers a model of transformation within verse that does not imagine the world as a system of necessary reactions. He obsesses over this problem throughout his poetic career because he is trying to conceive, within poetry and however paradoxically, an affirmative obedience, one that would not be fundamentally craven. He attempts to imagine becoming obedient to God’s will as opposed to following God’s orders. In Paul Ricoeur’s terms, he tries to imagine dependence without heteronomy: Allow me to conclude with this expression of dependence without heteronomy. Why, I will ask at the end of this meditation, is it so difficult for us to conceive of a dependence without

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heteronomy? Is it not because we too often and too quickly think of a will that submits and not enough of an imagination that opens itself? . . . For what are the poem of the Exodus and the poem of the resurrection, called to mind in the first section, addressed to if not to our imagination rather than our obedience? . . . If to understand oneself is to understand oneself in front of the text, must we not say that the reader’s understanding is suspended, derealized, made potential just as the word itself if metamorphosized by the poem? If this is true, we must say that the imagination is that part of ourselves that responds to the text as a Poem, and that alone can encounter revelation no longer as an unacceptable pretension, but a nonviolent appeal.66 The resentful inertia prompted by heteronomy seems precisely what Milton seeks to evade, the notion that one must be convinced by occasion or a bossy speaker that change is necessary, instead of choosing change as valuable in itself. Someone must be saying “To morrow” or else it could not happen. But this is really always Milton’s concern: trying to imagine a world where readers are not hoping to be told what to do, where events amount to more than agreement or resistance, and where we are not yearning to be led, let alone ruled, even by ourselves. When the poem seems to wax metapoetic and comments on its own pastoral and utopian imaginings—moments marked by that most solipsistic of pronominal puns, “Ay me”—the result is not a constraining futility or inevitable failure. When it asks rhetorically, “Ay me, I  fondly dream! / Had ye bin there—for what could that have don?” (56–57), it is not merely indicting the nymphs or expressing existential futility or shouting at the rain, but rather questioning the utility of kairos as a paradigm for change. The question is not what could you have done, an address to the nymphs, but what could that have done— the whole ensemble of real historical facts and actualizations as well as their imaginary counterparts, their having been in the proper position at the proper time with the proper attitude. The same basic problem reappears in the lyric’s catalogue of flowers: “For so to interpose a little ease, / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. / Ay me!” (152–54). Here too, “Ay me!” indicates meta-commentary, but differs from its first iteration. This second version celebrates imaginary reveries, instead of lamenting the lost opportunity to rescue Lycidas. In this

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second instance, neither a speaker nor an end appears to govern the frail thoughts of the poem. The false surmise, then, is not an indictment, the accusation that we should abandon fancy for the real work of mourning, or politics. Neither does the reiterated metapoetic comment return us to the practical world of speaking subjects struggling with reactions and limited resources. Instead, the repeated “Ay me!” marks the speaker’s transition from a kairotic understanding of the importance of actualized opportunity to an embrace of the imagination as the site of real change. This passage certainly begins with the same appeals to authoritative voices that we have witnessed throughout the poem. It opens with the fantasy that Alpheus or the Sicilian Muse will return to direct and render actual this imaginary floral arrangement and implies that this imaginary world doubles our presuppositions about real, pragmatic actuality. These lines appear immediately after the speaker evokes the two-handed engine and its final smiting. Thus, the fantasy of final revenge, uttered by a quasi-divine Saint Peter, prompts a request for yet more quasi-divine governing agents to return and boss the flowers around: Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past, That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse, And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast Their Bels, and Flourets of a thousand hues. 132–35

When the speaker concludes this sequence with “Ay me,” he does not lament the futility of thinking of occasions as kairotic opportunities for a controlling agent to intervene, even in the imagination. Rather, the poem presents this statement of futility as an ecstatic ejaculation. And there is reason to celebrate: The second “Ay me!,” complete with exclamation point, marks the liberation of imaginative potential as a force for immanent change in the world. As Alpers notes, the image of Lycidas visiting the sea bottom does not inject realism into an imaginary poem or reverse imagination with practicality: Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

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Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows deny’d, Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold . . . 154–63

For Alpers, several issues are pivotal here. First, Milton invents the “fable of Bellerus” from whole cloth, disallowing any attempt to tether meaning to an external symbolary. This is not because meaning is indeterminate but because meaning does not happen through an appeal to external, authoritative pronouncements that resolve disorder or verify truths. Second, Lycidas does not stage a dialogue between real and imaginary, placing the latter in the service of the former: The intricate syntax and the delicate solicitude of a word like “perhaps” do not represent a mind assaulted or horror-stricken, and if being “unillusioned” is at issue, the most poignant detail in the passage—imagining that Lycidas visits the bottom of the monstrous world—is as deeply illusioned as anything in the poem. These lines prove what the flower passage seemed to disprove—the adequacy of poetic imagination. The answer to “false surmise” is not the truth tout court, but what poets have always claimed—“true surmise.”67 Lycidas’ submarine visit is not one more attempt at agential control of the poem’s actions. Lycidas might will the visit, or he might passively experience it. Frankly, it does not really matter, because what occurs here is not a character’s action but a potential event in the poem and in the imagination. That is, even Lycidas’s death, which is not identical to King’s, is not a problem waiting to be solved or actualized. Rather, it is an imaginary occurrence. It is an event that happens in the present, an imaginary present that is not withdrawn from the real world. The only events that occur in the present, it turns out, are potential ones, the surmises, true or false, that can disavow the juridical, which is just another name for the tyranny of the actual, sinful world, and offer an apocalyptically redeemed future as a viable present possibility. Lycidas, then, shows that the indictment of pastoral and apocalyptic as escapist, impractical fantasy loads the deck, insisting that the imagination mirror the real, that its landscape and organization replicate the same authoritative speakers and structures that occur in the

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purportedly more important world. Yet the false surmise in this poem is that events amount only to such recalcitrant reproductions, not potentialities that offer the real escape of free possibility. What happens in Lycidas are events, but events whose sheer potentiality hopes to evade the willing slavery of action, actuality, causation, and being productive. For Milton, poetry sings, in the present, a transformative possibility— the apocalyptic abrogation of the real as both a law and a necessity. Reading this song as a potential event that nonetheless happens turns out to be one way that we might finally begin to imagine freedom as something more, and more interesting, than autonomy.

Chapter Four

How Poems End Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event of Ending in “Upon Appleton House”

“Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax” praises Thomas Fairfax for his conscience, humility, moderation, and fulfillment of a providential plan, all as part of its overarching occasion: Fairfax’s retirement from public life. We should not be surprised then that it is populated by images of reversal: inverted trees, boats sailing over bridges, and rational amphibii with canoes on their heads. Yet these proliferating inversions offer neither a secret indictment of Fairfax’s choice nor a hopeful anticipation of his return to a military command. Instead, Marvell’s reversals reveal that he is concerned with the same issues here as he is in the Cromwell poems: not the causes or effects of retirement or solitude, but what actually occurs in such moments. In other words, what happens in a turn? Is it simply a point after which everything is different? Or is it itself a present event, something conceivable in the present and not merely as a result of its ultimate revolutionary effects? Unsurprisingly, these poetic renditions of reversal also amount to a meditation on the nature of revolutionary events, what happens in the present of their occurrence, as opposed to the finality of their ultimate recognition. “Upon Appleton House” certainly supports the critical contention that Marvell is obsessed with reversal,1 but this obsession stems less from a resignation to history’s, fate’s, or time’s topsy-turvydom than from a commitment to imagining reversal as a moment of real, even apocalyptic novelty. Instead of treating revelation as the self-reflective 152

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recognition of an already written narrative, Marvell treats the present of reversal as a moment with thickness, substance, and the symbolic force necessary to effect change.2 “Upon Appleton House” treats symbols as temporal occurrences inside verse itself, instead of as relational nodes in a synchronic architecture. As a result, their temporal appearance is immediately accessible instead of being endlessly deferred into the future when a real revelation will finally occur. It is for this reason that Marvell appears to live in a world of calm reserve: He does not imagine the world as a chaos of difference and disorder begging for, but never quite achieving, order. If anything, there is too much similarity, too much comparison in our quotidian world, so much that it overwhelms the truly novel events symbolized by Mary Fairfax and Cromwell, both of whom present an apocalypse that could actually happen in this world. “Upon Appleton House” participates in a country-house genre that not only takes the house as an embodiment of its lord’s virtue but also stages numerous surprising reversals that testify to his magnanimity and power. The central stanza of Marvell’s poem follows this pattern in presenting the meadows’ repeated, proliferating turns as primarily a theatrical phenomenon: “No scene that turns with engines strange / Does oft’ner than these meadows change.”3 Subsequent stanzas continue to present the meadows’ transformations as theatrical and even narrative inversions: “This scene again withdrawing brings / A new and empty face of things” (61.441–42). “Engines strange” and “A new and empty face of things” might well indicate a suspicion of theatricality, that these are the worst kind of deceptive shows, in effect echoing the suspicion of the stage present in “An Horatian Ode.”4 This sequence of transformations, “these pleasant acts” (59.465), concludes with a literalization of metaphor, one that would seem to be the real, pragmatic capstone for all of these prior figures: Denton sets ope its cataracts; And makes the meadow truly be (What it but seemed before) a sea. 59.465–67

Curiously, it is precisely at this point that the speaker chooses to retire to the wood (61.482), after disavowing all the confusing reversals that he supposedly just concluded via literalization: Let others tell the paradox, How eels now bellow in the ox;

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How horses at their tails do kick, Turned as they hang to leeches quick; How boats can over bridges sail; And fishes do the stables scale. How salmons trespassing are found; And pikes are taken in the pound. 55.473–80

When the speaker retires from these paradoxical and figurative transformations, the very ones that the poem itself explores and uses, how exactly is he escaping them? In other words, how would a retirement from figuration occur inside a poem, without turning retirement into one more metaphorical reversal? These questions are pivotal because the speaker’s own retirement from such conundrums reenacts Fairfax’s, and precisely at the moment when the poem purports to take leave of representation. The conceit, if we can still call it that, is that “Upon Appleton House” does more than stage the meadows’ figural reversals but ends them in precisely the way that Fairfax escapes the vicissitudes of political reversal: through disavowal and retirement. Together, these staged retirements depict the possibility of apprehending an end, to poems and to a sequence of events, in the present of its occurrence. It is for this reason that “Upon Appleton House” also presents disavowal as something achieved through a return to the literal. Instead of treating such turns as a self-contradictory ideological ruse, I propose that we consider them as Marvell’s imagination of the immanent power of symbols, whereby a figure can have present, potential power and, simultaneously, end poems, as opposed to extending them indefinitely via a series of metonymic significations and their hermeneutic complements. In this sense, Marvell explores whether contemplation and retirement themselves, the termination of one’s ensnarement within the world of politics and pragmatism, are even possible. And it is for this reason that this poem on the occasion of Fairfax’s retirement is so obsessed with the nature of endings and escapes, apocalyptic and pastoral.

I In praising Fairfax’s decision to retire from public affairs, the lyric is decidedly more interested in the event of retirement itself than in the achieved solitude or calm that purportedly results from it. Like Marvell’s

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other political encomia, this lyric praises a forceful act, not the man who performs it.5 The contemplative life that Fairfax embraces is not, then, concomitantly, an achieved state of rest. It is important to remember that, for all its talk of retirement and contrary to the Jonsonian tradition of the country-house poem, the verse itself insists that Nunappleton is not a place of rest but a way station:6 The house was built upon the place Only as for a mark of grace; And for an inn to entertain Its Lord a while, but not remain. 9.69–72

These lines, of course, echo Fairfax’s own poem, which describes the house as an inn on the way toward a heavenly home: Think not, O man that dwells herein This house’s a stay, but as an inn, Which for convenience fitly stands, In way to one not made with hands. 1–47

Marvell’s version retains Fairfax’s insistence on the temporary nature of the country estate but does not present it as prefiguration, typological or otherwise, of a final abode. Marvell emphasizes something other than an interlocking network of resemblances as the ordering force of time or history. In Fairfax’s poem, the house resembles his ultimate restful home. In Marvell’s, the inn is an entertaining diversion but does not participate in such an analogical sequence. Instead, the house appears as a bare badge, without some ultimate eschatological significance: “The house was built upon the place / Only as for a mark of grace.”8 The mark of grace, this symbol that does not enter into a purposive plan or a system of substitutive comparison, is not utterly barren, however, standing as an indictment of a country-house genre that finds in architecture a type of metaphorical significance. The house itself ceases to possess typological significance as part of a metonymic chain of meaning. This mark of grace itself does not remain, just as its lord does not remain in the house. It is not just the fleetingness of the house that matters here but its status as a symbolic force outside temporal typological equations, with all of the reversals, overcomings, and fulfillments that such equations

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imply. Fulfillment in typology, after all, arrives with the antitype. Despite all of its doubleness and reversals, the poem does not offer substitution, similarity, and sublation as the mechanism of revelation’s appearance. Or to put it another way, Marvell is interested in the house not as a figure for something else, or as the site of transition, but rather as the temporal moment when one turns toward an eschatological end, which is not the same thing as spatially replacing one end with another. The mark of grace is not a substitute for something lost in reversal but the event of reversal itself. Here too, the poem attempts, through a materialization of a figure into an iconic badge, the end of figuration. This is not because figures are too weak to accommodate a transcendent truth but because representation and its reversals always threaten to turn verse into a perpetual motion machine, to defer the very end that apocalypse promises. When the speaker disavows paradoxes, he disavows the conflation of the event of reversal with the narrative or hermeneutic deferrals characteristic of typology and allegory. Yet in so doing, he does not just offer a plain, literal real in the place of figuration, turning the real, in effect, into just one more figure. The speaker abandons paradoxes to others because the concept of reversal, just like that of substitutive similarity and plain transparency, achieves only its own replication.9 Thus, the speaker presents the reversals of the hewel and worm as the briefest of victories: Who could have thought the tallest oak Should fall by such a feeble stroke! Nor would it, had the tree not fed A traitor-worm, within it bred ......................... And yet that worm triumphs not long, But serves to feed the hewel’s young. While the oak seems to fall content, Viewing the treason’s punishment. 69.551–70.554, 70.557–60

The oak that initially seemed to resist consents to its punishment. The triumph of the worm is reversed by the woodpecker. The woodpecker as natural instrument of destruction is a surprising inversion because of its relatively diminutive size. This passage is a recipe for constant reversal and reinterpretation, even after the speaker disavows paradox.

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However, it is precisely at this juncture that the image of the inverted tree appears: “Or turn me but, and you shall see / I was but an inverted tree” (71.567–68). The repetition of “but” emphasizes the facile insignificance of these inversions: as in, “only turn me and you’ll realize nothing more than that I was only an inverted tree.” In so doing, this image challenges the value of reversal imagined as a developmental structure. By maintaining that one begins where one wants to end, in heaven, the poem presents the inverted tree as little more than deciphering, recognizing what is already the case in this conflation of final and efficient causes. Nothing has really changed. The truth has merely been uncovered. Inversion, if it is to have transformative power, must follow a logic different from that of interpretive retrospection. Yet inversion in “Upon Appleton House” also does not amount to tactical calculation, confidently predicting and outwitting the future. Conventionally, the inverted tree designates a humanity with its roots in heaven, deriving its sustenance and value from a divine source.10 Yet if one is already rooted in heaven, toward what exactly is one growing in historical time? And what happens to the very notion of reversal when source and end are conflated in this manner? The succeeding lines suggest a change not clearly related to this reversal: Already I begin to call In their [the birds’] most learned original: And where I language want, my signs The bird upon the bough divines; 72.569–72

“Already I begin to call” declares what the speaker is already doing, indicating that inversion is unnecessary. In contrast, “Or turn me but” is prospective, but in a very narrow sense: It points to the future, but one whose secrets are already known and in which knowing occurs retrospectively—in the future you will see what I was already. The lines that precede the image of the inverted tree, however, require a transformative gift, so that the speaker might not just confer with birds and plants but be one of them: Thus I, easy philosopher, Among the birds and trees confer: And little now to make me, wants Or of the fowls, or of the plants.

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Give me but wings as they, and I Straight floating on the air shall fly: 71.561–66

The poem then stages, around this fantasy of both becoming and conferring with animals and plants, the ineffectuality of reversal as a conception of transformation. The reversals of “Or turn me but, and you shall see / I was but an inverted tree” do not provide the speaker with new access to birds. Rather, it is the easy wish to become like the birds— “Give me but wings as they”—that leads to the succeeding stanza’s new facility with the birds’ “most learned original” signs. Just as importantly, even though the addition that would transform the speaker into one of the birds is ironically “little,” this stanza implies that no additions are necessary to complete the metamorphosis into a plant. Transformation, then, is not the torturous process of overcoming paradox and tension, or of concocting a viable strategy on the basis of probabilistic prognostication. Neither is it the recognition of some more subterranean essence, however inverted. These stanzas then imply that it is the human penchant for dramatic reversals, epiphanic eruptions, and purposive planning that makes of change a laborious, difficult process, when in fact it takes little, now, to change a human into something else. The poem’s disavowal of the power of reversal, of course, does not leave eschatology unmolested. At the very least, the multiplication of reversals in the inverted-tree passage reveals the ineffectuality of reversal as a model for revelation. Yet Marvell’s examination of retrospective and prospective accounts of transformation also, and more importantly, offers an itinerary of symbolic power that treats figures’ temporal occurrence as more important than their apprehended similarity to their replaced signifieds. “Upon Appleton House” maintains that without an attunement to when symbols happen, we will never understand the forces at work within literary works, or what happens within them, much less the events that we label political or natural change. Rosalie Colie highlights these temporal obsessions when she notes that “Upon Appleton House” essentially occurs in present tense, but a present tense that exhibits several different types of presentness: immediate, narrative, continuing, and aphoristic or philosophical.11 She also describes the tenor of the poem as decidedly empirical, attuned to the immanent details of its own unfolding. As is the case with the speaker of Lycidas, the speaker of “Upon Appleton House” does not appear to know the end of the story, or the poem: “There is something

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tentative about the way the poet moves through his landscape and through his poem, writing as if he were actually living the scenes and experiences that are his subject, as if he were himself uncertain of what was about to happen next, or how an incident will turn out, or how it ought to be understood or interpreted.”12 Even the poem’s central conceit of events telescoped or foreshortened into a single day on the estate emphasizes its concern with the occurrence of reversal, when and how it happens. Just as reversals proliferate, so too do temporal transition words, especially “now,” which occurs twice in the concluding stanza.13 The consequence of all of these machinations is a country-house poem focused on the forces involved in inversion, irrespective of the consequences—subversion or containment; order or disorder; activity or passivity—of these reversals. As a result, this poem at least begins to ask what an immanent apocalyptic event looks like, before it becomes cannibalized by a history of winners and losers, and what distinguishes a reactionary from a transformative force, other than shortsighted, retroactive partisan allegiance. As was the case with the Cromwell poems, “Upon Appleton House” does not allow our modern understandings of political engagement to trot along unhindered. It too proves recalcitrant to a political criticism that wishes to treat reversal as an ironic, subversive force, or as evidence of a fundamental tension within prevailing political structures. This recalcitrance is not a result of Marvell’s much ballyhooed elusiveness, itself code for a rational, measured, tolerant reserve.14 Rather, “Upon Appleton House” explicitly mocks the notion of an endless, uncontrolled inversion that we could tether to political subversion, insisting that reversal really works in only one direction—top-down: So Honour better lowness bears, Than that unwonted Greatness wears. Height with a certain grace does bend, But low things clownishly ascend. And yet what needs there here excuse, Where ev’ry thing does answer use? Where neatness nothing can condemn, Nor pride invent what to contemn? 8.57–64

The startling implication for a modern criticism constructed around the subversive potential of carnivalesque preposterousness is not just

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that Marvell is a tool of the aristocracy or that he actively denigrates popular or communistic uprisings.15 Rather, this passage maintains that reversals are, in essence, fundamentally conservative, not a means of effecting political or social revolution. Marvell does not just choose the wrong side but rather affirms that the modern mechanism of resistance does not do what it claims to do. As Raymond Williams notes, the bourgeois genre of the countryhouse poem has already vitiated inversion as a political tool by insisting on individuation within classes. If everyone is unique, there is no structure to invert. In contrast to an aristocratic appropriation of pastoral that celebrates the country life in general as a vehicle for justifying the court, a bourgeois appropriation is not challenged by reversal but rather thrives on such inversions, precisely because they lead to exculpation.16 According to such a logic, no general systemic change is necessary, possible, or just, because all of these individuals are capable of redemption. Yet it is not just the content of this sociopolitical structure, but also its formal mechanism, that arrests transformation. Individuation rests on a lengthy sequence of mediations and comparisons that, above all else, preserves this mediated, dynamic series. In this passage, Fairfax’s particular honor acts not as a cinching concretization of a general rule but rather defers explanation and transformative reversal into a receding future. The general explanatory principle—“lowness clownishly ascends”—is bookended by a description of Fairfax’s unique humility (in the preceding stanza) and the insistence that in this specific instance, explanation is unnecessary: “And yet what needs there here excuse.” It is not just ambiguity that produces reversal, in short. Even precise distinctions—in this case between universal categories and particular examples—participate in and perpetuate a mediation that extends indefinitely into the future. The subject’s dialectical individuation insulates any structure of which she forms a part precisely because mediation postulates itself as an endless process. Even an apocalyptic end, it turns out, will ultimately require the intervention of this subject’s recognition. These lines do not mock the egalitarian goals of populist social striving so much as they insist that goals are not enough. Where everything does answer use, where order runs along efficiently, there is nothing to condemn. That does not mean that the order is just, only that its condemnation cannot rest on the leveling of distinctions. Instead, change must occur at the level of the forces that produce this order, itself a final formal structure that always coalesces into a structure of winners and

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losers. Novelty happens here, not by rearranging the results of the contest, but by changing its form and nature.17 As was the case with the Cromwell trilogy, “Upon Appleton House” looks to an ordering force itself for the principle of transformation and for the criteria by which one might evaluate that transformation. Here too, then, Marvell’s understanding of value and evaluation echoes that of Deleuze: “Strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact.”18 “Upon Appleton House” remains an enigmatic poem for modern readers precisely because it disavows many of the notions of resistance that still dominate the conception of political activity within literary criticism. For Marvell, though, the world turned upside down is still the same world.19 This seems the upshot of the indifference lodged within the inverted-tree image. “Or turn me merely and you will see that I was merely something else” testifies to the exhausted irrelevance of such upheavals as a paradigm for political change. This is the reason why there is nothing more reactionary than a tale of the underdog’s victory: Her triumph never even questions the basic nature of the contest. Marvell’s verse deals similarly with the reversals of pastoral. More specifically, he revises the pastoral tradition so that it does not connote a natural excess that overcomes want or resentment, only to require, yet again, the imposition of a moderating and productive rule. Even more radical is his insistence that pastoral does not lament a decline from a purer, more peaceful golden age. As Katherine Acheson contends, as part of her argument that abstract military and garden diagrams act as the poem’s organizing principle, pastoral and war are not opposed. Yet neither are they simply conflated in a mystical muddled unity, itself the reductive opposite—the reversal—of opposition. Instead, Acheson maintains that pastoral and war combine via an abstracted mathematics and geometry: In literary works and in criticism of those works the concepts of horticulture (or the garden, or the pastoral) and warfare are normally held to be opposites: the garden is the state of society in which human life is balanced and integrated with the natural world, while warfare is the state in which human society is upside-down, out of balance, and unnaturally inclined. But these illustrations [of gardens and military formations] link the two areas as phenomena that emerge directly from the

