The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  These types of immediacy are, however, framed in ways that demand our attention; having examined how the hymn is positioned in relation to literary and religious traditions, one needs now to look more closely at how it is positioned in relation to the rest of the poem. Not only is it an instance of the poem-within-a-poem pattern discussed above; the effects of that status are intensified because, like many other hymns, it begins with a reference to singing a hymn, another version of warm-up procedures (“‘What should we do but sing his praise?’” [5]). The impact of this frame on the sense of immediacy is, however, limited: although it certainly reminds us that we are witnessing a representation (which, we soon discover, is itself a representation of the psalms), it is also part of the performance, a way of singing rather than just of singing about singing. Later these hints are sustained by the description of the island as “a grassy stage” (11).

  Far more extensive, however, are the consequences of the other passages that frame the poem, in more senses than one. It opens:

  Where the remote Bermudas ride

  In th’ocean’s bosom unespied,

  From a small boat, that rowed along,

  The list’ning winds received this song.

  These seemingly straightforward lines in some respects provide textbook examples of how mediating devices can work in lyrics, while in other respects they simultaneously demonstrate and reject such mediation. To begin with, like many of the passages I have explored, they qualify the putative immediacy of lyric by identifying what ensues as a representation. The emphasis on the unusual setting prepares the reader for something special, for an event in the senses identified above; at the same time, however, the low-key language and the size of the boat arguably delimit the grandeur of what is about to ensue in a way that privileges the restraint Patterson and others associate with the Protestant—or, more specifically, Puritan—aesthetics of the poem over the process that anthropologists term warm-up.

  Mediating devices, we have seen, frequently locate the lyric in a particular time and place; in so doing, they may distance it from the reader and author, though they may also intensify its vision in a way that makes the poem and its subject more present, more immediate. Gesturing towards those more common types of mediation, this stanza at first seems to position the ensuing hymn geographically, turning space into place, as lyric frames so often do: “Where” (1) holds out the promise of such transformation, and the proper noun that shortly ensues, referring as it does to an area about which many members of Marvell’s original audience had been reading pamphlets, appears to deliver on the promise.

  But of course the singers themselves are not on the island but rather at sea, a locale that prototypically represents space not place, especially when one recalls Yi-Fu Tuan’s association of the former with movement and the latter with stasis. And the language of this stanza transforms the apparent positivism of the reference to the Bermudas, intensified by many readers’ prior knowledge of those islands, into a description that is itself, as it were, all at sea. Initially, “remote” (1) hints that those expectations might not be met, and in fact the four lines proceed to overturn it. If the islands, like the boat, “ride” (1), one implication is that their location is unstable, hard to determine; similarly, “unespied” (2) could suggest that the reader is privileged to see what others cannot, but it also arguably hints that if the islands are hard for anyone to spy, a “small boat” (3) will be impossible to find. Subterranean and debatable though it may be, that hint is reinforced in the fourth line of the stanza, which draws attention to the absence of other observers. As Rosalie L. Colie briefly but suggestively notes, the poet and persona do not seem present and the readers “seem to happen in”; one might extend that statement by suggesting that even we have trouble happening in on this land-scape.93

  In other words, this opening at once undertakes the task of locating the poem spatially and evades it, hence refusing one of the principal functions of mediating passages; as in many Winslow Homer paintings, the viewer is denied a shore of dry land from which to view the action at sea. If mediating devices summon up and position a vision, the detachment that Colie acutely stresses complicates but does not obviate those processes.94 Thus the interplay of immediacy and distance is rendered semantic and thematized, as is so often the case, and the viewer’s relationship to the poem crystallizes questions about representation.

  The conclusion reads,

  Thus sung they, in the English boat,

  An holy and a cheerful note,

  And all the way, to guide their chime,

  With falling oars they kept the time.

  (37–40)

  Like other frames, this modulates the suggestions of presence and presentness by defining the song as part of a particular moment: “Thus sung” (37) is tellingly different from the alternative Marvell could readily have chosen, “Thus sing.” In the same line, however, “English” relates the experience in the remote Bermudas island back to that of readers on Marvell’s island, many of whom had also been victimized by prelates.

  Framing is a thematic and imagistic focus of the poem: the pomegranates are jewel cases, the oranges “golden lamps in a green night” (18), the worshipers’ temple “frame[d]” in the rocks (31). And framing and its discontents enact the ethical stance of the poem. This apparently straightforward lyric was composed by the poet whose “Garden” represents Eden as not only the locale of temptation but also itself an epistemological temptation for readers who might unwarily assume that fallen man can return to a prelapsarian paradise. It was written by the man who warned us that his mourning nymph’s attraction to an innocent joy is itself a temptation. A similar agenda, I suggest, compels the frames that both exemplify and eschew mediation here. Marvell is trying to suggest that the paradisiacal world the poem evokes is not available to his readers, who live in a fallen world of prelates and other sea monsters; but, as devout Puritans themselves, they may approach that ideal in limited ways.95 Hence the poem on the one hand establishes the boat as “English” (37) while on the other distancing it. In this as in so many other respects, the dialogue of immediacy and mediation speaks the principal concerns of the poem.

