ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,
Hymns devout and holy Psalms
Singing everlastingly;
That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion’d sin
Jarr’d against nature’s chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience and their state of good.
O may we soon again renew that Song,
And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long
To his celestial consort us unite,
To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.
As a verbal performance intended to capture a sense of the religious uplift
associated with singing at its most sublime, the poem is a tour de force. Phrase
seemingly grows out of phrase, sound out of sound, in the manner of a single
sustained, spontaneous utterance—a poem very much composed by someone
with music in his blood, not just in his head. (Milton’s father, writes Aubrey,
was “an ingenious man, delighted in music, [and] composed many songs now in
print, especially that of Oriana.”) 4 And yet, of course, the poem is highly artful
in structure. The double octave of the first sixteen lines, imagined as being sung
in heaven, is “answered” by a diminished half in the single octave as sung on
earth, with the transition occurring when “the high-rais’d fantasy” seems, in fact,
at its highest pitch: the moment when the phrase “Singing everlastingly” toys
with the fantasy of the voice being released altogether from the bondage of
rhyme. Rhyming “everlastingly” with “Jubilee,” seven lines earlier, represents the
greatest stretch in a poem otherwise written exclusively in couplets or
alternating rhyme; and, to some degree, in this suspension, we can even glimpse
the history of Milton’s evolution as a poet: the full shift to “Singing
everlastingly,” or nearly so, being realized in the great blank verse of Paradise
Lost. But even in this instance, it is difficult not to feel—and the emotive verb
is deliberately chosen—the energy of the Miltonic line at work, and with it, the
expressive power of voice as an efficacious means to make something happen:
in this case, to bring in a future of endless singing. If “power ceases in the instant
of repose,” as Emerson once said, Milton concludes by imagining his way around
this problem altogether. 5
A contemporary coming upon “At a Solemn Music” in a bookstall in 1645
would not, of course, have the benefit of a “long” view of this poem or the
volume as a whole and therefore would not be able to spot the acorns from
which the later oaks would eventually grow: not simply the blank verse of the
later epics emerging between the rhymes, but how, for instance, in “At a Solemn
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