John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, a man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious variability and political turbulence and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.
1) His melody of diction:
Coleridge says of Milton that he is ‘not picturesque but a musical poet.’ Hallam says that ‘the sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped his soul in ecstasy.’ Tillyard rightly calls him the ‘God-gifted organ voice of England.’ We may note Milton’s own view as expressed in Il Penseroso:
“There let the pealing
organ blow
To the full Voic’d
quire below
In service high and
anthem clear
As may with sweetness,
through mine ear
Dissolve me into
ecstasies
And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.”
Music, both vocal and
instrumental, was diligently practiced and cultivated in the Elizabethan age.
Milton was born to the tradition of the Elizabethan poets and song-writers, who
had the musical notes tuning in their heads when they wrote verses. Trevelyan
rightly says,” in the poetry of John Milton, born five years after Elizabethan
died, we read clearly how the three chief elements in the English culture of
the day-music, the classics, and the Bible-combined to inspire the “ God-gifted
organ-voice of England.”
The point is that Milton, without conscious effort, wrote in melodious lines, phrases and cadences. He had not to assemble musical sounds and study musical effects like Tennyson. With his remarkable gift of choosing and making musical phrase and cadence, he could easily untwist ‘all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony.’ This can be appreciated by reading his verse aloud.
To take an example from Book 1 of Paradise Lost, we see how well the line:
“ Can execute their
aery purposes”— ( line 430),
Illustrates its
meaning by the swift flow of its metre while he describes the air as:
“ Brushed with the
hiss of rustling wings” — ( line 768)
We can almost hear, as we read, the rush and the sweep of the diabolic wings. So perfect, indeed, is the music of Milton’s line that they can charm us even when they are little more than a mere string of names.
Note the following lines from Book 1 of Paradise Lost—
“ From Aroer to Nebo,
and the wild
Of southmost Abraim;
in Hesebon
And Horoniam, Seon’s
realm, beyond
The flowery dale of
Sibma, clad with vines
And Eleale, to the
Asphaltic pool”— (2. 407-411)
The sublime association of scholarship and romance which these names carry contributes no less to their musical effect.
His Suggestive Power:
The most striking
characteristic feature of Milton’s poetry is his suggestive power. The effect
of hid poetry produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by what it
suggests. The opening vista of associations is the main thing in his poetry. It
may be remembered that Milton was well-studied in Latin and Greek. His poetry
is full of allusion to the Bible and the classics. This accounts for the
suggestiveness of hod poetry.
Macaulay writes, “We
often hear of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means
nothing; but applied to the writing of Milton, it is most appropriate. His
poetry acts like an incantation. Its merits lie less in its obvious meaning
than its occult power. They would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his
words than in other words, but they are words of enchantment. No sooner are
they pronounced than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of
beauty start at once into existence and all the burial-places of the memory
give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one
synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its
power.”
“ In support of these
observations, we may remark that any passage in the poems of Milton is more
generally known or more frequently repeated than those which are little more
than muster-rolls of names. They are not always more appropriate or more
melodious than other names. Every one of them is the first link in a long chain
of associated ideas. Like the dwelling place of our infancy revisited in manhood,
like the song of our country heard in a strange land, they produce upon us an
effect wholly independent of their intrinsic value. One transports us back to a
remote period of history. Another places us among the noble scenes and manners
of a distant region. A third evokes all the dear classical recollections of
childhood, the schoolroom, the dog-eared Virgil, the holiday, and the prize. A
forth bring before us the splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance, the trophied
lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the haunted forests, the
enchanted gardens, the achievements of enamored knights, and the smiles of a rescued princess.”
His sense of beauty:
In
a letter, dated September 23, 1637, to his friend Diodati, Milton wrote,
“Whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has
certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good
and the beautiful. Nor did Ceres, according to the table, ever seek her
daughter Proserpine with such unceasing solicitude as I have sought this idea
of the beautiful in all the forms and appearances of things, for many are the
shapes of things Divine. Day and night I am wont to continue the search.” Keats
could not have expressed his love of the beautiful on more passionate language.
