The Life of the Author: John Milton - Richard Bradford

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him to be remembered to this day but a poem by Milton on both called ‘Lycidas’. The piece was commissioned by John Alsop, a Fellow of Christ’s, as part of the collection of commemorative verses entitled Obsequies for Edward King, lost at sea …. The other twelve verses have largely been forgotten but ‘Lycidas’ became a literary event in its own right and is, after Paradise Lost, Milton’s most complex, puzzling and intensely scrutinised poem. It is, ostensibly and as required, a memorial to King, but its real subject is its author. It has frequently been compared with a piece of music, not because it was intended for song but as a consequence of its curious and unpredictable shifts in tone, subject and perspective. Some found this to be an anticipation of changing harmonies of the symphony (Nicolson, 1971, p. 105), but in truth it bears a closer resemblance to the radical, modernist literary technique of constantly altering the style and the perceived speaking presence of the text. King’s death is its starting point but thereafter it takes us through reflections on the nature of poetry, the complexities of religious belief, and political and theological conflict, all of which are interwoven with intimations of something terrible and apocalyptic about to happen. The question why Milton produced such a strange piece of work can best be addressed by treating it as an allegory. While Milton’s memorial to King is sincere enough it also serves as a pretext for exploring the world from which the latter had recently departed.

      In the middle of the poem Milton takes us to the banks of the ‘Camus’ (103), the Latin name for the Cam. Earlier in the piece Cambridge had been introduced as the intellectual home of King and Milton but this time we return there to address a religious and political agenda. Suddenly we are introduced to ‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ (109) who bears ‘Two massy keys … of metal twain’. This is an allusion to St Peter, to whom Christ gave the symbolic keys of the true church; it was the central divisive issue of the Reformation. The Papacy was regarded by Roman Catholics as the legacy of St Peter, its authority licensed by Christ, while many Protestants treated Rome as the corrupt usurper of Christ’s word. Cambridge, as we have seen, had by this time become a microcosm of this dispute and the Anglo-Catholics who by 1637 gained control of the city, and of the Church of England, are introduced as the ‘Blind mouths’. In 1865, in his (Sesame and Lilies, I, p. 22), John Ruskin offered the most enduring explanation of this image: ‘A “Bishop” means “a person who sees”. A “Pastor” means “a person who feeds”’ he argued, and concluded that ‘Blind mouths’ refers to the higher clergy of the Laudian church who deserved neither the title of bishop, since they had blinded themselves to Christian truth, nor the generic term pastor since they were greedy and corrupt. Milton says, they:

      (119–20)

      They are not the shepherd pastors who would care for their flock, but hedonists more concerned with the ‘lean and flashy songs’ of high ceremony. ‘The hungry sheep’ (125) have already become prey to ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ (125) – the Roman Catholic Church – who ‘Daily devours apace, and nothing said’ (129). But Milton warns that the

      … two handed-engine at the door,Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

      (130–1)

      The general consensus is that this instrument is the broadsword or axe that will be wielded by Protestantism against the Anglo-Catholic hierarchy, a shrewd diagnosis of the tensions that within five years would lead to Civil War.

      Aside from the poems and the brief enigmatic letters, all that remain from Milton’s reclusive period are his Commonplace Books in which he made notes on the vast range of material he scrutinised. These amounted to an index in prose, a sequence of comments by Milton on all he had read, listed according to his own subject-classifications. Under ‘Ethical’ are specified the subcategories of ‘moral evil’, ‘avarice’, ‘gluttony’, ‘suicide’, ‘curiosity’, ‘music’, ‘sloth’, ‘lying’ and ‘knowledge of literature’. It is intriguing that he associates literature and music, if only by implication, with issues that are by their nature fundamental and all-encompassing. By comparison, matters ‘Economic’ involve ‘food’, ‘conduct’, ‘matrimony’, ‘the education of children’, ‘poverty’, ‘alms’ and ‘usury’, and in the ‘Political’ section we encounter ‘state’, ‘kings’, ‘subjects’, ‘nobility’, ‘property and taxes’, ‘plague’, ‘athletic games’ and ‘public shows’. Notably, the pragmatics and diversions of existence (‘poverty’, ‘kings’, ‘subjects’, ‘matrimony’, ‘athletic games’, ‘public shows’) belong in separate – and dare one say, lesser? – categories while ‘knowledge of literature’ is part of the field of ethics. This is quite a radical perception of what literature – and in this regard literature involved almost exclusively poetry – meant. Even its more enthusiastic champions during the Renaissance conceded that verse was an entertaining subsidiary to such serious discourses as philosophy and theology.

      He was forming opinions, based on a regime of evaluative research, but for what purpose? He did not even hint at what his particular ambition or vocation might be but, in the manner of closing a circle, consider his apparent elevation of poetry to a state of intellectual significance in relation to his unorthodox comments on the church, marriage, kingship et al. and then look at his reflections on Dante’s notions of choice and fate: ‘The nature of each person should be especially observed and not bent in another direction; for God does not intend all people for one thing, but each one for his own work’ (CPW, I, p. 405). This is, admittedly, enigmatic but with hindsight it is possible to interpret it as an attempt by Milton to reconcile his undoubted talent, as a poet, with his deeply felt religious, political and social opinions. How might he harness the latter to the former? Political poets were, at the time, an unknown quantity. Later, however, apocalyptic events would force Milton’s affiliations together.

      He had become aware that his programme of self-absorbed reading and study must soon end (see ‘Letter to a Friend,’ CPW I, p. 319), but he was not certain of what would follow it. Briefly, he took rooms at the Inns of Court, presumably with thoughts of following his brother into the legal profession; but he stayed there only for a few weeks. It is likely that his studies of the history of the civilised world had reached a natural conclusion. He now confronted the present day and what he saw caused him to think again about his role, his duty. As a poet, in ‘Lycidas’, he presented the reader with a vision of uncertainty, possibly catastrophe. The tensions between the London-based Anglo-Catholic hierarchy and their pro-Calvinist counterparts in Scotland had moved beyond theological debate and would, in 1639, spill over into military conflicts – brief and inconclusive but anticipatory of the Civil War.

      What did Milton do? He chose to go abroad, to Europe. This decision might appear symptomatic of at best self-possession and at worst indifference, but it was quite the opposite. The intellectual, political, religious divisions of England had their origins further south: Calvinism, Catholicism, the Renaissance fabric of intellectual and aesthetic radicalism, were the products of Continental Europe. Milton, in order to become fully aware of what he could contribute to the condition of his homeland, first needed to encounter its influences.

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