English Minor Poems

Overview

The minor poems are about two hundred pages and they are minor only by comparison with what came after. Most were collected in the 1645 Poems, published when Milton was thirty-six and had written no epic, and they cover roughly fifteen years from his early twenties.

They matter for two reasons. Several of them are among the best short poems in English, and together they show Milton assembling the equipment he would use later: the classical machinery, the long periodic sentence, the ability to run a syntax across a dozen lines without losing it.

They are also the work of a man who was preparing himself with great deliberation for something he had not yet identified. Milton spent five years after Cambridge reading at his father’s house in Buckinghamshire, and wrote to a friend about his slow approach and his fear that his inward ripeness was late. That anxiety is the subject of two of the best poems here.

The 1645 volume also includes Latin and Italian poems, which are usually skipped and were not unimportant to him.

What happens

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Written on Christmas Day 1629, when Milton was twenty-one, and the first poem in which the voice is recognisably his. It is a hymn in a stanza he invented, and its best section is the long sequence in which the pagan gods are driven from their shrines as the child is born: the oracles struck dumb, the nymphs leaving the haunted spring, Apollo unable to divine, Osiris and Moloch and the rest going out into the dark. It is more moving about what is lost than about what has arrived, which is the first appearance of a quality Milton never lost.

L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. A matched pair, probably from around 1631, each about a hundred and fifty lines, in the same octosyllabic couplets. The first banishes melancholy and follows a cheerful man through a day of larks, ploughmen, country fairs, comedy and Lydian airs. The second banishes vain mirth and follows a contemplative man through a night of the nightingale, the lonely tower, Plato, tragedy, and finally the cloister and the organ.

The construction is precise: the same hours, the same countryside, the same England, seen twice. Milton does not choose between them, and the refusal is the poem. They were imitated relentlessly for two hundred years and are the source of a great deal of eighteenth-century poetry.

Comus. A masque, written for performance at Ludlow Castle in 1634 with music by Henry Lawes, who played the Attendant Spirit. A Lady is separated from her brothers in a wood and falls in with Comus, a sorcerer, son of Bacchus and Circe, who takes her to his palace and sets her in an enchanted chair.

The centre is a debate. Comus argues that nature is abundant and means her gifts to be used, and that hoarding chastity is a waste. The Lady answers with the doctrine of the sun-clad power of chastity and refuses to be moved. Milton gives Comus much the better verse, which he does again with Satan thirty years later.

Then the complication he wrote in. The brothers arrive and break the wand but fail to reverse the spell, and the Lady remains stuck fast until the river nymph Sabrina is called and releases her. The virtue is sufficient to resist and not sufficient to free her, and Milton knew what he was doing.

Lycidas. The great one. Edward King, a Cambridge contemporary of Milton’s, drowned in the Irish Sea in 1637, and friends assembled a memorial volume; Lycidas is Milton’s contribution and the last poem in it.

It opens with the poet complaining about being forced to write before he is ready, plucking the berries harsh and crude before the year has mellowed, which is about King’s death and about his own unreadiness. It proceeds through the conventions of pastoral elegy, the shepherds who fed the same flock, the question of where the nymphs were when he drowned, the procession of mourners.

Twice it breaks out. First on fame, after the observation that the Fury slits the thin-spun life: what is the use of the strict and thankless discipline if it can end like this? The answer given, in Apollo’s voice, is that fame is not a mortal plant and grows in heaven.

Then St Peter arrives among the pastoral mourners and denounces the clergy, shepherds who cannot hold a sheep-hook and do not care, who scramble into the fold for their own bellies, while the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. It ends with the two-handed engine at the door standing ready to smite once and smite no more, an image nobody has satisfactorily explained.

The poem then pulls itself back into pastoral, imagines the body washed to shore, consoles with the resurrection, and ends with the uncanny eight-line coda in which the singer is described from outside, rising and twitching his mantle blue, tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

Johnson hated it. In his Life of Milton he wrote that it was easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting, that its form was pastoral and therefore inherently false, and that where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief. He was wrong and the objection is worth understanding.

The sonnets. Twenty-four, mostly Italian in form, and unlike any other English sonnets of the period in that they are about politics, friends, music, his blindness and a dead wife rather than about love. The best known are On His Blindness, which turns on the question of whether God exacts day-labour, light denied, and answers with patience and the line about those who only stand and wait; and On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, a sonnet of pure fury about the killing of the Waldensians in 1655, which begins by asking God to avenge his slaughtered saints and never once softens.

How to read it

Read Lycidas first, aloud, twice, and then read it with notes. It is a hundred and ninety-three lines and it is the reason to open this book.

Read L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in sequence and in one sitting, since the effect depends on the symmetry.

Read the sonnets on blindness and on Piedmont, and then the one to his dead wife, which is the tenderest thing Milton wrote and ends with him waking.

Take Comus if you have time, mainly for the debate, and notice how good Milton makes the tempter.

Use an annotated edition. The classical and biblical references are constant and unglossed, and without notes a great deal of Lycidas is a list of names.

Read these before Paradise Lost rather than after. The long sentence that carries a subordinate clause across nine lines and lands the verb exactly where it is needed is being practised here, and the epic is much less forbidding once you have heard the instrument in a shorter piece.

Questions it raises

• Johnson said that where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief. Does the artifice of Lycidas keep the loss at a distance, or is the form what makes the grief expressible?
• Milton refuses to choose between the cheerful and the contemplative life. Is that balance, or evasion?
• The Lady in Comus resists by argument and cannot free herself. What is Milton conceding about the sufficiency of virtue?
• The digression on fame asks what the discipline is for if a life can be cut short. Does the poem answer its own question or change the subject?
• St Peter’s attack on the clergy sits inside a pastoral elegy for a drowned student. Why put it there?
• These were written by a man waiting to discover what he was for. What does it do to a poem to be written under that pressure?