Professor John
Rogers: It's not until Book
Three of Paradise Lost
that the poet explicitly reveals
to us,
to his readers,
the fact of the physical
handicap that might reasonably
be thought to render impossible
his composition of the poem.
It's not until Book Three,
until after Milton presents his
heroic portrait of Satan and his
heroic portrait of the fallen
angels when he establishes the
fact of his blindness.
So I'm going to be devoting
this lecture to Milton's
representation of his blindness
and especially to the invocation
of light with which Book Three
begins,
because I'm absolutely
convinced that a feeling for the
phenomenon of Milton's blindness
is crucial to any real
understanding of this poem,
certainly, but also of this
poet.
One of the questions that I
want here to pursue is the
question of why Milton -- with
the exception of an oblique,
and it's really a very oblique,
reference in the opening
invocation -- why Milton waits
until now,
until the third book of his
epic, to divulge his blindness
to his reader.
Milton began to lose his
eyesight around 1646.
This is when he's in his late
thirties and he was entirely
blind by February of 1652,
and that was at the age of
forty-four.
According to one of the
earliest biographers -- and
really usefully and wonderfully,
Merritt Hughes includes in the
back of the Hughes edition most
of the earliest biographies of
Milton.
They make for fascinating
reading.
These are sketches of the poet
written very shortly after
Milton's death.
According to one of these
biographers, Milton subjected
himself to a range of medical
procedures in order to cure,
or at least to forestall,
the darkness that was about to
set over him.
He imbibed a lot of potent
medicines -- obviously they were
ineffective -- and he endured
the indignity of that procedure
that was most commonly deployed
in the seventeenth century for
the treatment of any serious
disease,
and that was the process of
bloodletting.
We have to imagine that,
as was the case for other men
and women who underwent some
onset of blindness,
small incisions would be made
in the skin around Milton's eyes
and a quantity of blood would be
drained at regular intervals in
order to empty the body of the
harmful toxins,
or its "ill humors," that were
believed to produce this
terrible malady.The medical
community,
of course, was not able to
forestall the failure of
Milton's eyes and so,
as I said,
Milton was blind by 1652.
Milton would never see his
fourth child,
a daughter born three months
after the onset of total
blindness.
He would never again see the
face of his wife,
Mary Powell,
when she died three days after
the child's birth;
nor could he witness the death
of his only son,
John Jr., which occurred six
weeks after that.
And finally,
Milton would never see the face
of Katherine Woodcock,
the woman he married four years
later and who soon herself died
in childbirth,
nor would he ever see the face
of Elizabeth Minshull whom he
married nine years after
that.Why did Milton go
blind?
Reasonable conjecture leads us
to think that it was either
glaucoma or cataracts,
but of course our business here
has nothing to do with the real
causes of Milton's blindness but
with Milton's literary
figuration,
his representation of the
causes of his blindness.
I am convinced that one of the
most powerful determinants in
Milton's late writings is
Milton's drive to ascertain and
then also to justify the cause
of his loss of sight.
I think you have throughout the
late writings really a
proliferation of explanations
and justifications of his
blindness,
and they really fill Milton's
writing throughout the entire
period from 1650 to his death in
1674.First let us consider
how Milton's contemporaries
interpreted his blindness.
Milton's world fell into total
darkness a little less than a
year after he finished his great
and really quite daring
political treatise,
the First Defense of the
English People,
which was published in 1651.
This was the last of Milton's
regicide treatises.
It was written in Latin because
the new commonwealth government
had commissioned John Milton to
justify the unprecedented act of
regicide to the entire European
community,
which is why Milton didn't
write it in English.
Milton was responsible for
explaining to all of Europe why
the English people had beheaded
their king and why they had set
up a new government on what
Milton considered to be
idealistic non-monarchic
principles.
Now most of Milton's readers on
the continent were appalled by
England's action and appalled
especially by Milton's defense
of England.
It was widely thought -- not
only on the continent but also
by a lot of Milton's fellow
Englishmen -- it was widely
thought that God himself had
blinded Milton specifically for
his writing against the king.
Milton was the subject of a
number of sermons that were
delivered from the pulpits by
conservative Anglican churches,
and the sermons pointed to
Milton as an example.
Milton was an example:
"Look what happens to those who
lift their hand against God's
anointed king.
