The complete poetical works of John Milton

Front matter

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Class Book

PART FIRST: ENGLISH POEMS. On the Morning of Christ's Nativity 7

A Paraphrase on Psalm CXIV 10

Psalm CXXXVI .... 11

On the Death of a Fair Infant

dying of a Cough ... 12 At a Vacation Exercise in the

College 13

The Passion 15

On Shakespeare . . • -16

On the University Carrier . 17 Another on the Same . . .17 An Epitaph on the Marchioness

of Winchester .... 18 On his being arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three . . . .19 Poems written at Horton, 1632-1638, and in Italy, 1638-1639.

Written at Horton: L'Allegro and II Penseroso.

Introduction .... 23

L' Allegro 26

II Penseroso .... 28 Sonnet to the Nightingale . 30 Song on May Morning . . 30

On Time 30

At a Solemn Music ... 30 Upon the Circumcision . . 31 Arcades and Comus.

Introduction .... 32

Arcades 38

Lycidas.

Introduction .... 54

Written in Italy: Introduction .... 63 Sonnet : " Donna leggiadra, il

cui bel nome onora" . . . 63 Translation : " Lady gay and gracious, whose fair name hon- ORS " 63

Sonnet: ''Qual in colle aspro, all' imbrunir di sera " . .64

Translation : " As on a rough hillside, at dusk of evening "

Canzone : " Ridonsi donne e giovani amorosi " .

Translation : " The ladies and young lovers laugh at me "

Sonnet: " Diodati (e te 'l diro con maraviglia) "

Translation: ''Diodati (I tell it thee with wonder) "

Sonnet : " Per certo i bei vostr' occhi, Donna mia"

Translation: "In sooth, your beauteous eyes, my Lady" .

Sonnet: " Giovane, piano, e semplicetto am ante " .

Translation: "A young, and meek, and simple lover "

Poems written during the Civil War and the Protectorate, 1642-1658. Sonnets :

Introduction ....

When the Assault was intended to the City ....

To a Virtuous Young Lady .

To the Lady Margaret Ley

On the Detraction which followed UPON MY WRITING CER- TAIN Treatises

On the New Forcers of Conscience UNDER THE LONG PAR- LIAMENT

To Mr. H. Lawes on his Airs .

On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson

On the Lord General Fairfax .

To the Lord General Cromwell ......

To Sir Henry Vane, the Younger

On the Late Massacre in Pie-

MONT

On his Blindness

To Mr. Lawrence ....

To Cyriack Skinner .

On his Deceased Wife Translations : The Fifth Ode of Horace Lib. i. . Nine of the Psalms done into Metre :

64 (54 64 63 63 65 65 65

74 74 74 vm

Contents

Psalm LXXX, " Thou Shepherd

THAT DOST ISRAEL keep " . . 79

Psalm LXXXI, "To God our

PART SECOND: LATIN POEMS. De Auctore Testimonia

Joannes Baptista Mansus, Marchio

Vellensis Neapolitanus, ad

joannem mlltonum anglum . 321

Ad Joannem Miltonem Anglum,

triplici poeseos laurea coro-

NANDUM GRiECA NIMIRUM, LATINi, atque Hetrusca*, Epigramma Jo-

annis Salsilli Romani . . 321 Ad Joannem Miltonum . . . 322 Al signor Gio. Miltoni, Nobili

Inglese. Ode .... 321 Joanni Miltoni, Londinensi . . 322 Elegiarum Liber.

Elegia Prima — Ad Carolum Dio-

Elegia Secunda — In Obitum Pr-e-

conis Academici Cantabrigiensis 326 Elegia Tertia — In Obitum Pr^e-

sulis wlntoniensis . . . 327 Elegia Quarta — Ad Thomam Ju-

nium, Pr^ceptorem suum . . 329 Elegia Quinta— In Adventum

Veris 333

Elegia Sexta — Ad Carolum Dio-

datum, ruri commorantem . 337

Elegia Septima 340

Epigrammata :

In Proditionem Bombardicam 343

In Inventorem Bombards . 344

Ad Leonoram Rome Canentem . 344 Sylvarum Liber.

