MILTON QUARTERLY 59
Milton’s Unchanging Mind two 5r more worlds, he has curiously built a mosaic
and the Early Poems
Robert Ellrodt
In their edition of the 1645 Poems Cleanth Brooks
and John Edward Hardy claimed that “this work
testifies to the clear consistency of Milton’s whole
career, anticipating in many ways . . . the major works
to come.” This consistency was discovered in the con-
cern for style and the recurrence of symbolic motifs:
the music of the spheres, light and darkness, flowing
water and the nurturing of plants, clothing and
disguise. These and other motifs are no doubt pres-
ent but seem to be collected at random like the
flowers profuse of Eden. Some of them, we may agree,
are components of the pastoral mode and allow us
to look on Milton’s progression from pastoral poetry
to epic poetry as “a perfectly natural one” (256-58,
267).
The characters and incidents of the later epics are,
indeed, anticipated. Brooks and Hardy had seen in
Adam a more advanced version of the “gentle Swain”
(266). In the Latin epyllion In Quintum Novembris Le
Comte discerned foreshadowings of the actions of
Satan in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. But the
Acherontic fiend has none of Satan’s grandeur and
none of the pastoral figures can compare in depth and
complexity with “the goodliest man of men since
born.” Progression here does mean progress.
Technical mastery was early achieved. A sense of
euphony, conspicuous in both Latin and English
verse, proves equally impressive in melodious and
deliberately jarring effects. The “organ music of
speech” and “the peculiar Miltonic sublimity,” to bor-
row stock phrases, were attained in the verse of A
Vacation Exercise. In their movement and modulation
the Nativity Ode, “On Time,” and “At a Solemn
Music” give evidence of cunning control hardly sur-
passed in later and greater works. Swift progress in
the command of language and rhythm, however,
allowed for variety and development. How many of
the early poems, if they were anonymous, would have
been identified as Milton’s on internal evidence when
compared with the two epics or Samson Agonistes?
Yet, in the whole range of Milton’s works, Le Com-
te has discovered a “fixity of idea and emotional and
verbal pattern” (5). By studying parallels comprising
of verbal echoes. Artful repetition was no doubt
cultivated by a word artist whose imagination drew
on the poetic treasury of world literature. But subtle
iteration in different contexts also suited the work-
ings of a mind engaged in a constant re-examination
and re-assessment of experience.
Thematic and verbal recurrence therefore does not
preclude change. To select one instance, the frequent
association of sex with the metaphor of the “amorous
net” from Eleo I to Paradise Regained is by itself no
proof of an unvarying reluctance to sport with the
tangles of Neaera’s hair. Besides one cannot deny that
Milton repeatedly modified his views on political and
religious problems. In this respect we cannot ascribe
to him “a mind not to be changed by place or time,”
Le Comte’s epigraph for Yet Once More.
My claim is for changelessness in the structures, not
the content, of the mind.
In the life of any individual, opinions, likes and
dislikes, temperament itself may alter. Yet even re-
ligious conversions leave unchanged some distinctive
modes of consciousness. These immutable elements
of personality are formed, unaffected by evolution.
To prove their permanence has been my ambition in
the volumes I have devoted to the metaphysical poets.
I am conscious of courting disaster when making the
same claim for Milton in a short paper.
Fortunately my French colleague, Jean-FranGois
Came, has analyzed “the fundamental structures of
Milton’s world of imagination.” Ranging from the
earliest to the latest works, his illustrations bring
evidence of continuity in the poet’s response to sense
impressions, space and movement, time and
timelessness. Armand Himy discerns similar structures
in Cumus and in Puradise Lost and a sense of consisten-
cy emerges from Roger Lejosne’s careful study of
“Reason in the works of Milton.” With their works
in mind closer demonstration may not be needed for
ideas t h a t otherwise might seem oracular
pronouncements.
