Name: Angana Kundu
Year: PG I
Roll: 37

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Milton’s Paradise Lost has etched its mark throughout literary history for several reasons that cover both the areas of it being a deeply personal text of the author, as well as an extremely vivid example of literary masterpiece that explores several themes and ideas for the first time and in acute detail. However, it is one of the very rarely adapted texts in any other form of art, perhaps owing to the very complex and detailed nature of it. It is not to say that Paradise Lost did not have a significant amount of influence or that it failed to influence—from music to art (starting from the very popular illustrations by Blake), to theatre, films and later literary texts it has left its mark if not in entirety then in significantly notable fragments. However, without delving too deep into the quality of the adaptation, surprisingly few exist. Among the limited ones available, the one that stands out the most is arguably Penderecki’s 1978 opera. 

The opera Paradise Lost is in two acts with music by Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor, and an English libretto by Christopher Fry. It has witnessed Penderecki himself characterizing the work as a Sacra Rappresentazione[1] (sacred representation) rather than an opera. He wrote the opera on commission for the 1976 US Bicentennial celebrations. The first performance was given on 29 November 1978, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The same production was given at La Scala, Milan, on 31 January 1979. The opera is set in heaven, hell, and on earth at the dawn of creation, and is divided into 42 scenes.

Instead of using Milton’s famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera Paradise Lost with the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki’s instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer’s neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxes– they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry’s and Penderecki’s opera than in Milton’s original poem.

The instrumental introduction to Penderecki’s sacra rappresentazione continues to swell in texture, register, dynamics, and contrapuntal density until the intensity reaches a breaking point and the orchestra implodes. As the motives from the opening bars begin to regroup, a voice representing Paradise Lost’s poet John Milton resounds through the dark hall. Yet his narrated prologue for the first act begins not with the epic poem’s famous opening verses, but rather with lines selected from the invocation that commences Book III:

Hail, Holy Light! Before the sun, before the heavens thou wert
May I express thee?
But thou revisitest not these eyes that roll in vain to find thy piercing ray.
Thus with the year seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Eve or Morn,
Or summer’s rose, or human face divine.
Shine inward.
There plant eyes, that I may see
And tell of things invisible to mortal sight

As the opera unfolds, librettist Christopher Fry’s permutation of Paradise Lost’s original ordering in this introduction hardly anomalous, as Milton’s own chronology of events drastically differs from that of the Bible. Fry’s ordering throughout his libretto differs from both these chronologies. In a comparative analysis of all three texts by Agnieszka Draus, she notes that:

[while] Milton begins his poem with the lamentation of the Fallen Angels[,] Penderecki starts his opera with a scene set toward the end in Milton, that of the lamentation of Adam and Eve after the Fall. He concentrates on the human experience and desists from presenting us with any of the history preceding the creation of Man: the creation of the universe, the war in Hell and the fall of the Rebel Angels

However, despite its formal segregation from Genesis’s drama, the connotations of Milton’s prologue in Fry’s Paradise Lost seep through the frame. The Book III invocation draws a parallel between Milton’s literary creative act and God’s cosmological creative act. Although Milton does not directly refer to the creation story until Book VII – as Raphael relates to Adam how the world was created after Satan was thrown out of Heaven – the language of the Book III invocation strongly alludes to the opening verses of Genesis for the first time in the poem. Literary scholar Dale G. Priest takes this parallel further:

[In the Genesis verses,] the Spirit, acting for God, will function as creative agent to invest chaos with form. In such a way the bard [Milton] hopes to gain access to a high but secondary creative power (the gift of ‘holy Light’) to assist and inspire him in his task of rendering more luminous to human eyes the otherwise obscure mysteries of his subject.

Although Fry’s prologue only touches on the Genesis reference in the Book III invocation, Penderecki’s music seizes it more firmly, albeit through more abstract means. Yet, from another perspective, this musical beginning seems hardly set apart. Its melodic material archetypically conforms to certain constraints that permeate Penderecki’s neo-Romantic music. This consistency also has ramifications for dramatic interpretations of its melodic content. Chlopicka claims that the opera associates the tritone with Satan, in accord with the extra-musical connection between the interval and the diabolus in musica ostensibly begun in medieval times and perpetuated in various well-worn guises for centuries thereafter.

As Regina Chlopicka observes: The musical character of the protagonists is based on a special hierarchy of intervals, in which opposite poles are occupied by the octave and the tritone. The harmony of an octave, being uniform, pure, and perfect, symbolizes the figure of God, while the dynamic and tension-provoking tritone traditionally belongs to the realm of Satan (cf. medieval diabolus in musica.

One way in which Penderecki overrides this dilution is to accentuate the tritone somehow. For example, in the orchestra, flagrant and incessant semitonal runs that span a tritone and end on long accented pitches amplify Satan’s proclamations of victory during scene B of Act II. Furthermore, since Fry’s libretto incorporates Milton as a character (albeit a narrator) in the opera based on the poet’s creation, the parallels between God as cosmological creator and Milton as literary creator intimated in the Book III invocation buttress this paradox: Milton is outside of, and then participates in, the opera’s narrative and chronology, just as God is outside of, then participates in, time itself.  In Regina Chlopicka’s interpretation of the original epic, ‘Milton presents Christ as a hero, or a powerful leader, equipped with a full selection of attributes of power, fighting against Satan in order to render his complete defeat. Indeed, although Milton paints an elaborate picture of the Son of God’s sacrificial love during Book III, he also makes this decree: ‘Nor shalt thou by descending to assume / Man’s nature, lessen or degrade thine own’ (303–4). In contrast, Chlopicka notes that ‘in Penderecki’s work, the figure of the Messiah is stripped of any external features of grandeur and power’. Rather, Penderecki manages, within a melodic style that is relatively simple (or even simplistic, some might say), to unite modern sounds with expectations that mirror those of tonality under a single idiom. Thus, this melodic style that permeates much of Penderecki’s opera, which can create singular paradoxical moments with three special melodies, is in itself a paradox on another level, and perhaps reflective and representative of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical Christ, through whom paradise is regained.

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[1] Alternative name for azione sacra; literally meaning “sacred action”; 17th and early 18th century opera with religious subject; performed at Vienna court.

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Bibliography

1. Chlopicka, Regina. Krzysztof Penderecki: Musica Sacra – Musica Profana. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2003
2. Cohn, Richard. ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/2 (2004): 285–323.
3. Craig, William Lane. ‘God, Time, and Eternity’. Religious Studies 14 (1979): 497–503

Although the play is titled Comus because of it’s colourful and also nefarious devil figure, the title given by John Milton is rather plain and unassuming, though informative – A Mask presented at Ludlow-Castle, 1634 – telling us its form, location and date of origin. Comus was revived on stage during the reign of George II in 1738 and that is when it was conventionally and popularly renamed as Milton’s Comus. As the play took shape, so did a series of fanciful texts and images and group consciousness within it that led to the startling creation of what is known as the Zeitgeist. The Zietgeist is a German philosophical term that translates to “spirit of the age” or “spirit of the times”. It refers to an invisible driving force that dominates or decides the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.

Comus, which elementally celebrates the triumph of light over dark, is located in Britain and illuminated by the highest of British ideals. It might seem slightly odd that this pastoral masque with its doctrinal speeches and allegory, stage machinery for the rise and descension of spirits and nymphs should appeal to cultures which have continuously changed since court productions of Stuart times with their obsolete conventions. The scene from Comus most often recreated by artists is the one where Comus is defeated and the good successfully drives out the instruments of darkness. Comus’s parentage is mythological, created by Milton himself where he appears as the son of Bacchus and Circe. Unwary Britains, who were easily enthralled by Comus have been transformed into brutish creatures by him. They bask in their newly acquired physical stature, awed by their apparent sensual transformation and completely oblivious to the foul features of their disfigurement. The lecherous entity himself, a facsimile of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, was supposed to be portrayed by artists and painters as a malevolent presence, with his father’s “clustring locks”, braided with “rosie Twine” and “dropping odours, dropping Wine”. At the nocturnal climax of the play, Comus is subjugated and defeated by two harbingers of light; two Noble Brothers nbreak into his lair to rescue their sister – the Chaste Lady.

At the very climax of the masque arrives a river nymph by the name of Sabrina of the River Severn. She is summoned to caste her benevolent magic on the evil Comus and defeat him. Using a trap door and lift – Dea ex machina – Sabrina rises from the underbelly of the stage with her accompanying nymphs abd descends on her exit. Milton associates virtue and purity of island springs and rivers with the agricultural way of life. Sabrina protects and heals the flocks and herds in the river meadows at twilight. Milton teaches by dialectic – Apollonian daylight, chastity, temperance and discipline oppose Dionysian darkness, hedonism and allurement.

Daytime is dissed by Comus as brazen and tawdry. Water and spirit are opposed to wine and blood. Milton indicates virtue as an ascent higher than the Spheary chime, where the austere life of the mind overcomes the senses and the immortal soul is freed from the abhorrent shackles of the body.

The baits with which Comus sought to ensnare and entrap the Lady in the poem are described as “magick structures”. The meaning of magic in the context is manifold but unified by the idea of illusion. Literally, it implies any kind of demonic art that transforms appearances and has the ability to transform substances too. What transforms appearances in the masque is Comus’s “magick dust” with its ability to cheat and trick the naked eye. What appears to transform substances in the poem is his “orient Liquor” with its power to turn men into beasts. Figuratively, the magic dust refers to what Rosemond Tuve calls delusions that virtuous reason could not counter. Or in other words, hallucinations that could not be rationally explained or made sense of by impeccable reason or wisdom. Part of their implausibility lay in the fact that they originated from hypocrisy. Rosamond Tuve defines this hypocrisy as a vice in the eye of the creature and not in the judgment behind those eyes. Comus inherits the orient liquor from his mother Circe. The tempting cup of the Rennaisance Circe is associated with the pleasures of lust longing.

The Lady’s phrase “magick structures” refers to at least three kinds of structure. Firstly a physical structure (Comus’s stately Palace), secondly a conceptual structure (the image of things presented by Comus and symbolized by the palace) and thirdly a verbal structure which includes Comus’ language as part of his dialogue. It is Comus’ language that reveals the actual operation of fancy in the masque.

Comus’ deliberateness of dialogue suggests not absence of reason but its subversion by desire and sensuality. Subverted reason, which manifests itself as rhetoric, has the effect of transforming the threads of unrestrained fancy into something deeply depraved and perverse. The length of success of Comus’ language is largely dependant on the vividness of his victim’s own fancy. Just as his language creates pleasant pictures of the visible world without destinations perceived in that world by judgement or reason, so the effectiveness of his language and its ability to provoke and increase desire depends upon how much his victims concentrate on words as pictures at the expense of their consciousness of words as literal words. As Calvin puts it “Figures are illusory without an explanation”. With this level of focus and import laid on sensation at the expense of language and analysis, not only is the effect of Comus’ words illusory but it is also narcotic and creates an addictive tie.

The occasion for which Comus was written may well have suggested the use of magic: Wales had long been regarded as a haunt of magicians. On top of that magic was a convenient dramatic device. We may, in fact, ask whether Milton could, in the Spenserian manner, have dramatized the victory of virtue purely in terms of physical strength without lapsing into crude romance. Apart from the lack of decorum that might have resulted from Lady Alice Egerton’s wrestling with Henry Lawes in the midst of a banquet, and apart from the fact that Comus, a lusty man in his prime, would have been expected easily to subdue and subjugate a frail young maiden, a physical fight would also have opposed and thereby nullified Milton’s aim of demonstrating the superiority of mind over body. If Milton had called forth and pleaded to the major gods and devils to intervene and solve the struggle, an ultimate appeal to the highest divine authorities would have become unavoidable in a piece of writing so consistently and consciously preoccupied with the great chain of being. And this would have led to a treatment of problems of cosmic magnitude like those of Paradise Lost. But the use of magic provided an ideal solution. It did not endanger dramatic conventions; in literature magic had often been associated with the academic disputation, the débat ; and, since the works of a magician can be suddenly undone by more powerful magic, it provided the author with an admirable means of achieving a dramatic dénouement , or a suitable end to a convenient conclusion.

Magic, however, was much more than a playwright’s expedient: at the same time Milton used it to demonstrate the order of the universe of Comus. The history and timeline of radition, both theological and secular, had given those practicing magic, black or white, very definite places in the chain and chasm of being. So in Comus the relative powers of the participants are gradually made clear by references to the potency of their charms. Thus we can easily establish their rank in the hierarchy. The white and pure magic of the chaste Lady’s will alone is sufficient to avert disaster, but not powerful enough to keep Comus, born of mighty Circe and Bacchus, from immobilizing and repressing her in his enchanted chair. The Attendant Spirit, with the aid of magic, is nevertheless stronger than Comus, but not sufficiently so to release the Lady and undo the spell altogether. For this, a more powerful white magician, Sabrina, has to be invoked. Ultimately the Lady’s virtue and purity of thoughts acts as a trigger force releasing Sabrina’s full powers. But no might in the universe of Comus is strong enough to transmute or transform Comus’ crew back into human shape; all of his victims had once fallen for temptation and hence have irreversibly been exposed to the full might of his sorcery. The escape of Comus indicates the everlastingness of his nefarious schemes, and releases the author from the obligation of embarking upon problems outside the immediate world.

Citations

1. Piggott, Jan. “Milton’s ‘Comus’: From Text to Stage, the Fine Arts, and Book Illustration, c1750 – 1850.” The British Art Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 18–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43492111.
2. DISALVO, JACQUELINE. “Fear of Flying: Milton on the Boundaries Between Witchcraft and Inspiration.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 18, no. 1, 1988, pp. 114–137. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43447239.
3. Major, John M. “Comus and The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, 1959, pp. 177–183. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2866924.
4. Stevens, Paul. “Magic Structures: Comus and the Illusions of Fancy.” Milton Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3, 1983, pp. 84–89. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24464674.
5. Enkvist, Nils Erik. “THE FUNCTIONS OF MAGIC IN MILTON’S ‘COMUS.’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 54, no. 4, 1953, pp. 310–318. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43345240.

Name – Raidhani Debnath

PG II
Roll No – 39

Sreerupa Bhattacharya
PG 2, Roll 32.

I.

“Here then we have a basic change in interpretation… no longer a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment.” Thus writes Erwin Panofsky in his famous analysis of the two renditions of ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ by French baroque artist Nicholas Poussin. (Panofsky 1936) The “dramatic encounter with Death” the first time around (Fig 1) was evident in the anxious wistfulness of the four shepherds on encountering a skull and a tomb in the middle of Arcadia. The eponymous ‘ego’ is Death himself. The presence of the memento mori is a rude awakening that even the idyllic pastoral is susceptible to the ravages of time. It is this acceptance of death as fundamental to life that characterizes Poussin’s second painting (Fig 2), made about a decade after the first. In the latter, not only is the skull altogether absent, but the figures “no longer expresses surprise and dismay but quiet, reminiscent meditation.” (Panofsky 1936) Painted in 1637-1638, it was a testament to the “relaxed and less fearless spirit of a period that had triumphantly emerged from the spasms of Counter-Reformation.” (Panofsky 1936) Around that same time the situation across the Channel was quite different with England in the throes of socio-political flux. Charles I’s attempt to align Church of Scotland with the English episcopacy backfired marking the beginning of the end of the Personal Rule.

