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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, ), .
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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
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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
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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. Isaiah . promises that God will make Zion’s
9 MacCaffrey, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ as Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –; Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,’’ in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press10 , ), –. Thoreau, ‘‘Walking,’’ in The Natural History Essays, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake Cit11y: Peregrine Smith, ), –. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Random House, ), . Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 72
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102:1 / sheet wilderness ‘‘like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord,’’ and / the colonists saw themselves as new Israelites creating gardens in the wilderness of New England. When wilderness was not seen as desert, it was imagined as the dark forest, a disorderly place where we can easily lose our way and are likely to be threatened by wild beasts, outlaws, or PHILOLOGY savages, even demons. Given this context, it is startling to find Milton IN making the zone through which Raphael enters paradise ‘‘a Wilderness of sweets.’’ By the mid-seventeenth century, gardeners had begun to use the term wilderness to refer to a planting of trees ‘‘laid out in . . . [a] fantastic style, often in the form of a maze’’; the term could also refer 12 to a confused array of things. Wilderness, then, had begun to acquire 7217 STUDIES other senses besides the primary one. Whatever sense or senses of the word Milton may have had in mind, his phrase ‘‘a Wilderness of sweets’’ implies an unexpected and potentially disorienting profusion of fra- grances, if not for an archangel at least for the reader unused to imagin- ing a natural world that transcends ordinary experience. To suggest the ‘‘enormous bliss’’ possible in an unfallen world, where nature ‘‘[wan- tons] as in her prime,’’ Milton challenges us to relax our expectations of order and control and enter a wilderness of pleasurable sensations, as if entering an unknown territory of experience. Wild nature, in his ‘‘delicious Paradise’’ (.), promises pleasures that would seem exces- sive in any other context. Milton shows Satan tantalized and ultimately frustrated by encountering fragrant breezes and ‘‘pure now purer air’’ (.) in his initial approach to the Garden. In Raphael’s approach, the transition is even more clearly marked, by an emphasis on sensations so rich they can bewilder. Milton’s more conventional uses of wilderness and wildness in Para- dise Lost make the positive senses he gives the wildness of nature in the Garden more striking. When Satan approaches the hill at the top of which paradise is found, he encounters ‘‘a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides / With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access deni’d’’ (.–). Such wildness seems a distortion of the natural order (‘‘grotesque’’). Satan can simply leap over this barrier and the ‘‘verdur- ous wall’’ (.) that rises above it, of course, but the experience of encountering such a forbidding, tangled ‘‘wilderness’’ makes the pro- tected world of the Garden with its open vistas and ‘‘pleasant walks’’ seem more marvelous, for the reader as well as for Satan (.). Milton later signals the transformation of Adam’s attitude toward the Garden
12 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘wilderness.’’ Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 73
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102:1 / sheet when he realizes that Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit by having him / exclaim: ‘‘How can I live without thee . . . in these wild Woods forlorn?’’ (.–). Nothing has changed yet in the physical nature of the Gar- den, but Adam suddenly perceives it as ‘‘wild Woods,’’ instantly experi- encing a sense of dislocation which is a consequence of his new sense PHILOLOGY of impending alienation from God. Both the woods and Adam appear IN ‘‘forlorn,’’ abandoned by God, as Adam’s mood changes. Later, when Adam has eaten the fruit himself and awakened from a new kind of sexual encounter with Eve driven for the first time by lust, his instinct is to withdraw in shame to the deep shade of the woods, where he might hide from God and ‘‘[i]n solitude live savage’’ (.). After he and Eve 7217 STUDIES improvise garments from fig leaves to cover their nakedness, Milton compares them with the New World natives found by Columbus: ‘‘With feather’d Cincture, naked else and wild / Among the Trees’’ (.