“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638herself she figures the power of true poetry to counter unruly sensuality and de-
based rhetoric. She is the good poet whose elegant songs and rituals free the Lady
from the spells of the bad poet, Comus, and confirm her in her own arts of song.
And as nymph of the local river she brings the Lady into the region her Father
governs, and to a virtuous household that can partly control fallen nature and nur-
ture good pleasures.
The masque festivities at Ludlow Castle include the rustic dances of shepherds in
a recuperation of pastoral from Comus’s (and the court’s) deformation of it. The
presentation song by the Attendant Spirit and the children’s masque dances figure
and display their triumph: as the Spirit declares, they “triumph in victorious dance
/ Ore sensuall Folly, and Intemperance” (974–5). The scene images the virtuous
pleasure, beauty, and art that accord with the life of chastity, intimating that they
can be best nurtured in the households of the country aristocracy. If we compare
Coelum Britannicum, Thomas Carew’s sumptuous court masque of 1634 in which
the Caroline court is a model for the reformation of Olympus itself, it will be
evident how completely Milton has reversed the usual politics of masquing.
The Spirit’s epilogue, in quick octosyllabic couplets, provides another perspec-
tive on virtue and pleasure. In the much-expanded 1637 version, the Venus/Adonis
and Cupid/Psyche myths are presented as commentary on the masque action.^102
The Spirit flies to his own region, the Garden of the Hesperides, filled with sensu-
ous delights but still, like Ludlow, a place where fallen nature is mending but not
wholly cured. In explicit contrast to the joyous and free lovemaking of Venus and
Adonis in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, and especially to the fusion of the Caroline
court with the court of heaven in Coelum Britannicum, Milton underscores the dis-
tance between earthly virtue and heavenly perfection. Adonis here is only “waxing
well of his deepe wound” inflicted by the boar, commonly allegorized as sensuality,
and Venus sits “sadly” beside him (1,000–1). The Spirit then refers to a higher
realm where the cures and pleasures are perfect, where the Celestial Cupid (Christ)
will at length welcome Psyche (a figure for the Soul, the Lady, and the Bride of
Revelation) after her long journey and trials, and where the twins Youth and Joy
will be born from their union. Later, in Milton’s Apology for Smectymnuus (1642),
the twin progeny of Platonic love are said to be Knowledge and Virtue. The re-
wards in both cases are for spiritual lovers, not virgins as such. Milton’s Maske is
clearly a generic tour de force that conjoins and explores, as one subtle and complex
ideal, chastity, true pleasure, and good art, setting them against what he saw as their
debased counterparts, nurtured by the pastoralism and Neoplatonism of the Caroline
court masques.
Lycidas is the chef-d’oeuvre of Milton’s early poetry, and one of the greatest lyrics
in the language. In it Milton confronts and works through his most profound per-
sonal concerns: about vocation, about early death, about belatedness and
unfulfillment, about the worth of poetry. He also sounds the leitmotifs of reformist
politics: the dangers posed by a corrupt clergy and church, the menace of Rome,