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Milton's Wild Garden 147 of 68 102:1 / sheet / PHILOLOGY Milton’s Wild Garden IN by John R. Knott HEN I published Milton’s Pastoral Vision a little over thirty 7217 STUDIES years ago, I was taken by the subtlety with which Milton had reinterpreted the rich literary tradition of the earthly para- Wdise in representing the Garden of Eden, incorporating the rhetorical tropes by which poets had established an ideal landscape (a stream, flowers, shade trees, fragrant breezes, birdsong) and conventional fea- tures of the earthly paradise going back at least to Ovid (eternal spring, thornless roses, simultaneous flowers, and fruit) and blending them into 1 a fluid, dynamic, joyous natural world. And I noted the way that the life of Adam and Eve, at least in some aspects, embodied a sense of time- less ease associated with pastoral poetry, what Virgil called otium.Their ‘‘happy rural seat of various view’’ (.) has the look of an English Arcadia, with a pleasing alternation of hill and valley, sun and shade, 2 and ‘‘Flocks / Grazing the tender herb’’ (.–). With its flowery banks, shady bowers, and alleys of stately trees that afford ‘‘pleasant walks,’’ the Garden offers variety and sensuous delight within the con- text of what appears an ordered, knowable place where, as Northrop 3 Frye once said, we cannot lose our way. As I think about Milton’s Eden now, however, I am more struck by his emphasis on its wilder aspects, apparent in his insistence that the natural world in which Adam and Eve find themselves is fundamentally untamed, ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art’’ (.). Some critics have found the influence of the English countryside in Milton’s Eden or have seen it as anticipating the English landscape gar- 4 den that came into its own in the eighteenth century. Others have ar- 1 2 John R. Knott, Milton’s Pastoral Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose3 , ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ). 4 Frye, The Return of Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Helen Gardner, A Reading of ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . © The University of North Carolina Press Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 69 John R. Knott 102:1 / sheet gued that Milton was recalling the great Italian Renaissance gardens / that he saw in his travels, with their variety of landscape features and 5 their informal plantings and boschetti (wild woods). Visual analogues for many of the scenes Milton renders have been found in the art of 6 the period. Landscapes of the sort that I have been describing—the En- PHILOLOGY glish countryside, the Italian garden—are of course shaped by human IN presence.They offer versions of what we could call a middle landscape, following Leo Marx, something between the apparent disorderliness of 7 wilderness and the extremely structured, built environment of a city. Such open, varied, and patterned landscapes continue to appeal to us: in the fields and woods and stone walls of the New England country- 7217 STUDIES side, among other places, and in the pastoral settings of much classic children’s literature. We are comfortable with them because we know how to read such landscapes and have no difficulty placing ourselves in them. In the Eden of Paradise Lost, they suggest a world in which Adam and Eve experience not only delight, but also a sense of security, shadowed only by Raphael’s warning that they must ‘‘stand fast’’ (.) against some future temptation to disobey God’s one command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life. Milton’s Garden has other, more exotic aspects that make us recog- nize it as a version of the earthly paradise and not simply a Christian- ized Arcadia. It offers trees, fruits, and flowers of all kinds, fragrances beyond our normal experience, and growth more luxuriant than one would expect to find. The remarkable fertility and what Arnold Stein called the ‘‘authorized excess’’ of the Garden have long been recognized and have been seen as evidence of an abundance and vitality that distin- 8 guish Milton’s version of paradise. Other earthly paradises have all the conventional features but not this sense of teeming growth. In his initial presentation of the Garden, seen as Satan first views it, Milton describes brooks that water ‘‘[f]low’rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art / In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon / Pour’d forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain’’ (.–). The phrase ‘‘Pour’d forth profuse,’’ set against the fastidious art of the contemporary gardener, an art of tidy beds and elaborate knot gardens, conveys the fluidity and the sense of 5 John Dixon Hunt, ‘‘Milton and the Making of the English Landscape Garden,’’ Milton Studies6 (): –. Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagination and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton Univ7 ersity Press, ), chapters and . 