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conceptualization of space based on applied mathematics. Military strategy and gardening are both forms of “dominion” through which open spaces are made into territory and possession.20 War does not convert into the peaceful retirement of pastoral. Pastoral order does not suffer from the contingent eruption of conflict and an ultimate temporal decline. Moreover, in this model, the countryhouse poem does not reverse itself or suffer from the challenge of history’s intrusion. The inclusion of the early history of the estate in “Upon Appleton House” is then not an inversion of the idyllic nostalgia or atemporality characteristic of other poems in the genre but an insistence on the commensurability of pastoral and the real world.21 Here too, the poem allows readers to treat pastoral neither as fanciful figurative substitution nor as a retirement from reality easily abandoned by a return to the literal. Neither of these readings allows one to attend to the type of force involved in reversal, or what happens at this moment. Although Acheson is writing about space, her argument does show that “Upon Appleton House” presents relation as apprehensible in its own right. One does not need to go through the mediating relays of effects and ultimate substitutions.22 A criticism that battens on reversals, however, thinks that it knows, a priori, how to apprehend events—retroactively, on the basis of their results—and mistakes Marvell’s interest in the nature of temporal events and eschatology. Knowing the end is not what events or apocalypses endeavor to achieve, because they are not hermeneutic exercises. For Marvell, if eschatological events are to occur in the present, we must do more than chart the interaction between typological doubles or dialectical inversions, both of which happen in the same way: They occur over an empty gulf of synchronic, spatial opposition.23 Marvell’s lyrics simply counter that we should be able to do something with time other than map it. Despite its purported obsession with the significance of architecture, land, and space, the country-house genre just as often stages the problem of poetry’s own temporality, of when it is that a symbol or metaphor occurs. Under the guise of meditating on architectural moderation, it explores the acts of writing and reading poetry, often testifying to its power to contain, ideologically and actually, human beings and human virtue. And so “Upon Appleton House” opens with a homily,

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about verse and architecture, that claims for both the ability to contain great things: Humility alone designs Those short but admirable lines, By which, ungirt and unconstrained, Things greater are in less contained. Let others vainly strive t’immure The circle in the quadrature! These holy mathematics can In every figure equal man. 6.41–48

Similar praise for moderation appears throughout the country-house tradition. Thus, “To Penshurst” distinguishes its eponymous house from the gaudy McMansions of the early seventeenth century: Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold ............................... Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water: therein thou art fair. 1–3, 7–8

These lyrics certainly speak the language of space in evoking containment. But they also present symbols as fraught occurrences in time, not as an interpretive contemplation in an atemporal, transcendent mind. The uses of this moderation trope are essentially meditations on the nature of poetic figuration and its relationship to order, on whether figuration is primarily a matter of giving order to disorder and what it would mean for such an ordering event to occur. For example, Robert Herrick’s “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton” reverses the sequence of “To Penshurst,” placing praise for moderate architectural order at the end of the poem, after the demonstration of lordly largesse: . . . Comliness agrees, With those thy primitive decrees, To give subsistance to thy house, and proofe, What Genii support thy roofe,

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Goodnes and Greatnes; not the oaken Piles; For these, and marbles have their whiles To last, but not their ever: Vertues Hand It is, which builds, ’gainst Fate to stand.24 Of course, the estate grounds and the house still testify to the virtue of the lord, but in Herrick’s poem this testimony follows an explanatory sequence, concluding with the capstone of the house’s significance. This is not the mystical plenitude of Jonson’s sponte sua, self-sacrificing animals. One might assume a similar sequence of events behind Jonson’s poem, but the lyric itself does not follow this self-justifying order, offering a suasive case for its own images before they appear. Herrick’s reordering reveals that this genre is not just a story of a rigid structure fighting against pullulating force or even a contest between the forces of order and disorder. It is also a genre that meditates, within its figuration of poetic activity, on the event of metaphorical and symbolic meaning, when and how it is that vehicle comes to carry tenor. Does meaning burst onto the scene as the result of a symbolic epiphany, only to be retroactively and implicitly justified, as in Jonson’s poem? Or is metaphor the result of a careful progressive argument and explanation, one that makes the case that Pemberton’s house represents Pemberton’s virtue, instead of just asserting that it does? And most importantly, in what ways does the sequence matter? Even outside of Marvell’s own injection of history into the genre, the country-house tradition already stages, intertextually, the problem of meaning’s relationship to temporal sequences and the transitive reversals that follow on these occasions. “Upon Appleton House” accentuates this generic concern when, early in the poem, it stages the supersession of spatial proximity by temporal imminence. The culprit in this respect is the adverb “near.” Marvell’s speaker describes the house as a moderate structure that resembles natural order, but these early lines also highlight the fact that composition and building occur in time, that one does not just cast one’s eyes over a preconstituted, spatial order: “But all things are composèd here / Like Nature, orderly and near” (4.25–26). “Orderly and near” refers not only to nature but also to artifice itself, implying not only an analogy between these purportedly separate spheres but also temporal proximity. Significantly, “near” in this passage has no secure spatial coordinates—nature and the house are near, but not “near to” anything, even each other. “Near” might mean that both nature and

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the house are near us, intimately close to us, and thus not separated as an alienating structural order to nature’s autochthonous disorder. But without a direction or spatial reference—something to which the house could be near—“near” connotes temporal arrival, the notion that orderly composition is imminent, not just intimate. The rhyme with “here” only highlights the conflict between spatial and temporal organization at the heart of the poem. In this case, does homophony mean that space and time are conflated into a unity? Or conversely, does it emphasize that these must be different qualities, so as to avoid a tedious redundancy in the rhyme? Even if one were to resolve this problem, the poem would still ask after the exact moment of this reconciling or distinguishing event. Does this conflict end after the rhyme has occurred? And when exactly does a rhyme occur? When a reader recognizes the homophony after reading the second line, or when the reader anticipates it?25 “Near,” along with its status as part of a rhyme, indicates that, for this poem, imminent occurrence is not a temporal accident but a central feature of order, even the central ordering principle of the poem itself—couplets. In addition, the lyric insists that order occurs temporally in the present. That is the other feature of couplets as an organizing principle: They are paratactic and additive, but their completion is not endlessly deferred via a hidden hypotaxis. As a result, even in its earliest stanzas, “Upon Appleton House” implies that order is just as much an event as it is an alienating spatial structure, recognized as necessary, useful, or valuable after the fact or at the end of time. Even criticism that reads Marvell within the classic new historicist terms of subversion and containment still acknowledges that he is centrally concerned with the nature of events. For example, Catherine Gimelli Martin describes Marvell’s pastorals as static enclosures that require rupture for change but, in so doing, insists that containment requires transcendent events to interrupt this otherwise sealed continuity.26 Thus, Martin contrasts Marvell and Milton, presenting the former as exhibiting a passive resignation to fate in opposition to the latter’s immanent agency. In such a passive scenario, the future is in no way related to the present—it is not at all “near”—but comes like a thief in the night: Providential expectation is therefore restricted to a literal but largely atemporal hope concerning a future in no way coextensive with the present, which now affords the only proper sphere

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for human rationality or action. With direct communication between God and man rationally cut off, Christian conscience then becomes radically privatized and internalized as the sphere of moral and prudential rather than of broader social or spiritual considerations. In the service of politics, appeals to conscience are thus not only philosophically illegitimate but physically destructive because they bring about a return to the war of all upon all.27 Certainly, there is an indictment here of mystical zeal and private fanaticism and a probably undue faith in the ability of rational communication to prevent conflict. What is most important, however, is the presupposition that activity amounts to communication with a god whose primary function is to provide access to an already written providential narrative. For Martin, the future comes unexpectedly, across an empty, unpopulated gulf, because we do not know an already written story. Although Martin frames this problem as a matter of the relationship between activity and passivity, it is probably better imagined as a question of whether Marvell conceives of the future in primarily hermeneutic terms. Either an agent knows the story and, thus, participates in its immanent unfolding or one is consigned to the atomized passivity that ultimately results in chaos. The emphasis in “Upon Appleton House” on the proximity of the future, as well as the integration of Fairfacian historical destiny within the genre, seems to require that we not treat the future as the discovery of an unknown narrative or as the auto-generated eruption of a dialectical development, both of which imagine reversal as a pivot point located in an empty temporal space. Just as important is the fact that this pivot is very, very far away. Either it must arrive from a transcendent realm to rupture a prevailing order or it must “go as far as” contradiction in order to tip over into resolution.28 The dialectic of activity and passivity that dominates Martin’s account cannot conceive of what it would mean for order or the future to be near—for the apocalypse to be imminent, let alone occur—precisely because proximity is subsumed under activity, an agent’s always ultimately transcendent ability to wield an immanent instrumental force. As we saw in the case of the Cromwell poems, this critical frame preserves mediation within immediacy by treating the use of tools as the only concept of proximity. In contrast, “Upon Appleton House” imagines temporal nearness as a disavowal of such a subordination of means to a subject’s self-identified

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purposes and ends. The subject who wields such tools is always busy postulating its goals in the future and thereby attempting to ensure its own immortality. In this respect, the subject can never account for the transition from imminence to immanence. Marvell, instead, hopes to imagine an immanent ending through an emphasis on the occurrence of symbols. “Upon Appleton House” uses the temporal proximity of an orderly end as a means of imagining change and its attendant forces in the present. The reason for doing so is that the reversals characteristic of the subject, however nuanced, can never quite explain how anything finally ends or how a new event would occur that is not merely an inverted, reinterpreted version of the old. The transmutation of imminence into immanence, or even their conflation, does not, however, translate into a mystical, anarchic unity. Donald M. Friedman describes the apocalyptic inversions at the end of the poem, particularly the indistinguishability of river and bank, as evidence of an abandonment of the rage for order, but also acknowledges that the concluding return to Mary Fairfax’s lesser world entails not an ordering of the chaos entailed in a dissolving carnivalesque flood but an ordering of order: “But order in this line is itself contained and limited, since ‘decent’ establishes a criterion of appropriateness, adjustment to a standard, fittingness—in other words, orderliness. And to tame order would seem to be supererogatory, or at least to ensure that its potential for government or creation is moderated, that order, again, has been ordered.”29 He is writing, of course, about the child’s redundant production of order: ’Tis not, what once it was, the world; But a rude heap together hurled; All negligently overthrown, Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone. Your lesser world contains the same, But in more decent order tame; You, heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap, And Paradise’s only map. 96.761–68

What does “contains” mean in this passage? “Incorporates”? “Encloses”? “Epitomizes”? “Has the same elements as”? As this list of possibilities indicates, some of these are temporal events, events that happen in the present tense, some not. Actively enclosing these chaotic elements would

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seem to be different from being passively comprised of them. Certainly, we might maintain that Friedman is doing much the same as Martin in his reading of this passage, describing an ordering principle that moderates, for entirely practical reasons, even an excessive desire for order. Yet Friedman’s claim also raises the possibility that an architectural understanding of constraint and containment may well be incompatible with a poem that so insistently presents order as a redundant, but also proximate, temporal force. Even if we accept Friedman’s suggestion that Mary Fairfax redundantly orders the lesser world that already “contains” the macrocosmic world’s disorder, the stanza still explores not whether she is successful at achieving this goal but rather the nature of the redundant force that she brings to bear. The microcosm–macrocosm motif itself ensures success—how could it not?—but this passage also emphasizes how and when such containment occurs, a temporal event that too often reduces to the mere repetition of the fact of its victories over entropy.30 The ambiguity of “containing the same” impedes any simple sequencing of this process. Does “the same” mean simply these disordered macrocosmic elements, gulfs, deserts, precipices, stones? Or does it refer to the entirety of the entropic history narrated in the first four lines of the stanza, from “ ’Tis not, what once it was” onward, including the rude heaps and their overthrowing? In addition, gulfs and precipices are not just any old elements. Unlike stones and deserts, which at least have qualities that would unite them as entities, gulfs and precipices are fundamentally relational. There is no gulf without its relational status as an in-between space; there is no precipice without a terminus looking out into an abyss. By inserting such relational elements inside the very chaos that requires reordering, the poem unseats any neat oppositional atomism. This is not just more of the always already, a nascent order lodged within chaos. Rather, Mary’s process of “containing the same” poses complicated temporal questions that extend beyond the genre’s architectural metaphors. By troubling the temporal sequence involved in Mary’s epitomizing of the world as well as the presumed sequence of taming disorder, Marvell also poses a frustrating challenge to criticism both political and formal: We do not know when the events of orderly containment purportedly occur insofar as we continue to think of them as contests against disorder. Despite the nostalgic overtones of this stanza, “ ’Tis not, what once it was, the world” does not signify a lament for a more primordial, more peaceful Eden, one that, outside this domain of contestation, would,

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paradoxically—or, rather, hypocritically—offer a more perfect staging ground for subversion and critique. As Acheson notes, one consequence of the abstract mathematicism of “Upon Appleton House” is the insistence that “there is no state prior to, or better than, armed but peaceful vigilance.”31 Colie makes a similar point, noting that the nunnery episode presents the past as corrupt and, in so doing, countermands any generic drift toward pastoral nostalgia for a golden age.32 When we do witness nostalgia in the poem, it is not quite clear that the prior age is all that restful or golden: Unhappy! Shall we never more That sweet militia restore, When gardens only had their towers, And all the garrisons were flowers, ............................. The gard’ner had the soldier’s place, And his more gentle forts did trace. 42.329–30, 43.337–38

This passage supports Acheson’s claim that war and gardens are not fundamentally distinct in this poem, but it also demolishes a conception of time’s operation as progressive dialectical inversion or entropic degeneration. Gardeners were soldiers in this past, which does not mean that soldiers were nonviolent gardeners, called to the messy business of war by necessity. After all, most surprising here is the syntactical implication that the soldier’s later forts are “more gentle.” If we insist on a syntactical inversion, that the gardener traces his own more gentle forts, then the line has suddenly eschewed the very comparison that it postulates for two stanzas. If “his forts” are the gardener’s forts, this line means that he traces his own forts, not that he proleptically imitates a future military organization. In other words, these lines are a trap: Either one preserves the analogy and allows that the present militaristic world is gentler, or the analogy itself acknowledges that there can be no analogy, by insisting that the gardener imitates only himself and cannot be a prefiguration of a fall into debased militarism. In addition, as we will see in the context of the typological comparisons of warrior, mower, and messiah, the temporal sequence of comparisons matters, primarily because the ultimate goal is not an interlocking architecture of resemblances, which would then enable a series of frictionless reversals—the gardener is like a soldier, which means the solider is like a gardener.

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Instead, such similarities aim to understand the occurrence of similarities, metaphors, and symbols in time, which do not admit of such weightless retracings. The spatial results of such a sequence, in Marvell’s estimation, show only that something happened, not how it did or what forces, immanent and imminent, were involved in its execution. Marvell’s interest in sequence occurs in a genre that is already obsessed with limning the forces that bind together political and social communities in time. Even in presenting an ideologically suspect social cohesion and conviviality, country-house poems are intimately concerned with the event of communality and commensality, with the question of when community happens and of the conditions under which it happens. They are just as much concerned with the nature of social cohesion’s occurrence as they are with convincing a reader of the justness of her own oppression. Jonson, for example, offers us a fantastical solidarity in the present based on a self-sacrificing nature. The force binding individuals together, then, is this consumed sacrifice: “The painted partridge lies in every field, / And, for thy mess, is willing to be killed” (29–30). This image results not only in a ham-handed erasure of labor, but also, in Williams’s estimation, in the description of community as nothing more than a conglomeration of consumers.33 Certainly, Jonson’s poem reeks of ideological mystification, placed as it is in no discernible history. However, whatever its deceptive intentions, it also insists that a force is required for community, that it is not simply the case that community occurs, or that all one needs to do is pour chaos into the appropriate container. Aemilia Lanyer’s apparently more elegiac poem makes this obsession with present communal forces even more apparent, transforming an occasion of loss, Margaret Clifford’s departure from Cookham, into the fantasy of a future exercise of justice that would ground sociability. For Lanyer, it is justice, even vengeance, that enables the production of a restored and renovated community in the future, as a reaction against a punctual event. Yet this occasion itself seems to be only an example of the general eschatological reversals that will reform the world. Unlike Jonson’s dubious expulsion of venality and greed from Penshurst, Lanyer’s evocation of the country house recognizes that class and the city always return to destroy egalitarian pastoral interludes, that there is neither ideological nor nostalgic escape: Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:

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Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a diffrence is there in degree. Many are placed in those Orbes of state, Parters in honour, so ordain’d by Fate; Neerer in show, yet farther off in love, In which, the lowest always are above.34 Of course, Lanyer’s implication that the high shall be made low and the low rendered high is a revolutionary threat, as well as an entirely orthodox Christian sentiment. The poem begins with the innocuous injunction to choose heavenly treasures instead of worldly vanities: “Or, as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasures, / Which are desir’d above all earthly treasures” (15–16). In contrast, “the lowest always are above” makes a point that is much more threatening, if nonetheless conventional. It is not just that the phrase turns love into a competition with winners and losers. Even were we to insulate it from this charge, love still carries a threat in these lines, the one that Deleuze describes as the triumphalist desire to give without taking: For this is what was already horrible—the manner in which Christ loved. This is what would permit a religion of Power to be substituted for the religion of love. In Christ’s love, there was a kind of abstract identification, or worse, an ardor to give without taking anything. . . . Found by Mary Magdalene, who wants to give up everything for him, he perceives a small glimmer of triumph in the woman’s eye, an accent of triumph in her voice—and he recognizes himself in it. Now this is the same glimmer, the same accent, of those who take without giving.35 Lanyer’s poem makes apparent the class resentments and violently destructive fantasies that undergird this genre of poems and their valorization of pastoral equality. Moreover, it also exposes the violently revolutionary sentiments that inhabit pastoral Christianity. Christ’s return—a loving revelation—will completely revalue and ultimately destroy existing hierarchies. For Lanyer, however, in the present, this revaluation is discernible only as reversal: The low shall be made high, and vice versa. As opposed to intensifying the idyllic, unreal idleness of pastoral with self-sacrificing herds, Lanyer offers an apocalyptic, future justice as the real foundation for community. The differences between Lanyer’s future event and Jonson’s immanent natural force matter because they show that, at its origin, the country-house genre

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exhibits a marked concern with the immanent forces that bind communities and with the apocalypse as an imminent event that would found a nonresentful community. Lanyer’s and Jonson’s poems do not simply differ on the subject of class and its persistence within pastoral or country-house retreats. They present disparate accounts of when a just social order occurs, and of whether that occurrence entails a coming reversal, as Lanyer believes, or merely a present distinction, as in Jonson’s emphasis on Penshurst’s singularity. Marvell’s contribution to the genre attempts to meld the immanent force of Jonson’s poem with the imminent eschatological promise of Lanyer’s and, in the process, to give to revolution some of the promise of apocalyptic transformation. Unlike Lanyer, Marvell is not content to delay an ultimately just community. Such an approach always entails reducing the apocalypse to little more than a decoding operation, which assumes that what really matters is elsewhere, written in some other text that will be revealed in time. But neither does he offer the vitalist force of the pathetic fallacy that marks “To Penshurst.” Instead, “Upon Appleton House,” by focusing on the temporal event of figuration, presents, at least tacitly, a homology between poetic and political events. Moreover, Marvell refuses to worry, as Williams does, about the dangers of an aestheticized politics that such a homology implies.36 In this respect, “Upon Appleton House” follows the same pattern as do the political encomia to Cromwell, Villiers, and Hastings. Marvell’s poem provokes unease not merely because it participates in a genre that romanticizes and ideologically justifies devotion to a munificent benefactor and requires demystification as a result. Rather, his verse maintains that aesthetics is the only way to do politics and that the aesthetic is not a mere means to independent political ends. Reversals, oppositions, declarations, and allegiances, as we have already seen in the Cromwell trilogy, are not politics but the results of politics, conceived as the operation of forces. This poem is rife with iconographic enigmas precisely so as to imagine the temporal force of this type of aesthetic politics. Although criticism sometimes registers this phenomenon as elusive ambiguity, we should instead read it as more of Marvell’s interest in the nature of symbolic forces and in what it means for a symbol to occur in a poem, and not just to be recognized as having occurred. Although Marvell does seem interested in appropriating the imminent justice of “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the triumphalist apocalypse that Lanyer describes is strikingly absent from “Upon Appleton

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House.” Moreover, it even seems to be an object of scorn in Marvell’s account of the fearful, resentful birds who attempt to nest securely below the mowers’ scythes: Unhappy birds! What does it boot To build below the grass’ root; When lowness is unsafe as height, And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite? 52.409–12

In contrast to Lanyer’s poem, the low are not assured triumph, always coming out above, and the apocalypse appears as a much more indiscriminate destruction. Marvell’s implication seems to be that reversal is attractive only insofar as it offers a secure direction toward victory for the downtrodden, that a truly inverting process cannot be so firmly tied to a purposive, rational system of justice. In the end, it grounds neither an ethics nor a politics. The mower who kills the rail does so accidentally, and this death has significance only as a reflection of the mower’s own fate: With whistling scythe, and elbow strong, These massacre the grass along: While one, unknowing, carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail. The edge all bloody from its breast He draws, and does his stroke detest; Fearing the flesh untimely mowed To him a fate as black forbode. 50.393–400

The black fate signaled by this accident is, of course, that of an early, indiscriminate, insignificant death, one that cannot be retroactively recuperated into a just order precisely because of its inopportune untimeliness. The poem does not provide an ultimate goal for this entropic accident, one that would at least point toward a meaningful terminus. If there is reassurance in these lines, it comes from readers who willfully translate foreboding into foreshadowing and, as a consequence, turn chance into a progressive learning opportunity inside a stable narrative.

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Yet the rail’s fate also does not appear as a lesson in kairos, prompting readers to prepare for and await the arrival of a pivotal opportunity. The bird’s appearance in the poem intensifies contingency, the sense that preparation for contingency does not amount to better prediction or a keener recognition of significant patterns. As Ann Berthoff notes, what is unexpected is not the rail’s death and its entirely predictable significance but the transformation of this moment into a comedy of literalization: The unexpected death of the rail—the sudden, dramatic intrusion of discord is a characteristic development in pastoral and the masque—quickly becomes a comic interlude. . . . Speculation on the fearful significance of this untimely death is cut short by the appearance of ‘bloody Thestylis.’ . . . This astonishing trick of having a metaphor come to life is comparable to having a figure unmask.37 Simultaneously unprecedented and predictable, the rail’s death is an example of the bind in which all apocalyptic expectation finds itself. Thestylis’s intervention, as we will see in the next section, transforms this moment from a serene contemplation of the paradoxes inherent in eschatology into something other than one more treatment of the apocalypse as a matter of reflective or typological signs. The end of time might mean something, but it does not mean in the safe ways to which we are accustomed. Just as Marvell is not a craven company man who mocks the ability of the low to “clownishly ascend” (8.60), neither does he offer here a conservative and consoling existential despair: We are all doomed to be equal in death, so we should despair of worldly transformation and await a deferred revelatory transformation. The symbol does not just mean that the world is already organized as a series of insignificant accidents, a situation in which signification operates as a structural order that transmits a message of existential despair, or apocalyptic hope. Contrary to Margarita Stocker’s argument, Marvell does not invert the value of catastrophe, evoking the New Jerusalem via allusions to the Book of Revelation.38 This alternative, a process that translates imminent forces into an always deferred hermeneutic problem, drives one into the endless chiasmi—I wield stories and language, but am also constituted by them—with which we are so familiar from literary critical debates about the nature of signs. As Agamben notes, this is always

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the problem with imminence, its tendency to treat ends as impossibly receding in time: What is at risk here is a delay implicit in the concept of “transitional time,” for, as with every transition, it tends to be prolonged into infinity and renders unreachable the end that it supposedly produces. . . . The end of time is actually a timeimage represented by a final point on the homogeneous line of chronology. But as an image devoid of time, it is itself impossible to seize hold of, and, consequently, tends to infinitely defer itself. . . . The fallacy lies in changing operational time into a supplementary time added onto chronological time, in order to infinitely postpone the end.39 The apocalyptic event that would arrive both to change and to end everything cannot, then, arrive from elsewhere, the transcendent irrupting into the continuity of time, for this is to confuse space with time yet again. Paradoxically, it is to treat this transcendent realm as also less real than the immanent one into which it irrupts. Instead, if we are attempting to think a revelatory event, we must imagine it as a present change in how time itself operates. In Agamben’s terms, this is precisely what poetry does to time and why it is a special site for the examination of messianism: “It is not that there is another time, coming from whoknows-where, that would substitute for chronological time; to the contrary, what we have is the same time that organizes itself through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in order to make place for the time of the poem.”40 Significant events do not then arrive from elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is construed as a cloaked providential narrative. Instead, revelation appears as an immanent, forceful alteration of temporal order, because that is how ends must appear. A transcendent arrival merely changes the subject. It imagines ending as nothing more than interrupting a conversation. And as with all conversations, it can never think of its ending as a present possibility. Marvell, in contrast to the compensatory accounts of community present in other country-house poems, offers a presently possible apocalypse as the only community, but one whose presence is not the same thing as Lanyer’s retributive justice, a reassuring new order, or even its promise. Instead of asking readers to oscillate between the imminent arrival of novelty and the immanent presence of arrival’s action, “Upon Appleton House” asks us to imagine imminence as itself an exercise of

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force in the present, a force through which community occurs. Marvell treats pastoral and apocalyptic symbols as forces instead of nodes for comparative evaluation precisely so as to avoid imagining a hopeful second coming as a tale already written, a tired event already accomplished elsewhere and retold here. Such a story would have no force or value, precisely because it would be just and merely that—a story. For Marvell, however, revelation is not a narrative whose last page is currently withheld from readers by a sadistic, paternalistic author. After all, the apocalypse is not characterized by suspense—we already know what happens at the end, but not how the end could possibly happen.

