ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
by Lawes specifies, “not openly acknowledg’d by the Author.” (Milton was still
part of the genteel tradition, even if he was not part of the court.) And when
the two works were printed together in 1645, Milton drew attention to their
comparable status by allowing “Lycidas” to be the last word among the English
poems but endowing A Mask with its own title page and separate identity as a
literary achievement, replete with commendatory letters not only from Henry
Lawes but also Sir Henry Wotton, the former ambassador to Venice and current
Provost of Eton.
To some degree, it is as a “separate work” and as a “last word” that these two
performances speak most powerfully (although “last” in Milton almost always
includes predicating a future, and “separate” still involves interconnections with
other works). “Lycidas” emerged after nearly three years of complete silence—
two years and ten months to be exact. Indeed, so far as we know, except for
translating Psalm 114 into Greek heroic meter—the same Psalm 114 he had
paraphrased at age fifteen—Milton did not write any poetry between A Mask
and “Lycidas.” The usual explanation given is that during this time Milton had
embarked on a program of “relentless study” at Horton, a period that saw him
managing to defer a career in the clergy, against his father’s wishes, while also
preparing for some yet unspecified task. This preparation included voluminous
reading (and note-taking in Greek, Italian, and Latin, no less) in Dante,
Boccaccio, and Ariosto, but mostly in history, especially Church history and the
writings of the early Fathers, whom Milton came to view with increasing
distrust. 22
Without devaluing either the importance of this extended act of selfcloistering
on Milton’s part (far different in spirit from Donne’s forced
retirement) or its significance in arming the poet for a future life as a polemicist,
it seems also the case that the nearly three years of studying was enabled by the
comprehensive success of A Mask, not success in a commercial sense, but in
other more valuable ways for Milton, and that a significant respite was therefore
at least possible if not absolutely in order. Simply receiving the commission was
itself an unusual honor. The purpose of the masque was to celebrate the
appointment, made several years earlier, of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as
Lord President of Wales, and it allowed Milton as well the chance to collaborate
with Henry Lawes, the royal musician. (Perhaps an acquaintance of Milton’s
father, Lawes was possibly responsible for introducing the young Milton to the
world of nobility; but the precise details that might explain how Milton became
connected to the Egerton household or to that of the Countess of Derby,
celebrated in the fragment from Arcades, continue to elude Milton scholars.) 23
The occasion also provided Milton with the opportunity to draw together—
and to amplify—a number of themes and ideas explored in the earlier poetry.
Recent scholarship has attended so thoroughly to the circumstantial dimensions
potentially affecting production and subject matter, including the possible muted
connections to the notorious Castlehaven scandal of 1631, in which Egerton’s
brother-in-law, Mervyn Touchet, Lord Audley, was tried on a number of counts
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