Be Beginning to End

Another paper! This one explicates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s (unconventional) sonnet “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” and particularly argues that the poem depicts the approach of the Final Judgment. I’m content with this paper and, at the least, enjoyed the close reading of such a difficult poem. My only real regret is the dearth of footnotes. I include the poem below and would strongly encourage any to read the poem through carefully a few times.

Gerard Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, | her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, | stárs principal, overbend us,

Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth | her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; | self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite

Disremembering, dísmémbering, | áll now. Heart, you round me right

With: Óur évening is over us; óur night | whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,

Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! | Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; | right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these | twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

Be Beginning to End: Ending and Judgment in Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”

“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is a meditation on ends and ending. The close of day propels the poet toward the thought of the very end of all mortal things, the Day of Judgment. The central image of evening in balance between day and night embodies the poem’s tension between the present endings and their final conclusion. This poem works in that tension between the now and not-yet, between a tale and an oracle; Hopkins not only foretells what will end but what is now always ending. The poem serves as a call for himself and his reader to participate in that process: to be beginning to end.

The octave presents the literal image of evening that provides the foundation for the whole poem. The poet looks out at a fading day and describes the frustration of his senses as all things diminish from their sunlit hues to flat greyscale. The poem opens with a lengthy catalogue of epithets that delay evening until the second line; these adjectives build suspense that peaks in the pause before the poet finally settles on stupendous to characterize this evening. There is something of a shock as evening finally gives these modifiers a context. Hopkins shapes an evening here that is first earnest: it has agency; it strains with intensity and seriousness towards night. It is a thing apart from and above the speaker. It is itself in balance between light and dark—the evening is the cusp—and it is able to bring all things into balance, into harmony. After the caesura, vaulty hints at the noun that will come: it captures the arch of the sky over the poet. It is voluminous: not merely large, but literally able to fill volumes of poetry. Yet the evening is clearly incommunicable for the poet slips into an ellipsis that marks a pause and denotes something missing: the volumes unsaid that would clarify this evening so vast and beyond the reaches of the poem. Finally Hopkins settles on stupendous, with its implications of immensity and some of the original Latin’s[1] force of stunning and astounding. This foreshadows the straining of evening to encompass all and become the night that will “whélm” the poet at the close of the octave (8).

When the long-delayed “stupendous / Evening” finally comes, it contextualizes the speaker beneath the sky at the close of the day. The evening is not yet but strains to become night, and the stupendous evening is more cosmic by reaching towards not merely the earth’s night but the vast night of time in two senses at play with each other: this striven-for night belongs to time and yet encompasses time, reaching to be its womb, home, and hearse. This language initiates the apocalyptic implications that will unravel in the sestet, and there are significant echoes of scriptural language from the book of Revelation where God declares himself “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end . . . who is, and who was, and who is to come” (Douay-Rheims, Rev. 1.8). Here, though, the night is pointedly not yet upon Hopkins, and it is important not to let hearse overpower womb and home. While there looms a death, another birth and life likewise remain.

The “fond yellow hornlight wound to the west” (3) is of course the sun that has slipped beneath the horizon pictured as the cloudy light through the horn pane of a lantern, and Hopkins imbues it with all the warmth and familiarity of fond. It is hard not to recall the “last lights off the black West” of “God’s Grandeur” (11), but “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” withholds the promise of an imminent dawn. This warm but vanishing light is balanced above the speaker by the “wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height” (3). This is the pale, blank light of the fading day, not yet the darkened night sky. It is a vast blankness, empty and grey. Hoar further implies an ancientness. This scene is jarred by the verb isolated on the next line: “Waste” (4). These last bastions of day are spending, exhausting themselves and fading into the annihilation of night. With all its implications—of barrenness, wild ruin, and decay—this verb aggressively prepares for the confusion to come. Peter Milward’s otherwise sensitive and insightful commentary on “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” at this point goes astray. He insists rightly that the term emphasizes the sense that “all is but a vast and empty desert” in the gloam, but he then argues that it must be taken as an adjectival description; to take it as a verb “immeasurably weakens its force”, he argues (87). But waste as a modifier would leave this no sentence but a fragment with little sense and less force. It is precisely because this vestige of day is actively, presently wasting that the poet is spurred on to the despondency of the second half of the octave. The action of this poem is the process of ending, and the verb here complements and reiterates that movement.

The night’s way is prepared by the first stars that appear above the poet. These stars are “earliest” (4) at least in appearance on this particularly evening, but perhaps in creation as well. They are “earlstars, | stars principal” (4), stars personified as leaders and nobility, chief among stars. This “Fíre-féaturing heaven” that “overbend[s]” the world is peopled (4-5); principal connects these beings with the angelic principalities. The poet is small beneath these stars that bend over, looking down upon him as if in judgment. That playfulness of Hopkins’s earlier poem “The Starlight Night” is absent here: this evening is sparer than that other night’s “fire-folk sitting in the air” (2). Hopkins likely had in mind the role of stars in Revelation and their close connection to the judgment of God. There, the Apostle John sees omens of the day of “the wrath of the Lamb” when “the sun became black as sackcloth of hair” and “the stars from heaven fell upon the earth” (Rev. 6.12-13, 16). Hopkins’s stars are not yet falling, but they draw ever nearer to the earth with a fiery countenance.

These stars approach and overbend in judgment because, Hopkins tells us, “earth | her being has unbound” (5): confusion reigns below; the poet’s sight is confounded in the gloaming; the earth’s pied beauty is flattened into silver-grey. All things are “as- / tray”, and the line-break severs the very word (5-6). Hopkins turns from the confusion of the natural world to human nature: self, the distinguishing, identifying particularity of a thing, is turned inward, violently dislocating itself from all things and forgetting them. Echoes from Hopkins’s comments on the Spiritual Exercises inform this language: there he speaks of the fall of Lucifer as a turning away from God, an “instressing of his own inscape”; Lucifer raised his own hymn of selfpraise against Christ’s call to praise God “which indeed was a call into being”; Satan’s hymn is joined by other angels becoming “a counterpoint of dissonance and not of harmony” (Sermons 200-201). The poem here also bears echoes of Hopkins’s comment that, in death, “all that energy or instress with which the soul animates and otherwise acts in the body is . . . thrown back upon the soul itself” (Sermons 137). Such moral dissonance, the separation from God, works on the language of “self ín self steeped” and all things “throughther, in throngs” (6).

The structure of rhyme in this octave proffers a counter-voice to the discord and confusion that Hopkins mourns. Even the same violence exemplified by the severing of “as- / tray”, allows for the elaborate rhyme that ties “end, as-” back to the “stupendous / Evening” and the more orderly stars that “overbend us”; the rhyme clings and lingers even when the poet says his night “will end us” in the last line of the octave. Hopkins is able to instress a structure that persists within the chaos of the evening that he sees before him, and this more hopeful seed will flourish in the orderly division of all things in the sestet.

