The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

Difficult it is to write something original on Milton with a mountain of critical material on him before us. Equally difficult it is to review a scholarly book on Milton, that too on the Inspiration of Paradise Lost by such an erudite as K. D. Sethna, one among the ‘Poetry-mad people.' According to him, "To read Milton is to be energised, expanded, uplifted. For flagging and dwindling spirits there is no tonic finer than the poetry that is Miltonic" (p.9). Milton faced many difficulties from the conception to the composition of Paradise Lost but all the obstacles he had to face could also be said to have contributed to the peculiar greatness of the epic. There have been many serious studies that help us understand how this could happen and now before us is an altogether different approach, an Aurobindonian one.

The book under review contains twelve chapters curiously corresponding to the twelve Books of the epic and studies very originally the circumstances in which Milton was inspired, the manner this inspiration was carried on throughout the epic and also some paradoxes that enriched the inspiration rather than made it enigmatic. The first chapter illustrates that Milton's expressive rhythm indicates his spaciousness of soul. The soul-spaciousness does not relate to the spark of the Divine in the deep heart, which has to be realised by a spiritual discipline as in the case of Sri Aurobindo. Milton was not a yogi but he had an intellectual individuality and the core of this individuality's vision was powerfully religious. Milton the man, Milton the poet, the whole individuality of him, his entire soul is charged with the boundless, the unfeatured, the supra-mundane which is ever losing itself into an infinity of the invisible. Sethna says that it is this that renders Milton's soul spacious.

The second chapter traces the love of Macaulay and Sri Aurobindo for Milton. Soon there ensues a discussion about the way Milton gets broadly related to Sri Aurobindo. The author states that Savitri differs from Paradise Lost in both style and substance, word-craft and vision. Savitri was mostly dictated by Sri Aurobindo to the scribe, Dr. Nirodbaran, and similarly Paradise Lost was dictated in full. This observation leads Sethna to a study of the scene of the poet in the act of composing his masterpiece. While we know that Milton's dictation of poetry was during part of the morning, we know nothing about the inner process of Milton's composition and about the time when the process went on. Citing evidence, Sethna establishes two times for his composition — night and daybreak. The night seems the more productive. He concludes that Milton is perfectly passive in the process of composition. However, since Milton was blind during the composition there is very little essential distinction between his Urania-visited sleep and his wakefulness visited by the same Celestial Patroness. The paradox is that most of the epic's 10,565 lines, though thoroughly Miltonic, were, in respect of personal initiative, not at all composed by Milton (p.39).

When Sethna asserts the total effortlessness of Milton's complicated and deliberate-looking poetry, he does not imply that Milton did nothing to make such effortlessness possible. So the pertinent question now is: what makes Paradise Lost in spite of not being composed by Milton at all, so thoroughly Miltonic? The author points out that Paradise Lost is a peculiar form of lyricism with its four chief characteristics: absolute spontaneity, the warm concrete turn, the presence of Milton himself and the celebrated Miltonic music. It is the peculiar lyricism that makes the epic Miltonic. Now this lands us in another paradox: whether Milton is an epic-writer or a lyricist. In the fifth chapter Sethna tells us that Milton is spontaneous in a particular way that lyric poets are not. He terms it Milton's "sedulous cultivation of the inner mood — a deliberate travail seldom undergone by the lyric poets." The achievement of the inner mood involves three activities: religious sense, nurture of the ethical consciousness and the civic responsibility, and growth of the intellectual faculty and the artistic literary instinct.

The paradox of the immense mood-cultivation by Milton for the inspired, effortless composition of the epic leads to another paradox that Milton is at the same time a most original and a most derivative poet. Milton borrowed but he bettered the borrowings and presented them in his own original way. In chapter 7 Sethna deals with Milton's "plane" of Inspiration and Shakespeare's. Milton's style has an underlying restraint and Shakespeare's a basic leapingness. Founded on this distinction, the author brings out another difference between Milton and Shakespeare — the difference of "planes" of inspiration over and above "style" of inspiration. He agrees with Sri Aurobindo who characterises Shakespeare's plane as that of the Life Force, Milton's as that of the Mind. Chapter 8 has a comparative study of Paradise Lost and Savitri: in other words, a study of "Poetry of the Thought-mind" and "Overhead Poetry". The thought-mind in Milton echoes the movement of a greater power of cognition; its breath of expressive sound seems caught from a level of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo's system of Yogic philosophy considers the first "plane" (the Higher Mind) in the hierarchy of four "planes" above the mental level (the Mind Power) whose instrumental centre is in our brain — the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition and the Overmind in the ascending gradation. The poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra, of which Savitri has been composed.

In the ninth chapter, taking clues from Early Sri Aurobindo, Sethna writes about Early Milton of the Renaissance spirit and what in Paradise Lost might have been if Milton had continued in the same spirit. The next chapter interestingly argues the question: why did not Milton write what might and could have been written. While doing so Sethna explodes a misconception that Milton's relations with his first wife Mary were not particularly happy at any period by saying that it is an error (p.143). He also points out that "Paradise" and "Eden" are not synonymous. "Paradise", the "blissful seat" was only a part of the land of Eden. It is often said that the theme of Paradise Lost is that it "justifies the ways of God to men." But Sethna is of the view that it has a complex theme. The poem is multi-mooded. Many think that the epic is concerned merely with Man's Fall and God's punishment of him. The author says that Man's fate subsequent to that drama is equally important. It is not narrated as fact but rendered vividly present by prophecy and promise and preachment. Though death and woe are inflicted on Man as penalty for his sin, he is compensated for it with infinite goodness, mercy and grace shown on him. The last chapter deals at some length and in some details with the metaphysics of Paradise Lost.

This review is very sketchy and without flesh and blood. It is only an invitation to the wonderful world of Sethna. It is both a pleasure and a reward for one to read the book for its sheer clarity and encyclopaedic wisdom.

— D. Gnanasekaran

July 1995