87- ) English Literature

87-) English Literature 

John Milton 

Early translations and poems of John Milton

By the time he returned to England in 1639, Milton had manifested remarkable talent as a linguist and translator and extraordinary versatility as a poet. While at St. Paul’s, as a 15-year-old student, Milton had translated Psalm 114 from the original Hebrew, a text that recounts the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. This translation into English was a poetic paraphrase in heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter), and later he translated and paraphrased the same psalm into Greek. Beginning such work early in his boyhood, he continued it into adulthood, especially from 1648 to 1653, a period when he was also composing pamphlets against the Church of England and the monarchy. Also in his early youth Milton composed letters in Latin verse. These letters, which range over many topics, are called elegies because they employ elegiac metre—a verse form, Classical in origin, that consists of couplets, the first line dactylic hexameter, the second dactylic pentameter. Milton’s first elegy, “Elegia prima ad Carolum Diodatum,” was a letter to Diodati, who was a student at Oxford while Milton attended Cambridge. But Milton’s letter was written from London in 1626, during his period of rustication; in the poem he anticipates his reinstatement, when he will “go back to the reedy fens of the Cam and return again to the hum of the noisy school.”

Another early poem in Latin is “In Quintum Novembris” (“On the Fifth of November”), which Milton composed in 1626 at Cambridge. The poem celebrates the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes was discovered preparing to detonate explosives at the opening of Parliament, an event in which King James I and his family would participate. On the event’s anniversary, university students typically composed poems that attacked Roman Catholics for their involvement in treachery of this kind. The papacy and the Catholic nations on the Continent also came under attack. Milton’s poem includes two larger themes that would later inform Paradise Lost: that the evil perpetrated by sinful humankind may be counteracted by Providence and that God will bring greater goodness out of evil. Throughout his career, Milton inveighed against Catholicism, though during his travels in Italy in 1638–39 he developed cordial personal relationships with Catholics, including high-ranking officials who oversaw the library at the Vatican.

In 1628 Milton composed an occasional poem, “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,” which mourns the loss of his niece Anne, the daughter of his older sister. Milton tenderly commemorates the child, who was two years old. The poem’s conceits, Classical allusions, and theological overtones emphasize that the child entered the supernal realm because the human condition, having been enlightened by her brief presence, was ill-suited to bear her any longer.

In this early period, Milton’s principal poems included “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” and the so-called companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Milton’s sixth elegy (“Elegia sexta”), a verse letter in Latin sent to Diodati in December 1629, provides valuable insight into his conception of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Informing Diodati of his literary activity, Milton recounts that he is

Singing the heaven-descended King, the bringer of peace, and the blessed times promised in the sacred books—the infant cries of our God and his stabling under a mean roof who, with his Father, governs the realms above.

The advent of the Christ child, he continues, results in the pagan gods being “destroyed in their own shrines.” In effect, Milton likens Christ to the source of light that, by dispelling the darkness of paganism, initiates the onset of Christianity and silences the pagan oracles. Milton’s summary in the sixth elegy makes clear his central argument in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: that the Godhead’s descent and humiliation is crucial to the Christ child’s triumph. Through this exercise of humility, the Godhead on behalf of humankind becomes victorious over the powers of death and darkness.

“On Shakespeare,” though composed in 1630, first appeared anonymously as one of the many encomiums in the Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare’s plays. It was Milton’s first published poem in English. In the 16-line epigram Milton contends that no man-made monument is a suitable tribute to Shakespeare’s achievement. According to Milton, Shakespeare himself created the most enduring monument to befit his genius: the readers of the plays, who, transfixed with awe and wonder, become living monuments, a process renewed at each generation through the panorama of time. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” written about 1631, may reflect the dialectic that informed the prolusions that Milton composed at Cambridge. The former celebrates the activities of daytime, and the latter muses on the sights, sounds, and emotions associated with darkness. The former describes a lively and sanguine personality, whereas the latter dwells on a pensive, even melancholic, temperament. In their complementary interaction, the poems may dramatize how a wholesome personality blends aspects of mirth and melancholy. Some commentators suggest that Milton may be allegorically portraying his own personality in “Il Penseroso” and Diodati’s more outgoing and carefree disposition in “L’Allegro.” If such is the case, then in their friendship Diodati provided the balance that offset Milton’s marked temperament of studious retirement.

