SUBHASISH BARUA

PG-2, ROLL-22

Ultimate Certainty in Il Penseroso: Useful and Purposive

Scholarly reading, Il Penseroso(1848) by Charles West Cope

It is known widely that there is a difference between an established classic having genuine culture and a simple household name. Distinguishing oneself with a particular type of model with the help of tremendously effective external qualities is obviously a praiseworthy task. The utmost endeavour on the part of the person has to be measured in order to vivify the actual context of the text proper and the influence of the periphery on the centre, that is to say, the content of that text. That’s exactly what Milton does taking participation in tradition and individual talent as well.

Now, the interesting fact is what was school for Shakespeare is also for Milton. In fact, in Milton we encounter words or phrases, fraught with classical or Latin or Italianate importation, that make his poems linguistically and syntactically complex and variegated. What is more striking is Milton’s awareness of particular genre. Perhaps no other poet in Renaissance period is more conscious of genre than Milton, the result being one English pastoral elegy, one masque, one epic and divers others. This is not an accident, rather conscious outcome of his intellectual labour and diligent perusal. He was writing at the end of Renaissance when certain literary genres are losing their clutch. That’s why Paradise Lost is the last descendant of the epic genre. We have no more of it.

In case of pastoral tradition, apart from Lycidas, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso have also something to do with this setting. Now reading of the poems reminds me of Georgic fashion invented by Virgil in his poem bearing the same name. It’s locus classicus is the poem itself. Georgic, we may say, means a poem that is discursive, didactic, concerned with the agricultural foundation of a nation, the motto of which was purposefully taken up in Phyllips’s Cyder, Dyer’s Fleece. One traditional boundary is that which separates Georgic from pastoral and the distinction survived among Renaissance English pastoralists. Whereas the pastoral tradition concerns the relatively carefree world of shepherds, exemplars of the world of leisure or otium, the Georgic tradition concerns the more active world of farming, and the life of negotium, work, employment, occupation. Now the basic question comes up. Do L’Allegro and Il Penseroso qualify as emblems of pastoral poetry and Georgic literature? Another important thing regarding this enigmatic faculty is developed by Anthony Low in The Georgic Revolution pointing to the fact how poets of the seventeenth century concerned themselves with a world in which labour, even physical labour, was not simply the curse of Adam- but was a basis human dignity and the foundation of a healthy society. Milton, perhaps, is the first to shift the attention of English gentlemen from the aristocratic code of honor to the opposite ethic of duty, responsibility, religious dedication.

Now have the doctrines in the texts quoted above, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. ‘Nothing sweats in the world of L’Allegro’- Rosemond Tuve commented denoting the framework of the poem save ‘how the drudging Goblin sweat,/...His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the corn/That ten day-labourers could not end’, though it occurs in a tale. Now this comment summarily rejected the quality of Georgic in L’Allegro. We see going the characters to work, but not at work-

“While the ploughman, near at hand,

Whistles o’er the furrow’d land,

And the milkmaid singeth blithe,

And the mower whets his scythe,

And every shepherd tells his tale

Under the hawthorn in the dale.”

But the interesting point is that within the poem pastoral and Georgic are fused, the best evidence of which can be traced in the lines-

“Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,

Are at their savoury dinner set...

Which the neat-handed Phyllis dresses;

And then in haste, her bower she leaves,

With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;”

It is quite natural that L’Allegro, a poem about a cheerful man, hardly has anything to do with laborious work, save enjoying the moment with eating, travelling, watching. The person of the poem roams about the pastures, landscape, city, theatre almost behaving like a modern traveller. This flaneur-type quality of the character gives him the moment to note down everything that he sees in his mind happily. As opposed to it, we have the pensive man who turns ‘inward for meditation’. He does not wander, rather prefers to be within his solitary cabin (“lonly Towr”). It can rightly be said that Il Penseroso is more philosophical having earthly constructs. The character or the pensive man looks within not without for philosophical, or psychological, basis for understanding of basic human nature collaborated with setting. It has been just in saying that L’Allegro seems to be more extrovert and less exclusively cerebral in disposition than Il Penseroso, and that Il Penseroso celebrates more personalised, even private, experience. It seems to be interesting to me that a statistical chart having the list of possessive pronouns in the two poems shows the hierarchy- L’Allegro has seven possessive pronouns(pronouns-I,me,my, mine, us, our) and its counterpart has seventeen. L’Allegro stresses the object of perception, whereas Il Penseroso emphasizes on the process of that perception in the mind of the persona. Therefore it is more introspective, more egotistical. Now the poetic debate between these two poems has a corollary explanation to the opposition of day and night, to the contrariness between pleasure and wisdom, as one is driven to pleasure almost having a Utopian landscape and the other to duty (isn’t it plausible to have Freudian differentiation between Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle side by side?), to Milton’s struggle to become a great poet and a complete man.

