The Columbia History of British Poetry (62 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 266
a more widespread trepidation about action in the world in general, as is exemplified in the metaphor in Book I of a ship seeking refuge at sea by anchoring onto an island, which turns out to be a sea monster. The difficulty in distinguishing succor from danger pervades
Paradise Lost
; all Milton's post-Restoration works ponder the uneven and puzzling relationship between knowledge and action. In
Paradise Lost
the relationship between the two centers on Milton's insistence that Adam and Eve have free choice to obey or disobey the injunction against eating, appropriately, from the tree of knowledge, a free choice unaffected by God's foreknowledge that they will disobey.
Milton's notion of freedom is such, however, that it exists only in dialectical relation to disobedience; choice is meaningless without the possibility of choosing wronglyan idea extensively developed in his best-known prose work,
Areopagitica
(1644), which argues against pre-publication censorship. For Milton, there is no time in human history when one could avoid the possibility of a wrong choice with potentially disastrous consequences. And the difficulty of choosing correctly is further suggested by Adam's warning in Book IV that the "Tree / Of Knowledge [is] planted by the Tree of Life, / So near grows Death to Life." This fundamental ambiguity complicates the relationship between knowledge and choice throughout the epic.
Underlying the easy existence of Adam and Eve in Eden is an intellectual conundrum that defines both the condition of their personal relationship and the possibility of its collapse in their fallthe paradoxical correlation between unity and differentiation, similarity and dissimilarity, oneness and hierarchy. Milton conceives of similitude as a fundamental metaphysical principle of Creation: Christ and Adam are similitudes of God, Eve a similitude of Adam. In many ways, understanding this principle is the most important intellectual, emotional, and moral challenge of living in Eden, a challenge that manifests itself in the very nature of moral choice. It is precisely this paradoxical relationship between unity and hierarchy that Lucifer could not accept when God begot the Son, in Milton's heterodox Christology, by elevating one angel to be Head of the other angels, his Body, in order to better unite them as one; Lucifer's reaction against this paradox is the cause of the first rebellionthe rebellion of the fallen angels in heaven and their consequent fall.
The challenge Satan faced in the elevation of the Son resurfaces in the very first moments of Eve's consciousness. Directly after her cre-
 
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ation, as she recounts it in Book IV, Eve was attracted to her own reflection in a pool of water. Adam instructs her that in fact she is
his
true image. He persuades her to follow him rather than her watery reflection, imploring, "whom thou fliest, of him thou art / His flesh, his bone." "Part of my Soul I seek thee," he pleads, "and thee claim / My other half." Eve finally responds to this last appeal to oneness with a recognition of Adam's superiority as her head and guide. Throughout their relation Milton plays upon their resemblance as the shifting combination of parity and subordination, equality and hierarchy, symmetry and asymmetry; Adam and Eve thus remain within the proper parameters of resemblance in a way that Lucifer did not. Eve's mistake at the pool highlights Eden as a place of intellectual labor, where difficult moral and perceptual discriminations must be made.
As the relationship between Adam and Eve develops, discrimination between parity and hierarchy is increasingly invested with emotional charge, as in the debate in Book IX about working separately in the garden in order to work more efficiently. Eve creates the enabling condition of the Fall when she suggests that she and Adam separate "to divide our labors." At the core of Milton's epic is a domestic quarrel about the proper order of what Adam calls "household good." The quarrel resonates with parallels from Milton's first marriage while it connects the entire epic to the emerging structure of the middle-class family in the seventeenth century. Among Adam's arguments against separating is his insistence that it would be better to face Satan together. He appeals alternately to his hegemony over her as well as their complementarity. Adam asserts that he would be stronger than she to resist Satan, but only because of her presence, adding that Eve, too, would receive strength from his presence were Satan to approach her first. The logical movement of his speech typically maintains their relationship as both symmetrical and asymmetrical, as also suggested by Adam's address to Eve as "Sole
Eve
, Associate sole," implying both her dependence and independence.
Eve contends that true happiness can only result from "integrity," the unitary strength of the individual. Adam replies that free will can be directed well only within the social unit of the family, the real context of moral judgment; to withstand temptation, they must "mind" each other. However, in apparent frustration, Adam loses the balance between hegemony and complementarity: first, he commands Eve to
 
