Milton’s early Protestant ideals now seem at odds with his sophisticated Italianate
style. At court, Charles I patronized the baroque sculptor Bernini. This style, far
from Puritan plainness, displays its art with the confidence of the Catholic
Reformation. Milton wrote six sonnets in Italian, and English verse in an Italian way.
The title Paradise Lost answers that of Tasso’s epic,Gerusalemme Conquistata (1592),
‘Jerusalem Won’: ‘God’s Englishmen’ were interested not in the old Christian recon-
quest of the earthly Jerusalem but in gaining the heavenly Jerusalem. Milton
embraced Renaissance and Reformation, Greek beauty and Hebrew truth. This
embrace was strained in the 1630s as England’s cultural consensus came apart. In
1639 Milton abandoned a second year in Italy, returning from the palace of Tasso’s
patron in Naples to write prose in London. Although John Donne called Calvinist
religion ‘plain, simple, sullen, young’, the first Puritan writer who was truly plain and
simple was John Bunyan (1628–1688).
Strains begin to appear in Comus (1634), a masque for a noble family. It owes
something to Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), but Milton’s virtuous
Lady rejects the (sexual) Pleasure eloquently urged by Comus, the ‘bouncing belly’
of Jonson’s masque. Virtue is Chastity (i.e. obedience to divine Reason). The earnest
argument ofComus shows its author’s ambition.
Lycidas (1637) is an ambitious pastoral elegy for a Cambridge contemporary, a
priest and poet who drowned in the Irish Sea.Lycidas is the longest poem in a
collection otherwise in Latin and Greek. Nature mourns the young shepherd-poet,
and the parts of the classical pastoral elegyare displayed. Renaissance pastoral
convention allows Milton to discuss poetic fame, and to criticize the pastoral care
of bishops. He shows his poetic skill, and his horror at the early loss of a poetic
talent. Apollo tells him that Jove (i.e. the Christian God) will judge his fame in
heave n,a Reformation answer in a Renaissance form. The crisis comes after the list
offlowers brought ‘to strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. / For so to inter-
pose a little ease / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.’ The ‘false
surmise’ is the poem’s pagan pretence. Since the body was not recovered, there was
no hearse to strew: ‘thee the shores, and sounding seas / Wash far away, where’er
thy bones are hurled ...’. Then:
Weep no more, woeful shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor,
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.He is now with heaven’s ‘sweet societies / That sing, and singing in their glory
move, / And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.’ Revealed faith consoles, unlike
nature’s myth. Yet the poetry of nature returns:
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, guardian spirit
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
Thus sang the uncouth swain ...This unknown shepherd (Milton) sings a far from uncouth song.
THE STUART CENTURY 157pastoral elegy An
elaborate classical form in
which one shepherd-singer
laments the death of another.