SOURCE: "Milton's Early Radicalism," in Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 7-27.

How radical was the young Milton? Can we find evidence of a political commitment in the poetry associated with his Cambridge years? Is there anything in the early work that looks forward to the revolutionary?

Milton's Poems of 1645 has generally been seen as an unpolitical or apolitical volume, as embodying Milton's youthful poems of the age before the revolution. For those who find the image of Milton the revolutionary politically embarrassing, it is still possible to preserve Milton in the pantheon of great literary, figures, by focusing on this allegedly prepolitical gathering of the "minor poems." The "New Critical" reading of the 1645 volume offered in the commentary by Cleanth Brooks and John E. Hardy, presented a poet shorn of the political. The New Critical, depoliticizing approach to Milton was never as critically exciting as the application of the approach to the metaphysical poets. Milton never became a central figure in new critical practice, despite the earlier essay on "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" in Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn But the negative aspects of the approach, the removal of the socio-political context, had their effect and the Brooks and Hardy readings achieved a pervasive influence.

Louis Martz developed the approach in his elegant essay, "The Rising Poet, 1645."

Here is the picture of a youthful poet, free from adult cares, sometimes wandering alone, amusing himself, sometimes making music for his friends or acquaintances, sometimes writing in his native vein, sometimes evoking a strain from idealized antiquity—but with a light and dancing posture that we do not usually associate with John Milton: et humum vix tetigit pede. It is clear, from many indications, that Milton has designed his book with great care to create this impression.

The entire volume strives to create a tribute to a youthful era now past—not only the poet's own youth, but a state of mind, a point of view, ways of writing, ways of living, an old culture and outlook now shattered by the pressures of maturity and by the actions of political man.

But whereas Brooks and Hardy had essentially ignored the political, Martz presents a political motive behind the nonpolitical impression. He argues that the volume is contrived to present an unpolitical impression, a commitment to "the transcendent values of art" rather than "the political situation."

Meanwhile, the facing title page prepares us for a volume that will contain songs of unlabored elegance, in the recent courtly style: "The Songs were set in Music by Mr. Henry Lawes Gentleman of the Kings Chappel, and one of His Maiesties Private Musick"—a notice quite in line with Moseley's preface, which associates Milton's volume with the poems of Waller that Moseley had published a year before. Waller, as everyone knew, had been exiled for his plot against Parliament on the King's behalf; nevertheless Moseley insists on saying: "that incouragement I have already received from the most ingenious men in their clear and courtious entertainment of Mr. Waller's late choice Peeces, hath once more made me adventure into the World, presenting it with these ever-green, and not to be blasted Laurels." This bland ignoring, or bold confronting, of the political situation, with its emphasis upon the transcendent values of art, is maintained by reprinting here from the 1637 edition, Henry Lawes's eloquent dedication of Milton's Mask to a young nobleman with strong Royalist associations; by the Latin poems in memory of the bishops of Winchester and Ely; by the complimentary writings prefixed to the Latin poems, showing the high regard that Milton had won in Catholic Italy; by Milton's admiration for Manso, the fine old Catholicpatron of Tasso; and by other aspects of the volume, notably the sonnet beginning: "Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms, / Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease." This is not a poem of presumptuous naïveté but of mature awareness, in which the poet, as Brooks and Hardy say, with a "wry humor … contemplates a little ruefully but still with a fine inner confidence, the place of the poet in a jostling world of men at arms."

Immediately certain separations need to be made in Martz's account between Milton's activities and those of his publisher. Martz stresses the Waller connection. Milton may not have known of Moseley's intention, may not have agreed with it, may have gone along with it as many an author has gone along with a publisher's promotional strategy that he or she was not in agreement with. Milton may have tacitly accepted the image Moseley was creating. At the same time, the head-notes to the poems themselves and the arrangement of the volume allow a radical theme to be perceived in the volume. Both Moseley as publisher and Milton as writer would have been aware of the advantages of appealing both to Protestant radicals and to royalist aesthetes: a larger audience than appealing to only one sectarian group. Moseley may have endured Milton's radicalism as Milton may have endured Moseley's conservatism. The permutations are multiple. My point is to stress the multifaceted nature of the 1645 volume. Thomas Corns has argued that the 1645 Poems show Milton engaged in "a further attempt to dissociate himself from the archetypal sectary," an image with which his polemical writings had identified him. "It contains a number of poems which in no way square with his ideological position by 1645, but which serve to restate his social status and aspirations." And Corns concludes

Milton's volume of poetry indicates clearly enough in its maturer items the Puritanism of the poet. Milton draws attention to it. "Lycidas" is introduced as foretelling "the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height" … The abiding impression, however, of any browser selecting this volume in Moseley's bookshop early in 1646 must surely have been of the eminent respectability of its author. Over and over again the volume declares his wealth, his establishment connexions, his contact with European culture, and his scholarship.

