MILTON AS THE POETS’ POET.
BY WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
On the illuminated calendar of the C. L. S. C. appears this month the illustrious name of Milton. There remains hardly anything at the same time new and true to be said of the author of “Paradise Lost.” It has, however, occurred to me that the members of our ever widening Circle might be glad to see what a rich garland he wears as poets’ poet. This title has at different times been given to several different English names. Spenser was perhaps the first to receive it. Milton deserves it not less than Spenser. More, perhaps—for beside being a favorite poet with poets, Milton has happened also to be made the subject of poetical description and ascription beyond, as I should suppose, the fortune of any rival whatever.
It will, perhaps, be interesting, if not instructive, to gather here into a sheaf some of the laurels that have thus been wreathed around the brow of Milton by the laureate company of the poets since his day. The subject will be poetry, and poetry, too, will be the main part of the discussion.
Of course there is no way but to begin with Dryden’s famous hexastich:
Three poets in three distant ages born
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third, she joined the other two.
The foregoing is not very good poetry, but it is very good epigram, as might have been expected—for Dryden is a master epigrammatist, if but an indifferent poet. Do not scrutinize the present epigram too nicely, and how admirable it is! The last two lines are the gist of it. What precedes is only preparation for these two. Necessary preparation, but as criticism, not ideal. For though “loftiness of thought,” answering for sublimity, may doubtfully do to stand as the chief characteristic of Homer, and though Virgil’s quality may fairly well be expressed in the single word “majesty,” these two things, conceived as different from one another, can not be said to compose together the character of Milton. Milton surpasses in sublimity, no doubt, and he is surpassingly majestic; but you would hardly balance the one attribute against the other to express summarily his complement of qualities. The two attributes, sublimity and majesty, resemble each other too much to be good antitheses. But this paper is not to be a criticism.
Let us have a sharp contrast next. Gray in his ode on the “Progress of Poets:”
Nor second he,
(The poet means not second to Shakspere, whom he has just celebrated)
Nor second he, that rode sublime
Upon the seraph wings of ecstacy
The secrets of the abyss to spy.
He passed the flaming bounds of place and time,
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but blasted with excess of light
Closed his eyes in endless night.
Gray’s method is nowhere better exemplified than in this resplendent tribute to Milton. The very terms in which he glorifies his subject are with fine adaptation borrowed from that subject himself. The coincidence upon which here we chance is too good to be disregarded. Let us digress enough to bring in Gray’s sympathetically varied characterization of Dryden which immediately follows in the text of the ode:
Behold where Dryden’s less presumptuous care
Wide o’er the fields of glory bear
Two coursers of ethereal race
With necks in thunder clothed, and long resounding pace.
The equaling of Milton with Shakspere by Gray reminds of Tennyson in his “Palace of Art:”
And there was Milton, like a seraph strong,
Beside him Shakspere bland and mild.
But Tennyson has something more elaborate on Milton. This happens to be in one of his experimental pieces. Trying that master hand of his—turned “’prentice” on this occasion—at alcaics, a meter not often attempted in English, he makes Milton his inspiration:
O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies,
O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages,
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr’d from Jehovah’s gorgeous armories,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset—
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o’er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.
From one poet laureate of England to another is an easy transition. Run we back to Wordsworth. Of Wordsworth’s sonnet to Milton I need give only the last six lines:
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens—majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Very different in spirit from anything hitherto given is that burst of Shelley’s in his “Adonais,” allusive to Milton. It is curious how Shelley, in his unchastised youth of eager beating against the bars of convention and law, found his sympathy with Milton as much in ideas political as in ideas poetical:
He died
Who was the sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride—
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide.
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear sprite
Yet reigns o’er earth; the third among the sons of light.
It is the triumph of Milton as poet that he keeps his empire undisputed over minds that kicked with utmost energy against those religious sentiments which not only Milton the man held dearest, but which Milton the poet insisted on making of the very fabric of his verse. Byron, too, and this amidst the ribald freedom of his “Don Juan”—amidst the freedom of it, and with the freedom of it—says of Milton:
A little heavy but no less divine.
It will provide a conclusion conformed to a canon of ancient art in letters which forbade climax at the close, if now we present some lines from Byron, remarkable indeed, rather for ingenuity of adaptation than for high poetry, but still illustrative of the esteem compelled from their author for the sublime genius of Milton. The lines to be cited belong to Byron’s “Hints from Horace,” a work generally neglected, but certainly of notable merit, if not comparatively so good as Byron himself accounted it—who, I believe, preferred this satirical paraphrase of Horace to his “Childe Harold.” For the full appreciation of the passage following, one rather needs to have before him for comparison the corresponding text of Horace. Byron paraphrases and satirizes, the reins flung loose on the neck of his foaming Pegasus. Bowles and Southey have just been named for contempt, when, in contrast, the modesty and majesty of Milton’s opening is referred to:
Not so of yore awoke your mighty sire
The tempered warblings of his master lyre;
Soft as the gentle breathings of the lute
“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit”
He speaks, but, as his subject swells along,
Earth, heaven and Hades echo with the song.
Still to the midst of things he hastens on,
As if we witnessed all already done;
Leaves on his path whatever seems too mean
To raise the subject, or adorn the scene;
Gives, as each page improves upon the sight
Not smoke from brightness, but from darkness light;
And truth and fiction with such art confounds,
We know not where to fix their several bounds.
“There is more of poetry,” says Moore, “in these verses upon Milton than in any other passage throughout the paraphrase.” And more truth than poetry at that, one might justly add.
The subject is not exhausted, but enough has been produced to show that, in an eminent sense, Milton is a poets’ poet. I bespeak for my favorite among all the bards of all time a joyous and grateful observance of his annual day from every loyal Chautauquan.