II Thestylis’s appearance during the mowing episode stages an ending that is simultaneously an interpretive intervention and an attempt to render, temporally and literally, the poem’s own comparisons. On the one hand, it reveals Marvell’s fundamental impatience with suspenseful narrative and hermeneutic models of the apocalypse, those that attempt to think all change as a matter of the retrospective recognition of past change. On the other, it conflates the reading of metaphor with the physical and temporal making of comparisons, with the present acts that produce a world of resemblances. When Thestylis jumps to the parable of manna from the speaker’s comparison of the mowers and Israelites, she stages inside the poem what looks to be a completely legitimate interpretation. In fact, the pivotal masquing stanza, at the poem’s midpoint, invites precisely such hermeneutic acts: No scene that turns with engines strange Does oft’ner than these meadows change. For when the sun the grass hath vexed, The tawny mowers enter next; Who seem like Israelites to be, Walking on foot through a green sea. 49.385–90

Two stanzas later, of course, Thestylis appears to have overheard the speaker’s meditation and exhorts the mowers to turn metaphorical

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comparisons into reality. The mower’s scythe has just killed the lownesting rail when she intervenes: But bloody Thestylis, that waits To bring the mowing camp their cates, Greedy as kites, has trussed it up, And forthwith means on it to sup: When on another quick she lights, And cries, ‘He called us Israelites; But now, to make his saying true, Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew.’ 51.401–8

By the end of the stanza on the mowers’ victory, the narrator has adopted, at least in part, Thestylis’s hermeneutic role as well, interpreting for us the poem’s own metaphors, explicitly transposing mowing and warfare: “The women that with forks it fling, / Do represent the pillaging” (53.423–24). In this middle passage of “Upon Appleton House,” the poem stages the purportedly authoritative event of a speaker’s hermeneutic pronouncements alongside the bloody literalism of Thestylis’s intervention. That is, Thestylis’s lines conflate the act of recognizing metaphorical substitutions and the act of forcing the world to conform to these figural equivalences: “ ‘But now, to make his saying true, / Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew’ ” means, on the one hand, that it just so happens that these symbolic equivalences occur—as in “some mysterious force (probably another narrative script) makes the rails substitute for quails, and dew for manna.” On the other hand, this line is also an order addressed to the mowers, as in “in order to make the speaker’s comparison valid, you mowers must keep killing rails and make them fall like the quails of Exodus 16:13–15 or Numbers 11:31–34.”41 According to this logic, active agents can make the apocalypse occur in the present, can make a prophetic saying true, now. Metaphors do not simply correspond to already existent resemblances. Even the distinction between the comparison pairs, rails–quails and manna–dew, highlight this issue: Taking dew for manna is an interpretive act, not a violent one, like killing more rails. But that seems precisely the point of this sequence, that the distinction between contemplative interpretation and agential action does not hold, and that the mechanism of epistemological reversal that grounds such a model of political and poetic change is misguided.

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The metapoetic and self-referential elements of Thestylis’s intervention do not ultimately reveal a reserved and tolerant Marvell in opposition to the vengeful justice of Lanyer. Rather, Thestylis imagines herself as the fulfillment of the biblical epithet but in so doing maintains that typological resemblance is never enough to secure such metaphorical equations. As Berthoff remarks, Thestylis proceeds to unmask or act out the symbolic equation.42 This passage does not return us to a conflict between activity and passivity. Instead, Marvell attempts to take seriously the status of the apocalypse as a transparent or pure sign, what it would mean for this thing to occur without the opportunity for a necessarily retroactive interpretation: It is the end, after all. Thestylis’s performance of metaphor is part of this insistence that an imminently present metaphor can happen in the present. The other name for this phenomenon is, of course, literalization. Even if Marvell the man thinks that justice or the apocalypse is written and complete in some other text, his poetry does not think that our job is to decode it and then to accept it passively or to support and enact it freely, actively, or performatively. Our options are not constrained to agreement or disagreement, and words, especially literary ones, amount to more than pleas for allegiance. Contrary to Marshall Grossman’s argument, then, the Thestylis episode shows that the apocalypse is not the same thing as a providential plan: Moral virtue is the ability to recognize the pattern as it develops, to discover one’s destiny in time to choose it, and thus to construct one’s life as a narrative text. . . . The belief that one’s present acts become legible only when understood as signs in an incompletely known text, existing in an impenetrably alien atemporal matrix, engenders a sharp discontinuity between the self as subject of one’s acts and the self as subjected to the transcendental totality of Providence.43 Grossman’s account reaffirms the fundamental link between narrative and the juridical, making of self-location within an incompletely known providential story the mark of virtue. But as was the case with Milton, the problem of the event, the new, and liberty exceeds the juridical worldview that undergirds debates about agency and determinism. Instead of deferring to a future text, one that will be revealed in time,

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Marvell treats the immanent signs of his own poem as aesthetic events, distinct from representational, comparative, or hermeneutic ones. And even his imminent signs insist that the arrival one awaits is not the arrival of a story or an interpretation, a retroactive structure that would show us the order that was there or being built, to which we were at the time impervious. Such an eschatological sign cannot be read and interpreted after the fact, because it is the end of signs. For Marvell, this is the way to prevent transformation from occurring, not the way to effect it. In fact, the point of the rebus that Grossman describes is to arrest the relay between narratives, not to serve as the pivot from one already written tale to another. The apocalypse is more than pattern recognition, or choosing the already discovered, in short. It promises a revelation to end narrative, one that could happen in the present without beginning, yet once more, another story. Even were we to read the Thestylis episode as a parable denouncing naïve literalism or misinterpretation, instead of as a legitimate acting out of symbolic force, the poem would still reveal Marvell’s fundamental disavowal of hermeneutic apocalypses. Thestylis, of course, is not wrong to jump to the parable of manna, because the speaker explicitly compares the mowers and Israelites on the basis of a shared desert wandering: “Who seem like Israelites to be, / Walking on foot through a green sea” (49.389–90). And as we have seen, the speaker interprets her own comparisons as well, comparing the forking of hay to the pillaging that succeeds a victorious battle (53.423–24). The allusions to Exodus and Numbers and the radial reading that they require are precisely what hermeneutics, intertextuality, and even just comparison are all about and, thus, the poem does not, and cannot, really resist them. Rather, what matters in this middle passage of “Upon Appleton House” is that the poem stages the event of metaphorical and hermeneutic recognition, whether one solves the ambiguity or not, as utterly irrelevant to the force of revelation. Thestylis retroactively recognizes a metaphor, asks the mowers to make it true, and changes the meaning of the original comparison as a result of this recognition and request. Or she maintains that this change is already the product of the initial comparison. In either case, these stanzas depict meaning as divorced from fulfillment or revelation, not because the reader, Thestylis, misinterprets, but because she thinks of reading incorrectly, as a fulfillment that amounts either to recognizing another hidden text or to shaping the world to resemble this allusive model. She thinks that

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the new world is already written and that her job, at best, is to feign surprise when it arrives, even though she has already deciphered all of the signs heralding its coming or actively sought to make these signs true. Marvell does not understand the apocalypse as such a coy drama. Our job as readers of a poem, apocalyptic or otherwise, is not to pretend ignorance, knowing all along that a hermeneutic explanation of events will arrive to save us. In contrast, Marvell presents symbols as accessible temporal forces whose effects are not scripted and that do not require the elaborate duplicity and social paranoia that Thestylis stages. After lamenting the unhappy birds’ fate as a result of the mowers’ indiscriminate destruction, and after deducing the appropriate moral from the parable of the rails, the poem offers a line whose provenance seems impenetrable: Unhappy birds! What does it boot To build below the grass’ root; When lowness is unsafe as height, And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite? And now your orphan parents call Sounds your untimely funeral. Death-trumpets creak in such a note, And ’tis the sourdine in their throat. Or sooner hatch or higher build: The mower now commands the field 52.409–53.418

In what direction does “or sooner hatch or higher build” point? Does it suggest that what comes before is irrelevant, because the mowers have triumphed, as in “regardless of whether you hatch sooner or build higher, the mowers are now in charge”? Or does this line continue, into stanza 53, the rhetorical question from the preceding stanza, as in “what does it help to build lower, let alone hatch earlier or build higher”? In both of these instances, “Or sooner hatch or higher build” reaffirms the fatalism of the rhetorical question, either by continuing it or reiterating that escape is impossible. However, it is equally plausible that this line is not part of the rhetorical question at all but a response to a real question, one that promises a self-consciously willed and free escape. “Or,” then, along with the stanza break, would mark a rejection of the despairing fatalism of the preceding stanza, holding out hope for a future

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embodied, perhaps, in the mowers’ control of the field. At issue in the use of this single conjunction, in fact, is the same feigned surprise that we have already seen present in Thestylis’s performance. Is novelty something more than the feigned surprise of a hermeneut? If the disjunctive conjunction redundantly repeats the rhetorical question, it seems that we are thrown back into the world of a co-opted apocalypticism. If “or,” on the other hand, actually marks a disjunction that moves us out of such an interpretive eschatology, it would also be a forceful symbol within the poem, the moment where something happens, precisely as the promise of hatching and building in the future. In short, does “or” designate a disjunctive pair, nonetheless imagined as a spatially paired unity, even in dissonance? Or does it mark a temporal transition into a novel future? The ambiguity of this line encapsulates the interchange between agency and constraint that Grossman anatomizes: “The oscillation between space and time, between pictorial and verbal text, between description and narration in Marvell’s poem can be seen as an (ironically) allegorical representation of the way the self both produces and is produced by its language on one level and its history on another.”44 What is most important in Grossman’s reading of the poem is that it tacitly assumes that there is no event within the poem itself, only one within its meaning. Oscillation occurs in the realm of significance, not in the realm of text. That presupposition seems fundamentally at odds with these two stanzas, especially as any interpretation requires an event to occur within the verse. Either a digressive explanation of lowness’s insecurity—the passage on orphan parents and their “Death-trumpets” (52.413–16)—interrupts the rhetorical question or “Or sooner hatch or higher build” marks a shift away from the fatalism of the rhetorical question, readopts the vein of admonishment, and holds out the possibility of change after all. In either case, something happens, either within stanza 52 or between these two stanzas, and then interpretation comes to account for it. The problem with the concept of reversal, though, is that it ignores this event written within its own logic, marked in this case by “Or,” finding it either self-evident or uninteresting, and, in turn, takes the result of oscillation, ambiguity, for its force. In other words, ambiguity does not happen in a poem but in an interpretation of a poem. “Upon Appleton House,” though, locates the pivotal event— whether fate is written elsewhere and it is pointless to resist; whether one can really escape from such scripting via action; whether novelty is anything more than a redundant repetitiveness, marked by the illusion

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of change—within this conjunction, in the first line of a new stanza, heralding both connection and transition. Most important, though, again, is that something happens here, in the poem, at the moment of this word’s appearance. As I have suggested in the case of Thestylis’s acting out of metaphor, Marvell’s literalized figures seem a response to this interpretive conundrum, an attempt not to erase figuration by returning to some mystical transparency but rather to highlight the event of a symbol itself.45 Literalization, then, is the way to overcome a blindness to the event within figuration and to attend to the temporal sequence of comparison’s occurrence. As a result, “Upon Appleton House” treats similarity less as a map of transitive substitutions and more as a series of likenesses that appears in the present time of the poem: an itinerary, of sorts. After “Or sooner hatch or higher build,” the mowers reappear as an impersonal force: “The mower now commands the field; / In whose new traverse seemeth wrought / A camp of battle newly fought” (53.418–20). The mower is like a soldier and, in turn, the mower and soldier together are antitypes of a mowing messiah, whose destructive force clears the way for renovation.46 However, as Colie notes, the traditional metaphorical sequence is inverted in “Upon Appleton House”: typically, the soldier is like a mower.47 Importantly, it is not just the terms that reverse but the entire sequence: The real world of military violence is not softened, rationalized, or even explained by recourse to the imaginary georgic. Instead, the georgic resembles at least the results of real violence, which are, in turn and implicitly, like the mowing messiah. Through these sequential alterations, which echo those in “The Garden,”48 Marvell does not produce ambiguity but rather shows how the same is not a destination, and particularly not one that incorporates mower, soldier, and messiah into a seamless, transitive, spatial equation. The sequence of similarities matters not so that we can retrace how we reached the present typological fulfillment. Rather, the way in which mower, soldier, and messiah are the same matters, the sequence matters, because the events within the sequence, the irreversible, momentary forces that occur within this string, are what matters in a literalized verse. Marvell’s poetry is insistently a moving energia in this respect, but one that refuses to reduce energy to a directionless, easily redirected pullulation.49 What Marvell has done with the country-house poem is very much the same as what he does with Cromwell. He has not merely recon-

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ciled opposites, either via conflation or dialectical opposition, but rather has moved forces and events outside the opposition of inert sameness and dynamic difference.50 Moreover, force does not just unite or distinguish, and to reduce it to such goals erases its substance, the fact that it is worthy of attention as movement, event, and relation. Events are not on the road to restoring unity out of chaos and neither are they mired in continuity, wishing to evolve or dreaming of an external eruption of difference. Instead, events are executions of force, even within poems, that may submit to interpretation but are not resistant to or the opposite of interpretation. If, as Stocker maintains, “Marvell is the lyric poet of apocalypse,”51 then we should stop trying to treat him as its narrative, romance, or epic poet. A lyric apocalypse is not a fanciful prolepsis or metaphorization of a historical unfolding but rather an insistence that symbolic relations, because they act immanently, are the only things that can end a world or make a new one.52 Revelation does not offer a transcendent vantage from which to look back and interpret a series of interconnected apocalyptic signs. As he did with the concepts of liberty and allegiance, Marvell eschews any notion of the future that imagines itself looking backward, reinterpreting signs after the fact, because this is to imagine liberation as not really free and ends as not really ends. The relationship between the poem’s William Fairfax episode and its later praise for Thomas and Mary Fairfax forms perhaps the best sequential example of Marvell’s disavowal of a narrative or typological understanding of events, one that would rely on a final significant fulfillment as the mechanism for both terminating and evaluating a sequence. According to such a structure, a sequence ends in culmination and can be judged a success once it has achieved this culmination. Instead, Marvell offers a symbol, acting with both immanent and imminent force in the poem, as the only possible mechanism for endings, poetic or apocalyptic. As we saw in the case of Thestylis’s raining rails, a confirming event is necessary for a parabolic promise to be true. Marvell’s literalization simply affirms that this confirming event occurs within the poem, not in some prospective, hermeneutic future. Thus, the first Fairfax, who rescues Isabel Thwaites from the clutches of farcical but dangerous nuns, certainly prefigures the second. But, as was the case with the mowers–warriors sequence, this is not just conventional typology. The convent’s resistance is a real intervention within history, a literalization, even, that attempts to thwart the typological Fairfacian destiny:

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Is not this he whose offspring fierce Shall fight through all the universe; And with successive valour try France, Poland, either Germany; Till one, as long since prophesied, His horse through conquered Britain ride? Yet, against fate, his spouse they kept; And the great race would intercept. 31.241–48

The nuns’ attempt to thwart Thomas’s typological fulfillment fails, whereas Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne in “The Garden,” “only that she might laurel grow” (29), succeeds, but in both cases typology is not merely a way of looking at the world, a powerless epistemological perspective. It is a symbolic force that has immediate temporal power, which can be impeded or promoted. “Upon Appleton House” does not reaffirm in this moment that interpretation matters, that how one conceives the world changes how one acts within it, itself a reassertion of the subject’s organizing agency. Instead, interpretation, figured here as essentially typological, ceases to be a retrospective action outside the poem and, instead, becomes a force within it. That is, the contemplating, deliberating, and delaying self no longer acts as the principle of mediation between imagination and action. The culmination of this typological sequence, Thomas Fairfax, is not the culmination of the poem, however: That is, the end is not the end. Mary Fairfax appears as the immanent embodiment of a present ordering power, but one that also renovates the world in which she operates: But by her flames, in heaven tried, Nature is wholly vitrified. ’Tis she that to these gardens gave That wondrous beauty which they have; She straightness on the woods bestows; To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal-pure but only she; She yet more pure, sweet, straight, and fair, Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers are. 86.687–87.695

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This entirely conventional compliment ultimately returns us to the problem of containment. What does it mean for Mary Fairfax’s lesser world to contain the same, “but in more decent order tame” (96.766)? Or for her to be “heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap. / And Paradise’s only map” (96.767–68)? In some ways, this is the basic problem of the microcosm. What does it mean for it to contain the macrocosm? But it also catches in its net the broader problem of the operation of events within verse. Does the poem lead up to Mary as an epitome, a symbol or capstone for the entire previous historical sequence? And if so, are epitomes a logical fulfillment reached by explanation—in the same way that Herrick’s poem explains and supports its praise for Pemberton? Or does even this model of interpretive development subsume lyric events under narrative? Ends are not the same thing as resolutions and conclusions, as Stocker’s argument shows. She maintains that Marvell’s poems end as all eschatologies must, with a final image of the end, not its propositional summation or really any other type of rhetorical appeal: “In the allusion to mortality and universal End this Final Image ends an eschatological poem with the only image that could properly do this—an image of the End itself.”53 Yet in a system of resemblance, endings have no viable analogues. Any sketch, however provisional, that one provides of them will allow for endless additive figures and substitutions, in perpetuity. “Upon Appleton House” does not follow such a system in presenting its multiple typological endings as fundamentally impossible. The poem itself presents at least two typological ends: Thomas and Mary Fairfax, the latter not quite the same sort of teleological end as the former. It seems, then, that finality is not enough to secure an end, but not because of figuration’s weakness. Instead, finality itself must be marked and doubled by an event confirming this finality, an immanent symbol that does not just continue an infinitely long chain of deferred, significant, similar, imminent ends. Colie implies as much when she contends that, unlike Isabella Thwaites in the nun’s seductive appeal, Mary is not “like” the Virgin.54 In the nun’s subtle speech, “She [the Virgin] you [Isabella] resembles much” (17.132). Mary Fairfax’s first appearance in the poem, in contrast, emphasizes both her indistinguishability from the natural world and her escape from a system of comparison. The flowers, after all, do not send her any volleys of praise:

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None for the virgin Nymph; for she Seems with the flowers a flower to be. And think so still! though not compare With breath so sweet, or cheek so fair. 38.301–4

Mary seems to be a flower, when she is with the flowers, but should not really be compared to them. This passage is not just a traditional self-sublating simile. The imperative here, paradoxically, is to think that she seems to be within the genus of flowers, part of that category, but not to compare her to the elements of that category. As a flower, she epitomizes flowers but is not then like flowers, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, for that matter. She acts, in this sense, as an organizing force, even perhaps as a container, that does not for all that fulfill, surpass, or reverse what we already know about flowers and their significance. This is what it means to vitrify, to burn to the point that nature becomes glass, a diamond-hard symbol itself and a crystalline mirror. The poem then stages two apotheoses, rejecting the first, Thomas’s, as a deceptively false sequence of similitudes and endorsing the second, Mary’s, precisely because it resists the impulse to turn similarity into an authorization for substitution. Mary does not replace the Virgin, and neither is she the culmination of a typological sequence. Her status as a symbolic epitome—she neither substitutes nor fulfills but rather condenses and, simultaneously, subtracts or cuts—also explains why the apocalypse over which she presides is so calm, not the radical upheaval that one would expect if this were really about revolution and reversal.55 Stocker’s account of Marvell’s apocalypticism, in contrast, tends to conflate symbol and typology, making of the former the unproblematic badge of the latter’s accomplishment. Thus, she claims that the evocation of heraldry in the final stanza of “The Mower’s Song” itself amounts to a type of renovation: And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb 25–28

Stocker maintains that the mower’s suicidal destruction transforms into renovation as a result of “heraldry,” or the poetic sign that contin-

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ues after his death.56 We have witnessed this equation of trophies and tombs before in the elegy for Villiers, an equation that emphasizes the violence of such symbol-making: “Till the whole Army by just vengeance come / To be at once his trophy and his tomb” (127–28). Even if we bracket the violent force of heraldic symbols, how exactly would the perpetuation of the sign itself mean renovation, regeneration, or change? And how does grass become a heraldic symbol? Is it nothing more than the mower’s assertion that makes it so? The point is that this model of constructive destruction does not really do what it claims to do, showing how destruction inverts finally into construction, commemoration, or renovation. Instead, it palms this work off onto the preserving force of the symbol, conflating its significance with the event of its constitution and treating substitution as equivalent to transformation. But replacement is change of only a very limited sort. It abandons what has come before as hopelessly recalcitrant, reactionary, or lost, in effect equating presence and absence, a too persistent past and an irremediably lost one. In so doing, it turns novelty into an endless series of metonymies, simultaneously full of associational meaning and resistant to any formal alteration in the process of meaning. Yet as Mary’s status as a symbolic epitome and usher of a calm apocalypse indicates, Marvell’s verse does not consider significant substitution an eschatology or even a teleology. The purportedly typological sequence in “Upon Appleton House” merely lays bare the duplicity of a symbolic force imagined only as a spatial, compensatory substitution. In this sense, symbols are more complicated than the mute persistence of monuments, however emotionally resonant or stolid. It is by making eschatology into a competing providential narrative, heralded by decipherable signs ready to be interpreted by active readers, that one reduces readers to the passivity and inert waiting that Martin describes. This hermeneutic model essentially moderates the end times, making the end of time just another sign, just another narrative in need of reconciliation, just another parable about the interaction of activity and passivity. In this respect, Marvell is writing, prospectively and much earlier than Milton’s engagement with this issue in his major poems, an account of how and why revolutions fail. The apocalypse is not just another idyllic or utopian story, or one recounting the inevitability of the fickle hand of fate. Stocker admits as much when she contends that Marvell gives pastoral a forward-looking thrust and that he acknowledges its destructive aspect.57 There exists a conflict between a nostalgic pastoral, which laments the degeneration

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of order but affirms that this degeneration still occurs on a generic continuum, and a supplanting, forward-looking, dare we say apocalyptic pastoral, which offers the possibility of fundamental transformation.58 “Upon Appleton House” shows how the hermeneutic bent within a revolutionary millenarian thought ends up impeding not only transformation but also the very possibility of endings. It is not just that one muddles around in mysteries beyond human ken. Rather, the danger of such an interpretive apocalypse is that it is not an apocalypse at all because it insists that Revelation leaves the worldly, familiar process of revelation the same and intact. Ends then are not typological, an overcoming or surpassing of prior models.59 When the speaker enjoins the Nunappleton estate to affirm its precedence over other gardens, via the power of Mary Fairfax, he also thwarts precisely the comparative continuum that would allow for such completion: Employ the means you have by her, And in your kind yourselves prefer; That, as all virgins she precedes, So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads. 94.749–52

One could read “precedes” and “prefer” within an already written continuum of evaluation and resemblance. Yet to do so decides what is precisely at issue in these stanzas: the compatibility of continuity and apocalyptic change, the possibility of figuring, in both senses, the end. If “precedes” means coming first in rank along such an evaluative scale, then the action of preceding is merely a spatial reflection of this already existent narrative, an event already mapped. If “precedes” is a temporal action that does not reflect such a written plan, then Mary Fairfax, like Cromwell, through her own side her fiery way divides.60 This is not simply a problem of performativity, the forceful act that grounds ultimate reference yet still requires a linguistic conditioning structure for legibility. Rather, in Marvell’s hands, comparison rests on the similarity of events’ occurrences, not a set of generic qualities that they happen to possess after they occur. As a result, “Upon Appleton House” examines not only what it means for comparisons to happen but also when it is that one thing becomes similar to another. It is this question—when does a symbol become identical to its referent, or a sign to its meaning?—