–). Suddenly we see them as if through the eyes of European colonizers of America, as literal savages comparable to Bradford’s wild men in a wild 13 wood. In the postlapsarian world of Paradise Lost, nature becomes wild in the sense of being inhospitable and confusing. As the Garden is physi- cally transformed by the coming of ‘‘pinching cold and scorching heat’’ (.) as well as damaging winds, it loses its paradisal qualities al- together. Michael’s prediction of the future that Adam’s descendants can expect reflects the New Testament view of the world as a wilderness in which we are ‘‘strangers and pilgrims,’’ in the language of Hebrews (.). His promise is that Jesus will conquer the ‘‘adversary Serpent, and bring back / Through the world’s wilderness long wander’d man / Safe to eternal Paradise of rest’’ (.–).The physical paradise is dis- placed to an apocalyptic future in which the faithful can find bliss in heaven or earth, ‘‘for then the Earth / Shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Than this of Eden, and far happier days’’ (.–). Versions of the earthly paradise reappear in accounts of the New World, and I want to mention one of these to show the persistence of the ideal and also of a tension between wildness and the human need for order that one sees in Milton’s Garden. My example is from John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, published in five volumes in the s as a companion to his Birds of America. In the following pas-
13 J. Martin Evans develops this comparison in Milton’s Imperial Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ) in the course of a larger argument about the influence of accounts of the New World on Paradise Lost. See especially –. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 74
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102:1 / sheet sage, Audubon is describing the habitat of the mockingbird in Louisi- / ana: It is where the Great Magnolia shoots up its majestic trunk, crowned with ever- green leaves, and decorated with a thousand beautiful flowers, that perfume the air around; where the forests and fields are adorned with blossoms of every hue; PHILOLOGY where the Golden Orange ornaments the gardens and groves: where Bignonias IN of various kinds interlace their climbing stems around the White-flowered Stuartia, and mounting still higher, cover the summits of the lofty trees around, accompanied with innumerable Vines, that here and there festoon the dense foliage of the magnificent woods, lending to the vernal breeze a slight portion of the perfume of their clustered flowers; where a genial warmth seldom for-
7217 STUDIES sakes the atmosphere, where berries and fruits of all descriptions are met with 14 at every step. Unlike Milton, Audubon grounded his description in observation of an actual landscape, but this takes on attributes of an earthly paradise with its fragrance, vernal breeze, simultaneous flowers and fruit, and sense of infinite variety (‘‘blossoms of every hue’’). Audubon’s eye orders what could be seen as unruly. He describes flowering vines as festooning the trees and suggests a pleasing alternation of forest and field, garden and grove, making these forests seem inviting ones that we could walk through with ease, meeting natural wonders ‘‘at every step,’’ rather than a tangle of subtropical growth. Audubon clearly needed to find a kind 15 of order in this natural scene, even as he celebrated its wildness. Audubon would have known William Bartram’s descriptions of the paradisal luxuriance he found in Florida and also Chateaubriand’s ren- dering of Louisiana (in his popular romance Atala) as a scene of pri- mal nature, a ‘‘New Eden’’ in which ‘‘trees of every form and every 16 colour and every odour mingle.’’ The expected response to scenes of unspoiled nature for such writers was wonder, or what they frequently call ‘‘enchantment.’’ Satan’s wonder at his first glimpse of the Garden prefigures this response, although wonder in his case is mingled with envy and a resolve to destroy what he can’t possess. Stephen Greenblatt has seen expressions of wonder in Renaissance accounts of the New World as a form of appropriation, what he calls ‘‘a record of the coloniz- 14 15 Audubon, Ornithological Biography, vols. (Edinburgh, –) :. I consider Audubon’s rendering of seemingly pristine or paradisal landscapes at greater length in Imagining Wild America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), cha16p. . Bartram, Travels (New York: Viking Penguin, ); Francois René de Chateau- briand, Atala and René, trans. Rayner Heppenstall (London: Oxford University Press, ), . Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 75
