ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Are at their savory dinner set
Of Herbs, and other Country Messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses.
163
(“L’Allegro,” ll. 81–6)
And there is an epigrammatist of the familiar (“On the University Carrier”) and
an experimenter with short odes on sacred topics (“On Time” and “Upon the
Circumcision”). The last mentioned hints at overlapping interests connecting
early Milton with his slightly younger Cambridge colleague, Richard Crashaw, a
link that has sometimes allowed both a place under that wide European umbrella
known as the Baroque.
What keeps the collection from being strictly courtly or mannerist in its
samplings is also, paradoxically, something that led Milton to abandon poetry
almost altogether in his middle years: a sense of an event or occasion as more
than an incident in the ongoing history of an individual life or culture. For
whatever different personal reasons—later the “causes” will be more overtly
public and include politically controversial issues like divorce, censorship, and
regicide—the birthday of Jesus, turning twenty-three, the comparative
enticements of the active and the contemplative lives, an opportunity to
entertain nobility, the death of a Cambridge classmate: these subjects or
occasions proved an irresistible challenge to Milton and were of an order quite
different from those involving, say, the circumcision of Jesus or a song on a May
morning. And if the poems associated with each seem almost random in the
aggregate—and especially perplexing for being so—they were important in the
particular, each springing from a different moment in time and set of
circumstances, and requiring of Milton a different set of responses, a different
kind of “song.” As Michael Wilding has recently observed, registering some
disappointment over the near-absence of a politically radical poet in this first
collection of verse, “the dominant concern is poetry itself and the pursuit of the
proper subject of poetry.” 8 With another poet, this potentially narcissistic angle
might signal a disabling limitation at the outset. But with Milton, it usually
marks, emphatically, a new beginning, a new way of imagining the past and the
future, and the self-balancing that accompanies sustained creative acts.
“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
“I am singing the starry sky and the hosts that sang high in air, and the gods
that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines,” wrote Milton in the month
and year of his twenty-first birthday to his friend Charles Diodati. Scholars
usually associate these remarks with “The Ode on the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity,” “compos’d 1629,” as Milton notes in Poems. But these comments and
the few others Milton made in the letter to Diodati are not adequate preparation
for the 244-line poem that inaugurates this first volume. A kind of sonic boom
in twenty-seven stanzas (after a four-stanza proem in rhyme royal), the poem is