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that forms the crux of any attempt to apprehend revelation in a temporal present. When Nunappleton precedes all woods, streams, and gardens, in the same way that Mary precedes all virgins, what exactly is similar about the temporal event of preceding? It cannot just be the fact of precedence that grounds the comparison, for the stanza is hortatory. Yet the emulation that this stanza demands is of a very specific sort: Nunappleton should “precede” in the same fashion that Mary does. How is it, exactly, that “preceding” is subject to adverbial modification? By contending that “preceding” is an action that has a proper disposition attached to it, “Upon Appleton House” insists that there is more to it than just coming first, appearing first on a continuum of comparable instances: Winning does not produce similarity; how one wins does. Mary is certainly an epitome and symbol, but the manner in which that symbol occurs matters, and it is that manner of appearing that one must emulate—“as she all virgins precedes”—not the mere fact of her precedence as a mimetic model. When the speaker asks nature to “in your kind yourselves prefer,” it means both “in your own way” and “within your own category,” without the leaps and misuses of transposition, catachresis, and metaphor. It is this symbolic force, one that fundamentally transforms comparison, analogy, and metaphor into temporal forces as opposed to spatial catalogues of resemblance, that Marvell uses, promotes, and anatomizes. A similar image of self-mirroring categories occurs in “The Garden,” in the stanza purportedly about withdrawal into the solitary imagination: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas. 43–46

First, the ambiguity of “these” ends up thwarting the event of reversal, precisely because it is not clear whether the mind transcends its own constraining processes of resemblance creation, a set of future worlds and seas out there in the actual world, or the far other worlds and seas that are actually identical to those resemblances in the mind. In short, there is no way to determine what exactly is being reversed. As William

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Empson notes, this problem is only accentuated by the fact that each kind’s finding “straight its own resemblance” is itself ambiguous, and not just because of the indeterminacy of “straight.”61 When a kind finds its own resemblance, does it see itself or its alter ego? Is the kind an individual, reaffirming its participation in a general category or kind? Or is each kind itself a category, which in turn discovers its own resemblance? “The Garden,” then, asks us to consider what exactly is similar to similarity, to examine the moderating structure and purpose, if there is one, of this mania for resemblance and connection. In this respect, it mirrors those moments in “Upon Appleton House” when categories appear as something other than analogous containers for entities with similar qualities: when the elements of the estate—“fields, springs, bushes, flowers” (94.745)—precede their own kinds (94.745–52), as well as when Mary participates in the category of flowers (she seems one of them, but not like them) (38.301–4). As Lynn Enterline maintains, Marvell dreams of a world beyond correspondence and difference, beyond the logic of comparison, conceived either as constraining or reassuringly ordering.62 The transcendent creation of the resembling mind, in both “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House,” is not a substitutive or metonymic process, representing or expressing one thing with another. The ability to transcend these newly discovered resemblances entails the ability to escape the prevailing poetic logic of substitutive comparison that would turn all immanence into deferred imminence and all imminence into the tired, pre-understood script of typology. “Upon Appleton House” explores not just what utopias, idylls, and the Book of Revelation mean but how they mean, what it means for revealed meaning or a significant event to happen, finally.63 Thus, the final stanza emphasizes, as we have already noted, the temporality of symbols’ eventful force: But now the salmon-fishers moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. How tortoise-like, but not so slow, These rational amphibii go! Let’s in: for the dark hemisphere Does now like one of them appear. 97.769–76

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As with “precedes” and “prefers,” “appear” has a double significance, meaning both resemblance and happening. On the one hand, the hemisphere seems like these amphibii, a comparative and interpretive claim. On the other, just as the amphibii go, so too does the dark hemisphere arrive. They are similar in their happening, not in their qualitative appearance. After all, both receive the temporal adverb “now.”64 As we have seen already in the case of “precedes,” what sense does it make to compare arrivals? Do not all events arrive or happen in the same way? . . . Voilà. Marvell, of course, answers this question in the negative, insisting that attending to the nature of a force means acknowledging that all events are not merely species of the same spatial, consequentialist genus. This poem also suggests that we should be able to offer more in response to pivotal events in our world than bewildered surprise, which actually says more about the limitations of our prognosticating capacities than it does about how things actually happen. “Upon Appleton House” attempts to examine how revelation could ever end anything, how it escapes the sort of perpetuation of the past that we have seen elsewhere—in revolution, for example. In other words, what’s new about the apocalypse? Reading this final stanza as a matter of hermeneutic reversal means ultimately to moderate apocalypticism, making it a dialectical process, surely, but also a fundamentally safe and predictable one. If all arrivals are the same, then there is nothing particularly different, unnerving, surprising, or transformative about this one. We all understand the appeal, perhaps even the necessity, of a theory of revolution and the ideological oppositions that drive it. Marvell, however, is having none of it. His verse shows us that there is no secure, reserved position from which to perform such resistant critical reversals. As we saw in the Cromwell poems, there is no judgment that is not also an immanent, imaginative force, always at risk of accelerating the worst kinds of fanaticism and fascism as well as the most deplorably reactionary of nostalgic idylls. The deployment of symbols in “Upon Appleton House” matters because it presents revelatory force as something different from the world and its systems of evaluation, but also as something accessible within this very world. It presents the apocalyptic and transformative as true qualities of actions and events, and not merely as the reactionary evaluations of results—a reading of history as nothing more than that tedious tote board of winners and losers. It allows us, finally, to stop obsessing over tactics, strategies, purposes, and inevitable

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compromises and, instead, treat hope as something more than wishful thinking with its impotent imaginative projection into the past or future. That, then, is how poems end: not with an entropic whimper, catastrophic spectacle, or a utopian wish, but with the not so slow arrival of a very present hope.

Conclusion Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

So ending, it turns out, is much more difficult than it appears. Modern popular psychology to the contrary, closure and resolution are actually quite easy, insofar as they turn the world into a series of problems to be solved, riddles to be unraveled. Ending is difficult, for humans at least, because it entails stopping something without being recognized for doing so, either with the praise of one’s fellows or the spoils of victory in a strategic contest. The modern discomfort with endings can be encapsulated in one concept: the “postapocalyptic.” The postapocalyptic, no matter how horrific, promises us that the end is not really the end, that time marches on as before, that there is a day after, from which vantage we, true martyrs all, might reflect, at least, on all the destruction that we have wrought. The postapocalyptic reveals then our desire not for resolution but for infinite deferral itself, a desire fundamentally narrative in nature. There must be a moment where the narrative reflects on and provides a moral for the entire series of events that has come before. Even endings need closure. Lyrics, then, differ from narrative precisely around this distinction between ending and closure: narratives have or possess or show endings; lyrics end. As a result, their respective termini ultimately treat events as different types of phenomena. As Jonathan Culler’s account of the new lyric studies implies, narrative places events in a series, perpetuating the notion that the present is a fundamentally relational occasion, always threatening to slip away into the past or future.1 It is in this sense that narrative makes deferral 193

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and inaccessibility the basic character of all temporal designations. The present cannot be accessed because of its punctual fleetingness. The past recedes, from both the present and memory—a loss never recapturable. The future is always tantalizingly out of reach, a promise that might have effects now but that never occurs in its own right. The turtle of deferral, in short, all the way down. Yet the alternative to a history of endless disappointment and inbuilt lack is not merely the affirmation of an oppositional presence. The now of lyric cannot simply negate or oppose deferral with a positivist transparency or brute facticity. The oscillation, dialectical or hermetically cyclical, of coming to be and passing away that would ground such a retort seems precisely what Milton and Marvell hope to avoid, by battening on potential and force, respectively, as mechanisms for imagining apocalyptically present events. In this sense, neither potential nor force are responses at all, whether to the problem of absence, to the absence of consensus that motivates a system like philosophical hermeneutics, or to singular ruptures demanding equally singular responses not constrained by structure or rule. As we have seen, even sheer chance and surprise remain too bound up within a system of self-evident continuities to act as viable understandings of present events. It is still the same subject, inert even in its riven fragmentation, who is always acting surprised. All of these attempts at wrapping up and resolution, all of these closural elements that provide a capstone to termini, are not so much redundant additions to ends as they are betrayals of the novelty of endings. Unsurprisingly, this treachery is one more example of how we do not want what we claim to want—immanence, achieved in the moment of a revelatory face-to-face—but rather desire the very elaborate delays that we consistently lament.2 It is in this light that we should consider Milton’s adaptation of the sonnet tradition and Marvell’s rethinking of the object of praise in encomia—as assaults on a desire and a judgment always deferred. In a related vein, their approaches to pastoral attempt to conceive ends in the present without the backward-looking nostalgia of conclusion. They attempt to take seriously an apocalypse that is a real end and not merely the false terminus that still allows us to witness and witness for our successes and failures.3 Perhaps we should not be surprised that two poets centrally involved in revolutionary events, during a period that imagines transformation through the lens of a consistently disappointed apocalyptic anticipation, would obsess over the nature of ends. After all, an era that always anticipates the second coming right around the corner, that considers

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itself to be living in the end times, will consistently fall prey to disappointment and turn, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a sustained interrogation of the nature of conclusions. Yet as we well know, that interrogation often amounts to little more than an exercise in resentment, attempting to discern who betrayed the revolution with a stab in the back, or in a desired, even gleeful fatalism, reveling in the cynical knowledge of the impossibility of the truly new. The same developmental structure, I would argue, holds true in any era that considers itself uniquely poised on the fulcrum of history, paranoically and pridefully expecting a catastrophe just around the corner. So then, every era. The contemporary value of Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics lies in their presentation of alternatives to these dispiriting and entirely predictable models, however disquieting these alternatives’ utopian, anarchic, or even proto-fascistic undertones might be to modern ears. The apocalypse is not merely an eliminationist fantasy, one that we dismiss or celebrate in modernity as either a benighted, vengeful primitivism or an impending punishment for our enemies. These lyrics show it to be a means of thinking about hope and change in the present, without the deceptive promises of future deferral always undermining the substance of such considerations. Milton’s and Marvell’s poems have value for us, then, not because they give us ammunition in a political argument but because they emphasize the ontological stakes of all historico-political discussions. In treating transformation as an unproblematic phenomenon recognized after the fact, we have willingly allowed the event of a hopeful change to become almost permanently occulted. We embrace a concept of the event in which it is always too late to do anything about it. We choose only to learn from history—the most impotent tea of political engagement—not because we cannot do anything else with it but because our goal is to learn from the world, not to change it.4 Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics, then, are significant for modern readers, but especially those in the business of education, because they reconceive two of our most cherished political concepts, crisis and freedom, and their relationship to learning. What, if anything, do we learn from crisis? And can we learn to be free? In the former case, poetic events come to abrogate the tame understanding of change embedded within any account of kairotic reaction, essentially the idea that we are driven by the necessity of circumstance. A world populated by crises, punctual structural breakages that require response or solution, nonetheless produces a populace passively waiting for problems to occur so that it might finally spring into action.5 It is the world of resentful comic-book

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superheroes, one that thinks continuity a boring inertia and secretly longs for cataclysm so that another savior can swoop in and save the day. Almost needless to say, there is no saving this world because it demands, melodramatically and narcissistically, the imminence of its own destruction as the motor for all change. In the case of liberty, these lyrics insist that the quest for revolutionary change, emancipation, or even a positive autonomy ends up betraying freedom. Milton and Marvell present the literary as a means of imagining freedom outside the constraints of determination and reaction, and even outside the false choice of positive and negative freedom. Both of these models, ultimately, remain too bound to the law—as either an inescapable necessity or a tutelage to be overcome—to be of use for either poet. The apocalypse is an end to the law, which means that we should stop acceding to its continued necessity, the notion that the New Jerusalem amounts to nothing more than changing one’s representative in the legislature. It turns out, ultimately, that naïve, even immature fantasies of a radical freedom are much more difficult to sustain or even entertain than our customary condemnations of adolescent yearnings would suggest.

I The value of rethinking the nature of critical events in our present historical situation seems almost beyond remarking. The twenty-firstcentury academy is rife with discourses of crisis, rivaled only, perhaps, by the twenty-first-century economy.6 Yet rethinking crisis is not merely a means of resisting the type of shock doctrine that Naomi Klein has so persuasively anatomized.7 One does not need seventeenth-century poetry to reject the pervasive creation and exploitation of crises for political purposes. Instead, Milton and Marvell offer a more fundamental reconceptualization of what happens at a moment of transformation, rejecting the neurotic handwringing entailed in the concept of crisis. Their abrogation of tension, anxiety, conflict, and struggle ultimately defuses crisis as a valuable political tool. When we talk about change, in the twenty-first-century present, we essentially mean little more than a desperate, slavish reaction to problems. There’s very little novel, much less transformative, about responding to punctual crises that demand attention: That is, at best, responsibility; at worst, necessity. The possibility that we do not understand what a critical event is, that these recurrent crises are precisely manufactured to constrain

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novelty within a system of invented demand and productive response— demand and supply, question and answer, problem and solution—is precisely what cannot be thought. In other words, reactive response is not new, and we mistake adaptability and endurance for transformative change if we treat them as such.8 The attempt to think the event of change outside this reactionary straitjacket is what these lyrics offer. And it is precisely for this reason that they have far-reaching political value, despite their consistent disavowals of our cherished notions of political revolution. It turns out, paradoxically, that revolution is not nearly revolutionary enough. Modern discourses of crisis, including the “crisis in the humanities” or “the crisis of the university,” assume a model of events that may well preclude their solution. Events are either meaningful products of a given order and, therefore, necessary for this structure’s efficient functioning or they are radically exterior interruptions, by definition beyond a system’s ability to respond or anticipate. Milton and Marvell, however, offer a model of poetic events that does not imagine a crisis as a thing to be averted or resolved. The apocalypse is not a resolution of a problem, the tying off or explaining away of a disruption introduced earlier in a lyric. The apocalypse most definitely does not respond: It is not a dialogue or a discussion; it is an end. It is this possibility, of a real end paradoxically present under the names of potential and force, that Milton and Marvell employ. The repetitive singularities, these punctual crises with their demands for response, are precisely what neither end nor change. Yet neither Milton nor Marvell offers fidelity to contingent singularity as the solution to this causal and dialectical system of problemsleading-to-resolution, for the simple reason that a description of events as an unexpected eruption lets us off the ethical hook, allowing us to plead ignorance or chance, all with a glint of triumph in our eyes. Conceiving events as surprising says more about our lack of imagination and narcissism than it does about the nature of the new. A more nuanced account of what it means for something to happen—whether a crisis, a catastrophe, or a revolution—seems pivotal for a humanistic scholarship whose central concepts continue to revolve around the tensions and reversals—the internal events, in short—inherent in a subject’s agency and identity. Nowhere is this imperative clearer than in our self-serving reactions to spectacularly horrifying events, which do not even have the dignity of rising to the level of self-righteousness. For example, the now ubiquitous phrase “No one could have seen it coming” does not merely register a transparent attempt at exculpation,

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disingenuous surprise, or naïve despair at all the bad stuff that happens in the world. This phrase also encodes, however subtly, the triumph of a world-weary speaker who did everything she could to avert catastrophe but was overtaken by events. We should consider this phrase not as a gesture of regret and renewed pragmatic determination but rather as a fulfilled wish for disaster itself. Crisis is not an opportunity to be grasped or a catastrophe to be averted but a spectacular destruction to be adored because it always reveals the same thing: Human failures are failures of knowledge, not failures of will. It is not just the comforting involution of neurosis that makes such a model attractive. It is also the comforting embrace of epistemology and all of the reassuring warmth that it implies. There are no fundamental ontological conflicts, only those predicated on misunderstanding. Knowledge is power; discussion tends toward harmoniousness. Milton’s and Marvell’s verse shows that one does not need to be a Schmittian to find this position a dangerously Panglossian fiction of the discussing classes.9 We never really learn from crises, then, because they do little more than allow us to demonstrate our adaptability and responsibility and sometimes even the endurance of a martyr. Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalypticism arrays itself against this subject who wants nothing more than to match wits with events instead of actually experiencing a revelatory change, even if it would only be internal. As we have seen throughout this study, most of our visions of an apocalyptic end anticipate the ability to look back nostalgically, after the end, on the end. The temporally transcendent subject remains a knowing one even in its most abject of failures. In imagining itself as nothing more than the one supposed to know, it prevents itself from ever doing anything, of course, but also, paradoxically, from ever learning anything. Events in the immanent world are merely fodder for what this self already knows: its own transcendence of history’s transience. Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics hold out the possibility of finally experiencing events as something other than confirmation of this subject’s responsibility, power, or impotence. Instead, they hold out the possibility that this self might actually learn something after all.

II Apocalyptic lyrics teach us to be free. Such a claim undoubtedly sounds like an exaggerated claim for the value of literature. However, I am

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not contending that lyrics are essentially subversive or open-ended and therefore free. As Terry Eagleton notes, these are only the most fashionable hyperboles that would justify literature’s value or burnish its leftist credentials.10 If we are casting about for a justification for the value of poetry, then we have, of course, already lost. But that is only partly because of the loaded nature of the question in the current anglophone university climate. More importantly, justification is always retroactive, treating something’s value as securely and demonstrably past, bound to the present determinants and values that we all already know. As such, it will always issue in a fundamentally reactionary picture of what one is supposed to learn. Thus, Gilles Deleuze maintains that, as a pedagogical structure, recognition will always preserve the very values that we might hope to change: Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object. . . . For the new—in other words, difference—calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model. . . . By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a common sense and established values, for the attainment of current values (honours, wealth and power).11 Lyrics and apocalypses care about none of these established values. The freedom conferred by lyric does not reproduce all of the craven, desperate pleas for relevance that occupy university freshman-orientation events. When these lyrics speak of revelation, they do not mean the slowly dawning recognition of what has always been the case, whether human nature or God’s providence, but a radical transformation of our entire relationship to the world. Even “relationship” might not be right, as the apocalypse and lyric witness the end of mediation. In this respect, revelation is anathema to our customary understandings of slow, developmental learning. We do not “learn” a revelation so much as we witness it. Or rather, it buttonholes us. The reassuring developmental gradualism of modern university education has no truck with this model of an arresting immediacy, precisely because relation is king. Networked, synergistic, cooperative, interdisciplinary cross-pollination

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is the nature of the institution and, unsurprisingly, the nature of the learned freedom that it advances. Revelation disavows this entire interdependent structure, which is why it is unsurprising that denizens of the Enlightenment are always chalking apocalyptic sentiments up to revenge fantasies, despair, or proto-fascist disrespect for the Other. Regardless of the motive for these accusations, they result in fundamental denigrations of the apocalypse’s ability to teach freedom. As such, this broad cultural tendency will always misread works that attempt to figure liberation in antinomian or apocalyptic terms.12 And that is precisely what Marvell’s and Milton’s verse attempt: to reconceive freedom in terms of revelation. This verse then matters for a modern understanding of politics not because it offers us, at best, a rhetorical bludgeon or, at worst, triumphalist fantasies, but because it advocates a truly free change, not just in the world but to the world, such that governance and rule are no longer necessary. As Reinhart Koselleck argues, the mid-seventeenth century witnesses the decline of historico-allegorical treatments of the Book of Revelation.13 But that does not mean that the apocalypse just disappears. Rather, it transforms into a way of thinking about ends and novelty outside struggle, tension, constitutive contradiction, and all of those other sacred categories that so inform literary criticism as well as our basic notions of modern pedagogy. Apocalypticism ultimately becomes an avenue for imagining freedom outside a system of reactive determination and relation, including the liberal political and governmental structure replicated within an autonomous self. In short, it means the possibility of self-transformation no longer imagined as the piecemeal, self-defeating reformism of faculty senates and provincial legislatures. As we all know, winning an emancipatory struggle against masters turns freedom into, at best, an inert object finally achieved and, at worst, the repeated negation of constraint that requires the persistence of the very oppression it seeks to escape. For Milton at least, negative freedom of this stripe assumes, incorrectly, it turns out, that people intuitively act freely when shackles are removed.14 In good humanist arguments, it is usually at this point that positive freedom, defined as autonomy or self-determination, rides in on its white horse, arriving just in time to save us from reactive fear. Eagleton, for example, describes selfdetermination as the type of freedom that aesthetics heralds through its very form: “Human freedom is not a question of being bereft of determinants but of making them one’s own, turning them into the

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ground of one’s self-constitution. This is one reason why art has sometimes been considered a paradigm of free activity. To act autonomously is not to dispense with laws but to be a law unto oneself, which is what the word ‘autonomous’ means.”15 The white horse, it turns out, is liberating, but also eminently mature and pragmatic. To put a very fine point on it, though, what’s free about embracing limits as one’s own? Despite his critique of Stanley Fish’s essential conservatism, Eagleton’s freedom is equally bound to preserve the system of governance that we find at hand, within the liberal tradition: The mind, like the world, is organized according to legislative, executive, and judicial faculties. The goal is simply to become the agent making and administering the laws, to become self-determining and autonomous. In this account, then, positive freedom amounts to little more than a thinly veiled, internalized shadow play of electoral politics. Negative freedom, I would argue, gets something of a bad rap insofar as it at least attempts to end and escape from something, as opposed to pretending to transcend such mercenary reactivity with a positive autonomy. Positive freedom, in contrast, does not even pretend. It is the inveterate enemy of a novel, immediate liberty, depending as it does on the notion of mediated self-legislation for its model of freedom. Ultimately, even when he contends that form is itself fundamentally utopian, Eagleton transmutes a utopian possibility into an affirmation of necessity: For this aesthetic, then, works of art correspond to reality less in their content than in their form. They incarnate the essence of human freedom not by pleading for national independence or promoting the struggle against slavery, but by virtue of the curious kind of entities they are. One should perhaps add that as images of self-determination, they reflect less the actual than the possible. They are exemplary of what men and women could be like under transformed political circumstances. If they point beyond themselves, what they point to is a redeemed future. In this view, all art is utopian. . . . There is a logic to its self-production, so that it is not free of a certain necessity. But it is a necessity which it creates itself as it goes along.16 Even when evoking utopianism, Eagleton defines freedom as the creation and acceptance of limits, which is at least one reason why he characterizes psychoanalysis as liberating when it really teaches us to

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accept the necessity of repression: “But a certain kind of philosophical therapy can help to free us from this rigid sense of coercion, rather as psychoanalysis seeks to free us from various paralytic constraints, and rather as fiction, despite its limits, can disclose possibilities beyond the actual.”17 The actual, though, continues to govern, if not completely colonize the possible, as evidenced by the fact that Eagleton’s account of utopia amounts to little more than republicanism: Since every bit of the work is shaped by its general law or principle, with nothing contingent or extraneous, it forms a self-governing totality. Yet because this totality is simply the form taken by the relations of the work’s various components to each other, these components can be said to submit to a law which they fashion themselves. And this, for republican thinkers like Rousseau and Kant, is what defines the ideal social order. Politically speaking, the work of art resembles a republic more than it does an authoritarian state, which is one reason why it can figure as a critique of the ancien régimes for the emergent middle classes of late eighteenth-century Europe. Republicanism means collective self-determination, which is also true of the cooperative commonwealth known as a work of art.18 This is not utopia, but betrayed utopia. It is a utopia that still needs governance, not the New Jerusalem of God’s presence where there is no more need for kingship. It is a utopia that insists that people do not change, only institutions do, and not by very much. Eagleton’s account is worth sustained attention, not because it is characteristic of a measured, left-leaning, Marxist-inspired account of what utopia might entail, but rather because of its argumentative strategy. “Determination” is really the key concept here, particularly since Eagleton presents the absence of any determinations, “being bereft of any determinants” or “dispens[ing] with laws,” as an obvious logical impossibility. “Determinants” seems to mean “limits” in this self-evident phrase and we are supposed to find such antinomian fantasies eminently laughable. However, the apocalypse is precisely antinomian, or rather a-nomian. It is the end of law and its necessity. Eagleton and his fellow travelers are telling us that radical freedom is an immature fantasy that does not recognize the essential, immutable nature of human beings and their need for governance, in politics, in ethics, in epistemology, and in their very souls. This argument essentially amounts to the

