of the Biblical story, but the feature of the poem which has maintained its accredited significance is its tendency to cause the reader to think closely about the very notion of God’s incarnation, the intersection of the timeless and ineffable with the transient and fragile state of mortality.
In Stanza 14 he evokes the effect of the angelic choir:
For if such holy songEnwrap our fancy long,Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,And speckled vanityWill sicken soon and die,And lep’rous sin will melt from earthly mould,And hell itself will pass away,And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.
(133–40)
This and the stanza following it are ambiguously optimistic. The birth of Christ seems to offer a relatively painless and generous form of redemption. Sin, hell, mortality (‘the dolorous mansions’ and ‘the peering day’) are briefly removed; humanity seems to have been returned to ‘the age of gold’. But as we should be aware, this age, our prelapsarian state, is irretrievable, and in Stanza 16 Milton reminds us of the fact.
But wisest fate says noThis must not yet be so.
(149–50)
The child in the manger must be crucified:
The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,That on the bitter crossMust redeem our loss.
(151–3)
This concertinaing of Christ’s life, most specifically the image of a crucified infant, is deliberately shocking. The effect of the image underpins Milton’s message – before we can return to a golden age, comparable to the time before the fall, there is much suffering to be done, by Christ and us.
Throughout the poem Milton interweaves his presentation of the events attending the birth of Christ with intimations of theological truths that underpin it. In the first two stanzas he notes that,
Nature in awe to himHad doffed her gaudy trim
(32–3)
Nature has chosen to ‘hide her guilty front with innocent snow’, has thrown ‘the saintly veil of maiden white’ upon her ‘foul deformities’. Later in Stanza 7 he returns to this theme and tells how the sun,
Hid his head for shameAs his inferior flameThe new enlightened world no more should need.
(80–2)
The natural world was presented frequently in Renaissance verse as an approximation of its Edenic counterpart, its beauty a part of God’s design, but Milton turns this strategy around and reminds the reader that nature, incorporating man, is an element of our post-lapsarian state. Its attractions are but ‘foul deformities’ compared with what we have lost and appropriately it hides itself from the coming of Christ.
The poem is striking in that it continually projects its ostensible topic into a broader, all-inclusive contemplation of man’s relationship with God, focusing particularly upon the reason for the coming of Christ – man’s original act of disobedience and its consequences. Again, we should note that while this was an ever-present feature of Renaissance, post-Reformation consciousness, its emphatic resurfacings in Milton’s early verse suggests that as a poet he had an agenda, a scale of priorities. And he would eventually address himself directly to its apex: Paradise Lost, the fall of man.
It is evident from Milton’s early poetry that he was as confident and skilled in his use of figurative devices as any of his contemporaries, but it is equally clear that, unlike most of the Metaphysicals, he used language, poetic language, as a means of logically addressing the uncertainties of life, unlocking them; not as an experiment but as a harsh confrontation with the relation between language and knowledge.
Two other poems, written in 1631, during Milton’s final year at Cambridge, attest to his growing perception of poetry as a vehicle for both creative and intellectual endeavour. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ are poetic versions of the academic debating exercise where one person displays his skill as a rhetorician by arguing the relative values of two opposing, sometimes antithetical, ideas or propositions. Milton was required to do this as part of his Master’s degree and the two poems are based upon his engagement with the question of ‘Whether Day or Night is More Excellent’. The principal criterion for success in this academic exercise involved the extent to which equanimity and balance could be achieved between the opposing perspectives, and Milton’s poetic celebration of the various joys, benefits and opportunities of daytime and night-time experience attempts a similar exercise in symmetry. There is, however, a slight but detectable sense of empathy and commitment in ‘Il Penseroso’ (the night poem), while ‘L’Allegro’ (the day poem) involves more of an exercise in allegiance. In short, Milton discloses himself to be more innately predisposed to a state of mind which is removed from the distractions of unreflecting pleasure – he prefers night to day.
For example, two lines in ‘L’Allegro’ have exercised the attentions of numerous commentators:
Then to come in spite of sorrowAnd at my window bid good morrow
(46–7)
No-one was able to demonstrate precisely who or what comes to the window. It might be the mountain nymph (referred to in line 36), the singing lark (line 41) or Milton himself. The most likely explanation for this case of loose ambiguous syntax – very uncommon in a young man so alert to the discipline of composition – was that Milton in this poem was performing a duty, listing the pleasures of the day in the manner of a filing clerk, without any real enthusiasm or private enjoyment. As a consequence his attention lapses and he offers up a lazily constructed sentence.
Try as he might Milton cannot quite prevent elements of his temperamental disposition from disrupting the exercise in balance supposedly enacted in the two poems. At the conclusion of ‘Il Penseroso’ he asks night-time to
Dissolve me into ecstasiesAnd bring all heaven before mine eyes
(165–6)
implying that only the inner eye, the contemplative state, can enable human beings to properly understand what lies beyond the given world. In ‘L’Allegro’ he celebrates the pleasure of daytime as
Such sights as youthful poet’s dreamOn summer eves by haunted stream
(129–30)
and one should note that these sights inspire ‘youthful’ poets, implying that their more mature counterparts have moved beyond such distractions to thought.
The closing couplets of both poems are intriguing. The one from ‘L’Allegro’ is conditional:
These delights, if those can’st give,Mirth with thee, I mean to live
(151–2)
This suggests, subtly, that he could live with Mirth, if only … Compare this with the certainty of ‘Il Penseroso’:
These pleasures Melancholy give,And I with thee will choose to live.
(175–6)
These poems are important because they cause us to look beyond them to more emphatic disclosures of Milton’s state of mind in later work. They re-address a theme raised in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the diversions and attractions of the known world are temporarily suspended for the birth of
