Professor John Rogers: It's not until Book
Three of Paradise Lost that the poet explicitly reveals
to us, to his readers,
the fact of the physical handicap that might reasonably
be thought to render impossible his composition of the poem.
It's not until Book Three, until after Milton presents his
heroic portrait of Satan and his heroic portrait of the fallen
angels when he establishes the fact of his blindness.
So I'm going to be devoting this lecture to Milton's
representation of his blindness and especially to the invocation
of light with which Book Three begins,
because I'm absolutely convinced that a feeling for the
phenomenon of Milton's blindness is crucial to any real
understanding of this poem, certainly, but also of this
poet. One of the questions that I
want here to pursue is the question of why Milton -- with
the exception of an oblique, and it's really a very oblique,
reference in the opening invocation -- why Milton waits
until now, until the third book of his
epic, to divulge his blindness to his reader.
Milton began to lose his eyesight around 1646.
This is when he's in his late thirties and he was entirely
blind by February of 1652, and that was at the age of
forty-four. According to one of the
earliest biographers -- and really usefully and wonderfully,
Merritt Hughes includes in the back of the Hughes edition most
of the earliest biographies of Milton.
They make for fascinating reading.
These are sketches of the poet written very shortly after
Milton's death. According to one of these
biographers, Milton subjected himself to a range of medical
procedures in order to cure, or at least to forestall,
the darkness that was about to set over him.
He imbibed a lot of potent medicines -- obviously they were
ineffective -- and he endured the indignity of that procedure
that was most commonly deployed in the seventeenth century for
the treatment of any serious disease,
and that was the process of bloodletting.
We have to imagine that, as was the case for other men
and women who underwent some onset of blindness,
small incisions would be made in the skin around Milton's eyes
and a quantity of blood would be drained at regular intervals in
order to empty the body of the harmful toxins,
or its "ill humors," that were believed to produce this
terrible malady.The medical community,
of course, was not able to forestall the failure of
Milton's eyes and so, as I said,
Milton was blind by 1652.
Milton would never see his fourth child,
a daughter born three months after the onset of total
blindness. He would never again see the
face of his wife, Mary Powell,
when she died three days after the child's birth;
nor could he witness the death of his only son,
John Jr., which occurred six weeks after that.
And finally, Milton would never see the face
of Katherine Woodcock, the woman he married four years
later and who soon herself died in childbirth,
nor would he ever see the face of Elizabeth Minshull whom he
married nine years after that.Why did Milton go
blind? Reasonable conjecture leads us
to think that it was either glaucoma or cataracts,
but of course our business here has nothing to do with the real
causes of Milton's blindness but with Milton's literary
figuration, his representation of the
causes of his blindness.
I am convinced that one of the most powerful determinants in
Milton's late writings is Milton's drive to ascertain and
then also to justify the cause of his loss of sight.
I think you have throughout the late writings really a
proliferation of explanations and justifications of his
blindness, and they really fill Milton's
writing throughout the entire period from 1650 to his death in
1674.First let us consider how Milton's contemporaries
interpreted his blindness.
Milton's world fell into total darkness a little less than a
year after he finished his great and really quite daring
political treatise, the First Defense of the
English People, which was published in 1651.
This was the last of Milton's regicide treatises.
It was written in Latin because the new commonwealth government
had commissioned John Milton to justify the unprecedented act of
regicide to the entire European community,
which is why Milton didn't write it in English.
Milton was responsible for explaining to all of Europe why
the English people had beheaded their king and why they had set
up a new government on what Milton considered to be
idealistic non-monarchic principles.
Now most of Milton's readers on the continent were appalled by
England's action and appalled especially by Milton's defense
of England. It was widely thought -- not
only on the continent but also by a lot of Milton's fellow
Englishmen -- it was widely thought that God himself had
blinded Milton specifically for his writing against the king.
Milton was the subject of a number of sermons that were
delivered from the pulpits by conservative Anglican churches,
and the sermons pointed to Milton as an example.
