Milton – Simply Sublime

A young John Milton, to his schoolfriend Charles Diodata: ‘Allow me to use big language with you. You ask what I am thinking of? I am thinking of immortality. What am I doing? Growing my wings and meditating flight. But as yet our Pegasus raises himself on very tender wings. Let us be lowly wise.’

This charming image, the seductive humility of the last lines, cannot disguise the towering nature of the ambition – immortality. Paradise Lost, published when Milton was sixty, ‘long choosing and beginning late’, fulfilled his desire ‘to leave something so written to after times as they should not willingly let it die’. We haven’t, and ‘after times’ won’t. The poem, over ten thousand words long, bestowed on Milton a form of poetic deity. He is variously described as divine (Wordsworth), sublime (Byron), and, for Coleridge, ‘Milton is the deity of prescience’. Ted Hughes believed there is ‘a direct line which can be traced from Virgil to Dante, from Dante to Milton’. (It continued, Hughes noted, to Eliot.)

Milton on Mount Parnassus. How did he get there? John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street in London’s Cheapside to John Milton Snr, a wealthy scrivener and an excellent composer of music, whose own father, the keeper of the Forest of Shotover and a zealous papist, disinherited his son because he’d forsaken the religion of his ancestors. Disobedience in pursuit of intellectual and spiritual freedom requires courage. Milton learnt early that courage comes at a cost, though in the light of his father’s success he may also have deduced it was not necessarily prohibitive. Initially he was educated
at home, then at St Paul’s School, followed by Christ’s College, Cambridge, where, perhaps due to his good looks (he had wonderful hair) he was known as Our Lady of Christs. His ‘honest haughtiness’ (his phrase) did not endear him either to his fellow students or to teachers and, according to Dr Johnson, Milton, who may have been rusticated, was possibly one of the last students to suffer the indignity
of ‘corporal correction’. At Cambridge he wrote the oft-anthologised ‘Il Pensoroso’, the contemplative man who praises Melancholy, and its companion piece, ‘L’Allegro’, in which Melancholy is banished in
favour of the delightful invitation to ‘come, and trip it as ye go / on the light fantastic toe’. Seduction by argument drives his Mask, the rather strange Comus, rarely performed (perhaps advisedly), in which
‘The Lady’ is implored by Comus to ‘be not cosen’d with that same vaunted name Virginity . . . if you let slip time, like a neglected rose / It withers on the stalk with languish’d head . . . Beauty is nature’s
brag.’ In ‘Lycidas’, his haunting monody (written in memory of Edward King, a college contemporary drowned in the Irish Sea), pastoral beauty is in disturbing contrast to violent images of the drowning young man’s futile battle with the sea. The philosopher’s instinct to set in balance opposing views is clear in these early poems. They are a powerful harbinger of things to come – later, much later, after decades of political dissent and of little poetry.

Milton initially rejected a life in the Church – ‘a clergyman must subscribe slave . . . bought and begun with servitude and forswearing’, which was not his style . . . ‘Thoughts of Obedience, whether Canonical or Civil, raised his indignation’, said Dr Johnson. Instead he dedicated himself to six years’ intense study of Greek, Latin and Hebrew (Milton is perhaps literature’s most erudite poet). He then embarked on a tour of Europe, where he visited Galileo – no doubt a perfect meeting of minds – though we have no record of the conversation. In 1639, aged thirty-one, he returned to England to what was about to become the most turbulent period in its history – the Civil War and the execution of a king. The ardent Platonist had found the cause of his life, Republicanism; it would cost him dearly. Starting in 1641 Milton’s life and his brilliance were to be dedicated to a tireless, personally dangerous series of writings in defence of liberty, be it religious or civil – the philosophical cornerstone of his masterpiece should he live long enough to write it. Macaulay spoke of the ‘deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and tyrants’ and of ‘the faith which he so sternly kept with his country’. From 1641 almost twenty years passed of passionate politics, philosophy, marriages, births and deaths, during which Milton would serve as Secretary of Foreign Tongues under Oliver Cromwell and write, with reckless courage, two months after the execution of Charles I, ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’. An ardent pamphleteer, he published attacks on the episcopacy, particularly Bishops Usher and Hall: ‘Of Reformation in England and the Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It’; and on the Government in the still-stirring ‘Areopagitica’ – his great defence of the liberty of the press and the only work by a poet to have legal stature in American courts. According to Professor Myron Taylor the Bill of Rights owes more to John Milton than to John Locke. His work would be publicly burnt in Europe.

Private life was hardly much calmer. His first wife left him after six weeks of marriage, thus inspiring his pamphlet on divorce, ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’. She returned, perhaps influenced by the pamphlet or, possibly, the fact that he’d courted ‘a young lady of great accomplishments’, a certain Miss Davis. Milton married three times; death, rather than divorce, was the catalyst. These marriages
produced a son, who died, and three daughters. Though Dr Johnson commented rather meanly that on the death of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock (who died after fifteen months of marriage,
aged just thirty), ‘the poet honoured her memory with a poor sonnet’, the poem is very lovely indeed. Milton, dreaming of his dead wife, cries out, ‘But O as to embrace me she enclined, / I wak’d, she fled,
and day brought back my night.’

There was another, more terrible darkness which would engulf him – blindness. By 1651 Milton, aged only forty-three, was totally blind. ‘The most important fact about Milton for my purpose is his blindness . . . it would seem indeed to have helped him concentrate on what he could do best,’ wrote Eliot. Stripped of all political involvement by the Restoration in 1660, blind and battered, arrested and released (Marvell was one of those who pleaded for him), Milton, forced to ‘stand and wait’ – didn’t. He was, according to Harold Bloom, ‘unsinkable, there may be no larger triumph of the visionary will in western literature’. Paradise Lost, published 27 April 1667, was followed in 1671 by Paradise Regained.

Milton died on 8 November 1674, a month before his sixty-sixth birthday. One hopes he died ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’, the last line of his final great poem, Samson Agonistes.

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