Look what happened to Milton.
He was punished with blindness
for writing his defense of the
regicide."It's in response
to just this type of common
accusation that Milton writes
that lovely sonnet to his
friend,
Mr. Cyriack Skinner.
This is on page 170 in the
Hughes.
This is the sonnet in which
Milton insists,
just as he will in the
Second Defense of the English
People,
that his blindness has nothing
whatsoever to do with an act of
God.
In the poem to Cyriack Skinner,
Milton's been totally blind for
about three years now,
and he begins the sonnet to his
friend like this:
"Cyriack, this three years' day
these eyes,
though clear / to outward view
of blemish or of spot,
/ bereft of light thir seeing
have forgot."
Milton writes repeatedly
throughout this period that
despite his blindness,
his eyes appear -- and this is
incredibly important to him --
they appear to outward view to
be perfectly healthy.
He continually clears himself
of any wrongdoing by insisting
that his eyes are clear of
blemish or of spot -- or any
sign,
that is, I have to assume,
of sin or of corruption or
blame.
So far from being robbed of
light by God,
his eyes have simply -- and
isn't this a lovely metaphor --
his eyes have simply forgotten
how to see.
You'll remember how important,
how redemptive actually,
the idea of forgetting had
become to Milton in Paradise
Lost.Now,
Milton goes even further in the
sonnet in exculpating himself.
Look at line ten.
This is where he claims that he
is supported by his conscience,
his knowledge that he willingly
sacrificed his eyes for the
patriotic goal of political
liberty.
Milton is talking of his eyes
here: " lost them overplied / in
liberty's defense,
my noble task,
/ Of which all Europe talks
from side to side."
He ruined his eyesight with the
tireless labor that he devoted
to writing that first defense of
the English people.
Milton sacrificed his eyes for
the freedom of his countrymen,
the noble task for which he was
compensated.
He was compensated with the
talk of all of Europe,
he was a celebrity.
According to this formulation,
Milton has knowingly and
willingly bought fame as a
political liberator with the
noble,
sacrificial payment of his
eyes.Now,
this is the claim that Milton's
making publicly in these poems
in this period and in the prose
treatises.
It's a claim for the nobility
of the tragic condition that he
finds himself in,
and so in all of Milton's
public poetry and prose Milton
asserts his blindness as a point
of pride.
He even goes so far in the
Second Defense of the English
People to claim that his
blindness is actually a sign of
God's election;
God has chosen him,
and it's an incredibly
beautiful image,
the image of Milton's eyes
being covered by heavenly wings,
by angel wings,
almost as a favor.
He's continually asserting
publicly that his blindness is a
sign of strength.But we have
a more private and a more
personal consideration of his
blindness in a letter that
Milton wrote to his friend,
Dr.
Leonard Philaras,
the Athenian,
and this was in the packet.
In the more private venue of
the personal letter,
Milton seems in some ways to
lower his guard,
and he makes a powerful and
moving plea for a cure because
he's writing to a doctor.
Look in the packet.
This is around page sixty in
the packet.
The original page number is
722, I believe.
Milton's articulating here for
the doctor the history of his
loss of sight and the nature of
his condition:
"It is ten years,
I think, more or less,
since I noticed my sight
becoming weak and growing dim,
and at the same time my spleen
and all my viscera are burdened
and shaken with flatulence."
After this account of
intestinal discomfort,
Milton then describes the mist
that began to appear in his left
eye;
Milton's left eye was the first
one to fail.
Then a few sentences down he
describes the failure of the
right eye:
The other eye also
failing slowly and gradually
over a period of almost three
years, some months before my
sight was completely destroyed.
Everything which I
distinguished when I myself was
still seemed to swim,
now to the right,
now to the left.
Certain permanent vapors seemed
to have settled upon my entire
forehead and temples which press
and oppress my eyes with a sort
of sleepy heaviness especially
from mealtime to evening.
In this letter to the doctor,
Milton associates the onset of
his blindness with the onset of
a gastrointestinal complaint,
and in doing this he's
following the common wisdom
about the causes of blindness,
which was usually attributed in
the scientific community of the
seventeenth century to a
digestive problem.
