Representation
of death in Milton’s death poems
SANGNA MANDAL
PG I ROLL-28
Death was a long
tradition of memorialising through poetry, which became a form of remembrance. One of the main causes for the spread of the
theme of death was the effect of the Black Death. The dance of death
known as Danse Macabre in
French was an artistic genre of late medieval allegory on the universality of
death. The dance of death unites all people
from different strata of life. Dance of death consist personified death
summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along the grave,
typically pope, king, child and labourer. They were produced to remind people
about the fragility of life. The omnipresent possibility of death increased the
religious desire for penitence but it also evoked a hysterical desire for
amusement while still possible the last dance for cold comfort. The Danse Macabre combines both
desires: in many ways similar to the medieval mystery plays, the
dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind
people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared
at all times for death.
A Danse Macabre
painting may show a round dance headed by Death or a chain of alternating dead
and live dancers. From the highest ranks of the mediaeval hierarchy (usually
pope and emperor) descending to its lowest (beggar, peasant, and child), each
mortal's hand is taken by a skeleton or an extremely decayed body. The painting
presented the dead dancers as very lively and agile, making the impression that
they were actually dancing, whereas their living dancing partners looked clumsy
and passive. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is
completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a socio
critical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre Milton’s death poems had
many similarities with the dance of death. Milton had witnessed the death of
many family members. Therefore young Milton took up the theme of death at the
initial stage of his life. Here in this following discussion I intend to
discuss how death has been personified and represented through various symbols
in his poetry.
An epitaph on the marchioness of
Winchester
This poem exploits the paradoxes of birth and death,
flowering and untimely plucking. Death offers a scope for poetic lamentation.
The marchioness of noble birth died at the age of 23 years. The poem opens with
formal dignity, pointing with something like quiet pride to the “rich” tomb and
emphasizing the lady’s rank. Her “high birth” could not save her from death.
Indeed her “graces sweet” actually hastened her death. For her “high birth” and her own “graces” and
love brought with it death: she died in childbirth. The god of marriage was
summoned too hastily, it is suggested, to have well lighted his torch, for in
the very garland which he brought-
“Ye might discern a Cipress bud” - the emblem of death. The
hymen therefore dressed in the gown of death, came to their marriage to curse
the newly wedded couple. During
childbirth, Atropos came instead of Lucina, the Roman goddess of childbirth and
cut the threads of lives of both the mother and her child. The young mother, so
soon to enter the tomb herself, became a living tomb for her child. Death is personified as “unheedy swain”, intending to crop the
blossom, has “pluck’t up” the plant itself. But the drooping of the uprooted
plant is compared to the languishing of a human being. She became a tender and
beautifully doomed flower. The “pearls of dews” that she wore, symbols of youth
and morning freshness, become tears which presage her death. The last lines of
the poem turn from the womb to the realms of light where the lady now is. She
sits next to Rachael, the mother of joseph, who like her died in childbed. In
this region of celestial glory, the lady was no longer a marchioness, but a
queen. Thus the lady is linked with the “fair Syrian shepherdess” by the manner
of their deaths, and is seated next to her in the ranks of the saints.
Therefore Milton developed for himself a kind of poem in which wit is not
absent but is kept submerged and implicit, rather than dominant.