In an unrelated course of events, a pious young Cambridge graduate called Edward King drowned in the Irish Sea in August 1637. ‘Lycidas’ was Milton’s contribution to a volume of poetry meant to commemorate the untimely death. Penned in November 1637 (published in 1638) the poem is a ‘pastoral elegy’, in the tradition of Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, the same that inspired Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’ The painting and the poem are in tandem in time and tone. Thus, Panofsky’s comments on the paintings might be an useful starting point for the present discussion since the “change” in Poussin’s portrayal is also observable through the course of Milton’s poem. The agitated restlessness in the beginning has, it seems, given way to an assured contemplation of life, now that “Lycidas is in the blest kingdoms of joy and love.”  It opens with a dramatic expression of Lycidas’s death “ere his prime” but ends with the “uncouth swain…warbling his Dorick lay”, with an unhurried step towards “pastures new”. The shepherd – elegist’s anxieties have been eliminated. Thus, Martin J. Evans in his seminal essay ‘Lycidas’ notes that the final verse of the poem “opens up the possibility of living an entirely different kind of life… the course of Milton’s life it suggests is about to undergo a drastic change.” (Evans 1999)

But how does this change take place? The vision of Lycidas in heaven was affirmative but it comes right in the end as the consequence not the cause of the change. So the question remains as to what led to this assured transformation/altered consciousness and prompted such resolve?

In my reading of Lycidas the primary tirade is not simply against death, but untimely death. It is summed up in these lines:

“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade, 
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair?”

To “scorn delight and live laborious days” was futile because while one hoped to receive the “fair Guerdon (of) Fame” the “blind fury” prematurely “slit the thin spun of life.” Thus one realizes that what is being bemoaned here is the tireless commitment to the “shepherd’s trade” and “strict meditation of the Muse” because they ultimately yielded nothing. Here as an aside it should be kept in mind that E.M.W Tillyard had noted how “King is but the excuse for one of Milton’s most personal poems.” (cited in Evans 1999) Such an assertion places this passage as the main subject of lament since in the 1930’s Milton himself was living a life of abstinence, preparing for the “shepherd’s trade” ie for a career as an Anglican priest and “strictly meditate(d)” on his poetic vocation. Hence the writing of ‘Lycidas’ becomes an exercise in negotiating misgivings about his career in poetry and priesthood triggered by the untimely death of someone with similar aspirations.

Let us now return to the poem and once again direct our attention to the question, what placated the shepherd-elegists discontent? The tranquility that marks Poussin’s 1638 Arcadia comes after the unexpected confrontation with the memento mori (the skull) in 1628, which Panofsky sees as a “moral admonitory message… warning against a mad desire for riches and a thoughtless enjoyment of pleasures soon to be ended.” Similar admonitions and warnings are to be found in Lycidas too. However, I’d like to suggest that in case of Lycidas they go beyond the scope of moral reproach to emerge as  ‘violent epiphanies’. And it is these ‘epiphanies’ that effect a change liberating the shepherd-elegist/poet of his duty to lament Lycidas.

II.

If there’s a pervasive mood in the poem it is undoubtedly that of violence. From the “shattering leaves” to the “forced fingers rude” to the allusion to Orpheus’s “gory visage”, Milton’s pastoral is fraught with images of palpable violence. But in my opinion the most portentous is the violence accompanying the epiphanies, whether covert or overt. My use of the term ‘epiphany’ in this context is twofold. Firstly, derived from Greek, the word ‘epiphany’ means a sudden manifestation of a divine or supernatural being. In Christian theology, it also means the manifestation of a hidden message for the benefit of others, a message for their salvation. Secondly, Martin Bidney defines ‘epiphany’ as “puzzling but privileged moments, sudden gifts of vision, when one’s feelings of aliveness intensify and the senses quicken.”Such epiphanies are felt to be “expansive, mysterious and intense.” Both connotations of the term are applicable to Lycidas. The interruption by ‘Apollo’ and the coming of the ‘Pilot of the Galilean Lake’ fulfills the first meaning of epiphany as an example of the ‘manifestation of a divine being.’ But more importantly their voices birth those puzzling yet privileged moments that disrupt and reorient the narrative. These sudden interventions, it can be argued, effectively alter the consciousness.

The first epiphany in the poem occurs in line 76-77. This is right after the passage quoted earlier where the elegist resents the “thankless muse.”  In a letter to Charles Diodati, dated 23^rd November, 1637, Milton admits, “Listen, Diodati, let me talk to you grandiloquently for a while. You ask me what I’m thinking of? So help me God, an immortality of fame.” (Sanchez 1997) It is this fame that has been denied to Lycidas owing to his untimely death. As the speaker vents his frustration, there appears Phoebus Apollo, the Classical God of poetry and music, to dismiss such apprehensions: “Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.”

Man’s aspiration for poetic fame is unavailing. It is in vain to expect the ‘fair Guerdon’. Only in death does the poet gain fame. A poet’s worth cannot be measured in what mortals say (“rumours”) ‘Judging Jove’ alone shall bestow his pronouncements in heaven, where our fame shall then grow and “spread”, and that shall be the reward. This declaration causes the first affirmative turn in the narrative. Apollo’s intervention shakes the speaker out of his abjection: “Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears”(emphasis mine). ‘Trembling’ not only adduces to the heightened attention, the involuntary quickening of senses that characterise, but the use of the present continuous also indicates the sustained effect of Apollo’s appearance. The violence here is thus implicit and works only through suggestions of making the listener tremble. That this epiphany effects a change in the narrative is best evident when one looks at the next few lines. The apostrophe to Arethuse is an excuse to exult Phoebus’s speech: “O Fountain Arethuse… That strain I heard was of a higher mood.” This “higher mood” (the first and only reference in the poem) has been commonly interpreted to be epic poetry which as a form was more elevated than the pastoral. This is the “change” that Martin Evans plausibly notes in the last verse of the poem: a movement towards a “higher mood”, the “Christian epic”. This progression, it can then be argued, was made possible through the trembling epiphany of Phoebus.

The second appearance of a divine being is that of the Pilot of the Galilean Lake who promises that the corrupt clergy shall be punished on the day of Judgement. It is in this passage that perhaps the most potent rupture in the narrative of the poem takes place. The Pilot with his ‘mitred locks’ is St. Peter (in Matthews 16: 17 – 20, Jesus hands him the keys of the heaven) or, as some critics argue, Christ, but that is incidental to the present discussion. What is of significance is the function of this figure’s presence as a violent epiphany. What makes this passage a ‘puzzling and privileged moment’? It is puzzling on the surface because the ostensibly pagan pastoral suddenly experiences a Christian voice. It is not a mere digression as some believe. The puzzle is solved if we look back at the passage quoted as the crux of the elegists mortal predicament. If untimely death is what awaits “what boots it with uncessant care/To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade?” In Christian thought the Shepherd is a metaphor for God. Christ calls himself the ‘Good Shepherd’ and as an extension relates to the Bishops and Pastors who are entrusted with the responsibility of guiding and nurturing the flock ie the laity. That is the “shepherd’s trade,” to which Milton initially was destined “both by the intentions of my parents and friends” and “in my own resolutions.” However, his eventual disillusionment with the clergy is what resonates in Saint Peter’s diatribe against those who “creep and intrude and climb the fold,” only “for their bellies sake.” Peter would have happily sacrificed these self serving shepherds, who are nothing but thieves and robbers (John 10). The speech is replete with images of expressed aggression (“scrambled” food, “shoved” people) and festering decay (“rank”, “rot”, “foul contagion”). The rather grotesque “blind mouths” is an ironic allusion to Bishops (those who (over)see) and Pastors (those who feed). The explicit violence and the “privileged moment” finally come in the last four lines of Peter:

The grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said; 
But that two-handed engine at the door 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

The stealthy movement of the ravenous wolf is a reference to the clandestine workings of the Catholic Church. Much has been written about the “two handed engine at the door”, but its countless interpretations are not the concern here. It shall suffice for us to go with the most widely accepted interpretation from the Revelation that it is Christ’s “double edged sword” meant to be wielded on the day of Judgement to strike down the unworthy. Two things come forth at once in this passage that are relevant to the present discussion. First, we are told that the intemperate shepherds do not deserve to live (Peter would have traded their lives for Lycidas’s if he could) and second, that they shall all be struck down eventually. It might be said that the poet’s political views had not hardened yet and that St. Peter’s speech embodiesis the “last cri de coeur of a man who had once loved the English Church but now wants to reform the episcopacy not abolish it.” But such reform, Milton seems to affirm, perhaps requires a violent interruption. Hence the finality of the blow is significant, since it purposes to re-form. Peter’s promise finds its historical fulfillment in the execution of Archbishop William Laud in 1645, the year in which not coincidentally Milton published Lycidas yet once more with the added headnote. In light of these events, what then is of consequence in this passage is the consciousness that the ‘bad shepherds’ shall not have salvation. This is the epiphany, the privileged realization that shall be enough motivation to keep the uncouth swain bound to his vocation.

Until this point the elegist was engrossed in the dirge about the “hard mishap (that) hath doomed the gentle swain.” In the aftermath of Peter’s polemics there’s evidently a change in perspective. The uncouth swain is no longer lamenting untimely death. Instead what follows is the impulse to “dally with false surmise” so as to “interpose a little ease.”Accordingly we find the flower catalogue and the resplendent vision of Lycidas in heaven. The elegist urges the shepherds to “weep no more” because in death Lycidas has been awarded. He has transformed into the ‘Genius of the shore’ thus continuing to assume a position of guardianship. This relieves the uncouth swain of his dejection, although he can no longer remain in his old place. The two epiphanies have brought about a drastic change in consciousness. They have made a different life possible, one which assures retribution for a corrupt clergy and rewards for the persistent poet. But it should be noted that such a life is attained only through a violent awakening. The epiphany would not be life-changing, if not violent (Camus’s appearance is therefore inconsequential).

This brings me back to Panofsky’s comparative analysis of Poussin’s paintingscited in the beginning of the paper. Just like in the 1638 Arcadia painting, the dramatic engagement with Death subsides by the end of Lycidas. Forged in the violent epiphanies of life the uncouth swain no longer expresses surprise and dismay but a quiet meditation.

 

Works Cited

Bidney, Martin. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

Evans, Martin J. “Lycidas.” In Cambridge Companion to Milton, edited by Dennis Danielson, 39-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Milton, John. The John Milton Reading Room: Lycidas. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/text.shtml (accessed May 4, 2019).

Panofsky, Erwin. ” ‘Et in Arcadia ego: On the Coception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau.” In Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.

Sanchez, Reuben. Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose. London: Associated University Press, 1997.

Ayana Bhattacharya, PG 2

Whether it is the flamboyance of Lindall’s 2008 Grand Paradise Lost Costume Ball in Brooklyn, or the spectacle of 40 large oil paintings displayed at Fuseli’s 18th century Milton Gallery in London, Paradise Lost has charmed readers for over three centuries. The readers’ urge to participate in the enticing yet conflicted world of this Miltonic epic in a more visually tangible manner has manifested itself in myriad ways, beginning primarily with various illustrations of the narrative since the publication of the 1688 edition. On encountering a sombre Satan who dons a wreathed fedora hat in Pablo Auladell’s graphic novel adaptation of the epic, a figure so different from Blake or Martin’s visualization of Milton’s Satan,we realize the immense impact of Paradise Lost on popular imagination till date. More than any other work by Milton, this narrative has exceeded the bounds of highbrow literature to engender new texts and interpretations spread across diverse media. In the case of visual re-imaginations, whether illustrations or independent artworks influenced by Milton’s text, the varied ways of spatializing the biblical event of the felix culpa (or fortunate fall) on canvass or on paper has proved to be an interesting aspect of the afterlife of the epic poem.

The concept of space assumes an important role in the textual mapping of Paradise Lost, a narrative which extends the brief account of creation and the fall of man in the Genesis to give rise to a 1056 line epic poem. [1] The spatial distribution of the events of Milton’s epic occurs across the imaginary landscapes of heaven, hell, chaos,earth, and paradise over a course of 12 books composed approximately between 1658-63. Milton’s soaring poetry attempts to linguistically capture the sudden shifts in perspective while traversing various spaces/ places within the narrative, through the trope of travel and displacement. Interestingly, besides the enchanting Satan, and the dynamic Eve, characters which make Milton’s epic attractive to the readers, space itself emerges as a character in its own right in the epic. The multi-dimensional nature of spatiality reveals iltself as it linguistically and literally stretches across the numerous lines of poetry. The immense void of the tumultuous expanse of chaos is one such manifestation of the singular presence of space in Milton’s narrative. In the poet’s heterodox imagination, the darkness of this “unfounded deep” occupies an immaterial space outside our universe. Moreover, an alternate spatio-temporal realm is created at certain moments when the text transcends the world of narrative reality to conjure up a sphere of dreams and visions. For instance, in the case of Eve’s prophetic dream of seduction by Satan in the garb of an angel in Book V, the shepherd’s dream of being enchanted by fairies in Book I, or the vision of the future of humanity shown by Michael to a fallen Adam in Book XI, the reality of the present gives way other insubstantial spatialities situated in different time frames. What is intriguing to me is the relationship between text and image as illustrators  across centuries re-map the fascinating site of Milton’s epic in acts of creative re-interpretation. In this article, I will attempt to explore the visual manifestation of space in the graphic representations of Paradise Lost (engravings and paintings) by artists like John Martin and Gustave Doré.[2] I also wish to address certain questions like: what are the various ways of seeing which unfold before the viewer/reader as the text gets ‘imaged’ by various hands? What does it mean to engage in a discussion of visual translations of a text composed by a poet who had become blind by 1652, in order to picture “things invisible to mortal sight”?

James Treadwell writes in an article that though Paradise Lost has been a frequently illustrated text, it is “uniquely resistant to visual representation” since the illustrator enters the realm of earthly senses thus falling away from the heavenly language a celestial subject requires.[3] While I am in essential agreement with Treadwell ensuing discussion of the Blake and Martin’s illustrations as representation rather than interpretation (of a narrow literal kind) in the article, I wish to slightly rephrase his initial stance.[4] It is important to note that composed in a fallen world, both text and image inhabit the same plane of imperfection while simultaneously aspiring to a higher spiritual perfection. Milton, a fallen being, attempts to create a linguistic framework in order to imagine events of a pre-lapsarian universe inaccessible to human knowledge in its entirety. This attempt is an exercise in paradox since the word of fallen man is flawed and unstable. Thus, although the poet uses an idiom arising from classical references, biblical exegesis, scientific and colonial discourses to discerningly visualize Paradise Lost, it is the very nature of language which thwarts any effort at exhaustive detailing. Milton’s otherwise visually vibrant text with descriptive images and metaphors at times evades explication of certain aspects of a scene which are left to the reader’s imagination. These very descriptive gaps in the epic narrative open up the scope for hermeneutic possibilities, rather than limiting the illustrators’ ability to produce “faithful or literal visual rendering[s]” of the biblical drama.[5]

Spatial representations of heaven, hell and paradise

The sprawling landscapes of John Martin’s 19th century engravings is a visual embodiment of his unique conception of the Miltonic sublime. During 1926-27 he was commissioned by Septimus Prowett to make 24 mezzotint illustrations of Milton’s epic in two different sizes for a lucrative amount of £3500.[6] According to Marcia Pointon, Martin had developed a consciously distinctive style which fused vestiges of neoclassicism from the 18th century artists of the sublime like Fuseli, and elements of naturalistic landscape painting which was emerging as a major artistic trend in the 19th century.[7] In illustrating Paradise Lost, Martin foregrounds the spatial setting of the epic as a major player in the biblical narrative to create a sense of high drama. Dizzying vistas and staggering architectural feats dominate his engravings, while human and celestial characters alike (except Satan in hell) are rendered diminutive, powerless and subjugated to their vast surroundings.[8] Their diminished presence is stripped of individuality and reduced to the merely symbolic in Martin’s visual scheme. While he employs his technological and architectural leanings to envision Satan as the charming colonizer of hell, Martin seldom depicts God in his illustrations and chooses to render the Son invisible.[9] His mezzotints navigate space in various scenes through an infinite interplay of light and darkness, with the Divine taking the form of a shaft of transcendent light often shooting across the frame. In a radical reimagining of Milton’s text and unlike his predecessors, Martin makes no effort to render spiritual exaltation, torment, or human values through the postures and expressions of the various figures in Paradise Lost. Armed with an adept architectural imagination, Martin visualizes the “ascending pile” of Satan’s palace in hell as a majestic spectacle in The Raising of Pandemonium (Fig 1).