Hopkins’s heart, he says, sees something of that structure and rounds on him. The primary sense of round is to whisper, and it is a whisper that Hopkins affirms is “right” (7). The OED notes the sense of to open or widen the eyes (“round v.2”), and here the poet’s heart is widening his view so that it encompasses not only this particular, literal night, but the world’s last night, the end of all things, that brings with it God’s final judgment. Hopkins marked stresses on both ours, and the effect is to separate him from the chaos of the evening before him, his evening from this particular, literal evening, and the coming night from his all-encompassing night which “whélms, whélms, ánd will end us” (8). The end of day then becomes a picture of the end of all things; the confusion of literal sight and its reduction to monotone shades pictures the moral blindness and the division of all things into black or white that will come to the forefront in the poem’s conclusion.

The “Only” that opens the sestet presents a forceful opposition to all the chaos and confusion of the octave: Hopkins calls himself and us to attend this singular thing. It is also an only of exception: but for this one thing he would patiently await the oncoming night. What demands this attention and exception is a tree that Hopkins sees silhouetting the twilit silver of the sky. Its boughs are “dragonish”, and the poet emphasizes that they are “black, / Ever so black” against the “bleak light” of the sky (9-10). That these boughs are dragonish places them in a distinctly ominous light and reifies the connection to Lucifer discussed above. In those same notes on the fall of Lucifer, Hopkins observes the dragon to be “a type of the Devil to express the universality of his powers” and a symbol of “one who aiming at every perfection ends by being a monster, a ‘fright’” (Sermons 199). These boughs, then, are of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which Satan “[s]elf-trellises” in “The dark-out Lucifer” (2). That tree and the eating of its fruit by Adam and Eve is, in Christian thought, the font of original sin that cuts mankind off from God. Hopkins likewise wrote of the constellation Draco, the sign in the heavens which he takes to represent Satan’s attempt “to possess himself of the sovereignty of things, taking . . . the culmination of the firmament towards the pole, as a throne and post of vantage and so wreathing nature and as it were constricting it to his purposes (as also he wreathed himself in the Garden round the Tree of Knowledge)” (Sermons 198). In Hopkins’s thought, the dragon, Satan, and the Tree are closely intertwined; the devil’s rebellion spans time from before the world’s creation to the Day of Judgment. Here, it interposes itself between the speaker, who stands in the evening on the darkling earth, and the bleak but still illuminating pale light of the firmament. As this light becomes associated with the white and right of the poem’s close, it stands here for God.

Comments from Hopkins’s meditation on Hell further elucidate this image of boughs blotting out the grey light. These damasking branches mirror the effect of what he calls “scapes”, artifacts of thoughts and actions that are the source of the suffering of those in Hell; he says, “Our action leaves in our minds scapes or species, the extreme ‘intention’ or instressing of which would be painful and the pain would be that of fire” (Sermons 136). Pivotal to his idea is that, as creatures of God, we are directed and so strain towards Him; for the fallen, the scapes of sinful actions interpose themselves between us and God and so blot Him out and painfully rebound.

But this constraint and this blindness or darkness will be most painful when it is the main stress or energy of the whole being that is thus balked. This is its strain or tendency towards being, towards good, towards God—being, that is / their own more or continued being, good / their own good, their natural felicity, and God . . . . The one stress or strain then encountered and clashed with the other; for instance the will addressed, ‘at forepitch’, towards beatitude, happiness, in God, with its own act of aversion, with the scape or species, indurated in it, of the act by which it turned aside; the understanding open wide like an eye, towards truth in God, towards light, is confronted by that scape, that act of its own, which blotted out God and so put blackness in the place of light; does not see God but sees that . . . . (Sermons 138-9)

As the poet’s heart rounds him and his vision is widened to see this soon-to-whelm night, he recognizes these scapes of sin that separate him from his God. Hopkins of course is not in Hell, where the lost see nothing but these scapes, but he is an inheritor of the Fall and so must wrestle with his own sin. This same analogy between himself and the lost is present in “I wake and feel” where he says, “I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse” (12-14). The scourge of the lost is utterly to be themselves, to fully realize and perpetually instress their own sin. They are worse off than the poet: he is not cut off from God utterly: the light, though bleak, is not wholly blocked by these dragonish boughs.

This is not merely the poet’s own struggle: the Fall is of all mankind, and these dragonish boughs darken the vision of each man, woman, and child. That it is a general experience will be affirmed by the close connection to the biblical judgment of all mankind in the next few lines of the sestet. In an earlier poem, “The times are nightfall”, Hopkins calls on his readers to deal with their sin. The setting and language of that poem are strikingly similar to “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”: “The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; / The times are winter, watch, a world undone” (1-2). In the midst of this undone world, Hopkins calls his reader to turn to “your world within. / There rid the dragons, root out there the sin” (9-10). This is “Óur tale”, the story of all mankind since the Fall begat original sin. The metrical stress on our makes this tale parallel to “Óur évening” at the close of the sestet. This tale then is of life’s evening when we see as in a glass darkly but with vision enough to distinguish these dragons and begin to end them, to root them out.

Likewise, “óur oracle” corresponds to “óur night”, and it is to this oracle, this prophecy, of the end of things that the poet turns in the concluding lines of the poem. This oracle is spelled out by the leaves that damask the sky, and it is from this image that the poem draws its name. These are the oracles of the Sibyl, scattered to the wind. The closest allusion is to the Dies Irae, the hymn of the day of God’s wrath and judgment. There, the Sibyl is paired with the biblical King David as those who sang of the day when God will judge the quick and the dead, when all hidden things will be revealed. Coupled with the explicit reference to Christ’s own words about his return and his subsequent judgment in the next several lines, this squarely places the sestet in the setting of the biblical apocalypse where all are separated based on their relationship and obedience to God. This oracle looks forward to something far more encompassing than the night of “The times are nightfall”; in that day, the time for rooting out sin will be past, and naught will remain but to join the world in being judged.

The poet calls on his own heart to allow life—now wound down and faded with the sunlight to the West—to unravel, as one would yarn, all of its dappled “variety” according to its general color: black or white. What of life has hitherto been bundled up together in the poet’s actions and heart, he calls to be separated out on two spools. This consummates the octave’s image of twilight: in the last vestiges of light, the particular shapes and shades of a thing are indiscernible; what can be made out is merely a thing’s barest shape, its barest reality. It is or is not: has being or is not-being. Here that being is toward God, or it is the blackness of not-being, privation, away from Him. This variety being divided is also, given its biblical background, people: souls pitched toward or away from God. The whole passage depends on that binary opposition: either/or—one spool or the other—with nothing outside or in between. Hopkins calls for Christ’s words to be fulfilled: “He that is not with me, is against me; and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth” (Luke 11.23). He again calls on himself to participate in this, to be an agent of the Judge: “párt, pen, páck” all into “twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; | right, wrong” (11-12). The language drawn from shepherding is rampant throughout scripture, and it ties the sestet back to all things “astray” in the octave. These flocks then are primarily people and secondarily the activities that move the agent either toward or away from God. The good and bad actions of a person are intimately bound up with their being, their self, and are definitive of their relationship to God and their eternal existence. Hopkins wrote,

God is good and the stamp, seal, or instress he sets on each scape is of right, good, or of bad, wrong. Now the sinner who has preferred his own good, as revenge, drunkenness, to God’s good, true good, and God, has that evil between him and God, by his attachment to which and God’s rejection of it he is carried and swept away to an infinite distance from God; and the stress and strain of his removal is his eternity of punishment. (Sermons 139)

The tension between moral good and evil plays out in the rhythm. The two sets—“bláck, white” and “ríght, wrong” are each metrical feet, and both black and right have stresses marked. White and wrong do not easily take a slack, however, and the rhyme between white and right invites a weight there that black and wrong lack. It is fitting that this tension in the rhythm exists here for in dividing up souls, actions, and things in this manner, both the pied beauty of things and the variety that is a valuable good are sacrificed for that ultimate division between right and wrong, yes and no.

