The Life of the Author: John Milton. Richard Bradford

The Life of the Author: John Milton - Richard  Bradford


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beyond the given world. In ‘L’Allegro’ he celebrates the pleasure of daytime as

       Such sights as youthful poet’s dreamOn summer eves by haunted stream

      (129–30)

      and one should note that these sights inspire ‘youthful’ poets, implying that their more mature counterparts have moved beyond such distractions to thought.

      The closing couplets of both poems are intriguing. The one from ‘L’Allegro’ is conditional:

       These delights, if those can’st give,Mirth with thee, I mean to live

      (151–2)

      This suggests, subtly, that he could live with Mirth, if only … Compare this with the certainty of ‘Il Penseroso’:

      (175–6)

      These poems are important because they cause us to look beyond them to more emphatic disclosures of Milton’s state of mind in later work. They re-address a theme raised in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the diversions and attractions of the known world are temporarily suspended for the birth of Christ. Milton would eventually go blind and his sonnet on this condition recaptures the mood of ‘Il Penseroso’; the contemplative, unseeing state is now an obligation, not a choice, and it seems to suit his temperament. More significantly, in the so-called ‘Address to Light’ at the beginning of Book II of Paradise Lost, Milton revisits ‘Il Penseroso’. He is about to bring God into the poem and the lines on how darkness might ‘bring all heaven before mine eyes’ written thirty years before must surely have registered for the now blind poet.

      The poems written by Milton at Cambridge are complex existential pieces, sometimes indicating uncertainties regarding religious doctrine, but we should recognise that behind them Milton was aware of a society, a world, in a state that fluctuated between tyranny and chaos. Eventually the gap between the writing and the experience would narrow. He would become personally involved in a war and a new form of government unlike any in the history of Christian Europe and afterwards he would write a poem about the relationship between God and man.

      After seven years at Cambridge (1625–32), there were several career paths open to Milton. In 1631, his younger brother Christopher had been admitted to the Inner Temple in London to study for the profession of lawyer, but it had been assumed that John would make use of his considerable academic achievements and enter the more respectable sphere of the Church. Instead he chose an existence that some might regard as self-indulgent. He would spend the next seven years reading, thinking, writing and travelling.

      In the autumn of 1631 Milton’s father retired from business, gave up the house in Bread Street and moved with his wife Sara to Hammersmith, now part of Greater London but then a quiet country village some seven miles from the City. Less than a year later his son took up residence with him to begin what amounted to an extended period of self-education. As he would later reflect, ‘At my father’s house in the country, to which he had gone to pass his old age, I gave myself up with the most complete leisure to reading through the Greek and Latin writers; with the proviso, however, that I occasionally exchanged the country for the town, for the sake of buying books or of learning something new in mathematics or music, in which I then delighted’ (WJM, VII, p. 120). There is a sense here of Milton attending at once to the orthodoxies of intellectual endeavour, particularly classical learning, while calculatedly removing himself from the demands and opportunities of the contemporary world. He seemed set upon an objective, but its exact nature and the manner of its realisation remained undisclosed. There were, however, indications.

      There is against yt [his supposed inclination to the retired life] a much more potent inclination imbred which about this tyme of a mans life solicits most, the desire of house &


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