For Milton, his most oppressive
pain burdened his forehead and
his eyes in the hours following
the noontime meal,
and the pain in his head
corresponded to a pain in his
gut, which occurred presumably
in the same hours following the
noontime meal,
as his entire frame was shaken
with a violent flatulence.
This is the theory of how this
kind of digestive ailment caused
blindness: the digestive vapors
that Milton or anyone who was
going blind was not able to
expel successfully through
normal digestion and the normal
process of the passing of wind
-- these vapors were trapped in
our poet's body.
They began gradually to rise up
to his head over a period of
many months or even years where
they settled into the sockets of
his eyes.
Eventually they clouded over
his eyes and cut off all access
to light from the outside.
Another way of putting this:
the affliction that would alter
forever the last quarter of
Milton's life had its ultimate
cause in the process of
digestion.
Milton's greatest misery was
quite simply the consequence --
and he may have believed this --
the consequence of something he
ate.Now,
you probably have no doubt
guessed why I'm emphasizing this
particular figuration of
Milton's blindness as an
irrevocable change that follows
the ingestion of food.
The story of Milton's blindness
as he represents it brings us so
perilously close to the story of
the Fall,
which is, of course,
another narrative that imagines
the inalterable and terrible
effects of something eaten.
One critic, William Kerrigan,
in his brilliant analysis in
the book The Sacred Complex
has called Paradise Lost
the story of an evil meal.
It's important in the poem that
Adam and Eve fall at noon.
The forbidden fruit is their
noontime meal,
and it's possible that Kerrigan
is right in aligning the
dynamics of the loss of paradise
with the logic that Milton
employs in describing the loss
of his sight.
When Adam falls in Book Nine of
Paradise Lost -- and
these are the lines that are
behind me on the board here --
we have a description of the
almost physiological response of
the earth to the sinful
transgression of Adam:
"Earth trembl'd from her
entrails,
as again / in pangs,
and Nature gave a second
groan."
It's as if Milton has
transposed on to the entire
earth the digestive pains that
were the consequence of his own
noontime meal,
as if the flatulent earth were
responding sympathetically
somehow to the violent shaking
of Milton's own
entrails.Now,
we're left at the point that
we're so often left:
what's the point of all of
this?
What's at stake,
or what might be at stake,
in this connection between
Milton's own postprandial
groaning and moaning and the
even more poignant
post-lapsarian groaning of Adam
and Eve and the entire earth?
Now the connection between
these two phenomena,
I believe (if there is one),
involves transgression.
The physical deterioration that
visits human beings after the
Fall comes as a direct
consequence, of course,
of their transgression of
divine law.
It's possible that we have
buried in this narrative of
Milton's own physical
deterioration a related
narrative of a kind of
transgression and punishment.
I assume that it has already
become clear to you that this
will be one of those [laughs]
lectures that I'm giving over
entirely to perfectly shameless
biographical speculation.
It's one of the great joys,
and I take it to be one of the
great privileges,
of being able to lecture on
Milton in this format rather
than in a seminar format,
because of course if this were
a seminar you could (and you
would be right to) ask me for my
proof.
How do I know what Milton
was thinking?
And of course I have no proof
[laughter]
but I know what I believe.
I'm willing here and now to
share with you these things that
I believe actually quite
passionately.
My own belief is that on some
level Milton may not have
convinced himself when he wrote
in the second defense -- or
Milton may not have convinced
himself when he wrote in that
sonnet to Mr.
Cyriack Skinner -- that he had
willingly sacrificed his eyes
for the good of his country or
that God had permitted his
blindness as a sign of his
special election,
covering his eyes with angel
wings.
It's possible that what you
have in a letter like the letter
to Leonard Philaras is something
like a submerged expression of
guilt.
Maybe Milton's enemies were
right;
maybe Milton was to blame with
his transgressive challenges to
every conceivable form of
authority.
Maybe Milton was to blame for
his blindness,
the affliction that God visited
upon him for his crimes.Now
this,
of course, is just one way to
understand the extraordinary
attention that Milton gives to
his blindness in the invocation
to Book Three of his epic.
Turn to page 257 in the
Hughes.
Milton continues in
Paradise Lost -- this is
written well over a decade after
the onset of blindness -- Milton
continues to defend himself from
the imputation of blame.
The muse Milton invokes here is
not the traditional muse of the
classic epic or even the
heavenly muse that Milton seems
to have fashioned in the first
invocation.
