Expectation and prematurity in Milton's Nativity Ode

Modern Philology

Volumn 97, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 195-216

  Quint, David ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950559700     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/492834     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. "Ay, me, I fondly dream!" the swain will cry out in Lycidas (line 56), as he hopes that poetry might grant an exemption from death. For commentary on On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, see Albert S. Cook, "Notes on Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (1909): 307-68;
2. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, A Varionim Commentary on the Poems of John Milton (New York, 1972), 2, pt. 1: 34-110;
3. and the notes of Winifred Maynard in John Milton, Odes, Pastorals, Masques, ed.John Broadbent (Cambridge, 1975), pp.6-44.
4. Some important critical treatments of the poem are Paul Fry, The Poet's Calling (New Haven, Conn., 1980), pp. 37-48;
5. J. B. Broadbent, "The Nativity Ode," in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1960), pp. 12-31;
6. Rosamund Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp.37-72;
7. Don Cameron Allen, The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry (1954; enlarged ed., Baltimore, 1970), pp. 24-40;
8. Arthur Barker, "The Pattern of Milton's Nativity Ode," University of Toronto Quarterly 10 (1941): 167-81.
9. I. S. MacLaren provides a bibliography of Criticism at the endof his "Milton's Nativity Ode: The Function of Poetry and Structures of Response in 1629 (with a Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Criticism)," Milton Studies 15 (1981): 181-200.
10. I Cite the texts of On the Morning of christ's Nativity and of other poetic works of Milton from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London, 1968).
11. I cite Milton's prose works from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York, 1931), hereafter referred to as Works.
12. For Milton's annotations, see Milton, Works, 18:311.
13. Stella Puree Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair (Columbia, Mo., 1997), pp. 64-90. Revard's arguments and my own overlap at several points; she is particularly intent on relating Apollo to the classicizing culture of Papal Rome.
14. On this lore, see Joseph Fontenrose, Python (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 70-93.
15. For the relation of the Python tradition to Spenser's Error, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of "The Faerie Queen" (Princeton, N.J., 1976), pp. 135-51;
16. Nohrnberg discusses Milton's use of Python in The Reason of Church Government on p. 145.
17. Milton, Works, 12: 147.
18. For the tradition of the silencing of the oracles, derived largely from a Christianizing reading of Plutarch's On the Obsolescence of Oracles, see C. A. Patrides, "The Cessation of the Oracles: The History of a Legend," Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 500-507.
19. Plutarch's treatise lies behind the reference to Christ as "the mighty Pan" at line 89. The silencing of the oracles is featured in Milton's more proximate model for On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Tasso's canzone, "Mira devotamente, alma pentita," lines 73-90, written to celebrate the crêche in the chapel of Sixtus V in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; see Torquato Tasso, Opere, ed. Bruno Maier, 5 vols. (Milan, 1963), 2: 412-17.
20. Milton, Works, 4: 338.
21. Natalis Comitis mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decem (Padua, 1616), p. 189.
22. See, esp., Mother M. Christopher Pecheux, "The Image of the Sun in Milton's Nativity Ode," Huntington Library Quarterly 38 (1973-74): 315-33.
23. For the tradition, see Franz Dolger, Sol Salutis (Münster, 1925).
24. Pecheux mistakenly asserted that Moloch is the one god in Milton's list of expelled pagan deities who does not have associations with cults of sun worship (p. 331). John Selden's De diis syris, Milton's source for the gods of the ancient Near East, argues that Moloch was a solar deity and assimilates him with Mithras; see Selden, De diis syria syntagmata II (Amsterdam, 1680), pp. 103-5. The one deity in Milton's list whom Selden does not treat as a sun god is Dagon, "that twice battered god of Palestine" (line 199).
25. Eduard Norden has studied this tradition, which could alternately place the birth of the sun on December 25 or January 6 (the Christian feast of Epiphany) and which Norden places behind the announcement of the birth of a wonder-child in Virgil's Fourth Edogue. See Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes (Leipzig, 1924), esp. pp. 14-50. Crashaw exploits the same tradition of the sun's birthday in his "Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie," published in 1648 and possibly written shortly earlier, where the pagan religions that Christianity will replace are characterized as solar cults. Compare the announcement of the end of the pagan rites (lines 85-86) to the silencing of the oracles in Milton's ode.
26. For a critical discussion, see George Walton Williams, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw (Columbia, S.C., 1963), pp.60-83. If Crashaw wrote his poem between the 1646 and 1648 editions of his Steps to the Temple, he could have known the Nativity Ode.
27. Milton, Works (n. 1 above), 3.1:343.
28. The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 1:354.
29. The relationships among Milton's works in this period are discussed in A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Notes on Milton's Early Development," University of Toronto Quarterly 13 (1943-44): 66-101.
30. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of "Paradise Lost" (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), PP. 38-56.
31. So E. M. W. Tillyard suggests in his appendix, "The Doctrine of Chastity in Milton," in Milton (1930; rev. ed., New York, 1967), pp. 318-26.
32. Tillyard, p. 323, links the shift in Milton's attitude toward sexuality with the Nativity Ode, and he further relates it, as I shall do, to the myth of the music of the spheres in the Second Prolusion. This literary- biographical scheme should not be drawn too neatly. Where, for example, does Elegy VII fit in this picture, the most erotic of Milton's Latin poems and one that seems to draw precisely on the Apollonian poetics he attributes to Diodati's verse in Elegy VI? It is dated by Milton to the same year as the Nativity Ode in the Poems of 1645. And L'Allegro celebrates the same festivity and "store of ladies" which the Diodati of Elegy VI is said to enjoy. The poetics of chastity represent one dimension, for some time dominant, but not exclusive, of the young Milton's literary thought and endeavors. On Milton's retirement at Horton, see J. Martin Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Bachuards in "Lycidas" (Victoria, B.C., 1983). Whether Milton actually made a Commitment to sexual abstinence has been recentlychallenged by John Leonard, "Milton's Vow of Celibacy:A Reconsideration of the Evidence," in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995), pp. 187-201. Leonard does not take into account Elegy VI.