Fig.1 Book I, Line 710

In the foreground, Martin etches a bat-winged Satan, spear in hand, facing away from the viewer and gazing at the splendours of the rising palace built by his legions. In his text Milton employs the simile of visual music- the “dulcet symphonies” of an organ- to describe the erection of Pandemonium by the fallen angels. By “exercising massive architectural perspective and mechanical sublime”, Martin translates this sense of rhythmic symmetry inherent in Milton’s musical description to depict a striking palatial building, with doric columns and dragon statuettes incorporated in a highly complex design.[10] Milton’s description of hell as “darkness visible” comes through elegantly in Martin’s depiction of this space as a craggy terrain engulfed by a doomed darkness in which a throng of lowly beings burrow ominously into the ground to build a decadent altar to sinful greed.

Fig.2 Book II, Line 1

In the illustration of Satan Enthroned (Fig. 2), Martin depicts the colonizer of hell in an exalted fashion sitting on a lavish throne atop a rotund. This curved elevation can be read as signifying the orb of earth- a space which Satan will invade after orchestrating the fall. This composition reveals a unique geometrical interplay reflective of the artist’s architectural vision, and an aura of invasive darkness which can only be dispersed by the technology of arc-lamp chandeliers in the absence of the redeeming light of the Father.[11] Martin’s fascination with the Devil and his boundless power in the fallen world gets associated with exploitative colonizing and industrial practices of the 19th century, and the possession of massive wealth recommended by the utilitarian discourses of the day. Martin’s imaginative critique of the pitfalls of industrialization by associating it with Satan, bears testimony to that fact that like so many of his contemporaries Martin was also aware of the “fascination and horrors of industrial innovation”.[12]

Fig. 3 Book 10, Line 312 & 347

The illusion of a distant vanishing point of the tunnel in Martin’s etching of The Bridge Over chaos (Fig 3) remarkably captures the sense of limitless chasm  which the causeway attempts to traverse.

Over the foaming deep high Archt, a Bridge

Of length prodigious joyning to the Wall

Immovable of this now fenceless world…(X.301-03)

Though Martin only chooses to visually map the space occupied by the caverns of hell and the beginning of the bridge overlaid by rocky arches rather than chaos itself, he brilliantly compresses with his frame the vastness of the chaotic void which Satan has scaled. Moreover, as F Klingender points out, the bottomless pit in this plate is reminiscent of Martin’s knowledge of contemporary descriptions of coal-mines and underground tunnels like the Caledonian Canal and Brunel’s scheme for a tunnel under the Thames.[13] Thus we observe that spatiality in Martin’s visualization of hell takes on a phantasmagoric opulence and is shot through with a darkness pregnant with the “aesthetic of the machine”.[14]

The lack of natural illumination in hell is complemented by the flood of light irradiating the heavenly space depicted in Martin’s illustrations of scenes like Satan By The Stairs of Heaven (Fig. 4) or the adoration of God by the angels in heaven (Fig. 5). While the mezzotints depicting the majestic structures in hell were engulfed by an overpowering darkness thus reflecting evil and the exploitative aspect of industrialization, Martin celebrates the glory of heaven by etching equally grand architectural feats bathed in sublime light. The hellish exploitation is replaced by creativity in the celestial space. The geometric plotting of spatiality in these engravings captures the sight of the viewer and gives Milton’s rich poetic vision an alluring shape.

Fig. 4 Book III, Line 501

Fig. 5 Book III, Line 365

While describing Martin’s etchings of the stairs of heaven, Treadwell aptly praises the conception of space by distinguishing the “extraordinarily compressed recession of depth, opening invisible abysses between one flight and the next”.[15] In portraying the heavenly abode, Martin’s mezzotints set up a dialogue between sublimity and solidity (as distinct from the base materiality of structures in hell) which seems to haze into an effusion of light across the pictorial space, instead of crumbling into a dark oblivion. An effect is created so that the glorious flight of stairs appears to be suspended between “reality and allegory”. [16]

Each stair mysteriously was meant, nor stood

There always, but drawn up to heaven sometimes

Viewless … (III.516-18).

The Eden of Martin’s imagination is a lush expanse of thick vegetation and low ridges set in an alpine backdrop.[17] The luxuriant vegetation in the lap of smoky mountain ranges cloaked in light in the scenes like Adam and Eve’s Morning Prayer (Fig. 6) and Eve Startled by Her Reflection (Fig. 7), exudes calmness and joy of unfallen humanity.[18] Adam and Eve have been reduced to minute nude figures present in the backdrop of the spatial drama of harmonious nature bathed in light which beautifully captures the essence of pre-laprasian bliss.

Fig 6 Book V, Line 136

Fig. 7 Book IV, Line 453

However in the Temptation of Eve (Fig. 8) the spatial distribution between the land and sky shifts so that the focus is on dark menacing trees with gnarled branches. Martin foregrounds the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (indistinctive from the other trees in the distance) around whose twisted branches the serpent coils itself while tempting an overshadowed Eve with the forbidden fruit.

Fig. 8 Book IX, Line 780

In the above plate, Eve’s biblical self-indulgence and narcissism is symbolized by her position almost as the center of the frame (just like in engraving depicting her reflection).[19] With the infiltration of Satan in the Edenic space, the horizon line rises upwards in Martin’s engravings to give the sense of a darkening pit-like depth at the edge of which Adam and Eve are perilously positioned. This illusion of depth in the later scenes can be read as a premonition of the impending doom that will descend on fallen humanity. In the Expulsion Scene (Fig. 9) the sense of desolation and remoteness is clearly made apparent through the harsh expanse of a cavernous rocky landscape devoid of vegetation, and marked by the “deep recession characteristic of Martin’s perspective”. [20] The rugged terrain cradles the fallen couple who have been forever banished from the celestial light which recedes into the distant background and into the mouth of a cave like arch from which Adam and Eve emerge. Therefore, we observe the ways in which the Edenic space embodies the spectacle of spiritual conflict, thus emerging as the main protagonist in Martin’s visualization of the drama of fall.

Fig. X Book XII, Line 641

The 19th ce French artist, Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Eden exude a detailed naturalism more pronounced than that of Martin.[21] In Doré’s imagination the garden of Eden is beautiful in its ordered wilderness which bears testimony to the perfection of god’s creation. Although geographical space mainly acts as a backdrop of the biblical events portrayed in his 50 engravings of scenes from Paradise Lost (published in the 1864 edition), Doré’s graceful figures cannot be separated from the landscape in which they are situated. The organic wholeness of his compositions, evident both in his biblical illustrations and paintings, binds the figures with their natural surroundings in one seamless whole .  This harmonious and non-hierarchical relationship of Adam and Eve with nature, which they both tend to and draw sustenance from, becomes apparent in Doré’s illustration of a scene depicting the pre-lapsarian bliss of Eden (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11 The savoury pulp they chew, and in the rind, / Still as they thirsted, scoop the brimming stream (IV.335, 336)

Interestingly, Doré does not illustrate the actual scene of temptation. However, his engraving which depicts Satan in the garb of  a serpent approaching Adam and Eve succeeds in capturing a moment fraught with symbolic value (Fig. 12). This particular engraving foregrounds the serpent entering the thick bower inhabited by Adam and Eve, and the spatial composition of the frame creates a sense of depth to heighten the dramatic significance of the imminent fall. Doré’s detailed portrayal of a naturalized space dense with vegetation and the sharp perspective, seems to compress the distance between the viewer external to the image and the characters within it. This leads to a sense of immediacy such that while gazing at the picture, the viewer feels as if she has been offered a privileged view of this potent biblical scene.

Fig. 12 Nearer he drew, and many a walk traversed / Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine, or palm (IX. 434, 435)

Visually conceptualizing chaos and Milton’s cosmography

The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark

Illimitable Ocean without bound,

Without dimension, where length, breadth, & highth,

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise

Of endless Warrs, and by confusion stand…(II.891-97)

In describing chaos, Milton imagines an uncharted, immeasurable void which eludes linguistic signification. Dennis Danielson suggests that Milton expands the traditional two-stage theory of the creation of the universe (in which god organizes the unarranged original matter) to add a third stage in which a robust chaos is retained even after the creation of the world to symbolize the potential loss of cohesion and beauty.[22] Danielson thus defines Milton’s ‘multiverse’ as everything that exists beyond god himself, including an infinite chaos, empyreal heaven, hell, our world (universe or cosmos) and any other world god may have created. Thus it becomes apparent that Milton’s daring and beautiful conception of the cosmological structure encompassing all matter and non-matter is an imaginative and linguistic challenge. What Milton achieves is capturing through his sublime poetry, however poses a greater challenge for illustrators of Paradise Lost across centuries. Very few artists have undertaken the task of visual representation of the immaterial space of chaos.

Among his 50 engravings, Doré dedicates two pieces to attempt to visually conceptualize the complex facets of Milton’s chaos. The first engraving is an illustration of the scene in Book II in which the poet describes Satan’s struggle to traverse the unmapped abyss (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13 With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,

And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies:…(II.949-50)

Doré does not attempt to graphically represent an expanse of non-matter through which Satan falls ten thousand fathoms until a “tumultuous cloud” carries him upwards. Instead he fills the frame of his illustration with steep rocky ridges which Satan is depicted as climbing. The Archfiend is depicted as an angelic figure with muscular limbs (as in Doré’s other illustrations of the epic), clad in a marshal attire, wings spread, and attempting to clutch as the crags of the steep slope. Rather than giving off a sense of diabolical threat, the plate shows Satan’s endeavour as almost a heroic one by focussing on the moment of his struggle. Thus in this illustration, Doré conceptualizes  the bottomless spatiality of non-matter in terms of a rugged (although not chaotic) materiality.

Fig. 14 Down from th’ Ecliptic, sped with hop’d success,

Throws his steep flight in many an Aerie wheele… (III.740-41)

The above engraving (Fig. 14) is a beautiful illustration of Satan from the elliptical path of the sun down towards the arc of the created world.[23] This is one of Doré’s most famous representations of the Miltonic epic, and it succeeds in highlighting the harmony and beautiful order of the cosmos created by god. The starless night of the dark abyss of chaos is replaced in this scene, and Doré’s illustration, by innumerable stars shining brightly in the sky of god’s universe. Doré’s nimble Satan is suspended mid-flight, as if briefly halting to reluctantly appreciate the immense beauty of creation.

Milton’s cosmological design has also been visually represented by the American artist Terrance Lindall at the end of the 20th century. Lindall’s 1983 illustrations ( prints of original oil on canvas) of Paradise Lost, later published along with his prose rendition of the epic, employ a surrealistic mode to envision Milton’s world.

Fig. 15 The Visionary Foal

In this Boschian conception of the journey of Sin and Death into chaos (Fig. 15), Lindall spatializes the terrible horrors of Milton’s hell while adeptly capturing the dramatic charge of the moment . The inhabitants of hell seem to take on the grotesque animalistic aspect of the appearance on Sin in Milton’s description, while she herself is depicted as assuming a human form sitting astride the foal behind a miasma representing Death. Instead of constructing a bridge, Lindall paints them as riding across chaos on a one-eyed (the popular connotation being evil) foal with limbs of a lizard. Cradled by the greenish arch of hell, the canvas opens into chaos. Like in Martin’s illustration of The Bridge Over chaos, the expanse of tremulous void is spatially compressed in Lindall’s canvas. The curvature of the arch frames the chaos to create a sense of measureless depth. However the glimpse we get of Lindall’s spatial depiction of chaos is quite organized- with a sun reminiscent of the taichi symbol representing the dual forces of good and evil, and a spiral galaxy thrown into the mix.

Fig 16 The Pendant World

In the above illustration (Fig. 16) Lindall charmingly recreates the “pendant world”, hanging from the heavens by a golden chain, suspended in a tumultuous expanse of chaos.[24] This image beautifully compresses a huge expanse in a leap of artistic imagination. Lindall’s success at capturing the high imagination of Milton’s epic is predicated upon his historical situation at the closing of the a century which had witnessed the phenomenal success of science-fiction and speculative narratives. Moreover his access to a technique suited to capturing his vision, i.e. surrealism (rather than realism), makes his illustrations more appealing to the modern viewer/reader. Moreover the usage of brilliant colors by Lindall intensifies the magical quality of his illustrations, which are available in various forms with the rapid advancement of the print culture. In the midst of the vast abyss contained by Lindall’s frame, Satan appears as a speck, smoothly traversing the space in his flight towards the earth.

In concluding this discussion on the visual representation of spatiality, I would like to briefly look at the illustrations of Milton’s epic by the 18th century Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Between 1790 and 1820 Fuseli made nearly 200 representations of Paradise Lost in various media,only few of which survive today. Among the numerous scenes he had chosen to represent, the most famous one being his oil painting titled Satan and Death with Sin Intervening, those depicting the shepherd’s dream and the dream of Eve in Eden gain a special significance given his life-long passion for the artistic delineation of the supernatural and gothic horror. These scenes have not been illustrated often, especially because of the attempts of earlier artists to employ realist trends in their artistic representations of an otherwise imaginary world of Paradise Lost. However Fuseli’s 1973 oil painting called The Shepherd’s Dream (Fig. 17) is a unique and mesmerizing illustration of a simile Milton uses to describe the ability of the fallen angels to reduce their sizes, like fairies, so as to fit into the Great Hall of Pandemonium. Fuseli picks up this small detail to conceptualize a parallel realm of dreams- a fragile space inhabited by spectral shapes of mystical beings.

Fig. 17 The Shepherd’s Dream

Faerie Elves,

Whose midnight Revels, by a Forrest side

Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees,

Or dreams he sees, while…

they on thir mirth and dance

Intent, with jocond Music charm his ear;

At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds…(I.781-88)

The soft glow enveloping the fairies above the head of the hallucinating  shepherd (peasant in Milton’s text) creates a dream-like swoon. What fascinates me is the way in which this painting, although depicting a scene not central to the biblical drama of Milton’s epic, spatializes the essence of the imaginary, the fantastical, and the deceptive quality of chimeras- all important elements of the broader scheme of the poet’s imagination.

Thus we can say that a narrativization of “things invisible to mortal sight” has paradoxically become a potential minefield of visual exploration over the centuries. The fallen imagination of beings, who can only dream of immortality in a post-lapsarian world, has again and again attempted to artistically capture the perfection of Edenic bliss through the idioms of text and image. Paradise Lost in essence becomes a text which is not so much resistant to what Treadwell calls “basic components of an image”, as it is conducive to innovative image-making by various illustrators.

ENDNOTES

1. Some scholars surmise that the poet’s description of Satan’s path in this scene was influenced by the Ptolemaic geocentric model.
   By space I mean not just the linguistic recreation of an expanse passed down to us by the laws of physics and a historical past, but also an imaginative carving out of an unintelligible pre-history by Milton.
   
2. Given the limited scope of this article I have only selected only a of handful those illustrations by the above artists which I felt captured best the idea of spatiality as a distinct character in Paradise Lost. I have focused mainly on the engravings of Martin because of his distinctive treatment of space, and will briefly refer to the illustrations by Henry Fuseli and Terrance Lindall. However the illustrations by John Baptist Medina in the 1688 edition are also interesting vis-a-vis spatiality as he assembles various events situated in the same space (for example Eden) in a single pictorial frame is an act of compressing spatialities to focus more on events. It is also worth exploring the treatment of space in the captivating illustrations by 20th century artists like Carlotta Petrina and Mary Groom.
3. See James Treadwell’s essay “Blake, John Martin, and the illustration of Paradise Lost”.
4. Instead of viewing “interpretative meaning via degrees of accuracy” like Treadwell, I use the word interpretation in a broader sense of creative re-imagination.
   