John R. Knott 17 102:1 / sheet ing of the marvelous.’’ I find more than this in the wonder I have been / describing in Audubon, and in Bartram as well. Such wonder seems to manifest another kind of human yearning, a desire to experience an al- luring and seemingly pristine natural world that suggested to them the splendor of creation. In Audubon, such yearning is frequently colored PHILOLOGY by nostalgia for landscapes he perceived as transfigured by waves of IN settlement, or about to be, like the Ohio River valley he knew from his early trips down the river to Kentucky. There is a different but related kind of nostalgia in Milton’s immensely evocative rendering of Eden, more evocative because he presents it from the beginning as doomed by Satan. I would agree with J. Martin Evans, who sees Milton as an-
7217 STUDIES 18 ticipating the Romantic view of nature as wild and diverse. The key difference is that Milton identifies the pristine natural world, in its wild luxuriance, with a lost ideal of bliss associated with innocence. Such wildness exists only for those innocent of sin, in the enclosed paradise that embodies this innocence, although Milton’s account of creation also suggests the energy and abundance of the whole natural world: ‘‘Forth flourish’d thick the clus’tring Vine’’ (.), ‘‘last / Rose as in Dance the stately Trees, and spread / Thir branches hung with copious Fruit’’ (.–). The fact that Milton emphasized the role of Adam and Eve as gar- deners, concerned with keeping luxuriant growth in check, may seem to contradict the emphasis on the joys of a nature that ‘‘[wantons] as in her prime’’ that I have been describing. As is commonly recognized, Milton developed their roles as gardeners to a much greater degree than did his predecessors. Critics have explained this apparent contradiction as tension between a fecund nature that tends ‘‘to wild’’ and the efforts of Adam and Eve to preserve the kind of order represented by spaces suited to human occupation: paths, arbors, specially tended areas, and the nuptial bower, which Milton describes as ‘‘sacred and sequester’d’’ 19 (.). This seems to me a useful explanation of why we perceive the Garden as a dynamic and yet an ordered place, but I wonder whether it pays enough attention to Milton’s representation of the problems of trying to garden in paradise and their implications. As I have suggested, Milton’s Garden has an inherent order estab- lished by God, the creator of the larger pastoral landscape, with its pat- 17 18 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Evans, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), – .19 See, for example, Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience,’’ ff. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 76
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102:1 / sheet terned variety, and also of the paths and arbors that Adam and Eve / maintain. This is a place intended for human occupants: ‘‘This Paradise I give thee’’ (.), God tells Adam. Milton presents the nuptial bower as an example of how God ‘‘fram’d / All things to man’s delightful use’’ (.–), with trees and flowering shrubs forming a natural ‘‘Mosaic’’ PHILOLOGY (.) and violets, crocuses, and hyacinths underfoot creating a ‘‘rich IN inlay’’ (.). Nature does not seem potentially unruly here. The point of this description seems to be to illustrate the superiority of divine art- istry over subsequent human efforts (such as inlays of stone and metal). Nature appears in different aspects according to Milton’s emphases; it would be difficult to map any of his landscapes in Paradise Lost, in- 7217 STUDIES cluding that of the Garden, because they appear to shift with these em- phases. In describing the nuptial bower, Milton emphasizes the beauty of an intricate and relatively stable natural order. Elsewhere in the Gar- den, the ‘‘luxuriant’’ vine and other ‘‘wanton growth’’ require attention if Adam and Eve are to maintain their spaces. They must work, in other words, but this is ‘‘sweet Gard’ning labor’’ that serves to order their day and to make ‘‘ease / More easy’’ (.