[In the following essay, Weller maintains that Andrew Marvell's poetry rehearses the pastoral motifs that inform John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and he examines how the lyric mode is used in the expansive form of the epic.]

When Milton begins Paradise Regained by defining himself as “I who erewhile the happy garden sung,”¹ he is echoing the lines—possibly discarded by Virgil, possibly even non-Virgilian—which prefaced Renaissance editions of The Aeneid:

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi
ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,
gratum opus agricolis; at nunc horrentia Martis
[I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed,
then, leaving the woodland, constrained the
          neighbouring
fields to serve the husbandman, however grasping—a
          work
welcome to farmers; but now of Mars' bristling (arms
          and the man I sing)](2)

Virgil here is of course defining the shape of a canonical poetic career, moving from pastoral to georgic to epic, which his own works established. Later poets imitated both this progress of poetic ambition and these lines. Spenser's version of this gesture is the most familiar:

Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
          As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
          Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
          For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
          And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds.(3)

The remarkable thing about Milton's use of these lines is that he retrospectively identifies Paradise Lost as a pastoral, a poem about “the happy garden”—as opposed to the true epic, Paradise Regained, which he is about to write. No one familiar with Milton's aggressive approach to inherited literary traditions will be surprised by such metageneric discourse. Nevertheless, few of Milton's critics have followed this cue; even Empson, in his enterprising pursuit of the pastoral mode's transformations, apparently hesitated to regard all of Paradise Lost as a pastoral. Moreover, the allusive gesture raises other perplexities about how Milton regarded the shape of his own career. Once again, even critics who have noted the Virgilian signature (for example, Lawrence Lipking)⁴ have declined to explore its implications for Milton's self-understanding. Is there a Miltonic georgic, or does Paradise Lost occupy the place of both pastoral and georgic in preparation for Milton's efforts to sing the better, but unspectacular “fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom” (PL 9.31-32) (unspectacular, because even Paradise Regained gives us only the private version of Christ's abstinence from asserting His own will as separate from that of the Father). Perhaps it is the political writings which dominated the middle part of Milton's life and career that should be regarded as his georgic: plowing the fields of the commonwealth and sowing the seeds of a new political order to come. That is a speculation for a different kind of essay, of the more innocent genre, is an indispensable topic for Milton's poetic enterprise—or, indeed, as Anthony Low has shown in The Georgic Revolution, for the generic and political bearings of seventeenth-century poetry in general.⁵

Low takes account of the opening lines of Paradise Regained, but directs his attention less toward Milton's retrospective redefinition of Paradise Lost than toward the ways in which georgic elements reshape the conception of heroic action in Paradise Regained: “Like the Georgics, Paradise Regained does not describe a pastoral retreat from responsibility but instead dwells on small, recurrent actions, often trivial or inglorious in themselves, that nevertheless converge towards a turning-point in the world's history.” He reaches the strong and suggestive conclusion that “Milton chose in effect to write his Aeneid first and then his Georgics, and thereby to reverse the usual priorities.”⁶ Such a reconfiguration of generic hierarchies seems entirely within the scope of Milton's engagement with tradition, but in exploring the generic status of Paradise Regained Low leaves in place the assumption that Paradise Lost is indeed “epic”—“his Aeneid”—despite Milton's provocative hints to the contrary.

Low's emphasis on the significance for Milton of “small, recurrent actions, often trivial or inglorious in themselves” is also helpful (though its immediate application invites comparison with Stanley Fish's descriptions of Paradise Regained as an epic of inaction).⁷ Do such actions, however, belong exclusively to the world of georgic, rather than pastoral, poetry? The large-scale argument and ethical drive of Law's book strongly opposes pastoral otium (“as pastoral retreat from responsibility”) to the georgic's higher valuation of labor, but Milton's most explicitly pastoral poems, Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis, foreground the duties, not the leisure, of both the literal and metaphorical shepherd, even if his will to fulfill such obligations, to continue his work, is temporarily suspended by grief or a sense of futility. The plaintive refrain of Epitaphium Damonis—Ite domum impasti, domino iam non vacat, agni; “Go home unfed, my lambs, your troubled master is not free to tend you”—gives formal expression to the recurrent demands of pastoral labor (II. 18, 26, 35, and so on). This periodic rhythm, in which the shepherd participates no less than the agricultural laborer of the georgic, is essential to the contrast between epic and pastoral temporality which this essay seeks to explore—and which may partially explain Milton's implied classification of Paradise Lost as pastoral. As for “actions trivial and inglorious in themselves” which nevertheless “converge toward a turning-point in the world's history,” it is hardly necessary to note that the central event of Paradise Lost, considered simply as an action, is the plucking of a fruit.

