June 23, 2022 39Straight toward Heaven my won-
dering eyes I turned,
And gazed awhile the ample sky,
till raised
By quick instinctive motion up I
sprung....
“Thou sun,” said I, “fair light,
And thou enlightened Earth, so
fresh and gay,
Ye hills and dales, ye rivers,
woods, and plains,
And ye that live and move, fair
creatures, tell,
Te l l , if ye saw, how came I thus,
how here?
Not of myself; by some great
Maker then,
In goodness and in power
preeminent;
Tell me, how may I know him,
how adore,
From whom I have that thus I
move and live
And feel that I am happier than I
know.”When Eve awakens to existence, she
possesses the same quick, questioning
native intelligence as Adam, but finds a
fit object for contemplation and praise
faster and closer to home:That day I oft remember when
from sleep
I first awaked and found myself
reposed
Under a shade on flowers, much
wondering where
And what I was, whence thither
brought and how.
Not distant far from thence a
murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave and
spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood
unmoved
Pure as the expanse of Heaven. I
thither went
With unexperienced thought and
laid me down
On the green bank to look into the
clear
Smooth lake that to me seemed
another sky.
As I bent down to look, just
opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam
appeared
Bending to look on me; I started
back;
It started back. But pleased I soon
returned;
Pleased it returned as soon with
answering looks
Of sympathy and love.Critics have made much of the contrast
between Adam’s heaven- directed eye
and Eve’s downward, self- delighted
gaze, but the meaning of that differ-
ence isn’t altogether obvious in the po-
em’s prelapsarian world. For if Eve is
Narcissus- like in her fascination with
her own image, she is also Godlike in
that respect—or, as Milton’s nonchro-
nological narrative design teases us to
think, perhaps God is Eve- like.
By concentrating on the significance
each story has in the unfallen world,
Harrison avoids having to rehearse
the hackneyed question of how much
we ought to worry about Eve’s self-
absorption or Adam’s self- esteem;
what interests him instead is how Mil-
ton depicts, in fine linguistic detail,
the dawning of an individual sense of
being in the world. The pleating of self-
awareness registered in the reflexivesyntax of Adam’s “I found me laid” and
Eve’s “I... found myself reposed”; the
perceptual gains and losses incurred
by the advance of understanding (Eve
soon learns to see the lake as a lake and
not “another sky,” just as she learns to
see her reflection as a watery image and
not an ideal companion); the gradual
layering of narrative form on the raw
material of experience, tantalizingly
implicit in Eve’s use of the word “oft,”
an adverb that suggestively extends the
timeline of prelapsarian existence to
encompass the development of habits,
and a sense of oneself as a creature of
them; the inchoate theory of mind em-
bedded in Adam’s request that Eden’s
animal inhabitants “tell, if ye saw, how
came I thus”: again and again, Mil-
ton’s—and Harrison’s—minute atten-
tion to the fashioning of each blank
verse line pays off in startling insights
into the texture of what Milton’s con-
temporaries were just beginning to call
consciousness.“Milton’s song of innocence is, si-
multaneously, a song of experience,”
Harrison writes. Indeed, in contrast
with the splendidly inquisitive char-
acter of the unfallen Adam and Eve,
Satan’s airy dismissal of the very idea
of being created—“We know no time
when we were not as now,” he declares
to the host of rebel angels—starts to
sound less brave than boring, a telling
failure of the fallen imagination. It’s an
insight that resonates with Kadue’s in-
terest in the variety and ongoingness of
prelapsarian existence: there is more to
the story of what came before.
The same might be said of Milton’s
own life, according to two of the new-
est additions to the immense corpus
of biographies. Miles apart in method
and style, Nicholas McDowell’s Poet
of Revolution, the first of a planned
two- volume set, and Joe Moshenska’s
Making Darkness Light are joined by
a shared focus on the uneventful and
protracted course of Milton’s youth.
This is Milton’s age of innocence: be-
fore he was either a political revolution-
ary or an epic poet; before the scandal
of his writings on divorce and regicide;
before the civil war and the execution
of Charles I; before his appointment
as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary; before
blindness; before the collapse of the
republic and the heartbreak of the Res-
toration; before Paradise Lost, Para-
dise Regained, and Samson Agonistes
established him in his final decade as
the undisputed heir to Homer and
Virgil, Dante and Tasso, Chaucer and
Spenser.
The question has always been how he
got there—and why it took so long. The
first three decades of Milton’s life, from
his birth in London’s Bread Street in
1608 to his departure for an extended
tour of the Continent in 1638, were not
simply calm but becalmed, marked by a
peculiar intensity of ambition and aim-
lessness. The eve of his thirtieth birth-
day found him still living at home with
his recently widowed father, now in
the London suburb of Horton, having
acquired both a BA and an MA from
Cambridge but lacking any clear plan
for employment, marriage, or life be-
yond the confines of the family home.
He wasn’t by any means idle: having
decided at some point in his twenties
against a career in the church—the
obvious place for a man of his educa-
tion and abilities—he threw himselfinstead into a rigorous, capacious, and
seemingly boundless course of private
study, devouring any ancient and mod-
ern work he could get his hands on, fill-
ing the pages of commonplace books
with notes on his reading and ideas for
future literary productions of his own,
trying his hand at an array of English
and Latin verse forms, from devotional
poems to funeral elegies, sonnets, odes,
and even a full- scale court masque,
written for the Earl of Bridgewater. But
to what imagined end?