Comus and “Lycidas”

Milton’s most important early poems, Comus and “Lycidas,” are major literary achievements, to the extent that his reputation as an author would have been secure by 1640 even without his later works. Comus, a dramatic entertainment, or masque, is also called A Mask; it was first published as A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle in 1638, but, since the late 17th century, it has typically been called by the name of its most vivid character, the villainous Comus. Performed in 1634 on Michaelmas (September 29) at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, Comus celebrates the installation of John Egerton, earl of Bridgewater and Viscount Brackley and a member of Charles I’s Privy Council, as lord president of Wales. In addition to various English and Welsh dignitaries, the installation was attended by Egerton’s wife and children; the latter—Alice (15 years old), John (11), and Thomas (9)—all had parts in the dramatic entertainment. Other characters include Thyrsis, an attendant spirit to the children; Sabrina, a nymph of the River Severn; and Comus, a necromancer and seducer. Henry Lawes, who played the part of Thyrsis, was a musician and composer, the music teacher of the Egerton children, and the composer of the music for the songs of Comus. Presumably Lawes invited Milton to write the masque, which not only consists of songs and dialogue but also features dances, scenery, and stage properties.

The masque develops the theme of a journey through the woods by the three Egerton children, in the course of which the daughter, called “the Lady,” is separated from her brothers. While alone, she encounters Comus, who is disguised as a villager and who claims that he will lead her to her brothers. Deceived by his amiable countenance, the Lady follows him, only to be victimized by his necromancy. Seated on an enchanted chair, she is immobilized, and Comus accosts her while with one hand he holds a necromancer’s wand and with the other he offers a vessel with a drink that would overpower her. Within view at his palace is an array of cuisine intended to arouse the Lady’s appetites and desires. Despite being restrained against her will, she continues to exercise right reason (recta ratio) in her disputation with Comus, thereby manifesting her freedom of mind. Whereas the would-be seducer argues that appetites and desires issuing from one’s nature are “natural” and therefore licit, the Lady contends that only rational self-control is enlightened and virtuous. To be self-indulgent and intemperate, she adds, is to forfeit one’s higher nature and to yield to baser impulses. In this debate the Lady and Comus signify, respectively, soul and body, ratio and libido, sublimation and sensualism, virtue and vice, moral rectitude and immoral depravity. In line with the theme of the journey that distinguishes Comus, the Lady has been deceived by the guile of a treacherous character, temporarily waylaid, and besieged by sophistry that is disguised as wisdom. As she continues to assert her freedom of mind and to exercise her free will by resistance, even defiance, she is rescued by the attendant spirit and her brothers. Ultimately, she and her brothers are reunited with their parents in a triumphal celebration, which signifies the heavenly bliss awaiting the wayfaring soul that prevails over trials and travails, whether these are the threats posed by overt evil or the blandishments of temptation.

Late in 1637 Milton composed a pastoral elegy called “Lycidas,” which commemorates the death of a fellow student at Cambridge, Edward King, who drowned while crossing the Irish Sea. Published in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago (“Obsequies in Memory of Edward King”), a compilation of elegies by Cambridge students, “Lycidas” is one of several poems in English, whereas most of the others are in Greek and Latin. As a pastoral elegy—often considered the most outstanding example of the genre—Milton’s poem is richly allegorical. King is called Lycidas, a shepherd’s name that recurs in Classical elegies. By choosing this name, Milton signals his participation in the tradition of memorializing a loved one through pastoral poetry, a practice that may be traced from ancient Greek Sicily through Roman culture and into the Christian Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The poem’s speaker, a persona for Milton’s own voice, is a fellow shepherd who mourns the loss of a friend with whom he shared duties in tending sheep. The pastoral allegory of the poem conveys that King and Milton were colleagues whose studious interests and academic activities were similar. In the course of commemorating King, the speaker challenges divine justice obliquely. Through allegory, the speaker accuses God of unjustly punishing the young, selfless King, whose premature death ended a career that would have unfolded in stark contrast to the majority of the ministers and bishops of the Church of England, whom the speaker condemns as depraved, materialistic, and selfish.

