ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
highly specified theological reality.” In 1629, Milton wants to play both parts
to the verbal hilt—that of “the parting Genius” as well as the Herculean
Jesus—and even to invite us to smile in the process: “Our Babe, to show his
Godhead true,/Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.” In
Milton, humor almost always belongs to the triumphant; in this case it may
also be free of derision.
Expressive and expansive, the Nativity Ode is marked as a double
annunciation from the outset: “This is the Month, and this the happy morn”
reads the first line of the poem. The birth of the Word inspires a jubilant echo
some sixteen hundred years later, in what is both an act of homage and an
opportunity for recognition—for visibility, as the proem makes unabashedly
clear:
See how from far upon the Eastern road
The Star-led Wizards haste with odors sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet,
Have thou the honor first, thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the Angel Choir,
From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow’d fire.
166
(ll. 22–8)
Dating the composition of the poem in 1629, as Milton does in 1645, has
also encouraged scholars to widen the orbit of references beyond the
boisterous autobiographical moment when a poet represents himself as a
latter-day Isaiah being “toucht with hallow’d fire.” The expression of
Messianic sentiments in the middle of the hymn—the moment when,
through the force of “holy song,” Milton fancies that “Time will run back,
and fetch the age of gold”—has been interpreted as part of a larger antipapal
critique running through the poem and possibly aimed at the Caroline
court, 11 a criticism continued in the incipient Spenserian apocalypticism in
the figure of the dragon from Revelation 12:9 in Stanza 18. Again, Milton
calculates his stanza carefully, this time to signal the threatening power of
the dragon that persists into the present in the menacing sway of the
alexandrine at the stanza’s end:
And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th’old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And wroth to see his Kingdom fail,
Swinges the scaly Horror of his folded tail.