The desire to have that completeness is voiced forth from the very beginning through a set of binary opposition. The progression of the poem happens to be through dialectical opposition. It begins with Mirth-Melancholy contrast. The delight is valued and the pensive mood is invoked respectively. The invocation of Melancholy has a body of sources having a number of allusions in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The source of melancholy is attributed to Aristotle- while black melancholy was responsible for severe depression , Aristotle’s gold melancholy was the concern of poets. And its products were the highest of man’s artistic achievements. The kind of joy in L’Allegro is not the joy exorcised in Il Penseroso. The mention of Morpheus has two connotations. It is the source of weakness, marks a kind of progression to disease and then into madness in Classical theory. In Milton it turns out to be madness of Platonic bard. Both Melancholy and Morpheus are attributed to Genius. The idea of Genius forms itself later on in Romantic period. Classical concept of sublimity and Romantic conception of Genius merge and keep on changing from age to age. Morpheus’s name actually meant “dark”, Melancholy is associated with black and overall the setting is dark- it is night. Not only the setting but the mythical characters, such as Prince Memnon’s sister, Hemera, “starred Ethiop queen”, Cassiopeia, are elevated as beautiful because of their blackness. On the contrary, L’Allegro condemns Melancholy to be the offspring of Darkness and Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the gate of Hell. It should live in the dark region where Styx flows and where sinners live and shriek with pain. Dantesque Inferno portrays the same hellish picture vividly. The pleasure of L’Allegro is of that kind which takes one out of oneself; whereas the pleasures of Il Penseroso are much more brooding and solitary. The happy man visits theatre in the city. Now the concept of city at that time is inevitably related to courts. Basically indoor performances took place in courts having limited audience. Many of Shakespeare’s late plays were performed as indoor performance in courts. But later it extended into theatre with a larger audience as soon as the city became economic source and the centre for cultural and political development.

But exploring the poems en masse, I think that Milton had intended to exploit mere contrast, L’Allegro would have been sociable, Il Penseroso solitary; L’Allegro happy-go-lucky, Il Penseroso sober. The “Mountain Nymph sweet Liberty” presides over L’Allegro, and the “Cherub Contemplation” dominates Il Penseroso. But the fact is, “Mountain Nymph sweet Liberty” and “Cherub Contemplation” have much in common and tend to merge in the same figure. The happy man is the detached observer, gliding through his world, a mere spectator, turns “outward for observation”, and certainly keeps an aesthetic distance between him and the object. The speaker in L’Allegro moves quietly behind the infinitives, “to live”, “to hear”, “to come”, thereby making his experiences public. Milton’s technical phrases are, what John Carey says, “only hazily connected with any specific agent.” The lark of L’Allegro is perfectly juxtaposed with the nightingale, Elizabethan comedy against Greek tragedy, Lydian aires to “Such notes as warbled to the string/Drew iron tears from Pluto’s cheek.” But an interesting point about the music passage is that it occurs in both poems. In L’Allegro, we have an Orphean strain which would have won Eurydice; in Il Penseroso it deals with the sad monody when Orpheus lost her. The intended objective of Milton in the famous Orpheus-Eurydice-Pluto trio is to have music, or Art, in either case; this is, to me, sine qua non of the two poems, that is to say, the immortality of Art. Artist may undergo a certain number of problems, ups and downs, but the creation lasts forever as is evident through the desire of the persona of Il Pensoroso to “attain/...somthing like Prophetic strain” and to become “The trumpet of a Prophecy” like Shelley.

Now, in Il Penseroso, the aesthetically enriched passage is that in which Milton describes his Platonist reading:

“Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely Towr,

Where I may oft out-watch the Bear.”

The descriptions set us thinking. It made the pensive man more erudite person as opposed to the whimsicality of the happy one. The pensive man possesses some kind of meditative, ascetic life having ‘calm of mind/All passion spent.’ But what is spellbindingly beautiful is to connect Lamp with Literature. Is it the Lamp that bears resemblance to Baudelaire’s Le Voyage (The Voyage) or Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) or Tagore’s Sonar Tori (The Golden Boat) as all of these have something to do with new learning, undertaking a voyage to Modernity?

Now why the Tower? To me, it encapsulates poetic loneliness drawing conclusion or ultimate result from particulars to general. Milton’s ‘Lamp at midnight hour’ is echoed in Shelley’s lines in Prince Athanase-

“Then saw their lamp from Laian’s turret gleam,

Piercing the stormy darkness ,like a star,”

Both poets allude to Plato. Milton has ‘The spirit of Plato’ and Shelley has ‘Plato’s words of light’. This Tower gradually changes and becomes ‘the sacred dark of religious contemplation’ in Yeats. Is it the invocation to mysticism and old ritual cult? Perhaps that’s why Il Penseroso seems to me to be the tour de force as it is constructed with excellent jewellery and technical ornamentation. Another important thing is the cultivation of hermeticism associated with Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice great Hermes”), traditionally the author of Corpus Hermeticum, a body of mystical writings. Neo Platonists of the Renaissance regarded him as the source of all knowledge. The study of esoteric philosophy in the lonely tower is once again mutually reinforced.

The apparent blackness of the goddess ends in brightness, as black Cassiopeia became a constellation, or is born of brightness- Saturn and ‘bright-haired Vista’; the black of night, ‘staid Wisdoms hue’ is a necessary veil to conceal a brightness in reality too intense for human kind. This is the point which Milton later uses in Paradise Lost addressing the Celestial light: “Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/...Of things invisible to mortal sight.”