It's now exactly that power
from which Milton has been
excluded by virtue of his
blindness -- light:
"Hail holy Light,
offspring of Heav'n first-born,
/ Or of th' Eternal Coeternal
beam / May I express thee
unblam'd?"Let me just stop
right there.
"May I express thee unblam'd?"
Milton is exposing a fear at
the very beginning here of some
imputation of blame or guilt.
He's not even sure how to
address this inspiring light.
The first seven lines of this
invocation are not just the most
--and they are,
but they are not simply the
most impenetrable lines in the
entire poem.
They are among the most
difficult lines of poetry ever
written.
It's always worth asking why a
passage of poetry is so
impossible to wrap your brain
around.
What's at stake here in this
difficulty?
Why this struggle,
and why must Milton struggle
with such awkward metaphysical
categories in order simply to
address properly the power of
light?I think it's
understandable that Milton would
call the power of light
"offspring of Heav'n
first-born."
According to Genesis,
light is the first thing that
is created at the moment of
God's fiat lux:
"let there be light," that
great commandment.
But the problem really arises
in line two when Milton
conjectures that the beam of
light he's addressing wasn't
born or wasn't begotten at all,
it wasn't created;
that it might actually be
co-eternal with the eternal
Father himself.
This, I think,
is a much more dangerous
possibility.
Milton asks to be enlightened
by a light that might be as old
as the Father.
This runs utterly counter to
the creation account in Genesis.
Could this light be one of the
Father's rivals?
There's a fear here that the
ambition of this bid for
paternal light is presumptuous,
perhaps it's even satanic.
Satan of course in the next
book, Book Four,
will have his invocation to
light.Now,
the light Milton addresses has
been around forever.
Look at line eight of this
opening invocation.
This is on the next page: 
[B]efore the
sun,Before the Heavens thou
wert, and at the voiceOf
God,
as with a Mantle,
didst investThe rising
world of waters dark and
deep,Won from the void and
formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with
bolder wing,Escap't the
Stygian pool,
though long detain'dIn that
obscure sojourn,
while in my flightThrough
utter and through middle
darkness borneWith other
notes than to th' Orphean
LyreI sung of Chaos and
eternal Night,
Taught by the heav'nly Muse
to venture downThe dark
descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and
rare…
Milton's giving us a picture of
himself as proud.
Clearly, he's proud that he's
returned from the descent into
hell that he seems to have made
during the composition of the
first two books of his epics.
He himself has escaped the
Stygian pool,
and such a re-ascent is hard
and rare;
but we've just had represented
before this at the very end of
Book Two, just lines before
this,
Satan's own escape from the
Stygian pool and Satan's own
detainment in his obscure
sojourn through chaos.
There's a remarkable
identification that Milton is
bringing himself very close to:
an identification between
Milton and Satan.
There lingers in this relation
the idea that Milton has brought
upon himself some guilt,
some blame perhaps,
for having sung of hell and
having sung of chaos at
all.Milton,
of course, can't make this
connection explicit,
but there lurks the
possibility,
and I grant you that it's an
irrational possibility,
that Milton has done something
wrong -- I don't know how else
to read these lines -- by flying
through utter and through middle
darkness during his composition
of the first two books of
Paradise Lost.
I know this doesn't make
sense: it's almost as if
Milton's flight through darkness
had been responsible for the
literal,
visual darkness that is the
condition of his blindness,
which he is describing now to
us for the first time.
It's this possibility,
I think, the idea that Milton
has brought his blindness on
himself over the course of
[laughs]
the composition of the poem,
which of course isn't the case
-- it's this possibility that,
I think, accounts for the delay
in Milton's mention of his loss
of sight,
the delay until this moment in
the poem.
It's as if the guilt for his
blindness in some impossible way
lay in the composition of this
very poem,
as if the transgression that
called down the wrath of the
heavenly Father had been
Milton's glorious and heroic
treatment of Satan;
as if it were Milton's
ambitious attempt to supply the
angelic prehistory to the Book
of Genesis,
to the creation account that we
get in the Book of Genesis,
that had brought this wrath
upon him.
