“The planet-like music of poetry”: The Music of the Spheres and the Poetics of Mimesis in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss and Milton’s Nativity Ode
Résumés
Cet essai explore deux variations de l'identification allégorique courante entre la poésie et la musique des sphères à la Renaissance anglaise. Dans l'épisode du Bosquet des Délices d'Edmund Spenser, tiré du livre II du The Faerie Queene (publié en 1590), et dans l'Ode sur la Nativité de John Milton (publiée en 1645), il met en évidence l'inversion du trope, par laquelle la poésie est mise en contraste, plutôt qu'identifiée, avec la musique des sphères. Cette pratique remonte à la « poétique du bruit » de Geoffrey Chaucer, et il est également avancé que Spenser et Milton inversent le trope dans le but de le christianiser. Leurs variations sont discutées en termes de relation formelle entre l'harmonie cosmique (suggérant un ensemble homogène comprenant les cieux et la terre) et l'inaudibilité de la musique des sphères dans ce monde déchu (suggérant une différence qualitative entre les deux domaines et donc, une hiérarchie binaire). Dans le Bosquet des Délices de Spenser, le chevalier de la Tempérance rencontre un semblant de musique céleste, qu'il doit reconnaître comme trompeuse et surmonter pour parvenir à ses fins. Spenser présente ici de manière consciente la mimésis poétique et la transgression des frontières ontologiques comme dangereuses; la poésie chrétienne doit, en toute bonne foi, avertir les lecteurs de sa propre nature mimétique « défectueuse ». Milton, quant à lui, offre une vision épiphanique de l'harmonie cosmique dans une tentative ambitieuse d'inciter ses lecteurs à rechercher la perfection morale. Il tempère sa pratique mimétique en utilisant le mode conditionnel qui lui permet de signaler qu'il accepte, mais aussi dépasse, le principe mimétique suggéré par Spenser.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
musique des sphères, poésie de la renaissance anglaise, cosmopoetique, néoplatonisme, mimesis, Spenser (Edmund), Milton (John)Keywords:
music of the spheres, English Renaissance poetry, cosmopoetics, Neoplatonism, mimesis, Spenser (Edmund), Milton (John)Plan
Haut de pageNotes de l’auteur
Research for this chapter was conducted as part of the project “Cosmopoetic form-knowledge : astronomy, poetics, and ideology in England, 1500-1800”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG. German Research Foundation) – 429827737.
Texte intégral
I. Introduction
- 1 The description of poetic creation in terms of viewing the heavens is something of a commonplace in (...)
1In one of the first key contributions to English literary theory, the Apologie for Poetry (pub. 1595, but written during the 1580s), Sir Philip Sidney regularly references astronomy as a companion practice and form of knowledge to his subject, poetry.1 He concludes with a curse on the enemies of poetry:
- 2 Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, London, 1595, sig. L3r-L3v.
But if, (fie of such a but) you be borne so neere the dull making Cataphract of Nilus, that you cannot heare the Plannet-like Musick of Poetrie, if you haue so earth-creeping a mind, that it cannot lift it selfe vp, to looke to the sky of Poetry: [… ] thus much curse I must send you, in the behalfe of all Poets, that while you liue, you liue in loue, and neuer get fauour, for lacking skill of a Sonnet: and when you die, your memory die from the earth, for want of an Epitaph.2
- 3 “O curvae in terries animae et caelestium inanis” (Decimus I. Iuvenalis and Aulus Persius Flaccus, (...)
2Like the entirety of the Apologie, this humorous malediction shows Sidney’s witty use of classical learning: the reference to an “earth-creeping mind” incapable of lifting itself up to the heavens recalls Persius’s Satire II,3 the association with one of the foremost classical satirists stressing the playfulness of the statement. More poignantly, however, Sidney directly refers to the Somnium Scipionis, likening poetry to the music of the spheres and identifying it with the very heavens themselves.
3Sidney’s use of the simile, however, differs from Cicero’s. The Somnium refers to the Nile’s great cataract as an example of how the hearing might be dulled by permanent over-exposure to great noise:
- 4 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, ed. Konrad Ziegler, Leipzig, Teubner, 1969, p. 132 (VI.19). “ (...)
hoc sonitu oppletae aures hominum obsurduerunt; nec est ullus hebetior sensus in vobis, sicut ubi Nilus ad illa quae Catadupa nominantur praecipitat ex altissimis montibus, ea gens quae illum locum adcolit propter magnitudinem sonitus sensu audiendi caret. hic vero tantus est totius mundi incitatissima conversione sonitus, ut eum aures hominum capere non possint, sicut intueri solem adversum nequitis, eiusque radiis acies vestra sensusque vincitur.4
- 5 This difference is made explicit in Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream : “Then, too, we must not o (...)
4The music of the spheres, on the other hand, overstrains the human sensorium (“ut eum aures hominum capere non possint”, they cannot apprehend/contain/bear the sound). The cataract’s (earthly) power to deafen the human ear stems from permanent loudness; that of the music of the spheres from a categorical incompatibility between celestial signal and terrestrial receiver.5
- 6 Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, “« The name of Psalmes will speak for me ». Le rôle des psaumes dans la c (...)
- 7 Simeon K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony : Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, Tacom (...)
- 8 See Marc Berley, After the Heavenly Tune : English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song, Pittsburgh, D (...)
- 9 Simeon K. Heninger, “Sidney and Boethian Music”, Studies in English Literature 1500—1900, 23.1, 198 (...)
5In Cicero then, there are two parts to the analogy, signposted by the double “sicut”. Sidney only uses the first half: the enemies of poetry could hear its sweet music, if their senses were not closed to it. This qualifies the “likeness” between poetry and the music of the heavens, rooting it more firmly in this world, as Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise has pointed out: the term “like” in the phrase “planet-like music of poetry” signals mimesis and representation while emphasising the insurmountable difference between the music of the spheres and human song.6 It is true, the phrase offers a paradigmatic formula of the established idea “that poetry should echo the cosmic order inherent in the music of the spheres”, but in context, it also foregrounds that this “echoic” relationship is far from straightforward.7 The difference between the heavenly and the mundane, which may be elided in the conventional use of the trope, remains problematic in this complex treatise on the nature and functions of poetry.8 The question of how, as well as what, poetry represents – that is, the question of mimesis – stands behind this poignant simile, informed by “a complete program of aesthetics, as well as a long and revered tradition”, which S. K. Heninger has described as a “Boethian aesthetics in the Platonic mold”:9
- 10 Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, op. cit., p. 3-4.
Just as each planet generates a note contributing to the harmony of the heavens to comprise an all-inclusive diapason which represents the cosmos in musical terms, so must the elements of a poem fit together to comprise a comprehensive whole which reflects the universal order. Only then will poetry reproduce the “Planet-like Musicke” that Macrobius so greatly admired, and that Sidney takes to be a reasonable expectation for a poem. To epitomize the rich tradition which Sidney assumes we recognize and accept, we might say that Pythagorean cosmology should determine poetic theory.10
- 11 Heninger, “Sidney and Boethian Music”, art. cit., p. 42.
- 12 See the contribution by Claire Bardelmann in this issue. On the identification between music and po (...)
6However, as Heninger also concedes, “Sidney does not always accept [this aesthetics] without question, […] but frequently modifies and even challenges it. Some of his most radical innovations, in fact, use this esthetics as the point of departure”.11 This illustrates Claire Bardelmann’s observation that the commonplace identification between mundane art and musica mundana was recognized in Renaissance England as a cliché we should not take at face value.12
- 13 Wolfram R. Keller, “‘Therout com so gret a noyse’ : The Harmony of the Spheres and Chaucerian Poeti (...)
- 14 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. Oxford, Oxford University Pre (...)
- 15 Ibid., p. 394, l. 693.
- 16 Keller, “Therout”, art. cit., p. 82.
- 17 All references to The Faerie Queene are, by Book, canto, and stanza, to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie (...)
- 18 John Dryden first attests to this relationship between the three poets : “Milton was the Poetical S (...)
7On this basis, this essay examines the use of the trope by Edmund Spenser and John Milton, both of whom, like Sidney, use the trope in a less than conventional fashion to explore the nature and potential of poetic representation. Both, also like Sidney, admired Geoffrey Chaucer. For this poetic forebear, Wolfram Keller has recently shown how the use of the trope in The House of Fame and The Parlement of Foules amounts to a “poetics of noise”. Keller argues that far from using the trope in the conventional sense – the music of the spheres as an ideal for poetry –, Chaucer subverts it to “suggest[] that noise (rather than harmony) is a desirable quality in poetry”.13 In both works, Chaucer presents several instances of musica mundana, all of which are countered parodically, or even mixed, with noise and cacophony. Thus, in The House of Fame, the poet hears the music of the spheres from the Somnium Scipionis, but Scipio’s “great and pleasing sound” is here merely a “grete soun […] that rumbleth up and doun / In Fames Hous, full of tydynges, / Bothe of feir speche and chidynges, / And of fals and soth compouned”.14 Likewise, the eponymous parliament of birds deteriorates, from an order that is both musically and numerologically harmonious, into inconclusive “shoutyng” and a parodic roundel.15 Given that both poems are also concerned with the sources and purpose of poetry, Keller sees them as developing “a poetics that delights in the noisy contradictions of the here and now, rather than in the lofty authoritative harmonies of supernal numbers”.16 This fascinating observation throws light on similar ways in which the harmony of the spheres is interrogated by poets who self-consciously placed themselves in succession to Chaucer: Edmund Spenser modelled himself explicitly after “old Dan Geffrey (in whose gentle spright / The pure well head of Poesie did dwell)”,17 and John Milton famously declared Spenser “his Original”.18
- 19 For reasons of space, the issue of emulation or the imitation of poetic precedent, often raised in (...)