8 Marx, The Machine and the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Stein, Answerable Style (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ), . Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 70 Milton’s Wild Garden 102:1 / sheet an inexhaustible richness that characterizes nature in Milton’s garden, / something we are meant to regard with ‘‘wonder,’’ as we are told Satan does. Another passage shows even more dramatically what it means to enter Milton’s paradise and raises questions that I want to take some PHILOLOGY time to explore. This is the account of Raphael’s approach to Adam IN and Eve after he descends to earth in his role of heavenly messenger. Milton shows him passing through the camp of angels keeping protec- tive watch and into paradise itself: Thir glittering Tents he pass’d, and now is come 7217 STUDIES Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrh, And flow’ring Odors, Cassia, Nard, and Balm; A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here Wanton’d as in her prime, and play’d at will Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, Wild above Rule or Art, enormous bliss. (.–) Milton represents a liminal moment here, a boundary crossing into a place where an extravagant fragrance suggests a condition of bliss too great to be contained, or to be engendered by any of our restructurings of nature: ‘‘enormous’’ bliss, ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art,’’ as if challeng- ing our efforts to order or even to comprehend it. Whatever order exists in the Garden, whether in the larger pastoral landscape or in the more intimate spaces tended by Adam and Eve, coexists with this sense of an unrestricted, virginal nature playing out its own fancies independent of any human (or angelic) presence. Nature in this aspect delights by its excess, by its dynamic tendency to overrun limits. Another passage can serve to illustrate the other major way in which we see the wildness of Milton’s garden: from the perspective of those who live there. This comes from Eve’s argument to Adam in book in favor of working alone, in the professed interest of more efficient gar- dening: what we by day Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind, One night or two with wanton growth derides Tending to wild. (.–) All gardens tend ‘‘to wild,’’ as any gardener knows, but this one pos- sesses an extraordinary fertility; its growth is ‘‘wanton,’’ which here Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 71 John R. Knott 102:1 / sheet carries the older meaning of profuse or rank.This does not mean weedy / in our sense. There are no weeds in paradise, only in the fallen world we inhabit, and perhaps even there only in the eye of the beholder (if a weed is simply a flower in the wrong place). Some excellent critical commentary has been written about the interplay of wildness and order PHILOLOGY in Milton’s garden, by Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey and Barbara Lewalski IN among others, but I am not convinced that this sufficiently accounts for the meaning and force that Milton gives to wildness, which is usually 9 understood simply as an encroaching disorder. So I want to ask again what we should make of the wild aspect of Milton’s garden, and how recognizing the character and effect of this wildness might alter our per- 7217 STUDIES ception of the life of Adam and Eve, at least of their work as gardeners. We may not realize how unusual it was for Milton to give positive connotations to words such as ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘wilderness,’’ conditioned as we are by a society that increasingly values wilderness and can even talk about a wilderness ethic. We may forget that we owe our positive sense of wilderness to a major shift in sensibility that came about in the nineteenth century.Thomas Cole and his successors among the painters of the Hudson River School established American wilderness scenes as a legitimate subject for landscape painting and cultivated a sense of the wilderness sublime. A succession of writers, most notably Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, explored and celebrated the value of wild na- ture. Thoreau casts the longest shadow—the Thoreau who could say, ‘‘Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,’’ and, 10 most memorably, ‘‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World.’’ When Milton wrote, wild and wilderness usually carried negative con- notations, the sort one can see in William Bradford’s famous charac- terization (in ) of the New England found by the first colonists: ‘‘what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of 11 wild beasts and wild men.’’ In the next century, Samuel Johnson could define wilderness as ‘‘[a] desert; a tract of solitude and savageness.’’ Old Testament prophets had familiarized the sense of wilderness as a deso- late and hostile place.
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