Part 1 — ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY.
Reading edition
I.
This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heav'ns eternal King, Of wedded Maid and Virgin mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring: For so the holy Sages once did sing: That he our deadly forfeit should release,1 And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
II.
The glorious form, that light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of majesty, Wherewith he wont2 at Heav'ns high council-table To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, He laid aside; and, here with us to be, Forsook the courts of everlasting day, And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.3
III.
Say, heav'nly muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God? Hast thou no vers, no hymn, or solemn strein To welcome him to this his new abode Now while the Heav'n by the suns team untrod Hath took no print of the approaching light, And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?
IV.
See how from far upon the eastern rode The star-led Wisards4 haste with odours sweet; O run, prevent5 them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at his blessed feet; Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet, And join thy voice unto the angel quire,6 From out his secret altar toucht with hallow'd fire.
THE HYMN.
I.
It was the winter wilde While the Heav'n-born childe All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; Nature in aw of him Had doff't her gaudy trim, With her great Master so to sympathize: It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour.7
II.
Onely with speeches fair She woo's the gentle air To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, And on her naked shame, Pollute with sinfull blame, The saintly veil of maiden8 white to throw: Confounded that her Makers eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities.
III.
But he, her fears to cease, Sent down the meek-eyed Peace, She, crown'd with olive green, came softly sliding Down through the turning sphear,9 His ready harbinger,10 With turtle11 wing the amorous clouds dividing, And, waving wide her mirtle wand, She strikes a universall peace12 through sea and land.
IV.
No war, or battails sound, Was heard the world around; The idle spear and shield were high up hung; The hooked chariot13 stood Unstain'd with hostile blood; The trumpet spake not to the armed throng; And kings sate still with awfull eye,14 As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.
V.
But peacefull was the night Wherein the Prince of Light His raign of peace upon the earth began; The windes, with wonder whist,15 Smoothly the waters kist, Whispering new joyes to the milde ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
VI.
The stars, with deep amaze, Stand fixt in stedfast gaze, Bending one way their precious influence,16 And will not take their flight For17 all the morning light Or Lucifer18 that often warn'd them thence; But in their glimmering orbs did glow, Untill their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.
VII.
And, though the shady Gloom Had given day her room, The sun himself withheld his wonted speed, And hid his head for shame, As his inferiour flame The new-enlightn'd world no more should need; He saw a greater sun appear Than his bright throne or burning axle-tree19 could bear.
VIII.
The shepherds on the lawn20 Or ere21 the point of dawn Sate simply chatting in a rustick row; Full little thought they than That the mighty Pan22 Was kindly com to live with them below; Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, Was all that did their silly23 thoughts so busie keep.
IX.
When such musick sweet Their hearts and ears did greet As never was by mortall finger strook,24 Divinely warbled voice Answering the stringed noise25 As all their souls in blissfull rapture took; The air, such pleasure loth to lose, With thousand echo's still prolongs each heav'nly close.26
X.
Nature that heard such sound Beneath the hollow round27 Of Cynthia's seat the airy region thrilling, Now was almost won To think her part was don, And that her raign had here its28 last fulfilling; She knew such harmony alone Could hold all Heav'n and Earth in happier union.
XI.
At last surrounds their sight A globe of circular light, That with long beams the shame-fac't Night array'd; The helmed Cherubim,29 The sworded Seraphim Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displaied, Harping in loud and solemn quire With unexpressive30 notes to Heav'n's new-born Heir.
XII.
Such musick (as 'tis said) Before was never made But when of old the sons of Morning sung,31 While the Creator great His constellation set, And the well-ballanc't world on hinges32 hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltring33 waves their oozy channel keep.
XIII.
Ring out, ye crystall sphears;34 Once bless our humane ears (If ye have power to touch our senses so), And let your silver chime Move in melodious time, And let the base of Heav'ns deep organ blow, And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort35 to th' angelike symphony.
XIV.
For, if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back and fetch the age of Gold;36 And speckl'd Vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;37 And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her38 dolorous mansions to the peering day.
XV.
Yea, Truth and Justice then Will down return to men, Orb'd in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing, Mercy will set between, Thron'd in celestiall sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing; And Heav'n, as at som festivall, Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.39
XVI.
But wisest Fate sayes no; This must not yet be so; The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy, That on the bitter cross40 Must redeem our loss, So both himself and us to glorifie; Yet first to those ychain'd41 in sleep The wakefull trump42 of doom must thunder through the deep.
XVII.
With such a horrid clang As on Mount Sinai rang,43 While the red fire and smould'ring clouds out brake; The aged Earth, agast, With terrour of that blast, Shall from the surface to the center shake; When at the worlds last session44 The dreadfull Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.
XVIII.
And then at last our bliss Full and perfect is, But now begins; for from this happy day, Th' old Dragon45 under ground, In straiter limits bound, Not half so far casts his usurped sway; And, wroth to see his kingdom fail, Swindges46 the scaly horrour of his foulded tail.
