Vision in Milton’s Epic Poetry

Partner, Jane

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71017-4_6

Vision in Milton’s Epic Poetry

Jane Partner⁴

Chapter
First Online: 10 April 2018

304 Accesses

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

Abstract

This chapter connects the pervasive thematic importance of the eye in Milton’s epic poems with features of his poetic style. Milton’s use of his blindness as a source of poetic authority is shown to be set in contrast with Satan’s damnable ways of seeing—a point that is emphasised when a series of acrostics make the reader aware of the moral vulnerability of their own eyes. Partner examines the ways that Adamic vision before the Fall relates to the enhanced vision enabled by contemporary lens technology, reappraising Galileo’s recurrent presence in Paradise Lost, and offering a new reading of the ‘Aerie Microscope’ wielded by Satan in Paradise Regained.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 89.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Samuel Johnson, citing John Dryden, ‘The Life of John Milton’, in Lives of the English Poets: A Selection, ed. John Wain (London: Dent, 1975), p. 97.
2.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Milton I’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1951), p. 43. For an illuminating recent discussion of Milton’s visual sensibility, see Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
3.
See Margaret Miles, ‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine ’s De Trinitate and Confessions’, Journal of Religion, 63:2 (1983), 125–42; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 34–45; Dallas G. Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4.
Augustine , Christian Doctrine, in Works, ed. Marcus Dods, 15 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871–6), IX, 86.
5.
John Milton, Of Reformation, in Complete Prose Works, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), I.520; all further citations from Milton’s prose taken from this edition unless otherwise stated.
6.
Milton, The Reason of Church Government, CPW II.758, 784.
7.
Milton, Areopagitica, CPW II.429.
8.
Milton thus passes over ‘image’ OED n. 1 ‘an artificial imitation or representation of the external form of any object’, in favour of 3a ‘semblance, likeness’ and 4a ‘a thing in which the aspect, form, or character of another is reproduced; a counterpart, copy’. For Milton on man as the image of God in this latter sense, see PL VII.519–27, VIII.221.
9.
For a discussion of Milton’s response to this image, see Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 149–62.
10.
John Milton, Eikonoklastes, CPW III.342.
11.
See Eleanor Brown, Milton’s Blindness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), pp. 103–5.
12.
Roger L’Estrange, No Blinde Guides (London: Printed for H. Brome, 1660). For contemporary political references to Milton’s loss of sight see Brown, Milton’s Blindness, pp. 65–74.
13.
Milton, Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda , CPW IV.i.590.
14.
Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda , CPW IV.i.590.
15.
Ibid., CPW IV.i.589.
16.
Ibid., CPW IV.i.590; this translation of the passage is taken from Brown, Milton’s Blindness, p. 71.
17.
Paradise Regained, ll. 1688, 1690, 1687.
18.
On vision in Samson Agonistes see Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation, pp. 170–5.
19.
It should be noted that in contrast to Milton, Wither identifies the ‘Minde’ with the heart. On the theological tension between the ‘affective gaze’ and the ‘gaze of the intellect’, see William F. Pollard, ‘Richard Rolle and theEye of the Heart ’, in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 84–105.
20.
On the dating of Paradise Lost see Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998), p. 5.
21.
Thomas Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 101–2.
22.
On the debate see John Carey ed., Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997), p. 423.
23.
On Milton’s conception of his poetic method as visionary see Joseph Wittreich, Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, CA: Huntingdon Library Press, 1979).
24.
See John G. Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic: The Invention and Design of ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 3.
