Lyric Apocalypse

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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Netzley, Ryan, 1972–
  Lyric apocalypse : Milton, Marvell, and the nature
of events / Ryan Netzley.
    p. cm. — (Verbal arts : studies in poetics)
  Summary: “How can one experience the
apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues
that John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics
depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event.
In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events,
the modern question of what it means for something
to happen in the present” — Provided by publisher.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN

978-

0- 8232- 6347- 9 (hardback)

1. Milton, John, 1608– 1674—Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Marvell, Andrew, 1621– 1678—
Criticism and interpretation. 3. Apocalyptic
literature— History and criticism. 4. Apocalypse in
literature. 5. Revelation in literature. 6. Change in
literature. 7. En glish poetry— 17th century— History
and criticism. I. Title. II. Title: Milton, Marvell, and
the nature of events.
PR3592.P64N48

2014

821'.4—dc23

2014029450

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

C o n t e n t s

Ac know ledg ments

Introduction: Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time,
and the Possibility of Endings

1. Apocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events

in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

2. Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses

and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets

3. What Happens in Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility,

and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

112

4. How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event

of Ending in “Upon Appleton House”

152

Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom
and the End of Crisis

193

Notes

207

Bibliography

251

Index

265

Thomas P. Anderson and Jason Kerr read every single word of this
manuscript. I am grateful for their generosity, their patience, and, most
of all, their intellectually provocative responses to the argument. Their
comments, interest, and insight have made this a more nuanced and
interesting book. Daniel Shore and Greg Colón Semenza commented
incisively on the sonnets chapter and helped me to improve it substan-
tially. Brendan Prawdzik did the same for the chapter on “Upon Ap-
pleton House.” Finally, Yasuko Taoka gamely responded to a series of
questions about New Testament Greek. I owe all of them.

Numerous interlocutors at the following conferences helped to

shape this work: The Andrew Marvell Society meetings at the South-
Central Re nais sance Conferences in 2013 and 2012; the International
Milton Symposium in Tokyo in 2012; the British Milton Seminar in
2011; the 2011 Conference on John Milton, sponsored by Middle Ten-
nessee State University; and the Philosophical Collaborations Conference
at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 2011. In par tic u lar, I
would like to thank Nicholas von Maltzahn, Gabriella Gruder- Poni,
Nigel Smith, Blaine Greteman, Brendan Prawdzik, Lauren Shohet,
Daniel Shore, John Creaser, Thomas Corns, and Don Beith for provoca-
tive questions and extremely helpful comments at these venues. I would
also like to thank the students in my seminar on lyric and events, espe-
cially Brian Cook and Jay Simons, and in my se nior seminar on the

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

x Ac

know ledg ments

defi nition of poetry, especially Rosalind Whitley. They grappled enthu-
siastically and earnestly with the issues discussed in this book.

At Fordham University Press, Thomas Lay has been an encouraging

and enthusiastic champion of this project. I also thank the two manu-
script readers, whose comments helped me to improve and clarify the
argument and offered some pivotal objections. I am very grateful for
the meticulous care that they brought to the task of reviewing the
project.

During the course of this book’s composition, Alison Erazmus was

always game to celebrate moments of provisional triumph. It is dedi-
cated to her not only because she suffered through many, many ha-
rangues about the end of days, but also because of her indefatigable
willingness to imagine not only a better future, but also a more intense
and a more beautiful present.

“What happens now?” in modern parlance often means “What happens
next?” This is not so much an error as it is a recognition of the centrality
of a conception of the future, even an apocalyptic one, for any notion of
the present.

We are accustomed to the notion that the present is always

fl eeting into the past or yearning for a better tomorrow, a nodal point
defi ned via negation and ungraspable as such. This intuitive, geometric
model of temporality is precisely what Milton and Marvell seek to unseat
with their lyric pre sen ta tions of an immanent apocalypse. To treat an
eschatological revelation as a live, hopeful possibility— instead of as a
restful end to pain or struggle or an ultimate vengeance on one’s enemies—
requires more than empty wishfulness or even a commitment to revo-
lution’s promise of a purifi ed return to the past and the overturning of
existing structures. The lyric, with its penchant for immediacy, enables
precisely this attempt, insisting that a real event occurs within a poem and
that this event is not reducible to the mere archaeology of hermeneutics
or the daydreaming of fancy.

Milton and Marvell attempt nothing less than to present change, con-

crete, substantive transformation, as an affi rmative possibility in the
present, not something we merely recognize after the fact or confi dently
explain away as having been there all along. As a result, teleology, typol-
ogy, dialectic, and chance disruption all fail as viable understandings
of events. Teleology and typology treat occasions as nodes in a cloaked
providential design, ultimately uncovered belatedly by a wise and

Introduction

Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time,
and the Possibility of Endings

2 Introduction

penetrating reader. Although the dialectic describes the motor of change
as an auto- generated difference instead of a transcendent narrative, it
too insists that events have always already happened, that the new is
merely an actualization of what was already the case, in potentia. Chance
singularity, fi nally, turns events into little more than a fetishistic, self-
deluding surprise: We pretend not to know what we already know, that
the event is really coming. So we are left with neither a world- weary
exasperation that everything has already been written nor an idle faux
naïveté that awaits the ludic, liberating arrival of the other. These po-
ets use lyric forms, particularly pastoral and its country- house variant,
Petrarchan and occasional sonnets, and encomia, to reconceive the na-
ture of events, what it means for something to happen. For Milton and
Marvell, ultimately, novelty and change are more than po liti cal or
even epistemological concepts, represented in verse but occurring else-
where. These poets turn to lyric because it allows them to conceive the
new as operating immanently in the present. Lyric, in this sense, is not
just the safe containment of events inside an aesthetic object, the
repre sen ta tional narrative or dramatic doubling of the world’s more
important turning points. In Marvell’s and Milton’s hands, at least, it
is a genre that insists on the immediate temporality of its own poetic,
formal, and aesthetic events—that poems, their reading, and the changes
within them are happening right now.

This study focuses on a small portion of each poet’s lyric work: for

Milton, the composition of Lycidas in 1637 to the sonnets of the 1650s
(with a brief discussion of the choral sonnet at the end of Samson Ago-
nistes); for Marvell, the trilogy of Cromwell lyrics, as well as the early
royalist encomia, and “Upon Appleton House.” These poems testify to
their authors’ lifelong obsessions with the power and possibility of im-
manent po liti cal transformation. Although the regicide undoubtedly
intensifi es these concerns, this pivotal event does not cause them. In
fact, Lycidas and Marvell’s elegies for Hastings and Villiers exhibit the
same concern with apocalyptically transformative potentials and forces
that we see in poems written after Charles’s execution. Milton and Mar-
vell are not unique in attempting to imagine revolutionary change in
this period, but they do embrace po liti cal positions different from those
of defeated, nostalgic cavaliers, Nicodemist loyalists, parliamentary
republicans, or radical sectarians. They neither conceive of events as a
species of loss, as do cavalier poets such as Herrick and Lovelace, nor
do they cheerlead for occasional victories as the sign of po liti cal virtue
or God’s favor. They also do not consider a purifi ed po liti cal structure

Introduction 3

an adequate guarantee of transformative change, as loyalists or struc-
turalist republicans would, precisely because guaranteeing structures
necessarily betray change. Milton and Marvell, then, are not fi ghting
the tide of change in beleaguered defense of justice and virtue against
modern encroachments, and they are not comfortable members of a
vanguard targeting and reacting against monarchical tyranny— and this
is so precisely because such movements always risk blindness to their
own perpetuation of previous po liti cal models, the very thing that they
seek to unseat. They have, in short, an understanding of ends, revolu-
tions, and events that differs from that of their defeated compatriots or
zealous fellow travelers, one that is intimately concerned not with look-
ing back or mapping the future New Jerusalem but with the present of
apocalyptic transformation.

Although the regicide is certainly a pivotal occurrence for both Milton
and Marvell, it remains one event in a century of pivotal events. After all,
the hundred years between 1588 and 1688 are a period rife with national
turning points— the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, the
Restoration, the Great Fire, the Glorious Revolution— and may well
inaugurate our modern bourgeois notion of signifi cant historical happen-
ings.

Yet as Steve Pincus notes, it is only at the end of this period, with

the not- so- bloodless revolution of 1688, that we witness something like
our modern conception of revolution. For Pincus, this means a contest
between two competing plans for modernization, as opposed to a con-
fl ict between traditional and modern values or classes:

In contrast to both the classical modernizing and class struggle
perspectives, I suggest that revolutions occur only when states
have embarked on ambitious state modernization programs.
Revolutions do not pit modernizers against defenders of an old
regime. Instead revolutions happen when the po liti cal nation is
convinced of the need for po liti cal modernization but there are
profound disagreements on the proper course of state innova-
tion. . . . State modernization, as po liti cal aim and as po liti cal
pro cess, is a necessary prerequisite for revolution.

In this account, the events of the 1640s and 1650s fail as revolutions
primarily because Charles I is able to present himself as a defender of

4 Introduction

a traditional, conservative order, in opposition to the newfangled ideas
of Parliament. In addition, Pincus maintains that historians have mis-
takenly characterized the 1688 revolution as an unrevolutionary re-
turn to primordial rights and principles, at least in part because of
their projection of an earlier apocalyptic confl ict between Catholicism
and Protestantism onto the later period. By 1688, he avers, most of
the En glish “knew that the early Protestant worldview, the view that
Protestants and Catholics were locked in a fi nal eschatological struggle
for religious hegemony, was no longer tenable.”

Reinhart Koselleck offers a similar account of the demise of apoca-

lyptic expectation effected by the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.
When the war ends with a po liti cal settlement and not Armageddon,
the stage is set for the abandonment of eschatological thinking. Yet this
abandonment is not total, naturally, because the modern world of po-
liti cal prediction and prognostication shares with eschatology the no-
tion that there is nothing new under the sun, that there are structural
limits that enable legitimate and reliable prognostication.

In fact, I

contend that this new modern phase is not just the demise of a closed
cyclical sameness, Koselleck’s frequent characterization of an out-
moded eschatology, but one in which the apocalypse enters into im-
mediate experience, as opposed to receding into an imminent future. If
Roman Catholicism harnesses the apocalypse in support of institutional
imperatives, the Reformation challenge to such sublimation begets an
eschatology with immanent and not just future force:

The unknown Eschaton must be understood as one of the
Church’s integrating factors, enabling its self- constitution as
world and as institution. The Church is itself eschatological.
But the moment the fi gures of the apocalypse are applied to
concrete events or instances, the eschatology has disintegrative
effects. The End of the World is only an integrating factor as
long as its politico- historical meaning remains indeterminate.
The future as the possible End of the World is absorbed within
time by the Church as a constituting element, and thus does not
exist in a linear sense at the end point of time. Rather, the end
of time can be experienced only because it is always- already
sublimated in the Church.

I take Koselleck to be intimating here that the disordering force of a
post- Reformation desublimation of apocalyptic fi gures stems, at least

Introduction 5

in part, from these fi gures’ new immediacy and application to history.
That is, they now can be experienced without this institutional subli-
mation: One can experience an event and even an end in the present.
In contrast to Koselleck, this book maintains that when the end times
cease to be a matter of allegorical combat between Christ and anti-
Christ, one does not abandon eschatology as a backward fetishization
of sameness and closure.

Rather, Milton and Marvell participate in a

rethinking of apocalypticism at the moment when revelation ceases to
be a matter of allegorical decoding, when we begin to consider the end
of time happening within an historical or empirical temporality. In this
sense, they are trying to conceive apocalypticism in a world where the
reassuring constraints of an unfolding plan are no longer present as
the boundary of the future.

So what would a revolution look like in a period during which this

apocalyptic framework had not yet disappeared and during which the
confl ict with a purportedly anti- Christian papacy was not the only or
even the primary content of apocalyptic thought? Instead of defending
the honor of 1649 against Pincus’s challenges to its radicality or ef-
fectiveness, I propose that we take seriously the proposition not that
the revolution failed but that it was not really a revolution at all. Regard-
less of the accuracy of Pincus’s and Koselleck’s characterizations of the
demise of eschatology (and whether its ends are simply pursued by other
means after 1660 or 1688), what matters most in their narratives is
the future- oriented nature of all revolutionary change. For Pincus, all
revolutions “constitute a structural and ideological break from the pre-
vious regime. . . . And revolutionary regimes bring with them a new
conception of time, a notion that they are beginning a new epoch in
the history of the state and its society.”

The problem, almost needless

to say, with this model of transformation is that there’s very little new
about this conception of time as a series of radical breaks. Novelty
remains a dialectical differentiation from the past. The future remains
an ever receding promise. In Koselleck’s account, this promise is not
just receding but fundamentally betrayed:

That which was conceived before the Revolution as katechon
itself became a stimulus to revolution. Reaction, still employed
in the eigh teenth century as a mechanical category, came to
function as a movement which sought to halt it. Revolution, at
fi rst derived from the natural movement of the stars and thus
introduced into the natural rhythm of history as a cyclical

6 Introduction

meta phor, henceforth attained an irreversible direction. It
appears to unchain a yearned- for future while the nature of this
future robs the present of materiality and actuality; thus, while
continually seeking to banish and destroy Reaction, it succeeds
only in reproducing it: modern Revolution remains ever affected
by its opposite, Reaction. This alternation of Revolution and
Reaction, which supposedly is to lead to a fi nal paradise, has to
be understood as a futureless future, because the reproduction
and necessarily inevitable supersession of the contradiction
brings about an evil endlessness.

Although Koselleck ultimately presents this oscillatory dynamic as it-
self a motor for progressive and revolutionary movement, his diagno-
sis accurately, I think, describes Milton’s and Marvell’s suspicion of the
possibilities of revolutionary change, precisely because such change is
hopelessly tethered to a reactive present. For Milton and Marvell, at
least, 1649 is not a successful revolution precisely because it is not a
modern revolution. Or rather, it is a revolution conceived through the
lens of an apocalyptic present, not a promise of a modern state and all
the future rewards that it entails— power, success, effi ciency, law. Such
a model of change remains fundamentally conservative insofar as it pre-
serves a system of tension, struggle, and reward that remains the root
of monarchical tyranny, both for ruler and for ruled. As a result, the
Civil War and Commonwealth period pose different, more fundamental
questions about the nature of change— what it means for the new to
occur, in the present, and what it means for something to happen. Mil-
ton’s and Marvell’s lyrics, bridging as they do the pivotal event of 1649,
demonstrate that even our cherished notion of an event as a singular
crisis that demands a faithful response is in play within these poems.

In fact, as we will see, it is precisely the model of an external call for
reaction, the turning of events into an imagined speaker’s hailing, that
their works consistently challenge.

Although Milton and Marvell are intent on presenting an apocalyptic

change, they do not characterize it as a unique, unknowable rupture
within historical continuity. In this sense, a poststructuralist account
of events, in which the incalculable nature of an interruption requires
an ethical response and a radical responsibility from subjects, cannot
do justice to their pre sen ta tion of revelatory moments.

For Milton

and Marvell, the problem with revelatory change is not its surprising
break with continuity, but the diffi culty of presenting and conceiving an

Introduction 7

absolute end. As a result, even critical work that describes the event in
terms of an immanent break, like that of Alain Badiou, cannot accom-
modate their insistent evocations of a present and possible revelatory
ending. Badiou, for example, maintains that poetry is a mechanism for
preserving unknowable irruption:

If poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because it is
able to devote the latter to Presence; on the contrary, it is because
it trains language to the paradoxical function of maintaining
that which— radically singular, pure action— would otherwise
fall back into the nullity of place. Poetry is the stellar assumption
of that pure undecidable, against a background of nothingness,
that is an action of which one can only know whether it has
taken place inasmuch as one bets upon its truth.

Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics fundamentally challenge this conception
of poetry as the wagered maintenance of a singular event that occurs
elsewhere. For them, revealed presence is not gambling on a hopeful
future but a confi dent and hopeful rendering of an immanent occur-
rence. Such leaps of faith amount to a desperate confi dence, the desper-
ate faith of a zealous negative theology that takes human epistemological
limitations as evidence of something other than human frailty. Milton
and Marvell try to present and imagine a hoped- for end, not merely
predict, judge, or know it. What ever skeptical reserve they demonstrate
in the face of religious enthusiasm does not, then, amount to faith in a
secure rational procedure of prospective or retrospective evaluation. In
fact, for both of them, a blind zeal conceptually mirrors a rational skep-
ticism in that neither can truly understand an earnest commitment to
the possibility of God’s immanent presence.

In this sense, their work escapes the epistemological and subjectivizing

traps in a formulation like Badiou’s. For Badiou, the event is a rupture
that is fundamentally outside knowledge. This is because his ontology
of multiplicity requires that there be no self- belonging, no set that in-
cludes its elements and itself as a set.

This notion of the event, for all

its mathematical complexity, ultimately issues in a system of subjective
recognition in which novelty has only a retroactively recognized being.
In this system, events are never, at this time, in the present, taking place:
“It is the event which belongs to conceptual construction, in the double
sense that it can only be thought by anticipating its abstract form, and
it can only be revealed in the retroaction of an interventional practice

8 Introduction

which is itself entirely thought through.”

Badiou’s account remains

tethered to a logic of retrospective rupture, the arresting interpellation
of a crisis demanding the careful attention and singular fi delity of the
true revolutionary. As Daniel Smith notes, Badiou’s set theory, which
describes events as lacking existence, must then turn to a disturbingly
powerful subjectivity to account for occurrences:

The event thus appears in Badiou’s work under a double
characterization. Negatively so to speak, an event is undecidable
or indiscernible from the ontological viewpoint of axiomatics;
it is not presentable in the situation, but exists (if it can even be
said to exist) on the “edge of the void” as a mark of the infi nite
excess of the inconsistent multiplicity over the consistent sets
of the situation. Positively, then, it is only through a purely
subjective “decision” that the hitherto indiscernible event can
be affi rmed, and made to intervene in the situation. Lacking
any ontological status, the event in Badiou is instead linked to
a rigorous conception of subjectivity, the subject being the sole
instance capable of “naming” the event and maintaining a fi delity
to it through the declaration of an axiom (such as “all men are
equal,” in politics; or “I love you,” in love). In this sense, Badiou’s
philosophy of the event is, at its core, a philosophy of the
“activist subject.”

In this respect, the auto- generated immanent breaks that amount to
events in Badiou have the same result as the internally generated anti-
theses of the Hegelian dialectic: a recognition that aggrandizes the sub-
ject.

Just as importantly, such a model transforms the apocalypse into

a problem of human perception— just like every other historical event—
and fundamentally denies its status as the heralding moment of a new
world, one in which the mediating, sinful subject no longer exists. It
denies, in other words, the immediacy of face- to- face revelation and the
possibility of a radical conversion entailed therein.

Despite all their talk of irruption and revolution, models of events

like Badiou’s effectively prevent change by turning events into unreach-
able, transcendent impossibilities:

In this modern moment we are no longer satisfi ed with thinking
immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think
transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence

Introduction 9

that a breach is expected. . . . The Judeo- Christian word
replaces the Greek logos: no longer satisfi ed with ascribing
immanence to something, immanence itself is made to disgorge
the transcendent everywhere. No longer content with handing
over immanence to the transcendent, we want it to discharge it,
reproduce it and fabricate it itself. In fact this is not diffi cult—
all that is necessary is for movement to be stopped. Transcen-
dence enters as soon as movement of the infi nite is stopped. It
takes advantage of the interruption to reemerge, revive, and
spring forth again. . . . The reversal of values had to go so
far— making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism)
from which the Transcendent will save us.

Deleuze and Guattari insist on a mechanism for thinking about move-
ment without the arrogation of authority to a transcendent ruling, and
saving, subject. Just as important, though, is their anatomization of
the incapacity entailed in such models. As Smith notes, for Deleuze, an
irruptive event requires a subject with decidedly narrowed capacities:

The ethical themes one fi nds in transcendent philosophies such
as those of Levinas and Derrida— an absolute responsibility for
the other that I can never assume, or an infi nite call to justice
that I can never satisfy— are, from the point of view of imma-
nence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my
capacity to act. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other
words, transcendence represents my slavery and impotence
reduced to its lowest point.

Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics require an immanent understanding of
events precisely so as to avoid this reassuring impotence in the face of
revelatory transformation. As we will see, even waiting for and record-
ing apocalyptic change requires that we transmute the entity doing the
recording and waiting. If we do not, then it becomes diffi cult to imagine
the apocalypse as anything more than the settling of old scores, the fi nal
victory of a slighted, resentful subject. Milton and Marvell, in contrast,
try to show how this revelation could be desirable as such, and not
because it promises compensation for past injuries or inadequacies.

Milton’s and Marvell’s verse also demonstrates that there is some-

thing more disturbingly fanatical about the mea sured retrospection of
recognition than the most futuristic of prophecies or calls for zealous

10 Introduction

po liti cal violence. That is, violent rupture becomes the only possible
motor for transformation in a recognitional system. One always per-
forms this recognition from the standpoint of a triumphant victor after
combat and confl ict, requiring, then, the very sorts of retrospective (and
prospective, it should be said) triumphalism that seem anathema to a
transmutation of all worldly values. As Jonathan Goldberg notes, it is
around the value of rupture as a foundational instance that Badiou’s
and Agamben’s readings of Paul diverge:

More to the point would be Giorgio Agamben’s argument
about fi gura, his claim that Pauline theology is deeply rooted in
the double nature of typological fi guration, in which any fi gure
is at once historically real and yet anticipatory of a messianic
futurity. . . . His reading of Paul claims that various forms of
non- self- sameness are the Pauline legacy and contrasts with
Badiou, who treats Paul’s declaration of faith in the resurrection
of Jesus as a founding moment, an event that marks a rupture
with everything that has come before.

Agamben’s notion of poetic temporality, and its relationship to pres-
ent events, is correspondingly alien to Badiou’s postulation of a singular
rupture faithfully maintained. In Agamben’s account, a poem has an
eschaton, an end toward which it tends, but also has its own time, a
time encapsulated in rhyme. This is not the eternity of holism or unity
but rather a different order of time still within time: “It is not that there
is another time, coming from who- knows- where, that would substitute
for chronological time; to the contrary, what we have is the same time
that organizes itself through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsa-
tion, in order to make place for the time of the poem.”

The messianic

time that Agamben limns amounts to a time contracted into the moment
when it begins to end and stands as a rejection of a theoretical empha-
sis on the singular promise of futurity. Messianism is not, then, a tran-
scendent rupture that can also masquerade as a transition: “What is at
risk here is a delay implicit in the concept of ‘transitional time,’ for, as
with every transition, it tends to be prolonged into infi nity and renders
unreachable the end that it supposedly produces.” Instead of this model
of deferral, or even a notion of eschatology that would transcend chron-
ological time, messianism entails a transformation of the experience of
operational time: “What matters to us here is not the fact that each
event of the past— once it becomes fi gure— announces a future event

Introduction 11

and is fulfi lled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by this
typological relation. . . . The messianic is not just one of two terms in
this typological relation, it is the relation itself.”

On the one hand, this

is nothing more than the insistence that fulfi llment or telos is not enough
for understanding, that one must march through the experience of a
thought for understanding to occur. That seems innocuous and uncon-
troversial enough. However, the contention that messianism is relation
and that this relation is discernible in its own right ultimately entails
the suggestion that retrospective tension and subjective recognition play
no part in an apocalyptic transformation that re orients temporality.

In this case, the experience of thought cannot be the dialectical one of
internally generated breaks, reversals, and sublative re- relations. But
it can also not be the radically open responsiveness to the other that
requires aleatory interruption in order to function.

The messianic, then, is not a punctual, spectacular rupture, arriving

from inside or out to disrupt our historical continuity. Rather, Agamben
implies that we achieve continuity or relation, as such, only through
messianism. The apocalypse does not intervene to upset our retirement
plans and then force us to evaluate and then reorder everything as a
result of disruptive energies: That remains the Badiouian model of
revolutionary events. Instead, revelation means the pre sen ta tion and
transformation of relation, so that we no longer imagine the weak paper-
ing over of gaps as the proper characterization of connection. Badiou
represents the logic of the present that Milton and Marvell attempt to
escape: His emphasis on recognition results in a notion of the present
as a spatial network of connections perceived and operated by the
same disturbingly powerful subjectivity that we already know. The
disruptive break, then, is not an end. It is, in fact, the very condition of
events imagined as a relational sequence, narrative or otherwise. Thus,
as Badiou often avers, events, even apocalyptic ones, have no being.

Neither, likewise, does relation. In contrast, Agamben’s account of mes-
sianism insists on the thickness and presence of relation and relational
events, what Deleuze describes as “positive distance.”

At the level of

poetry, what this means is that rhyme transforms chronos into mes-
sianic time, not by promising an ideal regularity or unity that supersedes
the present but rather by transmuting expectant hope into a present
event:

The sestina— and, in this sense, every poem— is a soteriologi-
cal device which, th[r]ough the sophisticated mēchanē of the

12 Introduction

announcement and retrieval of rhyming end words (which
correspond to typological relations between past and present),
transforms chronological time into messianic time. Just as this
time is not other to chronological time or eternity, but is the
transformation that time undergoes when it is taken for a rem-
nant, so too is the time of the sestina the metamorphosis that
time undergoes insofar as it is the time of the end, the time
that the poem takes to come to an end.

So the poem does not overcome but rather transmutes chronos, in this
case through an insistence on rereading and anticipation as part and
parcel of the present. In turn, rhyme is the vehicle for treating hope as
something more than wishful thinking, the vehicle for making hope
happen in the present as a moment of apparent, and not merely analo-
gous or deduced relation.

Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalypticism arrays itself against the hol-

lowing out of the apocalyptic present that appears in critical work like
Badiou’s, because the eschatological event is the only present that, for
them, actually has something like substance or value. The apocalyptic
lyric, then, is the pre sen ta tion of a future with being in the present, in
opposition to the comforting evasions of deferral, mediation, and sub-
jective impotence. It is in this sense that it also unapologetically and
unironically wants what it wants: a revealed end. Most of the subjec-
tive projections into the future with which we are often besieged do not
want this at all. They prefer being able to look back, after the end, on
the end. Lyric demolishes precisely this fractured, temporally transcen-
dent subject, the same one that desires its own self- undermining postu-
lations of Archimedean points of view. This subject wants to be caught
out in its pretensions and errors, so that it can return to doing what it
always does: lamenting the impotence of its own epistemological struc-
tures and reason and, in so doing, turning all problems into problems
of knowing. In heralding the end of this subject, Milton’s and Marvell’s
lyrics promise that there is in this world, fi nally, not only novelty and
change but also conversion, hope, and even, dare one say it, learning.

Prior to the waning of millenarian sentiments that Koselleck and Pin-
cus describe, the early portion of the seventeenth century witnesses a
consolidation of En glish apocalyptic thought and its infl uence. The

Introduction 13

earlier work of John Bale and John Foxe certainly participates in the
broader Reformation tendency to apply the Book of Revelation to
historical events and lays the groundwork for later appropriations of
apocalypticism as a theological, polemical, and po liti cal tool. From the
commentaries of Thomas Brightman and Joseph Mede to radical publica-
tions from Fifth Monarchists and Ranters, seventeenth- century En gland
experienced an increase in the amount and infl uence of apocalyptic
writing. Certainly, the millenarian fervor of the Civil War, Common-
wealth, and Interregnum added to the sense of an imminent upheaval, as
did, paradoxically, the concerted attempt to domesticate or repurpose
such disruptive revolutionary sentiments after 1660. Yet we mistake
the sincerity of early modern En glish apocalypticism if we imagine it
solely as a po liti cally revolutionary tool, whether duplicitously or ear-
nestly deployed. As we have already noted in the context of Koselleck’s
work, despite the infl uence of Bale’s The Image of Both Churches and
its portrait of a mortal contest between a papal Antichrist and Refor-
mation Protestantism, there is more to the apocalypse than decoding
whom God favors in the confl ict between royalists and parliamentar-
ians or when the fi nal battle will be waged and won. The very allegorical
decoding that would make of history such a planned narrative appears
under suspicion in Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics. Although their suspi-
cions rest on different foundations, each poet backs away from treating
the apocalypse as a hermeneutic of history, a way to access the subter-
ranean providence that structures apparently chance events. It is not
that eschatology does not matter to history or that the apocalypse is
really a parable about the internal combat with sin but rather that the
way that it matters is different and more complicated than the layering
of an allegory implies. For example, Marvell treats the apocalypse as
an intensely forceful event fundamentally different in kind from mere
developments, causes and effects, or historical and po liti cal decisions.
It is certainly not another expository or hermeneutic layer that better
or more fully explicates another plane of action. These lyrics, then,
consistently defy attempts to treat their own evocations of apocalyptic
transformation as phenomenal expressions of a broader narratival un-
derstanding of the Book of Revelation.

For Milton and Marvell, the apocalypse is not identical to revolution,

either the world turned upside down or a return to a more primitive
purity. Revolution, as the prefi x implies, preserves what is overturned, in
effect requiring that the new retain what it has disavowed. In addition,
revolution imagines the relationship between the new and the old as

14 Introduction

either a narrated duel, a cyclical purifi cation, or an exposition of causal
relationships, none of which can do justice to the unpre ce dented, un-
caused nature of revelation. God does not win a fi ght with Satan and
then get to give a victory speech; and revelation is not a countdown
machine, whose occurrence can be hastened or slowed by human ac-
tions, Fifth Monarchists’ claims to the contrary. Milton’s and Marvell’s
apocalypses are not interested in causation or combat. This is not to
suggest that each is secretly a pacifi st— neither is— but rather that we
cannot conceive transformation as an accomplished goal or victory and
still preserve its status as a novel event. Contests necessarily harmonize
and render equivalent the contestants. Causes contain and presage their
effects in a way that precludes the new. It is precisely these limitations
on the conception of novelty that Milton and Marvell seek to overcome
by turning to apocalypticism.

Although there is much talk of revolution in seventeenth- century

po liti cal theory and polemic, Milton, Marvell, and their fellow travel-
ers also tend to view pivotal, catastrophic events through an eschato-
logical lens, which, in turn, allows them to consider the apocalypse as
simultaneously foreseeable, meaningful— both now and in the future—
and radically disruptive. Decoding signs of an imminent upheaval pos-
tulates a world that at least appears to possess a purposive order, but
an apocalyptic end must also occur as a radical disruption of the narra-
tive march of history. If Jesus returns like a thief in the night, the signs
that herald his arrival must be correct, but cannot present the event as
the result of a progressive, causal, or meaningful pro cess. Apocalyptic
signs must be accurate and knowable, but presage a new order that is
unpre ce dented. This tension between singularity and signifi cation, be-
tween the advent of a radically new world and the interpretive detec-
tion that heralds it, replicates modernity’s confl icted understanding of
events, but it also refl ects the essentially literary concerns of apocalyptic
thought in the period. That is, in what sense do signs happen in the same
way that events do? If signs are even to represent, let alone present
events, would they not have to occur in a manner at least analogous to
the occasions of which they are the linguistic doubles? Revelation en-
tails the occurrence of signs as an immediate, pure transparence, as the
immanent pre sen ta tion of an icon, even. Repre sen ta tion’s systems of
deferral, which tend to insulate the sign from such temporal prob-
lems, disappear at this eschatological moment and leave us, then, with
a sign tantamount to occasion itself instead of the commemoration of
occasion.

Introduction 15

The apocalypse has more than a retroactive or proleptic effect on

the present. Certainly, the promise of the messiah’s apocalyptic return
has immanent consequences that are distinct from those of a fore-
shadowed, calculated aim. This is a future promise that has effects
now, before it actually occurs, thus disrupting a simplistic conception
of cause’s relationship to effects. More importantly, the apocalypse also
promises us an end to the feeble roundabout of repre sen ta tion, oppo-
sitional and situational knowing, structure and its discontents— in short,
the entire panoply of mediation that dominates modern critical dis-
course. It instead promises us presence face- to- face, without negation
or re- presentation. Milton and Marvell attempt to create such an apoc-
alyptic sign, one that is simultaneously an immediate revelation. They
seek to advance the potential and force of apocalyptic imaginings, their
ability to issue in a real, even utopian transformation, instead of con-
fi rming yet once more the planned and promised ends that everyone
confi dently and quite rightly expects.

In holding out the possibility of a real present that is not always

fl eeting, the apocalypse does not just problematize a linear conception
of time— every narrative already does that, after all. It also challenges
the preeminent value of one of our most cherished modern concepts:
relation. Relation promises us a consoling causal or contextual net-
work, a defi nitional system of de pen den cy in which past, present, and
future are situationally determined by syntactical shifters, the self rec-
ognizes itself in opposition to some other, and the entire world extends
its interdependence in perpetuity. It is this intertextual, interconnected
interde pen den cy that constitutes eternity or is it least our mechanism
for conceiving it. This would be the consoling version of God’s ultimate
eternal presence, Paul’s eternal “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28),

one that

curiously, and self- servingly, mirrors our own modern conceptions of
networked ecol ogy, information, and even the interdisciplinary sym-
biosis of the university. Yet this Pauline revelation of the “all in all,” or
the alpha and omega, fi rst and last of the Book of Revelation (1:11,
22:13), is also an end, including an end to all of these interdependent
relations, most notably the temporal ones in which a future follows a
present, which in turn transforms into a past. The apocalypse is an end
to all of this and, as such, threatens to terminate our most comforting
of epistemological mediations and reassuring signifying structures. It is
the end of mediated, relational meaning, but also the end of the arrival
of imminent meaning— because an immanent meaning without defer-
ral or difference is right here, now. The apocalyptic event, then, is the

16 Introduction

occurrence of what linguistics and literature always claim to want: a
full presence currently absent and deferred by the repre sen ta tional struc-
tures of language, human epistemological limitations, or the voracious-
ness of a subject’s desires. But these mediated absences are actually much
more attractive than we make out, as our attempts to tame endings within
mediation reveal. Closure, synthesis, release, and resolution— all of
these critical concepts that make of the world a hermeneutic problem
to be solved or a chaos wishing for order— are not up to this task of
accounting for an ending that would also amount to presence.

The end

is neither an answer to a question, a solution to a problem, nor an effect
of a cause. Such a present terminus, as we will see, is more diffi cult to
conceive than we usually imagine.

Ultimately, the apocalypse is a way of thinking about change and

ends, one that does not reduce to a logic of cause and effect, delibera-
tion and action, reason and resolution. It is not that it was not used as
a po liti cal bludgeon during this period— it certainly was— but Milton’s
and Marvell’s uses do not conform to such a pattern. “Apocalypse,” for
these poets and in this book, does not mean the entire panoply of im-
ages and signs from Revelation. Milton and Marvell think this sort of
prophetic repre sen ta tion is precisely the enemy of change in the pres-
ent, the lurid fantasies that actually arrest the imagination in a projected
vengeance or suffering.

Instead, they employ the tools of lyric in order

to imagine revelation as something more than a fantasy of or for the
future. For example, Lycidas and “Upon Appleton House” emphasize
the temporal occurrence of symbols, that they happen within time within
the poem, so as to challenge notions of signifi cation and structure that
treat the present as inaccessible, as nothing more than a relational de-
pendence on historical pasts and imagined futures. Milton’s formal
experiments with the sonnet and Marvell’s generic alterations of the
encomium each seek to unseat the futural orientation of poetic forms
designed to curry favor, either in cravenly mercenary or in sincere fash-
ion. Their revisions strip these traditions of their implication in a system
of future rewards, not out of a principled moral objection so much as
out of a commitment to a more basic question of the ontological nature
of temporal change. We are in the land of Milton’s “reforming of Refor-
mation itself.”

Of course, the milieu in which Milton and Marvell write is not just

one among others in literary history. The same century that witnesses
a proliferation of climactic national events also witnesses a fl owering
of lyric poetry in En glish, unparalleled until the Romantic movement.

Introduction 17

The lyric, as numerous critics from Jonathan Culler to Hegel main-
tain, bears an intimate relationship to immediacy and temporality. In
fact, Hegel contends that the lyric is more concerned with history and
temporality than is the more narrative genre of epic:

For the outpouring of lyric stands to time, as an external
element of communication, in a much closer relation than epic
narrative does. The latter places real phenomena in the past and
juxtaposes them or interweaves them in rather a spatial exten-
sion, whereas lyric portrays the momentary emergence of
feelings and ideas in the temporal succession of their origin and
development and therefore has to give proper artistic shape to
the varied kinds of temporal movement.

The lyric, as a genre, is then, like revelation, a present pre sen ta tion of
immediacy, not its promise in the future or its declension into the past.
Culler’s account of the new lyric studies proceeds similarly, defi ning
lyric primarily in opposition to narrative, instead of to epic: “It is deadly
for poetry to try to compete with narrative— by promoting lyrics as
repre sen ta tions of the experience of subjects— on a terrain where narra-
tive has obvious advantages. If narrative is about what happens next,
lyric is about what happens now— in the reader’s engagement with each
line— and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its dif-
ference from narrative.”

Yet in what does this now consist, other than

its opposition to next, then, before, after, and other temporal and spatial
shifters? Culler’s defi nition, and others like it within literary criticism,
essentially make of immediacy both a restful self- presence and a dialec-
tical combatant. But what would it mean to write or even think about
temporal presence without recourse to all of these dialectical mechanisms
and reversals, many of which often border on a via negativa? Milton’s
and Marvell’s lyrics, I contend, use the apocalypse and all that it entails—
the face- to- face of revelation, the end of temporality in its sinful variant,
a really present and not merely deferred showing— so as to offer the
possibility of presence outside these reactive circuits. Lyric is neither a
commemoration (as opposed to a narrative re- counting) of past events
nor the wishful promise of a better future. It is that future or past ren-
dered immanent, as something that happens in the present of the poem.
“Now” is not a weak grammatical shifter, representing a fl eeting expe-
rience in some other temporality. Now is an event that occurs inside
poems, not the repre sen ta tion of events.

18 Introduction

The danger of such language— or really any claims to be writing

about “time”— is not simply that it counters structuralist and post-
structuralist orthodoxies but rather that it reeks of an anti- intellectual
mysticism more fi tted to bad readings of romanticism than to bad read-
ings of Milton and Marvell. Mediation, of what ever stripe, promises a
buffer against such naïve immanentism. Thus, Hegel maintains that
the designation “now” cannot be immediately affi rmative but must
proceed through mediated negation:

Sense- certainty thus comes to know by experience that its
essence is neither in the object nor in the ‘I,’ and that its imme-
diacy is neither an immediacy of the one nor the other; for in
both, what I mean is rather something unessential, and the
object and the ‘I’ are universals in which that ‘Now’ and ‘Here’
and ‘I’ which I mean do not have a continuing being, or are
not. . . . But what has been, is not; I set aside the second truth,
its having been, its supersession, and thereby negate the nega-
tion of the ‘Now’, and thus return to the fi rst assertion, that the
‘Now’ is.

Although Hegel’s procedure returns being to the present, in a fashion
that would be a welcome counter to Badiou’s beingless events, it re-
mains the case that the occurrence of “now” happens only as a very
specifi c type of mediated relation: opposition and negation. Despite
his ac know ledg ment that lyric is not a mystical liberation from feeling
but rather a liberation in feeling,

the black box of mysticism remains

in Hegel’s account of an asymptotic approach to pure differentiation.
The auto- generative oppositional structure of the dialectic that pur-
ports to resist such fl ights of fancy with mediation actually smuggles
within itself a uniform notion of distance and differentiation that re-
duces both to an empty mystical void.

This, at least, is Gilles Deleuze’s criticism of the Hegelian dialectic: It

claims to provide a mediating bulwark against the naïveté of immanence
but actually amounts to the mystifi cation of all distance and distinction.
There are more ways to do difference, even and including contradiction
and opposition, than are dreamt of in Hegel’s philosophy:

The idea of a positive distance as distance (and not as an
annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it
permits the mea sur ing of contraries through their fi nite differ-

Introduction 19

ence instead of equating difference with a measureless contrari-
ety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infi nite. It is
not difference which must “go as far as” contradiction, as Hegel
thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the
contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as
it follows the distance corresponding to it.

The idea, then, is to think distance, even Hegel’s dialectical difference, as
not an empty vacuum to be overcome but an affi rmative, substantive
relation. For Deleuze, Hegel’s dialectic cannot explain novelty, precisely
because it describes only an escalating confl ict, in which difference must
intensify into opposition and contradiction, which then topple over
into a change. When difference reaches the point of antithesis, change
miraculously occurs. Deleuze seems to consider such optimism hope-
lessly naïve and provides instead a model of change that requires an
affi rmative difference:

We speak, on the contrary, of an operation according to which
two things or two determinations are affi rmed through their
difference, that is to say, that they are the objects of simultane-
ous affi rmation only insofar as their difference is itself affi rmed
and is itself affi rmative. We are no longer faced with an identity
of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a
movement of the negative and of exclusion.

Deleuze’s terms in this respect mirror Agamben’s description of Pau-
line messianism. For Agamben, messianism, which entails an imagina-
tive “as not” that evades the logic of negation, also serves as the only
temporal model for a revelation that would not amount to a mystical
transcendence of the present:

It [the Pauline hōs mē ] sets it against itself in the form of the as
not: weeping as not weeping. The messianic tension thus does
not tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the
indifference between one thing and its opposite. . . . In pushing
each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does
not simply cancel out this fi gure, but it makes it pass, it prepares
its end.

Agamben’s and Deleuze’s assaults on dialectical negation matter for this
study not simply so that we can beat up on Hegel, but rather because

20 Introduction

they insist on a notion of novelty that would be compatible with an apoc-
alyptic revelation in which mediation ceases. For Deleuze, this concept
is univocity, which is, however paradoxically, the only mechanism for
distinguishing languages and beings: “Univocity means the identity
of the noematic attributed and that which is expressed linguistically—
event and sense. It does not allow Being to subsist in the vague state that
it used to have in the perspectives of analogy. Univocity raises and ex-
tracts Being, in order to distinguish it better from that in which it occurs
and from that of which it is said.”

In other words, transcendent judg-

ment or dialectical mediation do not preserve difference and distinction
but rather liquidate being into a single, amorphous mass. It is only uni-
vocity that makes distinction possible and that can capture a face- to-
face revelation, a sign as event and sense simultaneously in the present.
In this sense, Deleuze’s work allows us to treat an apocalyptic end as
something more substantive than the indefi nite eternity of the same
daily life that we already know.

Milton’s and Marvell’s appropriation of Reformation apocalypti-

cism does not represent the naïve hope of the optimistic or the resent-
ful despair of the failed revolutionary. Their poetic uses of revelation
are not merely a peculiar Protestant historical novelty consigned to
a benighted past of lockstep scriptural allegories and superstitious
countdowns to destruction. Their lyrics’ emphasis on present occur-
rence requires concomitant revisions to our own understanding of
repetition, fi nality, and the new. If poems do not report events after the
fact or attempt to restore or compensate for a lost past, what do their
repetitions and responses achieve? Moreover, when does repetition it-
self occur? When it is anticipated? Or after it occurs, in which case
there can be no present repetition? If we insist that lyrics repeat events
in a fi ctional present or produce an authentic immediacy or a virtual
futurity, how does that poetic event interact with its presumed pre de-
ces sor? Overcoming? Substitution? Incorporation? Destruction? In-
stead of treating lyric’s claims to immediacy as an excuse to reassert
the fundamental problems and constitutive tensions of repre sen ta tion,
this study proposes that Milton and Marvell are attempting nothing
less than a reconceptualization of what it means for something to hap-
pen. No longer does it seem viable to consider an event as an accom-
plishment or a fulfi llment. The very notion of poetic endings seems
bound up in their experiments with apocalyptic time: Are poetic reso-
lutions themselves events, or are they the end of events?

For modern

readers, I think, it seems obvious that recognition, retroactive or im-

Introduction 21

mediate, and response are what one brings to events. These early mod-
ern poets, embroiled in a revolutionary era, are interested in the much
more basic, even metaphysical question of what it means for some-
thing to happen, even if that something amounts to a crisis of incom-
pletion or catastrophic destruction.

Milton’s and Marvell’s verse does not seek to escape the logic of ten-

sion and confl ict because it suspects ideological duplicity, or because it
naïvely imagines that willfully optimistic thinking can change the world.
Their lyrics leave us with neither cynicism nor gullibility, precisely be-
cause both of these options ultimately harbor a fi nal fantasy of rest, either
in a hidden purpose (providential or malevolently conspiratorial) or in
an accomplished, inexpropriable freedom. The revisions that each poet
makes to the pastoral genre are designed to eliminate the hermeneutic
presupposition that poems are coded transmissions of a more impor-
tant secret content, that pastoral is really a means of obliquely critiqu-
ing court culture. Similarly, Milton’s revision of the Petrarchan sonnet’s
contemplative mood escapes both those interpretations that would
make of all love poetry a roman à clef about patronage and those that
insist on its sincere evocation of a subject’s internal passional machina-
tions. Marvell’s encomia perform an analogous revaluation, purging the
purportedly mercenary logic of praise of both craven, self- interested
social climbing and sycophantic blindness to the fl aws of its target. The
point, surely, is that the lyric genres that both poets use risk precisely
this oscillation between cynical hermeneutics— everything is really a sign
of some more important other thing— and solipsistic naïveté— we really
are in Arden because the poem tells us that we are and we think we
are. However, in each instance, their generic revisions focus on dis-
avowing precisely this oscillation in favor of advancing a lyric that
contains an immanent presence. After all, both cynicism and naïveté
are orientations toward a future imagined as impossible. Each pres-
ents the future as unreal, cloaked behind misleading signs or present
only as an imaginary fancy. Milton and Marvell think that the apoca-
lypse, poetry, and even hope have considerably more present power
and potential than that.

III

This study’s fi rst chapter explores Marvell’s reconceptualization of the
target of praise, his propensity to praise apocalyptically transformative

22 Introduction

forces instead of persons. All of Marvell’s encomia laud an event as
such, instead of the actor who would purportedly control this sig-
nifi cant occurrence. They praise means instead of ends, goals, or plans.
Even the titles of the Cromwell lyrics indicate that they are on or about
specifi c events: Cromwell’s return from Ireland, the fi rst anniversary
of the Protectorate, or his death. Instead of amounting to a disturb-
ingly proto- fascistic idealization of power, Marvell’s early elegies and
his poems in praise of Cromwell attempt to wrest encomium away
from its mercenary tendencies, insisting that only praise for force can
make of encomium something more than the most retrograde of self-
interested, social climbing. As a result, these poems demand a funda-
mental rethinking of po liti cal engagement. More specifi cally, Marvell’s
epideictic verse shows that one can pledge allegiance only to a force or
movement, not to a person, and it is only this revised model of alle-
giance that allows for anything like po liti cal change. In addition, only
allegiance to an apocalyptic force, acting in the present, can enable
real novelty. Loyalty to persons always results in inertia, precisely
because it amounts to nothing more than a restful and reassuring
agreement.

Chapter 2 explores the nature of imaginary potential in Milton’s

sonnets. More specifi cally, what happens when one imagines an alter-
native future? And in turn, what constitutes an event within thought?
These are pressing questions not only for Milton’s contemplative son-
nets, “How soon hath time” and “When I consider,” but also for those
praising Cromwell, Fairfax, and Vane, the occasional sonnet on the
massacre of the Waldenses, the fi nal sonnet recounting a dream visita-
tion from his deceased wife, and even the sonnet- form conclusion to
Samson Agonistes. The sonnet is important for Milton because it allows
for an imagination of apocalyptic and poetic events outside a logic of
resemblance. The volta and resolution of sonnets are formal means of
incorporating occasions within verse without recourse to analogy
or verisimilitude, or to a subtending providential narrative to be revealed
in an imminent future. As such, they allow for an eschatological pres-
ence within poetry, but also translate the apocalypse into a paratactic
rhetorical order, fi rmly rejecting the notion that apocalyptic events
amount to an overwhelming contingency or surprise or to a logical or
causal development. The concluding choral sonnet of Samson Agonistes
applies this paratactic principle to an entire dramatic history, ultimately
demonstrating that it is only lyric that can tell us what it means for

Introduction 23

something to happen, while still allowing us to do something about it
in the present. In this sense, this dramatic poem that concludes with
apocalyptic destruction is ultimately and perhaps counterintuitively
an attempt to take seriously what a poetics and a politics of hope would
entail.

Chapter 3 explores Milton’s depiction, in Lycidas, of a potentiality

that does not tend toward actualization. In an occasional elegy purport-
edly all about the fi nality of death and a poet’s response to it, Milton
outlines a possibility that is free from the directive interventions of not
only bossy prelates and hireling wolves but also authoritative speakers
like Saint Peter, Apollo, the author himself, and even God. The poem’s
famed evocation of apocalyptic justice for greedy prelates— the two-
handed engine that threatens to strike once and no more— also shows,
paradoxically, the limitations inherent in conceiving of the apocalypse
as a fi nal justice or fulfi llment. By disavowing the imperatives to per-
fection and productivity within both teleology and typology, Lycidas
attempts to advance an antinomian understanding of liberty, one that
would no longer consider autonomy or self- regulation the pinnacle
of freedom. As a result, the new revelation that the poem’s fi nal line
promises—“To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new”

— does not

amount to the actualization of a positive program or lurking potential,
precisely because such an understanding always devalues possibility,
treating it as an unreality until it appears inside the very real world it
hopes to change.

Chapter 4 contends that Marvell’s “Upon Appleton

House,” a

poem rife with images of reversal, explores what it means for revolu-
tion itself to happen in the present. On their own, these reversals do
not fundamentally change the world: An upside- down world remains
the same; only a subject’s epistemological perspective has changed.
“Upon Appleton House” attempts to revive the apocalyptic power of
these symbols by focusing on their temporal occurrence within the
poem. Marvell’s much ballyhooed penchant for a striking literaliza-
tion of meta phor is essentially an exploration of what it means for a
meta phor or symbol to occur in the present— what happens when me-
diation occurs immediately. The po liti cal effect is the replacement of
revolution with apocalypticism, precisely because it is only the latter
that can really end injustice, sin, or anything, for that matter. Reversal,
in contrast, acts only as a false ending, preserving itself through in-
version in perpetuity. The literary effect, however, is one in which the

24 Introduction

sequence of symbols and meta

phors, when they occur temporally,

matters more than the transpositional spatial network of which they
form a part. Ultimately, Marvell turns the country-

house genre, a

genre already obsessed with the nature of poetic production and its
architectural structure, into a tool for examining poetic occurrences,
the events that happen now, within verse. As a consequence, “Upon
Appleton House” becomes a brief for Marvell’s (and ultimately Mil-
ton’s) broader contention that po liti cal understandings of change will
always fail because they assume a divide between contemplation and
action and, in so doing, think that it is possible to describe po liti cal
change, even revolution, without an ontological account of transfor-
mation. For Marvell and Milton, the apocalypse provides precisely
this type of account: the postulation of fundamental alterations in the
nature of temporality alongside a serious examination of meaning’s
present occurrence, how something like real revelation could occur
immanently.

This study’s conclusion turns to the consequences of Milton’s and

Marvell’s reconceptualization of events for our understanding of cri-
sis, freedom, and learning. It explores what it means for change to
happen in the present. What would happen if we ceased to think of
change as reform, or even revolution, and imagined it as a present
apocalypse? In this respect, many of the categories that have come to
dominate our understanding of politics (critique, discussion, delibera-
tion, re sis tance, allegiance, and resolution) and literature (irony, ten-
sion, allegory, confl ict, climax, and resolution, again) seem dubious or
even impotent in this verse. The apocalypse, after all, does not support
the elaborate edifi ce of anxiety, confl ict, and struggle with which we
are accustomed to anatomize sociopo liti cal structures and their altera-
tion. And this is primarily because the reversals of revolution are not
the same thing as the events of revelation. The latter can certainly be
domesticated within the former, but this verse consistently demon-
strates the dangers of doing so. The lesson that these lyrics offer is that
we have consistently put our faith in the wrong engine of change. Rev-
olution looks attractive precisely because it can be made permanent
and extend into perpetuity the endlessly roiling cauldron of history
and politics with its revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The
apocalypse, however, holds out the possibility of a real end, and the
indictment that we have never really ended anything, that we are all
grasping, acquisitive hoarders of history, no matter how catastrophic

One cannot pledge allegiance to a person, a position, or even a nation.
One can declare allegiance only to a force or a movement. And it is
lyric that allows one to locate and praise this present force, instead of
reducing it to a wishful future or an inert past narrative. That, at least,
is the lesson of Marvell’s Cromwell poems, as well as of his early royal-
ist elegies. This chapter argues that “An Horatian Ode,” as well as his
other po liti cal encomia, uses the apocalypse to reconsider the nature of
allegiance, not just its ultimate object. If loyalism, in John Hall’s terms,
requires that one “not . . . respect the power or place for the persons
sake, but the person for the place and power[s] sake,”

then the act of

allegiance itself, the nature of this respect, changes as a result of this
shift from person to place: Allegiance to a revelatory power means some-
thing different from allegiance to a place or person. After all, “An Hora-
tian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” is not on or about
Cromwell or about his promised po liti cal position. It is on or about the
occasion of his return from Ireland. Even criticism that reads this poem
as an ambivalent evaluation of Cromwell still imagines it as withholding
from the man either allegiance or plaudits, not his triumphant home-
coming. So how is praising Cromwell’s return different from just prais-
ing Cromwell? As Blair Worden notes, in 1650 it is not yet clear that
Cromwell will become Lord Protector or even that the parliamentary
cause will be successful.

C h a p t e r O n e

Apocalyptic Means

Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell’s
Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

Marvell, then, praises this force before it has accomplished its goals

and so does not merely justify an existing order or sycophantically but-
ter up a victor. Just as importantly, the ode does not laud the eventual
success of Cromwell’s po liti cal program, offering only a rational wager
on its ultimate success. Mercenary calculations are absent from the
poem. Marvell instead consistently depicts Cromwell as an immediate
force without a plan. In so doing, he refuses to subordinate forceful
means to overriding teleological, rational, or even providential ends.

As a result of this attention to immediate means, the poem con-

ceives of po liti cal change as an apocalyptic, face- to- face immanence,
one not judged according to a transcendent logic of purposive pro-
grams or fi nal causes. Marvell’s ode does not cheerlead for partisan
triumph or revel in eliminationist fantasies in this respect but rather
attempts to reconfi gure the pro cess by which we evaluate truly signifi -
cant events. What does it mean to praise or condemn decisive, even
revelatory events as such, instead of weighing their outcome, retroac-
tively or proleptically? At the very least, it means that Marvell’s verse
is not just cagy or elusive but rather reconceives the pro cess through
which po liti cal change occurs, wrenching it away from the purposive
aims and declared allegiances characteristic of both parliamentarian
and loyalist factions. It is for this reason that “An Horatian Ode” iden-
tifi es Cromwell with apocalyptically transformative and irresistible
natural forces, and not just an ultimate providential victory. “The First
Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector”
goes even further, describing these forces as requiring the allegiance of
a public will in order to function and rejecting the notion that escha-
tology works like a narrative written elsewhere, in some transcendent
realm or future. In Marvell’s hands, revelation does not discover a
subtending providential narrative that has been ordering the world all
along, but rather lauds the instruments that transform the world into
something new. By praising means instead of ends, Marvell ultimately
turns apocalyptic force into an immanent presence, instead of a narra-
tive to which readers can only passively respond with ac cep tance or
ultimately futile re sis tance.

“An Horatian Ode,” as well as Marvell’s other more obviously epi-

deictic lyrics, attempts to praise events outside of a system of mercenary
self- interest and in opposition to a craven adoration for order. For
Marvell, it is the postulation of teleological ends as a standard of evalu-
ation that, paradoxically, prevents any present evaluative discrimination.

28 Apocalyptic

Means

Teleology certainly defers resolution into the future, thus hobbling im-
manent judgment, but it also denudes action of any specifi city by treat-
ing all ends as just another general form of accomplishment. As we all
know, means do not matter if the ultimate evaluative test is nothing
more than the achievement of a postulated goal. Marvell’s verse sim-
ply suggests that such a diminished view of force and potential results
even from a teleology that claims to attend to individual elements in a
broader purposive structure.

In contrast, “An Horatian Ode” outlines a desire for and evaluation

of apocalyptic force as such, without the unfolding of a scripted order
or the shocking eruption of an epiphany that would retroactively
ground such judgments. It is in this sense that the poem demonstrates
an Horatian equanimity and, as Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker note,
is decidedly free of anxiety.