In Obitum Procancellarh Medici 346 In Quintum Novembris . . 347 In Obitum Pr^esulis Eliensis . 354

Naturam non pati Senium . . 355 De Idea Platonica quemadmodum

Aristoteles intellexit . . 357

Ad Patrem 358

Ad Salsillum, Poetam Romanum,

JEgrotantem 362

Mansus 363

Epitaphium Damonis .... 367 Ad Joannem Rousium . . . 375

Appendix

I. Notes and Illustrations . . 381 II. Supplementary Latin and Greek

Poems 409

From the Elegiarum Liber : Apologus de Rustico et Hero . 409

De Moro 410

Ad Christinam, suecorum Reginam, Nomine Cromwelli . 410 From the Sylvarum Liber : In Salmash Hundredam . . 410 In Salmasium .... 410

PsALM CXIV, 'l<rpar)\ ore 7rai8es, or

Philosophus ad Regem . . 410 In Effigiei ejus Sculptorem . . 410

INDEX OF FIRST LINES INDEX OF TITLES

413 . 415

YOUTH AND COLLEGE LIFE, 1608-1632

We are aided in the study of Milton's life by the sharpness of line which separates the three main epochs of his history : his life of student ease, during which he was preparing himself with consecration for his poetic vocation ; his life of public service, when he put behind him his poetic ambitions and threw himself with fanatical ardor into the struggle for liberty ; and his old age, when, blind and discredited, he sat down amid the wreck of everything for which he had given his best twenty years, to write the poem which from early youth he had felt it his mission to leave to the nation.

Milton's youth was singularly sweet and sheltered. He was born in London on the 9th of December, 1608, the son of John Milton, a scrivener or solicitor doing business at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. It is worth noting that for two generations at least the Miltons had exhibited intense partisanship in the religious disputes which agitated the nation. Richard Milton, the poet's grandfather, had been a stubborn Catholic recusant under Elizabeth, and John Milton, the poet's father, had broken with his family in order to join the Puritans. The Puritanism of the home in Bread Street was not, however, of an ascetic or unlovely type. The father was an accomplished musician, of some note as a composer, and could even on occasion try his hand at poetry. This mellow atmosphere of taste and cultivation, spiritualized by a sincere piety, united with larger circumstances to enrich life for the young poet. We must remember that in Milton's childhood Shakespeare was still alive, that at the Mermaid Tavern, probably in the very street where the scrivener's house stood, Ben Jonson held his " merry meetings," and that most of the stalwart figures which had made the reign of the Virgin Queen illustrious were still to be seen about the streets of London. There was as yet hardly a hint of the passing away of those " spacious times," of the spirit of romance and adventure, which had filled Elizabethan England. His nature, therefore, was in no danger of being starved at the outset, as it must have been if his birth had fallen a few decades farther on in the struggle between the old and the new, when Puritanism had narrowed and hardened itself in order to project itself more forcibly against its enemies.

Yet perhaps it is not fanciful to see an adumbration of the new spirit soon to darken over England, in the unchildlike devotion with which the boy Milton gave himself to his studies. First under a private tutor, one Thomas Young, a Presbyterian curate, whom he reverenced tenderly in later life, and afterwards at St. Paul's School, he applied himself so eagerly to his studies that, as he himself says, from his twelfth year on he rarely left his books before midnight. Besides reading tl classical authors necessary for admission to the university, he was allowed to wan der freely through the literature of his own tongue ; the poets who have left th most distinct trace on his early work are Spenser and Sylvester, the latter in b translation of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French moralistic poet Du Be tas. In Milton's earliest verses, the paraphrases of Psalms xciv and cxxx\ written at fifteen, commentators have discerned traces of reading from such diver authors as Chaucer, Drayton, Drummond, Fairfax (the translator of Tasso) ai. Buchanan. A portrait by the Dutch painter Jansen which has been preserved to us, painted, it is true, before this passion for study began, but doubtless representing faithfully enough the features which Milton retained through boyhood, shows a reassuringly healthy little face. The gaze is frank and level, though with a sweet after-seriousness ; the form under the black braided dress betrays a delicate vigor, and the firm lines of the head are emphasized by the close-cropping of the auburn hair.

