Milton and his Muses

Abstract

Students reading the Nativity Ode sometimes find Milton unconvincing and unconvinced in his satisfaction with the birth of Christ. They know of course that the crucifixion was still to come, and they know that Milton knew it, but they mean something more than that. They mean that, in the Ode, the cost of the new dispensation is too high; they mean that the passing of the pagan gods is attended by too much feeling, by nostalgia and regret. They mean that the gap between the Heav'n-born child / All meanly wrapped in the rude manger and the alarming figure of power who Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew is too wide to be taken comfortably in stride. And they may be absolutely right. I want to suggest that Milton is trying to do two things in the Ode, and that the two things are not the same thing, are not even clearly or comfortably congruent one with another. Briefly, the one thing is a prefiguring of Paradise Regain'd, with a divine hero and discomfited devils; the other is a prefiguring of L'Allegro and II Penseroso, the apparent opposition that we do not so much choose between as assimilate, in an almost dialectical fashion. The one is the gesture of a Christian idealist, for whom the infant Jesus is God's only-begotten son and man's redeemer; the other, of an amoral artist, for whom elegant design carries everything before it. The first point clarifies itself; the second may not, but becomes clearer in terms of the recognized relationship between the Nativity Ode and the fifth Latin elegy, Adventum Veris, presumably written earlier in the same year as the Ode. My point is that the relationship is not just general but, in certain respects, precisely and neatly antithetical. The one is spoken by a premature but practising Christian, the other by a thorough-going pagan. In the one, earth voluptuously lays bare her fertile bosom, in order to wanton appropriately with the sun, her lusty paramour; in the other, she woos the gentle air to hide her guilty front with innocent snow, covering her foul deformities. In the one, the old gods are banished from their accustomed haunts; in the other, we pray that the gods not forsake their sylvan home, that every grove may long have its own appropriate deities. In the one, semi-bestial forms-the brutish gods of