Its evaluation of immanent forces is not

impatiently awaiting the arrival of an end that would buttress its judg-
ments. As a result, the ode also poses fundamental problems for a
revelation conceived as the hermeneutic deciphering of a providential
script and for a politics that ties evaluation to the anxious achieve-
ment of goals. What would it mean to yearn for an apocalypse that
does not promise a reassuringly planned New Jerusalem on the other
side of upheaval, and one that does not even consider the apocalypse
itself as a restful or joyful fi nality? In turn, what would it mean to evalu-
ate and value transformative events in the present, without the reas-
suring futural orientation and endless deferrals of imminence?

These questions are not unique to the ode but also occupy even

those poems in which the evaluation of their subjects is much less am-
biguous: the two other Cromwell poems, “The First Anniversary of the
Government” and “A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the
Lord Protector,” and Marvell’s royalist elegies for Henry, Lord Hast-
ings, and for Francis Villiers.

All of these lyrics are insistently occasional,

responding to a series of punctual events— military victories, triumphant
returns, anniversaries, deaths— whose ultimate signifi cance resides in
the future. In fact, this is the fate of all events, large and small, in a
world where apocalyptic ends are endlessly deferred: Their signifi cance
is not present in the present of their occurrence, or even in a con-
templative moment of retroactive recognition. Revelatory meaning,
with all of its attendant transformations, never occurs in this model.
In this respect, criticism that treats Marvell, throughout his work, as
exhibiting a skeptical reserve mistakes the rationale for this apparent
ambivalence.

What ever ambiguity exists in “An Horatian Ode” stems

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

less from its author’s commitment to liberal pluralism than from his
refusal to consider agreement with a person or party as a truly po liti cal
action. Donald Friedman makes much the same point when he main-
tains that “An Horatian Ode” and “Upon Appleton House” reveal
Marvell’s concern with revolutionary action itself instead of being dec-
larations of partisan allegiance: “Neither ‘Upon Appleton House’ nor
‘An Horatian Ode’ tells us very much, I believe, about Marvell’s explicit
po liti cal affi liations, for both poems are much more profoundly occu-
pied with the question of the right course of action in a revolutionary
time than they are with siding with one party or the other.”

The fi nal

program, party, or cause ceases to be the primary means of evaluating
events, in effect thwarting appeals to transcendent ends, teleological,
eschatological, or otherwise, as the ground for judgment. Instead, we
are left to evaluate actions within an immanent revolutionary time.

Marvell’s verse challenges the basic logic of engagement and with-

drawal, earnest commitment and ironic detachment, that dominates
liberal and Enlightenment po liti cal theory. All of these mechanisms of
po liti cal hesitation and recalcitrance disappear in a verse that refuses
to consider agreement with a person or party as the primary po liti cal
action. These poems, then, disavow the recalcitrant romance narrative
at the root of modern po liti cal theory. They do not consider the self
and its beliefs a cherished trea sure withheld from an adoring suitor and
relinquished only after a long, convincing, effective, and affective sua-
sive pro cess. As a result, these lyrics have little interest in shoring up a
site of in de pen dent judgment or sociocultural identities. To put it an-
other way, we have too readily assumed that Marvell’s elusiveness is a
result of evasion and not a more fundamental disavowal of the po liti-
cal categories that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Taking
positions, self- consciously defending them against opponents, and us-
ing the tools of rhetoric to sway opponents and waffl ers seem decid-
edly too selfi sh and self- interested for Marvell. Moreover, such a model
of politics assumes that a critical event, today or in 1650, is, at best, a
mercenary opportunity for securing agreement; at worst, an excuse for
extorting it.

Marvell wants us to imagine the apocalypse, in contrast to consol-

ing accounts of eschatological revolution that would turn it to respect-
able ends, as a sheer, potentially entropic force, one that does not reveal
or promise a meaningful pattern within an encroaching chaos. His is
not a chaos theory or the reassuring reordering of revolution that
returns us to a new identity. Rather, we learn from both nature and

30 Apocalyptic

Means

historical occasions to desire the catastrophic event as a symbolic force
that actually can produce ends in the present as opposed to deferring
them endlessly in a series of metonymic associations. Marvell’s force
does not reduce to a Machiavellian or Hobbesian adoration of power
or to praise for an emerging state form.

Yet in avoiding such structures,

neither does it amount to the pulsing fl ux of a mystical vitalist connec-
tivity.

Rather, treating the event as force means imagining it as an action

happening in a present time, and as one that does not prop up or develop
an agential self or achieve a fi nal aim to which we might bear witness.
In this sense, these actions are not those of a more reassuring martyr-
dom, in which a prefi gured apocalyptic force makes a rhetorical point
like any other.

Transformative, eventful forces, in short, are a-purposive,

and not merely without purpose.

Marvell’s verse appears elusive and ambiguous also insofar as it

embraces the sort of dangerously confl ated aesthetic politics that mod-
ern critics, at least since Benjamin, fear: “All efforts to render politics
aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Yet Benjamin’s solution to fas-
cism’s expressivist protection of existing property relations does not
reduce to a clean separation of affective art and rational politics. Instead,
“communism responds by politicizing art.”

Marvell is neither a com-

munist nor a fascist— or rather, I argue that it’s irrelevant if he’s one or
the other. What does matter is that his work confl ates the activities of
aestheticizing and politicizing and, in so doing, insists that there is no
structural guarantee that our acts are on the side of the angels, or even
of a laudable Frankfurt School Marxism. In Marvell’s case, keeping
these two domains separate is simply not an option, given that even
such a modulated separation would amount not to a neutral act but to
a royalist position. As Paul Hamilton notes, “this disengagement of art
from politics, happily for Eliot, inescapably mimes Royalism when it
consecrates a realm immune to po liti cal decision as the proper condi-
tion of poetry.”

Marvell does not seek this brand of disengagement

and, concomitantly, does not imagine aesthetic affect as merely an instru-
ment to be exploited or tamed. Aesthetic passion is politics precisely
because it embraces and revels in means and forces— the content, if not
the goal, of politics.

These lyrics resonate with an understanding of po liti cal movements

decidedly fascistic and, simultaneously, refuse to postulate a procedural
structure that necessarily and securely resists such dangerous tenden-
cies.

Although I share Michael Komorowski’s desire to move beyond

critical discussions of Marvell’s “tortured po liti cal loyalties,” I do not

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

think that the poem actually praises social or state structures or uncovers
the economic issues buried beneath po liti cal phenomena.

Such con-

siderations remain too focused on “place” and not enough on “power,”
to borrow Hall’s terms. Moreover, they postulate for signs the very sort
of mediating role that Marvell’s verse seems intent on repudiating. In-
stead, “An Horatian Ode” presents symbols as forces whose substance
and nature— their power to connect, link, and combine, as well as their
ability to distinguish, sever, and destroy— are accessible as such. Poetry
does not establish relationship or connectivity, making order out of
disorder. And neither does it essentially resist prevailing structures with
irony, critique, or ambiguity. Instead, Marvell’s verse praises, examines,
and evaluates the forces that happen prior to or within the concretized
nodes of a power— subjects, systems, architectures, etc.— precisely be-
cause there are no such guarantees, no automated procedures of judg-
ment that run without constant vigilance and the exercise of force. For
the future to exist, one must desire the force that makes this future, not
just the secure outcome of its exercise.

Although these formulations echo Carl Schmitt’s insistence that

the rule of law is and should be undergirded by the rule of men, his
insistence on the power of decision is incompatible with Marvell’s
depiction of an a-subjective force.

As Tracy Strong notes in her for-

ward to Po liti cal Theology, Schmitt is interested in obstructing apoc-
alyptic forces in defense of an existing order and praises both Hobbes
and Hegel for doing so. Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet, for example, con-
trasts the emergent modern po liti cal state, bent on the rational eradi-
cation of religious fanat i cism, with the forces of a disordering barbarous
heroism, of which apocalyptic would form a part. Hamlet, in fact, is
interesting precisely insofar as it stages this confl ict during what Schmitt
designates as “the century of the En glish revolution,” 1588 to 1688.

For Marvell (and for Milton, it turns out), however, the apocalypse is
not something one wants to neutralize, precisely because the preser-
vation of order is not paramount. The apocalyptic exercise of virtue
in Marvell differs from Schmitt’s apotheosis of decision in that, his overt
claims to the contrary, Schmitt is not really interested in the exercise
of force as such so much as in the halo of authority that results from
it. Despite all of his discussion of decision, Schmitt is not really inter-
ested in the act of decision so much as in its effects: order or the illusion
thereof.

In this respect, Schmitt falls victim to the category mistake that Gilles

Deleuze describes: He evaluates forces on the basis of abstracted results,

32 Apocalyptic

Means

assuming in advance the very possibility of equalization and compara-
bility that is at issue. For Deleuze, garnering a patina of authority does
not make you a master. Even if one wins, one can still be a slave: “We
cannot use the state of a system of forces as it in fact is, or the result of
a struggle between forces, in order to decide which are active and which
are reactive”; “strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the re-
sult and success of struggle as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that
the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact.”

Results and goals

then betray any real evaluation of po liti cal forces to the safely congealed
world of pragmatism and teleology. In contrast, Feisal Mohamed, in his
critique of Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian politics, maintains that the fo-
cus on immanent force in Nietz sche and Philosophy results in an abdi-
cation of judgment: “The limits of their [Hardt and Negri’s] politics
might arise in part from the limits of Deleuzean immanence, which takes
affi rmation and multiplicity as ends in themselves, rather than making
discerning evaluations among various kinds of affi rmation and nega-
tion.”

Deleuze, though, does not describe a world where evaluation has

disappeared in favor of joyous affi rmation. Rather, we evaluate forceful
means as such— we might call them relations— as opposed to the ultimate
issue of such forces. Attention to means certainly risks falling over into
fascism, but this is precisely the risk that Deleuze always anatomizes—
how can we fi ght or evade the little fascist inside us all?— and that Mar-
vell’s verse thinks necessary for po liti cal engagement. In treating politics
as something other than a series of calculated programs, Marvell at-
tempts a more thorough melding of aesthetic and po liti cal means than
the communist solution to fascist aesthetics that Benjamin outlines. It
is in this sense that Marvell reconceives what po liti cal change entails,
wrenching it away from our familiar paradigms of allegiance and oppo-
sition to people, parties, and their various plans and positions and re-
placing it with a formal style and manner that would examine the event
of transition itself.

Deleuze’s notion of immanent force allows us to take seriously the

po liti cal valences of Marvell’s aesthetic choices, because we need not
reduce them then to more decorous rhetorical aims. Moreover, such a
model allows us to treat revelatory change as something other than a
mysterious eruption into a present continuum. As we saw in the intro-
duction, in Deleuze’s estimation, modern models of the event, espe-
cially Alain Badiou’s, that treat rupture as its primary character are
essentially recipes for arresting change.

Marvell’s po liti cal verse does

not present the future as such an epiphanic stoppage, a break that ap-

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

peals elsewhere for judgment, meaning, or even being. Instead, it
shows that desiring the future means desiring the means to that future,
not just its achieved outcome. We, of course, have numerous concepts
that describe outcomes: sublation, overcoming, determinate negation,
revolution, performed identities. These are all aspects of reversal, the
notion that force develops its own internal opposite or recoils from
an external obstacle: in other words, dialectic or rupture. For Marvell
though, events are not as recalcitrant as this model of a ruptured iner-
tial continuity implies, and attending to them, even praising them, re-
quires more than an attention to results. It requires, at least, considering
the disturbing possibility that all execution is innocent, guiltless and
motiveless, and that a politics that wants to resist monarchy or fas-
cism errs when it seeks to judge effects instead of attempting to engage
forces, even symbolic apocalyptic ones.

“An Horatian Ode” often registers as the primary example of Marvell’s
po liti cal elusiveness, which entails both his refusal to take the clear
po liti cal positions of a Milton and the general ambiguity that seems a
hallmark of his poetics.

Thus, the sympathetic portrait of Charles I

on the scaffold becomes evidence of reserved doubleness, or even even-
handedness on Marvell’s part, not a treasonous duplicity directed against
eerily celebratory regicidal bloody hands:

That thence the royal actor born
The tragic scaffold might adorn:
While round the armèd bands
Did clap their bloody hands.
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene;
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try.
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

This mea sured portrait of the king is pivotal for criticism that reads
Marvell’s ambiguity as a cloaked indictment of the Commonwealth or

34 Apocalyptic

Means

Cromwell or as evidence of the poet’s moderate, rational reserve. Firmly
in the former camp, Takashi Yoshinaka depicts Marvell as a secular skep-
tic unmoved by the Cromwellians’ ideological machinations, whereas
Margarita Stocker characterizes this passage as evidence of both per-
sonal antipathy and neutral dispassion.

Eliot, of course, sets the tone

for the latter critical tradition, characterizing “An Horatian Ode” as
exhibiting “an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones” and Marvell
himself as “an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan.”

However, this critical position does not spring fully formed from Eliot’s
head but rather represents a distinct po liti cal position. As Nicholas von
Maltzahn notes, its origins lie, at least in part, in the Whig rebranding
project of the 1690s, designed to erase the party’s association with se-
crecy and polemic and to replace it with a more respectable public and
civic identity.

What is pivotal in each of these instances, in interpreta-

tions that focus on Marvell’s neutral reserve, as well in readings that
insist on his antipathy toward the regicide or the Commonwealth, is
that ambiguity and irony be translated into unambiguous po liti cal opin-
ions, that they mean something after all.

As Donald Friedman notes, despite the ode’s sympathetic portrait

of the king and generally pathetic depiction of the regicide, the poem
still displays Charles as an empty actor. Compassion in this instance
does not necessarily entail allegiance or even ambiguity:

Cromwell, in short, never comes to the stage, while Charles
is seen as perfectly suited to his role. I think the underlying
suggestion is that, whereas Cromwell’s actions blend the deed,
the thought, and the power to effect both, Charles can only
act out the gestures befi tting a king, since he has forfeited the
true foundations of this sovereign power. Cromwell acts, but
Charles is the actor, because there is no substance in his actions
any longer.

In contrast to Charles’s status as an empty cipher, Cromwell appears as
a fi gure with substance, one not subject to the hollow deceptions of
per for mance. But as Harold Toliver notes, one cannot simply replace a
monarchy and the entire evaluative system that attends it with the mer-
cenary yardstick of po liti cal or military success, or even of mutual dia-
lectical recognition. The risk in such a substitution is always that one
will turn all evaluation into little more than self- interested fl attery: “If
in praising the good king, the poet could consider himself part of a

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

‘consistent’ humanism celebrating the order of the universe, in praising
the accomplishments of a good politician, he remains an arm of the
state.”

Hirst and Zwicker note that there is a more positive valence to

such an alteration in po liti cal systems: A republic turns po liti cal par-
ticipation into a matter of choice, not an aristocratic engagement to
which one is resigned.

In either case, what changes with the death of

the king is not merely the object, but also the means of evaluation.

Marvell’s praise for Cromwell’s combination of knowledge and

will seems, in part, a response to this concern. The latter’s refusal to
maintain any customary distinction between contemplative retirement
and public engagement signals the sort of interconnected unity typi-
cally ascribed to a king within a system of networked resemblances:
“So much one man can do, / That does both act and know” (75– 76).
But even in this passage we witness Marvell’s second approach to the
problem of praising a politician: He changes the object of praise and
its conceptual structure, refusing to align it with an architecture of ac-
complishment. This alteration stems less from the fact that the Com-
monwealth project is incomplete and uncertain in 1650 than from a
basic commitment to rethink the act of valuing. The ode does not laud
the man who accomplishes these feats, nor merely the “so much” that
he can accomplish, the fact and event of the Irish victory. Rather, it
celebrates the energy that achieves this par tic u lar success. “So much”
is a decidedly ambiguous formulation that rejects the mercenary yard-
stick of the successful accomplishment of a purposed aim. After all, does
“so much” mean “only so much” or imply that this “so much” is actu-
ally quite large and impressive? In addition, by insisting that there is a
real and possible union between mind and will, knowing and acting,
Marvell’s portrait of Cromwell unseats our modern presumptions
about the constitution of subjects. Contrary to our understanding of
the inevitably riven performative self, reacting retrospectively or pro-
leptically to dialectical others, Marvell’s Cromwell is a force that does
not require external counterpoints in order to function. Cromwell is
an affi rmative apocalyptic force, and not a revolutionary or reactive
one. Modern accounts of self- conscious subjectivity might think this
fantastical or impossible, but we should not pretend that Marvell does
not present this fantasy, if for no other reason than that it strikes at
the heart of the reserved, deliberative, reasonable subjects that we so
often take ourselves to be.

The bitterly ironic contention that the defeated Irish can best praise

Cromwell certainly casts doubt on any reading of this poem as an

36 Apocalyptic

Means

unqualifi ed celebration of the Lord General and stands as the other
pivotal passage in arguments for Marvell’s reserved evaluation of po-
liti cal violence:

They can affi rm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confessed
How good he is, how just,
And fi t for highest trust;

77–80

Yet the work of this irony is not merely a single inversion, one that would
reveal a not so subtle condemnation of Cromwell’s bloody Irish massa-
cres. One does not need irony to perform subtle condemnations, after all,
and even when it is used in such scenarios it fundamentally changes the
nature of condemnation. The notion that irony acts as critique assumes
that one can simply arrest its reversals once they begin and turn them to
respectable purposive account: re sis tance. For example, the fi gure of a
defeated enemy offering praise for a conqueror is entirely conventional,
certainly, but this convention is itself fundamentally ironic: The praise
that the defeated offer is extorted, begrudging, and self- interested, and
therefore insincere. This insincerity, however, on its own does not amount
to a simple reversal of the panegyric, precisely because there is truth, and
a testament to the power of a conqueror, even in the possibility of ex-
torted, insincere praise. We have come to believe that praise, in order to
be worthy of the name, must be in de pen dent, voluntary, and sincere, the
gift of a free because reserved subject. But “An Horatian Ode” may well
imply that there is something better, and even sweeter, about an ex-
tracted, forced encomium: It testifi es to what one should value— force
and movement. Moreover, in this passage, insincerity does not even
amount to irony. The line does not indicate that the Irish do affi rm
Cromwell’s praises best, only that they can. Their confession of his jus-
tice and goodness is not the same thing as praise in the end. The false
syntactical enjambment of “and have” reinforces this distinction. For a
moment, “and have” seems to be connected to the preceding line about
the Irish’s potential praise for Cromwell, as in “they can do this and
have.” That initial connection disappears with the recognition that the
succeeding line reads “have confessed.” The result of this sequence is
then a distinction between the praise that the Irish can affi rm and the
confession they have offered of Cromwell’s various qualities. His quali-
ties, then, traits or victories that he owns, are not the object of praise.

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

The point of this traditional appeal to an enemy’s praise is not just to

serve as a mechanism for openly hidden denigration of the lauded per-
sonage. Nor is it to throw the entire encomium tradition into disrepute,
suggesting that there is no such thing as sincere, nonresentful, nonmerce-
nary praise. Instead of trying to explain away this conventional gesture
by pointing to its purportedly clear purpose, we should examine what it
means for the vanquished to praise their conqueror, what exactly is being
praised in this instance. Here, it means that the defeated Irish “can affi rm
his praises best” because they are witnesses to what encomium should
address: not virtuous leaders or their noble po liti cal goals but the force-
ful, amoral execution of virtue. “Affi rmation” and “confession” in this
case do not amount to a sign’s correspondence to some other phenom-
ena. The Irish testimony is the best affi rmation not because it bears wit-
ness to some unique causes, qualities that Cromwell possesses, or effects,
victories that anyone can see and then laud. Neither does the confession
that they have already offered of Cromwell’s justice amount to nothing
more than their own defeat. “Though overcome” indicates that they
praise him despite defeat. The outcome or event of the confl ict does not
make them better witnesses. The Irish in this poem appear as the best
witnesses to virtue because they witness the means, not the ends, of this
action. Marvell’s aim here seems to be nothing less than the reconceptu-
alization of the nature of encomium. Means and not ends are the object
of panegyric, the ode claims, and, contrary to our cherished moral squea-
mishnesses, that is not a bad thing.

The poem’s general conceit of casting the En glish Civil War in terms

of Roman history creates its own ambiguities, which, just as was the
case with irony, often ground critical attempts to read the poem as
po liti cal reticence or disapproval. If irony was subtle condemnation,
ambiguity is the curiously signifi cant withholding of full- throated alle-
giance. Even though the poem insists that Cromwell does not arrogate
power to himself, insofar as the poem portrays him as Caesar, he is
always a threat to parliament. Thus, after noting the enemy Irish’s pos-
sible confi rmation of Cromwell’s justness, the speaker reassures readers
that his victories have not issued in a haughty, threatening despotism:
“Nor yet grown stiffer with command, / But still in the Republic’s hand”
(81– 82). It is not just that these lines protest too much and, in the pro-
cess, give away their surprise that Cromwell remains loyal to the Com-
monwealth.

As Nigel Smith notes, Marvell’s allusions to Lucan’s

Pharsalia at least imply a suspicion of Cromwell’s power.

Yet such sus-

picion does not leave the mechanism of allegiance intact. If historical

38 Apocalyptic

Means

comparisons, with their continuities and discontinuities, can no longer
signify or explain agreement, that is at least in part the result of an
apocalyptically transformed present, one in which traditional analogues
no longer apply. When Worden maintains that “the ode, rather than
taking neither side, takes both,” he is describing neither apostasy nor
apathy.

Rather, he points to the fact that the ode undermines the no-

tion that ambiguous elusiveness has a point or purpose, that it is really
rhetoric or propaganda by other means. In this respect, “An Horatian
Ode” shows that literary reversals and indeterminacy are not coded
messages to be deciphered and that ambiguity and irony— these inter-
esting formal instruments— are something more than the illusion of a
reserved judgment, which can nonetheless transform itself seamlessly
into a sincere, declared allegiance. In turn, politics must be something
more than agreeing or disagreeing with a position hermeneutically de-
ciphered, rescued from ambiguity. Certainly, there are risks in advancing
an ambiguous politics. It would be aimless, without goals or recogniz-
able constituencies. Yet for Marvell, that is precisely what is attractive
about it. It would be pointless but ethical. After all, it is impossible to
bribe or extort such a politics, because it would lack the very self-
interested identities that would always threaten to undermine po liti cal
virtue.

Naturally, a criticism that imagines justice as the determination and

maintenance of relevant distinctions will demand the elimination of
ambiguity, for uncertainty is tantamount to either anarchy or tyranny.
For example, Thad Bower, citing René Girard, insists that indistin-
guishability is the hallmark of injustice in “An Horatian Ode” and evi-
dence of Marvell’s reticence in offering enthusiastic admiration for
Cromwell.

Girard, writing about Greek tragedy, somewhat incon-

gruously through the lens of Ulysses’ speech, in Shakespeare’s Troilus
and Cressida, about the dissolution of degrees, maintains that “the end
of distinctions means the triumph of the strong over the weak, the pit-
ting of father against son— The end of all human justice, which is here
unexpectedly defi ned in terms of ‘differences’ among individuals.”

Marvell, though, is no ambiguous, crafty Ulysses. The problem with
Girard’s contention is not just a po liti cal or moral one: that it is a tacit
argument for aristocratic despotism against egalitarian democracy. Nor
is it that it is self- contradictory: strong and weak remain distinctions,
even within Girard’s own condemnation. Rather, the limitation of
Girard’s account resides in its inability to imagine order outside a hier-
archically purposive system of power’s agential manipulation. Thus, the

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

concluding portion of Ulysses’ speech, to which Girard alludes, evokes
a voracious “universal wolf” whose destructive tendencies end only in
self- annihilation:

And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

Unlike Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, Marvell is not speaking to an
Agamemnon mocked by a warrior Achilles, and he is certainly not in-
dicting the latter for misunderstanding the role of wisdom in war. Ac-
cording to Ulysses, Achilles and his men “Count wisdom as no member
of the war, / Forestall prescience and esteem no act / But that of hand.”

Marvell, however, as we will see in our discussion of the falconer sim-
ile, offers a decidedly different portrait of the relationship between
hand and wisdom, suggesting that the universal wolf is not consigned
to self- destruction should he not be ruled by some external transcen-
dent authority. There are more means of ordering the world than are
dreamt of in Ulysses’ philosophy of hierarchical purpose.

Thomas Greene in his reading of the ode mirrors Bower in contend-

ing that indistinction is the great threat to historical order. Yet he also
acknowledges, in his use of the Freudian concept of the uncanny, that
there is something attractive, even mesmerizing about such indistinguish-
abilities. What’s most curious about Greene’s interpretation is that, while
he acknowledges that Marvell fl irts with the possibility of a hyperbolic,
even magical confl ation in “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House,”
he never considers the possibility that poetry itself might be precisely
this sort of uncanny identifi cation.

As a result, Greene maintains that

there are some types of confl ation not all that dangerous to our sense of
justice: prosodic ones that reaffi rm the value of distanced reserve. He
reads Marvell’s choice of an Horatian ode and even the length of the
lines as an indication of the ode’s aversion to “crude violence,” a con-
fl ation of sense and sound uncanny but not unjust:

The Horatian form of the ode, including the quiet formality, the
brevity of the lines, the refusal of the incantatory, can be read as
counter- apocalyptic. The poem resists that incantatory tempta-
tion as though it were crafted to remain aloof from the melo-
dramatic and lurid mysteries it refl ects upon. But this rhetorical
reticence cannot disguise the fact of a subject which is radically,

40 Apocalyptic

Means

metaphysically ungovernable. The poetic problem cannot really
be distinguished from the po liti cal problem.

In this reading, Marvell does not so much tacitly condemn Cromwell
as he withdraws from a po liti cal fray that requires such a clashing of
forces. For Greene, the “cool perception” that opposes “crude violence”
accomplishes a different type of po liti cal and poetic engagement, with-
out the intervention of force.

What is probably most striking about

this interpretation, however, is its inability to acknowledge that cool
stylistic and prosodic forces enable such a mea sured withdrawal. To
put it more pointedly, why think that the brevity of the lines means
clipped reserve and not enthusiastic, even incantatory, agreement, the
rhythmic equivalent of a hammer’s punctual emphatic force? Even if
there is something sententious and grave about the rhythm of these
lines, why would gravity imply a cool negative judgment, and not a
positive one?

Here, as was the case with ambiguity, a poetic tool signifi es in a very

specifi c way. Gravity means a right- thinking Enlightenment aversion
to violence. Yet this conclusion about the prosody is predicated on an
understanding of the nature of violent force that seems incompatible
with the poem’s own ending. The lines that precede the fi nal couplet, as
a consequence of their multiple fricatives, do tumble rapidly into the
sententious conclusion, which slows down as a result of its monosyllabic
words, rhetorical emphases, and multiple nasals:

Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night;
The same arts that did gain
A pow’r must it maintain.

117–20

Such prosodic deceleration cannot equate to the po liti cal reticence
that Greene describes. His reading of the ode’s generic properties rests
on the assumption that gravity cannot affi rm a fi nal affective enthusi-
asm for po liti cal violence, that the fi nal meaning that we know con-
trols the tool, that ends always govern and delimit means. Praise for
force can only sound like words tumbling over each other into orgias-
tic chaos. There can be no slow, inexorable force. Such a reading ig-
nores the very gradual deceleration that occurs in these lines. “Shady
night” contains the nasal consonant and unrounded vowel that will be

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

so central to the gravity of the fi nal couplet. “Same arts” deploys the
same speedy sibilants that accelerate the penultimate couplet into the
conclusion. Just as the falcon simile, as we will see, unseats a safe con-
tainment of instruments, so too does the concluding rhythm show that
gravity itself remains a force, not something different in kind than force.
If we assume, as Greene does, that violence is only the product of pre-
cipitate passion and, at best, ill- considered planning, then we have al-
ready decided precisely what is at issue in these lines: whether one can
have done with means after their ends have been accomplished, whether
right controls, fulfi lls, and ultimately abrogates might. In this instance,
though, the prosody doubles the sense and shows the limitations of
this wish for a guaranteed transcendence above the terrain of forces,
including prosodic and formal ones. The concluding lines aver that the
same arts and forces are at work before and after an end is achieved,
because there is no place of fi nal accomplishment from which to adju-
dicate, retroactively, events and their meaning. Marvell does not vio-
late modernity’s sacred commitment to justice by implying that might
makes right. Rather, he suggests that the very evaluative system that
grounds such notions of justice is misguided. This is what suspending
judgment means for Marvell: disavowing the entire transcendent and
teleological structure that makes evaluation a matter of prospective
ends or retrospective reinterpretation. Subjects fundamentally misun-
derstand how evaluation works insofar as they imagine themselves
either as having achieved a fulfi lled end of history from which to adju-
dicate competing claims or as having predicted this end. Instead, we are
always, as Deleuze insists, consigned to weighing forces in the present,
on the basis of their immanent qualities.

Even if we were to accept, ultimately, an equation of politics and

agreement, such a critical approach ignores the extent to which alle-
giance with a force, especially an apocalyptic one that ends something
instead of perpetuating it, is decidedly different from allegiance to a
person, belief, or party. So if Cromwell, as a military or po liti cal actor,
is not the object of encomium in this lyric, what does it mean to praise
his actions as such, his means and not his ends? The pivotal passage in
this respect is the falconer simile, when “An Horatian Ode” evokes
sympathy for, even empathy with instrumental force itself. These lines
do not desperately assure us that power is controlled by deliberate,
legislative judgments but rather that instrumental tools are betrayed
by such controlling forces:

42 Apocalyptic

Means

He to the Commons’ feet presents
A kingdom, for his fi rst year’s rents.
And, what he may, forbears
His fame, to make it theirs.
And has his sword and spoils ungirt
To lay them at the public’s skirt.
So when the falcon high
Falls heavy from the sky;
She, having killed, no more does search,
But on the next green bough to perch;
Where, when he fi rst does lure,
The falc’ner has her sure.

85–96

The simile appears disjunctive in some respects. Although Cromwell
willingly gives up his power to Parliament, the falcon must be lured,
and perhaps even betrayed. The falcon understands when there is no
more need for killing and “no more does search.” As a result, instru-
mental force does not need a secondary level of control, precisely be-
cause it appears to control itself. Power does not run on incessantly
killing, provided there is no legislative or rational authority to rein it
in: The universal wolf need not annihilate itself in an orgy of self-
destruction. Moreover, like Ulysses, the falconer seems in the simile to
fancy himself in control of the entire pro cess, the tricky master who
thinks that he lures the falcon to the bough, when she really just rests
there of her own accord. I do not wish to suggest that this simile is
praise for Cromwell or condemnation of the Parliament that would
tame him, that it asks us to reaffi rm the entirely banal conclusion that
po liti cal leaders overestimate their own power. Rather, the ode praises
the falcon as an instrument of power’s execution and provokes sus-
picion of any moderating legislative faculty— whether Parliament or
reason— because in its presumption it reduces force to nothing more
than a tool that one either controls or fails to control through a series
of deceptions and betrayals. Marvell’s po liti cal verse then praises a
tool without an agent and presents reason as the corruption of a pure
force. That propensity, and not some ideological propagandizing, ex-
plains the ode’s repeated meta phoric evocation of natural forces. In
fact, the pointlessness of praising a falcon, which can offer neither
patronage nor protection, demonstrates the mercenary duplicity of all
praise for people. For Marvell, Cromwell’s virtues and victories are

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

neither the excuse nor the reason for praising the man. Rather, the
man is the excuse for praising the event of a force’s expression, the only
object that would make of encomium something other than the most
craven bribery.

In a similar vein, the ode’s concluding comparison of Cromwell to

Hannibal and Caesar emphasizes not so much the former’s ultimate
loss or provisional successes, or the latter’s betrayal of the republic
and assassination, as it does the forceful acts that they both perform in
very specifi c milieux:

What may not then our isle presume,
While Victory his crest does plume?
What may not others fear,
If thus he crowns each year?
A Caesar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy an Hannibal,
And to all states not free
Shall climacteric be.

97–104

Hannibal, of course, is a model of the conqueror praised by his defeated
enemies, but without the extortive elements, purportedly, that char-
acterize Cromwell’s victories over the Irish.

What is important about

this passage, however, is that the comparison revolves around “to,”
what Caesar has done to Gaul, as opposed to Rome, and what Hanni-
bal has done to Italy, as opposed to Carthage. Cromwell’s resemblance
to these fi gures is not a function of prophecy, a prediction of what
Cromwell will do to Italy, France, or some other nation, let alone his
ultimate betrayal by his compatriots. Rather, the historical value of
the comparison resides in the fact that these attacks are climactic or
critical, in de pen dent of their ultimate consequences, Carthage’s defeat
or Caesar’s assassination. In other words, “to” restricts the analogy
to these acts, as opposed to serving as the ground for a not so subtle
prophecy of Cromwell’s ultimate fall, either as the result of internecine
treachery, à la Caesar, or as a consequence of military defeat, exile,
and betrayal, à la Hannibal. Although the poem perhaps tempts us to
read forward to the historical conclusions that we know, such an ap-
peal to fi nality and fi nal causes— that what Hannibal and Caesar mean
is determined by their ultimate fate— seems precisely what is at issue in
this poem. The ode attempts to confi ne the comparison to a narrow

44 Apocalyptic

Means

range of actions within these generals’ careers, thereby implying that
analogies can compare acts in themselves, not just the achieved conse-
quences of actions. Readers might chafe at the attempt to restrict their
hermeneutic ambit, or even suggest that such interpretive restriction is
impossible. I do not think that we should summarily dismiss Marvell’s
gesture, however, mainly because this comparison mirrors the concerns
of the falconer simile, which immediately precedes it: how to imagine
an apocalyptic force in the present without betraying it to a logic of
fi nal results.

This attention to activity itself also best explains those moments

when Marvell aligns praise with fate, providence, or some other histori-
cal, natural, or elemental force. When “An Horatian Ode” describes
Cromwell as an irresistible cosmic power against which it is pointless
to plead, resignation appears to be the only option:

’Tis madness to resist or blame
The force of angry heaven’s fl ame
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain;
But those do hold or break,
As men are strong or weak.
Nature that hateth emptiness,
Allows of penetration less:
And therefore must make room
Where greater spirits come.

25–26, 37– 44

Force seems to have a mercenary, instrumental value in this passage.
Yet it is nature, not humans, who must make room for greater spirits
and, moreover, it is not exactly clear how this making of room must
occur. Does the greater spirit require elimination of some other entity
to make this space, in which case the spirit takes this newly emptied
space? Do these spirits substitute themselves for lesser spirits? And in
this substitution, do they edge out, compress, or overcome their pre de-
ces sors? Or does space defy a zero- sum logic of metonymic replace-
ment and merely expand, “creating room” ex nihilo, as it were? Even if
we assume that the ultimate result of this passage is an analogical in-
junction for readers, that we must simply accept how the world works

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

and the necessary use of coercion for a greater goal, the nature of our
resignation to force still requires explication. Resignation is not an easy
passive response precisely because we do not await the arrival of an-
other purposive narrative that will drive us to specifi c actions or order
us around. Or rather, resignation to the way things are assumes that we
know how things are. Marvell’s poem assumes nothing of the kind, as
we have already witnessed in his treatment of politics as a repeatable
style, conceived in opposition to a chiseling rhetorical content. In fact,
the natural symbols in this poem are more complicated than their ped-
agogical or po liti cal message. Resolving ambiguity into a secure meaning
is easy and always proceeds in the same transcendent fashion. Marvell’s
poem is much more interested in exploring precisely what ambiguity is,
the forces that comprise it. Marvell then is not the shifty, pragmatic
company man to Milton’s principled republican. The comparisons
with providential or natural forces in “An Horatian Ode” are not sim-
ply ideological justifi cations, placing Cromwell beyond judgment into
a realm of amoral or extra- moral historical fact whose ac cep tance is an
unproblematic act on the part of readers.

And neither is Marvell merely

resigned to the march of providential history, no matter how active
that resignation might appear.

When Marvell begins to praise means

instead of ends, readers are no longer left with the same options—
agreement, belief, resignation, resistance— because the poem is no longer
asking for concurring declarations or rebuttal witnesses.

In Marvell’s verse, allegiance and obedience are not laudable features

of po liti cal action. But neither, for that matter, are transgression, sub-
version, and re sis tance.

Marvell’s Cromwell lyrics disavow or are just

uninterested in all the notions of faith, apostasy, and agreement that
tend to dominate accounts that want to make of the Civil War and
Commonwealth period a drama of subjectivity and sincerity. These
poems shows us that a conscious, internal virtue, one based on choices
made through reactive calculation and the rational weighing of op-
tions, is always suspect because it requires the division between con-
science and force, virtue and its execution, that someone like Cromwell
overcomes by ignoring it, disavowing it, or just bustling ahead. That
is, Marvell imagines even the internal exercise of conscience as an exer-
cise of force. For example, we might read the dismissal of Cromwell’s
opponents in “The First Anniversary” as propagandistic bluster, but to
do so mistakes the seriousness with which Marvell disavows punctual
re sis tance as a viable activity for politics:

46 Apocalyptic

Means

The crossest spirits here do take their part,
Fast’ning the contignation which they thwart;
And they, whose nature leads them to divide,
Uphold, this one, and that the other side;
But the most equal still sustain the height,
And they as pillars keep the work upright;
While the re sis tance of opposèd minds,
The fabric as with arches stronger binds

89–96

Signifi cantly, “the most equal” means both the most moderate and the
most similar. In the latter instance, opposed forces that are closest to
equivalence are the foundation of all order. In the former, moderation
does not overcome or erase the crossest spirits but rather is itself a force,
not something that transcends force. In both cases, the order that results
from opposition is not a function of an imminent telos, toward which
competitors unconsciously work. Rather, order, even moderate order,
results from an immanent interaction. Even if one insists on the ideo-
logical duplicity of this harmonious architecture, Marvell nonetheless
maintains that one cannot simply put forceful dynamism on the side of
progressive re sis tance and a lame architectural rigidity on the side of a
conservative history. There is, in short, an immanent dynamism even in
structure and already written historical narratives.

A similar rejection of any facile celebration of re sis tance occurs in

the confl ation of enemies and allies in “An Horatian Ode”:

And like the three- forked lightning, fi rst
Breaking the clouds where it was nursed,
Did thorough his own side
His fi ery way divide.
(For ’tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy;
And with such to inclose
Is more than to oppose.)

13–20

Courage, virtue, and force do not care about identifi cation or re sis-
tance, but not because they have managed to transcend these mun-
dane matters to a higher order of identity. Resignation and re sis tance
are “all one to courage high” precisely because courage and virtue are

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

not looking for agreement, because force does not woo a coy subject.
In fact, this type of subject, one who wants to be seduced into agree-
ment, appears only in these lines’ evocation of opposition. The lines
do not read “And, with such [Cromwell], to inclose / Is more than to
oppose,” but rather “And with such to inclose [the entire modifi ed act
of enclosing ‘with such’] / Is more than to oppose.” This passage, then,
is not a parable about which type of agential restraint is more grating
to Cromwell. Rather, “inclose” is not even a transitive verb in this in-
stance, implying that Cromwell is enclosed within some type of struc-
tural limit. A transitive verb insists that these lines ask readers to
discern what it means to contain such a courageous force, postulating
another delimiting, transcendent entity that would do the enclosing.
An intransitive reading, however, amounts to praising and participat-
ing in a force that closes in, but without the postulation of an external
subject that would contain Cromwell’s actions.

The transitive verb

implies that we are engaged in a contest of opposition and contain-
ment, always acting on and reacting to some direct object, which par-
adoxically leads to the conclusion that there is nothing other than
opposition— or “more than to oppose”— because all action amounts
to reaction. The intransitive verb, however, maintains that there are
affi rmative forces in the world not always motivated by this dialectic.
At the very least, the thorough evacuation and consistent disavowal of
a controlling agent in these lines thwarts any recourse to critical con-
ceptions of a reactive, deliberative subjectivity’s preeminence in the
po liti cal realm.

In Marvell’s hands, expressions of this ilk are not the ideological

justifi cations or supercilious condescension of the victorious suitor
but rather are an attempt to account for how power works. Instead of
considering “thorough his own side” as a fanciful mystifi cation of self-
suffi ciency, or as an allusion to Cromwell’s contested relationship with
other army factions, we should consider it yet more evidence of the
treatment of force as the object of praise. Or to put it another way,
even substituting “Cromwell” for “courage high” does not do what
critics often think it does. Such a substitution does not subsume the
exercise of courage under Cromwell as an agent but rather reduces the
agent to nothing more than another type of force, metonymically
equating Cromwell and courage. Otherwise, he becomes nothing more
than one more potentially treacherous falconer— in this case, one who
thinks that courage is simply a mercenary tool that he can use at will,
to put on or put off as needed. Needless to say, that’s not really courage

48 Apocalyptic

Means

at all. A brand of reading that reasserts the value of conscious delib-
eration and reserved choice on the part of an agent— that the equation
of courage and Cromwell means the subsumption of the former by the
latter— essentially transforms all virtue into an insincere shadow play
on Charles’s scaffold. Marvell, in contrast, offers a portrait of virtue
in de pen dent of all of the agential machines that seek to tame its exer-
cise or threaten its purity.

It turns out that even our interpretive prin-

ciples of substitution— what metonymy itself means— are bound up in
Marvell’s portrait of instrumental force and its poetic examination.
Do substitutions preserve the original element replaced, supplant it, or
incorporate it into an immanent, confl ated unity? At what point do
substitutions cease to be mechanisms for explication or elucidation,
and threaten the very purposes and agents they purportedly serve?
This is not just a resurrection of poststructuralist debates about me-
tonymy, meta phor, and iteration but rather yet another permutation
of Marvell’s consistent separation of means and ends within poetic
and po liti cal encomia.

Hamilton reads the concluding ambiguity of the poem and particu-

larly the concluding lines as an attempt to grapple with, if not produce,
a radically new po liti cal idiom: How can “the same arts,” a symbol of
continuity, transform into the radically new po liti cal idiom that Crom-
well’s elemental force appears to require? Hamilton instructively notes
the fundamental problem of all this revolutionary radicalism and ca-
tastrophe: “How far can disruption go, before an apocalyptic or cata-
strophic language is called for to replace available idioms of historical
continuity?”

Moreover, what is a catastrophic language, and how

would it be different from grave epigrammatic pronouncements? If we
are to take seriously the claim that Marvell uses verse to engage poli-
tics, then part of that engagement must surely entail repurposing con-
ventional forms and tools. But it also means asking if we have ever
really known how encomium, ambiguity, and even sententious, slow
couplets work. At the very least, “An Horatian Ode” shows that we
should be wary of claims that deliberative po liti cal structures, and de-
liberation in general, can arrest dangerous forces. In fact, such a faith
is precisely what the ode fi nds suspicious: that there is a structure of
reasoning, opposed to the messy executions of force in the world, that
guarantees results and transcends the events on which it passes judgment.
In addition, despite the apparent determining power of aims, readings
like Greene’s treat tools and means as having a secure meaning, in them-
selves, after all. Instruments have a limited number of uses, and humans,

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

especially literary critics, have a pretty good bead on this range. Irony,
prosodic slowness, and ambiguity all collaborate to mean deliberate,
reasoned judgment. Insofar as such claims locate a laudable rational-
ity and an essential signifi cance in the tools of literary analysis, there is
a peculiar risk for literary critics in assumptions of this sort.

Literary criticism’s interest in purposive ends has a variety of expla-

nations, all of them potentially laudable: an inheritance from Kantian
aesthetics; a pedagogical and intellectual commitment to treating poetry
as primarily a communicative or rhetorical medium; a right- minded
suspicion of zeal, charism, and the tendencies therein toward anarchic
po liti cal violence. However, one unintended consequence of this focus is
a literary criticism that has abandoned the exploration of how some-
thing means in favor of the more readily assessable mea sures of what it
means. In Marvell’s case, at least, these two fi elds of examination are
not complementary, precisely because he attempts to imagine instrumen-
tal force in its own right— specifi cally, as the place where we can fi nally
stop defending ourselves against accusations and really agree with some-
thing, as opposed to projecting ourselves imaginatively into the future,
when we will know that we have won the wager and successfully backed
the right horse. For Marvell, that means that we can pledge allegiance
only to forces, because every other potential object mires us in the para-
dox of sincerity: In showing ourselves sincere, we necessarily cease to be
so. When an apocalyptic force appears, we have to be willing, in short,
to clap our bloody hands, earnestly, without irony. If we are not so will-
ing, we will never be either loyal or subversive.

Marvell’s verse upends the way that literary criticism imagines the
activity of politics— sincerely declaring positions, expressing allegiances
to the leaders who embody them, and then using irony, ambiguity, or
prosody to resist or evade these authentic expressions.

None of these

are po liti cal actions in Marvell’s po liti cal lyrics. Obedience and re sis-
tance are not enough and do not really count as doing politics. Aes-
thetics might be many things, but it is not critique. Even when he writes
from a po liti cal position diametrically opposed to his fi nal two Crom-
well poems, that of a royalist sympathizer wishing for Fairfax’s and
Cromwell’s deaths, Marvell demonstrates the same obsession with a
politics beyond agreement. These similarities do not explain away

50 Apocalyptic

Means

Marvell’s shift in allegiances. Neither do I wish to argue for a supe-
rior consistency in his politics. Instead, the critical disputes about Mar-
vell’s partisan affi liations and beliefs— is he a shifty “company man” or
a pragmatic republican?— reveal that allegiance, to person, party, or
even principle, is not a particularly useful tool for conceptualizing his
politics.

Despite its similarities to the later Cromwell poems, the elegy for Lord

Francis Villiers does seem more sanguine about the ability of force to
translate into messages. It celebrates the pyramid of dead that Villiers
leaves in his wake, in so doing praising violent force in a manner simi-
lar to that found in “An Horatian Ode.” Yet, Villiers’ vengeful valor also
seems to replace sententious, commemorative messages with wounds.
If, as we have already seen, criticism of “An Horatian Ode” has often
tried to distinguish violence and the poem’s grave, mea sured serious-
ness, this is much less plausible in the elegy, which exhibits a decidedly
optimistic portrait of the confl ation of violence and reason, promising
an equation of trophies and tombs, both erected out of a pyramid of
dead:

Yet died he not revengeless: much he did
Ere he could suffer. A whole pyramid
Of vulgar bodies he erected high:
Scorning without a sepulchre to die.
And with his steel which did whole troops divide
He cut his epitaph on either side.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we hereafter to his honour will
Not write so many, but so many kill.
Till the whole Army by just vengeance come
To be at once his trophy and his tomb.

115–20, 125– 28

What is important about this passage is not just the customary appeal
to the violence of inscription, an epitaph that entails slaying. Nor is it
the speaker’s fantasy of substituting corpses for encomia in the future.
Rather, most important is its unabashed praise for a force that destroys
enemies but also transforms this very destruction into a substitutive,
even metonymic unity: Tombs are simultaneously trophies, but are also
merely associated with them; wounds and corpses replace sepulchers,

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

but are also somewhat like them, and are also associated with, but not
quite like, commemorative epitaphs that adorn them. Greene’s portrait
of a justice built on distinction seems decidedly absent in a poem that
gleefully promises such a series of substitutive confl ations. As David
Norbrook notes, the elegy offers virtually no plaudits for Villiers’ moral
virtues and even presents its concluding revenge fantasy as a private
matter, not a public event requiring rational justifi cation.

Yet Marvell’s

very public withdrawal into a private, eroticized revenge only serves
to obliterate the very modern distinction between a world of state rea-
son and private irrationality, the notion that a serious, mea sured pub-
lic deliberation necessarily or effectively arrests private passions, that
there is a safer world, intellectual or literary, where thought and per-
suasion are not subject to the interventions of power. In fact, Marvell’s
substitutions suggest that there is no such contemplative space that is
not already populated by force. Trophies stand in for tombs, which in
turn stand in for corpses, in turn standing in for the violence that pro-
duces them, the incisions of both wounds and epitaphs— and no amount
of retroactive, deliberate interpretation is necessary to effect or decode
this sequence.

The poem’s fantasy of a private reactive vengeance shows that

metonymic substitution itself is a product of force, not a sequence of
associations written elsewhere by fate or providence. Just as “The Gar-
den” insists that Apollo chases Daphne “only that she might laurel
grow” (30), the elegy’s speaker does not deduce that Villiers’s victims
are his epitaph. Villiers actively writes this epitaph himself, which then
authorizes the similarly violent confl ation of tombs and trophies in the
fi nal lines. These metonymic transformations are not retrospective ex-
plications of natural phenomena or poetic fi gures but rather are them-
selves the present work of the actors inside the poem. Villiers’s action
is not explained in the imminent future of his own death but rather is
the immanent transformative activity that he himself undertakes. What
seems most important about this moment in Marvell’s early royalist
elegy is its insistence that retroactive reinterpretation is inadequate to
commemoration, and likely to praise as well. In this respect, the elegy
participates in Marvell’s general propensity toward literalization, a
tendency not so much designed to knock fi guration as weak or to cel-
ebrate plainness but rather to consider metonymy, meta phor, and all
of their results as events that happen in the present, not rewritings that
intervene to remake history into a meaningful order.

52 Apocalyptic

Means

One consequence of this penchant for literalization is that Marvell

does not allow reserved praise or insulated hermeneutics to perform
the work of po liti cal re sis tance. I would argue that the great danger,
aesthetic and po liti cal, for Marvell is not idolatry or presence but the
secure withdrawal promised by a skeptical, interpretive transcendence.
In contrast, for Thomas P. Anderson, Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode,”
and Milton’s Eikonoklastes use ambiguity and hermeneutics to fi ght
against the power of a pure or transparent sign, the literal iconicity
that Charles’s Eikon Basilike achieves. The historical event of the regi-
cide transforms meta phor into a sign of loss, precisely because the-
atrical meta phors are used so often to describe Charles’ execution: “I
suggest that because the execution was so associated with meta phor,
the medium itself imparts a residue of the loss that it is designed to
mitigate. If theatrical meta phors for royal per for mance were com-
monplace before 1649, the execution was a limit event that literalized
the theatrical meta phor.”

In this reading, the king’s book thwarts

interpretation via its appeals to a transparent, literal presence. The
danger of such an aestheticized politics is its ability to render events
univocal, beyond the purportedly free discussion and deliberation that
interpretation would allow. Similar to and more successful than Mil-
ton’s point- by- point response, the ambiguities of “An Horatian Ode”
introduce possibilities for resistant reinterpretation.

Although I am

sympathetic to Anderson’s account of literalization, it seems to evince
precisely the faith in the resistant power of deliberative judgment that
Marvell’s verse abandons. Hermeneutics cannot stop Cromwell in the
present, not because it is the nonactivity of hoity- toity artsy types but
because it continues to conceive itself as a reactive, compensatory, and
ultimately retroactive project. Marvell’s revision of the sequence of
mythology’s creation is dispositive again here. Daphne’s transfor-
mation is not a retroactive explanation for the laurel and its present
signifi cance. Its signifi cance is a present and prospective product of
Apollo’s action, however far removed to the past. If Marvell worries
about an aestheticized politics, it is not because it prevents rational
interpretation but rather because it reduces interpretation to a tran-
scendent, removed, and ultimately impotent activity, as opposed to a
driving force.

Commemoration and interpretation are not, then, the compensatory

reactions and identity defenses that we have often been led to believe.
Marvell’s use of literalization and his concomitant reconceptualization
of metonymy gives even to elegies something more than a backward-

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

looking function. His po liti cal poems give fl esh and substance to the
cliché that funerals are for the living, presenting praise, persuasion, and
the acts of evaluation and interpretation themselves as present forces,
not a parasitic, impotent commemoration or interpretation that fancies
itself beyond power or its immanent matrices. A hermeneutic judg-
ment that retroactively explains what is the case ends up turning the
past into a series of justifi cations for the status quo. Possibility becomes
nothing more than the realization of an already given potential, a real-
ization conceivable only as a brute eruption into the real of the poten-
tial: “Every time we pose the question in terms of possible and real, we
are forced to conceive of existence as a brute eruption, a pure act or
leap which always occurs behind our backs and is subject to a law of
all or nothing.”

Literalization, though, attempts to reanimate possi-

bility as a present, optimistic power with the ability to generate the new.
Force itself, then, evaluates in the present, and is not reducible to a brute
instrument in need of rational ordering and principles of judgment.
Such a model assures that order will always fail, precisely because it has
only retroactive, compensatory force.

Even when Marvell turns to commemoration and celebration of

the Protectorate’s fi rst anniversary, he uses the same immanent terms
as “An Horatian Ode,” and presents Cromwell as a present natural
force:

While indefatigable Cromwell hies,
And cuts his way still nearer to the skies,
Learning a music in the region clear,
To tune this lower to that higher sphere.

45–48

Echoing the tradition of praise from an enemy that we have already
noted in “An Horatian Ode,” the poem concludes with an imagined op-
ponent reprising this intelligences– spheres comparison. If anything, this
rendering is even more eerily fascistic than its counterparts in its descrip-
tion of the sphere as moved by the dear leader’s munifi cent being, not
just his learned skills: “The nation had been ours, but his one soul / Moves
the great bulk, and animates the whole” (379– 80). The totalitarian
resonances of these lines are not merely the result of modern preoc-
cupations, that ubiquitous disease of etiologizing fascism. Rather, they
are the consequence of the poem’s attempt not only to present Crom-
well as a pervasive infl uence but also to condemn opponents for a merely

54 Apocalyptic

Means

retroactive, and therefore weak, conception of freedom. Thus, “The First
Anniversary” also presents Cromwell’s parliamentary opposition as
advocating only a nostalgic, reactive conception of liberty:

Such was that wondrous order and consent,
When Cromwell tuned the ruling Instrument,
While tedious statesmen many years did hack,
Framing a liberty that still went back.

67–70

It is not that parliamentary opponents offer constraint instead of free-
dom but that their liberty is regressive, moving in the wrong direction.
It does not move back to slavery, hypocritically or ironically erasing
its status as liberty. Rather, it is liberty itself that goes backward. What
would that mean exactly? Although this passage may well allude to
republican interest in an unwritten ancient constitution,

the lines de-

scribe freedom as something more complicated than an absolute good,
threatened only by its opposite number: slavery. Instead, liberty itself
can be misdirected, not via its own excesses— the distinction between
liberty and the enslavement to passion that goes under the name of
“license”— but via its direction. A liberty that looks to the past is still
liberty, but it carries within itself a recalcitrant, hoarding acquisitive-
ness incompatible with present freedom. I do not seek to paint Mar-
vell here as a naïve futurist or anarchist cheerleader but rather to note
the thoroughness with which he insists on engagement with the pres-
ent as the key aspect of Cromwell’s virtue, in a commemorative poem,
no less. And that present freedom means something more than retro-
active recognitions of past free actions or current republican safe-
guards against tyranny. It also means something more than a merely
futural hope or rational planning on the basis of normalized predic-
tions. In this sense, the apocalypse matters for Marvell because it en-
ables ending, as opposed to the stringing out of freedom across a
continuum of temporal deferral. For Marvell, then, liberty in the pres-
ent is the collapse of ends into means, an alternative to a purpose-
driven life that always defers freedom to the future by imagining it as
the accomplishment of its aim, whether that aim is the successful
achievement of a goal or the acquisition of freedom as an object, com-
modity, or right or even its reception as God’s revealed gift.

Even when “The First Anniversary” offers the traditional paternal-

ist distinction between license and liberty to justify rule by a virtuous

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

dictator, Marvell does not ask us to rest assured in the transcendent
inevitability of a providential order or the unassailable internal virtue
of a Lord Protector whose goodness fl ows seamlessly from private to
public domains. Cromwell’s internal self- regulation is not a guaranteed
substitute or reliable preparation for public order. In fact, there is no
way for us to secure public events. Neither retroactive interpretation
nor emulation will do the trick:

’Tis not a freedom, that where all command;
Nor tyranny, where one does them withstand:
But who of both the bounders knows to lay
Him as their father must the state obey.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And only didst for others plant the vine
Of liberty, not drunken with its wine.
That sober liberty which men may have,
That they enjoy, but more they vainly crave:
And such as to their parent’s tents do press,
May show their own, not see his nakedness.