5. Treadwell
6. Mezzotint is an engraving technique developed in the seventeenth century which allows for the creation of prints with soft gradations of tone and rich and velvety blacks.
7. J.M.W. Turner, who was one of the major 19th century landscape painters in the European tradition, had himself made a few water-color paintings of scenes from Paradise Lost.
8. In her 1970 book Milton and English Art, Marcia Pointon suggests that Martin’s choice of subject matter “nearly always involved the struggle of humanity in all its insufficiency against the natural powers of the universe…”
9. The only exception is an almost transluscent outline of the figure of God in Martin’s engraving of the scene of the creation of stars and planets.
10. See Kester Svendsen’s article “John Martin and the Expulsion Scene of Paradise Lost”.
11. Scholars like Pointon have suggested that the Great Hall of Pandemonium has been depicted by Martin along the lines of the Albert Hall.
    
12. Pointon
13. See F.D. Klingender’s 1947 book Art and the Industrial Revolution.
14. Klingender
15. Treadwell
16. Treadwell
17. Pointon says that Martin’s Eden is a “lush mixture of tropical and European fruits and plants” realistically portrayed.
    
18. However the peaceful setting of Eve Startled by Her Reflection is somewhat deceptive as the scene depicts Eve’s narcissism which is a prelude to her desire for more knowledge which will ultimately corrupt her perfect edenic family with Adam.
    
19. In Martin’s other representations of Eden, when Eve emerges on the scene along with Adam, their figures are pushed to one side of the frame.
    
20. Svendsen
21. Landscape paintings assume a significant role in Dore’s artistic oeuvre, and is a natural extension of his passion for travel.
    
22. See the chapter “Multiverse, Chaos, Cosmos” in dennis Danielson’s 2014 book Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution.
23. Some scholars surmise that the poet’s description of Satan’s path in this scene was influenced by the Ptolemaic geocentric model.
    
24. Romans 8:29-30 features the sequence known as the golden chain of salvation, the inviolable order in which our Creator saves His people. Moreover Milton might also be referring to Homer’s story of the golden chain of Zeus, suspended from Heaven, whereby he can draw up the gods, the erath and the sea, and the whole universe though they can’t draw him down.

Sourjya Mitra

PG II

40

John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 to Sara and John Milton Sr., at their home, the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street. Thus began Milton’s lifelong association with the metropolis, coming into its own with the rise of the merchant class as centres of power shifted from the country to the city. He was baptised at All Hallows, Bread Street, on 12 December, into the Protestant faith of the Church of England. He spent the entirety of his existence in and around London with a few exceptions: his years at the University of Cambridge from 1625 to 1632 and his journey to the Continent from 1638 to 1642 (although there is evidence he did not return immediately upon hearing news of the impending civil war) are the prolonged absences from the city.

Milton was the son of a scrivener, whose occupation included moneylending, and a professional composer. His business, conducted from his home, involved secretarial tasks, notary public work, real estate, loans, that led to his family living quite comfortably. John Milton Sr.’s business dealings, which can be traced in Chancery Court (according to John T. Shawcross) provided his son’s livelihood for years to come. His son, the poet, tutor, and civil servant, received very little compensation for his services and so, depended on his father’s allowance for his actual livelihood.

It is Bread Street that Milton was tutored by various authorities on subjects available to a middle-class child in seventeenth century London. Among them was Thomas Young, a Scotsman, who later became a dissenting minister and sent away to Hamburg. Young has been suggested as Milton’s friend to whom he sent an undated letter explaining his reasons for turning away from the ministry and to whom Of Reformation was dedicated. Young seemed to have shaped Milton’s antiprelatical (church government at the hands of bishops) position betokened by several antiprelatical tracts written 1641-42.

It is from Young’s tutelage in 1618-1620 that Milton progressed to Alexander Gill’s St. Paul’s School, close to his residence. Shawcross adds, that “during this period he would surely have heard sermons by the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Donne.” His years at the school were marked by Milton’s rigorous study for the ministry, which would often take him late into the night, and which perhaps, according to various scholars, contributed to his eventual loss of sight. He made the friendship of Alexander Gill, the younger, an instructor at St Paul’s School and of Charles Diodati, who would die an untimely death possibly due to the plague and to whom Milton would dedicate his Latin elegy Epitaphium Damonis.

Milton went on to matriculate at Christ College, Cambridge in the spring of 1625 at the age of sixteen. His years there were a mixture of happiness and misfortune, having been “rusticated” (suspended), an unfortunate result of his difficult relationship with his tutor William Chappell. Nevertheless, he excelled at Latin verse while at university and earned the sobriquet “The Lady of Christ’s,” a sobriquet which Shawcross notes “may comment upon his youthful good looks, but more probably on his dissociation from the usual social and athletic activities of male college students.” Milton received his Bachelor of Arts in 1629 and his Master’s in 1632.

After his tenure at Cambridge, Milton’s residence was a shuttle between Hammersmith, his father’s new lodgings in London and in Horton, Berkshire, “in studious retirement” as he called it. For Milton, who was growing increasingly disinclined to join the ministry even though he had signed the Subscriptions Book at Cambridge due to his disagreement with the praxis as well as the scripture of the Christian religion being promulgated by the Church of England at the time. During his “studious retirement” in Hammersmith and in Horton, pursued his studies moving both chronologically and geographically through matters of intellectual importance. His poetic output at the time — Arcades (1634), Comus (first performed in 1634), etc — all point to his avowal of a poetic vocation rather than one in the ministry. It was also during this period that Milton decided to keep a record of his studies and writing activities, what would later come to be known as the “Trinity Manuscript” (now held by the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge).

Sometime in 1637, Milton had expressed a desire to move from his ancestral home to the Inns of Court in London. Whether he was able to do so or not is unknown, but it indicates a desire to return to the city that would be a presence and has always been one, in his works. His move to Hammersmith and Horton starting in 1632 was perhaps also to look after his aging parents. By then, his mother had passed away and his brother’s wife and children had been sent to the village to relieve Milton of his filial duties. All the same, Milton felt he could embark on a trip to the Continent in 1638. In his essay “Of Travel,” Francis Bacon writes “It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen, but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered, than observation. Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use.” And so Milton did. He had started a record of his readings in a personal anthology referred to as the Commonplace Book during his “studious retirement” and it can be assumed it came with him on his wanderjahr. The accounts of his travels are found in Defensio Secunda (1654) written as a defence of himself against the virulent attack waged against his by Peter Du Moulin in Regii Sanguinis Clamor (1652). Bacon, in the same essay, goes on to write “As for the acquaintance, which is to be sought in travel; that which is most of all profitable, is acquaintance with the secretaries and employed men of ambassadors: for so in travelling in one country, he shall suck the experience of many. Let him also see, and visit, eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great name abroad; that he may be able to tell, how the life agreeth with the fame.” And so Milton followed the advice scrupulously, forging friendships with eminent Italian scholars in the course of his travels.

It was in Venice that Milton received tidings of bereavement: the death of his best friend Charles Diodati and that of his sister Anne reached Milton, who came back to London in 1639. He would take up lodgings at St Bride’s Churchyard on Fleet Street in the City of London. His nephew, John Phillips, his recently deceased sister’s son, would join him there. Later, he would move to larger quarters in Aldersgate, where his other nephew Edward, Anne’s elder son, joined him. In these rooms, Milton started school-teaching to provide for his nephews the kind of education he had had as a child. He took in students from outside the family as well, who went on to serve as amanuenses due to his failing eyesight. Whereas Milton took no care to write in uppercase while beginning a sentence, that his students made entries to the Commonplace Book and the Trinity Manuscript from there on, is evinced by this disparate grammatical styles.

Milton became increasingly embroiled in religious conflict at this time; he incurred the wrath of the people defending church administration, something he was strongly against ever since he was tutored by Young. His attempt at bringing back personal and domestic liberty through the divorce tracts only brought upon him endless vilification and namecalling. Shawcross observes that “Milton’s approaches in these works on church government and on divorce are usually historical and logical, although the logic sometimes plays upon the arts of rhetoric, and are sometimes vituperative.” Areopagitica (1644) emerged as a profound statement on the freedom of liberty and press in the debates over censorship and liberty at the time. It is only in London, where new technologies in printing were coming into fashion that rapid transmission of political tracts became possible and where the question of throttling the press pre-publication had a geographical reality.

In 1642, Milton married Mary Powell, sixteen years at the time, the daughter of Richard Powell, a man who was indebted to Milton’s father. She moved in with the poet and political commentator and looked after his nephews. Not for long, though, since she moved back with her parents after three months of marriage and would not be reunited with Milton for another three years. His marriage (and reunion with Powell) saw him move to the more fashionable area of Barbican in 1645. This was in part due to his growing family: his father had moved in with him since 1643, and his in-laws would also take up residence at his home following Mary’s pregnancy. By 1647, however, with the deaths of Milton Sr. and Powell’s father, Milton moved the family to smaller lodgings in High Holborn.

To go back to Milton’s religion and the concomitant politics, Jonathan Rosen notes that “what was for many a time of terrifying anarchy — this was, after all, the world that produced Hobbes’s “Leviathan” — was for Milton a great religious reckoning. In common with many radical Protestant groups, he saw the idea of a relationship to God unmediated by ecclesiastical authority as a justification for beheading the titular head of the Anglican Church, Charles I. It was defending the regicide of 1649 in a pamphlet called “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” that helped bring Milton to the attention of Oliver Cromwell. He was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues soon afterward.” This new role saw Milton’s move to Westminster, living in a street called Petty France. He occupied No. 19 York Street where he lived until the Restoration. During his tenure as civil servant, he had homes in Charing Cross, and Whitehall, apart from the house in Petty France.

This location(s) in London saw him through his tenure as “Latin Secretary” no doubt an epithet brought on by his inevitable blindness. By 1652, he would be completely blind. He had assistance in carrying out his role corresponding with foreign powers using the Latin language and taking on commissioned work. He did compose his own work at the time — Eikonoklastes (1649) — in response to Eikon Basilike that stirred sympathies for the imprisoned king. Milton’s defence of the protectorate stoked the ire of the Continent and kingdoms advocated the banning and burning of his books. Indeed, the Restoration also saw the banning and burning of Defensio prima and Eikonoklastes and Milton’s imprisonment for his earlier allegiances.

It was the plague in London in 1665 that prompted Milton’s displacement, along with his family, to the village of Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire (it is the only surviving Milton residence). It is around this time that Milton went into a semi-retirement and went back to older manuscripts and ideas. The time had come for the composition of his masterpiece Paradise Lost. But there was some delay in the publication; owing to the Great Fire of London, the presses had a difficult time in running again after all the damage. The epic would not appear before 1667. Milton’s last decades, leaving London for Buckinghamshire, seemed to have been of a “blind man, ill with recurrent gout, generally undisturbed by much outside activity, particularly after about 1667, with a few students, amanuenses, or family members reading to him and taking dictation,” according to Shawcross.

Adam had a hand, or more specifically a rib, in Eve’s creation, making him both parent and partner. And it is an especially poignant moment in the epic, which has a lot to do with the meditation of freedom within the framework of the relationship between “our first parents.” Adam declares “to loose thee were to loose myself.” (PL 9:959) London and Milton seem to have a similar relationship: Milton passed away on 8 November 1674, a result of heart failure. He was buried in the grounds of St Giles-without-Cripplegate in the City of London. In 1790, when the Church was undergoing renovation, Milton’s grave was dug up to erect a monument for the man. His body was desecrated, with gravediggers and locals, after a drunken night, decided to take bits and pieces of his body. Whatever remained was auctioned off much to public outrage. Eventually, some of the relics were bought and returned to the site, and among them was, unsurprisingly, a rib. London soil had finally reclaimed the person who created one of its several iterations and stayed on as a lover, returning to it. He was the witness to upheavals that was the most pronounced at the centre of the empire, London and saw it through all the transformations.

Bibliography.

1. Bacon, Francis. The Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

2. British Library. “John Milton’s commonplace book.” Accessed 5 May 2019. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-miltons-commonplace-book

3. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The John Milton Reading Room. Accessed 5 May 2019. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_9/text.shtml

4. Rosen, Jonathan. “Return to Paradise.” The New Yorker, 26 May 2008. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/return-to-paradise

5. Shawcross, John T. “The life of Milton.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton, edited by Dennis Danielson, 1-19. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Paramita Purkayastha

PG-II

58

The martial, masculine Christ is on the rise today, as he has always been any time in history when the conservative practitioners of a Christian sect have felt threatened. Here, I will take a look at how John Milton, a poet living and working in the most turbulent of times in British history, conveyed whatever he had to convey (and that is a lot) through Christ. Milton’s views on war were varied and extensive, and in keeping with the topic, here we will look only at the figure of Jesus Christ, whose portrayals in the poems that he features in had an uniquely Miltonian martial ethics. So, the poems considered for this paper would be specifically ‘An Ode To Nativity’, ‘The Passion’, ‘Upon Circumcision’ and ‘Paradise Regained’.

Milton was a Puritan. But he was a Puritan of a particular kind- his Puritanism was offset on one hand by the fading Renaissance humanist glory, on the other by the incoming Enlightenment with its valorisation of the ‘I’. Meaning that throughout his career, his personal ethics were often at odds with his public cause.

And because of this inevitable trouble with fitting in, it becomes difficult to categorise John Milton’s views on war with respect to his entire career. The core of his Puritanism was made of the belief that all warfare on this earth was symptomatic of the fallen state. But that does not mean he did not consider the necessity of engaging politically and philosophically with the practicalities, in fact, he did that with a gusto.In his early days, while teaching his pupils, Milton included tracts on military warfare which he consciously put in a secondary place but did not do away with. Milton had great interest in Machiavelli, as can be found from the mentions in the Commonplace Book. In the Readie and Easie Way, he writes that Protestants of all sects must unite to attack the Church of Rome, ‘cutting through his ill-united unwieldy brigade’.

The distinction between vita activa and vita contempletiva was something that occupied him all his life, culminating in the pairing of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained. As Elizabeth Oldman contends, “Peace for Milton was not a state of being, but a goal toward which to strive,” or put another way, a “desired state of repose”. G. Wilson Knight regarded Milton as the greatest English poet on war. Milton, regardless of his recognition at least towards the end of human failings, had immense faith in the soldier’s calling (for example, his Sonnet 8 ‘Captain or Colonel’). James Freeman’s Milton and the Martial Muse, the most comprehensive treatment of this titular poet and the martial muse, explores the ways in which the different characters in different poems are shaped by and deal with the thematics of warfare. And while Satan himself in Paradise Lost is ‘the very model of the modern military general’, he doesn’t succeed, and that forms the most important thread, lasting right down to the days of Paradise Regained.

It is documented that John Milton came into close contact with Hugo Grotius, the Danish war theorist who, while definitely not the first to formulate the idea of an international community, was definitely the first one to think of it not in terms of warfare but of mutual consent chalking out international laws. Whether and how much he influenced the young and impressionable Milton touring the continent is a matter of speculation, but what is true is that Milton was not immune to his views, as can be seen somewhat in his treatment of treatises vis a vis the Old Testament in the Christian Doctrine.

Regarding his advocacy of just war, it does seem Milton was influenced a lot by what Grotius had to say. In his De Jure Belli ac Pacis, published in 1625, Grotius writes that under some circumstances, war is justifiable. Those circumstances, or ‘just causes’, as identified in Book II, are self-defense, reparation of injury, and punishment. But once the war has begun, there are some rules which are to be followed on all sides, regardless of their cause being just or not. Milton was specifically influenced by the arguments of Book II in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), which actually got him his job with Cromwell.

Regardless of his views on the phenomenon of war, Milton was a vocal and ardent support of the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War (his Defenses still determines his reception among many quarters in England)- the vocal is literal as he was as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues in Oliver Cromwell’s reign. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates has often been used by critics who believed Milton was pro-war which is problematic because it does not call for vindication of war, rather, focuses on putting brakes on the deeds of the individual in power, on the event of which exceeding called for his execution by the people. And it is individual power that forms the backdrop of Milton’s depictions of Christ.

