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“Each Heav'nly Close”: Mythologies and Metrics in Spenser and the Early Poetry of Milton

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kenneth Gross
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Abstract

A poet cannot help borrowing images and verse shapes from earlier poems. But in adapting Spenser's final hexameter, a major writer like Milton makes an apparently simple formal imitation the locus for revisionary strategies of a highly figurative nature. Spenser's own prosodic choices are always shadowed by larger tropes of time, death, love, and voice, as is evident both in the rhetorical effects that characterize the closure of the Faerie Queene stanza and in the elusive river and echo mythologies that inhabit the refrains of the poet's two marriage odes. These works, in turn, strongly influence Milton's early strophic poetry, especially the Nativity Hymn and the song to Echo from Comas. Milton reinvents the hexameter close in ways that point to his larger poetic ambitions, finding in that metrical scheme a space in which to reflect on, oppose, and translate the deep structures of Spenserian mythmaking.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 21 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

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