279–82, 287– 92

It is not just that the mob displays its own excess. The allusion to
Noah’s drunken exposure authorizes all sorts of ironic readings inso-
far as it presents the Lord Protector as secretly unrestrained. We could,
of course, explain this allusion away as a pious expression of Crom-
well’s very human sinfulness, a none too subtly veiled suggestion that
he is a man just like other men, not a king who fancies himself purged
of such embarrassments. The allusion is jarring because, precisely at
the moment when readers should expect reassuring praise for a pri-
vately moderate patriarch, “The First Anniversary” offers its opposite,
but then simultaneously inverts the charge of excess, ascribing it to
viewers and not the disgraced patriarch. Certainly, this inversion com-
plicates any attempt to conceive Noah or Cromwell as translating inter-
nal virtue, via analogy, meta phor, or some other literary device, into the
public sphere. The same diffi culty emerges when Marvell comes closest
to presenting Cromwell as a man of reliably self- regulating virtue: “There-
fore fi rst growing to thyself a law, / Th’ambitious shrubs thou in just
time didst awe” (263– 64). We might well carve out an internal modera-
tion in these lines— Cromwell becomes a law governing himself— but
the passage also shows that even this purportedly innocuous self- control

56 Apocalyptic

Means

amounts to a disturbingly despotic appropriation of force. Cromwell,
in the pro cess of governing his own passions, becomes either a law unto
himself, with all of the sinister implications of such a phrase, or culti-
vates a law that develops into the mea sure of his own person, growing
into a standard that he has already set. The ambiguity of this passage,
like those we witnessed in the ode, does not appear to be in search of
resolution. Instead, the indeterminacy of what it means to become a
law to oneself does not connote some broader message about the fun-
damental confusion of law. Ambiguity does not mean antinomianism
here, giving us the comfort of treating ambiguity, yet again, as a subver-
sive or oppositional element, as a fi gure for an apocalypse that reverses
the requirements of the law. Instead, “The First Anniversary” disavows
or thwarts the possibility of reaching precisely such a transcendent
evaluative stance, from which one could then pass judgment on the orig-
inal ambiguity.

Marvell, then, does not use this occasion to justify Cromwell’s pub-

lic power via recourse to an internal moderation. Instead, the internal
law is identical to the public rule, not because humans are despotic or
evil, but because force is force in both domains and, as a result, one
domain cannot serve as a secure grounding for the other. In politics as
in aesthetics, there exists no neutral plain on which to adjudicate com-
peting claims, no transcendent surety that would reassure us that all
confl icts will resolve into a fi nal, meaningful unity.

Marvell insists

that even this dearth of surety does not amount to a restful resolution,
whether the triumphant transcendence of law or the equally triumphant
apotheosis, inherent to literary indeterminacy, of the reader. Instead, by
focusing on the operation of force, he grants respect to the transfor-
mations that must attend an apocalyptic future. The revelation of the new
in the present, after all, does not evaluate itself according to the estab-
lished values of parliamentary democracy.

“A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector”

intensifi es this praise for force by maintaining that even conscience
needs arms to succeed. Internal virtue is defi nitely not enough to trans-
form one into a king, even an imaginary shadow king: “He fi rst put
arms into Religion’s hand, / And tim’rous Conscience unto Courage
manned” (179– 80). These lines indicate that conscience is not secretly
brave but lacking in means. Rather, it requires force to function in its
own right. The lines do not assert that conscience can have public ef-
fects only when it acquires courage. Conscience remains timorous,
even internally, without arms. Marvell’s denial of the internal power of

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

conscience does not rest on a mercenary realism, in contradistinction
to Milton’s idealistic portrait of internal virtue. Warren Chernaik serves
as an example of this view, characterizing Marvell as the hard- nosed
realist and Milton as a naïve, perhaps even petulant retiree.

Of course,

Marvell’s letter to a friend in Persia offers substantial support for pre-
cisely this position: “For in this World a good Cause signifys little, un-
less it be as well defended. A Man may starve at the Feast of good
Conscience.”

But the poetry is a different story, precisely insofar as it

does not reaffi rm the understanding of liberty and constraint that dom-
inates accounts like Chernaik’s. In fact, for Chernaik, Marvell turns
liberty into the recognition of a necessary constraint: “Freedom then is
possible, according to Marvell, only after we have come to learn that ‘the
world will not go the faster for our driving.’ ”

The problem, of course,

with such a model is not that it misjudges Milton’s commitment to pub-
lic action or Marvell’s internally principled stands. Rather, Chernaik’s
system of passive withdrawal and active engagement imagines liberty
precisely as going backward, a retroactive recognition of constraint, not
the ability to embrace action, force, or events in the present. Liberty is
constraint and freedom is necessity. Marvell, however, consistently dis-
avows or evades such reversals, refusing to present interiority as a retired
refl ection of the exterior world.

By way of contrast, the Son in Paradise Regained maintains that virtu-

ous self- regulation turns one into a true king, that this internal kingship
substitutes for and is more authentic than public kingship. For Milton,
though, substitution means a replacement that obliterates the original
entity or concept, as opposed to Marvell’s consistent pre sen ta tion of
metonymy as a mechanism of present equation, and even confl ation.
Thus, the Son announces an aversion to external force, an aversion
decidedly at odds with Marvell’s portrait of Cromwell:

Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King;
Which every wise and vertuous man attains:
And who attains not, ill aspires to rule
Cities of men, or head- strong Multitudes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But to guide Nations in the way of truth
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know, and knowing worship God aright,
Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,

58 Apocalyptic

Means

Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That other o’re the body only reigns,
And oft by force, which to a generous mind
So reigning can be no sincere delight.

Marvell, frankly, does not distinguish private and public force in this
fashion, creating an internal realm where the reign of a paternalistic
conscience and its power is acceptable, but leaving the public world
free from such interventions (it is also not clear that Paradise Regained
ends by supporting this view; the Son may in fact learn his way out of
this oppositional dynamic). And neither does he present the internal
world as a replacement for the external, the place where one would be
more a king.

This difference occurs not because Marvell is a realist and Milton a

retiring idealist but rather because they understand the operation of
force within reason differently. Or rather, they estimate the power of
interpretation and reinterpretation differently. Marvell does not engage
in the sort of retroactive explanation and justifi cation that is the hall-
mark of the Son’s account. Instead of postulating a separate domain
for hermeneutic explanation and rethinking, Marvell’s po liti cal verse
insists that deliberation, justifi cation, and interpretation are immanent
forces in their own right. Cromwell grows to himself a law; he does not
reconsider what has occurred in the past. Substitution does not preserve
a lost past entity but rather preserves that entity as a present, affi rmative
phenomenon, an immanent metonymy not imagined as a narrative se-
quence. Otherwise, there is no way to conceive of ending, because even
an eliminationist replacement, like Milton’s, preserves the eliminated
phenomenon. In Marvell’s verse, it is the conceptualization of inter-
pretation as a withdrawn, contemplative activity, occurring in a secure
transcendent locale, the mind or the garden, not the irresistible roiling
power of chaos or passion or history, that actually renders judgment,
deliberation, and reason impotent, precisely because there is no way
to account for how all of these intellective or passionate decisions cross
over into action. This is, in short, the problem of the event, the emer-
gence or happening of the new in the world as something more than a
mystifi ed and mystifying eruption.

Milton is not always so reticent about force, of course. As Anna

Nardo notes, his sonnet to Cromwell praises the future Lord Protec-
tor’s physical might.

Composed two years after Marvell’s “Horatian

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

Ode” and almost three years before “The First Anniversary,” it lauds
the general for his military success in terms that echo Marvell’s own
accounts of Cromwell’s military victories:

And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast reard Gods Trophies & his work pursu’d,
While Darwen stream w

blood of Scotts imbru’d,

And Dunbarr feild resounds thy praises loud

4–8

Despite these similarities, Milton distinguishes peace and war in a fash-
ion incompatible with the concluding lines of Marvell’s ode. The son-
net’s volta, in fact, revolves around this fundamental difference, that
“peace hath her victories / No less renownd then warr” (10– 11), in-
stead of “The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain” (119–
20). Just as importantly, Milton’s sonnet imagines war as issuing in or
producing trophies, instead of being identical to them. Here we should
recall the tombs that are identical to trophies in Marvell’s Villiers elegy.
And instead of Milton’s transformation of nature into a land that be-
speaks Cromwell’s praise, Marvell insists that it is still the vanquished
enemy that utters such praise, emphasizing less the world’s potential
transformation into a laudatory monument than the continuous opera-
tion of this transmuting power. In this respect, Marvell is more of an
iconoclast than Milton is. Marvell resists the urge to translate Crom-
well’s victories into poetic monuments or tokens of his greatness, in
part because monuments and tokens always reduce praise to a past
event. In this model, even praise in the present relegates evaluation to
the past, allowing a monument to stand in for a past evaluation, as op-
posed to going through all the work of a present one. As Victoria Kahn
notes, such monument- mongering is precisely what Manoa does at the
end of Samson Agonistes. He reduces Samson’s actions to an excuse for
an inert, reactive, and decidedly aesthetic mourning.

For Marvell, this

is another reason why the Irish affi rm Cromwell’s praises best: Victory
is itself mute. Commemoration itself contains no real evaluation. It re-
duces the question of what happened to a question of who won.

Rather than retracing the critical debate over Milton’s and Marvell’s

competing po liti cal philosophies, or pegging this difference in senti-
ment to the different historical circumstances of May 1650 and spring
1652, I propose that the difference resides in the fact that Marvell and

60 Apocalyptic

Means

Milton are praising different things. That is, their conceptions of virtue,
its relationship to distinction, and the nature of aesthetic substitution
are substantially different. If Milton imagines virtue as in de pen dent
potential that is valuable because of its evasion of and distinction
from the slavery of actualization, as he does in Lycidas and the son-
nets, Marvell ultimately imagines it as the erasure of the distinction
between evaluation and act, will and force (as opposed to the substi-
tution of one for the other, or the dialectical sublation of one by the
other). Deleuze’s account of evaluation as an act of force, as opposed
to the arrogation of transcendent in de pen dence to one’s own inter-
pretive and deliberative powers, mirrors Marvell’s confl ation of these
two realms:

Action and reaction are more like means, means or instruments
of the will to power which affi rms and denies, just as reactive
forces are instruments of nihilism. . . . To interpret is to deter-
mine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to
determine the will to power which gives value to a thing. We
can no more abstract values from the standpoint from which
they draw their value than we can abstract meaning from the
standpoint from which it draws its signifi cation.

For Deleuze, there is neither value nor force in general, which is pre-
cisely why these two elements are worthy of attention in the fi rst place.
Deleuze objects to the continued prevalence of transcendence within
Enlightenment categories of judgment because such categories mas-
querade as drivers of transformation when they really leave values
themselves untouched, as an ideal beyond examination, critique, or
change:

What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had
the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distin-
guishing between existing beings, between modes of existence,
as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather
judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values),
criteria that preexist for all time (to the infi nity of time), so
that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being,
nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? . . .
Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of
existence.

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

An evaluation that can account for the new must be a practice of select-
ing among various forces, not forcing them to compete on a fi eld that
neutralizes their specifi city and activity in a paean to mea sured even-
handedness. As Daniel Smith notes, it is the separation of evaluation
and action effected by transcendence that poses the greatest threat to
human possibility because, for Deleuze, ethics always revolves around
human power and capacity:

Immanence believes in the possibility of transformative revelation in
the present precisely because it does not preserve a goal or realm of
unreachable impossibility toward which all ethical or po liti cal activity
aims.

The confl ation of evaluation and the capacity for action is Cromwell’s

special genius in “An Horatian Ode”: “So much one man can do, / That
does both act and know” (75– 76). No more division between the ex-
ecution of force and its decision, vita contemplativa and vita activa.
Or to put it in po liti cal terms, terms that might explain Marvell’s dis-
satisfaction with parliaments without reducing him to a proto- fascist,
there is no distinction between executive and legislative faculties. There
is a sense, certainly, in which Milton performs a similar disavowal of
distinctions, incorporating external events into a virtual model, but
the direction of these incorporations or confl ations is signifi cantly dif-
ferent. Marvell’s disavowal of distinction drags contemplation into the
domain of forceful action and, thus, issues in praise for the present exe-
cution of force. Milton’s, on the other hand, packs action back into
potential and possibility, insisting that this is the domain of real occur-
rences. Like Milton, Marvell is wary of treating force as a matter of
actualization, because this concept evaluates forces on the basis of their
results, not their essential exercise. Hirst and Zwicker maintain that
this aversion to depicting fi nal fulfi llments and reproductive fruition is
characteristic of Marvell’s entire corpus, from “The Picture of Little

62 Apocalyptic

Means

T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” to the Villiers elegy, and stems from a
basic discomfort with “the costly story of patriarchy.”

Instead of ex-

plaining this aesthetic tendency via recourse to a primordial personal
or po liti cal trauma, however, we should consider the possibility that
this pervasive choice refl ects a dissatisfaction with the prospect pro-
vided by achieved ends. Marvell evinces a consistent suspicion of such
fulfi llment precisely because it relies on the limiting perspective of ret-
roactive judgment, bound as it is to the transcendent survey of what
means have done or were supposed to do, as opposed to what they can
or could do.

By conceiving the execution of force in the present, its activity not

reduced, after the fact, to manifestations or meaningful substitutions,
Marvell’s po liti cal verse attempts to conceive of an event that includes
imminent promise under the rubric of immanent power. For all of
their attachment to specifi c past occasions, these poems all attempt
to imagine an apocalyptically transformative future occurring in the
present. For example, unlike the prolepsis that Milton always uses to
enhance the immediacy of the future, and despite its reputation as a
sycophantic encomium to Cromwell, “The First Anniversary” presents
the apocalypse as conditional on a conjunction of Cromwell’s and
the pop u lar will.

It is defi nitely not a providential narrative already

written:

Hence oft I think, if in some happy hour
High grace should meet in one with highest power,
And then a seasonable people still
Should bend to his, as he to heaven’s will,
What we might hope, what wonderful effect
From such a wished conjuncture might refl ect.
Sure, the mysterious work, where none withstand,
Would forthwith fi nish under such a hand:
Foreshortened Time its useless course would stay,
And soon precipitate the latest day.

131–40

Marvell does not just hedge his bets here, or deploy the conditional in
consummate passive- aggressive fashion. Even in adducing eschatology
as a justifi cation for Cromwell’s rule, “The First Anniversary” in this
moment refuses to make the obvious appeal to necessity, fi nality, or any
other variant of a future already written. After all, the line reads “lat-

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

est” and not “last” day, a choice that preserves the line’s meter, but also
resists the hasty foreshortening of time evoked in the preceding line. In
this respect, force is not simply another name for an abrupt, impatient
terminus.

What ever power apocalyptic narratives have in the present is not

then a consequence of their ability to herald or fi gure fi nality. In fact,
it is a past or future fi nality that Marvell consistently strips from his
depiction of apocalyptic events. As Annabel Patterson notes, when
“The First Anniversary” turns to Cromwell’s coaching accident to jus-
tify his rule by evoking its possible loss, Marvell writes the description
as present fact, not thwarted danger: “The poet becomes trapped in
his own fi ction, and begins to describe Cromwell’s death as if it had
actually occurred. . . . Fiction has taken over, but only, paradoxically,
to insist on another kind of truth.”

This other truth, of course, is at

least in part that even an anticipated apocalypse has immanent effects,
whether one wishes to ward it off or hasten its arrival.

What makes

narrative, apocalyptic, providential, or otherwise, dangerous is that it
ensnares readers in self- concern, dragging them back to the very sub-
ject that one would wish to transform, not because of some innate
narcissism, but because even reading the future as an unfolding story
means treating it as if it has already occurred, closed in its fi nality
whether conceived as a past history or a future script. Thus, the imag-
ined futural scenario of Cromwell’s death, of necessity, takes the form
of an alternative past:

Justice obstructed lay, and Reason fooled;
Courage disheartened, and Religion cooled.
A dismal silence through the palace went,
And then loud shrieks the vaulted marbles rent.
Such as the dying chorus sings by turns,
And to deaf seas, and ruthless tempests mourns,
When now they sink, and now the plund’ring streams
Break up each deck, and rip the oaken seams.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We only mourned ourselves, in thine ascent,
Whom thou hadst left beneath with mantle rent.

207–14, 219– 20

These lines depict the present as a simile that happens now: “Such as
the dying chorus sings by turns . . . When now they sink.” The poem

64 Apocalyptic

Means

does not caution us to avoid apocalyptic analogies but rather not to
imagine them in the form of a transcendent narrative that, of neces-
sity, has already or fi nally occurred. A resemblance that happens in the
present, that even bleeds over into the events of the present, thwarts
those subjects who arrogate to themselves the power of fi nal causes,
or at least their recognition. For Marvell, force does not amount to a
unidirectional cause guided by telos, either pushing effects forward or
rushing the story toward its ultimate conclusion:

What since he did, an higher force him pushed
Still from behind, and it before him rushed,
Though undiscerned among the tumult blind,
Who think those high decrees by man designed.

239–42

The blind tumultuous mob misunderstands causation, because it con-
siders it only as a matter of fi nal agency. Its error resides not just in
thinking high decrees are the result of human choice instead of God’s
plan but in considering God’s eschatological plan as remotely similar
to our conceptions of human motives. Apocalyptic forces rush ahead
certainly, but they also push from behind, “still”— as in “simultane-
ously.” Once again, Marvell’s verse attends to the in de pen dent means
through which an end might occur, not the confi dent logic of a pur-
pose already half achieved in the prospectus stage.

Marvell certainly does not treat the future as written, but it is his

verse’s rationale for this position that is most signifi cant here. His po-
liti cal lyrics are neither a celebration of human agency nor an active
resignation to a resentful apocalyptic destruction. In “An Horatian
Ode,” when the speaker promises that Cromwell will “ruin the great
work of time” (34), this is not a matter of destroying all that has been
built: governments, structures, orders, spaces. Rather, it means dis-
avowing time construed as work, the purposive overcoming of obsta-
cles, causation as temporally pre ce dent to effects, and the or ga ni za tion
of all action into a structure of means and ends. It is not that one can-
not assimilate eschatology to such a system of work and accomplish-
ment. One certainly can. Marvell, however, maintains that one should
not, because it is to mystify how events would ever occur, reducing
them to a table of inert resemblances and reversal, however cata-
strophic. Paradoxically, for modern criticism, at least, these lyrics

Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

maintain that it is interpretation and the notion of a reserved judg-
ment that makes violent upheaval necessary, precisely because they
postulate a radical aporia between past and present, contemplation
and action.

If we read these panegyrics as unsettling, it is not just

because Marvell is a partisan, praising the forceful virtue of his tribe’s
chosen leader. Rather, it is because Marvell celebrates movement, with
all of the danger, but also all of the hope, that that immanent term
implies.

The fi nal couplet of “An Horatian Ode,” then, does not justify

Cromwell’s past or future actions. It praises the exercise of the arts that
gain and preserve power, the forceful execution, in short, of virtue:
“The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain” (119– 20). This
does not mean that the journey is all that matters. Rather this couplet
erases the notion of an end, a purpose or fi nality cordoned off from the
instrumental force that would effect it: Order orders order; it does not
tame a chaos fundamentally different in kind. As a result, this execu-
tion of force is not the same thing as the virtuous expression of a subject,
the reserved knowing consciousness that would accumulate encomia
by acting in the world and then retreat to its country estate. We should
not read this moment as an instance of bowing, stoically or enthusiasti-
cally, to a proto- fascistic power, justifi ed by the ideological window
dressing of nature. Rather, the poem attempts to praise force as both an
act and an event, and not merely its subjective exercise or withhold-
ing, so as to produce an affi rmative account of allegiance. Means, and
not ends, allow us, fi nally, to agree enthusiastically in the present, as
opposed to awaiting, anxiously, a better deal that might arrive in the
future.

For Marvell, without attending to the ubiquitous and immersive

presence of force, there is no way to do politics. He is not squea-
mish about force and its exercise, because that is all there is, in the
social and po liti cal world, within reason, within conscience, and
within nature. The trick, though, is refusing to reduce this position
to yet one more version of a Hobbesian or Machiavellian nightmare,
in which force amounts to little more than constraint or threat. In
the end, force is the only concept that does not deceive itself by imag-
ining itself as morally pure, in either its essence or its effects. Reason,
rights, democracy, deliberation all imagine themselves as irrevocably
on the side of the angels. In treating Cromwell as a natural force,
“An Horatian Ode” ultimately maintains that we cannot abandon

Milton’s sonnets are po liti cal not because they praise and advise po liti-
cal fi gures, comment on historical events, or surreptitiously air con-
cerns about aristocratic patronage, but because they strike at the heart
of the Petrarchan tradition’s devotion to an absolutist theory of power
predicated on the temporal deferral of fulfi llment. They accomplish
this revolt by insisting that sonnets contain events, instead of simply
reporting on the already past happening of those events or advocating
for or prophesying their future occurrence. In this sense, Milton’s son-
nets attempt to treat events as free happenings in the present, as opposed
to an impotent retrospective postulation of a choice among options or
a prospective promise of future alternatives.

They present the apoca-

lypse as fundamentally paratactic, in contradistinction to a typological
or otherwise hypotactic system of development. As a result, Milton’s
sonnets imagine a non- resentful end of time, one that does not close with
the resolution of problems or justice for the wicked.

Milton’s rethinking of the sonnet tradition aims then not so much

at the monarchical politics of the genre’s historical practitioners as at
its conception of time, particularly its insistence that the event of union
and fulfi llment, and ultimately meaning and freedom, recedes into an
inaccessible, even infi nitely deferred future.

Instead of this model of

merely futural hope and immanent waiting, Milton’s sonnets attempt
to locate an apocalyptically conceived transformation in the present

C h a p t e r T w o

Hope in the Present

Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative
Events in Milton’s Sonnets

Hope in the Present

and, in a permutation of Hebrews 11:1, to give substance to hope.

the end, these poems reconsider the relationship between contempla-
tion and action, deliberative preparation and will, and insist that events
and actions are something more than the successful accomplishment
of an imagined, narrative plan. For Milton, thought is not merely the
prelude to action or a retrospective hermeneutic commentary. Rather,
Milton’s sonnets treat thought and the passional affects that attend it
as events in themselves, for it is only this type of immanent happening
that can wed both rational po liti cal persuasion and an apocalyptically
conceived transformation. Milton’s sonnets then amount to a fairly
grand claim for the power of poetry: that lyrics, because of their pen-
chant for immediacy, overcome or thwart the futural orientations not
only of narrative verse but also of hope itself.

That is, Milton turns to

the lyric for an anatomization of present hope, precisely because it is the
form that insists on the immanent, and not imminent, effects of consid-
ering, waiting, use, and optimism.

It turns out, then, that only lyric can

tell us what it means for something to happen while we are still able to
do something about it.

Precisely because it serves as one of early modernity’s most sophisti-

cated systems of meditation on temporality, as well as psychological
motives and desires, the Petrarchan sonnet tradition requires some-
thing more than a hasty dismissal as so much royalist balderdash.

Certainly this tradition in En gland often exhibits absolutist tendencies,
imagining power as administered by an absent, despotic mistress, who
nonetheless extracts from her devotees a delight in their own subjuga-
tion. What is most important for our purposes, however, is that the
central mechanism for this ideological extraction is a logic of deferred
signifi cation: One can delight in one’s own subjection precisely because
one’s suffering is a sign of a delayed or, what amounts to the same
thing, inverted favor. Astrophil and Stella makes this logic explicit sev-
eral times in the course of the sequence, but perhaps most transpar-
ently in sonnet 100. There is waiting here in the sestet, as there is in
Milton’s meditative sonnets, but it is marked by paradoxical reversals:

O plaints conserv’d in such a sugred phraise,
That eloquence it selfe envies your praise,
While sobd out words a perfect Musike give.
Such teares, sighs, plaints, no sorrow is, but joy:
Or if such heavenly signes must prove annoy,
All mirth farewell, let me in sorrow live.

Milton’s Sonnets

This sonnet maintains that the beauty that resides in a lover’s lament
is a function of a promised temporal inversion, thus the conditional
imploration in the fi nal two lines. The speaker embraces sorrow in ex-
pectation of a reversal that leads to a more valuable fulfi llment, either
an immanent joy in sorrow’s beauty, an imminent reward of love, or the
nobility of such endurance. In this respect, Astrophil and Stella pres-
ents deferral as characteristic not only of human temporal desire but
of conclusions themselves. Even the sonnet’s resolution entails waiting—
in this case, for the approval of an absent, indeterminate lord (even if
that lord is merely an aspect of the speaker) who will allow the speaker
to live in sorrow. Ultimately, Sidney’s entire sequence, which is typical
of the Petrarchan tradition, serves as a brief for how one can be con-
vinced to choose, freely, deliberately, and without ideological deception,
to love an abstract and eternally absent tyrant. Deferral, then, is not a
bug but a feature.

Although the lacking Petrarchan subject seems to cordon off an

interior realm separate from the po liti cal power of the sovereign, thus
laying the groundwork for a possible re sis tance to it, lack so pervades
this subject that, ultimately, even such re sis tance requires a deferred
recognition from some other authority, one that can never fi nally be
achieved.

In the end, this speaker desires and joys in his own lack and

his impossible quest for an unattainable transcendent fulfi llment at
the hands of a powerful despot. He does not want what he claims to
want— the apocalyptic end always out of reach. Although I have written
elsewhere of the incompatibility of this Hegelian and psychoanalytic
subject with early modern religious verse, what matters most here is
Milton’s assault on the temporal signature of this tradition: its orienta-
tion toward a future that will never arrive and, thus, its terrifying betrayal
of hope, the apocalypse, and a hopeful apocalypse.

It is against this structure of lack and power that Milton’s sonnets

revolt, by refusing to adhere to a traditional sonnet sequence that would
narrate the machinations of such a subject and by using the structural
turns of the sonnet to conceive transformative events in the present—
whether using, spending, considering, or waiting— in opposition to a
merely narcissistic refl ection.

Milton’s revolt, then, is not merely an

issue of subject matter but rather a rethinking and reuse of the form, one
that treats the volta as a site for examining when an event really occurs,
within the poem and within thought itself, and that employs revelation
to reconceive the relationship between deliberation and po liti cal events.
Numerous critics have described the sonnet tradition in En gland as a

Hope in the Present

not so subtly veiled meditation on an author’s public career, patron-
age, and a host of other economic, social, sexual, and po liti cal issues,

but Milton’s poems do not imagine politics as a matter of secrecy and
revelation— that is, as hermeneutics. Thus, they do not present the po-
liti cal as the unveiling of a latent, more important content.

Milton

does not demystify sonnets, because sonnets do not consider thought to
be a matter of mystifi ed internal secrecy or privacy. Instead, he treats
sonnets as occasional poems that present an apocalyptic event as usable
and thinkable in the present. For his sonnets, then, revelation does not
amount to ideological demystifi cation but to a radically transforma-
tive and re orienting experience of the present. In this sense, they offer
revelation and not revolution.

For example, Milton’s most insistently occasional sonnet, “On the

late Massacher in Piemont,” eschews mere refl ection on a lost past.

Instead, it affi rms the possibility of immediate change in the present and,
thus, evades the paradox of occasional verse that Angus Fletcher de-
scribes in his reading of A Mask: “The occasional poem displays a cer-
tain uncanniness, in this sense: it pretends to serve the purposes of a
moment that comes, and is gone, whereas the poetic act itself calls the
impermanence of that moment into question. There is a pathos in the
occasional; by commemorating the moment, the poet insists on its loss.
Every occasional poem is a tomb.”

In Fletcher’s account, events are

fundamentally kairotic, fl eeting moments for opportunistic response that
a poem can only lament. “On the late Massacher in Piemont,” however,
situates a historical occasion within the broader contours of an apoca-
lyptically conceived time. Although it opens with a plea for both ven-
geance and remembrance, the slaughter of the Waldenses is not really
an opportunity grasped, an occasion within a teleological narrative of
which readers or the speaker would be a part. However, the massacre
still acts within the poem as an occasion with present possibilities:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our Fathers worship’t Stocks and Stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groanes

These groans have already been recorded and redoubled, meaning that
their transcription is unnecessary: “Their moans / The Vales redoubl’d
to the Hills, and they / To Heav’n” (8– 10). The seeds of the martyrs’

Milton’s Sonnets

blood issue then not in vengeance or even remembrance. These are
both the province of the divine addressee. Instead of these kairotic op-
portunities for retribution and justice, the fi nal tercet offers escape,
and one accomplished before its appropriate time: “that from these
[the martyrs’ blood and ashes] may grow / A hunder’d-fold, who hav-
ing learnt thy way / Early may fl y the Babylonian wo” (12– 14). Instead
of waiting for an appropriate opportunity, learning from occasion
means rejecting such passivity and escaping early. In other words, the
present use of the occasion is temporally inappropriate. Contrary to
Fletcher’s account of the paradox of occasional verse, the sonnet suc-
ceeds in making the past present insofar as it uses the past to evade the
tyranny of narrative and narration. Learning the Lord’s way means
escaping the need to wait for a kairotic opportunity, even an apocalyp-
tic one. This sonnet certainly commemorates a massacre, but the event
of the poem, what happens in it, is a present preparation for an early,
untimely fl ight from woe. The apocalypse in this poem is not just a
resentfully narrated fantasy of the future. Instead, Milton’s occasional
sonnet takes a genre of endless deferral and waiting and makes of it a
genre of considered, premature action and escape, not just desperate
reaction, however dramatically appropriate.

As several critics have remarked, Milton’s sonnets are rife with

temporal indicators, emphasizing the extent to which the nature of the
present is one of their central concerns. For example, Janel Mueller
maintains that Milton’s sonnets utilize deixis in order to conjure an ex-
perience of the present in which po liti cal events occur:

One device in par tic u lar, we will fi nd, proves indispensable to
Milton’s making of poetry from politics. He keys his use of
the present tense within his text to a moment in present time
outside the text, synchronizing the “now” of direct address with
an occasion or event that is just “now” being experienced. In so
doing, he seizes upon the immediacy of the po liti cal moment
and makes poetry of its imperatives to action before these can
either pass into the historical record or become objects of
philosophical refl ection.

Although Mueller’s account jars with any attempt to explore the events
that occur within poetry, opting instead to place them “outside the
text,” it does nonetheless emphasize just how defeatist is the retrospec-
tive model of kairotic opportunity that Fletcher advances: All real

Hope in the Present

opportunity happened in a lost past; ergo, hope can only project what
is currently the case, with at best minor modifi cation, into a homolo-
gous, unimaginative future. Instead of turning to an event outside the
text as an imperative to action, we should imagine Milton’s transfor-
mation of the sonnet as a voracious formal incorporation, even canni-
balization, of such an event, particularly given the form’s own obsession
with pivotal turns, resolutions, and endings.

As he does with other poetic forms, Milton foregrounds an immedi-

ate temporal experience within verse, not just a retrospective recounting.
He adapts the sonnet form, a genre intent on exploring the immediate
internal machinations of a rebuffed lover, so as to explore what it means
for an event to happen presently, immediately, and potentially. Milton
turns to the sonnet because its generic history and structure make it a
privileged site for reconceiving the nature of contemplation and action
and their relationship to the wider world in time. And these reconcep-
tions, in turn, explore the possibility that present, apocalyptic, and
transformative events happen right now, within poems. Samson Ago-
nistes, via its sonnet conclusion, then takes this lyric potential and
applies it to a dramatized narrative, showing how poetry can ultimately
extricate us from seemingly endless debates about agency, subversion,
free will, and determinism. The conclusion of the dramatic poem, like
Milton’s freestanding sonnets, depicts lyric as the moment of a present,
thoughtful, usable freedom, as opposed to the mournful monument of
an irretrievable, inevitable loss of occasion. In this sense, a dramatic
poem that concludes with apocalyptic destruction and a sonnet is ulti-
mately, and perhaps counterintuitively, an attempt to take seriously
what a politics of hope would entail.

So what happens in a sonnet? The sonnet is a lyric machine that con-
tains events. In either its En glish or Italian form, it obsesses over the
nature of occasion, in the turn of the volta or the resolution implied by
a rhyming couplet. The volta, for example, promises a pivotal turn,
within the poem, that is neither identical nor reducible to a represented
action in an external world. A couplet implies resolution of a crisis but
poses its own formal problem for our pro cesses of interpretation:
namely, is the resolution of a sonnet an event or the end of events? This
is not simply a reiteration of a theoretical conundrum about the nature

Milton’s Sonnets

of endings.

Rather, it is central to the differing formal signifi cance of

the two sonnet forms. In contrast to its Italian counterpart, the En glish
sonnet replaces events with epigrammatic resolutions. Even when it
retains a traditional Italian volta, the concluding couplet implies, for-
mally, a detachable completion not present in any of the traditional
Petrarchan sestet schemes. Certainly, resolution also exists within the
Italian structure, but each form presents a different understanding of
the nature of resolution, what happens when problems are solved or
confl icts overcome. Anna Nardo describes the differences between these
sonnet forms in terms that make the En glish version more compatible
with a series of occasions than is the Italian’s focused problem- resolution
structure:

Whereas in the Italian pattern, the asymmetrical, bipartite
division into octave and sestet generally presents a problem and
resolution, in the Elizabethan, the three quatrains and a couplet
most often develop a theme in three stages and then clinch it in
an epigrammatic conclusion— sometimes witty or paradoxical,
sometimes grave or moral. Occasionally, Milton’s sonnets evince
a tripartite structure in content, if not in rhyme, and the surpris-
ing, poignant, witty, and aphoristic endings to several sonnets
may owe some of their punch to their Elizabethan pre de ces sors.

Like Nardo, Paul Fussell describes the En glish sonnet’s conclusion as
marked by wit, even fl ippancy, but he also emphasizes its evocation of
reasoned analysis. Fussell’s account of the Italian form is equally com-
plex, describing it as both a structure of deliberation and a repre sen ta-
tion of passionate feeling:

Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespear-
ean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the
im mense difference between them. Both present and then
“solve” problems, the Petrarchan form in its octave and sestet,
the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial
twelve lines and then in its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the
problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a rela-
tively expansive and formal meditative pro cess, for the sestet
allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly
reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean
sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny
compass of a twenty- syllable couplet, the “solution” is more

Hope in the Present

likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft
of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. . . . If the
shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced
sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with
the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the
Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary”
couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual,
analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility.

Fussell seems to have it both ways in his description of the En glish
sonnet, presenting it simultaneously as a wryly dismissive form and as
one that accords with the analytic movement of thought. Similarly, the
Italian scheme accords with both deliberation and emotional experi-
ence. The point here is not to take Fussell’s or Nardo’s accounts of the
meaning of sonnet forms to task but rather to show that the structure
of the sonnet is intimately concerned with the nature of deliberation
and resolution, whether it follows a methodical procedure or erupts as
a fl ash of insight.

Yet the form’s examination of the nature of thought

does not simply stage one more battle between affect and reason. In-
stead, the sonnet form explores when thoughts, acts, and even ends
occur and is, thus, bound up with the event and time of contemplation
and its purported translation into action.

The Italian and the En glish sonnet forms depict two different mech-

anisms for this translation. In the Italian system, the volta traditionally
issues in a diffuse order without a self- refl exive capstone or retrospec-
tive metacomment that would turn all that has come before into a
safely past artifact.

Resolution develops out of a punctual crisis or

problem, but does not announce itself as fi nally completed with a super-
numerary signal. The En glish sonnet adopts a more retrospective atti-
tude toward its internal moments, allowing for multiple occasions within
the three quatrains, which then receive signifi cance after the fact, after
the couplet reacts on them to produce or reveal their meaningful unity.
There is resolution here too, but it occurs via the intervening action of
the couplet, as a free commentative and concluding apparatus that is
more contemplative than Nardo’s account probably allows.

Instead

of the Italian sonnet’s emphasis on the event as a development of the
problem toward resolution, the En glish sonnet imagines it as an order-
ing or reordering response, the event as a matter of completion and
signifi cance— of interpretation, in short. Milton’s sonnets, however,
disavow both of these structures of resolution: the teleological, delib-

Milton’s Sonnets

erative, or dialectical unfolding of a problem toward solution and a
contingent eruption that requires revision, recalibration, and kairotic,
hermeneutic response. Instead, his verse attempts to preserve the value
of possibility against resolution in either the Italian or En glish sonnet
form.

Yet if the possible is to do anything more than justify the status

quo, it must be more than the discovery of a prior causal narrative.
Possibility must mean something more than the extraction of past op-
tions from an existing state of affairs. It is for this reason that Gilles
Deleuze develops the concept of the virtual in opposition to the more
limiting concept of potentiality. For Deleuze, when the virtual actual-
izes itself, it creates the very principles of its own actualization. And
these principles are not merely the readymade steps of a method. In
contrast, the possible is extracted from the real as precisely this sort of
readymade:

We give ourselves a real that is ready- made, preformed, pre-
existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to
an order of successive limitations. Everything is already com-
pletely given: all of the real in the image, in the pseudo- actuality
of the possible. . . . In fact, it is not the real that resembles the
possible, it is the possible that resembles the real, because it has
been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted
from the real like a sterile double. Hence, we no longer under-
stand anything either of the mechanism of difference or of the
mechanism of creation.

The paring down of the possible into the real is then incompatible
with a transformative and revealed truth. In this respect, Milton imag-
ines possibility as something more than a series of irredeemably lost
choices made in the past. Although Deleuze’s notion of the virtual is
closer to what Milton has in mind in describing possibility, I do not
think that the terminological switch is as important as Milton’s modi-
fi cation of the Aristotelian concept. In fact, possibility, as Susan James
notes, has a multitude of senses even in the Aristotelian tradition, in-
cluding the passive ability to be acted on, the active receptivity to such
impressions that the soul possesses, and even the ability to act.

Through-

out this study, I will be more interested in the ways in which Milton
separates the concept of possibility from actualization, deferred or
past, and not just the term he uses to describe this power.

Hope in the Present

As we have already noted, sonnets are an important form for Milton

because they attempt to take the power of thought itself seriously, as
something more than a refl ection on what is really important, action.
Here too, Deleuze seems apropos. He insists that we have often mis-
takenly assumed that learning happens only through the automatic
repetition of actions:

Perhaps the reason [for our diffi culty in understanding habit
formation] lies in the illusions of psychology, which made a
fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed
it to observe only that which moved. It asks how we acquire
habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being
misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed— namely,
whether it is through acting that we acquire habits . . . or whether,
on the contrary, it is through contemplating? Psychology regards
it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This,
however, is not the question. The question is whether or not the
self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contem-
plation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form
ourselves other than through contemplation.

If habits are acquired only through contemplation, then thought has
immediate, tangible effects. It does not act as a weak precursor to the
more real, more important business that is action. These are certainly
pressing questions for Milton’s contemplative sonnets, but they also
infl uence the ways in which his encomiastic sonnets address their sub-
jects, especially Cromwell. Instead of the bustling force of Marvell’s
ode, Milton’s Cromwell appears laudable precisely because of his in-
complete potential acts.

The sonnet to Cromwell is the only one in En glish with a conclud-

ing couplet.

It is important not just because of its unique conclusion

or its choice of subject matter, but because of the contortions Milton
performs in order to disrupt the concluding couplet’s status as a secure
and separable resolution, retroactively imposed by an authoritative
hermeneutic voice. The couplet requests assistance in defeating those
ubiquitous hireling wolves that Milton has been on about since Lycidas:
“Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves
whose Gospell is their maw” (13– 14).

Such a plea certainly could

be read as a self- refl exive, even transcendent resolution, but to do so

Milton’s Sonnets

demands that we imagine the couplet as a separate response to the
preceding four lines— as not, in short, part of the plea that makes up
the sestet. Although the couplet might imply that this is a distinct con-
clusion, it turns out that the speaker’s entreaty also forms part of the
rest of the sestet. This confusion is only intensifi ed by the fact that the
poem follows an Italian scheme in the octave, offers a delayed volta,
marked predictably by “yet,” but then offers another closed- rhyme qua-
train before entering into the concluding couplet. Thus, despite the con-
cluding couplet, this sonnet is not quite En glish, but neither does its
sestet follow a more open Italian rhyme scheme. This closed- rhyme
quatrain doubles the fi nal couplet’s request of Cromwell, but also ar-
rests any seamless logical transition into the resolving couplet. The im-
plication of this sealed rhyme is that the couplet’s resolution amounts
to little more than repetitive restatement and redundancy:

. . . yet much remaines
To conquer still; peace hath her victories
No less renownd then warr, new foes arise
Threatning to bind our soules w

secular chaines:

9–12

The problem that this sonnet poses, then, is whether the concluding
request resolves the threat noted in this fi nal quatrain or is merely the
rendering explicit of the entire sestet’s suasive appeal. Does the mani-
festation of the appeal act as the effect or consequence of a problem—
that much remains to be conquered? Or is the rendering of the appeal
still part of the description of the problem? The sestet’s rhetorical or ga-
ni za tion unfolds from problem to an actualized appeal, but the exact
character of this concluding, fi nal appeal remains ambiguous. It might
be a logical development from the sestet’s stated problem, an event of
resolution at the end of an argument. Or it might be the manipulative
rhetorical tactic of the encomiast, a repetition of the demand implicit
in the fi rst four lines of the sestet. Or it might be the hopeful plea of a
speaker desperate for justice or succor, awaiting Cromwell’s interven-
tion. In sum, this sonnet, more than the other sonnets of advice and
praise, poses the problem of whether endings are acts of hypotactic
development or of paratactic addition. That is, when one pleads, hope-
fully, for Cromwell’s help, does one await this help as an unfolding se-
quence in an external temporal world? Or does the plea of the couplet

Hope in the Present

lock the arrival of such aid back into the time of the poem itself, by treat-
ing it as logical development or as epigrammatic resolution? Formally,
this poem poses the problem of a detachable, even supplementary com-
pletion, a fulfi llment that remains extraneous to the thing fulfi lled. It is
the same problem we will fi nd in the case of Lycidas: How does one end
something of which one is not a part? But it also turns this issue into an
examination of that for which one waits. In this sestet, Milton sharply
distinguishes waiting for a resolution and waiting for an event or an end.

William McCarthy suggests that nothing really happens in this sonnet

until the fi nal clause, precisely because the statements in the fi rst twelve
lines are all subordinate to the fi nal plea. Thus, he maintains that this
sonnet, as well as the one addressed to Fairfax, praises incomplete
acts: “To this unfi nished work Milton subordinates their past achieve-
ments and their praise— subordinates them in the very syntax of the
sonnets, especially of the Cromwell [sic], it being almost entirely a set
of dependent clauses which resolve only at the last minute in the main
clause, ‘helpe us. . . .’ ”

McCarthy’s reading shows how this sonnet

pegs virtue to potential, an as yet unachieved fulfi llment. The sonnet’s
volta, in fact, evacuates the novel fi nality of its own status as a pivotal
event, unseating the disjunctive presupposition that grounds such crit-
ical disagreements. One should read “yet,” redundantly and emphati-
cally, as synonymous with “still.” If much remains yet to do— as in “still
much remaines / To conquer still”— then the event in the volta is not
unique and these lines bend over backward, via this redundancy, to
emphasize this lack of singularity. As such, even in a sonnet with at least
the air of En glishness, whose formal properties might well imply a
secure and separable resolution, Milton raises the question of whether
there are any actual turns or events in poems, or the world, including
those epigrammatic conclusions that would produce or reestablish a
peaceful unity.

McCarthy’s argument, in tethering praise to potential, maintains

that what is valuable about possibility is not its ultimate actualization
in the future but rather its immediate temporal occurrence. (As we will
see in the succeeding chapter, Lycidas describes a similar in de pen dent
potential that does not issue in actualization.) However, potential oc-
curs in the present in a manner incompatible with our predominant
notions of the event. It is neither a progressive unfolding, dialectical
or typological, nor a contingent eruption. In addition, the future for
which one hopes is not just potentially present, a category of being, but

Milton’s Sonnets

occurs in the present, a category of time. The result of praising incom-
plete acts is, ultimately, the disavowal of the value of completion as a
model for events or endings. Thus, “yet,” because it is both a logical
and a temporal operator, heralds the central division in the signifi -
cance of sonnet form: Does it represent the deliberative procedures of
thought, the temporal event of an argument’s transition into ac cep-
tance, the moment of commentative conclusion of a series of confl icts,
or a continuity at odds with any notion of a dramatic volta? But “yet”
also signifi es the abrogation of the distinction between a static conti-
nuity and the eruption of difference or change: Potential ends occur all
the time within continuity and are the only ways of conceiving our daily
lives as anything more than pointless private dramas or, what amounts
to the same thing, a useless, boring holding pattern.

Potential, then, is not merely a retrospective category, one that reaf-

fi rms a distinction between past and present, complete and incomplete
action. Instead, potential displays some of the “sense of immediacy,”
to borrow William Riley Parker’s phrase, that attends the sonnets, par-
ticularly the immediate considering of Sonnet 19.

Milton’s sonnets

encase, even at the level of their form and order, an examination of
continuity, climax, and resolution and refuse to take the transition from
deliberative potential thought into fi nal culminating action as the par-
adigm for events. For example, Sonnet 7 represents deliberation as a
mental activity without pivotal turns, without even the developmental
drama that one would expect from a rejection of the Petrarchan tradi-
tion. What is probably most striking in a sonnet often interpreted as a
dismissal or transcendence of idle Petrarchan pursuits is the absence
of any reversal, even an internal one, that could serve as the mark of
an event: In the past, things worked this way, but now everything has
changed and I have put away childish things. In fact, Sonnet 7 goes so
far as to evacuate the very notion of pivotal occasions, placing all under
the eye of the great taskmaster:

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest mea sure eev’n,
To that same lot, however mean, or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task Masters eye.

9–14

Hope in the Present

As with the Cromwell sonnet, this poem worries over the relationship
between “yet” and “still,” continuity and rupture, in the volta. Victoria
Silver maintains that there is a radical formal break between octave
and sestet, one that confi rms the incommensurability of human and
divine languages. This reading, though, threatens to ignore the ambi-
guity of “yet” and the poem’s more general tendencies toward the con-
fl ation of distinctions, even those between human and divine.

In the

sestet, in fact, “yet” means both “however” and “regardless.” It does not
matter if his maturation is more or less, slow or fast. The ambiguity
does not so much ask for resolution as show us the irrelevance of reso-
lution, a maneuver that ultimately eliminates the ambiguity by dis-
avowing it, not by resolving it. Either incommensurability does not
exist or, if it does, it does not matter. This is not to argue that differ-
ences in general do not matter. It is only to maintain that the poem
denies both the transitions between incongruous levels of language
that Silver describes and the dialectical reversals, from indeterminacy
to resolution, that govern her transcendental understanding of inter-
pretation. “Regardless” indicates that the disjunctive turn marked by
“however” or “but” is either not worth recognizing or non ex is tent.

Disavowal means that ambiguity is not a disequilibrium tending to-
ward or wishing for stasis or rest, and neither is it a problem that must
be overcome, solved, or transcended. This sonnet’s insistence that in-
determinacy is inconsequential then shows, more generally, that the
critical categories that we use to distinguish eventful turns inside a
contemplative poem— the hypotactic orders of dialectical or typologi-
cal unfolding or retrospective hermeneutics— are themselves under-
mined or, at least, rendered suspicious within and by the poem.

Ambiguity in Milton’s sonnets is not a structural tension emanating

from critique but rather a mechanism for disavowing the signifi cance
of distinctions— in this case, between contemplation and action. And
this is, of course, a temporal problem, posed by the ambiguity of “still”
in Sonnet 7—“It shall be still in strictest mea sure eev’n.” How can one
discern change without the security of retrospection? Does “still” mean
“continuity,” or “quiet and immobile”? In the latter instance, the in-
ward ripeness will exist quietly in these even mea sures, the implication
being that it does not exist there quietly quite yet, that a future change
will fi nally produce this stillness. Of course, the former sense, “conti-
nuity,” has exactly the opposite implication, that maturation is now
and continues to be in the future a matter of stable mea sure. As with
the ambiguity of “yet” in the preceding line, this one too tacitly erases

Milton’s Sonnets

itself within its own semantic logic. If “still” denotes continuity, the
inward ripeness to which the line refers maintains itself statically and
quietly in the same mea sure that it has always occupied. “Continuity”
contains “quiet” in the same manner that “regardless” contains “how-
ever.” Again, neither of these ambiguities calls for interpretive resolu-
tion, let alone the intervention of a reasoning reader. And neither do
they enact a dialectical reversal, through which a higher synthesis is
achieved. Instead, these are ambiguities without resolution, not because
indeterminacy reigns and poems lack fi nality but rather because ambi-
guities do not need, want, or request the fi nality of solution, ending, or
conclusion.

Milton’s sonnets, then, do not present ambiguity as a crisis in need

of solution and, moreover, do not present reaction to crisis as the pri-
mary pro cess of contemplation. Instead, Sonnet 7 allows for a truly
affi rmative utopian possibility, one in which revelation can happen
without having to proceed through the circuit of work and mediation.
In Gilles Deleuze’s parlance, Milton’s sonnets imagine a model of change
built on disavowal: “Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the
point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor
even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that
which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way
that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it.”

Most

important for Deleuze is the distinction between the escapes opened up
by disavowal and the false argumentative contestations that character-
ize negation. Disavowal, at the very least, allows us to think of sonnets
as something other than an oblique attempt at persuasion, allegiance,
and agreement: politics by other, more artistic means.

As we have already seen, this type of disavowal also characterizes

Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of messianism: “In pushing each
thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply
cancel out this fi gure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end.”

Yet

this is not an escape that takes refuge in resignation or wishful rever-
ies. Ultimately, for Agamben the messianic as not is the engine of a free
use of the world, a use without possession: “Use: this is the defi nition
Paul gives to messianic life in the form of the as not. To live messiani-
cally means ‘to use’ klēsis; conversely, messianic klēsis is something
to use, not to possess.” It also turns out that the word, a pure re-
vealed word, is not the fi nal epiphany that makes use unnecessary
but the means of achieving this free use: “The experience of the pure
word opens up the space for gratuitousness and use.”

These other,

Hope in the Present

non- apocalyptic words still work within a teleological, dialectical, or
typological system, serving the purposes offered them by these various
systems of signifi cance. They are, then, already used and are not avail-
able for us. In Agamben’s reading, revelation is not a restful resolution
to strife, itself a goal, but a transformation of the labor of historical
time into the liberty of free action.

And one of the central labors that

disappears is that of overcoming distance between deliberation and
action, the very distance that Milton seeks to abolish in his own ac-
count of contemplative use.

In this respect, Milton’s sonnets participate in the seventeenth-

century philosophical obsession with the relationship between passion
and action that James anatomizes. In par tic u lar, they respond to the
diffi culties of teaching an active virtue that haunt Augustinians and
Cambridge Platonists alike: “Because reasoning itself does not engage
the will and cannot create the ability to act on our understanding, the
question of how to achieve the one is consequently no longer the same
as the question of how to achieve the other. We face a new problem:
how is the love that constitutes knowledge of virtue to be created and
disseminated?”

Mimetic knowing is, of course, inadequate, but so

too is mimetic acting, as Milton’s indictment of liturgy makes clear. An
Apology Against a Pamphlet, for example, insists, conventionally, on
the value of practice: “For not only the body, & the mind, but also the
improvement of Gods Spirit is quickn’d by using. Whereas they who
will ever adhere to liturgy, bring themselves in the end to such a passe
by overmuch leaning as to loose even the legs of their devotion.”

Yet

An Apology also insists that habit is a product of the contemplative ac-
tions of conscience, not merely rote work: “There will not want divers
plaine and solid men, that have learnt by the experience of a good
conscience, what it is to be well taught, who will soone look through
and through both the lofty nakednesse of your Latinizing Barbarian,
and the fi nicall goosery of your neat Sermon- actor.”

“The experience

of a good conscience” does not designate merely successful achieve-
ments or actions that result from virtuous thoughts. The experience of
conscience is also these virtuous thoughts themselves. Here, Milton
emphasizes the centrality of will and use to the event of thought and
tries to escape the fantasy of an end to willing and thinking. After all,
that is what the division between active and contemplative lives entails,
the notion that a fi nal manifestation ends all deliberation and returns us
to the world of pragmatic reality and mechanical causation.

For Mil-

ton, this gesture is either prideful or despairing. It assumes that we can

Milton’s Sonnets

reach a moment where we know enough or have achieved enough to
stop thinking and to act, or that we have reached a level of hopelessness
where desperate resignation is legitimate. Potential in the sonnets is the
model for hopeful action, however paradoxically, precisely because it
does not project this resentful future where one could fi nally be done
with thinking, acting, and living.

Sonnet 7, of course, concludes with the striking implication that

God’s omnipresence is dependent on the use of a human actor: “All is,
if I have grace to use it so, / As ever in my great task Masters eye.” Every-
thing is under God’s gaze, as it ever was, but only if the speaker uses
it.

Now one might argue that the grace of use is itself a divine gift or

that use means recognition of God’s omnipresent order and, as a result,
that these lines do not mean what they seem to mean: that divine prov-
idence or even omniscience depends on human action and work. Such
hasty apologies, though, ignore Milton’s attempt, especially in the med-
itative sonnets, to abandon accounts of action that reproduce the sim-
plistic dichotomy of tyrannical agency and abject passivity, a mirror
image of the equally simplistic dichotomous account of events as either
erupting contingency or dialectical unfolding. Milton’s sonnets attempt,
essentially, to disavow these dichotomies without overcoming them,
without imagining their solution as the restful (or tense) suspension of
dialectical or teleological completion.

When Sonnet 7 affi rms that “All is . . . As ever,” it evokes a continu-

ity seemingly at odds with an apocalyptic revelation. But this is to
mistake the very specifi c sense that Milton gives to an apocalyptic end.
It is not a passively revealed status, a human purged of sin without
any more will to act. We are not done thinking or considering or act-
ing once we have achieved our purported goals, precisely because the
apocalypse is not a goal, the restful accomplishment of which ends all
acting. Instead, the apocalypse is the moment in the present when real
ends occur, instead of their enslaved double, a manifestation not all
that eventful. The “all” that “is” “as ever” is not a subtending ontology
gradually or dimly revealed, tacitly assumed, or fi nally made explicit.
“All is . . . As ever” does not mean that all is as it ever has been, affi rm-
ing the secure ground of a divinely ordered universe. Instead, these lines
insist on the grounding nature of potential. They mean that all is as if
always under God’s gaze, if I have grace to use it so. This is not so much
thinking making it so as an insistence that even what we mean by a
foundation for divine providence is or ga nized around possibility and
its potential for use. Even God’s dominion over the world occurs only

Hope in the Present

conditionally, in short, and that is not a denigration or diminution of
God’s goodness or power.

For both Agamben and Deleuze, negation preserves what is, the

given, even as it promises transformation. It imagines a resolution of
difference in which one recognizes the occurrence of change. But nega-
tion also maintains a very specifi c relationship to potential: Potential
is imperfect or second- class being, on the way to its negation into ac-
tuality. The blossom is the refutation of the bud; the action is the ab-
rogation of the thought, even as it is also its fulfi llment. The sonnet
form hobbles such an understanding of potential, however, mainly by
presenting itself as a lyric structure that contains an event or multi-
ple events, including that of recognition and persuasion. Events, even
events of thought, happen inside sonnets. They are not performed or
represented within them as potentialities that can be reactivated or re-
animated. “It shall be still in strictest mea sure eev’n” is a prophecy that
takes its authority not from a speaker’s ethos or illocutionary force.
Rather, the moment when mea sure’s evenness occurs is right in the line,
at the apostrophe that preserves the line’s meter, if not its rhythm: “Eev’n”
is, in miniature, a disavowal of what is given— in this case, the extra,
unwanted syllable of “even.” For Milton, these are not just the pro-
sodic tricks of a high formalism but an attempt to present how thought
happens in tandem with action. The problem with self- refl ection and
recognition is always that they cannot explain how their moments
of transcendent reversal return to the immanent world in order to
affect it, how possibility might enter the world other than by its own
negation.

Milton’s sonnets highlight resolution as the chief culprit in buttress-

ing a distinction between action and thought. When the speaker of
this sonnet disavows resolution, he is not being a coy hipster, holding
out the possibility of multiple meanings so as to remain faithful to
polyvocality. Rather, the sonnet seeks to evade the logic of solution,
achievement, and concomitant deferral, which also amounts to evad-
ing the logic of per sis tent tension yearning for impossible release. Son-
net 7 concludes with an already present escape from precisely this
model of anxious disjunction and reactive transformation, the very
model that we often use to describe historical and personal change.
Events are not moments of crisis overcome in a return to stasis, and
neither are they the achievement of a fi nal equanimity, potentially fi g-
ured within contemplation. Such an account openly despises endings
and the transformations that attend them, wishing to drown the event

Milton’s Sonnets

of ending in the most roiling and purportedly revolutionary of rivers:
the dialectic of history.