The one event worth chronicle in his school life is his friendship with Charles Diodati, a young Anglo-Italian whom he met at St. Paul's school. It was full of boyish generosity and emulation, and was perhaps the warmest human relationship which Milton ever experienced. It continued to grow in spite of their separation. Diodati went to Oxford, and Milton, at the age of sixteen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge.

The routine of a seventeenth - century college, with its fixed tasks and small tutorial methods, could hardly fail to be irksome to a spirit like Milton's, just awakening to the first arrogant consciousness of power. He complains that he is " dragged from his studies," and compelled to employ himself in " composing some trivial declamation." Whether on this or some other score, he got into trouble with his tutor Chappell, was rusticated for a time, and on his return was transferred to another tutor. A Latin verse-epistle (Elegy I) addressed to Diodati, recounting gaily his visits to the theatres and parks of London, marks the date of his temporary suspension. The same epistle contains a rapturous eulogy of the girls of London, the tone of which, with its youthful hyperbole and ardor, is particularly pleasant in his case.

For already he had begun to lay the foundations of that " conscious moral architecture " which was to be the dominant ideal of his life and to mark him out sharply among the spontaneous and desultory race of poets. His college companions, noting his fresh-colored oval face, his flowing auburn hair, his slender frame, his fastidiousness in manners and in morals, nicknamed him, with the happy offhand criticism given to undergraduates, the " Lady of Christ's." What they interpreted as feminine in him was really the expression of a deep conviction on his part, — a conviction virile enough, since it was to determine his whole conscious existence, but so far removed into the realm of ideality that it may well have seemed

YOUTH AND COLLEGE LIFE, 1608-1632 xi

a little wan to his boisterous companions, even if they had taken the trouble to understand it. This conviction was that he was appointed to some great work of poetic creation, and that such a work could come only as the outgrowth of a life of austerity. As yet it was merely the delicate austerity, the fastidious abstention, of an Elizabethan ; but it was of a kind to turn easily into something sterner. That this double conviction had taken complete possession of Milton's mind before he left college, two passages from his verse of this period testify. One we find imbedded in a Latin epistle to Diodati (Elegy VI), who, sending him some verses, has excused himself for their lightness of tone by the fact that they were composed in the midst of country merry-making. Milton accepts the excuse, but declares that the poet who would sing of great themes, " of wars, and of Heaven under adult Jove, and of pious heroes, and leaders half-divine, singing now the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the realms profound where Cerberus howls, — such a poet must live sparely, after the manner of the Samian teacher. Herbs must furnish him his innocent food ; clear water in a beechen cup, sober draughts from the pure spring, must be his drink. His youth must be chaste and void of offence ; his manners strict ; his hands without stain. He shall be like a priest shining in sacred vestment, washed with lustral waters, who goes up to make augury before the jealous gods. . . . Yea, for the bard is sacred to the gods : he is their priest. Mysteriously from his lips and breast he breathes Jove." There is in this perhaps an element of convention and of boyish bombast, but it is nevertheless the same thought which he expressed twenty years later, when he declared his early belief that " he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem . . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy."

Again, in the fragment entitled At a Vacation Exercise in the College, after singing the praises of English speech, he goes on to speak of the kind of subject upon which he longs to try its powers. He would take his hearers,

" Where the deep transported mind may soar Above the wheeling- pole, and at Heaven's door Look in, and see each blissful deity How he before the thunderous throne doth lie List'ning to what unshorn Apollo sings." . . .

