Comus's Wood of Allusion

MAGGIE KILGOUR Comus's Wood of Allusion Analysing allusion seems a ready and easy way of understanding poetic relations, through the mapping of how and when one poet 'borrows' from another. Such maps are, however, difficult to chart: talking about allusion at all leads one into woods in which boundaries between different uses of language become difficult to differentiate precisely. To a certain extent all language is 'allusive,' if by that one means simply that it refers to something beyond itself, which is not present. Any work drawing upon tradition has to be allusive in another sense, as it refers to a previous body of knowledge it presumes to share with its readers. Studying allusion further raises a number of questions about the way in which poets conceive of themselves and their relation to their society and culture, as well as to both their literary tradition and an audience; it thus engages ideas of similitude and difference, continuity and discontinuity or change, the locus of authority, ownership and property rights in poetry. The concept of allusion has implications also for discussions of the notion of originality. While to speak through others may appear a sign of a lack of imagination, of derivativeness, it may also be a way of creating a coherent and distinctive authorial voice. Milton is a good example of this apparent paradox; while he is one of the most allusive of all writers, he is also one of the most formidably original. As Hazlitt said, 'Milton has borrowed more than any other writer; yet he is perfectly distinct from any other writer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line ... the fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials.'1 For Dr Johnson, Milton's subsumption of his sources was a form of awesome egotistical sublimation in which 'the heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning~ to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts.,2 As in the old saying 'Everything Miss B eats turns into Miss B,' everything Milton takes into his textual bodies turns into himself. While Paradise Lost is built out of previous works - not only the word of God, but also a variety of classical and Christian sources - they are combined to create a unified and authoritative whole. In this essay I want to focus on Milton's presentation of his text's relation to the world and works outside of itself. I will be using not ParaUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1992/316 COMUS'S WOOD OF ALLUSION 317 dise Lost, however, but a work earlier in his poetic career, his masque of chastity, Comus, which represents the process of textual internalization, and thematizes its own containment of other poetic voices. The plot of the masque is straightforward, a variation of the old romance narrative that looks back to the Odyssey and forward to The Wizard of Oz, and which involves a central character whose return home is blocked by different obstacles. In Comus the conflict arises between the young virginal Lady, who, on her way home to her parents, gets lost in the woods, and the enchanter of the woods, Comus, son of Bacchus and Circe, who turns humans into animals. Like Circe, Calypso, and the Wicked Witch of the West, Comus tries to prevent the Lady's return "to her proper home and identity. Such a return, however, is also seen as a form of progress: Comus has been read as a narrative of maturation or development, a puberty or initiation rite through which the Lady moves from a state of childlike innocence and chastity towards the chastity that will achieve its true Protestant end in married love.3 Comus the character, however, threatens this forward movement, and so represents a kind of regressive force who tempts the Lady into a false union in which different things are not chastely married but promiscuously confused with one another. Indiscriminately , he tries to bring together separate things that should be kept apart, using metamorphosis to litenilly mate the human and the animal within a single...