Informing the poem is satire of the episcopacy and ministry, which Milton heightens through invective and the use of odious metaphors, thereby anticipating his later diatribes against the Church of England in the antiprelatical tracts of the 1640s. Likening bishops to vermin infesting sheep and consuming their innards, Milton depicts the prelates in stark contrast to the ideal of the Good Shepherd that is recounted in the Gospel According to John. In this context, the speaker weighs the worldly success of the prelates and ministers against King’s death by drowning. The imagery of the poem depicts King being resurrected in a process of lustration from the waters in which he was immersed. Burnished by the sun’s rays at dawn, King resplendently ascends heavenward to his eternal reward. The prelates and ministers, though prospering on earth, will encounter St. Peter in the afterlife, who will smite them in an act of retributive justice. Though Milton dwells on King’s vocation as a minister, he also acknowledges that his Cambridge colleague was a poet whose death prevented him from establishing a literary reputation. Many commentators suggest that, in King, Milton created an alter ego, with King’s premature death reminding Milton that the vicissitudes of fate can interrupt long-standing aspirations and deny the fulfillment of one’s talents, whether ministerial or poetic.

Antiprelatical tracts

Having returned from abroad in 1639, Milton turned his attention from poetry to prose. In doing so, he entered the controversies surrounding the abolition of the Church of England and of the Royalist government, at times replying to, and often attacking vehemently, English and Continental polemicists who targeted him as the apologist of radical religious and political dissent. In 1641–42 Milton composed five tracts on the reformation of church government. One of these tracts, Of Reformation, examines the historical changes in the Church of England since its inception under King Henry VIII and criticizes the continuing resemblances between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, especially the hierarchy in ecclesiastical government. In this tract and others, Milton also calls attention to resemblances between the ecclesiastical and political hierarchies in England, suggesting that the monarchical civil government influences the similar structure of the church. He likewise decries the unduly complicated arguments of theologians, whereas he praises the simplicity and clarity of Scripture.

In another tract from this period, The Reason of Church Government, Milton appears to endorse Scottish Presbyterianism as a replacement for the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England. A few years thereafter, he came to realize that Presbyterianism could be as inflexible as the Church of England in matters of theology, and he became more independent from established religion of all kinds, arguing for the primacy of Scripture and for the conscience of each believer as the guide to interpretation. In another tract from the period 1641–42, An Apology Against a Pamphlet, Milton verges on autobiography as he refutes scurrilous allegations attributed to Bishop Joseph Hall.

Divorce tracts of John Milton

Soon after these controversies, Milton became embroiled in another conflict, one in his domestic life. Having married Mary Powell in 1642, Milton was a few months afterward deserted by his wife, who returned to her family’s residence in Oxfordshire. The reason for their separation is unknown, though perhaps Mary adhered to the Royalist inclinations of her family whereas her husband was progressively anti-Royalist. Or perhaps the discrepancy in their ages—he was 34, she was 17—led to a lack of mutual understanding. During her absence of approximately three years, Milton may have been planning marriage to another woman. But after Mary’s return, she and Milton evidently overcame the causes of their estrangement. Three daughters (Anne, Mary, and Deborah) were born, but a son, John, died at age one. Milton’s wife died in 1652 after giving birth to Deborah.

During his domestic strife and after his wife’s desertion, Milton probably began to frame the arguments of four prose tracts: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, enlarged 2nd ed. 1644), The Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644), Tetrachordon (1645), and Colasterion (1645). Whether or not his personal experience with Mary affected his views on marriage, Milton mounts a cogent, radical argument for divorce, an argument informed by the concepts of personal liberty and individual volition, the latter being instrumental in maintaining or ending a marriage. For Milton, marriage depends on the compatibility of the partners, and to maintain a marriage that is without mutual love and sympathy violates one’s personal liberty. In such circumstances, the marriage has already ceased. In his later divorce tracts, Milton buttresses his arguments with citations of scholars, such as the 16th-century reformer Martin Bucer, and with biblical passages that he marshals as proof texts.

Tracts on education and free expression

About the time that the first and second editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce appeared, Milton published Of Education (1644). In line with the ideal of the Renaissance gentleman, Milton outlines a curriculum emphasizing the Greek and Latin languages not merely in and of themselves but as the means to learn directly the wisdom of Classical antiquity in literature, philosophy, and politics. The curriculum, which mirrors Milton’s own education at St. Paul’s, is intended to equip a gentleman to perform “all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” Aimed at the nobility, not commoners, Milton’s plan does not include public education. Nor does it include a university education, possible evidence of Milton’s dissatisfaction with Cambridge.