And over the years, while Milton never completely gave up on his Republican ideals, seeing Cromwell’s Commonwealth collapsing due to the adoption of the despotic values by those in charge, and also seeing that the same English people who had killed a king to protest against the tyranny had now gone and brought back his son to make him the monarch after his father, made him try to adopt a separate ethics of interpreting warfare, or more specifically, victory. Milton’s own complicity in a lot of things, from moderating his criticism of the Cromwellian regime to saving his skin after the Restoration, didn’t escape the inner eye of the devout Christian that Milton was. So the endeavour to reach paradise was the ultimate rite of purification, because on earth everybody with power became a despot in their own capabilities- a marker of man’s sinful nature. And also as A. Kook writes, Milton had to keep the republican cause alive while explaining its failure. Thus the Christ of Paradise Regained.

Christ in Milton’s early poems-

In his ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (Nativity Ode), his first major work with themes that would be expanded in his Paradise poems, Milton looks at Christ in a way markedly different from what he does in his later poems. It might have something to do with his young age and thus more temperamental nature, but what Milton very clearly brings out in this, and celebrates, is the sheer violence of the Advent (which is also a process of humanization), and the divine force makes the corporeal Christ assume agency. As Ed Simon writes in the Paris Review, imagining the scenes in the poem in terms of real life actually involve violence comparable to a Hollywood slasher movie. Sample:

Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspire’s the pale-ey’d Priest from the prophetic cell. [ 180 ]

The lonely mountains o’re,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale, [ 185 ]
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov’n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated Earth,
And on the holy Hearth, [ 190 ]
The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,
In Urns, and Altars round,
A drear, and dying sound
Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;
And the chill Marble seems to sweat, [ 195 ]
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.

Peor, and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twise-batter’d god of Palestine,
And mooned Ashtaroth, [ 200 ]
Heav’ns Queen and Mother both,
Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn.

And sullen Moloch fled, [ 205 ]
Hath left in shadows dred.
His burning Idol all of blackest hue,
In vain with Cymbals ring,
They call the grisly king,
In dismall dance about the furnace blue; [ 210 ]
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis hast.

Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian Grove, or Green,
Trampling the unshowr’d Grasse with lowings loud: [ 215 ]
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud:
In vain with Timbrel’d Anthems dark
The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark. [ 220 ]

He feels from Juda’s land
The dredded Infants hand,
The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside,
Longer dare abide, [ 225 ]
Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true,
Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew.

So much for ‘meek-ey’d Peace’! It must be noted that nowhere in this poem does Milton portray Christ as an avenger, rather his righteousness was distinct in that his Advent facilitated the vanquishing of gods responsible for child sacrifice (something which his birth, incidentally, would bring about), for prophesying, for propagating lust. Reading Milton’s works biographically can be downright dangerous, but this was coming at a time when the poet would get into epistolary fights regarding the civil war. The old icons whom he had admired while growing up by virtue of his classical education had to be denounced, at least spiritually, and Milton was at his spiritual best in his writing. The political actions notwithstanding, the fights in his poems, the conflicts and the arguments that he got into, were actually played out on a spiritual slate, like it did for his predecessors Herbert and Donne. However, it would be risky to put this entirely on transcendental terms as well- as Annabel Patterson writes, “[w]e still do not know whether Milton turned to biblical reinterpretation in order to transcend his political experience, now seen as failed and useless.”

‘The Passion’ is distinctive in the sense that Milton is completely occupied with his own grief while talking about the passion of Christ, who is the high priest of the Hebrews in this poem, and therefore of not much significance because Christ’s presence in this poem is in his absence. In ‘Upon the Circumcision’, a poem unusual in its subject matter, Christ comes to earth in full heavenly heraldry before letting it all go in order to be human.

Paradise Regained-

Paradise Regained, as John Rottenburg writes, might as well be a parody of the Gospel of Luke. This was an anti-Trinitarian retelling of the Gospel of Luke, and the tempting ends with Satan asking Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple in order to test God’s benevolence. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the temptation in Book IV of Paradise Regained is two-fold- in addition to political power over geographies, Satan offers him knowledge of all the classical world. For the purposes of this post, it is the first, the second, and the first part of the third temptation that will be focused on for elucidation of the points.

The first temptation is a clever and purposeful reworking by Milton. In it, Satan, disguised as a poor shepherd, asks Jesus to turn the stone to bread not for himself, but also for poor people like him. This takes a special meaning when we consider that the account opens with poor fishermen wondering when the messiah will free them from the woke of tyranny. Jesus’s rejection thus assumes special significance. (‘Plain Fishermen, no greater men them call,/…Thir unexpected loss and plaints out breath’d./Alas, from what high hope to what relapse [ 30 ]/Unlook’d for are we fall’n, our eyes beheld/Messiah certainly now come, so long/Expected of our Fathers; we have heard/His words, his wisdom full of grace and truth,/Now, now, for sure, deliverance is at hand, [ 35 ]/The Kingdom shall to Israel be restor’d:..’Book 2, PR).

In Book III, Satan’s second temptation to establish a kingdom of Jews by vanquishing all the existing rulers is not an anomaly in its evil. The Jews themselves have a very martial concept of the Messiah, and they believe that the Messiah on his coming will take the vengeance that is due to the Lord. At one point, they wanted to carry Jesus away for him to lead the fight against the conquering Romans. Continuing the point mentioned at the beginning of this paper regarding Satan being the model military general, it must be mentioned here that even in Paradise Regained, it is Satan who lays out the strategy for world domination in front of Jesus the carpenter. So much so that even the Son of God can’t help but appreciate. There will be a digression here on Lucifer, only as much as is required for the purposes of this post.

The idea of Lucifer as a modern military strategist (in Paradise Regained, called ‘the great Dictator’) can be traced back to Paradise Lost, where with his individualism and iconoclastism, he is the epitome of the modern American spirit today, as Edward Simon writes in The Atlantic. With his ability to make the heaven in hell and the vice versa through the sheer power of words, he could easily be the con man of the Wild West, the kind who would often join the troops of an army with the promise of rape and pillage. The novelist D.H. Lawrence, remarked in his under-read 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature that, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”and Lucifer was the best metaphor for that. But what of course allowed the proliferation of such a metaphor in the New World is Lucifer’s discovery in his rebellion against heaven, that extreme self-invention inevitably leads to the ultimate form of alienation: a radical distance from God and from fellow humans.(‘High on a throne of royal state,” where he “exalted sat… To that bad eminence… insatiate to pursue / Vain war with heav’n’. Book II, Paradise Lost)

And that the royal throne was not the aspirational ideal is demonstrated by the fact that King David and the royal throne are mentioned twelve times in Paradise Regained, all of them in Books III and IV, which examine the last two temptations exploring the themes of political and religious power and nine of these twelve references are to specifically to the object that is David’s throne, . Of these nine, Satan mentions the throne six times, which reveal Satan’s desire for and importance bestowed on temporal power. And Milton’s choice to incorporate the historical figure of David is of no coincidence, when we consider also the themes of political and religious power developed in Luke chapter four. Furthermore, David, as already mentioned, was a prophet-king. The allusion to David’s throne is typological in nature because David’s throne was to be a “shadow” of the eternal throne of Christ’s, as explained in the New Testament- Satan’s desire for a temporal kingdom is juxtaposed with Christ’s for an eternal kingdom.

For example, Satan says to Christ in Book IV, in the third temptation:

Aim therefore at no less than all the world,
Aim at the highest, without the highest attained
Will be for thee no sitting, or not long
On David’s throne, be prophesied what will (ll105-08).

As Stanley Fish points out in Surprised by Sin. what makes Lucifer so indicative of the fallen state of the human condition is the fact that humans identify so much with him. That Milton gave him the best lines in Paradise Lost is to make the readers align themselves with him and to come face to face with their own depravity- of facing the world in highly individualistic, entitled, competitive terms, epitomised today by the American neoliberal competitive individualistic attitude.

“Know therefore when my season comes to sit/ On David’s throne, it shall be like a tree/ Spreading and overshadowing all the earth” (146-8). This tree of course is the “cross,” and on it Jesus will be crucified, and the final victory over Satan will happen when Christ “rises” from it. It is also interesting to note here that in Paradise Lost sin was plucked from a tree, in contrast to the above citation where sin is “crushed” on a tree. Satan therefore is a counterfeit of Christ, since Satan attempts to obtain temporal power by way of deception, unlike Christ who is obedient to his father’s plan to “crush” Satan and establish an eternal kingdom. And going by the fact that Rome was the state that sanctioned Christ’s crucifixion and also the biggest persecutor of the early Christians, Christ’s denial of the rule over Rome achieves a special significance, (and never poignancy).

Now, the words of a carpenter in his early 30s who preached for around 3 years alone don’t make a religion lasting millennia unless they are made to suit the need of the hour. With the coming of the Apostles, Christianity has been warfare since, and wars are required to keep power going, as we know too well by now. Till date, the Church has assumed militaristic demeanour the moment it has perceived the need for it, with the most frequently cited justification being Paul in Romans, Timothy and Corinthians, and Matthew 16 verse 18.

Milton, by merit of his social and historical location, recognised all this first hand when he was writing Paradise Regained. And he focused on the spiritual warfare, not only that, he took it completely out of the realm of the material, also because he himself was at the receiving end of the Church of England (he hated William Laud with all his heart). He wanted the spiritual battle to be independent of the Church, but also not dependent on those on earth, and that is why he used Jesus in Paradise Regained to denounce everything earthly.

I have focused so much on Christ’s rejection of all things temporal and subsuming himself only to the glory of the Father because this is how Milton forms a new kind of hero in Christ, suited for the hour, as will be explored in the following section.

Christ the hero

Jesus Christ as a hero has been there since the advent of Christianity, the heroic ethic having undergone substantial changes over the years. In the medieval times there was the emergence of the tender image of Christ informed mostly by monastic Christology and scholastic Christology. There was also the emergence of Christ as a knight. This imagery of Christ found sustenance in Ephesians 6:13-16.

Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.   And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God…

The imagery centred on two types- Christ as the lover-knight, sacrificing himself for his lover’s soul (most notable example being in the 1215 Ancrene Riwle), or Christ as the warrior fighting with Satan, often the Black Knight or a fire-breathing dragon (Satan is depicted as a dragon in the ‘Nativity Ode’. These images reached their pinnacle in the Middle English sermons, dramas, hymns and religious lyrics in the 13^th to the 15^th centuries– in one of the hymns, the crown of thorns gets transformed into a battle helmet. A very famous example of this is Piers Plowman, and Howard William Troyer works out extensively in his article that Piers is an exercise of Christ in humanity, corporeality. The miles Christianus, the Armor of God and the militia Christi are old horses flogged to death whose corpses won’t be included here.

In Paradise Regained, we find a new hero is Christ, who while obviously and necessarily influenced by what has gone before, is also uniquely Milton’s. This is a hero of the Word who fights with and through words. It is the word of God that is given the utmost authority- Christ is not so much the agent as the word of God made flesh (lines 122-125, Book III, PR). God, the Father of the Son, has already decided on his worthiness and the outcome is known to him (lines 126-170, Book I, PR), so unlike in the case of Job, Christ’s tempting is not an ironical act in the sense that it is a pre-decided pact between God and the Temptor. Rather, it is ironical in the sense that God already knows the outcome, the Son being His Word. This might as well hark back to the Alexandrian School of thought, which was fashioned on the Gospel of John and regarded Jesus as the eternal Logos who was united with the father before the act of Incarnation.

 In keeping with the renunciation of classical knowledge in Book IV of Paradise Regained, it would be an anomaly to have a hero of an epic who retains the classical heroic ethics. This is also in tandem with Milton’s larger ethics, something we have already seen in his construction of Adam in Paradise Lost. So we have Christ whose heroism is solely through his identity as the Son of God. And also in denying the martial valour of the earthly heroes, by denying the most important achievement for a classical hero- glory. This is the essence of Paradise Regained, and Milton meditates on it extensively. Because it is also crucial to the purpose of this post, I quote extensively:  

To whom our Saviour calmly thus reply’d.
Thou neither dost perswade me to seek wealth
For Empires sake, nor Empire to affect
For glories sake by all thy argument.
For what is glory but the blaze of fame,
The peoples praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, & well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise,
They praise and they admire they know not what;
And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
And what delight to be by such extoll’d,
To live upon thir tongues and be thir talk,
Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise?
His lot who dares be singularly good.
Th’ intelligent among them and the wise
Are few, and glory scarce of few is rais’d.
This is true glory and renown, when God
Looking on the Earth, with approbation marks
The just man, and divulges him through Heaven
To all his Angels, who with true applause
Recount his praises; thus he did to Job,
When to extend his fame through Heaven & Earth,
As thou to thy reproach mayst well remember,
He ask’d thee, hast thou seen my servant Job?
Famous he was in Heaven, on Earth less known;
Where glory is false glory, attributed
To things not glorious, men not worthy of fame.
They err who count it glorious to subdue
By Conquest far and wide, to over-run
Large Countries, and in field great Battels win,
Great Cities by assault: what do these Worthies,
But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave
Peaceable Nations, neighbouring, or remote,
Made Captive, yet deserving freedom more
Then those thir Conquerours, who leave behind
Nothing but ruin wheresoe’re they rove,
And all the flourishing works of peace destroy,
Then swell with pride, and must be titl’d Gods,
Great Benefactors of mankind, Deliverers,
Worship’t with Temple, Priest and Sacrifice;
One is the Son of Jove, of Mars the other,
Till Conquerour Death discover them scarce men,
Rowling in brutish vices, and deform’d,
Violent or shameful death thir due reward.
But if there be in glory aught of good,
It may be means far different be attain’d
Without ambition, war, or violence;
By deeds of peace, by wisdom eminent,
By patience, temperance; I mention still
Him whom thy wrongs with Saintly patience born,
Made famous in a Land and times obscure;
Who names not now with honour patient Job?
Poor Socrates (who next more memorable?)
By what he taught and suffer’d for so doing,
For truths sake suffering death unjust, lives now
Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours.
Yet if for fame and glory aught be done,
Aught suffer’d; if young African for fame
His wasted Country freed from Punic rage,
The deed becomes unprais’d, the man at least,
And loses, though but verbal, his reward.
Shall I seek glory then, as vain men seek
Oft not deserv’d? I seek not mine, but his
Who sent me, and thereby witness whence I am.

The inclusion of Job’s example, while a further illustration of Jesus’s point of the futility of earthly glory, has political relevance. Christopher Hill took the construction of the Fall as a personal attempt by Milton to seek logic of the failure of the English Revolution, not in historical terms, but something that affected him profoundly at a personal level. As A. Krook writes:

‘Milton creates in the Restoration Christ a model of resistance to false forms of authority suitable for Christ’s followers as well. In Paradise Regained, Milton’s soteriology, characteristically heterodox, defines Christ’s combat as a struggle for correct interpretation, rather than as a physical struggle or ordinary battle; separates Christ’s victory that regains lost paradise from his work that saves mankind; and makes Christ’s salvific action exemplary rather than vicarious.7 In so doing, Milton models his Christ into a leader who potentially re-creates the English civil war as something other than complete and final failure, developing a method of resistance that will both account for the republicans’ defeat and allow them to survive politically.’

This is also an explanation for Milton’s choosing of the Tempting of Christ as the subject matter for an epic which he would consider his masterpiece (while critics beg to differ, it might as well be that Milton himself accorded so much importance to this work because coming at the time that it was, the epic was, well, important to Milton). Had Jesus perfectly compensated for Adam’s succumbing to the temptation, then logically the rest would not have been required. This temporal space is where Milton foregrounds his epic- Adam’s submission to temptation and his falling were symptomatic of man’s inherently fallen nature. Jesus’s victory over Satan made Adam’s succumbing a standalone act, it mitigated the circumstances and created space for him to act as the pure son of God who would save humanity (whose condition created the space for the Original Sin in the first place) by sacrificing himself. In other words, it brought the time for him to act as the true Messiah. According to Frederic Jameson, this was Milton’s repudiation of millennarianism, and the accommodation of the possibility of the resurrection of the Republican cause within that. All was not lost yet, Milton had to say.

