Professor John Rogers:
In the invocation to Book
Nine of Paradise Lost,
Milton describes -- and
it's wonderful to see this
representation of this process
that, I think,
we've been wondering about --
he describes the process by
which the heavenly muse
inspires, and he says inspires
nightly, the composition of his
epic.
He explains that the subject
for his heroic song -- and of
course, we'll be getting to Book
Nine later,
but it's relevant for our
discussion today -- Milton
explains that the subject for
his heroic song,
the subject of the Fall of man,
"pleas'd me long choosing,
and beginning late…"
-- pleased me long choosing and
beginning late.
We know very well Milton
decided to write an epic poem at
a very early age,
but his decision to write an
epic poem,
some epic, long predated his
sense of what exactly that epic
was going to be about.
He was long in choosing the
subject of his heroic song and,
as we know from all of -- and
we've encountered a number of
them -- all of those
protestations of delay Milton
began his epic late.
We last left the poet in the
1640s.
Areopagitica,
you'll remember,
was written in 1644.
The story of Adam and Eve and
of the fall of Satan may strike
us -- having read or about to
read Paradise Lost  --
may strike us as a natural
subject for Milton to have
chosen for his epic poem.
After all, this is an extremely
pious Puritan.
But as late as the 1640s,
this was not at all the epic
subject that Milton was
intending to use.
Milton -- and we know this --
Milton was a political
revolutionary,
and when he anticipated writing
the great poem,
he consistently imagined that
it would be a poem on a
nationalist theme.
Milton's would be an epic
demonstrating the origins and
the heroic achievement of his
own nation, England;
or maybe he'd be thinking a
little broadly of Britain,
which is England,
Scotland and Wales.
In this respect it would
resemble Spenser's Faerie
Queene, or perhaps
more importantly,
Virgil's Aeneid --
other nationalist
epics.Now Milton at the same
time -- we're talking about the
1640s -- had been contemplating
writing a play.
That was supposed to be a
tragedy that,
in some manuscript drafts that
we still have today -- in some
manuscript drafts,
he titled this prospective
tragedy Paradise Lost and
in other drafts Adam
Unparadised.
Actually all of these early
drafts -- these notes,
these outlines for this tragedy
that actually never seems to
have gotten written -- are
included in the Tyco packet.
But by the time Milton begins
writing his epic,
he abandons his plan for a
nationalistic poem,
a nationalist poem,
and decides instead to use the
subject matter that he had been
intending for that prospective
tragedy,
Paradise Lost.
So the reasons for this really
enormous shift in plans,
and the enormous shift in
subject matter,
are worth exploring.Milton
had devoted nineteen years to
the world of politics.
A lot has happened since the
exuberant optimism of the
political spirit that we see in
a tract like Areopagitica.
In 1649,
the great Puritan Revolution
reached an unspeakable climax.
A minority government of
revolutionary Puritans had
effectively taken control of the
state.
The radical Puritan Parliament
voted to execute the tyrant --
what they considered to be the
tyrant,
King Charles I -- and to
establish its own government.
Milton participated with
extraordinary enthusiasm and
considerable zeal in the
establishment of England's new,
non-monarchic government,
initially a commonwealth and
then what we can think of as a
republic.
He had been the foremost
propagandist for the Puritan
side.
He had not only written really
quite daringly on behalf of the
execution of this particular
king,
but he wrote another pamphlet,
Eikonoklastes (which is
included in the Hughes edition),
 which is a shocking
defense of just regicide in
general -- not just in England,
but as a kind of political
principle.Milton probably
around this time,
around the time that he was
writing and finishing the
regicide treatises,
began to lose his eyesight.
This is in the earliest years
of the commonwealth government.
Nonetheless,
even blind, Milton served the
new regime as both a state
licenser -- and I won't even get
in to the irony of the fact that
Milton seems to [laughs]
actually become the licenser,
the licenser of printed text
that, of course,
he had seven or eight years
before so utterly abhorred in
Areopagitica.
He seems to have had some
work as the state licenser,
but also more importantly (and
this was a much bigger
commitment) as the nation's
Latin secretary,
which means that he would
compose and translate all of
England's correspondence with
the governments on the continent
into and from Latin.
Up until this period,
the early 1650s,
Milton was a devoted
contributor to the ideal Puritan
notion of this government,
and it was really the height of
his political idealism.Fast
forward a few more years.
By the end of this decade,
by the end of the 1650s,
Milton could see,
as could others,
fairly clearly that what we can
think of as the imminent
collapse of the republican
government.
The majority of Englishmen were
calling for the return of their
nation's rightful monarch.
It wasn't long before the
revolution failed and the Stuart
monarchy was restored.