That rising and falling movements had an early
fascination for the author of Paradise Lost appears not
only in Comw and in Lycidas-Lycidas ‘sunk low but
mounted high”-but in several poems which offer im-
ages of flight and a bird’s eye view before alighting:
“On the Death of a Fair Infant,” “In Obitum Praesulis
Eliensis,” In Quintum Novembris, “Naturam non pati
60 MILTON QUARTERLY
senium.” A delight in geographic expansion, so
magnificently displayed in the greater poems, is
noticeable in the fourth and fifth Latin elegies and
In Quintum Novembris. The preference for distant and
extended vistas is manifest in the allusions to the
“heaven’s wide pathless ways”and the “wide watered
shore.” Long before Paradise Lost creation and the
cosmos were the backdrop for the Nativity Ode, At
a Vacation Exercise, “De Idea Platonica,” “Naturam non
pati senium.”The youthful poet already meant to “sing
of secret things that came to pass / When Beldam
Nature in her cradle was” (Vacation Exercise 45-46).
He had early dreams of Paradise and light, whether
in classical or Christian terms, from the “gleaming
gates of Olympus” (“In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis”
62-63) and the Hesperian fields of Elegy 3 to the
“sapphire-color’d throne,” conjured by “A Solemn
Music” (7), or the visions of It Penseroso and the
“Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester.” Poetry
and “Olympus, our first home” had become indivisi-
ble by the time he wrote Ad Patrem (17-40).
Though “new acquist of true experience” eventu-
ally taught him to seek what the angel will call “a para-
dise within thee, happier far” (PL 12.587), Milton
always conceived of heaven as a place rather than a
state. Though the “seat of early bliss be fail’d” a “fair-
er Paradise” is still the prospect held out in Paradise
Regained (4.612-13) and the triumph of Christ over
temptation has recreated Eden as a “flowr’y valley”
in the desert (4.586-90).
There is to my mind a link between this longing
for a blissful seat and Milton’s apprehension of time
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his recur-
rent allusions either to Edenic beginnings or the final
consummation- already a prominent theme in
“Naturam non pati senium” as in the Nativity Ode and
the poem “On Time.”
What strikes me as characteristic in the Miltonic in-
tuition of time is a constant tendency to a recapitula-
tion of past, present, and future, not in a single
moment-nunc stuns-but in a continuous succession
or revolution, as in the almost Yeatsian “perpetually
revolving gyre”-ppetuo revolubik gyro-of Elegy 5, one
of the first cyclic images. That is why, though Milton,
particularly in the prose works, echoes the traditional
conception of eternity as timelessness- the totum simul
of the scholastics- his own predominant inclination,
related to his concern with history and large tracts of
time, leads to visions of eternity as the endless exten-
sion of time-a purer time perhaps, like the “grateful
vicissitude” of day and night in heaven (PL 6.8), but
still conceived as continuance. Hence the revealing
epithet, “long Eternity,” in “On Time.” Eternity “looks
over the records of the past” in “De Idea Platonica.”
In Paradise Lost Adam learns that time shall “stand fixt:
beyond is all abyss, / Eterniv, but an “Eternity, whose
end no eye can reach” (12.555-56) is still imagined as
infinite extension rather than fucity.
My further claim is that these structures of Milton’s
mind dictate the choice of perspective, poetic form,
and syntax.
We early discover that we cannot expect from Mil-
ton the kind of dialectic or dramatic immediacy
offered by the metaphysical poets, though he can
achieve dramatic effects of a different nature.
Donne in his elegies and epicedes alike started from
an image or idea which allowed development through
analogy or argument. Milton’s funeral elegies have a
narrative opening like the elegy on the death of the
Bishop of Winchester or glide into narrative after the
opening lines in “Death of a Fair Infant” or “An
Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester.” Elegy 7
and In Quintum Novembris, a miniature epic, are pure
narrative.
