The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England

6 The Rhetorics of Lyric: Conclusions and New Perspectives

c h a p t e r 6 The Rhetorics of Lyric Conclusions and New Perspectives Beneficent spirit of the Severn’s ominous borderlands, Milton’s Sabrina harbors odd companions on her own borders.1 So significant for the purposes of this conclusion is the song invoking her that its latter section merits a lengthy quotation: Sabrina fair 859 Listen where thou art sitting Under the grassy, cool, translucent wave, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Listen and save. 866 Listen and appear to us In the name of great Oceanus, By the earth-shaking Neptune’s mace And Tethys’ grave majestic pace. 870 By hoary Nereus’ wrinkled look, And the Carpathian wizard’s hook, By scaly Triton’s winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus’ spell, By Leucothea’s lovely hands 875 And her son that rules the strands. By Thetis’ tinsel-slipper’d feet, And the Songs of Sirens sweet, By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb, And fair Ligea’s golden comb, 880 t h e r h e t o r i c s o f l y r i c 229 Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks, By all the Nymphs that nightly dance Upon thy streams with wily glance, Rise, rise. (A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 859–861, 866–885; emphasis in original)2 In line 878 references to the sirens begin to invade Milton’s catalogue of more appropriate attendants for Sabrina, alluring the lyric away from the translucency, semantic and aquatic, on which it began. Five of the nineteen lines quoted above (878–882) directly invoke that treacherous glee club, while the “wily glance” (884) of the nymphs, not fortuitously an echo of Comus’s earlier description of his own trains (151), at least mirrors the enticements of the sirens and, alternatively , may be read as an additional description of them. Might one explain away the unsettling appearance of the sirens’ narrative by claiming that these are not the seductive singers whom Comus links to Circe earlier in the poem (“I have oft heard / My mother Circe with the Sirens three” [252–253]) but rather merely the embodiments of Platonic celestial harmony invoked by Milton himself in “At a Solemn Music” and Arcades? Haemony, Louis Martz suggests, may represent sacred song.3 Or one might join Stella P. Revard in glossing this passage as a description of “nurturing” water deities linked thematically to Sabrina?4 Any attempt to finesse the sirens’ presence in these ways is, however, countered by the reference to “soft alluring locks” (882); although the menacing implications of a woman plotting seduction coexist with the appeal of the phrase (as erotic menace so often does in Milton), its negative resonances are intensified by that use, only two lines later, of “wily,” an adjective not only deployed earlier in this poem as noted above, but also applied twice to the snake in Paradise Lost. And the connection between the sirens’ modus operandi and that of Circe and her son is surely more powerful and more immediate for most Renaissance and contemporary readers than the positive biographical entries Revard adduces for them. The point is not that those positive stories are completely erased; rather, if the presence of these dangerous singers casts a shadow over even Sabrina, the myth of the menacing sirens overshadows the alternative story of their unthreatening alter egos. A similar conflation occurs in the nineteenthcentury English painter William Etty’s illustration for the poem. Now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, his “Scene from Milton’s Comus” recalls the cast of characters in the woodcut by the seventeenth-century Italian Jiulio Bonasone, discussed in Chapter 1. Etty’s canvas represents Circe, the Naiades, and the sirens; while the raised eyes of two of those singers suggest spirituality, their voluptuous bodies, so characteristic of Etty’s nudes, as well as the company they keep, evoke the threatening seductiveness Milton associates with them. The textual history of the poem registers its author’s unease with the inclusion—and the exclusion—of the sirens. Their description was crossed out, then restored, a process that the most thorough student of Milton’s editorial emendations, S. E. Sprott, believes occurred when its author was drafting the poem.5 Moreover, the fact that the wily nymphs were inserted after the passage was initially composed is telling, as is the number of trochaic adjectives with very different valences that...