ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Music” the image of God’s creatures standing in “obedience” in their state of
good, able to sing in “perfect Diapason” to their “Lord,” anticipates the perfect
harmony of Adam and Eve before the fall in Paradise Lost; or even more subtly
at a structural level the uncanny way in which, exactly three-quarters of the way
through this poem (in line 21 of 28), the “fair music” is broken, just as in the
epic paradise is lost three-quarters of the way through the poem (in book 9 of
the 12 in the 1674 edition). Nor would that contemporary be in a position to
chart the many concerns elsewhere in the volume as they reappear in amplified
form down the road: the silencing of the pagan oracles in the Nativity Ode and
the expulsion of the fallen angels from heaven in Paradise Lost; the temptation
of the Lady in A Mask and the temptation of Jesus in Paradise Regained; the
personal anxiety expressed over vocational direction in the sonnet written in his
twenty-third year, “How soon hath time,” and Samson’s incessant worries over
his calling in Samson Agonistes.
One could go on almost indefinitely reading the later verse in light of this
first collection, refining points of connection, noting major and minor
alternations and expansions, and eventually confirming, in retrospect, a view of
this volume as evidence of “The Rising Poet”—to quote the title of Louis Martz’s
still influential essay 6 —with “Lycidas” being accorded a climactic place in this
scenario. English poetry’s greatest iconoclast is also a poet of great continuity.
(The repeated adjective seems unavoidable.) And a “long view” ensures, in turn,
not just the lyrical Milton, but his first collection of verse, a unique place in
literary history. No poet’s “juvenilia” from the seventeenth century—to borrow
Samuel Johnson’s barely adequate description of early Milton up through
Poems 7 —indeed, perhaps no poet’s “juvenilia” in English has seemed so
substantial an indication not simply of future promise (a theme Milton reiterated
in the prose from his middle years when he was writing little poetry) but of
present accomplishment as well.
In all likelihood, however, a contemporary reader’s first response to Milton’s
Poems would not have been one of simple admiration but one of puzzled surprise.
It might have even included irritation over a sense of entrapment by the
venturesome Moseley for luring customers with a title page nearly identical in
appearance to the one the publisher had just used for another Caroline
lookalike: the best-selling Poems by Edmund Waller, which went through three
editions in 1645 alone. (Copies of Milton’s would remain unsold into the
Restoration.) The resemblances on the title page continue in the references in
each to the “Songs set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lawes Gentleman of the Kings
Chappel, and one of his Majesties Private” musicians. But appearances are
deceiving. Milton’s “book” is no more accurately represented by its Caroline
cover than the author himself by the accompanying engraving by William
Marshall. (Milton ridiculed the portrait in Greek verse placed just below the
engraving.) Where Waller’s Poems follows the formula for genteel verse almost
to the letter, Milton’s, beginning with the truculent verse in Greek under his
own portrait, questions conventional displays of geniality almost from the start.
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