QA CriticalNotes JOHN MILTON 1608 1674 Paper Outline A Contradiction between Milton the Puritan and Milton the republican or bourgeois revolutionist and Milton the Renaissance humanist B The writer as a staunch fighter for freedom and against tyranny C Miltonic blank verse Characteristics From I638 to 1639 he travelled through France to Italy spending sixteen months in Florence Rome Naples and other Italian Cities and meeting a number of prominent figures there including Galileo in prison and writing some Latin and Italian verses This trip intensified the poet s hatred of papacy and absolutism From Italy he planned to make an extended trip eastward to Greece and the Palestine but the political developments in England at the time made him decide to cut short his journey and return According to Milton himself When I was preparing to pass over into Sicily and Greece the melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my purpose for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad while my fellow citizens were fighting for liberty at home He started making orations against tyranny and scholasticism and writing some Latin verses and also a few English poems including chiefly the ode On the Morning of Christ s Nativity and the sonnet On Shakespeare From his early childhood his family had destined him to a career of religion but he gave it up on account of the distaste he and his family had toward the oppressions within the Anglican Church The earliest of his five anti episcopal pamphlets Of Reformation appeared in 1641 and the other four followed in rapid succession from 1641 to 1642 These early pamphlets of Milton s like all his later ones were part of the actual religious controversy and political struggle then going on and in them Milton stood on the side of the Puritans and argued for religious freedom and against the authority of the bishops in church government Comus the theme here a typical one for the Puritan poet is that of the power of virtue and purity to subdue the forces of evil but this poetic drama contains also a definitely political meaning for Comus in a way represents the wild life of drunkenness and immorality at the court of Charles I and his Cavaliers and the lady stands for virtue and purity while the Attendant Spirit and Sabina symbolize help from God who protects the good and the virtuous So here we may see the reflection of the conflict in England then between the Puritans and the Cavaliers and Milton obviously meant to suggest by this masque that though the spirit of evil as represented by the king and his Cavaliers may triumph for a while yet eventually with the help of God the virtuous though persecuted Puritans will frustrate the vicious tricks and brut violence of the evil forces and free themselves from tyranny However Comus was first of all an occasional piece meant to serve as a lavish theatrical performance of Ludlow Castle to celebrate the reunion the Egerton family and to give the youthful poet an opportunity display his richness of imagery and lyricism of language in the tradition of Spenser and Sidney The story in Comus is a borrowed one but Milton the Puritan treats of it in his peculiar way Comus a pagan god and son of Bacchus and Circe way lays travellers and tempts them to drink a magic liquor which changes their countenances into the faces of wild beasts A lady and her brothers lose their way in a forest at night Separated from her brothers she is attracted by the sound of revelry and comes to the merry making of Comus and his wild drunken followers Comus appearing in the shape of a shepherd offers to give her lodging in a cottage and leads her off Her brothers looking for her are told of what has happened to the lady by the good Attendant Spirit who takes the form of the shepherd Thyrsis He warns them of the magic power of Comus and gives them the root of the plant Haemony as a protection Here the scene changes and Comus with the group of his wild followers around him urges the lady to drink from a glass but she a symbol of virtue and purity resists his enticements At this moment her brothers burst in and drive out Cumus and his men but unfortunately they have not obtained the magic wand of Comus and so are unable to release the lady from the enchanted chair in which she sits Thyrsis then calls upon Sabina goddess of the neighbouring river Severn who comes with her water nymphs and frees the lady Finally she and her two brothers return safely home Lycidas the last of the shorter poems of Milton s youth was an elegy written upon the occasion of the death of Edward King who got drowned in a shipwreck on his way to Ireland in 1637 King was not Milton s intimate friend and so the poem was more a literary here exercises than a true expression of mourning over a dead comrade The traditional form of pastoral verse is used and the whole elegy is a lengthy speech of a shepherd wailing the death of another The poem begins first with the gathering of flowers to mourn for the dead and with the shepherd s reminiscence of his past days of happy association with the now dead companion Finally there is a brief description of the shepherd who has sung the whole song above Inside this conventional framework of the spirits invoked to bewail the dead there are two bright spots in the trenchant utterances of the poet s personal thoughts and feelings First here again as in the twin poems L Allegro and Il Penseroso we find the youthful poet s inner contradictions between a solemn life of studies and poetry such as his Puritan faith prompts him and a gay life of physical pleasures such as was the common practice of well to do people around him expressed in the allegorical language of poetry Alas what boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd s trade And strictly meditate the thankless Muse Were it not better done as others use And the answer is for Milton to pursue his poetic career with Fame as the final object To sport with Amaryllis in the shade Or with the tangles of Neaera s hair Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise That last infirmity of noble mind To scorn delights and live laborious days And the fear of the brevity of life that may prevent one from attaining fame is overruled by the Puritan faith in the reward of fame in heaven More important is the satire in the poem on the worldly clergy of the Anglican Church uttered via the mouth of St Peter Enow of such as for their