The moot point for which Il Penseroso remains one step ahead is the inevitable connection of the life of contemplation with a sort of Higher Life and the shades of Melancholy with the brightest vision that brings ‘all Heav’n before mine eyes’. This highly evaluated construction has no parallel programme in L’Allegro. Here the secular life passes over into the religious. Can it be viewed as a hope to turn towards religion, as for most of the eighteenth century Milton was esteemed as religious poet? This fact further gets attested by the transformation of the almost semi-pagan “Genius of the Wood” into the Christianity which is faintly suggested in the invocation to Melancholy as “pensive Nun”. Keatsian idea of self-forgetfulness in “Forget thy self to Marble” is enhanced to hermit’s forsaking of the secular world altogether.

Suffice it to say that the pensive man is fit to endure the intellectual light sparked off from the Lamp. At the end an overwhelmingly interesting point comes from comparative study of the concluding couplets of the two poems:

“These delights, if thou canst give,

Mirth with thee, I mean to live” (L’Allegro)

and

“These pleasures Melancholy give,

And I with thee will choose to live” (Il Penseroso)-

the instrumental and governmental key word is ‘if’. The conditional ‘if’ is not present in Il Penseroso which reaffirms the final verdict that Milton chooses Melancholy over Mirth. But can it be read as the triumph of Christian contemplation and ascetic orientation practiced in ‘lonely Towr’ over pleasures enjoyed in L’Allegro? Interpretations seem abound.

Of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, I think opinion is uniform. Every man that reads them, reads them with pleasure. What Johnson says is just, “They are two noble efforts of imagination.” The characters of these poems are not necessarily kept apart, but the circumstance has been productive of greater excellence. Of these two exquisite poems, I think the last one is the most taking, which is owing to the subject. The mind, practically, delights most in these solemn images, and a genius delights most to paint them with personal disposition.

Simply put, the pensive man is philosophically more enriched going through a comparatively more enigmatic set of oppositions. The ultimate victory of his unending toil is akin to the heightened ethical and philosophical status of the Wedding-Guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for both returned “sadder” and “wiser”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stanley Fish, What It’s Like to Read L’Allegro and Il Penseroso

Cleanth Brooks and John E. Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton

Rosemond Tuve, Structural Figures of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism

Charles Dexter Cleveland, The Poetical Works of John Milton

The Project of Immortalising:

Milton’s Poems on Death

  By

Shamik Ghoshal

Class: PG II

Roll Number: 31

For

Prof. Amlan Das Gupta

Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin.

Starting from the 1620s, Milton wrote quite a few poems, both in English and in Latin, on the deaths of individuals, both people close to him (friends and family) and also strangers (mostly public figures). He continued doing this, till around the middle of the 1640s. One might question the reason behind this obsession with writing poetry about death. Did Milton cultivate this genre out of a certain perversion and morbidity in his character? The answer is no. Middle English literature and art is heavy with the idea and images of death and the dead. Almost every other work of visual art shows a memento mori or portrays the Danse Macabre, the poems echo ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ (‘the fear of death dismays me,’ from The Lament for the Makaris by William Dunbar). But that too was not only out of morbidity, but was done as an unconscious exercise to familiarise oneself with the idea of death, more precisely, the idea of one’s own death. One can also not overlook the morbid representations of the carrion or the ‘transi’ (the perished one) in the artes moriendi as the means of depicting death and anything related to it, as suggested by Philippe Ariès in his monumental work Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. This continued even into the 16^th and 17^th centuries, most notably in the love poetry of John Donne, where one can see the poet’s obsession with the idea of the intermingling of love and death, represented mostly through its physical manifestations -- the grave, the relic, the cadaver. Milton’s poems differ from those of Donne and the medieval English poets, because of the lack of the physicality of death in them. The most important artefact of death, the corpse, is missing from Milton’s corpus of death poems. The second point of difference lies in the fact that even though Dunbar is writing about the deaths of individual poets in his poem, or Donne about that of the lover or the beloved, they are actually talking about death in general. Milton, on the other hand, in his early poems on the deaths of individuals, is trying to be a part of the social aspects of the phenomenon of death, that includes writing obituaries and memorial notes. One can simply not raise the question of morbidity in association with these poems.

In 1631, Milton wrote a poem entitled, Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, where he talks about the death of Jane Savage, the Marchioness of Winchester. There was no personal connection between the poet and the Marchioness; she was merely a public figure and her death was no personal loss for Milton. When she died, she was with child, but Milton does not exploit the macabre potential of the theme, except for a passing mention of the ‘mother’s womb’ becoming a ‘living tomb’ for the child. Having mourned the double death, Milton goes on to talk about how the Marchioness will be welcomed in heaven, where she will be ‘[n]o marchioness, but now a queen.’ In another poem, written a few years earlier, Milton talks about a more personal loss. In this poem, On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, in which the poet mourns the death of his infant niece, who survived only a single summer, there is a glimpse of the idea of the intermingling of Eros and Thanatos in the image of winter as the lover and killer of the child. Milton writes:

For he being amorous on that lovely dye

That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss

But killed alas, and then bewailed his fatal bliss.[1]

Here, too, Milton first mourns the child and then puts forth the consolation of heaven. Unlike in the case of the Marchioness, who would be welcomed as a saint in heaven for her virtuous life, the child would be taken in, not only because she was innocent by virtue of being an infant, untouched by vice, but also because she was, as Milton claims, God’s agent, one of the ‘golden-winged host,’[2] whose purpose on earth had been served. From these two poems, one can conclude that the early death poems, especially those written in English, show a similarity in structure -- the first, longer fraction of the poem generally mourns the dead person, talking about their great personality and virtue and the loss that the earth will suffer at their absence, and the second is about the beautiful and eternal life in heaven that they will enjoy after death. I believe, that there was a specific, utilitarian purpose behind writing these poems, other than mourning or commemorating the dead. Milton wrote these poems out of a sense of responsibility, that urged him to make the dead individuals immortal through his works. They might lead an eternal life in heaven, but man is a forgetful race, and once someone is dead, it does not take them too long to forget that person. The death poems were mostly written for anthologies of elegies for the dead persons, or were circulated among his friends; they were open to the public eye, to read and to remember the dead through them. But by the time Milton wrote Lycidas, this attitude would change.

