The Development of Milton's Thought: Law, Government, and Religion

Eight. The Three Major Poems

159 EIGHT The Three Major Poems The three major poems have entered our discussion often in the previous chapters. In relation to the subject of Milton’s unchanging or changed mind the question of the dates of their composition must be considered. We can and should read a text as it is received, but we also should acknowledge that, as with Comus, the received text may be significantly different from an earlier version and in such a situation we cannot legitimately employ the received text to read that earlier version. There have been changes in the author’s world between such dates that may have influence of various types upon that received version , and in any case the received text presents an accrual of whatever thought and changes of thought may have occurred over the course of its writing. But also, as with Paradise Lost, the received text, which is a culmination of writing from, apparently, 1640 through 1665, may retain earlier writing influenced by externals and by internalities 160 The Development of Milton’s Thought of the mind present at those times. It has been argued that Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes were both begun at earlier dates than 1670 (when their texts seem to have been completed and in the process of being printed, although the first edition of their single volume was 1671). Not everyone has accepted that such earlier compositional attempts and thus possible persisting elements are valid. Arguments have postulated dramatic attempts for both works in the later 1640s when Milton was still considering a drama on Paradise Lost, which had been begun around 1640 and, it would seem, Milton worked on the epic in ensuing years until he was able to return to it more fully in 1661. Perhaps (and I feel probably) Milton returned to Paradise Lost periodically in later 1655 and again in 1658, at which times his composition had turned to epical writing. In 1660 too much was occurring (including his brief hiding from government authorities and then his brief imprisonment ) to sustain the attention needed to develop and complete the text that appeared in August (?) 1667. Remarks by Thomas Ellwood, often cited in scholarship, suggest that the poem was complete by the time Milton was staying at Chalfont St. Giles in June (?) 1665 through February (?) 1666 to avoid the plague. It should be remarked that the text may have been complete prior to his stay at Chalfont St. Giles. Following the publication of Paradise Lost, he responded to Ellwood’s question, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” Milton gave no answer, “sate some time in a Muse: then brake of that Discourse, and fell upon another Subject.” Later (how long we do not know), he showed Ellwood “his Second POEM, called PARADISE REGAINED; and in a pleasant Tone said to me, This is owing to you: for you put it into my Head, by the Question you put to me at Chalfont ; which before I had not thought of.”1 The “Muse” in which Milton sat seems to have been given over to thinking about the question, and the fact that Ellwood—a typical, interested, religious, informed The Three Major Poems 161 reader—did not fathom that paradise did not need to be “found,” it needed to be “regained,” and that indeed his epic had shown how it could be regained. (See Fletcher’s enumeration of sections that make clear that “All this is carefully worked out in Paradise Lost which opens with the idea fully formed.”)2 The brief epic is presented in dramatic dialogue, not dissimilar to the “dramatic” (speech) sections of the long epic, which would seem to be retained (and altered) from some of its early attempts as recorded at least in the Trinity Manuscript. I am not suggesting that Paradise Regain’d was conceived as the poem it is during an earlier period; I suggest that, like Paradise Lost, sections had been written earlier that looked toward a drama on the temptation. Further, the brief epic has been analyzed as exhibiting prosody that would often place it after Samson Agonistes and before the completed Paradise Lost in some of its composition. (Most telling in such prosodic study, for one important criterion, are run-on lines as opposed to less “accomplished,” end-stopped lines.3 ) Milton’s thankful remark...