Again, this separation of things is both a tale and an oracle: now and not-yet. Now, the speaker may labor to divide the actions in his own life, his own heart. He may engage in the ending, the winding down of things and begin, in small, to separate his chaff from his wheat. The language of shepherding is particularly apposite given Hopkins’s responsibilities as a pastor, shepherding the flock of Christians. From these sheep comes the wool and yarn that provide the metaphor in the sestet. The oracle presages a day to come: that final day about which Christ spoke “when the Son of man shall come in his majesty . . . . And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left” (Matt. 25.31-33). Christ gave the terrible warning that for those who failed to do justice or charity to the least among mankind, there waits the “everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” (25.41). This is the primary sense of the close of the poem. Hopkins calls himself to let all things—him included—be separated in this manner, to resist the chaotic blending and confusion of the octave, the ramifying effects of the Fall. The night that will end him brings with it the final division, when he and all things will be separated to or against God.

That dreadful end appears vividly to the poet who, in his meditation on Hell, sought to “see with the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth and depth of hell” and experience “an interior sense of pain which the lost suffer, so that if I should through my faults forget the love of the Eternal Lord, at least the fear of punishment may help me not to fall into sin” (Sermons 135-36). In this exercise, he aimed to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the suffering of those in Hell. The reality of his imagination permeates the meditation, and it inspires the warning to heed nothing in life but these two flocks: “reckon but, reck but, mind / But thése two” (12-13). This warning is threefold: to measure out or count out all into these two, to heed and to concern oneself with only these two, and to take thought after or to hold in the mind only these two. The significant semantic overlap between these terms enforces the seriousness behind the poet’s call. He continues to admonish himself and his reader both to beware and to be aware of the world of the Day of Judgment where these two flocks will “tell, each off the óther”—that is, where they will count off of the other: an addition to one is a detraction from the other (13). Every son and daughter of Adam will be reckoned up in one of these two flocks: the poet’s somber warning is to heed which flock it is that we stray towards.

Ware takes a second direct object: a rack. The rack consummates the rhymes begun by pack and black, and the consonantal violence of reckon and reck; it pointedly puns on wrack. Here Hopkins shows us the ruin of the lost. On this rack are thoughts: the thoughts wring themselves, tortured by the instressing of the scapes of their own sin; they string themselves by their own aversion from God and even constitute the rack on which their selfishness strings them; they are disembodied, unable to find shelter, unable to escape their selves. Like Milton’s Satan and Hopkins’s own Caradoc, they and their actions are themselves their Hell. Hopkins wrote that “in man all that energy or instress with which the soul animates and otherwise acts in the body is by death thrown back upon the soul itself”, and here that violence grinds them (Sermons 137). This is the final equivalent to the octave’s earlier “self ín self steeped and páshed—qúite / Disremembering, dismembering | áll now” (6-7). On this rack, we are shown the lost synecdochically as thoughts: from a whole person the body is torn away, and the spirit is reduced to only the thoughts that are its torture, its godlessness. The blending of spiritual and physical in the thoughts which “agaínst thoughts ín groans grind” (14) is characteristic of Hopkins’s view of Hell where the lost suffer sensibly through the “intellectual imagination” (Sermons 136). The instressing of themselves—their own sin—is their rack. For those who say no to God, who strive after the black and the wrong, this end realizes fully their disobedience. With this dreadful warning of what end awaits the lost in that final day, the poet concludes the sonnet.

Hopkins introduced his meditation on Hell by noting all the different classes among the lost, and he states his intent to make “a Colloquy with Christ our Lord . . .  therewith to give Him thanks because He has not permitted me to fall into any of these classes by putting an end to my life” (Sermons 136). In light of the inextricable relationship between the language and imagery of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” and this meditation, it is important to emphasize with Hopkins the sharp divide he draws between himself and the lost. As wholly as he enters imaginatively into the experience of that place, he is not of it and does not remain there. It rightly spurs him on to holiness as it never does for the truly lost. For all the spiritual struggles that his darker sonnets convey, Hopkins does not abandon himself to Hell. Unfortunately, some critics have proven all too ready to read Hopkins as the primary victim of the rack in the last two lines of this poem. While thoughtful in his analysis, Raymond V. Schoder reads the poem so and therefore misses the thrust of the eschatological language. Schoder sees in the close of this sonnet a poet who, in response to the whelming night, “must no longer fear or struggle against this darkness in his mind and soul. Rather he must understand and accept it, even welcome it as an implicit promise of a coming, however distant, dawn” (645). The final rack is “of his own bitter meditations” that he is wrung upon willingly, argues Schoder (645). The poem resists such a reading. The black (actually of the boughs silhouetting the pale evening, not of the night) is a moral darkness, against which Hopkins would certainly continue to struggle. And, again, the rack is so closely connected to Hopkins’s thoughts on Hell that it seems beyond belief to think that he would consider himself truly stretched upon it. In context, the rack exists first in an oracle; it is not a present, personal torment that he here describes.

I join Robert Boyle, contra Schoder, in finding “no ring whatever of relief, patience, or resignation” in these concluding lines (141). Boyle helpfully and respectfully corrects some of Schoder’s interpretation where it goes astray, but, like Schoder, he reduces the eschatological force of the sestet and finds Hopkins presently on the rack: “He strings himself,” says Boyle, “to resist that torture, that wringing, which he himself inflicts on himself” (142). The earth unbounding her being and falling into darkness is not a normal law of the spiritual life and so not a model for Hopkins, as Schoder argues: Boyle takes it to be precisely that falling into night that Hopkins must resist so terribly and painfully. He must fight the “advance of self-induced darkness, hanging on to what is left of day” (142); his “thoughts would not grind together in his heart if he would loosen the tension . . . if he would relax into being a rebellious or disloyal man . . . and give up reaching for a share in God’s life” (143). This unfortunately misconstrues the pivotal difference between the night of the octave that will end us, and the blackness of the dragonish boughs in the sestet that blot but have no clear movement within the poem: they do not whelm as does the night. The poet’s statement (with the definite modal auxiliary will) does not seem to leave room for the resistance to the night that Boyle finds, and there is little room to wiggle in the poet’s clear and firm assertion of what night will bring: conclusion and judgment. Nor does such a reading easily make sense of the sestet as an oracle of that future world which informs the central emotion of this passage. Where Boyle wants to read only a present reality in this image, the poet looks at the future spelt upon these leaves. It is precisely the consummation of all things that are presently ending that is so arresting about this final world and this rack.