25.
On Milton’s tendency to refer to ‘the space surrounding the earth in mathematical images’ see Harinder Singh Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 196; Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, p. 35. For geometric imagery of space in Paradise Lost see in particular Milton’s reference to cartographic projections: ‘all this globous earth in plain outspread’ (V.649); the earth ‘from one entire globose / Stretched into longitude’ (V.753–4).
26.
On Milton’s preference for the mathematical rationality of architectural metaphors rather than allusion to the visual arts, see Judith Dundas, Pencil’s Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), pp. 213–34.
27.
Thus, elsewhere in Paradise Lost Milton describes: ‘that light / Sent […] through the wide transpicuous aire’ (VIII.140–1); the earth is ‘that Globe whose hither side / With light from hence, though but reflected, shines’ (III.722–3); the Earth’s light follows a deflected course ‘from the wall of Heav’n / Though distant far some small reflection gains’ (III.427–8); the sun’s rays ‘Arraying with reflected Purple and Gold / The Clouds that on his Western Throne attend’ (III.596–7).
28.
See Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, PL VIII.134 n., p. 436.
29.
William Blake , ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 35.
30.
Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 28.
31.
See Robert Hunter West, Milton and the Angels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, [1955]), pp. 43–8, 136–40; Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 137–68.
32.
Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 138.
33.
Robert Dingley, Divine Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Eye (London: Printed by J.M. for H. Cripps, and L. Lloyd,1654), p. 45.
34.
See ‘gaze’ OED v. 1, ‘To look vacantly or curiously about’.
35.
Stephen Gosson , Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Imprinted for Thomas Gosson, 1582), sig. B7^r. See also Clifford Davidson, ‘The Anti-Visual Prejudice’, in Iconoclasm Versus Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Nichols (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1989), pp. 33–46; Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre’, ELH, 52 (1985), 297–310.
36.
John Milton, Eikonoklastes, CPW III.343, 342.
37.
Thus the progression from ‘visible’ (IX.604), through ‘beheld’ (IX.608), to ‘gaze’ (IX.611). The word ‘gaze’ appears ten times in Paradise Lost, and five of these usages occur in Book IX (at lines 524, 535, 539, 578 and 611). Of the others, four also relate directly to Satan (II.613; III.671; IV.356; V.47), the single exception forming part of the phrase ‘at gaze’ (VI.205).
38.
This sin was defined by Augustine as a ‘certain vain and curious desire’ for knowledge, sight being ‘the sense chiefly used for attaining knowledge’, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (London: J. H. Parker, 1939), Book X, p. 238. See also Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Structure and the Symbolism of Vision in Michael’s Prophecy, Paradise Lost, Books XI–XII’, Philological Quarterly, 42 (1963), 25–35 (p. 28); Elizabeth Marie Pope, ‘Paradise Regained’: The Tradition and the Poem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), pp. 51–60.
39.
Genesis 3:4: ‘The serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’.
40.
When Satan presents himself as the deity’s ‘eye’, he punningly imagines circumnavigating God’s ‘new creation round’ (III.661–3). Later, his circling flight does indeed lead him to be found ‘compassing the earth’ (IX.59), before his eventual entry into Paradise: ‘I must walk round / This garden, and no corner leave unspied’ (IV.528–9).
41.
Milton, Letter 24, to Philaras, 28 September 1654, CPW IV.ii.869–70; this trans. cited from Brown, Milton’s Blindness, p. 16.
42.
Milton, Letter XX, to Peter Heimbach, 8 November 1656, CPW VII.495; this trans. cited from Brown, Milton’s Blindness, p. 75.
43.
See Milton’s other moral uses of the vocabulary of visual distortion for cognitive error: ‘squint suspicion’, Comus, 413; ‘is common sense flown asquint’, Tetrachordon, CPW II.641.
44.