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prove her "constancy" by obeying him, and then he abruptly relents, resigned to her desire go her own separate way, but apprehending trouble for a "much deceived, much failing, hapless
Eve
."
It is through Eve that
Paradise Lost
meditates on what it is like to be wrong. Convinced by Satan she will be intellectually raised to a "divine Similitude" if she eats the forbidden fruit, Eve first puzzles over whether she can now be "more equal" to Adam, but finally decides to share "equal Lot" with him by inviting him to eat as well. Adam immediately recognizes she is lost, but instinctively decides to follow her, drawn by "the Link of nature." "Our State cannot be severed, we are one, / One Flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself,'' he declares. Adam and Eve ultimately cannot sustain the emotional and intellectual conditions of the earthly Paradise, the difficult, delicate balance between complementarity and hierarchy.
Even Adam's mistake is difficult to evaluate morally. The explicit censure of his decision to follow Eve does not enervate the heightened beauty of their
Liebestod
, emotionally charged by Adam's offer to sacrifice himself for love of Eve. The very wrongness of his action is the typological prefigurationand therefore the historical inaugurationof the redemptive death of the second Adam, Christ. The coincidence of sin and its opposite in the Fall intimates a moral complexity that makes ethical judgment almost unfathomable. At the historical and personal moment in which Milton writes
Paradise Lost
, typological foreshadowing is no longer the key to understand how to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, as Milton and his political peers believed on the eve of the revolution. Typological fulfillment in and through the second Adam may ultimately lead to personal redemption, a "paradise within," but in the meantime, prophecy renders the divine will in history endlessly complex for time-bound human beings. Typological foreshadowing, once the mark of the poet-priestly voice, has become instead the mark of bewildering ethical choice, a fall into history as much as redemption out of it.
Paradise Regained
and
Samson Agonistes
If in his early career Milton felt anxiety over finding just the proper poetic beginning in pastoral, it is evident by the time of
Paradise Regained
(1671) that he felt the same uneasiness about ending in epic. Echoing Spenser and Virgil, the first line of
Paradise Regained
aston-
 
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ishingly identifies Milton as the epic poet by referring to the much longer, more ambitious
Paradise Lost
as his garden poem, his pastoral apprenticeship.
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
were published together in 1671, and though there is some question about whether Samson Agonistes was actually written before or after the Restoration, most scholars choose the post-Restoration period of composition. Both works are about redeemers coming to understand their redemptive actions; they meditate on history to fathom the oxymoronic, passive nature of redemptive action.
Paradise Regained
is about Satan's temptations of Christ when Christ is just about to enter into manhoodwhen he is about to realize his vocation as redeemer; the work opens with Christ pondering just how he will perform the act of redemption. Through a series of temptationsthe main subject of the workSatan seeks both to confirm that Christ is the Messiah and to forestall his own destruction. Satan tries to incite Christ with a desire for public recognition and power. He challenges him to make himself known: he tempts him to perform a miracle, to turn stone to bread in the wilderness; he tempts him to have his name spread through wealth in the first of several vast worldly spectacles he presents to Christ. He further tempts Christ with the worldly knowledge of Greece and Rome, which Christ stingingly rejects in favor of the completeness of biblical knowledgeperhaps the most troubling attitude readers of the classical Milton have had to digest. As symbol of wealth, power, and political empire, Rome plays an especially important role for both Christ and Satan: Satan tempts Christ with the conquest of Rome not only for fame and worldly riches, but also as the occasion of redemptive actionRome is the oppressor of Israel; to conquer Rome is to deliver Israel, and thus inherit David's throne and fulfill the prophecies of redemption.
Behind this temptation is the problem that gnaws at Milton in his last two worksregret over the attempt to second-guess divine "prediction," to act as if one could be a step ahead in the redemptive narrative. From the start, Christ's response to this temptation is simply patience, passivity. Through adversity with Satan he stops trying to know what he must do to save mankind, accepting that he will realize his redemptive nature only if God works through him in God's own time. As he says in Book III, "who best / Can suffer, best can do," where
suffering
retains the sense of passivity and patience derived from its Latin equivalent,
patiens
.
 
