“Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die”: Milton’s Monument of Words

Rohitashwa Sarkar,
PGI,
Roll No: 37.

“ That° we on Earth with undiscording voice

May rightly answer that melodious noise;°

As once we did, till disproportion’d° sin

Jarr’d against natures chime…” [1]

These lines in Milton’s At a Solemn Musick introduce us to the poet’s view of sin, and consequently, Death, which is related to sin in his entire early oeuvre. In the poem, at first Milton imagines an unfallen or redeemed harmony between Heaven and Earth in terms of music, which is a recurring motif in his poetry. Christian agents like angels and cherubiks play alongside Sirens and are mingled with an Orpheus-like figure who will breath life and inspiration into rocks and other dead things with his music. But ‘disproportion’d sin’ is the persistent wrong tune in the fallen Christian Universe. How do we understand the term disproportioned? Perhaps we could use time as an instrument: in a scribd essay by someone nicknamed tatertot, the author writes “The poem associates heaven with eternity and earth with time”[2]. By earth he means a post-lapserian world, where time is linear and forward moving, as opposed to the eternity in Heavenly-time. The two are different time dimensions, therefore meaningful in different orders of language, which makes their harmonius mingling impossible. What troubles Milton is the placement of one (Earthly dimensions) within the other (Eternal Time). Therefore Eartliness, which is a result of sin, is an aberration to the poet, an element that does not conform to the rules of the language it is a part of; it is familiar but incongruous and therefore ‘Uncanny’; it lacks closure. I will argue that in most of Milton’s early poetry that deals with Death and Sin, the poet attempts to enclose the uncanny in causality, metre and allusions to attempt to normalize it. His ‘Poetry of Death’ emerges therefore as a therapeutic exercise. For this purpose I will look at most of his early poetry.

In 1631 ( atleast that is the date that Milton gives to it), he wrote two epitaphs on the deceased University carrier Hobson, who was forced to rest and cease his regular activities when the plague hit England. Milton’s enterprise in both the poems is to speculate and argue regarding the cause of Hobson’s death – in the first one, he personifies Death, and says the former would never have gotten to Hobson had the latter not had to resign from work; in the latter, titled ‘Another on the Same’, he uses analogies from Classical astronomy (the allusion to time and motion is from Aristotle’s Physics, 4.11-12) to explain the same cause. To begin with, the well-argued cause itself gives a structure and consolation to Death. It implies that if a person dies, the reasons can be traced to factors which influenced his life, and also implies that one can choose healthier options on the basis of such causality. An important point worth noting here is the plague, the principle agent, often features in Milton’s early poetry as a punishment or damnation of sorts; ‘black perdition’ is the name he grants it; this implies that the attempt at overriding or normalizing sin in poetic idiom has only been partially successful. But he tries nonetheless. The other way in which he tries to conquer Death is through mastery of idiom, which is what Stella P. Revard says: “they (the epitaphs) resemble in some ways the Latin funera (included in the Poemata) that Milton wrote for Cambridge dignitaries, as they allow the poet to exercise his pungent wit with one conceit after another that allude to Hobson’s occupation.”[3] The employment of a series of linguistic devices as a means of coping with death is common in all of human history, of course. Mourning rites, epitaphs, obituaries are there for all to see; it is his Poetry for Milton, the significance of which lies in the crucial perspective it grants the student of his poetry.

In other poems, the hope of redemption is far more apparent. This is where Milton’s concerns regarding sin and Death become properly visible. On the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, for example, Milton compares her to Rachel – the wife of Jacob who died in bearing his second child, and has a dream that the Marchioness will reunite with the former in a Heaven-like space. In the epitaph for the Bishop of Winchester, the comparison, or condensation more-like, is with Moses. Therefore these narratives converge into a hope of re-union with the lost harmony. Even though Milton here is speaking directly regarding redemption or resurrection, the drive here is the same as before: rationalization of Death. The difference is, in this particular system, Milton can directly engage sin. In the earlier quoted epitaphs, that concern was at best present in the sense that it was repressed or conspicuously demoted to the background to the foreground of an argument regarding the necessity of work. Here Milton can take more space and time to evoke the feeling, and therefore exercise more poetic license, experiment further with form and in effect tackle Death with a larger arsenal. It is not for nothing that the size of these poems is greater than the earlier two.

It is in On Shakespeare that Milton raises the function of writing to a permanent defiance of Death. Milton says Shakespeare does not require a statue or a starry pyramid as a monument, but has “ in our wonder and astonishment/ Hast built thy self a live-long° Monument.”[4]  Shakespeare’s immortality arises from the impressions his work creates. His creation is his redemption. This has meta-textual associations in atleast two ways: one in that Milton is attempting a similar exercise: through his writing, in all the poems mentioned, he is trying to render Death redundant. The other manner in which Milton’s exercise is meta-textual for this poem in particular, of course, is it is a Shakespearean sonnet written in traditional iambic pentameter. This makes Milton’s poem an ode to the deceased, which also turns it into a monument to Shakespeare. Milton, therefore, following Shakespeare’s lead, is able to build a monument through words for the man who built his own monument through his own words, which is a fine point of departure or entry for the final point I wish to raise.

It is this: each Milton poem that is about someone else’s death is only peripherally about someone else, even though that is what is apparent on the surface. The real significance of his poetic enterprise exists outside the text. The real death that he is trying to combat, in small, determined bursts, is his own impending one. Like every little poem that builds an enclosure like a coffin or a shrine of words around a deceased figure, the latent hope that is ultimately apparent is that Milton’s oeuvre will also be his final, eternal resting place, the heaven to which he will return after his tryst on Earth.  This concern regarding his own Fame, Work and Death is embraced with greater courage and directness in later poems, which proves the persistence of the concerns throughout his life. In Oh his Blindness, for example, writing is ‘God’s work’, i.e. the work that has been given to Milton by God, which he realizes he must keep doing despite what he thought was an obstacle. The fact that he thinks of his poetry as a sacred duty shows that he considers it his sole passport to redemption and immortality, whether in Heaven or on Earth.

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[1] Stella P.Revard, ed.,” At a Solemn Musick”, John Milton: Complete Shorter poems, pg 38.

[2] "Milton at a Solemn Music Analysis." Scribd. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

[3] Stella P.Revard, ed.,“Introduction to the 1645 volume: Poems of Mr. John Milton”, John Milton: Complete Shorter poems, pg 3.

[4] “On Shakespear. 1630.”, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems.