And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.The beauty of the close does not end the discord of ‘where Lycid lies’, a deliberate
false note. Such passionate question-and-answer is to mark all of Milton’s mature
work.
Personal concerns also obtrude in the prose to which, in an abrupt change of
plan, Milton now devoted himself. In London in 1641–2 he published five anti-
episcopal tracts; and in 1642, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, he married
Mary Powell, a girl half his age who soon went back to her Royalist family. Milton
wrote four tracts in favour of divorce, then attacks on the king, and then composed
the government’s Defences of its regicide. At Cromwell’s death, Milton called again
for a republic and liberty of conscience, publishing The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth as Charles II returned.Prose and Paradise Lost
Milton’s prose might today be little read if he had not written Paradise Lost. The first
pr inciples ofpolitics and religion were being debated in Parliament, at open-air
meetings, and in tracts. None appealed to principles more grandly than Milton,
although he abused opponents. He had come to notice when he argued that
Scripture allowed the putting away of a wife found to be incompatible. Then, in an
attack on episcopacy,The Reason of Church Government (1642), he confessed to an
‘inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study
(which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of
nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not
willingly let it die.’
He resolved ‘to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among
mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect.’ He outlined his
plans:Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account
of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to
propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic
form whereof the two poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a
diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model; or whether ...But poetry was postponed. Satan’s address to the Sun, written in 1642, appeared in
Paradise Lost in 1667.The brief epic Paradise Regained and the tragedy Samson
Agonistes followed in 1671.
The only prose which has escaped from the ‘dust and heat’ of controversy is
Areopagitica, called after the Areopagus, the hill of Ares where the Athenian parlia-
ment met.This speech for the liber ty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of
England is couched in the form of a classical oration, beginning with a quotation
from Euripides: ‘This is true liberty, when free-born men, / Having to advise the
public,may speak free ...’.Areopagitica, ho wev er, defends not free speech but a free
press. It asks Parliament to stop the pre-publication ‘licensing’ of books, a practice
begun by Henry VIII, abolished in 1641, but reimposed in 1643. A particular kind of
liberty was one of Milton’s ideals, and his speech has noble sentences:158 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700
John Milton, aged about 62,
when he had been blind for
ten years. Engraved by William
Faithorne for The History of
Britain, 1670.