It is a side illustration of the remarkable unity of Milton's purpose, that, translating the pagan terms here given into Biblical ones, this subject is the one to which, in old age, he reverted for his supreme effort.

He did not content himself with theory alone. During the seven years which he spent at Cambridge, he wrote, besides much Latin verse, a number of English poems. Of these only three or four are remarkable enough to have singled Milton out from the crowd of young poets and poeticules who then swarmed at the universities. First among these is of course the Hymn on the Nativity, written in the sixth year of his college residence, when he was twenty-one years old. The xii THE LIFE OF MILTON

opening stanzas are disfigured by the conceits and ingenuities which had been made fashionable in England by the extraordinary poems of John Donne, seconded by the example of the Italian poet Marini. But as the poem progresses, Milton's imagination takes fire, the images gain in majesty and richness, and the language gathers a kingly confidence of rhythm and phrase, a shadowed but triumphant music, like the chanting of young seraphs awe-struck at their theme, — which were altogether new in English verse. One has to know with some minuteness what poetry had been under Elizabeth and James, to realize the unique quality of voice in this Hymn. Taking the poem as a whole, one can scarcely agree with Hallam that it is " perhaps the finest ode in the English language," but again and again in its unequal lines Milton sends a herald voice into the wilderness, announcing in no dubious tones the advent of a master of song.

Clearly as we can now see Milton's gift announced in these early college efforts, they by no means stilled their author's restless desire to make that announcement more signal. The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday breathes deep dissatisfaction with his accomplishment up to that time. He grudges the " hasting days " which leave him songless, and — thinking perhaps, as Mr. Gosse suggests, of young Abraham Cowley, whose marvellously precocious productions had already made him famous in his thirteenth year — he speaks enviously of those " more timely happy spirits," the blossoming of whose genius had been seasonable. From this grudging mood he rises at the end into a tone of large resignation to the conditions under which he shall be called to work out his desires. When we consider what those conditions were to be, the words fall upon the ear with a special accent : —

" Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-master's eye."

It was in such a mood that Milton left Cambridge, after seven years' residence there. His father had intended him for the church, but such a career, although not yet rendered impossible by his broadening opinions, was distasteful because of the trammels it imposed. An academic career was no more alluring, even if it had been possible without taking orders. His discontent with the Cambridge tone comes out several times in his Latin verses and elsewhere. In his first elegy, alluding to his rustication from college, he exclaims, " How ill does that place suit with poets ! " and in one of his pamphlets he makes disdainful allusion to the young graduates who " flutter off all unfledged into theology, having gotten of philology or philosophy scarce so much as a smattering, and who for theology " are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." Upon Cambridge, therefore, and its " turba legentium prava " he turned his back, not however, to return to the house in Bread Street. His father, having acquired a competency, had retired to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, seven-

HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638 xiii

teen miles to the southwest of London ; here, amid rural sights and sounds, Milton was to spend the next five years, the happiest of his life.

II Horton Period, 1632-1638

It was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton's genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men's lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contemplation. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set between his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the tyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds. His " long holiday " at Horton left Milton free to capture in verse the ductile grace of youth, to have his leafy season. Afterward his work was to be less a sylvan growth, and more a monumental thing builded with hands.

The narratable facts of these five years are naturally few. Milton says himself that he " spent a long holiday turning over the Latin and Greek authors," and some volumes annotated by him have been preserved to show the wide range of reading indicated. The most notable additions to his treasury of thought were contributed by Euripides and Plato. He made occasional visits to London, for instruction in music and mathematics, to purchase books, to visit the theatres, and to call upon his married sister Anne Phillips or his younger brother Christopher, now entered as barrister at the Inner Temple. The facts of real significance, however, are the ones which cannot be chronicled, — the drama which goes on in every sensitive life between the individual soul and the spirit of nature. The episodes are nothing, — a ramble by starlight along a piece of water, a nesting bird surprised in the hedge, a speaking light at dawn, — but the results, when the one actor is young enough to meet the eternal youth of the other, are not to be measured. In the beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale we see the habitual seriousness of Milton's nature invaded by the tenderness and soft vague passion of spring in the country ; it has a troubadour grace and wistfulness discernible nowhere else among his utterances. More characteristically and with equal beauty, these new influences found expression in the twin poems L y Allegro and II Penseroso, named from the two typical moods of mind in which the poet confronts the pageantry of nature, the mood of joyous receptivity and the mood of sober contemplation. In the studied symmetry of these poems, their contrapuntal answering of part to part, as well as in the objective standpoint from which they are written, there is a selfconsciousness alien to the born nature poet. Such a poet indeed Milton was not.