The son of the executed king,
who had been in exile in
France, was returned to the
throne in England;
and so at the Restoration -- as
it's called, the restoration
which took place in 1660 -- the
Puritan revolutionaries,
the revolutionaries like Milton
who had devoted their labors to
the success of this utopian
ideal of the Puritan
commonwealth,
experienced a humiliating and
bitter defeat.
A lot of Milton's friends,
a lot of Milton's comrades,
were hanged and quartered.
Milton himself was jailed and
jailed for having written the
regicide treatises,
we have to assume,
and it seems to have been
solely the influence of some
important friends that kept
Milton from being held in prison
indefinitely.
It's entirely imaginable that
Milton could have been executed
for his writings on behalf of
the killing of King
Charles.So it's at this
point -- this is after the
revolution has failed that
Milton begins to write his epic
poem: it's at this point that
Milton chooses to write an epic,
not on a nationalist theme as
Virgil had done or as Spenser
had done.
There was simply no nation
worth writing about.
All of Milton's labors in the
cause of liberating England from
the tyranny of monarchy had in
some way -- could be construed
as having been useless.
All of Milton's expectations
that England might actually be
transformed, and they were
glorious expectations,
into something like a Puritan
utopia or even a Puritan
paradise -- all of that had been
destroyed.
It's at this point that Milton
chose for the subject of his
epic poem the subject of the
tragedy that he'd been
contemplating for so many years.
The epic was going to treat the
Fall, the Fall of Adam and Eve
from their blissful state in
Eden,
but also the fall of the rebel
angels after their failed
revolution.
There's a continual analogy
running through Paradise
Lost, and it's a very
troubling one,
that associates the paradise
that man lost with the utopian
government that England lost.
Of course, perhaps even more
troubling is the satanic
parallel as well.
You'll want to think about why
Milton seems so aggressively to
invite the association of the
failure of the just revolution
of the Puritans,
and of course that's how he
would see it,
with the failure of the unjust
revolution of the rebel angels
under the guidance of
Satan.Milton began writing
his epic poem too late to
celebrate a virtuous political
realm.
It's too late for this to be a
political poem,
but Paradise Lost is
late for all sorts of reasons.
It's late for some personal
reasons as well.
Milton had been,
as you know,
anticipating writing this poem
since he was at least nineteen
years old.
He didn't even begin to fulfill
what we can think of as his epic
promise until he was nearly
fifty years old,
until he had actually lost the
use of his eyes,
until he could no longer read,
and until he could no longer
use a pen to write.
Finally, Milton's poem is late
by virtue of the simple fact
that it's written in the form of
an epic.
An epic might have seemed
[laughs]
like a great idea when Milton
was nineteen,
but by the time Milton gets
actually around to writing it,
it's an entirely superannuated,
utterly outdated form.
There's, of course,
the undeniable fact that the
greatest epics,
The Iliad,
The Odyssey,
and then The Aeneid,
were all written in a
heroic literary past that would
have struck anybody as
irrecoverable;
but even the modern practice of
epic writing,
or romance epic writing,
had basically entirely fizzled
out by the end of the sixteenth
century,
when the Italians I'm thinking
of, Tasso and Ariosto,
were writing.
There had been a half century
that had passed since any great
modern epic or romance epic had
even been produced.
There would have been a
prevailing sense,
and Milton has to have been
sensitive to this,
that it was simply too late to
write an epic of any kind on any
subject.
Milton began his epic poem
late.It's in relation to all
of these forms of lateness that
we can best understand the
opening invocation of
Paradise Lost.
So look at the first lines
of the poem.
This is page 211 in the
Hughes.
Harold Bloom has written,
and I think he's absolutely
right, that Milton begins
Paradise Lost with a
powerful defense against
lateness.
You can think of it as this
reaction to the problem of
lateness that accounts for one
of the invocation's most
distinctive features,
and that's the repetition of
the word "first."
You actually have the word
"first" appearing six times in
the first thirty-three lines of
Paradise Lost.
We'll do a little catalog of
them: "Of Man's First
Disobedience and the Fruit" --
that was line one,
of course.
Line eight: "That Shepherd,
who first taught the chosen
Seed..."
Line nineteen:
"Thou from the first / wast
present…"
Go down to line twenty-seven:
"Say first, for Heav'n hides
nothing from thy view."
Line twenty-eight:
"say first what cause."
And line thirty-three:
"Who first seduc'd them to that
foul revolt?"
Milton is alerting us to the
significance of the word "first"
in the very first line,
in this wonderful act of
violating the laws of iambic
pentameter.Now the rhythm of
a true line of iambic pentameter
-- and there are,
of course, hundreds,
maybe thousands of such lines
in this poem -- a true line of
iambic pentameter would run like
this.
You know this:
"da-DA-da-DA-da-
DA-da-DA-da-DA," an unaccented
syllable followed by an accented
syllable, and that little
pattern repeated five times.