Perhaps we should be unsurprised by such a potentially self-

aggrandizing gesture in a sonnet, or any lyric, for that matter. Para-
doxically, it is the sonnet’s ingenuous narcissism, its almost vainglorious
self- memorialization, that provides the most promising model for a
thought interested in change, which explains, in part, Milton’s use of
the form. The Petrarchan tradition, for all of its hyperboles, is one that
takes the formative role of thought seriously, its ability to habituate
and change the subject who is speaking. This is not quite the ex nihilo
logic of thinking making it so, but it does consider thought to be itself
a type of transformative action, not a mere refl ection on external events,
where the true transformation really abides. Milton’s revisions of the
Petrarchan sequence are designed not to demystify sonnets, revealing
their true po liti cal content, but rather to render them more embarrass-
ingly earnest, without the ironic roman à clef tendencies of the Sidney
circle. He also relies on the formal properties of the sonnet to concep-
tualize what it means for something to end hopefully but still be, in the
course of this ending, an object for human use and contemplation. In
other words, hopeful waiting is not a waiting for some deferred arrival
but one that treats potential as simultaneously a present occurrence
and a transformative end. “All is . . . As ever” occurs as an end to a very
specifi c train of thought: the notion that time unfolds in a sequence of
potentials leading to actualities— i.e., as a causal narrative. These lines
mean that the end has already occurred and that its fi nal arrival is not
what we are awaiting. Rather, we are waiting for the end of the notion
that hope must always be deferred into the future.

How, then, does a poem make hope a present substance, and not merely
a wishful dreaming? How would a poem go about imagining a present
revelation, and not merely the promise of a future one? The meditative
sonnets, Sonnets 7 and 19, do not append contemplation to an explicit
or promised fulfi llment. Thought is not merely preparation for action,
an internal prelude whose real value lies in its actualization. As a con-
sequence, consideration is not identical to deliberation, which implies a
preparatory juridical proceeding. Yet Milton’s sonnets also eschew a
world or ga nized by a model of anticipated revelation, of aristocratic

Hope in the Present

secrets or the end of time, the ultimate explicit showing of what is al-
ready so, somewhere in some other narrative. Instead, these sonnets
treat thinking and imagining as eventful activities in the present that
do not merely prime us for revelatory change. They are revelatory
change itself. They challenge the notions of events with which we are
most familiar— a dialectical sublation that preserves the old as the
opposite of the new; an external, contingent eruption into continuity
that one retroactively reinscribes within a causal system; a transcendent
divine narrative that humans initially fail to recognize but ultimately
uncover— because these all end up making revelation in the present
inconceivable and impossible. In such models, the event of the present
is the opposite of possibility. It becomes a limitation of a plethora of
options down to a single, real now, the very sort of narrowing that
Deleuze anatomizes and Milton rejects. The sense of immediacy that
Parker, Mueller, and Margaret Thickstun all fi nd in these poems requires
a notion of events that does not depend on a surprising or reactive erup-
tion into an immanent continuity, much less the constraining of imagi-
native potential into a logic of developmental, dialectical, or interpretive
actualization.

Milton’s verse is not satisfi ed with a mediated appeal

to an external plan, one that would turn poetry back into illustrative
hermeneutic commentary on this hidden narrative. Instead, his sonnets
offer a continuity in which readers must live and think, day to day, but
also one in which thoughtful considering— itself a type of use— amounts
to more than mere anticipation and planning, all with the hope of an
end to such planning. For Milton, thinking changes things and to believe
otherwise is to turn the apocalypse into nothing more than a benighted
fatalism hoping for an end equivalent to annihilation: one in which
“When I consider how my light is spent” means that my light is wasted
and exhausted, not that it is used.

Milton, of course, is not alone in obsessing over the relationship

between thought, passion, actualization, and action within the Christian
and more general Western Eu ro pe an literary traditions. We certainly
witness a similar interest in passion’s activity within Richard Crashaw’s
verse: “The Flaming Heart” avers, after all, that “Love’s passives are his
activ’st part. / The wounded is the wounding heart.”

The invocation to

book 9 of Paradise Lost presents a similar reversal of passivity into ac-
tivity. Instead of recounting the “long and tedious havoc” of war, the
epic speaker presents patience as a triumphant heroism, “the better for-
titude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung.”

Georgia Ronan

Crampton contends that this inversion is entirely in keeping not only

Milton’s Sonnets

with the agere et pati topos that stretches at least back to Homer but
also with the early Church’s solution to the paradox of the Incarnation.
Leo the Great and the Council of Chalcedon ultimately divide Jesus’ life
into an active ministry of miracles and preaching and a passive suffering
on the cross.

This division is a response to the conceptual contradic-

tion between an impassible god and an obviously passible, suffering
Christ. Yet Crampton also notes the ways in which the Passion becomes
a model for individual, internal triumphs over, paradoxically, one’s own
passions. Out of the division imposed on Jesus’ life comes the paradox
of a victorious suffering:

But the Passion of Christ did exert a powerful attraction as an
alternative heroic ideal. It was a model transcendent but open
to all, urged upon all, a prize for which mere Christian wayfar-
ers, too modest to set out for a golden fl eece, might compete.
Patience, from the root pati, to suffer, took for its unique
exploit not the deed but the ordeal. One crystallization of this
modality, its relation to agere et pati obvious, was the victory of
patience. In earliest exegesis, unaffected by the intimate identifi -
cation with the passion of Christ just under survey, praise of
patience might naively retain rather more of the spirit of the
Old Adam than the New. Some commend a cheerful patience as
that posture best calculated to set an enemy’s teeth on edge. So
Tertullian notes what satisfaction the patient sufferer may glean
in frustrating his oppressor.

In addition to its appearance in Paradise Lost, this notion, or a permu-
tation of it, makes an appearance in Paradise Regained’s evocation,
discussed in the preceding chapter, of an internal reign superior to that
of worldly kingship. Yet Paradise Lost ultimately corrects the Muse’s
own pre sen ta tion of patience’s superior strength. After all, Michael
rebukes Adam’s request for the place and date of Jesus’ triumph be-
cause this is not a fi ght with winners and losers:

. . . say where and when
Thir fi ght, what stroke shall bruise the Victors heel.
To whom thus Michael. Dream not of thir fi ght,
As of a Duel, or the local wounds
Of head or heel . . .

12.384–88

Hope in the Present

The problem, in Michael’s estimation, is not just that Adam wants
journalistic details, appointing the time and place of the end. He also
continues to imagine the end as a matter of contest. In “The Flaming
Heart,” Crashaw’s speaker does not exhibit the same aversion to the
language of conquest, preserving it in the interior meta phorical space
of a heart that contains even contradictory things:

o heart! the æquall poise of love’s both parts
Bigge alike with wounds and darts.
Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same;
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame.
Live here, great heart; and love and dy and kill;
And bleed and wound; and yeild and conquer still.

75–80

Milton’s sonnets do not offer similar series of reversals that resolve
into paradoxical unities. Moreover, even his contemplative sonnets ex-
hibit a marked discomfort with locating confl ict, let alone triumph in
an interior, allegorical space. This discomfort stems less from a desire
to act in the world than it does from an attempt to wrest even imagi-
native conceptions of patience and thought away from this dynamic
of the duel. As the Second Defense notes, winning has little to do with
virtue: “A cause is neither proved good by success, nor shown to be
evil.”

The great danger is precisely the one that Crampton here anat-

omizes: patience turns into just another way to win and reduces to
little more than the pettiest passive- aggressive behavior.

Sonnet 19 undoubtedly responds to the agere et pati tradition, as

evidenced by its central conceit of an active patience, one that intervenes
“to prevent / That murmur” (8– 9), not just to endure it. However, this
sonnet does not seek, as does the invocation to book 9, the inverting
transformation of patience into a more valuable species of strength.
Instead, Milton ultimately eschews both the visual spectacle charac-
teristic of the Passion, a tendency also exhibited by the entirety of Para-
dise Regained,

and the triumphant revelation that weakness is actually

strength. Spectacularity and reversal encourage precisely the type of
waiting that “When I consider” hopes to eliminate: the self- satisfi ed
inertia of attentive worry enabled by kairos. Milton’s verse attempts
to rethink the apocalypse so that we do not construe it as no more inno-
vative than victory. Sonnet 19 seeks the erasure of these very categories,
including the disavowal of the reversals inherent in a victorious or

Milton’s Sonnets

active patience. It presents the apocalypse as an immanent potential
that overcomes precisely the distinctions— between action, suffering,
and thinking— that ground a revelation imagined as a dramatically un-
veiled inversion. Such a model of apocalyptic immanence is necessary
so that we can act in and attend presently to the world, and not just wish
for it to all be over in a blaze of righ teous glory.

Sonnet 19’s depiction of ser vice advises readers on how to act within

a world of frustrating continuity, one in which a kairotic, spectacular
apocalypse does not intervene to direct one’s actions. Often however,
criticism of this sonnet attempts to locate such an epiphany inside the
poem by treating Patience as a personifi ed interruption of normal order.
Such a maneuver is characteristic of those readings that revolve around
determining whether the speaker accepts Patience’s dictates and, in turn,
whether the po liti cally engaged Milton would affi rm the type of resig-
nation that purportedly appears in the couplet:

. . . God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

9–14

Perhaps unsurprisingly, arguments about these lines often insist that
attentive waiting, patient, apocalyptic, or otherwise, is just not in Mil-
ton’s nature. For example, Carol Barton maintains, after quoting
passages from the Second Defense and The Reason of Church Govern-
ment, that “these do not strike me as the declarations of someone who
could wallow in the kind of indolent self- pity that the last line of Son-
net XIX is historically assumed to portray.”

In this instance, Milton

appears as a striving actor, not the sort of person who would even
create such an indolent, passive speaker, let alone be one. Regardless
of the legitimacy of this interpretation of the sonnet’s fi nal line, such
readings— even those, like Barton’s, that wish to redefi ne the conclud-
ing resolution— always assume that the sonnet indeed ends in at least
self- advisory, if not self- justifi catory, resolution and that somewhere in
the poem is an interrupting problem that requires resolution. The gno-
mic quality of the concluding sentence, though, masks what is really a
paratactic concluding three lines. There is no “however” or “more

Hope in the Present

importantly” that transitions into the fi nal clause. The colon after “with-
out rest” does not, cheekily or ironically, subordinate standing and
waiting to the rushing thousands of the preceding line, and neither does
it present waiting as an example of this hasty busyness. Instead, it
silently and paratactically coordinates them, without fanfare. “Also”—
“in addition,” “by the way”— those who do not receive such bustling
tasks are of ser vice.

When the speaker maintains that God does not need human work or

the return of divine gifts, the sonnet does not so much set up an instance
of indistinction as it reaffi rms the poem’s rejection of any model of
hypotactic development, much like the disavowal of resolution that we
witnessed in “How soon hath Time.” That is, “When I consider” denies
the entire conceptual architecture of hypotaxis— logical de pen den cy
and causation, a problem- solution structure— that transforms all dis-
cussions of ethics into a determinism– free will debate whose ultimate
goal is the determination of juridical responsibility. God does not use
parataxis here to produce a befuddling indistinction. Busy activity and
alert standing and waiting may well be the same thing in the eyes of
God, but that does not mean that their difference has been erased, over-
come, or resolved in a higher synthesis. “Only” in “They also serve who
only stand and waite” emphasizes that these two approaches to one’s
devotional ser vice are fundamentally irreconcilable, that standing and
waiting are themselves a type of disposition unconnected to some
other aim.

Parataxis, then, does not amount to the affi rmation of indiscrimi-

nate identity, the notion that all difference is epiphenomenal, or to a
lament about contingency, that addition means digressive disorder.
Rather, in this instance, “also” emphasizes that something occurs in
this moment that does not simply reduce to the unfolding of a plan,
always already lodged within what looks to be a series of events. Even
the event of God’s gifts is supernumerary in this sonnet. Gifts and
work amount to the same thing insofar as they are equally irrelevant
for conceptualizing one’s action in the world. God is not bound by
necessity or chance—“Necessitie and Chance / Approach not mee, and
what I will is Fate” (7.172– 73)—and neither, for that matter, are hu-
mans. “When I consider” is, then, a poem that attempts to root out
not just the overt appeals to necessity that dominate our understand-
ing of ethical thought and action but also those that infect our basic
conceptual architecture and, as a consequence, stunt any moral action.
It is in this sense that parataxis offers a real immanent hope, in oppo-

Milton’s Sonnets

sition to the world- weary cynicism of a hypotactic structure, however
narrativally or dramatically compelling.

As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, a teleological poem threatens

not only to have seen everything before but also to put everything in the
ser vice of a conclusive self- annihilation: A “maximally closed” poem
“would be a pre- eminently teleological poem and in a sense a suicidal
one, for all of its energy would be directed toward its own termina-
tion.”

In contrast, an apocalypse organizes history according to its end

but does not bleed this end, as a principle of causation or closure, back
into the paratactic unfolding of events. To do so turns revealed truth
into nothing more than the hidden motor of history, cruelly cloaked by
God. Smith’s description of the paratactic generation of poetry refl ects
precisely this challenge to narrative and structural orders. When repeti-
tion itself becomes the principle of generation,

the coherence of the poem will not be dependent on the sequen-
tial arrangement of its major thematic units. In a nonparatactic
structure (where, for example, the principle of generation is
logical or temporal), the dislocation or omission of any element
will tend to make the sequence as a whole incomprehensible, or
will radically change its effect. In paratactic structure, however
(where the principle of generation does not cause any one element
to “follow” from another), thematic units can be omitted, added,
or exchanged without destroying the coherence or effect of the
poem’s thematic structure.

Paratactic poems do not develop, logically, rationally, or otherwise,
toward their conclusion, whether that conclusion is individual po liti cal
action or the collective end of history. As a result, ends are not goals,
but termini. As Smith’s analysis implies, it turns out that all apocalyp-
tic ends are paratactic, precisely because apocalypticism is something
more than a teleological undercurrent or providential narrative behind
phenomenal history. The apocalypse is not the potential seed of reve-
lation that matures over time. For Milton, it is not even the promise of
a revealed and redeemed future but rather a potential that itself occurs
in the present. Or rather, this revealed future must also occur potentially
in the present. And “potentially” does not mean that it might, perhaps,
occur but rather that it occurs as potential. “They also serve” is a surprise
inside the poem that refuses resignation to inevitability or actualization
as the paradigm for po liti cal action. It ultimately requires, as a result of

Hope in the Present

its formal intrusion, that we expand what the possible entails, treating
it as something more than reverse- engineered potentiality.

The conceptual structure of these fi nal lines— hypotactic resolution

or paratactic list— matters precisely because, as previously noted, this
sonnet takes as its subject the way one acts in a world providentially
ordered by God. Moreover, as the sestet insists, one’s acts are not the
result of a divine need. Nor are they even a response to human need.
The sonnet begins not with a kairotic response necessitated by an occa-
sion but with a repeatable occurrence that the speaker can will into
existence. As Tobias Gregory maintains, “when” comes to mean “when-
ever” as a result of the fact that both the fi rst line and patience’s reply
occur in the present.

“Whenever” turns the poem’s thoughtful activi-

ties into everyday occurrences and as such denudes them of the oppor-
tunism that we too often ascribe to events. The poem begins, after all,
not with the caused event of Milton’s blindness— thus the diffi culties
in dating its composition

— but rather with a present considering of

this effect, a considering that itself is an event in the present and not
merely an empty, timeless refl ection on the past. “When I consider how
my light is spent” (1) emphasizes that this considering happens in the
present, “is,” and that it is a temporal occurrence, “when.” Thickstun
is particularly compelling on this subject, showing how a simple altera-
tion in tense could have transformed this poem into a consoling reso-
lution located safely in the past: “By presenting his poem in the present,
and as part of a continuing internal struggle, Milton frames Patience’s
words as a ‘quotation’ and leaves his own assent unperformed.”

That

is, “When I considered how my light was spent” would locate both loss
and contemplative reconciliation safely in the past, reducing “consider-
ing” to nothing more than acclimation to necessity. It would also incline
the sonnet’s opening line toward reading “spent” as exhausted, as op-
posed to “used.” Although “When I consider how my light is spent, / E’re
half my days, in this dark world and wide” (1– 2) seems to suggest that
light has been annihilated, the remaining lines in the opening quatrain
imply that talent at least remains, even if unused: “And that one Talent
which is death to hide, / Lodg’d with me useless” (3– 4). That is, the
sonnet’s fi rst four lines close with the image not of extinguished talent
but of talent present but currently (and only currently) unused. In the
opening line, “spent” may have all the initial hallmarks of a fi nal, irre-
deemable wasting (which we will witness again in Samson Agonistes’
concluding sonnet), but the poem itself drives us away from precisely

Milton’s Sonnets

this type of kairotic fatalism toward the possibility that impossibility
does not inexorably rule our lives.

In this sense, Sonnet 19 echoes Sonnet 7’s emphasis on the central-

ity of active use for one’s contemplative and devotional life and its
challenge to a kairotic or ga ni za tion of time. The later sonnet’s present-
tense considering is more a rejection of any punctual tension than it is
a required response to a singular, unchangeable contingency. The goal
is not to develop the constant vigilance against sin that Stanley Fish
describes but rather to escape the endless oscillations that necessarily
attend this model of ethical thought and action, something that the
notion of kairotic crisis can never attain.

After all, kairos means an-

ticipating a problem and its solution, an orientation to the future that
wishes for, if not manufactures, the crisis it will ultimately overcome.
In this model, events themselves have no real effect in the present
other than as excuses for one’s necessary actions. Milton’s sonnet, in
contrast, maintains that a really present potential happens and has
real effects in the present. In this respect, his portrait of potential mir-
rors Deleuze’s depiction of reverse causality, a concept that treats the
future not as a withdrawn absence but as a force in the present world:

Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that are
without fi nality but testify nonetheless to an action of the future
on the present, or of the present on the past, for example, the
convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply an
inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse
causalities that shatter evolution. . . .  It [the State] was already
acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive
societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged
but could not reach without self- destructing. . . .  To ward off is
also to anticipate. . . .  But in order to give a positive meaning to
the idea of a “presentiment” of what does not yet exist, it is
necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already
in action, in a different form than that of its existence.

Milton, of course, imagines the anticipation of the apocalypse as wel-
coming, instead of warding off, but does nonetheless offer a model of
possibility acting within action. Possibility’s status in the present may
not rise to the level of existence for Deleuze, but it certainly seems to
for Milton. Future apocalyptic events do more than vaguely infl uence

Hope in the Present

the present. Milton uses prolepsis to show that possibility exists in the
present as well.

I have written elsewhere of the signifi cance of prolepsis in Milton’s

early devotional poetry, particularly its rejection of lack as a determin-
ing factor in desire and reading.

In this respect, prolepsis makes de-

ferred ends present, packing them back into an immediate now. This is
the case with “Upon the Circumcision,” which insists that the sign of
obedience has power in the present moment, as opposed to the keno-
sis and atonement that have already occurred in the past:

For we by rightfull doom remediles
Were lost in death, till he that dwelt above
High thron’d in secret bliss, for us frail dust
Emptied his glory, ev’n to nakednes;
And that great Cov’nant which we still transgress
Intirely satisfi ’d,
And the full wrath beside
Of vengeful Justice bore for our excess,
And seals obedience fi rst with wounding smart
This day, but O ere long

Huge pangs and strong

Will pierce more neer his heart.

17–29

Yet even in instances like this, where the future appears to have al-
ready happened, prolepsis does not double for determinism, present-
ing the secret narrative telos that we ultimately recognize as governing
the world. First, all of the events that the speaker narrates have al-
ready happened, meaning that the fi ction of suspense implied by “but
O ere long” is transparently hollow. Thus, the predictive value of pro-
lepsis disappears. As a result, “this day” emphasizes the present of the
speaker’s utterance and the value of this imperfect seal, an emphasis
only accentuated by the phrase’s fl oating position at the beginning of
a line: It is an enjambed conclusion to the preceding clause, but also
a supernumerary deixis. Because of its place in the line, “this day” also
acts as an emphatic period to the preceding discussion of atonement
and, consequently, turns the concluding prophecy into an afterthought.
“Upon the Circumcision” then shows that the inevitability of a narra-
tive unfolding is less important than the immediate usefulness of the
present seal of obedience. The work of the future in the present— the

Milton’s Sonnets

reverse causality that Deleuze describes— does not amount to the dis-
covery of providence’s plan. Instead, prolepsis fundamentally alters the
temporal character of action. It is neither a kairotic reaction to an oppor-
tunity nor the overcoming of a problem or tension, precisely because
the future has being in and is packed back into the present. What one
would anticipate, an eschatological or teleological end, must be already
present in order to have any effect in this present. Its immanent effects,
in turn, amount to more than the revelation of purposive order. There
is, after all, nothing transformative about fate.

Sonnet 19 casts similar suspicion on the compatibility of kairotic and

proleptic anticipation. The volta, in which patience arrives prematurely
and proleptically, nonetheless indicts kairos as a scheme for understand-
ing events. That is, patience, of all qualities, does not wait for the op-
portune moment to intervene:

. . . though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day- labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. . . .

4–10

Even in arriving early, patience fails to prevent a murmur that has al-
ready been reported in line 7: “Doth God exact day-

labour, light

deny’d” (7).

Indeterminacy is not the result here, or casting asper-

sions on the validity of Patience’s counsel. Instead, the premature volta
asks readers to stop anticipating a climactic event that will dramati-
cally alter one’s life. This seems the substantive point of the adverb
“soon.” Even within a form as regular as the sonnet, one cannot rely
on the appearance of pivotal turns to effect change, conversion, or
novelty, precisely because one is still imagining events either as an ex-
ternal formal structure of unfolding signifi cance or as the product of
an agent’s free action that threatens such homologous systems. Both
systems turn events into weak kairotic signs, of providential, develop-
ing order and a subject’s liberty, identity, or power, respectively. Under
this system, an apocalypse can never occur, precisely because all ends
are only signs of the end. In fact, nothing ever happens within a hypo-
tactic poem, because its signs operate inside a developmental system

Hope in the Present

that denies meaning’s possibility as a present occurrence. What ever
events do occur reaffi rm the impossibility of a radical, immediate rev-
elation, precisely because meaning itself happens later and only in the
fullness of time. Literary criticism, insofar as it imagines meaning as a
networked architecture or as an unfolding plan, seeks to ward off the
apocalypse and replace revelation with revolution.

The critical tendency to personify patience only demonstrates just

how alluring is the temptation to imagine even an internal world of
radical freedom as populated by allegorical personifi cations who will
resolve our problems and tell us what to do. Typically, one reads these
lines as “Patience, in order to prevent that murmur.”

However, it is

equally viable to treat the infi nitive clause as a narrowing modifi er,
sectioning this par tic u lar patience off from a more general quality, not
a universal plan of action directed by a personifi ed virtue. In this case, the
line would read, “the patience to prevent that murmur.” The former
implies calculation and a goal- oriented plan, administered by an ab-
stracted, bossy quality; the latter, a contingent, one- off quality without
a teleological horizon— parataxis, in short. The murmur to which pa-
tience responds—“Doth God exact day labour, light deny’d”— appears,
at least for a moment, as ambiguous. It is simultaneously the speaker’s
impertinent complaint and the speaker’s imaginary rendition of God’s
chiding of a lazy worker.

In both cases, though, the speaker character-

izes God as the sort of manipulatively cruel taskmaster who would
demand not just obedience but acquiescence to the rationale for obedi-
ence. That is, God chides, “I don’t demand more than you can perform.”
The next phrase is implied: “So shut up and quit complaining.”

Yet despite this negative portrait of the divine taskmaster, the sonnet

still allows one to escape the logic of necessity that the early volta
threatens to impose. “The patience to prevent that murmur” does not
demand that Patience, as an allegorical quality, manifest itself success-
fully, respond to an imagined drama acted out in one’s head (like an
internalized juridical deliberation), and in so doing prevent “that mur-
mur.” After all, in the poem itself, that murmur is not prevented but
preserved. When we read the line as “the patience to prevent that mur-
mur,” patience is a restricted quality that does not participate in such
imagined internal contests, precisely because that is to allow actualiza-
tion tyranny over the imagination. “The patience to prevent that mur-
mur” is a potentiality, not a competing imagined actuality— as in “the
patience that could prevent that murmur”— one whose occurrence, as
a potential, does not hinge on the registered success of its promised

Milton’s Sonnets

action. The murmur can still occur and not contradict or undermine
the occurrence of this more narrowly construed quality. It is for this
reason that Milton attempts to present possibility as an in de pen dent
occurrence, something that happens in

de pen dent of actualization.

Otherwise, God participates in the endless dialogue of accusation and
counteraccusation that prevents any real change.

In this moment, the hypotactic order implied by “in order to” dis-

appears, and the patience to prevent that murmur replies soon, but
not “in order to” accomplish something, in this case the goal of quiet-
ing an uppity speaker. On the one hand, the sonnet reveals that much
criticism imposes on readers and the world the very system of teleo-
logical need that the poem itself explicitly rejects. On the other, and
more importantly, it shows how the logic of even an internal struggle—
the eruption of a personifi ed quality within the self in order to chide
the self— misunderstands how events happen and ultimately wards off
such occurrences by turning all events into nothing more than the sig-
nifi cation of struggle or its end, when someone wins or loses.

Milton’s verse attempts to reconceive the apocalypse and its histori-

cal internalization around precisely this issue. Revelation matters for
politics not because it offers us, at best, a rhetorical bludgeon or, at
worst, eliminationist fantasies, but because it provides the paratactic par-
adigm for a truly free change in the world. If, as Reinhart Koselleck
argues, the mid- seventeenth century marks the end of a closed eschato-
logical confl ict between Christian and anti- Christian churches, apoca-
lypticism does not just disappear, cast into the ash can of history’s
benighted primitivism.

But neither does it simply return to the status

of an internal allegory, a rhetorically powerful way of speaking about
redemption, but one that doesn’t really alter the ways in which we think
or act: Once modernity arrives, and the Book of Revelation retreats to
a primarily parabolic or meta phorical status, thought does not pro-
ceed unchanged. Instead, in Milton’s hands, the apocalypse transforms
into a way of thinking about ends and novelty outside struggle, tension,
constitutive contradiction, and all of those other sacred categories that
so inform literary criticism. The apocalypse that Milton reconceives in
the sonnets is not then the spectacular end of history but rather an at-
tempt to conceive of a truly transformative end in the present. This is
not a rational humanist domestication of eschatological force so much
as it is a thoroughgoing assault on the way we think about thinking, the
ways in which modern accounts of thought’s fundamentally dependent
character transmute conceiving and imagining into craven reactions.

Hope in the Present

It is also for this reason that the meditative sonnets are pivotal for
examining Milton’s notion of apocalyptic events: because events hap-
pen within thought. Considering, then, is not just an internalization of
an external legislative deliberation or a dialogic weighing of options.
The locus of events is inside this considering mind, but that does not
amount to a simple containment of public happenings, let alone the
solipsistic fantasy that thinking makes it so. Considering means some-
thing more than a prelude to actualization, in either its dialectical or
its performative variants.

This notion of the event of thought, what happens when one thinks,

conceives, or considers, is not quite the same as Fish’s description of
foundationless conceiving in Paradise Lost, including his own rejection
of “thinking’s making it so.” Fish defends Milton against the charge of
naïve idealism but nonetheless describes conceiving as an unpre ce dented,
even apocalyptic eruption of thought:

The fact that the visible world provides no fi rm (uninterpreted)
basis for determining the shape of things (including the shape
of God) does not leave us in a state of freedom as much as it
leaves us in a state of almost unbearable responsibility. True,
we are not constrained by in de pen dent evidence to a specifi c
construction of the world, but this absence of (external) con-
straint is not the lifting but the imposing of a burden, the burden
of hazarding (on the basis of insuffi cient information, without
the support of the evidence of things seen) a construction which,
once hazarded, will form the environment in which we there-
after live. . . . Our conceivings, even though they are grounded
in nothing— in no brute empirical datum— produce grounds
that one cannot simply wish away, if only because it is against
their now- in- place background that wishes (or any other mental
actions) could themselves be conceived. Our conceivings, in
short, have consequences.

Fish conceives of conceiving as an inexplicable, ex nihilo creation, or
as an unpre ce dented, external apocalyptic intrusion into an otherwise
static world of already conceived consequences. All originary thought
amounts to an in de pen dent, surprising eruption. In contrast to Fish’s
reading, “considering” in the sonnets amounts to an immanent pro-
cess of weighing and valuing, one that does not despair of the prospect

Milton’s Sonnets

of persuasion and change, even for those with fundamentally opposed
conceptions of the world. For that is what Fish’s account does here: It
consigns us to a world where change is, if not impossible, at least inex-
plicable. Milton, of course, believes no such thing.

The alternative to such autoge ne tic creation is not, however, the

comforts of a retroactive hermeneutics or of dialogic reaction. Sonnet
19, for example, does not authorize treating events as already established
interpretive problems unfolding toward or searching for consensus, or
as a speaker’s dialectical reaction to another’s speech. This, again, is
the signifi cance of its paratactic end, that the additive is not supernu-
merary or unnecessary, or merely an expression of an already existent
unity. The statement to which patience purportedly responds lacks the
sort of defi nitive author who would call for such a direct retort. The
very murmur that patience purportedly heads off at the pass is also
ambiguously presented as the Maker’s chiding. As we have already
noted, “Doth God exact day- labour, light deny’d” is simultaneously
the speaker’s impertinent complaint and the speaker’s imaginary rendi-
tion of God chastising a lazy worker. My point here is not to highlight,
yet once more, an indeterminate ambiguity. Rather, the simultaneity of
these possibilities asks not for an interpretive struggle that would end
in resolution but for an abandonment of this very model of reading,
one that imagines tension and struggle as events that must be resolved
back into continuity, and statements as unfortunately necessary vehicles
for the power and authority of their authors. Milton revises the sonnet
here in opposition to Fussell’s model of tension and release, precisely
because this notion of movement is a fundamentally conservative de-
piction of human desire as a yearning for stasis.

A restful stasis, in

itself, is not essentially valuable, particularly in a sonnet that describes
the proper devotional disposition of those who seek to serve God. Ser-
vice entails a present opening to apocalyptic change, which is not the
same thing as the wish for a restful home. Unfortunately, I think that
we have taken “openness” in critical theory to mean little more than
cynical preparation for what happens after the event. Instead, in Mil-
ton’s case it connotes something closer to an active contemplation of
possibilities that results in new habits and adaptabilities.

If the sonnet’s complaint is simultaneously the desired fantasy of

chastisement and the speaker’s own fond whingeing, then the speaker
does not ask for a resolution to a problem, in this case the illusion of
God’s unreasonable demands. Contrary to his own self- presentation,

100

Hope in the Present

he is not engaged in a negotiation headed toward consensus. Resolv-
ing this indeterminacy entails endorsing a fundamentally reactive and
mercenary understanding of the speaker’s model of action. He offers
to serve and give a true account of himself only because God might come
back and chide him. Deciding who speaks this chiding line means decid-
ing who is responsible and, in so doing, reducing life to a trial. It also
means that fear and embarrassment, not a freely given love, are the only
possible motivations, as they always must be in a juridical system of
re sis tance, response, and complaint.

For Milton, considering means the transformation of thinking into

an event instead of just a step in a formative pro cess. His sonnets, then,
revise a Petrarchan tradition of spectacularly performed obedience so
as to maintain that the event of thought is not an audacious show, either
of rebellion against or conformity with an existent narrative arc. This
aversion to demonstration resonates with Deleuze’s concept of virtual
events: The virtual preserves imagination’s being and, more importantly,
its transformative, creative power. In this respect, it attunes with how
Milton conceives of an in de pen dent possibility:

The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but
rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of
resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence
and of creation. . . . For, in order to be actualized, the virtual
cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its
own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is
simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible
that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble
the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in
the pro cess of actualization— the difference between the virtual
from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and
also the difference between the complementary lines according
to which actualization takes place.

For Deleuze, the virtual allows us to imagine the new as different from
the old, as opposed to becoming mired in a logic of similarity. The vir-
tual itself is not ruled by actualization, a fi nal cause or demonstration
acting as the conditioning principle for any change. Instead, a virtually
thinking nature is where a dependent possibility can be imagined and
where one can approach transformative movement as such, whether
that movement is imagined as conversion or as conviction. It is this

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101

notion of the virtual that comes closest to describing the possibility that
Milton’s sonnets limn.

This revised model of possibility matters, in part, because it begins

to describe how persuasion itself might occur, how poetry might begin
to move readers, and, fi nally, how sonnets might amount to something
more than tedious navel- gazing. Milton’s sonnets show that it is only
on this imaginative plain that minds can really meet and interact, and
where the force of persuasion and reason could work on and move
individuals, instead of always appealing to the higher authority or tri-
angulated relay of an adjudicating, abstract plane. Contrary to Fish’s
argument then, the absence of external, universal standards is pre-
cisely what makes an immediate, immanent interaction of considering
persons possible. The secure fortress of subjectivity and the equally
secure apathy of the patient instrumental object, untouched in its soul
by its use, are fundamentally inadequate to the task of treating con-
vincement as anything more than the result of extortion, fatigue, gam-
bling, or chance.

Poetry, at least, tries to conceive of how reason

might interact with reason, how one would think with another, even
God, as opposed to at or against her. It is in this sense that it tries to
imagine revelation in the present. And this would be thought as a use-
ful practice, as opposed to a mere imaginative internalization of public
debate, a deliberative prelude to practice, or to a fanciful elaboration
of a narrative telos residing elsewhere.

What Milton’s sonnets achieve, then, is the explicit incorporation of

events, as these possibilities, into poetry, the transformation of the oc-
casional poem from a response to mere external contingency into a
form where response is not required. What ever valorization of contem-
plation we might remark in Milton’s theology, politics, or verse, the
result is not simply allegorical internalization and its correlative, the
attempt to deploy agential control over chance externalities. The apoc-
alypse does not require domestication within the internal world of al-
legory and deliberation. It is not the emblem of po liti cal disappointment
or despair, the resentful, lazy wish for a reversal of one’s experience of
defeat. Concomitantly, the sonnet form, that bastion of narcissistic,
aristocratic introspection and self- interest, does not serve as an impedi-
ment to action, the endless dithering of a confl icted speaker- lover or
the fantasy of a completed and resolved totality. And neither is it delib-
erative preparation for ultimate action, po liti cal or amorous. Instead,
Milton transforms the sonnet into what it already is: a site for the imag-
inative internal development and deployment of possibility, a site for

102

Hope in the Present

considering, not planning or prophecy. In this light, we once again wit-
ness the fundamental duplicity of the Petrarchan tradition. The sonne-
teer does not want what he claims to lack, the beloved, but rather has
precisely what he wants, in the present, immanently, right now: possible
events (and these are really the only kind) that are not mere imaginary
substitutes for the real thing. In Milton’s sonnets, potential is the real
thing and manifestation an enslavement to cause, effect, actualization,
narrativization, and the entire realm of reactive hypotaxis. Or, to put it
in more militant terms, the possible is where ethical, because paratactic,
relations and dispositions exist; the actual, where feasibility, calculation,
bribery, and gambling reign. In contrast to hackneyed indictments of
idealism, it turns out that manifestation and actualization will always
be adolescent fantasies of liberation from the shackles of dependence,
possibility, and thought.

Milton fantasizes in his last sonnet about seeing his wife again in

heaven. However, Sonnet 23 also closes with the real world breaking
into what turns out to be a dream. “Methought I saw my late espoused
Saint” does not indicate, prior to its fi nal line, that this fantasy is the
product of a distinct dream state. We might well cast this knowledge
back to the beginning of the poem and then act as if we knew it all
along, but it is not clear that this retroactively imposed telos is what
the poem asks us to do (we will witness the same phenomenon in Lyci-
das). The reversal in this poem, if there is one, occurs in the fi nal line:
“I wak’d, she fl ed, and day brought back my night” (14). Smith contends
that this fi nal line does not perform the metapoetic or metanarratival
comment that one might expect in a Re nais sance tradition. Instead of
securing the sonnet’s thematic closure by turning the poem into an
artifact on which one might comment, the story of the dream and the
speaker’s waking simply terminates.

The cold- eyed recognition of

this causal real world, however, does not even appear where the son-
net form requires: It is an afterthought, the tacked- on disruption of a
more important virtual world. The eruption of the actual world into
Sonnet 23 abruptly ends the sonnet and Milton’s sequence of sonnets.
Yet this ending is not the result of development or transcendence. Ac-
tuality is not the result of a commentative or even metacommentative
maneuver. If anything, Milton’s fi nal sonnet does not so much break
the fourth wall as it does incorporate the real world back into the poetic
one. He awakens from his dream inside the sonnet, after all, and, as
Smith maintains, does not offer a formal marker of the poet’s resolving
mastery.

Milton’s Sonnets

103

For all of their celebration of the imaginary and potential as sites

in de pen dent of manifestation and reaction, of possibility not subordi-
nate to the actual, Milton’s sonnets nonetheless acknowledge the exis-
tence of the actualized world. Considering is not a withdrawal inward
or a mystical reservation of the self. Instead, it entails a fundamental
reconception of how one acts, what it means to act, in this world. At
its most basic, this reconceiving requires that we rethink success,
achievement, and resolution as categories of ends. Instead of being the
culmination of a pro cess or plan, even if that plan is God’s, Milton’s
sonnets, including the sonnet that concludes Samson Agonistes, asks
us to treat resolution, the solving or overcoming of problems, as itself
an event, one not reducible to the deferred elimination of disordered
tension. Milton’s sonnets rethink endings not because he desperately
wishes for vengeance from on high but rather because he is attempting
to conceive the promise of the apocalypse— a real ending as opposed
to a false one— as a possibility that does not simply refl ect the prag-
matic world of problems and solutions. Only through such a recon-
ception of the nature of events can we treat poetry as anything more
than pious homilies about the past or delusional ideological window
dressing promising a never present future. It is also only this reconcep-
tion that allows us to treat apocalyptic change as a live possibility in
the present— that is, as hope.

III

The Chorus’s use of the sonnet form at the end of Samson Agonistes,
a poem about the human attempt to act obediently in the world when
divine orders and directives are not forthcoming, shows that the na-
ture of considering events is not merely a retreat into privacy or inte-
riority, a reaction to the world with little real effect. The retort that
considering has no real effects in the public world— equivalent to Satan’s
sarcastic question directed to the Son in Paradise Regained, “What dost
thou in this World?” (4.372)— mistakes the extent to which Milton
reconceives the relationship between world and thought. He does not
imagine the Petrarchan tradition as an exercise in self- refl ection, pre-
cisely because the bourgeois distinction between private interiority and
public exteriority treats an apocalyptic end as nothing more than a
place of rest and, simultaneously and incongruously, as the logical ful-
fi llment of the self’s internal confl icts, suffering, and ultimate desert.

104

Hope in the Present

The objections of pragmatism assume and actually thrive on this world
of laborious suffering, appealing to a quite natural wish for release and
comfort, a promise of future better days, for their suasive power. Mil-
ton’s sonnets, and particularly his sonnet conclusion to the dramatic
poem, suggest that this world is a world of slaves enamored of their
own victimhood (yet another dubious inheritance from the Petrarchan
tradition), and that only an immanent account of thought can overcome
this self- fulfi lling, defeatist prophecy.

Ultimately, once the dialectic

of potential and actual, thought and act, private and public disappears,
the ground of such pragmatic objections itself disappears.

Just as

importantly, though, the conception of an end as a brand of accomplish-
ment disappears. We no longer recognize an end because of the release
of tension and the return to a state of static calm. It is not just that the
dramatic poem’s sonnet conclusion offers a lyric as opposed to a nar-
rative resolution. A lyric conclusion does not dissolve tension because
it does not imagine events or ends as a response to problems. The
apocalypse is not a solution to the problem of sin. The end, of a poem
or of time, is not an argument or a lure. It is a paratactic addition, an
event that does not follow from a pre ce dent hypotactic order.

Samson Agonistes treats the sonnet itself as the very sort of paratac-

tic and apocalyptic ending that occurs inside Milton’s freestanding
sonnets. The Chorus’s fi nal lines appear as a commentary on and sum-
ming up of the events of the poem. However, the sonnet itself, both
formally and thematically, appears as supernumerary, and not just
because of the Chorus’s famed unreliability. As such, the sonnet in
Samson Agonistes, like the concluding couplet of the Cromwell son-
net, enacts a meditation on when it is that meaning occurs. In that re-
spect, reconceiving events means reconceiving not only the nature of
meaning’s own happening but also the nature of outcomes, that other
nagging meaning of events in early modernity.

When the dramatic

poem evokes a great event from which one learns, it turns education and
meaning into pivotal occasions within verse itself. Samson Agonistes,
with its famously absent middle, shows that one learns apocalypti-
cally, using the present ending that occurs in this temporal world as
the acting out of possibility, not as the herald of an ultimate manifes-
tation or deferred revelation. One learns from events only if they are
possibilities, not fi nalities that are accomplished or anticipated, tied
off, as it were, from the present. Refl ecting on and resigning oneself to
the world, either historical or futural, is not learning. Only using the

Milton’s Sonnets

105

apocalypse as a present, uncaused possibility issues in true experience
from the great event.

Samson Agonistes concludes with the unreliable, jingoistic Chorus

offering what at fi rst glance appears an ironic promise of order. The
Chorus’s sonnet casts Panglossian eyes back over the events depicted in
the poem:

All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns
And to his faithful Champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns
And all that band them to resist
His uncontroulable intent,
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent.

1745–58

The Chorus concludes by offering precisely the same reassurance with
which the sonnet begins: Someone has actually learned something from
all of these dramatized events, which themselves reveal a providential
order in their conclusion. The opening quatrain informs us that “in the
close” one learns that things are ever best. The fi nal four lines merely
reiterate that this discovery issues in learning and consolation. Thus,
there is no conventional thematic volta. Neither is there a formal break
between octave and sestet. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern of
an En glish sonnet with open- rhyme quatrains, until we reach the fi nal
distich. What break there is is primarily metrical, a shift from the sym-
metrical tetrameter of lines1 to 6, into the more asymmetrical pentam-
eter of lines 7 and 8.

The fi nal four lines are even more conspicuous

in this regard: Although the sestet’s rhyme scheme is cdcdcd, the last
four lines act as a closed metrical quatrain, with two pentameter lines
wedged between two tetrameter lines. Since the sonnet lacks a major
thematic or formal turn, Gaza’s mourning seems merely a continuation

106

Hope in the Present

of the glorious witness offered to Samson. Gaza mourns “whence,”
from the place that, or as a consequence of the fact that, highest wis-
dom has borne witness for Samson gloriously. Thematically, in fact, it
seems that the middle six lines of the Chorus’s sonnet are bookended
by the ironic or naïve homilies of the resolving quatrains: “All is best”
and “all passion spent.” The metrical symmetry of the opening six lines
and the concluding closed metrical quatrain only reinforce this notion.
In other words, no event occurs in the sonnet itself. It is merely a “sin-
gle statement”

that comments on past events, wrapping them up

into a neat hermeneutic ball.

It is relatively simple to dismiss the Chorus’s use of the sonnet in

this context as so much irony. Namely, it uses the genre of the sonnet to
signify resolution— specifi cally, the resolution of a pedagogical process—
but this resolution is ironic, insofar as the sonnet gives an empty prov-
idential order to events in the poem that fundamentally defy such neat
summation. In this respect, the Chorus’s sonnet is merely a mirror
image of Manoa’s promised monument to Samson, the inevitable trans-
formation of iconoclasm into idolatry that Daniel Shore notes.

After

all, Manoa does maintain that the monument will contain or be adorned
with Samson’s “Acts enroll’d / In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song”
(1736– 37), a song that perhaps would not sound much different from
the choral sonnet. In keeping with Shore’s argument, it is entirely pos-
sible that the Chorus here misunderstands, yet once more. This time it
mistakes what sonnets are, treating them as commentary on events
when they are really a means of encapsulating events within verse, or
a means of presenting the nature of events, and not merely their mean-
ing.

But instead of dismissing the Chorus entirely as an emblem of

ironized unreliability, it would probably be better to consider the pos-
sibility that the sonnet form does something other than merely signify
rigid formalism at the end of the dramatic poem, that its discussion of
events and experience does something more than reveal error. What
happens if we read the Chorus’s sonnet as neither idolatrous error nor
naïve resolution— in other words, outside a modern hermeneutics of
suspicion and demystifi cation— but as a successful attempt to contain
the event of Samson in sweet lyric song? At one level, answering this
question entails determining not so much the identity as the nature of
the “great event” from which the Chorus learns. Certainly, “this great
event” might be anything from God’s glorious witness to the Philis-
tines’ own mourning. However, even once we locate the past happen-
ing to which the phrase refers, the sonnet still leaves open the question

Milton’s Sonnets

107

of how one gleans “true experience” from it, what even mediated par-
ticipation in this event would entail. Just as important in this respect is
the poem’s concluding evocation of catharsis: namely, whose passion
is spent at the end of this poem and who does the spending? Do the
servants acquire new experience and calm of mind, and then God dis-
misses them? Or is God the spender of passion? The ambiguous nature
of this passionate expenditure— whether it is exhausted, wasted, or
used— reproduces the concern with use that occupies “How soon hath
Time” and “When I consider.” For Milton, an ending, the moment when
conclusion happens within the poem, must be something more than
merely a release of tension or an entropic winding down of energy. It
must be something more than a moment when, purportedly, one comes
to rest.

The initial knock on the Chorus’s interpretation of events, of course,

is that it imagines its own experience as decidedly passive, confi rming
Samson’s claims of Israel’s own slavish apathy. God does all the acting
in the fi nal four lines, according to this reading. It is his action through
Samson that allows his servants to acquire experience, in the past, via
this great event; he dismisses his servants as well; and both of these
actions lead to his servants’ almost automatic catharsis. Yet it remains
possible that these lines are not irony, that God’s servants can, in fact,
acquire true experience from a great event that they do not directly
witness. The Chorus has made precisely this point in its anatomy of
active and passive heroism (1268– 96). Despite all of the bustling of
the active hero and the downtrodden’s admiration for his “invinci-
ble might,” it is actually patience that provides, if not victory, at least
in de pen dence:

But patience is more oft the exercise
Of Saints, the trial of thir fortitude,
Making them each his own Deliverer,
And Victor over all
That tyrannie or fortune can infl ict,

1287–91

In keeping with Crampton’s analysis of the agere et pati topos, pa-
tience becomes a weapon in this passage. More importantly, unlike
active heroism, it allows the saints to deliver themselves. In this re-
spect, the poem’s aversion to spectacle reveals more than the classic
Christian paradox of the low being made high, and the concomitant

108

Hope in the Present

refusal to treat immediate empirical perception as a particularly
privileged type of knowledge. Samson Agonistes also indicates that
the patient contemplation of events, not the act of immediately wit-
nessing them, is the avenue to knowledge. Yet it is even more inter-
ested in the temporal mechanism through which a thoughtful patience
allows us to liberate ourselves. As Anthony Low notes, we might well
infer that the victorious crowns of the apocalypse will ultimately ac-
crue to these patient saints, but neither the Chorus nor the dramatic
poem ever confi rms this assumption.

We should take the Chorus’s

concluding sonnet seriously because it stages its own answer to this
problem of autonomous deliverance, whether we can teach ourselves
in the present to be free via contemplation—regardless of whether our
learning ultimately issues in a fi nal victory or recognition.

It is for this reason that the identity of the agent who spends passion

is such an important issue. There are at least two options in this respect.
God could be the agent, the one who orchestrates every action in the
fi nal four lines: as in, “He hath dismist his servants with new acquist
of true experience from this great event with peace and consolation
and calm of mind, and all passion spent.” However, this reading seems
less plausible than one in which the servants do the spending, particu-
larly given that the concluding chorus itself performs an action within
the poem: It re unites the divided semichoruses that comment, respec-
tively, on the Philistines’ internal blindness (1669– 86) and Samson’s
virtuous illumination (1687– 1707). The latter semichorus is, of course,
the one that describes Samson’s action as that of a serpent- dragon (1692)
feasting on “tame villatic Fowl” (1695). Yet this reunifi cation is not a
resolution of different perspectives or even an educative progress beyond
petty tribalism, both of which describe the event of ending as a relatively
simple moment of accomplished stasis or agreement. Instead, these
concluding lines emphasize that reunifi cation does not result from the
discovery of analogies, either disturbing (the serpent- dragon) or reas-
suring (the second semichorus’s comparison of Samson to the phoenix
[1699– 1707]) and that even stasis itself is not so much a quality as it is
itself an act or event in time, an echo, of course, of the standing ser vice
of “When I consider.”

Even the Chorus’s concluding reunifi cation of the semichorus only

accentuates the fi nal line’s interpretive conundrum: whether “all pas-
sion spent” is a quality, an appositive continuation of “calm of mind,”
or a recounted action. “All passion spent” may only modify “calm of
mind,” clarifying the nature of this calm, or even just reiterating it: as

Milton’s Sonnets

109

in, “His servants he with new acquist / Of true experience from this
great event / With peace and consolation [and calm of mind, all passion
spent,] hath dismist.” According to this reading, “spent” is a participial
adjective and his servants do nothing more than receive calm, consola-
tion, and catharsis from God. As a result, the servants are calm, purged
of passion. Their nature has been modifi ed by something else, and the
description of their passion’s evacuation is merely a paratactic repeti-
tion. But “spent,” of course, is also a preterite verb, recounting what
the servants did in the past. In this reading, which is buttressed by the
metrical similarity of the middle lines of the sonnet’s concluding qua-
train (they are both pentameter), God’s dismissal and consolation of
his servants acts as a parenthetical appositive and it is the servants who
do the spending of passion: “His servants (he with new acquist / Of true
experience from this great event / With peace and consolation hath
dismist, / And calm of mind) all passion spent.” This spent passion is
simultaneously a quality that the servants receive, a supernumerary
description of their already described state, and a recounting of their
previous activities in the past. Certainly, these lines remain retrospective,
in contrast to the more insistently present sonnets that this chapter has
discussed. However, the Chorus’s lines meditate on how even retro-
spection happens in the present, whether our looking back on the past
amounts to fi nding qualities that have always been there or recounting
occasions that occurred. This problem is only further accentuated by
the fact that the acquisition of a quality—“true experience from this
great event”— is precisely what the concluding sonnet promises to de-
scribe. In the end, as with “When I consider how my light is spent,” the
ambiguity of “spent” does not seek resolution but rather renders, in
the present, the apocalyptic fantasy of use without necessity, pragma-
tism, and the debilitating cynicism of feasibility studies. Certainly, there
is no point at which the inexhaustible mines of passion will be depleted,
just as there’s no end of considering. But for Milton, that is not so much
a recipe for deferral as it is yet one more insistence that use is not teleo-
logical, that what ever acts we perform in the world are tethered to an
inexhaustible possibility, not to the fi nalities of purposiveness.

Milton’s sonnets offer a theory of the event not because they reduce

sonnets to a hermeneutic retrospection or because they embrace the
fl ow of historical time or because they allow for the aleatory. Rather,
sonnets, for Milton, are a site— not the only one, but certainly a privi-
leged one— where one can explore the occurrence of meaning, the imme-
diacy of mediation, the idea that meaning is not merely a possession, a

110

Hope in the Present

being, or a quality, but that it too happens in the temporal world. But
to happen does not mean to develop or to resemble, to emanate from
something else, or even to participate in a series of causes. For Milton,
sonnets are valuable precisely because they reproduce thought, the
world, and each other not through an accurate, verisimilitudinous de-
scription of the world but through repeated formal structures. And it
is this ability to present events without similarity or repre sen ta tional
correspondence, necessarily retrospective procedures, that allows sonnets
to be a window onto unpre ce dented and really present apocalypses, as
opposed to the entire panoply of recounted and represented apocalypses,
from Revelation to The Road.

When Samson Agonistes compares its protagonist to a snake feast-

ing on tame birds, this simile does not affi rm that the apocalypse is
analogical, that it can be understood via comparison. Instead, it shows
precisely how futile is the attempt to comprehend eschatology within
the domains of an already existing experience, meta phorical, imaginary
or otherwise. Yet it also refuses the equally comforting bosom of nega-
tive theology and the ineffable, the affi rmation of language’s weakness
as the solution to and cause of our own lack of imagination. The result
in the dramatic poem is then a demand for a resolution that would
amount to something other than a reaffi rmation of resemblance. The
sonnet, as a formal structure, does not look like events and, just as im-
portantly, and just like lyric in general, it does not represent them. The
Chorus’s sonnet, despite its retrospective hermeneutic content, occurs
as a conclusion precisely because it holds events and the experience of
them within itself, simultaneously. “This great event”— another example
of the deictic immediacy that Mueller describes— means the event hap-
pening right now, in the present. This event, unlike the ones on which
the Chorus attempts to refl ect, is not part of a plan. Yet this additive,
paratactic event— in this case, the event of reading the poem, right
now— is still ultimately useful and is actually the only type of event
that is useful. A hypotactic order of occasions transforms eschatology
into teleology and turns readers and devotees back into mere spectators
to images of the end, at best active readers of a narrative already writ-
ten. That is the revision of tragedy that this sonnet effects. Instead of a
reactive passion wasted by witnessing a mimetic display, the sonnet
describes the useful, pragmatic, prudent spending of passion. Passion,
then, is itself an event, and a useful one at that. It is certainly not equiv-
alent to black, cold, tartareous dregs. Passion well used is considering,
not as Fish’s chaotic principle of ex nihilo creation and chance, but

112

Can we conceive of the apocalypse as something other than an ulti-
mate compensation for defeat, loss, or weakness, as an event valuable
and desirable for reasons other than the promised triumph of the
godly? This is a particularly pressing question for a poem that prom-
ises (and, in its 1645 version, celebrates) the fall of its enemies and a
future world of new pastures, all in the pro cess of commemorating a
friend’s death. Lycidas, instead of responding to loss with mourning,
consolation, or revolution, imagines this temporal event as essentially
apocalyptic, an immanently and immediately apprehensible revelation.
Especially in its later, revised form, which adds a headnote emphasizing
the lyric’s prophetic fantasy of an eschatological punishment for the
En glish episcopate, the pastoral elegy explores the nature of radical
change, the moment when an affi rmative and desirable transformation
occurs, instead of one to which we begrudgingly acquiesce. Lycidas,
then, refuses to imagine change according to a logic of reaction, as the
purifying returns or upending reversals of revolution. In this respect,
the elegy is of a piece with Milton’s optimistic, if not utopian, pam-
phlets from the 1640s, po liti cal works that David Norbrook describes
as intent on charting an apocalyptic novelty: “What was at hand was
not a ‘revolution’ in the old sense of a return to a previous state of pu-
rity but something completely without pre ce dent: the New Jerusalem
‘without your admired linke of succession descends from Heaven.’ ”

An apocalypse, after all, is a revelation, not a revolution.

C h a p t e r T h r e e

What Happens in Lycidas?

Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events
in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

113

For the Milton of the late 1630s and 1640s, the reactive and retro-

spective returns of revolution always risk undermining the “reforming
of Reformation itself.”

We can recognize a reversal after the fact, cer-

tainly, but in so doing we give to it a meaning that threatens to betray
it, redomesticating it within an unfolding continuity, causal or otherwise.
Yet these are not merely pragmatic po liti cal or rhetorical calculations, an
attempt to wheedle agreement out of a parliament or a populace. The
account of events in Lycidas is just as much ontological as it is a none
too subtle Trojan horse for an anti- prelatical rebellion. The apoca-
lypse, in this respect, is not merely a set of images that allows one to
intensify one’s attacks on episcopacy or monarchy or an elaborate al-
legorical account of an individual subject’s conversion experience. It is
also a fundamental challenge to how we conceive of signifi cant events,
po liti cal, historical, and otherwise. Ultimately, Milton’s pastoral elegy
reveals that retrospection cannot do justice to an apocalyptic change,
because it projects an immutable subject forward into the future, one
who can look back, after this cataclysmic alteration, on all that has
come before.

If we are to understand events in the present, instead of simply react-

ing to them, we must abandon the retroactive, hermeneutic conception
of what constitutes occasion and the desperately slavish subject— one
very similar to the Petrarchan subject that we met in the previous
chapter— that comes with it. Pastoral lyric, like the sonnet, is also very
much the engine for producing that conceptual alteration. Both of
these forms show how we misunderstand Milton’s career, and his con-
ception of verse, if we imagine him as reacting to a past experience of
defeat or loss, even after 1660.

His poetic project is, even early in his

career, an attempt to imagine what a present apocalyptic event would
look like. There is no simple retrospection, at least not in a manner
that we could imagine, after an unpre ce dented eschatological end, no
projected po liti cal program whose success would be the mea sure of its
truth. The apocalypse, in Milton’s hands, becomes a way of conceiving
present potential without submitting this potential to a necessary teleo-
logical, typological, dialectical, or performative development toward
fi nal expression. To be a real potential, we must be able to experience
it in the present, as potential, and not as a reverse- engineered possible
choice in the past.

