WITH MORTAL VOICE: MILTON DEFENDS AGAINST THE MUSE

BY STANLEY FISH

There she was, for centuries, the big
broad with the luscious tits, the secret
smile, a toga of translucent silk, cool
hand on the shoulder of the suffering
poet -- the tease who made him
squeeze those great words out. He
was the mirror and the lamp, she the torch
who burned with the blue butane of a pure
refusal, too good for mortal use, her breath
was cold as mountain streams, the chill
of the eternal -- no hint of plaque
or any odor of decay. Ethereal as hell,
a spirit in chiffon, the mystery is
how she had got so rounded in the butt
and all her better parts as soft as butter,
why such a wraith should be so ample,
what her endowments had to do
with that for which she set example --
all this was surely Mystery, oh that elusive
object of desire, that "untouch'd bride
of quietness," that plump poetic dish
who lived on air but looked
as if she dined on pasta.

-- from "The Muse," by Eleanor Wilner, Ms., March/April 1991

When Milton invokes his muse at the beginning of book 7 of Paradise Lost, he does so with a hesitation that does not resolve itself in the following lines. The hesitation concerns the rightness of the name by which the muse is called: "Descend from Heav'n Urania, by that name / If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine / Following, above th'Olympian hill I soar." ¹ These lines deliberately recall two earlier invocations, that of book 1 in which the poet announces his intention "with no middle flight... to soar / Above th'Aonian Mount" (1.14-15) and that of book 3 in which he rejoices at having escaped the "Stygian Pool... while in my flight / Through utter and through middle darkness borne / With other notes than to th'Orphean Lyre / I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night " (3.14-18). All three invocations are addressed to the same person (?), and all three worry [End Page 509] either the identity or the location of the addressee. Does the muse sit on the "secret top" (1.6) of Oreb (in which case we still wouldn't be able to locate it since the mount is secret) or on Sinai? Is the muse co-existent with "Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born" (3.1) or "hearest thou rather pure Ethereal stream, / Whose Fountain who shall tell" (3.7-8)? In these first two invocations, the question of the muse's gender is carefully avoided (although the phrase "Thou O Spirit" at 1.17 seems a reference to one of the persons of the Trinity and to the masculine noun for spirit, animus; lumens (light) is neuter), but in the third the name given is unambiguously female. No sooner is it given, however, than it is qualified and even repudiated. I call, the poet says, not the name, but the meaning, but he doesn't tell us what the meaning is, except negatively: "for thou / Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top / Of old Olympus dwell'st, but Heav'nly born" (7.5-7). That is, you are not one of those women, nor were you born of women, since "heav'nly born" means precisely born of Heaven, of the Father, generated directly by him as were the Son and the Holy Spirit. Gender is admitted once again when the muse is said to converse "with Eternal Wisdom... / Wisdom thy Sister" (7.910), but the marking of Wisdom as female (and here Milton as many have noted follows Proverbs, chapter 8), tells us nothing about the muse who plays with Wisdom its sister but is not (or at least is not said to be) Wisdom's sister in turn. All we know is that both play "In presence of th'Almighty Father", who is "pleas'd / With thy Celestial Song" (7.11-12).

The introduction of the Almighty Father does not so much dispel the uncertainties of gender and person as render them less urgent; for the Father, precisely because he is almighty, grounds and centers a play that is anything but free, a play circumscribed by his "presence," by the fact of his unique status as the creator, as the first, derivative of nothing. The precedence of the Father, with respect to his creatures, is mimed in the verse when his presence counters the adverb that introduces them: "Before" (7.8). For a moment it seems that the adverb is truly theirs, that they exist before (prior to) anything; but then they are revealed to be "before" in another, lesser sense: they play before -- on the stage of, in the prior sight of -- the Father. No wonder he is pleased with the muse's celestial song; the song is his in the sense that its singers define themselves in relation to his generative and authorizing power -- he is present, they are derivative -- and therefore whatever their song its content will be an acknowledgement and celebration of that same power: they please [End Page 510] him because the desire to please him is constitutive of their very being.

None of this is said directly: all we have is the phrase "Celestial Song"; but the phrase is enough in any of its several meanings: the most perfect, the song above all others. As a word indicating the matter of the song, "Celestial" tells us that its single subject is the heavens, the realm of deity; and in its most literal sense "Celestial" names the instrument or medium of the song: the heavens produce the song; its movements are the song. I call this meaning literal because the putative singer of the song is Urania, the muse of astronomy, and I refer to her as the "putative" singer because she is not the originating agent of the song but a figure (in several senses) for its true agency, the machinery of the heavens, or, in the more familiar designation, the music of the spheres. It is this music, the operating sound of the universe he everywhere informs (that is, after all, what uni verse means) that pleases God; he is listening to his work or to his own works working, as everything that issues from him (and, in the context of Milton's materialist monism, the category of "issuing from him" is all-inclusive) breathes back to him the spirit he first infused.