With this iambic template in
mind, with this little paradigm
in our head, we may feel
metrically constrained to read
the first line of this poem like
this: "Of Man's First
Disobedience,
and the Fruit" --
"da-DA-da-DA-da-DA..."
It sounds stupid.
It should sound stupid.
It's impossible to get away
with such an awkward reading,
but that's the reading that the
metrical form is pushing us into
producing.
The problem with my awkward,
metrically proper reading of
that first line is that the word
"first" insists on being
accented,
and it screws up the template:
"Of man's first
disobedience,
and the fruit,"
and so Milton is rebelling
against an implicit law of
poetic meter in the very first
line of what,
of course, we know will be this
extraordinarily self-conscious
poem.
You could think of this as the
poem's first -- by no means its
last -- its first act of poetic
disobedience.Now the word
"first" begins to take on a much
bigger range of significances
than we might at first think.
When Milton instructs his muse,
"Say first, for Heav'n hides
nothing from thy view,"
there's something more here
than the primary sense of the
word, which is just "first in
sequence."
Milton, of course,
is instructing the muse to
explain first,
before she gets around to
explaining anything else,
what caused Adam and Eve to
fall.
That's just the simple
sequential sense of "first," the
first that comes before second,
third and fourth;
but there's something more
radical here than the ordinal or
sequential sense of "first."
"First" can also mean
"earliest": Milton's describing
his muse now,
at the present moment of the
writing of the poem,
to be the first one perhaps
ever to explain the cause of the
Fall, to be the first to tell
the story of the loss of
paradise or,
I don't know -- to be the first
poet ever to write an epic poem.
Milton's constructing -- it's a
remarkable and impossible
strategy here,
and it's one we can call a
strategy of retrospective
anticipation and it's a type
of…
Of course, this retrospective
anticipation can only be a
fiction.
One can never come before
something that,
of course, has already
happened, but this fiction of an
impossible firstness is
something that Milton is working
very hard to accomplish
here.We know this.
Milton has already indulged
this fantasy of coming before
something that's already
happened.
We recognize this desire to
anticipate an already existing
narrative, from what?
From Milton's first major poem,
the Nativity Ode.
Milton directed the
heavenly muse in that poem,
you'll remember,
to prevent -- to come before --
the three wise men who were
hasting to the manger with their
gold and their frankincense and
their myrrh: "O run,
prevent them with thy humble
ode…
/ have thou the honour first,
thy Lord to greet."
I suggest that we can hear
echoes of that same youthful
competitiveness in Milton's
first major poem in these
opening lines,
in the beginning of the great
epic of Milton's maturity.
Milton wants to write an epic
that in some ways comes before,
or prevents,
the great epics of Homer and
Virgil.
It's safe to say that this is
no easy feat.As presumptuous
[laughs]
as that desire is,
to come before Homer or to come
before Virgil,
it's by no means the final
sense,
I think, of Milton's ambitious
drive to be first.
Milton invokes the same
heavenly muse here who inspired
Moses, that shepherd.
Look at line eight:
Moses, "that shepherd,
who first taught the chosen
Seed."
It's almost as if -- could this
be?
It's almost as if Milton wants
to narrate the events of the
Creation and the Fall with the
same kind of firstness that
Moses did.
Milton would,
of course, have assumed that it
was Moses who had written the
first five books of the Bible,
the Pentateuch,
and to prevent,
or come, before Moses is an act
of prevention or anticipation
far more dangerous than mere
literary competitiveness.
What's Milton doing here?
We could see him as actually
vying with scripture.
Implicit in this invocation is
a truly remarkable claim that
this poem is the product of the
same divine authority that had
informed and inspired the
writing of the Holy Bible.
Sing Heav'nly Muse,
that on the secret top Of
Oreb, or of Sinai,
didst inspire That
Shepherd,
who first taught the chosen
Seed, In the Beginning how
the Heav'ns and Earth Rose
out of Chaos:
Or if Sion Hill Delight
thee more,
and Siloa's Brook that
flow'd Fast by the Oracle of
God;
I thence  Invoke thy aid to
my advent'rous Song...
Now Milton doesn't want simply
to be an epic poet like Homer
and Virgil.
That's -- no sweat with that
one!
Milton wants to be a divine
prophet like one of the great
Hebrew poets of the Old
Testament.
This is why he's continually
placing the imaginative origin
of the poem back to the very
dawn of time,
perhaps even back before -- if
you can imagine such a time --
before the very dawn of time.
Milton wants to create the
illusion that he's predicting,
or that he's prophesying,
the actions recounted in the
poem, as if Milton were
prophesying what of course we
know to be already past.
This is the strategy of
retrospective
anticipation.Now Milton can
make this implicit claim for a
prophecy because he's being
inspired by none other than the
divine spirit that had inspired
Moses to sing of divine
creation: "how the Heav'ns and
Earth / rose out of Chaos" --
this is already an outrageous
claim,
but Milton dares to go even
further.
