The chaos in the politically and religiously unstable England of the seventeenth century was reflected in its lack of Marian poetry. The poets of the era, a number of whom had been born during Elizabeth's reign, remembered the lesson learnt during the preceding century: if they valued their lives and liberty they must needs be circumspect in their writings about issues which might be interpreted as being Catholic-orientated. Hence they wrote with caution and in much of the surviving poetry of the era, praise of Mary is often under-stated. Even when writing about Christ's Nativity, the poets generally left out any reference to the Blessed Virgin or trod gingerly when writing about her.
Rowland Watkyns' couplet; Upon Christ's Nativity or Christmas, written in 1662, tersely states:
Christ had four beds, and those not soft, nor brave,
The Virgin's womb, the manger, cross and grave.
By equating the gentle protection of the Blessed Virgin's womb with the coarse hay within the manger, the agonising cross and the cold sterility of the claustrophobic tomb, the poet leaves the sense of his lines open to connotation. The womb is in fact soft; the connotation of brave, whether noble or courageous, is left open to interpretation: from the Christian perspective today the cross is most noble, even if the secular perspective of first-century Romans may have been that it was shameful.
When John Milton (1608-1674) mentions the Blessed Virgin in his poetry, he is so circumspect that he succeeds in creating the mother as a negative personality, a voiceless backdrop to Christ's Birth, instead of a woman of vitality with a prominent and God-given role in bringing forth One Who is God's Son and hers also.
Milton introduces his poem: On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 1 composed in 1629, with a verse in which but a single line describes the Blessed Virgin, when he writes that Christ was of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born (3). He proceeds to lavish two stanzas on Nature and the winter snow which cast a Saintly Vail of Maiden white (42) over the earth to hide its foul deformities (44) from her Maker's eyes (44). On the auspicious occasion of Christ's nativity it seems inconsistent to sing the praises of the virgin snow while failing to do the same for the virgin mother. If Milton intends to make use of the snow imagery as a symbol of Mary's virginity, the matter of the foul deformities (44) to which he refers needs to be resolved, for the fact that there were no such distortions in Mary's character may be inferred from the Archangel Gabriel's greeting to her in the Biblical words:
Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee : blessed are
thou among women . . . Fear not, Mary, for thou has found
grace with God
( Luke 1 : 28-30 ) .
In his poem, Milton describes Astaroth or Astarte, the Semitic goddess of fertility sometimes regarded as a moon goddess ( Martz 1963 : 260 ) as Heav'ns Queen and Mother both, emphasising the inconsistent viewpoint of his era which regarded as idolatrous the fact that such titles were traditionally and/or doctrinally applied to the Blessed Virgin, yet saw no harm in bestowing them on pagan goddesses.
Faint praise of Mary is sounded in the final stanza, where the poet writes :
But see the Virgin blest
hath laid her Babe to rest
( 237-238 )
Having thus timorously conceded that indeed Mary is blessed, Milton hastily continues : Time is our tedious Song should here have ending ( 239 ) . If the poet himself regards his composition as tedious, who is the reader to disagree? However, the fact that he manages to render boring a topic ablaze with literary and religious possibilities is proof that a poet who writes on the Birth of Christ cannot capture his readers' interest by playing down the actual event and ignoring the personae involved in favour of astral bodies.
This assertion may be thought to lack perspective, in the light of Bruce Kin's ( 1982 : 161-162 ) laudatory critique of On the Morning of Christs Nativity, which he hails as
.. . one of the greatest English odes ( using the ) soaring,
diving, here-and-there movement of the Pindaric ode to shift
the focus from the Christ child to the Incarnation of the
Redeemer of fallen man and nature, and to set His birth
within the vast perspectives of human and eternal history
. . . along with ideas which centuries of Christian
scholarship had evolved to harmonise pagan with Christian
history and myth, into a comprehensive cosmological view.