There are many descriptions of this universal choir in Milton's work. In book 4, responding to Eve's wondering why the stars shine even when the pair is asleep, Adam reminds her that the business of the stars is not to provide light to human kind, but to offer "ceaseless praise" to the creator:

... how often from the steep
Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to other's note
Singing thir great Creator.

(4.679, 680-84)

"Echoing" is not a causal or formulaic word here, for it points to the chief characteristic of this song; it has only one note and that a note that has been sounding long before any particular singer takes it up; everyone is in the position of Ovid's echo, always giving back the words of another ("auditaque verba reportat"). ² It doesn't matter, therefore, whether the singer is "sole or responsive each to other's note," for the song is always corporately sung even when the singer is apparently single. And since this is a song that everyone sings, it is a song that no one sings; and, moreover, it is a song sung to no one, [End Page 511] since there isn't anyone not already singing it. In the ordinary sense of communication the speaker offers something to the receiver (a message, insight, pleasure) he or she does not yet have; but this is a scene not of communication -- of distance between parties in different zones of understanding -- but of responsiveness, of voices answering one another in conformity with a harmony that is already achieved. Nor can it be said that everyone is singing to God, as if he were a spectator and separate from the song; he is the song, its content and its source; they are all "Singing their... Creator", not singing about their creator, but singing -- breathing, uttering and therefore ceaselessly replicating -- him.

The point is even more precisely made in At a Solemn Music when Milton celebrates "the fair music that all creatures made / To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed." ³ In the first half of line 22 the preposition "to" suggests a distinction between the singers and the audience-object of their song; but in the second half the song itself is revealed to have been impelled ("swayed") by its putative recipient; their Lord breathes into them the love that they then return ("what could they else") to him. The result is "Perfect diapason" -- harmony -- that lasts so long as God's creatures remain "In first obedience, and their state of good." ⁴ The key word here is "first"; the motion required is a motion that involves no departure from a position -- of obedience and submission, of ceaseless praise -- originally assumed; a standing still even though to the untutored eye there seems to be movement and variation. The model of this motion that is not movement is, appropriately enough, the "Mystical dance" of the Heavens, described in lines that provide still another gloss on "Celestial Song":

Mystical dance, which yonder starry Sphere
Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheels
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem:
And in thir motions harmony Divine
So smooths her charming tones, that God's own ear
Listens delighted

(5.620-27).

It is this harmony that Adam and Eve join earlier in book 5 when they offer their morning prayer: the style of the prayer is described as "various" (5.146), but the variety is only a surface phenomenon for in whatever style they pray the desire that moves them is the desire [End Page 512] "to praise / Their Maker, in fit strains" (5.147-48); moreover, by the same logic, any strain is fit so long as praise is its content. The hymn proceeds (if that is the right word) by celebrating God's "glorious works" (5.153), but the work of the hymn is prevented by the work it celebrates since all of these already, before the prayer is uttered and independently of its various motions, "declare / Thy goodness... and Power Divine" (5.158-59). The performance thus is rigorously self-reflexive: Adam and Eve sing God's praise by praising works that already praise him; in such a song there can be no beginning, middle or end because it is at every point and at every instant the same; the motion to which the song urges God's creatures is the motion they "naturally" mime: "join all ye Creatures to extol / Him first, him last, him midst, and without end" (5.164-65). In a strict sense then, there is nothing the prayer can do but testify to the prevenient power that is the cause of everything including its own utterance. As Herbert puts it, "But who hath praise enough? nay who hath any?" ⁵ God is not only the object of all praise, but the producer of the praise he receives.

The moral is the one I have already drawn: in a celestial song no one can be said to be doing the singing; rather, everyone is sung by an informing presence whose precedence is endlessly and involuntarily declared. Everyone is in the position of Wisdom and her sister Urania, playing in ways made possible by him before whom they play. This insight is proclaimed again and again in Milton's work, but even when it is unambiguously embraced, it bears a double aspect: if one regards the goal of the Christian life as the reabsorption of all discordant voices into the single voice of a universal choir ("Oh may we soon again renew that song, / And keep in tune with heaven" ⁶), the exchanging of one's individual (and therefore separate) identity for a corporate identity is a prospect viewed with unspeakable (a word not casually chosen) joy; but if one values, as one can hardly help doing, the sound of one's own utterances, even if what the utterances sound is a lament for a lost unity with the divine, the prospect of recovering that unity will be experienced as a threat. Promise and threat are thus indissoluble, intertwined with one another, and are experienced as such by all creatures, poets not excepted. Typically, Milton will present himself as someone who wishes nothing more than to serve -- "I conceav'd my selfe to be now not as mine own person but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded" -- while he tends to displace the anxiety of service -- the anxiety of the loss of agency and personal efficacy -- [End Page 513] onto others or onto highly fictionalized versions of himself. ⁷ The invocation to book 7 is a particularly compressed instance of this double move by which Milton creates -- or perhaps performs; just how much he is aware of the complexities of this moment is an open question -- a drama that fully explores the tensions and ambiguities of his conflicted position.