In a section of his book, Philippe Ariès traces the history of the tomb, starting from Classical antiquity till the 20^th century. He says that tombs and graves in pre-Christian and early Christian civilizations bore inscriptions, ‘indicating the desire to preserve the identity of the tomb,’[3] but by the beginning of the 5^th century, this died out and gradually gave rise to common graves, in which many people were buried together, only to be dug out years later to accommodate new bodies. This tradition gave rise to single graves without inscriptions, but they too were reused (as one sees in the ‘gravedigger’s scene’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). This continued till as late as the 13^th century, when inscriptions bearing names or even portraits of the dead were revived. This forms a part of the general trend of that period in history which concerns one’s attempt to establish one’s own identity and this phenomenon coincides with that of anonymous artisans coming out and trying to be famous as individual artists through signed artworks. Aries writes,

The evolution in funeral art forms continued on the way to increased personalization until the early seventeenth century[4]

This tradition was not only prevalent in Milton’s time, but the obsession that fused death and the preservation of one’s own identity, even after death had made the individual a part of the universal, was increased and was manifested through the writing of poems like Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester and Lycidas.

Lycidas, written for Edward King, who died at sea, follows the same two-fold structure of mourning and the promise of heaven like all other poems of death by Milton, and here again, the poet practises his exercise of immortalising a dead person for posterity in his poetry. Milton is considered to be the last of the great Renaissance poets and in him one finds the anxiety of working in all the classical literary genres that were revived during the Renaissance. Although Milton wrote Lycidas, following the traditions of the pastoral elegy, in it he used a trope that was popular during the Renaissance in a different genre of poetry, the sonnet. Right from the beginning of sonnet writing during the Renaissance, starting with Petrarch, the idea of the lover, suffering from the pain of unrequited love, making the unresponsive beloved immortal through his poetry and thus enjoying a position above that person was quite popular. It continued even down to the sonnets of Shakespeare, which preserved this functional aspect of the genre, despite the structural changes. Shakespear’s sonnets to his ‘fair friend’ shows a matured insight of a poet, who is aware of the transience of physical beauty and of life. In spite of bearing images of ‘Reverdie’, these poems of love are heavy with the stench of death and decay, hidden beneath the apparent beauty of spring. But a poem is not a product of nature and hence will never perish. This allows the poet the confidence to write

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.[5]

Milton did something similar in Lycidas. Milton’s biographer, Christopher Hill says that the poem ends ‘by reminding us that life on earth goes on’ even after a person dies and that the poet was ‘always more concerned with this world than the next.’[6] So whether Lycidas acquires a position in the ‘blest kingdoms meek of joy and love’[7] is not as important as his name surviving on earth and Milton believes that it can be made possible through his poem. But the poem is much more than the monody that it poses to be.

Hill writes that in Lycidas, Milton ‘did not perhaps produce quite what was expected,’[8] that is an elegy for a dead fellow student. Through his concern for this particular demise, the poet is actually expressing his feelings about death in general and also ‘calls God’s justice in question.’[9] If someone as virtuous and as learned as Edward King could suffer such an unfortunate fate, then what would happen to the rest of them? Milton too was a scholar and a virtuous man, and his sentiment about the death of King also reflects his fear of his own death. Even if he is accepted in heaven for his virtuous and scholarly life, will he be remembered on Earth? I believe, here again, poetry was the only consolation for the poet. Like posterity will remember the dead by reading about them in his poems, they will also remember him as the composer of those poems. Along with Lycidas, not only will people remember the ‘uncouth swain’[10] who lamented his dead friend, but also the poet, who gave the swain his voice. This idea is also apparent in the next major poem about death that Milton wrote.

Epitaphium Damonis, written in Latin, is a poem about a more personal loss of the poet. It is an epitaph on his dead friend Charles Diodati, who was so close to Milton that Hill suggests that there could even have been a homosexual love affair between the two. This poem, although about a greater loss than the death of King, is more matured and less dramatic than Lycidas. But in spite of that, the poem is more about Milton than about Diodati. Milton expresses his grief through the character of the shepherd Thyrsis, who bewails the loss of his friend Damon. The poem is based in a pastoral setting that in spite of being more akin to Virgil’s pastoral of ‘soft primitivism’ of the golden age, than the harsh Ovidian pastoral, that is more savage than beautiful, is not set in Virgil’s Arcady, but rather the pastoral setting of Theocritus’ Sicily. In a major section of the poem, which seems to occupy a position of supremacy over the others, Thyrsis laments his own condition, talking about his sorrow, pain and suffering for having been left alone. The poem actually becomes a space of a narcissistic exercise of self pity for the poet, and Thyrsis rather than Damon, comes out to be the more important of the two characters. This was not the case in Lycidas, where Lycidas occupied the position of supremacy throughout the poem, the swain being mentioned only in the short, final stanza. Thus the poems of death are not only Milton’s project of immortalising the dead but also an attempt at making his own name (and fame, ‘that last infirmity of noble mind’[11]) survive. They are like a portrait, for which not only the subject, but also the painter becomes well-known.