Milton was an example: "Look what happens to those who
lift their hand against God's anointed king.
Look what happened to Milton.
He was punished with blindness for writing his defense of the
regicide."It's in response to just this type of common
accusation that Milton writes that lovely sonnet to his
friend, Mr. Cyriack Skinner.
This is on page 170 in the Hughes.
This is the sonnet in which Milton insists,
just as he will in the Second Defense of the English
People, that his blindness has nothing
whatsoever to do with an act of God.
In the poem to Cyriack Skinner, Milton's been totally blind for
about three years now, and he begins the sonnet to his
friend like this: "Cyriack, this three years' day
these eyes, though clear / to outward view
of blemish or of spot, / bereft of light thir seeing
have forgot." Milton writes repeatedly
throughout this period that despite his blindness,
his eyes appear -- and this is incredibly important to him --
they appear to outward view to be perfectly healthy.
He continually clears himself of any wrongdoing by insisting
that his eyes are clear of blemish or of spot -- or any
sign, that is, I have to assume,
of sin or of corruption or blame.
So far from being robbed of light by God,
his eyes have simply -- and isn't this a lovely metaphor --
his eyes have simply forgotten how to see.
You'll remember how important, how redemptive actually,
the idea of forgetting had become to Milton in Paradise
Lost.Now, Milton goes even further in the
sonnet in exculpating himself.
Look at line ten.
This is where he claims that he is supported by his conscience,
his knowledge that he willingly sacrificed his eyes for the
patriotic goal of political liberty.
Milton is talking of his eyes here: " lost them overplied / in
liberty's defense, my noble task,
/ Of which all Europe talks from side to side."
He ruined his eyesight with the tireless labor that he devoted
to writing that first defense of the English people.
Milton sacrificed his eyes for the freedom of his countrymen,
the noble task for which he was compensated.
He was compensated with the talk of all of Europe,
he was a celebrity.
According to this formulation, Milton has knowingly and
willingly bought fame as a political liberator with the
noble, sacrificial payment of his
eyes.Now, this is the claim that Milton's
making publicly in these poems in this period and in the prose
treatises. It's a claim for the nobility
of the tragic condition that he finds himself in,
and so in all of Milton's public poetry and prose Milton
asserts his blindness as a point of pride.
He even goes so far in the Second Defense of the English
People to claim that his blindness is actually a sign of
God's election; God has chosen him,
and it's an incredibly beautiful image,
the image of Milton's eyes being covered by heavenly wings,
by angel wings, almost as a favor.
He's continually asserting publicly that his blindness is a
sign of strength.But we have a more private and a more
personal consideration of his blindness in a letter that
Milton wrote to his friend, Dr.
Leonard Philaras, the Athenian,
and this was in the packet.
In the more private venue of the personal letter,
Milton seems in some ways to lower his guard,
and he makes a powerful and moving plea for a cure because
he's writing to a doctor.
Look in the packet.
This is around page sixty in the packet.
The original page number is 722, I believe.
Milton's articulating here for the doctor the history of his
loss of sight and the nature of his condition:
"It is ten years, I think, more or less,
since I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim,
and at the same time my spleen and all my viscera are burdened
and shaken with flatulence."
After this account of intestinal discomfort,
Milton then describes the mist that began to appear in his left
eye; Milton's left eye was the first
one to fail. Then a few sentences down he
describes the failure of the right eye:
The other eye also failing slowly and gradually
over a period of almost three years, some months before my
sight was completely destroyed.
Everything which I distinguished when I myself was
still seemed to swim, now to the right,
now to the left. Certain permanent vapors seemed
to have settled upon my entire forehead and temples which press
and oppress my eyes with a sort of sleepy heaviness especially
from mealtime to evening. In this letter to the doctor,
Milton associates the onset of his blindness with the onset of
a gastrointestinal complaint, and in doing this he's
following the common wisdom about the causes of blindness,
which was usually attributed in the scientific community of the
seventeenth century to a digestive problem.