  Allied to Marvell in multiple ways, Milton also enacts a drama of limitation and caution through that dialogue. In his Nativity Ode, both immediacy and distancing are repeatedly invoked, thematized, and questioned (as of course is mediation in both the narrow sense this chapter deploys and its theological ramifications). Thus the text explores the transhistorical questions about authorship and representation, as well as more local theological problems that, I am arguing here, are often negotiated through the dual effects on which this chapter concentrates.

  Seldom known for achieving irenic consensus, Miltonists have parted company, especially in recent years, on fundamental interpretive problems about this text. That this poem celebrates not only the birth of Christ but also Milton’s triumphant instauration as poet-prophet remains a popular and predominant position in many quarters.96 Among the dissonant voices, however, are the critics who draw attention to the suppression of the speaker’s presence at a number of junctures; J. Martin Evans maintains that that erasure contributes to a dehumanized scene that ends on a negative note, while Hugh MacCallum sees it as contributing to the poise and balance he finds in the poem.97 Other readings emphasize not the celebration but the limitation of poetic achievement; David Quint finds the putative personal and spiritual triumphs of the poem significantly undercut by its emphasis on the impossibility of achieving a pure world and the purified poetry the speaker seeks.98

  Inconsistencies and unresolved conflicts in the text lie behind these opposing readings. The poem—not coincidentally the celebration of a divine mediator—stages the tension between the assertion that scriptural events may be immediately present at the date flagged in Milton’s title, 1629, and the countervailing claim that they can be approached only through types of mediation that may create an impression of presence but also carry with them aest
hetic limitations and spiritual dangers. In so doing, Milton does not eschew the celebration of poetry and his own position as poet that most critics still find in the text—the answer to the rhetorical question in stanza three about whether the Muse has a song is clearly a resounding yes99—but he does demonstrate the limitations of that version of mediation, together with those of other versions. In other words, whereas the shifts in the poem between the speaker’s presence and its disappearance or redefinition through first person plural pronouns has previously and persuasively been traced to Milton’s exploration of his personal role in interpreting scriptural events, those changes also help to construct an unresolved debate about the potentialities and limitations of both immediacy and mediation in lyric poetry.

  In exploring all these issues, Milton of course focuses mainly on Christ’s nativity; but in so doing he responds to millenarianism through a comparison of the immediacy of the nativity and that of the Second Coming. His interest in Protestant apocalyptic visions at this point in his career is not surprising for many reasons. Whereas Bale and Foxe were among the many prominent sixteenth-century figures in this tradition, prophecies about that event were becoming increasingly prominent in Milton’s culture, possibly reaching their peak in the 1640s. More specifically, in 1627, two years after Milton was admitted to Christ’s College and two years before he wrote the Nativity Ode, Joseph Mede, a Fellow of that college, published his influential Clavis Apocalyptica, which included the prediction that the Antichrist would fall within twenty-five years. Once again, historical developments in a smaller temporal unit within the early modern period encourage potentialities of lyric.

  Witness above all the paratextual material that precedes the text proper in this poem. Although students of Milton have interpreted his decision to add the subtitle “Composed in 1629” in the 1645 edition as an announcement of his poetic instauration, in fact those three words also establish a dialogue with what precedes them, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” providing an example of the concerns of this chapter. Is the subtitle in apposition to—or in opposition to—the title? In other words, is 1629 indeed a version of the morning of Christ’s nativity, or does the poem draw attention to a major temporal gap that marks other types of distance as well? From a different perspective, the title poses another unresolved question: to what extent is its author using “on” in the common sense of the Latin de, translated as “about,” “on the subject of,” a usage that Milton deploys in much of his early poetry? That is, is the poem “on” that morning in that it is a meditation on a prior event, a meditation occurring in 1629 rather than the year of the nativity? Or is Christmas Day 1629 itself the morning of the nativity in the sense that the event is happening on that day? Or is it through the very act of meditating on and writing about the event that it recurs? Conceivably, too, the classicist who wrote this poem was aware as he did so that de could be used spatially, signifying “down from, from an origin,” thus casting in spatial terms the distance that is implied temporally by “Composed in 1629.” If so, this is the first of many instances in this text where spatial positioning interacts with the temporal questions more overtly established through shifting verb tenses.

  As the lyric progresses, through the temporal shifts noted by many readers and other strategies, Milton pulls us back and forth between those possibilities.100 “This is the Month, and this the happy morn,” the ode opens; emphasized by the anaphora and the meter of the opening foot, which may be either spondaic or trochaic, the deictic “this” stresses immediacy, hinting that the event is occurring even as we watch. “Did bring” (4), however, locates that momentous occasion in the past, one of many instances where deictics and verbs conflict rather than cooperate. From one perspective, the distancing effect of the verb tense is intensified by the line that follows it, “For so the holy sages once did sing,” whether that statement is read as separating the poet’s song from that of the sages or as suggesting that the first four lines quote them rather than merely repeating the gist of their song. The former reading anticipates and mirrors the rivalry with other singers established by reading “prevent” (24, quoted below) in terms of poetic competition.