The connection between potentiality and apoca-

lypse does not amount, however, to a subject’s safe internalization of
the Book of Revelation, essentially the reduction of apocalypse to a
harmless allegory with no real historical or po liti cal force. Neither

114

What Happens in Lycidas?

does eschatology amount to a determinate end of a subject’s relatively
free action. Eschatological transformation does not issue in a constrain-
ing fi nality, precisely because the apocalypse is an end not to potential
but to actualization as the model for events. As Paul Ricoeur notes, the
fi nality implied by teleological plans, however providential, will always
betray the hopeful possibilities inherent in apocalypticism:

We should begin to see at what point the notion of God’s
design— as may be suggested in different ways in each instance,
it is true, by narrative, prophetic, and prescriptive discourse— is
removed from any transcription in terms of a plan or program;
in short, of fi nality and teleology. What is revealed is the
possibility of hope in spite of. . . . This possibility may still be
expressed in the terms of a design, but of an unassignable
design, a design which is God’s secret.

As J. D. Fleming notes, Milton chafes at the notion of esoteric secrecy,

and never more so than in his pre sen ta tion of revelatory potential.
Thus, although Lycidas and the sonnets exhibit an aversion to teleol-
ogy similar to Ricoeur’s, Milton’s lyrics also attempt to treat events and
meaning as immanently contained within and even motored by a free,
imaginative verse. This is so not only in the headily optimistic epideic-
tic sonnets to Cromwell and Fairfax but also in his pre sen ta tion of
Edward King’s death. The hopeful possibilities of apocalyptic change
do not disappear over the course of Milton’s career, precisely because
the poems themselves stage these potentials in de pen dently of their
manifestation in historical accomplishments.

Lycidas attempts to describe a potentiality that is not actualized by

a controlling or performative force and that does not prophesy a future,
fi nal actualization. The New Jerusalem is neither an impossible utopia
nor an urban- planning document. Yet the elegy also does not allow
readers to treat occasion as nothing more than a shocking, transparent
self- evidence. An event is not pornography— we do not simply know it
when we see it. Milton adapts the pastoral elegy, a genre intent on com-
memorating the loss of an idealized poet- friend, so as to explore what
it means for an event to happen presently and immediately. If Milton
criticism has obsessed over the relationship between poetry and politics,
this is not because Milton infuses poetry with politics or continues his
po liti cal commitments by other, more oblique means within verse.

Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

115

Rather, Lycidas shows how Milton, from early in his career, reconcep-
tualizes the connection between apocalyptic events, po liti cal change,
and poetry so that our traditional categories of po liti cal engagement—
deliberation, resolution, consent, and action— no longer apply. Milton’s
poem is not a withdrawal from the real world of politics into pastoral
idealism or revenge fantasy but rather is a meditation on the event of
possibility, what it means for a radically transformative, even apoca-
lyptic possibility to occur in the present— as opposed to extinguishing
itself within a fi nal accomplishment. It is in this sense that the poem
performs an embarrassingly sincere defense of pastoral escape, resisting
the urge to treat it as either ironic commentary or romantic, escapist,
implausible, nostalgic, irresponsible idealism.

Even the latter, it turns

out, remains too dependent on actuality to be of real po liti cal use.
Lycidas ultimately maintains not that poetry helps politics, or can teach
us something important about the real world, but that the valuable
world where events— even po liti cal events— occur is within the domain
of possibility, also known as poetry.

The apocalypse is not a conclusion, conceived either as a bare terminus
or a resolving interpretation. Revelation does not arrive from elsewhere
in order to tie off dynamic development in a now static continuity. Yet
neither is it the hermeneutic unveiling of a more primordial narrative
gurgling beneath the surface of phenomenal events. For Milton, it means
neither history, nor allegory, nor dialectical unfolding. Each of these
models of events assumes that what we are really seeking is a restful
end, mastery over or protection from the roiling cauldron of an ever
threatening entropic chaos. As we witnessed in the preceding chapter,
such models produce the slavish brand of waiting that Milton fi nds
destructive, if not outright sinful. Yet he does not just chalk this error
up to an amorphous original sin, a predilection for sloth. Instead, he
pegs it explicitly to the ways in which we conceive of endings, especially
our propensity to treat them as the narratival or dialectical develop-
ment of problems toward resolution. Problems are solved, potentials
are realized, and this is how ends occur.

Yet in each of these cases,

ending amounts to supplementation, a translation from a world of in-
completion to completion across a mysterious gulf, of either unknowing

or nonbeing, ultimately sealed by a conclusion of a different order. Final
resolutions are not part of the things they end.

It is precisely this logic

that Milton challenges, because it insists that revelation must always
remain infi nitely deferred or occur as only an inexplicable irruption of
the transcendent. In neither case would we be able to conceive of an
apocalyptic change in the present. It is that impossibility that Lycidas
seeks to overcome via its treatment of potentiality and endings.

The elegy begins, certainly, with an occasion of loss that is also a

terminus: “But O the heavy change, now thou art gon, / Now thou art
gon, and never must return!”

The repetition of “now thou art gon,”

however, highlights the indeterminacy of this change. Is it King’s death
that is the heavy change? Or has a heavy change occurred at the time
of King’s demise, “now that he is gone”? These early lines pose then a
basic question about what it means for a fi nal loss to occur. Does “now
thou art gon” describe an event in the past from which change issues
and to which one gives meaning and recognition: “O the heavy change
now that thou art gone”? Or does “now thou art gon” repeat the fact
of a heavy change: as in, “O the heavy change, which is that now thou
art gone”? The fi rst offers a sequence of hypotactic development. The
change results from Lycidas’s death. The second is a paratactic repeti-
tion, the unguided reiteration of the ejaculatory lament, “O the heavy
change.” The repetition of “now thou art gon” only intensifi es the co-
nundrum. Does repetition mean hypotactic development or paratactic
addition, or even a fundamental sameness? These two lines tempt read-
ers to treat “now thou art gon” both as a problem within a broader
hypotactic structure and as a desperate reiterated cry. Yet simultane-
ously, the repetition of “now thou art gon” emphasizes that loss is an
event that happens in the present, that it happens over and over, and
that it is not a fi nal fact recognized only in the past. That is the reason
for the speaker’s odd declaration, which also has the mood of an im-
perative as a result of the end- stopped exclamation point: “and never
must return!” One would expect here “and never will return.” The fact
that the speaker enjoins his departed friend never to return reveals fi rst
that it takes real work within the poem to turn events into an inert past.
Second, it reveals that even the declarative, retrospective comment on
events is a present command and a desire that these events stay in the
past as past: “And never must return!” indicates that this loss is desir-
able, something this speaker affi rms and enjoins. The pastoral elegy
then does not so much commemorate loss as it repeats the event of
loss itself, now, in the present, insisting that we cannot understand it if

116

What Happens in Lycidas?

Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

117

we are always imagining it as a historical, narrative, or dramatic event
requiring a mournful reaction and preservation.

These lines, then, encode the problem of whether ends occur as agents

of change, or whether change occurs in de pen dently of a fi nal end. A
similar problem haunts the poem’s mysterious two- handed engine:
“But that two- handed engine at the door, / Stands ready to smite once,
and smite no more” (130– 31). It is not just that the engine and its agent
remain ambiguous in this famous crux. The inevitability of this fi nal,
presumably apocalyptic smiting is itself in question. After all, Milton’s
speaker notes with bitter irony that these clerical interlopers have al-
ready received their deserts:

Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep- hook, or have learn’d ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdsmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;

119–22

They do not need to reckon their ultimate fate, not just because they are
careless but also because it has already been reckoned for them. Like-
wise, they are sped both because they have succeeded in their worldly
endeavors and because they have fi nalized their own fate. In this respect,
what could the always ready two- handed engine add to the equation?
The enigma of this passage, then, is not just fi guring out the nature of
the tool but what it would mean to end something, once and for all, the
purported hope of the poem’s opening line, “Yet once more” (1). In other
words, are all endings redundant? Or are all endings doomed to failure?
These are particularly pressing questions for an eschatology that would
seek to be something other than a hidden teleology. If revelation really
changes anything, then surely it must amount to more than the cynical,
knowing decoding of fi nal causes at work within a typologically con-
ceived world.

Instead of throwing up our hands in despair in anticipation of a

contingent, unpredictable apocalyptic resolution, Milton tries to imag-
ine an eschatological event occurring within verse, a potential occasion
that is itself real and transformative and does not amount merely to an
allegorical internalization of the Book of Revelation. That is, he turns
to lyric and its imaginative possibilities because the conception of events
as external eruption produces nothing more than passivity and because
their conception as dialectical or typological unfolding thwarts any

understanding of affi rmative, transformative novelty.

To put it in

Frank Kermode’s terms, ends must be positively transformative, not
reactively or retrospectively so: “Ends are ends only when they are not
negative but frankly transfi gure the events in which they were imma-
nent.”

Here, we should emphasize Kermode’s adverb: “frankly.” Im-

manent ends do not resemble subjective agents, adopting the form of
their actions, their per for mances or manifestations of transformation.
Frank transfi guration is not ironic change or critique, the assumption
of a reserved distance on the part of an actor. It means that ends must
act in the present, and not merely as an endlessly deferred goal. Lyci-
das then attempts to treat both pastoral and apocalyptic imagination
as something other than critical, ironic reactions against the real or as
fanciful romantic dreams of a future idyll. It attempts to transform an
actual act into a potential event while simultaneously resisting the com-
pulsion to imagine possibility as a new goal, a thing that can itself be
fulfi lled as an aim or revealed retroactively as the motor for an accom-
plishment. In that sense, potential is the way to imagine something hap-
pening in the present, as opposed to refl ecting on something having
happened in a past present.

The evocation of the two- handed engine demonstrates that the

apocalypse itself, if we imagine it as a coming fi nality, does not and will
not happen. The desire for fi nality ultimately turns the apocalypse into
a meta phor. It is not a radical break from the world but is always pro-
leptically fi gured in every terminus or telos. But the apocalypse can
operate neither as a deferred fi nality toward which time tends nor as a
revelation of what is already the case. Neither of these models amounts
to novelty. The fi gure of the two- handed engine, smiting once and no
more, reveals the limits of fi nality in this respect:

And when they [the “blind mouthes”] list, their lean and

fl ashy songs

Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing [little] sed,

But that two- handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

123–31

118

What Happens in Lycidas?

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119

These lines contain an ambiguous speaker, or nonspeaker: Who is it
that said “nothing” or “little”? Does the grim wolf say little? Or do the
“blind mouthes” (119) of the prelates say nothing? Or do the “hungry
Sheep” (125) say little, in which case this line would indict the weak
response of the godly to such encroachments? Similarly, does “but”
mark a transition to the speaker’s triumphant authoritative threat, or
does this statement about the engine come from the wolf or the blind
mouths, indicating that the threat of apocalyptic justice belongs to cra-
ven bishops, not Milton’s chosen few? In the latter instance, “but that”
means that the blind mouths say little except that the two- handed en-
gine stands ready to strike, indicating that this is the revenge fantasy
not of the poem’s speaker but rather of his opponents.

The messy textual history of these lines accentuates precisely this

ambiguity. In the Trinity manuscript, Milton writes “nothing sed” and
then crosses it out, replacing it with “little.” Justa Edovardo King nau-
frago, the volume of elegies for Edward King published in 1638 in which
Lycidas fi rst appears, prints “little sed.” The 1645 edition returns to
the original “nothing sed.” Roy Flannagan and John Leonard contend
that “nothing” is less cautious and so represents a renewed po liti cal
confi dence in 1645, or at least a reaction to the fall of Laudian censor-
ship.

Yet 1645’s return to the original reading, “nothing,” does not

completely settle the ambiguity of this utterance. After all, the hungry
sheep could say nothing and suffer under an even fi ercer indictment.
However, Milton’s manuscript emendation indicates more than po liti-
cal caution in the late 1630s. “Little” implies an enjambment of sense,
as in “Little sed, but that,” as opposed to “nothing,” which implies a full
stop, as in “nothing sed. But that.” The former pushes readers to expect
that the next lines will report the content of this little saying. It asks
readers to anticipate that “but that” does not constitute a new authori-
tative voice but the small voice just evoked. In contrast, “nothing sed, / But
that,” because it asks us not to expect more commentary, presents the
two- handed agent as an inexplicable non sequitur. There might be an
implied dialogue here, or at least a cry of despair to which the speaker
responds between the lines. Yet the lines themselves do not offer such
a causal link, leaving it to readers to concoct an explanation for the
disjunctive transition. In either case, it is not just the indeterminacy of
the engine that complicates interpretation of this eschatological smiting.
Most important is that this line, which purportedly heralds fi nality,
ultimately undercuts the very notion of a fi nal, conclusive action, either
by presenting this fi nal threat as a weak, little saying or depicting it as

a paratactic non sequitur. Thus, even within Saint Peter’s dread speech,
Milton undermines the fi nality of apocalyptic justice.

The unknowable engine does not so much ask us to decode myste-

rious signs in order to discover its secret as it does drive us to abandon
waiting for fi nality to arrive. Even if we read these lines as the promise
of the apocalypse, why should we think that, once the engine strikes no
more, everything will be fi nished? Is it not just as plausible that striking
once and then no more designates fi nality’s impotence or irrelevance,
not its power? After all, Milton does not seem like the sort of fi gure for
whom evil could be so easily extirpated, with one fell stroke. In fact,
the reading of this line as a moment of fi nal justice rests on the presup-
position that “and” connotes sequence and not interchangeability.
However, “stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” does not only
mean “smite once and then smite no more.” It also carries the possibility
that it reads “either smite once or smite no more.” In standing ready,
that is, both options are available to it. Moreover, the event that these
lines report is not the fi nal act of smiting but rather the occurrence of
the potential to smite. We have already noted, in Chapter 2’s discussion
of the sonnets, the resemblance between Milton’s conception of pos-
sibility and Gilles Deleuze’s account of virtuality. The same concerns
circle around the two- handed engine. If we treat the possible as some-
thing that resembles the real but without being, then it becomes diffi -
cult to discern what a fi nal realization would add to potentiality: “That
is why it is diffi cult to understand what existence adds to the concept
when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the pos-
sible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as
retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it.”

If the en-

gine stands ready to smite, in Deleuze’s estimation, it is not clear what
its fi nal smiting, the realization of this potential, would accomplish
other than redundancy.

Even more provocative is the possibility that smiting once is the same

thing as not smiting any more, that “and” links neither sequential nor
alternative actions but identical ones. Such an imaginative “as not” is
precisely Giorgio Agamben’s defi nition of messianism, one that is able
to evade the annihilating sequences of negation:

The Pauline hōs mē seems to be a special type of tensor, for it
does not push a concept’s semantic fi eld toward that of another
concept. Instead, it sets it against itself in the form of the as not:

120

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weeping as not weeping. The messianic tension thus does not
tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the
indifference between one thing and its opposite.

Agamben further maintains that the result of this proximity between
weeping and not weeping— they are not antitheses facing each other
across a wide gulf of contradiction— is that Paul rejects any permuta-
tion of the apocalypse that treats it as the intrusion of a transcenden-
tal outside. In fact, messianism erases this boundary inside time: “In
this way, the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence, or, if
one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence
and transcendence, between this world and the future world.”

This

indiscernability is not the result of an unknowable break in temporal
continuity, the sort of irruptive event that Badiou would describe.

Instead, the boundary between immanence and transcendence disap-
pears via a reworking of present time itself, the notion of use that we
met in the preceding chapter on the sonnets. For Agamban, messian-
ism erases this distinction because transcendental irruption cannot
constitute a revealed end to immanent continuity. Transcendence can
act only as a forceful defl ection, negation, or dissolution of continuity.
It is the end conceived as supernumerary and belated, yet again.

The two- handed engine presents readiness as an event in the time

of the poem. In this respect, we witness a problem with waiting and the
nature of possibility similar to what we experienced in “When I con-
sider”: They also serve who stand ready to smite once or no more. This
problem is only accentuated by the echoes of the opening lines’ “once”
and “more” in this moment of purported fi nality: “Yet once more, O ye
Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown” (1– 2); “that two- handed
engine at the door, / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more”
(130– 31). The engine’s smiting, once and no more, implies that the open-
ing lines require tying off, that “yet once more” means not “only once
more” but rather “yet again.” The engine or, rather, its potential use
must intervene to close off this endless repetition. However, because it
is the possibility of smiting that here occurs, the apocalypse does not
appear as a matter of reversal or revolution. As Norbrook notes, the
two- handed engine is most likely the Word itself, the power of the scrip-
tural message, an interpretation that would emphasize that an eschato-
logical end is not so much a reversal as it is a literary incorporation of
the apocalypse back into the present:

An enormous amount of critical effort has gone into fi nding a
precise referent for this ‘dark conceit’. But its most likely
referent is yet another rhetorical fi gure, the two- edged sword of
Revelation 1:16 and 19:15, which was commonly interpreted in
the apocalyptic tradition as referring to the im mense power of
the prophetic Word. The threatening, almost surreal character
of Milton’s ‘two- handed engine’ recalls the illustrations in Bale’s
Image of Both Churches and in many Protestant New Testa-
ments of Christ standing with his arms apart and the two- edged
sword issuing from his mouth. In this sense the trope is self-
referential: its menacing indeterminacy, designed to inspire awe
and repentance, embodies, as well as referring to, what Milton
later called the ‘quick and pearcing’ force of the Christian
message. Christ’s ‘reforming Spirit’, wrote Milton, mounts a
‘sudden assault’ on human traditions. Earlier in the 1630s he
had felt himself to be ‘unweapon’d’, but Lycidas refl ects a
growing confi dence in his linguistic powers.

Ultimately, Norbrook claims a forthright, positive power for language,
apocalyptic and pastoral, which follows from his contention that the
apocalypse replaces revolution’s model of transformation, in which
change requires a return to an earlier purity. The two- handed engine is
not simply an arrival that one awaits but the symbolic embodiment
and occurrence of the very transformative word that effects change.
Even more important is the fact that this symbol is right here at hand,
standing ready for use. The engine then presents revelatory change as
something that is decidedly not a matter of waiting. This symbol re-
quires neither the arrival of our hermeneutic decoding nor its own
referent. Both of these arrivals amount to the same fi nal fantasy, that
apocalyptic ends need an interpretive intervention in order to proceed
and that we cannot appropriately employ these symbols without the
sort of self- refl ection that preserves our selves into the future. The end
is doubly deferred, both through an interpretive procedure that imag-
ines meaning as coming from elsewhere and through a historical con-
tinuum that must await the arrival of this referent even after its
decoding. In short, if we imagine the apocalypse as fi nality, there is no
way to conceive of it or its meaning happening in the present, because
the engine will always require a retrospective, supplementary interpre-
tation of what it is in order to do what it can do.

122

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123

These notions of apocalyptic ending are mistaken, as Norbrook’s

analysis implies, because the word is right here ready to hand and
does not require reversal, the internal one of self- refl ection or the ex-
ternal one of revolution, in order to function. It is for this reason that
Lycidas, much like Milton’s sonnets, also challenges understandings of
the apocalypse that treat events as a matter of kairos. Reaction to cri-
sis or opportunity assumes the very negative moment of reversal that
revelation rejects. In this respect, Norbrook’s emphasis on the utopian
affi rmations of Milton’s early verse seems particularly apt: “Milton’s
early poetry is radical not only in its explicit po liti cal comments but in
its underlying visionary utopianism. The joy of poetic composition
is bound up with the exercise of the po liti cal imagination. The early
poems in fact heralded a period of unpre ce dented utopian specula-
tion.”

The lyric then does not promise divine retribution but rather

shows that the threat of such fi nal justice in the future is nothing
more than an empty, idle threat, regardless of its speaker: “little said,
except that there’s an engine at the door to punish those wolves for
their transgressions.” The engine is a symbol of scriptural power that
thwarts its own decoding, not because signs are polysemous or mean-
ing is impossible but rather because such hermeneutic deciphering treats
meaning as something that can never happen. For Milton, however, a
force is a symbol and a symbol is a force, in the present, and not as
the derived product of an intellective rumination— a point to which
we will return in our discussion of Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House.”
When a symbol happens, of course, it is not as if a thought actualizes
itself. The occurrence of symbols, as connected tokens of their refer-
ent, means the occurrence of potential as such. Lycidas then exposes
the fancifully reactionary nature of our dreams of radical and revolu-
tionary change. Even a future transformation imagined as reversal,
whether the rise of the proletariat or the last’s being made fi rst, har-
bors within its very conceptual form a fantasy of stasis, the future
as the safe harbor from which one looks back on the roiling sea of
change.

The indeterminacy of the poem’s opening line presages the dis-

avowal of reversal and fi nality present in Saint Peter’s speech. On the
one hand, it promises an end to repetition. “Yet once more” (1) would
then mean “only once more.” On the other, it connotes continuity and
familiarity, as in “still one more time I do this.” Even if we read the latter
utterance as exasperation, the fact of a speaker’s wishing for fi nality

does not necessarily indicate that the poem endorses such a wish, let
alone the inherent laziness of a speaker wishing to be done with the
task of poetic production. The concluding line, “To morrow to fresh
Woods, and Pastures new” (193), promises novelty, but this new pas-
ture might well be the same landscape in which the speaker plucks
berries, harsh and crude, thwarting the very optimistic future that the
opening lines prophesy. No matter what we might make of the conclu-
sion’s promise, the wish for fi nality in these opening lines carries with
it a basic resentment. “Only once more,” however sanguine it might
be about the future success of its plans, loathes these reported poetic
activities because they are merely means to a more important end. In
part, the fi rst line encapsulates this problem by offering two “once
mores.” The call for repetition must itself be repeated: “Yet once
more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-
sear, / I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude” (1– 3). Yet reitera-
tion, here, is not simply evidence of failure or exasperated impatience.
Neither is this proximate repetition of “once more” a redundancy, a
tedious tactic for delaying an act moving toward actuality. The repeti-
tion of “once more” marks not a resentful wish for completion but
rather an affi rmation of possibility, provided we do not assume that it
must ultimately lead somewhere else, to fulfi llment or fi nality. That
is, repetition is a problem only if we have some other, more pressing
engagement.

Lycidas, especially in its fi nal line, attempts to conceive of the apoca-

lypse, optimistically and affi rmatively, as something new within history,
not merely the typological fulfi llment of an incomplete sign or the
unveiling of an as yet unknown truth. It treats revelation as an event
of face- to- face encounter, an unveiling that also reveils, not in order to
retain the deferrals characteristic of signifi cation but so as to preserve
signs as present temporal phenomena. Signs and meaning still occur in
revelation, but they happen without the mediation of resemblance, an-
ticipation, and reversal. In this respect, the pastoral elegy mirrors some
of the early devotional verse in its deviation from an orthodox typo-
logical confi guration of history. As we have already seen in Chapter 2,
“Upon the Circumcision” uses prolepsis as a means to pack ends back
into the present. In treating the future as already present, this rhetorical
fi gure certainly thwarts attempts to imagine religious desire as always
a matter of lack and deferral, a point that I have argued elsewhere.

Yet prolepsis also thwarts the notion of a typological sequence that
grounds accounts of a future fi nality. Prolepsis hinges on the notion that

124

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125

we can know and treat a future end as already present. In this sense, it
runs the risk of replicating the reactionary version of potential that
Deleuze describes. Yet in Milton’s devotional verse, this resemblance
actually allows potential to function as an in de pen dent present occur-
rence. Thus, the Nativity Ode describes a fi nal, salvational bliss as some-
thing that begins “now.” It might be full and perfect “then,” but it also
happens in the present, and not merely as part of a charted develop-
mental progress:

And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins.

18.165–67

“But now begins” calls attention to the present tense “is,” which ap-
pears where we might expect “will be.” Edward Tayler notes this sur-
prising present- tense intrusion as well but argues that it evinces Milton’s
interest in a transcendent eternal present. These future- tense lines are
preceded by an evocation of the Old Testament judgment on Sinai,
which Tayler reads as further evidence of Milton’s typological under-
standing of history: “With such a horrid clang / As on mount Sinai
rang / While the red fi re, and smouldring clouds out brake” (17.157–
59).

Yet this stanza closes with a litany of future- tense inevitabili-

ties that complicate such a reading of history’s essentially analogical
character:

The aged Earth agast
With terrour of that blast,
Shall from the surface to the center shake;
When at the worlds last session,
The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne.

17.157–64

A typological sequence ends, as Tayler maintains, with the antitype
unmasking or enlightening the “shadowie Types.”

The apocalypse,

though, poses a very specifi c problem for a pro cess whose end is si-
multaneously fulfi lling and conclusive. Namely, its revelatory end is
immediate and therefore not subject to the recognitional relays that
ground typology. In answer to this problem, Tayler’s eternal present,
nunc stans, or “standing now,” substitutes a transcendent timelessness

for history. The apocalypse acts as the pivot into this alternative plane
of temporality. However, Milton’s obsessive rendition of the now of
standing, in the case of both the two- handed engine and “When I con-
sider,” militates against such a leap out of history. Instead, prolepsis
shows us the eternal acting and happening within time, not as a future
destination of a soul fi nally liberated from care. Typology, in other
words, assumes unjustly that what will be and what is do not happen
precisely because they have already been written. The apocalypse es-
capes typology because any prefi guration betrays its most important
feature: a present revelation that also ends the long sequence of signi-
fying, shadowy resemblances on which typology relies. In short, it
ends that of which it is a part, which means that it ends something, as
Kermode puts it, immanently.

For fulfi llment to happen, and not just be promised, it must occur

in time as the end of such an analogical sequence. Agamben describes
this as a the erasure of those deferrals and distances characteristic of
fundamentally conservative models of historical unfolding— typology,
kairos, and the dialectic:

What matters to us here is not the fact that each event of the
past— once it becomes fi gure— announces a future event and is
fulfi lled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by this
typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern
the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos and antitypos
together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according
to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it
concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past
and future, typos and antitypos, in an inseparable constellation.
The messianic is not just one of two terms in this typological
relation, it is the relation itself. . . . Here, the past (the complete)
rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfi lled, and the present
(the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfi llment.

Agamben here explores the transformative event of typological fulfi ll-
ment, what happens when it occurs. Certainly, it cannot just perpetu-
ate resemblances indefi nitely. Yet what does it mean for the relation
itself, in its immediacy, to occur? In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton
describes this event as an eternal, repeated ending: “Thus his kingdom
will not pass away, like something ineffectual, nor will it be destroyed.

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Its end will not be one of dissolution but of perfection and consumma-
tion, like the end of the law.”

Milton’s analogy here is instructive.

The end of the law is the arrival of an internal “law of liberty,”

which

is probably more aptly described as the rule of faith. Christian liberty
in this context is not the fi nal achievement of liberty but rather an im-
manent regulatory model that refl ects the transformed disposition of
the believer. Like Agamben’s messianism, which changes the nature
of time, law’s fulfi llment changes the nature of the acts that believers
perform. Most strikingly, these revelatory actions repeat eternally and
immediately, without the deferrals characteristic of purposiveness.
They happen not as repeated preparatory moments but as unachieved
ends, which happen over and over. They occur proleptically and repeti-
tively. They also occur potentially, because they never reach the fi nal-
ity of a completed resolution or dissolution. This, in fact, is the only
way for the apocalypse to work within typology. They are compati-
ble organizations of time only if we allow for the possibility that a
fulfi lling antitype occurs prior to its ultimate, concluding occurrence.
Milton uses prolepsis as a means of exploring such potential occur-
rences and of insisting on revelation’s immanent ethical and symbolic
import.

In the Nativity Ode, treating this fi nal bliss as already having oc-

curred turns out to allow readers to do something other than passively
watch its inevitable analogical unfolding. If the end has already hap-
pened in the present, then the potential that attends this end occurs
right now as well. Bliss or smiting is not an achievement, because its
accomplishment has already been written and, as such, has already
happened. Moreover, revelation in this case does not amount to show-
ing what will happen. The facts of the future are not hidden, waiting
to be uncovered. Instead, apocalyptic change amounts to the occur-
rence of novelty as an immediate, pure sign, a symbol that happens
and does not require deciphering. That is perhaps why the two- handed
engine is so important for an understanding of Lycidas: It stands as a
symbol whose interpretive ambiguity is irrelevant to its forceful action
or happening.

Tayler describes the entirety of the poem in similar terms

but characterizes the events within the poem as a brand of formal per-
formativity: “The pastoral poem sinks in order to mount, just as the
pastoral fi gure sinks in order to mount, with the result that structure
refl ects theme, structure mirrors meaning. . . . Lycidas endures, trium-
phantly, as a work of art that is what it says.”

Yet such a performative

model reproduces the very impulse to productivity that the poem seems
to challenge. Moreover, the prospect of a text’s doing what it says is
also the last outpost of the subject in any understanding of immanent
action. That is, performativity, although resembling a presently occur-
ring action, nonetheless always relies on a logic of demonstration that
returns events to their recognizing and policing subjects. These repeated
“once mores,” however, thwart our rush to a necessarily repetitive per-
formative speech act that would give these words a future actual ground:
the assumption, in other words, that they may have no foundation at
present but are certainly trying to build, constitute, or manifest one in
the future. Performativity ultimately cedes to the future— not just this
future, but any future— the responsibility for change in the present.
Instead of embarrassed self- justifi cations and self- constitutions, these
lines hint that a truly transformative event is repetitively virtual, an
unabashed and unapologetic potentiality severed from productivity,
the evasion of the demand that use and imagination bow to the bitter
constraint of pragmatism, telos, effi ciency, manifestation, or success.

Even within such a productive performativity, nothing new really

happens, because revelation is just like the end of every other story that
we know. Events in this model still require the supplementary fulfi ll-
ment of either hermeneutic decoding or antitypical manifestation. In
reducing the apocalypse to typological, hermeneutic, narrative resolu-
tion, Tayler ultimately domesticates Christianity into bourgeois story-
telling. Yet if we already know the end of the story, what really happens
other than the tedious repetition of these already written scripts? As
Jason Kerr aptly notes, Milton stages precisely this problem in books
11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, which repeat both biblical history and
biblical prophecy prior to the existence of their source. For Kerr, this
temporal priority preserves for Adam the contingent possibility of these
events: “Everything turns on our recognizing that there was no Bible
in Eden, for otherwise the events it would eventually describe could
not remain contingent, but would rather be imbued with a dull neces-
sity that would make Michael’s educational endeavors both point-
less and boring.”

This is not quite the situation of the Nativity Ode,

“Upon the Circumcision,” or “The Passion.” These poems do not drama-
tize a past before scriptural composition. And neither are the speakers
in these poems in Adam’s position prior to a written scriptural proph-
ecy or narrative. However, they do explore concerns similar to those
that Kerr anatomizes— namely, when we know that history and its end
are written, how do we act in that world? And just as importantly,

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how do events happen in a world in which their end has already been
composed and determined? The notion that our job is to interpret the
world or text or to recognize its unfolding plan assumes our participa-
tion in the very transcendent eternity that could behold such a fi nal
plan in its entirety. The hermeneutic response, in other words, grants
us a vantage point at the end of history and time, after everything im-
portant has happened, except for our own antitypical comment on its
meaning. It also assumes that repetition itself is not really an event,
that the transition from scripture to historical actuality changes noth-
ing. This would be the weakness of possibility that Deleuze describes:
The possible resembles the real and, thus, realization is an unproblem-
atic, epiphenomenal iteration of potential. Lycidas, as I have already
suggested, treats possibility as an event that can happen in de pen dent
of fi nal manifestation, never more so than when it repeats scriptural
prophecies themselves.

The temporal machinations of scriptural prophecy matter in the case

of Lycidas, of course, because the poem’s very fi rst line, the one that
promises one last repetition, is itself an iterated citation. “Yet once more,”
as both Tayler and Michael Lieb note, alludes to Hebrews 12:26– 29
and its promise of an apocalyptic purgation.

Both Lieb and Tayler

read the opening line as an evocation of fi nality, but, by its very repeti-
tion, “yet once more” shows that this signifi cation has not been fi nally
achieved. One has to reiterate Hebrews 12 in order to effect fi nality,
an aim impeded, if not thwarted, by the fact that Hebrews 12:26 reit-
erates Haggai 2:7.

To complicate matters even further, the Geneva

gloss reads Haggai 2:7, “Yet a litle while, and I wil shake the heauens
and the earth,” as an exhortation to patience prior to the completion
of the restored temple, not as a mark of achieved fi nality.

However,

it is not just that the line lacks completion because of this citational
repetition but that Hebrews itself reiterates “yet once more,” indicat-
ing that even here, within a divine promise, a secure ending does not
occur: “Whose voyce then shouke the earth, and now hathe declared,
saying, Yet once more wil I shake, not the earth onely, but also heauen.
And this worde, Yet once more, signifi eth the remouing of those things,
which are shaken, as of things which are made with hands, that the
things which are not shaken, may remaine” (Heb 12:26– 27). God’s voice
promises a fi nal justice, a destruction that will ultimately also preserve.
However, the very next verse maintains that this utterance signifi es
removal but is not the same thing as this renovating destruction. Shaking
the earth in this passage is not a fi nal event, because this voice that

shakes the earth and heaven must then again receive its hermeneutic
complement: an explanation, yet once more, of what this voice signifi es.
This explanation, though, tells us that the temporal expression itself, “yet
once more” (eti hapax), means removal, not the shaking action that
God’s voice promises.

Certainly, the interpretation of the event is itself

an event, bearing the same mark of meaning’s repetitive occurrence.
But these verses also insist that repetition itself is removal, that formal
temporal repetition itself is the mark of transformation. In maintain-
ing that “yet once more” means change, the epistle shows that repeti-
tion can never amount to the uncovering of a static sameness. When
Milton begins Lycidas with this phrase, he emphasizes precisely the
temporal character of meaning’s, repetition’s, and even sameness’s oc-
currence. Even if the future is written, in short, its happening remains
more than an uncovering and a realization. In this case, it means the
possibility of an apocalyptically transformed present.

This phenomenon in Hebrews and in Lycidas is not the self-

aggrandizement of a resentful and paranoid poetic hubris, an attempt to
co- opt and outfl ank any and all readerly autonomy and, thus, criticism.
It is not merely reaction, in short. Instead of resorting to our familiar criti-
cal concept of the meta- poetic, a self- conscious, specular artifi ciality—
look at me looking at you looking at me— we should treat the contained
event of citation and interpretation as something other than an attempt
at a subject’s mastery of its own message. A hermeneutic event inside
the poem is not more securely univocal than one outside, precisely be-
cause meaning is no longer a search for synchronic correspondence or
verifi cation. Instead, Milton emphasizes that meaning is a dynamic tem-
poral occurrence. In addition, this internal event is not merely a prolep-
tic end, a poison pill designed to snuff out potentiality. In Lycidas at
least, the point is not to treat the future as if it has already occurred but
rather to treat potential as itself an occurrence and an occasion, pre-
cisely because its end has already been written. Paradoxically, a certain
future allows possibility to occur as something other than progression.
And just as importantly, it allows revelation to occur as an immediate
event, without the retrospective interpretation that turns it into just
another species of signs. Milton thus transforms a genre intent on com-
memorating the life of a lost friend into a poem intent on teaching us
how to live while history and life itself are still happening.

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The textual history of Lycidas spans pivotal developments in Milton’s
po liti cal thought, however mysterious, and only further emphasizes
the lyric’s focus on apocalyptic events. Most striking in this respect, of
course, is the second sentence added to the headnote in the 1645 edition
of Milton’s poems. It calls attention to the poem’s prescience, implying
that the lyric’s prophecies about the imminent smiting of blind mouths
have been verifi ed: “In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend,
unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas,
1637. And by occasion foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy
then in their height” (p. 74). The result of this addition, of course, is to
transform events, retroactively, into a primarily hermeneutic endeavor
and, apparently, a test of the authority of a speaker. The new subtitle
intervenes, in 1645, to tell us what the poem did in 1638, and, in so
doing, claims for its author the ability to prophesy. But what happens
in the poem in 1638, before it becomes fodder for such retroactive
interpretation?

This is a problem not just of remaining faithful to the

elegy’s original moment of composition but also of knowing whether
the event foretold has already and fi nally happened. After all, the phrase
does not read “And by occasion foretold” but rather presents its own
prophecy in the present tense. Will this ruin happen in the future, after
1645? Or has it already occurred, with the episcopacy’s fall from power,
or even with William Laud’s execution in January 1645? In addition
to the problem of the prophecy’s tense, the added sentence itself poses
an interpretive conundrum. What does “by occasion” mean? Does it just
repeat “and,” standing in for a phrase like “in addition”? Does it mean
little more than “next to,” in turn highlighting the incidental nature of
the occasion?

In this moment of apparent prophetic triumph, the

phrase implies that this entire foretelling was an accident: “By occasion,”
it just so happened. Even if we take this prepositional phrase to mean
“through occasion” or “as a result of occasion,” we are left with a retro-
active prophetic utterance emphasizing its own de pen den cy, if not con-
tingency. In this reading, “by occasion” would be not false modesty
but rather an indication that prophecy is incompatible with an Archi-
medean fi nality, and that a poem that has recourse to such prophetic
power must abjure the type of actualization that would allow faith to
turn into nothing more than certainty.

Such hedging on Milton’s part is not idiosyncratic circumspection.

It is entirely in keeping with orthodox theological understandings of

prophecy’s relationship to faith. For example, Luther maintains that
prophecy must stem from a passive analogy, not the demonstrations
or even signs of actual experience:

So then, an analogy is an assimilation, not one that is produced
by the intellect, but one that is contained in the matter itself, or,
rather, it is neither of the two, but that in virtue of which one
thing agrees with another in its peculiar characteristics and
becomes like it. To be sure, one may prophesy something new
but, in doing so, one must not transcend the characteristic
nature of faith. In other words: what one prophesies must
not be provable by experience; it must only be a token of
things that are in no way apparent either by signs or other
indications. Otherwise, faith will be destroyed by prophecy
and become a plain kind of wisdom that any knowledgeable
man can understand and comprehend and by which he can
construe a similar prophecy.

Yet Luther does not advocate mere passivity here, letting things be
what they are until an irresistible grace intervenes to reveal the truth.
Rather, a prophetic faith requires not only a poetic distinction between
opaque tokens and apparent signs but also a distinction between types
of “appearance,” a term that signifi es both an entity’s perceived quali-
ties and its temporal arrival. “By occasion” in the 1645 headnote ren-
ders ambiguous any fi nal decoding of providential design or apocalyptic
signs, but does so more through its portrait of a symbol’s occurrence
than through the opacity or indeterminacy of its meaning.

For Milton, certainty amounts to unfreedom, precisely because it

depends on an ultimate external verifi cation. Instead of such a search
for external rules, one must read, interpret, and understand these to-
kens without an appeal to completion or actualization. In this respect,
the analogies that ground an apocalyptic reading of history cannot issue
in a countdown, the inevitable progress of a narrative already written,
merely awaiting its revelatory actualization in time. Lycidas rejects the
notion that the event of meaning awaits or occurs elsewhere, lurking
behind or beneath the poem only to irrupt in a glorious epiphanic un-
veiling. It also eschews the fi nal juridical authority of speakers, narra-
tors, and even poets. Instead, the poem’s treatment of its own occasions,
King’s death as well as its own republication in 1645, demonstrates an
abiding concern with what it means to conceive and experience a reve-

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latory event in the present, instead of as a past retroactively represented.
In this respect, it is also concerned with what it means to experience a
present sign, one not always deferring its meaning to some later date.
That, after all, is what revelation means: not simply an unveiling but a
temporal moment that ends the entire mediated sequence of interpre-
tation with face- to- face presence and radically alters the very nature
of signs.

Milton’s concern with the nature of events in Lycidas is then fun-

damentally literary, not because he is a callous, self- interested jerk—
Samuel Johnson’s famous reading

— but rather because the operation

of signs remains a pivotal theological question, even in 1637. As Brian
Cummings has so thoroughly argued, if we hope to understand the
confessional allegiances of early modern authors, we should start by
looking at what their works do, not necessarily what their avowals
say:

Most accounts of religious writing are founded on an unac-
knowledged conceptual separation of the surface of discourse
from the beliefs that motivate them. Religion comes fi rst, writing
follows after. This goes hand in hand with the attempted identifi -
cation of a writer’s beliefs in terms of a doctrinal position or
party. . . . It is at the surface of discourse that the nexus of
grammar and grace is found. It is here that the anxieties and
tensions of early modern religion are revealed.

Although recent historical and biographical work on Milton has pro-
vided welcome nuance to the age- old portrait of a staunch, immutable
puritan revolutionary, it continues to present politics as primarily a
matter of represented positions and allegiances, whether with moderate
anti- Laudians or with a longer tradition of ecumenical humanists. For
example, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell have argued that, with-
out the prophetic headnote, the pastoral elegy of 1637 is, at best, a ten-
tative rehearsal of Milton’s more radical po liti cal positions. Although
they read the poem as “the stirrings of a new direction,” as early evi-
dence of Milton’s reaction against the Laudian church that at least
begins during the Horton retirement, they also note the fundamental
diffi culty of pinpointing a radicalizing event in 1637, this period that
“marks a turning point in his life.”

Yet it is precisely this incomplete

stirring, this unrealized potential, that makes Lycidas a po liti cally radi-
cal document: not because it prepares the way for Milton’s later positions

but rather because it does not present represented doxa as the site of
po liti cal or ethical activity.

Ultimately, the lyric shows that politics occurs not in the fi nally re-

alized pronouncements and positions of authoritative speakers— like
Peter’s digressive condemnation of the clergy or Milton’s thoughts about
the Church of En gland in 1637 or 1645— but in such potential, unre-
alized stirrings, utopian or apocalyptic. In 1645, the poem “fortels” in
the present the ruin of the clergy and, in so doing, refuses the certainty
that would make Peter’s speech nothing more than a confi rmed past
accomplishment. In other words, the poem treats potential, prepara-
tory, contemplative, and deliberative signs as events outside a develop-
mental or tutelary narrative and, thus, holds out the possibility of a
politics that would not always be asking for the approval of a juridical
mechanism of recognition and reward. Milton does not here advance
a subjective interpretive liberty, certainly, but he does offer reading it-
self, an encounter with pure, present signs, as the engine of change. In
this, he is entirely in keeping with the broader Augustinian and Protes-
tant understanding of conversion. As Cummings notes, Luther’s conver-
sion, like Augustine’s, is a product of reading, not of pivotal epiphanic
reactions to events in the world: “Luther thereby offers to replicate in
his readers the reformatory powers he attributes to his own experi-
ence of reading. He presents a history of reading which demands of the
reader a corresponding energy and patience in interpretation. By reading
he was converted, and by reading he hopes to convert his readers.”

For Milton, reading— and especially the reading of nonnarrative poetry—
acts as a mechanism of change, even radicalization, precisely because
it treats possibility as an in de pen dent event, as something that happens
outside the bitter constraints of pragmatic actualization or typological
resemblance. The treatment of events in Lycidas, then, registers Mil-
ton’s commitment to literature as the site of po liti cal transformation
itself, a commitment that does not waver throughout his career and
does not respond, in the later poems, to an experience of defeat at the
Restoration.

Even in its earliest version, without the confi rming headnote, Lyci-

das, under the rubric of “occasion,” evinces an abiding concern with the
temporal occurrence of revelatory events and signs: namely, when do
events mean? When do they become signifi cant? Milton, perversely, uses
a commemorative genre to insist that events have an immediate, present
power not reducible to their retroactive recognition. Although the poem
begins by describing King’s death as a sad occasion that requires reac-

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tion, it also acknowledges that the poet values this loss as such. The fi rst
lines depict the occasion as a kairotic event, a loss and an opportunity,
that necessitates and makes possible the poem’s own prematurity:

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never- sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fi ngers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due.

1–7

In these lines, occasion seems a causal entity, not a singular accident.
Unlike the headnote, this passage evokes an interlocking system of
reactive necessity: The occasion seems to compel, buttonholing the
speaker, just like bitter constraint. However, despite the elegy’s generic
force, which would suggest that the speaker is reacting to loss, the occa-
sion is “dear” not only in the sense that it is momentous or expensive,
the cause of sadness and grief, but also because we should cherish it, in
itself, regardless of the heavy expenditure of mourning. The poem does
not present this estimation of the occasion as a crass, heartless careerism
(the craven kairotic logic of never letting a crisis go to waste) but rather
maintains that events are not valuable only insofar as they are scarce:
“Dear” does not amount only to “dearth.” Scarcity as a principle of
value is, of course, a principle of necessity: namely, we must value these
events because they are so rare. We cannot choose to value them because
they are valuable. Thus, the affi rmative connotation of “dear,” the notion
that something should be cherished in itself, does not amount merely
to Milton’s unconscious revelation of self- interest. It also strikes at the
heart of a system of value that could operate only reactively, in which
the prospect of loss is the only thing that confers value on anything. Even
in these opening lines that sound so much like elegiac reaction, Lycidas
questions the legitimacy of kairos as an approach to the world, chal-
lenging the supposition that events are rare opportunities that compel
reaction and that we recognize them only through a retrospective inter-
pretive procedure.

King’s death poses, in miniature, the problem that attends a positively

valued apocalypse, or any non- dialectical account of change, for that
matter: How could we conceive transformation outside a constraining

reaction, dialectical or otherwise, that issues in or seeks a fi nal reso-
lution? How can one wish for a change in the present that does not
amount to a backward- looking yearning for the solution to a prob-
lem? An apocalyptic desire, the devout wish for the elimination of a
past world, often seems morally noxious, if not misanthropically socio-
pathic. Imagining the apocalypse as a reactive reward or just vengeance
at least has the benefi t of preserving the logical and moral progression
of this world into the next and, in the pro cess, maintaining a reverent
respect for this lost past. Yet despite the risk of an anarchic utopia-
nism that such a break from the past entails, Milton’s poem refuses to
present the sad occasion of King’s death or the world’s destruction as
a preservative resolution of problems or tensions. This is most appar-
ent in the elegy’s fi nal line, which eschews precisely this endless oscil-
lation between circular sameness and unfolding difference: “To morrow
to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” (193). What’s most signifi cant about
this ending is that it does not herald or jump off from a fi nalized ac-
complishment, the completion that the opening lines seem to promise.
As we have seen, the new pastures of the fi nal line do not circle back
to the promised completion of the fi rst, “only once more.” Neither, how-
ever, does it promise the endless cyclicality of pastoral escape and
return, “still once more.” Both of these readings turn repetition into
resolution, treating the rereading that the fi nal lines enjoin as safely con-
tained within the poem’s unifi ed structure of problem and solution. As
J. Martin Evans notes, Lycidas does not authorize casting the swain’s
appearance at the end of the poem back over everything that has come
before:

And while it is certainly legitimate to reinterpret the earlier
sections of the poem retrospectively in the light of what we
learn later— indeed, as we have seen, Milton’s method is to
force us to do so repeatedly— it is not legitimate to read the
poem as if we knew from the very outset that the uncouth
swain was a fi ctional persona. If that is how Milton intended
us to respond, he would have supplied a balancing prologue.
To say, with Friedman, that “Milton chose a pastoral persona”
through which to speak Lycidas is to be wise before the event.

“Being wise before the event” is the quality of a reader who thinks that
no events happen within reading. For such a reader, there is no surprise
that is not always already contained by her own foresight. In turn, sur-

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prise amounts to nothing more than the thwarting of her own expecta-
tions. In a related vein, Isabel MacCaffrey notes the unique absence of
any prospective prologue in Lycidas, compared to Milton’s other ma-
jor poems, all of which offer some anticipatory foreshadowing:

Let us recall, however, a curious fact: Lycidas, almost alone
among Milton’s important poems, does not suggest at the
beginning how it will end. . . . We are related to this poem’s
action as eavesdroppers, ignorant, like the speaker, of where
we shall fi nally emerge. Lycidas is, in short, a poem bound to
the wheel of time, which is made to revolve before our eyes;
we observe events as they occur.

Evans’s and MacCaffrey’s analyses suggest the limitations of any ap-
peal to cyclicality or the always already of the dialectic in readings of
this poem.

Even as it insists on its own status as a repetition, the

pastoral elegy maintains that rereading and reinterpretation happen in
the present, that they are not products of a masterful knowing subject
surveying its domain— the poem— after the fact from the transcendent
heights of a synchronic present.

“To morrow” does not return us to the foundation of the poem’s

opening line and, as a consequence, Lycidas does not reaffi rm a circu-
lar consoling order by repeating a pastoral commonplace.

Instead,

the concluding promise of the future is an unpre ce dented line in an
already unpre ce dented fi nal eight lines. Evans notes that the “uncouth
Swain” appears suddenly and curiously in a concluding stanza of ottava
rima:

Ottava rima was associated not just with narrative verse in
general but with a par tic u lar kind of narrative verse. It was
the standard vehicle of the sixteenth- century romantic epic,
the stanza of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso, and of their En glish translations by Fairfax and
Harington. . . . It invokes the turbulent world of heroic action
and romantic love. The concluding stanza of Lycidas thus
carries with it a set of values diametrically opposed to those
associated either with the pastoral as a genre or with Edward
King as a character.

By making action the product of an intertextual literary tradition, Ly-
cidas allows the literary to cannibalize action, certainly, but it also

treats literary action as something other than the authoritative per-
formativity in which words do what they say. However powerful and
useful the concept in other domains, in Milton’s case, performativity
risks not just reaffi rming the value of the very sinful subject that the
godly should mortify. It also subjects the activities of writers and read-
ers to the laws of illocutionary force, the juridical structures of recogni-
tion and identity that, even when they are subverted, arbitrate meaning’s
occurrence.

Milton’s poem, and his po liti cal thought, resist categori-

zation under the rubric of performativity precisely because of their
per sis tent anti- or a-nomianism, the notion that law has already been
fulfi lled and, therefore, abrogated. Thus, when the elegy erases a key
distinction between contemplation and action, it does so in order to
validate reading and rereading, those purportedly more passive activi-
ties, instead of the power of speaking or speakers to actualize poten-
tial. In the end, performativity remains too enamored of the virtue of
accomplishment for a pastoral idyll or elegy. It will always treat words
as powerful and interesting only when they do or produce what they
say, not when they say what they can do.

Inside the ottava rima stanza, the fi nal line appears even more

abruptly than does the uncouth swain. This stanza that is purportedly
all about the entrance into action recounts the swain’s preparation for
action and, then, offers a fi nal line that does not contain a demand, a
performative act, an order, or even a verb:

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray;
He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

186–93

In this passage that transforms the poem into the retrospective report-
ing of the swain’s past singing, Milton twice insists that this past hap-
pening is still present. The anaphora—“And now . . . And now”— not
only creates a temporal frisson in these concluding lines. It also deem-
phasizes the swain’s fi nal action: “At last he rose.” In this respect, the
fi nal line does not connote a naïve optimism, the wishful thinking of a

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deluded speaker imagining that, this time, everything will be different
and one will not need to begin poems “Yet once more . . .” Instead, the
ending reveals the poem’s obsession with the nature of an apocalyptic
potential and novelty, what it means for something to be or become
new as an unpre ce dented break with historical continuity. After all,
the swain suddenly appears to cast his authorial shadow back over the
poem that we have just read, remaking the poem into his own speech.
But this revision does not merely reveal to us what had already oc-
curred in an occult fashion, suggesting that novelty is little more than
a cynical recognition of what had always already been the case. The
swain’s sudden appearance, of course, incites reinterpretation, but also
treats the act of rereading as a novel event. One never reads the same
poem twice, naturally, but that relatively tired mantra, in Milton’s
hands, becomes something a bit more harrowing: the notion that signs
themselves happen in the course of reading and that novel— because
revelatory— events occur through rereading. In this case, Milton again
insists that revelation amounts to more than a mining expedition. A
sign does not unveil but discards the very mechanism of uncovering and
re- covering that turns apocalyptic literature into a series of esoteric
cryptograms. In doing so, it ceases to be the retrospective recognition
of a hidden past or the prospective imagining of a scripted future and,
instead, offers the occurrence of a present potential in which one might
actually participate.

After singing his song, the swain rises only “at last,” a belated, de-

layed, contemplative rising that certainly fi ts with the opening lines’
portrait of a sad occasion that compels. Even the reactive twitching of
his mantle implies recalcitrance, a speaker prone to inertia and prompted
to action only by external force. This unpre ce dented frame makes the
fi nal line even more unpre ce dented in its affi rmative, and not merely
begrudging optimism. Instead of a new speaker intervening to alter
readers’ understanding of the entire preceding poem, the fi nal line ap-
pears as an unspoken linguistic event. Although one might suggest that
the uncouth swain is enjoining us or himself to “Go to the morrow,”
such a reading assumes that the way to make sense of this line is to
transform it into rhetoric, to determine the speaker and the addressee.
But it is not clear that “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new”
is voiced by anyone in the poem, let alone whether it is hortatory or a
mere statement of the most obvious of facts— that the poem is over
and we will do something different tomorrow. This fi nal line suggests
that the point of reading the poem is not to fi gure out who has the

power to make such a promise but to examine how meaningful resolu-
tion itself even happens in the present. The evocation of a possible fu-
ture outside the poem is itself an internal event within the poem, one
that affi rms, contains, and advances possibility but does not then prom-
ise it, prophesy it, or assert its inevitable manifestation.

This fi nal line

asks what it means for tomorrow to occur— for an anticipation is also
an occurrence— which is not the same thing as tomorrow becoming
today, for possibility itself to occur, and not just its actualization.

If critics since Samuel Johnson have questioned the sincerity of Mil-

ton’s sorrow in the face of King’s death, this stems at least in part from
the fact that the poem attempts to escape the obsessive rumination of
loss that characterizes mourning and the dialectic and that fundamen-
tally hobbles novelty as a result. If “To morrow to fresh Woods, and
Pastures new” marks a termination, it is the termination of reversal as
the primary mechanism for understanding change. It is a termination,
however fanciful, that ends without a fi nal, resolving negation, the pur-
portedly necessary transition from a lacking, dependent potentiality to
actuality, preserving the past in the conclusion, as it were.

The reac-

tive consolations of the dialectic, like the productive actualizations of
performativity, will always betray poetry’s attempt to present an in de-
pen dent potentiality, precisely because they imagine change as a mas-
terful manifestation of potential. Regardless of its nature, whether it is
a subject or a system, transformation happens at the behest of an au-
thority shepherding possibility into actuality. And we know potential
only from its effects, these actualizations that we witness and then use
to track possibility back in time. For Milton though, it is not enough
for an elegy to show that one has changed or to enact change in the
present of its per for mance. It must also contain the unacted possibility
of change, not because openness or incompletion are noble liberal val-
ues but because events happen in the present only as these potentials.
Otherwise, events are consigned either to the past of inert recognition
with, at best, an inexplicable mediate effect on the present and future
or to the future of wishful thinking where an authoritative law or sub-
ject still verifi es the real.

For Milton, of course, poetic resolution can never amount to ac-

cepting the authority of a bossy speaker or an equally bossy performa-
tive law. As Paul Alpers notes, Lycidas stages the insuffi ciency of
precisely such conclusions. For example, the poem continues after the
very speech that we would expect to solve the problem of poetic voca-

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tion, Phoebus’s paean to a transcendent, eternal, and thus justifi catory
fame. For Alpers, this is because the lyric does not offer its own mean-
ing as the elimination of problems, or even as an educative structure:

If the point of the poem is to resolve the question about the
worth of earthly, particularly poetic endeavor, is the answer
not given in Phoebus’ speech? If the point of the poem is to
educate the swain, has he not here been instructed? . . . I want
to be a literalist myself here and say that the poem continues
because its purpose is not to solve a problem or console the
speaker or dramatize a situation but to “sing for Lycidas”—
that is, properly commemorate the dead shepherd. . . . Divine,
authoritative, fi nal judgment is precisely what cannot con-
clude this poem. The questions of Lycidas are questions about
this world and the value of our lives in it. Hence the appro-
priateness of pastoral elegy: what we need, and what we need
to be assured of, are human voices, and what they must be
able to sing is that life can continue despite the violent breach
in it.

Phoebus’s appearance and its aftermath challenge the concluding power
of speakers not only because the poem itself continues but also because
it is not clear that a transcendent eternity is even a more secure author-
ity in Phoebus’s own speech. Contrary to Alpers’s reading, the speaker’s
repetition of this divine intervention ends up questioning the authority
of even human voices, individual or collective. After lamenting the
premature death of Lycidas at the hands of a blind Fury that, incon-
gruously, wields the shears usually reserved for the Fates, Phoebus inter-
venes with the consolation that praise, unlike life, is not such an untimely
victim:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infi rmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to fi nd,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits the thin- spun life. But not the praise,
Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfet witness of all judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.