The conflict is figured in gender terms. As we have already seen, the gender of Milton's muse is rendered obscure when the firm identification of Urania is ostentatiously withdrawn. The obfuscation is not casual, for when Milton says "The meaning not the Name I call" (7.5) he avoids what would in effect be a heresy, identifying the source of his inspiration as female. Gender marks difference, variety, a plurality of perspectives, but in a God-centered universe difference and variety are accidental and temporary conditions, for finally all creatures play in the presence of the Almighty. Gender difference is like the vagaries of the starry spheres as they move in mystical dance; it is more apparent than real, allowed to emerge only so that the unifying power of a monistic deity can be repeatedly reaffirmed, as it is, for example, when the apparently independent efforts of both the good and the rebel angels are countered by the irresistible force of God's chariot or when the priority of Urania and Wisdom is revealed to be secondary in relation to a precedent Almighty before whom they play. By first naming Urania and then participating in her demotion, Milton, in the person of his epic voice, marks himself as a creature of the Father and yet even though the figure of the female has apparently been domesticated, when he moves into the body of the invocation Milton displays a fear of the female that is unmistakably a form of castration anxiety:

... Up led by thee
Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presum'd
An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,
Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down
Return me to my Native Element:
Lest from this flying Steed unrein'd (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower Clime)
Dismounted on th'Aliean Field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.

(7.12-20)

Nominally, this is the language of courtesy as when one apologizes for having presumed above one's class; but as is often the case, courtesy is a mask for darker feelings and here it masks an accusation: [End Page 514] "you've led me on." "Up led by thee" assigns the agency to Urania; the presumption, if there is any, is hers, and the poet is the innocent object of her urgings. Moreover, those urgings as he recalls them are as sexual as they are social: there are two scenes imagined here; in one a reluctant guest (how reminiscent this is of Herbert's Love III) draws back from the invitation of a superior; in another (slightly submerged), a young man flees the advances of a powerful woman. This second drama is not foregrounded; instead, Milton displaces its anxieties into its apparent opposite, the scene of abandonment with its attendant fear of being cut loose, of being unsupported, alone, "forlorn"; but in choosing Bellerophon as the vehicle of this preferred fear, Milton (inadvertently?) alludes to everything he would push away: for as the poem's early editors remind us, Bellerophon's story begins with the unwelcome importunings of an aggressive female:

Bellerophon was a beautiful and valiant youth, son of Glaucus; who refusing the amorous applications of Antea wife of Praeteus king of Argos, was by her false suggestions like those of Joseph's mistress to her husband, sent into Lycia with letters desiring his destruction.

A young man of talent avoids the amorous nets of a designing woman who in response to having been scorned contrives to have her husband destroy him. As it turns out, however, the stratagem fails when Bellerophon "came off conqueror" in the "several enterprises full of hazard" to which he was put. It is then that he attempts "vaingloriously to mount up to Heaven on the winged horse Pegasus" and incurs the wrath of still another king, Jupiter, who sends a fly to sting the horse and throw the rider. In some versions of the story Bellerophon is blinded by his fall and "Forsook by Heav'n forsaking human kind, / Wide o'er the Aleian field he chose to stray, / A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way." ⁸