If the allusion with which Milton opens Paradise Regained redirects the reader's attention to pastoral, one way of considering what status and force that genre might have had for him by the second half of the seventeenth century is to revisit the work of Andrew Marvell, the contemporary writer who might have been best equipped to ponder Milton's challenging evocation of pastoral. Marvell is arguably the century's most distinguished exponent of the genre. As Paul Alpers comments, “Marvell's unusual self-consciousness about pastoral fictions and conventions makes him not just a poet to study, but a collaborator in critical analysis and definition.”⁸ Anthony Low observes Marvell's affinities with the georgic enterprise of revaluing agricultural labor—his central pastoral figure, after all, is not a shepherd but a mower—but stops short of claiming Marvell for georgic poetry, assigning him rather a place “among the most subtle of English pastoralists.”⁹

Marvell is in any case a contemporary poet in whom Milton certainly took an interest. Milton had known him at least as early as 1653, when he recommended him to the Council of State as Assistant Latin Secretary; even though this initial recommendation failed to gain Marvell the appointment, he eventually succeeded to Milton's own position as Latin Secretary in 1657, and his and Milton's paths continued to cross as servants of the Commonwealth. Although Marvell's lyrics went unpublished until 1681, after his death, the complex of personal and political relationships between Milton and Marvell strengthens the surmise that the older poet would have read Marvell's major lyrics, dating from the 1650s, in manuscript form. The relations between Milton and Marvell have been sensitively and astutely explored by Judith Herz. Herz, however, focuses primarily on the influence of Milton's early poems on Marvell's lyrics, and she concludes that “in Paradise Lost one does not find too many clear traces of Milton's reading of Marvell.”¹⁰

While there are perspectives from which this last assertion might be disputed, the positive and historical connections between the two poets matter less than the opportunity their works offer to consider the lyric and epic embodiments—face-to-face, as it were—of a shared set of narrative and even theological possibilities. Surprisingly, Marvell, especially in his mower poems, rehearses in a pastoral, quintessentially lyric mode the motifs which will inform Paradise Lost; and it is tempting to take the opening of Paradise Regained as testimony that Milton saw and acknowledged such a connection; that is, that he understood that such topics as enclosure and freedom, lost innocence and the consciousness of mortality, errancy and the longing to find a “home” in the world might belong to the province of pastoral and georgic as well as epic. If Milton tacitly claims that his sprawling, ambitious storytelling may best be understood as pastoral, Marvell explores the question of what narrative—arguably the narrative which sets the terms of human history—looks like when distilled and compressed into the more traditional dimensions of pastoral lyric. How does narrative possibility, deliberately circumscribed and held in check, inflect the shape and mood of a lyric? What claims can lyric make for itself as a narrative medium against the hectoring expansiveness of epic poetry?

If this description of the epic seems prematurely to load the dice, it echoes the rhetoric of Marvell's own lyrics which always imply awareness of the potential grandiosity of their topics. At the threshold of Upon Appleton House (ironically, perhaps, the longest of his poems) he announces the ideology of lyric; ostensibly describing the “sober frame” of Nun-Appleton House, the language implicitly endorses its own style and sense of proportion:

Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrained,
Things greater are in less contained.(11)

I call such language the ideology of lyric because Marvell already echoes Donne's distaste for “chronicle” and “half-acre tombs” and his preference for building “pretty rooms” or stanzas in the unassuming but wholly adequate space of songs and sonnets. At the same time Upon Appleton House makes the alignment of genre with length less literal or quantifiable. Despite the scope of its argument and its seven hundred seventy-six lines—approximately the size of a book of Paradise Lost—Upon Appleton House arguably retains the sensibility of a lyric: that is, each of its conceits or images is developed with a concentrated wit that is serenely indifferent to the poem's forward movement. In discussing the “precision and symbolic secrecy” of Marvell's emblematic images, Rosalie Colie speaks of “the actual and conceptual space around each of [their] elements”¹² which forces the reader to supply missing connections and applications. The emblematic seems the most spatialized, the least narrative of poetry's representational possibilities. Does it also require something like pastoral leisure—a leisure antithetical to narrative momentum and linearity—to unravel such enigmatic significances?

Colie entitles her chapter devoted to emblems and emblematic poetic practice “Small Forms: Multo in Parvo,” and the Latin phrase encapsulates the peculiar densities of seventeenth-century lyric. (For a non-Marvellian example, consider the political content of Lovelace's “The Grasshopper,” as expounded by Don Cameron Allen.)¹³ Marvell appears consciously, even aggressively, to avoid the heroic mode of narration in both Upon Appleton House and “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.” If the potentially epic or public content of these poems threatens to burst the boundaries of lyric discourse (like the “three-forked lightning” of Cromwell dividing his “fiery way” through his own allies [“An Horatian Ode” 13, 16]), the poet has nevertheless refrained from claiming on his own behalf the position of epic bard. Marvell has always been discussed as a self-consciously “minor” poet, cowed perhaps by his distinguished contemporary's achievement of his “vast design” (“On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost” 2). Nevertheless the firm and repeated engagement of his lyrics with the imaginative terrain of the epic suggests a more sustained argument about the virtues of multum in parvo and a firm, not necessarily modest, assertion about the narrative efficacy of lyric—as though the potency of plot might be experienced even more intensely in the narrative kernel than in its discursive full expansion. A cultural politics—more ramified and elusive than the question of party adherences—may have strengthened his reluctance to assume the prerogatives of an epic stance. Recent criticism has foregrounded the linkage between gender and genre, but this line of inquiry might be supplemented by further consideration of the ways in which Donne, Marvell and other seventeenth-century lyric poets, though male, perceived themselves as socially marginal. (Marvell may have felt estranged from masculine privilege for other reasons too.)¹⁴ The motives—political, esthetic, even psychological—for repudiating the authority and putative centrality of “public,” large-scale forms such as epic narrative were clearly multiple, and this essay returns, at least briefly, to such questions in its conclusion.

Marvell's general address to the aesthetics of scale may be clarified by examination of a poem which supplies a particular instance of “Things greater … in less contained” and suggests emergent intimacies between Marvell's lyrics and Milton's epic (Upon Appleton House 44). If “The Mower to the Glowworms” were read without its title, it would be a kind of riddle poem, since it is not until the third stanza, midway through the poem, that “Ye living lamps” and “Ye country comets” are finally named as “glowworms,” and the suspended identification solicits the cosmic and political contexts which the evocation of glowworms will deflate:

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;

(“The Mower to the Glowworms” 1-8)

In the high style of seventeenth-century verse (the Miltonic style, for example) “ye living lamps” might well be the stars and planets or the angelic intelligences that animate them; “Ye country comets” extends the astronomical discourse but, with a parodic stance of bumpkin bashfulness, disowns the national consequences of light which “portend[s] / No war, prince's funeral.” However, the disavowal contains a sly kicker: if these comets shine to “no higher end / Than to presage the grass's fall,” they shine for the most inclusive end of all, for “All flesh is grass,” and as “The Mower's Song” declares, “flow'rs, and grass, and I and all, / Will in one common ruin fall” (21-22). Indeed, the fall occurs over and over again throughout Marvell's pastoral poems: Damon the Mower cuts his own ankle, and “there among the grass fell down, / By his own scythe, the Mower mown” and the speaker of “The Garden” “Stumbling on melons … Ensnared with flowers” falls “on grass” (“Damon the Mower” 79-80; “The Garden” 39-40). The fact that these recurrent falls are pratfalls, comic rather than tragic events, makes its own comment on the lofty import of the Fall; falling, in a natural setting, Marvell seems to say, is too endemic to the clumsy, perishable stuff of human flesh to evoke either surprise or lasting regret. Where the narrative of epic may differ from that of lyric is in the epic premise of one-time, irrevocable events which shape and enchain sequential history.

The third stanza of Marvell's poem moves even closer to the world (and words) of Paradise Lost:

Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray.

(“The Mower to the Glowworms” 9-12)

The “officious flame” of the glowworms will become, in an epic frame, Raphael's description of the stars and planets as “those bright luminaries / Officious” (PL 8.98-99; in both instances it seems possible to hear the modern sense of “officious” intruding upon the more seventeenth-century sense of “serviceable”). It is perhaps at this moment, too, that Milton offers his response to Marvell's argument that “small is beautiful”; when Adam seems shocked at the wastefulness of the “great architect”'s design, Raphael says,

                    let it speak
The maker's high magnificence, wh built
So spacious, and his line stretched out so far;
That man may know he dwells not in his own

(PL 8.100-3)

“The wandering mowers” to whom the glowworm's light “shows the way” are Marvell's pastoral equivalent of a postlapsarian Adam and Eve; the conjunction of “way” and “wandering” in the final lines of the epic is almost too familiar to need citation (“They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way” [PL 12.648-49]), although, notoriously, wandering and errancy mark the reader's apprehension of Milton's Eden even before its inhabitants have incurred expulsion.

The “foolish fires” of the next lines anticipate one of Paradise Lost's most famous similes, comparing Satan to a will-o'-the-wisp (or “wandering fire”) as he leads Eve to the forbidden fruit (PL 9.634-43). Epic simile is, in effect, abbreviated lyric, often expressing a yearning for the pastoral world its own events disrupt or displace—only one of the ways in which epic narrative thematizes homecoming and its opposite. Marvell's lyric also encapsulates its plot as loss (“That I shall never find my home”), and describes this loss in terms which resonate for Paradise Lost (“For she my mind hath so displaced” [“The Mower to the Glowworms” 16, 15]). Paradise Lost narrates the mind's dis-placement not so much in terms of self-alienation as in terms of its unmooring from a particular place, from an origin to which its identity is referable; what remains is to discover that the mind is its own place and that the renunciation of Eden will produce a “paradise within thee, happier far” (PL 12.587). In this sense Paradise Lost is as much an epic of subjectivity as its Romantic or post-Romantic successors, and it may be this investment in subjective experience which encourages Milton to claim alliance with the lyric at least through its specifically pastoral embodiments.

“Damon the Mower” and “The Garden” have already been mentioned in the context of the Fall as pratfall, but troping the fall—and compressing its tragic and comic possibilities into a single image—is only one example of how Marvell's pastoral poems incorporate the narrative possibilities and concerns with human freedom and agency that are writ large in Paradise Lost. The speaker of “The Mower against Gardens” might be inveighing against the divine gardener Himself when he complains that the gardener enclosed

                    A dead and standing pool of air
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
                    Which stupified them while it fed.

(6-8)

Enclosure in itself precipitates the fall, fostering a longing for the “wild and fragrant innocence” of “the sweet fields”; without this fortunate fall, Eden would be a tyrant's “green seraglio,” inhabited by “eunuchs” of the human will (34, 32, 27). “The Mower against Gardens” does not enact the narrative of transgression which would break the garden's protective but suffocating limits, but it does suggest the necessity of this plot.

“The Garden,” on the other hand, has a more complicated and ambivalent relation to the enclosed space of both garden and lyric—in punning terms, the lyric plot. If the formality and boundedness of the garden represent the space of lyric utterance, “The Garden” offers two ways of imagining the relation of lyric to the more indefinite duration and extension of narrative (including, of course, the narrative of epic): it is, on the one hand, exempt from the mystifications, the vain amazements, of the public spaces in which the linear entailments of historical narrative unfold, but it also supplies the space in which engagements with a more strenuous world of political and erotic imperatives may be rehearsed. At least initially, “The Garden” suggests that gardens are places where narrative is preempted:

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid,
While all flow'rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
…
No white nor red was ever seen
So am'rous as this lovely green.

(1-8, 17-18)

The plots of erotic love, statesmanship, sainthood, and athletic or military prowess are already anticipated within the garden, but the verb “close” (“all flow'rs and all trees do close”) has ominous undertones that warn against a premature resolution which depends, among other things, upon the exile of other human bodies:

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate:
…
Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone.

(57-58, 63-64)

“The Garden” cannot unequivocally embrace this image of self-sufficiency, and the verdant withdrawal of the mind, “from pleasures less,” finds less a supplement than a counterpoise in the image of the bird who “sits,

and sings … till prepared for longer flight” (41, 53, 55); the solitude and repose of the garden do not foreclose but enable—enable, for example, a transcendence of (even an escape from) their own forms of transcendence.

Thus, whether “The Garden” aborts potential narratives, proleptically assimilates them, or presents lyric as narrative's point of departure, it seems questionable to reserve the term “narrative” for events which occur in public spaces. If lyric is a figuration of experience outside of history—an improbable transcendence, unless lyrics themselves have no determinate origins—what status do we accord to its internal movement? It is of course possible to insist on a strong separation between history and other manifestations of temporality, but the term “narrative,” which encodes no such distinction, threatens this notional boundary. The sequence of moments within a poem always produces not only a single but a double narrative: the possibly illusory trace of a movement of intellect and feeling to be derived from the poem, and the successive stages of making meaning and connection which the reader's progress through the poem enacts (and it is the specific contribution of reader-response criticism, at its most rigorous, to model this second kind of narrative). Pastoral, in any case, provides a middle term between a critical definition of lyric which emphasizes its capacity to arrest, freeze, and remove its happening from the flux of history (to paraphrase Sharon Cameron in Lyric Time¹⁵) and an account of narrative which foregrounds its mimesis of historical events. Things clearly happen in the pastoral: ploughing, sowing, harvesting and gleaning, the breeding, herding, and slaughter of livestock, birth and dying—not to mention the gratuitous embellishment and celebration of these compulsive rhythms by song, dance, and festival. To deny these repetitive sequences a place in history—or to declare them non-narrative because they are repetitive—would be to make political history the only history that matters. Moreover, it is in relation to the cyclical character of pastoral narrative that Milton's identification of Paradise Lost is, theologically at least, most significant. While the events of Paradise Lost seem to constitute a singular narrative, and are thus far epic, it is by no means necessary—perhaps even spiritually myopic—to suppose that they have occurred once and for all. The archangel Michael, prompting Adam and Eve to rebuild their paradise within, surely implies that rebellion, fall, repentance, regeneration, the loss and recovery of heaven or of Eden are narrative potentialities of individual lives. By seeing the epic as pastoral, Milton incorporates human cycles of spiritual struggle into the epic dimensions of Christian narrative. The incidents of Christian history are always figural, always atemporally available to the believer; if epic imitates events which are locked into a particular sequence of imperial emergence or decay, spiritually significant events will escape the confines of its narrative. Not surprisingly, Milton uses the pastoral mode for his “Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity” which shatters the unidirectional linearity of history by urging his poem—and the reader—to get to the stable before the wise men do.

Upon Appleton House likewise enacts the sense that history can be entered, or reentered, at multiple moments as the “tawny mowers” move through the high grain of the estate like the “Israelites … Walking on foot through a green sea” (389-90). Miltonic similes offer comparable experiences of transhistorical montage as the image of rebel angels, swept by waves of hellfire, fades into the (ahistorical? contemporary?) image of fallen leaves in an Umbrian vale (or is Vallombrosa the valley of the shadow of death?), which yields in turn to a view of Pharaoh's army overwhelmed by the Red Sea—only to reinstate the visual rhyme of Lucifer's fallen followers (PL 1.301-2). Historical boundaries are not the only ones to dissolve in Upon Appleton House; the farmworker Thestylis (herself a surrogate for the poet, as Alpers notes [WP 243]) knows that the poet has compared the mowers to the Jews leaving Egypt:

‘He called us Israelites;
But now, to make his saying true,
Rails rain for quails, for manna dew.’

(406-8)

Is Thestylis outside or inside the poet's consciousness? Has the poet verified his comparison by deploying the narrative to make it true? Does the distinction between the figural and the empirical matter?

Significantly, the pastoral freedom of the imagination is seen as requiring a georgic preparation, a clearing of the ground; the labor of mowing produces

A new and empty face of things,
A levelled space, as smooth and plain
As cloths for Lely stretched to stain.

(442-44)

Not only does “stain” suggest that Lely's canvas may be most valuable when blank, but even God's handiwork seems most potent at the threshold of realization: “The world when first created sure / Was such a table rase and pure” (445-46). In this context the political project of the Levellers (“this naked equal flat / Which Levellers take pattern at” [449-50]) appears creative as well as destructive, and the following stanzas associate the close-cropped surface of “polished grass” with the mirrors of art (“A landskip drawn in looking-glass”) and science (“multiplying glasses,” i.e., microscopes)—media of reflection and knowledge (457, 458, 462). In “Damon the Mower” the title figure also stakes the value of his labor on its power to expose: “This scythe of mine discovers wide / More ground than all his [the shepherd's] sheep do hide” (51-52). Perhaps it is not surprising that the poet who could envision the spiritual achievement of “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” (“The Garden” 47-48) would devote so much attention to the mind's powers to undo the world as part of its (re)making, but it is a conception of work, both intellectual and imaginative, which unexpectedly links Marvell's poetics to the projects of twentieth-century philosophy.

Inevitably the mower's georgic labor links him to the ultimate figure of erasure: “For Death thou art a Mower too” (Damon the Mower” 88). The ground which the mower's work—and the georgic work of art—reveals is mortality. If Marvell tropes the pastoral tradition by substituting a mower for a shepherd, it has less to do with the cultural politics surrounding the contemporary status of labor than with a desire to strengthen the dignity of pastoral—to supply the weight of labor to its almost weightless sense of freedom and to deepen the consciousness of mortality that pervades the lives of shepherds, farmers and, for that matter, poets. Pastoral conventionally concedes that its world is not exempt from death—Et in Arcadia ego¹⁶—but that acknowledgment might well be regarded as too insouciant or perfunctory. Even in Marvell's poetic world, the sense of threat is muted: Damon brings Juliana “the harmless snake … Disarmèd of its teeth and sting,” but the reason that Juliana prefers the shepherd is surely not that his gifts are superior or that he sweats less, but that tending flocks evokes less awareness of death than the sharp strokes of Damon's scythe which cause the grass to wither (“Damon the Mower” 35-36).¹⁷

Although the mower participates in a cycle of agricultural activity, the stages of this cycle, from sowing to harvest, provide a sharper temporal punctuation than the ebb and flow of herders' activity. The georgic, in other words, supplies a middle term between the presumptive linearity and the irreversibility of secular history (on which epic narrative putatively models itself) and the relaxed, repetitive eddies of pastoral's extrahistorical events. Marvell does not compromise the meditative space of pastoral by anchoring it in the georgic's less open-ended temporality but displays the wit, for which T. S. Eliot famously praised him, of recognizing, as “implicit in the expression of every experience, … other kinds of experience which are possible.”¹⁸ One might argue that in this instance the wit is redundant: that the pastoral already knows what kinds of experience it tacitly defers or holds at bay—just as the reply of Ralegh's skeptical nymph to the plea of Marlowe's ardent shepherd (both wholly permissible expressions of the pastoral mode) can seem a trifle literal-minded. However, in the context of this essay, the more important aspect of Marvell's pastoral practice is not that it recognizes that “flowers do fade” and “wayward winter” beckons but that without renouncing its own particularity it opens onto other genres: rehearsing the potential elements of large-scale, even epic narrative, and incorporating the gravity of georgic's rural vision. Eliot's definition of wit, if extended to mode or genre, either dissolves the very idea of such species or insists on their necessary complementarity, even interpenetration. As they follow their strikingly different poetic talents and inclinations, both Milton and Marvell discover in the always controvertible rules of genre new opportunities to debate the very stakes of literary representation.

Needless to say, if Milton invites readers to revisit Paradise Lost as a kind of pastoral, he does not suppose that pastoral involves an evasion of that “mortal taste” on which the poem's opening lines insist. As Book IX of Paradise Lost had begun with a critique of epic presuppositions, the beginning of Paradise Regained invokes Virgil to comment aggressively on the post-Virgilian, and non-Christian, hierarchy of genres, but these lines also prompt a particular rereading of Paradise Lost, in which its events belong not to the “absolute past” of traditional epic (see Bakhtin, elaborating Goethe¹⁹) but to an immediate and renewable present of spiritual experience, a pastoral of the soul. Still, a pastoral Paradise Lost is only one of the generically plural possibilities of reading that the poem generates; just as Christian history is both atemporal and linear—in the epic sweep from first Adam to second, from creation to apocalypse—its poetic representation must fulfill as well as resist a chronologically structured narrative pattern.

Reading a book, especially in the age of print, is the very pattern of a spiritual experience. There is no place in which it necessarily occurs (“To teach thee that God attributes to place / No sanctity, if none be thither brought” [PL 9.836-37]); its events occur in an eternal present, as conventions of critical discourse corroborate; and it cannot supply something which the supplicant for grace or understanding does not already possess:

                    who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior …
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself

(PR 4.322-24, 325-26)

Could a radical practice, such as Milton's, of reading or of spiritual freedom—they are virtually the same—accept a prescriptive or normative account of the values which an epic promulgates? E. M. W. Tillyard defines the epic poet as “the mouthpiece of the age,” who “must be centered in the normal, he must measure the crooked by the straight, he must exemplify that sanity which has been claimed for true genius. No pronounced homosexual, for instance, could succeed in the epic, not so much for being one as for what his being one cuts him off from.”²⁰ If Marvell and other seventeenth-century poets did shy away from the pretensions of epic, it may well have been from such hegemonic complacencies that they recoiled. Other critics, including Bakhtin and Lukacs, have expressed, less repulsively than Tillyard, the sense that epic narrative entails a unanimous evaluation of events from an “absolute past.” But when the epic narrates sacred events, it seems theologically impossible for a believer to regard them as “absolutely past”; that spiritual contemporaneity has a secular double in the present tense of the reader's subjectivity—that is, the moment in which the reading occurs. It is debatable whether the critics who have been mentioned articulate even the implied ideology of epic, but the experience of epic has always been more diverse. The Aeneid, for example, mourns the victims, or incidental casualties, of the Roman empire's inception far more than it celebrates its sober, stricken founder—even St. Augustine wept for Dido—and Paradise Lost, like all of Milton's poetry, is saturated in nostalgia for non-Christian realms of imaginative experience. The religious and literary motives for preserving a reader's freedom mesh with one another, and that freedom includes the prerogative of reading the epic narrative with a sense of its plural generic possibilities—to read it, for example, as lyric, as elegy, as pastoral, as georgic, and not as the triumphalist voice of a patriarchal culture. The allusive gesture with which Milton opens Paradise Regained does not so much diminish, as enrich, Paradise Lost, with a nod not only to the varied world of poetic pastoralism (and perhaps to Marvell as its contemporary exponent) but to the generic pluralism of epic itself.

Notes

1. John Milton, Paradise Regained, John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford, 1991); references to Milton's poems will be to this edition and cited in text by poem, book, and/or line number.

2. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, with tr. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), pp. 240-41.

3. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, Proem, st. 1, II. 1-5, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), p. 27.

4. Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, 1981), p. 69.

5. Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, 1985).

6. Low, Georgic Revolution, p. 351. Low presumably is using “priorities” in both a temporal and a moral sense.

7. Stanley Fish, “The Temptation to Action in Milton's Poetry,” ELH, 48 (1981), 516-31, and “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation to Plot in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies, 17 (1983), 163-85.

8. Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago, 1996), p. 66; hereafter cited in text as WP.

9. Low, Georgic Revolution, p. 274; italics mine.

10. Judith Herz, “Milton and Marvell: The Poet as Fit Reader,” Modern Language Quarterly, 39 (1978), 262.

11. Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, II. 41-44, in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Stony Donno (Harmondsworth, 1976); references to Marvell's poems will be to this edition and cited in text by poem and/or line number.

12. Rosalie L. Colie, “Small Forms: Multo in Parvo,” in The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 48, 41.

13. Don Cameron Allen, “A Reading of Lovelace's ‘The Grasshopper,’” in Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 80-92.

14. For a compact summary of critical speculations on this topic, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 91-92n.

15. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore, 1979).

16. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in his Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY, 1955), pp. 295-320.

17. Ironically, it is Juliana rather than the mower who is the bearer of mortality. In “Damon the Mower” the only sting in the meadows belongs to Juliana—“Hark how the Mower Damon sung, / With love of Juliana stung”—and “The Mower's Song” frankly laments, “she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me” [1-2; 5-6]. On the connection between desire and the apprehension of death, and the gynephobic tradition which derives from it, see Henry Staten's Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore, 1995).

18. T. S. Eliot, “Marvell” (1921) in his Selected Essays (New York, 1964), p. 262.

19. M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), pp. 13-16.

20. E. M. W. Tillyard, “The Nature of the Epic” in Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition, ed. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago, 1973), pp. 51, 480.

I wish to thank Jane Hedley for the opportunity to present an initial version of this essay on a panel of the 1997 Modern Language Association Convention; Kathryn Stockton and Karen Brennan for their encouragement to develop the talk into an essay; and Robert Caserio and Herbert Tucker for their perceptive suggestions for revision.