“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” depicts endings: the end of day and dapple that draws Hopkins’s thoughts to the final end of all mortal things. Not merely descriptive, the poet calls himself and his reader to be beginning to end, to engage in that divisive process of all things towards or away from God. It is this ultimate end that the poet instresses in the strain of evening towards night, in the confusion of all things in the growing darkness, and in the scapes of his own and of all mankind’s sin that stand between us and God. The eschatological language is primary in this poem and so must be read as central to interpret rightly. However conclusive, the poet does not despair for this ever ending world but spurs himself and his readers to end rightly, to divide up all things, and await in readiness the end that will come like a thief in the night.

 

 

 

Works cited

Boyle, Robert. Metaphor in Hopkins: “That Small Commonweal”. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina, 1961. Print.

Douay-Rheims Bible. Ed. Richard Challoner. 1752. Sacred-texts.com. Web. 2 December 2015.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed.

Christopher Devlin, S.J.. New York: Oxford, 1959. Print.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Major Works. Ed. Catherine Phillips. New York: Oxford,

2009. Print.

—. “God’s Grandeur”. 128.

—. “No Worst”. 167.

—. “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”. 175.

—. “The dark-out Lucifer”. 129.

—. “The times are nightfall”. 161.

Milward, Peter. Landscape and Inscape: “Wild Hollow Hoarlight”. Grand Rapids: William B

Eerdmans, 1975. Print.

“round, v.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2015. Web. 25 November 2015.

Schoder, Raymond V. “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”. Thought 19 (1944): 633-648. Print.

“stŭpĕo”. Simpson, D. P. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary: Latin-English, English-Latin. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977. 146. Print

 

[1] From stupendus, the gerund form of stupēre, “to be stunned, struck senseless” (“stŭpĕo”).

A Paper on Pope

 

The following paper constitutes the term paper for my Intro to Literary Studies class taken in the Fall of 2015. The class used Alexander Pope’s Dunciad as a test case for disparate kinds of scholarly work. The poem ostensibly is a mock-epic that depicts the spread of Dulness (a goddess) and her victory of English culture. This paper deals with a number of interesting issues, but it also remains unpolished in several areas. I’ll admit that I struggled to acquire the required number of secondary sources, and some of my citations are superficial at best. Nonetheless:

The Limits of Allusion: Pope’s use of Milton in The Dunciad Book IV

It is difficult to delineate the limits of Pope’s allusions to Milton in The Dunciad, particularly in Book IV where Pope uses Milton as a principal ingredient to concoct the universal darkness with which his poem closes. Pope alludes to Milton at critical points in Book IV that shape the tone and character of the restoration Dulness, and he carefully constructs these allusions in ways that balance satirical comedy with satirical seriousness. There are, in general, two different categories of his allusions to Milton, though they admit of some overlap. Pope uses these different types of allusions both to establish and to limit the extent to which Milton’s work influences The Dunciad’s depiction of Dulness and her dunces. Pope exerts a meticulous control, building his own limitations into these allusions so that they achieve precisely the effect needed at any given time to shape Dulness and her dunces in both their diabolical danger and comic blundering.

These two types of allusions I call atmospheric allusions and thematic allusions. The most significant distinction between these two types rests in the use to which Pope puts his Miltonic sources. The atmospheric allusions, in general, work to recapitulate the atmosphere of the poem: they are generally comic, undercutting the dunces by comparison to Miltonic characters. These work to create the setting of The Dunciad in which the dunces are constantly undermined by the epic precedents. They are also somewhat superficial in their reach back into the original Miltonic context. To some extent, of course, the degree to which any particular reader will be able or inclined to read back into the original context of these Miltonic allusions will vary, but Pope, in this type of allusion, does not draw deeply on his Miltonic source and in fact intentionally limits them. These allusions rely on the familiar mock-epic mode that Pope demonstrated most clearly in The Rape of the Lock. Allusions of the second type, the thematic allusions, are meticulously crafted to do more than invite that mock-epic comparison. They selectively imbue Pope’s poem with the thematic cosmos of Milton’s works—Paradise Lost primarily, but other minor works as well. Pope uses this second type to help shape the tone of Book IV, particularly in regard to the menace Dulness represents and the book’s apocalyptic conclusion. It is the Miltonic background of Chaos and Night that provides the foundation on which Pope builds the overwhelming darkness of Dulness and so dramatically closes his poem.

The main difference that arises between these two categories is primarily of extent not kind. That is, the effect these Miltonic allusions have is carefully controlled by how much of Milton Pope lets into his own poem. In the first category—the atmospheric allusions—Pope selectively restricts his language to allow only allusively the discrepancy, for instance, between dunce and devil. The effect is typically to belittle a dunce by the comic divide between him and the Miltonic original. In the thematic allusions—the second category—Pope draws more deeply out of Milton’s context (usually from Paradise Lost) to shape the menacing, ominous tone of poem’s concluding book. Pope, in these allusions, does not so much borrow from Milton as he does manipulate both the Miltonic original and his reader’s impression of his Miltonic original to manufacture the apocalyptic tone of Book IV.

This distinction helps navigate two contrary tendencies among some of the scholarship that addresses the question of Pope’s Miltonic allusions. On one side is the method of interpretation best exemplified by Aubrey Williams’s classic analysis presented in Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning. He focused his critical attention on Dulness as a distinctly Satanic and diabolical force, a being bent on “the uncreating of creation, the disordering of order” (137) as he says; the world of Dulness is, he argues, “a negation of the world as known in Christian doctrine” (155). The Miltonic allusions, in his view, relate Dulness to Milton’s Chaos and Night, and consistently identify her with Milton’s Satan; all this makes Dulness an explicitly anti-Christian force. If the tone of his argument occasionally has more in common with Warburton than with Pope, it remains that he makes a compelling case that has proven influential for over half a century. Williams’s method, however, in its tendency toward systemization, flattens the differences between allusions and downplays the comic element that pervades nearly all of them. On the other side of the critical playing field, contra Williams, are critics such as Dustin Griffin who, in his Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century, argues that the Miltonic allusions “on the whole . . . are designed to be largely comic, to belittle the dunces, or to recall the old view (present in Paradise Lost) that even the devil . . . is an ass” (174). He astutely recognizes the instability of Pope’s Miltonic referents: Pope’s willingness to associate—sometimes in the same passage—a given dunce with multiple Miltonic characters works against the kind of neat systemization that Williams propounds. In his view, this effect is overwhelmingly to mock the dunces: “Pope primarily wants us to see the dunces as comic bumblers” (177). Both Williams and Griffin recognize elements at work in some of Pope’s Miltonic allusions, but they both err towards extremes by making one type of allusion or the other too dominant. Explication of several examples of both these different types of allusions will illuminate the intermixed, cooperative comic and diabolical elements that permeate this apocalyptic final book.