As stated earlier, Milton was the last of the great Renaissance poets and his anxiety of reworking and recapitulating the forms and genre of literature of his predecessors shows his awareness of his position. This position was consolidated, when in 1632, his poem, An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare, was published among the prefatory material of Shakespeare’s Second Folio. It is true that in 1632, Shakespeare, although dead and gone, did not need a John Milton, scrivener’s son and a scholar at Cambridge, to hold ‘weak witness’[12] of his name, but it was rather the other way round. It was an opportunity for Milton to be associated not only with the name of the greatest poet of the English tradition, but also be a part of a project, that bore the names of the likes of Ben Jonson, whose elegy on Shakespeare prefixed the First Folio. But the truth is that Milton needed no big name to tag along with for his own to survive, for he would still have been known to us as he is now, through the greatness of his own works, which made him a source of inspiration for his immediate successors and the English Romantics (for whom his work was a manifestation of the sublime) and through which he still survives as one of the most widely read and criticised poets even in our own age, in spite of the attempt of decanonising him in the 20^th century.

---

[1] John Milton, "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey. (London: Longman, 1968). p130.

[2] Milton, "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough." p14.

[3] Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, (London: Marion Boyars, 1974). p46.

[4] Ibid. P 48.

[5] William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 18," inShakespeare's Sonnets,(London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2010). p147.

[6] Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). p52.

[7] Milton, “Lycidas.” p256.

[8] Hill. p49.

[9] Ibid. p49.

[10] Milton, “Lycidas.” p256.

[11] Ibid. p248.

[12] Milton. “On Shakespeare.” p127.

“Op'ning her fertile womb”: Milton and childbed suffering in “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester” and Sonnet 23

Gustav Klimt. Hope, II 1907-8

Anwita Ghosh, PG- II, Roll No. - 001300402014

Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull

Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world

Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere

Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her. […]                                
                                              [“Elegy for a Still-Born Child”, l.1-8][1]

It is the gravity of the world, its “intimate nudge and pull”, that makes the mother “heavy with the lightness in her”. The oxymoron continues still as stillbirth becomes for Seamus Heaney a confounding moment that at once combines birth and death (“Birth of death, exhumation for burial;” l.14). In this poetic appropriation, Heaney is unwittingly following the tradition of funerary poetry that was so popular in the seventeenth century. Many of the poets of that time wrote poems on death in childbirth and deaths of children. However, Heaney’s diction hardly insinuates any glorification of maternal sacrifice that often accompanied the said tradition. In his earliest-written published English poem, “On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough”, seventeen-year old Milton addresses the mother of the dead child:  

Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
Her false imagin'd loss cease to lament,
And wisely learn to curb thy sorrows wild;
Think what a present thou to God hast sent,
And render him with patience what he lent; (l. 71-75)[2]

Soon followed “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester”, who died along with her stillborn child and was then “No Marchioness, but [now] a Queen” (l. 74). Milton experienced the deaths following childbirth of two of his own wives (one of them the “late espoused saint” of Sonnet 23) and their newborn children and also of his only son. In fact his entire poetic career manifests an almost disproportionate engagement with death and a constant re-turn to the dead, be it “Lycidas” or “Epitaphium Damonis”. However, in this particular essay I wish to study Milton’s attitude towards maternal suffering in childbirth with respect to “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester” and Sonnet 23.

On April 15, 1631, Lady Jane Paulet, wife of Lord John Paulet, fifth Marquis of Winchester, was delivered of her dead son before she died of causes related to complicated childbirth and an infected abscess on her cheek. The nature of this occasion stirred up quite a number of elegies including those by Ben Jonson, William Davenant and our very own John Milton. No personal connection between Milton and the Paulets is known and it seems that Milton probably wrote the poem intending to get it published in a Cambridge volume of memorial verses. The educated seriousness of the poem speaks less a language of bereavement and mourning. It reads more like a young poet testing his skills at witty poetic exercises. Although longer and more elaborate than most epitaphs, the poem retains the characteristics of the genre in that it identifies its subject, describes her station in life, and gives her age. In the first forty-six lines, the Marchioness is referred to in the third person, and the pathos of her early death is emphasized though almost austerely; thereafter, she is directly addressed, and consolation is derived from her present pristine existence. And this is how the poem moves from the abode of “darkness, and with death” (l. 10) to that “[o]f blazing majesty and light” (l. 70).

A detailed account of Jane’s aristocratic lineage not only inaugurates the poem but also underlines its unifying theme of genealogy and its crisis only to be undermined by the fact that her “high birth” and her own “graces…”

Quickly found a lover meet; (l. 16)

and love brought with it death: she died in childbirth. This is followed by the hasty summoning of the god of marriage who well lighted his torch only to welcome darkness as in the very garland which he brought

Ye might discern a Cipress bud, (l. 22)

the emblem of death. And Atropos, the Fate who snips the thread of man’s life, in destroying the fruit manages to destroy the tree as well. Thus the young mother soon to enter the tomb herself becomes a living tomb for her child.