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contention that people can never change, the very proposition that revelation—and pedagogy, for that matter—explicitly denies. In Deleuze’s estimation, here too we find a fetishization of quotidian, pragmatic recognitions that attempts to substitute for the possibilities entailed in thought: On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking? Like Bergson, we may well distinguish between two kinds of recognition— that of the cow in the presence of grass, and that of a man summoning his memories: the second can serve no more than the first as a model for what it means to think.19 Eagleton offers only such intuitions of the everyday as the ground for his argument for the necessity of constraint. Surely one cannot believe that there are no limits, or that one cannot conceive something without limits. As Deleuze notes, rather than being self-evident, such ripostes are merely a testament to the myopic lack of imagination of their bearers. They are also a stunningly succinct piece of evidence showing why freedom can never be learned in this fashion. Hectoring immature rubes about their fantasies of autogenesis might get one recognized as a serious, hardnosed teacher, but intuitive realism never taught anyone to be free. In addition to its antinomian propensities, the apocalypse throws a wrench into any pedagogical process built around self-conscious reflection or metacognition by insisting that there is no after. The apocalypse is the end of both history’s sequence of occurrences and its narration, which means that there is no space to reflect calmly on what it all means or meant. The mediated speaking of events, in which their causes announce themselves as disinterested or even partisan forces, is no longer necessary.20 The same holds true for a lyric form that emphasizes its own immediacy (which is not to be confused with the deluding immediacy of a speaking subject). Certainly, lyric uses the tools of mediated discourse, conversation, and communication. But the apocalypse puts an end to the functional utility of this tool. No more conversation is necessary, after all, to mediate revealed truth. Instead of responding to events as mediated calls for help or directive orders, to

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be obeyed or resisted, lyric presents events without reaction. These lyrics embrace the possibility of a presentation without representation— outside representation, not in dialectical reaction to it. These poems treat the future as immanently present, and not in the manner of a hollowedout, wishful pining (which essentially amounts to treating the future as a past already lost). Neither utopianism, idealism, nor idyllism, lyric then treats the future as a substantially present hope—because ends do happen in the present. From apocalyptic lyrics one will not garner a neat plan or political program, let alone the reassuring testimony of a martyr. But one will find in them a model of learning that embraces potential and force instead of empathic dialogue, conversation, and the mutual recognition of shared necessary relationships. It is not that the apocalypse is impatient but rather that it disavows the pieties about tutelage, apprenticeship, and maturation that dominate our understanding of learning. It is an assault on everything from the education college’s developmental stages and learning styles to the professorial preservation of slowness as a valuable reading principle. Development and determination always amount to the same basic betrayal: the transformation of the liberty of potential forces into nothing more than feasibility studies and pragmatic calculations. These might be the stuff of job applications and career planning, but they are definitely not the stuff of learning. To learn freedom, one must learn in the present to be in the present. And that means learning to act, not to react, respond, deliberate, plan, or even to know. Anything less is a betrayal of an ontological liberty to the twin enemies of epistemology and politics. Unlike teleological development, apocalyptic freedom does not get hung up on this endless wheel of preparation. Now is a live possibility in this present, conceived as either potential or force. And just as importantly, there is no mystery to its actualization, precisely because it has no truck with this tyrant. But that also means that it is difficult to teach in a university or poetic setting bent on decorum. It is not that one cannot learn to be free but rather that the way one does so is incompatible with emulation, fear, narrative, positive reinforcement, behavioralism, and most of the other pedagogical tools we have at our disposal. One learns freedom from the revelatory events of potential and force because these are the moments when one is neither planning nor interpreting and, therefore, not mired in the teleological project of self-preservation and edification. If we learn nothing else from these poems, obsessed as they are with apocalyptic change at the dawn of modern capitalism and the bour-

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geoisie, it is that events can be something more and better than that to which we meekly submit. The language of revolution has taught us that we must respond to our foes, whether royalists or bankers, with programmatic plans to solve problems, with arguments, or even with guns. Milton and Marvell show us that only an apocalypse, conceived as potential or force, allows for the transformation that we seek. Potential and force do not transmute automatically into an authoritarian fascism, but we should not mute their decidedly disturbing echoes, especially their assault on some of our most cherished liberal and Enlightenment values—openness, rational discussion, collaboration, respect for others, skepticism. Contrary to their self-aggrandizing claims, democracy, reason, and Enlightenment cannot protect us from tyranny, not because history is cyclically closed but rather because all of these historical phenomena misunderstand what an event is, treating it as a call for response, whether that response is a welcoming discussion or an imposing order. Lyric shows us that, even inside language, events do not speak and we thwart any power of the future in treating them as speech. When we imagine what happens now, there is no next, no redundant capstone to this present apocalyptic ending. Reflection, it turns out, is precisely the way to resist learning from history, to pretend that we are learning when we are really just going through the empty machinations of recognition. Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics insist that we learn in the present, from a present change and not a self-conscious rumination on necessary or contingent crises. They attempt to conceive what it is like to be free in the present, as opposed to imagining freedom as a prospective, deferred accomplishment. They promise, in short, that there might finally be a learning that is not redolent of accommodations to our own past weakness or preparation for our inevitable future disappointments. It is in this sense, then, that their lyrics finally make learning hopeful.

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Notes

Introduction: Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time, and the Possibility of Endings 1. For Kant’s contention that all remembrance, and even all history, occurs with an eye toward prophecy, see Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, rev. and ed. Hans H. Rudnick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), part 1, par. 35, p. 77: “All desire contains (doubtful or certain) anticipation of what is possible through foresight. Recalling the past (remembering) occurs only with the intention of making it possible to foresee the future; we look about us from the standpoint of the present in order to determine something, or to be prepared for something.” 2. For Carl Schmitt’s designation of this period as “the century of the English revolution,” see Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), 65. For Schmitt, Hamlet stages the conflict in this century between an emergent modernity and the entropic forces, like apocalypticism, of a barbarous religious fanaticism. 3. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 33. See also 8–9, 24–25, 28. 4. Ibid., 479. 5. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 9, 16. 6. Ibid., 8.

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Notes to pages 5–7

7. For the contention that, in Koselleck’s work, the purposiveness of historical consciousness is dependent on learning from defeat—i.e., one can ask what went wrong and engage in theoretical reflection—see Hayden White, preface to The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Kerstin Behnke (Stanford: Stanford Universtiy Press, 2002), xiii. This seems one of the central reasons for Koselleck’s dismissal of eschatology: In a final battle, there is no time for reflection. However, my contention is that, without the possibility of a real end, reflection allows for the abrogation of real stakes, making sincere reflection unnecessary because there is always the possibility of a do-over. 8. Pincus, 31. Pincus also contends that establishment and opposition Whigs have a fundamentally different understanding of the duration of the 1688 revolution: the former conceive it as a self-contained event in 1688–1689, the latter as a broader reformist process (21). For my purposes, this is significant because it also encodes two fundamentally different notions of causation: one in which a punctual problem demands or leads to resolution and one in which cause is a driving force that is unmotivated, or at least not motored by reaction. For the contention, which Pincus also cites (30), that revolutions erase their causes, see Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1983), 5: “When great revolutions are successful their causes cease to exist, and the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible.” De Tocqueville’s comment suggestively implies that revolutions are both unrecognizable and apocalyptic. 9. Koselleck, Futures Past, 18. 10. For an account of the complexity of the concept of crisis, see Koselleck, “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of ‘Crisis,’ ” in The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Presner, 240–43. 11. For the classical Derridean formulation of the future as radically alien, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5: “The future . . . is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.” For a more recent account of events as unfigurable rupture, one that still works in the Derridean tradition, see Richard Terdiman, “Can We Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126 (March 2011): 477. 12. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 192. 13. Ibid., 190: “Ontology demonstrates that the event is not, in the sense in which it is a theorem of ontology that all self-belonging contradicts a fundamental Idea of the multiple, the Idea which prescribes the foundational finitude of origin for all presentation.”

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14. Ibid., 178. 15. Daniel W. Smith, “Alain Badiou: Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 289. For the related argument that Badiou’s validation of the event risks falling over into fascism, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 62. Mohamed substitutes an “evental claim,” a demand or assertion that arises from an event, as a more skeptical, safer alternative to this dangerous praise for any sort of happening. I would argue that Badiou’s activist subject revels in claims just as much as it does in sites. 16. For the notion of an immanent break, see Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42–43. For the centrality of recognition to the Hegelian dialectic, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111–12. For an account of the limitations of recognition as a paradigm for thought, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135–36. 17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47. 18. Smith, “Jacques Derrida: Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence, and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” Essays on Deleuze, 285–86. Smith also notes that the Derridean system attends to impossibility, whereas Deleuze, focuses on possible real experience: “Derrida defines deconstruction as the experience of the possibility of the impossible—that is, the (impossible) possibility of the impossible ‘marks an absolute interruption in the regime of the possible.’ Such is the formula of transcendence. Deleuze, for his part, defines his philosophy as a search, not for the conditions of possible experience, but rather the conditions of real experience. Such is the formula of immanence” (281). 19. Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 21. 20. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 82. 21. Ibid., 70, 74. 22. Ibid., 73. See also Agamben’s insistence that messianism rejects dialectical processions: “What is decisive here is that the plērōma of kairoi is understood as the relation of each instant to the Messiah—each kairos is unmittelbar zu Gott [immediate to God], and is not just the final

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result of a process (as is the case with the model Marxism inherited from Hegel)” (76). 23. Badiou, Being and Event, 189–90. 24. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 173. 25. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 82–83. 26. For the contention that even immutable, transhistorical proverbs obey a sequential logic of before and after, see Koselleck, “Time and History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Kerstin Behnke, 109: “But on closer view, even these explanations always contain the inescapable indicator of a before and an after, without which a piece of epigrammatic wisdom or a psychological or sociological model of explanation become meaningless.” I argue here that once the apocalypse comes unmoored from allegory and analogy, it threatens precisely this sort of intuitive factuality and apperception, the necessity of the before and after. 27. For an account of the modern epistemic shift that limits representation’s ability to define things and knowledge, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994), 236–49. For Foucault, the flat table of reciprocally resembling representations acquires a depth and a secret, an unrepresented and unrepresentable element: “The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself. In order to find a way back to the point where the visible forms of beings are joined—the structure of living beings, the value of wealth, the syntax of words—we must direct our search towards that peak, that necessary but always inaccessible point, which drives down, beyond our gaze, towards the very heart of things. Withdrawn into their own essence, taking up their place at last within the force that animates them, within the organic structure that maintains them, within the genesis that has never ceased to produce them, things, in their fundamental truth, have now escaped from the space of the table” (239). Revelation may respond to the limitations of representation, but it adopts neither of these models. For Milton and Marvell, its truth is not a hidden secret ultimately shown, nor is it the interrelations of a secure matrix of resemblances. My study attempts to describe the occurrence of signs outside these traditional accounts of signification. 28. Throughout, all biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible: Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

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29. For an attempt to unify literature and literary theory around the concept of problem-solving strategies, see Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 175–76, 223. Eagleton acknowledges Henry James’s remark that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere” but like James imagines this as a positive endlessness (27). See James, preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Portable Henry James, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin, 2004), 471. 30. For the related argument that judgment is precisely what arrests change and novelty, see Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135: “If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment.” Deleuze contrasts judgment with combat in this essay, valorizing the latter as superior to judgment’s duplicity (133). My argument here is that Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalyptic lyrics attempt to escape the dynamics of combat and judgment. 31. John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:553. 32. G. W. F. Hegel, “Lyric Poetry,” in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2:1136. Hegel even goes so far as to maintain that no one returns to old songs and that therefore songs are always about and motivated by the present (1143–44). 33. Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (Jan 2008): 202. In evoking this formal distinction, I do not want to restage a debate between historicism and formalism, old or new. The seemingly endless debate between attention to history or attention to the poem (as if anyone claims not to be attending to the poem), or between content and form, misses the more basic question of whether there is really any difference at all between history and poem. Here, following Marjorie Levinson’s account of new formalism, I am arguing for an affirmative redefinition of what happens in a poem. See Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (March 2007): 561. For examples of the call for a return to literary form that depict this return as a reaction against historicism, see Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary Studies (Seattle: Short Studies from the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2003); Stanley Fish, “Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 1–12. 34. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 62–63. 35. Hegel, “Lyric Poetry,” 1112: “Its task, namely, is to liberate the spirit not from but in feeling.” 36. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 173. 37. Ibid., 172.

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Notes to pages 19–23

38. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 24–25. 39. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 180. 40. For Deleuze’s interest in the actual infinity of Leibniz, see Smith, “The New: The Conditions of the New,” Essays on Deleuze, 249: “The formula of the finite says that, in any analysis, one reaches a term where the analysis ends—a term such as the ‘atom.’ The formula of the indefinite says that, no matter how far one pushes the analysis, whatever term one arrives at can always be divided or analyzed further, indefinitely, ad infinitum— there is never a final or ultimate term. The formula of the actually infinite, however, is neither finite nor indefinite. On the one hand, it says that there are indeed ultimate or final terms that can no longer be divided—thus it is against the indefinite; but on the other hand, it says that these ultimate terms go to infinity—thus they are not atoms but rather terms that are ‘infinitely small,’ or as Newton would say ‘vanishing terms.’ . . . It would be nonsensical to speak of an infinitely small term that can be considered singularly. Rather, infinitely small terms can only exist in infinite collections. Spinoza’s simple bodies, in other words, are in fact multiplicities: the simplest of bodies exists as infinite sets of infinitely small terms, which means that they exist collectively and not distributively.” 41. For the claim that the end of the poem is not properly part of the poem, see Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113. For Agamben of course, the idea is to consider the end of the poem as a state of emergency, which is also an entirely typical, foundational state of affairs: In this respect, his poetics mirrors his discussion of the state of exception within the state. See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17–25, 168–73. For the contention that even a basic formal feature like rhyme is bound up in this problem of events, and that one can expect rhyme only retroactively, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48: “One cannot say that the second rhyme-word in Jonson’s couplet has fulfilled an expectation set up by the first because there is nothing in the lines to create such an expectation (always excepting the effect of the reader’s previous experience with English distichs). . . . The expectation arises only when the principle of rhyme has been perceived as such, and it thus takes at least one couplet (or rhyme) to create the expectation of another.” Smith’s account also suggestively points to the ways in which the apocalypse might itself be like rhyme: One can expect it only after it occurs. Outlining the nature of this apocalyptic occurrence inside Milton’s and Marvell’s verse, in the present, and not just after it occurs, is the central task of this study. 42. Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), line 193.

Notes to pages 26–30

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1. Apocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies 1. John Hall, The true cavalier examined by his principles and found not guilty of schism or sedition (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656), 109. For a discussion of Hall in the context of loyalism, see John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 5. 2. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83. See also Michael Komorowski, “Public Verse and Property: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ and the Ownership of Politics,” ELH 79, no. 2 (2012): 323. For the related claim that “An Horatian Ode” presents Charles’s execution as augury, analogous to the discovery of the bleeding head during construction of the Roman capitol, see Thomas M. Greene, “The Balance of Power in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ ” ELH 60, no. 2 (1993): 388. For the contention that Cromwell is the object of apocalyptic expectation already in 1650, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, “ ‘The Antichrist, the Babilon, the great dragon’: Oliver Cromwell, Andrew Marvell, and the Apocalyptic Monstrous,” in Monstrous Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 96. Although for different reasons, in Knoppers’s argument, as in Worden’s, Cromwell’s task remains unfulfilled in 1650. 3. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 58. 4. For an argument tying “Upon Appleton House” to these other occasional poems via the concept of epideictic rhetoric and Marvell’s experiments with it, see Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 51, 95–110. For the contention that each of the Cromwell poems is less about Cromwell than about the specific occasion that prompts it, see Joad Raymond, “A Cromwellian Centre?” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven W. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 154. 5. For a recent example, see Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-SeventeenthCentury England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 66. 6. Donald M. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 225. 7. For the depiction of Marvell’s understanding of power as a Machiavellian realism, see Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–5, 15–16. For the argument that “An Horatian Ode” praises the

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Notes to pages 30–31

structure of the modern state, see Komorowski, 322, 334–36. For the argument that Marvell exhibits a skeptical aversion to puritan providentialism, see Yoshinaka, 66. Yoshinaka, however, too hastily reduces all Protestant providentialism to the contention that might makes right (96). 8. For the contention that Marvell figures revolutionary political possibilities through an autonomous vitalist connectivity, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 39–69. 9. For a discussion of Marvell’s fraught relationship to political violence, and the distinction between glorifying terrorism and promoting martyrdom, see David Norbrook, “Marvell’s ‘Scaevola Scoto-Brittannus’ and the Ethics of Political Violence,” in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), 182. Contra Norbrook, I argue that Marvell praises and is interested in the execution of force, even if that includes terrorism, not in the declaration of a moral implied by martyrdom. Even arguments that acknowledge the disturbing praise for amoral force in the ode often subsume it under a more respectable goal. For example, see R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and Seventeenth Century Revolutions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), 130: “The result is a moral paradox: amorality in the service of one’s country can become a moral imperative.” 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241, 242. 11. Paul Hamilton, “Andrew Marvell and Romantic Patriotism,” in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 85. 12. For a nuanced account of why we should be suspicious of deliberative judgment’s effectiveness in this respect, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 34–35, 42, 130–31. For the classical account of totalitarianism as a movement and not a structure, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 389–92, 475–79. 13. Komorowski, 316, 321. 14. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 22, 32–34, 48. For a succinct explanation of Schmitt’s importance to the discussion of aesthetic politics, see Victoria Kahn, “Aesthetics as Critique: Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Samson Agonistes,” in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), 107–10. Kahn uses Benjamin’s account of baroque drama to explain Milton’s aesthetics. She also contends that Milton heaps suspicion

Notes to pages 31–34

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on purely aesthetic responses to the world and, in so doing, attempts to resist an aesthetic ideology that would reaffirm the status quo (104). My claim here is that Marvell is not so worried about passional aesthetic responses and considers them essential to any politics. 15. Tracy B. Strong, foreword to Political Theology, xxxii; Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), 62–65. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 58, 61. 17. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present, 34. Similarly, Mohamed takes issue with Badiou’s and Žižek’s notion of an “evental site” for similar reasons: Such ruptures threaten to justify any and all political decisions, so it is more prudent to construe occurrences as “evental claims” capable of skeptical evaluation (61). 18. For the argument that Deleuze participates in a long tradition of aesthetic politics in France, one that includes Hugo and André Malraux, in which style supersedes content as the vehicle for politics, see Tom Conley, “From Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze,” in A Deleuzian Century? ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 250. 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47. For a compelling account of the ways in which Badiou’s notion of rupturing events reintroduces transcendence into a purportedly immanent picture, see Daniel W. Smith, “Alain Badiou: Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 289, 310–11. 20. Even Chernaik’s analysis, which reads Marvell as a man of action, not contemplation, finds in this poem a dialectical weighing of historical events. See The Poet’s Time, 15–16. 21. Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2007), lines 54–64. All references to Marvell’s poetry are to this edition. Line numbers, and stanza numbers where appropriate, will appear in parentheses. 22. Yoshinaka, 121–22; Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 83. 23. T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 261, 253: “Many of them [supporters of the revolution] were gentlemen of the time who merely believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart; though they were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly foresee the tea-meeting

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and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men of education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to that spirit of the age which was coming to be the French spirit of the age. This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies latent or the forces active in Puritanism; the contest does great damage to the poetry of Milton; Marvell, an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan, and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by it” (253). 24. Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Marvell’s Ghost,” in Marvell and Liberty, 62, 66. 25. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 264. 26. Harold Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 36. Marvell’s reconceptualization of praise may be a response to this basic problem, but I will argue that even his poems before the regicide seem to exhibit an interest in forceful events, not their actors. For Friedman’s claim that Marvell attempts to form Cromwell into an integral whole that might escape this bind, see Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 274: “The worth of inner integrity and self-command is set against the worldly success of Augustus, and both are judged in the light of their incommensurability. In Marvell’s poem his great effort is to make Cromwell, by the powers of metaphor and imaginative sympathy, a figure of the union of the two kinds of success and the two kinds of integrity of purpose.” 27. Hirst and Zwicker, 142. 28. For the argument that Marvell experiments with the epideictic tradition, see Patterson, 51. Whereas Patterson focuses on Marvell’s reinvention of classical tradition, my focus is on the alteration of the means and concept of praise in his verse. 29. Komorowski, 328. 30. Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 81; Nigel Smith, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell, 268–70. See also Stocker, 71; Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1972), 238. For the contention that Cromwell stokes fears of dictatorial Caesarism by delaying his return from Ireland, see Worden, 90. For the centrality of Lucan to seventeenth-century conceptions of politics and republicanism, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–62. 31. Worden, 86. 32. Thad Bower, “Sacred Violence in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ ” Renascence 52 (1999): 79. For the related claim that Ramism describes justice as founded on distinctions and their preservation, see Hodge, 8, 12. 33. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 51. For Ulysses’ speech, see William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, in The Norton Shakespeare:

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Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 1.3.101–24. 34. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.121–24. 35. Ibid., 1.3.198–200. 36. Thomas M. Greene, 392, 382. For the contention that appeals to alchemical science in the ode are merely a strategy that allows Marvell to transcend politics, see Lyndy Abraham and Michael Wilding, “The Alchemical Republic: A Reading of ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,’” in Marvell and Liberty, 115: “Alchemy was a system of thought that crossed the parliamentarian-royalist divide. It was also an intellectual system that could raise the debate from difficult, immediate issues of politics, like the vocal opposition to the Irish campaign, the radical cries for redistributing wealth, the threats to property. A scientific metaphor is presented to transcend the contingent political.” For the competing claim, which Abraham and Wilding themselves quote, that for Puritan revolutionary reformers “transmutation was not only an instrument to achieve utopia (by generating infinite wealth, for instance), but a description of utopia, of the process of inner and outer reformation,” see J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649–1644,” Past and Present 135 (1992): 52. My argument here certainly hews closer to Mendelsohn’s reading of the political valences of alchemical transformation. 37. Thomas M. Greene, 390. 38. Ibid., 395. 39. I’m thinking here primarily of “f,” “s,” and “sh,” all voiceless fricatives. For an account of the complex interaction between emphasis and sonorous mimesis in “To His Coy Mistress,” see John Creaser, “ ‘As One Scap’t Strangely from Captivity’: Marvell and Existential Liberty,” Marvell and Liberty, 163. 40. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 40–72. 41. I wish to thank Nicholas von Maltzahn and Gabriella Gruder-Poni for alerting me to the importance of this passage during a panel hosted by the Andrew Marvell Society at the South-Central Renaissance Conference in March 2012. 42. For the argument that the ode’s comparison of Cromwell with natural forces does not necessarily justify his actions, because such a comparison also removes them from a providential order and relegates them to the realm of secondary causes, see Yoshinaka, 120. 43. For the contention that Marvell bows to historical necessity, see Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 18–19. For the characterization of Marvell’s metaphysical attitude as “active resignation,” in which one inverts fatal determinism into willed choice, see Hamilton, 82. 44. For the suggestion that Marvell’s verse, with its propensity for literalization, does not proceed by declaration at all but rather via hints and

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Notes to pages 45–50

attitudes, see Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Song: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 18, 176. 45. For the contrary argument that Marvell is obsessed with the problem of transgression and containment, see Donald M. Friedman, “Rude Heaps and Decent Order,” in Marvell and Liberty, 124. Friedman does suggestively acknowledge the ways in which “Upon Appleton House,” in its praise for Mary Fairfax, does not just order chaos, but also orders order (135), in a type of perverse redundancy. 46. For the argument that these lines affirm the necessity of a controlling architectural structure, see Hodge, 15. I argue that this passage is a description of the competing forces that make a building possible, not of the concrete structures that contain these forces. 47. For the contention that Marvell frequently violates parallelism with such grammatical chiasmi, see Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 222. 48. For the contrary argument that Marvell uses the categories of agency, constraint, and kairos in his poetic presentations of the political, see Nigel Smith, “The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell,” Renaissance and Reformation 25 (2001): 140: “Thus, his prosody may be said to embody the dilemmas and ambiguities that characterize his visions of political and personal liberty: the limits of free will or individual agency, and the force or frustration of determining external forces; the apparently pleasant exploitation of dire circumstances; the flight from what would generally be regarded as pleasant sociability or genuine commitment into refined isolation.” 49. Hamilton, 83–84, 79. 50. In this respect, we might recall John Spurr’s contention that Marvell is decidedly suspicious of doctrinal creeds. See John Spurr, “The poet’s religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 169: “Was it legitimate to require of Christians statements of their belief? Despairing of ever formulating an exact and unexceptional creed, Marvell denounced them all as ‘meer instruments of Equivocation or Persecution’: the wily would take them in their own sense and the scrupulous would fall foul of the penalties for following the dictates of conscience.” 51. For an argument against reading Marvell as a “company man,” one that relies primarily on the elegy upon Cromwell’s death, see William M. Russell, “Love, Chaos, and Marvell’s Elegy for Cromwell,” English Literary Renaissance 40 (2010): 273. For one version of the tendency against which Russell argues, see John Wallace, “Andrew Marvell and Cromwell’s Kingship: ‘The First Anniversary,’ ” English Literary History 30 (1963): 209: “He sold himself down the river as a poet and surrendered his independent critical mind first to a servitude under Cromwell, then to a slavery under the Whigs.” For an account of Marvell’s complex political responses to republicanism, latitudinarianism, “Puritan libertarianism,” and even the

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Levellers, see Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 108, 112–13, 129, 133, 138. For the argument that Marvell’s work, poetry and prose, shows how ideology is experienced at the level of a personal, individual life of affective attachments, see Hirst and Zwicker, 150. 52. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 181–82. 53. For the argument that such a literalization of figures is central to Marvell’s style, see Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 150, 158, 368n36; Colie, 79; Dominic Gavin, “ ‘The Garden’ and Marvell’s Literal Figures,” Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 224–52; Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 12. For a similar contention that characterizes such literalization as the Freudian uncanny, the symbol cannibalizing the thing symbolized, see Thomas M. Greene, 391. 54. Thomas P. Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 179. 55. Ibid., 183–85, 193, 197–98. Although I disagree with the consequence of Anderson’s argument, faith in the resistant potential of literary criticism, I do find compelling his nuanced account of the relationship between loss and literalization. 56. For a related version of this claim, see Colie, 4, 299. Colie, in contrast to my argument about interpretation as an immanent force, insists that Marvell’s performance of criticism within his verse is always a result of a mediated worldview (4). 57. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 211. See also Daniel W. Smith, “The New: The Conditions of the New,” in Essays on Deleuze, 252: “On the one hand, the real is supposed to resemble the possible that it realizes, which means that every thing is already given in the identity of the concept, and simply has existence or reality added to it when it is ‘realized.’ . . . On the other hand, since not every possible is realized, the process of realization involves a limitation or exclusion by which some possibilities are thwarted, while others ‘pass’ into the real. With the concept of possibility, in short, everything is already given.” 58. See Smith, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell, 289. 59. For the argument that Marvell is not really interested in republicanism and has little faith in the ability of parliaments to protect liberty of conscience, either before or after the Restoration, see Worden, 148–51. 60. For a discussion of Carl Schmitt’s description of the similarities between neutral aesthetics and the presumed neutrality of procedural liberalism, see Kahn, 107. For Schmitt’s emphasis on the centrality of the personal to all sovereign decisions, see Schmitt, Political Theology, 32–34, 48. For his reading of Hamlet as the contest between barbarism and such neutral forces, see Hamlet or Hecuba, 62–65.