The Atmospheric Allusions

Pope’s atmospheric allusions to Milton frequently function in Book IV by establishing a typical mock-epic relationship between the characters and actions of his dunces and the characters and actions of Milton’s poems. Representative examples are manifest throughout the fourth book of The Dunciad, though it is worth noting that this type is prevalent throughout the first three books as well. A definitive characteristic of these allusions is the way that Pope restricts how much of the Miltonic context appears in his own poem. He is careful to shape the perception of these allusions and evoke his intended response. A pertinent example comes from the central portion of Book IV when Busby, the schoolmaster, proceeds before Dulness. The poet says,

. . . a Spectre rose, whose index-hand

Held forth the Virtue of the dreadful wand;

His beaver’d brow a birchen garland wears,

Dropping with Infant’s blood, and Mother’s tears. (4.139-42)

This draws its rather grim force from the first book of Paradise Lost where Milton depicts the demon and false-god Moloch, described as a

horrid King besmear’d with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,

Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud

Their childrens’ cries unheard, that past through fire

To his grim Idol. (1.392-6)

Pope does a couple of interesting and characteristic things in adapting this Miltonic demon for his purposes. First, Pope takes from this Miltonic passage only two words directly—“blood” and “tears”—and varies it from Milton’s “blood / Of human sacrifice” to “Infant’s blood”; from “parents’ tears” to “Mother’s tears”. In so doing, he pointedly controls the degree to which Milton’s Moloch interposes itself onto his own characterization of Busby. The mock-epic contrast is rooted first and foremost in the disproportion between Moloch and Busby: for all Busby’s reputation for discipline, he was not an infanticide. That disproportion signals clearly that he is drawing on another source. This allusion continues a larger trend of associating dunces with Miltonic demons; it gives an initial impression of menace to this particular dunce that mars the way we view his character even when he speaks of more mundane verbal, educational pedantry; but, significantly, it dramatically undercuts the dunce by begging a comparison to a demon and false god who literally had infants burnt on his altars. This dual effect—making Busby more menacing than he really was by this connection, and simultaneously undermining it by the disproportion between the dunce and the demon—is characteristic of Pope’s Miltonic allusions throughout the whole poem and particularly the fourth book. This mock-epic tension gives the allusion its force and creates that primary comic effect. Rather than, as Williams argued, showing that “dunce and devil, in grotesque confederacy, pursue the same ‘intent’” (137), this mock-epic parallel finally places the dunce in a laughably trite light.

Several brief examples of these mock-epic atmospheric allusions will bear out these points. Two dunces from the central part of Book IV are characterized with reference to Miltonic characters: the butterfly chaser (lines 420-436) is tied to Eve, and the deistic clerk (lines 459-492) ties his actions to Satan leaping into the Garden. In this first example, the butterfly chaser describes his actions: “It fled, I follow’d; now in hope, now pain; / It stopt, I stopt; it mov’d, I mov’d again” (4.427-28). His language invites a comparison between his actions and those of Eve, shortly after her creation, when she encounters her reflection in the water, ignorant of what she sees. She says,

As I bent down to look, just opposite,

A Shape within the watery gleam appeared

Bending to look on me, I started back,

It started back, but pleas’d I soon returned,

Pleas’d it returned as soon with answering looks

Of sympathy and love . . . . (Milton 4.460-65)

Both the dunce and Eve share an immoderate attraction toward something beautiful, and in Milton’s poem Eve is swiftly corrected by an angel to attend to Adam, not herself. The disproportion, however, between Eve’s human, feminine beauty in its perfect state before the Fall is such a higher type of beauty that this dunce’s obsession with the butterfly appears absurd. More, he is not corrected in his mistake—Dulness lauds him for his actions, in fact (4.437-38)—and he destroys other beauty (a flower) in his pursuit of this butterfly.

The deistic clerk follows this dunce and at length describes his efforts to undermine belief in the Christian God. In this process of replacing God with “some Mechanic Cause” (4.475) he and those like him “at one bound o’er-leaping all his laws, / Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause” (4.477-78). This alludes to Satan’s entrance into the Garden of Eden:

Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt,

At one slight bound high over leap’d all bound

Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within

Lights on his feet. (Milton 4.180-83)

The disproportion between Satan and this deistic dunce is less pronounced here: both are working against God in some fashion. It is not entirely alleviated, however, for Satan in this passage is making his way into the Garden to effect the Fall of the entire human race and separate mankind from God; the dunce is propounding bad metaphysics. While this allusion highlights a real menace on the part of the dunce, it continues the mock-epic tendency of undermining the seriousness of the dunce in question by apparent elevation—association with Satan at one of his most insidious moments.

Both of these atmospheric allusions rely on that mock-epic mode to shape the poem’s portrayal of the dunces in light of the Miltonic precedent and perpetuate the general attitude of the poem towards the dunces. Neither, however, makes the dunces seem any more menacing because of the connection to Miltonic character than they otherwise would have. That restricted influence is exemplary of Pope’s careful control, as a more pointed example will further illustrate.

This example of an atmospheric allusion—one not of this mock-epic type—will further demonstrate the careful control Pope exerts over Milton in these allusions. The most salient example of this appears early in Book IV: to the opening lines, Pope’s Bentley comments on the poet’s prayer “half to shew, half veil the deep Intent” (4.4) by saying that this deep intent he “durst not fully reveal, and doubtless in divers verses (according to Milton) ‘more is meant than meets the ear’ (4.4n). This passage is overt and explicit in bringing Milton into The Dunciad, it borrows from Milton’s passage a tone of mystery and suspense, and it is far removed in tone and meaning from Milton’s original context. The passage comes from Milton’s poem “Il Penseroso”, a poem on poetic melancholy personified. Here in this passage, Milton refers to other writers, primarily Spenser, who wrote “Of Turneys and of Trophies hung; / Of Forests, and inchantments drear, / Where more is meant then meets the ear”; this is first and foremost a comment on Edmund Spenser’s use of allegory (118-20). While Milton’s poem closes with a prayer for, he says, “something like prophetic strain” (174), there is nothing particularly cosmic or ominous in Milton’s original. This passage addresses poetic technique and has no sinister or ominous significance at its root. Pope’s Bentley—who is of course the butcher of Paradise Lost in Pope’s view—notably uses Milton badly. His pointed eisegesis of this passage allows Pope to imbue his own poem with a sense of religious mystery that accompanies Dulness’s appearance at the beginning of this book. That “more is meant then meets the ear” in Pope’s context rings of secrets lying in wait for the reader.