The hapless babe before his birth

Had burial, yet not laid in earth,

And the languished mother’s womb

Was not long a living tomb. (l. 31-34)

The invocation of Lucina, the coming of Atropos with her shears, the pastoral fable of the “unheedy swain”, the “slip” and the “carnation train” described in that fable, the two epitaphic figures of the “fruit and tree” and the “womb” as “tomb”: all of these figures are more than rhetorically integrated comparisons. For Louis Schwartz these choices are a product of a conscious plan and are designed to suggest a confrontation with social realities as well as the medical realities of which Milton, or indeed anyone, could easily have been aware even if he or she had no firsthand experience of them.[3] While scholars debate the actual mortality rates for childbirth deaths in seventeenth century, the most problematic position is perhaps that of the male subject in the entire procedure. Generally the masculine witness to early modern childbirth occupied one of the two positions: the surgeon who delivered death, or the husband, who viewed the potentially fatal consequences of his expressed love and sexual desire. And in this case one might sense in the young poet an uneasy mélange of these two respective gazes. Milton is at once the meticulous surgeon who tries to linguistically symbolize an apparently paradoxical situation, the birth of death and the bereaved husband whose consolation aims to elevate the woman to a higher pedestal of motherhood. The role of the latter, however, is felt less in “Epitaph” than in Sonnet 23, as I will discuss shortly. In this cultural, professional, and personal realm, the masculine presence thus signals a possibility of death. It will be interesting to examine Milton’s role as a male poet and his act of symbolization, as in verbally representing the “birth of death”, in “Epitaph” with this awareness in mind.

The second part of “Epitaph” proves more than anything else that for Milton maternal suffering was yet to play out its part in all its gruesome physical details, as one will see later in the grotesque presentation of the postlapsarian childbirth offered by Sin in Paradise Lost. Amidst a flurry of classical, biblical and literary allusions, Milton’s “Epitaph” reaches a climax in the allusion to Rachel, the mother of Joseph (Genesis 29:9 and 35:18), who too died in childbed. In his Paradiso, Dante had placed Beatrice and Rachel, both mothers who died in childbirth, together in the third rank of the celestial Rose. This concluding allusion, although at times criticized for being a little strained, serves enough to articulate Milton’s reserved expression of grief and finally of hope. Placing Lady Jane next to Rachel, Milton invokes an exaltation of rank with which the poem ends:

No marchioness, but now a queen. (l. 74)

The analogy emphasizes that Jane is not only salvaged by her death but the form of her self-sacrifice has achieved for her a place of particularly high glory. Maternal mortality becomes a matter of heroic defeat and the childbed is transformed from a conflicting zone of birth, death and degradation to a battlefield that glorifies the pains involved and deserves grand poetic memorialization. This is reinforced by Milton when he wishes the Lady rest after her hard travail for the sake of future life:

Sweet rest seize thee evermore,

That to give the world increase,

Shortened hast thy own life’s lease; (l. 50-52)

Hence Milton’s elevation of Jane to the status of a “queen” (l. 74) not only suggests Mary but also a thematic continuation of the description of titled lineage with which he begins the poem. [4] Finally, when the parts are subordinated to the whole, one might note how the arrangement of the events in Lady Jane’s life (her birth, marriage and bearing of two children and her death along with her second child) constantly refer to a motif of exaltation for laudable deeds.[5] But above all, it is the potential of motherhood and the dangers involved in it that are magnified to such an extent that the Marchioness is treated no less than a fatally wounded epic hero. In “A Beautiful Death”, Jean-Pierre Vernant has written eloquently about the layers of significance that surrounds the treatment of the dead warrior in Homer. Vernant does not extend his argument beyond epic, but one might sense a similar treatment of the death of a warrior in Milton’s presentation of the Marchioness’ death in childbirth, especially when Vernant wrote:

Even though it is no longer in his power to conquer and survive, he must still fulfill the demands that the warrior status makes on him and his peers: he must transform his death into eternal glory, change the fate of all creatures subject to demise into a blessing that is his alone and whose luster will be his forever.[6]        

In Milton and Maternal Mortality (2009), Louis Schwartz contends that Milton was unusual in making childbirth and maternal mortality a subject for poetry, and, in his analysis of this literature, Schwartz identifies a distinctive shift from Milton’s early writing to his later literary endeavours; while works like “On Shakespeare” and “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester” in some ways idealize maternal suffering, reading it as powerful metaphor for the act of creativity and corporeal transcendence, later treatments, including Sonnet 23 and Paradise Lost that offer more ambiguous conclusions.