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61. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 5, 146–49. 62. Marvell, “To a Friend in Persia,” in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 2:309. 63. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 149. 64. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), book 2, lines 466–70, 473–80. All references to Milton’s poetry, other than Paradise Lost, are from this edition. Book and line numbers will appear in parentheses. 65. Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 117. One might argue that Milton identifies force and reason only in a prelapsarian world whereas Marvell is more optimistic about their compatibility after the fall. The competing accounts of Eve’s creation in Paradise Lost would serve as an example of this prelapsarian identification. See Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007): Eve claims that “thy gentle hand / Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see / How beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (4.488–91); Adam, that “she what was Honour knew, / And with obsequious Majestie approv’d / My pleaded reason” (8.508–10). Instead of reading these as competing perspectives, I suggest that we read them as noncontradictory accounts of an event that merges force and reason. In Eden, force is reason and reason is a force. 66. Hirst and Zwicker note that Milton certainly read “An Horatian Ode” and that the opening lines of Milton’s sonnet echo it. See Hirst and Zwicker, 171. 67. Kahn, 119. 68. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 54. 69. Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 134–35. For the argument that Marvell suspends judgment because he is ecumenically open to the views of others, see Yoshinaka, 56. I would contend that Marvell does not just suspend but disavows judgment in its entirety. 70. Smith, “Jacques Derrida: Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in Essays on Deleuze, 285–86. 71. Hirst and Zwicker, 143. 72. See Patterson, 69. 73. Ibid., 80. 74. For the concept of reverse causality that informs but is not quite identical to my argument here, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A

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Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 431. 75. For the related contention that Marvell, unlike Milton, can conceive of a peaceful apocalypse, see Patterson, 87.

2. Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets 1. For Henri Bergson’s argument that the category of choice, within the free will–determinism debate, makes a present, free action impossible, see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 182–83: “You will see that the argument of the determinists assumes this puerile form: ‘The act, once performed, is performed,’ and that their opponents reply: ‘The act, before being performed, was not yet performed.’ In other words, the question of freedom remains after this discussion exactly where it was to begin with; nor must we be surprised at it, since freedom must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been.” For a succinct account of Bergson’s model of immanent freedom, conceived in opposition to choice, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 147. 2. For the argument that Paradise Lost presents a possible present fulfillment that counters the Petrarchan tendency to treat desire as an always deferred consummation or irremediable lack, à la Lacan, see Ilona Bell, “Milton’s Dialogue with Petrarch,” Milton Studies 28 (1992): 95. 3. For the contention that Milton’s world is populated with distinct little ends or miniature apocalypses, as opposed to transitional states, see Steven C. Dillon, “Milton and the Poetics of Extremism,” Milton Studies 25 (1989): 271. 4. For the contention that apocalyptic hope is a present phenomenon, effected proleptically by the Christ event, see William Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13: “The Christ event as apocalyptic model indicates that apocalypse comes about as the in-breaking into history of a radically other order of existence, the event of the divine, and therewith the revelation of the final truth and judgment that otherwise eludes humankind in history, throughout which we are confined within an incomplete and uncompletable succession of temporally delimited, fragmentary moments. This event can be conceived of as imminent in every moment and as immanent to human experience as such, so far as it is turned toward its

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own ultimate possibilities.” In this respect, Franke quotes John 5:25: “Verely, verely I say unto you, the houre shal come, and now is, when the dead shal heare the voyce of the Sone of God: and they that heare it shal live.” Throughout, all biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible: Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 5. I am indebted to comments from Daniel Shore, in response to a paper delivered at the 2012 International Milton Symposium, for remarking the pivotal role that the temporality of hope plays in this project. 6. For the contention that Petrarch is obsessed with temporality, see Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 22. Greene argues that Petrarch organizes the Canzoniere to produce a sensation of temporal process, via an at-least implied alternation of tenses, in contrast to prior lyric anthologies that are merely a collection of fragments (42). However, Greene also maintains that individual poems remain additive— they can be shifted or reordered throughout—instead of adopting a narrative logic (49). 7. Philip Sidney, Sonnet 100, Astrophil and Stella: The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 231, lines 9–14. 8. For the argument that Sidney’s attempt to anatomize Astrophil’s character results not in subversion but in inertia and, ultimately, the impossibility of change and resolution, see Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism, 102: “In a sense, the moral and characterological dilemma of Astrophil and Stella is exactly that of lyric fiction’s nominative mode, which creates a strong character within a certain emotional setting but shows difficulty in moving him or her about for a dynamic resolution. The notions of selfhood that keep such speakers at the epistemological and political centers of these works implicitly require that the fictions must draw whatever conclusions they have out of those framed, isolated selves.” For the classic formulation of the resistant potential of dialectical interiority in Shakespeare’s sonnets, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 22. For a compelling critique of Fineman’s reading as a perpetuation of the nineteenth century’s bourgeois and romantic conception of convention and its subversion, see Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20, 28, 30, 43. 9. For an account of the necessary link between a psychoanalytic subject built around lack and fascism, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For my discussion of the limitations of lack for conceiving devotional

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desire, see Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 3–22, 190–96. 10. For the argument that Milton eschews the type of sonnet sequencing that would imply narrative, as well as significant turns inside the poem’s repeated form, see R. S. White, “Survival and Change: The Sonnet from Milton to the Romantics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171: “The technical contribution he made through enjambment was to make the sonnet into a single statement rather than a series of transitions made up of quatrains, octaves and couplets: ‘For Milton was already writing sonnets that, if not ignoring the volta entirely, rushed through that point to the end of the poem.’ Milton also loosened the sonnet from its place in a fictional sequence, paving the way for treating it as a personal meditation on a significant occasion rather than advancing a narrative.” Here, White quotes Phillis Levin’s introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, ed. eadem (New York: Penguin, 2001), lxiii. For an evaluation similar to Levin’s, see F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 100–1. Prince, however, chalks this violation of the volta up to Milton’s nonnative Italian. 11. For influential versions of the argument that sonnet sequences double the social and political anxieties of patronage relationships, see Arthur F. Marotti, “ ‘Love Is Not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” English Literary History 49 (1982): 396–428; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,” SEL 24 (1984): 53–68. For the argument, from a queer theoretical perspective, that Shakespeare’s sonnets encode an eroticized social and not just sexual desire between men, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 28–48. 12. For the argument that Milton’s work is never esoteric but always exoteric and essentially opposed to secrecy, an argument that informs mine throughout, see James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1–29, 67, 159–60. 13. For a brief survey of Milton’s predecessors in the tradition of occasional sonnets, on the continent and in England, see Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 8–11, 17: “Between 1642 and 1660 he wrote all but the earliest of his sonnets, each of which presents his intense engagement with a real person, event, or issue important during this period of reformation. As a sonneteer, he fell heir to a single-sonnet tradition rich in humorous, occasional, satiric, heroic, friendly, and elegiac sonnets, and to a sequence tradition which had broadened its content to include the ideals

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of civilization. Thus literary tradition and social upheaval converged to inspire his recruiting the form, which had previously flourished in court, into the service of godly civitas” (17). 14. Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 7. See also James G. Mengert, “The Resistance of Milton’s Sonnets,” English Literary Renaissance 11 (winter 1981): 93. 15. Sonnet 18, “On the Late Massacher in Piemont,” in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), lines 1–5. All references to Milton’s poetry, other than Paradise Lost, are from this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. When numbering Milton’s sonnets, I have followed the modern chronological order that includes the sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and Skinner. 16. Janel Mueller, “The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in Milton’s Sonnets,” in “Politics and Poetic Value,” ed. Robert von Hallberg, special issue, Critical Inquiry 13 (spring 1987): 477. For the related contention that individual sonnets highlight their occasional nature with temporal markers, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 128–29: “Looked at individually, the sonnets are isolated occasional poems which repeatedly signal their completeness and individuality by internal references to their specific times of composition; not one is lacking its day, hour, now, then, while, or when.” For the similar contention that Milton’s sonnets are obsessed with temporality, see Jennifer Lewin, “Milton’s Sonnets and the Sonnet Tradition,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose, ed. Peter C. Herman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007), 80, 87; Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, “Pursuing the Subtle Thief: Teaching Meter in Milton’s Short Poems,” idem, 92, 96. For the argument that sonnets end up challenging any simple version of lyric immediacy, see Heather Dubrow, “The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, 36–38. Dubrow also maintains, though, that sonnets multiply variations on the nature of presence: “Because it packs so many degrees and types of immediacy and distance within its compact space, I would suggest that the sonnet even more than other forms invites us to reject the binary of immediacy and distance in favour of a model that traces various degrees of what we might term here-ness. Just as some languages, such as Turkish, have different words for ‘right here’, ‘a little further away’, ‘still further’ and so on, so the sonnet often includes degrees of our here-ness, and indeed often expresses meaning in part through the movement among them” (38). 17. For the argument, already cited in the introduction, that the final line of the poem is not part of the poem precisely because it no longer contains the possibility of enjambment with a succeeding line, see Giorgio

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Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113. 18. Nardo, 158–59. 19. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965), 127–28. For a similar account of the Italian sonnet’s deliberation and the English sonnet’s aphoristic wit, see John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), 3, 14, 17–19. 20. In this respect, we should also recall that Fussell describes the Petrarchan sonnet as a structure of sexual release. See Fussell, 121: “We may even suggest that one of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan sonnet structure is the pattern of sexual pressure and release. Surely no sonnet succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analogous to the general kinds of ‘release’ with which the reader’s muscles and nervous system are familiar.” 21. For the contention that metacommentary is a resolving feature because it turns poems into artifacts, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 150. 22. For the contention that the English sonnet form enables more elaborate deliberation than the Italian does, see Fuller, 14. 23. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 98. It might also be worth remarking that Bergson distinguishes between narrative and creative art: “Bergson does not disguise the fact that the story-telling aspect appears to him to be inferior in art; the novel would above all be story-telling, music on the contrary, emotion and creation” (135n36). 24. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in SeventeenthCentury Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 33–34. 25. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 73. 26. Among the Italian sonnets, 3, 4, and 5 conclude with rhyming couplets. 27. For the Cromwell sonnet, I have followed the text from the Trinity MS included in Revard’s edition instead of the version from Letters of State (1694). 28. William McCarthy, “The Continuity of Milton’s Sonnets,” PMLA 92 (Jan 1977): 102. For the related argument that, although the Cromwell sonnet is written for a specific occasion, there is no real action because there is no main verb in the octave, see Kurt Schlueter, “Milton’s Heroical Sonnets,” SEL 35 (1995): 130. 29. William R. Parker, “The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,” PMLA 73 (June 1958): 200.

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30. Victoria Silver, “ ‘Lycidas’ and the Grammar of Revelation,” English Literary History 58 (1991): 785, 796–98. 31. For the argument that this sonnet consistently conflates distinctions, see Stephen Booth and Jordan Flyer, “Milton’s ‘How Soon Hath Time’: A Colossus in a Cherrystone,” English Literary History 49 (summer 1982): 458. Booth and Flyer insist, however, that “yet” cannot mean “still” at the volta: “In line 9, Yet means ‘however’—and nothing else; the context dictates it: Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow. However, the word Yet does appear here in a general context that takes identity from the pertinence of all its elements to the idea of time” (463). Booth and Flyer justify this claim via the “idiomatic implications” of the line’s syntax: “It is probably unnecessary to explain the means by which the imperative potential of Yet be it is blocked. The idiomatic implications of the words’ positions (Yet be it, not ‘Be it yet’) invite one to take Yet to mean however; and the syntax (or . . . or), and the presence and nature of the independent clause line 9 introduces confirm the presumption that Yet be it opens a subjunctive construction (‘However, whether it be less or more or . . .’), and not an imploring imperative (‘Let it still be,’ ‘May it continue to be’)” (467n5). I do not think that the idiomatic reading of this phrase is as obvious, or that explanation is as unnecessary, as Booth and Flyer maintain. 32. For the argument that the Petrarchan tradition exhibits an obsession with differentiation and “diacritical desire,” see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 11–12, 54. 33. For the related claim that the Cromwell sonnet renders the solution to its own problems in immanent terms, as opposed to the reversal implied by the dialectic, see Warley, 180: “Milton places the imaginary position which will resolve social problems within the social problems themselves, rather than situating resolution in a place apart.” The problem, then, doesn’t invert into the solution: The solution is positively immanent within the problem. 34. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31. 35. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 24–25. 36. Ibid., 26, 135. 37. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397: “Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the

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mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next.” 38. James, 229. 39. An Apology against a Pamphlet, in The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:937–38. I am indebted to Jason Kerr for alerting me to the importance of this passage for my argument. 40. Ibid., 935. 41. For an account of seventeenth-century responses to this problem, from Spinoza’s rejection of a faculty of judgment distinct from perception to Hobbes’s equation of thought and motion, see James, 150, 203–5, 282–84. 42. For the argument that “if I have grace to use it so” deftly conflates faith and works, as part of the sonnet’s grand incorporative fantasy, see Booth and Flyer, 455. 43. See Margaret Thickstun, “Resisting Patience in Milton’s Sonnet 19,” Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 172, 177–78. 44. Richard Crashaw, “The Flaming Heart,” in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1970), l. 73–74. Subsequent references to Crashaw’s poetry are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. 45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 9.30, 31–33. All references to Paradise Lost are from this edition and include book and line numbers in parentheses. 46. Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 22–23. 47. Ibid., 33–34. 48. A Second Defense of the English People, trans. Helen North, in The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 4.1:652. On this issue, see also Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2001), 349–57. 49. See Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 13–41; Vanita Neelakanta’s “Paradise Regain’d in the Closet: Private Piety in Milton’s Brief Epic,” in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton, ed. Mimi Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 146–72. 50. Carol Barton, “ ‘They Also Perform the Duties of a Servant Who Only Remain Erect on Their Feet in a Specified Place in Readiness to Receive Orders’: The Dynamics of Stasis in Sonnet XIX (‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent’),” Milton Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1998): 113. See also

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Thickstun, 172: “Milton the writer may understand Patience’s doctrine, but Milton the speaker does not acquiesce”; David Urban, “The Talented Mr. Milton: A Parabolic Laborer and His Identity,” Milton Studies 43 (2004): 15–16. 51. Smith, Poetic Closure, 197. Smith does, however, in contrast to my argument here, maintain that parataxis necessarily levels ontological distinctions (106). 52. Ibid., 99. 53. Tobias Gregory, “Murmur and Reply: Rereading Milton’s Sonnet 19,” Milton Studies 51 (2010): 30. 54. See Parker, “The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,” 196– 200; Maurice Kelley, “Milton’s Later Sonnets and the Cambridge Manuscript,” Modern Philology 54 (August 1956): 20–25. 55. Thickstun, 177. 56. Fish, How Milton Works, 354–57. Fish maintains that Paradise Regained rejects any dramatic understanding of the world as “a succession of routine events punctuated now and then (and only for exceptional people) by moments of crucial choice” (354–55). 57. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 431. 58. See Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist, 149–89. 59. For brief versions of this claim, see Bruce Boehrer, “Reading for Detail: Four Approaches to Sonnet 19,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose, 168; Sagaser, 91. 60. See Thickstun, 172; Urban, 14; Nardo, 147–48. 61. See Silver, 787: “If one retains the lyric mode of the octave, then the speaker is heard to murmur, ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied’; but once one enters the narrated dialogue of the sestet, that murmur becomes the ironic response of God, who chides the speaker for his faithlessness even as Patience now succeeds in preventing a murmur otherwise articulate.” 62. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985), 9. 63. Fish, How Milton Works, 524. This passage seems the root of Fish’s contention, in his work on politics and university education, that conceived frames of reference determine the limits of intelligibility prior to any universal evidentiary procedures. See Fish, “Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of Our Warrior Intellectuals,” Harper’s (July 2002): 33–40; Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 64. For the psychoanalytic elaboration of the death drive as a yearning for inanimate stasis, see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). 65. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97. When Deleuze maintains that virtuality amounts to a world in which “nothing happens,” he is essentially skewer-

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ing the logic of resemblance entailed in a theory of realization. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 158: “Nothing happens, and yet everything changes, because becoming continues to pass through its components again and to restore the event that is actualized elsewhere, at a different moment.” See also Adorno’s account of art and redemption in Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6: “In their relation to empirical reality, artworks recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other.” 66. For the argument that Astrophil and Stella and English Petrarchism in general oscillate between assertions of rhetorical power and failure, see Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 106–7. Although these oscillations are incompatible with my argument here, Dubrow’s account might explain why Milton chooses the sonnet form to think about passivity and potential. 67. For the argument that apocalypticism is a type of unconditioned communicative openness, see Franke, 55: “In effect, what I am suggesting is that apocalyptic revelation is essentially communicative reason—that is, reason as the power of unrestricted communication.” Despite this contention, Franke continues to insist that language can perform only an inadequate mediating function: There is ultimately no unrestricted meeting of minds, only the faith that they will meet (80). 68. Smith, Poetic Closure, 123–14, 150. Smith also notes that this conclusion is an interruption: “The poem concludes, then, with the interruption of the dream, but, more significantly, with the sober return to the stable ordinariness of daytime reality, and to the permanence and absoluteness of personal night” (126). 69. For a nuanced and more positive account of the value of vulnerability as an ethical category, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the PostSecular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 58–61. 70. For the argument that Samson Agonistes is about the nature of thinking, see Radzinowicz, 56. Radzinowicz, however, describes thought as a dialectical development toward resolution: “Synthesis and tempering, the knowledge of good through the experience of good and evil, this is the meaning for Samson of the laboring of his mind, to have arrived at the place where antitheses are resolved” (62). 71. Paradise Lost frequently uses “event” to mean “outcome,” particularly in the context of the Fall: “event perverse!” (9.405); “but I feel / Farr otherwise th’ event, not Death, but Life / Augmented” (9.983–85). Perhaps only fallen humans imagine events as successes or failures.

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72. For the claim that an even number of feet in English results in a monotonous meter, see Fussell, 131. 73. White, 171. 74. Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94. 75. For my more extensive argument about how the entirety of Samson Agonistes erases the possibility of events outside poetry, see Ryan Netzley, “Reading Events: The Value of Reading and the Possibilities of Political Action and Criticism in Samson Agonistes,” Criticism 48 (fall 2006): 509–33. 76. Anthony Low, “Action and Suffering: Samson Agonistes and the Irony of Alternatives,” PMLA 84 (May 1969): 517.

