The Development of Milton's Thought: Law, Government, and Religion

Seven. Conceptual Reflections in Milton’s Poetry and Prose

135 SEVEN Conceptual Reflections in Milton’s Poetry and Prose For the reader and scholar of literature the words and images employed to communicate the meanings, experience, creation, and enjoyment of that literature are extremely important—they are the very elements constituting any reading or analysis. I have in previous chapters paid attention to words and images and the specific concepts that are carried within their usage. We receive pictures that supply connotative realizations, leading the reader to more than surface, denotative meaning. Some of those pictures provide allusions to other words and depictions and situations, sometimes other writing, other happenings, and sometimes, thereby, deeper meanings . Allusion may lead us to things that lie outside the writing we are reading; they may be sources the author is echoing, consciously or unconsciously.1 But allusion may also lead us to the fuller text by being self-referential, by 136 The Development of Milton’s Thought internal allusion, cued often by repetition, echo, prolepsis. The word or image with its conceptual connotation adds meaning with each echoing occurrence,2 perhaps alters meaning that has been misinterpreted (often deliberately intended by the author), becomes witness to the author’s composition and artistry and intended conception to be communicated or to be made ambiguous (destabilized, to recall Peter Herman’s significant description in chapter 1), at times to undermine and even oppose what the reader would first have concluded. This chapter first looks at a different kind of conceptual development: the alteration of meaning (“concept”) in a literary work through allusion and particularly through internal allusion. It is not that the essence of the concept has changed but that the reader’s understanding of the concept may change, and it may move into the realm of uncertainty , even fallibility. Second, specific words, including some treated earlier, are shown to bear connotations that have often been unacknowledged (or not recognized at all), adding to or altering concepts that otherwise would seem to be delimited in many readings of Milton’s work. 1 We are all aware of an author’s using allusions to other authors and works in order to achieve a depth of meaning and context well beyond the denotation of the words or their specific appearance in the author’s text. At times the meaning or context is iterative; at other times it yields additional knowledge or sets up irony or satire or even paronomasia. It may serve particularly to link events and thoughts across a period of time, thus stressing likenesses and differences. Critical arguments have been lodged against things like variora that point out only the existence of an allusion, but, to repeat myself, “The fault...lies in the lack of attention that has generally been paid to such citations by those who have made them.... Conceptual Reflections in Milton’s Poetry and Prose 137 Most commentators have simply cited a source because of a language similarity, or at least they do not generally go beyond simple citation.”3 But while allusions as sources are important, so is self-allusion, internal allusion within a work. The first words of Paradise Lost take us immediately to the Bible, for example, the reader not even being required to understand them as biblical, for they state common and much-repeated lore: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden. Recalling the common and much-repeated lore about the Fall of humankind through its disobedience of breaking God’s one prohibition by eating the fruit of a particular tree in Eden, the reader may immediately think of “apple” and “Eve” and “sin.” Recalling the usual Bible translation , near its beginning in chapter 3 of Genesis, another reader may remember further that the text specifically cites the woman’s quoting God as admonishing them not to eat or even touch it “lest ye die,” and, of course, the role of the serpent is elaborated upon. But as we read those first four lines of the poem carefully we understand that this is only “Man’s” first disobedience, and we recognize that Milton is punning in talking of a mortal taste since that adjective (“of man,” human) derives from the Latin for death. Significantly Milton says “Man’s disobedience,” meaning obviously humankind’s (as the word is used in chapter...