The most renowned tract by Milton is Areopagitica (1644), which opposes governmental licensing of publications or procedures of censorship. Milton contends that governments insisting on the expression of uniform beliefs are tyrannical. In his tract, he investigates historical examples of censorship, which, he argues, invariably emanate from repressive governments. The aim of Areopagitica, he explains, is to promote knowledge, test experience, and strive for the truth without any hindrances. Milton composed it after the manner of a Classical oration of the same title by Isocrates, directed to the Areopagus, or Athenian council. Informed by Milton’s knowledge of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and of orations by Demosthenes and Cicero, Areopagitica is a product of the very kind of learning that Milton advocates in Of Education. It is ultimately a fierce, passionate defense of the freedom of speech:

Antimonarchical tracts

Counterbalancing the antiprelatical tracts of 1641–42 are the antimonarchical polemics of 1649–55. Composed after Milton had become allied to those who sought to form an English republic, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)—probably written before and during the trial of King Charles I though not published until after his death on January 30, 1649—urges the abolition of tyrannical kingship and the execution of tyrants. The treatise cites a range of authorities from Classical antiquity, Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, political philosophers of the early modern era, and Reformation theologians, all of whom support such extreme—but just, according to Milton—measures to punish tyrants. Thereafter, Milton was appointed secretary for foreign tongues (also called Latin secretary) for the Council of State, the executive body of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Milton was entrusted with the duties of translating foreign correspondence, drafting replies, composing papers in which national and international affairs of state were addressed, and serving as an apologist for the Commonwealth against attacks from abroad.

In this role as an apologist, Milton received the Council of State’s assignment to refute Eikon Basilike (“Image of the King”), which was published in 1649 within days of the king’s beheading. Subtitled The True Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, Eikon Basilike portrays the late king as pious, contemplative, caring toward his subjects, and gentle toward his family. Though putatively a personal account by Charles himself, the work was written by one of his supporters, Bishop John Gauden, and was very effective in arousing sympathy in England and on the Continent for the king, whom some perceived as a martyr. In his rebuttal, Eikonoklastes (1649; “Image-Breaker”), Milton shatters the image of the king projected in Eikon Basilike. Accusing Charles of hypocrisy, Milton cites Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard, duke of Gloucester, in Richard III as an analogue that drives home how treachery is disguised by the pretense of piety.

Soon afterward, Milton participated in major controversies against two polemicists on the Continent: Claudius Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise), a Frenchman, and Alexander More (Morus), who was Scottish-French. Charles II, while living in exile in France, is thought to have enlisted Salmasius to compose a Latin tract intended for a Continental audience that would indict the Englishmen who tried and executed Charles I. Universally acknowledged as a reputable scholar, Salmasius posed a formidable challenge to Milton, whose task was to refute his argument. Often imbued with personal invective, Milton’s Defense of the English People Against Salmasius (1651), a Latin tract, fastens on inconsistencies in Salmasius’s argument. Milton echoes much of what he had propounded in earlier tracts: that the execution of a monarch is supported by authorities from Classical antiquity to the early modern era and that public necessity and the tyrannical nature of Charles I’s sovereignty justified his death.

In 1652 an anonymous Continental author published another Latin polemic, The Cry of the King’s Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides. Milton’s refutation in Latin, The Second Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman, in Reply to an Infamous Book Entitled “Cry of the King’s Blood” (1654), contains many autobiographical passages intended to counteract the polemic’s vitriolic attacks on his personal life. Milton also mounts an eloquent, idealistic, and impassioned defense of English patriotism and liberty while he extols the leaders of the Commonwealth. The most poignant passages, however, are reserved for himself. Soon after the publication of Defense of the English People, Milton had become totally blind, probably from glaucoma. The Cry of the King’s Blood asserts that Milton’s blindness is God’s means of punishing him for his sins. Milton, however, replies that his blindness is a trial that has been visited upon him, an affliction that he is enduring under the approval of the Lord, who has granted him, in turn, special inner illumination, a gift that distinguishes him from others.