The "Consolatio" in Milton's Funeral Elegies

Abstract

MILTON'S PREOCCUPATION with his role as a Christian poet is plainly reflected in the frequency of his allusions to Heaven. In addition to Paradise Lost some sixteen of the minor poems involve particularized descriptions of Heaven, either as the seat of the Deity or as the abode of the blessed in the future life. Seven poems portray Heaven as the home of the Divinity; in all these poems except Comus the description is introduced to illustrate the capacity of poetry or music to ennoble the ecstatic soul by blending it with the divine harmony, a favorite conception of Milton's. Nine other poems conclude with pictures of Heaven and the future life that are suggested by the topic of death. This paper excludes the visions in Mansus and On Time to focus on the images of Heaven presented in Milton's formal funeral elegies, which span his development from seventeen to thirty. Although in praising Lycidas Paul Elmer More could assert that always rang true when he wrote of the world to come,' we shall see that a convincing treatment of this subject was not easy and that Milton was by no means always successful. Close scrutiny of the considerable problems that these descriptions involved for him may illuminate the vexatious topic of the representation of Heaven in Paradise Lost and throw some interesting sidelights on the central intellectual question posed by the poet's thought: to what degree does his work harmonize Christian and classical influences? Although these problems should not lead us to underestimate the importance of Christian eschatology for the poet's inner religious life,2 the conclusions of the funeral elegies generally do not bespeak the rapt imagination of a Richard Baxter launched upon the grand finale to The Saints Everlasting Rest. Indeed, we must be circumspect in using the descriptions of Heaven as evidence for Milton's religious beliefs. For example, he several times endows the glorified saints with powers of intercession and mediation that, interpreted theologically rather than aesthetically, would make our staunchly Protestant bard a crypto-Catholic. Virtually dictated by the pattern governing the poet writing Christian elegy, the consolatio, as Renaissance rhetoricians like Julius Caesar Scaliger conceived of it, offered the writer a supreme opportunity to 'How to Read Lycidas, Milton's Lycidas: the Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A.

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