Milton's Wild Garden

Abstract

Milton's Wild Garden John R. Knott When I published Milton's Pastoral Vision a little over thirty years ago, I was taken by the subtlety with which Milton had reinterpreted the rich literary tradition of the earthly paradise in representing the Garden of Eden, incorporating the rhetorical tropes by which poets had established an ideal landscape (a stream, flowers, shade trees, fragrant breezes, bird song) and conventional features of the earthly paradise going back at least to Ovid (eternal spring, thornless roses, simultaneous flowers, and fruit) and blending them into a fluid, dynamic, joyous natural world.1 And I noted the way that the life of Adam and Eve, at least in some aspects, embodied a sense of timeless ease associated with pastoral poetry, what Virgil called otium.Their "happy rural seat of various view" (4.247) has the look of an English Arcadia, with a pleasing alternation of hill and valley, sun and shade, and "Flocks / Grazing the tender herb" (4.252-53).2 With its flowery banks, shady bowers, and alleys of stately trees that afford "pleasant walks," the Garden offers variety and sensuous delight within the context of what appears an ordered, knowable place where, as Northrop Frye once said,we cannot lose our way.3 As I think about Milton's Eden now, however, I am more struck by his emphasis on its wilder aspects, apparent in his insistence that the natural world in which Adam and Eve find themselves is fundamentally untamed, "Wild above Rule or Art" (5.297). Some critics have found the influence of the English countryside in Milton's Eden or have seen it as anticipating the English landscape garden that came into its own in the eighteenth century.4 Others have argued [End Page 66] that Milton was recalling the great Italian Renaissance gardens that he saw in his travels, with their variety of landscape features and their informal plantings and boschetti (wild woods).5 Visual analogues for many of the scenes Milton renders have been found in the art of the period.6 Landscapes of the sort that I have been describing—the English countryside, the Italian garden—are of course shaped by human presence. They offer versions of what we could call a middle landscape, following Leo Marx, something between the apparent disorderliness of wilderness and the extremely structured, built environment of a city.7 Such open, varied, and patterned landscapes continue to appeal to us: in the fields and woods and stone walls of the New England countryside, among other places, and in the pastoral settings of much classic children's literature. We are comfortable with them because we know how to read such landscapes and have no difficulty placing ourselves in them. In the Eden of Paradise Lost, they suggest a world in which Adam and Eve experience not only delight, but also a sense of security, shadowed only by Raphael's warning that they must "stand fast" (8.640) against some future temptation to disobey God's one command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life. Milton's Garden has other, more exotic aspects that make us recognize it as a version of the earthly paradise and not simply a Christianized Arcadia. It offers trees, fruits, and flowers of all kinds, fragrances beyond our normal experience, and growth more luxuriant than one would expect to find. The remarkable fertility and what Arnold Stein called the "authorized excess" of the Garden have long been recognized and have been seen as evidence of an abundance and vitality that distinguish Milton's version of paradise.8 Other earthly paradises have all the conventional features but not this sense of teeming growth. In his initial presentation of the Garden, seen as Satan first views it, Milton describes brooks that water "[f]low'rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art / In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon / Pour'd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain" (4.241-43). The phrase "Pour'd forth profuse," set against the fastidious art of the contemporary gardener, an art of tidy beds and elaborate knot gardens, conveys the fluidity and the sense of [End Page 67] an...

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