From these representatives of the atmospheric allusions, it is clear that the Miltonic allusions often have surprisingly little to do with the most duncical aspects of the dunces, and the dunces have little in common with the Miltonic referents. In this last example, for instance, it is Busby’s pedantry that he offers to Dulness and which is most offensive to Pope, not his harsh corporal punishment which is highlighted by the Miltonic allusion. This same trait is exemplified by Aristarchus’s description which contains several allusions to Paradise Lost: his face is “plow’d” by his Remarks, like Beelzebub’s and Satan’s; more importantly, he “kingly, did but nod” (4.207) to Dulness while her other dunces bow, as Adam bows to the angel Raphael who, in reply, “Kingly from his state / Inclin’d not” (Milton 11.249-50). This certainly reflects Aristarchus’s duncish pride, but that, again, is not the primary concern that Pope has with him. It is Aristarchus’s pedantic obsession with digammas and other such trivial things that concerns Pope. Likewise, the Pseudo-Bentley’s footnote early in the book shows how willing Pope is to use Milton even when their respective works have little in common, little that would readily bear comparison. It is a testament to his abilities as an artist and craftsman that Pope is able to make Milton relevant to his own purposes and imbue Milton’s words with his own poem’s atmosphere. Valerie Rumbold, in her thorough article “Milton’s Epic and Pope’s Satyr Play”, rightly notes how difficult it is “to impose on actual instances of echo and allusion” like these the “solemnity” that Williams sees as primary (151). It is precisely the (often comic) disparity between Pope and Milton, between dunce and demon, which makes these allusions as rhetorically effective as they are.

The Thematic Allusions

Allusions of the second kind begin and end Book IV: they are more substantial and much more closely related to the cosmic and menacing tone with which Pope paints Dulness in this final book. The term thematic allusion is appropriate to emphasize that these allusions use Milton’s thematic context—primarily from Paradise Lost—to shape the thematic tone of Pope’s poem, particularly in Book IV. Without letting Miltonic contexts overwhelm his own, Pope draws on them to evoke a particular response from his readers and shape our perception of Dulness and her minions. It is through these allusions that Pope establishes the apocalyptic tone that is coextensive with the conclusion to his poem. In “On Looking into Pope’s Milton”, Barbara K. Lewalski pointedly notes how the addition of book four to The Dunciad provided Pope with a “new focus” that “brings Miltonic materials pertaining to Chaos, Ancient Night, God, the Son, and Satan into prominence” (41-2). Pope’s poem becomes more cosmic, more mythic: “this is no longer mock-epic” Lewalski argues, “it is at least in part an anti-epic of demonic epic, a Paradise Lost with the dark powers wholly triumphant” (42). She overstates her case in saying the four-book Dunciad has none of the mock-epic left in it, but its allusions clearly go far beyond that. It is worth reiterating that these thematic allusions are not wholly different in kind than the atmospheric allusions discussed above: what sets this second category apart is the extensive use that Pope gets out of them and the degree to which he lets the Miltonic context interact with his poem.

Book IV opens with a passage steeped in Miltonic characters and ideas: there are at least four Miltonic references within the first twenty lines and its notes[1]. The opening lines of Book IV are at a sensitive position where they profoundly influence the thematic tone of the rest of the book. Taking advantage of this, Pope draws from Milton extensively here: he layers allusions within allusions in a manner that explicitly connects his poem to Milton’s without leaving the bounds that he sets. In lieu of the traditional invocation to the Muse, the poet opens with a call to the parents of Dulness. He says,

Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light

Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!

Of darkness visible so much be lent, 

As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent.

Ye Pow’rs! Whose mysteries restor’d I sing,

To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing[2],

Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,

Then take at once the Poet and the Song. (4.1-8)

Note first that he calls on Milton’s Chaos and Night. This evokes, quite purposefully, the whole ethos of Milton’s world outside of God and God’s creation. Chaos, for Milton, exists in this primordial abyss, in some sense external and prior to God’s creative activity. It is a return to this pre-creative state that Satan promises in return for passage through Chaos to earth. From the realm of Chaos come what Milton calls the “dark materials” (2.916) out of which God creates all things. Satan, as he looks into this abyss, sees “The secrets of the hoarie deep” (2.891), and these secrets inform the “mysteries restor’d” of which Pope sings. Before he actually journeys into the abyss, Satan describes Night who, should anyone dare enter her realm, “receives him next / Wide gaping, and with utter loss of being / Threatens him, Plung’d in that abortive gulf” (2.439-42). Pope has echoed this language throughout The Dunciad in speaking of Dulness and the dunces’ anti-creative labors: consider Cibber, in a “vast profound,” around whom “much Embryo, much Abortion lay” (1.118-121). Pope pointedly does not put forward his own counterparts to Chaos and Night that would allow for the comic disparity seen in the atmospheric allusions: Chaos and Night here remain purely Miltonic. All of this material at work behind this invocation charges Pope’s context with implications of Milton’s realm of Chaos.

Pope goes a step further, for he calls on Chaos and Night to “one dim Ray of Light / Indulge” (4.1-2), parodying Milton’s invocation to Light at the opening of Book III of Paradise Lost. There, Milton says,

Hail holy light, offspring of Heav’n first-born,

Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam

May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,

And never but in unapproached light

Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,

Bright effluence of bright essence increate. (Milton PL 3.1-6)

At first glance, the contrast—that mock-epic disjunction—between the two invocations gives Pope’s passage some of its force. Pope invokes the parents of Dulness rather than Dulness herself just as Milton invokes Light rather than God. Milton of course recognizes the divide between himself and God, and his physical blindness further informs the discrepancy between himself and Light. Pope, too, recognizes his weakness and inability to act before Chaos, Night, and Dulness, for they will “take at once the Poet and the Song” (4.8). More, the light that he invokes turns out to be the same “darkness visible” that paradoxically illuminates Milton’s Hell (1.63). But Pope’s passage goes beyond this mock-epic tension: the elaborate, multi-layered allusions signal something much more significant is at work here. By so variously connecting Dulness and his own poetic inspiration to Milton’s Chaos, Night, and Hell, Pope thoroughly charges the opening of this book with the thematic cosmos of Paradise Lost. The key difference between this allusion and the earlier atmospheric allusions is that the extended identification of the duncical with the Miltonic prevents any discrepancy between the two from wholly undercutting Pope’s material. There is not the clear disproportion between them seen in the example of Busby, for instance. While the mock-epic relationship is superficially established, it is not allowed to come to fruition and control the relationship between Pope’s original and his Miltonic referent. Instead, the Miltonic here carefully informs Pope’s world, identifying his Dulness with all the grim terror of Milton’s Chaos and Night.[3] Dulness, as she expands and begins to overwhelm philosophy, religion, and culture, is not undercut in any clear way by Chaos, Night, and Hell as happens to Busby by Moloch. Dulness is a near equal to her parents.