–); work becomes arduous only after the Fall. Such gardening labor ‘‘declares [their] Dignity’’ (.), as Adam tells Eve, distinguishing them from the animals, and it also allows Milton to give Eve a special role as what amounts to master gardener. She is more sensitive than Adam is to the flowers, which she names and tends with nurturing care, and she seems to have her favorite garden- ing spots, like the one in which Satan finds her working alone on the day of the Fall. The critical tendency to characterize the labor of Adam and Eve as georgic has served as a way of enhancing its importance, for example, by emphasizing its simplicity and dignity and by showing its continuity with labor in the postlapsarian world and thus suggesting 20 that the arts of civilization have a place in paradise. Together, Adam and Eve practice a kind of gardening that would have 21 been recognizable to Milton’s contemporaries. They prune fruit trees, prop up flowers, and train vines on trees and arbors, acting on God’s instructions to Adam to ‘‘Till and keep’’ paradise. In elaborating on the 20 See Stella Revard, ‘‘Vergil’s Georgics and Paradise Lost: Nature and Human Nature in a Landscape,’’ in Vergil at , ed. John A. Bernard (New York: AMS Press, ); Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Barbara Lewal- ski, ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Diane Kelsey McColley, A Gust for Paradise (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 21). See Charlotte Otten, ‘‘‘My Native Element’: Milton’s Paradise and English Gardens,’’ Milton Studies (): –, on contemporary gardening practices reflected in Paradise Lost. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 77
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102:1 / sheet biblical injunction to ‘‘dress’’ and ‘‘keep’’ the Garden (Gen. .), Milton / inevitably committed himself to a language that implies the necessity of control, with adjectives such as ‘‘overwoody’’ (.) and ‘‘overgrown’’ (.). One could say that this is a problematic language to use of a place in which the profusion of nature is celebrated as good and delight- PHILOLOGY ful or, more broadly, that developing the implications of gardening in IN such a place is inherently problematic. Yet I think that one can explain such apparent difficulties and appreciate Milton’s handling of them by focusing on the ways in which Adam and Eve interpret their roles as gardeners. If Milton makes us see the gardening of Adam and Eve as a natu- 7217 STUDIES ral and fitting activity ordained by God, he also causes us to wonder how successful it can be. Nature in the Garden grows ‘‘Luxurious by restraint’’ (.), Eve observes, in the same speech in which she argues that she and Adam can work more efficiently if they separate. Milton shows Adam and Eve pursuing their labor in a natural setting so large and so fertile that one has to question how they can make any real head- way, even with the prospective help of ‘‘younger hands’’ (.) that they invoke on several occasions. At one point, they praise God for ‘‘this delicious place / For us too large, where thy abundance wants / Par- takers, and uncropt falls to the ground’’ (.–).They cannot hope to ‘‘dress’’ and ‘‘keep’’ a Garden so large and so irrepressibly fertile in the sense of wholly domesticating or controlling it. We are told that ‘‘much thir work outgrew / The hands’ dispatch of two Gard’ning so wide’’ (.–). As Milton represents their gardening, the activity itself, the process, seems more important than its results. In addition to giving shape and purpose to their daily lives, gardening can become emblem- atic for Milton. As Adam and Eve ‘‘led the Vine / To wed her Elm,’’ we are told, so Eve ‘‘spous’d about him twines / Her marriageable arms’’ (.–). Following Augustine’s allegorizing of the biblical command to dress and keep the Garden, Barbara Lewalski interprets the garden- ing of Adam and Eve as an emblem of moral control, suggesting the 22 need to prune the affections. What I find most interesting about the work of Adam and Eve as gar- deners, however, apart from the delight and instruction they find in this work, is its apparent ineffectiveness. Adam shows some awareness of this, even as he tells Eve that they need to go to bed to be ready to get up before dawn to resume their work:
22 Lewalski, ‘‘Innocence and Experience,’’ ff. See also Lewalski, Rhetoric of Literary Forms, –. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 78
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102:1 / sheet Tomorrow ere fresh Morning streak the East
/ With first approach of light, we must be ris’n, And at our pleasant labor, to reform Yon flow’ry Arbors, yonder Alleys green, Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
PHILOLOGY That mock our scant manuring, and require