For Milton, his most oppressive pain burdened his forehead and
his eyes in the hours following the noontime meal,
and the pain in his head corresponded to a pain in his
gut, which occurred presumably in the same hours following the
noontime meal, as his entire frame was shaken
with a violent flatulence.
This is the theory of how this kind of digestive ailment caused
blindness: the digestive vapors that Milton or anyone who was
going blind was not able to expel successfully through
normal digestion and the normal process of the passing of wind
-- these vapors were trapped in our poet's body.
They began gradually to rise up to his head over a period of
many months or even years where they settled into the sockets of
his eyes. Eventually they clouded over
his eyes and cut off all access to light from the outside.
Another way of putting this: the affliction that would alter
forever the last quarter of Milton's life had its ultimate
cause in the process of digestion.
Milton's greatest misery was quite simply the consequence --
and he may have believed this -- the consequence of something he
ate.Now, you probably have no doubt
guessed why I'm emphasizing this particular figuration of
Milton's blindness as an irrevocable change that follows
the ingestion of food.
The story of Milton's blindness as he represents it brings us so
perilously close to the story of the Fall,
which is, of course, another narrative that imagines
the inalterable and terrible effects of something eaten.
One critic, William Kerrigan, in his brilliant analysis in
the book The Sacred Complex has called Paradise Lost
the story of an evil meal.
It's important in the poem that Adam and Eve fall at noon.
The forbidden fruit is their noontime meal,
and it's possible that Kerrigan is right in aligning the
dynamics of the loss of paradise with the logic that Milton
employs in describing the loss of his sight.
When Adam falls in Book Nine of Paradise Lost -- and
these are the lines that are behind me on the board here --
we have a description of the almost physiological response of
the earth to the sinful transgression of Adam:
"Earth trembl'd from her entrails,
as again / in pangs, and Nature gave a second
groan." It's as if Milton has
transposed on to the entire earth the digestive pains that
were the consequence of his own noontime meal,
as if the flatulent earth were responding sympathetically
somehow to the violent shaking of Milton's own
entrails.Now, we're left at the point that
we're so often left: what's the point of all of
this? What's at stake,
or what might be at stake, in this connection between
Milton's own postprandial groaning and moaning and the
even more poignant post-lapsarian groaning of Adam
and Eve and the entire earth?
Now the connection between these two phenomena,
I believe (if there is one), involves transgression.
The physical deterioration that visits human beings after the
Fall comes as a direct consequence, of course,
of their transgression of divine law.
It's possible that we have buried in this narrative of
Milton's own physical deterioration a related
narrative of a kind of transgression and punishment.
I assume that it has already become clear to you that this
will be one of those [laughs] lectures that I'm giving over
entirely to perfectly shameless biographical speculation.
It's one of the great joys, and I take it to be one of the
great privileges, of being able to lecture on
Milton in this format rather than in a seminar format,
because of course if this were a seminar you could (and you
would be right to) ask me for my proof.
How do I know what Milton was thinking?
And of course I have no proof [laughter]
but I know what I believe.
I'm willing here and now to share with you these things that
I believe actually quite passionately.
My own belief is that on some level Milton may not have
convinced himself when he wrote in the second defense -- or
Milton may not have convinced himself when he wrote in that
sonnet to Mr. Cyriack Skinner -- that he had
willingly sacrificed his eyes for the good of his country or
that God had permitted his blindness as a sign of his
special election, covering his eyes with angel
wings. It's possible that what you
have in a letter like the letter to Leonard Philaras is something
like a submerged expression of guilt.
Maybe Milton's enemies were right;
maybe Milton was to blame with his transgressive challenges to
every conceivable form of authority.
Maybe Milton was to blame for his blindness,
the affliction that God visited upon him for his crimes.Now
this, of course, is just one way to
understand the extraordinary attention that Milton gives to
his blindness in the invocation to Book Three of his epic.
Turn to page 257 in the Hughes.
Milton continues in Paradise Lost -- this is
written well over a decade after the onset of blindness -- Milton
continues to defend himself from the imputation of blame.