An allusion at the cusp of the triumph of Dulness towards the close of Book IV corroborates the points above and will help develop them further. Again, at a sensitive location in the action of the poem, this other elaborate Miltonic allusion helps Pope control his reader’s perspective on Dulness as she begins to bring all culture under her sway. After Dulness yawns and Britain begins to fall to sleep, Pope calls on the Muse to help him recount those who drift off. He says,

O Muse! relate (for you can tell alone,

Wits have short Memories, and Dunces none)

Relate, who first, who last resign’d to rest;

Whose Heads she partly, whose completely blest . . . . (4.619-23)

First, this is particularly funny in the way it exemplifies its own claim: Pope repeats himself, as if, by the end of his parenthetical statement, he’s forgotten that he already called on the Muse to relate. But something of a more serious undertone draws its force from Paradise Lost where Milton portrays the fallen angels, recently cast out of Heaven into Hell, as they begin to wake. Milton says,

Say, Muse, their Names then known, who first, who last,

Rous’d from the slumber, on that fiery Couch

At their great Emperor’s call. . . . (1.376-78)

At work here is a distinct inversion (but not primarily a comic parody) of the Miltonic source material. Milton shows us the fallen angels after days of lying senseless on the floor of Hell as they begin to rouse and recover from that terrible blow of God’s wrath. It is notably Satan’s call that causes them to stir. Pope’s Dulness plays the role of God, not punishing but blessing; her dunces are faithful to her, not rebellious, and they fall to slumber where the demons after falling into Hell rise again. But the allusions to Dulness-as-Satan are not completely forgotten, and she here inverts Satan’s call to wake the demons: she yawns and puts them to sleep. While this allusion is less elaborate than that which opens the fourth book, it draws a close parallel between the actions of these two poems and their principal characters. There is certainly a first-blush comic element borne out of the image of Dulness putting to sleep, but where this in a different context might remain merely a mock-epic parody, the somber reality that this is the death of culture prevents that comic aspect from being fully realized. This, again at particularly sensitive point in The Dunciad, draws on the likewise particularly sensitive first introduction to Satan and the other devils in Paradise Lost. Addison, Pope’s contemporary, had noted in his papers for the Spectator that this passage in Milton is pivotal in shaping the whole view of Satan (170). Pope then inverts the whole structure of Paradise Lost in The Dunciad by concluding with the parallel image of Dulness at the very close of his

It is this type of allusion that forms the bedrock of Aubrey Williams’s assessment of the poem, and they rebut Griffin’s attempt to find in Pope’s Miltonic allusions solely depictions of the dunces as laughingstocks. It is not merely or firstly comedy that is at work in these thematic allusions. In his Preface to Pope, I.R.F. Gordon aptly describes the conclusion of Book IV as particularly diabolical: “Dullness’s victory has a profoundly evil, even Satanic force. She is the ‘great Anarch’ just as Satan in Paradise Lost, which was never very far from Pope’s mind, is the ‘great Adversary’” (157). He rightly notes the palpable sense of evil in the last lines of the poem. Dulness’s call to sleep closely ties her to Satan’s actions and likewise inverts God’s call into being from Genesis. Gordon unhappily misidentifies Pope’s epithet in the last couplet of the poem, for the Anarch there is certainly Milton’s Chaos, not Satan, but rather than softening the diabolical seriousness of Dulness, this identification further solidifies Pope’s intentional association between Dulness’s victory and Milton’s realm of Chaos. It also undercuts Wiliams’s tendency to identify Dulness and Satan on a consistent one-to-one basis, but Dulness’s opposition to the creative order of Milton’s God is even stronger than Gordon and Williams believe.

 The Limits of Allusion

Some via media is needed between critics who follow Williams’s interpretive methodology and those, on the other hand, like Griffin, who too narrowly focus on the comic. In the latter camp, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., for example, argues that even at its most cosmic The Dunciad’s anti-creative strain—a strain so thoroughly informed by Milton—functions “satirically rather than metaphysically” (266). At odds with Gordon cited above, Damrosch unwaveringly insists that “a genuinely Satanic vision of evil [is] absent from the Dunciad” (266). Such a view, however, cannot save the appearances of Pope’s elaborate integration of his Dulness with Milton’s Chaos and Night. As Frederick Keener has observed in his insightful comments on The Dunciad in An Essay on Pope, even at this grim end Pope may still call upon one muse, Satyr, who has not wholly fallen prey to Dulness, and she is still “somehow capable of beneficent action” (99). It is a satire, however, of an impending metaphysical doom, and Pope alternately brings to bear Miltonic seriousness and his own comedy in crafting this conclusive book. By paying close attention to the nuances among Pope’s allusions to Milton and parsing the differences between these two categories of allusions, perhaps the first few steps toward a middle way can be found.

From only the few examples discussed above (though they are largely representative of Pope’s use of Milton) what seems most striking is the careful control Pope exerts on each Miltonic allusion to attain precisely the effect most useful to his poem and his themes at any given moment. Pope sharply delineates what of Milton’s original material is allowed into The Dunciad: in the atmospheric allusions, the Miltonic is sharply curbed and often far removed from its original context: recall how little Pope actually borrows from Milton in his description of Busby. In the thematic allusions, Pope draws much more deeply but still carefully shapes the Miltonic themes even as he adopts and utilizes them. Pope is, if nothing else, a careful craftsman. Williams’s view rests on the basic assumption that Milton’s themes enter into The Dunciad whenever Pope alludes to Milton, but such is simply not the case: Pope always limits and controls his uses of Milton.

Another example of an atmospheric allusion from early in Book IV demonstrates this. Coming before her dunces, the poet tells us that Dulness “mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal’d, / In broad Effulgence all below reveal’d” (4.17-18). This reiterates an image Pope has used throughout the poem of Dulness clouded, but this passage in particular recalls Satan upon his return to Hell after successfully tempting Adam and Eve: He “invisible / Ascended his high Throne” and then “At last as from a Cloud his fulgent head / And shape Star-bright appear’d” (Milton 10.444-45, 449-50). The obvious parallels invite contrast: Satan here returns thinking himself victorious, expecting the resounding cheers of his compatriot devils. What greets him, however, is a hiss as they all are transformed to serpents. In The Dunciad, the poet has explicitly told us that he sings now of Dulness’s triumph and she likewise, thinking herself victorious, is enthroned. This is exemplary of Pope’s portrayal of Dulness as a diabolical force: he sticks closely to the Satanic precedent in Dulness’s appearance and action. While this particular allusion does not rely on the typical mock-epic disproportion, much of the seriousness is sharply undercut by the ribaldry inherent in the clouds concealment of her face only while, it is implied, her nether regions are exposed. This inversion—for of course it is Satan’s head that is revealed in the Miltonic original—sharply limits how much of Satan’s character enters into Dulness’s portrayal by the inclusion of this ridiculous element. In its context within The Dunciad, this occurs at a serious moment when otherwise the emphasis is on the impending apocalypse that attends to Dulness’s empire restored. Pope is able to use a Satanic allusion—which at first blush should recapitulate that apocalyptic seriousness—to soften Dulness’s diabolical victory with a comic effect.

