O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first-created beam, and thou great word,
Let there be light, and light was over all;
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.Milton’s self-vindication turns Scripture and tragedy into autobiography. For
example, Dalilah betraying Samson to the Philistines recalls the first Mrs Milton.
Finally the persecuted hero pulls down the temple, slaying all his foes at once: ‘the
world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight’ (Marvell). The last chorus, both Greek and
Christian, begins: ‘All is best, though we oft doubt / What the unsearchable dispose
/ Of highest wisdom brings about’. It ends:His servants he with new acquist
Oftrue experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind,all passion spent.Milton left an example to English poets of dedication and mastery, but also of
passionate self-assertion.nThe Restoration
The restor ed monarchy inaugurated a new temper, and a cultural style which lasted.
Although things sobered up under King William, Congreve’s The Way of the World
(1700) is still a ‘Restoration comedy’. Charles II’s return gave literature chances it had
not had for eighteen years. The theatres opened, determined to reject Puritan
earnestness. The king’s friends came back from France with a more secular, sceptical
and ‘civilized’ tone, and neo-classical ideas. The Church of England was re-
established. Charles patronized the Royal Society, the Royal Observatory, the theatre
and the opera. In 1665–6 the Plague and the Great Fire destroyed much of London.
Sir Christopher Wren designed fifty-one new churches; his St Paul’s Cathedral was
co mpleted in 1709. London ‘society’ took shape in the new quarter of St James’s. Tea,
coffee and chocolate were drunk in places of public recreation. Horse-racing became
a fixture in a social calendar. It became ‘civilized’ for men to be agreeable, not to
converse on religion and politics, and to speak gallantly of ‘the fair sex’.
There were wars with Protestant Holland, then with Catholic France. The expul-
sion in 1688 of James II, Charles II’s Catholic brother, led to the exclusion by Act of
Parliament of Catholics from the succession. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church
was established by law; had the monarch come north, he or she would change
religion as he crossed the border (as today). Monarchy was limited by Parliament,
and the City’s commercial interests; the wounds of the Civil War slowly healed. The
governmental balance struck in the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 prevailed in
England until the extension of the franchise in the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
Writing took its tone not from the Court but from a polite society defined by rank,162 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700