“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.  

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[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).