Godfrey of Bulloigne: A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ll. 11–12. See also Edmund Spenser: ‘That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry, / Which may let in a little thought unsound’, Epithalamion, in Amoretti and Epithalamion ([London]: Printed by P. S[hort] for William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. H2^r, ll. 236–7; Giles Fletcher: ‘[Despair] seemed hell, and then he out would crawle, / And ever, as he crept, would squint aside’, ‘Christs Victorie on Earth’, in Christs Victorie, and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth, Over, and After Death (Cambridge: C. Legge, 1610), p. 33, stanza 27, ll. 6–7; Phineas Fletcher: ‘[Jesuite’s] squinted eyes / Take in and view ascaunce the hatefull light’, ‘The Locusts’, in Locustae, vel pietas jesuitica (Cambridge: Thomam & Joannem Bucke, 1627), Canto II, stanza 24, ll. 4–5.
45.
For Milton’s other usages of obliquity as moral degeneracy see: ‘her obliquities in ascensions and declensions’, Tetrachordon, CPW II.680; ‘the obliquity of sin’, ibid., CPW II.657; ‘the source of all vice, and obliquity against the rule of law’, The Reason of Church Government, CPW I.836.
46.
Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, PL III. 560–1n., p. 202.
47.
Ibid., PL III.556–7n., p. 201.
48.
‘Circling’ OED a. 1a ‘forming a circle’, 2 ‘revolving’.
49.
Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, PL III.552–6n., p. 201.
50.
See, for example, Mildmay Fane, Otia Sacra. Optima Fides, ed. Donald Friedman (London: Richard Coates, 1648; New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), pp. 19, 24, 114, 115; Edward Benlowes, Theophila (London: Printed by R.N., sold by Henry Seile and Humphrey Moseley, 1652), pp. 268, 269; see also Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Genre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 95–104.
51.
Virgil , Aeneid VII–XII, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), vii, ll. 601–4; P. J. Klemp, ‘“Now Hid, Now Seen”: An Acrostic in Paradise Lost’, Milton Quarterly, 11 (1977), 91–2.
52.
See also Isaiah 14: 12–15: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! […] For thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God’. On Milton’s use of the morning star to allude to ‘Satan’s original glory’, see John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 104–19.
53.
Milton, ‘To Mr. Cyriak Skinner Upon his Blindness’, in Shorter Poems, p. 346. See also Dingley: ‘Let not your eyes wander but be fixed on right objects […] Do as Marriners, That have their eye on the Star’, Divine Opticks, p. 39. Compare also the linear progress and moral rectitude of Uriel gliding ‘through the even / On a sun beam, swift as a shooting star’ that ‘shows the mariner / From what point of his compass to beware / Impetuous winds’, PL IV.555–6, 558–60.
54.
‘Tract’ OED n.³ 8; n. 1. For a discussion of this acrostic see also Leonard, Naming in Paradise, pp. 136–40.
55.
Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987), p. 249. For an account that considers other possible acrostics, though in my view these are accidental, see Mark Vaughn, ‘More Than Meets the Eye: Milton’s Acrostics in Paradise Lost’, Milton Quarterly, 16 (1982), 6–8.
56.
See Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 5–6, 44–5; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 222, 320; Olaf Pedersen, The Book of Nature (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1992).
57.
Nathanael Culverwell, Spiritual Opticks; or, A Glasse Discovering the Weaknesse and Imperfection of a Christians Knowledge in This Life (Cambridge: Printed by Thomas Buck and to be sold by Anthony Nicholson, 1651).
58.
Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing (London: Henry Eversden, 1661), sig. B2^r.
59.
On the debates over this passage, see Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, pp. 280–302.
60.
See for example Grant McColley, ‘Milton’s Dialogue on Astronomy: The Principle Immediate Sources’, PMLA, 52 (1937), 728–62; Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 77; Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare, pp. 65, 106.
61.
Thomas Corns, Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (London: Longman, 1994), p. 61.
62.
Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 195; see also David Reid, The Humanism of ‘Paradise Lost’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 46–63; John Reichert, Milton’s Wisdom: Nature and Scripture in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 1–7, 19–50.
