186
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of these things; and it's found where variety of effect gives way
to monotony.
If,
when Milton seems to be describing Satan's meta–
morphosis into a serpent, the devils digging gold out of a hill, and the
garden of Paradise (X 556, I 688, IV 268) he is really slapping at
Eve, an extraordinary monotony settles over the poem; and the more
ingenuity one devotes to the argument, the more repetitious its pat–
tern becomes.
If
we suppose ourselves obliged to keep in mind that
Eve is to be identified with Sin, Eden, serpents, vines, Pales, Pomona,
Proserpina, Pandora, Pyrrha, Ceres, Circe, and Pharaoh's daughter,
large sections of the poem will consist of nothing but labored explana–
tions and explorations--indeed, every epithet, every image, every as–
sertion will be the occasion for an adventure in indirection. Now epic
poetry, read in this way, cannot be epic; among the cardinal virtues
of the proper epic are motion, magnitude, sustained narrative line,
typicality of character, and clarity of emotional response. Milton, if
he had expected his poem to be read by detailed analysis of the
imagery, would certainly have written it very differently than he did.
He would not have written an epic at all, he would have written
a Euphuistic romance.
As
it is, he employs frequently the stock
epithet, the conventional adjective, and the broad, swift, fluid tech–
niques of impressionism, eked out with some explicit allegory and
versified sermonizing. His unit of thought and expression, within
which images are fitted and arranged (and from which Empson
vigorously extracts them), is the verse paragraph. He manipulates a
double plot with some
skill,
integrating the fall of Satan with that
of Adam, playing Satan against Christ as champions of their respec–
tive causes, gradually narrowing the limits of his theater and resolving
the vast, awful lights and darks of his myth into the mingled earth–
colors of everyday. The peculiar qualities that Empson looks for in
the poem are undoubtedly there, to some degree; and the fact that
Milton did not intend them may not be particularly important. But
there's something profoundly frustrating about a man who insists on
investigating a giraffe as
if
it were a rabbit oddly botched in the
making.The sort of discoveries that make it a brilliant incarnation of
rabbit are precisely those which get in the way of its being a func–
tioning giraffe. And when the entire animal kingdom has been re–
duced to the category of more or less successful rabbit, a natural
monotony ensues.