McDowell’s Poet of Revolution is a
Miltonist’s life of Milton; for him the
crucial question is the one that has de-
fined and divided Milton scholarship
from the beginning, the question of
politics:How and why did John Milton, the
obscure occasional poet who took
an oath pledging his allegiance to
the episcopal Church of England
and the Stuart monarch in Cam-
bridge in 1632, and who mainly
employed himself during the 1640s
as a private tutor, become the in-
famous defender of regicide and
propagandist for the republican
governments of the 1650s whose
books were burned for their capac-
ity to “lead to Rebellion, murther
of Princes, and Atheism itself”?Early lives of Milton—according to
Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns,
there were five accounts already in cir-
culation by the end of the seventeenth
century—treated this question as a
moral diagnosis: depending on one’s
own political leanings, Milton was ei-
ther a born champion of human free-
dom or the inveterate enemy of order
and decency.
In more recent times, however, Mil-
ton biographers have been divided not
on the righteousness of his cause but
on the duration of his commitment to
it. There are those like A. S. P. Wood-
house, Christopher Hill, and Barbara
Lewalski, for whom Milton is the Puri-
tan poet par excellence, whose father’s
disinheritance by his Catholic grandfa-
ther became a foundation for his politi-
cal and religious radicalism—a Milton,
as McDowell writes, “always already
on the path to becoming a fully wea-
ponized Puritan revolutionary.” The
trouble with this view, dominant for
most of the twentieth century, is that
there’s very little concrete evidence for
it—and in their revisionist 2008 biogra-
phy, Campbell and Corns argued that
it got what evidence there was entirely
wrong. Their Milton was “a contented
Laudian both in his personal loyalties
and in his theology”—not a youthful
firebrand but the reverse, a supporter
of the liturgical ceremonialism and
strict episcopal governance of Charles
I’s archbishop, William Laud.
For his part, McDowell believes
that both sides have missed the point:
whatever Milton thought at various
moments in his youth about predesti-
nation, liturgy, or church governance,
those convictions didn’t guide his ac-
tions or shape his identity. From the age
of seven to the age of twenty- four, Mil-
ton spent much of his time in the class-
room, first at St. Paul’s School and then
at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the
vast majority of that time was devoted
to the cultivation of rhetorical skill.
Like every Renaissance schoolboy and
university scholar, he was taught to re-
gard persuasive utterance in prose andverse as a quasi- divine faculty, capable
of swaying the hearts of princes, direct-
ing the course of empires, and tuning
the music of the spheres. Rather un-
usually, he appears to have taken such
commonplaces literally. If the young
Milton believed anything, McDowell
argues, it was this: that eloquence and
erudition were the twin prerequisites of
greatness, and that any effort expended
in the cultivation of such gifts would
surely be rewarded, if not in this world
then in the world to come.
As McDowell reminds readers, it
isn’t just Milton’s modern biographers
who have been perplexed by the inten-
sity of his commitment to this creed. In
a 1633 letter to an unknown correspon-
dent, possibly his former tutor Thomas
Young, Milton labors to explain why,
having received his MA in 1632, after
seven years at university, he promptly
returned home to read and study some
more. Anxiously parrying the charge
that he is squandering his time and
his expensive training, “dream[ing]
away my Yeares in the arms of studi-
ous retirement like Endymion with the
Moone,” he rifles his bookshelf for ci-
tations in support of “tardie moving.”
He finds an unlikely proof in the par-
able of the talents, reading Christ’s
judgment against the unprofitable ser-
vant who buries his God- given gifts as
a paradoxical injunction not to “take
thought of being late, so it give advan-
tage to be more fit.” In this against- the-
grain interpretation—an early instance
of his free hand with Scripture—delay
is a down payment on future success.
“Milton’s continued obscurity is in fact
an investment,” McDowell writes, and
his apparent slackness a form of good
stewardship, “exemplifying ‘due and
timely obedience’” to the will of God
and his own poetic calling.That simmering, nervy sense of possi-
bility is an aspect of Milton’s sensibil-
ity to which Moshenska’s freer, almost
novelistic account of the poet’s life is
exceptionally well attuned. In an el-
egantly crafted series of meditations,
each keyed to a single date and text,
his Making Darkness Light tracks the
stuttering progress of the poet’s career
across days and decades, at home and
abroad. A careful reader of other Mil-
ton biographies, from the seventeenth
century to the twenty- first, Moshenska
engages dutifully with the genre’s req-
uisite puzzles, but he allows familiar
scholarly queries about the origins of
Milton’s political radicalism or the
nature of his religious commitments
to be joined and jostled by a host of
what he calls “weirder, less respectable
questions”:What would it feel like to be di-
vinely inspired? What would it be
like to inhabit a mind capable of
recalling nearly everything that it
had experienced? What is it like to
compose more than ten thousand
lines of intricate verse while blind?And in the first two of the book’s three
parts, which concentrate on Milton’s
childhood, college, and postcollege
years, he turns again and again to the
problem of vocation, “in its literal and
etymological sense”: “What was Mil-
ton called to do and to be?”
Whatever their ostensible theme—
the birth of Christ, the virtues of an aris-
tocratic family in Wales, the untimelyNicholson 38 40 .indd 39 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 31 PM