70–84

One might certainly ask after the source of this description of fame,
whether the poem’s speaker recites Phoebus’s lines or whether this is
Phoebus’s own intervention inside the poem. Yet even if we assume
that Phoebus is the authoritative speaker here, what he says is at best
ambiguous: namely, whose are those pure eyes? The “perfet witness of
all judging Jove” presents the familiar double- genitive problem. Are
these pure transcendent eyes that belong to Jove and thus judge and
see true fame? Or do these eyes belong to a nameless fi t audience, per-
haps a group of the poem’s own readers, that itself witnesses and testi-
fi es to the existence of Jove?

The ambiguity of this witnessing, then, already troubles the very

resolution that Phoebus promises, blurring the lines between an im-
manent power and a transcendent, centralized, and reassuring erasure
of problems. Phoebus’s speech shows how a focus on fi nding authori-
tative voices in the poem obscures the more basic questions of what it
means for resolution to occur and, moreover, for one to be truly per-
suaded by the promise of the future. Again, as Alpers notes, this is not
just a matter of multiplying possible authorities or challenging the au-
tocracy within an individualized model of authority. Even at the very
beginning of the poem, the shepherd does not sing the song. Songs just
seem to occur: “The passage is full of sounds, but the human fi gures
are represented as listening to them: ‘both together heard’ the grey- fl y;
‘old Damaetas loved to hear our song’; ‘Meanwhile the rural ditties
were not mute’— no doubt sung by shepherds, but the locution sug-
gests that they simply occur, like the sounds of nature.”

This song that

simply occurs, however, ends up acting as a fairly far- reaching chal-
lenge to a host of literary critical categories, from speaking subjects to
typological resemblance. In addition, the temporal immediacy of a song
that simply occurs unseats attempts to reduce such occasions— and
decidedly lyric occasions at that— to examples of hypotactic, teleologi-
cal, or typological development. For example, when the speaker asks,

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“Alas! What boots it with uncessant care / To tend the homely slighted
Shepherds trade, / And strictly meditate the thankles Muse” (64– 66), the
answer that Phoebus gives—“Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy
meed” (84)— relies on the same logic of progressive accomplishment that
the shepherd himself rejects: “Were it not better don as others use, / To
sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair?”
(67– 69). Sporting with nymphs treats the world in the same manner
as does Phoebus’s advised quest for fame: as a place of moments to be
seized, even if they are for trivial pursuits. Instead of the pragmatic
worldly values implied by Phoebus’s promise of a heavenly reward, a
song that simply occurs in a poem “occurs” only as potential but none-
theless exists as this potential prior to its actualization.

Milton’s elegy

utilizes this feature of lyric so as to advance an antinomian understand-
ing of apocalyptic events that would no longer bow to one of these
various rules of actualization. The poem continues after all of this
sound, authoritative advice not because we’re still waiting for an authen-
tically human voice to tell us what to do but because the poem attempts
to provide an escape from all of these petty pedagogues and teapot
dictators.

Instead of examining the poem’s complex portrait of immanent

occasions, modern criticism has often focused on the destabilization
and reconsolidation of the speaking subject, a focus that replaces a
consideration of events with attention to the nature of authority and
sincerity.

In fact, it often seems that literary criticism can conceive

of events only as a species of speech, as if there were no sad occasion
dear.

However, the multiplication of speakers in Lycidas ultimately

thwarts a literary criticism that always treats subjects as engaged in the
same futile task: attempting and failing to achieve autonomy. How many
different voices would it take for us to abandon an interpretive appa-
ratus that always results in the same pragmatic, defeatist conclusion—
that subjects assert and simultaneously undermine their own authority?
Even if the multiplicity of personae in Lycidas does not parody this
critical assumption, the sheer number of voices, at the very least, implies
that we should consider possibilities other than a structurally inbuilt
failure. Christopher Kendrick, for example, counters this critical focus
on speaking subjects by contending that the multiple voices in the poem
do not stage a dialogue— characterized by eventful interruptions and
reconsolidating agreements— so much as they exhibit the subject- less
pack behavior described by Deleuze and Guattari.

Yet it is not only

the number of speakers in Lycidas that upsets critical attempts to read
it as dialogic. As Elizabeth Hanson notes, the elegy not only decenters
and collectivizes the authoritative subject. It also abrogates the tempo-
ral logic of loss and reaction on which even multiple fragmented sub-
jects are based: “If the consolation Lycidas offers is to be adequate in
Milton’s own terms it must transcend the elegiac economy of loss and
compensation.”

The romance of subject formation tends to portray

the heroic self’s attempt to order the world as a noble quest in confl ict
with contingent, unpredictable, entropic events. Even in its failures, its
quest for mastery yields compensations that nonetheless allow it to
persevere. Yet this dialectical model gives subjects too much credit, for
it is they who desire and preserve this endlessly repeatable elegiac econ-
omy into the future. For Milton, this wry, knowing subject, however
multifarious, who is always pretending to be surprised, jolted into rec-
ognition by catastrophe or the interruptions of another speaker, is also
the one who, by defi nition, has no interest in possibility— because there
is nothing new in this world— and is incapable of conceiving it as any-
thing more than a Whiggish, reverse- engineered explanation of one’s
present position. It is also the subject, unsurprisingly, who always dis-
misses pastoral as nostalgic, impractical, fanciful idealization— as
impossibility, in short.

What, then, would it mean to take the potential of pastoral escape

or apocalyptic transformation seriously, as a possibility that occurs in
time, and not merely as an interesting, critical, or thought- provoking
fl ight of fancy? Certainly, the dialectic seems to provide one tantaliz-
ing option insofar as it offers the freedom of an auto- generated differ-
ence and, thus, the possibility of autonomy.

However, autonomy still

seems too tied to juridical analogies to account for the rule of faith
that characterizes Milton’s notion of Christian liberty. Autonomy is
not the repeated fulfi llment of the law so much as it is the perpetua-
tion of law as a deferred internal judgment. A dialectical vision of the
world will, in addition to preserving the juridical, always treat poten-
tial as imperfection, insisting that action amounts to manifestation, the
making actual of the “always already.” In Hegel’s formulation, “action
alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition
from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content
which is brought out into the daylight and displayed, is nothing else
but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as
a unity in thought; and it is actual— this is its form as an existent unity.”

At the most basic of levels, Lycidas challenges this presupposition by

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transforming imaginary possibilities into events on a par with Edward
King’s death. This is not narcissism or the aggrandizement of poetry on
Milton’s part so much as it is an attempt to incorporate events within
verse, in the pro cess treating poetry as something other than a Johnny-
come- lately commentary on history. In this respect, “to morrow to fresh
Woods, and Pastures new” does not promise a future event that is out-
side the poem, one in which resolution or repetition would occur, but
rather undertakes an immanent reordering of temporality such that
potential does not unfold toward the actual or depend on it for its be-
ing. For Milton, contemplation and rereading, or the implicit unity of
thought, to borrow Hegel’s terms, is where events happen, not their
static transition into a competing “real” world. Most importantly, this
occurrence cannot be conceived as the actualization of a potential, even
in the imagination.

It is in this light that we should consider the abrupt ending of Lycidas.

It eschews a constitutive per for mance or promise, the commitment to
produce the new in the future as a resolution of present problems. Such
a future remains fundamentally reactive, which is precisely what the
abrupt termination of the fi nal line seems designed to escape. As a result,
it is not delusional, ideological, or false because, or if, novelty does not
occur tomorrow. Within poetry, the test is not the juridical one of
successful accomplishment, the fulfi lling of promises in the future.
Instead, Lycidas advances a notion of change without self- refl ective,
self- motivated critique and, conversely, one that does not assume that
inertia is the case and that only disruptive action intervenes to make
change. Neither the poem’s concluding line nor the opening promise,
“Yet once more,” signal a return to a dialectic that would preserve an
overcome thesis in its ultimate resolution. Instead, Milton imagines
possibility as a type of disavowal, one that seeks to escape precisely
the resentful, but also the nostalgic, model of a bitter constraint in which
it is impossible to value positively any occasion, sad or dear, let alone
change oneself without the prompt of an external force.

The erup-

tion of an unspoken line at the end of the poem means, then, the end
of a self and world imagined as inertial, as resentful preservation, or as
potential always imperfect prior to its mediated manifestation. It means
fi nally defanging the accusations of romantic utopianism that dog pas-
toral’s, apocalyptic’s, and even lyric’s steps. Possibility, in sum, is not the
degraded escapism of a contemplative, alternative reality but an imma-
nently possible imaginative and transformative escape. In Lycidas, then,
the notion of an apocalyptic end, one that does not preserve what it

ends, makes possible the thought of a real and present renovation, con-
version, and change.

The assertions of poetic power in Lycidas amount to something

more than a merely mercenary careerism, an expression of Milton’s
anxiety about his relative lack of fame in 1638 or 1645.

Instead, the

elegy’s intense focus on the nature of events offers nothing less than a
radically a-nomian—and not just antinomian— account of the world
in which freedom, including the freedom of the reader, does not amount
to reaction, acting either in conformity with or in opposition to nor-
mative ideals. Potential events are valuable precisely because they do
not participate in a system of actualization that is tyrannical in at least
two senses. First, such a system postulates an authoritarian prime mover
as the origin of all force insofar as every subsequent action amounts to
a reverberating reaction to this initial autonomous decree. Second, it
reduces possibility to nothing more than impotent, retrospective wish-
fulness, in the pro cess lauding the ex nihilo creator of force for her
ability to act out of nothing. Abandoning this system of interlocking
reactions is not, itself, a reaction: to affi rm otherwise begs the question
by assuming the universality of such a reactive system. Affi rming the in-
escapability of reaction amounts, ultimately, to accepting the tyrant’s
plea of necessity as the ontological and not merely the po liti cal truth.
Not reacting does not equate to inertial or caused passivity, precisely
because that would be merely to accept as inevitable a logic of action
that cannot freely and without pre ce dent transform its own condi-
tions.

In this respect, we should also reconsider Milton’s personal

motto, adapted from 2 Corinthians 12:9: “made perfect in weakness.”

The full phrase is “my power is made perfect through weakness.”
Weakness here is not simply a revolutionary Christian paradox, the last
being made fi rst or the meek inheriting the earth. Rather, it is power—
potential and capability— that weakness perfects. In Milton’s hands,
this perfected power serves as a refusal of the entire system of develop-
mental stages and demonstrative successes and failures that would
govern one’s actions, devotions, life. Lycidas presents events as potential
happenings precisely so as to free them from a structure that would
judge them by the entire panoply of worldly measures— objectives,
goals, accomplishments, completion, actualization, outcomes— all of
which are predicated on the limitation of possibility by ends.

The future in Lycidas is a problem of free action outside a model of

reassuring re sis tance, a free use of the world without the retroactive

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juridical evaluative systems that automatically translate potential into
a moralizing, bossy “should” and a capability reverse- engineered from
its manifestation. For Agamben, this challenge to the juridical vision
of the world is precisely what is most valuable about Pauline Christi-
anity: “The juridicizing of all human relations in their entirety, the
confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and what we
are supposed to do and not supposed to do, what we are supposed to
know and not know, not only signal the crisis of religion but also, and
above all, the crisis of law.”

“To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pas-

tures new” then is unpre ce dented in a very specifi c sense: It is a sur-
prise that does not intervene as a reaction against what comes before,
either in opposition or in fulfi llment. Instead, as the capstone to a se-
ries of unpre ce dented and present events in the fi nal eight lines of the
poem, it conceives novelty as a free potentiality, without the constraint
implied by a subjectivation pro cess that reduces all action to agree-
ment or disagreement, with a providential narrative or its authorita-
tive author. Such potential events are then the paradigm for free action
precisely because they do not respond to a motivating problem or re-
quire a suasive intervention in order to start their own transformative
movements. They also do not submit to a performative system of eval-
uation still too tied to the logic of work: A potential saying has value
perhaps especially when it remains undone or unacted. Lycidas, fi nally,
asks us to imagine the new as something more and more interesting
than the tired, slavish, soul- killing drive to be productive or the equally
soul- killing drive to resist.

This reading gives the lie to any attempt to imagine Milton’s major

poems as a retreat from or an oblique engagement with the po liti cal
sphere, a reaction to the experience of defeat. Already in 1638 he offers
a model of transformation within verse that does not imagine the
world as a system of necessary reactions. He obsesses over this prob-
lem throughout his poetic career because he is trying to conceive, within
poetry and however paradoxically, an affi rmative obedience, one that
would not be fundamentally craven. He attempts to imagine becoming
obedient to God’s will as opposed to following God’s orders. In Paul
Ricoeur’s terms, he tries to imagine dependence without heteronomy:

Allow me to conclude with this expression of dependence
without heteronomy. Why, I will ask at the end of this medita-
tion, is it so diffi cult for us to conceive of a dependence without

heteronomy? Is it not because we too often and too quickly think
of a will that submits and not enough of an imagination that
opens itself? . . . For what are the poem of the Exodus and the
poem of the resurrection, called to mind in the fi rst section,
addressed to if not to our imagination rather than our obedi-
ence? . . . If to understand oneself is to understand oneself in
front of the text, must we not say that the reader’s understand-
ing is suspended, derealized, made potential just as the word
itself if metamorphosized by the poem? If this is true, we must
say that the imagination is that part of ourselves that responds
to the text as a Poem, and that alone can encounter revelation
no longer as an unacceptable pretension, but a nonviolent
appeal.

The resentful inertia prompted by heteronomy seems precisely what
Milton seeks to evade, the notion that one must be convinced by occa-
sion or a bossy speaker that change is necessary, instead of choosing
change as valuable in itself. Someone must be saying “To morrow” or
else it could not happen. But this is really always Milton’s concern:
trying to imagine a world where readers are not hoping to be told
what to do, where events amount to more than agreement or re sis-
tance, and where we are not yearning to be led, let alone ruled, even
by ourselves.

When the poem seems to wax metapoetic and comments on its

own pastoral and utopian imaginings— moments marked by that most
solipsistic of pronominal puns, “Ay me”— the result is not a constrain-
ing futility or inevitable failure. When it asks rhetorically, “Ay me,
I fondly dream! / Had ye bin there— for what could that have don?”
(56– 57), it is not merely indicting the nymphs or expressing existential
futility or shouting at the rain, but rather questioning the utility of
kairos as a paradigm for change. The question is not what could you
have done, an address to the nymphs, but what could that have done—
the whole ensemble of real historical facts and actualizations as well
as their imaginary counterparts, their having been in the proper posi-
tion at the proper time with the proper attitude. The same basic prob-
lem reappears in the lyric’s cata logue of fl owers: “For so to interpose a
little ease, / Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. / Ay me!”
(152– 54). Here too, “Ay me!” indicates meta- commentary, but differs
from its fi rst iteration. This second version celebrates imaginary rever-
ies, instead of lamenting the lost opportunity to rescue Lycidas. In this

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second instance, neither a speaker nor an end appears to govern the
frail thoughts of the poem. The false surmise, then, is not an indict-
ment, the accusation that we should abandon fancy for the real work
of mourning, or politics. Neither does the reiterated metapoetic com-
ment return us to the practical world of speaking subjects struggling
with reactions and limited resources. Instead, the repeated “Ay me!”
marks the speaker’s transition from a kairotic understanding of the
importance of actualized opportunity to an embrace of the imagina-
tion as the site of real change.

This passage certainly begins with the same appeals to authorita-

tive voices that we have witnessed throughout the poem. It opens with
the fantasy that Alpheus or the Sicilian Muse will return to direct and
render actual this imaginary fl oral arrangement and implies that this
imaginary world doubles our presuppositions about real, pragmatic
actuality. These lines appear immediately after the speaker evokes
the two- handed engine and its fi nal smiting. Thus, the fantasy of fi nal
revenge, uttered by a quasi- divine Saint Peter, prompts a request for
yet more quasi- divine governing agents to return and boss the fl owers
around:

Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; Return Sicilian Muse,
And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast
Their Bels, and Flourets of a thousand hues.

132–35

When the speaker concludes this sequence with “Ay me,” he does
not lament the futility of thinking of occasions as kairotic opportu-
nities for a controlling agent to intervene, even in the imagination.
Rather, the poem presents this statement of futility as an ecstatic
ejaculation. And there is reason to celebrate: The second “Ay me!,”
complete with exclamation point, marks the liberation of imagina-
tive potential as a force for immanent change in the world. As Alp-
ers notes, the image of Lycidas visiting the sea bottom does not
inject realism into an imaginary poem or reverse imagination with
practicality:

Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou to our moist vows deny’d,
Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold . . .

154–63

For Alpers, several issues are pivotal here. First, Milton invents the
“fable of Bellerus” from whole cloth, disallowing any attempt to tether
meaning to an external symbolary. This is not because meaning is inde-
terminate but because meaning does not happen through an appeal to
external, authoritative pronouncements that resolve disorder or verify
truths. Second, Lycidas does not stage a dialogue between real and
imaginary, placing the latter in the ser vice of the former:

The intricate syntax and the delicate solicitude of a word like
“perhaps” do not represent a mind assaulted or horror- stricken,
and if being “unillusioned” is at issue, the most poignant detail
in the passage— imagining that Lycidas visits the bottom of the
monstrous world— is as deeply illusioned as anything in the
poem. These lines prove what the fl ower passage seemed to
disprove— the adequacy of poetic imagination. The answer to
“false surmise” is not the truth tout court, but what poets have
always claimed—“true surmise.”

Lycidas’ submarine visit is not one more attempt at agential control of
the poem’s actions. Lycidas might will the visit, or he might passively
experience it. Frankly, it does not really matter, because what occurs
here is not a character’s action but a potential event in the poem and in
the imagination. That is, even Lycidas’s death, which is not identical to
King’s, is not a problem waiting to be solved or actualized. Rather, it is
an imaginary occurrence. It is an event that happens in the present, an
imaginary present that is not withdrawn from the real world. The only
events that occur in the present, it turns out, are potential ones, the
surmises, true or false, that can disavow the juridical, which is just an-
other name for the tyranny of the actual, sinful world, and offer an
apocalyptically redeemed future as a viable present possibility.

Lycidas, then, shows that the indictment of pastoral and apocalyp-

tic as escapist, impractical fantasy loads the deck, insisting that the
imagination mirror the real, that its landscape and or ga ni za tion repli-
cate the same authoritative speakers and structures that occur in the

150

What Happens in Lycidas?

152

“Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax” praises Thomas Fairfax
for his conscience, humility, moderation, and fulfi llment of a provi-
dential plan, all as part of its overarching occasion: Fairfax’s retirement
from public life. We should not be surprised then that it is populated by
images of reversal: inverted trees, boats sailing over bridges, and ratio-
nal amphibii with canoes on their heads. Yet these proliferating inver-
sions offer neither a secret indictment of Fairfax’s choice nor a hopeful
anticipation of his return to a military command. Instead, Marvell’s
reversals reveal that he is concerned with the same issues here as he is
in the Cromwell poems: not the causes or effects of retirement or soli-
tude, but what actually occurs in such moments. In other words, what
happens in a turn? Is it simply a point after which everything is dif-
ferent? Or is it itself a present event, something conceivable in the pres-
ent and not merely as a result of its ultimate revolutionary effects?
Unsurprisingly, these poetic renditions of reversal also amount to a
meditation on the nature of revolutionary events, what happens in
the present of their occurrence, as opposed to the fi nality of their ulti-
mate recognition.

“Upon Appleton House” certainly supports the critical contention

that Marvell is obsessed with reversal,

but this obsession stems less

from a resignation to history’s, fate’s, or time’s topsy- turvydom than
from a commitment to imagining reversal as a moment of real, even
apocalyptic novelty. Instead of treating revelation as the self- refl ective

C h a p t e r F o u r

How Poems End

Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event
of Ending in “Upon Appleton House”

“Upon Appleton House”

153

recognition of an already written narrative, Marvell treats the present of
reversal as a moment with thickness, substance, and the symbolic force
necessary to effect change.

“Upon Appleton House” treats symbols as

temporal occurrences inside verse itself, instead of as relational nodes in
a synchronic architecture. As a result, their temporal appearance is im-
mediately accessible instead of being endlessly deferred into the future
when a real revelation will fi nally occur. It is for this reason that Marvell
appears to live in a world of calm reserve: He does not imagine the
world as a chaos of difference and disorder begging for, but never quite
achieving, order. If anything, there is too much similarity, too much
comparison in our quotidian world, so much that it overwhelms the
truly novel events symbolized by Mary Fairfax and Cromwell, both of
whom present an apocalypse that could actually happen in this world.

“Upon Appleton House” participates in a country- house genre that

not only takes the house as an embodiment of its lord’s virtue but also
stages numerous surprising reversals that testify to his magnanimity
and power. The central stanza of Marvell’s poem follows this pattern
in presenting the meadows’ repeated, proliferating turns as primarily a
theatrical phenomenon: “No scene that turns with engines strange / Does
oft’ner than these meadows change.”

Subsequent stanzas continue to

present the meadows’ transformations as theatrical and even narrative
inversions: “This scene again withdrawing brings / A new and empty
face of things” (61.441– 42). “Engines strange” and “A new and empty
face of things” might well indicate a suspicion of theatricality, that
these are the worst kind of deceptive shows, in effect echoing the sus-
picion of the stage present in “An Horatian Ode.”

This sequence of

transformations, “these pleasant acts” (59.465), concludes with a lit-
eralization of meta phor, one that would seem to be the real, pragmatic
capstone for all of these prior fi gures:

Denton sets ope its cataracts;
And makes the meadow truly be
(What it but seemed before) a sea.

59.465–67

Curiously, it is precisely at this point that the speaker chooses to retire
to the wood (61.482), after disavowing all the confusing reversals that
he supposedly just concluded via literalization:

Let others tell the paradox,
How eels now bellow in the ox;

154

How Poems End

How horses at their tails do kick,
Turned as they hang to leeches quick;
How boats can over bridges sail;
And fi shes do the stables scale.
How salmons trespassing are found;
And pikes are taken in the pound.

55.473–80

When the speaker retires from these paradoxical and fi gurative trans-
formations, the very ones that the poem itself explores and uses, how
exactly is he escaping them? In other words, how would a retirement
from fi guration occur inside a poem, without turning retirement into
one more meta phorical reversal? These questions are pivotal because
the speaker’s own retirement from such conundrums reenacts Fairfax’s,
and precisely at the moment when the poem purports to take leave of
repre sen ta tion. The conceit, if we can still call it that, is that “Upon Ap-
pleton House” does more than stage the meadows’ fi gural reversals but
ends them in precisely the way that Fairfax escapes the vicissitudes of
po liti cal reversal: through disavowal and retirement. Together, these
staged retirements depict the possibility of apprehending an end, to
poems and to a sequence of events, in the present of its occurrence. It is
for this reason that “Upon Appleton House” also presents disavowal as
something achieved through a return to the literal. Instead of treating
such turns as a self- contradictory ideological ruse, I propose that we
consider them as Marvell’s imagination of the immanent power of sym-
bols, whereby a fi gure can have present, potential power and, simulta-
neously, end poems, as opposed to extending them indefi nitely via a
series of metonymic signifi cations and their hermeneutic complements.
In this sense, Marvell explores whether contemplation and retirement
themselves, the termination of one’s ensnarement within the world of
politics and pragmatism, are even possible. And it is for this reason that
this poem on the occasion of Fairfax’s retirement is so obsessed with the
nature of endings and escapes, apocalyptic and pastoral.

In praising Fairfax’s decision to retire from public affairs, the lyric is
decidedly more interested in the event of retirement itself than in the
achieved solitude or calm that purportedly results from it. Like Marvell’s

“Upon Appleton House”

155

other po liti cal encomia, this lyric praises a forceful act, not the man
who performs it.

The contemplative life that Fairfax embraces is not,

then, concomitantly, an achieved state of rest. It is important to remem-
ber that, for all its talk of retirement and contrary to the Jonsonian
tradition of the country- house poem, the verse itself insists that Nun-
appleton is not a place of rest but a way station:

The house was built upon the place
Only as for a mark of grace;
And for an inn to entertain
Its Lord a while, but not remain.

9.69–72

These lines, of course, echo Fairfax’s own poem, which describes the
house as an inn on the way toward a heavenly home:

Think not, O man that dwells herein
This house’s a stay, but as an inn,
Which for con ve nience fi tly stands,
In way to one not made with hands.

1–4

Marvell’s version retains Fairfax’s insistence on the temporary nature
of the country estate but does not present it as prefi guration, typologi-
cal or otherwise, of a fi nal abode. Marvell emphasizes something other
than an interlocking network of resemblances as the ordering force of
time or history. In Fairfax’s poem, the house resembles his ultimate
restful home. In Marvell’s, the inn is an entertaining diversion but does
not participate in such an analogical sequence. Instead, the house ap-
pears as a bare badge, without some ultimate eschatological signifi cance:
“The house was built upon the place / Only as for a mark of grace.”

The

mark of grace, this symbol that does not enter into a purposive plan or
a system of substitutive comparison, is not utterly barren, however,
standing as an indictment of a country- house genre that fi nds in archi-
tecture a type of meta phorical signifi cance. The house itself ceases to
possess typological signifi cance as part of a metonymic chain of mean-
ing. This mark of grace itself does not remain, just as its lord does not
remain in the house.

It is not just the fl eetingness of the house that matters here but its

status as a symbolic force outside temporal typological equations, with
all of the reversals, overcomings, and fulfi llments that such equations

156

How Poems End

imply. Fulfi llment in typology, after all, arrives with the antitype. De-
spite all of its doubleness and reversals, the poem does not offer sub-
stitution, similarity, and sublation as the mechanism of revelation’s
appearance. Or to put it another way, Marvell is interested in the
house not as a fi gure for something else, or as the site of transition, but
rather as the temporal moment when one turns toward an eschato-
logical end, which is not the same thing as spatially replacing one end
with another. The mark of grace is not a substitute for something lost
in reversal but the event of reversal itself. Here too, the poem attempts,
through a materialization of a fi gure into an iconic badge, the end of
fi guration. This is not because fi gures are too weak to accommodate a
transcendent truth but because repre sen ta tion and its reversals always
threaten to turn verse into a perpetual motion machine, to defer the
very end that apocalypse promises.

When the speaker disavows paradoxes, he disavows the confl ation of

the event of reversal with the narrative or hermeneutic deferrals charac-
teristic of typology and allegory. Yet in so doing, he does not just offer a
plain, literal real in the place of fi guration, turning the real, in effect, into
just one more fi gure. The speaker abandons paradoxes to others because
the concept of reversal, just like that of substitutive similarity and plain
transparency, achieves only its own replication.

Thus, the speaker pres-

ents the reversals of the hewel and worm as the briefest of victories:

Who could have thought the tallest oak
Should fall by such a feeble stroke!

Nor would it, had the tree not fed
A traitor- worm, within it bred
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And yet that worm triumphs not long,
But serves to feed the hewel’s young.
While the oak seems to fall content,
Viewing the treason’s punishment.

69.551–70.554, 70.557– 60

The oak that initially seemed to resist consents to its punishment. The
triumph of the worm is reversed by the woodpecker. The woodpecker
as natural instrument of destruction is a surprising inversion because
of its relatively diminutive size. This passage is a recipe for constant
reversal and reinterpretation, even after the speaker disavows paradox.

“Upon Appleton House”

157

However, it is precisely at this juncture that the image of the inverted
tree appears: “Or turn me but, and you shall see / I was but an inverted
tree” (71.567– 68). The repetition of “but” emphasizes the facile insig-
nifi cance of these inversions: as in, “only turn me and you’ll realize noth-
ing more than that I was only an inverted tree.” In so doing, this image
challenges the value of reversal imagined as a developmental structure.
By maintaining that one begins where one wants to end, in heaven, the
poem presents the inverted tree as little more than deciphering, recog-
nizing what is already the case in this confl ation of fi nal and effi cient
causes. Nothing has really changed. The truth has merely been uncov-
ered. Inversion, if it is to have transformative power, must follow a
logic different from that of interpretive retrospection.

Yet inversion in “Upon Appleton House” also does not amount to

tactical calculation, confi dently predicting and outwitting the future.
Conventionally, the inverted tree designates a humanity with its roots
in heaven, deriving its sustenance and value from a divine source.

Yet

if one is already rooted in heaven, toward what exactly is one growing
in historical time? And what happens to the very notion of reversal when
source and end are confl ated in this manner? The succeeding lines sug-
gest a change not clearly related to this reversal:

Already I begin to call
In their [the birds’] most learned original:
And where I language want, my signs
The bird upon the bough divines;

72.569–72

“Already I begin to call” declares what the speaker is already doing,
indicating that inversion is unnecessary. In contrast, “Or turn me but”
is prospective, but in a very narrow sense: It points to the future, but one
whose secrets are already known and in which knowing occurs retro-
spectively— in the future you will see what I was already. The lines that
precede the image of the inverted tree, however, require a transformative
gift, so that the speaker might not just confer with birds and plants but
be one of them:

Thus I, easy phi los o pher,
Among the birds and trees confer:
And little now to make me, wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants.

158

How Poems End

Give me but wings as they, and I
Straight fl oating on the air shall fl y:

71.561–66

The poem then stages, around this fantasy of both becoming and con-
ferring with animals and plants, the ineffectuality of reversal as a concep-
tion of transformation. The reversals of “Or turn me but, and you shall
see / I was but an inverted tree” do not provide the speaker with new
access to birds. Rather, it is the easy wish to become like the birds—
“Give me but wings as they”— that leads to the succeeding stanza’s new
facility with the birds’ “most learned original” signs. Just as importantly,
even though the addition that would transform the speaker into one of
the birds is ironically “little,” this stanza implies that no additions are
necessary to complete the metamorphosis into a plant. Transformation,
then, is not the torturous pro cess of overcoming paradox and tension,
or of concocting a viable strategy on the basis of probabilistic prognos-
tication. Neither is it the recognition of some more subterranean essence,
however inverted. These stanzas then imply that it is the human penchant
for dramatic reversals, epiphanic eruptions, and purposive planning that
makes of change a laborious, diffi cult pro cess, when in fact it takes little,
now, to change a human into something else.

The poem’s disavowal of the power of reversal, of course, does not

leave eschatology unmolested. At the very least, the multiplication of
reversals in the inverted- tree passage reveals the ineffectuality of rever-
sal as a model for revelation. Yet Marvell’s examination of retrospective
and prospective accounts of transformation also, and more importantly,
offers an itinerary of symbolic power that treats fi gures’ temporal oc-
currence as more important than their apprehended similarity to their
replaced signifi eds. “Upon Appleton House” maintains that without an
attunement to when symbols happen, we will never understand the
forces at work within literary works, or what happens within them,
much less the events that we label po liti cal or natural change.

Rosalie Colie highlights these temporal obsessions when she notes

that “Upon Appleton House” essentially occurs in present tense, but a
present tense that exhibits several different types of presentness: im-
mediate, narrative, continuing, and aphoristic or philosophical.

She

also describes the tenor of the poem as decidedly empirical, attuned to
the immanent details of its own unfolding. As is the case with the
speaker of Lycidas, the speaker of “Upon Appleton House” does not
appear to know the end of the story, or the poem: “There is something

“Upon Appleton House”

159

tentative about the way the poet moves through his landscape and
through his poem, writing as if he were actually living the scenes and
experiences that are his subject, as if he were himself uncertain of
what was about to happen next, or how an incident will turn out, or
how it ought to be understood or interpreted.”

Even the poem’s cen-

tral conceit of events telescoped or foreshortened into a single day on
the estate emphasizes its concern with the occurrence of reversal,
when and how it happens. Just as reversals proliferate, so too do tem-
poral transition words, especially “now,” which occurs twice in the
concluding stanza.

The consequence of all of these machinations is a

country- house poem focused on the forces involved in inversion, irre-
spective of the consequences— subversion or containment; order or
disorder; activity or passivity— of these reversals. As a result, this poem
at least begins to ask what an immanent apocalyptic event looks like,
before it becomes cannibalized by a history of winners and losers, and
what distinguishes a reactionary from a transformative force, other
than shortsighted, retroactive partisan allegiance.

As was the case with the Cromwell poems, “Upon Appleton House”

does not allow our modern understandings of po liti cal engagement to
trot along unhindered. It too proves recalcitrant to a po liti cal criticism
that wishes to treat reversal as an ironic, subversive force, or as evidence
of a fundamental tension within prevailing po liti cal structures. This
recalcitrance is not a result of Marvell’s much ballyhooed elusiveness,
itself code for a rational, mea sured, tolerant reserve.

Rather, “Upon

Appleton House” explicitly mocks the notion of an endless, uncontrolled
inversion that we could tether to po liti cal subversion, insisting that
reversal really works in only one direction—top- down:

So Honour better lowness bears,
Than that unwonted Greatness wears.
Height with a certain grace does bend,
But low things clownishly ascend.
And yet what needs there here excuse,
Where ev’ry thing does answer use?
Where neatness nothing can condemn,
Nor pride invent what to contemn?

8.57–64

The startling implication for a modern criticism constructed around
the subversive potential of carnivalesque preposterousness is not just

160

How Poems End

that Marvell is a tool of the aristocracy or that he actively denigrates
pop u lar or communistic uprisings.

Rather, this passage maintains that

reversals are, in essence, fundamentally conservative, not a means of
effecting po liti cal or social revolution. Marvell does not just choose
the wrong side but rather affi rms that the modern mechanism of re sis-
tance does not do what it claims to do.

As Raymond Williams notes, the bourgeois genre of the country-

house poem has already vitiated inversion as a po liti cal tool by insist-
ing on individuation within classes. If everyone is unique, there is no
structure to invert. In contrast to an aristocratic appropriation of pas-
toral that celebrates the country life in general as a vehicle for justify-
ing the court, a bourgeois appropriation is not challenged by reversal
but rather thrives on such inversions, precisely because they lead to
exculpation.

According to such a logic, no general systemic change is

necessary, possible, or just, because all of these individuals are capable of
redemption. Yet it is not just the content of this sociopo liti cal structure,
but also its formal mechanism, that arrests transformation. Individua-
tion rests on a lengthy sequence of mediations and comparisons that,
above all else, preserves this mediated, dynamic series. In this passage,
Fairfax’s par tic u lar honor acts not as a cinching concretization of a
general rule but rather defers explanation and transformative reversal
into a receding future. The general explanatory principle—“lowness
clownishly ascends”—

is bookended by a description of Fairfax’s

unique humility (in the preceding stanza) and the insistence that in
this specifi c instance, explanation is unnecessary: “And yet what needs
there here excuse.” It is not just ambiguity that produces reversal, in
short. Even precise distinctions— in this case between universal catego-
ries and par tic u lar examples— participate in and perpetuate a media-
tion that extends indefi nitely into the future. The subject’s dialectical
individuation insulates any structure of which she forms a part pre-
cisely because mediation postulates itself as an endless pro cess. Even
an apocalyptic end, it turns out, will ultimately require the intervention
of this subject’s recognition.

These lines do not mock the egalitarian goals of populist social striv-

ing so much as they insist that goals are not enough. Where everything
does answer use, where order runs along effi ciently, there is nothing to
condemn. That does not mean that the order is just, only that its con-
demnation cannot rest on the leveling of distinctions. Instead, change
must occur at the level of the forces that produce this order, itself a fi nal
formal structure that always coalesces into a structure of winners and

“Upon Appleton House”

161

losers. Novelty happens here, not by rearranging the results of the con-
test, but by changing its form and nature.

As was the case with the

Cromwell trilogy, “Upon Appleton House” looks to an ordering force
itself for the principle of transformation and for the criteria by which
one might evaluate that transformation. Here too, then, Marvell’s under-
standing of value and evaluation echoes that of Deleuze: “Strength or
weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle
as a criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even
the essence of fact.”

“Upon Appleton House” remains an enigmatic

poem for modern readers precisely because it disavows many of the
notions of re sis tance that still dominate the conception of po liti cal
activity within literary criticism. For Marvell, though, the world turned
upside down is still the same world.

This seems the upshot of the indif-

ference lodged within the inverted- tree image. “Or turn me merely and
you will see that I was merely something else” testifi es to the exhausted
irrelevance of such upheavals as a paradigm for po liti cal change. This
is the reason why there is nothing more reactionary than a tale of the
underdog’s victory: Her triumph never even questions the basic nature
of the contest.

Marvell’s verse deals similarly with the reversals of pastoral. More

specifi cally, he revises the pastoral tradition so that it does not connote
a natural excess that overcomes want or resentment, only to require,
yet again, the imposition of a moderating and productive rule. Even
more radical is his insistence that pastoral does not lament a decline
from a purer, more peaceful golden age. As Katherine Acheson con-
tends, as part of her argument that abstract military and garden dia-
grams act as the poem’s or ga niz ing principle, pastoral and war are not
opposed. Yet neither are they simply confl ated in a mystical muddled
unity, itself the reductive opposite— the reversal— of opposition. Instead,
Acheson maintains that pastoral and war combine via an abstracted
mathematics and geometry:

In literary works and in criticism of those works the concepts
of horticulture (or the garden, or the pastoral) and warfare are
normally held to be opposites: the garden is the state of society
in which human life is balanced and integrated with the natural
world, while warfare is the state in which human society is
upside- down, out of balance, and unnaturally inclined. But
these illustrations [of gardens and military formations] link
the two areas as phenomena that emerge directly from the

162

How Poems End

conceptualization of space based on applied mathematics.
Military strategy and gardening are both forms of “dominion”
through which open spaces are made into territory and
possession.

War does not convert into the peaceful retirement of pastoral. Pasto-
ral order does not suffer from the contingent eruption of confl ict and
an ultimate temporal decline. Moreover, in this model, the country-
house poem does not reverse itself or suffer from the challenge of
history’s intrusion. The inclusion of the early history of the estate in
“Upon Appleton House” is then not an inversion of the idyllic nostal-
gia or atemporality characteristic of other poems in the genre but an
insistence on the commensurability of pastoral and the real world.

Here too, the poem allows readers to treat pastoral neither as fanci-
ful fi gurative substitution nor as a retirement from reality easily aban-
doned by a return to the literal. Neither of these readings allows one
to attend to the type of force involved in reversal, or what happens at
this moment. Although Acheson is writing about space, her argument
does show that “Upon Appleton House” presents relation as apprehen-
sible in its own right. One does not need to go through the mediating
relays of effects and ultimate substitutions.

A criticism that battens

on reversals, however, thinks that it knows, a priori, how to apprehend
events— retroactively, on the basis of their results— and mistakes
Marvell’s interest in the nature of temporal events and eschatology.
Knowing the end is not what events or apocalypses endeavor to
achieve, because they are not hermeneutic exercises. For Marvell, if
eschatological events are to occur in the present, we must do more
than chart the interaction between typological doubles or dialectical
inversions, both of which happen in the same way: They occur over
an empty gulf of synchronic, spatial opposition.

Marvell’s lyrics sim-

ply counter that we should be able to do something with time other
than map it.

Despite its purported obsession with the signifi cance of architec-

ture, land, and space, the country- house genre just as often stages the
problem of poetry’s own temporality, of when it is that a symbol or
meta phor occurs. Under the guise of meditating on architectural mod-
eration, it explores the acts of writing and reading poetry, often testifying
to its power to contain, ideologically and actually, human beings and
human virtue. And so “Upon Appleton House” opens with a homily,

“Upon Appleton House”

163

about verse and architecture, that claims for both the ability to contain
great things:

Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrained,
Things greater are in less contained.
Let others vainly strive t’immure
The circle in the quadrature!
These holy mathematics can
In every fi gure equal man.

6.41–48

Similar praise for moderation appears throughout the country- house
tradition. Thus, “To Penshurst” distinguishes its eponymous house
from the gaudy McMansions of the early seventeenth century:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,
Of wood, of water: therein thou art fair.

1–3, 7– 8

These lyrics certainly speak the language of space in evoking contain-
ment. But they also present symbols as fraught occurrences in time,
not as an interpretive contemplation in an atemporal, transcendent
mind. The uses of this moderation trope are essentially meditations on
the nature of poetic fi guration and its relationship to order, on whether
fi guration is primarily a matter of giving order to disorder and what it
would mean for such an ordering event to occur.

For example, Robert Herrick’s “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pember-

ton” reverses the sequence of “To Penshurst,” placing praise for mod-
erate architectural order at the end of the poem, after the demonstration
of lordly largesse:

. . . Comliness agrees,
With those thy primitive decrees,
To give subsistance to thy house, and proofe,
What Genii support thy roofe,

164

How Poems End

Goodnes and Greatnes; not the oaken Piles;
For these, and marbles have their whiles
To last, but not their ever: Vertues Hand
It is, which builds, ’gainst Fate to stand.

Of course, the estate grounds and the house still testify to the virtue of
the lord, but in Herrick’s poem this testimony follows an explanatory
sequence, concluding with the capstone of the house’s signifi cance.
This is not the mystical plenitude of Jonson’s sponte sua, self- sacrifi cing
animals. One might assume a similar sequence of events behind Jonson’s
poem, but the lyric itself does not follow this self- justifying order, offer-
ing a suasive case for its own images before they appear. Herrick’s
reordering reveals that this genre is not just a story of a rigid structure
fi ghting against pullulating force or even a contest between the forces
of order and disorder. It is also a genre that meditates, within its fi gu-
ration of poetic activity, on the event of meta phorical and symbolic
meaning, when and how it is that vehicle comes to carry tenor. Does
meaning burst onto the scene as the result of a symbolic epiphany, only
to be retroactively and implicitly justifi ed, as in Jonson’s poem? Or is
meta phor the result of a careful progressive argument and explanation,
one that makes the case that Pemberton’s house represents Pemberton’s
virtue, instead of just asserting that it does? And most importantly, in
what ways does the sequence matter? Even outside of Marvell’s own
injection of history into the genre, the country- house tradition al-
ready stages, intertextually, the problem of meaning’s relationship to
temporal sequences and the transitive reversals that follow on these
occasions.

“Upon Appleton House” accentuates this generic concern when,

early in the poem, it stages the supersession of spatial proximity by
temporal imminence. The culprit in this respect is the adverb “near.”
Marvell’s speaker describes the house as a moderate structure that re-
sembles natural order, but these early lines also highlight the fact that
composition and building occur in time, that one does not just cast
one’s eyes over a preconstituted, spatial order: “But all things are com-
posèd here / Like Nature, orderly and near” (4.25– 26). “Orderly and
near” refers not only to nature but also to artifi ce itself, implying not
only an analogy between these purportedly separate spheres but also
temporal proximity. Signifi cantly, “near” in this passage has no secure
spatial coordinates— nature and the house are near, but not “near to”
anything, even each other. “Near” might mean that both nature and

“Upon Appleton House”

165

the house are near us, intimately close to us, and thus not separated as
an alienating structural order to nature’s autochthonous disorder. But
without a direction or spatial reference— something to which the house
could be near—“near” connotes temporal arrival, the notion that or-
derly composition is imminent, not just intimate.

The rhyme with “here” only highlights the confl ict between spatial

and temporal or ga ni za tion at the heart of the poem. In this case, does
homophony mean that space and time are confl ated into a unity? Or
conversely, does it emphasize that these must be different qualities, so
as to avoid a tedious redundancy in the rhyme? Even if one were to
resolve this problem, the poem would still ask after the exact moment
of this reconciling or distinguishing event. Does this confl ict end after
the rhyme has occurred? And when exactly does a rhyme occur? When
a reader recognizes the homophony after reading the second line, or
when the reader anticipates it?

“Near,” along with its status as part

of a rhyme, indicates that, for this poem, imminent occurrence is not a
temporal accident but a central feature of order, even the central order-
ing principle of the poem itself— couplets. In addition, the lyric insists
that order occurs temporally in the present. That is the other feature
of couplets as an or ga niz ing principle: They are paratactic and addi-
tive, but their completion is not endlessly deferred via a hidden hypo-
taxis. As a result, even in its earliest stanzas, “Upon Appleton House”
implies that order is just as much an event as it is an alienating spatial
structure, recognized as necessary, useful, or valuable after the fact or
at the end of time.

Even criticism that reads Marvell within the classic new historicist

terms of subversion and containment still acknowledges that he is cen-
trally concerned with the nature of events. For example, Catherine
Gimelli Martin describes Marvell’s pastorals as static enclosures that
require rupture for change but, in so doing, insists that containment
requires transcendent events to interrupt this otherwise sealed conti-
nuity.

Thus, Martin contrasts Marvell and Milton, presenting the for-

mer as exhibiting a passive resignation to fate in opposition to the
latter’s immanent agency. In such a passive scenario, the future is in no
way related to the present— it is not at all “near”— but comes like a thief
in the night:

Providential expectation is therefore restricted to a literal but
largely atemporal hope concerning a future in no way coexten-
sive with the present, which now affords the only proper sphere

166

How Poems End

for human rationality or action. With direct communication
between God and man rationally cut off, Christian conscience
then becomes radically privatized and internalized as the sphere
of moral and prudential rather than of broader social or spiritual
considerations. In the ser vice of politics, appeals to conscience
are thus not only philosophically illegitimate but physically
destructive because they bring about a return to the war of
all upon all.

Certainly, there is an indictment here of mystical zeal and private fanat-
i cism and a probably undue faith in the ability of rational communi-
cation to prevent confl ict. What is most important, however, is the
presupposition that activity amounts to communication with a god
whose primary function is to provide access to an already written provi-
dential narrative. For Martin, the future comes unexpectedly, across
an empty, unpopulated gulf, because we do not know an already writ-
ten story. Although Martin frames this problem as a matter of the re-
lationship between activity and passivity, it is probably better imagined
as a question of whether Marvell conceives of the future in primarily
hermeneutic terms. Either an agent knows the story and, thus, partici-
pates in its immanent unfolding or one is consigned to the atomized
passivity that ultimately results in chaos.

The emphasis in “Upon Appleton House” on the proximity of the

future, as well as the integration of Fairfacian historical destiny within
the genre, seems to require that we not treat the future as the discovery
of an unknown narrative or as the auto- generated eruption of a dialec-
tical development, both of which imagine reversal as a pivot point lo-
cated in an empty temporal space. Just as important is the fact that this
pivot is very, very far away. Either it must arrive from a transcendent
realm to rupture a prevailing order or it must “go as far as” contradic-
tion in order to tip over into resolution.

The dialectic of activity and

passivity that dominates Martin’s account cannot conceive of what it
would mean for order or the future to be near— for the apocalypse to
be imminent, let alone occur— precisely because proximity is subsumed
under activity, an agent’s always ultimately transcendent ability to
wield an immanent instrumental force. As we saw in the case of the
Cromwell poems, this critical frame preserves mediation within imme-
diacy by treating the use of tools as the only concept of proximity. In
contrast, “Upon Appleton House” imagines temporal nearness as a dis-
avowal of such a subordination of means to a subject’s self- identifi ed

“Upon Appleton House”

167

purposes and ends. The subject who wields such tools is always busy
postulating its goals in the future and thereby attempting to ensure its
own immortality. In this respect, the subject can never account for the
transition from imminence to immanence. Marvell, instead, hopes to
imagine an immanent ending through an emphasis on the occurrence
of symbols. “Upon Appleton House” uses the temporal proximity of an
orderly end as a means of imagining change and its attendant forces in
the present. The reason for doing so is that the reversals characteristic
of the subject, however nuanced, can never quite explain how anything
fi nally ends or how a new event would occur that is not merely an in-
verted, reinterpreted version of the old.

The transmutation of imminence into immanence, or even their con-

fl ation, does not, however, translate into a mystical, anarchic unity.
Donald M. Friedman describes the apocalyptic inversions at the end
of the poem, particularly the indistinguishability of river and bank, as
evidence of an abandonment of the rage for order, but also acknowl-
edges that the concluding return to Mary Fairfax’s lesser world entails
not an ordering of the chaos entailed in a dissolving carnivalesque fl ood
but an ordering of order: “But order in this line is itself contained and
limited, since ‘decent’ establishes a criterion of appropriateness, adjust-
ment to a standard, fi ttingness— in other words, orderliness. And to
tame order would seem to be supererogatory, or at least to ensure that
its potential for government or creation is moderated, that order, again,
has been ordered.”

He is writing, of course, about the child’s redun-

dant production of order:

’Tis not, what once it was, the world;
But a rude heap together hurled;
All negligently overthrown,
Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.
Your lesser world contains the same,
But in more decent order tame;
You, heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap,
And Paradise’s only map.

96.761–68

What does “contains” mean in this passage? “Incorporates”? “Encloses”?
“Epitomizes”? “Has the same elements as”? As this list of possibilities
indicates, some of these are temporal events, events that happen in the
present tense, some not. Actively enclosing these chaotic elements would

168

How Poems End

seem to be different from being passively comprised of them. Certainly,
we might maintain that Friedman is doing much the same as Martin in
his reading of this passage, describing an ordering principle that mod-
erates, for entirely practical reasons, even an excessive desire for order.
Yet Friedman’s claim also raises the possibility that an architectural
understanding of constraint and containment may well be incompati-
ble with a poem that so insistently presents order as a redundant, but
also proximate, temporal force. Even if we accept Friedman’s suggestion
that Mary Fairfax redundantly orders the lesser world that already “con-
tains” the macrocosmic world’s disorder, the stanza still explores not
whether she is successful at achieving this goal but rather the nature of
the redundant force that she brings to bear. The microcosm– macrocosm
motif itself ensures success— how could it not?— but this passage also
emphasizes how and when such containment occurs, a temporal event
that too often reduces to the mere repetition of the fact of its victories
over entropy.

The ambiguity of “containing the same” impedes any simple sequenc-

ing of this pro cess. Does “the same” mean simply these disordered mac-
rocosmic elements, gulfs, deserts, precipices, stones? Or does it refer to
the entirety of the entropic history narrated in the fi rst four lines of the
stanza, from “ ’Tis not, what once it was” onward, including the rude
heaps and their overthrowing? In addition, gulfs and precipices are not
just any old elements. Unlike stones and deserts, which at least have
qualities that would unite them as entities, gulfs and precipices are fun-
damentally relational. There is no gulf without its relational status as
an in- between space; there is no precipice without a terminus looking
out into an abyss. By inserting such relational elements inside the very
chaos that requires reordering, the poem unseats any neat oppositional
atomism. This is not just more of the always already, a nascent order
lodged within chaos. Rather, Mary’s pro cess of “containing the same”
poses complicated temporal questions that extend beyond the genre’s
architectural meta phors. By troubling the temporal sequence involved
in Mary’s epitomizing of the world as well as the presumed sequence of
taming disorder, Marvell also poses a frustrating challenge to criticism
both po liti cal and formal: We do not know when the events of orderly
containment purportedly occur insofar as we continue to think of them
as contests against disorder.

Despite the nostalgic overtones of this stanza, “ ’Tis not, what once it

was, the world” does not signify a lament for a more primordial, more
peaceful Eden, one that, outside this domain of contestation, would,

“Upon Appleton House”

169

paradoxically— or, rather, hypocritically— offer a more perfect staging
ground for subversion and critique. As Acheson notes, one consequence
of the abstract mathematicism of “Upon Appleton House” is the insis-
tence that “there is no state prior to, or better than, armed but peaceful
vigilance.”

Colie makes a similar point, noting that the nunnery epi-

sode presents the past as corrupt and, in so doing, countermands any
generic drift toward pastoral nostalgia for a golden age.

When we do

witness nostalgia in the poem, it is not quite clear that the prior age is all
that restful or golden:

Unhappy! Shall we never more
That sweet militia restore,
When gardens only had their towers,
And all the garrisons were fl owers,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The gard’ner had the soldier’s place,
And his more gentle forts did trace.

42.329–30, 43.337– 38

This passage supports Acheson’s claim that war and gardens are not fun-
damentally distinct in this poem, but it also demolishes a conception of
time’s operation as progressive dialectical inversion or entropic degen-
eration. Gardeners were soldiers in this past, which does not mean that
soldiers were nonviolent gardeners, called to the messy business of war
by necessity. After all, most surprising here is the syntactical implication
that the soldier’s later forts are “more gentle.” If we insist on a syntac-
tical inversion, that the gardener traces his own more gentle forts, then
the line has suddenly eschewed the very comparison that it postulates
for two stanzas. If “his forts” are the gardener’s forts, this line means
that he traces his own forts, not that he proleptically imitates a future
military or ga ni za tion. In other words, these lines are a trap: Either one
preserves the analogy and allows that the present militaristic world is
gentler, or the analogy itself acknowledges that there can be no analogy,
by insisting that the gardener imitates only himself and cannot be a pre-
fi guration of a fall into debased militarism. In addition, as we will see
in the context of the typological comparisons of warrior, mower, and
messiah, the temporal sequence of comparisons matters, primarily be-
cause the ultimate goal is not an interlocking architecture of resem-
blances, which would then enable a series of frictionless reversals— the
gardener is like a soldier, which means the solider is like a gardener.

170

How Poems End

Instead, such similarities aim to understand the occurrence of simi-
larities, meta phors, and symbols in time, which do not admit of such
weightless retracings. The spatial results of such a sequence, in Marvell’s
estimation, show only that something happened, not how it did or what
forces, immanent and imminent, were involved in its execution.

Marvell’s interest in sequence occurs in a genre that is already ob-

sessed with limning the forces that bind together po liti cal and social
communities in time. Even in presenting an ideologically suspect social
cohesion and conviviality, country- house poems are intimately concerned
with the event of communality and commensality, with the question of
when community happens and of the conditions under which it hap-
pens. They are just as much concerned with the nature of social cohe-
sion’s occurrence as they are with convincing a reader of the justness of
her own oppression. Jonson, for example, offers us a fantastical soli-
darity in the present based on a self- sacrifi cing nature. The force bind-
ing individuals together, then, is this consumed sacrifi ce: “The painted
partridge lies in every fi eld, / And, for thy mess, is willing to be killed”
(29– 30). This image results not only in a ham- handed erasure of labor,
but also, in Williams’s estimation, in the description of community as
nothing more than a conglomeration of consumers.

Certainly, Jonson’s

poem reeks of ideological mystifi cation, placed as it is in no discernible
history. However, what ever its deceptive intentions, it also insists that
a force is required for community, that it is not simply the case that
community occurs, or that all one needs to do is pour chaos into the
appropriate container.

Aemilia Lanyer’s apparently more elegiac poem makes this obsession

with present communal forces even more apparent, transforming an
occasion of loss, Margaret Clifford’s departure from Cookham, into
the fantasy of a future exercise of justice that would ground sociability.
For Lanyer, it is justice, even vengeance, that enables the production of
a restored and renovated community in the future, as a reaction against
a punctual event. Yet this occasion itself seems to be only an example
of the general eschatological reversals that will reform the world. Un-
like Jonson’s dubious expulsion of venality and greed from Penshurst,
Lanyer’s evocation of the country house recognizes that class and the
city always return to destroy egalitarian pastoral interludes, that there
is neither ideological nor nostalgic escape:

Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:

“Upon Appleton House”

171

Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a diffrence is there in degree.
Many are placed in those Orbes of state,
Parters in honour, so ordain’d by Fate;
Neerer in show, yet farther off in love,
In which, the lowest always are above.

Of course, Lanyer’s implication that the high shall be made low and the
low rendered high is a revolutionary threat, as well as an entirely or-
thodox Christian sentiment. The poem begins with the innocuous in-
junction to choose heavenly trea sures instead of worldly vanities: “Or,
as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasures, / Which are desir’d above all
earthly trea sures” (15– 16). In contrast, “the lowest always are above”
makes a point that is much more threatening, if nonetheless conven-
tional. It is not just that the phrase turns love into a competition with
winners and losers. Even were we to insulate it from this charge, love
still carries a threat in these lines, the one that Deleuze describes as the
triumphalist desire to give without taking:

For this is what was already horrible— the manner in which
Christ loved. This is what would permit a religion of Power to
be substituted for the religion of love. In Christ’s love, there
was a kind of abstract identifi cation, or worse, an ardor to
give without taking anything. . . . Found by Mary Magdalene,
who wants to give up everything for him, he perceives a small
glimmer of triumph in the woman’s eye, an accent of triumph in
her voice— and he recognizes himself in it. Now this is the same
glimmer, the same accent, of those who take without giving.

