ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
angelic choir, the next nine the flight of the heathen gods. The conclusion, the
last stanza, presents the scene in the stable.” 9 Once this information is grasped,
it seems equally important not to be bound by an overview that might prevent
the manifold “signs” of sound from reverberating—the often splendid images of
singing that recur, wrapped into the sonorous sweep of the metrically varied
poetic line:
Such Music (as ’tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator Great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanc’t world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the welt’ring waves their oozy channel keep.
165
(ll. 117–24)
The distinction between singing and writing keeps being blurred in this poem;
the playful sounds well up in the mouth, wanting to be realized, released,
through acts of speech that are sometimes more, sometimes less, than melodic.
If the birth of Jesus is accompanied by a “Divinely-warbled voice/Answering the
stringed noise” (ll. 96–7), then later the “trump of doom” is announced with an
ear-splitting “horrid clang/As on mount Sinai rang” (ll. 157–8). As for the pagan
gods, we only imagine their being silenced by the “Word.” In the poem, Milton
reveals them as disenchanted, “charmed” by a greater power but still audible,
now made the subject of every strange and alluring gothic sound imaginable:
The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flow’r-inwov’n tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
(ll. 181–8)
This is the parting music that Keats would remake into the “Ode to Psyche.”
Such imagined acts of ventriloquism on Milton’s part can be sorted into
moral categories. Indeed, the poem insists that this “dividing” action—to
borrow Sanford Budick’s phrase—is being carried out under our eyes, with one
party exiting while the other is entering. 10 But if celebration is real, cessation
is also a necessary fiction, not only because the Day of Doom remains in the
distance or because, as Budick points out, the alternative modes spell out “a