Sonnet was rather a tired form when Milton got to it and if he was a traditionalist in his preference for the Italian over the English structure, Milton also challenged poetic conventions in his sonnets. Only his first six sonnets, probably composed in the early 1630s, deal with romantic love, the typical structure of the verse form during the height of its popularity in the late sixteenth century. Instead Milton used the sonnet in a new way- to write about political events, friends, people he admired and himself. He also deviated from tradition by eschewing a formal sonnet sequence and the only common denominator across all his sonnets appears to be himself. Although Milton mostly used the sonnet form for public occasions yet much like Shakespeare, some of his best known sonnets are masquerades for moments of intense magnitude in his personal life. Milton’s last sonnet, Sonnet 23, numbered XIX in Poems (1673), is one such sonnet that meditates on an aspect of a mourner’s suffering, the bereaved person’s dream. The poem recounts a dream vision in which the speaker sees his wife return to him (as the dead Alcestis appeared to her husband Admetus), but as she inclined to embrace him in the dream he “waked, she fled, and day brought back (his) night” (l. 14). The monosyllabic last line bears all the emotional weight of the poem as waking up fills the speaker with anguish and dismay. It is disputed whether the sonnet is about Milton’s second wife, Katherine Woodcock, whom he married in 1656 and who died in 1658 having borne him a daughter in 1657, or about his first wife, Mary Powell, who died in May 1652, three days after giving birth to a daughter. However, there are actually “very few references (within the poem) that are necessarily autobiographical”[7]. And therefore there are some critics who have argued against all the autobiographical readings. Leo Spitzer, for example, argues that no particular wife, but it is the figure of “donna angelicata”, revered by Dante and Petrarch, who resides at the heart of the sonnet. He concludes that the experience of the poem is therefore general and as the embodiment of literary tradition, it represents the conventional “problem of the Ideal in our world.”[8] One wonders why Spitzer fails to consider the fact that the poem’s theological and philosophical implications can well be rooted in the particular biographical references. It is hard to ignore the turbulent phase of Milton’s life during the 1650s and the specificity of lines 5 and 6 seems to concede that the poem does refer to historical fact as was pointed out by Thomas Wheeler.[9] The four deaths mentioned above highlight more than anything else the crises and difficulties Milton experienced as a husband and father.  The complex of intense emotion (awe, regret, guilt, grateful praise, hope, and despair) surrounding the “veiled” face of the poem helps us to understand how Milton’s approach to childbed suffering developed in the meantime, that is to say more than twenty five years after he wrote “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester”.  

Much like “Epitaph”, Sonnet 23 curiously balances a pedantic display of learning and a whirlwind of powerful emotions especially that of guilt and despair. The allusive structure of “Epitaph” anticipates the typologically structured octave of Sonnet 23. The latter moves from Alcestis to the Israelite women of Leviticus, who then suggest Mary and Elizabeth in Luke allowing the lines to come to a pause just over the octave/sestet break in an expression of Christian “trust” in a future redemption and reunion of husband and wife.  The sestet, drawing upon the conventions of the Elizabethan love poetry, begins by deploring the excessive ferocity and strength of four senses culminating to a sense of sexual touch. But the last two lines express the utter failure in the reconciliation of the desire for flesh with that of the spirit. Moreover his “night”, far more than his blindness, is his realization that his “saint” has truly fled. The tripartite structure of the sonnet corresponds to a progression from Greek myth, Old Testament law to a New Testament belief in salvation with the advent of Christ as is evident in the typological structure discussed above. A sense of self-sacrificial love permeates all three allusions and Rachel of “Epitaph” becomes here one of the ladies of Leviticus. If the first allusion from Euripides’ Alcestis situates Milton as an estranged husband, the allusion to the “childbed taint” brings out the bereaved father in Milton provided one keeps in mind the biographical context. However, as one approaches the end the figure of Admetus seems to merge with that of Orpheus, as John C. Ulreich writes:

From the very first, Hercules’ successful rescue of Alcestis inevitably suggests the countertype of Orpheus and his “half-regained Eurydice” (L’Allegro, l.149), and this countertype continues to function throughout the poem, not simply as a type of Christian sacrifice, but as an archetype of love and loss:

But O, as to embrace me she inclin’d,

I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.[10]

However, the most troubling part of the sonnet is perhaps the insinuations of lines 5-6,

Mine as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,

Purification in the old Law did save, 

Milton’s reference to “Purification in the old Law” is invariably glossed as an allusion to the twelfth chapter of Leviticus, which describes the rite of purification after childbirth:

And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled . . . she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtle dove, for a sin offering. (12:6-7).

There is, however, another even more appropriate scriptural allusion in the New Testament, for which the old law of Leviticus is a source:

And when the days of . . . [Mary’s] purification according to the [old] law of Moses were accomplished, they brought . . . [Jesus] to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord . . . and [in the words of Leviticus] to offer a sacrifice . . . a pair of turtle doves. (Luke 2:22, 24). 