On the death of a fair infant
There was good authority among classical poets Milton knew
for letting earth rest gently upon the fragile dust beneath a mood reflected by
Ben Johnson in his lines on his dead daughter –
“This grave partakes the fleshy birth
Which cover lightly, gentle earth”
“On the death of a fair infant” also exhibits the
metaphysical qualities of death. According to Milton’s nephew Edward Philips,
the poem was occasioned by the death of Milton‘s niece, the infant daughter of
his sister Anne Philips. Milton here employs a metaphysical paradox and simultaneously
depicts child beauty and its decay, corruption and immortality. Milton here
poses to demonstrate the dual nature of death. He mainly focuses on the
enigmatic power of death. In Milton’s elegy, the power proves more effective as
it eases the pain which inevitably results from the knowledge that the innocent
child’s body is decomposing in the grave. Death here becomes cohesive,
harmonising force. The ceremonious formality of the elaborate mythology is
lightened somewhat by the conceit Milton employed in the 1st four stanzas: the
little flower was so lovely that winter was tempted to kiss her rosy cheeks, a
conceit which might have been charming if the young versifier had not felt it
necessary to develop it at too much length through the legends of Aquilo and Orythia, Apollo and
Hyacinth. Death is personified
as the Bleak Winters which cease the life of the infant and dry the fairest
flower into a lifeless one. The death loses its paradoxical image and is
depicted as an instrument of beatitude. The ceremonial, trapping, framing and
staging of death was important in renaissance culture. Death is an inevitable
and inseparable part of truth and mortal life. Milton vitiates the effect where
he says that the child’s life is imagined as an impact of cosmic disorder and
her death is considered as an act of god where he is able to restore her
position which is appropriate to her nature. The images of womb and tomb are
juxtaposed in this poem. The womb was a grave in which the child had its
prenatal sleep and the tomb symbolises that the child had been laid to an
eternal sleep. Therefore death is also personified as sleep which fell upon the
infant and drew away the physical soul from it. The poem ends with a hope where
the poet advices the young mother to curb her sorrows as the offspring was a
mistake but she can be blessed with another child. Milton depicts the cycle of
life which will ‘flie back with speed’ and ‘set the hearts of men on fire’.
Louis Schwartz
examines a much neglected aspect of Milton’s authorial and biographical
persona, his unusual attention to female suffering in childbirth and its
disastrous consequences. In “Milton and Maternal Mortality”, Schwartz
shows Milton’s responses to pregnancy and maternal death in his early and late
poems. Death has been given a still birth imagery in “On the death of a fair
infant”. His chapter on “An epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester” places an
apparently unsustainable burden of blame on her husband. That approach is
especially unsettling since Milton is not blamed despite of sharing the same
husbandly fate. Similarly strained assumptions prove problematic in the next
section discussion of sonnet 23, which gives a little resumed ‘romance’ makes
it primary referent Mary Powell.
On the Hobson poems
Milton in the two poems turns most of the jests on the fact
that Hobson died while his weekly trips to London had been temporarily stopped
by the plague. In the first poem, which is the form of an epitaph, death has
broken his girth and thrown him off his horse or else mired him in a slough.
Hobson has kept upon the road so continuously that, had it not been for the
enforced vacation, death would hardly have caught him at all. Finding him so
long at home, death concludes that he has come to the end of his journey, and
like the servant at an inn, pulls off his boots and takes away the light.
The second poem, “another on the same” abandons the mock
epitaph in favour of a succession of paradoxes and puns. The constant movement
of the humble carrier is compared to the celestial bodies of the spheres, the
substance of which, according to Aristotle, is indestructible so long as their
movement continues. Death is modelled as time which gave long vacation i.e.
cessation to the life of Hobson. Milton constantly puns on time. Death has also
been presented as ‘carrier’ carried away the ‘leisure’ of Hobson. Leisure which
is health giving to others brings death to him- the death who apparently takes
the charge of leisure carried away the life of him. Thus, there is a constant
image of reversal and paradoxes in this poem. In the Hobson poems he gives his
wit a more pointed, epigrammatic form than it takes in such a poem as “On Shakespeare”.
On time
The poem begins in an almost taunting tone: time, the slow,
the inexorable, is urged to hurry. Its hours are “leaden stepping” and their
speed is but that of the clock weights. With line 4, the image shifts from that
of a race to that of feeding. Time is urged to glut itself, for he can stuff
into his maw only what is valueless. Time is destroying itself. Time’s maw is
in reality its tomb and time, in its greed and envy, is actually devouring
itself. “Mortal dross” suggests that time is really a scavenger, removing the
corruption of death. Milton came to write in “Paradise Lost”, he represented death and sin as scavengers.
The poem closes, as it began, by addressing time directly.
