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 16th
and 17th 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 20th 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 5th 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 13th 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 20th century.
No comments:
Post a Comment