xiv THE LIFE OF MILTON

He sees nature neither with the spiritual insight of Wordsworth nor with the childlike absorption and awe of his contemporary Henry Vaughan. Standing outside nature, he uses its spectacles as text and illustration of a mood which has its origin within. He does not even draw illustration exclusively from those sights which met his eye in the landscape about Horton, but borrows eclectically, wherever in visible nature or in scenes remembered from books he finds matter to his purpose. In any exact sense, therefore, these poems are not personal. In a larger sense they are profoundly so. They are the record of a serious, scholarly mind suddenly invaded in a propitious moment of youth by the beauty of external existence, — a beauty gay or sober, as chance may determine, but always richly soliciting. In a letter to Diodati, written from Horton, Milton says : " God . . . has instilled into me, if into any one, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor ... is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful . . . through all the forms and faces of things." Such pure sestheticism has on his lips a somewhat alien sound. We seem to be listening to the author of Endymion, rather than to the author of Comus.

Mark Pattison was the first of Milton's biographers to give sufficient emphasis to the pathos which these poems derive from the fact that in them, for the first and last time, Milton spoke in the free, joyous spirit of the time which was passing away forever. Even here, to be sure, the mood is chastened and objectified ; but taken broad and long, in their lightness, their grace, their eager response to sensuous beauty, these poems are of the great lyric age inaugurated by Spenser, though they show a sense of form and an economy of expression which Spenser's diffuser muse could not attain. When we look forward fifteen years and see Milton grimly seconding the movements of a party whose fanaticism crushed out the joy and poetry of life in England, cut down the Maypoles, closed the theatres, broke the stainedglass windows, and tore out the organ-pipes, the lines which celebrate the " jocund rebeck," the " well-trod stage," and the " storied windows richly dight," take on a peculiar significance. The man who was to be the pamphleteer champion and the bard of Puritanism is living here in the world of romantic charm which Cromwell's armies were to sweep away. The man who had written the Sonnet to the Nightingale was to turn that " small lute " into a trumpet whence he might blow soul-animating strains of strenuous applause.

Either shortly before or shortly after Milton left college he had been asked, probably by young Henry Lawes, at that time gentleman of the Chapel Royal and one of the King's private musicians, to furnish a portion of the words for an entertainment to be presented before the Countess Dowager of Derby, at her country-seat of Harefield, by the younger members of her family. The libretto which Milton furnished is the fragment known as Arcades, or the Arcadians. Harefield lay only ten miles from Horton, and it is possible that Milton may have been present on the night when the actors in the little masque, disguised as shepherds and sylvan deities, and carrying torches in their hands, approached the aged countess, seated

HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638 in state at the end of the historic avenue of elms known as the Queen's walk. The aged dowager had in her youth been Spenser's friend ; and it is pleasant to dwell, with Professor Masson, upon the possibility that the eyes which had seen the first saw now also the last of the great line of Elizabethan minstrels. In any case, Lawes was so well satisfied with Milton's words that three or four years later he applied for a more elaborate piece of work of the same sort, this time to celebrate the inauguration of the countess's son-in-law, the Earl of Bridgewater, into his duties as Lord President of Wales. Lawes had under his instruction the Lady Alice, youngest daughter of the earl, as well as her sister and two brothers ; he desired to put their accomplishments to service in the production of a masque gorgeous enough to suit the august occasion. The heartiness with which Milton threw himself into his part of the project is evidenced by the rich and rounded beauty of the result. He never gave his work a definite title, but it is named in modern editions from the chief dramatis persona, Comus, the god of revelry. All efforts to discover whether or not the young author was present when his masque was given in the banqueting-hall of the historic castle of Ludlow, on the Welsh border, have been futile.

