ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Suggestive phrases like “linked sweetness,” “wanton heed,” and “giddy cunning,”
following quickly on the heels of the speaker’s wish to be “Married to immortal
verse,” draw out the linked, wanton, cunning pleasures of the poetry itself. And
“Il Penseroso” expresses a form of religious ecstasy that has as little in common
with the apocalyptic claims made in the Ode in 1629 as it does with the antiprelatical
Milton of 1645. Walking “the studious Cloister’s pale,” loving “the
high embowed Roof”: these are just the kind of religious habits Milton
relentlessly criticizes in the prose as spiritually anemic and “superstitious.”
As tricky as these poems are as single or twinned utterances—and the fluidity
of Milton’s tetrameter verse almost defies the best analysis 15 —they possess an
equally tricky place in critical attempts aimed at delineating Milton’s career
along a single axis. Do they together represent what Milton left behind, much
to the special regret of many eighteenth-century readers like H.J.Todd, who drew
from these poems proof that “no man was ever so disqualified to turn puritan as
Milton”? 16 Or are they evidence, once again, that Milton did not always practice
what he preached? Or should we regard their appearance in 1645 as reinforcing
a distinction Milton had recently emphasized in The Reason of Church
Government when he memorably assigned works written in prose to the “left
hand” and those written in poetry to the “right”? Or do they point to a deeper
and perhaps irresolvable rift in Milton between the latitudinarian and the
authoritarian: the Milton willing to think laterally and spaciously and encoding
that belief in a persona who moves effortlessly across the landscape, pleased by
what he sees, imagining free access to “upland Hamlets,” “Tow’red Cities,” and
masques and pageants alike (in “L’Allegro”); or the longitudinal Milton,
indifferent to the “rhubarbarians,” Seamus Heaney’s borrowed term for those
“crying out against the mystification of art and its appropriation by the grandees
of aesthetics” 17 —the Milton of “Il Penseroso” who imagines his “Lamp at
midnight hour/Be[ing] seen in some high lonely Tow’r,/Where I may oft
outwatch the Bear” (Il. 85–8)?
“How soon hath time”: Sonnet 7
It is in the spirit of these “sportive” companion poems to raise more questions
than they answer about the “proper” subject of poetry. They are twin products
of myth making, not history, and at the very least their presence reminds the
reader that there is more than one Milton even in 1645. Much of their appeal,
in fact, is to keep at arm’s length issues treated with utmost gravity elsewhere
in Milton—and with some personal anxiety, as in the best-known sonnet from
Poems, “How soon hath Time.” Although Johnson was quick to dismiss these
“little pieces…without much anxiety” 18 —meaning all twenty-three of Milton’s
sonnets written over a twenty-year period, including the now canonical late
ones like “Avenge O Lord,” “When I Consider,” and “Methought I Saw”—
Milton found the sonnet hospitable for exploring a range of subjects and
attitudes, not just the amatory matters of a Nightingale—a topic that might
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