IN More hands than ours to lop thir wanton growth: Those Blossoms also, and those dropping Gums, That lie bestrown unsightly and unsmooth, Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease. (.–)
7217 STUDIES Adam’s ‘‘unsightly’’ reveals an innate aesthetic preference for well-kept paths, free of the debris that naturally litters them, whereas ‘‘unsmooth’’ suggests a practical concern with keeping these paths clear of obstruc- tions. He describes ‘‘wanton growth’’ that forever needs lopping with gardening tools that Milton describes as formed by ‘‘rude’’ art, ‘‘Guilt- less of fire’’ (., ). Showing Adam preoccupied with ‘‘unsightly’’ paths entails a certain artistic risk, inherent in using the heightened style of epic to render domestic subjects. Our ‘‘general Ancestor’’ (.) can begin to sound like our next door neighbor. The point of taking the risk, I believe, is to show that the gardening labor of Adam and Eve can- not begin to control the wild nature around them, for all the importance of this labor for giving rhythm and meaning to their daily lives and for engaging them in an exchange with a vital natural world that affirms their harmony with it as well as affording them pleasure. Milton has Raphael paraphrase for Adam God’s charge to newly cre- ated man in Genesis (.) to subdue the earth and take dominion over every living thing, and we first see Adam and Eve, through Satan’s eyes, as ‘‘Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,’’ who ‘‘In naked Majesty seem’d Lords of all’’ (., ). Yet if Milton follows biblical authority and interpretive tradition in asserting their lordship over the natural world, thus establishing their place in the hierarchy of Creation, he does not seem to have been interested in showing them subduing the ram- pant vegetation of the Garden. Adam describes this as mocking their ‘‘scant manuring’’ (managing), Eve as deriding their lopping and prop- ping and pruning and binding in a night or two of ‘‘wanton growth.’’ By introducing such strong words (‘‘mock,’’ ‘‘derides’’), Milton suggests both the irrepressible dynamism of the nature they attempt to manage and a sense of bemusement on nature’s part. It is as though nature, or God through the natural world, smiles at their efforts. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 79
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102:1 / sheet Adam shows a clearer sense of the larger purpose of their labors than / does Eve (God made them for delight, not for ‘‘irksome toil’’ [.], he reminds her), and of the limits of these labors. In response to her argu- ment that they can get more done if they separate, in the critical scene that sets the stage for the Fall, he seems less concerned than before about PHILOLOGY messy paths. His primary object is to keep Eve by his side, where he IN assumes that she belongs: These paths and Bowers doubt not but our joint hands Will keep from Wilderness with ease, as wide As we need walk, till younger hands ere long Assist us. 7217 STUDIES (.–) Wilderness in this negative sense of an engulfing disorder does not genuinely threaten the Garden as Milton imagined it. There is no sug- gestion that Adam and Eve are likely to be overwhelmed by the ‘‘wan- ton growth’’; if they cannot always keep the paths neat, they can at least keep them open; of that Adam is confident. Humans do belong in this Garden, in a state of productive tension with its wild fertility, pursuing their gardening labors in order to preserve the kinds of spaces the ‘‘sov- ran Planter’’ created for their ‘‘delightful use,’’ as Milton puts it (.– ). These spaces make the Garden habitable and give it a human scale. I want to question the tendency in critical commentary on the gar- dening in Eden to view the inherent wildness of nature in the Garden in purely negative terms, as a threat to an ideal order that Adam and Eve are trying to achieve by their labors. Evans sees Adam’s supervision of the Garden as ‘‘absolutely necessary to the preservation of its per- fection,’’ a perfection that Evans sees as conditional upon the ability of 23 Adam and Eve to ‘‘preserve the balance of forces on which it depends.’’ While this view recognizes the dynamism of nature in Eden, it assumes an ideal that depends upon a degree of control that it seems unlikely that Adam and Eve can exercise. And this understanding of perfection makes it dependent upon achieving a condition of stability, however precarious, that seems incompatible with the ‘‘ceaseless change’’ (.) that Adam and Eve celebrate in their morning hymn. One could under- stand the perfection of the Garden differently, as implying complete- ness and freedom from corruption or flaw, rather than such a condition of balance.