Donne’s Obsequies end in the present tense with a
note of finality: his Muse “hath spoke, and spoke her
last” (Obsequies to the Lord Harrington). Milton’s Latin
elegies, like Lycidas, open up vistas of futurity, either
for the mourned ones or for the mourner himself
(“Death of a Fair Infant,” “Winchester Epitaph,” and
all the Latin funeral elegies). In Elegy I , addressed to
Diodati, life in the city becomes a succession of
episodes described in balanced statements: seu, seu,
seu, sive; saepe, saepe, saepe, sive-in fact, a temporal
succession rendered in English by “sometimes” and
“often.”
The early “Carmina elegiaca” (?1624) evidence a
fondness for a circular pattern with the repetition of
the first two lines in inverted order at the close. Pat-
terns of circularity and inversion will be greatly refined
in later and far greater poems but the initial impulse
is transcended not effaced when the epic poet praises
the mystical dance of angels and planets in their
“mazes intricate, / Eccentric, intervoldd, yet regular
/ Then most, when most irregular they seem” (PL
5.622-24).

A characteristic device in the early poems is to set
a song of hymn within a formal narrative framework.
“On May Morning” in this respect is a miniature an-
ticipation of the hymn On the Morning of Christ’s
Nutiwity. The closing lines in each poem give us a sense
of completion: time is the “Song should here have end-
ing.” Yet each poem remains curiously open-ended.
Spring is here, but we “wish [him] long“ and the angels
sitting “serviceable”around the “sleeping Lord” seem
to wait in momentous expectation. So does the fitting
close of each great poem open the prospect of future
action beyond the present accomplishment: Adam
and Eve entering the world of human effort and con-
quest, youth spurred to adventures high by yearly
visits to Samson’s tomb, Christ returning “home to
his Mother’s house private,” yet to do his Father’s will
“and begin to save mankind.”
The sense of aesthetic distance is the consequence
of the formal approach. Such distance does not mean
that we are “never close up to the scene” as Brooks
and Hardy observed about the Nativity Ode (103). The
blind author of Paradise Lost will even develop a
camera eye technique which deliberately sets an ob-
ject at a distance to bring it near in a close up, then
again remove it from the foreground, yet allow it to
shine in the distance: “far off his coming shone” (PL
6.768; cf. “So seem’d / Far off the flying Fiend”
([2.642-431). This is different from the Mannerist
perspective which invites the beholder into the pic-
ture (as if enclosed in the scene), just as Donne’s open-
ings compel the reader into the experience lived
through by the speaker. Milton’s reader remains a
spectator, impressed, but uninvolved. And so is the
poet himself, or his persona when he plays the spec-
tator’s part, in the twin poems of mirthful or pensive
contemplation; in the ecstasies as in the simpler en-
joyments, a conscious detachment is maintained.
Aesthetic distance, however, does not imply imper-
sonality as Brooks and Hardy had assumed (263). A
vivid sense of the self is as obvious in the early poems
as in the moving invocation to light in Paradise Lost.
Young Milton even stages himself with some com-
placency in the Italian as in the Latin poems: the “Gio-
vane piano,” who confesses he “knows not how to
escape from himself’ (Sonnet 6) becomes the young
poet whose father trusted him with the chariot of
Hyperion in Ad Putrem. This self-consciousnessmay
lead to failure as in “The Passion,” rightly described
MILTON QUARTERLY 61
as “a poem about himself writing a poem” (Parker
1:71-72). The spectator walking ‘not unseen”through
the landscapes of L’Allegro becomes the ‘unseen” con-
templator in I1 Penseroso but each is aware of the figure
he makes as stroller or hermit. The companion pieces
however are successful because they are the expres-
sion of a mood in which the self and the surround-
ing world are in harmony.
Milton’s self-consciousness is unattended by the
ironic self-observation noticeable in the poetry of
Donne, Herbert, and Marvell. In the opening state-
ment of Elegy 3, “I was sad,” Moestus erum, emotion
declares itself with the simplicity, though not the deep
resonance, of the blind bard’s or Samson’s lament on
their loss of sight.