  Yet this is the first of many points in this lyric where one needs to qualify the widespread contemporary assumption that to establish a text as a representation is to establish it as well as a mere ruse, for, from another perspective, the line merges the poem we are reading and the sages’ song, thus anticipating the presentation of this very text to the Christ child and also hinting that it is a material product, a tangible gift (a point to which I will return shortly). Moreover, it is conceivable, though by no means indisputable, that the repeated “this,” in addition to all its other meanings, gestures towards the text itself, implying that the morn can be re-created in—and as—a lyric. In short, the opening stanzas, like the title and subtitle, raise unanswered questions about in what ways and to what extent the spiritual act of meditation and the poetic act of representation can draw us closer to their object.

  Such questions are further complicated in the next few lines. Line 5 works like the metapoetic references I have explored to distance us from what the words make present with the reminder that we are reading a representation. And after another stanza, whose three past tense verbs emphasize the historical gap between 1629 and the birth of Christ, the ensuing reference to the poem itself suggests an extraordinary immediacy of time and place: “O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, / And lay it lowly at his blessed feet” (24–25).

  In short, the opening stanzas that frame the hymn themselves repeatedly run quickly to the original scene of the nativity, only to block that movement through various strategies for distancing the birth of Christ and the act of writing about it. This tension between immediacy and distance is also established metrically: the hexameters that end the stanzas slow them down, creating a pause (which in the third stanza mimes aesthetically the decision to abide which the line expresses: “And chose with us a darksome House of mortal Clay” [14]).101 As the poem progresses, changes in verb tenses continue the veering between presentness and distance. For example, whereas the first stanza in the hymn proper commences, “It was the Winter wild” (29; italics inserted), the strophe immediately following it begins, “Only with speeches fair / She woos the gentle Air” (37–38).

  Such shifts are all the more striking when one compares other poems on the same subject. Crashaw’s nativity ode, examined earlier from a different perspective, shifts between immediacy and distancing as well. For example, Thyrsis first refers to the baby in the third person, then moves to the second; later the Christ child is addressed by the poet immediately after he lifts his head, and it is as though that motion, with its sense of physical presence, enables the address. Moreover, the later version of the poem intensifies the immediacy by changing the tenses of lines 65–69: the infelicitous earlier version, “streight his eyes advis’d his Cheeke, / ‘Twixt Mothers Brests to goe to bed” (49–50), becomes “See, see, how soone his new-bloomed cheek / Twixt’s mother’s brests is gone to bed” (67–68). Yet the movements in Milton’s poem are more startling. In Crashaw’s version temporalities and positionalities generally remain stable: with the exception of the rewritten lines 65–69, the poem records impressions from the past reported in the present; the persistent anaphora on “We saw” and “I saw” (33, 35, 36, 51, 58, 72, 74, 76, 77) emphasizes this structure. In Milton’s lyric, in contrast, the reader repeatedly shifts abruptly from a sense of being present at the scene to watching the speaker watching the scene or hearing him report on doing so. Her-rick’s “Ode of the Birth of our Saviour” achieves some immediacy through the direct address to the child and the use of epiphora to emphasize that the baby was born “here” (3, 4, 5, 8, 27, 28, 31), but most of the time it regards that birth from a time period clearly distant from it; the one apparent exception, the promise to dress the baby in silks and jewels and make for it a room of ivory and amber, in fact reminds us that this adornment i
s metaphorical, involving adornment with praise and celebration rather than with literal clothes, and thus could be read not only as the product of a time period considerably after the birth but also as a reference to acts of representation like writing this poem. Thus Herrick, like Crashaw and Milton, moves from more immediate to more distanced responses; but like Crashaw and unlike Milton, he significantly limits the effects of doing so in that he does not repeatedly shift temporalities.

  Those shifts carry with them many implications for authorship in general and Milton’s putative instauration as poet-prophet in particular. Whether or not Milton is identifying with Christ in all the respects that Richard Halpern sometimes compellingly but sometimes unpersuasively enumerates,102 he is surely allied through the role of intercessor. “But see!” (237), the final stanza opens, in the most overt of many reminders that poetry’s gifts include intermediation, that is, it makes the scenes from the past present. But yet again that gift functions paradoxically, delimiting the very presence it apparently creates with reminders of the act of representation: much as the opening of the poem did through its references to those “holy sages” (5), the newly minted sage composing this lyric almost immediately qualifies the effects of “But see!” (237) with “Time is our tedious Song should here have ending” (237). This line shifts us from story time to discourse time and draws attention to the question of where the lyric is located, temporally and spatially, without conclusively resolving it. Indeed, that question is further complicated by the plural pronoun. To be sure, the text and its reader are “here” at the manger—there is apparently no room in the inn for poesy, its creators, and its readers—and yet, by reminding us that we are reading a poem, the line distances us from the scriptural events while simultaneously locating itself within them. “Here” could, after all, refer to a point in the text as well as a place in the stable.