The muse Milton invokes here is not the traditional muse of the
classic epic or even the heavenly muse that Milton seems
to have fashioned in the first invocation.
It's now exactly that power from which Milton has been
excluded by virtue of his blindness -- light:
"Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,
/ Or of th' Eternal Coeternal beam / May I express thee
unblam'd?"Let me just stop right there.
"May I express thee unblam'd?"
Milton is exposing a fear at the very beginning here of some
imputation of blame or guilt.
He's not even sure how to address this inspiring light.
The first seven lines of this invocation are not just the most
--and they are, but they are not simply the
most impenetrable lines in the entire poem.
They are among the most difficult lines of poetry ever
written. It's always worth asking why a
passage of poetry is so impossible to wrap your brain
around. What's at stake here in this
difficulty? Why this struggle,
and why must Milton struggle with such awkward metaphysical
categories in order simply to address properly the power of
light?I think it's understandable that Milton would
call the power of light "offspring of Heav'n
first-born." According to Genesis,
light is the first thing that is created at the moment of
God's fiat lux: "let there be light," that
great commandment.
But the problem really arises in line two when Milton
conjectures that the beam of light he's addressing wasn't
born or wasn't begotten at all, it wasn't created;
that it might actually be co-eternal with the eternal
Father himself. This, I think,
is a much more dangerous possibility.
Milton asks to be enlightened by a light that might be as old
as the Father. This runs utterly counter to
the creation account in Genesis.
Could this light be one of the Father's rivals?
There's a fear here that the ambition of this bid for
paternal light is presumptuous, perhaps it's even satanic.
Satan of course in the next book, Book Four,
will have his invocation to light.Now,
the light Milton addresses has been around forever.
Look at line eight of this opening invocation.
This is on the next page: [B]efore the
sun,Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voiceOf
God, as with a Mantle,
didst investThe rising world of waters dark and
deep,Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,Escap't the
Stygian pool, though long detain'dIn that
obscure sojourn, while in my flightThrough
utter and through middle darkness borneWith other
notes than to th' Orphean LyreI sung of Chaos and
eternal Night, Taught by the heav'nly Muse
to venture downThe dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare…
Milton's giving us a picture of himself as proud.
Clearly, he's proud that he's returned from the descent into
hell that he seems to have made during the composition of the
first two books of his epics.
He himself has escaped the Stygian pool,
and such a re-ascent is hard and rare;
but we've just had represented before this at the very end of
Book Two, just lines before this,
Satan's own escape from the Stygian pool and Satan's own
detainment in his obscure sojourn through chaos.
There's a remarkable identification that Milton is
bringing himself very close to: an identification between
Milton and Satan.
There lingers in this relation the idea that Milton has brought
upon himself some guilt, some blame perhaps,
for having sung of hell and having sung of chaos at
all.Milton, of course, can't make this
connection explicit, but there lurks the
possibility, and I grant you that it's an
irrational possibility, that Milton has done something
wrong -- I don't know how else to read these lines -- by flying
through utter and through middle darkness during his composition
of the first two books of Paradise Lost.
I know this doesn't make sense: it's almost as if
Milton's flight through darkness had been responsible for the
literal, visual darkness that is the
condition of his blindness, which he is describing now to
us for the first time.
It's this possibility, I think, the idea that Milton
has brought his blindness on himself over the course of
[laughs] the composition of the poem,
which of course isn't the case -- it's this possibility that,
I think, accounts for the delay in Milton's mention of his loss
of sight, the delay until this moment in
the poem. It's as if the guilt for his
blindness in some impossible way lay in the composition of this
very poem, as if the transgression that
called down the wrath of the heavenly Father had been
Milton's glorious and heroic treatment of Satan;
as if it were Milton's ambitious attempt to supply the
angelic prehistory to the Book of Genesis,
to the creation account that we get in the Book of Genesis,
that had brought this wrath upon him.