The same careful control is apparent in the first eight lines of Book IV discussed above. This thematic allusion—or rather this cluster of allusions—importantly establishes much of the cosmic tone of Book IV through its Miltonic referents, as discussed above. In the midst of that passage, however, Pope leaves the epic precedent of Paradise Lost:

Ye Pow’rs! Whose mysteries restor’d I sing,

To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,

Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,

Then take at once the Poet and the Song. (4.5-8)

The sixth line leaves the context of Paradise Lost and echoes Sonnet VII by Milton in which he bemoans “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, / Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!” (1-2). Despite little to show for increasing age, Milton defends himself by saying that he is led “To that same lot, however mean or high, / Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven” (11-12). Pope’s echo is subtle, borrowing obliquely the notion of a winged Time leading toward something significant. As Pope makes use of this sonnet, it serves a variety of functions, not the least of which is simply to interrupt the otherwise menacing allusions to Paradise Lost with a much more mundane allusion to Milton’s birthday. At least part of Milton’s concern in his sonnet regards poetic achievement or lack thereof; his response at the end of the sonnet is that such things are in the hands of Heaven. Pope adopts this subject of poetic achievement, and this Miltonic allusion helps to shift from Chaos and Night to Pope himself. He draws attention to his act of singing and to his impending defeat: Chaos and Night shall “take at once the Poet and the Song”. The effect of this allusion is first to jar rather violently, for it stands in stark contrast to the preceding allusions to Paradise Lost. That jarring distracts from the cosmic implications of Chaos and Night that Pope raises in the first two couplets.

Something akin to the mock-epic disproportion is at work here, though Pope does not blatantly mock himself nor is Milton’s sonnet at all an epic precedent. Pope is being swept toward these powers of Chaos, Night, and Dulness, and his poetic achievement is this selfsame Dunciad; Milton is swept toward some fate predestined by Heaven, and his poetic achievement, in retrospect, is Paradise Lost. That tension between Pope and Milton is only the secondary effect, though, and the first is, as stated, to knock the reader’s focus away from the thematic implications of his allusions to Chaos and Night. Those cosmic themes are not smothered by this secondary allusion, but they seem blunted by the counterpoint, as it were, that moves the poem in an unexpected direction. One of Pope’s goals is certainly to draw attention to his own act of writing The Dunciad in the face of Dulness, but it is also a powerful tool with which Pope can control and soften the effect of the earlier allusion without undercutting or contradicting it. This allows him to maintain the apocalyptic implications of the restoration of Milton’s Chaos and Night with all the accompanying danger in their undoing the creative work of Milton’s God, while he simultaneously limits the effect of that Miltonic stuff on the reader as if by a feint in a different direction. This analysis perhaps makes too much of a brief allusion to a minor poem, but it is precisely because it is such a curiously placed allusion to a minor poem that it demands attention.

The critical question regarding the limits of Pope’s Miltonic allusions does not so much concern how far back into the Miltonic original we ought to read based on these allusions in The Dunciad; instead, the question becomes where Pope places the limits that shape our reading of them. At his best, Pope successfully crafts these allusions to be self-limiting. In the example just discussed, he uses the interplay between the larger thematic allusion and this smaller, briefer atmospheric allusion to govern our response. When discovered, the limits he puts in place provide the right balance between the diabolical seriousness implied by the thematic Miltonic allusions and the comic mockery created by the majority of the mock-epic atmospheric allusions. To overshoot these carefully established limits leads to the critical issues discussed above. For the critics like Williams and Gordon, to miss Pope’s restrictions on his own thematic allusions lets in too much of the Miltonic background, and so they resultantly read the anti-creative, anti-Christian elements at work in Chaos and Night to be overwhelming in The Dunciad. To limit Pope’s allusions too soon is to entirely miss that real seriousness at work and, like Griffin and Damrosch, to overemphasize the comic mock-epic effect and treat it as absolute.

Book IV of The Dunciad provides a structure for Pope to take advantage of these Miltonic precedents without letting them run rampant. Though this survey has been by necessity limited, the others of Pope’s Miltonic allusions throughout the poem do likewise fall into these two categories and so can be helpfully understood in that light. While I believe there remains further work to be done to better understand these different types of allusions and the uses Pope makes of them, the central distinction seems valuable in understanding Pope’s use of Milton. To rightly interpret these allusions, one must be attentive to the limitations Pope has established. It is through these limited allusions that Pope shapes his characters, Dulness and her dunces. For all that he says he will be swept away by their empire restored, Pope, with apparent ease, manages to control Milton, Chaos, Night, and Dulness. A recognition and appreciation of that control can begin to unlock some of what Pope does with these many Miltonic allusions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works cited

Addison, Joseph. “Notes Upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost”. Milton: The Critical

Heritage. Ed. John T. Shawcross. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970. Print.

Damrosch Jr., Leopold. The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. Berkeley: University of

California, 1987. Print.

Gordon, I.R.F. A Preface to Pope. New York: Longman, 1976. Print.

Griffin, Dustin. Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.

Keener, Frederick M. An Essay on Pope. New York: Columbia, 1974.

Kinsley, William. “Physico-Demonology in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’.” Modern Language Review 70.1

(1975): 20-31. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 Nov. 2015.

Lewalski, Barbara. “On Looking into Pope’s Milton.” Milton Studies 11 (1978): 29–50. Print.

Milton, John. “Sonnet VII: How Soon Hath Time”. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Upper

Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1957. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Print.

Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad in Four Books. Ed. Valerie Rumbold. New York: Pearson, 2009.

Print.

Rumbold, Valerie. “Milton’s Epic and Pope’s Satyr Play: “Paradise Lost” in “The Dunciad in Four

Books.” Milton Quarterly 38.3 (2004): 138-162. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22

Oct. 2015.

Shawcross, John T. Milton: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1970. Print.

Williams, Aubrey. Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning. London: Methuen, 1955. Print.

 

[1] I am indebted to Valerie Rumbold for the careful cataloguing of Pope’s allusions to Milton that she provides in her article “Milton’s Epic and Pope’s Satyr Play”.

[2] This sixth line is an allusion to a sonnet by Milton and demonstrates the earlier comment about how readily in this book Pope leaves the more epic context of Paradise Lost. This allusion will be further discussed below.

[3] The discrepancy between these passages does provide something of a comic element: rather than a clear disproportion between Pope’s themes and characters and Milton’s themes and characters, there is something similar to the mock-epic tension between Pope himself as speaker in The Dunciad and Milton as poet in Paradise Lost. However, it is notably not Pope that is denigrated by the allusion. It is rather comical to note this: Milton invokes light with this prayer because he is neither so proud nor so holy as to be able to express Light and God rightly; Pope, however, has to beg darkness off of Chaos because, presumably, he’s neither dim nor dull enough to express Dulness without aid. This attention to the comic attends even the most serious of these thematic allusions.