The relevance of Bellerophon's story to Milton's poetic ambitions and to his recent political fortunes (when he was the object of a restored king's vengeance) is obvious and obviously intended (especially given the fact of a shared blindness), but Milton just as obviously intends to restrict the scope of the allusion, since he invokes it in order to insist not on the similarities but on the differences between them. Let his fate not be mine, he asks, even as he describes himself in terms that make the two careers indistinguishable: "fall'n on evil days, / On evil days... fall'n and evil [End Page 515] tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compast round" (7.25-27). This act of misrecognition would itself be extraordinary even if it were not one in a lengthening series. To be sure, Urania is at first recognized without hesitation, but her identity is then blurred in a gesture of apparent scrupulosity ("The meaning, not the Name I call" [7.5]) that allows the issue of her gender, and with it the threat of female aggression, to remain unconfronted. Urania is then re imagined in a benign form as the gracious patroness while her role as pursuer and seducer is hidden in an ambiguous phrase ("Up led by thee" [7.12]). She is then further hidden, indeed suppressed, when Milton alludes to Bellerophon's troubles but fails to recall their origin in the "amorous applications" of Antea. The poet may be, as he says, "with dangers compast round" (7.27), but a great deal of his (perhaps unconscious) energy is here devoted to not seeing the danger before his very eyes. Of course his eyes (as he notes) are darkened, but that disability is yet one more emblem of the psychological wound the poet is experiencing even as he denies it; for as Freud observes in "The 'Uncanny,'" "anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often... a substitute for the dread of castration," that is, the dread of being rendered powerless, of losing agency, of being unmanned. ⁹ This dread is at once the source of the energy in this passage and that which the passage wants desperately to push away. Milton simply cannot bear to acknowledge that the force to which he prays -- by any name and in whatever gender form -- is the force whose disabling threat he fears, and he defends against that threat not only by reconceiving it in a succession of benign shapes, but by displacing it onto the condition he in fact desires, the condition of being adrift and alone, unsupported by -- and therefore independent of -- any higher power.

It is not that he lies when he says that he wishes not to be "forlorn"; it is just that forlorness comes in two versions, each with its liabilities and attractions. To be forlorn is to be lost, that is "to not be found" (O.E.D.) and one way of being lost -- of not being pointable to -- is to be known only as the effect and instrument of a superior agency, to be the singer of a celestial song in the sense defined above, a song that is not your own but is, as it were, community property, which is therefore also the status of the singer. The alternative mode of forlorness is precisely to be separate from this corporate ensemble, to be unlocatable in relation to its normative center, to be divergent from its circular, centripetal paths, to be "Erroneous," to "wander." One in this condition is indeed lost, fallen, cut off, [End Page 516] extraneous, on the outer edges, but he is also, and by the same analysis, found, not as an entity centered by primordial being, but as an entity de centered, off to the side, separate, standing out from the crowd, distinct, unique. In the surface rhetoric of this passage, losing oneself in the "Heav'n of Heav'ns" is the preferred form of loss, but in the lines that point the contrast, the instability of the opposition and the ease with which the positive and negative poles can be reversed, become apparent:

Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible Diurnal Sphere;
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the Pole
More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang'd.

(7.21-24)

The division of the poem mirrors the division of the universe into heavenly and sub-lunar regions and each phrase extends and deepens the opposition between the narrow and the vast, between the visible and the inaccessible, between the temporal and the eternal. In the context of these oppositions, Milton finds himself, as he has already said, in his "Native Element", that is "on Earth" (and therefore bound to another female figure) where he is engaged in an enterprise less glorious than the one he has attempted in the first six books. But this narrowing is his salvation, not in theological terms but in the terms of his personal ambitions. A "narrower bound" is a bound that is limited and therefore one that can be extended in ways that mark an accomplishment; someone who is situated narrowly, rather than being situated universally (that is, not situated) can proceed from one point to another and claim credit for his progress; his actions are measured out by time; they are "Diurnal," of a day, and of a day that differs from the day before and from the day that may follow; he lives in a world of risk and therefore in a world of possibility, and because he does he can be said (as Milton says here of himself) to be standing, that is to be visibly erect and erectly visible, distinguishable from others and from other potential versions of himself, both greater and lesser.

In short, he is not "rapt", a word that in naming the condition he has escaped surfaces the sexual fears attending its prospect. To be "rapt" is to be taken out of oneself, to be carried away by force, to be ravished, to be raped; and this last is what Milton fears would happen were he to remain in Urania's grasp and therefore be incapable of standing on his own, of rising up to his full, autonomous height. No [End Page 517] wonder he regards himself as "More safe" in the diurnal confines of earth; his very identity would be at risk were the rapture of Urania's embrace to be prolonged (as the Celestial song is, by definition, prolonged throughout eternity). Indeed, were he to be incorporated into that song, he would no longer be singing and he could not say, as he says here, "I sing," an announcement in marked contrast to the more deferential yielding of agency in the invocation to book 1: "Sing, Heav'nly Muse" (1.6).