63.
See Marjorie Nicolson, ‘Milton and the Telescope’, ELH, 2:1 (1935), 1–33; Donald Friedman, ‘Galileo and the Art of Seeing’, in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: Binghamton, 1991), pp. 159–74; Judith Scherer Herz, ‘“For Whom This Glorious Sight”: Dante, Milton, and the Galileo Question’, in Milton in Italy, ed. Di Cesare, pp. 147–57; Amy Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo and Sunspots: Optics and Certainty in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 34 (1996), 23–43; Annabel Patterson, ‘Imagining New Worlds: Milton, Galileo, and the “Good Old Cause”’, in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1993), pp. 238–60; Joanna Magali Picciotto, ‘Literary and Scientific Experimentalism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’ (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley , 1999), pp. 435–9; Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, pp. 59–68.
64.
See Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo and Sunspots’, p. 29; Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 171–2.
65.
Milton, CPW II.538. There has been controversy over whether this meeting took place, though the reasons put forward as to why Milton might have lied about such an encounter are ultimately unconvincing. Milton’s account was initially questioned by S. B. Liljegren in Studies in Milton (Lund: C. W. E. Gleerup, 1918), pp. 23–36; Nicolson (‘Milton and the Telescope’, pp. 22–3) reviews and dismisses Liljegren’s charge. On the ‘omission’ of Galileo’s blindness, see Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo and Sunspots’, pp. 28–9, and A. N. Wilson, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 91. See also A. H. Gilbert, ‘Milton and Galileo’, Studies in Philology, 19 (1922), 152–85.
66.
Herz, ‘“For Whom This Glorious Sight”’, p. 150.
67.
Neil Harris, ‘Galileo as Symbol: The “Tuscan Artist” in Paradise Lost’, Annali del’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 10:2 (1985), 3–29 (p. 20).
68.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 1980), p. 133. It has been argued that the supposedly pejorative epithet ‘Tuscan artist’ might distance the narrator’s viewpoint from that of the scientist. The term has provoked discussion, leading critics to impute an association with alchemy and magic, see especially Roy Flannagan, ‘Art, Artists, Galileo and Concordances’, Milton Quarterly, 20:3 (1986), 103–5; Harris, ‘Galileo as Symbol’, pp. 20–1. Contrary to these claims, however, it was not in fact unusual to describe an astronomer as an ‘artist’: Ralph Knevet: ‘By helpe of Jacobs staffe, the Artist wise / May take the altitude of any starre’, ‘Eleg. III’ (1637), stanza 17, ll. 1–2; John Donne: ‘But, as when Heav’n lookes on us with new eyes, / Those new starres ev’ry Artist exercise’, ‘Funerall Elegie’, in An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary (1611), ll. 67–8; Abraham Cowley: ‘the great Artist in his Sphere of Glass Saw the whole Scene of Heav’enly Motions pass’, ‘To Dr. Scarborough’, in ‘Pindarique Odes’ (1656), p. 36, ll. 73–4.
69.
Homer, Iliad, Lattimore trans., XIX.373–4.
70.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Printed [by Richard Field] for William Ponsonbie, 1596), V.iii.3, l. 9.
71.
Harris, ‘Galileo as Symbol’, p. 13.
72.
See PL I.596; II.708; VI.311.
73.
Friedman, ‘Galileo and the Art of Seeing’, pp. 166–7.
74.
Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Telescope and Imagination’, Modern Philology, 32 (1935), 233–60; Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The “New Astronomy” and English Literary Imagination’, Studies in Philology, 32 (1935), 428–62. See also Stillman Drake, ‘Galileo and Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, in Galileo: Man of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 56–79.
75.
See Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 80–2, 313; Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, p. 63.
76.
Galileo Galilei, The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, ed. and trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 59.
77.