Not only is this the same muse
who had inspired Moses to write
about the Creation,
this heavenly spirit was
actually present at the moment
of creation.
Look at line seventeen: 
And chiefly Thou O
Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright
heart and pure, Instruct me,
for Thou know'st;
Thou from the first Wast
present, and with mighty wings
outspread Dove-like satst
brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it
pregnant…
Of all of the appearances of
the word "first" in these
opening lines,
this is the "first" that has to
bear the most weight.
The spirit to whom Milton is
praying was the actual vehicle
through which God created the
universe.
This is the spirit through whom
God fashioned the world out of
chaos.
This is the spirit that Moses
says, in the first Book of
Genesis, that moved upon the
face of the waters at the time
of creation.
Milton goes beyond the image of
this creation,
this creative power provided
for us by the King James
translation of the Bible or by
any English translation of the
Bible in Milton's time.
He looks back even further.
Milton goes back to the Latin
version of the Bible which
translates the Hebrew word for
moved as
incubabat.
That's Jerome's translation.
Incubate is the strange
Latin word, and it's a verb --
of course, as we know -- it's a
verb typically used with
relation not to spirits but to
gestating birds,
and it literally means "to
brood."
To incubate means to
brood or to sit on one's eggs
until they hatch.
And so Milton's Holy Spirit,
the creative force behind the
entire universe,
actually sat brooding on the
vast abyss,
sitting on the waters of chaos
just as a mother dove might sit
on her eggs.Think of what
Milton's asking us of here.
He's asking a lot.
He's asking us to imagine God,
or perhaps this is God's
creative spirit,
as some sort of feminine being
laying the universal egg and
brooding over it until it bursts
forth with new life.
This is a risk.
Milton's treading an
extraordinarily fine line
between the tremendous beauty of
this image,
on the one hand,
and its potential impiety or
just grotesquery on the other.
No sooner has Milton conjured
this already unbelievable image
of a kind of maternal creation
than he reverses all of the
gendered categories that he's
just established.
He adds to this image that is
perfectly, sufficiently filled
with grotesquery as it is -- he
adds this next phrase:
"and mad'st it pregnant."
How do we even begin to
appreciate this amazing imagery
here?
In portraying the deity,
I would think,
if I were to write an epic poem
-- I would feel that I would be
expected to stay within the
fairly narrow parameters of
religious decorum.
Milton had no precedent for
this.
There's no precedent for this
depiction of a god or a holy
spirit as a kind of
hermaphroditic being.
I think it's safe to say that
we're intended to be shocked,
maybe even repulsed,
by this remarkable description
of the deity;
and so I'm hoping you feel
something of a shock of these
lines, "and mad'st it pregnant."
Milton is taking a huge
aesthetic risk here.Whatever
you're reading,
it's always worth thinking
about and considering what the
motives might be for such
extraordinary literary risk
taking.
This image of the curious
process by which the heavenly
spirit creates the universe is
absolutely central to this poem,
and it's central to the poem
for two reasons.
It's central to Milton's
theological vision that will
soon establish itself throughout
the poem,
and it's also,
I think, central to his poetic
vision, his vision of what a
poem is or should be.
This shocking image,
this impossible-to-imagine
image of a brooding
impregnation,
establishes the foundation for
two of this poem's most daring
elements.
The first is the radical
theology, and the second is this
poem's equally radical and
equally daring original verse
form.Let's take the first
thing first,
the radical theology.
I'm only able to talk about a
small component of Milton's
theological daring here.
It's with this image of a
brooding impregnation that
Milton announces the presence in
his poem of his most potent,
what I think is the most
interesting, theological
innovation that he comes up with
here.
It seems to be the case that
Milton rather late in his life
has become a monist.
He embraces the heterodox idea
of monism, sometimes called
animist materialism or vitalism,
which is essentially a denial
of any distinction between the
body and the soul.
The principle of monism had
just introduced itself in
England around the mid-1640s,
around, it's been argued,
the time that Milton's writing
Areopagitica,
and it met with all sorts of
opposition.
Orthodox scientists,
orthodox Christians -- everyone
agreed in the seventeenth
century that matter,
or substance or body,
was entirely separate from and
distinct from the immaterial,
the incorporeal,
stuff called spirit or soul.
So orthodoxy is definitively
dualist.
There are two types of stuff
[laughs]: immaterial stuff and
matter or body;
but Milton insisted that
there's no such thing as an
immaterial spirit,
that that was a contradiction
in terms.
Everything that we call soul or
spirit, even God himself,
for John Milton is bodily.
Spirit is merely a kind of
bodily form of energy,
and God at the beginning of
time infused this energy into
the entirety of the material
world at the Creation.So
physical life,
physical matter,
for the mature Milton is never
lifeless or dead.