The remainder of this line -- "with mortal voice, unchang'd" -- is at once tautological and explanatory of the bolder claim he now utters, the claim to be uttering. A mortal voice is, literally, the voice of someone who can die, that is someone whose actions are necessary because he is distant from a goal -- union with the divine -- whose achievement will render those actions beside the point because he would already be at the point to which they would bring him. A mortal voice is a voice that has somewhere to go, something to do, something to say; and while it is impelled forward by the hope of its eventual silencing (in the deep harmony of universal song), a mortal voice also has a stake in the deferral of that happy (?) consummation; for so long as it is still so to speak "on the road," it can enjoy successes and failures, it can be noted and marked; it can leave a mark. A mortal voice, in short, is a voice that can have a career, and as we know no poet is more obsessed with the shape of career, with the hopes and anxieties of vocation and achievement, than Milton. In almost everything he writes the urgency of the present occasion -- be it theological, political, domestic, educational -- is tied implicitly and often explicitly to the distance he has travelled or hopes to travel on the roadway of his ambitions; even when he meditates on celestial harmonies and eschatological visions, he issues reports on his own situation in relation to the quotidian pressures of historical contingency. Remember me, he says (following the example of Virgil), I'm the fellow who interrupted his studies to write the tracts against prelacy, the one who answered Hartlib's call for a treatise on education, and here I am again, still standing up for what I think is right, though my political enemies have triumphed and I have "fall'n on evil days, /... In darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude" (7.25, 27-28).

This has the surface sound of a complaint, but it is also unmistakably a boast and the welcoming of an isolation ("And solitude") that allows the poet to present himself as the type of a beleaguered hero, [End Page 518] a backlit figure in a highly theatricalized landscape. Thus, when he says, in the very same line, "yet not alone", the assertion must be heard in at least two tonal registers, as an expression of self-comfort -- someone up there likes me -- and as a re-emergence of the fear the passage has alternately surfaced and repressed, the fear that he will not be allowed to be alone, will not be allowed to be, will be engulfed in the embrace of an omnivorous woman who at this very moment seems to be sliding back into his bed: "yet not alone, while thou / Visit'st my slumbers Nightly" (7.28-29). Once again he puts a brave show on it, and yields the precedence to Urania in two famous lines: "still govern thou my Song / Urania, and fit audience find, though few" (7.30-31). But despite the linking conjunction, the two lines fall apart. If Urania truly, that is, strongly, governs his song then the question of audience is moot because it will be assured; Urania's song is cosmic and therefore leaves no room for an audience -- for a gap between producer and receiver -- since every possible auditor is already a participant. Although Milton appears to be asking for guidance, he is really asking for a space in which to operate: "give me just a few people who need to be moved somewhere, who are not already on a guided track; don't give me so much help that my efforts are overwhelmed and superfluous." Of course he does not explicitly push Urania away, out of his bed; instead he resorts to the strategy (of which he is perhaps unaware) he has employed before; he transfers his hostility to a substitute and insists on a distinction between that substitute and Urania, a distinction that simply cannot be maintained.

This time the proxy nemesis is the "rout" of Thracian women who first drowned out the voice of Orpheus and then dismembered him:

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race
Of that wild Rout that tore the Thracian Bard
In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drown'd
Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her Son.

(7.32-38)

Alastair Fowler is perhaps understating the case when he observes (in a note to his 1968 edition) that the "myth of [Orpheus's] dismemberment by Thracian women during the orgies of Bacchus seems to have focussed some of Milton's deepest fears." ¹⁰ In this [End Page 519] invocation, the focus is dispersed among other surrogate figures, for Bellerophon, in addition to sharing with Orpheus and Milton the characteristics of valor, abstemiousness and isolation, also does battle with an Amazonian horde and comes off victorious. The question becomes, will Milton join Bellerophon in his success or will he become the heir to the fate of Orpheus? That fate brings to dramatic life the anxiety that is the content of this passage, the anxiety of being drowned out, of having your voice taken from you, of losing the contest for precedence and thereby losing yourself. In these lines the context is fought in the arena of a single word "rapture"; the word of course harkens back to "rapt" in "rapt above the pole," but this time it belongs, at least for a moment, to the mortal singer, whose voice famously has the power to control, to dominate, to shape the world, and even, as Milton reminds us in Il Penseroso, to constrain Gods: "... bid the soul of Orpheus sing / Such notes as warbled to the string, / Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, / And made hell grant what love did seek." ¹¹ It is just such notes -- such "rapture" -- that at first prevents the "crazed women of the Cicones" (M, 11.3-4, 121) from exercising their counter-rapture (the noun can mean either the act of forcibly carrying away or the state of being so carried). The sexual nature of their assault is unmistakable in Ovid's narration: the women are furious with Orpheus for having withheld himself from them and turned instead to young boys. (In book 1 he is said to have introduced homosexual practices to Thrace.) They are the proverbial women scorned and so proclaim themselves when one of them cries "See, see, here is the man who scorns us ("hic est nostri contemptor," [M, 11.7]); and even as she says this, she hurls "her spear straight at the tuneful mouth of Apollo's bard" (M, 11.7-8, 121). Explication seems superfluous: as a penalty for having refused to play the man, Orpheus will be placed in the role of a woman, the sign of his masculinity turned against him with the intention of penetrating him and making him rapt. But the spear refuses its goal, turned back, as are the stones that follow, "by the sweet sound of voice and lyre" (M, 11.11, 121). At this point the contest for the phallus (and the voice is also a phallus, an organ of extension and potency), for the position of power, for the right to have the say; is stalemated; but then "the drums, and the breast-beatings and howlings of the Bacchanals, drowned the lyre's sound; and then at last the stones were reddened with the blood of the bard whose voice they could not hear" (M, 11.17-19, 121). Silenced, without voice and without power, Orpheus is completely overwhelmed, made into [End Page 520] nothing, and when the women proceed to dismember him, their castrating act seems an unnecessary repetition of what they have already done.