Galileo Galilei , Letters on Sunspots , in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. and trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 80–125 (pp. 93–4); see also Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo and Sunspots’, p. 35.
78.
Fish, Surprised by Sin, p. 29.
79.
No sunspots were seen between 1655 and 1660, when Boyle observed a single large spot. Two small spots then appeared in 1661, but no more were sighted until 1671, and there were few observations until 1715. See E. W. Maunder, ‘The Prolonged Sunspot Minimum, 1645–1715’, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 32 (1922), 140–5.
80.
This vocabulary of spottedness further resonates with Milton’s description of his own blind orbs, which were deceptively ‘clear / To outward view, of blemish or of spot’, ‘To Mr. Cyriack Skinner Upon his Blindness’, ll. 2–3. Compare also Milton’s account of this paradox in Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda : ‘[my eyes] are as unblemished in appearance, as lucid and as free from spot, as those which possess the sharpest vision. In this stance alone am I, most reluctantly, a deceiver’, CPW IV.i.583; this trans. from Brown, Milton’s Blindness, p. 68.
81.
Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo and Sunspots’, p. 40.
82.
Lewalski, ‘Structure and the Symbolism of Vision’, p. 35. See also Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, p. 169, and Herz, ‘“For Whom This Glorious Sight”’, p. 157.
83.
‘At a Vacation Exercise in the College’ (first published 1674, probably composed 1628), l. 171.
84.
Francis Quarles, ‘Job Militant’, in Divine Poems (London: John Marriott, 1632), Section 12. Meditation 12, l. 166; George Wither, ‘The Authors Meditation upon sight of his Picture’, in A Collection of Emblemes (1635), sig. A4^v.
85.
Joseph Beaumont, Psyche, XV.1324; Arthur Wilson, commendatory verse in Benlowes’ Theophila (cited above), l. 8; John Davies, A Divine Psalme (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1652), ll. 1–2. See also: John Vicars, A Prospective Glasse to Looke into Heaven (London: W. Stansby for John Smethwicke, 1618); the dénouement of Thomas Jordan’s masque Fancy’s Festivals (1657) comes when the ‘carnal eye’ is helped to ‘view the splendours of Eternity’ with an ‘Optick from Fidelia’s Cabinet’. Thomas Jordan, Fancy’s Festivals (London: Thomas Wilson, 1657), Act 5. The metaphor is also used by Dingley, Divine Opticks, p. 79. It should be noted that at this date, context must be used in individual cases to determine the distinction between the senses of ‘prospective glass’ as ‘a magic glass or crystal, in which […] distant or future events could be seen’ (‘prospective-glass’ OED 1), and that of a ‘spy-glass’ or ‘telescope’ (‘prospective-glass’ OED 2).
86.
Hermann Hugo , Pia Desideria (Antwerp: Typis Henrici Aertssenii, 1624), p. 160.
87.
Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London: Printed by G.M. and sold at John Marriots shope, 1635), p. 175.
88.
For an account of both sides of the debate see Lewalski, ‘Structure and the Symbolism of Vision’, p. 25.
89.
‘Speculation’ OED 1 ‘sight’, 4 ‘contemplation’, 2b ‘observation of the heavens’.
90.
On the descriptions in Gerard’s Herbal, see Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, PL XI.413–15n., p. 621.
91.
Lewalski, ‘Structure and the Symbolism of Vision’, p. 27.
92.
Ibid., p. 28.
93.
Kester Svendsen, ‘Milton’s “Aerie Microscope”’, MLN, 64:8 (1949), 525–7; David Thorley, ‘Milton and the Microscope’, ELH 81:3 (2014), 865–88. See also Lara Dodds, ‘“Great things to small may be compared”: Rhetorical Microscopy in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies 47 (2008), 96–117.
94.
Nicolson, ‘Milton and the Telescope’, p. 11n.
95.
See Pope, ‘Paradise Regained’, pp. 112–14.
96.
During Adam’s vision, the phrase ‘he looked, and saw’ occurs at lines XI.556, XI.638, XI.712 and XI.840.
97.
See Carey, Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, pp. 473–6.
98.
‘Parallax ’ OED n. 1a.
99.
Nicolson (‘Milton and the Telescope’, p. 11n.) claims that Milton’s use of the term ‘microscope ’ is ‘curious’, and implies that it was not current until after Hooke’s report to the Royal Society in 1663; but see ‘microscope’ OED 1, where there are three citations that precede this date, the first of which appeared in 1651. The OED also gives a more satisfactory reading of Milton’s usage by citing it as ‘figurative’ under ‘microscope’ OED n. 2. On this term, see also Thorley, ‘Milton and the Microscope’, pp. 877–8.