One of the inheritors of the Renaissance culture, Milton gives expression to
this love of beauty in almost all his poems. In L’Allegro and Il Penseroso there
is little, that is distinctly Puritan. Note how tenderly he sketches a rural
scene in L’Allegro—
“ the ploughman, near
at hand,
Whistles o’er the
furrowed land,
And the milk-maid
singeth blithe,
And every shepherd
tells his tale,
Under the hawthorn in the dale.”
Then he proceeds to
describe his love of romance:
“ Towered cities
please us then,” etc.
The poem breathes the
joyous spirit of the Renaissance, coupled with a passionate love of beauty
which the Renaissance fostered. Then in Il Penseroso, he depicts a scholar’s
life:
“ let my lamp at
midnight hour
Be seen in some high
lonely tower
Where I may outwatch
the Bear,
Which thrice-great
Hermes, unsphere
The spirit of Plato.”
This is again the
spirit of the Renaissance. However, the tone becomes austere in Il Penseroso
than in L’Allegro. The poet is attracted by pagan learning and music of the
cathedral. It is all in Elizabethan tradition in which a perception of the
beauty of Greek myths and legends and a pagan note are inextricably woven. This
pagan learning which Milton’s spirit had imbibed could not be wholly discarded
even when he begins to write a more serious poem dominated by the puritan spirit.
Not that in Lycidas where his puritanism is definitely articulate, he begins
with and returns again and again to the imagery and style of a pagan poet:
“ For we were nursed
upon the self-same hill,
For the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill.”
His puritanism however
aggressive it becomes, could not wholly kill his sense of beauty. When Milton
could write in paradise lost of —
“ All that bowery
loveliness,
The brooks of Eden
mazily murmuring
And bloom profuse and
cedar arches.”
Or of—
“The smell of grain,
of tended grass, or kine,
On dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound”
To which he adds the
lovely picture—
“It chanced with
nymph-like step fair virgin pass
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more.”
His sense of beauty
could not have been lost.
His high Seriousness:
According to Mathew Arnold, ‘ High seriousness’ is the test of all great poetry. High seriousness marks both Milton’s character and poetry. He always had a high standard of poetry in his view with which he was always comparing himself, nothing short of which could satisfy his zealous ambition. He thought of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him. In fact, Milton’s chief talent, and indeed his distinguishing excellence lies in the sublimity of hod thoughts. He lived apart in the solitude of his own thoughts, carefully excluding from his mind whatever might distract his purpose or alloys its purity or damp his zeal. “With darkness and with dangers compassed around, he had the mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory, piling up every stone of luster from the brook,” for the delight and wonder of posterity. That monument certainly is the Paradise Lost, in which he” pursues things un-attempted yet in prose or rhyme.”
His superb Imagination:
It
is the sustained power of imagination of none but Milton himself that could
have shaped Paradise Lost. It is claimed for paradise Lost that the theme it
handles is vaster and of a more universal human interest than any handled by
Milton’s predecessors. In fact, it deals with the fortune of the whole human
race, not of a city or of an empire. Apart from the profoundest significance of
the Fall Of Man, the foregoing issue of the rebellion of the angels reacts upon
Milton’s scheme of the universe, leading to the creation of the world for the
habituation of man and to represent these changes being wrought in universal
space through eternity in their true proportion and magnitude and in relation
to the development of the theme is the task of a supreme imagination—an imagination that can soar above time and space, and feel at home only in
infinity.
Lowell rightly
says.”In reading Paradise Lost one has the feeling of vastness. You float
under an illimitable sky brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the
abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen
ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene changes, it is with
an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds......He produced these
effects by dilating our imagination with an impalpable hint rather than by
concentrating them upon too precise particulars.”
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