Milton preempted,
he prevented,
Genesis.He continues his
address to the light:
[T]hee I revisit
safe,And feel thy sovran
vital Lamp;
but thouRevisit'st not
these eyes, that roll in
vainTo find thy piercing
ray,
and find no dawn;So thick a
drop serene hath quench'd their
Orbs,Or dim suffusion
veil'd.
Like so many [laughs]
of the lines in this
invocation, these lines are
violently crammed with an almost
unbearable pathos.
"Thee I revisit safe" -- but
thou revisit'st not these eyes:
it's impossible to read these
lines and not feel that Milton
is in some way accusing the
deity of injustice.
It's as if Milton were
challenging the holy light to
revisit Milton,
just as Milton is revisiting
the holy light.
He structures this challenge --
it's the logic of a quid pro
quo here.
He's seeking compensation for
his loss but the compensation
that he's looking for isn't
forthcoming.At least,
it's not forthcoming yet.
Line thirty-two:
"nor sometimes do I forget /
those other two equall'd with me
in Fate, / so were I equalled
with them in renown…"
Here he lists the famous blind
bards, the blind prophets of the
Western tradition,
asking the muse of light to
repay him for his fate,
the fate of blindness,
with fame and renown:
the renown or fame enjoyed by
blind Thamyris and blind
Maeonides -- Maeonides is Homer
-- and Tiresias and Phineus.
Milton knows perfectly well
that each of these figures had
been blinded as some sort of
punishment for a crime,
at least according to most of
the legends surrounding them.
Each of these seers was thought
to have been blinded for
aspiring to an intimate
knowledge of the godhead.
Even as Milton is asking God to
elevate him to the status of
their equal and an equal to
Homer,
sharing an equal renown and an
equal fame, he's implicitly
acknowledging that terrifying
possibility,
and it really is terrifying,
that his blindness,
like theirs,
is the result of his own
transgression:
his punishment for trespassing
on divinity.But this
acknowledgment -- if it is,
and I think it is -- this
acknowledgment of guilt only
takes place between the lines,
below the surface of the
invocation.
For the most part Milton is
struggling to clear himself from
any imputation of sin or crime.
From lines forty to fifty,
the strategy of this invocation
shifts again,
and Milton catalogs the losses
that he has endured through the
loss of his sight.
When before had a poet
represented himself in such
heartbreaking lines?
Thus with the
YearSeasons return,
but not to me returnsDay,
or the sweet approach of Ev'n
or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom,
or Summer's Rose,Or flocks,
or herds, or human face
divine;But cloud instead,
and ever-during
darkSurrounds me,
from the cheerful ways of
menCut off…
A few poets have been willing
even [laughs]
-- well, after Milton,
to subject themselves to this
kind of absolutely pathos-filled
self-representation.
For exposing himself in all of
his vulnerability Milton has
everything to lose here,
and for exposing himself in all
of his vulnerability Milton asks
for something in return.
He asks to be recompensed for
these extraordinary losses.
I am [laughs]
absolutely convinced that
there's a way in which this
request is not irrational.
It's completely reasonable.
Because he has bathed himself
in a pathos,
I think, that's almost too
painful even to read,
we as readers are willing
[laughs]
to grant him anything he wants.
There's a kind of naked
emotional logic governing our
experience of these
lines.Let's look at the
moment at which Milton asks for
the payback.
This is line fifty-one:
I have lost all these things,
in other words,
"so much the rather thou
Celestial Light / shine inward,
and the mind through all her
powers / irradiate,
there plant eyes…"
Milton is demanding for his
pains the inspiration of the
heavenly muse.
God owes him this,
and so Milton is remarkably
undoing the logic of sin and
punishment that he had inherited
in his understanding of his
blindness,
and he's restricting it as
something entirely different.
He's turning it into a logic of
loss and compensation.
Milton has sacrificed his sight.
He has lost almost everything,
and so much the rather lets God
repay him for that loss,
what is once again his noble
self-sacrifice.
You have Milton reworking here
the rhetoric of guilt.
His blindness becomes important
not because it's a sign of
punishment or of blame or of
spot or of blemish,
but it's a guarantee of the
inspirational success of the
poem.
This is like a promissory note,
his blindness is,
for his poetic reward -- the
fact that this poem will have
been inspired by the heavenly
muse.Oh,
this is wonderful.
