POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL AND AT COLLEGE It is hardly wrong to say that the English poems which Milton wrote before his twenty-third year are interesting chiefly because of their defects. Although he attained very early a sense of his individual power and a conviction of his mission as a singer, he was surprisingly tardy in finding his voice. Many poets have done their most characteristic work at an age when Milton was still speaking in the borrowed accents of a debased school. During the first half of the seventeenth century English poetry lay under the spell of an enthralling personality, that of John Donne. This singular man, known in mature life by the staid titles of Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, and Prolocutor to the King's Convocation, the author of sermons and religious poems which are still read for their mystical fervor, had had a wild youth, and had produced a body of love poems of unexampled intensity. Unfortunately, along with a power of direct impassioned expression which instantly imposed itself, he had an intellectual perversity, a delight in far-fetched analogies and wiredrawn conceits, which made him the evil genius of young poets. His was the chief among many influences contributing during the reign of James and the first Charles to fill the garden of the Muses with growths of fantastic tastelessness, which all but smother the "plants and flowers of light.” To see how far this perversion went even in the case of real poets, one has only to read such a production as "The Tear," by Richard Crashaw, where the eyes of the Magdalen, after being compared to everything else conceivable, are rapturously addressed as That Milton's boyish admiration was attracted to the tinsel gewgaws of this "metaphysical" school of poetry, as Dr. Johnson oddly named it, is plain in all his early verse. The lack of humor which was his one great congenital fault, exposed him especially to the temptations offered by the conceitful manner. His verses "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough," with its drolly humorless title, is a perfect example of emotional and imaginative falsity, such as the school of the concettisti was sure to engender in a juvenile bard who had not yet arrived at artistic selfknowledge. Even in the "Passion," written after the "Ode on the Nativity," he relapses oddly into conceitfulness. Perhaps the worst length to which he was ever tempted occurs in the closing stanzas of this poem. Speaking of the tomb of Christ, he says, "Mine eye hath found that sad, sepulchral rock, That was the casket of Heaven's richest store, And here, though grief my feeble hands up lock, Yet on the softened quarry would I score The note with which he excused himself for not completing this poem, saying that he was "nothing satisfied with what he had done," has a touch of pathos. He failed to see the difficulty, which was not that the subject was "above the years he had when he wrote it," but that he was benumbed and bewildered by contact with a perverted style. Even thus hampered, however, his genius could not help sending out an occasional herald voice; and we do not have to look far to find exceptions to all that has just been said concerning these early efforts. Curiously enough, the very first line of his recorded composition, "When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son," ritten at fifteen, has the true Miltonic gravity and largeness. In the "Vacation Exercise," in close connection with the longing there expressed to use his native language in some great poetic emprise, we find an expression of his disgust at the ingenuities so dear to the heart of the "metaphysicals," those 66 'New-fangled toys ard trimming slight, Which take our late fantastics with delight." His lines on Shakespeare show an appreciation of that sane master completely at variance with the stiff exaggeration of its concluding verses, which are quite in the concettistic spirit. It should not go unchronicled either, that in the lines on the death of Hobson, the University carrier, Milton showed at least a seasonable desire to be humorous. But it is the hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity which allows us to read his early title clear. A good deal of reservation, it is true, has to be made even here. The poem has to an extreme degree the Jacobean vice of diffuseness, possibly caught in this instance from the beautiful religious epic of Giles Fletcher, Christ's Victory and Triumph on Earth and in Heaven; the metre of the induction is certainly imitated from that poem, and an occasional quaint dulcity of expression, such as, "See how from far upon the Eastern road The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet," seems as certainly caught from it. The opening description of Nature's attempt to hide her sin under a covering of snow at the moment of the Saviour's birth, the sun's shamed reluctance to rise because of the presence of a greater Sun, and the drolly prosaic figure in the next stanza from the last, where the sun is pictured in bed, with cloud curtains drawn about him and his chin pillowed upon a wave,— over all this is the trail of affectation and mistake. In places, too, where the thought becomes more sincere, the imagery remains unplastic. The descent of " meek-eyed Peace," for example, in the third stanza, reminds one of the stage-contrivances of a court masque; and the figures of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, in stanza fifteen, have the same disillusioning suggestion. But when all reservation is made, and all the unvitalized matter counted out, there remains enough true poetry in the Hymn to have furnished forth a lesser man for immortality. Scattered lines and even stanzas of splendid utterance occur throughout, but the grand manner begins in earnest with the nineteenth stanza: "The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words de ceiving, Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from his prophetic cell. "The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edged with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn ¦ The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn." These and the four stanzas which follow are not only magnificent and flawless, they are also pitched in a key before unheard in England, and colored with the light of a new mind. The Hymn shows Milton's youthful gen ius at its highest point; but if we would read the full record of his youth, we must turn to the Latin poems. He gradually desisted from Latin as a means of poetic expression in later life, abandoning it altogether, except for a stray trifle, after his thirtysecond year. But during his life at college ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY solema plea for resevered (1629) For an account in Milton's own words of the origin of this ode, the reader is referred to the closing lines of the Sixth Latin Elegy, translation, p. 339. He there calls it a birthday gift for Christ," and says that it was begun on Christmas morning. That it was not written in response to a general invitation on the part of the academic authorities, as has sometimes been conjectured, but sprang from a personal impulse, seems clear from the context of that passage. he poured into this alien medium all the first fervor of his imagination. When we say, therefore, that he was, as he averred himself to be, not "timely happy," in putting out the flowers of his song, we must say it with this reservation of the Latin poems in mind. He laid aside, and, here with us to be, Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day, And chose with us a darksome house of mor tal clay, body Sacrifice Christ's Jues. acceptent t Now while the heaven, by the Sun's team' untrod, Hath took no print of the approaching light, 20 And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright? The saintly veil of maiden white to throw; Confounded, that her Maker's eyes ties. |