3. What Happens in Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy 1. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 225. 2. John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:553. 3. For an example of this reading, see Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Faber and Faber, 1984), 318. 4. For Deleuze’s account of this reverse engineering, which we have already discussed in the preceding chapter, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 98. For the argument that revelation means “pure potency,” see William Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 52. Franke’s concept of apocalyptic openness, however, ultimately invites the intervention of a transcendent authority, an invitation at odds with the suspicion of authoritative speakers in Lycidas: “Of course, what I am invoking here is not any authoritatively dictated, positive protocols, but simply the openness to a higher authority than our own” (86). 5. Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 87. 6. See James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1–29, 67, 159–60. 7. For the argument that pastoral is a genre constituted, from its inception, as self-conscious meditation on its own self-contradictions, its own metaphorizing and anti-pastoral processes, see Judith Haber, Pastoral and

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the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–11. Although I tend to agree with Haber that new-historicist readings of pastoral devolve into ideology critique (3), my argument here is that contradiction and the dialectical tension it implies mistake pastoral poetry’s interest in a potentiality outside of a dialectic of actual and potential, a potentiality that is, ultimately, the engine of novelty. 8. For the contention that poetry in itself is only potential, a possible utterance, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 16–17. Smith’s account of poetic potential, however, rests upon her insistence that poems are ahistorical and do not really occur until they are enacted or performed (15–17): “Every utterance, in other words, occurs within a specific context of circumstances and motives. When a poem occurs, however, it is unmoored from such a context, isolated from the circumstances and motives that might have occasioned it” (15). My argument throughout this chapter is that Milton challenges precisely this presupposition: that poems and potentiality do not occur. 9. For an account of seventeenth-century philosophy’s anti-Aristotelian assault on final causes that serves as the backdrop for my argument, see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 67–74. 10. As in preceding chapters, Agamben’s argument that the final line of the poem is not part of the poem informs my argument. See Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113. 11. Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), lines 37–38. All references to Milton’s poetry, other than Paradise Lost, are from this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. 12. For the argument that Milton abandons any traditionally reactive conversion experience, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: SelfRepresentation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 54: “Nowhere in his works does Milton acknowledge the need for a conversion experience. The idea of a conversion experience is not resituated in terms of the reader; it is simply absent from Milton’s vocabulary. The theological and Puritan poet is in this way, paradoxically, not a religious poet; he lacked the conviction of sin that is both a prerequisite to and a component of conversion.” I argue that this is not a prideful personal idiosyncrasy but a concerted attempt to embrace an affirmative understanding of apocalyptic events, including that of conversion. 13. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 175. Kermode also

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describes the modern notion of crisis as a transition from naïve imminence to the installation of immanent ends: “And although for us the End has perhaps lost its naïve imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent” (6). Of course, Kermode’s argument revolves around fiction, not verse. My argument here is that a lyric that tends toward immediacy enacts an even more radical rejection of imminence in favor of immanence. 14. I have included the emended reading from the Trinity manuscript and the poem’s first publication in Justa Edovardo King naufrago (1638) because I think “little” is more than just an example of a dismissible selfcensorship in the manuscript, prompted by the publication demands of the 1638 volume. In addition to Revard’s textual note, see The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 98, 105n56. I am indebted to Thomas Corns for suggesting that I pay more careful attention to these textual variants. 15. John Leonard, “ ‘Trembling Ears’: The Historical Moment of Lycidas,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991): 79; Flannagan, Riverside Milton, 98, 105n56. See also Stella P. Revard, “Lycidas,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), 255. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 212. 17. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 24. 18. Ibid., 25. 19. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 192; Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42–43. For a Derridean account of events as unfigurable rupture, see Richard Terdiman, “Can We Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126 (March 2011): 477. For the classic Derridean passage, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5: “The future . . . is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.” 20. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 264. For a similar identification of the engine and the Word, but based on parallels with Francis Bacon, see Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 137. For the argument that the engine is not the Word but the medium for transmitting it, the printing press, see James Kelley and Catherine Bray, “The Keys to Milton’s ‘Two-Handed Engine’ in Lycidas (1637),”

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Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 124. For the argument that the two-handed engine is the winnowing fan that separates wheat from chaff, which explains why there is both smiting and a hopeful conclusion to the poem, see David Sansone, “How Milton Reads: Scripture, the Classics, and That Two-Handed Engine,” Modern Philology 103 (2006): 341. 21. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 268. 22. For my discussion of prolepsis in Paradise Regained and the early devotional poetry, see Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 149–89. 23. Edward Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), 36. 24. Ibid., 33. 25. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 74–75. 26. Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), book 1, chap. 33, 6:627. 27. Ibid., book 1, chapter 27, 6:535–36, 539. 28. For an account of a pure or present sign that informs my argument here, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77; Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22: “We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content. . . . We never learn by doing like someone, but by doing with someone, who has no resemblance to what we are learning.” 29. Tayler, 55–56. 30. Jason A. Kerr, “Prophesying the Bible: The Improvisation of Scripture in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2013): 28. 31. See Tayler, 48–50; Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 55–56; Lieb, The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1989), 56. Joseph Wittreich makes a similar claim and remarks Milton’s frequent use of this formula in his other works. See Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1979), 138–40. 32. For my account of similar double citational effects in the pinnacle scene of Paradise Regained, and the resistance to interpretation that they produce, see “How Reading Works: Hermeneutics and Reading Practice in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 49 (2009): 146–66. 33. Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). In the Authorized Version and most modern Bibles, this passage is numbered as verse 6. All citations

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of biblical passages in English are from this translation and edition. Book, chapter, and verse will appear in parentheses. 34. The Greek (transliterated) reads: “Hou hē phōnē tēn gēn esaleusen tote, nun epēggeltai legōn, Eti hapax egō seisō ou monon tēn gēn alla kai ton ouranon. To de eti hapax dēloi [tēn] tōn saleuomenōn metathesin hōs pepoiēmenōn, hina meinē ta mē saleuomena.” See The Greek New Testament, ed. Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, and Allen Wikgren in cooperation with the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Münster, Westphalia, 3rd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1983). I am indebted to Yasuko Taoka for her help in parsing this passage. 35. For the contention that Lycidas sums up the 1638 volume but emphasizes its own novelty and modernity in the 1645 Poems, see Christopher Kendrick, “Anachronism in Lycidas,” English Literary History 64 (1997): 19–20. For the contrary argument that the pastoral elegy is an outmoded genre in 1637, particularly in comparison with the other poems in Justa Edovardo King naufrago, see Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 90. 36. For a brief account of the noncausal nature of occasion and its association with free, nonhuman choice in Margaret Cavendish’s vitalism, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 190–92, 205. 37. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 334–35. For the contrary argument that prophecy means “‘testimony’ or participation in a debate to be judged from its results,” see Martin, 126. For the argument that history is contingency and that prophecy amounts to a causal certainty, see John C. Ulreich Jr., “ ‘And by Occasion Foretells’: The Prophetic Voice in Lycidas,” Milton Studies 18 (1983): 21: “What Milton foretells ‘by occasion’ is no accident of history but its cause, the incarnate Word transforming the world, as the word of the poet transforms the occasion of Edward King’s death into a prophetic moment.” My argument here follows Luther in insisting on the incompatibility of prophecy and certainty. 38. For Johnson’s famous indictment, see Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon, 1967), par. 180–81, 1:163: “It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of ‘rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel.’ ‘Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.’ In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting:

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whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.” See also, E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), 80. 39. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 281. 40. Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008), 100, 92. I am indebted to Jason Kerr for suggesting the importance of this problem for my reading of Lycidas. For the claim that the 1645 edition of Poems is an ecumenical humanist, not a radical Puritan document, see Martin 117. 41. Cummings, 63. 42. J. Martin Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Backwards in “Lycidas” (Victoria: University of Victoria, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 1983), 70. For a related version of this argument that targets critics, such as M. H. Abrams, who read the poem as a sequence of dramatic voices, see Robert Martin Adams, “Bounding ‘Lycidas,’ ” Hudson Review 23 (1970): 299, 299n3: “It might be pointed out that Mr. Abrams himself reads the poem from back to front, by beginning with the fact that it’s the speech of an unnamed rustic singer. Properly speaking, he doesn’t and we don’t have the slightest reason to suspect this till the end of the poem; and if we’re going to talk about the ‘actual order’ of the poem, this is a fact of some significance. . . . The withholding of the ‘uncouth swain’ till the end of the poem militates, for one thing, against a ‘dramatic’ reading of it; we can’t suppose it’s the lament of one figment of Milton’s fictional imagination for another, if we have no reason to suspect the existence of the first.” 43. Isabel G. MacCaffrey, “Lycidas: The Poet in a Landscape,” in Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 246–48. See also Smith, Poetic Closure, 129–30. Smith notes that Lycidas creates the illusion of the “concurrent passage of time,” but nonetheless regards the poem’s final eight lines as a framing device that locates the entire poem in the past (130). 44. For the argument that Lycidas has the rough structure of a Hegelian dialectic, see Jon S. Lawry, “ ‘Eager Thought’: Dialectic in Lycidas,” in Milton’s “Lycidas,” 237–38. For an account of ritual repetition in Milton as an endless dialectical struggle, see Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6–7: “While I begin this book with a fundamental opposition, between creation and chaos, and make it my paradigm for other distinctions—between licit and illicit knowledge, language that ritually performs and language that cannot, ritual and pathological repetition— all of those distinctions break down in the face of the continual struggle between oppositions.” For the argument, within a Derridean and Lacanian

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tradition, that undecidability allows one to evade the dialectic of presence and absence, see Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 120. 45. For the argument that any reaffirmation of order is consoling, even the somewhat duplicitous promise of a future that only circles back to the past, see Rosemond Tuve, “Theme, Pattern, and Imagery in Lycidas,” in Milton’s “Lycidas,” 176: “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 seems 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.” Personally, I find this last one of the most terrifying sentences in literary criticism. 46. Evans, 71–72. 47. For the classic account of performative speech acts, especially the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 94–107. 48. For the argument that poetic closure “creates in the reader the expectation of nothing,” a nothing that is nonetheless populated by “ultimate composure,” “stability, resolution, or equilibrium,” see Smith, Poetic Closure, 34. It is precisely this model of finality that Milton’s notion of apocalyptic potential is designed to resist: i.e., revolutions end in equilibrium, but apocalypses do not because they are not even reacting to, let alone resolving tensions (3). 49. For this notion of preservative negation, one not reducible to a merely dismissive end or rejection, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19, 36, 308. For my account of the value of bare, dismissive negation in Paradise Regained, see “Reading, Recognition, Learning, and Love in Paradise Regained,” in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton, ed. Mimi Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 117–45. 50. Paul Alpers, “Lycidas and Modern Criticism,” English Literary History 48 (1982): 479. For the related contention that the final ottava rima acts as an unnecessary coda to a poem that has already achieved closure, see Smith, Poetic Closure, 192. 51. Alpers, 472. 52. See Smith, Poetic Closure, 16–17. 53. For the argument that criticism mistakenly focuses on subjects at the expense of objects in the poem, see Lauren Shohet, “Subject and Object in Lycidas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47 (2005): 101–2.

Notes to pages 143–44

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54. For influential examples of this critical strain, see Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2001), 261, 276; M. H. Abrams, “Five Types of Lycidas,” in Milton’s “Lycidas,” 226. For the contention that Abrams and Fish mistakenly oppose convention and individual voice, see Alpers, 469. For the more general argument that drama and fiction represent events, whereas lyric only represents discourse, see Smith, Poetic Closure, 122 55. Kendrick, 16–17. More generally, my argument here is at odds with Kendrick’s description of the poem as shot through with retroactivity (18). Kendrick also quotes a short story by John Berryman that aptly sums up the voraciously acquisitive author and subject at the root of most modern criticism of the poem. See John Berryman, “Wash Far Away,” in The Freedom of the Poet, ed. idem. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 372. In the story, a professor is brushing up on Milton’s allusions prior to his customary lecture on Lycidas: “As Milton’s imitations and telescopings multiplied, he commenced to feel restless, distant, smaller. What one editor neglected, another observed, and he began to have a sense of the great mind like a whirring, sleepless refinery—its windows glittering far out across the landscape of night—through which poured and was transformed the whole elegiac poetry of Greece and Italy and England, receiving an impress new and absolute. Mine! it seemed to call, seizing one brightness, another, another, locking them in place, while their features took on the rigidity and beauty of masks. Through the echoing halls they posed at intervals, large, impassive, splendid; a special light moved on their helms, far up, and shadows fell deep between them. The professor collected himself and glanced at the time.” 56. Elizabeth Hanson, “To Smite Once and Yet Once More: The Transaction of Milton’s Lycidas,” Milton Studies 25 (1989): 72. Raymond MacKenzie makes a similar claim about Epitaphium Damonis, maintaining that the pastoral fantasy involves not the sublation of tension but the evacuation of it. See Raymond N. MacKenzie, “Rethinking Rhyme, Signifying Friendship: Milton’s Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis,” Modern Philology 106 (2009): 552: “If it is not condescending to call this vision a fantasy, then we should stress the quality of the fantasy: the removal of opposition. The tension between Christian and pagan is not resolved in dialectical manner, for there is no synthesis, no compromise in which one pole dominates or supersedes the other, nor one in which both poles give up something of their essence in order to reach some new stage. Instead, the poles of opposition are allowed to coexist; all that has changed is the removal of the tension between them.” 57. For a succinct account of the Hegelian argument that only the dialectic allows for self-transformation, see Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),

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122–23: “The absence of internal negativity [in Spinoza] robs agents of the motor of self-transformation. Change comes from the outside. . . . Negation is necessary for true positivity, for self-determination through self-correction.” 58. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 237. 59. For an account of the difference between disavowal and negation, already discussed in Chapter 2, see Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31. For Agamben’s account of “autosuppression,” which also informs much of this paragraph, see Agamben, The Time That Remains, 24–25. Agamben’s most compelling example of this phenomenon comes from Marx: “The proletariat [is] only able to liberate itself through autosuppression. . . . The fact that the proletariat ends up being identified over time with a determinate social class—the working class that claims prerogatives and rights for itself—is the worst misunderstanding of Marxian thought” (31). 60. For this formulation, I am indebted to Don Beith’s question at the panel “On Shame in Philosophy and Politics” (papers by Anthony Steinbock and Fabricio Pontin, commentary by Ryan Netzley) at the Philosophical Collaborations Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, March 24, 2011. For the contention that the poem itself transforms the pastoral tradition but does so via a logic of negation, see Ulreich, 14: “The renewal of pastoral, however, requires a radical transformation; the creation of a new world requires the destruction of the old. . . . That which has been ‘received by tradition’ is precisely the pastoral vision which Lycidas finally transcends, not by rejecting images of shepherds feeding their flocks, but by transforming their ‘rural ditties’ (32) into the ‘unexpressive nuptial Song’ (176) of the Lamb” (14). I find these sentences puzzling insofar as the latter eschews the negation that the former insists is requisite for the production of novelty. 61. For the argument that Lycidas stages Milton’s concern with his own poetic vocation, see William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:157, 163; John T. Shawcross, “Milton’s Decision to Become a Poet,” Modern Language Quarterly 24 (1963): 21–30. 62. For the related argument that Paradise Lost stages a conflict between vitalist autogenesis and authoritarian rule, see Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 103–76. 63. The Greek, again transliterated, is “en astheneia teleitai.” For discussions of this motto in the context of Sonnet 19, see Russell M. Hillier, “The Patience to Prevent that Murmur: The Theodicy of John Milton’s Nineteenth Sonnet,” Renascence 59 (summer 2007): 254–55; William R. Parker, “The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,” PMLA 73 (June 1958): 198–99.

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64. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 135. For the contrary contention that Milton transforms pastoral’s conventional procession of mourners into a trial of suspects, adding a juridical element that ultimately heralds the coming of class, see Kendrick, 4, 30–31. 65. For an argument that the fetishization of work and productivity inflects and infects many critical denigrations of pastoral, see Linda Woodbridge, “Country Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 189–214. For Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between work and free use, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397. For Hegel’s competing account of a “pure action” derived from and superseded by work, see Phenomenology of Spirit, 244–45. 66. Ricoeur, 117. 67. Alpers, 486–87.

4. How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event of Ending in “Upon Appleton House” 1. See Nigel Smith, “The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell,” Renaissance and Reformation 25 (2001): 143: “Marvell capitalizes on the energies of contrary forces as both a theme and an embodiment, at every level of poetic construction. They are usually figured as one kind of doubleness or another: a reversal, an instance of reflexivity, or a ‘self-inwoven device.’ They are self-conceived more than once by Marvell as an ‘echoing song,’ and very recently they have even been labelled a ‘boomerang’ method.” My argument here is that Marvell is interested in the nonreactive forces at work within such reversals, not the more comforting results of such inversions. See also Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Song: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 188, 276; Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 216. 2. For the argument that “Upon Appleton House” depicts the present as potentiality, see Joan Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 39: “Marvell, then, uses his liminal position in the Fairfax household to create in ‘Upon Appleton House’ a realm of mutual possibility in which the past is referenced, the future is promised, but the present is pure potential.” My study attempts to anatomize the temporal and symbolic forces at work within such potentials.

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3. Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2007), stanza 49, lines 385–86. All references to Marvell’s poetry are to this edition. Line numbers, and stanza numbers where appropriate, will appear in parentheses. 4. For the contention that “Upon Appleton House” is a masque, but one that does not justify Fairfax’s retirement, see Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 170–71. 5. For the contention that it is not clear that Fairfax’s retirement is permanent in 1651 and that, as a result, the poem is not simply a celebration of retirement or solitude, see Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 170. 6. For the suggestion that, unlike Jonson, Marvell embraces solitude, see Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 54. For Jonson’s depiction of the country house as a restful space, see Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” in The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin, 1975), 98, lines 99–102: “Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee / With other edifices, when they see / Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, / May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.” All references to Jonson’s poetry are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. Marvell also reconceives these “heaps” in the final lines of “Upon Appleton House,” presenting the entire world, and not just other denigrated houses, as overthrown heaps. 7. Thomas Fairfax, “Upon the New-built House att Apleton” (Bodleian MS Fairfax 40), in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, 218n71. 8. For the related contention that Marvell’s verse grapples with Descartes’ challenge to an analogical cosmos, see Donald M. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 24. 9. For Deleuze’s account of disavowal and its distinction from negative reversal (already cited in Chapter 2), see Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31. For the limitations of self-reflective reversal as a conception of thinking, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135–36. For the argument that Marvell actually escapes existential dread and the reactive anxiety that attends it, see John Creaser, “Marvell’s Effortless Superiority,” Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 408: “These poems are the mind’s declaration of independence from the Fall and the causes of dread which weigh on the human consciousness.”

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10. See Creaser, “Marvell’s Effortless Superiority,” 419, 423n22; A. B. Chambers, “ ‘I Was but an Inverted Tree’: Notes toward the History of an Idea,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 291–99. 11. Colie, 252–53. 12. Ibid., 182–83. 13. Ibid., 252, 261. 14. For the contrary contention that Marvell embraces a tolerant skepticism, see Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 56, 66. Contrary to Yoshinaka, I would contend that Marvell does not skeptically suspend judgment but rather disavows it. 15. For an argument that charts Marvell’s distaste for Levellers and Diggers, see Wilding, 121–23, 154–55. 16. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 28: “This declaration by negative and contrast, not now with city and court but with other country houses, is enough in itself to remind us that we can make no simple extension from Penshurst to a whole country civilisation. The forces of pride, greed and calculation are evidently active among landowners as well as among city merchants and courtiers. What is being celebrated is then perhaps an idea of rural society, as against the pressures of a new age.” 17. For a more positive account of individuating energies within the Marxist tradition, see Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:52–53: “If the subject is to genuinely resist reification in solitude here, it may no longer even try to withdraw into what is its own as though that were its property; the traces of an individualism that has in the meantime delivered itself over to the market in the form of the feuilleton are alarming. Instead, the subject has to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself; it has to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of a pure language. . . . He overcomes its alienation, which is an alienation of use, by intensifying it until it becomes the alienation of a language no longer actually spoken. . . . Only by virtue of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyric language represent language’s intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of ends.” 18. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 61. 19. For the argument that eschatology amounts to such reversals, see Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 61–63.

242

Notes to pages 162–65

20. Katherine O. Acheson, “Military Illustration, Garden Design, and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ [with illustrations],” English Literary Renaissance 41, no. 1 (January 2011): 179. 21. For the contrary argument that “Upon Appleton House” stages the secularization of religious idioms and typology, see Clinton Allen Brand, “ ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the Decomposition of Protestant Historiography,” English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001): 510: “As erstwhile subjects of the King struggled to comprehend what it could mean to be subjects of history, theological idioms were politicized, nationalized, and historicized in unprecedented ways by a pervasive kind of cultural catachresis: providence became a way of talking about policy; divine election signified political authority; the great chain of being underwrote social order; prophecy and mysticism voiced marginalized perspectives; millennium and apocalypse articulated the hopes and fears of historical existence.” The problem with such an equation of transformation and catachresis is that it ends up maintaining that all change is an effect of metaphor and its misuses: i.e., there can be no transformation without a violently reactive misuse that is also a substitution. 22. For the related argument that the diagrammatic abstraction of fortification illustration informs Marvell’s spatial understanding in this poem, see Acheson, 156. In contrast to Acheson, I characterize this procedure not as dehumanization in the service of imposing a schematic order on a recalcitrant nature (159) but rather as an attempt to examine relational force as such, or to take this force as the object of examination. 23. For a description of the concept of positive distance that informs these sentences, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 173. For a description of this in-between relation as a forceful becoming that does not obey the logic of reversal, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 293: “A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.” 24. Robert Herrick, “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton,” in The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), 200, lines 95–102. 25. For the contention that one can expect rhyme only after it has already occurred, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48: “One cannot say that the second rhyme-word in Jonson’s couplet has fulfilled an expectation set up by the first because there is nothing in the

Notes to pages 165–70

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lines to create such an expectation (always excepting the effect of the reader’s previous experience with English distichs). . . . The expectation arises only when the principle of rhyme has been perceived as such, and it thus takes at least one couplet (or rhyme) to create the expectation of another.” 26. Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Enclosed Garden and the Apocalypse: Immanent versus Transcendent Time in Milton and Marvell,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 144, 152, 163. 27. Ibid., 154–55. For the related claim that Marvell reacts against a Puritan providentialism because he ultimately equates it with the notion that might makes right, see Yoshinaka, 95–96. I would argue, contrary to Yoshinaka, that Marvell does not subscribe to a hierarchy of value that elevates ends over means. 28. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 82; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 173. 29. Donald M. Friedman, “Rude Heaps and Decent Order,” in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 124, 133, 135. For the related argument that Marvell’s pastorals are open-ended, not closed, see Paul Hamilton, “Andrew Marvell and Romantic Patriotism,” in Marvell and Liberty, 86. For the contrary contention that “Upon Appleton House” never offers a standard reference point against which decency could be judged, see Colie, 184: “In ‘Upon Appleton House’ Marvell presented a world with no fixed reference-point, no text like Sebonde’s against which to measure the world under scrutiny, so that its shiftiness and its peculiarities seem in Appleton’s nature, intrinsic to it rather than the result of a particular astigmatism or particular perspective.” 30. For Deleuze’s contention that disorder is an illusion and that we are only really dealing with competing orders, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 18. 31. Acheson, 147. 32. Colie, 227. 33. Williams, 30: “Indeed there is more than a hint, in the whole tone of this hospitable eating and drinking, of that easy, insatiable exploitation of the land and its creatures—a prolonged delight in an organised and corporative production and consumption—which is the basis of many early phases of intensive agriculture: the land is rich, and will be made to provide. But it is then more difficult to talk, in a simple way, of a ‘natural order,’ as if this was man in concert with nature. On the contrary: this natural order is simply and decisively on its way to table.”