All of this is encapsulated in Milton's "till the savage clamor drown'd / Both Harp and Voice", but in an excess of bitterness he cannot forbear adding one more detail that points the anti-feminist moral "nor could the muse defend / Her Son" (7.36-38). The message is clear, if women aren't attacking you, they are failing you; and yet, as if he were himself blind to the significance of what he has just written, he turns immediately around and prays to a woman: "So fail not thou, who thee implores: / For thou art Heavn'ly, shee an empty dream" (7.38-39). But is this, in fact, a prayer? It may have that form, but in the context of what precedes it -- a parade of women who seduce or abandon -- it sounds quite differently, as either a dare or a taunt. "How will you perform, Urania? Will you rob me of my voice by snatching me up to the Heaven of Heavens, or will you stand by while others of your sex drown me out by even harsher means?" The true intention (perhaps unknown to the intender) of the so-called prayer is to put Urania on the defensive, asked either to answer for her immanent failure or to renounce her efforts to appropriate him, to rapt him above the pole. Read this way, the lines are subversive of their surface function, to distinguish between Urania and the other female figures -- Antea, the Amazon horde, the Thracian women -- who suffuse this passage with so much threat. Milton may think (or want us to think) that in turning to Urania he provides himself with a bulwark against that threat, but everything in these lines works to make her its very emblem and therefore a figure who must be at once pushed away and mastered.

In short, the real content of the invocation is the struggle between its speaker and its object, and the struggle continues when the invocation is formally over and the poet says, at the beginning of a new verse paragraph, "Say Goddess" (7.40). Once again, a gesture of apparent deference is in fact a move in a very serious game, for what Milton does here is recognize the Goddess from the podium, grant her a turn at saying, give her leave to speak, to play in his presence; it is he who says who has the say and thus it is he who says even when she is doing the saying. What she is bid say is what Adam and Raphael said to one another after the angel's account of the War in Heaven. That is, Milton yields the floor of saying so that (by his permission) someone else can say what two other agents say in the course of a long conversational day. Moreover, as embedded sayers [End Page 521] Adam and Raphael proceed to act out again the saying contest that introduces, and sets the stage for, their acts of speech. Adam invites, nay implores, his superior to speak and does so in precisely the terms employed by Milton in the first line of the invocation: "Deign to descend now lower, and relate" (7.84). He then endows Raphael's voice with the Orpheus-like power to control nature: "... the great Light of Day yet wants to run / Much of his Race though steep, suspense in Heav'n / Held by thy voice, thy potent voice" (7.98-100). "Held by thy voice" is like "rapt above the Pole"; it declares the strong, indeed preemptive, precedence of one person over the other; but the question of whose voice is the most potent is not that simple since it is Adam's voice (again imitating the epic invoker) that constrains Raphael to speak, a strategy that Adam will later acknowledge to be part of still another strategy ("How subtly to detain thee I devise" [8.207]).

There seems to be no end, no bottom, to this jockeying for verbal power, but in fact there is a bottom and it is located precisely where one would not expect to find it, deep within the structure of recessed sayings, in a saying which the sayer Raphael reports at the behest of the sayer Adam, both of whom are said by Urania at the bidding of the archsayer (or so he would be) Milton. The saying Raphael reports is that of his "Omnific Word" (7.217). "Omnific" means all-powerful, all-creating; it is the word that checkmates because it is the origin of all others, including the words that relate its story here in book 7. The moment the omnific word emerges in the text it renders beside the point the verbal maneuverings of the poem's other agents -- of Raphael, Adam, Urania, Milton -- all of whom are now seen to be playing in his almighty (verbal) presence and by his dispensation. And this the omnific word does from what is apparently a position of (textual) subordination -- the object of a relating of a relating of a relating. Indeed, one might suspect that in placing the omnific word so deeply within his structure, Milton hopes to contain it, to avoid the implications of "omnific" -- the implication that he is at every moment being spoken -- even as the adjective is bestowed; and if this is Milton's intention (however unself-consciously deployed) it is one that has already worked itself out in my exegetical labors, for in analyzing this invocation I seem to have fallen in with its sublest strategy: I duly noted the early appearance of "th'Almighty Father" (7.11), and then promptly forgot about him, put him out of my mind, transferred my attention to the succession of threatening women [End Page 522] paraded in the lines that follow, and in so doing I have reinforced by extending a deeper defense against an even more primary threat, the threat of castration by the father.