From the vantage point of eternity, “attired with stars”, time is looked down
to triumph over death. Death’s association with time has been implied in the
phrase “mortal dross” and in reference to eternity. Chance must shut out from
the world of eternity because eternity is a realm of perfectly harmonious
order. The mention of stars gives a concrete image for this conception. The
celestial bodies were unchanged and their movements were perfectly regulated.
By them, mortal men measured time, but the planets and stars themselves were
above the realm of time.
On Shakespeare
Ben Jonson’s “to the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr
William Shakespeare’ is an epigram in heroic couplets. Milton’s basic figure is
used by Jonson: thou art a monument without a tomb, but Milton did not
necessarily borrow it from Jonson. Both were using one of the most familiar
commonplaces of literary tribute, never more succinctly phrased than by Horace:
“exegi monumentum aere perennius” (I have built a monument more lasting
than bronze)
Shakespeare, says Milton, needs no monument of stone, no
pyramid, to preserve his “reliques”. His works are his monument. The sepulchre
he had raised himself so transcends any of marble “that kings for such a tomb
would wish to die”.
Milton speaks of Shakespeare as a poet by “nature” whose
“easy numbers flow” “to the shame of slow endeavouring art”. The “sepulchre”,
“monument”, “marble” invoked the ceremony of death. In L’Allegro too Milton’s passing tribute is to “sweetest
Shakespeare, fancy’s child” who marbles his native woodnotes wild. Here he is
obviously thinking of the romantic comedies and of Jonson’s “learned sock”.
Again in paradise lost Shakespearean lines echo in ears and spring to his lips
in paraphrase. Despite of his tribute to the romances the lines he paraphrased
were from the tragedies by which he had been deeply moved.
Lycidas
The elegy is a “mournful, melancholic” poem especially a
funeral song of the lament for dead. It was a specific genre for lament and
commemoration.
Milton’s pastoral
monody ‘Lycidas’ records a moment in history--- 1637 – when a
young pastor poet and learned college friend, Edward king, met an untimely
death by drowning, and when archbishop laud was imposing an oppressive
programme of censorship and ecclesiastical reform on England. Lycidas begins
with a shaking, the shattering of the poet’s laurel crown, as well as shaking
of the religious and national hopes of England: ‘yet once more, o ye laurels
and once more/ ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere’. Included within the
personal crisis, the necessity of a young poet taking on a poetic task that he
feels unready to shoulder, to compose a song to lament Lycidas, ‘dead ere his
prime’ is also the shadow of national crisis. .
At the beginning of the introduction to Milton’s monody on
the death by drowning imagery foreshadows the poet‘s thematic concerns in the
three major sections of the poem. In the first major section of the elegy,
Milton laments the loss of king in his capacity as a budding poet who but for
his untimely death might one day have earned the “laurels” symbolic of poetic
success. The second section mourns the young man’s death because he had been a
promising Christian pastor, as theologically learned as he was virtuous and
hence potentially worthy of an “ivy” chaplet – an ancient symbol of great
learning. In the 3rd segment, Milton laments that death has prevented king from
achieving fulfilment in human love, a theme prefigured in the poet’s intention
to crush the dark leaves of “myrtles” – the shrub sacred to Venus. All these
flowers mentioned have a long tradition of literary usage- either in the
celebrations of love especially during the springtime or in the lamentation
over the death one who had been greatly loved.
Death is represented as an animate being who plucked the
untimely “berries” with its forced fingers thereby resulting in the shattering
of “leaves before the mellowing year”. This image evokes a sense of strain and
awkwardness that poet does something against his better judgement. The whole
nature mourns at the sudden death of the young poet. The death has resulted in
untimely plucking of the young poet’s talents.
The image of death is also presented through the figure of
Atropos. In Greek mythology, Atropos was one of the three Moirae, the fates,
the female deities who supervised fate rather than determine it. Atropos was
known as inevitable and cut the thread of life with the “abhorred shears”. She
worked along with Clotho, who spun the thread and Lacheis, who measured the
length. They were the daughters of Zeus and Themis (the goddess of order). The
fury and fate are blended into the composite image of death-
Fame is the spur that
the clear° spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair Guerdon° when we hope to find, reward
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits° the thin-spun life
Therefore death here is found in the figures of fate and
fury and it is the death that spun the lifespan of man through its spear.
Finally the image of hyacinth described in the line “like to
that sanguine flower inscribed with woe” is also related to death and
resurrection. Hyacinth was a tutelary deity of one of the principal Spartan
festivals- the Hyacinthia- held in every summer. It is comprised of
three days- mourning for the death of the divine hero on first day and
celebrating his rebirth on the next two days as Apollo Hyakinthios. Hyacinth
flower is also red with the blood of Adonis, who was gored to death by a wild
boar. Also Apollo’s discus was responsible for slaying Hyacinth. A twist in the
tale makes the wind god Zephyrus responsible in the death of Hyacinth. Her
beauty caused a feud between Apollo and Zephyrus. Zephyrus blew Apollo‘s
discuss off course so as to injure and kill Hyacinth.The premature death of Hyacinth is equated with untimely death of
Lycidas.
Milton in Lycidas is not lamenting king as a person;
he is lamenting the young poet; and the young poet is, because of the very
roots of the tradition of the pastoral elegy, the dying gods and the dying gods
has conquered death. It is important for instance that Orpheus comes in at a
key point of the poem. Orpheus is the type of all poets. But he is also a kind
of pre figuration of Christ. Like Christ he descends into hell and comes out
again; but where Christ harrows hell, Orpheus loses Eurydice at the last
moment. Like Christ as the Logos, Orpheus harmonises natural world with his
music. Like Christ, he is cruelly sacrificed, but unlike Christ, he has n
resurrection. The muse who bore him cannot bring him back to life again, and
the muse is not only ‘golden haired calliope’, she is ‘universal nature’. Nature
gives life but cannot conquer death.
Lycidas, being a pastoral elegy, is an attempt to
deal with the oblivion faced by man through death. It is all about the duty of
the apollonian poet (Milton) to make a stand against the Dionysian disorder of
human life and experience. Memory dwells in the dark recesses of the mind, and
experience itself is chaotic in nature. The poetic expression of these entities
involves imposing order and decorum on them, which is essentially, an
Apollonian act. Yet, a poet could never be bereft of poetic madness, de furore
poeticus – so felt the great literary proponents of antiquity, such as Homer
and Theocritus. This ‘madness’ was a divine frenzy, a state of transcendent
ecstasy. Ancient Greek thought equated the creation of art with ritual,
religion and substance induced ecstasy; the ritual or Dionysian madness was
undifferentiated from its poetic counterpart.
The poet is torn between Apollonian and Dionysian elements,
and such is undoubtedly the case with life too. This created a great anxiety in
Milton, which found expression in his treatment of the poet as an Orphic
figure, in constant danger of being torn apart by Maenads- practitioners of the
Bacchic orgy. In Lycidas, Milton mentions Orpheus, son of the muse
calliope, the archetype of the inspired poet. He had founded cults to both
Apollo and Dionysus, honouring the two inevitable patrons of the poet. Though
he had founded the Dionysian mysteries, he used to venerate Apollo, the sun god
as the greatest among gods. Eratosthenes, in a variant account of Orpheus‘s
death, says that when he was worshipping the sun on Mount Pangaeum ,one
morning, the offended Dionysus unleashed his “rout that made the hideous roar”
and had him dismembered.
Milton thus noticed that in this world, action is
precarious, the good die young, and the wicked often prosper. This capricious
programme of fate becomes the menace of Dionysian disorder and dissolution to
the poet. Through poetry, and its Apollonian brilliance then, Milton tries to
keep alive memory of the virtuous Edward King, both in man’s mind, and in a
deified afterlife.
Therefore Milton employs various metaphysical elements
through his representation of death. He also justifies his use of paradoxes in
his other death poems. Lycidas was the last poem where Milton was able to fuse
Christian and pagan imagery. The flower catalogues that are used in his death
poems, are associated with ideas of surviving fame, memorial tribute and the
possibility of resurrection. Thus Milton uses the imagery of the “dance of
death” in his death poems to represent and personalise death.