The main motive of the poem, the power of chastity to subdue the forces of evil, is a conventional one in the literature of the time. It is only in occasional passages of deeper conviction that we can see the growth of Milton's mind away from the idyllicism of L' Allegro and II JPenseroso, toward the polemic sternness which, after announcing itself in golden adumbrations of melody in Lycidas, was to go on gathering intensity and losing beauty until its ugly culmination in the Reply to Salmasius. In the light of Milton's later development, the very fact of authorship in the masque form shows the irony of events. These poem-pageants summed up all that was most gorgeous, extravagant, and pleasure-loving in the court life of the Tudors and the Stuarts. They had always constituted a covert protest against the Puritan barrenness and strictness of life, and shortly before Comus was written, this protest had become overt. The attack made by the Puritan barrister Prynne upon the stage, in his Histriomastix, had given offence to the court ; a passage of ponderous invective against women-players was interpreted as an insult to the Queen, who had shortly before taken part in a masque at Whitehall. The result was a revival of the masque by court sympathizers, on a scale of unprecedented splendor, and the masque became a kind of rallying point for cavalier feeling. Comus belongs certainly by date and probably by intention to this demonstration against the Puritan party. It is indicative of the quiescence of Milton's mind at this time with respect to the political situation, that he should have lent his powers unwittingly to such a task.

The next three years of Milton's life at Horton were unproductive. He continued that elaborate course of intellectual and spiritual preparation which he had marked out for himself, fortifying himself in all ways for the greater task which vaguely beckoned. To Charles Diodati he writes, in response to an inquiry as to what he is thinking of, " Why, may God help me, of immortality ! I am growing my wings for a flight." For broad flight he was not yet ready, and for lesser ones the sting of occasion was lacking, until the autumn of 1637. Then news came of the sinking of a ship in the Irish Sea, and the loss of all on board, including Edward King, a fellow of Christ's and an old college-mate of Milton's. King's Cambridge friends determined to issue a little volume of commemorative verse, to which Milton, as a recent graduate, was asked to contribute. It is an odd experience now to turn over the pages of this little volume, and, after reading the wellmeaning heaviness of which it is mainly composed, to come suddenly at the end upon the large threnodic rhythm of the opening lines of Lycidas. Lycidas has been called by so competent a critic as the late Mr. Pattison, the highwater mark, not only of Milton's genius, but of English lyric poetry. Superlatives are dangerous, and never more so than when dealing with work of a commanding order. It is perhaps more to our purpose to note what the same critic has suggestively pointed out, that in this poem the world of Milton's youth and the world of his manhood meet. The general tone of the lament is indistinguishable from that of the ordinary pastoral threnodies of the school of Spenser. There is the same air of deliberate convention, the same pensive beauty, the same delicious melancholy grace in the wearing of the rue. But once past the induction we come upon lines which apprise us that we are in the presence of a sterner moral conception than ever troubled the smooth pipes of the early pastoralists. In the passage beginning

" Last came and last did go The pilot of the Galilean lake,"

there is a " smothered and suspended menace," a passion of purification, which was soon to wreak itself upon everything in Church and State for which the House of Stuart stood, and to sweep away in its blind zeal much that was beautiful and desirable. It was to take, among other good things, that very gift of pure melody which was given to Milton's youth. He was to come out of the struggle strengthened to grapple with a vast theme, but stiffened and shorn of grace. He was to live to build language into large harmonic masses, intricate and solemn fugues, but never to recapture that simple singing voice which charms us in the poems written during his " long holiday " at Horton.

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