Lanyer’s poem makes apparent the class resentments and violently de-
structive fantasies that undergird this genre of poems and their valori-
zation of pastoral equality. Moreover, it also exposes the violently
revolutionary sentiments that inhabit pastoral Christianity. Christ’s
return— a loving revelation— will completely revalue and ultimately
destroy existing hierarchies. For Lanyer, however, in the present, this
revaluation is discernible only as reversal: The low shall be made high,
and vice versa. As opposed to intensifying the idyllic, unreal idleness
of pastoral with self- sacrifi cing herds, Lanyer offers an apocalyptic,
future justice as the real foundation for community. The differences
between Lanyer’s future event and Jonson’s immanent natural force
matter because they show that, at its origin, the country- house genre

172

How Poems End

exhibits a marked concern with the immanent forces that bind com-
munities and with the apocalypse as an imminent event that would
found a nonresentful community. Lanyer’s and Jonson’s poems do not
simply differ on the subject of class and its per sis tence within pastoral
or country- house retreats. They present disparate accounts of when a
just social order occurs, and of whether that occurrence entails a com-
ing reversal, as Lanyer believes, or merely a present distinction, as in
Jonson’s emphasis on Penshurst’s singularity.

Marvell’s contribution to the genre attempts to meld the immanent

force of Jonson’s poem with the imminent eschatological promise of
Lanyer’s and, in the pro cess, to give to revolution some of the promise
of apocalyptic transformation. Unlike Lanyer, Marvell is not content to
delay an ultimately just community. Such an approach always entails
reducing the apocalypse to little more than a decoding operation, which
assumes that what really matters is elsewhere, written in some other
text that will be revealed in time. But neither does he offer the vitalist
force of the pathetic fallacy that marks “To Penshurst.” Instead, “Upon
Appleton House,” by focusing on the temporal event of fi guration, pres-
ents, at least tacitly, a homology between poetic and po liti cal events.
Moreover, Marvell refuses to worry, as Williams does, about the dangers
of an aestheticized politics that such a homology implies.

In this

respect, “Upon Appleton House” follows the same pattern as do the
po liti cal encomia to Cromwell, Villiers, and Hastings. Marvell’s poem
provokes unease not merely because it participates in a genre that ro-
manticizes and ideologically justifi es devotion to a munifi cent benefac-
tor and requires demystifi cation as a result. Rather, his verse maintains
that aesthetics is the only way to do politics and that the aesthetic is not
a mere means to in de pen dent po liti cal ends. Reversals, oppositions, dec-
larations, and allegiances, as we have already seen in the Cromwell tril-
ogy, are not politics but the results of politics, conceived as the operation
of forces. This poem is rife with iconographic enigmas precisely so as to
imagine the temporal force of this type of aesthetic politics. Although
criticism sometimes registers this phenomenon as elusive ambiguity, we
should instead read it as more of Marvell’s interest in the nature of sym-
bolic forces and in what it means for a symbol to occur in a poem, and
not just to be recognized as having occurred.

Although Marvell does seem interested in appropriating the immi-

nent justice of “The Description of Cooke- ham,” the triumphalist apoc-
alypse that Lanyer describes is strikingly absent from “Upon Appleton

“Upon Appleton House”

173

House.” Moreover, it even seems to be an object of scorn in Marvell’s
account of the fearful, resentful birds who attempt to nest securely
below the mowers’ scythes:

Unhappy birds! What does it boot
To build below the grass’ root;
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?

52.409–12

In contrast to Lanyer’s poem, the low are not assured triumph, always
coming out above, and the apocalypse appears as a much more indis-
criminate destruction. Marvell’s implication seems to be that reversal
is attractive only insofar as it offers a secure direction toward victory
for the downtrodden, that a truly inverting pro cess cannot be so fi rmly
tied to a purposive, rational system of justice. In the end, it grounds
neither an ethics nor a politics. The mower who kills the rail does so
accidentally, and this death has signifi cance only as a refl ection of the
mower’s own fate:

With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
These massacre the grass along:
While one, unknowing, carves the rail,
Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail.
The edge all bloody from its breast
He draws, and does his stroke detest;
Fearing the fl esh untimely mowed
To him a fate as black forbode.

50.393–400

The black fate signaled by this accident is, of course, that of an early,
indiscriminate, insignifi cant death, one that cannot be retroactively
recuperated into a just order precisely because of its inopportune
untimeliness. The poem does not provide an ultimate goal for this
entropic accident, one that would at least point toward a meaningful
terminus. If there is reassurance in these lines, it comes from readers
who willfully translate foreboding into foreshadowing and, as a con-
sequence, turn chance into a progressive learning opportunity inside
a stable narrative.

174

How Poems End

Yet the rail’s fate also does not appear as a lesson in kairos, prompt-

ing readers to prepare for and await the arrival of a pivotal opportu-
nity. The bird’s appearance in the poem intensifi es contingency, the
sense that preparation for contingency does not amount to better pre-
diction or a keener recognition of signifi cant patterns. As Ann Berthoff
notes, what is unexpected is not the rail’s death and its entirely pre-
dictable signifi cance but the transformation of this moment into a
comedy of literalization:

The unexpected death of the rail— the sudden, dramatic intru-
sion of discord is a characteristic development in pastoral and
the masque— quickly becomes a comic interlude. . . . Speculation
on the fearful signifi cance of this untimely death is cut short by
the appearance of ‘bloody Thestylis.’ . . . This astonishing trick
of having a meta phor come to life is comparable to having a
fi gure unmask.

Simultaneously unpre ce dented and predictable, the rail’s death is an
example of the bind in which all apocalyptic expectation fi nds itself.
Thestylis’s intervention, as we will see in the next section, transforms
this moment from a serene contemplation of the paradoxes inherent
in eschatology into something other than one more treatment of the
apocalypse as a matter of refl ective or typological signs. The end of
time might mean something, but it does not mean in the safe ways to
which we are accustomed.

Just as Marvell is not a craven company man who mocks the ability

of the low to “clownishly ascend” (8.60), neither does he offer here a
conservative and consoling existential despair: We are all doomed to
be equal in death, so we should despair of worldly transformation and
await a deferred revelatory transformation. The symbol does not just
mean that the world is already or ga nized as a series of insignifi cant
accidents, a situation in which signifi cation operates as a structural order
that transmits a message of existential despair, or apocalyptic hope.
Contrary to Margarita Stocker’s argument, Marvell does not invert
the value of catastrophe, evoking the New Jerusalem via allusions to
the Book of Revelation.

This alternative, a pro cess that translates im-

minent forces into an always deferred hermeneutic problem, drives one
into the endless chiasmi— I wield stories and language, but am also
constituted by them— with which we are so familiar from literary criti-
cal debates about the nature of signs. As Agamben notes, this is always

“Upon Appleton House”

175

the problem with imminence, its tendency to treat ends as impossibly
receding in time:

What is at risk here is a delay implicit in the concept of “transi-
tional time,” for, as with every transition, it tends to be pro-
longed into infi nity and renders unreachable the end that it
supposedly produces. . . . The end of time is actually a time-
image represented by a fi nal point on the homogeneous line of
chronology. But as an image devoid of time, it is itself impos-
sible to seize hold of, and, consequently, tends to infi nitely defer
itself. . . . The fallacy lies in changing operational time into a
supplementary time added onto chronological time, in order to
infi nitely postpone the end.

The apocalyptic event that would arrive both to change and to end
everything cannot, then, arrive from elsewhere, the transcendent irrupt-
ing into the continuity of time, for this is to confuse space with time yet
again. Paradoxically, it is to treat this transcendent realm as also less
real than the immanent one into which it irrupts. Instead, if we are at-
tempting to think a revelatory event, we must imagine it as a present
change in how time itself operates. In Agamben’s terms, this is precisely
what poetry does to time and why it is a special site for the examination
of messianism: “It is not that there is another time, coming from who-
knows- where, that would substitute for chronological time; to the con-
trary, what we have is the same time that organizes itself through its
own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in order to make place for the
time of the poem.”

Signifi cant events do not then arrive from else-

where, even if that elsewhere is construed as a cloaked providential nar-
rative. Instead, revelation appears as an immanent, forceful alteration of
temporal order, because that is how ends must appear. A transcendent
arrival merely changes the subject. It imagines ending as nothing more
than interrupting a conversation. And as with all conversations, it can
never think of its ending as a present possibility.

Marvell, in contrast to the compensatory accounts of community

present in other country- house poems, offers a presently possible apoc-
alypse as the only community, but one whose presence is not the same
thing as Lanyer’s retributive justice, a reassuring new order, or even its
promise. Instead of asking readers to oscillate between the imminent
arrival of novelty and the immanent presence of arrival’s action, “Upon
Appleton House” asks us to imagine imminence as itself an exercise of

176

How Poems End

force in the present, a force through which community occurs. Marvell
treats pastoral and apocalyptic symbols as forces instead of nodes for
comparative evaluation precisely so as to avoid imagining a hopeful
second coming as a tale already written, a tired event already accom-
plished elsewhere and retold here. Such a story would have no force
or value, precisely because it would be just and merely that— a story.
For Marvell, however, revelation is not a narrative whose last page is
currently withheld from readers by a sadistic, paternalistic author.
After all, the apocalypse is not characterized by suspense— we already
know what happens at the end, but not how the end could possibly
happen.

Thestylis’s appearance during the mowing episode stages an ending
that is simultaneously an interpretive intervention and an attempt to
render, temporally and literally, the poem’s own comparisons. On
the one hand, it reveals Marvell’s fundamental impatience with sus-
penseful narrative and hermeneutic models of the apocalypse, those
that attempt to think all change as a matter of the retrospective rec-
ognition of past change. On the other, it confl ates the reading of meta-
phor with the physical and temporal making of comparisons, with
the present acts that produce a world of resemblances. When Thesty-
lis jumps to the parable of manna from the speaker’s comparison of
the mowers and Israelites, she stages inside the poem what looks to
be a completely legitimate interpretation. In fact, the pivotal mas-
quing stanza, at the poem’s midpoint, invites precisely such herme-
neutic acts:

No scene that turns with engines strange
Does oft’ner than these meadows change.
For when the sun the grass hath vexed,
The tawny mowers enter next;
Who seem like Israelites to be,
Walking on foot through a green sea.

49.385–90

Two stanzas later, of course, Thestylis appears to have overheard the
speaker’s meditation and exhorts the mowers to turn meta phorical

“Upon Appleton House”

177

comparisons into reality. The mower’s scythe has just killed the low-
nesting rail when she intervenes:

But bloody Thestylis, that waits
To bring the mowing camp their cates,
Greedy as kites, has trussed it up,
And forthwith means on it to sup:
When on another quick she lights,
And cries, ‘He called us Israelites;
But now, to make his saying true,
Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew.’

51.401–8

By the end of the stanza on the mowers’ victory, the narrator has ad-
opted, at least in part, Thestylis’s hermeneutic role as well, interpreting
for us the poem’s own meta phors, explicitly transposing mowing and
warfare: “The women that with forks it fl ing, / Do represent the pillag-
ing” (53.423– 24). In this middle passage of “Upon Appleton House,”
the poem stages the purportedly authoritative event of a speaker’s her-
meneutic pronouncements alongside the bloody literalism of Thestyl-
is’s intervention. That is, Thestylis’s lines confl ate the act of recognizing
meta phorical substitutions and the act of forcing the world to conform
to these fi gural equivalences: “ ‘But now, to make his saying true, / Rails
rain for quails, for manna, dew’ ” means, on the one hand, that it just so
happens that these symbolic equivalences occur— as in “some mysteri-
ous force (probably another narrative script) makes the rails substitute
for quails, and dew for manna.” On the other hand, this line is also an
order addressed to the mowers, as in “in order to make the speaker’s
comparison valid, you mowers must keep killing rails and make them
fall like the quails of Exodus 16:13– 15 or Numbers 11:31– 34.”

According to this logic, active agents can make the apocalypse occur in
the present, can make a prophetic saying true, now. Meta phors do
not simply correspond to already existent resemblances. Even the dis-
tinction between the comparison pairs, rails– quails and manna– dew,
highlight this issue: Taking dew for manna is an interpretive act, not a
violent one, like killing more rails. But that seems precisely the point of
this sequence, that the distinction between contemplative interpreta-
tion and agential action does not hold, and that the mechanism of epis-
temological reversal that grounds such a model of po liti cal and poetic
change is misguided.

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How Poems End

The metapoetic and self- referential elements of Thestylis’s interven-

tion do not ultimately reveal a reserved and tolerant Marvell in opposi-
tion to the vengeful justice of Lanyer. Rather, Thestylis imagines herself
as the fulfi llment of the biblical epithet but in so doing maintains that
typological resemblance is never enough to secure such meta phorical
equations. As Berthoff remarks, Thestylis proceeds to unmask or act
out the symbolic equation.

This passage does not return us to a confl ict

between activity and passivity. Instead, Marvell attempts to take seri-
ously the status of the apocalypse as a transparent or pure sign, what
it would mean for this thing to occur without the opportunity for a
necessarily retroactive interpretation: It is the end, after all. Thestylis’s
per for mance of meta phor is part of this insistence that an imminently
present meta phor can happen in the present. The other name for this
phenomenon is, of course, literalization. Even if Marvell the man thinks
that justice or the apocalypse is written and complete in some other
text, his poetry does not think that our job is to decode it and then to
accept it passively or to support and enact it freely, actively, or perfor-
matively. Our options are not constrained to agreement or disagree-
ment, and words, especially literary ones, amount to more than pleas
for allegiance.

Contrary to Marshall Grossman’s argument, then, the Thestylis

episode shows that the apocalypse is not the same thing as a provi-
dential plan:

Moral virtue is the ability to recognize the pattern as it devel-
ops, to discover one’s destiny in time to choose it, and thus to
construct one’s life as a narrative text. . . . The belief that one’s
present acts become legible only when understood as signs in
an incompletely known text, existing in an impenetrably alien
atemporal matrix, engenders a sharp discontinuity between the
self as subject of one’s acts and the self as subjected to the
transcendental totality of Providence.

Grossman’s account reaffi rms the fundamental link between narrative
and the juridical, making of self- location within an incompletely known
providential story the mark of virtue. But as was the case with Milton,
the problem of the event, the new, and liberty exceeds the juridical
worldview that undergirds debates about agency and determinism.
Instead of deferring to a future text, one that will be revealed in time,

“Upon Appleton House”

179

Marvell treats the immanent signs of his own poem as aesthetic events,
distinct from repre sen ta tional, comparative, or hermeneutic ones. And
even his imminent signs insist that the arrival one awaits is not the ar-
rival of a story or an interpretation, a retroactive structure that would
show us the order that was there or being built, to which we were at the
time impervious. Such an eschatological sign cannot be read and inter-
preted after the fact, because it is the end of signs. For Marvell, this is
the way to prevent transformation from occurring, not the way to effect
it. In fact, the point of the rebus that Grossman describes is to arrest
the relay between narratives, not to serve as the pivot from one already
written tale to another. The apocalypse is more than pattern recognition,
or choosing the already discovered, in short. It promises a revelation to
end narrative, one that could happen in the present without beginning,
yet once more, another story.

Even were we to read the Thestylis episode as a parable denouncing

naïve literalism or misinterpretation, instead of as a legitimate acting
out of symbolic force, the poem would still reveal Marvell’s funda-
mental disavowal of hermeneutic apocalypses. Thestylis, of course, is
not wrong to jump to the parable of manna, because the speaker ex-
plicitly compares the mowers and Israelites on the basis of a shared
desert wandering: “Who seem like Israelites to be, / Walking on foot
through a green sea” (49.389– 90). And as we have seen, the speaker
interprets her own comparisons as well, comparing the forking of hay
to the pillaging that succeeds a victorious battle (53.423– 24). The allu-
sions to Exodus and Numbers and the radial reading that they require
are precisely what hermeneutics, intertextuality, and even just compari-
son are all about and, thus, the poem does not, and cannot, really resist
them. Rather, what matters in this middle passage of “Upon Appleton
House” is that the poem stages the event of meta phorical and herme-
neutic recognition, whether one solves the ambiguity or not, as utterly
irrelevant to the force of revelation. Thestylis retroactively recognizes
a meta phor, asks the mowers to make it true, and changes the meaning
of the original comparison as a result of this recognition and request.
Or she maintains that this change is already the product of the initial
comparison. In either case, these stanzas depict meaning as divorced
from fulfi llment or revelation, not because the reader, Thestylis, mis-
interprets, but because she thinks of reading incorrectly, as a fulfi ll-
ment that amounts either to recognizing another hidden text or to
shaping the world to resemble this allusive model. She thinks that

180

How Poems End

the new world is already written and that her job, at best, is to feign
surprise when it arrives, even though she has already deciphered all
of the signs heralding its coming or actively sought to make these signs
true. Marvell does not understand the apocalypse as such a coy drama.
Our job as readers of a poem, apocalyptic or otherwise, is not to
pretend ignorance, knowing all along that a hermeneutic explana-
tion of events will arrive to save us. In contrast, Marvell presents sym-
bols as accessible temporal forces whose effects are not scripted and
that do not require the elaborate duplicity and social paranoia that
Thestylis stages.

After lamenting the unhappy birds’ fate as a result of the mowers’

indiscriminate destruction, and after deducing the appropriate moral
from the parable of the rails, the poem offers a line whose provenance
seems impenetrable:

Unhappy birds! What does it boot
To build below the grass’ root;
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?
And now your orphan parents call
Sounds your untimely funeral.
Death- trumpets creak in such a note,
And ’tis the sourdine in their throat.

Or sooner hatch or higher build:
The mower now commands the fi eld

52.409–53.418

In what direction does “or sooner hatch or higher build” point? Does
it suggest that what comes before is irrelevant, because the mowers have
triumphed, as in “regardless of whether you hatch sooner or build higher,
the mowers are now in charge”? Or does this line continue, into stanza
53, the rhetorical question from the preceding stanza, as in “what does
it help to build lower, let alone hatch earlier or build higher”? In both
of these instances, “Or sooner hatch or higher build” reaffi rms the fatal-
ism of the rhetorical question, either by continuing it or reiterating that
escape is impossible. However, it is equally plausible that this line is
not part of the rhetorical question at all but a response to a real ques-
tion, one that promises a self- consciously willed and free escape. “Or,”
then, along with the stanza break, would mark a rejection of the despair-
ing fatalism of the preceding stanza, holding out hope for a future

“Upon Appleton House”

181

embodied, perhaps, in the mowers’ control of the fi eld. At issue in the
use of this single conjunction, in fact, is the same feigned surprise that
we have already seen present in Thestylis’s per for mance. Is novelty
something more than the feigned surprise of a hermeneut? If the disjunc-
tive conjunction redundantly repeats the rhetorical question, it seems
that we are thrown back into the world of a co- opted apocalypticism.
If “or,” on the other hand, actually marks a disjunction that moves us out
of such an interpretive eschatology, it would also be a forceful symbol
within the poem, the moment where something happens, precisely as
the promise of hatching and building in the future. In short, does “or”
designate a disjunctive pair, nonetheless imagined as a spatially paired
unity, even in dissonance? Or does it mark a temporal transition into
a novel future?

The ambiguity of this line encapsulates the interchange between

agency and constraint that Grossman anatomizes: “The oscillation be-
tween space and time, between pictorial and verbal text, between de-
scription and narration in Marvell’s poem can be seen as an (ironically)
allegorical repre sen ta tion of the way the self both produces and is
produced by its language on one level and its history on another.”

What is most important in Grossman’s reading of the poem is that it
tacitly assumes that there is no event within the poem itself, only one
within its meaning. Oscillation occurs in the realm of signifi cance, not
in the realm of text. That presupposition seems fundamentally at odds
with these two stanzas, especially as any interpretation requires an event
to occur within the verse. Either a digressive explanation of lowness’s
insecurity— the passage on orphan parents and their “Death- trumpets”
(52.413– 16)—interrupts the rhetorical question or “Or sooner hatch
or higher build” marks a shift away from the fatalism of the rhetorical
question, readopts the vein of admonishment, and holds out the possi-
bility of change after all. In either case, something happens, either within
stanza 52 or between these two stanzas, and then interpretation comes
to account for it. The problem with the concept of reversal, though, is
that it ignores this event written within its own logic, marked in this
case by “Or,” fi nding it either self- evident or uninteresting, and, in turn,
takes the result of oscillation, ambiguity, for its force. In other words,
ambiguity does not happen in a poem but in an interpretation of a
poem. “Upon Appleton House,” though, locates the pivotal event—
whether fate is written elsewhere and it is pointless to resist; whether
one can really escape from such scripting via action; whether novelty
is anything more than a redundant repetitiveness, marked by the illusion

182

How Poems End

of change— within this conjunction, in the fi rst line of a new stanza,
heralding both connection and transition. Most important, though,
again, is that something happens here, in the poem, at the moment of
this word’s appearance.

As I have suggested in the case of Thestylis’s acting out of meta phor,

Marvell’s literalized fi gures seem a response to this interpretive conun-
drum, an attempt not to erase fi guration by returning to some mystical
transparency but rather to highlight the event of a symbol itself.

Literalization, then, is the way to overcome a blindness to the event
within fi guration and to attend to the temporal sequence of comparison’s
occurrence. As a result, “Upon Appleton House” treats similarity less as
a map of transitive substitutions and more as a series of likenesses that
appears in the present time of the poem: an itinerary, of sorts. After “Or
sooner hatch or higher build,” the mowers reappear as an impersonal
force: “The mower now commands the fi eld; / In whose new traverse
seemeth wrought / A camp of battle newly fought” (53.418– 20). The
mower is like a soldier and, in turn, the mower and soldier together
are antitypes of a mowing messiah, whose destructive force clears the
way for renovation.

However, as Colie notes, the traditional meta-

phorical sequence is inverted in “Upon Appleton House”: typically,
the soldier is like a mower.

Importantly, it is not just the terms that

reverse but the entire sequence: The real world of military violence is
not softened, rationalized, or even explained by recourse to the imagi-
nary georgic. Instead, the georgic resembles at least the results of real
violence, which are, in turn and implicitly, like the mowing messiah.
Through these sequential alterations, which echo those in “The Gar-
den,”

Marvell does not produce ambiguity but rather shows how the

same is not a destination, and particularly not one that incorporates
mower, soldier, and messiah into a seamless, transitive, spatial equation.
The sequence of similarities matters not so that we can retrace how we
reached the present typological fulfi llment. Rather, the way in which
mower, soldier, and messiah are the same matters, the sequence matters,
because the events within the sequence, the irreversible, momentary
forces that occur within this string, are what matters in a literalized
verse. Marvell’s poetry is insistently a moving energia in this respect,
but one that refuses to reduce energy to a directionless, easily redirected
pullulation.

What Marvell has done with the country- house poem is very much

the same as what he does with Cromwell. He has not merely recon-

“Upon Appleton House”

183

ciled opposites, either via confl ation or dialectical opposition, but rather
has moved forces and events outside the opposition of inert sameness
and dynamic difference.

Moreover, force does not just unite or distin-

guish, and to reduce it to such goals erases its substance, the fact that
it is worthy of attention as movement, event, and relation. Events are not
on the road to restoring unity out of chaos and neither are they mired
in continuity, wishing to evolve or dreaming of an external eruption of
difference. Instead, events are executions of force, even within poems,
that may submit to interpretation but are not resistant to or the op-
posite of interpretation.

If, as Stocker maintains, “Marvell is the lyric poet of apocalypse,”

then we should stop trying to treat him as its narrative, romance, or epic
poet. A lyric apocalypse is not a fanciful prolepsis or meta phorization
of a historical unfolding but rather an insistence that symbolic relations,
because they act immanently, are the only things that can end a world
or make a new one.

Revelation does not offer a transcendent vantage

from which to look back and interpret a series of interconnected apoc-
alyptic signs. As he did with the concepts of liberty and allegiance,
Marvell eschews any notion of the future that imagines itself looking
backward, reinterpreting signs after the fact, because this is to imagine
liberation as not really free and ends as not really ends.

The relationship between the poem’s William Fairfax episode and

its later praise for Thomas and Mary Fairfax forms perhaps the best
sequential example of Marvell’s disavowal of a narrative or typologi-
cal understanding of events, one that would rely on a fi nal signifi cant
fulfi llment as the mechanism for both terminating and evaluating a se-
quence. According to such a structure, a sequence ends in culmination
and can be judged a success once it has achieved this culmination.
Instead, Marvell offers a symbol, acting with both immanent and immi-
nent force in the poem, as the only possible mechanism for endings,
poetic or apocalyptic. As we saw in the case of Thestylis’s raining rails, a
confi rming event is necessary for a parabolic promise to be true. Mar-
vell’s literalization simply affi rms that this confi rming event occurs within
the poem, not in some prospective, hermeneutic future. Thus, the fi rst
Fairfax, who rescues Isabel Thwaites from the clutches of farcical but
dangerous nuns, certainly prefi gures the second. But, as was the case with
the mowers– warriors sequence, this is not just conventional typology. The
convent’s re sis tance is a real intervention within history, a literalization,
even, that attempts to thwart the typological Fairfacian destiny:

184

How Poems End

Is not this he whose offspring fi erce
Shall fi ght through all the universe;
And with successive valour try
France, Poland, either Germany;
Till one, as long since prophesied,
His horse through conquered Britain ride?
Yet, against fate, his spouse they kept;
And the great race would intercept.

31.241–48

The nuns’ attempt to thwart Thomas’s typological fulfi llment fails,
whereas Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne in “The Garden,” “only that she
might laurel grow” (29), succeeds, but in both cases typology is not
merely a way of looking at the world, a powerless epistemological per-
spective. It is a symbolic force that has immediate temporal power, which
can be impeded or promoted. “Upon Appleton House” does not reaffi rm
in this moment that interpretation matters, that how one conceives the
world changes how one acts within it, itself a reassertion of the subject’s
or ga niz ing agency. Instead, interpretation, fi gured here as essentially
typological, ceases to be a retrospective action outside the poem and,
instead, becomes a force within it. That is, the contemplating, deliber-
ating, and delaying self no longer acts as the principle of mediation
between imagination and action.

The culmination of this typological sequence, Thomas Fairfax, is not

the culmination of the poem, however: That is, the end is not the end.
Mary Fairfax appears as the immanent embodiment of a present order-
ing power, but one that also renovates the world in which she operates:

But by her fl ames, in heaven tried,
Nature is wholly vitrifi ed.

’Tis she that to these gardens gave
That wondrous beauty which they have;
She straightness on the woods bestows;
To her the meadow sweetness owes;
Nothing could make the river be
So crystal- pure but only she;
She yet more pure, sweet, straight, and fair,
Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers are.

86.687–87.695

“Upon Appleton House”

185

This entirely conventional compliment ultimately returns us to the
problem of containment. What does it mean for Mary Fairfax’s lesser
world to contain the same, “but in more decent order tame” (96.766)?
Or for her to be “heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap. / And Paradise’s only
map” (96.767– 68)? In some ways, this is the basic problem of the micro-
cosm. What does it mean for it to contain the macrocosm? But it also
catches in its net the broader problem of the operation of events within
verse. Does the poem lead up to Mary as an epitome, a symbol or cap-
stone for the entire previous historical sequence? And if so, are epito-
mes a logical fulfi llment reached by explanation— in the same way
that Herrick’s poem explains and supports its praise for Pemberton?
Or does even this model of interpretive development subsume lyric
events under narrative?

Ends are not the same thing as resolutions and conclusions, as

Stocker’s argument shows. She maintains that Marvell’s poems end
as all eschatologies must, with a fi nal image of the end, not its prop-
ositional summation or really any other type of rhetorical appeal:
“In the allusion to mortality and universal End this Final Image ends
an eschatological poem with the only image that could properly do
this— an image of the End itself.”

Yet in a system of resemblance,

endings have no viable analogues. Any sketch, however provisional,
that one provides of them will allow for endless additive fi gures and
substitutions, in perpetuity. “Upon Appleton House” does not follow
such a system in presenting its multiple typological endings as funda-
mentally impossible. The poem itself presents at least two typologi-
cal ends: Thomas and Mary Fairfax, the latter not quite the same
sort of teleological end as the former. It seems, then, that fi nality is
not enough to secure an end, but not because of fi guration’s weak-
ness. Instead, fi nality itself must be marked and doubled by an event
confi rming this fi nality, an immanent symbol that does not just con-
tinue an infi nitely long chain of deferred, signifi cant, similar, immi-
nent ends.

Colie implies as much when she contends that, unlike Isabella

Thwaites in the nun’s seductive appeal, Mary is not “like” the Virgin.

In the nun’s subtle speech, “She [the Virgin] you [Isabella] resembles
much” (17.132). Mary Fairfax’s fi rst appearance in the poem, in con-
trast, emphasizes both her indistinguishability from the natural world
and her escape from a system of comparison. The fl owers, after all, do
not send her any volleys of praise:

186

How Poems End

None for the virgin Nymph; for she
Seems with the fl owers a fl ower to be.
And think so still! though not compare
With breath so sweet, or cheek so fair.

38.301–4

Mary seems to be a fl ower, when she is with the fl owers, but should
not really be compared to them. This passage is not just a traditional
self- sublating simile. The imperative here, paradoxically, is to think
that she seems to be within the genus of fl owers, part of that category,
but not to compare her to the elements of that category. As a fl ower,
she epitomizes fl owers but is not then like fl owers, or the Blessed Virgin
Mary, for that matter. She acts, in this sense, as an or ga niz ing force, even
perhaps as a container, that does not for all that fulfi ll, surpass, or re-
verse what we already know about fl owers and their signifi cance. This
is what it means to vitrify, to burn to the point that nature becomes
glass, a diamond- hard symbol itself and a crystalline mirror. The poem
then stages two apotheoses, rejecting the fi rst, Thomas’s, as a decep-
tively false sequence of similitudes and endorsing the second, Mary’s,
precisely because it resists the impulse to turn similarity into an au-
thorization for substitution. Mary does not replace the Virgin, and
neither is she the culmination of a typological sequence. Her status
as a symbolic epitome— she neither substitutes nor fulfi lls but rather
condenses and, simultaneously, subtracts or cuts— also explains why
the apocalypse over which she presides is so calm, not the radical
upheaval that one would expect if this were really about revolution
and reversal.

Stocker’s account of Marvell’s apocalypticism, in contrast, tends to

confl ate symbol and typology, making of the former the unproblem-
atic badge of the latter’s accomplishment. Thus, she claims that the
evocation of heraldry in the fi nal stanza of “The Mower’s Song” itself
amounts to a type of renovation:

And thus, ye meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my tomb

25–28

Stocker maintains that the mower’s suicidal destruction transforms
into renovation as a result of “heraldry,” or the poetic sign that contin-

“Upon Appleton House”

187

ues after his death.

We have witnessed this equation of trophies and

tombs before in the elegy for Villiers, an equation that emphasizes the
violence of such symbol- making: “Till the whole Army by just ven-
geance come / To be at once his trophy and his tomb” (127– 28). Even
if we bracket the violent force of heraldic symbols, how exactly would
the perpetuation of the sign itself mean renovation, regeneration, or
change? And how does grass become a heraldic symbol? Is it nothing
more than the mower’s assertion that makes it so? The point is that this
model of constructive destruction does not really do what it claims to
do, showing how destruction inverts fi nally into construction, commem-
oration, or renovation. Instead, it palms this work off onto the preserv-
ing force of the symbol, confl ating its signifi cance with the event of its
constitution and treating substitution as equivalent to transformation.
But replacement is change of only a very limited sort. It abandons what
has come before as hopelessly recalcitrant, reactionary, or lost, in effect
equating presence and absence, a too per sis tent past and an irremedia-
bly lost one. In so doing, it turns novelty into an endless series of me-
tonymies, simultaneously full of associational meaning and resistant
to any formal alteration in the pro cess of meaning. Yet as Mary’s status
as a symbolic epitome and usher of a calm apocalypse indicates, Mar-
vell’s verse does not consider signifi cant substitution an eschatology or
even a teleology. The purportedly typological sequence in “Upon Apple-
ton House” merely lays bare the duplicity of a symbolic force imagined
only as a spatial, compensatory substitution. In this sense, symbols are
more complicated than the mute per sis tence of monuments, however
emotionally resonant or stolid.

It is by making eschatology into a competing providential narra-

tive, heralded by decipherable signs ready to be interpreted by active
readers, that one reduces readers to the passivity and inert waiting
that Martin describes. This hermeneutic model essentially moderates
the end times, making the end of time just another sign, just another
narrative in need of reconciliation, just another parable about the in-
teraction of activity and passivity. In this respect, Marvell is writing,
prospectively and much earlier than Milton’s engagement with this
issue in his major poems, an account of how and why revolutions fail.
The apocalypse is not just another idyllic or utopian story, or one re-
counting the inevitability of the fi ckle hand of fate. Stocker admits as
much when she contends that Marvell gives pastoral a forward- looking
thrust and that he acknowledges its destructive aspect.

There exists

a confl ict between a nostalgic pastoral, which laments the degeneration

188

How Poems End

of order but affi rms that this degeneration still occurs on a generic
continuum, and a supplanting, forward- looking, dare we say apoca-
lyptic pastoral, which offers the possibility of fundamental transfor-
mation.

“Upon Appleton House” shows how the hermeneutic bent

within a revolutionary millenarian thought ends up impeding not only
transformation but also the very possibility of endings. It is not just that
one muddles around in mysteries beyond human ken. Rather, the dan-
ger of such an interpretive apocalypse is that it is not an apocalypse at
all because it insists that Revelation leaves the worldly, familiar pro cess
of revelation the same and intact.

Ends then are not typological, an overcoming or surpassing of prior

models.

When the speaker enjoins the Nunappleton estate to affi rm

its pre ce dence over other gardens, via the power of Mary Fairfax, he
also thwarts precisely the comparative continuum that would allow
for such completion:

Employ the means you have by her,
And in your kind yourselves prefer;
That, as all virgins she precedes,
So you all woods, streams, gardens, meads.

94.749–52

One could read “precedes” and “prefer” within an already written con-
tinuum of evaluation and resemblance. Yet to do so decides what is
precisely at issue in these stanzas: the compatibility of continuity and
apocalyptic change, the possibility of fi guring, in both senses, the end.
If “precedes” means coming fi rst in rank along such an evaluative scale,
then the action of preceding is merely a spatial refl ection of this already
existent narrative, an event already mapped. If “precedes” is a tempo-
ral action that does not refl ect such a written plan, then Mary Fairfax,
like Cromwell, through her own side her fi ery way divides.

This is not

simply a problem of performativity, the forceful act that grounds ulti-
mate reference yet still requires a linguistic conditioning structure for
legibility. Rather, in Marvell’s hands, comparison rests on the similarity
of events’ occurrences, not a set of generic qualities that they happen to
possess after they occur. As a result, “Upon Appleton House” examines
not only what it means for comparisons to happen but also when it is
that one thing becomes similar to another. It is this question— when does
a symbol become identical to its referent, or a sign to its meaning?—

“Upon Appleton House”

189

that forms the crux of any attempt to apprehend revelation in a temporal
present.

When Nunappleton precedes all woods, streams, and gardens, in

the same way that Mary precedes all virgins, what exactly is similar
about the temporal event of preceding? It cannot just be the fact of
pre ce dence that grounds the comparison, for the stanza is hortatory.
Yet the emulation that this stanza demands is of a very specifi c sort:
Nunappleton should “precede” in the same fashion that Mary does.
How is it, exactly, that “preceding” is subject to adverbial modifi cation?
By contending that “preceding” is an action that has a proper disposi-
tion attached to it, “Upon Appleton House” insists that there is more
to it than just coming fi rst, appearing fi rst on a continuum of compa-
rable instances: Winning does not produce similarity; how one wins
does. Mary is certainly an epitome and symbol, but the manner in
which that symbol occurs matters, and it is that manner of appearing
that one must emulate—“as she all virgins precedes”— not the mere fact
of her pre ce dence as a mimetic model. When the speaker asks nature
to “in your kind yourselves prefer,” it means both “in your own way”
and “within your own category,” without the leaps and misuses of trans-
position, catachresis, and meta phor. It is this symbolic force, one that
fundamentally transforms comparison, analogy, and meta phor into
temporal forces as opposed to spatial cata logues of resemblance, that
Marvell uses, promotes, and anatomizes.

A similar image of self- mirroring categories occurs in “The Gar-

den,” in the stanza purportedly about withdrawal into the solitary
imagination:

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance fi nd;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas.

43–46

First, the ambiguity of “these” ends up thwarting the event of reversal,
precisely because it is not clear whether the mind transcends its own
constraining pro cesses of resemblance creation, a set of future worlds
and seas out there in the actual world, or the far other worlds and seas
that are actually identical to those resemblances in the mind. In short,
there is no way to determine what exactly is being reversed. As William

190

How Poems End

Empson notes, this problem is only accentuated by the fact that each
kind’s fi nding “straight its own resemblance” is itself ambiguous, and not
just because of the indeterminacy of “straight.”

When a kind fi nds its

own resemblance, does it see itself or its alter ego? Is the kind an indi-
vidual, reaffi rming its participation in a general category or kind? Or is
each kind itself a category, which in turn discovers its own resemblance?
“The Garden,” then, asks us to consider what exactly is similar to simi-
larity, to examine the moderating structure and purpose, if there is one,
of this mania for resemblance and connection. In this respect, it mirrors
those moments in “Upon Appleton House” when categories appear as
something other than analogous containers for entities with similar
qualities: when the elements of the estate—“fi elds, springs, bushes, fl ow-
ers” (94.745)— precede their own kinds (94.745– 52), as well as when
Mary participates in the category of fl owers (she seems one of them,
but not like them) (38.301– 4). As Lynn Enterline maintains, Marvell
dreams of a world beyond correspondence and difference, beyond the
logic of comparison, conceived either as constraining or reassuringly
ordering.

The transcendent creation of the resembling mind, in both

“The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House,” is not a substitutive or
metonymic pro cess, representing or expressing one thing with another.
The ability to transcend these newly discovered resemblances entails
the ability to escape the prevailing poetic logic of substitutive compari-
son that would turn all immanence into deferred imminence and all
imminence into the tired, pre- understood script of typology.

“Upon Appleton House” explores not just what utopias, idylls, and

the Book of Revelation mean but how they mean, what it means for
revealed meaning or a signifi cant event to happen, fi nally.

Thus, the

fi nal stanza emphasizes, as we have already noted, the temporality of
symbols’ eventful force:

But now the salmon- fi shers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise- like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go!
Let’s in: for the dark hemi sphere
Does now like one of them appear.

97.769–76

“Upon Appleton House”

191

As with “precedes” and “prefers,” “appear” has a double signifi cance,
meaning both resemblance and happening. On the one hand, the
hemi sphere seems like these amphibii, a comparative and interpre-
tive claim. On the other, just as the amphibii go, so too does the dark
hemi sphere arrive. They are similar in their happening, not in their
qualitative appearance. After all, both receive the temporal adverb
“now.”

As we have seen already in the case of “precedes,” what sense

does it make to compare arrivals? Do not all events arrive or happen
in the same way? . . . Voilà. Marvell, of course, answers this question
in the negative, insisting that attending to the nature of a force means
acknowledging that all events are not merely species of the same spa-
tial, consequentialist genus. This poem also suggests that we should
be able to offer more in response to pivotal events in our world than
bewildered surprise, which actually says more about the limitations
of our prognosticating capacities than it does about how things actu-
ally happen.

“Upon Appleton House” attempts to examine how revelation could

ever end anything, how it escapes the sort of perpetuation of the past
that we have seen elsewhere— in revolution, for example. In other words,
what’s new about the apocalypse? Reading this fi nal stanza as a matter
of hermeneutic reversal means ultimately to moderate apocalypticism,
making it a dialectical pro cess, surely, but also a fundamentally safe and
predictable one. If all arrivals are the same, then there is nothing par-
ticularly different, unnerving, surprising, or transformative about this
one. We all understand the appeal, perhaps even the necessity, of a theory
of revolution and the ideological oppositions that drive it. Marvell,
however, is having none of it. His verse shows us that there is no secure,
reserved position from which to perform such resistant critical reversals.
As we saw in the Cromwell poems, there is no judgment that is not also
an immanent, imaginative force, always at risk of accelerating the worst
kinds of fanat i cism and fascism as well as the most deplorably reac-
tionary of nostalgic idylls. The deployment of symbols in “Upon Apple-
ton House” matters because it presents revelatory force as something
different from the world and its systems of evaluation, but also as some-
thing accessible within this very world. It presents the apocalyptic and
transformative as true qualities of actions and events, and not merely
as the reactionary evaluations of results— a reading of history as noth-
ing more than that tedious tote board of winners and losers. It allows us,
fi nally, to stop obsessing over tactics, strategies, purposes, and inevitable

193

So ending, it turns out, is much more diffi cult than it appears. Modern
pop u lar psychology to the contrary, closure and resolution are actu-
ally quite easy, insofar as they turn the world into a series of problems
to be solved, riddles to be unraveled. Ending is diffi cult, for humans at
least, because it entails stopping something without being recognized
for doing so, either with the praise of one’s fellows or the spoils of vic-
tory in a strategic contest. The modern discomfort with endings can be
encapsulated in one concept: the “postapocalyptic.” The postapoca-
lyptic, no matter how horrifi c, promises us that the end is not really the
end, that time marches on as before, that there is a day after, from which
vantage we, true martyrs all, might refl ect, at least, on all the destruction
that we have wrought. The postapocalyptic reveals then our desire not
for resolution but for infi nite deferral itself, a desire fundamentally nar-
rative in nature. There must be a moment where the narrative refl ects
on and provides a moral for the entire series of events that has come
before. Even endings need closure. Lyrics, then, differ from narrative
precisely around this distinction between ending and closure: narratives
have or possess or show endings; lyrics end. As a result, their respective
termini ultimately treat events as different types of phenomena. As
Jonathan Culler’s account of the new lyric studies implies, narrative
places events in a series, perpetuating the notion that the present is a
fundamentally relational occasion, always threatening to slip away
into the past or future.

It is in this sense that narrative makes deferral

Conclusion

Revelation: Learning Freedom
and the End of Crisis

194 Conclusion

and inaccessibility the basic character of all temporal designations.
The present cannot be accessed because of its punctual fl eetingness. The
past recedes, from both the present and memory— a loss never recap-
turable. The future is always tantalizingly out of reach, a promise that
might have effects now but that never occurs in its own right. The
turtle of deferral, in short, all the way down.

Yet the alternative to a history of endless disappointment and inbuilt

lack is not merely the affi rmation of an oppositional presence. The now
of lyric cannot simply negate or oppose deferral with a positivist trans-
parency or brute facticity. The oscillation, dialectical or hermetically
cyclical, of coming to be and passing away that would ground such a
retort seems precisely what Milton and Marvell hope to avoid, by bat-
tening on potential and force, respectively, as mechanisms for imagin-
ing apocalyptically present events. In this sense, neither potential nor
force are responses at all, whether to the problem of absence, to the
absence of consensus that motivates a system like philosophical herme-
neutics, or to singular ruptures demanding equally singular responses
not constrained by structure or rule. As we have seen, even sheer chance
and surprise remain too bound up within a system of self- evident con-
tinuities to act as viable understandings of present events. It is still the
same subject, inert even in its riven fragmentation, who is always act-
ing surprised. All of these attempts at wrapping up and resolution, all
of these closural elements that provide a capstone to termini, are not
so much redundant additions to ends as they are betrayals of the nov-
elty of endings. Unsurprisingly, this treachery is one more example of
how we do not want what we claim to want— immanence, achieved in
the moment of a revelatory face- to- face—but rather desire the very elab-
orate delays that we consistently lament.

It is in this light that we should

consider Milton’s adaptation of the sonnet tradition and Marvell’s re-
thinking of the object of praise in encomia— as assaults on a desire and a
judgment always deferred. In a related vein, their approaches to pastoral
attempt to conceive ends in the present without the backward- looking
nostalgia of conclusion. They attempt to take seriously an apocalypse
that is a real end and not merely the false terminus that still allows us to
witness and witness for our successes and failures.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that two poets centrally involved

in revolutionary events, during a period that imagines transformation
through the lens of a consistently disappointed apocalyptic anticipation,
would obsess over the nature of ends. After all, an era that always
anticipates the second coming right around the corner, that considers

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

195

itself to be living in the end times, will consistently fall prey to disap-
pointment and turn, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a sustained interrogation
of the nature of conclusions. Yet as we well know, that interrogation
often amounts to little more than an exercise in resentment, attempt-
ing to discern who betrayed the revolution with a stab in the back, or
in a desired, even gleeful fatalism, reveling in the cynical knowledge of
the impossibility of the truly new. The same developmental structure, I
would argue, holds true in any era that considers itself uniquely poised
on the fulcrum of history, paranoically and pridefully expecting a catas-
trophe just around the corner. So then, every era. The contemporary
value of Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics lies in their pre sen ta tion of alter-
natives to these dispiriting and entirely predictable models, however
disquieting these alternatives’ utopian, anarchic, or even proto- fascistic
undertones might be to modern ears. The apocalypse is not merely an
eliminationist fantasy, one that we dismiss or celebrate in modernity
as either a benighted, vengeful primitivism or an impending punish-
ment for our enemies. These lyrics show it to be a means of thinking
about hope and change in the present, without the deceptive promises
of future deferral always undermining the substance of such consid-
erations. Milton’s and Marvell’s poems have value for us, then, not
because they give us ammunition in a po liti cal argument but because
they emphasize the ontological stakes of all historico- political discus-
sions. In treating transformation as an unproblematic phenomenon
recognized after the fact, we have willingly allowed the event of a
hopeful change to become almost permanently occulted. We embrace
a concept of the event in which it is always too late to do anything
about it. We choose only to learn from history— the most impotent tea
of po liti cal engagement— not because we cannot do anything else with
it but because our goal is to learn from the world, not to change it.

Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics, then, are signifi cant for modern readers,

but especially those in the business of education, because they reconceive
two of our most cherished po liti cal concepts, crisis and freedom, and
their relationship to learning. What, if anything, do we learn from crisis?
And can we learn to be free? In the former case, poetic events come to
abrogate the tame understanding of change embedded within any ac-
count of kairotic reaction, essentially the idea that we are driven by the
necessity of circumstance. A world populated by crises, punctual struc-
tural breakages that require response or solution, nonetheless produces
a populace passively waiting for problems to occur so that it might
fi nally spring into action.

It is the world of resentful comic- book

196 Conclusion

superheroes, one that thinks continuity a boring inertia and secretly
longs for cataclysm so that another savior can swoop in and save the
day. Almost needless to say, there is no saving this world because it
demands, melodramatically and narcissistically, the imminence of its
own destruction as the motor for all change. In the case of liberty, these
lyrics insist that the quest for revolutionary change, emancipation, or
even a positive autonomy ends up betraying freedom. Milton and Mar-
vell present the literary as a means of imagining freedom outside the
constraints of determination and reaction, and even outside the false
choice of positive and negative freedom. Both of these models, ulti-
mately, remain too bound to the law— as either an inescapable necessity
or a tutelage to be overcome— to be of use for either poet. The apoca-
lypse is an end to the law, which means that we should stop acceding to
its continued necessity, the notion that the New Jerusalem amounts to
nothing more than changing one’s representative in the legislature. It
turns out, ultimately, that naïve, even immature fantasies of a radical
freedom are much more diffi cult to sustain or even entertain than our
customary condemnations of adolescent yearnings would suggest.

The value of rethinking the nature of critical events in our present
historical situation seems almost beyond remarking. The twenty- fi rst-
century academy is rife with discourses of crisis, rivaled only, perhaps,
by the twenty- fi rst- century economy.

Yet rethinking crisis is not merely

a means of resisting the type of shock doctrine that Naomi Klein has
so persuasively anatomized.

One does not need seventeenth- century

poetry to reject the pervasive creation and exploitation of crises for
po liti cal purposes. Instead, Milton and Marvell offer a more funda-
mental reconceptualization of what happens at a moment of transfor-
mation, rejecting the neurotic handwringing entailed in the concept of
crisis. Their abrogation of tension, anxiety, confl ict, and struggle ulti-
mately defuses crisis as a valuable po liti cal tool. When we talk about
change, in the twenty- fi rst- century present, we essentially mean little
more than a desperate, slavish reaction to problems. There’s very little
novel, much less transformative, about responding to punctual crises
that demand attention: That is, at best, responsibility; at worst, neces-
sity. The possibility that we do not understand what a critical event is,
that these recurrent crises are precisely manufactured to constrain

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

197

novelty within a system of invented demand and productive response—
demand and supply, question and answer, problem and solution— is
precisely what cannot be thought. In other words, reactive response is
not new, and we mistake adaptability and endurance for transforma-
tive change if we treat them as such.

The attempt to think the event of

change outside this reactionary straitjacket is what these lyrics offer.
And it is precisely for this reason that they have far- reaching po liti cal
value, despite their consistent disavowals of our cherished notions of
po liti cal revolution. It turns out, paradoxically, that revolution is not
nearly revolutionary enough.

Modern discourses of crisis, including the “crisis in the humanities”

or “the crisis of the university,” assume a model of events that may well
preclude their solution. Events are either meaningful products of a given
order and, therefore, necessary for this structure’s effi cient functioning
or they are radically exterior interruptions, by defi nition beyond a sys-
tem’s ability to respond or anticipate. Milton and Marvell, however, of-
fer a model of poetic events that does not imagine a crisis as a thing to
be averted or resolved. The apocalypse is not a resolution of a problem,
the tying off or explaining away of a disruption introduced earlier in a
lyric. The apocalypse most defi nitely does not respond: It is not a dialogue
or a discussion; it is an end. It is this possibility, of a real end paradoxi-
cally present under the names of potential and force, that Milton and
Marvell employ. The repetitive singularities, these punctual crises with
their demands for response, are precisely what neither end nor change.

Yet neither Milton nor Marvell offers fi delity to contingent singu-

larity as the solution to this causal and dialectical system of problems-
leading- to- resolution, for the simple reason that a description of events
as an unexpected eruption lets us off the ethical hook, allowing us to
plead ignorance or chance, all with a glint of triumph in our eyes. Con-
ceiving events as surprising says more about our lack of imagination
and narcissism than it does about the nature of the new. A more nu-
anced account of what it means for something to happen— whether a
crisis, a catastrophe, or a revolution— seems pivotal for a humanistic
scholarship whose central concepts continue to revolve around the ten-
sions and reversals— the internal events, in short— inherent in a subject’s
agency and identity. Nowhere is this imperative clearer than in our
self- serving reactions to spectacularly horrifying events, which do not
even have the dignity of rising to the level of self- righteousness. For
example, the now ubiquitous phrase “No one could have seen it com-
ing” does not merely register a transparent attempt at exculpation,

198 Conclusion

disingenuous surprise, or naïve despair at all the bad stuff that hap-
pens in the world. This phrase also encodes, however subtly, the tri-
umph of a world- weary speaker who did everything she could to avert
catastrophe but was overtaken by events. We should consider this
phrase not as a gesture of regret and renewed pragmatic determination
but rather as a fulfi lled wish for disaster itself. Crisis is not an opportu-
nity to be grasped or a catastrophe to be averted but a spectacular de-
struction to be adored because it always reveals the same thing: Human
failures are failures of knowledge, not failures of will. It is not just the
comforting involution of neurosis that makes such a model attractive.
It is also the comforting embrace of epistemology and all of the reas-
suring warmth that it implies. There are no fundamental ontological
confl icts, only those predicated on misunderstanding. Knowledge is
power; discussion tends toward harmoniousness. Milton’s and Mar-
vell’s verse shows that one does not need to be a Schmittian to fi nd this
position a dangerously Panglossian fi ction of the discussing classes.

We never really learn from crises, then, because they do little more

than allow us to demonstrate our adaptability and responsibility and
sometimes even the endurance of a martyr. Milton’s and Marvell’s
apocalypticism arrays itself against this subject who wants nothing
more than to match wits with events instead of actually experiencing
a revelatory change, even if it would only be internal. As we have seen
throughout this study, most of our visions of an apocalyptic end an-
ticipate the ability to look back nostalgically, after the end, on the end.
The temporally transcendent subject remains a knowing one even in
its most abject of failures. In imagining itself as nothing more than the
one supposed to know, it prevents itself from ever doing anything, of
course, but also, paradoxically, from ever learning anything. Events in
the immanent world are merely fodder for what this self already knows:
its own transcendence of history’s transience. Milton’s and Marvell’s
lyrics hold out the possibility of fi nally experiencing events as some-
thing other than confi rmation of this subject’s responsibility, power, or
impotence. Instead, they hold out the possibility that this self might
actually learn something after all.

Apocalyptic lyrics teach us to be free. Such a claim undoubtedly sounds
like an exaggerated claim for the value of literature. However, I am

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

199

not contending that lyrics are essentially subversive or open- ended
and therefore free. As Terry Ea gleton notes, these are only the most
fashionable hyperboles that would justify literature’s value or burnish
its leftist credentials.

If we are casting about for a justifi cation for the

value of poetry, then we have, of course, already lost. But that is only
partly because of the loaded nature of the question in the current an-
glophone university climate. More importantly, justifi cation is always
retroactive, treating something’s value as securely and demonstrably
past, bound to the present determinants and values that we all already
know. As such, it will always issue in a fundamentally reactionary pic-
ture of what one is supposed to learn. Thus, Gilles Deleuze maintains
that, as a pedagogical structure, recognition will always preserve the
very values that we might hope to change:

Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials,
in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’
and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented
in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecifi ed eternal
object. . . . For the new— in other words, difference— calls
forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition,
today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other
model. . . . By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles
for recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a common
sense and established values, for the attainment of current
values (honours, wealth and power).

Lyrics and apocalypses care about none of these established values. The
freedom conferred by lyric does not reproduce all of the craven, des-
perate pleas for relevance that occupy university freshman- orientation
events. When these lyrics speak of revelation, they do not mean the
slowly dawning recognition of what has always been the case, whether
human nature or God’s providence, but a radical transformation of
our entire relationship to the world. Even “relationship” might not be
right, as the apocalypse and lyric witness the end of mediation. In this
respect, revelation is anathema to our customary understandings of
slow, developmental learning. We do not “learn” a revelation so much
as we witness it. Or rather, it buttonholes us. The reassuring develop-
mental gradualism of modern university education has no truck with
this model of an arresting immediacy, precisely because relation is king.
Networked, synergistic, cooperative, interdisciplinary cross- pollination

200 Conclusion

is the nature of the institution and, unsurprisingly, the nature of the
learned freedom that it advances.

Revelation disavows this entire interdependent structure, which is

why it is unsurprising that denizens of the Enlightenment are always
chalking apocalyptic sentiments up to revenge fantasies, despair, or
proto- fascist disrespect for the Other. Regardless of the motive for
these accusations, they result in fundamental denigrations of the apoc-
alypse’s ability to teach freedom. As such, this broad cultural tendency
will always misread works that attempt to fi gure liberation in antino-
mian or apocalyptic terms.

And that is precisely what Marvell’s and

Milton’s verse attempt: to reconceive freedom in terms of revelation.
This verse then matters for a modern understanding of politics not
because it offers us, at best, a rhetorical bludgeon or, at worst, trium-
phalist fantasies, but because it advocates a truly free change, not just
in the world but to the world, such that governance and rule are no
longer necessary. As Reinhart Koselleck argues, the mid- seventeenth
century witnesses the decline of historico- allegorical treatments of the
Book of Revelation.

But that does not mean that the apocalypse just

disappears. Rather, it transforms into a way of thinking about ends
and novelty outside struggle, tension, constitutive contradiction, and
all of those other sacred categories that so inform literary criticism as
well as our basic notions of modern pedagogy. Apocalypticism ulti-
mately becomes an avenue for imagining freedom outside a system of
reactive determination and relation, including the liberal po liti cal and
governmental structure replicated within an autonomous self. In short,
it means the possibility of self- transformation no longer imagined as
the piecemeal, self- defeating reformism of faculty senates and provin-
cial legislatures.

As we all know, winning an emancipatory struggle against masters

turns freedom into, at best, an inert object fi nally achieved and, at worst,
the repeated negation of constraint that requires the per sis tence of the
very oppression it seeks to escape. For Milton at least, negative freedom
of this stripe assumes, incorrectly, it turns out, that people intuitively
act freely when shackles are removed.

In good humanist arguments,

it is usually at this point that positive freedom, defi ned as autonomy
or self- determination, rides in on its white horse, arriving just in time
to save us from reactive fear. Ea gleton, for example, describes self-
determination as the type of freedom that aesthetics heralds through
its very form: “Human freedom is not a question of being bereft of
determinants but of making them one’s own, turning them into the

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

201

ground of one’s self- constitution. This is one reason why art has some-
times been considered a paradigm of free activity. To act autonomously
is not to dispense with laws but to be a law unto oneself, which is what
the word ‘autonomous’ means.”

