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The Myth of Orpheus in Milton’s “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “Lycidas.”

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá

Well, Phaedrus, the priests in the sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona declared that the earliest oracles came from an oak tree, and the men of their time, who lacked your modern sophistication, were simple-minded enough to be quite satisfied with messages from an oak or a rock if only they were true. But truth is not enough for you; you think it matters who the speaker is and where he comes from (Plato 1973:76).

1. Introduction

1.1 The prospect of various choices

A recognition of the limits of methodology is essential in literary interpretation. One should not overestimate what any critical technique is capable of achieving. A critical approach may be likely to help the informed reader or critic achieve a particular kind of insight within a piece of writing but it may also leave unattended other modes of experience of the text itself once there is no such thing as a totalizing methodology or viewpoint. In choosing a critical approach, the critic must bear in mind that it should not only correspond to his immediate intuition of the work, but it should also enable him to draw rational and objective conclusions. The analysis should preferably counterpoint internal and external evidence, methodology and intuition, so as to make text interpretation an act of appreciation and understanding. In the case of the writings of John Milton, the interpretative challenge is doubly internal, for this Renaissance poet seems to have undergone a process of cutting off the vision of the literal eye, and establishing a (better) vision within whose focal point is music.

John Milton's inward gaze may have been a consequence of his life and times, or of his education and religious beliefs. In any case, the poet went blind in his late mature years and composed all of his late writings without the help of his literal eye. John Milton (1608-1674) was born in London, the son of a scrivener from whom he learned how to play the viol and the organ. He went to St. Paul’s School and later on to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was to acquire a part of his scholarly erudition. Within these years and perhaps all through his life, John Milton was to be found striving in between his self and what he expected from mankind, for besides being studious and unique, he was, both in praxis and in thought, not willing to give in to arbitrary authority. Carrying about a feminine quality in his appearance, thinking of man as spirit and hardly ever of man as flesh and bones, John Milton could have been blamed for aloofness, but yet he was quite tuned to the circumstances touching politics and religion.

Whatever the occasion, the political prose treatises, the religious compositions, and verse of John Milton have already been studied and dealt with extensively. One cannot systematically approach any writing of Milton's without first acknowledging that critical study in Milton scholarship ranges from simplistic readings and stereotyped interpretations to the ones that, being aware of the political naivete of traditional literary history, manage to appreciate Milton’s text in the context of seventeenth century England, and not as a subtext of an overpowering poetical personality. Through close attention to the text and a direct regard for historical context, a method of interpretation should be able to survey the Renaissance poet’s own views on the nature of poetry as well as to take into account the many meanings and levels of meaning confined to the poet’s choice of a single referent. Milton seems to have found an everlasting delight on the sublime and, especially in his youth, a “keen delight in turns on words or play on meanings as in the mordents, turns, and trills of a court musician” (Steadman 1975:8), but his poetry surpassed these mannerist bouts of composition and reached a point where his political and poetical subject-matters were infused with several interlocking concepts at once.

Milton saw to the several layers of meaning in his writings, and was always attentive to decorum, for he was highly genre-conscious. His imaginative energy transformed most of the genres he worked with beyond recognition. This kind of poetic practice together with the Renaissance and Classical poetic theory Milton was acquainted with gave him ample warrant to rework intertextually the literary models he had at hand. In regard to genre and to Milton’s polysemous poetics, the dialectical and dialogical perspectives offered by Peirce’s semiotics and Johansen’s communicative model would disclose Milton's different points of view, scan the copiousness of his themes, and unfold the guiding interpretative principle through which he sought to establish his inward vision. The Peircean and Johansenean semiotic stances are dialogical and dialectical to the same extent that Russian genre-theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s propositions are: “the dialogic interaction of forms; the ‘polyglossia’ of several generic languages within the work; strong connectives linking the poem to contemporary reality; the valorization of process” (Lewalski 1994:81). These points, initially intended for Mikhail Bakhtin, also hold true for the Peircean and Johansenean models, and they appear to be the proper perspective to look upon the Miltonic text. Milton’s signposts, be them music, natural or moral philosophy, religion, and politics, can be approached as limina, cutting edges that open up into a quasi-parallel world where genre boundaries and poetical voices converse with themselves and in the process constantly defer meaning forward.Milton’s early writings are recreative inasmuch as they work meaning in a dialectical process whose synthesis is for the better part hesitant and uncertain. This is so because the poet distrusts language to the point of letting hold of the unnamed name, he “does with language what the ‘Maker of that maker,’ as Sidney calls him, does with the matter of chaos, not just ordering but vivifying and diversifying abundant life” (McColley 1994:90). The densely interwoven linguistic fabric used by Milton seems to count on hesitancy to vivify his poetic nature, and on uncertainty to diversify his poetical worlds. Milton’s writings, the work of the least mystical of religious poets, are a motivation for those in search of fully available articulations in recondite allegorical junctions so powerfully expressive that transform chaos into cosmos. To understand a possible ordering of Milton’s poetic cosmos, the following points will be drawn into perspective: the study of myth, the author's biographical and historical contexts, and the configuration of his oeuvre. The search for an ordering recreation of Milton's youthful poetic cosmos is what connects me as an informed reader to this poet's early writings. Thus, I want to study Milton's early pieces-"L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and Lycidas"-to learn how the author reworked the myth of Orpheus in these poems so as to help him order his poetic cosmos, distinguish between two different orders (the human and the divine), and discover if "the heavenly music of the spheres" closed in on Milton.

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