Turn to the very last page of
Hughes, of the Merritt Hughes
edition. This is page
1044.
This is one of the earliest
biographies of Milton written in
the seventeenth century.
It's an anonymous one,
and it gives us some remarkable
details about this man's life.
Some of them are so astonishing
there's no way they could have
been made up.
The anonymous writer at the top
of page 1044 is describing
Milton's daily habits as he was
composing Paradise Lost
and the later poems.
Milton, it seems,
would dictate the most recent
installment of Paradise Lost
in the morning.
So this is what we learn:
"[H]e, waking early"-- and
you'll see this wonderful
admiration of the dear,
Puritan Milton -- "waking
early, as is the use of
temperate men,
had commonly a good stock of
verses ready against his
amanuensis came..."
The amanuensis is the
secretary, the young man who
would come to Milton's house --
and there were a number of them
-- who would take down
dictation.
Milton seems to have composed
the poem at night in his sleep,
which, the biographer
continues: "which,
if it happened to be later than
ordinary, [Milton]
would complain [if the
amanuensis or the secretary got
there too late Milton would
complain]
saying he wanted to be
milked."This absolutely
[laughs]
stunning biographical detail is
italicized here presumably
because it's a quotation --
that's a form of noting a
quotation;
but the italics seem to me at
least to indicate as well that
this is an extraordinary
privileged moment in this
biographical text.
It's a scandalous little tidbit
if it's true.
We have in here an
extraordinary image of Milton's
understanding of his own poetic
output,
and if this isn't true,
what we do have here at the
very least is an incredibly
close and intimate reading of
this very invocation that we're
focusing on.
Having filled himself up with a
stock of verses the night
before, Milton could imagine
himself as a source of spiritual
and poetic nourishment.
Milton could imagine himself
the distinctly feminine source
of this nourishing poem,
as if by a process of
identification so complete
Milton could imagine himself in
the role of the maternal muse
who feeds the poet as she
inspires the thoughts that move
harmonious numbers.
It's not the muse only but the
poet, too, who can be
milked.Now,
God the Father tells the Son --
this is in the dialog between
the Father and the Son later in
Book Three -- that at the end of
time there won't be a Father and
a Son because God shall be "All
in All."
A related form of a kind of
absolute internalization and
absolute identification is at
work, I think,
in this incredibly moving cry
to be milked.
The muse has so completely
inspired the poet,
so completely transferred her
power to him,
that it's almost impossible to
tell who is who or who is
feeding whom.
When Milton in the invocation
requests that the muse,
the holy light,
feed on thoughts,
we have a moment of confusion
that would only seem to
guarantee that the transference
of power has actually taken
place.
It doesn't matter whether these
thoughts belong to the muse or
to the poet.
These thoughts are "All in
All."You have other
guarantees as well in Book Three
of Milton's having filled up at
the fount of heavenly
inspiration,
and these moments of guarantee
[laughs]
come in in extraordinarily
unexpected places.
Look at Book Three, line 576.
In the Hughes Edition
this is page 272.
On his way from hell to earth,
Satan stops at the sun,
which is, of course,
the source of earthly light,
and Satan watches as the sun
dispenses light to all of the
little stars of heaven.
This is how Milton's astronomy
works:
Where the great
LuminaryAloof the vulgar
Constellations thick [of course,
the "great Luminary" is the
sun],That from his Lordly
eye keeps distance due,
Dispenses Light from
far…
Now, this "great Luminary," the
sun, dispenses light to the
surrounding stars.
With this image you have a
clearly demarcated model of a
particular kind of power
relation.
This is the powerful sun's
unilateral inspiration of the
stars.But look what happens
next.
This is the stars: 
…
[T]hey as they moveThir
Starry dance in numbers that
computeDays,
months, and years,
towards his all-chearing
LampTurn swift their various
motions…
The stars are filling up here
with the light of the sun and
they're behaving just as
Milton's thoughts do when he's
been inspired,
when they have been inspired by
holy light.
They're filled with the
capacity of a kind of free will,
and they turn themselves in
starry dance.
Milton is very carefully
reworking in this passage,
this astronomical passage,
the key words of the invocation
that we've been looking at:
"move"and "numbers."
He projects his image of the
inspired composition of the poem
onto the enormous screen of the
entire cosmos.
