ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev’n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-Master’s eye.
F.T.Prince’s fine remark in The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse that this sonnet
reflects the poet’s “new-found confidence” in his “grasp of the form” seems
specifically prompted by what Prince calls the “striking outburst” of parallelisms
in the sestet: 20 the feeling of gravity the measured phrasing gives to what is now
no longer a poem of personal reflection but a religious meditation suddenly
incorporating those Calvinist imponderables, predestination and grace. If Milton
has been influenced by Italian models of phrasing, however, he has partly
camouflaged that debt not only through a Protestant emphasis on grace but with
a diction as monosyllabically plain in its use of English as anything Herbert ever
wrote. In its sudden linguistic concentration, moreover, the sestet resonates with
meaning of a higher kind. Beginning with the indefinite “it”—most scholars
connect the referent to “inward ripeness”—and continuing in the expanding
syntax and allusions, the sestet empties the “occasional” from the poem: the
topical, the temporal, the twenty-three-year-old speaker. And in its place, it
plants at more than the grammatical level the single conditional “if”: the “if” of
“if I have grace to use it so,” then “All is.”
The turn toward the conditional in the sonnet is inseparable from a turn
toward a heroic conception of the self: heroic not just in the sense of the new
note of resolve that suddenly saturates the sestet but also in the sense of the
speaker’s imagining an instrumental role for himself in the cosmic scheme of
things. As Paradise Lost will later make explicit, Milton accepted a Calvinist
emphasis on the infusion of grace as a necessary condition of election, but he
also resisted the determinism underlying Calvin’s notion of predestination. (“If
I foreknew,/Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,” says Milton’s God,
addressing the fall of mankind in Paradise Lost 3:117–18.) In the sonnet, from
the speaker’s point of view, the challenge of the conditional is everything. How
to meet it remains unclear, or rather remains unspecified, but the sestet presents
a future for Milton’s “inward ripeness” to grow, and the future includes nothing
less than “all.”
By its own account, by its own strict measures of accounting, “How soon hath
time” is a pivotal poem in more than a structural sense. Milton, in fact, included
a copy of it in a revealing letter he wrote to a “friend” usually thought to be his
former teacher at St. Paul’s, the Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Young, who had
apparently accused him of dreaming away his “Yeares in the armes of studious
retirement like Endymion with the Moone as the tale of Latmus” goes. 21 And
Milton further highlighted the sonnet’s pivotal role in 1645 by placing it
immediately after the amatory sonnets and before the heroic sonnet beginning
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