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Notes to pages 171–77

34. Aemilia Lanyer, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134, lines 103–10. Subsequent references to Lanyer’s verse are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. 35. See Gilles Deleuze, “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50. 36. See Williams, 28–32. Williams, of course, notes that Marvell’s poem does include representations of labor, but he characterizes these representations as aestheticized appropriations: “The magical country, yielding of itself, is now seen as a working landscape filled with figures. . . . All these are seen, but in a figure: the conscious look at a passing scene” (56). I maintain that Marvell’s verse never really worries about the aestheticization of politics, primarily because it rejects the notion that one could resist a fascistic aestheticized politics with a transcendent judgment. Instead, aesthetic and political events operate at the same immanent level, and it is only at this level that the work of political transformation can occur. 37. Berthoff, 174. 38. For the argument that the apocalypse amounts to an optimistic dialectical reversal and synthesis of the narratives of providence with history, see Stocker, 42. Stocker also acknowledges that a dialectical model entails treating evil as “necessary to the purposes of God” (42). However, the quotation she adduces as evidence of Marvell’s support for this position, from The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Second Part, claims that God is “complacent” in allowing evil, not that evil is necessary. See The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Second Part, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 1:1672–73, ed. Patterson, Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas Von Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 323: God has “distinguish’d the Government of the World by the intermitting seasons of Discord, War, and publick Disturbance. Neither has he so order’d it only (as men endeavour to express it) by meer permission, but sometimes out of Complacency.” The point of the passage is that God chooses and wills this order, not that it is necessary. See Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 29: “Yet to Marvell as to Milton, God takes pleasure in the working out of his own justice, even though men, aware only of their own suffering, are unable to recognize the divine pattern.” 39. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 70. Agamben also argues that spatialized time sacrifices thinkable time to representable time and, inversely, that experienced time sacrifices the representable to the thinkable (64). I argue here that Marvell throws in his lot with experiential time. 40. Ibid., 82. 41. See Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 228n407–8. It is also worth noting that the allusion itself is ambiguous, evoking the positive

Notes to pages 177–82

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providence in Exodus 16:13–15 and the punishment for gluttonous disobedience in Numbers 11:31–34. For the contention that Thestylis is a figure for a resurgent millennialism among the army in 1651, see Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17. 42. Berthoff, 174. 43. Grossman, 213. For a contrasting account of Hobbes’s materialist and historical understanding of eschatology, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 184–85: “God is not to be known through understanding of his nature, but rather as will or power and through the revelations or prophecies—themselves words—which he wills to make known to us; and a further consequence is that these words may not be fully intelligible, and that what matters is rather the faith by which we acknowledge them to be God’s words than the reason by which we apprehend their meaning.” Pocock’s account informs my reading of Marvell, particularly insofar as he maintains that interpreting and understanding words is not what one does with prophecy. The rejection of interpretation seems the result of Pocock’s contention that Hobbes reduces all of salvation to statements about time: “The whole structure of faith and salvation has been reduced to a system of statements in and about time” (186). 44. Grossman, 216. 45. For variations on this claim, see Dominic Gavin, “‘The Garden’ and Marvell’s Literal Figures,” Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 224–52; Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 150, 158, 368n36; and Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 12; Colie, 79. 46. For this sequence, see Stocker, 235. 47. Colie, 287. 48. For example, the speaker makes Daphne’s transformation into the laurel the successful goal, not the thwarted consequence of Apollo’s pursuit: “Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that she might laurel grow” (29–30). For the argument that this passage amounts to an “unmetaphoring” of figures that replaces erotic with poetic desire and ultimately amounts to a critique of figuration, see Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 150, 158, 368n36: “I find Colie’s term particularly useful since it preserves the very sense of suspension this technique produces—one recognizes the unmetaphor or unfigure by contrast to the figure on which it plays; however literal these one-time metaphors become, there is no systematic way to be sure whether the image in question is ‘in’ or ‘without’ the figural register” (368n36). Colie’s concept of unmetaphoring also treats literalization as an ironic critique of figurative power. See Colie, 79: “The figures, then, are so naturalized

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Notes to pages 182–88

within the pastoral as to lose their figurative power: the poet mocks their cliché quality by taking their fiction literally. Such ‘unfiguring’ and ‘unmetaphoring’ characterizes much of Marvell’s practice and is, I think, a function of his critical analysis. He turns back, as it were, to actualize the charged language of poetic traditions. . . . Again and again, he pushes against the devices of his craft to find the literal truth they contain. He cleans them of their conventional metaphorical associations to begin anew.” 49. For the distinction between enargia, vividness, and energia, force or movement, see Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 112–13; and of course, Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poetry, in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 246. 50. For the contention that Marvell seeks to escape the logic of correspondence and difference, as well as the logic of comparison, see Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus, 178, 183. 51. Stocker, 31. 52. For the contention that Marvell “immanentizes the eschaton,” see Brand, 502. 53. Stocker, 61. 54. Colie, 246. 55. Ibid., 269. 56. Stocker, 239. 57. Ibid., 163–64. See also Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v., “epitome,” accessed February 8, 2014, http://www.oed.com. 58. For the contention that “The Mower’s Song” dramatizes a local apocalypse enacted in the name of preserving pastoral traditions, see Colie, 33: “Insisting upon his rights as a pastoralist, the Mower ruins his environment, destroys the dream, to keep intact the hyperbole to which he is accustomed. The pastoral contract is thus made to recoil upon itself, the tradition’s self-destruction made to seem a natural implication of its own convention.” I argue that Colie’s account here is precisely of an apocalypse transformed by the categories of identity and reversal into nothing more than dialectical development. 59. For the contention that Marvell seeks to “summarize and surpass” his predecessors in a wide variety of genres, see Joseph H. Summers, introduction to Andrew Marvell, ed. Summers (New York: Dell, 1961), 13. 60. For the description of this phenomenon as “a metamorphosis in which an object becomes its own essence,” see Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 223. I maintain that this formulation still ties metamorphosis too closely to teleological fulfillment and mutes the emphasis on transformative becoming in Marvell’s poems. However, Friedman does conclude his study by presenting metaphor as a solution to the endless oscillations in

Notes to pages 188–94

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“Upon Appleton House”: “The fluctuation of the poem between poles of realism and symbolic extravagance reflects the constant oscillation between these two poles of moral action. If there is any resolution it is in the metaphors themselves that form the substance of ‘Upon Appleton House’ ” (246). My argument here is that “metaphors themselves” means treating symbols as temporal events, not commemorative tokens of resemblance. 61. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), 124–26. For the contention that “straight” as an adjective means both “correct” and “constraining,” see Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus, 168. 62. Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 178, 183. Enterline reads both “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House” as failed attempts at such transcendence, whereas I argue that Marvell repurposes symbolic force to such an extent that one is not always bound to the dialectical wheel of failure. 63. For the contention that the final stanza pushes readers into an ambiguous present and that the rational amphibii represent the immanence of a “reflective moment,” see Hirst and Zwicker, 30. 64. For the contention that “Upon Appleton House” repeats “now” so often that it ultimately evacuates finality, see Colie, 252: “The effect of that final ‘now,’ after so many others, is to diminish our sense of finality, to suggest that there will be another and another ‘now,’ that the performance is over only for this particular summer’s day.”

Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis 1. Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (Jan 2008): 202. This sequentialism seems the upshot of Culler’s contention that narrative is always about what happens next. 2. For my earlier discussion of a similar phenomenon in seventeenthcentury devotional verse, see Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 193–96. 3. For Foucault’s description of archaeology as a mechanism for describing change, outside mystical vitalism or narrativized causation, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 173: “Rather than refer to the living force of change (as if it were its own principle), rather than seek its causes (as if it were no more than a mere effect), archaeology tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute ‘change’; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analyzable status of transformation.” Although I would not characterize my study as participating in this archaeological method, the general motive—treating

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Notes to pages 194–200

change as something more than a black box at the center of time or history— certainly informs my project. 4. I borrow this formula from Terry Eagleton’s characterization of Stanley Fish’s reading strategies as an inverted Marxism. See Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 45: “The point is to interpret the world, not to change it.” Eagleton’s attempts to unify literature and literary theory around the concept of problemsolving strategies (175–76, 223) seems at odds with Milton’s and Marvell’s consistent suspicion of such dialectical unfoldings. 5. For the related contention that the concept of crisis promotes a debilitating “negative occupation of the immanent world,” see Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 9. 6. For an account of the work of “crisis” in recent economic discourse, see Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 48–54. 7. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 2007). 8. For the threefold definition of crisis, as the permanent crisis of the world on trial, a transitional phase, and an end or final decision, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of ‘Crisis,’ ” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 240. In Koselleck’s view, all of these notions share a model of immanent interpretation, one that does not have recourse to divinity, despite their theological roots: “Despite their theological impregnation, what is common to all three models is that they make the claim to offer historically immanent patterns of interpretation for crises that are theoretically able to do without the intervention of God” (241). In other words, despite the limitations that I describe here, crisis enables an immanent history, instead of an Augustinian appeal to some other transcendent narrative. 9. For Schmitt’s denigration of the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” borrowed from Donoso Cortés, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 59. 10. For the liberal definition of literature as tending toward self-critical openness, see Eagleton, The Event of Literature, 68–70, 104. Eagleton also heaps suspicion on Pierre Macherey’s Althusserian-Marxist account of literature’s essentially subversive character (96). 11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 136. 12. For an example of the presupposition that only natural regularity, not apocalyptic disruption, can ground freedom, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 159–60. Rogers,

Notes to pages 200–3

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of course, considers apocalyptic events to be little more than authoritarian capriciousness. 13. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 9. Koselleck’s argument here turns on the fact that when the Thirty Years’ War ends in 1648 with a political settlement and not Armageddon, one must abandon eschatological thinking. I contend, however, that this event causes Milton and Marvell to rethink the notion that the apocalypse is a battle or a system of analogies. 14. For Milton’s portrait of a servile mind that desires its own enslavement, regardless of the external governmental form to which it is subject, see The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 7, rev. ed., ed. Robert W. Ayers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 357–63. For Spinoza’s presentation of the related position, culled from Machiavelli, that there is no point in liberating a people who will only clamber for more subjection, see Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 5.7. 15. Eagleton, The Event of Literature, 140–41. 16. Ibid., 142–43. 17. Ibid., 166. 18. Ibid., 141. 19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 135. 20. For this description of modern narratival history, in which events are made to speak for themselves, and an account of its development from more partisan chronicle histories, see Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 19–23.

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Index

Abraham, Lyndy, 217n36 Acheson, Katherine, 161–62, 169, 242n22 actualization. See possibility Adams, Robert Martin, 235n42 Adorno, Theodor, 229n65, 241n17 Agamben, Giorgio, 10–12, 19–20, 81, 120–21, 126, 147, 174–75, 209– 10n22, 212n41, 224–25n17, 231n10, 238n59, 239n64, 244n39 agreement, 29–30, 38, 41, 47, 49 allegiance, 22, 26–27, 29, 34, 37–38, 41, 45, 49–50, 65, 133–34, 178 allegory, 5, 13, 96–97, 113, 210n26 Alpers, Paul, 140–41, 142, 149–50 ambiguity, 37–38, 49, 56, 80–81 Anderson, Thomas P., 52, 219n55 antinomianism, 23, 56, 138, 143, 145, 148, 202–3. See also freedom apocalypse: and anticipation, 63, 89–90, 194–95; and contemplation, 97–99; in English Reformation thought, 12–14; and force, 21–22, 28, 30, 49, 56, 158, 175–76, 186–87; and learning, 24–25, 71, 104–5, 195–96, 198–200, 203–5; and modernity, 3–5, 31; and novelty, 14, 16, 20, 27, 97–98, 112, 121–22, 124, 127–30, 135–36, 139, 152–53,

183, 187–88, 191–92; and possibility, 1–3, 14–16, 88–94, 104, 113–15, 117–18, 236n48; and presence/immanence, 1–3, 14–16, 27, 81–83, 88–89, 95–96, 110–11, 115–16, 121–22, 125–26, 159, 162, 178–80, 188–89, 197, 221–22n4, 229n67, 230n4, 246n58; and revolution, 4–6, 13–14, 29–30, 112–13, 121–23, 171–72, 186, 191, 197, 208n8, 236n48; and temporality, 10–12, 15–17, 20–21, 24, 54, 62–64, 71, 125–26, 158–59, 167–68, 174–75, 187–88, 193–94, 204–5, 208n7, 210n26, 212n41. See also endings; force; messianism; possibility; revelation; revolution; temporality autonomy. See freedom Badiou, Alain, 7–8, 11, 12 Bale, John, 13, 122 Barton, Carol, 88 Benjamin, Walter, 30 Bergson, Henri, 221n1, 225n23 Berthoff, Ann E., 174, 178 Booth, Stephen, 226n31 Bower, Thad, 38 Brand, Clinton Allen, 242n21

265

266 Campbell, Gordon, 133 Catholicism. See Reformation change. See novelty Charles I, 3–4, 33–34, 52 Chernaik, Warren, 57, 218–19n51, 244n38 Colie, Rosalie, 158–59, 169, 182, 185, 219n56, 245–46n48, 246n58, 247n64 community, 170–72, 175–76 contemplation, 76, 82–83, 101, 108, 229n70. See also under apocalypse; events Corns, Thomas N., 133 country-house poems, 24, 160, 162–65, 170–73, 175–76. See also lyric; pastoral Crampton, Georgia Ronan, 86–88, 107 Crashaw, Richard, 86–88 Creaser, John, 217n39, 240n9 crisis, 93, 195–98, 232n13, 248nn5–6, 248n8. See also events; kairos; occasion Cromwell, Oliver, 22, 26–27, 34–37, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 53–57, 58–59, 63, 76–77, 153, 182, 188, 213n2 Culler, Jonathan, 17, 193, 247n1 Cummings, Brian, 133, 134 Deleuze, Gilles, 8–9, 18–20, 171, 211n30, 225n23, 226–27n37, 233n28, 242n23; and force, 31–32, 60–61, 161; and possibility, 75–76, 93, 100, 120, 228–29n65; and recognition, 199, 203 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 61, 208n11, 209n18 dialectic, 18–20, 33, 47, 83, 135–36, 145, 229n70, 235n44, 237n56, 237–38n57, 244n38, 248n4 Dubrow, Heather, 224n16, 226n32, 229n66 Eagleton, Terry, 199, 200–3, 211n29, 248n4, 248n10 elegy, 52–53, 130, 135, 144, 170, 234n35. See also lyric Eliot, T. S., 34, 215–16n23 encomium, 16, 21–22, 37, 42–43, 52–53, 194, 216n28. See also lyric endings, 7, 44, 102, 167, 183, 231–32n13, 247n64; and deferral,

Index 15–16, 23–24, 54, 69, 115, 118, 122, 156, 175, 193; and resolution, 16, 77–78, 84–85, 114–16, 127, 145–46, 185, 188, 193–94. See also under lyric; see also retrospection ends. See means Enterline, Lynn, 190, 219n53, 245n48, 246n50, 247n62 epideictic. See encomium eschatology. See apocalypse Evans, J. Martin, 136–38 events: and contemplation, 58, 61–62, 97–100; and historical significance, 3–4; within literature, 1, 14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 51, 67–72, 78, 84, 101, 106–11, 115, 140, 145, 181–83, 247–48n60; and novelty, 2–3, 14, 24, 32–33, 58, 95, 127–29, 147–48, 161, 167, 190, 195–97; and presence/ immanence, 1–2, 5, 9–12, 20, 28–30, 62, 71–72, 86, 92, 104, 114, 116–17, 135–36; and reversal, 152–53, 156, 159, 162; and singularity, 6–10, 20–21, 33, 58, 165–66, 209n15, 215n17. See also crisis; kairos; means; occasion; temporality Fairfax, Mary, 167–68, 184–86, 188 Fairfax, Thomas, 152, 154–55, 183–84, 240n5; “Upon the Newbuilt House att Apleton,” 155 Fallon, Stephen M., 231n12 fascism, 30, 32, 222n9 Faust, Joan, 239n2 finality. See endings Fish, Stanley, 98–99, 101, 228n56, 228n63 Flannagan, Roy, 119 Fleming, James Dougal, 114, 223n12 Fletcher, Angus, 70, 71–72 Flyer, Jordan, 226n31 force, 31, 35, 46, 123, 159–61, 172, 189, 216n26, 218n46, 220n65; and evaluation, 31–33, 40–41, 47–49, 53, 60–61, 65, 155, 214n9; as present event, 13, 22, 43, 53, 58, 62, 176, 183; and purpose, 27, 30–31, 42, 44, 63. See also under apocalypse; Deleuze, Gilles formalism, 211n33 Foucault, Michel, 210n27, 247–48n3 Foxe, John, 13

Index

267

Franke, William, 221–22n4, 229n67, 230n4 freedom, 54, 56–57, 82, 146, 198–200, 221n1, 248–49n12; and autonomy, 143–44, 150–51, 196, 200–5 Friedman, Donald M., 34, 167–68, 216n26, 218n45, 246–47n60 fulfillment. See endings Fussell, Paul, 73–74, 225n20 future. See temporality

Kendrick, Christopher, 143–44, 234n35, 237n55 Kermode, Frank, 118, 231–32n13 Kerr, Jason A., 128 Klein, Naomi, 196 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 213n2, 227n49 Komorowski, Michael, 30–31 Koselleck, Reinhart, 4–6, 97, 200, 208n7, 210n26, 248n8, 249n13

Gavin, Dominic, 219n53, 245n45 Girard, René, 38–39 Goldberg, Jonathan, 10 Greene, Roland, 222n6, 222n8 Greene, Thomas M., 39–40 Gregory, Tobias, 92 Grossman, Marshall, 178, 181 Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, Gilles

Lanyer, Aemilia, 178; “The Description of Cooke–ham,” 170–73, 175 learning, 198–205, 233n28; and modern universities, 199–200. See also under apocalypse Leonard, John, 119 Lieb, Michael, 129 literalization, 23, 51–53, 153–54, 178, 182, 245–46n48 literary criticism, 48–49, 97, 219n55 Low, Anthony, 108 Luther, Martin, 132, 134 lyric, 12, 16–18, 84, 193–94, 224n16, 237n54; and endings, 20–21, 117, 142–43, 183–85; and immediacy, 1–2, 68, 72, 79, 199, 203–5. See also country-house poem; elegy; encomium; narrative; pastoral; sonnets

Haber, Judith, 230–31n7 Hall, John, 26, 31 Hamilton, Paul, 48, 217n43 Hanson, Elizabeth, 144 Hegel, G. W. F., 17–19, 144, 211n32, 236n49 hermeneutics. See interpretation Herrick, Robert, “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton,” 163–64 Hirst, Derek, 35, 61–62, 219n51, 220n66, 245n41, 247n63 Hodge, R. I. V., 218n46 hope, 21, 23; as present event, 12, 67–68, 85, 191–92, 195, 204–5 hypotaxis. See parataxis imagination, 149–51. See also contemplation interpretation: as present event, 24, 52–53, 58, 130, 139, 164, 176–77, 181, 183–84. See also under retrospection irony, 34, 36, 38, 49 James, Susan, 75, 82, 227n42, 231n9 Jonson, Ben: “To Penshurst,” 163–64, 170, 171–72, 240n6 Kahn, Victoria, 59, 214–15n14 kairos, 92–93, 95, 123, 135, 148–49, 174. See also crisis; events; occasion Kant, Immanuel, 207n1

MacCaffery, Isabel, 137 MacKenzie, Raymond N., 237n56 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 165–66, 187, 232n20 martyrdom, 30, 198, 214n9 Marvell, Andrew, 26–66, 152–92; aesthetic politics of, 29–32, 52, 56, 59–60, 172, 214–15n14, 219n60, 244n36; “An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers,” 50–51, 187; “The First Anniversary,” 27, 45–46, 53–56, 62–64; “The Garden,” 39, 51–52, 182, 184, 189–90, 245n48, 247n62; “An Horatian Ode,” 26–29, 33–48, 52, 61, 64–66, 213n2, 213–14n7, 220n66; compared to Milton, 45, 52, 57–62, 165–66; “The Mower’s Song,” 186–87, 246n58; “A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector,” 56–57; The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Second

268

Index

Marvell, Andrew (cont.) Part, 244n38; “To a Friend in Persia,” 57; “Upon Appleton House,” 16, 29, 152–70, 172–86, 188–92, 247–48n60, 248nn61–64 McCarthy, William, 78 meaning. See interpretation; symbol means: versus ends, 22, 27, 32–33, 37, 40–41, 45, 48, 54, 60, 64–66, 166–67, 172, 243n27. See also force Mendelsohn, J. Andrew, 217n36 messianism, 10–11, 120–21. See also apocalypse metaphor, 23–24, 169–70, 182, 188–90, 245n48, 246–47n60. See also symbol metonymy, 47–48, 50–51, 155, 185, 187, 190 millennialism. See apocalypse Milton, John, 67–111, 112–51; An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 82; De Doctrina Christiana, 126–27; Eikonoklastes, 52; “How soon hath time” (Sonnet 7), 79–81, 83–85; Lycidas, 16, 78, 112–24, 129–51, 232n14, 234n38; compared to Marvell, 45, 52, 57–62, 165–66; “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint” (Sonnet 23), 102; Nativity Ode, 125; “On the late Massacher in Piemont” (Sonnet 18), 70–71; Paradise Lost, 86–88, 220n65, 229n71; Paradise Regained, 57–58, 228n56, 233n22, 233n32; The Readie and Easie Way, 249n14; Samson Agonistes, 59, 103–10, 230n75; A Second Defense of the English People, 88; “To the Lord Generall Cromwell May 1652” (Sonnet 16), 58, 76–78, 225n27; “Upon the Circumcision,” 94–95; “When I consider” (Sonnet 19), 88–92, 95–97, 99 modernity, 3–4, 6, 207n2. See also under apocalypse Mohamed, Feisal G., 32, 209n15, 214n12, 215n17, 229n69 Mueller, Janel, 71–72

187–88, 193; and history, 13–15, 249n20; and retrospection, 62–64, 94, 128, 134, 152–53, 166, 176–80. See also lyric; retrospection; teleology negative theology, 17, 110 Neelakanta, Vanita, 227n49 new. See novelty Norbrook, David, 51, 112, 121–23, 214n9 novelty, 6, 60–61, 97, 118, 147, 211n30, 238n60. See also under apocalypse; events

Nardo, Anna K., 58–59, 73, 223–24n13 narrative, 17, 26–27, 86, 223n10, 225n23; and deferral, 71, 176,

Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 224n16, 229n70 Reformation, 4, 13, 20 regicide, 3, 33–34

occasion, 72–73, 79, 131, 134–35, 234n36. See also crisis; events; kairos parataxis, 67, 77, 89–92, 96, 99, 104, 116, 119–20, 165, 228n51 Parker, William Riley, 79 past. See temporality pastoral, 21, 144, 161–62, 169, 187–88, 194, 230–31n7, 237n56, 238n60, 246n58. See also countryhouse poems; lyric Patterson, Annabel, 63, 216n28, 221n75 pedagogy. See learning performativity, 127–28, 138, 147 Petrarchism, 67–70, 85, 102. See also sonnets Pincus, Steve, 3–4, 5, 208n8 Pocock, J. G. A., 245n43 possibility, 143–51; and actualization, 75, 83–85, 97, 100–1, 113–14, 120, 129, 219n57, 231n7; as present event, 53, 75, 79, 101, 104–5, 115, 118, 125, 140, 231n8, 239n2. See also under apocalypse postapocalyptic, 193 potential. See possibility present. See temporality prolepsis, 94–95, 124–26, 127 prophecy, 131–32, 207n1, 234n37 prosody, 39–41, 49, 84, 165 Protestantism. See Reformation

Index representation, 14–15, 110, 204, 210n27 resolution. See under endings retirement, 152–55. See also reversal retrospection, 28, 71–72; and interpretation, 51–53, 74, 109–10, 134–36, 157–58, 183; and subjectivity, 7–8, 11, 41, 113, 118. See also under narrative revelation, 8, 14–15, 27–28, 96, 112, 125, 133, 179, 183, 203–4, 210n27. See also apocalypse Revelation, Book of, 13, 15, 97, 113, 174, 200 reversal, 23, 33, 68–69, 156–62, 167, 171, 191, 239n1, 242n23. See also under events revolution, 3–6, 23–24, 123, 152, 160, 207n2, 208n8. See also under apocalypse; see also reversal Ricoeur, Paul, 114, 147–48 Rogers, John, 214n8, 234n36, 238n62, 248n12 Russell, William M., 218n51 Sansone, David, 233n20 Schmitt, Carl, 31–32, 207n2, 219n60 Schwartz, Regina M., 235n44 Shakespeare, William: Troilus and Cressida, 38–39 Sharp, Hasana, 237–38n57 Shohet, Lauren, 236n53 Shore, Daniel, 106 Sidney, Philip, 68, 246n49 Silver, Victoria, 80, 228n61 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 91, 102, 212n41, 228n51, 231n8, 235n43, 236n48 Smith, Daniel W., 8–9, 61, 209n18 Smith, Nigel, 37, 218n48, 239n1 sonnets, 16, 21, 84–85, 194, 224n16, 229n66; definition of, 69–74, 101–2; Italian versus English, 74–75, 77, 225n22. See also lyric; Petrarchism Spinoza, Benedictus de, 227n41, 237–38n57, 249n14 Spurr, John, 218n50 Stocker, Margarita, 34, 174, 183, 185, 186–87, 241n19, 244n38

269 subjectivity, 12, 31, 35, 45–47, 69, 101, 138, 140–44, 147, 160, 184, 194, 197–98, 209n15, 222n9, 236n53, 241n17. See also under retrospection symbol, 123, 132, 153–54, 163–64, 172, 182–83, 185, 187–89, 247n60 Tayler, Edward, 125, 127–28, 129 teleology, 1–2, 5, 10, 23, 27–28, 41, 64, 83, 91, 114, 117, 178, 204, 246n60 temporality, 1–2, 64–65, 164–70; and present events, 17–18, 52–54, 71, 125–26, 190–91, 204–5. See also under apocalypse Thickstun, Margaret, 92 Thirty Years’ War, 4, 249n13 time. See temporality de Tocqueville, Alexis, 208n8 Toliver, Harold, 34–35 transformation. See novelty typology, 1–2, 10–11, 23, 117–18, 125–26, 155–56, 182–84, 186, 190 Ulreich, John C., Jr., 234n37, 238n60 university. See learning utopianism, 123, 145, 187, 201–2, 217n36 virtuality. See possibility von Maltzahn, Nicholas, 34 Wallace, John M., 218n51 Warley, Christopher, 222n8, 226n33 White, Hayden, 208n7, 249n20 White, R. S., 223n10 Wilding, Michael, 217n36, 240n5, 241n15 Williams, Raymond, 160, 170, 241n16, 243n33, 244n36 Woodbridge, Linda, 239n65 Worden, Blair, 26, 38, 213n2, 216n30, 219n59 Yoshinaka, Takashi, 34, 213–14n7, 220n69, 241n14, 243n27 Zwicker, Steven N., 35, 61–62, 219n51, 220n66, 245n41, 247n63

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VERBAL ARTS: STUDIES IN POETICS

Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry Marc Shell, Talking the Walk and Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events