And, just as in the invocation,
the actual mover,
the agent behind the action of
inspiration, is uncertain.
They "turn swift their various
motions" or are turned by his
magnetic beam.
We don't know who's turning
what.
It's "All in All."It's at
this moment of uncertain agency
that Milton really [laughs]
gives us something truly
amazing,
and I ask your indulgence here.
You will know that it's
indisputable,
the point that I'm about to
make, but I think it's shocking:
the sun warms the universe just
as the holy light will warm the
poet.
That much, I think, is clear;
but Milton's figuration of this
process, this process of
infusion, is truly one of the
most surprising moments in the
poem for my money.
This process of infusion
replicates on the grand scale --
okay.
Well, let me read it first: 
[That]
beam, that gently warmsThe
Universe, and to each inward
partWith gentle penetration,
though unseen,Shoots
invisible virtue even to the
deep…
This process of infusion
replicates on the grand scale of
the entire cosmos the rhythms of
the intimate human act of coital
ejaculation.
You simply can't deny that
that's what's happening here.
Milton may give us a cosmic
image of the process of
inspiration but this is a
process by which the universe,
and by association the poet
himself, has been feminized and
transformed mysteriously into
something like the maternal muse
herself.
Milton tells us at the
beginning of the invocation that
the light to which he prays was
present at the creation.
Maybe that light was the same
as that identifiable with the
heavenly spirit in Book One who
"dove-like,
satst brooding on the vast
Abyss / and mad'st it
pregnant..."
And maybe Milton here in Book
Three is imagining himself the
glorious recipient of this
remarkable act of divine
impregnation.
He's no longer the vulnerable
male poet whose poetic potency,
just like his sight,
can be cut off at whim,
"from the cheerful ways of men
/ cut off".
He's a body impregnated by God.
The universe is a body
impregnated by God and perhaps
even indistinguishable at some
point from God.
He's a figure impervious to
punishment or pain.The
psychic processes and strategies
that I've been describing here
are clearly operating at the
level of fantasy.
This is wish fulfillment.
It's certainly not logic.
There's no moment in
Paradise Lost at which
the poet will actually present a
logical statement concerning
this wish to be absolutely
infused with divinity,
to be so divine that he would
be invulnerable to punishment or
to be so divine that he would be
invulnerable to the physical
humiliation of blindness.
You don't have anything like an
explicit statement to that
effect in Paradise Lost,
but there is elsewhere in
Milton and I want to draw you to
this now.
There is such an articulation
in another poem.
This is what many scholars
believe was the last poem that
Milton wrote,
Samson Agonistes,
and so I'm going to ask you
to turn to page 553 in the
Hughes to this passage in
Samson Agonistes. Even
though we don't read the
Samson Agonistes until
the end of the semester,
I want to look at this small
section of it now since it
engages the problem of blindness
with as much pathos and with as
much force as anything that
Milton ever wrote.So Samson
you know.
Samson is the biblical hero
whose strength was bound up in
his hair.
Samson was blinded by the
Philistines after his hair had
been shorn by his treacherous
wife, Delilah.
Milton calls her "Dah-lee-lah."
Look at the Hughes.
This is line eighty of
Samson.
Milton has his hero,
Samson, bewailing the fact of
his blindness:
"O dark,
dark, dark, amid the blaze of
noon, / irrecoverably dark,
total eclipse without all hope
of day!"At this point it's
wonderful: Samson begins to echo
Milton from the invocation that
we've been looking at,
the invocation to Book Three of
Paradise Lost.
Here's Samson: 
O first created Beam,
and thou great Word,"Let
there be light,
and light was over all";Why
am I thus bereav'd thy prime
decree?The Sun to me is
darkAnd silent as the Moon,
When she deserts the
night,Hid in her vacant
interlunar cave.Since light
[try to follow this logic]
so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself,
if it be trueThat light is
in the Soul,She [the soul]
all in every part…
Samson's feeling his way here
toward Milton's theory of
monism, the idea that the soul
is diffused throughout every
part of the human body.
Since the light of the soul is
diffused throughout every part
of the body, why,
Samson asks:
Why was the sightTo
such a tender ball as th' eye
confin'd?So obvious and so
easy to be quench't,
And not as feeling through
all parts diffus'd,That she
might look at will through every
pore?