Dr Corns is surely right in pointing to the contradictions within the 1645 volume between Milton's gestures at respectability and his gestures at radicalism. In part the contradictions may have been tactical, in part they may have expressed contradictions within Milton's own political thinking. But in exploring these contradictions it is necessary that both the conservative and the radical impulses should be explored. And though the apolitical, conservative, and respectable reference of the 1645 volume has been established, the radical impetus has been comparatively little examined. Christopher Hill has stressed that

Although at the age of seventeen Milton wrote conventional Latin elegies on two bishops, the Vice-Chancellor and the university bedel, he never composed poems to royalty. Edward King, his junior contemporary, between 1631 and 1637 contributed to six collections of Latin verse celebrating royal births, marriages, etc.

But apart from such important negative, contextual evidence, what signs of radicalism can be read in the poems themselves?

When "Lycidas" was reprinted as the culminating item in the English poems in the 1645 volume, it was prefaced by an introductory five lines not present on its first appearance in the memorial volume for Edward King:

In this monody the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height.

The first sentence exists in the Trinity manuscript. But the reference to "our corrupted clergy" appears only in the 1645 volume. It is a sentence that draws attention to the radical attack from the Pilot of the Galilean lake:

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake,
Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold?

If the reader of 1638 missed decoding the pastoral, the reader of 1645 could not avoid the denunciation, could not avoid seeing the poet as placed unambiguously with the forces of reform. And the poet's gifts of political prophecy are likewise made unavoidable:

But that two-handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

The attack and the promise of doom were written when the clergy were "then in their height." It is not a convenient piece of hindsight, but a committed exercise of radical foresight. As Haller remarked in The Rise of Puritanism,

The blazing distinction of its author's genius and character has made it difficult for later generations to understand clearly how intimately and completely he was related to his own time. Milton's poem, with its extraordinary denunciation of the prelatical church, has become one of the most admired poems in literature. Yet, it was an expression of the same spirit which had been long making itself heard in the Puritan pulpit and which was at the moment clamoring in the reckless pamphlets of Prynne and Lilburne.

The 1645 superscription draws attention to the apocalyptic political note in "Lycidas." But the careful reader in 1638 as well as in 1645 would have detected a threatening gesture to established order in the poem's opening phrase, "Yet once more …." Brooks and Hardy remark that "Evidently this is not the first time he has come forward with an immature performance, and this is the usual gloss. But, as a number of commentators "have remarked, there is a heavy resonance to "Yet once more," for all its seeming innocuousness. The allusion is to the Epistle to the Hebrews 12: 25-7:

See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven: whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.

Both the King James and the Geneva Bibles make crossreference to Haggai 2: 6-7:

For thus saith the Lord of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts.

The opening phrase, then, establishes the note of doom, of the judgement of the Lord, of the Second Coming. The earth and the heavens will be shaken, and those things that do not stand firm will be removed. And the conclusion of the poem, with Lycidas entertained by

makes an allusion to Revelation 7: 17, "wipe away all tears from their eyes." The references are inescapably apocalyptic. The political pressures about to erupt in the revolution are sensed by the poet-prophet. Doom is spelled out for the corrupt clergy. And the vision of renewal, of the New Jerusalem, is caught in the final line:

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

The two indisputable points of emphasis in any collection of poems are the opening and closing positions. If we would argue that Milton deliberately used the concluding position to make a radical political assertion with "Lycidas," then it is likely that he would make similar use of the opening position. And we notice there is a brief, situating gloss attached to the title of the first poem of the 1645 volume: 'On the Morning of CHRISTS / Nativity. Compos'd 1629.' Typographically "Compos'd 1629" is presented as part of the title. It does not have the explicit political proclamation of the head-note to "Lycidas," but it clearly makes some proclamation; why else is it there?

The frequent assumption that Milton was somehow apologizing for early work, distancing himself from juvenilia by attaching dates in this volume has never seemed to me persuasive. Milton does not seem the sort of writer to be apologetic. There were a few poems from the Cambridge years not included in the 1645 volume; if he did not feel the poems were adequate to stand alone, then why not leave them with the uncollected? Rather than see the attached date as an apology, we might better see it as a political hint. The date worked into the "Lycidas" head-note, 1637, serves to establish that the poem denounced the clergy at the time of their height and foretold their ruin. The date 1629 puts "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" way back in the prerevolutionary days. And in those days the poet is shown as looking forward to better times to come. We are offered a glimpse of the apocalypse, delayed but promised.

The process has begun. And even though "The babe lies yet in smiling infancy," Milton looks forward to the Cru cifixion, and from the Crucifixion forward again to the Second Coming:

Commentators have remarked how Milton moves from his ostensible theme of the nativity to a vision of apocalypse. What I would stress here are the political uses of apocalypse. Although millenarian beliefs were not confined to the radicals, their expression increasingly implied a revolutionary component. At the time the poem was composed, millenarian speculations were suppressed. Joseph Mede's Key to Revelation had appeared in Latin two years earlier, but no English translation appeared until 1643 when a committee of the House of Commons ordered one. Hill points out that "no vernacular translation of the seminal works on Revelation and Daniel by Brightman, Mede, Pareus or Alsted was published in England until after the meeting of the Long Parliament."

"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," then, introduces a vernacular glimpse of apocalypse at a historical moment when such visions were suppressed because of their radical Utopian political implications. The poet reminds us of the date. And it is reissued as the opening proclamation to a collection of poems at an historical moment when apocalyptic pronouncements were part of the vanguard of rev olutionary ideology. Between composing and publishing the poem Milton had written that powerful apocalyptic vision concluding Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England (1641), looking forward to:

that day when thou the Etemall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distributing Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Commonwealths, shalt put an end to all Earthly Tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and milde Monarchy through Heaven and Earth.

It is a vision that reminds us that apocalyptic imagery was not a "purely literary" matter, nota matter of pure aesthetics. In the context of the 1640s, a vision of apocalypse was a revolutionary vision. And in 1645 the parade of defeated pagan gods invited a reading that allowed an analogy with the parade of defeated bishops, clergy, and courtiers—Strafford, Laud, and the rest of that crew.

That 'arched roof invites a Gothic image. Here we can see the English unpurged church as much as any remote Hellenic ritual, the priest and the cell allowing a ready impression of Roman Catholic leanings.

We are accustomed to the critical procedure that glosses "all-judging Jove" in "Lycidas" as the Christian God. Classical references can be decoded for a contemporary, Christian meaning. It is no remote or illegitimate reading that would see in "consecrated earth" "altars," and "service quaint" a reference to established Anglican ceremonial, the resented altar rather than the table, the quaint idolatrous rituals. As Milton was to write in Of Reformation:

the Table of Communion now become a Table of separation stands like an exalted platforme upon the brow of the quire, fortifi'd with bulwark, and barricado, to keep off the profane touch of the Laicks, whilst the obscene and surfeted Priest scruples not to paw, and mammock the sacramentall bread, as familiarly as his Tavern Bisket.

Peor, and Baalim,
Forsake their temples dim …

English churches are readily referred to as temples particularly if the fetishism of church buildings is being denounced. "O Spirit, that dost prefer / Before all temples the upright heart and pure" Milton was to write in Paradise Lost

Once the pursuit of correspondence is begun, it is hard not to read this as a dismissal of the Roman Catholic cult of Mary.

In vain with timbrelled anthems dark
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipped ark.

What are these but black surpliced clergy promenading to church music—music so denounced by radical Puritans who held it was the work of Antichrist, introduced by the Pope in 666 AD. And to see this whole "damned crew" "troop to the infernal jail" had an undoubted prophetic touch when the twelve bishops did indeed troop off to jail in the Tower in 1641/2.

This is a contextual reading. The events of the early 1640s draw out a reading that was only prophetically implicit in the Cambridge of 1629. But the arrangement of the 1645 volume encourages the emergence of this reading, not only with the opening poem balancing the explicitly radical attack on the clergy of the concluding poem, but with the two psalms immediately following "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Again they are prefaced with a temporal headnote. "This and the following Psalm were done by the Author at fifteen years old." There is no need to read in this any apology for immaturity. Psalm 136 has endured more widely than any of Milton's verses through its incorporation and happy popular acceptance in the English hymn book. If any implication of immaturity remains, it is in the context of truth spoken out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, of powerful, irrefutable, prophetic, Christian utterance from the young poet.

Our babe to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew

Not a blasphemous assumption of Godhead; but none the less a clear indication of prophetic possession in youth, the year preceding his matriculation at Cambridge. For what is the subject of these two psalms? We tend too readily to pass them by, see them as part of that psalmversifying of Protestant tradition, and disregard their quite specific content.

When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son,
After long toil their liberty had won
(Psalm 114, 1-2)

In bloody battle he brought down
Kings of prowess and renown.
(Psalm 136, 62-3)

In 1634 Milton turned to Psalm 114 again, translating it into Greek hexameters and sending a copy to Alexander Gill. With the victories of the Parliamentary army of 1645, these versions take on a prophetic significance.

To bring out the full political implications of the young Milton's prophetic vision, we need to look at that recurrent image of the Cambridge poems, the music of the spheres. As Arthur Barker remarked, "The force with which this idea struck Milton's imagination is indicated by the fact that from the '[Nativity] Ode' to 'Lycidas' he was almost incapable of writing on a serious subject without introducing the music." In the context of the image of the music of the spheres, the prophetic note takes on an unavoidable millenarian political edge. The lost music can be regained; there can be a new golden age.

     XIII
Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears.

And the poet begs the music to ring out for a quite specific social purpose:

The age of gold is glossed in political terms, not only in moral terms. "Lep'rous sin will melt from earthly mould," but also

Truth, Justice, and Mercy have their undeniable reference to earthly administrations as well as to any larger spiritual context. As J. B. Broadbent remarked, "The second descent, of Mercy, Truth and Justice, has only the abstract effect of a reference to eschatology, because Milton is thinking of political rather than spiritual qualities". And the conclusion of "At a Solemn Music" suggests the achievement of that music on earth prior to the transcending of the material realm:

O may we soon again renew that song,
And keep in tune with Heav'n, till God ere long
To his celestial consort us unite,
To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.

It might be argued that truth, justice, and mercy are easy abstractions. Is there any social specificity in Milton's vision that would entitle us to see a more fleshed-out incipient radicalism? The description of "the Heav'n-born-child / All meanly wrapp'd in the rude manger" "On the Nativity,"30-l) certainly allows a sympathy for the poor.

Milton was later to use the circumstances of Christ's humble birth to make a radical point. "For notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of som devoted still ignorantly to temples, we may be well assur'd that he who disdaind not to be laid in a manger, disdains not to be preachd in a barn" (Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of the church, 1659). And the vision of the shepherds "Sat simply chatting in a rustic row" again asserts a lowly simplicity. It serves to contrast Christ's heavenly majesty with the humility of his descent to earth, but it serves too to elevate the humble and to devalue the earthly proud; the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Hugh Richmond has remarked on the aesthetic consequences of this note of humility, this rejection of an elitist standpoint.

The theme of a saviour "All meanly wrapt in the rude manger" encourages in Milton a quaint particularity more characteristic of the humble craftsman than the sophisticated academic … the virtues admired in "On the Nativity" derive from this modest recognition of the Christian rhythm: its acceptance of the humble, quaint, discontinuous nature of experience, which gave the art of anonymous medieval craftsmen a vivid particularity denied to the arid theorizing of the pretentious Schoolmen. Few but scholars and specialists now regularly read even an Aquinas, while millions still delight in the statuary and paintings of the forgotten artisans who were his contemporaries.

Although, as Milton wrote in the vacation exercise of 1628, "my hand has never grown horny with driving the plough … I was never a farm hand at seven or laid myself down full length in the midday sun," he did not fail to remind himself in The Reason of Church-government Urg'd against Prelaty (1641) that "ease and leasure was given thee for thy retired thoughts out of the sweat of other men." Against the often-presented image of the élitist Milton, we need to reassert his stress on Christ's humble birth, on the simplicity of the shepherds, on the simple manual labour of Adam and Eve, contrasted with the tyrannical pomp of Satan's authoritarian regime in Paradise Lost.

So far we have stressed the threatening aspect of the apocalyptic note, the warnings of doom on the ungodly. But the vision of the Second Coming was a vision of universal peace. And so in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"

     IV
No war, or battle's sound
Was heard the world around …

Rosemond Tuve has stressed the theme of peace in the poem:

Encouraged to do so by Milton's own unifying use of great ancient images towards one thematic end, we could make shift to indicate the theme of this nativity hymn in two symbolic words: our peace. Only, however, if they are understood to carry all those wide and deep meanings he has gathered in, touching the redemption of all nature from guilty error, reconciliation and restored participation in the divine harmony, and final union with the divine light; traditional in poetry and liturgy of the season, these were to Milton most familiarly accepted and most natural in the form given them in the New Testament epistles.

But in noting "all those wide and deep meanings" gathered around peace, Miss Tuve ignores the political. Yet a vision of peace is of course a political vision. It cuts across those vested power-interests that need and create and maintain war. The political context is presented clearly enough by Milton; the implements of warfare—the products of organized political societies—are stressed:

It is organized warfare that is alluded to; not just spear and shield but the chariot, product of a technological state; not something that can be dismissed as a small brawl, but "the armed throng." And the political organization behind the warfare now brought to a halt is spelled out as monarchy:

And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

They sit there still before the wand of peace. Their reactions are not shown; the blankness of their portrayal is indication enough that Milton could not spell out what had happened to them, a lack of comment that indicates the inexpressible anti-monarchical feeling. In times of press censorship and severe repression, it is the negative evidence that we need to turn to. When monarchy appears again in the poem it is in connection with the Satanic reaction to the beginning of the new age:

It is a kingdom; and the phrase "usurped sway" evokes the idea of other usurping kings; the Norman Yoke, that imposition of tyranny on the English people by the usurping power of William the Conqueror, one of the most powerful radical images of the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary period.

To find political radicalism in the non-prophetic early poems as well as in the prophetic ones would strengthen our case. "L'Allegro" seems an initially unlikely locus for the political: but the force with which the political has been denied here suggests a significant repression.

Come, and trip it as you go
On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free …

It is hard to see how "sweet Liberty" could be construed as anything other than liberty. It is not luxury or licence or anything pejorative. It is a positive value that has an unavoidable political meaning. Switzerland, that Protestant mountainous stronghold of religious freedom, may be implied. Yet Cleanth Brooks in his influential essay in The Well Wrought Urn dismisses this natural reading:

If, under the influence of Milton's later political career, we tend to give Liberty any political significance, we find her in "L'Allegro" in very strange company, consorting with

Jest and youthful Jollity
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed smiles …

Sport that wrincled Care derides
And Laughter holding both his sides.

But the passage Brooks quotes precedes the introduction of "Liberty"; jest, jollity, quips, and cranks are presented as the qualities or companions of Mirth. Liberty is a more serious quality that Milton distinguishes from Mirth. Brooks offers no argument for his rejection of the political reading of liberty here. He implies that a knowledge of Milton's later career pollutes the reading, but liberty would have meant liberty whatever Milton's later career. And the introduction of Dr Johnson does not clinch Brooks's case. "Dr Johnson, always on the alert to ruffle up at the presence of Milton's somewhat aggressively republican goddess, does not betray any irritation at the presence of Liberty here." That Dr Johnson made no political interpretation here does not preclude such an interpretation. Brooks went on to make another distortion that has proved remarkably influential in later readings:

The first scene is a dawn scene—sunrise and people going to work: the ploughman, the milkmaid, the mower, and the shepherd. But though we see people going to work, we never see them at their work.

But when we turn to that first scene, Brooks's case simply falls down:

While the ploughman near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.

Stanley Fish has pointed to the pervasive ambiguity of syntax and image and reference in "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso." What Brooks did was to accentuate one aspect of the ambiguous and repress the other. The phrases in the poem that can be read as indicating people going to work can as readily be interpreted as accounts of their being engaged in work. The ploughman who "whistles o'er the furrowed land" may be whistling across a ploughed field on his way to work; or the whistles may express the song of his labour and the speed with which he is ploughing. The milkmaid who "singeth blithe" may as readily be singing while she works as not. The shepherd who "tells his tale" can be telling a tale while keeping an eye on the sheep; or he may be counting them, telling his sheep, keeping tally. The clinching case is the mower who "whets his scythe." Cleanth Brooks writes as if the sharpening of the scythe was not work, but some relaxed occupation of the mower's leisure time. But the scythe has to be constantly resharpened, and the whetting is part of the rhythm and activity of mowing as much as the strokes cutting the grass.