Milton preempted, he prevented,
Genesis.He continues his address to the light:
[T]hee I revisit safe,And feel thy sovran
vital Lamp; but thouRevisit'st not
these eyes, that roll in vainTo find thy piercing
ray, and find no dawn;So thick a
drop serene hath quench'd their Orbs,Or dim suffusion
veil'd. Like so many [laughs]
of the lines in this invocation, these lines are
violently crammed with an almost unbearable pathos.
"Thee I revisit safe" -- but thou revisit'st not these eyes:
it's impossible to read these lines and not feel that Milton
is in some way accusing the deity of injustice.
It's as if Milton were challenging the holy light to
revisit Milton, just as Milton is revisiting
the holy light. He structures this challenge --
it's the logic of a quid pro quo here.
He's seeking compensation for his loss but the compensation
that he's looking for isn't forthcoming.At least,
it's not forthcoming yet.
Line thirty-two: "nor sometimes do I forget /
those other two equall'd with me in Fate, / so were I equalled
with them in renown…" Here he lists the famous blind
bards, the blind prophets of the Western tradition,
asking the muse of light to repay him for his fate,
the fate of blindness, with fame and renown:
the renown or fame enjoyed by blind Thamyris and blind
Maeonides -- Maeonides is Homer -- and Tiresias and Phineus.
Milton knows perfectly well that each of these figures had
been blinded as some sort of punishment for a crime,
at least according to most of the legends surrounding them.
Each of these seers was thought to have been blinded for
aspiring to an intimate knowledge of the godhead.
Even as Milton is asking God to elevate him to the status of
their equal and an equal to Homer,
sharing an equal renown and an equal fame, he's implicitly
acknowledging that terrifying possibility,
and it really is terrifying, that his blindness,
like theirs, is the result of his own
transgression: his punishment for trespassing
on divinity.But this acknowledgment -- if it is,
and I think it is -- this acknowledgment of guilt only
takes place between the lines, below the surface of the
invocation. For the most part Milton is
struggling to clear himself from any imputation of sin or crime.
From lines forty to fifty, the strategy of this invocation
shifts again, and Milton catalogs the losses
that he has endured through the loss of his sight.
When before had a poet represented himself in such
heartbreaking lines?
Thus with the YearSeasons return,
but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev'n
or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom,
or Summer's Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face
divine;But cloud instead, and ever-during
darkSurrounds me, from the cheerful ways of
menCut off… A few poets have been willing
even [laughs] -- well, after Milton,
to subject themselves to this kind of absolutely pathos-filled
self-representation.
For exposing himself in all of his vulnerability Milton has
everything to lose here, and for exposing himself in all
of his vulnerability Milton asks for something in return.
He asks to be recompensed for these extraordinary losses.
I am [laughs] absolutely convinced that
there's a way in which this request is not irrational.
It's completely reasonable.
Because he has bathed himself in a pathos,
I think, that's almost too painful even to read,
we as readers are willing [laughs]
to grant him anything he wants.
There's a kind of naked emotional logic governing our
experience of these lines.Let's look at the
moment at which Milton asks for the payback.
This is line fifty-one: I have lost all these things,
in other words, "so much the rather thou
Celestial Light / shine inward, and the mind through all her
powers / irradiate, there plant eyes…"
Milton is demanding for his pains the inspiration of the
heavenly muse. God owes him this,
and so Milton is remarkably undoing the logic of sin and
punishment that he had inherited in his understanding of his
blindness, and he's restricting it as
something entirely different.
He's turning it into a logic of loss and compensation.
Milton has sacrificed his sight.
He has lost almost everything, and so much the rather lets God
repay him for that loss, what is once again his noble
self-sacrifice. You have Milton reworking here
the rhetoric of guilt.
His blindness becomes important not because it's a sign of
punishment or of blame or of spot or of blemish,
but it's a guarantee of the inspirational success of the
poem. This is like a promissory note,
his blindness is, for his poetic reward -- the
fact that this poem will have been inspired by the heavenly
muse.Oh, this is wonderful.
Turn to the very last page of Hughes, of the Merritt Hughes
edition. This is page 1044.