100.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1616), ed. Brian Woolland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), II.ii.45–8.
101.
On this connection see also Dingley: ‘with an Admiring or an Idolatrous eye, as the Disciples gazed on the stately Fabrick and Furniture of the Temple’, Divine Opticks, p. 93.
102.
An additional reference is cast back to the tempting prospect insinuated into Eve’s dream in Paradise Lost ‘With him I flew, and underneath beheld / The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide / And various’ (V.87–9), which re-emphasises the redemptive purpose of Christ’s triumph over temptation.
103.
For other instances in Paradise Regained see also: ‘[Satan] disappeared / Into thin air diffused’ (I.498–9); ‘bleak air’ (II.74); ‘the middle region of thick air’ (II.118); ‘airy jaunt’ (IV.399); ‘through the air sublime’ (IV.542). In Paradise Lost see also ‘The serpent, prince of air’ (XII.454).
104.
Samuel Cradock, The Harmony of the Four Evangelists (London: Samuel Thompson and Francis Tyton, 1668), p. 41. William Perkins also described how Satan had been able to ‘resemble [the cities] to outward senses in a glasse, or in the aire’, Satans Sophistrie Answered by Our Saviour Christ, and in Divers Sermons Further Manifested (London: Richard Field for E.E., 1604), p. 90; and see also Pope, ‘Paradise Regained’, p. 113.
105.
Christopher Blackwood, Expositions and Sermons upon the Ten First Chapters of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, According to Matthew (London: Henry Hills, for Francis Tyton, 1659), p. 103. Thomas Bilson also suggests that Satan has the power ‘to makes spectres and shews of any thing in the aire, and to deceive the eyes of men’, The Survey of Christs Sufferings for Mans Redemption (London: Melchisedech Bradwood for John Bill, 1604), p. 308.
106.
On the theory that the kingdoms were rainbow-like visions see Bilson, Survey, pp. 309–10, and Perkins, Satans Sophistrie, pp. 88–9. This connection might also reveal the additional force of Milton’s initial description of Satan in Paradise Lost through comparison with an aggrandising optical illusion caused by the air: ‘As when the sun new risen / Looks through the horizontal misty air / Shorn of his beams’ (I.594–6). See ‘ refraction’ OED 3a: ‘The deflection of the beams or light from heavenly bodies when not in the zenith, due to the refracting power of the atmosphere, which increases their apparent elevation’, and see for example Sir Christopher Heydon: ‘There lieth a deceipt or fallacie in the refraction of beams, which cheifly happeneth about the Horizon, where the aire is alwaies thickest’, A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie ([London]: Printed by John Legat, 1603), p. 137.
107.
See Watson Kirkconnell, Awake the Courteous Echo: The Themes and Prosody of ‘Comus’, ‘Lycidas’, and ‘Paradise Regained’ in World Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 288–306.
108.
Fletcher, Christs Victorie, p. 42, stanza 58, ll. 5–8.
109.
Edward Leigh, Annotations Upon All The New Testament Philological and Theologicall (London: W.W. and E.G. for William Lee, 1650), p. 104. For the argument that Satan used magnification as part of an armoury of illusionism, see also Francis Luca, In Lucam Commentaria (1606), in Scripturae sacre cursus completus, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Solesmis, 1862), col. 538; see also Cornelius Jansen, In Lucam Commentaria (1639), in ibid., cols. 536–7.
110.
Daniel Dyke, Two Treatises. The One, of Repentance, the Other, of Christs Temptations (London: Edward Griffin for Ralph Mab, 1616), pp. 317–18.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Trinity Hall and Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Jane Partner

Authors

Jane Partner
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Partner, J. (2018). Vision in Milton’s Epic Poetry. In: Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71017-4_6

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71017-4_6
Published: 10 April 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71016-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71017-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics