SOURCE: Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. “‘Smit with the Love of Sacred Song’: Psalm Genres.” In Milton's Epics and the Book of Psalms, pp. 135-69. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

[In this excerpt, Radzinowicz suggests that the mixture of psalm genres and classical influences apparent in the work allows Paradise Lost to transcend the epic genre and become an expression of religious worship as well.]

Milton's use of psalm genre in Paradise Lost is not only prior to that in Paradise Regained, but richer. This richness owes something to the greater sweep of Paradise Lost, a sweep that allows him both to exploit all the literary capacities of those genres prominent in Paradise Regained—hymns, laments, and wisdom songs—and to deploy the three genres not significant in the briefer epic: prophetic psalms, blessing psalms, and thanksgiving psalms.

Hymns are sung across Paradise Lost not only by angelic choirs, praising both God's nature and his specific acts, but also by the human pair, extemporizing occasional forms of praise in their worship during all the liturgical hours of a day. Milton grounds them on his reading of hymnal psalms as describing God's deeds and qualities and appropriate both at canonical hours of worship and at seasonal celebrations of God's greatness unfolding through history. His Puritan dislike of fixed forms of worship, however, is usually clear when human beings invent hymns. Either Adam himself claims spontaneity to begin or end a hymn or the narrator draws attention to God's preference for extemporized song.

Laments are spoken across the epic not only by the human sufferers in penitence but also by the poet, the Son, and even God himself. Milton grounds them on his reading of lament as expressing grief for human sin and mortality by each witness to it. Of God's capacity to feel emotion and to sorrow, God being perhaps the most unexpected of the mourners, Milton wrote in Christian Doctrine:¹

On the question of what is or what is not suitable for God, let us ask for no more dependable authority than God himself. … If he grieved in his heart Gen. vi.6, and if, similarly, his soul was grieved, Judges x.16, let us believe that he did feel grief. For those states of mind which are good in a good man, and count as virtues, are holy in God.

Wisdom song in Paradise Lost enters disputation or dialogue between Satan and various unfallen and fallen angels—Abdiel and Uriel or Belial and Beelzebub—and thoughtful conversation between the angelic visitors and Adam, or even Adam and Eve. Yet while Paradise Lost makes a more prominent use of hymn and laments than Paradise Regained, its use of wisdom song is more restrained, perhaps surprising readers who find the epic overfull of preaching and teaching. Nonetheless, in Paradise Lost dramatic or lyric speech overrides the enumeration, proverb, and generalized self-representation of wisdom song. Exceptionally, however, the last two books owe a good deal to it. The last two books of Paradise Lost are most like Paradise Regained, of course, so the similar use of wisdom materials is not surprising. Both are composed of dialogue between an angel (Satan or Michael) and a human being (Adam or Jesus); both conversations produce human education or enlightenment.

As well as those three psalm genres singled out later in Paradise Regained, Milton imitates three others in Paradise Lost. First, he makes the prophetic psalm the model for the poems, lyrically meditating on the power of poetry, on his own poetical intuitions, and on the godly inspirations that authorize his poetry. Second, he uses blessing psalms to respond quickly to, or briefly predict, the scripturally historic events of his plot. Paradise Lost surveys a historical sweep incomparably richer than that of Paradise Regained, tracing not only “the track Divine” (11.354) of God's acts but the faltering steps of men and fallen angels; the opportunity for benediction and imprecation is correspondingly much greater. Yet Milton modifies the genre by strikingly limiting the curse. Third, he treats thanksgiving not as an independent genre but as a mode naturally linking itself at crucial moments to other psalm genres. Hence thanksgiving instances the power of psalms as a lyric mode to communicate process or change of feeling within a sustained epic. Psalms contribute in Paradise Lost, therefore, not simply to variety and multivocality, or to plot foregrounding, but to narrative or psychological fluidity.

In Paradise Regained, Milton places Christ at the historical moment in which the old covenant gives way to the new; hence he makes particular use of New Testament psalms and of genres widely quoted or imitated in the New Testament. In Paradise Lost the Book of Psalms is Milton's primary authority, but the distinction between Old and New Testament psalmody is scarcely worth making, so little does the decorum of the epic highlight it. Paradise Lost treats all time, from man's first disobedience to one greater man's obedience; it does not center that sweep of history on a moment of fulfillment, or emphasize kairos over history. Not even in Michael's account of the transient world and the race of time does the distinctiveness of the gospel era pit the New Testament against the Old. A progressive revelation is shown to Adam, each stage of which has value not only in itself but in its role within an arc of enlightenment.²

Finally, in addition to the local effects of lyrical intensification, two overarching literary consequences of Milton's psalm adaptations are prominent in Paradise Regained—the securing of harmonious and varied multivocality on the one hand, the emphasis provided in foregrounding epiphanic moments on the other. These two strategies were developed first in Paradise Lost and carried over into Paradise Regained. One other literary result of generic adaptation in Paradise Lost deserves a preliminary word, however, and that is what I will call lyrical simultaneity, the personal expression of continuous worship. The large mimetic scope afforded Milton in Paradise Lost only partly explains the richer presence of psalm genres in Paradise Lost. Just as important is Milton's awareness of the interconnections among psalm genres as acts of worship. Milton not only draws on lyric at affective points in the narrative mode of Paradise Lost, both to vary and to structure it, he also shapes the epic itself into a mode of worship. He conceives of the whole poem, which he calls “my Song,” as an act of praise for the special audience of God and his worshipers, not simply for the “fit audience though few” of his own time or “after ages.” His conversion of an extended narrative into an offered lyric has for Milton the authority of David's Book of Psalms read not as an anthology of moments of worship but as an oblation. The intention to subsume narrative poetry into lyric controls the nature of Milton's individual adaptations.

Throughout Paradise Lost Milton refers to his poem diversely as story, words, adventure, deeds, performance, verse, and process of speech. These characterizations point toward sequence, duration, variety, completeness, drama; they point to Milton's narrative, dramatic, and encyclopedic intentions.³ He also uses another group of words to refer to it, a group including song, flight, and harp. These point toward unity and synchronicity. The deep structure resulting from the rage for order is the lyric. Milton's love of the Book of Psalms as the clearest biblical form of the focusing of a poet's desire for intense expressive utterance shows him how to lift epic into the undisturbed song of pure consent without impairing his intention to justify God's ways to men. Psalms too narrate, but their narrative impulse is controlled by a constant desire to worship; lyric governs their mode and unifies them as looking toward God as much as toward men. When Milton envisages his poem not as a public or civic act but as a religious act, a further usefulness of the admixture of psalm genres into a book of worship in the control and unity of epic becomes apparent.

THE PROPHETIC PSALM AND MILTON'S PROEMS

Milton adapts the proem, the first literary genre one encounters in Paradise Lost, from the prophetic psalm. Prophetic psalms enclose a response from God to the psalmist's prayers. The response is given in God's words, though sometimes in indirect discourse or summary. Hence the psalmist sees himself as a channel of influence; he has a message from God that he will in turn communicate to the people. The signature of the prophetic psalm is the oracular message responding to significant questions posed by the psalmist, questions like those commonly found in the books of the prophets. When Milton treated the prophetic psalm in Christian Doctrine, he distinguished the superstitious and illicit claims of self-appointed soothsayers from the reasoned teaching of seers. The value of the genre to him stems from those two attributes: the prophetic message from God, and the thoughtful questions of the seer that prompted it.⁴

Prophetic psalms work through a predictable generic schedule. The psalmist and his world are troubled, or emerging from trouble.⁵ In that dark time, God emerges from or speaks from his secret and holy dwelling place.⁶ The theophany is sketched briefly or fully, and God then speaks.⁷ His oracle declares his absolute sovereignty and power over man and creation (Psalms 2, 110), his preservation of the oppressed and the good (12, 91, 102), his righteousness and hatred of evil (18, 81), his mercy to his people and those who are merciful (18, 89), his preference for inner holiness over burnt offerings (50), his contempt for rebellious nations (2, 60, 81, 108), his coming in judgment (75, 95), the union of mercy and truth with righteousness and peace in his salvation (89), and his giving of the law and his promise of the Messiah (2, 89, 110). The oracles are strikingly like the messages of the prophets. Prophetic psalms call on hymn to develop the themes of praise, on lament to detail the dark historical moment, on petition to ask for God's answer to it; in response to God's words, they turn finally to thanksgiving or to benediction. They organize borrowed features into an independent genre.⁸

The proems in Paradise Lost, despite their variety, also exhibit a consistent shape.⁹ All open invoking the aid of a person or spirit associated with God in secret holy places, lament the poet's historical or personal afflictions, pray for inspiration and purification, center that prayer on a desire to praise or justify God, vow obedient response to God's grace, speak of renewed confidence or hope for deliverance, and express thanksgiving and strengthened faith; finally, all acknowledge that regenerated vision is the moral precondition for the fulfillment of God's promises. These elements common to all the exordia are recognizably similar to the sequence of motifs in prophetic psalms; if the words of God are what stand out in the prophetic psalms, the acknowledgment that he heeds and receives such words stands out in Milton's four proems. The shape and form of the proems, as well as the inclusion of some invariant topoi is the result of Milton's critical and imaginative grasp of prophetic psalms. He found in David the model for the kind of personal utterance he also saw in the prophets. The proems would not take their distinctive shape without Milton's awareness of Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante as predecessors in the mode; neither would they have their distinctive form without inspiration from the Book of Psalms.¹⁰

The first proem, introducing not only the first structural section but the entire epic, opens with a full invocation to God who has heretofore from Oreb or Sinai, at Sion's hill or Siloa's brook, inspired prophets and teachers. It recalls a dark and troubled time when death entered the world, but promises a time when one greater Man will restore mankind. God is invoked as creator, figured in a trope of mighty wings like that in the prophetic Psalm 91.1 and 4: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. … He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.” God's aid is sought for the enlightenment of the poet's darkness; from his sustaining grace will proceed the poet's confidence in his poetry. All those elements are familiar in prophetic psalms, and the first proem is a contexture of the common features of the genre.¹¹

But if one particular prophetic psalm especially inspires the first exordium, it is Psalm 18, a psalm David is shown composing in 2 Samuel 22, before ascribing all his songs to the inspiration of God. Paul quoted it in Romans 15.9 as confirming the promise of the Messiah. Milton frequently cited it in Christian Doctrine. Its themes of loss, victory, the upright man, and the inspired singer recommended the psalm to Milton's invocational use. Psalm 18 is one of the great theophanic odes of the Book of Psalms, showing the destiny and responsiveness of the royal worshiper in a vast context of divine action. It opens with an introduction praising God (vv. 1-2), details the psalmist's dark hours of affliction (3-6), fully narrates God's theophany (7-15), depicts the king's deliverance by divine help (16-19), characterizes that deliverance as a personal vindication (20-31), recites the consequent triumphs of the loyal king over his enemies (31-45), and concludes with inspired praise of God. The spaciousness of the psalm, filling the created and uncreated cosmos from God's secret dwelling down to the darkness of death, is equaled by its temporal sweep, enclosing the personal history of the psalmist and his transformation from a terrified to a confident man, within a mighty sequence of God's delivering acts. The most comprehensive of the prophetic psalms, it is well suited to Milton's most comprehensive exordium.¹²

Like the proem, Psalm 18 opens with hymnal invocation, in a series of synonymous metaphors for God's strength and worth—“my rock, and my fortress … my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower”—as the source of the psalmist's song. God's moral worth figured in height becomes in other psalms his dislike of burnt-offering and preference for clean heart, hands, and lips; of the same order is Milton's faith that God prefers before all temples “th'upright heart and pure” (1.18). The psalm then modulates into a lament in the time of trouble when “the sorrows of hell compassed me about.” The lament strikingly shifts tense among future, present, imperfect, and perfect, so that the reality of the loss in the past persists in the present, while the redemption of the past predicts the future—“will call,” “shall be saved,” “compassed,” “called,” “heard … yea … did fly,” “regarded,” “wilt shew,” “will enlighten.” The bravura of tenses creates a sense of historical comprehensiveness. Milton produces a similar effect by a similar variation in the first proem—“Brought Death,” “Restore … and regain,” “didst inspire,” “taught,” “Rose,” “Delight,” “Invoke,” “intends to soar,” “dost prefer,” “Wast present,” “Illumine,” “may assert.”

Psalm 18 presents the theophany in considerable detail, creating a spatial sweep just as comprehensive as the earlier temporal scope—the Godhead descends hidden behind bright fire and dark clouds; he rides a cherub in the storm and speaks in thunder; his energy exposes the foundations of the world and the fountainheads of the sea. Milton's similar cosmic setting refers not to God's descent as a bird “upon the wings of the wind” but to creation as a bird that “Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss” (1.21). After an account of God's particular regard for David, the psalm concludes with trust, confidence, thanksgiving and renewed praise, in phrases powerful over seventeenth-century Puritan experience,¹³ and behind Milton's prayer, “What in me is dark / Illumin.” At the end the psalmist gratefully sings “deliverance … and … mercy to his anointed, … and to his seed for evermore,” the theme of Milton's “great Argument.” The first proem, like the others, is modeled on the scenario and topoi of the prophetic genre in general, but the cosmic scope of prophetic Psalm 18 made it particularly appropriate for an introductory exordium.

The second proem opens with a new invocation to God under the image of light, laments the loss of the poet's eyesight, gives God the tribute of a constant yearning for inspired song even in darkness, prays for inner light and dedicates its compensatory higher vision to renewed poetry. Among its moving confessions, it praises the psalms it imitates:

                                                                                Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Cleer spring, or shadie Grove, or Sunnie Hill,
Smit with the love of sacred Song; but chief
Thee Sion and the flowrie Brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowd feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit.

(3.26-32)

The reference to the flowery brooks that wash the feet of Mount Sion carries a latent allusion to the priestly office in Joshua 3.13-15, when “the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth” was carried over Jordan into the promised land, and “the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest),” and to the agricultural festival historicized and reinterpreted as the Feast of Tabernacles in terms of Israel's sacred election.

The Feast of the Tabernacles, a time for the renewal of the covenant with Yahweh, involved ceremonies at which water from the springs of Siloa and Gihon was poured over the altar, to secure salvation from “the well of salvation.” The waters symbolize God's blessing in the renewal of the year and the hearts of the faithful. The water rite at the Feast of Tabernacles anciently took place at dawn. As light renewed the day, water renewed the earth. Both hymns and prophetic psalms analogize the return of light and the waters of renewal; Psalm 36, a hymn, strikingly combines the two: “For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light” (v. 9). Milton's images of renewal, too, intermingle images of light and water when God's voice commanding light “as with a Mantle didst invest / The rising world of waters dark and deep, / Won from the void and formless infinite” (3.10-12).¹⁴

As the poet leaves the darkness of hell to enter the world of light, he draws on the lyrical expressions of release from the dominance of darkness found in a number of prophetic psalms.¹⁵ But if one in particular inspires the second proem, it is Psalm 102, a psalm having the contrastive shape of that proem. Psalm 102, the fifth of the penitential psalms, encloses a glorification of God within lament and supplication, a dark ground to the hoped-for blessing, and contrasts the glory of God with the state of man. Following a brief invocation and prayer (1-2), the psalmist laments his condition in detail (3-11), God appears in a glorious theophany (12-13), the psalmist praises God's mercy and power (14-22), he then recalls his lament, and faithfully acknowledges his God (23-28).

Psalm 102 not only supplies the structure contrasting man's transience with God's glory used in the proem but incorporates many of the figures Milton used. The ascent-descent figure, “thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down,” is preserved in reverse in Milton's lines, “Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend.” The trope of the psalmist as a lonely bird—“a pelican of the wilderness,” “an owl of the desert,” “a sparrow alone upon the housetop”—is refigured in Milton's nightingale, the “wakeful Bird” that sings “in shadiest Covert hid.” The psalmist's sorrow imaged as darkness, “like a shadow that declineth,” is accommodated to Milton's isolation in blindness. In both psalm and proem, God is invoked from the height of his sanctuary, regarding the earth from heaven; in both theophany elicits a vow of praise: the psalmist will write “for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord” (v. 18) and Milton will “tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight.” While the value to Milton of Psalm 102 for the second proem is both figural and structural, his imitation shows an analytic grasp of the whole psalmic genre.

In the third proem, an invocation to Urania gives way to a lament in which Milton mourns the historical “evil dayes” on which he has fallen, surrounded by enemies and alone save for the nightly visit of his muse. He prays for inspiration, fit audience, and protection from malignant contemporaries. His prayer is trustful, for Urania has previously led him into Heaven “an Earthlie Guest,” yet he fears his isolation (7.14). The entire three-part skeleton—hymnal invocation, historical lament, prayer—and many of Milton's motifs are familiar from prophetic psalms. One oracular psalm, however, Psalm 89, suffices as evidence of Milton's indebtedness to the genre. Psalm 89 too treats in a tripartite form a time of national disaster when God's covenant has failed. First, in a hymnic section (1-18), God is surrounded by celestial beings in heaven and faithful people on earth, while the psalmist “make[s] known [his] faithfulness to all generations.” In the second section (19-37), a theophany, God delivers an oracle of promises to David. The last section (38-51) laments his historical misfortunes as king and prays to God for deliverance. (The last verse is also a doxology to the third book of the Psalter.)

The third proem opens with Milton's representation of heaven; God lives with Urania and Wisdom, his personified celestial companions. The scene is like the opening hymn of Psalm 89, also picturing God among abstract personifications and believers making music, “mercy and truth shall go before thy face. Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound” (vv. 14-15). The second part of Psalm 89 records the covenant God gave David, followed by the national failures that make David suffer, at which “all his enemies … rejoice.” For Milton too “savage clamor [has] dround / Both Harp and Voice”; like David, he is personally threatened “In darkness, and with dangers compast round” (7.36-37, 27). While Milton places the psalmist's experiences in a contemporary historical context, he also represents his own historical era not only by psalm echoes, but by classical as well. As the heavenly muse and the classical muse are contrasted, the former trusted and the latter dismissed as a fiction, so the fit few and the barbarous dissolutes of the Restoration are contrasted. The royal Davidic context of Psalm 89 makes it suitable for the historic force of the third proem, while the promise of being led by the voice of God is the signature of prophetic psalms in general.

The fourth and last proem considers a series of topics also derived from prophetic psalm—God's former friendship and present alienation from man, the admonition of a faithless people, the poet's solitary nightly listening to the prophetic voice, and the extolling of patience and martyrdom as heroic. Psalm 50, for example, contrasts God's former shining face with his judgmental voice, “thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee” (v. 21), that yet promises salvation. Prophetic psalms in general comfort the faithful in such formulas as “be not afraid,” “I am with thee,” “I shall deliver thee,” “I am thy help,” and “wait on the Lord.” Milton's last and darkest proem, surveying God's tragic distance from his creatures, also promises that to some in every generation, he will make himself known; they will be sustained by his voice, just as the poet is sustained by his inspiration. Psalm 12.5, for example, unites the denunciation of vain and duplicitous speakers with the promise of mercy “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy.”

Treating inspiration, or the voice of God heard as an inner voice, then, Milton wrote proems in imitation of prophetic psalms. His imitations draw upon hymn and wisdom song and place their strategies within the imitation of prophetic psalms. The proems are spoken by a seer who knows scribal poems and a bard whose role includes teaching and witness; they are also spoken by a worshiping poet to whom hymn is a natural mode. The same speaker—now prophet, now sage, now worshiper—is heard in three other places in Paradise Lost which, while not taking the form of proem, involve self-representation that combines prophetic psalms with hymns. Each converts narrative verse into lyric, or introverts an encyclopedic universe of action into a human heart of obedient worship. Those three places are the warning that opens Book IV (vv. 1-8) and the two variations of hymnic address in Book III (412-39) and Book V (202-8).

Book IV opens with a warning interpolation by the narrator, prophesying and pitying:

O For that warning voice, which he who saw
Th'Apocalyps, heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be reveng'd on men,
Wo to the inhabitants on Earth! that now,
While time was, our first-Parents had bin warnd
The coming of thir secret foe, and scap'd
Haply so scap'd his mortal snare.

(4.1-8)

The poet here writes from within his own era, outside the moment of the poem. The lines are not a prayer, for the petition is out of date; they are not lament, but echo Revelation. Milton does not endorse Revelation, for he has another vision of how God's mercy will ultimately function, a vision that revises both Revelation and Psalm 2.

Milton quotes Revelation 12.7-12, depicting a final war in heaven between Michael and the dragon Satan and ending when the good angels chase Satan out of heaven “into the earth” and a loud voice cries: “Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time” (v. 12). That vision offers a Christian explanation of Job 1.7, “And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it,” and of Daniel 12.1, “And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation … and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.” The passage in Revelation 12.7-12 follows and explains the messianic prophecy of “a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron,” and Psalm 2 is the source of both the prophecy and the millenial violence of threatened doom. In it, God promises his begotten son “the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” and warns mankind of the son's power:

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.

(vv. 10-12)

Speaking in his voice as narrator, Milton would like to warn his own dramatic characters of the vengeful approach of Satan, defeated by Christ in an empyreal war that brought complete victory in heaven and forecasts a final victory on earth. But he is inhibited not only by epic convention but by the thematic force of Paradise Lost. Milton denies that Satan's prophesied rout will take place in a duel through the local wounds of head or heel; he foretells it will result from a cure effected in the heart of each human being, the ultimate stage on which the action of Paradise Lost is played out (12.386-96). He repudiates John's gloss of Psalm 2 in the treatment of the war in heaven in Revelation. Instead he converts John's psalm-based militant heroism into patient obedience. That introversion owes a good deal to Paul's discussion of the old and new Adam in Romans, to Paul's treatment of both love and the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians, and to Hebrews's treatment of priesthood, all three of which draw on the prophetic Psalms 2, 18, 95, 102, and 110. The instinctive warning thus hangs proleptically at the opening of Book IV not as revealed prophecy but as revised prophecy.

The other two lyrical self-representations occur within two of the hymns Milton composed for Paradise Lost. In context, the voices we hear seem to belong to characters in the epic, once to the angelic choir, once to Adam and Eve; upon consideration, the voice is the poet's.¹⁶ On the first occasion a “multitude of Angels” sings a “sacred Song,” their first hymn and the first hymn in the poem. The dialogue in heaven ended, they praise Father and Son, ending:

Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Fathers praise disjoine.

(3.412-15)

Nice grammarians might point out how suitable the singular “my Song,” “my Harp,” is for unison chant; nice explicators, how suitable the praise from angels who have just heard the Father promise the Son that “All knees to thee shall bow.” But the lines implicate the poet himself and recall his resolution in the second proem some three hundred lines earlier.

On the second occasion, Adam and Eve sing a Benedicite omnia opera after their morning discussion of Eve's dream. With “Unmeditated … prompt eloquence” they invite all creatures in the hierarchic order of their creation to join praise of the creator. Toward the close of their hymn, Milton unobtrusively changes the number of the pronoun they use from plural to singular:

Witness if I be silent, Morn or Eeven,
To Hill, or Valley, Fountain, or fresh shade
Made vocal by my Song.

(5.202-4)

As their hymn ends they revert to the first person plural:

Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us onely good.

(5.205-6)

The pronominal shift makes Milton's claim to have himself received from the “Parent of good” the expressive gifts and illumination by which he speaks for mute creation.

Taken together, the personal interventions dedicate “copious matter” to a continuous act of praise. They establish concord as a primary intention and relate that concord to worship by all creation. The resultant undissenting song of pure consent contains words the poet finds in Psalms. The psalmist in like manner promises new song, as in the prophetic Psalm 89, incorporating the praise of heavens, the sea, the earth, and the mountains. Psalmists too narrate, of course, the histories of Israel's victorious destiny; but they narrate under the dominance of lyric and govern narrative by lyrical impulses to express their experiences of God in song.

THE HYMNAL PSALM AND MILTON'S HYMNS

Hymning begins in heaven; there is none in hell. In Book III Milton summons the “Heav'nly Quire” and puts them on stage in silence. “The Sanctities of Heaven … thick as Starrs” receive in silence “Beatitude past utterance” from the divine presence. While God and the Son converse, they remain silent, first with “new joy ineffable,” then in fear of death, and finally with wordless wonder. Then at God's command the angels are released from the mute immobility to which Milton repeatedly directs our attention:

                                                            But all ye Gods,
Adore him, who to compass all this dies,
Adore the Son, and honour him as mee.

(3.341-43)

A vignette of life in Heaven then introduces their hymn that ends with Milton's personal vow of ceaseless praise. The whole scene is closed with a sibilant half-rhyme as “they in Heav'n, above the starry Sphear, / Thir happie hours in joy and hymning spent” (3.416-17).

That representation of heavenly hymning is remarkable, not the least for its extraordinary painterly feeling,¹⁷ but the abiding impression it gives is of timeless praise, with all its themes and topoi. When the angels begin to move and sing, a reader might anticipate the passage of angelic minutes, an hour, a forenoon, or a day in eternity. (If for theological reasons celestial beings inhabit the present tense, for grammatical reasons a narrative of past events may not.) But setting the stage for the angels' hymn, Milton does not describe a past event in adjusted past tenses. He creates a syntactically remarkable twenty-one line sentence in which the important image is the timeless amaranth that shades the fountain of life, presented at the center of a triple complex-compound structure with angelic movements and songs on either side. The sentence begins with the anticipated pluperfect:

          No sooner had th'Almighty ceas't, but all
The multitude of Angels with a shout
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heav'n rung
With Jubilee, and loud Hosanna's fill'd
Th'eternal Regions.

(3.344-49)

The reader expects to hear that when God had ceased, the angels began to adore. The angels, however, remain within an ablative parenthesis of apposition in the present progressive tense; heaven is the subject of the sentence; and the verb when it comes is not the imperfect indicative “Heav'n rang” but “Heav'n rung,” an intransitive past participle without auxiliary and so of infinite duration, “Heav'n rung” and rung and rung with jubilee.¹⁸ The substitution of an unexpected tense for an expected (enallage) is one of the hallmarks of psalmic hymn, often for the same reasons of temporal infinitude as Milton's. The grammatical indeterminacy of the passage has been faulted,¹⁹ but its suspensions suggest God's timeless omnipresence, to which jubilee and hosanna are awed responses. Then Milton transfers agency to the choir of angels as “lowly reverent / Towards either Throne they bow” (3.349-50) in an eternal present, casting down their crowns in a moment so extended by a description of the figures on them that the crowns never reach the jasper pavement. The scene reveals how easily psalm and classical figure unite in Milton's art. If the angels wear coronets of gold by way of Revelation 4, John having found them in the hymn Psalms 8 and 103, their enchased pagan figure does not fade, for its flowers are refreshed in running waters, waters Milton refers to the hymn Psalm 36, “the river of thy pleasures” and “the fountain of life.”²⁰ He completes the mise-en-scène by commenting on the angels, the spirits elect, at the threshold of their praise, “No voice exempt, no voice but well could joine / Melodious part, such concord is in Heav'n” (3.370-71).

Three terms in that remarkable scene govern the angelic hymn that follows it and may introduce Miltonic hymnography: jubilee, hosanna, and spirits elect. Jubilee signifies exultation and joy from the metonymic yobel, or Hebrew ram's horn used as a trumpet; hosanna signifies celebrative praise in its Greek transliteration of a Hebrew imperative “save now” or “save, pray”; spirits elect signify those called to sing praise. The first two are psalm-derived words for liturgical worship; the third, a psalm-derived concept for the unity of worshipers in hymn. Many psalms are written about the singing of psalms, about their own expressive exultation. Of these, Psalms 47, 98, and 150 command joy in referring to the yobel; Psalm 118 commands hosanna in using the formula “save now”; and Psalms 33, 68, 97, and 148 exhort the spirits elect, in translation called saints or the righteous, to praise God. Milton imitates all of those Psalms—33, 47, 68, 97, 98, 118, 148, and 150—in his first angelic hymn.

The angels have two themes for two subjects of praise, God and the Son, creation and redemption, majesty and mercy, power and love. Their sacred song interweaves the two subjects in a three-part hymn. The first part (3.372-89) uses the pronouns thee, thy, and thou to praise both the Father invisible in light and the Son who as divine similitude makes him visible, devoting one sentence to the “Father … Omnipotent” and one to the “Begotten Son.” The second part (3.390-410) ritually crosses and alternates thou and he in a mazy pattern of reference now to the Father and now to the Son in their complementary roles, now stressing their interaction. As the first part describes the natures and qualities of Father and Son in parallel attributions, the second part prophesies their actions along the lines laid down in their dialogue. The third section (3.410-15) vows perpetual praise of Father and Son, which Milton also promises.

The angels praise the Father's nature through the topoi of king, creator and invisible light; they praise the Son's through the topoi of divine similitude, transfused glory, and visible light. They praise the Father's thunderous might and charioted justice in the agency of the Son's quelling the fallen angels; they praise the Son's offer to die for man, as his response to the Father's mercy and pity, accompanying his justice. Milton is careful to avoid the smallest sense of opposition in his role differentiations. Almost all these topoi can be found in the hymns echoed in the mise-en-scène: the father in 47, 68, and 97; the creator in 33, 96, 148, and 150; excessive light in 97; vice-gerency in 33, 68, 98, and 118; God's mercy in 97 and 98; his love in 118, 147, and 149.²¹ Milton's thematic clusters of psalmic proof texts in Christian Doctrine, when discussing God and the Son, brought together such topoi; his analysis of hymn as worship gave him the sense of its structure within which to organize those topics.

In structure, hymns begin with an invocation, the call to sing God's praise.²² A development follows, specifying the grounds of praise in God's nature and action, often in parallel clauses beginning “for he,” and adducing the psalmist's own experience of God. The conclusion follows, frequently as a repetition or return to the invocation. Psalm 147 exemplifies the normal structure and uses topoi found in the first hymn.

Psalm 147 has a tripartite structure, each new section at verses 7 and 12 being introduced by a variation of the invocation “Praise ye the Lord: for it is good to sing praises unto our God; for it is pleasant; and praise is comely” (v. 1). Milton's triple form unites two praise formulas in part one, “Thee Father first they sung” and “Thee next they sang of all Creation first,” varies them at part two into “Thee only extoll'd, Son of thy Fathers might,” and varies that at part three into the direct discourse “Hail Son of God.” Milton secures closure by the personal vow that repeats the motif of joint or unified praise from the opening formula “never shall my Harp thy praise / Forget, nor from thy Fathers praise disjoine” (3.414-15).²³

Although the structure of Psalm 147 is triple, its thematic material is double; all the thoughts of the psalmist circle around the two concepts of the power of God and his compassionate grace, manifest in creation and election. Part one argues God's pity, efficacious because of his power—he who summons stars and names them affords trustworthy help—and ends “Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite. The Lord lifteth up the meek: he casteth the wicked down to the ground” (vv. 5-6). Part two urges God's care of all creation, even “the young ravens which cry,” and his preference for man's faith over his strength. In Paradise Lost, the angels' hymn emphasizes the Father “to pitie enclin'd” by using the phrase twice. Part three extols God's election of one people, “He hath not dealt so with any nation,” while the angels close as well with the Son's “unexampl'd love.”

The literary value of echoing the topics, themes and structures of hymn at this point in Paradise Lost lies in the power of the hymn to unify narrative and worship, reinforcing the contrast of the realms of light and darkness in the poem. Book III began with the proem invoking light as God's element, the element revisited by the poet guided through hellish darkness by the heavenly muse, and petitioning for inner light in order to “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3.54-55). Between that invocation and the first hymn, the Father and the Son in heavenly precincts found the way to save all willing persons. The angels praise lyrically what the dialogue showed dramatically; their hymn modulates into Milton's in a recollection of the invocation, providing a framework of devotion for the theological dialogue, unifying a central episode, and foregrounding the immediate shift to the contrasting figure of Satan, who struggles toward the sun, a light he detests. Finally, the first hymn commences a devotional strategy that develops across the entire epic, rendering each decisive action of Father or Son its own praise.

Milton wrote eleven hymns in Paradise Lost, some in direct and some in indirect discourse, all signaled by references to hosanna or halleluia (Hebrew hallel, “praise,” plus Jah, “God”), to jubilee or to the elect singers. Angels sing twice in Book III: the choir of elect saints in the hymn I have just analyzed, and Uriel in a brief spontaneous hymn in the presence of Satan disguised as a “stripling Cherube” (3.702-21). In Book IV, Adam's first words in the poem are a hymn to God spoken to Eve, ending with the formula “But let us ever praise him” (4.411-39); Adam and Eve together praise God in a liturgical evensong, ending with gratitude “when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep” (4.721-35). In Book V, they balance the evensong with a matins hymn (5.153-208). In Book VI, at the end of the War in Heaven, the angels, “all his Saints … With Jubilie,” briefly hymn the Son's victory (6.882-92). Book VII celebrates creation with three hymns; first the angels hail the proposal to create the world with a brief gloria (7.182-91), then the angels greet the Son with a royal processional hymn on the twilight before the seventh day of creation (7.565-73), and finally on the sabbath itself the angels sing a hymn to Creation (7.602-32). In Book VIII, when Adam recalls his own creation for Raphael, he reports his haunting search for his maker in order to praise him, asking fellow creatures: “how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live” (8.280-81). In Book X, the last hymn of Paradise Lost is a short halleluia sung “loud … as the sound of Seas” by “the heav'nly Audience” when God prophesies the end of time (10.643-48). Editors have identified some of these songs as hymns and found some verbal echoes to various psalms in only five of them.²⁴ Milton's practice, however, is to imitate the common structure of psalmic hymn and ornament or develop it with common hymnic topoi, not simply to transpose one psalm for the sake of one lyric moment.

The introit of hymns is usually a second person plural exhortation to worship, sometimes includes psalmist and congregation in the first person plural, and occasionally is personal to the psalmist.²⁵ Milton adapts various introits to one angelic singer, the choir, the individual human being, and the human chorus. The introit sometimes addresses a specific audience, sometimes includes bystanders, and sometimes, as in Psalm 148.1-4, draws in all creation, “Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights. Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens.” This variety in practice was not wasted on Milton seeking multivocality. Thus he patterns the angels' processional song of victory in Book VI on enthronement hymns such as Psalms 68 and 97, for which the audience is the victorious king, just as he patterns the human benedicite omnia opera on creation hymns where creation is both subject and audience, and patterns Adam's tentative hymn seeking his maker on pilgrim song. In the last, where Adam questions the highest being he sees “Thou Sun, … faire Light” about God his maker, Milton asks us to recall how the sun figured as blasphemous introit to Satan's soliloquy in Book IV:

          O thou that with surpassing Glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams.

(4.32-37)

Both Adam's and Satan's introits recall the pantheistic origins of hymn in nature salutations; Satan founded that paganism, but his reason causes Adam to redirect his attention from nature to her maker. Exhortation in psalmic hymn always contains the name and aspect of God to be praised, often specifying musical instruments and dance, such gestures as shouting, clapping, and skipping, and the time and place of the praise.²⁶ The length of the introit varies, most of Psalm 148 and the whole of 150 being taken up with it, as one might say the whole of Adam's pilgrim hymn is an introit searching its object.