- 20 Sidney, Apologie, op. cit., sig. H.2.r. See Kenneth Borris, “Platonism and Spenser’s Poetic : Ideal (...)
- 21 Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters : Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and Renaissance Antipoeti (...)
- 22 See, for instance, Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
8In the following, the focus thus rests on how these two poets use the music of the spheres to reflect on the nature, potential, and purpose of poetry. Specifically, I want to focus on the issue of mimesis, that is, the question of how, and what, poetry represents.19 Sidney, following Plato, differentiated between “icastic” and “phantastic” poetry, the former “figuring foorth good things” (i.e., representing some higher truth), the latter “infect[ing] the fancie with vnworthy obiects” (i.e., distracting illusions).20 Debates about the legitimacy of poetry in the sixteenth century turned on this question, and both Spenser and Milton – given their poetic ambitions – had to engage with them.21 For both poets, “icastic” representation is problematised in a Christian context by the question to what extent divine truth can be verbally expressed at all, usually captured under the rubrics of accommodation and apophaticism.22 The trope of the music of the spheres, I want to show, allows for the poignant negotiation of these contemporary issues within the tradition of “national poets”.
- 23 See Caroline Levine, Forms. Whole, Hierarchy, Rhythm, Network, Princeton, Princeton University Pres (...)
- 24 Ibid., 39.
- 25 Thus, Stephen Gosson, in his 1579 attack against contemporary plays and poetry, The Schoole of Abus (...)
9My thinking about the music of the spheres is “formalist” in that it seeks to uncover the fundamental structures underlying the concept, and to understand how these structures produce meaning. Generally speaking, the music of the spheres yokes two forms:23 first, that of the “bounded whole”, which, among other things, works to create homogeneity, quelling difference and making for inclusiveness.24 This form is central to the trope in most of its classical through early modern incarnations. Its key idea is that the mathematical proportions of earthly music apply also to, and indeed are derived from, heavenly harmony. This argues for continuity and homogeneity between earth and the heavens, with proportion and order as the homogenizing factors uniting the “whole”. As a convention and commonplace, the parallel between the music of the spheres, human art, and social order allows for the transfer of knowledge between astronomy, poetics, and ideology, with each domain deriving authority and legitimacy from the “form-knowledge” associated with the homogeneous whole in the other domains.25 For poetics, it follows from this homogeneity that it is possible to (“icastically”) mirror heavenly order on earth. As Kepler argued in the Harmonice Mundi, the discovery of polyphonic song allowed men to intuit God’s satisfaction with his works:
- 26 Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, ed. Max Caspar and Walther v. Dyck, Gesammelte Werke 6, Munich, C (...)
ut scilicet totius Temporis mundani perpetuitatem in brevi aliqua Horae parte, per artifìciosam plurium vocum symphoniam luderet, Deique Opifìcis complacentiam in operibus suis, suavissimo sensu voluptatis, ex hac Dei imitatrice Musica perceptae, quadam tenus degustaret.26
- 27 In his discussion of the trope in Sidney’s Apologie, Berley relates it to “conflicting biblical not (...)
10However, the extent of “quadam tenus” (“up to a point”, “in a manner of speaking”), i.e., the extent of human intuition of divine satisfaction through earthly art “aping” the music of the spheres, introduces a categorical difference: human music stands not in synecdochical relation to heavenly music, but in analogical relation – as a mundane imitation, it attempts to accommodate the “true” music, but is always in danger of collapsing into “phantastic” travesty.27 On this account, the concept of the music of the spheres clearly distinguishes between the perfection of the celestial spheres, in which such harmony exists, and the sublunary realm, where it does not, and cannot. As the second term in Cicero’s simile stipulates, the ears of most mortals would be simply incapable of apprehending the celestial music. This difference between two bounded wholes can be framed in terms of a second form, that of the hierarchical binary – the celestial music is not simply loud and perpetual, like the cataract’s roar, it is also qualitatively different. In this sense, the binary trope rests on the distinction between two bounded wholes, as there is a clear evaluative difference between the perfect heavens and the flawed sublunary world. Whenever musica mundana is intuited in the sublunary world, for whatever reason and by whatever means, the boundaries of the constituent wholes are transgressed, and this will reflect on the binary. Thus, the evaluative difference between the sublunary and superlunary realms can be emphasised, clarified, and reinforced by the imagined transgression, or it can be (albeit provisionally) troubled, blurred, or even levelled.
- 28 Berley, After the Heavenly Tune, p. 56-57.
11The trope of the music of the spheres, then, allows for both of these conflicting worldviews, which entail not only conflicting views of human nature, but also of the nature and purpose of poetry: is it imitative of some ineffable and literally inexpressible ideal (in a more or less static relation, accommodating human limitation, with the purpose to teach and delight), or can it actually achieve a union between the human soul and cosmic harmony (either by attuning the soul, or by transporting it, both in a dynamic relation)?28 What is more, the trope foregrounds and epitomizes this conflict. The consequences Spenser and Milton derive from such “collisions” between the whole and the binary are the subject of what follows.
II. Spenser: “one confused mas”
- 29 The modern association of Spenser’s style with musicality goes back to Coleridge (David S. Wilson-O (...)
- 30 See John Hollander, “Music”, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia, Toronto, Unive (...)
- 31 A. K. Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument : The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s Epit (...)
- 32 Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.
- 33 Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser, Geneva, Librairie E. Droz, 1960.
- 34 Besides these, other important early explorations include Maren-Sofie Røstvig, “The Hidden Sense : (...)
- 35 A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961, p. 1 (...)
12Given the melodiousness of Edmund Spenser’s verse,29 actual references to music in his works are not as frequent as one might expect.30 However, at least since Ken A. Hieatt’s analysis of the numerological and cosmic patterns in the Epithalamion,31 Alastair Fowler’s ingenious application of such a reading to The Faerie Queene,32 and the influential discussion of the Fowre Hymnes by Richard Ellrodt,33 the significance of Pythagorean and Platonic thought, and their musical corollaries, for his work is well established.34 In the following, I want to focus on one particular instance from The Faerie Queene’s final canto of Book II. It has been read as a counterpart to the music heard at the end of Book I, during the betrothal between the knight of Holiness, Redcrosse, and Una.35 At that moment, two kinds of music mingle: “a song of loue and iollity” by a human singer, and “an heauenly noise”
Heard sownd through all the Pallace pleasantly,
Like as it had bene many an Angels voice,
Singing before th’eternall maiesty,
In their trinall triplicities on hye […] (FQ I.xii.39)
- 36 FQ I.i.1, editor’s note on line 8.
- 37 On the history of the term “musica coelestis”, see Reinhold Hammerstein Die Musik der Engel : Unter (...)
13The phrase, “Like as it had bene”, is familiar at this point, and indeed, The Faerie Queene alerts readers from its very first stanza to “the disparity throughout the poem between what is and what seems to be”.36 Hence, the seemingly angelic song is to be viewed with some reservation. In any case, it is not musica mundana but rather its Christian counterpart, musica coelestis, produced by the nine orders of the angels in veneration and praise of God.37 Like musica mundana, it is conventionally inaudible to mortals. At this culminating point in the Legend of Holiness, a parallel to Christ’s marriage to the church in Revelations 19, the music puzzles its hearers:
Yett wist no creature, whence that heauenly sweet
Proceeded, yet eachone felt secretly
Himselfe thereby refte of his sences meet,
And rauished with rare impression in his sprite. (FQ I.xii.39)
14The source of the music is ineffable, and its effect rapturous: it bypasses – even overwhelms – the senses and is apprehended directly in the soul or spirit. The poet’s voice fails to express the delight produced by the music and refuses even the attempt at representation:
[…] their exceeding merth may not be told:
Suffice it heare by signes to vnderstand
The vsuall ioyes at knitting of loues band. (FQ I.xii.40)
- 38 Edmund Spenser, The Minor Poems, Part One, ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich (...)
15This kind of expression through the negative – the source of the music is unknowable, and its effect indescribable – is employed by Spenser to great effect in his later Fowre Hymnes (1596). In the “Hymn in Honour of Love”, Spenser suggests that owing to the spark “of that heauenly fyre” that remains in the human spirit, man “doth desire / That seemes on earth most heauenly, to embrace”.38 In the “Hymn to Heavenly Beauty”, however, he stresses that the image of true (i.e., heavenly) beauty is beyond poetic representation on earth:
- 39 Ibid., p. 228-229 (ll. 225-231).
