Representation of death in Milton's death poems

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.