All matter contains within it
something like a "potency of
life";
that's Milton's phrase.
It has a capacity for action,
actually a capacity for motion,
and, just as books can take on
a life of their own in
Areopagitica,
so all matter for later Milton.
Even what we think in our
vulgar ways to be inanimate
objects -- even they seem to
have within them something like
a potency,
a potency of life or an
infusion of divine spirit.
Of course, the human body is
the supreme example of the
spiritually infused corporeal
substance.
It's infused with divine spirit.
And this is a huge problem in
the seventeenth century.
Milton's contemporaries were
endlessly conjecturing where it
is exactly in the body that the
soul resides.
Some of you may know that
Descartes, the great French
philosopher and Milton's
slightly older contemporary,
had decided that the soul
resided in the pineal gland of
the body, the soul managed
[laughs]to govern the body from
this tiny,
little place in the -- where is
the pineal gland?
I think it's in your brain,
the back of your head.
Thank you.
Keep that in mind.The soul
for Milton though isn't distinct
from body.
It is the body.
The soul infused its power
throughout the entirety of the
bodily frame,
and so body and soul in
Milton's incredibly moving,
and I think really beautiful,
vision almost becomes
indistinguishable.
All of this monistic
philosophy, I think,
is implicit in the image of
divinity's impregnation of the
vast abyss.
Milton's God doesn't,
as we learn from Genesis,
doesn't fashion the matter of
chaos with his hands.
He impregnates it with spirit,
and he gives it a potency of
life.
As you'll see in Book Seven,
the book of the Creation,
he gives it a liberty to
organize itself into the order
of the created world -- a
freedom to create itself.
That's one consequence of
Milton's image of a brooding
impregnation.There's a
second type of potency that's
also established in with this
image,
and that's the potency of the
kind of verse that Milton is
writing in Paradise Lost.
It's been argued,
and I think there's something
to this, that Milton's monism is
closely connected to his
implicit theory of poetry.
There's no question that the
shock experienced by the first
readers of Paradise Lost
had next to nothing to do with
the content of this poem,
which might strike us as
shocking in itself.
We would think that Milton's
contemporaries might be aghast
that such a sympathetic portrait
of Satan could be used at the
beginning of the poem.
No, the most immediately
shocking aspect of the poem was
its style, and we have to look
at the actual poetic form by
which this poem is constructed
because the poetic form is
absolutely integral to its
meaning.
If you're not taking notes in
this lecture,
you have to write down at least
one sentence.
You must write this down
because this will be the most
important thing I say all
morning: Milton's Paradise
Lost is the first narrative
poem in English that didn't
rhyme.Milton wrote his epic
in lines of unrhymed iambic
pentameter or what we call,
and what Milton would have
called, blank verse.
Up to this point in literary
history, only verse written for
the theater had been written in
unrhymed lines of iambic
pentameter, in blank verse.
This is the verse form,
you'll recognize it,
in so many of the long speeches
of characters in the plays of
Marlowe and of Shakespeare.
Those are plays though,
and all English narrative
poems, including all of
Shakespeare's narrative poems,
they had all been written in
rhyme, either long verse
paragraphs of rhymed heroic
couplets or in intricately
rhymed stanzas.
For most readers in Milton's
time, rhyme was actually
constitutive of poetry,
and Milton's lines of unrhymed
verse here may well have not
seemed poetry at all.
It was shocking.There seems
to have been something of a kind
of outcry about the style of
Paradise Lost.
Look at page 210 in the
Hughes. It's in response
to what seems to have been an
aesthetic reaction to the poem
that the printer of Paradise
Lost asked Milton,
went back to Milton and asked
him to append a note to the
book's second printing -- to
append a note that explains why
the poem rhymes not.
People can't deal with this
poem until they [laughs]can get
a handle on the fact that it
doesn't rhyme.
So Milton writes this and adds
it, appends it,
to all subsequent editions of
the poem.
This is what Milton tells us: 
The measure is English
Heroic Verse without Rime,
as that of Homer in Greek,
and of Virgil in Latin;
Rime being no necessary Adjunct
or true Ornament of Poem or good
Verse, in longer Works
especially,
but the Invention [and this is
so familiarly Miltonic]
of a barbarous Age,
to set off wretched matter and
lame Meter;
grac't indeed since by the use
of some famous modern Poets,
[okay, Spenser might have done
it kind of well,
the whole rhyme-thing,
but nonetheless,
the modern poets are]
carried away by Custom,
but much to their own vexation,
hindrance, and constraint to
express many things otherwise,
and for the most part worse
than they else would have
exprest them.
Milton brings to his critique
of rhyme that same -- and this
is familiar -- the same
political rhetoric that he had
brought to his critique of
monarchy in the regicide
treatises.