33. For the tradition, see Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (1908; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1966), Pp. 96-106.
34. Charles G. Osgood ("Paradise Lost 9.506; Nativity Hymn 122-153," American Journal of Philology 41 [1920]: 76-80) draws attention to the fifth book of Lactantius's Divine Institutes for the identification of the Golden Age with the worship of Christianity itself.
35. A modern editor of the Eclogues suggests that Virgil has the Statesman passage in mind in the Fourth Eclogue when it predicts "the regression from Iron to Heroic to Golden Age." See the Eclogues, ed. Robert Coleman (Cambridge, 1977), p. 141,
36. Statesman, 270e, quoted from Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J., 1963), p. 1036. I am grateful to Michael Murrin for pointing this Platonic myth out to me.
37. See D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago, 1964).
38. Jean Daniélou, From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings, trans. Herbert Musurillo (New York, 1961), pp. 112-17, 273,
39. and Platonisme et Théologie Mystique (Paris, 1944), pp. 110-23.
40. See John O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (Durham, N.C., 1979), pp. 138-52;
41. and Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, md., 1985), pp. 314-19.
42. See Mario di Cesare, Vidas "Christiad" and Vergilian Epic (New York, 1964), pp. 222-23, 274-79;
43. The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote, D. D., 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1751), 1:239-40 (Discourse 14) and 1:388 (Discourse 23); for Whichcote's remarkable discussion of the relationships of these "principles" and grace, see 1:370-73 (Discourse 23).
44. A. N. Wilson makes some brief but indicative remarks on the intellectual climate of Milton's Cambridge in A Life of John Milton (1983; reprint, London, 1996), pp. 22-23.
45. See Ad Patrem, lines 30-37, where the poet looks forward to an eschatological heaven in which he will be singing antiphonally to the music of the spheres, only to claim that he already sings among the starry choirs; such song, the poem suggests (lines 56-66) blends his own poetic art with the music of his father. See Laurence Stapleton, 'Milton and the New Music," University of Toronto Quarterty 23 (1953-54): 217-26.
46. For At a Solemn Music, see John Hohlander, The Untuning of the Sky (1961; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 323-31.
47. Kerrigan, The Sacred complex, p.37.
48. See also William Kerrigan, "The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism," English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 125-66, for an astute discussion of the relationship of Milton's early interest in bodily assumption into heaven to his later embrace of mortalism, both, Kerrigan argues, ways to avoid the experience of the body's decay in death.
49. "Poetic anxiety implores the Muse for aid in divination, which means to foretell and put off as long as possible the poet's own death, as poet and (perhaps secondarily) as man. The poet of any guilt culture whatsoever cannot initiate himself into a fresh chaos; he is compelled to accept a lack of priority in creation, which means he must accept also a failure in divination, as the first of many little deaths that prophesy a final and total extinction" (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence [Oxford, 1973], p.61). Milton is the hero of Bloom's book, particularly Milton the modern poet embodied in his Satan who struggles against a God who "is cultural history, the dead poets" (p. 21). On the fourth stanza in the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, see Fry (n. 1, above), who links the sense of rivalrywith the Magi with the appearance at line 74 of Lucifer-already, for Fry, a figure of a Satanic Milton (pp. 44-45).
50. In one of the best critical assessments of the poem, Broadbent complains: "The language of Milton'spoetryis notoriouslydeficientin 'body'" ("The NativityOde" [n. 1 above], p. 17)-a position that would be hard to extend, as Broadbent appears to do, to Paradise Lost and to the two most famous naked bodies of world literature-and that the Nativity Ode shares "so much of learned, Platonizing Christian Humanism's partial apperception of the gospel" (p. 30). This high-church Eliotism-the Metaphysicals are, of course, to be preferred to the Puritan-grasps well the limitations of the Nativity Ode, but it does not register the poem's own recognition and dramatization of those limitations.
51. See Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), pp. 12-17. Wilding suggests that the publication of the Ode on the Morning of christ's Nativity in the Poems of 1645 was a conscious intervention into the religious debates of the period; by carefully dating the poem to 1629, Milton, Wilding argues, attributed to it a kind of prophetic premonition of the crisis of the 1640s.
52. Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton: The 1645 Edition with Essays in Analysis (New York, 1951), p. 101.
53. Ashtaroth and her "tapers' holy shine" (line 202) bring to mind the complaint of a character in Erasmus's dialogue, "A Fish Diet" ("Ichthyophagia"): "How many there are who put their trust in the Virgin Mother's protection, or Christopher's, rather than that of Christ himself! They worship the Mother with images, candles, and canticles. Christ they offend recklessly with their wicked life" (The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson [Chicago, 1965], p. 355).
54. Spurr, "'Sable-stoled Sorcerers,'" Milton Quarterly 26 (1992): 45-46.
55. Revard (see n. 3 above) also connects the Nativity Ode to this passage in In Quintum Novembris (p. 86).
56. This double view of Milton's development becomes a retrospective view in the fiction of Paradise Regained, which features a Jesus repeatedly tempted to premature action. For a fundamental critical reading that shapes the terms of my essay, see James Nohrnbcrg, "Paradise Regained by One Greater Man: Milton's Wisdom Epic as a 'Fable of Identity,'" in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto, 1983), pp. 83-114.
57. Milton, Works, 3:241.