The work presented is joyous. In "L'Allegro" labour is delight. It is a vision like William Morris's haymaking in News from Nowhere; fulfilling, enjoyable. Yet the exhausting quality of the labour is not repressed: this is not a false or purely decorative pastoral. To read of

Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest

is to be reminded of the hardship of physical rural labour, of the need for rest, of the harshness of the places of rest available to the labourer. When we are shown the cottage "hard by" the towers and battlements, the "hard" picks up the "barren breast" of the mountains on which the "labouring clouds … rest" to remind us of the hard life of the cottager; its implications spread into the cottage life, not the castle or crenellated manor-house. And it is not easy to see how labour can be evacuated from the picture of the cottagers

Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
Are at their savoury dinner set
Of herbs, and other country messes,
Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses;
And then in haste her bower she leaves,
With Thestylis to bind the sheaves;
Or if the earlier season lead
To the tanned haycock in the mead …

Brooks comments "we do not accompany them to the haycock, nor do we feel the sun which tans it." But the demands of labour cannot that easily be denied. The emphatic present tense stresses the present activity of dressing the dinner and rushing off to work; the "haste" with which Phillis leaves the bower to bind the sheaves emphatically stresses a hurried meal, hurried because of the pressing demand of labour; and the alternative "or if the earlier season lead" similarly stresses that whatever season there is pressing work. There is always some demand.

As a result of his case, Brooks has to distort the poem further by treating unambiguous images of labour as somehow exceptions. He writes:

Nobody sweats in the world of "L'Allegro"—except the goblin:

(Perhaps it is overingenious to suggest that in this scene—the only depiction of strenuous activity in the poem—Milton has "cooled" it off by making the flail "shadowy," by presenting it as part of a night scene, and by making the labourer, not a flesh-and-blood man, but a goblin. And yet the scene has been carefully patterned: it is balanced by the passage in "II Penseroso," where the spectator having taken refuge from the sun listens

While the Bee with Honied thie,
… at her flowry work doth sing …

Goblins and bees are the only creatures presented "at work" in the two poems.)

But rather than excepting goblins and bees, we might more profitably see them as thematic reinforcements of the image of labour. All nature labours: human male and female—ploughman and milkmaid; the labouring clouds; the insect world, the bee, type and reminder of human social labour here as in Marvell's "The Garden"; and the supernatural world. Labour is not something separate from life, either here, or in Adam and Eve's gardening labour in Eden, or in the description of God as "my great taskmaster" in "Sonnet 7."

The significance of Brooks's denial of the presence of labouring activity in "L'Allegro" is brought into political focus by some comments of Raymond Williams in The Country and the City:

The whole result of the fall from paradise was that instead of picking easily from an all-providing nature, man had to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow; that he incurred, as a common fate, the curse of labour. What is really happening, in Jonson's and Carew's celebrations of a rural order, is an extraction of just this curse, by the power of art: a magical recreation of what can be seen as a natural bounty and then a willing charity: both serving to ratify and bless the country landowner, or, by a characteristic reification, his house. Yet this magical extraction of the curse of labour is in fact achieved by a simple extraction of the existence of the labourers. The actual men and women who rear the animals and drive them to the house and kill them and prepare them for meat; who trap the pheasants and partridges and catch the fish; who plant and manure and prune and harvest the fruit trees; these are not present; their work is all done for them by a natural order. When they do at last appear, it is merely as the "rout of rural folke" or, more simply, as "much poore" …

It is this extraction of the existence of the rural labourers in the representative rural poetry of the early seventeenth century that Milton confronts and resists. Brooks attempts to subsume "L'Allegro" to this dominant, quasi-pastoral, patrician, land-owning vision. And his attempt to do so when detected reveals the politics of Milton's vision more clearly. The labourers are present; indeed, the labourers are introduced before the landowners, gentry, and aristocrats are encountered in the poem. The labour of the rural workers is recognized, given a dignity and an aesthetic beauty in commemoration, and its hardships acknowledged. The human basis for Milton's stand against the forces of oppression—bishops, monarchs, all the figures of power and authority that he confronted—lies here in a recognition and sympathy for the labouring class.

And "labour and intent study" are the destined lot of the prophetic poet. Inspiration works dialectically with the medium; the medium needs to have a store of knowledge and a developed wisdom, across which inspiration can play. Describing the first steps in his decision to become a writer, Milton recalled in The Reason of Church-Government Urg'd Against Prelaty that, encouraged by the response his early poems had received from members of the private Academies of Italy,

I began thus farre to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.

Labour and intent study and inward prompting—the Protestant drive. And prophetic millenarianism has a long tradition of radical, revolutionary associations. The surprise would be if Milton's prophetic apocalyptic note were unpolitical. The repression of apocalyptic commentary under Laud was from a recognition of its revolutionary potential. In that time of brutal censorship, the political had to be expressed covertly, in literary code. By 1645 the political situation had changed and the code could be openly translated. From that perspective we can rediscover the radicalism of Milton's earlier years.