I let it get much later than I had hoped, because I played a round of video games, talked to Ana, read on the Internet, and Googled things. I'm still going to feel confident about my day, though, because in addition to 6 hours of class, I did 1 hour of work for Leonard, I read 56 pages + an article for Diana, I read Astrophel, and now I'm going to write for a few minutes.
From Astrophel, Milton stole two lines which begins the process of casting Sidney into the pastoral world:
"Young Astrophel the pride of shepheards praise,
Young Astrophel the rusticke lasses loue:"
Milton turns these lines into the praise of "young Hyacinth," and mentions that after his death, he's turned into a flower, just as in Spenser's poem, Astrophil and Stella are turned into flowers.
Other features of the verse could have come from Spenser as well: most notably the series of questions and the panegyric.There are other sources as well, of course.
I am fascinated by the invocation of Sidney and Spenser as Hyacinth and Apollo. First of all, because the latter two are a classical example of doomed homosexual love, which seems here to be envisioned as a poetic relationship. One explanation is that Spenser's fine praise of Sidney is equated with Apollo's own rendering of Hyacinth immortal.
I'm interested, too, in the sort of Ovidian/delicate Shakespearean/Elizabethan sonnet aetiology of the infant's death--it's the sort of thing that would entirely in character for the later Spenserians--Barnfield or Watson, say--except that it's written about death. Or Sidney! Sidney can write like this.
I want to think about the relationships in play.
Aquilo:Orithyia :: winter's force: child
winter's force:child :: Apollo: Hyacinth
In each case, the beloved is royal. But how does the inaugural violence of Boreas relate to the ending violence of Hyacinth?
My argument in class today was that the poem, really, is about poems. The child is of a piece with the child in Shakespeare's sonnets, or Sidney's sonnets, really. Or Daniel's, even--the kid doesn't seem real.
Where Milton is like Ovid and unlike Spenser here is that he's attempting to spin out enough material for his poem. Astrophel is not one long poem--it's a series of short ones that cover similar ground, but Sidney has enough of a life that much can be said that's panegyric but not inaccurate.
Milton needs to spin out hypotheticals in order to have a story to tell, and he does so using the questions that for Spenser were markers of the speaker's emotional state. Here, Milton is praising the child with the questions--the answers to which are almost always actually the opposite of what he implies it is. And he does so, in such a way that he can then rebuke the mother for a fake loss.
But of course the fake loss is what the poem is trying to set up! Milton just doesn't have the guts--to coin a phrase--yet to own the fake loss in the person of the speaker.
The speaker really isn't that far from a sonnet speaker, who doesn't have anything new to say and has to spend all of his ingenuity to say it. From that point of view, Milton's customary rebuke to the genre isn't particularly interesting, because it reads as a rebuke of his own poor writing.
I think one of the things he later learns from Spenser is a different sort of subject position from which to write lyric. Pastoral is a lot of help with that, because it allows the introjection of nature into the discourse AND it allows for thicker speakers, in a way that will eventually complicate the voice of lyric more generally.
I might hypothesize, though, that as pastoral speakers become locations for the lyric I, the dissociation that lets homosexuality work in that genre fades away.
I'm not sure I believe that argument, but it's not bad for right now!
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