The body or development of the hymn commences with the grounds on which praise is to be offered. All hymns praise God either as creator or ruler of history. Milton's first and last angelic hymns deal with God's plans to save mankind and so direct attention to Christ as the perfect hero; his human hymns praise creation; all the other angelic hymns treat now one, now the other topic. In the Psalter, hymns consider either God's qualities or his acts and are generated from repetitions, accretions, or dramatizations of praiseworthy attributes or works of providence or creation. Hymns describing his praiseworthy nature consist of a sentence or a series of short sentences of which God is the subject, enumerating his traits. Hymns declaring his deeds consist of a dramatic or narrative rendering of one sort of action.²⁷ Psalm 147 and the first angelic hymn balance enumeration and drama, praising God's many holy attributes but focusing on two, his power and mercy. Milton's purest creation hymn is the matins benedicite omnia opera, in which Adam and Eve exhort other created beings, each in his own sphere, to praise the Creator; his fullest is the angelic processional at Creation itself. Psalms 104 and 148 have been correctly identified as sources for the benedicite, but the creation hymns 8, 29, 46, and 114 are generically typical and supplied Milton with a good deal, to which he added from Genesis and Job.

Of course Milton relates the action praised to the special occasion for each of his hymns. The morning hymn, when the earth seems renewed to awakening man, for example, naturally suggests creation. But morning and evening hymns are liturgical as well as occasional; thus as Adam and Eve's matins song derives from the morning liturgy, it uses topoi from Psalm 19, itself a hymn combining praise of Creation with wisdom thoughts about the law. The angels, singing on each day of Creation, hymns Milton does not record, mark the end of their hexameral task by imitating creation hymns. Uriel's hymn, treating God's defense of order against chaos, imitates simpler enumerative psalms, like Psalm 29, praising God who divided earth from water, light from darkness. Only the angelic gloria imitates New Testament hymn, and only in introit.

Hymns close in a circling return to the exhortation, sometimes in the psalmist's vow always to worship in the same way or in his prayer that his song be always acceptable. The poet's intrusion into the benedicite, for example, with both vow and prayer, recalls the combination in the closure of Psalm 19. The literary work of the matins prayer of Adam and Eve, however, is to modulate from Eve's dream to the Father's charge to Raphael to warn the pair; as lyric, it foregrounds narrative.

Uriel's hymn before the stripling cherub, Satan in disguise, may provide a final instance of that kind of literary usefulness. Uriel praises order emerging from chaos and describes the organization of the heavens, the earth, and the stars at God's voice (3.702-21). Psalm 29 traverses similar thematic ground. Its introit instructs the mighty to glorify the Lord. The development expresses awe at the power of God's voice to order nature: “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters. … The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire” (vv. 3, 7). After a terse theophany, “The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King for ever” (v. 10), the psalmist concludes that the power of the God of creation will bless his people with peace; similarly Uriel indicates to Satan how God has beneficently ordained light for Adam's Earth. Satan then resumes his errand of darkness. The literary use of Uriel's brief hymn is to throw into relief a strangely menacing sequence. Preceded by the narrator's warning that neither man nor angel can penetrate the disguises of hypocrisy, Uriel's noble praise of “all [God's] works” (3.702) and his special care for “Earth the seat of Man” (3.724) ends with Satan's departure, with a reverentially deceitful bow, on his way to ruin that orderly creation. Book III closes with the vertigo of his “steep flight in many an Aerie wheele,” and when the poet resumes in his own era, eons after the fall Satan engineers, he laments his helplessness to prevent human woe: “O For that warning voice” (4.1).

The hymn affords Milton many occasions to vary the expressive voices heard in his long narrative; the settings for individual hymns provide occasions for foreshadowing and for more than emotional coloring; finally, the consistency and interrelationship among hymns unifies the epic as itself an act of worship.

WISDOM PSALMS IN PARADISE LOST

That Milton considers himself not only bard or seer but also spokesman or teacher, the “interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland,”²⁸ prompts him to frequent sententiae in imitation of wisdom song. These occur from the beginning of the epic (e.g., Milton's apothegmatic comment [1.690-92] on how naturally gold grows in hell's soil) to the end (e.g., Michael's observation [12.220-22] on how unnatural military training is to both noble and ignoble human beings). But wisdom song most richly influences the witness of Abdiel before and during the war in heaven. Wisdom psalms range between the proverbial expression of practical morality and the meditation on faithful witness by a suffering servant of the Lord; Abdiel's dialogue with Satan draws on both.

In conclave in Lucifer's camp, the proposition is debated that God the King is an arbitrary tyrant. Satan there does not so much misread psalms as he misappropriates Milton's own language of liberty in the prose to justify rebellion against God. Abdiel corrects him with right reading of both psalms and Milton. Milton sought no models for human institutions from revelations of celestial life and none for the human political state in the monarchic government of heaven. God's kingship presented to him no grounds for legitimating human kingship, the position of the Stuart ideologues. When Israel sought and was given monarchs in 1 Samuel 8.4-8, both Scripture and Milton thought its desire contemptible, degenerate, and contrary to God's progressively revealed will that human beings be free and mature. The debate between Lucifer and Abdiel interweaves scriptural and contemporary political language; but although the contest results in pseudo-libertarian wisdom proverbs by Satan and wise commonwealth corrections by the Servant of God (Abdiel is called by the etymology of his name at 6.29), it owes more to Milton's political experience than his generic experience of psalms.²⁹ His analysis of wisdom song gave him, however, Abdiel's role as witness to God's perfect justice and God's acknowledgment of him. The mild voice that greets Abdiel from golden cloud (6.28) as he returns to the Mount of God speaks the fullest wisdom psalm in the poem, announced both by the salutation “Servant of God” and the description of Abdiel's role as “the testimonie of Truth”:

          Servant of God, well done, well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintaind
Against revolted multitudes the Cause
Of Truth, in word mightier then they in Armes;
And for the testimonie of Truth hast born
Universal reproach, far worse to beare
Then violence: for this was all thy care
To stand approv'd in sight of God, though Worlds
Judg'd thee perverse: the easier conquest now
Remains thee, aided by this host of friends,
Back on thy foes more glorious to return
Then scornd thou didst depart, and to subdue
By force, who reason for thir Law refuse,
Right reason for thir Law, and for thir King
Messiah, who by right of merit Reigns.

(6.29-43)

Editors have properly noticed echoes of Psalm 62.7, “In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God” in its opening two lines, and of Psalm 69.7, “Because for thy sake I have borne reproach” at line 34.³⁰ Psalm 62, a wisdom song growing out of a song of trust, exhibits the normative morality and the counting device common in the genre: “God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God. Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work” (vv. 11-12). Psalm 69, a personal lament by a suffering servant, shows the afflicted psalmist persecuted in a religious cause (“the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up”) and his witness resulting in his alienation (“I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children,” “I became a proverb to them” [vv. 9, 8, 11]). Psalm 62, representing God as moral judge of human value, and Psalm 69, depicting the servant as witness to religious truth, are Milton's sources.

