Milton Borrows a Word: Or, Cherubim in the Mist

Eugene D. Hill Milton Borrows a Word: Or, Cherubim in the Mist In the opening sentence of the paragraph that concludes his big epic, Milton makes what would seem a surprising lexical choice, introducing into English a word that had not been needed before and would subsequently be employed infrequently and largely as a flourish of aureate diction. The sentence reads: So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard Well pleas'd, but answer'd not; for now too nigh Th'Archangel stood, and from the other Hill To thir fixt Station, all in bright array The Cherubim descended; on the ground Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning Mist Ris'n from a River o're the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel Homeward returning. {PL 12.625-32)1 The difficult word, the sole lexical puzzle here, is of course "meteorous." Milton could well, one might at first imagine, have written "meteoric," a word to whose existence in the midseventeenth century the OED indubitably attests. Donne had used it in a letter that would be published in 1651: "Our nature is Météorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven, for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spirituali joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly pleasure."2 The middle state of man: that would seem precisely what Milton would choose to evoke in this valedictory moment of his poem. So why the difficult borrowing of the Greek term? 118Eugene D. Hill No doubt part of the answer lies with matters of sound and rhythm. The thicker and darker vowel sounds of "meteorous" suit the hazy texture of the image better than "meteoric." If Douglas Bush was right in his 1965 edition in adding an accent (from the Greek original) to the second "e" — and perhaps even if he wasn't right — the phrase creates a wonderful sense of gliding with its near equal stresses on all the syllables: Gliding meteorous. But the difficult word requires more than musical felicity to justify its appearance in this key moment, the penultimate simile in Paradise Lost. In their Explanatory Notes on Paradise Lost, the Richardsons, father and son, provide the following gloss: Gliding Meteorous as a Meteor, Aloft meteorous [in Greek]. So the Word Signifies, Gliding above the Surface, in Opposition to the Black, Low-Creeping Mist in which Sathan Wrapt himself, IX. 180. the Simile relates to the Gliding Motion of the Angels, as a mist in That respect, not as Gathering Ground at the Labourer's heel; the Words Explain it So.3 Christopher Ricks quotes some of this, with great praise for its belleletristic acuity, in Milton's Grand Style; the Richardsonian explication stands as Ricks's "final example of how Milton releases enhancing suggestions from the burial-places of memory."4 Another eighteenth-century editor, Bishop Thomas Newton, borrowed an explanation from Addison: Heliodorus in his Ethiopics acquaints us, that the motion of the Gods differs from that of mortals, as the former do not stir their feet, nor proceed step by step, but slide o'er the surface of the earth by an uniform swimming of the whole body. The reader may observe with how poetical a description Milton has attributed the same kind of motion to the Angels who were to take possession of Paradise.5 This account of the words survives at least into nineteenth-century editions. In 1809 the Rev. Henry Todd sends a reader to his comment on Paradise Lost 6.71: "Our author attributes the same kind of motion to the Angels, as the ancients did to their gods; which was gliding Milton Borrows a Word119 through the air without ever touching the ground with their feet."6 But none of this helps account for Milton's borrowing of the word. The key twentieth-century commentators on our passage have come at it by way of Milton's meteorology — that is to say, literally, the science of middle-level atmospheric phenomena. In the Renaissance, to be sure, the term "meteors" embraced a far broader range of meaning than it does today, as a glance through William Fulke...