Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/114

 POEMS DURING CIVIL WAR AND PROTECTORATE

��he exhorted Cromwell to save the spiritual kingdom from bondage. In addition to the old foes of the pure church, the Presbyteri- ans, there had sprung up new foes in the shape of men who, though nominally Inde- pendents, desired to see ministers of the Gospel supported at the public expense. Of these Cromwell, doubtless from prac- tical considerations of state, proved to be one. Milton represented the extreme rad- ical wing of Independency, which not only held in abhorrence every interference of the secular power with the church, but declared that all ministers who accepted pay for their ministrations were " hireling wolves." This sonnet is Milton's cry to Cromwell to turn back into the true road. The exhor- tation was not heard; yet as had been the case before with Fairfax, Milton retained his admiration for his chief in the face of vital differences of thought.

The sonnet on young Henry Vane, unlike the foregoing two, was not prompted by any definite public crisis, but sprang from a train of thought similar to that which had led to the Cromwell sonnet. The young statesman who, at twenty-four, had been governor of Massachusetts, and had then and afterwards learned to know

"Both spiritual power and civil, what each

means, What severs each,"

stood as a pillar of hope to the poet in these years when he was brooding jealously upon " the bounds of either sword."

The sonnet on the Piedmontese massacre disputes with the sonnet on his blindness the honor of first place among Milton's efforts in this form. No subject could have been more calculated to touch the inner- most springs of passion in him. The Vau- dois had cherished, long before Luther's time, presumably indeed from the earliest Christian centuries, a form of worship and a theology conceived in the purest spirit of the Reformation. Amid the intense reli- gious ferment of the sixteenth and seven-

��teenth centuries they had stood as a type of the prisca fides of the early church, a survival of the golden age of apostolic faith. In January, 1655, the Duke of Savoy determined to suppress them. An edict was issued ordering the inhabitants of three valleys either to leave the country or to embrace the Catholic religion. On their refusal to comply, a general massacre was instituted, and carried out with fright- ful refinements of cruelty. The news filled Protestant Europe with horror. Behind the slow, measured denunciation of Mil- ton's sonnet we can feel a mighty bulk of public wrath. In these wonderful lines the poet's art is at once at its soberest and at its intensest. Pattison has finely said of it : " It would not be easy to find a sonnet in any language of equal power to vibrate through all the fibres of feeling. Yet with what homely materials is the effect pro- duced ! Not only is there not a single purple patch in the wording, but of thought, or image, all that there is is a borrowed thought, and one repeatedly borrowed, namely, Tertullian's saying, ' The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church ; ' yet we may say that with a familiar quotation for its only thought, and with diction al- most below ordinary, its forceful flood of suppressed passion sweeps along the hack- neyed biblical phrases of which it is com- posed, just as a swollen river rolls before it the worn pebbles long ago brought down from the mountain side. From this sonnet we may learn that the poetry of a poem is lodged somewhere else than in its matter or its thoughts or its imagery or its words. Our heart is here taken by storm, but not by any of these things. The poet hath breathed on us, and we have received his inspiration. In this sonnet is realized Wordsworth's definition of poetry, 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feel- ing.'"

Only one more group remains to be con- sidered, the sonnets purely personal and autobiographic. Of these there are four,

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