23 Evans, Genesis Tradition, –. Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 80
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102:1 / sheet Diane Kelsey McColley describes human effort as essential to ‘‘guard
/ 24 [the Garden’s] beauty and keep it fruitful.’’ The notion of needing to work to keep the Garden fruitful, by pruning the fruit trees to make them more productive, assumes an ideal of domesticated nature that is at odds with the character of the Garden. By pruning ‘‘overwoody’’ PHILOLOGY trees and training grape vines on elms, Adam and Eve may increase the IN productivity of the Garden in a limited way, but it is hard to see this as more than a token effort. In a world in which Eve can choose from among ‘‘fruit of all kinds’’ (.) and is conscious of such abundance that ‘‘untoucht’’ fruit must await future hands (.–), it makes little sense to worry about productivity.To make the gardening of Adam and 7217 STUDIES Eve credible, Milton had to draw upon the experience of gardening in a world where nature may need managing to be productive by our stan- dards and to yield certain kinds of aesthetic pleasure. A hazard of em- phasizing the georgic dimension of Paradise Lost is that we will lose sight of the unique character of life in Eden, which offers wonder and deeply satisfying ease as well as the discipline of labor. The labor of Adam and Eve must be seen in the context of the dynamic interplay of wild nature and ordered spaces that Milton presents in his Garden and their experi- ence of a nature that is ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art’’ (.). Adam and Eve take their pruning and propping seriously (they are acting on God’s mandate and responding to what they perceive as incursions of ‘‘wan- ton growth’’), but Milton gives the reader a perspective that they lack. If rule and art were to prevail over nature in the Garden, it would lose its marvelous qualities and the capacity to offer extraordinary pleasures. Tidiness and control are not really the point. The fact that Satan comes upon Eve surrounded by flowers, preoccu- pied with her task of sustaining them, provides another kind of com- mentary on the limitations of gardening in Eden. The emotional charge of this scene comes from the sense of Eve’s loveliness and vulnerability that it conveys and from the way that it recalls the poignant simile by which Milton had linked Eve with Proserpina earlier in describ- ing the Garden as surpassing even ‘‘that fair field / Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs / Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis / Was gather’d’’ (.–). When Satan sees Eve, newly separated from 24 McColley, Gust for Paradise, . McColley discusses Eve’s gardening in more detail in ‘‘Milton’s Environmental Epic: Creature Kinship and the Language of Paradise Lost,’’ in Beyond Nature Writing, ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), –. She illustrates, approvingly, Eve’s recognition of the plants’ ‘‘need’’ for tending () and characterizes the dominion that she and Adam exercise as a form of ‘‘benevolent care’’ (). Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 81
John R. Knott
102:1 / sheet Adam, she appears half hidden by roses, stooping to support flowers / that hang ‘‘drooping unsustained’’: them she upstays Gently with Myrtle band, mindless the while, Herself, though fairest unsupported Flow’r, PHILOLOGY From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh. IN (.–) Like Proserpina, Eve is about to be surprised by the lord of the under- world, but the lines imply blame as well as the pain of imminent loss. She has cast off her best prop, in Milton’s patriarchal view, and she is
7217 STUDIES not alert to the danger Adam has warned her about but is lost in her gardening, ‘‘mindless the while.’’ Milton describes Satan as he approaches as appearing ‘‘now hid, now seen / Among thick-wov’n Arborets and Flow’rs / Imborder’d on each Bank, the hand of Eve’’ (. –). ‘‘Hand’’ here means handiwork, the gardening art by which Eve has apparently shaped this part of the Gar- den, with its arborets and flower borders. We are told that Satan finds her in ‘‘the sweet recess of Eve’’ (.), a spot more ‘‘delicious’’ than a host of legendary gardens. This appears to be a special place within the larger Garden, to which Eve has withdrawn for some private garden- ing time. She is not engaged in the work of clearing ‘‘unsightly’’ paths or reforming alleys overgrown with branches that preoccupies Adam, rather, she is tying up drooping flowers that, we are told earlier, are re- sponsive to her care: ‘‘they at her coming sprung / And toucht by her fair tendance gladier grew’’ (.