The Miltonic MomentUniversity Press of Kentucky, 14/12/2021 - 176 páginas Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as "the Miltonic Moment." This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus)," and "Lycidas." These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning. The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical. Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age. |
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... stanza and its tribute to a child who will “stand 'twixt us and our deserved smart” (69) On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough reads like a prologue to the Nativity Ode; in the opening stanza of the The Passion, Milton begins ...
... stanza not only to the birth of the Christ child but to the era that immediately preceded it: This is the Month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King, Of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born, Our great ...
... stanza of the Nativity Ode, he structures the poem in such a way that by the time we come to the end of it the voice (or, as I shall argue later, the voices) singing the hymn seems to be physically present at the manger in Bethlehem ...
... stanza, the frozen tableau at the manger is about to come back to life again. In Comus the sense of intermediacy is primarily narrative; the Lady's adventures are an interruption in her journey to Ludlow Castle, an unwelcome hiatus in a ...
... stanza, Milton refers to himself no less than six times, and the poem as a whole is obsessively selfreferential. The Nativity Ode, on the contrary, contains not a single “I,” “me,” or “my” in its thirty-one stanzas. If Lycidas is “a ...