These [laughs]
are extraordinary lines.
These are among my most
favorite lines in all of Milton.
Samson is questioning the
wisdom and the justice of God's
admittedly -- who can deny it?
-- God's extremely peculiar
configuration of the human body.
You read this and you realize
that Samson is really on to
something here.
Why didn't, we ask with Samson,
God implant the sense of sight
in human beings just as he
implanted the sense of touch or
feeling?
Why isn't sight like touch,
diffused through all parts of
the body "that she might look at
will through every pore?"
Milton's pushing here toward a
fantasy of physical
invulnerability,
imagining an alternative --
this is science fiction -- an
alternative model of bodily
configuration that would render
impossible the all-too-easy
quenching of the tender
eyeballs.In the context of
Samson Agonistes,
in this particular speech
of Samson's, we have to write it
off as a kind of morally suspect
complaint.
This is the faithless
questioning of the justice of
God's creation.
Milton doesn't permit himself
in Paradise Lost,
at least not explicitly,
to impugn the wisdom behind
God's creation of the
all-too-vulnerable human body,
but he does fashion for us
there a fantasy in Paradise
Lost.
It's a lot like Samson's
fantasy of a body exempt from
harm, free from disability,
and that is,
of course, the body of the
angels.
And so the last passage that
I'm going to ask you to look at
is on page 331 of the Hughes
edition. This is Book
Six,
line 344, and the narrator here
is the Archangel Raphael.
Raphael's explaining to Adam
why the angels in the war in
heaven can't be permanently
wounded or harmed.
Now we already know that angels
-- we've already learned this --
that angels when they please can
"either sex assume" or both,
but Raphael gives us even more
information about these
perfectly fantastical figures.
Their bodies have been
constructed along precisely
those lines that Samson was
proposing.
Their vital functions are
diffused through every
part.So look at the bottom
of the page.
This is line 344.
[F]or Spirits that live
throughoutVital in every
part, not as frail manIn
Entrails,
Heart or Head,
Liver or Reins,
[these angels]Cannot but by
annihilating die;Nor in thir
liquid texture mortal
woundReceive,
no more can then the fluid
Air:All Heart they live,
all Head, all Eye,
all Ear,
All Intellect,
all Sense…
The body of each and every
angel has been created "All in
All."
No sensory power or important
function has been confined to a
tender ball or a delicate orb or
a particular organ.
These angels are all eye.
They have the power of sight
diffused throughout their entire
bodies, and we can only imagine
that they can -- just as Samson
had fantasized -- that they can
see through every pore;
and so the Miltonic angel
enjoys the state of absolute
sight and absolute inspiration
and absolute oneness with God
that Milton is bidding for on
some level in his complex and
ambitious invocation to light in
Book Three.Now,
Milton isn't finished
articulating for us the
impossible process of his poetic
inspiration,
the miracle by which the blind
poet is compensated for his
blindness with the vision of
things invisible to mortal
sight.
Especially as we will see in
the invocation,
or the quasi-invocation,
to Book Seven of Paradise
Lost,
the poem will continue to voice
doubts that this process of
inspiration has actually
occurred;
but you have in the figure of
the Miltonic angel a literalized
image, an embodiment,
of Milton's most ambitious
fantasy for his poem.
It's an unrealistic fantasy for
himself, of course,
but it is an ambitious fantasy
and a genuine one,
I think, for his poem.
We know that the body of the
poet, of course,
would never undergo its much
desired, much fantasized
metamorphosis into the body of
an angel.
Milton's would never become a
body perfected,
rendered impervious to
humiliation and darkness,
but the body of the angel may
in the end be an entirely
appropriate image for Milton's
fantasy of the body of the poem.
It's this perhaps peculiar idea
that I'll leave you with today:
we'll grant that Milton is
right, that he was inspired by
God to write this poem.
If he is right,
then the body of this epic
really is very much like the
angelic body.
It is infused,
and we have to believe it's
infused in every part,
with the spirit of God.
It's nothing less than all
heart, all intellect,
and -- and this is an
extraordinarily resonant word
for Milton -- all
sense.Okay.
That's the end of this lecture.
Let me remind you that when you
read Book Three for next time,
you will also look at the
passages from The Christian
Doctrine that are assigned
on the syllabus.