Nevertheless, it is suggested that is God, Who created the universe, had desired a broad canvas for the Birth of the Christ Child, He would not have limited the setting of His Son's arrival to the rough, malodorous interior of a stable, nor chosen for characters a teenage girl, a baffled carpenter, a band of rough shepherds and a triumvirate of wise men. It is the inspired simplicity of the nativity scene that causes Christian hearts to lift at its commemoration and it was in reducing the issues pertaining to the cosmos by becoming an Infant in poor circumstances that Christ established Himself as the focal point in the life of Everyman. Milton's poem, however cleverly comprehensive, lacks an essential quality of child-like wonderment. The mediæval poets were always impressed in wonderment at the truths of faith. By allowing his academic powers to overshadow the sensitivity of his intellect, Milton (and others like him) rendered himself incapable of sharing that wonderment or of conveying it in a genuine manner to his reader and resorted to an ostentation which, for all its superficial brilliance, lacks genuine substance.
That John Milton lived long enough to gain a far deeper comprehension of the Blessed Virgin's prominence in the life of her Son is evident in Paradise Regained, published in 1671, forty-two years after the publication of On the Morning of Christ's Nativity and three years before his death.
BUT TO HIS MOTHER MARY
But to his mother Mary, when she saw 60
Others returned from baptism, not her Son
Nor left at Jordan tidings of him none,
Within her breast though calm, her breast though pure,
Motherly cares and fears got head and raised
Some troubled thoughts, which she in sighs thus clad: -
'Oh what avails me now that honour high,
To have conceived of God, or that salute,
"Hail, highly favoured, among women blest!"
While I to sorrows am no less advanced,
And fears as eminent above the lot 70
Of other women, by the birth I bore:
In such a season born, when scarce a shed
Could be obtained to shelter him or me
From the bleak air? A stable was our warmth,
A manger him; yet soon enforced to fly
Then into Egypt till the murderous king
Were dead, who sought his life, and, missing, filled
With infant blood the streets of Bethlehem.
From Egypt home returned, in Nazareth
Hath been our dwelling many years; his life 80
Private, unactive, calm, contemplative,
Little suspicious to any king. But now,
Full grown to man, acknowledged, as I hear
By John the Baptist, and in public shown,
Son owned from heaven by his Father's voice,
I looked for some great change. To honour? no;
But trouble, as old Simeon plain foretold,
That to the fall and rising he should be
Of many in Israel, and to a sign
Spoken against - that through my very soul 90
A sword shall pierce. This is my favoured lot,
My exaltation to afflictions high!
Afflicted I may be, it seems, and blest!
I will not argue that, nor will repine.
But where delays he now? Some great intent
Conceals him. When twelve years he scarce had seen,
I lost him, but so found as well I saw
He could not lose himself, but went about
His Father's business. What he meant I mused -
Since understand; much more his absence now 100
Thus long to some great purpose he obscures.
But I to wait with patience am inured;
My heart hath been a storehouse long of things
And saying laid up, portending strange events. '
Thus Mary, pondering oft, and oft to mind
Recalling what remarkably had passed
Since first her salutation heard, with thoughts
Meekly composed awaited the fulfilling.
( 60-108 )
Whereas the poet devotes more space to the Blessed Virgin in the later poem, however, there is no suggestion of honour to Mary in her own right. The entire passage from Paradise Regained (Book II lines 60-108 ) , is a historical treatise of her involvement with her Son until the time he launched into his public life, after being baptised in the River Jordan by John the Baptist ( Matthew III-13-17 ) , in which hardly anything is said about Christ's mother herself. Nevertheless there is a slight thawing in the poet's attitude in Mary's regard, particularly discernible in his depiction of her maternal concern in the introductory six lines, his acknowledgement of her overriding motherly fears for her Son as she tells His History in the main body of the poem and finally the description of her as meekly composed ( 109 ) . What emerges above all is Milton's empathy with Mary's sorrows, born from the wisdom that accompanied his old age and his infirmity, and the poet's recognition of the fact that Mary herself is totally indifferent to any splendour implied by the prominence she has been given by God, and which she values only because it brought her Christ for her Son. Despite this maturity of understanding and wisdom and his touching empathy with a fellow human being's sufferings, Milton's Puritan instincts nevertheless preclude his engaging in any form of hyperdulia.
Dr Luky Whittle
1 On the morning of Christ's Nativity: This is the month and this is the happy morn - John Milton - Martz 1963:251
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