You can also hear Satan's
critique of the tyranny of
heaven in this account of the
rhyme as well.
Like kingship,
rhyme is a custom.
It's an invention of a
barbarous age which a blind and
ignorant population will accept
only to its own vexation,
hindrance, and constraint.
It's always Milton's duty --
this is the reason that he was
put on this earth:
to liberate a people from any
such constraining customs.
It's the rhetoric of liberation
that -- this is the rhetoric
that permeates all of Milton's
political prose.While Milton
decided against writing an
explicitly political nationalist
poem,
he did see himself as writing a
poem that performed some kind of
political function.
It performed its revolutionary
function in a much more subtle,
though, and a much more
insinuating kind of way.
And so at the end of this note
on the verse Milton claims that
Paradise Lost:
…
is to be esteem'd an example
set, the first in English
[another important first],
of ancient liberty recover'd to
Heroic Poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of
Riming.
It's a wonderful metaphor.
It's as if Milton is thinking
of the poem as if it were a
human body, and the rhyme words
at the end of the typical heroic
couplet -- the two lines that
rhyme at the end,
and then another two lines with
a different rhyme at the end of
those two lines -- these lined
rhymes of the poems by his
contemporaries,
his competitors:
the rhyme words function as
shackles.
I think that's the image here.
They're manacles that confine
the otherwise vulnerable and
tender flesh of the body of the
poem.
Rhymes are barbarous forms of
constraint that impinge upon the
true freedom of the body of the
poem.
Milton explains here in the
middle of the note that's why
other cultures have rejected
rhyme:
…
as a thing of itself,
to all judicious ears,
trivial and of no true musical
delight;
which consists only [true
musical delight consists only]
in apt Numbers,
fit quantity of Syllables,
and the sense variously drawn
out from one Verse into another,
not in the jingling sound of
like endings...
So Milton refuses to force his
poem to make sense through the
barbarous mechanics of rhyme,
which for Milton reduces all of
the spirit, all of the life of a
poem or of a line,
simply to that jingling sound
at the end of the line.
And so in Milton's verse here,
sense or meaning is variously
drawn out from one verse into
another.
Sense, the very spirit of
meaning, is infused throughout
an entire line rather than being
singled out and separated or
segregated to the end of the
line in the form of the rhyme
word.Sense in Milton's
poetry functions a lot like soul
or spirit does in Milton's
theology,
and so Milton's note on the
verse clues us into this
intimate connection between his
radical poetics of blank verse,
on the one hand,
and his radical theology of
monism on the other.
You can see from the handout
that I've given you -- I hope
you can see from the handout
that I've given you a quotation
here from Milton's Christian
Doctrine,
yes, in which Milton describes
the process whereby God actually
impregnates the human body with
soul: "Nor did God merely
breathe that spirit into man,
but moulded it in each
individual and infused it
throughout."
The divine soul is everywhere
in the Miltonic body,
the human body.
Of course, that means that all
human acts are sanctioned by God
including -- maybe most
importantly,
the sexual act is given the
highest form of divine approval
imaginable.
Milton wants us to think of the
sense of his verse as being
similarly infused;
the poem is similarly infused
throughout with some kind of
soul or spirit or divine energy
throughout the entirety of a
verse paragraph.Milton
refuses in Paradise Lost
to constrain a thought,
or to confine it,
to a grammatical unit of sense.
A grammatical unit of sense is
never identical to a line in
Milton's poem.
Sense doesn't simply end at the
end of a ten-syllable line.
Now most rhymed poems in
Milton's day were end-stopped
lines of verse.
An end-stopped line is one in
which the grammatical unit of
sense stops precisely at the end
of the line.
The next line of verse picks up
a different thought and the next
one after that,
and so on.
You can actually see the
mechanics of end-stopped verse
quite clearly in the rhymed
version of Paradise Lost
that,
admittedly, the great poet John
Dryden wrote.
This was supposed to be the
libretto for an opera.
Dryden seems to have gotten
permission from the old,
blind poet Milton himself
because Dryden felt that the
public had an interest in
reading Paradise Lost but
they couldn't deal with the fact
that it didn't rhyme;
so Dryden set out on this
remarkable project of making the
whole thing rhyme,
and I invite you to read
Dryden's efforts.
They're really quite remarkable.
It's not unlike what the Turner
Broadcasting Network does with
old movies, colorizing them in
order to make them more
palatable to a modern
audience.You'll notice that
every line of the passage from
Dryden here concludes with a
comma or a period,
because every line constitutes
its own syntactical unit of
meaning.
Milton's poem -- this is a
statistical fact,
I don't know who came up with
it -- Milton's poem has far
fewer end-stopped lines than the
verse of any other poet.