How then dare I, the nouice of his Art,
Presume to picture so diuine a wight,
Or hope t’expresse her least perfections part,
Whose beautie filles the heauens with her light,
And darkes the earth with shadow of her sight?
Ah gentle Muse thou art too weake and faint,
The pourtraict of so heavenly hew to paint.39
16It is for the angelic choirs to contemplate such beauty
- 40 Ibid., p. 229 (ll. 261-263).
As carries them into an extasy,
And heare such heauenly notes, and carolings
Of Gods high praise, that filles the brasen sky […].40
- 41 Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, “Retractatio als Transparenz : Rekursive Strukturen in Spensers Fowre Hy (...)
17Verena Lobsien sees in the Fowre Hymnes the “poetic analogue” to Neoplatonist negative theology grounded in apophaticism, rejecting any attempt to form concepts of the divine and instead focusing on its incommunicability. She argues that in these hymns, “the poetic imagination persistently reflects on itself as incapable of achieving its ends. In its ostentatious powerlessness, it acknowledges its own nature”.41 This poetics, I want to show, also informs the 1590 Faerie Queene, and it emerges in the context of the music of the spheres.
- 42 Leo Spitzer points out the close connections, ever since antiquity, between “ideas of the ‘well-tem (...)
18At the end of Book II, Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, and his helpmate, the Palmer, enter the lair of the witch Acrasia. In her Bower of Bliss, concupiscence and excess hold sway over the minds and bodies of those in thrall to its mistress.42 As Guyon and the Palmer enter the Bower, their first sensation is auditory:
Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,
Of all that mote delight a daintie eare,
Such as attonce might not on living ground,
Save in this paradise, be heard elswhere:
Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee:
For all that pleasing is to living eare
Was there consorted in one harmonee;
Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree. (FQ II.xii.70)
- 43 See John Hollander, “Spenser and the Mingled Measure”, English Literary Renaissance 1.3, 1971, p. 2 (...)
19This passage is modelled after Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (16.12ff.), but the introduction of heavenly harmony is Spenser’s addition.43 A passage in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, however, is a likely reference, if not source. Chaucer’s dreamer-narrator and Scipio Africanus, having expostulated on the music of the spheres, enter a paradisical garden:
- 44 Chaucer, Riverside, ed. cit., p. 388 (ll. 190-191, 197-200).
On every bow the bryddes herde I synge,
With voys of aungel in here armonye
[…] Of instruments of strenges in acord
Herde I so pleye a ravyshyng swetnesse,
That God, that makere is of al and lord,
Ne herde nevere beter, as I gesse.44
- 45 Ibid., ll. 204-205.
- 46 As Keller observes, in the Parlement, “references to harmony appear to increase, culminating in the (...)
- 47 Judith Anderson has stressed the ubiquitous presence of the Parlement in The Faerie Queene (Reading (...)
20This celestial birdsong is in harmony with the wind; the place itself is supremely temperate (“Th’air of that place so attempre was / That nevere was grevaunce of hot ne cold”45). In Chaucer’s poem, this “natural” harmony is a structural intermediary between the music of the spheres and the discordant noise of the Parliament of Fowls.46 Spenser may have had this configuration of a paradisical, “temperate” garden and a “poetics of noise” in mind in composing the Bower of Bliss episode.47
- 48 This is part of Spenser’s negotiation, in the Bower, of the contrast between art and nature, encaps (...)
21The poem clearly states that the music in the Bower could not be of earthly provenance, but nonetheless, it is difficult to identify its precise nature.48 Its component parts seem easily recognized, as they are all firmly of this world, but even that idea is qualified in the next stanza:
The joyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet:
Th’ angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th’ instruments divine respondence meet […]. (FQ II.xii.71)
- 49 Hollander characterizes the “mixture of “natural music” with the artificial musical sounds of human (...)
22While this is by no means the Platonic music of the spheres, Spenser does suggest an “angelic”, “divine” melody unavailable below on earth.49 However, this celestial harmony is troubled by the ambiguity of “joyous birds shrouded” (suggesting death) in an oxymoronic “cheerful shade”. How are we to reconcile these paradoxes with the music’s harmony? Indeed, its source is soon found out: “There, whence that musick seemed heard to bee, / Was the faire witch”; the voices are those of “Many faire ladies and lascivious boyes, / That ever mixt their song with light licentious toyes” (FQ II.xii.72). The two heroes know better than to fall for this illusion (“seemed”) of heavenly harmony. The Bower of Bliss, they understand, is artificial rather than natural in spite of appearances:
A place pickt out by choyce of best alyve,
That Natures worke by art can imitate:
In which what ever in this worldly state
Is sweete, and pleasing unto living sense,
Or that may dayntest fantasy aggrate,
Was poured forth with plentifull dispence,
And made there to abound with lavish affluence. (FQ II.xii.42)
- 50 In a passage that anticipates Sidney’s definition of “phantastic” poetry, the headmaster of Spenser (...)
23The appeal to the senses is firmly of “this worldly state”, and the Bower is later described as “the most daintie paradise on ground” (FQ II.xii.58, emphasis added) – contrasting it with the perfection of the heavens, but also suggesting an alluring contiguity that is already indicated when the song is first heard, which “might not on living ground, / Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere” (FQ II.xxi.70). This dangerously appealing mixture must be renounced, so Guyon and the Palmer capture Acrasia and destroy her garden of delights. The knight of Temperance can tell musica instrumentalis from musica mundana in spite of appearances. In order to keep moderation in all things, it is crucial to perceive the “phantastic” semblance of harmony, presented with intent to deceive.50 The music of the Bower only seems to bring the harmony of the heavens down to earth in order to instil overindulgence and forgetfulness of social duties, as in the young man encountered sleeping in Acrasia’s arms, who “in lewd loves, and wastfull luxuree, / His dayes, his goods, his bodie he did spend” (FQ II.xii.80).
- 51 See the discussion of the same passage in John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky : Ideas of Music (...)
- 52 Compare also the beast-men the Palmer transforms back into human shape at the end of the canto : th (...)
24The confusion between the heavenly and the earthly is indeed the very hallmark of the Bower of Bliss.51 The entire section is structured by transgressions of boundaries disturbing order and temperance: art and nature are said to be indistinguishable (FQ II.xii.59); and the “naked damzelles” rising from the lake mingle water and air, bring down the morning star into their glistening hair, and tease the observing knight by partly revealing and partly concealing their bodies (FQ II.xii.63-68).52 As the heroes first approach the Bower by boat, a fog suddenly covers the land,
And heavens chearefull face enveloped,
That all things one, and one as nothing was,
And this great universe seemd one confused mas. (FQ II.xii.34)
25The distinction between the perfect heavens and flawed earth is elided – the ordering boundary between them is seemingly (!) dissolved, resulting in a union that is not benignly inclusive but hopelessly confusing. This is described as the key threat of the Bower, and by implication, the central problem for the virtue of Temperance, in Platonic terms: the Bower troubles difference and order, such as the binaries of art and nature, illusion and truth. In this space,
One would have thought, (so cunningly the rude
And scorned partes were mingled with the fine,)
That Nature had for wantonesse ensued
Art, and that Art at Nature did repine;
So striving each th’ other to undermine,
Each did the others worke more beautify […]. (FQ II.xii.59)
26Art and nature intermingle to a degree where it is impossible to tell them apart, and while the result is aesthetically pleasing, it is morally corrupting. This is a remarkably critical view of mimesis for a poet, to be sure. To what extent does it apply to Spenser’s own poetry?
- 53 See, e.g., Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment : Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of (...)
- 54 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of (...)
27At least since Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning, it has been widely accepted that in the second book of the Faerie Queene, Spenser is exploring the paradoxical fascination with and revulsion from native cultures in colonies both in the New World and in Ireland.53 In the latter colony, Spenser himself witnessed atrocious violence from both sides, and he earned for himself a living as a planter. The resolve with which Guyon proceeds against the witch and her pleasure garden is described, by Greenblatt, as “the conquest of desire” against a native culture perceived as idle and “pointless”, arousing “a longing both to enter and to destroy”: “The violence of the destruction was regenerative; they [sc., colonizers] found in it a sense of identity, discipline, and holy faith”.54 The suggestion that the garden offers a seemingly perfect harmony feeds into this, I would argue: it stresses its attractiveness, but at the same time, it renders the awareness that to give in to this temptation would be to give up the boundary between civility and savagery – a boundary that is as strict as that between the heavens and earth, and must be policed rigorously to remain so. Otherwise, the cultural binary collapses into “one confused mas”.
- 55 This is borne out by the proem to Book V, in which the poet laments that the very order of the heav (...)
- 56 Consider, in this context, Spenser’s own stanzaic form, invented for The Faerie Queene : each stanz (...)
- 57 The problematic relationship between entertainment and instruction is spelled out in Spenser’s “Let (...)
- 58 Acrasia is not killed, but enchained by Guyon – temptation cannot, and must not, be done away with (...)
- 59 Keller, “Disharmonic Spheres”, art. cit., p. 12.
28The Bower of Bliss episode registers that we yearn for harmony, but that we must not expect it in this world.55 The virtue of temperance teaches us to accept this – any excess, even of harmony, is to be shunned. The implicit poetics of this episode suggest, then, that poetry should warn the reader against falling for false promises.56 For all its natural beauty and grace, The Faerie Queene’s form is also self-consciously artificial. It mixes art and nature, much like the Bower of Bliss, but it does so in good faith rather than bad. Unlike the “phantastic”, deceitful music of the garden, intended to tempt its hearers towards excess and indulgence, the poem’s aim is to teach virtue and to affirm order: moral, social, colonial, and cosmic. Even as readers are tempted to lose themselves in the labyrinthine romance, the poem continually reminds them that their true quest is not for entertainment, but for moral improvement.57 In doing so, it develops a “poetics of noise” that is a variant of Chaucer’s: on the basis of a fundamental separation between the perfect heavens and this fallen world, Spenser presents the semblance of complete harmony as fraudulent and misleading, at least in this world. Poetry written in good faith must remind the reader that perfection is unavailable here below – it must foreground its mimetic principles and mark its own nature as representation.58 In this sense, it is true of the Faerie Queene what Keller has written of the Parlement of Foules, that it “ultimately offers disharmony as the main ingredient of its own making”.59
III. Milton: “This must not yet be so”
- 60 Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution : The Making of John Milton, Princeton, Princeton University (...)
- 61 John Milton, In Scholis Publicis : De Sphaerarum Concentu, London, 1674, p. 83-87, here p. 83. “I b (...)
29Instead of reading Milton’s early poetry exclusively in a religious context (between “radical” Puritanism and “conservative” Laudianism), Nicholas McDowell proposes, in his recent biography, to focus on “the degree to which the poetic imagination of the young Milton was fired by Platonic and Neoplatonic notions of the δαίμων, or daemon—a winged soul or spiritualized being, intermediate between man and God, empowered to convey divine knowledge from the heavenly to the earthly realm”, and thus on “Milton’s sense of himself as a solitary singer seeking to harmonize his song with heavenly music”.60 As a student at Cambridge, Milton presented a short Latin disputation before his college, the “prolusion” De Sphaerarum Concentu, “On the Harmony of the Spheres”. Much like Sidney, Milton seems to approach the topic playfully – “quasi per lusum dicta”.61 He affirms that Pythagoras must have been speaking allegorically:
- 62 Milton, Harmony, ed. cit., p. 234-236.
Surely, if he held any doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, or taught that the heavens revolve in unison with some sweet melody, it was only as a means of suggesting allegorically the close interrelation of the orbs and their uniform revolution in accordance with the laws of destiny for ever. In this [allegorical practice] he followed the example of the poets […].62
30Rather than a cosmological concept turned trope, the music of the spheres was poetic to begin with – it represents something that could not be expressed in other terms. The mimetic principle is based on the hierarchical difference between heaven and earth, with the music mediating “only” figuratively. However, Milton then comes round, via an ironic address to Aristotle, to the contrary claim that it is really only our corrupted, sinful bodies that prevent us from hearing the music – if we uplift our souls, we can hear it again:
- 63 Ibid., p. 239.
[...] how can we become sensitive to this heavenly sound while our souls are […] bowed to the ground and lacking in every heavenly element? But if our souls were pure, chaste, and white as snow, as was Pythagoras’ of old, then indeed our ears would ring and be filled with that exquisite music of the stars in their orbits; then would all things turn back to the Age of Gold, and we ourselves, free from every grief, would pass our lives in a blessed peace which even the gods might envy.63
- 64 Ibid.
31Clearly, Milton’s Prolusion entertains the same playful manner as Sidney’s towards the music of the spheres. Next to the reference to the identical passage in Persius, this is evident from the speaker’s hyperbole, from his pretended deference to the ancient gods, and from the way he wraps up his oration, apologizing with evident false modesty for “offending against that very harmony of which I speak” by his “confused and unmelodious style”.64 As in Sidney, the trope is treated with mock-seriousness in a kind of intellectual exercise intended to showcase the speaker’s erudition and rhetorical skill. However, the more important parallel is that for Milton, too, the trope raises the question of the poetics of mimesis. As David Ainsworth has argued, through the “metaphorical” music of the spheres that is first dismissed but then reasserted as a representation that communicates not a literal, but a higher truth, the Prolusion makes a case for inspired poetry to “close the gap” between fallen humankind and God:
- 65 David Ainsworth, Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation : Reading Through the Spirit, New York, (...)
When it is impossible to represent a thing accurately as itself, the best that can be done is to capture the essence of the thing mimetically, to represent the thing as accurately as possible in a way which preserves that which must remain mysterious. But the harmony of the spheres itself stands in for the divine order of creation, representing God’s proportionate design. Milton suggests, then, that only through poetry can humanity capture that design truly.65
- 66 See, for instance, Diane K. McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge, C (...)
- 67 John Milton, “On the Morning of CHRISTS Nativity : Compos’d 1629”, in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Lon (...)
- 68 Noam Reisner, “The Poetic Promise of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’”, in Thomas N. Corns (ed (...)
- 69 Reverberating Song, op. cit., p. 183.
32This is a strong claim and one that would place Milton’s concept of mimesis – the representation of a representation, but one with the power to attune or transport (in Sidney’s terms, icastically) – in marked contrast to Spenser’s more modest poetics. Most recent commentators on Milton’s use of music as a trope for poetry agree that it changes over the course of his career, from the Prolusion to Paradise Regained.66 I only want to consider Milton’s return to the trope in the poem that, by his own admission, launched him on the career of a serious poet: “On the morning of Christs nativity”, written in 1629 and later chosen to open his 1645 volume of Poems.67 Even for this single example, critics are divided over the poetics of mimesis of heavenly music informing it: Noam Reisner argues for the speaker’s pointed failure to join the angelic choir that leads him to concede “that his imagination strayed into dangerous territory” and “to reflect on the implications of his mimetic audacity”;68 Erin Minear, like Ainsworth, sees Milton as suggesting “that describing heavenly song may be a way of joining it”.69 The question of mimesis, then, is again at the centre, and so is the question of a poetics of noise.
- 70 Poet of Revolution, op. cit., p. 173. For an in-depth discussion of the debt to Spenser in the Ode (...)
- 71 Each stanza of the Hymn consists of eight lines : “two iambic trimeter couplets that are interrupte (...)
33The poem opens with four introductory stanzas in modified rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza closely identified with Chaucer and imitated, inter alia, by Spenser in his Fowre Hymnes. As McDowell points out, Milton’s deviation from the “standard” rhyme royal is to “substitute[] a twelve-syllable alexandrine for the final decasyllabic line in the manner of the famous stanzaic form of Spenser’s Faerie Queene”.70 The introductory stanzas thus establish a link with both Chaucer and Spenser. The speaker invokes his “Heav’nly Muse” (l. 15) to present a welcome gift to the Saviour. Recalling the apophaticism of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes, he too asks the muse: “Hast thou no vers, no hymn, no solemn strein, / To welcome him to this his new abode [?]” (ll. 17—18). However, the difference in attitude becomes clear when the speaker encourages his muse to outpace the “Star-led wisards” (l. 23) and “prevent them with thy humble ode” (l. 24). His appeal to his muse, “And joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire” (l. 27), is the hyperbolic expression of a vatic Christian poetics that is exemplified, but also retracted, in the following “Hymn”. Milton developed a new eight-line stanza for it,71 and its twenty-seven stanzas can be divided into four thematic sections: the first eight stanzas establish the setting near the stable with a description of wintry Nature’s homage to the “Heav’n-born-childe” (l. 30), and “meek-eyd Peace” (l. 46) suspending all earthly conflict. Stanzas 9 to 16 offer a rapturous rendition of the music of the spheres merging with the angelical choirs in celebration of the Incarnation. The next ten stanzas, 17 to 26, describe the banishment of the pagan divinities, with the final stanza returning to the stable, where Mary puts her child to rest as angels attend on them.
34Milton appropriately shapes his gift on the occasion of God becoming not only man, but child, of the divine entering the mundane, through a number of contrasts: most obviously, the poem is suspended temporally between the present of 1629 and the “first” Christmas, on the one hand, as well as the Creation of the world and the promised return of Christ triumphant at the end of time, on the other. The dark and cold of the winter night is broken by the light of the adoring stars; the peace of the blessed night is offset all too starkly against the eternal strife between men, and between men and the ancient gods. Sublunary nature – flawed, corrupt, sinful – is juxtaposed with the glory of the heavens; weak and mortal mankind contrasts with the creeping procession of the old gods, and the glittering ranks of the angels. However, most to the purpose among these contrasts – strongly suggesting a binary, rather than wholeness – is that between silence, music, and noise.
35In Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, contrasts are transgressed, as we have seen. In Milton’s stable, and on the occasion of the ultimate transgression between the divine and the human, they tend to be neatly juxtaposed instead. Into this conflicted world, the heavenly music breaks, heard by the shepherds in the fields:
When such musick sweet
Their hearts and ears did greet,
As never was by mortall finger strook,
Divinely-warbled voice
Answering the stringed noise,
As all their souls in blisfull rapture took:
The Air such pleasure loth to lose,
With thousand echo’s still prolongs each heav’nly close. (ll. 93-100)
- 72 On Milton’s use of music, “as a communal exercise of harmonious association”, to “both inspire[] an (...)
- 73 Catherine Belsey points out that “unexpressive” signifies, not only inexpressibility, but also that (...)
36The music’s source is ineffable; its destination is not only the ear, but also the heart and the soul.72 Its component parts are voice, string and echo, but none of them are of human origin – indeed, human agency is specifically ruled out, and the notes are called “unexpressive” (l. 116), apophatically surmounting human description.73 By contrast to the music in the Bower of Bliss, it is quite clear that Milton’s is indeed of unearthly origin: it is the angelic choirs announcing the nativity. However, their song also recalls the music of an earlier turning point in the history of the world:
Such Musick (as ’tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator Great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanc’t world on hinges hung […]. (ll. 117-122)
- 74 Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas, op. cit., p. 103. For a fuller discussion, see McColley, Po (...)
37The music establishes a link between Creation and Incarnation, facilitating the layering of temporal deictics that links the present of 1629 (in which “’tis said”), the time of the Nativity (“Before”), and Creation itself (“when”). In the parenthesis, “as ’tis said”, the speaker moreover defers authority for temporally situating this music, conceding that his epiphanic present may recall the grandeur of the Incarnation, but for an intuition of Creation itself, he must rely on tradition. The poem, however, permits the reader through its own musicality to intuit its subject – Leo Spitzer rightfully speaks of “the colossal world-organ voice of Milton”.74
38Still, the poet is humble in his appeal to the heavens, and this time explicitly to the music of the spheres:
Ring out ye Crystall sphears,
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
And let the Base of Heav’ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th’ Angelike symphony. (ll. 125-132)
- 75 See Minear, Reverberating Song, op. cit., p. 187.
- 76 On the analogous use of “perhaps” in Paradise Lost to signal the “precision of poetic language’s ca (...)
39Here, Milton clearly spells out that the music of the spheres is not identical, but supplementary to the angelical song – suggesting a harmonic union not only of musica coelestis and musica mundana, but of classical philosophy with Christian theology.75 And yet: the second parenthesis again suggests doubt, as the poet defers to the possibility that indeed, the heavenly music may not be audible to human ears.76 However, he appeals to heaven that it might be so – this time not recalling the Incarnation, but foretelling some future moment of bliss (“once”). Thus, the “ninefold harmony” is presented in a way that clearly marks it as an expression of the speaker’s wish – given the radical difference between the humble speaker and the sublime object of address, the imperatives “let…move”, “ring out”, “bless”, and “make up” mark an orational intention. This flags Milton’s description of the music of the spheres as quite the opposite of the music in the Bower of Bliss, where musica instrumentalis seemed to mingle with musica mundana to such a degree that they were indistinguishable, with the effect of deceiving the listener. Milton clearly frames his description in terms of an as-yet unfulfilled desire, wishing for the imagined music, and putting its audibility in doubt. Thus, the next stanza continues in the conditional:
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl’d vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell it self will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. (ll. 133-140)
40The parallels with Milton’s Prolusion are obvious – yet here, the reference to the Golden Age is free from all playfulness. The “music of the stars” is now “holy song”; the vague freedom “from every grief” is specified as the demise of vanity, sin, and hell itself. In the Prolusion, Milton had also framed this blissful experience in the conditional, but the difference to the poem is nonetheless striking: while the speech had posited that it might be attained “if our souls were pure, chaste, and white as snow”, the poem momentarily upholds it as an effect of the music bestowed by divine grace.
41However, this sublime vision is shattered with the utmost bluntness:
But wisest Fate sayes no,
This must not yet be so,
The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
So both himself and us to glorifie […]. (ll. 149-154)
- 77 Cp. Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2015, p. (...)
- 78 See Eric J. Dobson, “Milton’s Pronunciation”, in Ronald D. Emma and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Langu (...)
- 79 The archaic prefix in “ychain’d” (l. 155) signals Milton’s debt to Spenser and his medieval model, (...)
- 80 As the “old Dragon” slithers away, he “Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail” (ll. 168, 17 (...)
42The music of the spheres cannot return us to a golden age; the “new” mode of time is not cyclical (i.e., rhythmic) but teleological (linear), from Incarnation to Crucifixion to Resurrection to the Apocalypse.77 The jarring of the harsh, largely monosyllabic trimeters with the mellifluous first pentameter replicates how the bitterness of the crucifixion intrudes on the serene nativity scene: the smiling “Babe” becomes the anguished man of sorrows within two lines. Appropriately, “Infancy” and “glorifie” seem difficult to reconcile, refusing to rhyme properly.78 The ecstatic music is banished as this pivotal stanza rushes into the next,79 which initiates the hymn’s final movement, on the banishment of the heathen powers. Not all of them go quietly, and their noise marks them out as enemies to divine harmony.80 And yet, their banishment is effective:
The Oracles are dumm,
No voice of hideous humm
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. (ll. 173-175)
43Whereas in Spenser’s Bower, the sound of sin was harmonious and tempting, Milton renders it as noise subdued into silence by the Saviour. As the cacophony of idols dies away, the final stanza returns to the manger, where Mary “Hath laid her Babe to rest” (l. 238). The scene is tranquil, but there remains, of course, the poet’s voice. He states self-effacingly, again in analogy to the Prolusion: “Time is our tedious song should here have ending” (l. 239). In the poem’s final lines,
[…] all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable. (ll. 243-244)
44Milton concludes with another rhyme that is slightly off. As Maggie Kilgour points out, “the final rhyme […] breaks the harmony” yet again, “[b]ut the awkwardness is itself meaningful”:
- 81 Kilgour, “Harnessing Angels”, art. cit., p. 47. Contrast John Creaser, Milton and the Resources of (...)
Throughout The Hymn the uneven line lengths remind us of the incommensurability between the human and the divine even as the two are brought “in line” together. The final couplet of each stanza and here of the poem as a whole joins uneven feet. There is a deliberate emphasis on inequality that is never fully resolved […].81
- 82 See also Teskey, Poems, op. cit., p. 54.
45This coupling also recalls the effect from Spenser’s stanza in The Faerie Queene of eight pentameters concluding on a hexameter,82 and here as there, this “unevenness” expresses that perfect harmony is normally out of reach in this world, for both poet and reader. Unlike the deceitful music in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, aimed at making the listener forget reality and succumb to its beauty, Milton’s heavenly music is firmly couched in the conditional. The Christian poet reminds his readers that Incarnation and crucifixion, grace and suffering, harmony and “clang”, are interdependent in their meaning and hence inseparable.
IV. Conclusion
- 83 Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of, London, Jonathan Cape, 2008, p. 1.
46Julian Barnes opens his memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened of, with the words: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him”.83 Both Spenser and Milton, as self-consciously Christian poets, subscribe to the idea that the music of the spheres is something to be missed. They suggest that the yearning for perfect harmony is deeply human, but also, that this yearning must go unfulfilled in this world. For Spenser, the idea that art might offer perfection is something sinister – he is convinced that we must be wary of “phantastic” temptation. In the Bower of Bliss, the music of the spheres is not heard – something like it is, and the poem aims to warn us against false semblances. Temperance lies in accepting the imperfection and inconclusiveness of mundane experience, and in resisting the desire for hyperbolic, “celestial” aesthetic experience. Of the two forms uneasily linked in the trope, the whole and the hierarchy, Spenser clearly foregrounds the primacy of the latter, alongside the consequences of transgressing the boundary creating the hierarchy. The unity of the cosmic whole is available only as an idea in the fallen part of this whole. In The Faerie Queene, disharmony (chaos, noise) becomes a structural principle – true, it is what the questing knights struggle against, but it is also clearly the hallmark of the present world. Even as he registers the yearning for perfection, Spenser self-consciously concedes mimesis as deceitful and dangerous. Given the dangers of sensual pleasure, his poem must retract its own efforts by stressing that worldly art can only offer “dark conceits” or incompleteness.
47This imperfection is temporarily suspended, for Milton, on the epiphanic Christmas morning. In a vision transcending the limits of time and space, the speaker evokes the music of the spheres as a means of rendering the glory of the natural world, supplementing the glory of the supernatural expressed in angelic song. Both lie at the centre of Milton’s vision, but both are self-consciously hedged in doubt and conditionals, acknowledging the fallen condition of man. The harmony is replaced, harshly, by the noise of the retreating false gods, and finally, by silence. Even this silence registers imperfection in the rhyme that renders it. Milton reminds his readers in good faith that his work this side of heaven requires divine grace to perfect it. Still, for him, mimesis – which like Spenser, he “retracts” in a self-conscious way – is capable of inspiring, as the vatic speaker aims to join his voice with those of the angels. He dares present the cosmic whole, as long as it remains clear that readers must work towards it themselves – mimetic poetry is no substitute for heavenly harmony, but an incentive to strive towards it.
48In both Spenser and Milton, the music of the spheres stands for a perfection that is unavailable in this world. They do not follow the conventional trope of the music of the spheres as a model for poetry. For both, human art could only ever hint at such harmony: Spenser holds it out as temptation, Milton as promise. The trope pinpoints their views on the desire behind mimesis: Spenser warns against its “phantastic” dangers; Milton “icastically” asks the reader to put it to use in striving for God. For both, poetry must remind its readers of its own limits, and of its own rootedness in the noise and chaos of this world, rather than the harmony and order of the next. In this sense, unlike Chaucer, they do not “delight” in a poetics of noise, but they practice it nonetheless to show the fallenness of this world, and our dependence on divine grace.
Notes
1 The description of poetic creation in terms of viewing the heavens is something of a commonplace in the period ; see Florian Klaeger, “Golden Worlds and Brazen Lies : Comparing Astronomy and Poetry in English Renaissance Poetics”, in Anja Müller-Wood et al. (ed.), Translating Renaissance Experience, Móntreal, Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre, 2021, p. 45-66.
2 Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, London, 1595, sig. L3r-L3v.
3 “O curvae in terries animae et caelestium inanis” (Decimus I. Iuvenalis and Aulus Persius Flaccus, Juvenal and Persius, George Gilbert Ramsay [trans.], Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 340).
4 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, ed. Konrad Ziegler, Leipzig, Teubner, 1969, p. 132 (VI.19). “The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it. Indeed, hearing is the dullest of the senses : consider the people who dwell in the region about the Great Cataract, where the Nile comes rushing down from lofty mountains ; they have lost their sense of hearing because of the loud roar. But the sound coming from the heavenly spheres revolving at very swift speeds is of course so great that human ears cannot catch it ; you might as well try to stare directly at the sun, whose rays are much too strong for your eyes” (transl. from Ambrosius Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, William Harris Stahl [trans. and ed.], New York, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 74).
5 This difference is made explicit in Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream : “Then, too, we must not overlook the fact that we do not catch the sound of the music arising in the constant swirl of the spheres because it is too full to be taken into the narrow range of our ears. Indeed, if the Great Cataract of the Nile withholds the ominous thunder of its falls from the ears of the inhabitants, why is it surprising that the sound coming from the vastness of the universe surpasses our hearing ? No idle words were these [in the Dream] : What is this great and pleasing sound that fills my ears ? Cicero would have us understand that if the ears of a man who deserved to participate in the heavenly secrets were filled with the vastness of the sound, surely the hearing of other mortals would not catch the sound of celestial harmony” (Macrobius, Commentary, op. cit., p. 199-200).
6 Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, “« The name of Psalmes will speak for me ». Le rôle des psaumes dans la conception sidnéienne de la musique de la poésie”, Études Épistémè, 18, 2010, https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/646 (last accessed 24 July 2022), par. 11 : “C’est celui de la mimésis, de la représentation, qui dit qu’il demeure toujours un écart indépassable entre musique des sphères et chant humain”.
7 Simeon K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony : Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, Tacoma, WA, Angelico Press, 2013, p. 3.
8 See Marc Berley, After the Heavenly Tune : English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2000, p. 50-60, here p. 52.
9 Simeon K. Heninger, “Sidney and Boethian Music”, Studies in English Literature 1500—1900, 23.1, 1983, p. 37-46, here p. 41-42.
10 Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, op. cit., p. 3-4.
11 Heninger, “Sidney and Boethian Music”, art. cit., p. 42.
12 See the contribution by Claire Bardelmann in this issue. On the identification between music and poetry in a tract that was near-contemporary to Sidney’s Apologie, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, see Laïla Ghermani, “L’enargeia musicale ou les modalités d’une ut musica poesis dans The Arte of English Poesie de George Puttenham (1589)”, Études Épistémè, 18, 2010, https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/645 (last accessed 18 October 2021). The very fact that Shakespeare could re-state the identification in a popular comedy like The Merchant of Venice (in the last scene’s famous “touches of sweet harmony” speech) shows how commonplace it was (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, London, Bloomsbury, 2010, 5.1.55-65).
13 Wolfram R. Keller, “‘Therout com so gret a noyse’ : The Harmony of the Spheres and Chaucerian Poetics”, in Jacomien Prins and Maude Vanhaelen (ed.), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres : Renaissance Conceptions of the Pythagorean Music of the Universe, New York, Routledge, 2018, p. 80-98, here p. 81.
14 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 360 (ll. 1025-1029).
15 Ibid., p. 394, l. 693.
16 Keller, “Therout”, art. cit., p. 82.
17 All references to The Faerie Queene are, by Book, canto, and stanza, to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al., rev. second edition, London, Routledge, 2013. This passage, FQ VII.vii.9, directly refers to Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules. Spenser constructs his own poetic authority here by reference to Chaucer, who in turn references Cicero and Macrobius (see Craig A. Berry, “Propagating Authority : Poetic Tradition in The Parliament of Fowls and the Mutabilitie Cantos”, in Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffiths (eds.), Rereading Chaucer and Spenser : Dan Geffrey with the New Poete, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019, p. 212-223).
18 John Dryden first attests to this relationship between the three poets : “Milton was the Poetical Son of Spencer […] : Spencer more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body ; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease. Milton has acknowledg’d to me, that Spencer was his Original” (Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern […], London, 1700, sig. *A.1.r.). In Areopagitica (1644), Milton acknowledged, perhaps with some irony, “our sage and serious Poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas” (Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton : 1643–1648, ed. Ernest Sirluck, vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1959, p. 480-570, here p. 516). Further specific references by Spenser to Chaucer, and by Milton to Chaucer and Spenser, will be discussed below. On the relationship between the three poets, see, for instance, A. K. Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton : Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations, Montreal, MQUP, 1975, and Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext : Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, New York, Fordham UP, 2008. On Chaucer and Spenser, see Patrick G. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight : A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993, and Stenner, Badcoe, and Griffiths (ed.), Rereading Chaucer and Spenser, op. cit. ; on Spenser and Milton, see Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser : The Politics of Reading, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983, and John Guillory, Poetic Authority : Spenser, Milton, and Literary History, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983. See Annabel M. Patterson, Reading between the Lines, Madison, Wis., University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, p. 36-56, for some qualifications of the “Spenser-and-Milton” pairing. For a comparative discussion of the three poets’ “cosmopoetics”, see Florian Klaeger, Reading into the Stars : Cosmopoetics in the Contemporary Novel, Heidelberg, Winter, 2018, p. 122-169.
19 For reasons of space, the issue of emulation or the imitation of poetic precedent, often raised in early modern reflections on mimesis, must be left aside here.
20 Sidney, Apologie, op. cit., sig. H.2.r. See Kenneth Borris, “Platonism and Spenser’s Poetic : Idealized Imitation, Merlin’s Mirror, and the Florimells”, Spenser Studies : A Renaissance Poetry Annual 24, 2009, p. 209-268, and Kenneth Borris, Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.
21 Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters : Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment, Detroit, Wayne State UP, 1996.
22 See, for instance, Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
23 See Caroline Levine, Forms. Whole, Hierarchy, Rhythm, Network, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015. Levine argues that often “when forms meet, their collision produces unexpected consequences, results that cannot always be traced back to deliberate intentions or dominant ideologies” (ibid., 8).
24 Ibid., 39.
25 Thus, Stephen Gosson, in his 1579 attack against contemporary plays and poetry, The Schoole of Abuse (dedicated to Sidney), had stated : “Pythagoras […] condemnes them for fooles, that iudge Musike by sound and eare. If you will bee good Scholers, and profite well in the Arte of Musike, shut your fidels in their cases, and looke vppe to Heauen [to see illustrated there] : the order of the Spheres, the vnfallible motion of the Planets, the iuste course of the yeere [etc.]. The politike lawes, in wel gouerned common wealthes, that treade downe the proude, and vpholde the meeke [...] are excellent maisters to shewe you that this is right Musicke, this perfecte harmony” (The Shoole [sic] of Abuse, London, 1579, sig. 8.r-8.v.). Gosson presents the Renaissance cliché of the harmony of the spheres as an aesthetic and social ideal, based on the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. In the context of his treatise, it contributes to his appeal for art’s proper use and function – that is, to be socially and spiritually instructive (see Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 237). Harmonious order is deemed evident from the heavens, and this evidence is taken as proof for the legitimacy of social and aesthetic order, as well. Gosson’s inversion, by which political order is turned into an aesthetic ideal, only highlights the circular logic informing the correspondence (or homogeneity) between “above” and “below”.
26 Johannes Kepler, Harmonice mundi, ed. Max Caspar and Walther v. Dyck, Gesammelte Werke 6, Munich, C. H. Beck, 1940, p. 328.
27 In his discussion of the trope in Sidney’s Apologie, Berley relates it to “conflicting biblical notions of the creation of man : one based on analogy, one based on synecdoche” (After the Heavenly Tune, op. cit., p. 54-55).
28 Berley, After the Heavenly Tune, p. 56-57.
29 The modern association of Spenser’s style with musicality goes back to Coleridge (David S. Wilson-Okamura, “The Formalist Tradition”, in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 718-732, here p. 724). For recent discussions of Spenser’s style, see David S. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, and Richard D. Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019.
30 See John Hollander, “Music”, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990, p. 482-484.
31 A. K. Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument : The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion, New York, Columbia University Press, 1960.
32 Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.
33 Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser, Geneva, Librairie E. Droz, 1960.
34 Besides these, other important early explorations include Maren-Sofie Røstvig, “The Hidden Sense : Milton and the Neoplatonic Method of Numerical Composition”, in id. et al. (ed.), The Hidden Sense and Other Essays, Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 1963, 1-112, here p. 71-92 ; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age [1979], London, Routledge, 2003, p. 111-127 ; and the work of Simeon K. Heninger cited throughout this essay. Also see Elizabeth Bieman, Plato Baptized : Towards the Interpretation of Spenserʼs Mimetic Fictions, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988, Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction : Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, and most recently, Borris, Visionary Spenser, op. cit. The 2009 volume of Spenser Studies, edited by Kenneth Borris, Jon Quitslund and Carol Kaske, constitutes a crucial reckoning with earlier approaches to “Spenser and Platonism” as much as a new departure.
35 A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961, p. 104-105. The use of structural doubles with a parodic function has long been identified as a key strategy in The Faerie Queene. Building on the work of Harry Berger (The Allegorical Temper. Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Yale, Yale University Press, 1957), Angus Fletcher (The Prophetic Moment. An Essay on Spenser, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971), and Carol V. Kaske (Spenser and Biblical Poetics, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1999), critics have discussed the functions of various doublings or pairings, divisions, repetitions, echoes, etc. as narrative devices for “self-parody” and negotiations of selfhood as well as of poetics. As Linda Gregerson puts it, “The poem’s characters, […] unlike its readers, are not privy to the secrets of malicious disguise or false creation ; they encounter even the most blatant antitype or simulacrum as a fresh interpretive conundrum. Within the poem, virtue must learn its own nature by navigating the complex terrain of antipathy and alliance. Outside the poem, with a partial, but only a partial, interpretive advantage, the reader is invited to do the same. From either perspective, the image in the mirror is a cumulative composite” (“The Faerie Queene (1590)”, in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 198-217, p. 210). Most recently, this function of “discipline” has been discussed by Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene : Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020.
36 FQ I.i.1, editor’s note on line 8.
37 On the history of the term “musica coelestis”, see Reinhold Hammerstein Die Musik der Engel : Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des Mittelalters, 2nd, rev. ed., Berne, Francke, 1990, p. 135.
38 Edmund Spenser, The Minor Poems, Part One, ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1943, p. 198 (ll. 107, 110-111).
39 Ibid., p. 228-229 (ll. 225-231).
40 Ibid., p. 229 (ll. 261-263).
41 Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, “Retractatio als Transparenz : Rekursive Strukturen in Spensers Fowre Hymnes”, in id. and Claudia Olk (ed.), Neuplatonismus und Ästhetik : Zur Transformationsgeschichte des Schönen, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2007, p. 117-138, here p. 129 and 135 (my translation).
42 Leo Spitzer points out the close connections, ever since antiquity, between “ideas of the ‘well-tempered mixture’ and of the ‘harmonious consonance,’ which fuse into the one all-embracing unit of the world harmony” (Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony : Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung”, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963, p. 7) – hence the particular thematic focus discussed here in a book on the virtue of temperance.
43 See John Hollander, “Spenser and the Mingled Measure”, English Literary Renaissance 1.3, 1971, p. 226-238, here p. 229-230.
44 Chaucer, Riverside, ed. cit., p. 388 (ll. 190-191, 197-200).
45 Ibid., ll. 204-205.
46 As Keller observes, in the Parlement, “references to harmony appear to increase, culminating in the double representation of the harmony of the spheres. What begins promisingly with the harmonious hierarchy of the participating birds, ends disharmoniously in the parliamentary proceedings” (Wolfram R. Keller, “Disharmonic Spheres : Metapoetic Noise in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls”, in id. and Cornelia Wilde (eds.), Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains : Transformations of Music in Early Modern Culture between Sensibility and Abstraction, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2021, p. 11-37, here p. 33.
47 Judith Anderson has stressed the ubiquitous presence of the Parlement in The Faerie Queene (Reading the Allegorical Intertext, op. cit., p. 135-153), identifying this passage as well and concluding that “[r]ecognizing such a benign source behind Spenser’s Bower confirms and complicates still further our response to its undeniable attractions, making all the more shocking the reductive violence of Guyon’s wrath” (p. 137-138).
48 This is part of Spenser’s negotiation, in the Bower, of the contrast between art and nature, encapsulated in stanzas 58 and 59, discussed below and widely from Berger’s Allegorical Temper, op. cit., to Angela D. Bullard, “Tempering the Intemperate in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss”, Spenser Studies : A Renaissance Poetry Annual 31-32 (2018), p. 167-187.
49 Hollander characterizes the “mixture of “natural music” with the artificial musical sounds of human voices and instruments” as a “morally unwholesome blending of […] musical categories” (“Mingled Measure”, art. cit., p. 229-230). On the ancient links between birds and winged musician angels, via Plato’s sirens and others, see Kathi Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death : Studies in Musical Iconology [1970], Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 47-57.
50 In a passage that anticipates Sidney’s definition of “phantastic” poetry, the headmaster of Spenser’s school, Richard Mulcaster, explained the Puritan objections to music as “to[o] great a prouoker to vaine delites, still laying baite, to draw on pleasure : still opening the minde, to the entrie of lightnesse”, adding that “in matters of religion also, to some it seemes offensiue, bycause it carieth awaye the eare, with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the minde with a Syrenes sounde, pulling it from that delite, wherin of duetie it ought to dwell, vnto harmonicall fantasies, and withdrawing it, from the best meditations, and most vertuous thoughtes to forreine conceites, and wandring deuises” (Positions, London, 1581, p. 38). Mulcaster dismissed these objections, but Spenser seems to explore them in this passage.
51 See the discussion of the same passage in John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky : Ideas of Music in English Poetry : 1500—1700, New York, Norton, 1970, p. 112-113.
52 Compare also the beast-men the Palmer transforms back into human shape at the end of the canto : these victims of Acrasia’s spell disturb the boundary between human and animal not only physically but also mentally, as their brute bodies are shaped “According to their minds like monstrous” (FQ II.xii.85). Concluding the book on this note drives home the point, as Guyon observes : “See the mind of beastly man, / That hath so soone forgot the excellence / Of his creation, when he life began, / That now he chooseth, with vile difference, / To be a beast, and lacke intelligence” (FQ II.xii.87). The “vile difference” that mixes perfection and fallenness stems from a free choice between excellence and monstrosity.
53 See, e.g., Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment : Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 121-141, and recently, Thomas Herron, “Mixed Up : Race, Degeneration, and Irish ‘Old English’ Politics in Spenser’s Castle Joyous and Bower of Bliss”, Spenser Studies : A Renaissance Poetry Annual 35, 2021, p. 69-105. I discuss the historiographical aspects of Book II’s “Irish dimension” in Florian Kläger, Forgone Nations. Constructions of National Identity in Elizabethan Historiography and Literature : Stanihurst, Spenser, Shakespeare, Trier, WVT, 2006, p. 141-172.
54 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 183. See the important qualifications to Greenblatt’s argument in Harry Berger, Resisting Allegory : Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ed. David L. Miller, New York, Fordham University Press, 2020, p. 137-139.
55 This is borne out by the proem to Book V, in which the poet laments that the very order of the heavens as observed from earth (the constellations making up the zodiac), is “wandred farre from where it first was pight” (FQ V.i.4) : “So now all range, and doe at randon rove / Out of their proper places farre away, / And all this world with them amisse doe move, / And all his creatures from their course astray, / Till they arrive at their last ruinous decay” (FQ V.i.6).
56 Consider, in this context, Spenser’s own stanzaic form, invented for The Faerie Queene : each stanza runs to nine lines, recalling the number of the Muses, the Ptolemaic spheres, and the angelic orders (Borris, Visionary Spenser, op. cit., p. 53). What is more, the first and last lines were set apart typographically ; with seven lines indented between them. The first eight lines are pentameters, the final line is an alexandrine. The seven indented lines recall the seven classical planets, the outermost lines might then represent the sphere of the fixed stars at the top and, at the bottom, earth. This last line differs metrically from the other eight, inscribing the difference between the sublunary and superlunary worlds into the very fabric of the poem, as each stanza offers a “little world” or image of the cosmos in itself. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCBCC : there are thus two A rhymes, three C rhymes, and four B rhymes. These numerical attributes thus cover almost all numbers on the “Platonic lambda” of heavenly harmony (“the mixture arising out of these seven numbers [1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 27] brought about the generation of the World-Soul at the behest of the Creator” [Macrobius, Commentary, op. cit, I.vi.46, p. 109]), but stop short of completing it fully – the third uneven number, 27, is left out. The very fabric of the poem, its stanzaic form, offers a glimpse of Platonic harmony, but purposefully does not undertake to complete it, thus maintaining the boundary between the perfect heavens and the flawed sublunary realm.