This reworking of the heroic model was punctuated and made prominent by the juxtaposition of Samson Agonistes, which is one of the only ways in which its inclusion could be explained, according to A. Krook. Samson relies on his own scriptural interpretation to not only kill, but also to take his own life. Biographical interpretations notwithstanding, Samson might as well have been a tempting model for the blind poet being mocked and defending his views in a changed world. But, as Krook writes, Samson might as well represent what is no longer tenable in the post-Restoration world. The two kinds of political engagement, active and contemplative, thus become cyclical.

How dark is Milton’s Jesus?

Satan offering Christ all the kingdoms of the world, Third Temptation, Paradise regained, William Blake. This particular representation of Satan also channels the second part of the temptation which is uniquely Miltonic- the repudiation of Classical knowledge.

When we consider the fact that Milton was writing at an age when the English society had begun to participate in and become acquainted with colonialism, does Christ in Paradise Regained attain more shades? Especially when there is Satan offering him both multiple kingdoms and also the ability to free his people from the yoke of tyranny?  There are many readings on Paradise Lost , a preceding work, and colonialism, and when we see that Christ says in Paradise Regained that it is not up to him to free his people because they are effectively colonised because of their own sins (lines 414-440, Book 3, PR, also Book I quoted above- the political milieu in which Christ was operating), reading Christ’s image through the lens of colonialism should definitely be indulged in. J. Martin Evans, in his book Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism, argues that while Milton, in his position as Secretary of Foreign tongues, was very intimately aware of and acquainted with the colonial debate, he did not take a clear stand as to what he exactly espoused, and shifted back and forth on the topic in his works. Christ in Paradise Regained comes very close to the view that the slavery was justified because blacks were regarded  as the descendants of Canaan, Ham’s son who bore the curse of his grandfather (naked) Noah. But, this is, and it is very important that this be noted, not an endorsement of colonialism per se- in the third and the last temptation, putting Christ on the Mountain, it is Satan who offers Christ realms rich, very specifically, in ‘Cedar, Marble, Ivory, or Gold’. Satan actually gets into an elaborate description of all the kingdoms on offer, brought into Christ’s vision ‘By what strange Parallax or Optic skill [ 40 ]/Of vision multiplyed through air, or glass/Of Telescope, were curious to enquire:/And now the Tempter thus his silence broke.’Could this be an allusion to science and colonialism working in tandem? Could be. And Christ’s reply to all this?

‘I never lik’d thy talk, thy offers less,
Now both abhor, since thou hast dar’d to utter
The abominable terms, impious condition;
But I endure the time, till which expir’d,
Thou hast permission on me.’

How to conceive Christ has been a raging issue ever since the people who had actually seen Christ died, sometimes even before that. Milton wasn’t alone aware of and alarmed by the politics of representation. As has been said in the beginning of this post, Christ has come to the rescue, or rather been brought to the rescue (somewhere God might be having fun at this), whenever people have felt threatened. And at its objective best, this is the purpose of Christ, really. A very recent example would be Time LaFaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’ novel Glorious Appearing from their Left Behind series which has descriptions of the avenger Christ which would compete with any Hollywood ripper movie. Sample this:

‘Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood… It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin…Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.”

And there is no wonder that the series became an adult best-seller during the early 2000s, during the Bush Jr era. Right now, there is a renewed urge to do away with the Lamb to make way for the Lion.

‘I think a lot of people are looking at contemporary conflict around the world and seeing it as a kind of religious war,” said Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton. ”And there is no kind of conflict that becomes more intractable than when people are convinced that they alone have access to God’s truth and the other side are the people of Satan.”

This is not a new battle, as has been said in the beginning. Once upon a time, the Vikings were lured in through the vision of a warrior Christ- there was simply no other way for them to accept a bearded brown man. At the end of the day, for Milton, violence was indeed a symptomatic, and thus characteristic, means to an end. A carefully thought out violence that was in keeping with his Christian faith and that did not exacerbate the already precarious conditions that he was witnessing and that he fervently hoped was not permanent.

CITATION

1. Kirkpatrick, David D. “Wrath and Mercy; The Return of the Warrior Jesus.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/weekinreview/wrath-and-mercy-the-return-of-the-warrior-jesus.html.

• Cotton, James. “The Christ Knight.” Medieval Studies Research Blog Meet Us at the Crossroads of Everything, 28 May 2015, sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2015/05/28/the-christ-knight/.

• Simon, Edward. “What’s So ‘American’ About John Milton’s Lucifer?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Mar. 2017, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/whats-so-american-about-john-miltons-lucifer/519624/.

• Rottenburg, John. “Typology in Paradise Regained (John Milton).” Typology in Paradise Regained by John Milton., http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/preg_gm.htm#fnB10.

• Krook, Anne K. “The Hermeneutics of Opposition in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 1996), pp. 129-147. https://www.jstor.org/stable/450931

Rupsa Dey

PG-1, Roll- 20

One of the greatest example of an English poet with disabilities is that of the blind bard, John Milton, and as can be expected, Milton is frequently mentioned in disability studies. As much as he is named in disability studies, discourse on the impact of milton’s blindness on his work beyond his autobiographical sonnets of his own impairment, is scant. Milton’s letters reveal that he had a deeper understanding than was usual of the seventeenth century medicinal practice and tradition, and about his own impairment, he had an eagerness to understand the nature of it. In fact, his descriptions of the lack of sight in his most notable works helped scholars to understand the nature of blindness that Milton was afflicted with. It is not uncommon for one to think that Milton’s blindness affected to a certain extent his employment of words best suited to describe that which is sensorial. This paper will try to look at Milton’s understanding of vision, disability and the impact his blindness had on his poetics.

Derrida in his Memoirs of the Blind¹, asks, “What happens when one writes without seeing? A hand of the blind ventures forth alone…trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight.” And this is perhaps true for Milton who trusted in the memory of his sight and relied heavily upon his other senses to draw as accurately as was possible vivid descriptions detailing taste, touch, smell and sounds. Milton, it must be understood had no doubt that he was in a very particular way, lacking in physical capacity. He situated himself at a position of lack whereupon he might have even felt compelled to compensate through the usage of descriptive sensory details, as if to recollect from memory all that he saw and see them once again clothed in a more brilliant light. The most worked upon sonnet when it comes to Milton’s blindness is sonnet XVI: When I consider how my light is spent, where one finds Milton struggling to reconcile and accept his loss of sight. That the loss of sight is something to be mourned, or something Milton thought was to be mourned is evident in the entirety of the sonnet, which reads like a long sigh, a resultant of one’s struggle to accept one’s insignificance in the face of divine perfection. There must be no doubt that in seventeenth century England, blindness was seen as a disability. As mentioned, Milton had situated himself at a position of lack. He lacked the ability to be fully dependent on himself. “He had lost so much of his independence” Brown says, noting that “there is nothing to the blind that spells dependence so much as having to be led about”².

In early modern Europe, there was little in terms of medical advancements that could be done to actually help recover sight. People most afflicted with blindness belonged to the lowest rungs of the society, poverty stricken, where little hygiene could be maintained. For the better part of history, blind people have had to get by through the means of begging. It is of no surprise that the hand of the blind was looked down upon by the Ancient Hebrews, associated as it was with beggary. In fact the debasement of the disabled, especially of the blind was so prevalent in ancient society that in Leviticus, the laws of compassion make a special mention of it. “Thou shalt not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the Lord.” (Lev: 19:14). In Fifteenth century, practices such as ground glass and burnt human excrement ash poured into eyes of animals were common practices to cure blindness in animals³. The results, it can be concluded, was less than satisfactory.  It is not uncommon that the poet should find himself hopeless in seventeenth century England where knowledge about blindness was limited and the methods to cure it, though less savage than its preceding age was nothing if not questionable. In his letter to Leonard Philaras, Milton shows as I have mentioned previously an eagerness in understanding his own blindness. The poet’s failing sight troubled him so much, that it became difficult to keep up hope. He writes to Philaras,

“As you have therefore suggested to me that I should not give up all hope of recovering my sight and told me that you have a friend and a close companion in the paris physician, Thevenot, especially distinguished as an oculist…”

In various letter to his friends, Milton talks in depth of his failing sight, the details of which he so clearly mention that it is understandable that the poet was desperate to not only himself understand but also make others understand the symptoms so as to provide as much clarity on the nature of his blindness as was possible and devise a cure. In his letters, we find a scientific observation kept by the patient of his own illness. At length, Milton writes of his blindness,

“I felt my eyes at once thoroughly pained, and shrinking from the act of reading,, but refreshed after bodily exercise. If I looked at a lit candle, a kind of iris seemed to snatch it from me. Not very long after, a darkness clouded over the left part of my left eye…”

Here, we see that Milton is having to recount every detail that he had observed, every problem that he had encountered and he is having to do so in painful details. It is laborious and strenuous for the poet who seems to be reliving his discomfort, pain and a further feeling of loss as he talks about it. The letter shifts from the detached medical tone to a more sentimental and self reflexive tone where every word enunciates and prolongs his mourning,

“Yet the darkness which is perpetually before me by night as well as by day, seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish and such that when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light.”

Milton writes that “inveterate mists” have settled onto his forehead and temples that make him drowsy, depressed and induce a “sleepy heaviness” in him. Milton himself after describing his “sleepy heaviness” writes that his mind is frequented by the comparison of Phineus from Argonautica. Phineus had been condemned by Zeus to ‘a lingering old age’ and blindness, taking from him that which was dear to him most, his prophetic vision. In this comparison which sees Milton indulging in self aggrandisation, we also see Milton grasping at similitude with figures in mythology, in an action which can be called self soothing. He is searching for a point of relatability so that he does not feel crippled by his lack. The poet’s loss of his sight is as dear to him as Phineus’s prophetic vision. However, this is not only Milton trying to search for relatability. This is also a way in which he aligns the poet figure with the prophet, the seer, one who is capable of receiving the divine inspiration and conveying it to masses through the means of an expression that he may choose.

It is impossible to conclude with certainty what exactly Milton’s blindness was. However, ophthalmologists have noted that Milton’s blindness could be a result of glaucoma rather than myope. Let us consider for a moment the case for glaucoma. The symptoms that Milton describe indicates progressive damage to optic nerves, a late consequence of intraocular pressure and typical of glaucoma. In the letter to Philaras, cited above, Milton says that as his disease progressed, his eyes hurt when he tries to read but felt recovered after “bodily exercise”. Secondary glaucoma is progressive. It progresses slowly and one who has lost sight of one eye in glaucoma has a higher chance of losing the other as well. Both doctors and psychiatrists have noted in patients of glaucoma, that the attacks have frequently followed mental disturbances. Milton, for all we know cannot be called one who was at an absolute peace with both his private and public life in the commonwealth. In fact, one who was as mentally engaged as he was, it comes as little surprise that Milton frequently felt anxious, denied (a clerical life) and above all, was a perfectionist (compiling an errata list for paradise lost when completely blind). All the symptoms point towards glaucoma and now, critics and medical examiners alike are of the opinion that Milton’s blindness was a case of secondary glaucoma⁴. Milton in fact attributed the cause for his blindness to excessive study in Second Defense, saying that he rarely went to bed before midnight, “the first cause of injury to my eyes”. Nathan Paget, Milton’s friend and early biographer wrote of Milton’s Gutta Serena which indicated blindness in the presence of a clear pupil, in contrast to Gutta obscura which referred to cataract.

In Paradise Lost, Milton writes,

Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou

Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain

To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;

So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,

Or dim suffusion veiled

These lines when read with Milton’s blindness in mind, reads autobiographical. Milton seems to be drawing from the anxieties of his own personal self, the utter frustration of the self when it feels abandoned. In Milton’s laments there lies a sense of abandonment that he projects onto the heavenly father. Milton’s inner world was truly just as dark, or rather darker than the world he creates, for in its grim reality, Milton indeed must have felt lost, grappling with the darkness that only blindness leaves behind. It is more brutal because it is real and the lack for Milton is an ever present element in his reality. But perhaps these words reflect more than just Milton’s inner world and frustration. When read carefully, it also reveals a scientific understanding of the different kinds of blindness. What is interesting is Milton’s usage of the word “serene”. “So thick a drop serene” seems to be referring to Gutta serena, the blindness which has closed their orbs. It is thick but clear, or serene. The second line beginning, “Or dim suffusion veiled” is directly in contrast to the preceding line. Here, the important word is “veiled”, referring to the opacity of cornea, as if something dim and dark has put a veil over them. This is Gutta obscura.

What we see here is an emergent language to write blindness. Milton seems to be doing exactly that, writing blindness, and language is malleable in his capable hands. It is not only becoming a medium to convey his anguish, fears and doubts but also becoming in the process, self revealing and self referring. The words by the dint of them being positioned in the very way that Milton has placed them becomes a window to Milton’s inner world and at once a self descriptor. What Milton lacks in sight, Milton recovers and nurtures to give rise to a practised hand capable of tackling both sentiment and science.

This leads me to the next set of lines in Paradise Lost, once again we see Milton use common medical knowledge in a poetic manner to render the sentimental scientific. He writes,

Then purged with Euphrasy and rue

The visual nerve-for he had much to see

And from the well of life three drops instilled

So deep the power of these ingredients pierced.

Even to the inmost seat of mental sight.

Euphrasy or Euphrasia literally called “eye bright” is well known for its healing properties over the visual organs and Milton once again proves his knowledge over prevalent medical practices, especially in relation to the eye⁵. He gives to his character, the first man by the hand of the Archangel a clarity in vision, something he himself is denied. He even prescribes, in his fashion, “three drops” to the eyes. It is almost as if Milton himself is playing doctor, making possible in the bounds of fiction what is not possible in the scopes of his brutal reality. Milton even gives Adam, “the inmost seat of mental sight”, something that Milton believes he himself has access to. This calls to mind Milton’s comparison of himself to Phineus.

In the ten years between 1639-1649, Milton’s life was actively engaged in the public sphere and was characterised by an extraversion that would be in stark contrast to the introversion of the following years. For fifteen months in 1638, Milton travelled from France to Switzerland, encountering many scholars on his way, while also beginning to look at the discord between Charles I and the Parliament from a different viewpoint. Europe provided him with an intellectually charged cultural enlightenment that England’s unrest failed to deliver and soon Milton returned, more obstinate in his determination to defend liberty against tyrannies. The following years, Milton wrote five pamphlets against the clergy. He was determined to expose the behaviour of the clergy, and what he saw as their inappropriate usage of authorial power. In 1642, he met and fell in love with Mary Powell. However after getting married, the bride shortly returned to her family and Milton spent the next few years authoring the divorce pamphlets⁶. He also wrote Areopagitica. His wife returned but in 1644, his health and vision began to fail. When National strife intensified Milton was appointed Secretary of Foreign Tongues under Oliver Cromwell. During this time Milton enjoyed a heated written exchange with Salmasius. The both attacked each other viciously in their political writings. By this time Milton’s right eye rapidly began to diminish in its capabilities and he later wrote in Second Defense, “the choice lay before me between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight”. For Milton, serving the Commonwealth was of primary importance and he thought it to be his inner calling, or rather, heaven speaking to him, urging him to serve his nation with the remaining eyesight that he had. He continued to study and write excessively and later in sonnet XXII, attributes his eyesight failure partly to the pressure and the demands of his service. Milton writes,

What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied

In liberty’s defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe talks from side to side.

The usage of the world “overplied” clearly denotes over-application. The poem is almost conversational and Milton’s lament rings clear as he confides in his friend, the aftermath of blindness.