Milton's lines,
we say, are enjambed:
they run in to one another,
and a syntactical unit for
Milton is continually spilling
out.
It's bursting out of the line
and infusing itself into the
next line, and then into the
next, and into the next.
I don't know who came up with
this statistic but I love it:
nearly three out of every five
lines in Paradise Lost
are enjambed -- they embrace
the practice of enjambment.
The meaning or the sense of a
verse paragraph is diffused
throughout a series of lines.
I think that Milton intends for
us to think of the verse in
Paradise Lost as he
wanted us to think of books in
Areopagitica:
the lines of Milton's poetry
are not absolutely dead things,
but they do contain within them
a potency of life.So Milton
imagined that his own verse was
to be read and experienced
something like a body.
Of course, it's a body that
enjoys an extraordinary degree
of freedom, and this is a
freedom that's infused into the
Creation when the Holy Spirit
impregnates the vast abyss.
This is also the freedom
enjoyed by surely,
hands down, the most remarkable
of all of Milton's corporeal
creatures, and those are the
angels.
I imagine it sounds strange to
hear that Milton is asking us in
some way to think of the lines
of his poetry as if they were
the bodies of angels,
but the notion of corporeal
freedom is so central to Milton
that it actually makes sense in
some ways that Milton would want
to attribute it to all of the
most original and the most
daring elements of his poem.
This is an argument that's been
developed really quite
brilliantly by a great Milton
critic,
William Kerrigan.A lot of
Book One is given over,
as you know,
to those magnificent catalogs
of the names of the fallen
angels as Milton names the
demons,
the fallen angels,
and catalogs the names that
they assumed when they ascended
to earth and took on the form of
pagan deities.
Look at line 423 in Book One.
I'll bet you,
even if you're reading this for
the second or the third time,
you were surprised again when
you came to this point.
Milton's been noting that some
of the pagan deities that the
fallen angels eventually became
were male and some were female.
It's here that Milton for no
[laughs]
explicit, or no apparent,
reason at all -- it's here that
he provides a little theoretical
digression on the stunning
flexibility of angelic bodies.
In the context it is a little
gratuitous.
Line 423: 
For Spirits when they
please Can either Sex
assume, or both;
so soft And uncompounded is
thir Essence pure, Not ti'd
or manacl'd with joint or limb,
 Nor founded on the brittle
strength of bones, Like
cumbrous flesh;
but in what shape they
choose, Dilated or
condens't, bright or
obscure, Can execute thir
aery purposes,
 And works of love or
enmity fulfil.
Clearly, the angels have bodies
here.
They're made of matter just as
human beings are,
but their bodies aren't
compounded of separable
elements.
They don't have joints and
limbs or organs or flesh.
They're nothing but a strangely
embodied form of pure spirit,
corporeal spirit:
a spirit that's been infused
through a loosely circumscribed
shape.Now we learn later
that the fact that these spirits
can "either Sex assume" actually
comes in rather handy,
as the angels are permitted to
experience a form of sexual
union that far exceeds the
miserable coition that creatures
like us are forced to perform,
the coition "founded on the
brittle strength of bones,"
Milton writes.
Milton's angels in an act of
sexual union are fully smooshed
together.
They are un-individuated,
if that makes any sense,
in the act of sexual union.
There is the unutterable sexual
rush that can only come about
through total corporeal
enjambment.Now this little
discussion that Milton's given
us here on the ambisexuality of
his angels,
not unlike perhaps the
ambisexuality of his God,
seems to have little to do with
the discussion at hand of the
heathen deities,
but I think it has everything
to do with Milton's
understanding of his own verse,
which he has freed from the
bondage of rhyming just as
angels are freed from the
manacles of joints and limbs.
Milton's not only writing in a
poetic style that he thinks is
politically motivated and
ideologically motivated,
and he is doing that,
but the style of Paradise
Lost is also powerfully
eroticized for Milton.
In its amazing malleability of
form, having dismissed the
manacle of rhyme,
the poem is teeming with the
same kind of erotic energy --
this is,
I think, Milton's fantasy for
the poem -- the same energies
that charge that image of books
in Areopagitica.So
let's look at an example of how
this might actually happen,
a way in which the verse
actually seems to generate this
sensation of bodily freedom.
Just look at the first line of
the poem: "Of Man's First
Disobedience and the Fruit."
We think at first,
because before we read this
poem we were so used to reading
end-stopped lines of verse,
like the lines of verse that
all of Milton's contemporaries
were disgorging -- we assume,
I think, after the first line
that the line should be
pronounced like this:
"Of Man's First Disobedience
and the Fruit" -- and
implicitly,
"of the fruit of the
Disobedience," as if the line
was actually:
"Of Man's First Disobedience
and its Fruit,"
meaning the fruit of the
disobedience.
We read "fruit" naturally,
here, as if it meant "result"
or "consequence."