Milton used “testimony,” the Puritan term of art for professing God and being acknowledged by him, on only three occasions in his poetry, once when the Father's voice at Jesus' baptism is called “the testimony of Heaven” in Paradise Regained (1.78), once in his literal translation of Psalm 81.5 on God's testimony to Joseph, and once now for Abdiel. He used the term “servant” also springly, in psalm translation and in concurrence with testimony. Both words spoken to Abdiel point to wisdom song. God hails Abdiel for maintaining the truth alone against many and for upholding it by force of reason. In the quintessential posture of wisdom song, Abdiel cared only for divine approval. In the wisdom tradition an enlightened agent without specific command or authority from God sees what is right in any given situation and acts on the rational basis of his knowledge of God and the universe. Psalm 37.5-6 instances the God-fearing rationality of the wisdom teacher and of Abdiel equally: “Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday” (vv. 5-6). The prophet knows God has sought him out and given him a special message, but the sage mediates a total attitude and culture; both act in the shadow of God. Abdiel reasons against Satan, taking right reason for his law; through it he discerns God's nature and Christ's merit. He refutes the worldly wisdom of Lucifer by rational argument based upon his total experience. His message is not prophecy, though some have seen prophecy in it; it is wisdom.³¹ The truth he teaches about God's nature is reciprocally acknowledged by the Father.

The value to Paradise Lost of the generic imitation of wisdom song is the lyrical reinforcement it provides for themes represented in narrative and the foregrounding it gives for forthcoming narration. During the political debate between Abdiel and Lucifer, Abdiel reasonably recalls God's design in exalting the Son to create not a static meritocracy in Heaven with fixed status for all members under unvarying law, but an evolving organic unity. He derives the plan from his general experience of God and God's proclamation of the Son, “bent rather to exalt / Our happie state under one Head” (5.829-30). Milton does not endorse Abdiel's political ideology of divine monarchy as a model for the human state. The wisdom in Abdiel's words lies in his recognition that, in the political sphere as in the religious, progressive enlightenment is possible. God makes new and contingent decrees “for the very purpose of allowing free causes to put into effect that freedom which he himself gave them.”³² The social perfection of heaven lies in the continual growth in community, against which Satan rebels to seek self-aggrandizement. To him new law must necessarily be the mark of absolutism; to Abdiel new law if just is reform, the sign of progressive revelation and of augmented freedom. Lucifer proposes not to inquire further but to use force, “our own right hand … by proof to try / Who is our equal” (5.864-66).

Throughout the exchange, Lucifer rejects every value of Abdiel's praised by the Father in the wisdom song that ends the first half of their exchange and foregrounds the second. He speaks and reacts irrationally, justifying rebellion neither from personal experience nor necessary logic. He overvalues numbers, rejoicing when “none seconded” Abdiel's words. He chooses force. Then Abdiel leaves:

                                                  From amidst them forth he passd,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he susteind
Superior, nor of violence fear'd aught;
And with retorted scorn his back he turn'd
On those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom'd.

(5.903-7)

He departs in the spirit of wisdom Psalm 1.1, “Blessed is the man that … sitteth [not] in the seat of the scornful,” he turns his back on the “seat / High on a Hill, far blazing” (5.756-57) of the scornful, warning Satan with one last cautionary proverb, based on Psalm 2.9-10, “That Golden Scepter which thou didst reject / Is now an Iron Rod to bruise and breake / Thy disobedience” (5.886-88).³³ When they meet again on the battlefield, he produces several more—“Most reason is that Reason overcome,” and “few somtimes may know, when thousands err”—before chancing his own right arm. God's testimony of wisdom, greeting him briefly, celebrates the contrary values just established in narrative; it foregrounds the duel to come between Abdiel and Lucifer in the thick of battle, where when “Warr wearied hath perform'd what Warr can do,” God himself calls off the all too equal struggle (6.695).

The major value of wisdom psalm in this extended episode is as lyrical highlighting and foregrounding, but it also contributes to multivocality. Milton paid no attention to the many actual speakers of psalms,³⁴ but imitated praise, prophecy, or wisdom as angel, bard, witness, or any other speaker in such a way as to produce an overlaid richness of many voices. Abdiel's exchange with Lucifer exhibits a particularly rich interweaving: the bard (instructed by the Heavenly Muse) tells what Raphael (charged by God to instruct man) told Adam that Abdiel (described as unswervingly truthful) said to Lucifer (whose words are called “bold discourse without control”) and what testimony he received from God (a voice from a cloud) in return. That multivocality allows Milton to present Raphael's words to Adam as instruction,³⁵ to create in Abdiel wisdom's martus, and, perhaps for the length of God's lyrical witness, to console himself for the pain of the rejection in the Restoration of his own vision of community.

Notes

1. YP [Complete Prose Works of John Milton, edited by Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953-82).]] 6:134-35.

2. In Christian Doctrine, Milton wrote that the Old Testament prefigures and proves the New, that the New is more liberating and doctrinally superior to the Old, but that the Old is textually more reliable and incorrupt than the New, and that personal interpretation of both testaments is the responsibility of each human being, aided by the spirit within him (YP 6:521-23, 576, 587-89). The effect is to diminish the wish to distinguish between them.

3. See Grose, Milton's Epic Process, 9, 12, 18; Lawry, The Shadow of Heaven, 130-83; Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost, chaps. 2 and 8; my introduction to Book VIII of Paradise Lost, 40-48; and Miner, “The Reign of Narrative in Paradise Lost,” 3-25.

4. See Introduction above, pp. 15-18. Prophetic psalms giving God's oracular words include Psalms 2, 12, 50, 60, 75, 81, 82, 85, 91, 95, 102, 108, and 110. The royal hymn and thanksgiving Psalm 18 and the royal Psalm 89 are also sources of inspiration for the proems. Royal songs attached by commentary to David at this or that moment in his life may be transferred by a poet to moments in his own life felt to be similar.

5. The prophetic moments include, for example, times when “the heathen rage” (2.1), “the faithful fail” (12.1), “all the foundations of the earth are out of course” (82.5), or “as in the day of temptation in the wilderness” (95.8).

6. For example, “upon my holy hill of Zion” (2.6), “in the secret place of thunder” (81.7), “from the height of his sanctuary” (102.19), and “from the womb of the morning” (110.3).

7. It is announced, for example, in “The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice” (18.13), and “Thou spakest in vision to thy holy one” (89.19) and “The Lord said unto my Lord” (110.1).

8. See Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 140-70; Budick, The Dividing Muse, 51-56, 142-43; and MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God, 82-91. All three discuss prophetic psalms without identifying the genre. The Geneva Bible frequently calls David “Prophet” in subtitles pointing to lament (Psalm 25, “The prophet … grieved”), hymn or thanksgiving (Psalm 8, “The Prophet considering the excellent liberalitie and fatherlie providence of God towards man … doeth not only give great thankes, but is astonished”).

9. On Milton's exordia see Samuel, Dante and Milton, 47-66, 292-94; Schindler, Voice and Crisis: Invocation in Milton's Poetry, chap. 3; Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 25-54; and my own “‘To make the people fittest to chuse’: How Milton Personified His Program for Poetry,” 3-23.

10. For the first proem (1.1-26) the index to CE suggests Psalm 28.2; Sims suggests 23.3, 2.6 (a prophetic psalm), and 28.2. For the second proem (3.1-55) Sims suggests 104.2, 14.2, and 102.18-19 (a prophetic psalm). For the third proem (7.1-50) Sims suggests 17.3. For the fourth proem (9.1-46) no psalmic source has been suggested.

