The Orphic Singer of Milton’s Nativity Ode

Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” has yet to be read as an Orphic song by a poet who served his apprenticeship with Virgil and Ovid. The Renaissance tradition of Orpheus as the preeminent example of poetry’s power to control nature and change history is affirmed in Milton’s first major English poem by his awareness of the threat from “the rout that made the hideous roar” in the true telos of the story. The ode, in the larger story of Milton’s development, attempts to “prevent” the need for a poem such as “Lycidas” or the incomplete work “The Passion.”