For when one begins to look more closely at the passage, there are at least as many menacing or impotent fathers as there are aggressive women and ineffectual mothers. It is after all Praeteus who sends Bellerophon to what he hopes will be his destruction; and it is Jupiter who causes him to fall lest he become a rival in the heavens, the same Jupiter who would have been swallowed by his father had not his mother wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes, and the same Jupiter who is the father of Urania, Wisdom and Calliope, the mother of Orpheus, and if the Muse could not defend her son, neither can the grandfather; nor could Apollo, Orpheus's father in many versions of the legend, Apollo, the God of poetry who appears only after the damage has been done to perform the belated rescue of a head already described as lifeless ("exanimis" [11.53]). Ovid makes the point (which Milton is surely remembering at some level) with a single word, "tandem": "At last Apollo appeared" (M, 11.58, 125). Where was he when the frenzied women drowned the bard's voice? Was he himself wary of encountering that castrating rout, or was he perhaps less than completely miserable to find that a singer of rival power had been silenced? I am not suggesting that we are meant to lean very heavily on these lines of inquiry or follow out to the end the associations they call up, only that those associations weigh on the passage and freight it with vague forebodings of aggression and betrayal that always point back to a figure of male authority, that is, to the figure of God. The fact that it is female figures who are foregrounded in these lines only attests to the depth and extent of Milton's anxieties; better to shift everything on to the traditional repository of male fears rather than confront the truth acknowledged by Orpheus when he says "all things yield to the sway of Jove" ("cedunt Iovis omnia regno" [M, 10.148, 75]).

It is a truth Milton was continually proclaiming, yet one he could never fully accept; and his conflicted relationship with the ideal of submission is acted out in the careers of even his most exemplary heroes. The Lady of Comus has her moment of doubt and disequilibrium before she recovers the equanimity of perfect faith; both the speaker of Lycidas and the Samson of Samson Agonistes are inveterate murmurers who respond with bitterness to a world they never made and find impossible to understand; and even the Christ [End Page 523] of Paradise Regained recalls moments when the desire to perform "victorious deeds" and "heroic acts" flamed in his heart. ¹² It is only when Milton creates a character more or less out of whole cloth that he can even imagine what it would be like not to feel the stirrings he describes as "That last infirmity of noble mind." ¹³ That character is Abdiel, the zealous loyalist, whose finest moment is not seen by anyone including himself. It is a moment that follows upon something more visibly heroic, his rising to affirm his fidelity to the Father even in the midst of the Satanic host. Now he is on the way back to his friends, but the surprise that awaits him when he arrives is anticipated in the syntax of book 6's opening lines:

All night the dreadless Angel unpursu'd
Through Heav'n's wide Champaign held his way, till Morn,
Wak't by the circling Hours, with rosy hand
Unbarr'd the gates of Light.

(6.1-4)

"Unpursu'd" is an early clue as to what will soon happen or rather not happen: Abdiel's flight is without the temporal pressure, at least in one direction, that usually gives such actions point. The significant shift, however, occurs at the end of the second line: when we first read it "till Morn" seems an adverbial phrase modifying "held his way" and therefore a gloss on Abdiel's action; but line 3 reveals that in the fuller syntax "till Morn" is the object of the participle "Wak't" (the morn is waked) and then the subject of "unbarr'd." What this means is that in the course of these lines the agency is taken away from Abdiel and given to the Morn who now has the forward initiative. It is her way, not his, and moreover it is a way that will proceed independently of anything Abdiel does or doesn't do. The hours circle; that is, they don't go in a straight line but describe motions that return always to the same appointed place. The effect of this image is to further undercut the urgency and point of Abdiel's linear flight; and that effect is itself redoubled when that flight is interrupted by a leisurely explanation of the subordinate and indeed decorative role of time in the realm of the heavens:

                There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night.