This is one of the earliest biographies of Milton written in
the seventeenth century.
It's an anonymous one, and it gives us some remarkable
details about this man's life.
Some of them are so astonishing there's no way they could have
been made up. The anonymous writer at the top
of page 1044 is describing Milton's daily habits as he was
composing Paradise Lost and the later poems.
Milton, it seems, would dictate the most recent
installment of Paradise Lost in the morning.
So this is what we learn: "[H]e, waking early"-- and
you'll see this wonderful admiration of the dear,
Puritan Milton -- "waking early, as is the use of
temperate men, had commonly a good stock of
verses ready against his amanuensis came..."
The amanuensis is the secretary, the young man who
would come to Milton's house -- and there were a number of them
-- who would take down dictation.
Milton seems to have composed the poem at night in his sleep,
which, the biographer continues: "which,
if it happened to be later than ordinary, [Milton]
would complain [if the amanuensis or the secretary got
there too late Milton would complain]
saying he wanted to be milked."This absolutely
[laughs] stunning biographical detail is
italicized here presumably because it's a quotation --
that's a form of noting a quotation;
but the italics seem to me at least to indicate as well that
this is an extraordinary privileged moment in this
biographical text.
It's a scandalous little tidbit if it's true.
We have in here an extraordinary image of Milton's
understanding of his own poetic output,
and if this isn't true, what we do have here at the
very least is an incredibly close and intimate reading of
this very invocation that we're focusing on.
Having filled himself up with a stock of verses the night
before, Milton could imagine himself as a source of spiritual
and poetic nourishment.
Milton could imagine himself the distinctly feminine source
of this nourishing poem, as if by a process of
identification so complete Milton could imagine himself in
the role of the maternal muse who feeds the poet as she
inspires the thoughts that move harmonious numbers.
It's not the muse only but the poet, too, who can be
milked.Now, God the Father tells the Son --
this is in the dialog between the Father and the Son later in
Book Three -- that at the end of time there won't be a Father and
a Son because God shall be "All in All."
A related form of a kind of absolute internalization and
absolute identification is at work, I think,
in this incredibly moving cry to be milked.
The muse has so completely inspired the poet,
so completely transferred her power to him,
that it's almost impossible to tell who is who or who is
feeding whom. When Milton in the invocation
requests that the muse, the holy light,
feed on thoughts, we have a moment of confusion
that would only seem to guarantee that the transference
of power has actually taken place.
It doesn't matter whether these thoughts belong to the muse or
to the poet. These thoughts are "All in
All."You have other guarantees as well in Book Three
of Milton's having filled up at the fount of heavenly
inspiration, and these moments of guarantee
[laughs] come in in extraordinarily
unexpected places.
Look at Book Three, line 576.
In the Hughes Edition this is page 272.
On his way from hell to earth, Satan stops at the sun,
which is, of course, the source of earthly light,
and Satan watches as the sun dispenses light to all of the
little stars of heaven.
This is how Milton's astronomy works:
Where the great LuminaryAloof the vulgar
Constellations thick [of course, the "great Luminary" is the
sun],That from his Lordly eye keeps distance due,
Dispenses Light from far…
Now, this "great Luminary," the sun, dispenses light to the
surrounding stars.
With this image you have a clearly demarcated model of a
particular kind of power relation.
This is the powerful sun's unilateral inspiration of the
stars.But look what happens next.
This is the stars: …
[T]hey as they moveThir Starry dance in numbers that
computeDays, months, and years,
towards his all-chearing LampTurn swift their various
motions… The stars are filling up here
with the light of the sun and they're behaving just as
Milton's thoughts do when he's been inspired,
when they have been inspired by holy light.
They're filled with the capacity of a kind of free will,
and they turn themselves in starry dance.
Milton is very carefully reworking in this passage,
this astronomical passage, the key words of the invocation
that we've been looking at: "move"and "numbers."
He projects his image of the inspired composition of the poem
onto the enormous screen of the entire cosmos.
And, just as in the invocation, the actual mover,
the agent behind the action of inspiration, is uncertain.