XIX.
The oracles are dumm;47 No voice or hideous humm Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos48 leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.
XX.
The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore A voice of weeping49 heard and loud lament; From haunted spring and dale Edged with poplar pale The parting50 Genius is with sighing sent; With floure-inwov'n tresses torn The nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
XXI.
In consecrated earth, And on the holy hearth51 The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint In urns and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamins52 at their service quaint And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power forgoes53 his wonted seat.
XXII.
Peor and Baälim54 Forsake their temples dim, With that twise batter'd god55 of Palestine; And mooned Ashtaroth, Heav'ns queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers holy shine; The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn;56
XXIII.
And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dred57 His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals ring They call the grisly58 King In dismall dance about the furnace blue; The brutish59 gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis last.
XXIV.
Nor is Osiris seen In Memphian grove or green Trampling the unshowr'd grass60 with lowings loud, Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest; Naught but profoundest hell can be his shroud; In vain with timbrel'd anthems dark The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.
XXV.
He feels from Judas land The dredded Infants hand; The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;61 Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide, Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine: Our Babe, to show his Godhead true, Can in his swaddling bands controul the damned crew.
XXVI.
So, when the Sun in bed,62 Curtain'd with cloudy red Pillows his chin upon an orient wave, The flocking shadows pale Troop to th' infernal jail; Each fetter'd ghost slips to his severall grave; And the yellow-skirted Fayes Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-lov'd maze.
XXVII.
But see the Virgin blest Hath laid her Babe to rest; Time is our tedious song should here have ending; Heav'ns youngest teemed63 star Hath fixt her polish'd car, Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending; And all about the courtly stable Bright-harness'd angels sit in order serviceable.64
NOTES.
This poem was begun by Milton on Christmas day, 1629. He had then just completed his twenty-first year, and was still an undergraduate at Christ's College, Cambridge. From certain fragments and other evidence, it is believed that he contemplated writing a series of poems on great Christian events in a similar way. This is the first poem of importance which he wrote. Hallam speaks of it as perhaps the finest lyric of its kind in the English language. "A grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the Scriptures."
"Thy slanders I forgive, and therewithal Remit thy other forfeits."
—Measure for Measure, Act v, sc. 1.
"Therefore the antique wizards well invented That Venus of the fomy sea was bred,"
meaning by "antique wizards" ancient philosophers.
"I prevented the dawning of the morning."—Psalm cxix. 147.
"I will have nothing to hinder me in the morning, for I will prevent the sun rising."—Izaak Walton, Compleat Angler.
"When I am dead, strew me o'er With maiden flowers."
—Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act iv, sc. 2.
Parkes's Topography of Hampstead, 1818, contains the following:
"The office of harbinger still exists in the Royal Household, the nominal duty of the officer being to ride one stage onward before the king on his progress, to provide lodging and provision for the court."
The last knight-harbinger was Sir Henry Rycroft (appointed in 1816, died October, 1846, aged eighty). The office became extinct at his death.
sovran. Old French souverain. Some derive it from Lat. supra, above, and regno, to reign.
"So was the Titaness put downe and whist."
It also meant to keep silent, as in Surrey's "Virgil":
"They whisted all, with fixed face intent."
A game of cards in which the players are supposed to keep silent is called whist.
birds of calm. Halcyons. See note 1, page 78.
"Happy constellations on that hour Shed their selectest influences."
—Paradise Lost, VIII, 512.
"The gilded car of day His glowing axle doth allay."
"But this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep."
"And such, I ween, the brethren were That came from Canaän, The brethren Twelve, that kept yfere The flocks of mightie Pan."
In the Glosse to the Calendar for May it is said that "Great Pan is Christ, the very God of all shepheards, which calleth himselfe the great and good shepheard. The name is most rightly (methinks) applied to him; for Pan signifieth all, or omnipotent, which is only the Lord Iesus. And by that name (as I remember) he is called of Eusebius in his fifth booke, De Preparat. Evange."
"The silly virgin strove him to withstand."
Chaucer, in the "Reves Tale," uses it in the more modern sense of simple, or foolish:
"These sely clerkes han ful fast yronne."
But in the "Legend of Good Women" it has another meaning:
"O sely woman, full of innocence."
The meaning of this word has completely changed.
"Now strike the golden lyre again."
"At every close she made, th' attending throng Replied, and bore the burden of the song."
Cynthia. The moon. In the ancient mythology applied to Artemis, from Mount Cynthus in the island of Delos, her birthplace.
"The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she."
Also Milton, "Lycidas," 176:
"And hears the unexpressive nuptiall song."
"Sure she was nigher to heaven's spheres, Listening the lordly music flowing from The illimitable years."
—Tennyson, Ode to Memory.
"The music of the spheres! list, my Mariana!"