We don't find this out until we
get to the next line,
that the "fruit" at the end of
the line is only a kind of
temporary resting place.
It's a provisional ending.
It's not a rhyme word,
and so it doesn't constitute
the end of a unit of sense as a
rhyme word would in most heroic
couplets.The sense of the
sentence pushes us on to the
next line,
which alters our view of the
meaning of the word "fruit:":
"Of Man's First Disobedience
and the Fruit / of that
Forbidden Tree."
The word isn't figurative.
It turns out to be literal,
real fruit, and we realize now
that we've only partially
understood the sense of the word
"fruit."
The combination of our readerly
experience of these two lines --
first, the figurative reading
that comes from our habits of
reading end-stopped verses,
and now the literal meaning of
"fruit" that comes from this
newly acquired habit of reading
enjambed lines -- it's the
experience of both of these
cognitive sensations that
provides us with a true
signifying experience of what
Milton can do with a word like
"fruit,"
which is obviously going to be
a loaded one in the
poem.Look at another
instance of the malleability of
this verse a few lines down:
…
[the heavenly spirit that]
didst inspire That
Shepherd, who first taught the
chosen Seed,
 In the Beginning how the
Heav'ns and Earth Rose out
of Chaos...
Now at first,
I think Milton seems to mean
that the shepherd,
Moses, inspired by the muse,
first taught the Israelites how
the heavens and earth rose out
of chaos in the beginning.
It was Moses who came up with
this phrase, Milton thought,
"in the beginning."
Those are the first words of
the Book of Genesis;
but Milton has clearly placed
this little phrase,
this adverbial phrase "in the
Beginning," in an awkward place.
He frees himself -- this is an
insight that William Kerrigan
has also had -- he frees himself
from the strictures of
conventional syntax,
and he places that phrase "in
the Beginning" at the beginning
of the line, very strangely and
very awkwardly before the "how":
"in the Beginning how the
Heav'ns and Earth."
He's done this because he wants
to permit this phrase to do more
than simply modify the verb
"rose."
We can also see in this phrase
"in the Beginning" -- we can see
it applying to the end of the
preceding clause,
"That Shepherd who first taught
the chosen Seed / in the
Beginning."
"In the Beginning" can modify
the verb "taught" as easily as
it can the verb "rose."
It can either verb assume,
just as Milton's angels can
"either Sex assume."There's
an important point,
I think, that's being made with
this second possibility.
Milton needs to imagine the
narrative of the Creation as if
the narration itself were taking
place in the beginning,
as if poetic creation could be
a first in the same radical way
that the creation of entire
universe is obviously a first.
This is a strategy called
double syntax,
the notion that "in the
Beginning" can modify one verb
or the other.
It's just this kind of
rhetorical trick that Milton
uses -- so many rhetorical
tricks like this that Milton
will use throughout the poem --
that led Dr.
Johnson to say in utter
exasperation,
but admiration,
that "Milton wrote no
language": this isn't English
[laughs]
that Milton is writing
here.Milton's language
doesn't have the same kind of
headlong rush that most
declarative English sentences
have.
We're continually being
prevented from reading the text
to get to the end.
We're prevented from rushing to
the end of the sentence,
or to the end of the poem,
because at least as far as the
-- well, you can understand why.
As far as the plot goes,
we know how it's going to end.
We know, of course,
that Adam and Eve are going to
eat the stupid fruit;
but Milton is developing a
style -- and he's working really
hard to do this -- that works to
resist our drive to get to the
end of the story.
It's through a mechanism of an
entirely new kind of verse that
Milton weaves into the metrical
fabric of the poem,
a new perspective on that old
theological problem of human
free will and divine
foreknowledge.
Can it be said that we actually
chose to sin or to eat the apple
if God had known all along how
the story would end,
or that we would do this thing
in the first place?
That's the conundrum that on
some level we've all confronted
and has been confronted since
time began;
but Milton knows that if this
poem is going to be successful,
we cannot as readers be
permitted to think the story had
to be what it was.
We can't be permitted to think
that the story had to turn out
the way it did.
We need to think that the
actions in the story were in
some way free and absolutely,
perfectly undetermined.
We need to get at the story of
the Fall from the perspective of
its beginning rather than from
the perspective of its
ending.And so Milton infuses
this angelic freedom,
and he infuses this bodily
liberty, into the actual body of
the verse itself,
of course, to make a point.
He's incorporating his style,
a radical, original style,
into the essential argument of
the poem.
He permits his own
unconstrained indulgence in
poetic enjambment.
He permits enjambment to become
the verbal medium.
This is the pulsating vehicle
for his precious theology of
free will and for his politics
of liberty.Okay.
That's the end.
I want to remind you a final
time to look at your Spenser,
the cave of Mammon episode,
as well as Dr.
 