Milton’s saint comes as one “saved” because real purification is spiritual and figurative, not literal and ceremonial; the law is “old” because it has been transcended by the new covenant of faith.[11] But the utter failure to embrace the “saved” one implies not only a state of impurity on the part of the dreamer but also a sense of helplessness, all the more because it is the dreamer’s expression of love that has led to the “childbed taint”- the original sin that needs “Purification in the old Law”. The fact that the woman is veiled and she disappears before the veil is ever lifted might suggest the speaker’s physical blindness. The sonnet thus expresses what George Boas has described as the “pathos of the blind man’s reaching after his dead wife in a dream.”[12] The physical blindness may in turn imply various states of symbolic blindness: his fallen state, his position in the deceptive material world and the illusions and limitations of his own “fancied sight”. The expression “fancied sight” not only hints at a sensation of heightened vision but also suggests a sight which is driven by desire. And the result of this desire was the “childbed taint”. The child-bed has undone three lives, so to speak, but the undoing of the speaker is most ironic. His potency is responsible for his present impotent existence of separation and frustration. His act of love has led to destruction and barrenness instead of the professed creation. Overwhelmed by guilt he anxiously acknowledges his role in his beloved’s death. In The Dialectics of Creation, Michael Lieb explains how the images of reproduction and regeneration represented within Paradise Lost give expression to the struggles between good and evil, creation and degradation, as well as profane and pious poetics.[13] While fallen birth mostly signals the degradation of those productive beings precisely because of its resemblance to postlapsarian human experience, the womb itself frequently appears as a place of potential. This dangerous interplay of life, death and degradation in the domain of childbirth, as represented in Paradise Lost, take on special significance when we reflect on Milton’s personal encounters with the risk of childbirth. This conflict in Milton, which finds expression in Sonnet 23, is succinctly described by Schwartz in his essay:

Milton…finds himself not only helpless in the face of his wife’s suffering but forced to recognize that this suffering is caused by his own desires to express love and to procreate…a man may love a woman just as God does, but the man’s love causes painful death, not life.[14]       

                                                                                            

As Schwartz, Lieb, and others who discuss the implications of birth in Paradise Lost have noted, the depictions of procreation in Milton’s work reveal much about the poet’s equation of fallen and unfallen creativity. However, as the essay attempted to show, Milton’s attitude to maternal mortality did undergo a drastic change by the time he wrote his last sonnet. The disturbing masculine indifference of “Epitaph” is replaced by a guilt-ridden anxiety of Sonnet 23. While suffering in “Epitaph” is distinctly beyond the body because the young poet refuses to treat the Marchioness in the grim physical details of seventeenth century childbirth, the man in Sonnet 23 is one who has watched his wife undergo the perils of pregnancy and delivery and has responded from the knowledge of his part in the suffering. Although this specifically masculine experience of childbirth is dealt with different sets of context in the two poems, yet the sense of loss of unfallen procreation, a theme explored more intensely in the great epic, permeates both the poems abundantly.  

---

[1] Heaney, Seamus. Poems 1965-1975: Death of a Naturalist; Door into the Dark; Wintering Out; North (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).

[2] All citations of Milton’s poems are from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968).

[3] Schwartz, Louis. "Scarce-well-lighted Flame": Milton's "Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" and the Representation of Maternal Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Epitaph in All in All: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Durham, Charles W., and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999), pg. 213.

[4] Ibid., pg. 214.

[5] Wilson, Gayle Edward. "Decorum and Milton's "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" Milton Quarterly 8.1 (1974), pg. 11-14.

[6] Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), pg. 50.

[7] Schwartz, Louis. Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pg. 158.

[8] Spitzer, Leo. “Understanding John Milton” in Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). 

[9] Wheeler, Thomas. “Milton’s Twenty-third Sonnet,” Studies in Philology, LVIII (1961).

[10] Ulreich, J.C. “Typological Symbolism in Milton's Sonnet XXIII.” Milton Quarterly. 8. 1974. pg. 7-10.

[11] Ibid., pg. 7.

[12] Boas, George."The Problem of Meaning in the Arts," Meaning and Interpretation, (University of California Publications in Philosophy, 25 (1950)., pg. 319.

[13] Lieb, Michael. The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in “Paradise Lost” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). 

[14] Schwartz, Louis. “Spot of child-bed taint”: Seventeenth-Century Obstetrics in Milton's Sonnet 23 and Paradise Lost, Milton Quarterly. 27. 1993, pg. 101.

Bibliography

Boas, George."The Problem of Meaning in the Arts," Meaning and Interpretation, (University of California Publications in Philosophy, 25 (1950).  

Heaney, Seamus. Poems 1965-1975: Death of a Naturalist; Door into the Dark; Wintering Out; North (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).

Hill, Elizabeth.  “A Dream in the Long Valley: Some Psychological Aspects of Milton’s Last Sonnet”.  Greyfriar 26 (1985).

John Carey and Alastair Fowler, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968).

Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in “Paradise Lost” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).

Pruitt, Kristin A., and Charles W. Durham. Living Texts: Interpreting Milton. (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2000).

                                             

R.F. Hall. “Milton’s sonnets and his contemporaries”.  in The Cambridge Companion to Milton., ed. Dennis Danielson.  (Cambridge University Press.  1999).

Schwartz, Louis. Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009).

Schwartz, Louis. "Scarce-well-lighted Flame": Milton's "Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" and the Representation of Maternal Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Epitaph in All in All: Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Durham, Charles W., and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1999).

Schwartz, Louis. “Spot of child-bed taint”: Seventeenth-Century Obstetrics in Milton's Sonnet 23 and Paradise Lost, Milton Quarterly. 27. 1993.

Spitzer, Leo. “Understanding John Milton” in Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). 

Ulreich, J.C. “Typological Symbolism in Milton's Sonnet XXIII.” Milton Quarterly. 8. 1974.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Froma I. Zeitlin, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991).

                                      

Wheeler, Thomas. “Milton’s Twenty-third Sonnet,” Studies in Philology, LVIII (1961).

Wilson, Gayle Edward. "Decorum and Milton's "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" Milton Quarterly 8.1 (1974).