57 The problematic relationship between entertainment and instruction is spelled out in Spenser’s “Letter of the Authors” (1590), in which the poet concedes that “historical fiction” is delightful to the readers of his day, but he stresses that he chose this form (as a kind of honeyed pill) for that reason – to achieve his goal of “fashion[ing] a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” (Faerie Queene, ed. cit., p. 714-718, here p. 714). Entertainment, then, is clearly in the service of instruction. Cp. Berger, Resisting Allegory, op. cit., 141-142.
58 Acrasia is not killed, but enchained by Guyon – temptation cannot, and must not, be done away with here below. Contrast to this complex meta-poetic use of the trope in a colonial context Ben Jonson’s rather more conventional application, in his Irish Masque at Court (first performed 1613). Here, a bard of Ireland is introduced to the king (James himself, for whom the masque was performed) : “This is that James of which long since thou sung’st / Should end our country’s most unnatural broils ; / And if her ear, then deafened with the drum, / Would stoop but to the music of his peace, / She need not with the spheres change harmony” (Ben Jonson, The Irish Masque at Court, ed. David Lindley, in David Bevington et al. (gen. ed.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson 4, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 243-250, here p. 249 [ll. 129-133]). The colony is unable to hear the music of the spheres, not because it is inaudible or too loud, but owing to the noise of war. However, submitting to the monarch’s pacifying “music” would suffice to “tune” Ireland into celestial harmony, which is identified with political accord. James apotheotically turns into a mediatory figure, channelling the music of the spheres to the sublunary realm. The bard’s role here is reduced to prophetic approval.
59 Keller, “Disharmonic Spheres”, art. cit., p. 12.
60 Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution : The Making of John Milton, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 14 and p. 143.
61 John Milton, In Scholis Publicis : De Sphaerarum Concentu, London, 1674, p. 83-87, here p. 83. “I beg you, my hearers, not to take this theory as seriously intended” (Delivered in the Public Schools : On the Harmony of the Spheres, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton 1, ed. Don M. Wolfe, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953, p. 234-239, here p. 234).
62 Milton, Harmony, ed. cit., p. 234-236.
63 Ibid., p. 239.
64 Ibid.
65 David Ainsworth, Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation : Reading Through the Spirit, New York, Routledge, 2020, p. 88. Ainsworth compellingly links this idea to the nature of the Holy Spirit, which “Milton understands […] as God’s means of filling in those gaps within the hearts of believers. And music, poetry, and prophecy blend together to allow a similar substitution for that which awaits fulfillment ; by incompletely expressing the inexpressible, these modes of thought permit humanity to reach toward salvation through an attempt to comprehend in part God’s ineffable design and, thus, attune themselves better as parts of it” (ibid., p. 91-92). Ainsworth’s book thus situates the present topic in the important context of Milton’s anti-trinitarianism.
66 See, for instance, Diane K. McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 175-217 ; Berley, After the Heavenly Tune, op. cit., p. 141-205 ; Andrew Mattison, “Sweet Imperfection : Milton and the Troubled Metaphor of Harmony”, Modern Philology 106.4, 2009, p. 617-647 ; Seth Herbst, “Milton and Music”, Essays in Criticism 66.1, 2016, p. 96-116 ; Erin Minear, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton : Language, Memory, and Musical Representation, London, Routledge, 2016, p. 165-256 ; Ainsworth, Milton, Music, op. cit., passim.
67 John Milton, “On the Morning of CHRISTS Nativity : Compos’d 1629”, in Poems of Mr. John Milton, London, 1645, p. 1-12. The poem is quoted in the following, by line, after John Milton, “On the Morning of CHRISTS Nativity. Compos’d 1629”, in The Shorter Poems, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski and Estelle Haan, The Complete Works of John Milton 3, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 5-13. Among the early poems utilizing the trope of the music of the spheres, the Ode is most fruitfully compared to “At a Solemn Music”, with its emphatic celebration of earthly music imitating celestial music (see, e.g., Ainsworth, Milton, Music, op. cit., p. 32-37).
68 Noam Reisner, “The Poetic Promise of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’”, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), A New Companion to Milton, Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. 230-240, here 237.
69 Reverberating Song, op. cit., p. 183.
70 Poet of Revolution, op. cit., p. 173. For an in-depth discussion of the debt to Spenser in the Ode (“something of a summa of Milton’s experiments with Spenserian closure”), see Kenneth Gross, “‘Each Heav’nly Close’ : Mythologies and Metrics in Spenser and the Early Poetry of Milton”, PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 98.1, 1983, p. 21-36, here p. 29 (but see passim).
71 Each stanza of the Hymn consists of eight lines : “two iambic trimeter couplets that are interrupted by a pentameter, and […] a final rhyming couplet that joins one tetrameter line and a longer closing hexameter” (Maggie Kilgour, “Harnessing Angels : The Pattern of Rhyme in Milton’s Nativity Ode”, Milton Quarterly, 54.1, 2020, p. 41-53, here p. 44). Recalling what has been said above about the Platonic lambda informing the Faerie Queene stanza, cp. Røstvig’s claim that “the structure of Milton’s Nativity Ode is patterned after this Platonic lambda, its 27 8-line stanzas representing the two impulses issuing from the One. This presupposes that the poet, before setting pen to paper, conceived an archetypal pattern in his mind, a pattern whose numerical proportions were those of the harmonious universe itself” (“The Hidden Sense”, art. cit., p. 44).
72 On Milton’s use of music, “as a communal exercise of harmonious association”, to “both inspire[] and metaphorically represent[] heavenly rapture”, see David Ainsworth, “Rapturous Milton and the Communal Harmony of Faith”, Milton Quarterly 47.3, 2013, p. 149-162, here p. 149.
73 Catherine Belsey points out that “unexpressive” signifies, not only inexpressibility, but also that the song is “not expressive, not, that is, a sign of a presence which is elsewhere” – it is not, itself, mimetic (John Milton : Language, Gender, Power, New York, Blackwell, 1988, p. 4).
74 Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas, op. cit., p. 103. For a fuller discussion, see McColley, Poetry and Music, op. cit., p. 185-192. On the contrast between orality and print, see Randall Ingram, “The Writing Poet : The Descent from Song in The Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645)”, Milton Studies 34, 1996, p. 179-197.
75 See Minear, Reverberating Song, op. cit., p. 187.
76 On the analogous use of “perhaps” in Paradise Lost to signal the “precision of poetic language’s calculated ambivalence”, see Justus Fetscher, “Vielleicht : Über eine Minimalfigur kosmologischer Imagination zwischen Milton und Kant”, Modern Language Notes 125.3 (German Issue), 2010, p. 511-535.
77 Cp. Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 46.
78 See Eric J. Dobson, “Milton’s Pronunciation”, in Ronald D. Emma and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Language and Style in Milton. A Symposium in Honor of the Tercentenary of Paradise Lost, New York, Frederick Ungar, 1967, p. 154-192, here p. 161-162.
79 The archaic prefix in “ychain’d” (l. 155) signals Milton’s debt to Spenser and his medieval model, Chaucer. The “horrid clang” (l. 157) of sinful reality intrudes upon the perfect music, disrupting it and suspending it until the final judgment. As Teskey points out, the polymath Milton would have been well aware of the Latin and Greek root of the term “clang” signifying “noise” (Poetry, op. cit., p. 60).
80 As the “old Dragon” slithers away, he “Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail” (ll. 168, 172) ; Apollo leaves “With hollow shreik” (l. 178), the spirits of the heathen dead “moan” (l. 191) and “A drear, and dying sound” is heard in the temples (l. 193) ; Moloch’s cymbals ring “In vain” (l. 208), as do the “Timbrel’d Anthems dark” of Osiris’s priests (l. 219). Moreover, the mountains resound with “A voice of weeping […] and loud lament” (l. 183) as “The parting Genius is with sighing sent” and the nymphs “mourn” (ll. 186, 188).
81 Kilgour, “Harnessing Angels”, art. cit., p. 47. Contrast John Creaser, Milton and the Resources of the Line, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 258.
82 See also Teskey, Poems, op. cit., p. 54.
83 Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of, London, Jonathan Cape, 2008, p. 1.
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Florian Klaeger, « “The planet-like music of poetry”: The Music of the Spheres and the Poetics of Mimesis in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss and Milton’s Nativity Ode », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 43 | 2023, mis en ligne le 15 septembre 2023, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/16265 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.16265
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