THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

assertion of a sure and certain hope of the Christian Resurrection. When Camus, the personification of the University
of Cambridge, enters the poem at line 103 its frame of reference shifts easily enough towards modern learning and to
modern Puritan polemics. Camus is closely followed by the figure of St Peter, the keeper of the keys of heaven and
hell, who expresses not merely regret for the loss of the talented Cambridge graduate, King, but a deeper sadness for
the state of the Church which he might nobly have served. Milton not only hijacks the first Pope to his cause, but
makes him the mouthpiece for an attack on bad shepherds (Anglican prelates and ‘corrupted Clergy’) who fail both to
feed ‘the hungry Sheep’, and to offer proper defence against the ‘grim Woolf (the Roman Church) who ‘daily devours
apace’. The closing sections of the poem transform the earlier evocation of mourning with an allusion to the might of
the redeeming Christ ‘that walk’d the waves’. Lycidas rises above the waters in which he once sank to be received
into the ‘blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love’. In the last lines the lamenting, uncouth (here ‘unknown’) shepherd
who has been the narrator of
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the poem rises, twitches his ‘blue’ mantle (that is, no longer of mourning colour) and sets out to ‘fresh Woods, and
Pastures new’.
The 1645 edition of the Poems contains some ten sonnets, five of which are in Italian. The 1673 reissue added
nine more, all composed between 1645 and 1658; three further, including ‘To the Lord General Cromwell’ of 1652,
were published posthumously in 1694. If the Italian sonnets play with conventionally amorous ideas, those in English
turn, for the most part, to private and political themes. Milton honours the dead wife of a friend, and pays public
tribute to the talents of his sometime friends and associates Henry Lawes, Cyriack Skinner, and Edward Lawrence.
More poignantly, he also takes up personal issues, notably the consequences of his blindness (‘When I consider how
my light is spent’) and a vision, as through a glass darkly, of his dead second wife (‘Methought I saw my late
espoused Saint’). It is, however, in the explicitly political sonnets that his resonant, declamatory style moves him
furthest from the ideas and the imagery of love. ‘On the late Massacher in Piemont’, for example, rings with religious
indignation at the massacre of Waldensian Protestants by the Duke of Savoy in 1655 and demands divine retribution
for such an offence against God’s truth. A similar urgency echoes through the sonnet which Milton addressed to
Cromwell (‘our cheif of men’) in May 1652. Its opening octave plays tribute to the Protector’s ‘faith & matchless
Fortitude’ and to his recent military successes, but its sestet shifts from adulation to a demand for renewed civil
action. In returning to the religious issues that had long concerned him, Milton insists on the rights of dissenters to
detach themselves from any established state Church which might attempt to bind ‘our soules with secular chains’.
The final couplet cleverly reverses a reference to Christ’s parable of the hireling shepherd, who, unlike the good
shepherd, runs away from the threatening wolf. Only Cromwell, it is implied, has the energy and determination to
keep the pack of ‘hireling wolves’ at bay.
With the collapse of his hopes for the development of an earnest Protestant republic in 1660, Milton seems, of
necessity, to have turned away from overtly political literature and to have redirected his creative urge into a long
cultivated project for an English epic poem. His heroic poem might, he trusted, proclaim to the civilized world the
coming of age of English literature. Milton assiduously prepared for the intellectual challenge he had posed himself,
searching for both an appropriate subject and an epic style worthy of it. In the Latin poem ‘Mansus' of 1638-9 he had
considered the fitness of subjects drawn from national history, and in particular from Arthurian legend; in the early
1640s he noted down some twenty-eight further ideas including a heroic treatment of King Alfred whose exploits, he
held, might stand comparison to those of Homer’s Odysseus. At some point in the Civil War the idea of ancient kingly
heroism must have seemed too coloured by the sins of modern monarchs to be a fit subject for epic celebration, though
material assembled for these abortive projects was reshaped as the prose History of Britain (probably written
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in the late 1640s, published 1670), a volume which bemoans the failure of both Britons and Saxons to maintain and
defend their ancient liberties.
The exploration of a more devastating and universal failure emerges in the project for a sacred tragic drama
entitled ‘Adam Unparadiz’d’. To what extent Milton had developed the scheme of this tragedy can no longer be
ascertained but it would seem that certain elements of it served in the dramatic shaping of the providential theme of
Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674). As the poem’s opening lines stress, he had moved from a meditation on the
political disappointments visited on ‘God’s Englishmen’ to an epic treatment of ‘Man’s First Disobedience ... Death
... woe ... loss’. Earlier European epic poems had celebrated some kind of military success: Homer’s Iliad traced the
causes and progress of the Greek struggle against Troy; Virgil’s Aeneid explored the origins and nature of Rome’s
imperial destiny; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) dealt heroically and romantically with the First Crusade; and
Camoens’s Os Lusiadas (1572) rejoiced in the past and present expansion of maritime Portugal. Milton, who was