ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
paraphrase the quieter Psalm 23), nor the exuberant erotics apparent in Milton’s
decision to gender the landscape by adding “Ewes” to the Biblical original and
then to make them the Rams’ mates, their possession. High and huge-bellied, as
if about to give birth, the mountain seems almost a fanciful projection of poetic
expectation. And yet, of course, Milton would also become, broadly speaking,
the other great religious poet of the seventeenth century, the eventual author of
Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671).
As Moseley recognized, Milton’s initial collection ought to be read not in
light of Herbert but Spenser, “whose Poems in these English ones are as rarely
imitated, as Sweetly excell’d.” There is some irony in Moseley’s proclaiming a
patriotic love of “our own language” as a chief reason to publish a collection of
verse as conspicuously cosmopolitan as Milton’s: the neo-Latin poetry
constitutes an important “half” of the volume, as Stella Revard has recently
emphasized, the two forming a “double book” describing Milton’s sophisticated
literary aspirations. 3 But Moseley’s notion of Milton’s imitating and excelling,
indeed his notion of Milton’s “sweetly” excelling the work of another English
poet remembered especially for his long unfinished epic, is right on target. It
points to Milton’s ambitious musicality, to the varied but fruitful courtship of
“Voice and Verse”—to quote from “At a Solemn Music”—that is inspirationally
central to the collection as a whole and one of the chief features differentiating
it from its many Caroline counterparts. Here, for instance, is Milton in the poem
alluded to above. Composed when he was about twenty-five, it is short enough
to quote in full and yet, in its upward phrasal sweep and grandly suspended
clause, seemingly resistant to notions of closure. It is probably only right, too,
that a first quotation from Milton should be from a work with “solemn” in the
title. The word means both “serious” and “dignified,” retaining its earlier
associations with the sacred and the ceremonial but now given, in the poem, an
apocalyptic emphasis, especially in the image of the saints singing around the
bejeweled throne (a fusion of Ezekiel 1:26 with Revelation 14:3–4) and in the
splendid, concluding alexandrine:
Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav’n’s joy,
Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce,
And to our high-rais’d fantasy present
That undisturbed Song of pure concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-color’d throne
To him that sits thereon,
With Saintly shout and solemn Jubilee,
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow,
And the Cherubic host in thousand choirs
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,
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