A New Song: Singing Space in Milton's Nativity Ode

Mary Oates O'Reilly A New Song: Singing Space in Milton's Nativity Ode Since its earliest Greek beginnings, the ode has encouraged poets to imagine a sacred or ideal space in which their songs might be sung.1 When John Milton wrote his Nativity Ode (1629), he knew many poems that defined and populated such sacred "singing places." As we would expect, he followed his predecessors in creating an imaginary place in which to sing his own new song, and, like his master Spenser, he saw any poetic setting as being rich in symbolic possibilities, especially psychological ones. But his own concern about his vocation as a Christian poet led him to question what sort of structure he might decorously imagine to accommodate this song that must be, for deeply-felt aesthetic and religious reasons, entirely new.2 From Pindar, who celebrated athletic victories in grave, hieratic strains, Milton took the notion of the ode as a poem celebrating an agon: the infant Christ is a doughty warrior who topples the gods in "their own shrines."3 And Pindar, whose odes were actually performed by choral groups at celebratory feasts and whose dirges may have been performed at funeral feasts, also provided many imagined singing spaces, among them the "rich and blessed hearth" and the "friendly table";4 he presents, too, a Greek image of the paradise to which the heroic may, along with their poets, aspire: For [the pious in Hades] shines the might of the sun below during nighttime up here, and in meadows of red roses their country abode is laden with . . . shady frankincense trees and trees with golden fruit, and some take delight in horses and exercises, others in draughts, and others in lyres; and among them complete happiness blooms and flourishes, (my emphasis)5 96Mary Oates O'Reilly But it was Horace who discerned, as Spenser was later to do, the expressive possibilities of this singing space as an imaginary paradise for the poet to draw upon as a source of metaphor: Me the ivy, the reward of poets' brows, links with the gods above; me the cool grove and the lightly tripping bands of the nymphs and satyrs withdraw from the vulgar throng, if only Euterpe withhold not the flute, nor Polyhymnia refuse to tune the Lesbian lyre.6 This ode makes the "cool grove" a synecdoche for the poetic consciousness; it, like many such spaces in odes by later writers, is less a physical location, more a locus amoenus of the mind. Milton's sensitivity to his vocation as a Christian poet does not allow him even the imaginary luxury of such a pagan retreat; yet he does "seek" a place where his own voice may be heard by an audience as famously select as that Horace covets: "fit" and necessarily "few." As a Christian poet, Milton also had imaginative access to such singing spaces as the Temple, where Zacharias and Simeon sang their canticles; to the fields, where David sang his; and to plain houses where Mary and Elizabeth praise God's mercy in sending a Redeemer. Even the precincts of the New Jerusalem — singing space for Lycidas — could conceivably provide a decorous venue for a new song. But equally close to Milton's immediate literary experience were the abundant sacred loci found everywhere in Spenser.7 In the Fowre Hymnes, for example, many images of paradise appear and are supplanted; at the end of each poem, the poet imagines himself in the sort of "heaven" appropriate to the aspirations of that particular hymn, culminating at the end of the fourth in a representation of Heaven itself.8 Spenser creates these loci confidently and abundantly, and locates the speaker of his sacred odes within them, usually as one of a number of worshippers. By doing so, he relates himself both to other members of his social and religious world — in the "Hymnes" all are "lovers" — and, by implication, to earlier writers of ode, his precursors in sacred song. The hymns are personal utterances, but, since we imagine their being sung in places where they can praise a single object of desire, they emphasize the shared quality of this object: it is...