L’Allegro and I1 Penseroso are contrasted moods and
there is artful complexity in the parallelism but not
in the moods. The very closeness of the parallels re-
veals another aspect of the poet’s mind. Owing to his
strong ethical bent Milton sees life in terms of conflict,
but he perceives sameness as well as difference in the
antagonists. Good and evil are twins; Satan will ape
God; hell is a perverted image of heaven.
Moral dualism therefore does not call for on-
tological dualism. In a search for psychological
coherence it may prove possible to establish interre-
lations between Milton’s ways of apprehending time
and space, as earlier described, and his insistence on
the eternity of matter or his conception of spiritual
bodies. That the poet actually believed angels “with
keen dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive hear”
could “transubstantiate” earthly viands is surely not
without significance (PL 5.436-38).
At first sight this acceptance of materiality in spiritual
natures might suggest an evolution in Milton’s views.
The Elder Brother in Cmus claimed that the soul,
when it “imbodies,” “imbrutes”and loses “the divine
property of her first being“ (468-69). But this is spoken
from an ethical perspective about a soul “clotted by
contagion”and not a line in the masque asserts or im-
plies a watertight distinction between matter and spirit.
Jove’s court is thronged with “bright aerial Spirits”(3);
‘aerial” does not mean immaterial and the ‘gardens fair
of Hesperus” are more sensuously described than
Spenser’s Garden of Adonis (980-1001).
That the young poet thought himself a Platonist
need not be denied for Platonism has often suffered
a sea-change in poetry. The author of Paradise Lost,
62 MILTON QUARTERLY
no doubt, used the language of accommodation when
“lik‘ning spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express
them best” (5.573-74), but he also voiced his deeper
conviction when he wondered
though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things
therein
Each to other like more than on Earth is
thought?
(5.574-76)
This is apparently Platonic doctrine, but the per-
spective is inverted. Milton is not saying that the
phenomenal world is but a shadow of the ideal: he
claims the ideal and the phenomenal have more in
common than we think. Therefore the poet’s
language, borrowed from the senses, aims, in fact, at
projecting the reality of our material world into the
unsubstantial world of spirit. Indeed, an inverted
Platonism is best reconciled with the millenarian
dreams he had entertained. That this tendency was
present in the very first poems may be surmised from
the delighted insistence on the sensuous splendor of
the divine abode. It has even been suggested that
Milton had arrived at his “later metaphysical monism”
in “Naturam non pati senium” (see Variorum 1:216),
but this assertion may rest on an over-ingenious in-
terpretation of a mythological image. Is it fanciful to
suggest that the essential materialism of Milton’s im-
agination is more safely, though obliquely, revealed
in an early sensitiveness, noted by Le Comte, to the
resistance offered by the very air? A sensitiveness later
heightened, but not created, by blindness since in-
numerable instances could be offered from the cedentes
auras of In Quintum Novembris to the winnowing
flights of angels and the great Copernican vision of
the earth that “spinning sleeps / O n her soft Axle”
and “bears [us] soft with the smooth Air along”
(8.164-66).
The unbroken imaginative continuity traced in
Milton’s works must rest on individual modes of con-
sciousness either inborn or acquired in infancy. Care-
ful examination of the poems written at Cambridge
is, indeed, justified if his race of glory, like Samson’s,
was ordered and prescribed from his early days.
Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle
WORKS CITED
Brooks, Cleanth, and John Edward Hardy, eds. Poems of
Mr. John Milton. The 1645 Edition with Essays in
Analysis. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1951.
Came, Jean-FranFois. Les stwtures fondamentales de l’univers
imaginuire miltonien. Paris: Didier, 1976.
Himy, Armand. Pensie, mythe et structure dans le Paradis Per-
du. Publications de I’Universite de Lille, 1977.
Hughes, Merritt Y., and John Steadman, eds. A Variorum
Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. 4 vols. to
date. New York: Columbia UP, 1972-.
Le Comte, Edward S. Yet Once Mme: Verbal and Psychological
Pattem in Milton. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953.
Lejosne, Roger. La Raison dans l’oeuwre de Milton. Paris:
Didier, 1981.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merrirt
Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957.
Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1968.