–). Seeing Eve in her ‘‘sweet recess’’ heightens the sense of violation we feel when Satan intrudes, but the fact that Milton emphasizes the highly gardened nature of the place and Eve’s own obliviousness to any threat as she tends her flowers suggests that he wants us to question her absorption in gardening itself and to see it as a form of self-absorption. Context is critical here. We might be inclined to admire Eve for her sympathy with the flowers and her ability to empty her mind of distracting thoughts and immerse herself in the present moment. In this garden, at this particular moment, however, Eve’s preoccupation with her flowers is dangerous. It suggests an indul- gence and inattention that magnify her vulnerability. Milton’s telling adjective, ‘‘mindless,’’ makes us see her as unaware, careless, not only innocent but culpable in a way that Ovid’s Proserpina is not. After the Fall, Eve’s shocked response when she learns from Michael that she and Adam will have to leave Eden reveals the depth of her at- tachment to her flower gardening. One can sympathize with Eve’s re- Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 82
Milton’s Wild Garden
102:1 / sheet action and still recognize a form of excess and a failure to grasp the / fundamental significance of the loss of Eden, from Milton’s perspective. Adam comes closer to seeing this significance in his lament for the loss of the places where he has talked with God in the Garden (.ff.): ‘‘under this Tree,’’ ‘‘among these Pines,’’ ‘‘at this Fountain.’’ Eve’s re- PHILOLOGY sponse focuses on the flowers’ presumed need for her nurturing and on IN an environment in which she feels at home, in part because of her efforts to domesticate it:
O flow’rs, That never will in other Climate grow,
7217 STUDIES My early visitation, and my last At Ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names, Who now shall rear ye to the Sun, or rank Your Tribes, and water from th’ambrosial Fount? Thee lastly nuptial Bower, by mee adorn’d With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower World, to this obscure And wild, how shall we breathe in other Air Less pure, accustomed to immortal Fruits? (.–) It is hard not to be moved by this lament, really a lament for the loss of a state of being and for an identity, which in this passage has strong maternal overtones, as well as a lament for the particular pleasures of tending these flowers. Eve’s anxious evocation of a lower world, ‘‘to this obscure / And wild,’’ suggests that the loss she imagines includes the pleasurable sense of control she enjoyed through her work of tending and adorning. An ‘‘obscure’’ world is one that is dark or gloomy as well as unknown, and ‘‘wild’’ in this context implies an uncertainty and dis- order radically unlike anything she has known in her previous experi- ence of nature. Eve’s fear that her flowers will not grow in ‘‘other Climate’’ is a rea- sonable one, but I believe that Milton wants us to see her as naive here in supposing that the flowers of the Garden need her to ‘‘rear’’ them in ranks and water them, and in believing that she herself can exist only in Eden. Michael will teach Adam a lesson that she must learn also, that God ‘‘attributes to place / No sanctity’’ (.–), and he will do this in part by the painful device of describing how paradise will be swept away by the flood, Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 83
John R. Knott
102:1 / sheet With all his verdure spoil’d, and Trees adrift
/ Down the great River to the op’ning Gulf, And there take root an Island salt and bare, The haunt of Seals and Orcs, and Sea-mews’ clang. (.