They "turn swift their various motions" or are turned by his
magnetic beam. We don't know who's turning
what. It's "All in All."It's at
this moment of uncertain agency that Milton really [laughs]
gives us something truly amazing,
and I ask your indulgence here.
You will know that it's indisputable,
the point that I'm about to make, but I think it's shocking:
the sun warms the universe just as the holy light will warm the
poet. That much, I think, is clear;
but Milton's figuration of this process, this process of
infusion, is truly one of the most surprising moments in the
poem for my money.
This process of infusion replicates on the grand scale --
okay. Well, let me read it first:
[That] beam, that gently warmsThe
Universe, and to each inward partWith gentle penetration,
though unseen,Shoots invisible virtue even to the
deep… This process of infusion
replicates on the grand scale of the entire cosmos the rhythms of
the intimate human act of coital ejaculation.
You simply can't deny that that's what's happening here.
Milton may give us a cosmic image of the process of
inspiration but this is a process by which the universe,
and by association the poet himself, has been feminized and
transformed mysteriously into something like the maternal muse
herself. Milton tells us at the
beginning of the invocation that the light to which he prays was
present at the creation.
Maybe that light was the same as that identifiable with the
heavenly spirit in Book One who "dove-like,
satst brooding on the vast Abyss / and mad'st it
pregnant..." And maybe Milton here in Book
Three is imagining himself the glorious recipient of this
remarkable act of divine impregnation.
He's no longer the vulnerable male poet whose poetic potency,
just like his sight, can be cut off at whim,
"from the cheerful ways of men / cut off".
He's a body impregnated by God.
The universe is a body impregnated by God and perhaps
even indistinguishable at some point from God.
He's a figure impervious to punishment or pain.The
psychic processes and strategies that I've been describing here
are clearly operating at the level of fantasy.
This is wish fulfillment.
It's certainly not logic.
There's no moment in Paradise Lost at which
the poet will actually present a logical statement concerning
this wish to be absolutely infused with divinity,
to be so divine that he would be invulnerable to punishment or
to be so divine that he would be invulnerable to the physical
humiliation of blindness.
You don't have anything like an explicit statement to that
effect in Paradise Lost, but there is elsewhere in
Milton and I want to draw you to this now.
There is such an articulation in another poem.
This is what many scholars believe was the last poem that
Milton wrote, Samson Agonistes,
and so I'm going to ask you to turn to page 553 in the
Hughes to this passage in Samson Agonistes. Even
though we don't read the Samson Agonistes until
the end of the semester, I want to look at this small
section of it now since it engages the problem of blindness
with as much pathos and with as much force as anything that
Milton ever wrote.So Samson you know.
Samson is the biblical hero whose strength was bound up in
his hair. Samson was blinded by the
Philistines after his hair had been shorn by his treacherous
wife, Delilah. Milton calls her "Dah-lee-lah."
Look at the Hughes.
This is line eighty of Samson.
Milton has his hero, Samson, bewailing the fact of
his blindness: "O dark,
dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / irrecoverably dark,
total eclipse without all hope of day!"At this point it's
wonderful: Samson begins to echo Milton from the invocation that
we've been looking at, the invocation to Book Three of
Paradise Lost.
Here's Samson: O first created Beam,
and thou great Word,"Let there be light,
and light was over all";Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime
decree?The Sun to me is darkAnd silent as the Moon,
When she deserts the night,Hid in her vacant
interlunar cave.Since light [try to follow this logic]
so necessary is to life, And almost life itself,
if it be trueThat light is in the Soul,She [the soul]
all in every part… Samson's feeling his way here
toward Milton's theory of monism, the idea that the soul
is diffused throughout every part of the human body.
Since the light of the soul is diffused throughout every part
of the body, why, Samson asks:
Why was the sightTo such a tender ball as th' eye
confin'd?So obvious and so easy to be quench't,
And not as feeling through all parts diffus'd,That she
might look at will through every pore?
These [laughs] are extraordinary lines.