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In effect, Christ's response to Satan's frustrated demand, "What dost thou in this World?" is simply
nothing
. In the final temptation Satan transports Christ to the top of the Jerusalem Temple and challenges him to fall so that he can fulfill the prophecy of being lifted up to safety by angels; only by standing still, however, is Christ rescued. His inaction is the confirmation that he "may now begin to save mankind." Christ represents the ideal (perhaps a fantasy) of action without agency.
The title character of
Samson Agonistes
learns the lesson of
Paradise Regained
only by first succumbing to the temptation that Christ resistedsecond-guessing the redemptive narrative. In this regard
Samson Agonistes
is Milton's most overtly autobiographical statement in poetry, his most explicit and extensive exploration of the nature of vocation. There are numerous parallels between Samson and Milton's personal life, including his blindness, his first marriage, and his views on divorce recorded earlier in his four divorce tracts (16431645).
Samson Agonistes
has especially conspicuous parallels with Milton's personal and political situation after the failure of the Puritan Commonwealth. The Philistine courtly reveling of lords and priests during the festival of the god Dagon reflects Milton's view of the Stuart court. The tragedy is set after Samson's betrayal by Dalila, when Samson's promise to deliver the Israelites from Philistine conquest appears to have failed, leaving Samson blind, in disgrace, a slave and prisoner of the Philistines. Harapha taunts Samson with the accusation that he is a usurper, "a Murderer, a Revolter, and a Robber", a "League-breaker"terms that recall Stuart accusations of regicide against the rebels, including Milton himself.
Similarly, at the beginning of the drama at least, Samson deals with the same kind of situation that Milton had to after the collapse of the Commonwealth: he ponders the limits of conformity to civil power in order to survive in a society with whose norms he was fundamentally at odds, although by the drama's end (if not by Milton's) any such conformity will be insupportable. It is tempting to read the work as Milton's final, wrenching attempt to find a biblical narrative of political fall and spiritual regeneration with which to identify.
Like
Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes
presents the problem of action as a problem of knowledge, particularly knowledge of how salvation will be achieved in the historical narrative of Israel and the personal narrative of Samson himself. The work opens with Samson defeated, a blind captive slave, meditating on the nature of what he thought was his
 
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calling to deliver Israelan issue he painfully wrestles with as he encounters each of the work's characters who come to confront him, including his father Manoa, his betrayer Dalila, and his warrior counterpart Harapha. The question of vocation begins when Samson is baffled by his election as a Nazarite, "a person separate to God, / Designed for great exploits," assuring himself that when he fought the Philistines, he acted not out of delusion as a private individual in "Single rebellion," but on divine command.
Samson concedes he was wrong when he thought he understood "Divine Prediction," believing nowwrongly, it will turn outthat he has been severed from the providential plan. He cannot understand the divine narrative from within the narrative. The difficulty of reading that narrative is underscored when he has to explain why he married outside his tribe: he married his first wife, the woman of Timna, because of a divine command he felt from "From intimate impulse" to be the first step in his mission to deliver Israel. The divine plan, Samson is prophetically given to understand, is achieved by transgression of the Law. When the woman of Timna proved false, he anticipated ''Divine Prediction" on his own by marrying a Philistine woman, Dalila, as a logical deduction from his first divinely ordained marriage.
The encounter with Dalila further probes salvific action within the context of the middle-class domestic relationship at the heart of the drama, as emphasized by Milton's most significant change in the biblical storyhe makes Dalila Samson's wife. She insists she gave him up to the Philistines to protect him from "perilous enterprises," while she "at home sat full of cares and fears." Proposing to relieve him of all public vocation, Dalila now offers him "domestic ease." She further explains that by trapping him, she sacrificed her private happiness to the public good of her people. Completing the role reversal, Dalila finally flaunts her fame and honor as the woman who delivered her nationshe has become the renowned public actor, attempting to reduce Samson to a private person confined to the home. A theme largely ignored in
Paradise Regained
, right action is enmeshed with issues of sexual identity, in this case assigning epic action and fame to a woman.
However, Dalila's victory is vitiated by Samson's realization that liberty may be found in passive suffering rather than active performance. Similarly, Harapha, the Philistine hero who appears in the garb of a chivalric knight, rightly perceives Samson's contempt for all his "gor-

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