–) PHILOLOGY This vision of the destruction of an ideal, anticipated by the earlier scene IN in which Milton describes newly fierce winds rending the trees of the Garden, does more than teach a lesson, of course. It evokes an enor- mous sense of loss. This loss has many dimensions, but one important one is the loss of a relationship with the natural world that had a de- gree of intimacy and ease, and a capacity for unselfconscious delight in 7217 STUDIES sensuous pleasure, that Milton saw as irretrievably lost with the Fall. The postlapsarian nature that we see in the image of Adam tilling the ground is one in which all the marvelous vitality and fertility that we find in Eden has gone out of the earth, and with it the possibility of a truly harmonious relationship with the natural world. The fear of wildness embodied in Eve’s lament and in Adam’s earlier cry (‘‘How can I live without thee . . . in these wild Woods forlorn?’’) re- flects the sense of discontinuity between life in Eden and life in a fallen world that runs through Paradise Lost and gives the poem much of its complexity and power. Milton’s play on the meanings of wildness be- comes one means of registering this discontinuity. If Adam and Eve never consciously express the appreciation for a nature wild above rule or art that the narrator does, they delight in their interaction with a na- ture that ‘‘mocks’’ their efforts to subdue it. These efforts are essential to Milton’s conception of life in the Garden, as an expression of the im- portance and dignity of the human presence in the natural world and as one way of giving meaning to lives that might otherwise seem slack. They can be seen as a means of enacting obedience to God, by follow- ing the mandate to tend the Garden, and perhaps also as a means of signalling the importance of learning moral discipline. Yet it is easy to overemphasize the humanistic, educative value of work in Eden at the expense of the joys of living with a natural world as fresh, exuberant, and marvelous as the one Milton represented in the Garden. I conclude with two dawn scenes that suggest the nature of this joy and link it with qualities of the natural world that I have been discuss- ing. Adam describes to Raphael how he awakened for the first time and perceived an active, delightful natural world around him: ‘‘all things smil’d / With fragrance and with joy my heart o’erflowed’’ (.–). He has not yet been led up by God into the Garden itself, but the fra- Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11 147 of 84
Milton’s Wild Garden
102:1 / sheet grance anticipates the ‘‘Wilderness of sweets’’ that the Garden offers / and serves Milton as a way of expressing the sensuous character of Adam’s joy. Fragrance becomes the signature of paradise for Milton, representing the mood it evokes in everyone but Satan, incapable of joy because of his hostility to the Creator of the natural world that em- PHILOLOGY bodies it. IN The other scene occurs in the passage at the beginning of book in which Adam calls to a sleeping Eve in words that echo the Song of Songs: Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field
7217 STUDIES Calls us; we lose the prime, to mark how spring Our tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove, What drops the Myrrh, and what the balmy Reed. (.–) This could be a morning in the world we know, except for the lemon trees, myrrh, and ‘‘balmy Reed.’’ Prime, the first hour in the Roman day, here suggests nature ‘‘[wantoning] as in her prime’’ and the vitality of the newly created world. Adam anticipates joys that await in the ‘‘fresh field,’’ but this is one of those moments in Paradise Lost colored by Milton’s elegiac sense. Eve has overslept because of the dream prompted by Satan that prefigures the Fall. The moment illustrates one of the characteristics of Milton’s representation of wild nature in Para- dise Lost, which has the effect of making the ‘‘enormous bliss’’ it pours forth inseparable from a sense of its transience. I dwell on this sense of loss because it is so woven into the fabric of Milton’s poem and also be- cause, as I have said, it links him with the sense of a vanishing wildness one finds in nineteenth-century America, and after. There was nothing in Milton’s experience analogous to Audubon’s Louisiana or Thoreau’s Maine woods, of course. What he rendered was a mythic place, and his imagining of this was colored by a long literary tradition, but that tradi- tion does not explain why he attached so much value to the capacity for wildness of nature in this place, with its ‘‘wanton growth.’’ We cannot answer this question fully, but I think that the answer has to do with a kind of yearning that resurfaced in nineteenth-century America in an- other form and that is still with us, a yearning for a pristine, vital natural world where we can make a place for ourselves and find harmony and delight. This may be a lost ideal, or simply one that we need to keep reinventing, but it is a powerful and enduring one.
University of Michigan Tseng 2004.12.6 07:11