Deborah Knight suggest, “the sort of understanding we want to achieve involves us in the imaginative reduplication of how things are for someone else”⁶. Milton, uses empathy and recollections from memory to give to his details a vividness that perhaps wouldn’t have been possible with human sight. In king Lear, Gloucester after being blinded, says, “I see it feelingly!” To what extent does a blind man, who previously had sight have to engage in reduplication of images that it becomes as vivid as day to the readers? What is most essential to understand here is the application of words. Application of words change for the means to communicate those very same sights that the author could see before has now been taken away from him and almost all that he says, is a projection and assembling of images along with a heightened sense of empathy. The author then develops a newer language within the given, one that depends on the other sensory aspects, the minute details that one would have easily overlooked had one been sighted because of the unspoken understanding of that detail being an inseparable part of a thing mentioned. However the moment one’s sight fails, it is those unspoken and most importantly unquestioned details that become paramount in the reduplication of images. And this demands for a newer language, or rather, a newer way to look at the very same language, a way that is capable of evoking other senses in a way which immediately portrays a picture and is potent with all of the details that make it alive, rendering it as if an extra dimension out of the bounds of the pages.

Samson Agonistes, upon which Milton had started making notes as early as 1640 is an important poem, and even autobiographical to a certain extent when we think of the author and the protagonist’s similar journey through blindness. In 1640, Milton still had partial sight but he was also aware of the limited time that he would enjoy that partial sight. As I have broadly outlined, 1640 was an active time for Milton and he employed himself as much as he could in his travels and service for the Commonwealth. It must be no surprise therefore that the fear of losing the capability which makes possible for him to be so active was ever present in his mind. In fact, Milton who anticipated his blindness perhaps engaged himself publicly and in that vigorous manner because he knew of the impending darkness that would befall him shortly. In Samson Agonistes, we see an anticipation in the language that Milton uses. Here he is not only crafting images in the way one with perfect sight can see, but also crafting images in the way one without any sight would relate to the things around him. Since he still had partial sight, it was a world he still had access to, although dimmer. Milton writes,

Which shall I first bewail,

Thy bondage or lost sight,

Prison within prison Inseparably dark?

Thou art become (O worst imprisonment)

The dungeon of thyself

These above lines read autobiographical. Milton himself is trying to reconcile with the fact that he would not be able to see anymore. By the time, Samson Agonistes was completed, Milton had been left completely blind and Borges notes Milton’s Homer-like memory, in rehearsing and recollecting from memory that which the sight does not grant anymore. He sees a poet whose memory had to readjust in proportion to the irreversible diminution of his world.

Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,

And all her various objects of delight Annull’d,… (70-72)

The Sun to me is dark

And silent as the Moon … (86-87)

There can be no doubt that Milton’s own personal experience intensified that which he wrote and that which he thought the performer, a man with sight could evoke through his words on the stage, a darker version, essentially Miltonian, Theatrum Mundi. Samson is suspended not only in literal darkness but also in spiritual darkness and of this Milton found himself to be not guilty, albeit he arrived to it after his many doubts and fears, once again reflected in his letters. In his letter to Philaras, he had revealed doubt that it resulted from either a positive or a negative divine act. Samson Agonistes is not only Theatrum Mundi but also essentially theatre of the blind⁷.

Patterns of autobiography are visible throughout Milton’s poetry and it is the manipulation and careful reapplication of self that Milton employs through language and crafts a narrative for the reader who Milton introduces into the physical world once again in a way more immediate to responses. Milton’s language, of the blind and by the blind generates within its poetic bounds a visceral world, one that affirms the innermost mental world and sheds light on it. Reading his poetry, one cannot help but believe Milton truly was gifted with inner sight and what the blind bard saw, could not be seen with mere human sight.

Notes

1. Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Print.
2. Brown, Eleanor Gertrude. Milton’s Blindness. Columbia University Press, 1968. Print.
3. L. R. “John Milton’s Blindness: A Suggested Diagnosis.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3963, 1936, pp. 1275–1275. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25355091.
4. Kemble, James. “Milton’s Blindness.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 3965, 1937, pp. 44–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25355257.
5. Drysdale, John James. Robert Ellis Dudgeon. Richard Hughes. John Rutherfurd RussellMaclachlan. The British Journal of Homeopathy: Vol 41. Stuart and Company, 1843. Print.
6. Knight, Deborah. “In Fictional Shoes: Mental Simulation and Fiction.” Philosophy Pictures: An Anthology. Ed. Noël Carrol and Jinhee.
7. NEELAKANTA, VANITA. “‘Theatrum Mundi’ and Milton’s Theater of the Blind in ‘Samson Agonistes.’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 30–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23242187.

Name: Balagopal S. Menon
PG II, Roll Number: 59

John Milton wrote Areopagitica as a direct response to the English Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643, as is evident from the subtitle of Milton’s tract (please refer to the picture above). The focus of this essay will be on Milton’s treatment of the book as an object – at once both impermanent and immortal. He uses this definition of a book in his tract in order to put across his defense of what may be noted as the right of a printer to publish and that of an author to be published.¹

Before moving on to discuss Areopagitica, establishing the context for this discussion should aid in understanding it further. As Barry Stocker notes, the Reformation relied on the printed word. Soon after the advent of printing in Europe, it was used as a tool against the Catholic Church and its hierarchical authority on the continent. Through pamphlets and various other tracts, people could now spread their ideas to different places without being physically present at the site.² This aided the spread of Protestant belief across Europe. Through the Star Chamber and other royal and ecclesiastical censors, the government, under Charles I, maintained a pre-publication censorship which lasted until 1641. After the Presbyterians managed to abolish the Star Chamber, they introduced their Licensing Order in 1643 in order to primarily suppress the works by royalists and radical Protestants. According to the Licensing Order, no book, pamphlet, paper, or their parts could be printed unless it was approved of and licensed by the person/people appointed by either or both Houses of the Parliament for this purpose. If any printing press violated this law, the resulting punishment was “to seize and cary away such printing Presses Letters, together with the Nut, Spindle, and other materials of every such irregular Printer, which they find so misimployed, unto the Common Hall of said Company, there to be defaced and made unserviceable according to Ancient Custom.”³ Here, there is a noticeable shift towards a stress on the physicality of books and therefore ideas themselves. Ideas that were once abstract now took the form of literature and naturally, the best way to limit its proliferation was by destroying the operative parts of the press itself. It is in this context that Milton presents his characterisation of the book in his work.

As noted by Chaney, Noga, and Luxon, Milton kept adapting his rhetoric throughout the tract in order to frame his arguments in the most convincing manner possible. For instance, he provided a lot of Classical examples in the first half of the text while later balancing it out with examples from the Bible. The scholars identified a two-fold purpose behind this choice: first, it helped Milton demonstrate how Greek and Roman learning may be used to instruct Christian morality, a point he stresses throughout his work; second, and perhaps more importantly, it helped establish a subtle comparison between the members of the English Parliament to the senators and leaders of Ancient Greece and Rome, thereby flattering them ever-so-slightly in order to change their minds about the Licensing Order. Also, by providing counter examples of Catholic Spain and the Inquisition to a largely anti-Catholic English Parliament, he kept up with his technique in order to influence the members of both the Houses. One could extend this argument further to understand Milton’s discussions regarding the book as an object within his tract:

“For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye.”⁴

It seems like Milton’s objective here is to establish the book in terms of its potential as an immortal vial of ideas rather than just as an impermanent object. Contrary to the rules stated in the Order, he not only opposes the pre-publication ban advocated by the Parliament, but is also focused on promoting the importance of books as agents of change in the hands of the general public.

Through the books, various ideas take on a material form. Destroying books, therefore, is tantamount to slaying immortality or striking at the quintessence itself. Thus, for Milton, the regulations imposed by the government take on an absurd character. As noted by Pierre Lurbe, he stretches the absurdity in policing and censoring to every aspect of a citizen’s life. In this way, what begins in order to “rectifie manners,” goes on to regulate “recreations and pastimes,”⁴ and even moves into regulating everyday conversations.

The potency which Milton ascribes to books could be seen in terms of what Aristotle defined as “potentiality” (dynamis), as opposed to “actuality” (energeia), in his treatise De anima (On the Soul). In his discussion of Aristotle’s treatise, Giogrio Agamben notes that the former distinguishes between two kinds of potentialities. The first kind is known as generic potentiality and it is what we usually mean when we talk about a child’s potential for growth. The second kind of potentiality is defined in terms of the impotentiality (or, adynamia, as Aristotle calls it) displayed by a person with knowledge or ability. For instance, in the case of a poet, the potential is understood in terms of the poet’s potential to “not-write poems.”⁵ In the case of Milton’s book, therefore, this potential is transferred to it from its author whose soul is encapsulated within the work itself.⁶ The censorship by the state, in this regard, becomes the deciding (and even, defining) factor for the potential of the work. In a state with strict orders, the work fails to transcend its impotentiality, thus its potential remains unfulfilled. Now, Agamben extends this further to state that the freedom for both good and evil is equal to one’s capability for impotentiality. A book which is dependent on the Parliament’s laws is not exactly free or capable of its own impotentiality. Milton seems to note this as he talks of the necessity for people’s freedom to choose the good books from the bad. He notes in his tract that it is the Devil who whips someone for reading. God, on the other hand, allows us the freedom to read and choose for ourselves.⁷ According to Milton, rejecting evil without knowing or understanding it, is not virtue rather it could be counted as a form of heresy. God gave us reason so we have the freedom to choose for ourselves (Milton would repeat this in greater detail in Book IX of Paradise Lost, while discussing God’s creation and banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden). As the writer puts it, God “trusts him (man) with the gift of reason to be his own chooser.”⁴

The manner in which humans choose to exercise this freedom is the only way in which one could attain salvation. And in order to make our choice, we must have a proper knowledge of both good and evil. While Milton does describe books as “issue of the brain,”⁴ he also insists that if the book is proved to be bad, then it must be “justly burnt, or sunk into the sea.” Therefore, one can safely conclude that what he argues for is not freedom of speech or unregulated printing rather he is simply opposed to pre-publication banning of works in general.

While the pamphlet has been recorded to have had no effect in its time, ⁸ Milton’s unorthodox arguments inspired an entire generation of later legislators. The ghost of Areopagitica looms over laws as recent as the US Bill of Rights, etc.⁸ Milton’s tract even inspired and preceded some of the later works by scholars and theorists such as Agamben and others. In concluding this essay, a quote from George Steiner’s Real Presences seems to ring true in the context of Milton’s work: “Censors […] bear corrupt but unmistakable witness to the ambiguous mastery of texts over life.”⁹

Notes:

¹The fact that Areopagitica does not argue for free or unregulated speech or printing rather, Milton simply puts forward his case for not banning books before their publication, is noted by several scholars, chief of whom are Nathan Chaney, Casey Noga, and Thomas H. Luxon.

²As noted by Christopher Hill in Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, this was the time which saw “the whole fantastic outburst of radical ideas and actions, spreading into all spheres of life and thought.”

³“June 1643: An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing.” Check “Works Cited” for more details.

⁴John Milton, Areopagitica. All quotations from the text are taken from the version available on The John Milton Reading Room online archive maintained by Dartmouth College. For links and other details, check the “Works Cited” section.

⁵“What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.” Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” Potentialities,p. 183.
Do check the “Works Cited” section for further details.

⁶”…as active as that soule was whose progeny they are…” – Part of the large quote from Milton’s text which was quoted earlier in this essay.

⁷“…the Divell whipt St. Jerom in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero […] To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d.” Milton, Areopagitica.

⁸As noted by Chaney and others, “Parliament ignored it. However, as the first major treatise on press freedom, it influenced the arguments of many later advocates for the abolition of censorship.” William Walker posits a different opinion in his essays like, “Human Rights, Modernity, and Milton’s Areopagitica,” often placing Milton’s thought and ideas in league with early Greek thinkers such as Isocrates and even some of the Renaissance humanists.

⁹George Steiner, Real Presences, p. 151.

Works Cited:

Agamben, Giorgio. “On Potentiality.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 177-184.

Aristotle. On the Soul (De Anima). Translated by J. A. Smith. https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/aristotle.soul.html.

Chaney, Nathan, Casey Noga, and Thomas H. Luxon. “Introduction.” Areopagitica, written by John Milton, Dartmouth College. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/intro/text.shtml.

Hill, Christopher. Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.

“June 1643: An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing.” Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, originally published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1911, pp. 184-186. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp184-186.

Lurbe, Pierre. “Areopagitica, or the Uses of Literacy according to John Milton.” LISA e-journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2013. DOI : 10.4000/lisa.5195. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Milton, John. Areopagitica. The John Milton Reading Room. Dartmouth College. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html.

Milton, John. “Book 9.” Paradise Lost. The John Milton Reading Room. Dartmouth College. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_9/text.shtml.

Steiner, George. Real Presences, Open Road Integrated Media, 2013.

Stocker, Barry. “Milton on Freedom of Printing: Areopagitica.” Notes on Liberty. WordPress, May 2015, https://notesonliberty.com/2015/05/25/milton-on-freedom-of-printing-areopagitica. Accessed 5 May 2019.

Walker, William. “Human Rights, Modernity, and Milton’s Areopagitica.” The European Legacy, vol. 23, no. 4, 2018, pp. 365-381. Taylor and Francis Online, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2018.1433386.

Arjun Motwani (PGII, Roll 34)

‘A Gentleman of Oxford’, writing in 1756 about the apparently superfluous and irrelevant details in many of Milton’s epic similes, complained that Milton is “guilty” of “running away from his Similes, whose Beauty consists in its Brevity as much as in any particular Part of its Construction, to make a Parade of his Knowledge of foreign Countries” (emphasis mine). [1] The question of Milton’s “luxurious Comparisons that deviate from the Subject” was, as Christopher Ricks points out, debated fairly often during the eighteenth century; [2] but what is striking about the ‘Gentleman of Oxford’ is his suggestion that Milton’s allusions to foreign cultures were only meant to impress the readers with their erudition and hence, were dispensable insofar as their removal would have made no conceivable difference to the overall project of justifying the ways of God to man. It is true that Milton (or, more precisely, the epic narrator in Paradise Lost) refers to and also imaginatively evokes a wide range of faraway ‘exotic’ places while narrating events which had taken place even before the beginning of historical time. Also, Milton, as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State, would have been deeply aware of England’s diplomatic relations with the Oriental nations from where merchant-adventurers brought back valuable goods, and, possibly, of the accounts these travellers were penning down after returning home [3]. However, this does not mean that the wide geographical knowledge Milton had amassed (and which, in Of Education, he wished all English children would amass through “the use of the Globes, and all the Maps; first with the old names, and then with the new”) [4] simply filtered into the discourse of the epic-narrator in an unmediated manner, resulting in unnecessary and avoidable “excursions into the exotic, part of an encyclopedic epic’s obligation to be encyclopedic even in its naming of places” (Balachandra Rajan). [5]

That Milton’s epic similes serve definite aesthetic functions, rather than merely parading the poet’s impeccable command over geography, was recognised by critics as early as Addison, who praised Milton for not “quit[ting] his Simile till it rises to some very great Idea, which is often foreign to the Occasion that gave Birth to it.” [6] Richardson also defended the extended similes despite acknowledging that they are not always strictly “to the Purpose”, on the grounds that readers feel delight when, “The Main Business being done, the Poet gives the rein a little to Fancy.” [7] The poet’s “Fancy”, we might add, often leads him to faraway enchanting places which most contemporary readers would have perceived as hovering nebulously somewhere near the outer reaches of the known world. Not only are such flights of Fancy “foreign to the [main] Occasion”, but they also lead to the conjuring up of places with tantalisingly unfamiliar names (like ‘Sericana’, ‘Bengala’, ‘Imaus’) that serve as signifiers of  radical difference: the places are, in a very literal sense, foreign. Milton, of course, does not invent the numerous Oriental place names scattered throughout the text. He culls them from the works of Classical geographers and contemporary travellers to the east, and also from the increasingly detailed atlases and maps of Biblical lands (often appended to early modern King James and Geneva Bibles) which were being produced in Europe in the wake of the cartographic revolution. [8] But it is still significant that he chooses to interrupt his narrative at key moments in order to launch into digressive similes where the vehicle is drawn from the matter of the East, because, by stimulating a sense of wonder through his depiction of places dimly glimpsed and shrouded in mystery, he possibly tries to a convey a sense of the far more marvellous nature of the original thing being compared. (The technique, in other words, is that of comparing “Great things with small” (2.922). Thus, when the fallen angels in the outer chamber of Pandemonium undergo a sudden transformation from giants to “less than smallest dwarves” (1.781), they are compared to “that Pigmean Race/ Beyond the Indian Mount” (1.780); and this is followed by the evocation of a haunting moonlit landscape reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with “Faery Elves” gallivanting all around and creating “Jocond Music” that charms the solitary peasant returning home (1.781-788). Similarly, while describing how Satan is greeted with delightful fragrance when he reaches the borders of Eden, the garrulous epic narrator proceeds to draw a parallel with the experience of merchants sailing “Beyond the Cape of Hope” who smell the “Sabean odours” wafting towards them from the “spicie shoare” of “Arabie the blest” (4.159-165). The first simile is possibly based on a cartographic practice of inscribing images of pygmy-like inhabitants on some maps of eastern Asia, [9] whereas the second one derives from and participates in a proto-Orientalist discourse about the wondrous aroma of the perfumes of Arabia.

