ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
a classic instance of Miltonic amplification at the conceptual and oral (as well
as aural) level: the single event of the birth of Christ radiating outward to the
Day of Judgment and beyond; the vision of the babe “all meanly wrapt” in the
rude manger setting off shock waves of rapture throughout the world and time.
Lyric is jubilantly calibrated to record the moment in its bold, spectral
significance:
It was the Winter wild,
While the Heav’n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to him
Had doff’t her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun, her lusty Paramour.
A new music—Spenserian sounding, the stanza is Milton’s own creation—a new
mood, indeed, a new mode of being accompanies the birth of the boy, perhaps
even a new politics: “Yea, Truth and Justice then/Will down return to men” (ll.
141–2). Years later, Milton will represent the single action of Eve in Paradise Lost
as the great deflationary moment of the epic: “she pluck’d, she eat.” But in 1629,
with youth very much on his side, the incarnation of Jesus resonates melodiously,
and authoritatively, through the universe:
But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of light
His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The Winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kiss’t,
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
164
(ll. 61–8)
“Charmed,” a disyllable, reminds us at the end of the latent power in the new
music even at its most peaceful: when “The Winds, with wonder whist.”
(Milton’s wordplay also allows for the wondrous possibility on this occasion that
the winds are both silenced—“whist”—and yet able to communicate—
“whispering”—their sense of joy.)
Earlier criticism, still recollected in the Hughes edition of Milton, rightly
worried about determining a “structure” for organizing these twenty-seven
stanzas, with Arthur Barker’s argument for a tripartite division, after the manner
of “Lycidas,” being the most widely accepted, “The first eight stanzas of the
‘Hymn,’” writes Barker, “describe the setting of the Nativity, the next nine the