Milton and the New Music

MILTON AND THE NEW MUSIC LAURENCE STAPLETON IN thlnking of composition in a poem, as distinguished from the circumstances of the poet's writing it, the only question that matters is what exists and acts in the lines themselves. But the kind of observation then demanded of the reader is, luckily, inexhaustible, provided that the poem has intensity of language, or feeling, or idea: inseparable elements, varyingly combined according to the skill and interest of the poet and not unaffected by the spirit of the age. By the spirit of the age I mean what the poet and his associates read, heard discussed , saw about them, but equally, the expectations of the intelligent reader or listener, by which any writer will be affected whether he sympathizes with these expectations or wishes to change them. When the poet elects to write on a traditional theme, one that has been practised by a number even of his own contemporaries, he at once invites our attention to the method of his composition: what he includes, what rejects, and whether the several parts of his poem' so interact as to become independent. In Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," a particularly strikiog example of the possibility of such choices on the part of the poet matches the possibility of such discoveries on the part of the reader. Before Milton at dawn on Christmas day in 1629 began his "humble ode," he had no doubt read other poems about the Nativity, though which ones he may have read is largely a matter of conjecture , and of limited relevance. Images of creation as a harmony and of the music of the spheres he had encountered in ancient writers, then, fused with Christian tradition, perhaps in T asso or in Giles Fletcher, or the ubiquitous du Bartas in Sylvester's translation. In these rhetorical excursions, there is nothlng to compare with what Mr. Arthur Barker has called the "controlled complexity'" of the Nativity Ode. Milton obviously worked with a sense of command and of novelty in the task. He said as much, in writing to his friend lArthur Barker. "The Pattern of Milton's Nativity Ode," University 0/ T oronto Quarterly, X (1940-1) , 177. Mr. Barker brieBy and efficiently characterizes the traditional patterns of idea and imagery which could have furnished Milton with a convention. He does not discuss Tasso's "Pel Presipio di Dostro Signore," which, as Grierson pointed out in the Introduction to his M elaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921 ), xlviii, is perhaps closer to Milton's Nativity Ode than any comparable English poem. Mr. Barker's article will, I think, remain the taking-off point for future critical discussions of the Nativity Ode. It is supplemented in some details by the comments of Cleanth Brooks and John Hardy in their introduction to the poem in Poems 0/ MT. John Milton (New York, 1952 ); in the main, however, their interpretation follows his analysis. 217 Vol. XXIII, no. 3, April, 1954 218 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Charles Diodati. But the combination of forthrightness and of reserve in the language of the poem shows it, too. In his study of the Nativity Ode, Mr. Barker maps out its structure firmly. "The first eight stanzas ... describe the setting of the Nativity, the next nine the angelic choir, the next nine the flight of the heathen gods. The ... last stanza presents the scene in the stable." He finds that "the three movements each present a single modification of the simple contrast, preserved throughout the poem, between images suggesting light and harmony and images of gloom and discord." The three equal movements are held in relation "not by the repetition of a structural pattern, but by the variation of a basic pattern of imagery."2 While not disagreeing with, indeed valuing, Mr. Barker's analysis, it seems to me that this poem is built out of something more than the variation of a basic pattern of imagery. Fortunately, Mr. A. S. P. Woodhouse, recognizing the merit of Mr. Barker's article, at the same time adapts its critical insight to a wider purpose and leads uS to approach the question of structure...