“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674Into the Desert, his Victorious Field
Against the Spiritual Foe, and broughtst him thence
By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire,
As thou art wont, my prompted Song else mute,
And bear through highth or depth of natures bounds
With prosperous wing full summ’d to tell of deeds
Above Heroic, though in secret done,
And unrecorded left through many an Age,
Worthy t’have not remain’d so long unsung. (1.1–17)The lines “inspire, / As thou art wont” suggests that his new confidence stems from
his experience of the Spirit’s aid in his long epic and his sense of that aid continuing
in this “prompted” song, which would be “else mute.” It may owe something as
well to the greater familiarity of the new locale – the fallen world of history, not the
eternal places. Here the Miltonic Bard records what happens, what is said, what
seems to be the case, but he does not often comment on speeches and scenes as he
did in Paradise Lost, having given over the role of authoritative critic and judge to
his hero, Jesus.
The epic proposition makes the rather startling claim that this poem treats a
vastly more noble and heroic subject than Paradise Lost, whose hero conquers his
enemy, regains the regions lost to Satan, and establishes his own realm – in this,
more like Aeneas than like Adam. These opening lines allude to the verses, then
widely accepted as genuine, that introduce the Aeneid in most Renaissance edi-
tions, supposedly announcing Virgil’s movement from pastoral and georgic to an
epic subject.^108 That echo and the reference to Paradise Lost as a poem about a happy
garden suggest, with witty audacity, that Milton has now, like Virgil, graduated
from pastoral apprentice-work to the true epic subject, the spiritual warfare and
victory of Jesus. Also, several allusions to the Book of Job suggest that Milton is
now carrying out a poetic project he imagined a quarter of a century earlier in the
Reason of Church-governement, when he proposed Virgil and Tasso as models for a
long epic and the Book of Job as a “brief model” (CPW I, 813). This poem is in
part shaped by the exegetical tradition that interpreted Job as epic, and also by the
long tradition of biblical “brief epics” in three or four books, in Latin and in the
vernacular literatures.^109
Milton reworked and adapted epic conventions and topics to his unusual subject.
He transformed the central epic episode, the single combat of hero and antagonist,
into a three-day verbal battle, a poem-long intellectual and moral struggle. The
poem begins in medias res with Christ’s baptism. There are two Infernal Councils
(held in mid-air rather than Hell because Satan has now gained that region), and a
Council in Heaven in which God prophesies his Son’s immediate and ultimate
victory over Satan. Also, there are two transformed epic recitals – Christ’s medita-
tion about his youthful experiences and aspirations, and Mary’s reminiscenses about
the prophecies and promises attending the hero’s early life – as well as a transformed