—Shakespeare, Pericles, Act v, sc. 1.
"There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims."
—Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act v, sc. 1.
"If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, How would he wish that Heaven had left him still The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!"
—Pope, Essay on Man, I.
"Her voice, the music of the spheres, So loud, it deafens mortals' ears, As wise philosophers have thought, And that's the cause we hear it not."
—Butler's Hudibras, II, i, 617.
See, also, Montaigne, Essays, I, xxii; Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, II, 9; Plato's Republic, VI; Dryden's "Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew," etc.
"A blisful lyfe, a peseable, and so swete, Ledde the peplis in the former age."—Chaucer.
"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould Breathe such divine, enchanting ravishment?"
"Those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd For our advantage, on the bitter cross."
wakefull. Awakening.
spread. Prepare, make ready. A similar use of the word survives in the idiom "to spread the table."
Spenser, quoting the story which Plutarch relates in "his Booke of the ceasing of miracles," says, "For at that time, as hee sayth, all Oracles surceased, and enchaunted spirites that were woont to delude the people thenceforth held their peace."—Glosse to Shepheards Calendar, May.
Spenser, in the same Glosse, quoted from above, says, "About the same time that our Lorde suffered his most bitter passion for the redemption of man, certaine persons sailing from Italie to Cyprus and passing by certaine iles called Paxæ, heard a voice calling aloud Thamus, Thamus, (now Thamus was the name of an Egyptian which was pylote of the ship), who, giving ear to the crie, was bidden, when he came to Palodes to tell that great Pan was dead: which hee doubting to doe, yet for that when hee came to Palodes, there suddenly was such a calme of winde that the ship stoode still in the sea unmooved, he was forced to crie aloude that Pan was dead: wherewithall there was heard such piteous outcries, and dreadfull shriking as hath not beene the like."
Genius. Spirit. See "Lycidas," 182:
"Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore."
Peor. The name of a mountain of Palestine is here used as one of the titles of Baal, who was worshipped there.
Baälim. Plural of Baal, meaning that god in his various modifications.
Ashtaroth. The Syrian goddess Astarte. But her worship was identified rather with the planet Venus than with the moon.
Hammon. A Libyan deity, represented as a ram or as a man with ram's horns.
Milton, in "Paradise Lost," says:
"Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allur'd The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day."
Isis. The Egyptian earth-goddess, afterwards worshipped as the goddess of the moon.
Orus. The Egyptian god of the sun.
the dog Anubis. Juvenal says, "Whole towns worship the dog."—Sat., XV, 8.
Osiris, or Apis, one of the chief gods of the Egyptians, was represented by a bull.
sacred chest = worshipt ark, below.
Typhon. A monster among the gods, variously described by the poets. He was a terror to all the other deities.
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
John Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, in the year 1608, eight years before the death of Shakespeare. From his boyhood he showed the possession of more than ordinary powers of mind. He was educated first under private tutors, and at St. Paul's School, and finally at Christ's College, Cambridge, where in 1632 he received the degree of "Master of Arts." His first considerable work was the "Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity," written in 1629. Within the next seven years he wrote the most noteworthy of his shorter poems: the masque, "Comus"; the pastoral piece entitled "Arcades"; the beautiful descriptive poems, "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso"; and the elegy, "Lycidas." In 1639 he made a tour upon the Continent, visited the famous seats of learning in France and Italy, and made the acquaintance of many of the great poets and scholars of his time. Upon hearing, however, that civil war was about to break out in England, he hastened home, resolved to devote himself to what he regarded as his country's best interests. Poetry was abandoned for politics, and for the next twenty years he wrote little except prose—political tracts and controversial essays. When Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Milton was appointed Latin Secretary of State, a position which he continued to hold until towards the downfall of the Commonwealth. But after the Restoration he quietly withdrew into retirement, resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the writing of the great poem which he had been contemplating for many years. Through unceasing study he had lost his sight; the friends of his youth had deserted him; the fortune which he had received from his father was gone. And so it was in darkness, and disappointment, and poverty, that in 1667 he gave to the world the great English epic, "Paradise Lost." It was in that same year that Dryden published his "Annus Mirabilis." Milton shortly afterward wrote "Paradise Regained"; and, in 1671, he produced "Samson Agonistes," a tragedy modelled after the masterpieces of the Greek drama. On the 8th of November, 1674, at the age of sixty-six years, his strangely eventful life came to a close.
WORDSWORTH'S SONNET TO MILTON.
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Other Poems to be Read: L'Allegro; Il Penseroso; Comus; Lycidas; selections from Paradise Lost.
References: Masson's Life and Times of John Milton; Milton (Classical Writers), by Stopford Brooke; Milton (English Men of Letters), by Mark Pattison; Macaulay's Essay on Milton; De Quincey, Milton vs. Southey and Landor; Coleridge's Literary Remains; Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Hazlitt's English Poets.