11. For example, Psalms 50.23, 75.1, 82.5, 85.9, 91.1ff., 102.18-19, 102.25, 110.3.

12. Psalm 28 is a brief version of Psalm 18. Editors have found verbal echoes of 28.2, “I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle,” in Milton's “fast by the oracle of God.” “Thy holy oracle” refers to “the mercy seat of thy holy temple,” the same concept in 18.6, “he heard my voice out of his temple.”

13. Compare 18.28-29:

    For thou wilt light my candle: the Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.
    For by thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I leaped over a wall.

    with Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners:

    I am for going on, and venturing my eternal state with Christ, whether I have comfort here or no; if God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the Ladder even blindfold into Eternitie, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy Name. (103)

14. Sims, The Bible in Milton's Epics, 261, suggests Psalm 104.2, “Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment.”

15. For example, Psalm 18.12, “At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed”; 50.2, 89.15, “they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance”; and 110.3.

16. See Ferry, Milton's Epic Voice, 49-55, for a strong monovocal case, the voice being that of the poet throughout the epic; see Swaim, Before and After the Fall, 159-214, for the argument that distinctions are carefully made between two kinds of angelic discourse.

17. See Allen, The Harmonious Vision, 98-103; Frye, Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts, 187-205; and Fowler, The Poems of John Milton, 580-85.

18. Compare the hypothetical heroisms of Satan's duel with his son Death in Hell, “and now great deeds / Had been achiev'd, whereof all Hell had rung …” (2.722-23), where the pluperfect conditional expresses irony.

19. Fowler, The Poems of Milton, 580, notes William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 160, and Adams, Ikon, 106.

20. See Fowler, The Poems of Milton, 581.

21. To give but one example of each, kingship is praised in Psalm 97.1, “The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice”; Creation in 96.5, “the Lord made the heavens”; excess of light in 97.2, 4, “Clouds and darkness are round about him. … His lightnings enlightened the world”; power exercised through vice-gerency in 98.1, “his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory”; his mercy and love in 147.3, “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.” Editors note only Psalm 85.10, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” echoed in the angels' hymn at “and end the strife / Of Mercy and Justice in thy face,” although there is equal verbal echo in Psalm 89.14, “mercy and truth shall go before thy face” (3.406-7), and, more to the point, topical and structural allusions to numerous psalms are found in the hymn.

22. See chapter 2 (“‘With Hymns, Our Psalms … our Hebrew Songs and Harps’”) above.

23. Fowler, The Poems of Milton, 585, suggests an adaptation of the promise to resume the god's praise common in pagan hymn, echoing the end of Virgil's hymn to Hercules. Among the many psalmic hymns that end with such a promise is Psalm 145, “My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord: and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and ever.”

24. For 3.372-415, Ps. 85.10; for 3.702-35, Ps. 111.2-4, 8; for 4.411-39, none; for 4.720-35, Pss. 148, 74.16-17, and 127.2; for 5.153-208, Pss. 2.6-7, 148, and 137.6, 104; for 6.882-93, none; for 7.182-91, none; for 7.565-74, Pss. 8.6, 24.7, and 8.4; for 7.601-32, Pss. 8.3, 8.6-7, and 146.1; for 8.272-81, none; for 10.643-48, none.

25. For example, Psalm 33.1, “Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous,” uses the common exhortative form; Psalm 95.1, “O come, let us sing unto the Lord,” the inclusive form; Psalm 104.33, “I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live,” the personal form.

26. Instruments and gesture like those given, for example, in Psalms 33.2, 147.7, 47.1, and 149.3 are variously transferred to Milton's hymns: harps are noted at 3.365, 5.151, 7.559, and 7.594; shouts and bowing, at 3.345 and 351; standing and listening at 3.711; palm waving and singing at 6.885-86; offering incense at 7.599; running and moving at 8.268; and loud singing at 10.642.

27. The distinction between descriptive and declarative hymns is that made by Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, 81-122.

28. The Reason of Church Government, YP 1:811-12.

29. See my essay “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, 204-29.

30. See Sims, The Bible in Milton's Epics, 265 and Fowler, The Poems of Milton, 731.

31. But see Robert West, “Abdiel,” in A Milton Encyclopedia 1:11-12.

32. YP 6:160.

33. “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth” (vv. 9-10).

34. He said nothing even of those named in psalm headings, where to David seventy-three are attributed, to Asaph twelve, to “the sons of Korah” eleven, to Heman “the Ezrahite” and Ethan “the Ezrahite” two, to Solomon two, and to Moses one—wisdom songs being among those attributed to Asaph, the sons of Korah, Heman, Ethan, and Solomon, conveying some sense of professional Levitical calling. See Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship, 2:95; von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, 15-23; and Michael D. Goulder, The Psalms of the Sons of Korah, 16-22.

35. For all Raphael's so-called Platonic epistemology, he often himself sounds like a wisdom teacher, and nowhere more so than in choosing the image of the growing tree from Psalm 1 to represent to Adam the ontology of enlightenment.

Works Consulted

Adams, Robert Martin. Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955.

Aers, David, ed. Paradise Lost: Book VII. Vol. 6 of The Cambridge Milton for Schools and Colleges, edited by John B. Broadbent, 6:9-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Allen, Don Cameron. The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954.

Budick, Sanford. The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton's Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to that which is to come. Edited by Roger Sharrock. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Carey, John, and Alastair Fowler, eds. The Poems of John Milton. London: Longmans, 1968.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. (Published in U.S. as English Pastoral Poetry. New York: Norton, 1938.) London: Chatto & Windus, 1950.

Ferry, Anne Davidson. Milton's Epic Voice: The Narrator in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Frye, Roland Mushat. Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Goulder, Michael D. The Psalms of the Sons of Korah. (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (JSOT): Supplement Series 20 [1982].) Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982.

Grose, Christopher. Milton's Epic Process: Paradise Lost and Its Miltonic Background. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

Lawry, Jon S. The Shadow of Heaven: Matter and Stance in Milton's Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Lieb, Michael. Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of Paradise Lost. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

MacCallum, Hugh. Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton's Epic Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.

Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82 [cited as YP].

Miner, Earl. “The Reign of Narrative in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 3-25.

Mowinckel, Sigmund. The Psalms in Israel's Worship. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. “The Politics of Paradise Lost.” In Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. pp. 204-29. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

———. “‘To make the people fittest to chuse’: How Milton Personified His Program for Poetry.” The CEA Critic 48/49 (1986): 3-23.

Samuel, Irene. Dante and Milton: The Commedia and Paradise Lost. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Schindler, Walter. Voice and Crisis: Invocation in Milton's Poetry. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984.

Sims, James H. “Bible, Milton and the.” In A Milton Encyclopedia [edited by William B. Hunter,] 1:142-63. [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1978-83.]

———. The Bible in Milton's Epics. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962.

Steadman, John M. Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Swaim, Kathleen M. Before and after the Fall: Contrasting Modes in Paradise Lost. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

von Rad, Gerhard. Wisdom in Israel. Translated by James D. Martin. London: SCM, 1972.

West, Robert H. “Abdiel.” A Milton Encyclopedia 1:11-12.

Westermann, Claus. Praise and Lament in the Psalms. Atlanta: John Knox, 1981.