These are among my most favorite lines in all of Milton.
Samson is questioning the wisdom and the justice of God's
admittedly -- who can deny it?
-- God's extremely peculiar configuration of the human body.
You read this and you realize that Samson is really on to
something here. Why didn't, we ask with Samson,
God implant the sense of sight in human beings just as he
implanted the sense of touch or feeling?
Why isn't sight like touch, diffused through all parts of
the body "that she might look at will through every pore?"
Milton's pushing here toward a fantasy of physical
invulnerability, imagining an alternative --
this is science fiction -- an alternative model of bodily
configuration that would render impossible the all-too-easy
quenching of the tender eyeballs.In the context of
Samson Agonistes, in this particular speech
of Samson's, we have to write it off as a kind of morally suspect
complaint. This is the faithless
questioning of the justice of God's creation.
Milton doesn't permit himself in Paradise Lost,
at least not explicitly, to impugn the wisdom behind
God's creation of the all-too-vulnerable human body,
but he does fashion for us there a fantasy in Paradise
Lost. It's a lot like Samson's
fantasy of a body exempt from harm, free from disability,
and that is, of course, the body of the
angels. And so the last passage that
I'm going to ask you to look at is on page 331 of the Hughes
edition. This is Book Six,
line 344, and the narrator here is the Archangel Raphael.
Raphael's explaining to Adam why the angels in the war in
heaven can't be permanently wounded or harmed.
Now we already know that angels -- we've already learned this --
that angels when they please can "either sex assume" or both,
but Raphael gives us even more information about these
perfectly fantastical figures.
Their bodies have been constructed along precisely
those lines that Samson was proposing.
Their vital functions are diffused through every
part.So look at the bottom of the page.
This is line 344.
[F]or Spirits that live throughoutVital in every
part, not as frail manIn Entrails,
Heart or Head, Liver or Reins,
[these angels]Cannot but by annihilating die;Nor in thir
liquid texture mortal woundReceive,
no more can then the fluid Air:All Heart they live,
all Head, all Eye, all Ear,
All Intellect, all Sense…
The body of each and every angel has been created "All in
All." No sensory power or important
function has been confined to a tender ball or a delicate orb or
a particular organ.
These angels are all eye.
They have the power of sight diffused throughout their entire
bodies, and we can only imagine that they can -- just as Samson
had fantasized -- that they can see through every pore;
and so the Miltonic angel enjoys the state of absolute
sight and absolute inspiration and absolute oneness with God
that Milton is bidding for on some level in his complex and
ambitious invocation to light in Book Three.Now,
Milton isn't finished articulating for us the
impossible process of his poetic inspiration,
the miracle by which the blind poet is compensated for his
blindness with the vision of things invisible to mortal
sight. Especially as we will see in
the invocation, or the quasi-invocation,
to Book Seven of Paradise Lost,
the poem will continue to voice doubts that this process of
inspiration has actually occurred;
but you have in the figure of the Miltonic angel a literalized
image, an embodiment, of Milton's most ambitious
fantasy for his poem.
It's an unrealistic fantasy for himself, of course,
but it is an ambitious fantasy and a genuine one,
I think, for his poem.
We know that the body of the poet, of course,
would never undergo its much desired, much fantasized
metamorphosis into the body of an angel.
Milton's would never become a body perfected,
rendered impervious to humiliation and darkness,
but the body of the angel may in the end be an entirely
appropriate image for Milton's fantasy of the body of the poem.
It's this perhaps peculiar idea that I'll leave you with today:
we'll grant that Milton is right, that he was inspired by
God to write this poem.
If he is right, then the body of this epic
really is very much like the angelic body.
It is infused, and we have to believe it's
infused in every part, with the spirit of God.
It's nothing less than all heart, all intellect,
and -- and this is an extraordinarily resonant word
for Milton -- all sense.Okay.
That's the end of this lecture.
Let me remind you that when you read Book Three for next time,
you will also look at the passages from The Christian
Doctrine that are assigned on the syllabus.