However, in the context of the epic similes involving allusions to the Orient, it is useful to keep in mind C. A. Martindale’s observation that the two things being compared might have no more than a single point of correspondence, and hence, it is possible for them to be actually quite dissimilar. [10] The principle on which the simile operates is, as Martindale points out, that of “idem in alio: the poet discerns the like in the unlike”; and, in fact, “without some degree of unlikeliness, there would be no simile at all.” [11] It is only the degree to which the two things are dissimilar that varies. Also, if and when the elements of the comparison are fairly heterogeneous, “the simile may highlight the likeness in the apparent dissimilarity or it may to some extent stress the dissimilarity” (emphasis mine). [12] When read with this caveat in mind, it becomes evident that Milton’s comparison of Hell’s fallen angels with Himalayan pygmies on the basis of their diminutive stature alone does not, ipso facto, imply a “Satanisation of the Orient” (to use Balachandra Rajan’s phrase) [13]: it is only in one respect that the inhabitants of the Indian mount resemble the infernal creatures jostling for space in Pandemonium; and, one might argue, the effectiveness of the simile depends on a tacit acknowledgement of how dissimilar the two ultimately are. That Milton does not intend to show a total and perfect correspondence between the two things being compared must be kept in mind while reading the other similes involving the Orient or the New World as well. It is especially crucial to our understanding of the fig-tree passage (9.1101-1114), which is arguably the most complex and ambiguous among the references to India in the poem and also imbued with great theological import.

Milton’s ekphrasis of the phenomenal Indian fig tree occurs right after the climax of the poem. Adam and Eve, having partaken of the forbidden fruit and slaked the “Lust” with which they were “burn[ing]” (9.1015), fall asleep; but their sleep is disturbed by “unkindly fumes” and guilty, tormenting dreams (9.1050). On waking up and realising that they have lost their innocence and that their faces are marked indelibly by “foul concupiscence” (9.1078), they feel overwhelming anguish. They also become painfully aware of their nakedness and Adam, having excoriated Eve for her role in enabling Satan to lead them to disobedience, suggests that they search for a tree whose leaves are broad enough to hide well those “middle parts” which “seem most/ To shame obnoxious” (9.1094). Luckily, they soon chance upon the Indian fig tree (the ficus benghalensis, more commonly known as the banyan tree, even though Milton never uses this name), whose broad leaves would adequately serve their purpose. [14] It is at this critical juncture, when the narrative tension is at its peak, that the epic narrator embarks on a lengthy enumeration of the notable features of this tree, which would surely have been a botanical curiosity for most seventeenth century English readers:

… both together went

Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose

The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d,

But such as at this day to Indians known

In Malabar or Decan spreds her Armes

Braunching so broad and long, that in the ground

The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow

About the Mother Tree, a Pillard shade as pillars

High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between;

There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heate

Shelters in coole, and tends his pasturing Herds

At Loopholes cut through thickest shade: Those Leaves

They gatherd, broad as Amazonian Targe

And with what skill they had, together sowd,

To gird thir waste, vain Covering if to hide

Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike

To that first naked Glorie. (9.1101-1114)

In terms of its function in the narrative, the passage (especially the part dealing with the Indian herdsman) creates a mood of pastoral calm and serenity immediately after the harrowing depiction of Adam’s and Eve’s transgressions and their torrid postlapsarian lovemaking. It fully satisfies Boileau’s requirement that the epic simile disengage us “from too painful an Attention to the principal Subject… by leading [us] into other agreeable Images.” [15] What is surprising, however, is that this locus amoenus is not to be found in the countryside of Italy or Greece but in the (apparently) verdant plains of “Deccan or Malabar” – places which Milton’s contemporary Peter Heylyn, in his influential account of the “chorographie and historie of the whole vvorld” called Cosmographie (1652), described as being inhabited by idolatrous people who worship demons. [16] Moreover, the idol-worshippers of Malabar, according to Heylyn, participated in devotional forms very similar to the worship of the infernal Moloch; but here, this is not even hinted at by Milton (and this despite the fact that in A Second Defence, written fourteen years earlier, Milton himself had railed against the hopeless paganism of the Indians and their innate susceptibility to despotism, calling them “the most stupid of mortals”). [17] Milton’s aim then, in describing the herdsman’s contented slumber, is simply to present a foil to the anguish and moral turmoil of Adam and Eve. This foil is superbly effective in throwing into relief Adam’s and Eve’s crippling awareness of their nakedness because the herdsman is said to belong to a land whose inhabitants, according to contemporaries like Heylyn, are “content with no more covering than to hide their shame”. [18] Naturally, in this context, Milton leaves out those details about the Malabar herdsmen which would show that they have their own share of moral depravity. The portrayal is, thus, a product of Milton’s exercise of his “fertile literary imagination” [19], rather than of any desire to present an accurate and full account of the customs of foreign lands; Milton is, after all, a poet and not an Orientalist ethnographer.

As for the elaborate description of the banyan tree, Milton would have found the details not only in Pliny’s Natural History and John Gerard’s Herball (largely derived from Pliny), but also in the travelogue written by a Jesuit merchant called Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, which was anthologized by Samuel Purchas in Purchas His Pilgrimes. [20] From these sources, however, Milton could have gleaned information only about the striking appearance of the banyan tree (a tree “very wonderful to behold”, as his immediate source, Linschoten, averred) [21]; the allegorical significance of the hanging roots, which reject light and air and prefer instead to remain mired in the earth, had been pointed out by other writers like Thomas Becon and Walter Raleigh. Both of them, following earlier authorities, discerned in the constitution of the banyan tree an allegory of Adam’s initial uprightness in the eyes of God and his subsequent tragic descent into the world of corruption and imperfection. Becon, for instance, explained: “As this tree (saith he) so did Man grow straight and upright towards God, untill such time as he had transgressed and broken the Commandment of his Creatour; and then like unto the boughs of this tree, he beganne to bend downwarde, and stouped toward the earth, which all the rest of Adam’s posteritie have done, rooting themselves theirein and fastening themselves to this corrupt world.” [22] Raleigh too, in his History of the World, went on to explain how the ponderous, earth-bound roots of the banyan mirror the first parents’ fall from prelapsarian glory, and also how its “lack of fruit is analogous to the rarity of virtue”. [23] (Milton indeed takes pains to highlight that the fig tree he is concerned with is not the “kind for Fruit renown’d”, but this can have another implication too, which will be discussed soon). Raleigh’s analysis of the sinister implications of the banyan tree’s fruitlessness is possibly somewhat indebted to biblical passages like Habakkuk 3:17, where God punishes humankind’s wickedness by decreeing that “the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines”; and, Milton might also, according to Alice M. Mathews, have been influenced by this link between barenness and evil reiterated throughout Bible. [24] Keeping in mind the dark moral associations acquired by the Indian fig tree by the time Milton was writing his epic, Alastair Fowler concludes, in his annotations to the fig-tree passage, that the “proliferating tree is a tree of error: it is an objective correlative of the proliferating sin that will ramify through Adam’s and Eve’s descendants.” [25]

There is, however, also a plausible alternative to this grim interpretation. While it is true that there was a tradition of reading the Indian fig tree as an allegory of mankind’s fallenness, it must also be kept in mind that in the popular imagination, it had none of the connotations of corporeality or “foul concupiscence” which had attached themselves to the more conventional and well-known ficus carica. The fruits of the (conventional) fig tree, as Karen Edwards reminds us, were often thought to induce sexual passion [26]; and, following the Genesis account of Adam and Eve covering themselves with fig leaves, Michelangelo even went to the extent of depicting the forbidden fruit not as an apple but as a fig, thereby popularising this identification. But Milton’s Indian fig, devoid of such baleful fruits and belonging to a noticeably different species, offers only “thickest shade” to the weary herdsman. This absence of fruits, in other words, actually serves to underscore its difference from the tree symbolising torrid postlapsarian lust; it is indeed telling that those seeking shelter beneath it enjoy only cool shade, peaceful repose, and protection from the sun’s scorching “heate”.

The significance of Milton’s banyan tree, thus, is difficult to ascertain through a survey of such extratextual discourses alone, since one can reach two very contradictory conclusions. There is, however, nothing within the epic simile itself which proves that Milton intends to present the tree as an “objective correlative” of mankind’s “proliferating sin”, especially since the ekphrasis of the tree segues into an account of how blameless shepherds, exhausted by honest labour, are sheltered by it. The simile is based on a correspondence between the fig tree in Eden and the fig tree which “at this day” flourishes in Deccan and Malabar [27] (this might appear tautological insofar as one fig tree is bound to be like another fig tree); but, as a whole, it appears to foreground the contrast between the spiritual anguish wracking Milton’s protagonists and the carefree calmness enjoyed by the Rousseauistic noble savages of India.

The analogy between Adam and Eve and ‘primitive’ peoples is further emphasised in the simile immediately following the fig-tree passage; but here, the question of whether the two are ultimately similar or dissimilar becomes more difficult to resolve: “… Such of late/ Columbus found th’ American so girt/ With featherd Cincture, naked else and wilde belt/ Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores” (9.1115-1119). It is tempting to read this simile as an instance of Milton’s portrayal of the New World inhabitants as especially tainted by sin and corruption, but a careful reading reveals that here, too, there is only one concrete point of similarity between Adam and Eve and the native Americans: their garments. There is no explicit reference to their spiritual condition, and it is not necessary to assume that the New World ‘savages’ resemble the tormented Adam and Eve in every respect. In fact, Adam’s earlier fervently expressed wish to hide himself from God and live the untroubled life of a ‘savage’ (“O might I here/ In solitude live savage, in some glade/ Obscur’d,…” (9.1083-1086) only hints that he finds such a life enviable, since it does not entail an excruciating awareness of one’s own fallenness. There is, of course, the anachronism of Adam mentioning ‘savages’ who would inhabit the New World only much later, but still, the overall tendency to romanticise ‘primitive’/non-civilised life emerges quite clearly.

It is important to note that in terms of antiquity, India and the New World did not enjoy the same venerable position in seventeenth century historical imagination: while America was the uninscribed ‘virgin’ territory which could be the bearer of virtually any meaning imposed on it by its ‘discoverers’, Indian civilisation was avowedly much older, and had been discussed and interpreted by the ancients. Not only was it supposed to be a part of the primordial core of human civilisation, but, as Balachandra Rajan points out, it was also the site where the earliest phase of Biblical history was sometimes thought to have unfolded, since many of the ancient church fathers “followed Josephus in making the Ganges one of the rivers of Paradise.” [28] Luis de Camoes too, while chronicling the establishment of Portugal’s divinely sanctioned Indian empire in The Lusiads, followed this tradition and described the Ganges as originating from Eden (Milton had, possibly, read the poem either in the original or in Richard Fanshawe’s 1655 translation). [29] Now, it is true that Milton does not explicitly situate his Eden in India. Also, by the seventeenth century, the general exegetical consensus about the location of Eden had tilted towards the Mesopotamian region, with such influential theologians as Calvin “marshaling all [their] philological resources and consulting the latest developments in Ptolemaic cartography to reconstruct Eden’s Mesopotamian surroundings with unprecedented exactitude” (Morgan Ng). [30] But this hardly detracts from the fabled antiquity of India, not least because ‘India’, in the early modern period, signified a somewhat amorphous landmass whose precise geographical borders were difficult to determine and, in fact, irrelevant: it was, according to Pompa Banerjee, “an everywhere that is not Europe”. [31] In the conceptual horizon of many of Milton’s contemporaries (especially those not very well versed in geography), the boundaries between India and Mesopotamia would have been fairly blurred and porous anyway, with the attributes of the one being easily transferable to the other. It is this cavalier disregard for the fixity of borders while imagining the Orient that made Samuel Purchas denounce those who have “comprehended under this name [of India] a a huge Tract of Land, no lesse in judgment… then the third part of the Earth.” [32] Milton’s India too, despite not being identified as the place where Eden had once flourished, does appear to be freighted with Edenic associations, since it is there that the primordial fig tree is to be found “at this day”. The banyan, thus, is a tangible relic of a hoary Biblical past, a relic which links the time of the epic narrator (“this day”) with the time in which the unrepeatable scriptural events had transpired; and the fact that it is to be found in the plains of Deccan and Malabar implies India’s primeval origins and proximity to the place from where human history began. In Paradise Lost at least, India is not the land of servile devil-worshipping barbarians.

ENDNOTES

[1] Quoted in Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 118.

[2] Ricks, 119.

[3] Walter S. H. Lim, “John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost,” in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, ed. Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203.

[4] The John Milton Reading Room, “Of Education”,
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/of_education/text.shtml (accessed May 2, 2019).

[5] Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50.

[6] Ricks, 120.

[7] Ricks, 120.

[8] Morgan Ng, “Milton’s Maps,” Word & Image 29:4, 428-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.798092

[9] Lim, 209.

[10] C. A. Martindale, “Milton and the Homeric Simile,” Comparative Literature 33:3 (Summer, 1981), 224.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1770903

[11] Martindale, 224.

[12] Martindale, 225.

[13] Rajan, 50.

[14] Milton seems to have had rather inaccurate ideas about the size of banyan leaves, which are seldom as broad as Amazonian shields; and it is possible that had confused them with the leaves of banana. For a survey of the various opinions concerning this confusion, see Marissa Nicosia, “Milton’s Banana: Paradise Lost and Colonial Botany,” Milton Studies 58 (2017): 49-66.

[15] Ricks, 116.

[16] Lim, 220.

[17] Lim, 216.

[18] Lim, 218.

[19] Lim, 209.

[20] S. Viswanathan, “Milton and Purchas’ Linschoten: An Additional Source for Milton’s Indian Figtree” Milton Newsletter 2:3 (October, 1968), 43.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24443431

[21] Quoted in Viswanathan, 44.

[22] John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (New York: Longman, 1968), 502.

[23] Jeffrey Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2001), 173.

[24] Alice M. Mathews, “The Fruitless Tree in Paradise Lost: Symbol of Sin,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove : Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 22.

[25] Fowler, 502.

[26] Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152.

[27] Mathews, 22.

[28] Rajan, 57.

[29] James H. Sims, “Christened Classicism in Paradise Lost and The Lusiads,” Comparative Literature 24:4 (Autumn, 1972), 338.

[30] Ng, 436.

[31] Pompa Banerjee, “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 37 (1999), 142.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26395911

[32] Quoted in Banerjee, 142.