(6.4-8)

[End Page 524]

That is, for the sake of variety (here a purely aesthetic category) there is a light show in heaven that simulates day and night, that simulates the "Diurnal Sphere" in which the passing of time is attended by crisis, choice and unpredictable consequences. In Heaven time's passing is devoid of such risks because everything is always and already centered on the central and informing value of the universe; so that when in line 12 Raphael tells us that "now went forth the Morn," we are meant to understand that "now" merely marks a turn-taking and not a moment of poised urgency; and if we miss the point, the verse quickly reminds us of it: "Such as in highest Heav'n" (6.13). "Shot through with orient Beams" (6.15) further dissipates the already attenuated energy of Abdiel's flight, and for all intents and purposes, Abdiel disappears from the passage, reemerging only as the object of the effect he had hoped to cause:

when all the plain
Cover'd with thick embattl'd Squadrons bright,
Chariots and flaming Arms, and fiery Steeds
Reflecting blaze on blaze, first met his view.

(6.15-18)

The "first" in line 18 is very precise: the view precedes his "taking it in"; it is before him in two senses of the word; it is in front of him and it was there before he saw it; in relation to it he is superfluous; it doesn't need him, and the extent of his inefficacy is given a slow deliberate gloss: "War he perceiv'd, war in procinct, and found / Already known what he for news had thought / To have reported" (6.19-21). That is, Abdiel had thought that there was something he could do, something he could say, words that only he could produce, words that would make a difference because they would be different, not already spoken in the eternal present; but that thought, and the vision of self and identity of which it is an extension, are countermanded by a reality that has no place for them, the reality of the "omnific word."

At this moment Abdiel is exactly in the position the epic narrator occupies in the opening of book 7, confronted by the suffocating omnipresence of the deity he serves. What distinguishes the two is their reaction, or, rather the fact that Abdiel doesn't have a reaction. The hinge between what he has just "met" -- the castrating sight of his undeniable impotence -- and what he now does is the word "gladly": [End Page 525]

Already known what he for news had thought
To have reported: gladly then he mixt.

(6.20-21)

The extraordinary thing about "gladly" is that it participates in both actions (because it participates in two syntactical structures) and thereby acknowledges no difference between them: Abdiel would have been glad to report and he just as gladly mixes, that is, loses himself in a host already composed without his reportorial aid. I don't mean that he says to himself, "well, that was a disappointment (not to have reported), but I can still enjoy the fellowship of my peers"; he doesn't say anything to himself; the two possible modes of action which for us would be seen as active and passive respectively are for him absolutely continuous, of a piece, alternative forms of service. He can take no credit for not feeling aggrieved because his great moment has been taken from him, because it never occurs to him to be aggrieved, and therefore he deserves credit precisely in the measure he would not think to claim it. As far as he is concerned, he just does what he does, or is what he is, and as he is named, the servant of God.

Thus, when God says to him, "servant of God, well done" (6.29), he is really saying, "Good job at being Abdiel, Abdiel." Being Abdiel is being just one thing, all the time, being what Christ declares himself to be -- "me hung'ring... to do my father's will" -- and what Milton sometimes claims to be, "I conceav'd my selfe to be now not as mine own person...." ¹⁴ But even here, the language betrays him: he conceives himself to have a corporate identity, but the act of conceiving, of thinking about himself in that way, is performed at a distance from what it contemplates; and so he fails of his claim and of his goal. But is it his goal? Does not a part of him want to fail, want to fall and wander erroneous and desolate on the plain, so that he can make his way, make his mark, make his career, speak with a mortal voice, a voice that sounds only because it is far from home, from patria, in exile, but a voice that sounds a note the exile loves as he loves himself?

Duke University

Notes

1. Paradise Lost, ed. M. Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1935), 7.1-3. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by book and line.

2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. F. J. Miller (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1916), 3.369; hereafter cited parenthetically in text by book and line for Latin and by page for English quotations, and abbreviated as M.

3. "At a Solemn Music," in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 17, lines 21-22.

4. "At a Solemn Music" (note 3) , lines 23-24.

5. George Herbert, "Providence," in George Herbert, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 104, line 141.

6. "At a Solemn Music" (note 3) , lines 1.25-26.

7. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-1982), 1:871.

8. Paradise Lost. A Poem, in Twelve Books, ed. Thomas Newton, 2 vols., eighth edition (London, 1770), 2:6-7. The substance of the note was first given by Patrick Hume in 1795.

9. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 137.

10. The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (New York: Longmans, 1968), 777.

11. "Il Penseroso," in John Milton (note 3) , 28, lines 105-108.

12. Paradise Regained, in John Milton, 24, lines 1.215, 216.

13. "Lycidas," in John Milton (note 3) , 41, line 71.

14. First quotation from Paradise Regained (note 11) , 259. Second from Prose Works (note 6) , 1:637, 871.