John Milton - justifying the ways of God to men
INSIGHT into the GREATS - Priya David
Coming to John Milton (1608-1674) fresh from the impact of
Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell in the same century is bound to cause
something of a culture shock. Distinct from each other though the latter
three may be, their commonality in regard to expressive vitality and
fecundity is equally distinct.
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John Milton |
With Milton we find ourselves in a different poetic tradition
altogether, one that is characterised by loftiness of tone and
magniloquence of utterance. Milton seems to have broken with his peers
and reached for inspiration to an influence of the previous century,
namely the elaborated and exalted style of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.”
It is not surprising that he saw fit, initially, to describe
Shakespeare as “Fancy’s child, warbling his native Wood-notes wild:”; in
other words, he saw Shakespeare as an untutored genius, his imaginative
power uncomplemented by stylistic accomplishment. The inspiration goes
deeper than style, for Spenser’s is an epic of great moral purpose and
Milton is very much the moralising poet.
He is driven by his Puritanical zeal to improve and reprove, and
there is a recurrent didactic note in his poetry even when his subjects
are not directly religious, as in the elegiac “Lycidas”, where threnody
is interspersed with diatribes against the false shepherds of the
church.
This ultimately religious motivation reaches its peak in his magnum
opus, “Paradise Lost.”
This is not meant to imply that Milton’s poetry is artificial and
pedantic. There is a compelling quality about much of his earlier verse
that could not be there but for virtues of style and feeling. In
“L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the pair of poems that contrasts the happy
and the melancholy man, he succeeds in evoking both states: “Sport that
wrinkled Care derides, And laughter holding both his sides” “Dissolve me
into ecstasies, And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.” Yet, we cannot
fail to feel a lack of immediacy in the experiences, they move us
through skilful description rather than spontaneous expression.
Both of these are, however, combined in the famous sonnet on his
blindness, beginning, “When I consider how my light is spent,” and
ending, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Between these two
lines, Milton questions how he can serve God without this “one Talent”,
but comes to realise that those who bear their yoke with fortitude
render the best service.
We have here the same spirit of anguish followed by trusting
acceptance found in the Davidic Psalms of the Bible, and also a
foretaste of the need to come to terms with God’s righteousness which is
the raison d’etre of “Paradise Lost.” Though he was steeped in Classical
and Mediaeval literature, Milton’s greatest literary influence was the
Bible as it was for John Bunyan.
This brings us to the great epic that Milton had brooded over all his
life and now proceeded to compose in complete blindness, an achievement
comparable to Beethoven’s composing his greatest music in complete
deafness. Criticism of “Paradise Lost” has attended the work from the
18th century to date, starting with Addison who said, “our language sunk
under him, Johnson: “reading the poem is a duty rather than a pleasure”
and Eliot, “Milton writes English like a dead language.”
Perhaps the mistake these critics and their followers have made is to
overlook the purpose of the poem. This is far removed from the common
pursuit of the generality of poetry, which is to express human
experience from a human viewpoint. It is, as Milton declared in his
opening, the pursuit of “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme”,
namely to “assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to
men.”
This is a far cry from the religious poetry of the Metaphysicals like
Donne and Herbert, who were mainly concerned with explaining themselves
to God, as was Hopkins two centuries later, whereas Milton’s was the
converse, explaining God to man. A revolutionary poetic purpose demanded
a revolutionary poetic, and this is what Milton had been feeling his way
towards all along, ( resulting in the tendency to remoteness and
artificiality when he was dealing earlier with purely human
experience)..
Here is the opening of “Paradise Lost”:
“Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree,
whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With
loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful
Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb or of Sinai,
didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the
beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d Fast by the Oracle of
God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle
flight intends to soar Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things
unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.”
The revolutionary nature of the style will at once be apparent. All
the above comprises just one sentence, there is no rhyming, the thought
carries across the lines to stop and resume in mid-line and the
parenthetical and other interpolated clauses are more a feature of prose
than of poetry up to that time. We are presented with passages, rather
than stanzas, of verse. Yet, in spite of these departures from
accustomed poetical practice, the poetic flow and strength of these
lines can hardly be denied.
The loftiness and grandiloquence spoken of at the beginning are now
seen to be not extravagant but appropriate to the sublimity of the
subject. What Milton has done is to devise a form of non-dramatic blank
verse that sustains his explanation, through twelve books amounting to
over 10,000 lines, of the whole operation of Divine Providence as seen
in the Creation and the fall and restoration of man.
It is a stupendous achievement, for Milton presents not only an
entirely new poetic sensibility but an entirely new poetic language to
convey it. His invention of non-dramatic blank verse proved to be
invaluable to the poets of the 19th century Romantic period,
particularly Wordsworth who effected his own revitalisation of it in
propounding his philosophy of Nature.
The ultimate success of a work of art depends not on its stated
purpose but on the evidence of its art. As Lawrence pointed out, “Never
trust the artist, trust the tale.” It is here that, while acknowledging
the greatness of “Paradise Lost”, we have to ask ourselves whether
ultimately it is a great success or a great failure. To his 19th century
poetic successors it was a success, but for reasons that Milton would
have regarded as denoting failure.
Blake wrote, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of
Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he
was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” This
statement has set the tone for much of the critical evaluation of the
work up to the present.
The indication is that the poetry is more alive in its depiction of
Satan and his brood than in that of the other characters. Perhaps the
ultimate reason for this is a failure of “gusto”, (that Keatsian quality
so needed by the artist to become the personae he portrays), in Milton’s
portrayal of God and the Son of Man as compared with his portrayal of
Satan and the humans.
It would seem that his aim of justifying the ways of God to men,
while noble, was too high for the poetic imagination of even one of
Milton’s genius to accomplish. The greater achievement of “Paradise
Lost” was in the establishment of a tradition of non-dramatic blank
verse that was to serve the interests of English poetry well into the
future. It is for a future poet with a comparable motivation to Milton’s
to endeavour afresh to justify the ways of God to men. If such a poet
ever comes forward and does succeed, his indebtedness to Milton will be
unquestionable.
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