The white horse, it turns out, is lib-

erating, but also eminently mature and pragmatic. To put a very fi ne
point on it, though, what’s free about embracing limits as one’s own?
Despite his critique of Stanley Fish’s essential conservatism, Ea gleton’s
freedom is equally bound to preserve the system of governance that
we fi nd at hand, within the liberal tradition: The mind, like the world,
is or ga nized according to legislative, executive, and judicial faculties.
The goal is simply to become the agent making and administering the
laws, to become self- determining and autonomous. In this account,
then, positive freedom amounts to little more than a thinly veiled, inter-
nalized shadow play of electoral politics.

Negative freedom, I would argue, gets something of a bad rap insofar

as it at least attempts to end and escape from something, as opposed
to pretending to transcend such mercenary reactivity with a positive
autonomy. Positive freedom, in contrast, does not even pretend. It is the
inveterate enemy of a novel, immediate liberty, depending as it does on
the notion of mediated self- legislation for its model of freedom. Ulti-
mately, even when he contends that form is itself fundamentally uto-
pian, Ea gleton transmutes a utopian possibility into an affi rmation of
necessity:

For this aesthetic, then, works of art correspond to reality less
in their content than in their form. They incarnate the essence
of human freedom not by pleading for national in de pen dence
or promoting the struggle against slavery, but by virtue of the
curious kind of entities they are. One should perhaps add that
as images of self- determination, they refl ect less the actual
than the possible. They are exemplary of what men and women
could be like under transformed po liti cal circumstances. If they
point beyond themselves, what they point to is a redeemed
future. In this view, all art is utopian. . . . There is a logic to its
self- production, so that it is not free of a certain necessity. But
it is a necessity which it creates itself as it goes along.

Even when evoking utopianism, Ea gleton defi nes freedom as the cre-
ation and ac cep tance of limits, which is at least one reason why he
characterizes psychoanalysis as liberating when it really teaches us to

202 Conclusion

accept the necessity of repression: “But a certain kind of philosophical
therapy can help to free us from this rigid sense of coercion, rather as
psychoanalysis seeks to free us from various paralytic constraints, and
rather as fi ction, despite its limits, can disclose possibilities beyond the
actual.”

The actual, though, continues to govern, if not completely

colonize the possible, as evidenced by the fact that Ea gleton’s account
of utopia amounts to little more than republicanism:

Since every bit of the work is shaped by its general law or
principle, with nothing contingent or extraneous, it forms a
self- governing totality. Yet because this totality is simply the
form taken by the relations of the work’s various components to
each other, these components can be said to submit to a law
which they fashion themselves. And this, for republican thinkers
like Rousseau and Kant, is what defi nes the ideal social order.
Po liti cally speaking, the work of art resembles a republic more
than it does an authoritarian state, which is one reason why it
can fi gure as a critique of the ancien régimes for the emergent
middle classes of late eighteenth- century Eu rope. Republicanism
means collective self- determination, which is also true of the
cooperative commonwealth known as a work of art.

This is not utopia, but betrayed utopia. It is a utopia that still needs
governance, not the New Jerusalem of God’s presence where there is
no more need for kingship. It is a utopia that insists that people do not
change, only institutions do, and not by very much.

Ea gleton’s account is worth sustained attention, not because it is

characteristic of a mea sured, left- leaning, Marxist- inspired account of
what utopia might entail, but rather because of its argumentative strat-
egy. “Determination” is really the key concept here, particularly since
Ea gleton presents the absence of any determinations, “being bereft of
any determinants” or “dispens[ing] with laws,” as an obvious logical
impossibility. “Determinants” seems to mean “limits” in this self- evident
phrase and we are supposed to fi nd such antinomian fantasies emi-
nently laughable. However, the apocalypse is precisely antinomian, or
rather a-nomian. It is the end of law and its necessity. Ea gleton and his
fellow travelers are telling us that radical freedom is an immature fan-
tasy that does not recognize the essential, immutable nature of human
beings and their need for governance, in politics, in ethics, in epistemol-
ogy, and in their very souls. This argument essentially amounts to the

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

203

contention that people can never change, the very proposition that
revelation— and pedagogy, for that matter— explicitly denies. In Deleuze’s
estimation, here too we fi nd a fetishization of quotidian, pragmatic
recognitions that attempts to substitute for the possibilities entailed in
thought:

On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist
and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is
an apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But
who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these
acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking? Like Bergson,
we may well distinguish between two kinds of recognition—
that of the cow in the presence of grass, and that of a man
summoning his memories: the second can serve no more than
the fi rst as a model for what it means to think.

Ea gleton offers only such intuitions of the everyday as the ground for
his argument for the necessity of constraint. Surely one cannot believe
that there are no limits, or that one cannot conceive something without
limits. As Deleuze notes, rather than being self- evident, such ripostes
are merely a testament to the myopic lack of imagination of their bear-
ers. They are also a stunningly succinct piece of evidence showing why
freedom can never be learned in this fashion. Hectoring immature rubes
about their fantasies of autogenesis might get one recognized as a seri-
ous, hardnosed teacher, but intuitive realism never taught anyone to
be free.

In addition to its antinomian propensities, the apocalypse throws

a wrench into any pedagogical pro cess built around self- conscious
refl ection or metacognition by insisting that there is no after. The apoc-
alypse is the end of both history’s sequence of occurrences and its nar-
ration, which means that there is no space to refl ect calmly on what it
all means or meant. The mediated speaking of events, in which their
causes announce themselves as disinterested or even partisan forces, is
no longer necessary.

The same holds true for a lyric form that empha-

sizes its own immediacy (which is not to be confused with the delud-
ing immediacy of a speaking subject). Certainly, lyric uses the tools of
mediated discourse, conversation, and communication. But the apoca-
lypse puts an end to the functional utility of this tool. No more con-
versation is necessary, after all, to mediate revealed truth. Instead of
responding to events as mediated calls for help or directive orders, to

204 Conclusion

be obeyed or resisted, lyric presents events without reaction. These lyr-
ics embrace the possibility of a pre sen ta tion without representation—
outside repre sen ta tion, not in dialectical reaction to it. These poems treat
the future as immanently present, and not in the manner of a hollowed-
out, wishful pining (which essentially amounts to treating the future as a
past already lost). Neither utopianism, idealism, nor idyllism, lyric then
treats the future as a substantially present hope— because ends do hap-
pen in the present.

From apocalyptic lyrics one will not garner a neat plan or po liti cal

program, let alone the reassuring testimony of a martyr. But one will
fi nd in them a model of learning that embraces potential and force in-
stead of empathic dialogue, conversation, and the mutual recognition of
shared necessary relationships. It is not that the apocalypse is impatient
but rather that it disavows the pieties about tutelage, apprenticeship,
and maturation that dominate our understanding of learning. It is an
assault on everything from the education college’s developmental stages
and learning styles to the professorial preservation of slowness as a
valuable reading principle. Development and determination always
amount to the same basic betrayal: the transformation of the liberty of
potential forces into nothing more than feasibility studies and prag-
matic calculations. These might be the stuff of job applications and ca-
reer planning, but they are defi nitely not the stuff of learning.

To learn freedom, one must learn in the present to be in the present.

And that means learning to act, not to react, respond, deliberate, plan,
or even to know. Anything less is a betrayal of an ontological liberty to
the twin enemies of epistemology and politics. Unlike teleological devel-
opment, apocalyptic freedom does not get hung up on this endless
wheel of preparation. Now is a live possibility in this present, conceived
as either potential or force. And just as importantly, there is no mystery
to its actualization, precisely because it has no truck with this tyrant.
But that also means that it is diffi cult to teach in a university or poetic
setting bent on decorum. It is not that one cannot learn to be free but
rather that the way one does so is incompatible with emulation, fear,
narrative, positive reinforcement, behavioralism, and most of the other
pedagogical tools we have at our disposal. One learns freedom from the
revelatory events of potential and force because these are the moments
when one is neither planning nor interpreting and, therefore, not mired
in the teleological project of self- preservation and edifi cation.

If we learn nothing else from these poems, obsessed as they are with

apocalyptic change at the dawn of modern capitalism and the bour-

Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis

205

geoisie, it is that events can be something more and better than that to
which we meekly submit. The language of revolution has taught us
that we must respond to our foes, whether royalists or bankers, with
programmatic plans to solve problems, with arguments, or even with
guns. Milton and Marvell show us that only an apocalypse, conceived
as potential or force, allows for the transformation that we seek. Poten-
tial and force do not transmute automatically into an authoritarian
fascism, but we should not mute their decidedly disturbing echoes,
especially their assault on some of our most cherished liberal and
Enlightenment values— openness, rational discussion, collaboration,
respect for others, skepticism. Contrary to their self- aggrandizing claims,
democracy, reason, and Enlightenment cannot protect us from tyranny,
not because history is cyclically closed but rather because all of these
historical phenomena misunderstand what an event is, treating it as a
call for response, whether that response is a welcoming discussion or
an imposing order. Lyric shows us that, even inside language, events do
not speak and we thwart any power of the future in treating them as
speech. When we imagine what happens now, there is no next, no redun-
dant capstone to this present apocalyptic ending. Refl ection, it turns
out, is precisely the way to resist learning from history, to pretend that
we are learning when we are really just going through the empty mach-
inations of recognition. Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics insist that we learn
in the present, from a present change and not a self- conscious rumina-
tion on necessary or contingent crises. They attempt to conceive what
it is like to be free in the present, as opposed to imagining freedom as a
prospective, deferred accomplishment. They promise, in short, that there
might fi nally be a learning that is not redolent of accommodations to
our own past weakness or preparation for our inevitable future disap-
pointments. It is in this sense, then, that their lyrics fi nally make learning
hopeful.

207

Introduction: Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative
Time, and the Possibility of Endings

For Kant’s contention that all remembrance, and even all history,

occurs with an eye toward prophecy, see Immanuel Kant, Anthropology
from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, rev. and ed. Hans
H. Rudnick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), part 1,
par. 35, p. 77: “All desire contains (doubtful or certain) anticipation of
what is possible through foresight. Recalling the past (remembering) occurs
only with the intention of making it possible to foresee the future; we look
about us from the standpoint of the present in order to determine some-
thing, or to be prepared for something.”

For Carl Schmitt’s designation of this period as “the century of the

En glish revolution,” see Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion
of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York:
Telos, 2009), 65. For Schmitt, Hamlet stages the confl ict in this century
between an emergent modernity and the entropic forces, like apocalypti-
cism, of a barbarous religious fanat i cism.

Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2009), 33. See also 8– 9, 24– 25, 28.

Ibid., 479.

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical

Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 9, 16.

Ibid., 8.

N o t e s

208

Notes to pages 5–7

For the contention that, in Koselleck’s work, the purposiveness of

historical consciousness is dependent on learning from defeat— i.e., one can
ask what went wrong and engage in theoretical refl ection— see Hayden
White, preface to The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History,
Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Kerstin Behnke (Stan-
ford: Stanford Universtiy Press, 2002), xiii. This seems one of the central
reasons for Koselleck’s dismissal of eschatology: In a fi nal battle, there is
no time for refl ection. However, my contention is that, without the possi-
bility of a real end, refl ection allows for the abrogation of real stakes, mak-
ing sincere refl ection unnecessary because there is always the possibility of
a do- over.

Pincus, 31. Pincus also contends that establishment and opposition

Whigs have a fundamentally different understanding of the duration of
the 1688 revolution: the former conceive it as a self- contained event in
1688– 1689, the latter as a broader reformist pro cess (21). For my pur-
poses, this is signifi cant because it also encodes two fundamentally differ-
ent notions of causation: one in which a punctual problem demands or
leads to resolution and one in which cause is a driving force that is unmo-
tivated, or at least not motored by reaction. For the contention, which
Pincus also cites (30), that revolutions erase their causes, see Alexis de
Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart
Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1983), 5: “When great revolutions are suc-
cessful their causes cease to exist, and the very fact of their success has
made them incomprehensible.” De Tocqueville’s comment suggestively
implies that revolutions are both unrecognizable and apocalyptic.

Koselleck, Futures Past, 18.

10.

For an account of the complexity of the concept of crisis, see Ko-

selleck, “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of ‘Crisis,’ ”
in The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Presner, 240– 43.

11.

For the classical Derridean formulation of the future as radically

alien, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998), 5: “The future . . . is that which breaks absolutely with constituted
normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstros-
ity.” For a more recent account of events as unfi gurable rupture, one that
still works in the Derridean tradition, see Richard Terdiman, “Can We
Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126 (March 2011): 477.

12. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York:

Continuum, 2005), 192.

13.

Ibid., 190: “Ontology demonstrates that the event is not, in the

sense in which it is a theorem of ontology that all self- belonging contra-
dicts a fundamental Idea of the multiple, the Idea which prescribes the
foundational fi nitude of origin for all pre sen ta tion.”

Notes to pages 8–11

209

14.

Ibid., 178.

15.

Daniel W. Smith, “Alain Badiou: Mathematics and the Theory of

Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Essays on Deleuze (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 289. For the related argument
that Badiou’s validation of the event risks falling over into fascism, see
Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post- Secular Present: Ethics, Politics,
Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 62. Mohamed sub-
stitutes an “evental claim,” a demand or assertion that arises from an event,
as a more skeptical, safer alternative to this dangerous praise for any sort
of happening. I would argue that Badiou’s activist subject revels in claims
just as much as it does in sites.

16.

For the notion of an immanent break, see Badiou, Ethics: An Essay

on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001), 42– 43. For the centrality of recognition to the Hegelian dialectic,
see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 111– 12. For an account of the limitations
of recognition as a paradigm for thought, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference
and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 135– 36.

17.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans.

Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 47.

18.

Smith, “Jacques Derrida: Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence, and

Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” Essays on
Deleuze, 285– 86. Smith also notes that the Derridean system attends
to impossibility, whereas Deleuze, focuses on possible real experience:
“Derrida defi nes deconstruction as the experience of the possibility of the
impossible— that is, the (impossible) possibility of the impossible ‘marks
an absolute interruption in the regime of the possible.’ Such is the formula
of transcendence. Deleuze, for his part, defi nes his philosophy as a search,
not for the conditions of possible experience, but rather the conditions of
real experience. Such is the formula of immanence” (281).

19.

Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and

Materiality in Re nais sance Repre sen ta tions (New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 21.

20.

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the

Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 82.

21.

Ibid., 70, 74.

22.

Ibid., 73. See also Agamben’s insistence that messianism rejects

dialectical pro cessions: “What is decisive here is that the plērōma of kai-
roi is understood as the relation of each instant to the Messiah— each
kairos is unmittelbar zu Gott [immediate to God], and is not just the fi nal

210

Notes to pages 11–15

result of a pro cess (as is the case with the model Marxism inherited from
Hegel)” (76).

23.

Badiou, Being and Event, 189– 90.

24.

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles

Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990), 173.

25. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 82– 83.
26.

For the contention that even immutable, transhistorical proverbs

obey a sequential logic of before and after, see Koselleck, “Time and His-
tory,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner
and Kerstin Behnke, 109: “But on closer view, even these explanations al-
ways contain the inescapable indicator of a before and an after, without
which a piece of epigrammatic wisdom or a psychological or so cio log i cal
model of explanation become meaningless.” I argue here that once the
apocalypse comes unmoored from allegory and analogy, it threatens pre-
cisely this sort of intuitive factuality and apperception, the necessity of the
before and after.

27.

For an account of the modern epistemic shift that limits repre-

sen ta tion’s ability to defi ne things and knowledge, see Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1994), 236– 49. For Foucault, the
fl at table of reciprocally resembling repre sen ta tions acquires a depth
and a secret, an unrepresented and unrepresentable element: “The con-
dition of these links resides henceforth outside repre sen ta tion, beyond
its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind- the- scenes world even deeper
and more dense than repre sen ta tion itself. In order to fi nd a way back to
the point where the visible forms of beings are joined— the structure of
living beings, the value of wealth, the syntax of words— we must direct
our search towards that peak, that necessary but always inaccessible
point, which drives down, beyond our gaze, towards the very heart of
things. Withdrawn into their own essence, taking up their place at last
within the force that animates them, within the organic structure that
maintains them, within the genesis that has never ceased to produce
them, things, in their fundamental truth, have now escaped from the
space of the table” (239). Revelation may respond to the limitations of
repre sen ta tion, but it adopts neither of these models. For Milton and
Marvell, its truth is not a hidden secret ultimately shown, nor is it the
interrelations of a secure matrix of resemblances. My study attempts to
describe the occurrence of signs outside these traditional accounts of
signifi cation.

28. Throughout, all biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible:

Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

Notes to pages 16–19

211

29.

For an attempt to unify literature and literary theory around the

concept of problem- solving strategies, see Terry Ea gleton, The Event of
Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 175– 76, 223. Ea-
gleton acknowledges Henry James’s remark that “really, universally, rela-
tions stop nowhere” but like James imagines this as a positive endlessness
(27). See James, preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Portable Henry
James, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin, 2004), 471.

30.

For the related argument that judgment is precisely what arrests

change and novelty, see Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,”
in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135: “If it is
so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on
the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by
defying judgment.” Deleuze contrasts judgment with combat in this essay,
valorizing the latter as superior to judgment’s duplicity (133). My argu-
ment here is that Milton’s and Marvell’s apocalyptic lyrics attempt to es-
cape the dynamics of combat and judgment.

31.

John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Mil-

ton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:553.

32.

G. W. F. Hegel, “Lyric Poetry,” in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art,

trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2:1136. Hegel even goes so
far as to maintain that no one returns to old songs and that therefore
songs are always about and motivated by the present (1143– 44).

33.

Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (Jan 2008): 202. In

evoking this formal distinction, I do not want to restage a debate between
historicism and formalism, old or new. The seemingly endless debate be-
tween attention to history or attention to the poem (as if anyone claims
not to be attending to the poem), or between content and form, misses the
more basic question of whether there is really any difference at all be-
tween history and poem. Here, following Marjorie Levinson’s account
of new formalism, I am arguing for an affi rmative redefi nition of what
happens in a poem. See Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?”
PMLA 122 (March 2007): 561. For examples of the call for a return to
literary form that depict this return as a reaction against historicism, see
Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary Studies (Seattle: Short Studies
from the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2003); Stanley
Fish, “Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism,” Milton Studies 44
(2005): 1– 12.

34.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 62– 63.

35.

Hegel, “Lyric Poetry,” 1112: “Its task, namely, is to liberate the

spirit not from but in feeling.”

36.

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 173.

37.

Ibid., 172.

212

Notes to pages 19–23

38. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 24– 25.
39.

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 180.

40.

For Deleuze’s interest in the actual infi nity of Leibniz, see Smith,

“The New: The Conditions of the New,” Essays on Deleuze, 249: “The
formula of the fi nite says that, in any analysis, one reaches a term where the
analysis ends— a term such as the ‘atom.’ The formula of the indefi nite says
that, no matter how far one pushes the analysis, what ever term one arrives
at can always be divided or analyzed further, indefi nitely, ad infi nitum—
there is never a fi nal or ultimate term. The formula of the actually infi nite,
however, is neither fi nite nor indefi nite. On the one hand, it says that there
are indeed ultimate or fi nal terms that can no longer be divided— thus it is
against the indefi nite; but on the other hand, it says that these ultimate
terms go to infi nity— thus they are not atoms but rather terms that are ‘in-
fi nitely small,’ or as Newton would say ‘vanishing terms.’ . . . It would be
nonsensical to speak of an infi nitely small term that can be considered sin-
gularly. Rather, infi nitely small terms can only exist in infi nite collections.
Spinoza’s simple bodies, in other words, are in fact multiplicities: the simplest
of bodies exists as infi nite sets of infi nitely small terms, which means that
they exist collectively and not distributively.”

41.

For the claim that the end of the poem is not properly part of the

poem, see Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans.
Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113. For
Agamben of course, the idea is to consider the end of the poem as a state of
emergency, which is also an entirely typical, foundational state of affairs: In
this respect, his poetics mirrors his discussion of the state of exception
within the state. See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17– 25,
168– 73. For the contention that even a basic formal feature like rhyme is
bound up in this problem of events, and that one can expect rhyme only
retroactively, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How
Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48: “One cannot
say that the second rhyme- word in Jonson’s couplet has fulfi lled an expecta-
tion set up by the fi rst because there is nothing in the lines to create such an
expectation (always excepting the effect of the reader’s previous experience
with En glish distichs). . . . The expectation arises only when the principle of
rhyme has been perceived as such, and it thus takes at least one couplet (or
rhyme) to create the expectation of another.” Smith’s account also sugges-
tively points to the ways in which the apocalypse might itself be like rhyme:
One can expect it only after it occurs. Outlining the nature of this apoca-
lyptic occurrence inside Milton’s and Marvell’s verse, in the present, and
not just after it occurs, is the central task of this study.

42.

Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden,

Mass.: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), line 193.

Notes to pages 26–30

213

1. Apocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events
in Marvell’s Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies

John Hall, The true cavalier examined by his principles and found

not guilty of schism or sedition (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656), 109.
For a discussion of Hall in the context of loyalism, see John M. Wallace,
Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1968), 5.

Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian En gland: John

Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 83. See also Michael Komorowski, “Public Verse and
Property: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ and the Own ership of Politics,” ELH
79, no. 2 (2012): 323. For the related claim that “An Horatian Ode” pres-
ents Charles’s execution as augury, analogous to the discovery of the
bleeding head during construction of the Roman capitol, see Thomas M.
Greene, “The Balance of Power in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ ” ELH 60,
no. 2 (1993): 388. For the contention that Cromwell is the object of apoc-
alyptic expectation already in 1650, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, “ ‘The
Antichrist, the Babilon, the great dragon’: Oliver Cromwell, Andrew
Marvell, and the Apocalyptic Monstrous,” in Monstrous Bodies / Po liti cal
Monstrosities in Early Modern Eu rope, ed. Knoppers and Joan B. Landes
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 96. Although for different rea-
sons, in Knoppers’s argument, as in Worden’s, Cromwell’s task remains
unfulfi lled in 1650.

Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of

the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 58.

For an argument tying “Upon Appleton House” to these other oc-

casional poems via the concept of epideictic rhetoric and Marvell’s ex-
periments with it, see Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown
(Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1978), 51, 95– 110. For the con-
tention that each of the Cromwell poems is less about Cromwell than
about the specifi c occasion that prompts it, see Joad Raymond, “A Crom-
wellian Centre?” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed.
Derek Hirst and Steven W. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 154.

For a recent example, see Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambiva-

lence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-

Seventeenth-

Century En gland (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 66.

Donald M. Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1970), 225.

For the depiction of Marvell’s understanding of power as a Machia-

vellian realism, see Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion
in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 3– 5, 15– 16. For the argument that “An Horatian Ode” praises the

214

Notes to pages 30–31

structure of the modern state, see Komorowski, 322, 334– 36. For the argu-
ment that Marvell exhibits a skeptical aversion to puritan providentialism,
see Yoshinaka, 66. Yoshinaka, however, too hastily reduces all Protestant
providentialism to the contention that might makes right (96).

For the contention that Marvell fi gures revolutionary po liti cal pos-

sibilities through an autonomous vitalist connectivity, see John Rogers, The
Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 39– 69.

For a discussion of Marvell’s fraught relationship to po liti cal vio-

lence, and the distinction between glorifying terrorism and promoting
martyrdom, see David Norbrook, “Marvell’s ‘Scaevola Scoto- Brittannus’
and the Ethics of Po liti cal Violence,” in Reading Re nais sance Ethics, ed.
Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), 182. Contra Norbrook,
I argue that Marvell praises and is interested in the execution of force,
even if that includes terrorism, not in the declaration of a moral implied
by martyrdom. Even arguments that acknowledge the disturbing praise for
amoral force in the ode often subsume it under a more respectable goal.
For example, see R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell
and Seventeenth Century Revolutions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978),
130: “The result is a moral paradox: amorality in the ser vice of one’s coun-
try can become a moral imperative.”

10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241, 242.

11.

Paul Hamilton, “Andrew Marvell and Romantic Patriotism,” in

Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 85.

12.

For a nuanced account of why we should be suspicious of deliber-

ative judgment’s effectiveness in this respect, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Mil-
ton and the Post- Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011), 34– 35, 42, 130– 31. For the classical ac-
count of totalitarianism as a movement and not a structure, see Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), 389– 92, 475– 79.

13.

Komorowski, 316, 321.

14.

See Carl Schmitt, Po liti cal Theology: Four Chapters on the Con-

cept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1985), 22, 32– 34, 48. For a succinct explanation of Schmitt’s
importance to the discussion of aesthetic politics, see Victoria Kahn,
“Aesthetics as Critique: Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Samson Agonistes,” in
Reading Re nais sance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007), 107– 10. Kahn uses Benjamin’s account of baroque drama to
explain Milton’s aesthetics. She also contends that Milton heaps suspicion

Notes to pages 31–34

215

on purely aesthetic responses to the world and, in so doing, attempts to
resist an aesthetic ideology that would reaffi rm the status quo (104). My
claim here is that Marvell is not so worried about passional aesthetic
responses and considers them essential to any politics.

15. Tracy B. Strong, foreword to Po liti cal Theology, xxxii; Carl Schmitt,

Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan
and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), 62– 65.

16.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietz sche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 58, 61.

17.

Mohamed, Milton and the Post- Secular Present, 34. Similarly, Mo-

hamed takes issue with Badiou’s and Žižek’s notion of an “evental site” for
similar reasons: Such ruptures threaten to justify any and all po liti cal deci-
sions, so it is more prudent to construe occurrences as “evental claims”
capable of skeptical evaluation (61).

18.

For the argument that Deleuze participates in a long tradition of aes-

thetic politics in France, one that includes Hugo and André Malraux, in
which style supersedes content as the vehicle for politics, see Tom Conley,
“From Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze,” in A Deleuz-
ian Century? ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 250.

19.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans.

Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 47. For a compelling account of the ways in which Badiou’s
notion of rupturing events reintroduces transcendence into a purportedly
immanent picture, see Daniel W. Smith, “Alain Badiou: Mathematics and
the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Essays on
Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 289, 310– 11.

20.

Even Chernaik’s analysis, which reads Marvell as a man of action,

not contemplation, fi nds in this poem a dialectical weighing of historical
events. See The Poet’s Time, 15– 16.

21. Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return

from Ireland,” The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed.
(Harlow, UK: Longman, 2007), lines 54– 64. All references to Marvell’s
poetry are to this edition. Line numbers, and stanza numbers where ap-
propriate, will appear in parentheses.

22. Yoshinaka, 121– 22; Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The

Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1986), 83.

23. T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” in Selected Essays, 1917– 1932 (New

York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 261, 253: “Many of them [supporters of
the revolution] were gentlemen of the time who merely believed, with
considerable show of reason, that government by a Parliament of gentle-
men was better than government by a Stuart; though they were, to that
extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly foresee the tea- meeting

216

Notes to pages 34–38

and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men of education and culture, even
of travel, some of them were exposed to that spirit of the age which was
coming to be the French spirit of the age. This spirit, curiously enough,
was quite opposed to the tendencies latent or the forces active in Puritan-
ism; the contest does great damage to the poetry of Milton; Marvell, an
active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan, and a poet on a
smaller scale, is far less injured by it” (253).

24.

Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Marvell’s Ghost,” in Marvell and Liberty,

62, 66.

25.

Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 264.

26.

Harold Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale Univer-

sity Press, 1965), 36. Marvell’s reconceptualization of praise may be a re-
sponse to this basic problem, but I will argue that even his poems before
the regicide seem to exhibit an interest in forceful events, not their actors.
For Friedman’s claim that Marvell attempts to form Cromwell into an
integral whole that might escape this bind, see Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 274:
“The worth of inner integrity and self- command is set against the worldly
success of Augustus, and both are judged in the light of their incommen-
surability. In Marvell’s poem his great effort is to make Cromwell, by the
powers of meta phor and imaginative sympathy, a fi gure of the union of
the two kinds of success and the two kinds of integrity of purpose.”

27.

Hirst and Zwicker, 142.

28.

For the argument that Marvell experiments with the epideictic tra-

dition, see Patterson, 51. Whereas Patterson focuses on Marvell’s reinven-
tion of classical tradition, my focus is on the alteration of the means and
concept of praise in his verse.

29.

Komorowski, 328.

30.

Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2010), 81; Nigel Smith, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell,
268– 70. See also Stocker, 71; Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., The Complete
Poems (New York: Penguin, 1972), 238. For the contention that Crom-
well stokes fears of dictatorial Caesarism by delaying his return from Ire-
land, see Worden, 90. For the centrality of Lucan to seventeenth- century
conceptions of politics and republicanism, see David Norbrook, Writing
the En glish Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627– 1660 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23– 62.

31. Worden, 86.
32. Thad Bower, “Sacred Violence in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ ” Rena-

scence 52 (1999): 79. For the related claim that Ramism describes justice
as founded on distinctions and their preservation, see Hodge, 8, 12.

33.

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 51. For Ulysses’ speech, see
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, in The Norton Shakespeare:

Notes to pages 38–45

217

Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton,
1997), 1.3.101– 24.

34.

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.121– 24.

35.

Ibid., 1.3.198– 200.

36. Thomas M. Greene, 392, 382. For the contention that appeals to

alchemical science in the ode are merely a strategy that allows Marvell to
transcend politics, see Lyndy Abraham and Michael Wilding, “The Alchem-
ical Republic: A Reading of ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return
from Ireland,’ ” in Marvell and Liberty, 115: “Alchemy was a system of
thought that crossed the parliamentarian- royalist divide. It was also an in-
tellectual system that could raise the debate from diffi cult, immediate issues
of politics, like the vocal opposition to the Irish campaign, the radical cries
for redistributing wealth, the threats to property. A scientifi c meta phor is
presented to transcend the contingent po liti cal.” For the competing claim,
which Abraham and Wilding themselves quote, that for Puritan revolution-
ary reformers “transmutation was not only an instrument to achieve utopia
(by generating infi nite wealth, for instance), but a description of utopia, of
the pro cess of inner and outer reformation,” see J. Andrew Mendelsohn,
“Alchemy and Politics in En gland, 1649– 1644,” Past and Present 135 (1992):
52. My argument here certainly hews closer to Mendelsohn’s reading of the
po liti cal valences of alchemical transformation.

37. Thomas M. Greene, 390.
38.

Ibid., 395.

39.

I’m thinking here primarily of “f,” “s,” and “sh,” all voiceless frica-

tives. For an account of the complex interaction between emphasis and
sonorous mimesis in “To His Coy Mistress,” see John Creaser, “ ‘As One
Scap’t Strangely from Captivity’: Marvell and Existential Liberty,” Marvell
and Liberty, 163.

40.

See Deleuze, Nietz sche and Philosophy, 40– 72.

41.

I wish to thank Nicholas von Maltzahn and Gabriella Gruder- Poni

for alerting me to the importance of this passage during a panel hosted by
the Andrew Marvell Society at the South- Central Re nais sance Conference
in March 2012.

42.

For the argument that the ode’s comparison of Cromwell with

natural forces does not necessarily justify his actions, because such a com-
parison also removes them from a providential order and relegates them
to the realm of secondary causes, see Yoshinaka, 120.

43.

For the contention that Marvell bows to historical necessity, see

Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 18– 19. For the characterization of Marvell’s
metaphysical attitude as “active resignation,” in which one inverts fatal
determinism into willed choice, see Hamilton, 82.

44.

For the suggestion that Marvell’s verse, with its propensity for lit-

eralization, does not proceed by declaration at all but rather via hints and

218

Notes to pages 45–50

attitudes, see Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Song: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry
of Criticism (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1970), 18, 176.

45.

For the contrary argument that Marvell is obsessed with the prob-

lem of transgression and containment, see Donald M. Friedman, “Rude
Heaps and Decent Order,” in Marvell and Liberty, 124. Friedman does
suggestively acknowledge the ways in which “Upon Appleton House,” in
its praise for Mary Fairfax, does not just order chaos, but also orders order
(135), in a type of perverse redundancy.

46.

For the argument that these lines affi rm the necessity of a control-

ling architectural structure, see Hodge, 15. I argue that this passage is a
description of the competing forces that make a building possible, not of
the concrete structures that contain these forces.

47.

For the contention that Marvell frequently violates parallelism

with such grammatical chiasmi, see Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 222.

48.

For the contrary argument that Marvell uses the categories of

agency, constraint, and kairos in his poetic pre sen ta tions of the po liti cal,
see Nigel Smith, “The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell,” Re nais-
sance and Reformation 25 (2001): 140: “Thus, his prosody may be said to
embody the dilemmas and ambiguities that characterize his visions of po-
liti cal and personal liberty: the limits of free will or individual agency, and
the force or frustration of determining external forces; the apparently
pleasant exploitation of dire circumstances; the fl ight from what would
generally be regarded as pleasant sociability or genuine commitment into
refi ned isolation.”

49.

Hamilton, 83– 84, 79.

50.

In this respect, we might recall John Spurr’s contention that Mar-

vell is decidedly suspicious of doctrinal creeds. See John Spurr, “The poet’s
religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, 169: “Was it
legitimate to require of Christians statements of their belief? Despairing
of ever formulating an exact and unexceptional creed, Marvell denounced
them all as ‘meer instruments of Equivocation or Persecution’: the wily
would take them in their own sense and the scrupulous would fall foul of
the penalties for following the dictates of conscience.”

51.

For an argument against reading Marvell as a “company man,”

one that relies primarily on the elegy upon Cromwell’s death, see William
M. Russell, “Love, Chaos, and Marvell’s Elegy for Cromwell,” En glish Liter-
ary Re nais sance 40 (2010): 273. For one version of the tendency against
which Russell argues, see John Wallace, “Andrew Marvell and Cromwell’s
Kingship: ‘The First Anniversary,’ ” En glish Literary History 30 (1963):
209: “He sold himself down the river as a poet and surrendered his in de-
pen dent critical mind fi rst to a servitude under Cromwell, then to a slavery
under the Whigs.” For an account of Marvell’s complex po liti cal responses
to republicanism, latitudinarianism, “Puritan libertarianism,” and even the

Notes to pages 50–56

219

Levellers, see Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 108, 112– 13, 129, 133, 138. For
the argument that Marvell’s work, poetry and prose, shows how ideology
is experienced at the level of a personal, individual life of affective attach-
ments, see Hirst and Zwicker, 150.

52.

Norbrook, Writing the En glish Republic, 181– 82.

53.

For the argument that such a literalization of fi gures is central to

Marvell’s style, see Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia
and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 150, 158, 368n36; Colie, 79; Dominic Gavin, “ ‘The Garden’
and Marvell’s Literal Figures,” Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 224– 52;
Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 12. For a similar contention that characterizes
such literalization as the Freudian uncanny, the symbol cannibalizing the
thing symbolized, see Thomas M. Greene, 391.

54. Thomas P. Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from

Shakespeare to Milton (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 179.

55.

Ibid., 183– 85, 193, 197– 98. Although I disagree with the conse-

quence of Anderson’s argument, faith in the resistant potential of literary
criticism, I do fi nd compelling his nuanced account of the relationship
between loss and literalization.

56.

For a related version of this claim, see Colie, 4, 299. Colie, in con-

trast to my argument about interpretation as an immanent force, insists
that Marvell’s per for mance of criticism within his verse is always a result
of a mediated worldview (4).

57.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 211. See also Daniel W. Smith,
“The New: The Conditions of the New,” in Essays on Deleuze, 252: “On
the one hand, the real is supposed to resemble the possible that it realizes,
which means that every thing is already given in the identity of the concept,
and simply has existence or reality added to it when it is ‘realized.’ . . . On
the other hand, since not every possible is realized, the pro cess of realization
involves a limitation or exclusion by which some possibilities are thwarted,
while others ‘pass’ into the real. With the concept of possibility, in short,
everything is already given.”

58.

See Smith, ed., Poems of Andrew Marvell, 289.

59.

For the argument that Marvell is not really interested in republi-

canism and has little faith in the ability of parliaments to protect liberty of
conscience, either before or after the Restoration, see Worden, 148– 51.

60.

For a discussion of Carl Schmitt’s description of the similarities

between neutral aesthetics and the presumed neutrality of procedural lib-
eralism, see Kahn, 107. For Schmitt’s emphasis on the centrality of the
personal to all sovereign decisions, see Schmitt, Po liti cal Theology, 32– 34,
48. For his reading of Hamlet as the contest between barbarism and such
neutral forces, see Hamlet or Hecuba, 62– 65.

220

Notes to pages 57–63

61.

Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 5, 146– 49.

62.

Marvell, “To a Friend in Persia,” in The Poems and Letters of An-

drew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927),
2:309.

63.

Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 149.

64.

John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella

P. Revard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), book 2, lines 466– 70,
473– 80. All references to Milton’s poetry, other than Paradise Lost, are
from this edition. Book and line numbers will appear in parentheses.

65. Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lin-

coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 117. One might argue that
Milton identifi es force and reason only in a prelapsarian world whereas
Marvell is more optimistic about their compatibility after the fall. The
competing accounts of Eve’s creation in Paradise Lost would serve as an
example of this prelapsarian identifi cation. See Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K.
Lewalski (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007): Eve claims that “thy gentle
hand / Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see / How beauty is excelld
by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (4.488– 91); Adam,
that “she what was Honour knew, / And with obsequious Majestie approv’d /
My pleaded reason” (8.508– 10). Instead of reading these as competing
perspectives, I suggest that we read them as noncontradictory accounts of
an event that merges force and reason. In Eden, force is reason and reason
is a force.

66.

Hirst and Zwicker note that Milton certainly read “An Horatian

Ode” and that the opening lines of Milton’s sonnet echo it. See Hirst and
Zwicker, 171.

67.

Kahn, 119.

68.

Deleuze, Nietz sche and Philosophy, 54.

69.

Gilles Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” in Essays Critical

and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 134– 35. For the argument that
Marvell suspends judgment because he is ecumenically open to the views
of others, see Yoshinaka, 56. I would contend that Marvell does not just
suspend but disavows judgment in its entirety.

70.

Smith, “Jacques Derrida: Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and

Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in Essays on
Deleuze, 285– 86.

71.

Hirst and Zwicker, 143.

72.

See Patterson, 69.

73.

Ibid., 80.

74.

For the concept of reverse causality that informs but is not quite

identical to my argument here, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A

Notes to pages 63–68

221

Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo phre nia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 431.

75.

For the related contention that Marvell, unlike Milton, can con-

ceive of a peaceful apocalypse, see Patterson, 87.

2. Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses
and Contemplative Events in Milton’s Sonnets

For Henri Bergson’s argument that the category of choice, within the

free will– determinism debate, makes a present, free action impossible, see
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Con-
sciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959),
182– 83: “You will see that the argument of the determinists assumes this
puerile form: ‘The act, once performed, is performed,’ and that their oppo-
nents reply: ‘The act, before being performed, was not yet performed.’ In
other words, the question of freedom remains after this discussion exactly
where it was to begin with; nor must we be surprised at it, since freedom
must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in
the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been.” For
a succinct account of Bergson’s model of immanent freedom, conceived in
opposition to choice, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and
Freedom,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana
Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 147.

For the argument that Paradise Lost presents a possible present ful-

fi llment that counters the Petrarchan tendency to treat desire as an always
deferred consummation or irremediable lack, à la Lacan, see Ilona Bell,
“Milton’s Dialogue with Petrarch,” Milton Studies 28 (1992): 95.

For the contention that Milton’s world is populated with distinct

little ends or miniature apocalypses, as opposed to transitional states, see
Steven C. Dillon, “Milton and the Poetics of Extremism,” Milton Studies
25 (1989): 271.

For the contention that apocalyptic hope is a present phenomenon,

effected proleptically by the Christ event, see William Franke, Poetry and
Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2009), 13: “The Christ event as apocalyptic model
indicates that apocalypse comes about as the in- breaking into history of a
radically other order of existence, the event of the divine, and therewith
the revelation of the fi nal truth and judgment that otherwise eludes human-
kind in history, throughout which we are confi ned within an incomplete
and uncompletable succession of temporally delimited, fragmentary mo-
ments. This event can be conceived of as imminent in every moment and
as immanent to human experience as such, so far as it is turned toward its

222

Notes to pages 68–69

own ultimate possibilities.” In this respect, Franke quotes John 5:25: “Verely,
verely I say unto you, the houre shal come, and now is, when the dead
shal heare the voyce of the Sone of God: and they that heare it shal live.”
Throughout, all biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible: Geneva
Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

I am indebted to comments from Daniel Shore, in response to a paper

delivered at the 2012 International Milton Symposium, for remarking the
pivotal role that the temporality of hope plays in this project.

For the contention that Petrarch is obsessed with temporality, see

Roland Greene, Post- Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western
Lyric Sequence (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1991), 22. Greene
argues that Petrarch organizes the Canzoniere to produce a sensation of
temporal pro cess, via an at- least implied alternation of tenses, in contrast
to prior lyric anthologies that are merely a collection of fragments (42).
However, Greene also maintains that individual poems remain additive—
they can be shifted or reordered throughout— instead of adopting a narrative
logic (49).

Philip Sidney, Sonnet 100, Astrophil and Stella: The Poems of Sir Philip

Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 231, lines 9– 14.

For the argument that Sidney’s attempt to anatomize Astrophil’s

character results not in subversion but in inertia and, ultimately, the im-
possibility of change and resolution, see Roland Greene, Post- Petrarchism,
102: “In a sense, the moral and characterological dilemma of Astrophil
and Stella is exactly that of lyric fi ction’s nominative mode, which creates
a strong character within a certain emotional setting but shows diffi culty
in moving him or her about for a dynamic resolution. The notions of self-
hood that keep such speakers at the epistemological and po liti cal centers
of these works implicitly require that the fi ctions must draw what ever
conclusions they have out of those framed, isolated selves.” For the classic
formulation of the resistant potential of dialectical interiority in Shake-
speare’s sonnets, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention
of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986), 22. For a compelling critique of Fineman’s reading as a per-
petuation of the nineteenth century’s bourgeois and romantic conception
of convention and its subversion, see Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences
and Social Distinction in Re nais sance En gland (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 20, 28, 30, 43.

For an account of the necessary link between a psychoanalytic sub-

ject built around lack and fascism, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo phre nia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983). For my discussion of the limitations of lack for conceiving devotional

Notes to pages 69–70

223

desire, see Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious
Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 3– 22, 190– 96.

10.

For the argument that Milton eschews the type of sonnet sequenc-

ing that would imply narrative, as well as signifi cant turns inside the poem’s
repeated form, see R. S. White, “Survival and Change: The Sonnet from
Milton to the Romantics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet,
ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 171: “The technical contribution he made through enjamb-
ment was to make the sonnet into a single statement rather than a series
of transitions made up of quatrains, octaves and couplets: ‘For Milton
was already writing sonnets that, if not ignoring the volta entirely, rushed
through that point to the end of the poem.’ Milton also loosened the son-
net from its place in a fi ctional sequence, paving the way for treating it as
a personal meditation on a signifi cant occasion rather than advancing a
narrative.” Here, White quotes Phillis Levin’s introduction to The Penguin
Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in En glish, ed. eadem
(New York: Penguin, 2001), lxiii. For an evaluation similar to Levin’s, see
F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1954), 100– 1. Prince, however, chalks this violation of the volta up to
Milton’s nonnative Italian.

11.

For infl uential versions of the argument that sonnet sequences

double the social and po liti cal anxieties of patronage relationships, see
Arthur F. Marotti, “ ‘Love Is Not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and
the Social Order,” En glish Literary History 49 (1982): 396– 428; Ann Ro-
salind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,”
SEL 24 (1984): 53– 68. For the argument, from a queer theoretical perspec-
tive, that Shakespeare’s sonnets encode an eroticized social and not just
sexual desire between men, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men:
En glish Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 28– 48.

12.

For the argument that Milton’s work is never esoteric but always

exoteric and essentially opposed to secrecy, an argument that informs mine
throughout, see James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophi-
cal Hermeneutics (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1– 29, 67, 159– 60.

13.

For a brief survey of Milton’s pre de ces sors in the tradition of oc-

casional sonnets, on the continent and in En gland, see Anna K. Nardo,
Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1979), 8– 11, 17: “Between 1642 and 1660 he wrote all but
the earliest of his sonnets, each of which presents his intense engage-
ment with a real person, event, or issue important during this period of
reformation. As a sonneteer, he fell heir to a single- sonnet tradition rich in
humorous, occasional, satiric, heroic, friendly, and elegiac sonnets, and to
a sequence tradition which had broadened its content to include the ideals

224

Notes to pages 70–73

of civilization. Thus literary tradition and social upheaval converged to
inspire his recruiting the form, which had previously fl ourished in court,
into the ser vice of godly civitas” (17).

14. Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s

Comus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 7. See also James G.
Mengert, “The Re sis tance of Milton’s Sonnets,” En glish Literary Re nais-
sance 11 (winter 1981): 93.

15.

Sonnet 18, “On the Late Massacher in Piemont,” in Complete Shorter

Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), lines
1– 5. All references to Milton’s poetry, other than Paradise Lost, are from
this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. When numbering
Milton’s sonnets, I have followed the modern chronological order that
includes the sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and Skinner.

16.

Janel Mueller, “The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in

Milton’s Sonnets,” in “Politics and Poetic Value,” ed. Robert von Hallberg,
special issue, Critical Inquiry 13 (spring 1987): 477. For the related conten-
tion that individual sonnets highlight their occasional nature with temporal
markers, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The
Growth of Milton’s Mind (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1978),
128– 29: “Looked at individually, the sonnets are isolated occasional poems
which repeatedly signal their completeness and individuality by internal ref-
erences to their specifi c times of composition; not one is lacking its day,
hour, now, then, while, or when.” For the similar contention that Milton’s
sonnets are obsessed with temporality, see Jennifer Lewin, “Milton’s Son-
nets and the Sonnet Tradition,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Shorter
Poetry and Prose, ed. Peter C. Herman (New York: Modern Language As-
sociation of America, 2007), 80, 87; Elizabeth Harris Sagaser, “Pursuing the
Subtle Thief: Teaching Meter in Milton’s Short Poems,” idem, 92, 96. For
the argument that sonnets end up challenging any simple version of lyric
immediacy, see Heather Dubrow, “The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode,” in The
Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, 36–

38. Dubrow also maintains,

though, that sonnets multiply variations on the nature of presence: “Be-
cause it packs so many degrees and types of immediacy and distance within
its compact space, I would suggest that the sonnet even more than other
forms invites us to reject the binary of immediacy and distance in favour of
a model that traces various degrees of what we might term here- ness. Just as
some languages, such as Turkish, have different words for ‘right here’, ‘a
little further away’, ‘still further’ and so on, so the sonnet often includes
degrees of our here- ness, and indeed often expresses meaning in part through
the movement among them” (38).

17.

For the argument, already cited in the introduction, that the fi nal

line of the poem is not part of the poem precisely because it no longer
contains the possibility of enjambment with a succeeding line, see Giorgio

Notes to pages 73–79

225

Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113.

18.

Nardo, 158– 59.

19.

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random

House, 1965), 127– 28. For a similar account of the Italian sonnet’s delib-
eration and the En glish sonnet’s aphoristic wit, see John Fuller, The Son-
net (London: Methuen, 1972), 3, 14, 17– 19.

20.

In this respect, we should also recall that Fussell describes the Pe-

trarchan sonnet as a structure of sexual release. See Fussell, 121: “We may
even suggest that one of the emotional archetypes of the Petrarchan son-
net structure is the pattern of sexual pressure and release. Surely no sonnet
succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analo-
gous to the general kinds of ‘release’ with which the reader’s muscles and
ner vous system are familiar.”

21.

For the contention that metacommentary is a resolving feature

because it turns poems into artifacts, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic
Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968), 150.

22.

For the contention that the En

glish sonnet form enables more

elaborate deliberation than the Italian does, see Fuller, 14.

23.

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 98. It might also be worth remark-
ing that Bergson distinguishes between narrative and creative art: “Berg-
son does not disguise the fact that the story- telling aspect appears to him
to be inferior in art; the novel would above all be story- telling, music on
the contrary, emotion and creation” (135n36).

24.

Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-

Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 33– 34.

25.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 73.

26. Among the Italian sonnets, 3, 4, and 5 conclude with rhyming

couplets.

27.

For the Cromwell sonnet, I have followed the text from the Trinity

MS included in Revard’s edition instead of the version from Letters of
State (1694).

28. William McCarthy, “The Continuity of Milton’s Sonnets,” PMLA

92 (Jan 1977): 102. For the related argument that, although the Cromwell
sonnet is written for a specifi c occasion, there is no real action because
there is no main verb in the octave, see Kurt Schlueter, “Milton’s Heroical
Sonnets,” SEL 35 (1995): 130.

29. William R. Parker, “The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,”

PMLA 73 (June 1958): 200.

226

Notes to pages 80–82

30. Victoria Silver, “ ‘Lycidas’ and the Grammar of Revelation,” En-

glish Literary History 58 (1991): 785, 796– 98.

31.

For the argument that this sonnet consistently confl ates distinctions,

see Stephen Booth and Jordan Flyer, “Milton’s ‘How Soon Hath Time’: A
Colossus in a Cherrystone,” En glish Literary History 49 (summer 1982):
458. Booth and Flyer insist, however, that “yet” cannot mean “still” at the
volta: “In line 9, Yet means ‘however’— and nothing else; the context dic-
tates it: Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow. However, the word Yet does
appear here in a general context that takes identity from the pertinence of
all its elements to the idea of time” (463). Booth and Flyer justify this claim
via the “idiomatic implications” of the line’s syntax: “It is probably unnec-
essary to explain the means by which the imperative potential of Yet be it
is blocked. The idiomatic implications of the words’ positions (Yet be it,
not ‘Be it yet’) invite one to take Yet to mean however; and the syntax (or . . .
or), and the presence and nature of the in de pen dent clause line 9 intro-
duces confi rm the presumption that Yet be it opens a subjunctive construc-
tion (‘However, whether it be less or more or . . .’), and not an imploring
imperative (‘Let it still be,’ ‘May it continue to be’)” (467n5). I do not think
that the idiomatic reading of this phrase is as obvious, or that explanation
is as unnecessary, as Booth and Flyer maintain.

32.

For the argument that the Petrarchan tradition exhibits an obsession

with differentiation and “diacritical desire,” see Heather Dubrow, Echoes
of Desire: En glish Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 11– 12, 54.

33.

For the related claim that the Cromwell sonnet renders the solu-

tion to its own problems in immanent terms, as opposed to the reversal
implied by the dialectic, see Warley, 180: “Milton places the imaginary
position which will resolve social problems within the social problems
themselves, rather than situating resolution in a place apart.” The problem,
then, doesn’t invert into the solution: The solution is positively immanent
within the problem.

34.

Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean Mc-

Neil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31.

35.

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the

Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 24– 25.

36.

Ibid., 26, 135.

37.

See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capi-

talism and Schizo phre nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397: “Work is a motor cause that meets re sis-
tances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and
must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor
cause, but one that has no re sis tance to overcome, operates only upon the

Notes to pages 82–89

227

mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one
moment to the next.”

38.

James, 229.

39.

An Apology against a Pamphlet, in The Complete Prose Works, ed.

Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:937– 38. I am
indebted to Jason Kerr for alerting me to the importance of this passage
for my argument.

40.

Ibid., 935.

41.

For an account of seventeenth- century responses to this problem,

from Spinoza’s rejection of a faculty of judgment distinct from perception
to Hobbes’s equation of thought and motion, see James, 150, 203– 5,
282– 84.

42.

For the argument that “if I have grace to use it so” deftly confl ates

faith and works, as part of the sonnet’s grand incorporative fantasy, see
Booth and Flyer, 455.

43.

See Margaret Thickstun, “Resisting Patience in Milton’s Sonnet

19,” Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 172, 177– 78.

44.

Richard Crashaw, “The Flaming Heart,” in The Complete Poetry

of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York
University Press, 1970), l. 73– 74. Subsequent references to Crashaw’s
poetry are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses.

45.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, Mass.:

Blackwell, 2007), 9.30, 31– 33. All references to Paradise Lost are from
this edition and include book and line numbers in parentheses.

46.

Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering

and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1974), 22– 23.

47.

Ibid., 33– 34.

48.

A Second Defense of the En glish People, trans. Helen North, in

The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1966), 4.1:652. On this issue, see also Stanley Fish, How Milton
Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2001),
349– 57.

49.

See Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power,

and Poetry in Restoration En gland (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1994), 13– 41; Vanita Neelakanta’s “Paradise Regain’d in the Closet: Private
Piety in Milton’s Brief Epic,” in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton, ed.
Mimi Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2012), 146– 72.

50.

Carol Barton, “ ‘They Also Perform the Duties of a Servant Who

Only Remain Erect on Their Feet in a Specifi ed Place in Readiness to
Receive Orders’: The Dynamics of Stasis in Sonnet XIX (‘When I Consider
How My Light Is Spent’),” Milton Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1998): 113. See also

228

Notes to pages 89–100

Thickstun, 172: “Milton the writer may understand Patience’s doctrine,
but Milton the speaker does not acquiesce”; David Urban, “The Talented
Mr. Milton: A Parabolic Laborer and His Identity,” Milton Studies 43 (2004):
15– 16.

51.

Smith, Poetic Closure, 197. Smith does, however, in contrast to my

argument here, maintain that parataxis necessarily levels ontological dis-
tinctions (106).

52.

Ibid., 99.

53. Tobias Gregory, “Murmur and Reply: Rereading Milton’s Sonnet

19,” Milton Studies 51 (2010): 30.

54.

See Parker, “The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,” 196–

200; Maurice Kelley, “Milton’s Later Sonnets and the Cambridge Manu-
script,” Modern Philology 54 (August 1956): 20– 25.

55. Thickstun, 177.
56.

Fish, How Milton Works, 354– 57. Fish maintains that Paradise

Regained rejects any dramatic understanding of the world as “a succes-
sion of routine events punctuated now and then (and only for exceptional
people) by moments of crucial choice” (354– 55).

57.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 431.

58.

See Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist, 149– 89.

59.

For brief versions of this claim, see Bruce Boehrer, “Reading for

Detail: Four Approaches to Sonnet 19,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s
Shorter Poetry and Prose, 168; Sagaser, 91.

60.

See Thickstun, 172; Urban, 14; Nardo, 147– 48.

61.

See Silver, 787: “If one retains the lyric mode of the octave, then

the speaker is heard to murmur, ‘Doth God exact day- labour, light de-
nied’; but once one enters the narrated dialogue of the sestet, that murmur
becomes the ironic response of God, who chides the speaker for his faith-
lessness even as Patience now succeeds in preventing a murmur otherwise
articulate.”

62.

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical

Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985), 9.

63.

Fish, How Milton Works, 524. This passage seems the root of Fish’s

contention, in his work on politics and university education, that con-
ceived frames of reference determine the limits of intelligibility prior to any
universal evidentiary procedures. See Fish, “Postmodern Warfare: The Ig-
norance of Our Warrior Intellectuals,” Harper’s (July 2002): 33– 40; Save
the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

64.

For the psychoanalytic elaboration of the death drive as a yearning

for inanimate stasis, see Freud, Beyond the Plea sure Principle, trans. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).

65.

Deleuze, Bergsonism, 97. When Deleuze maintains that virtuality

amounts to a world in which “nothing happens,” he is essentially skewer-

Notes to pages 100–4

229

ing the logic of resemblance entailed in a theory of realization. See Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 158:
“Nothing happens, and yet everything changes, because becoming contin-
ues to pass through its components again and to restore the event that is
actualized elsewhere, at a different moment.” See also Adorno’s account of
art and redemption in Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot- Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6: “In their relation to empirical reality,
artworks recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything
would be as it is and yet wholly other.”

66.

For the argument that Astrophil and Stella and En glish Petrar-

chism in general oscillate between assertions of rhetorical power and fail-
ure, see Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 106– 7. Although these oscillations
are incompatible with my argument here, Dubrow’s account might ex-
plain why Milton chooses the sonnet form to think about passivity and
potential.

67.

For the argument that apocalypticism is a type of unconditioned

communicative openness, see Franke, 55: “In effect, what I am suggesting
is that apocalyptic revelation is essentially communicative reason— that is,
reason as the power of unrestricted communication.” Despite this conten-
tion, Franke continues to insist that language can perform only an inade-
quate mediating function: There is ultimately no unrestricted meeting of
minds, only the faith that they will meet (80).

68.

Smith, Poetic Closure, 123– 14, 150. Smith also notes that this con-

clusion is an interruption: “The poem concludes, then, with the interruption
of the dream, but, more signifi cantly, with the sober return to the stable
ordinariness of daytime reality, and to the permanence and absoluteness of
personal night” (126).

69.

For a nuanced and more positive account of the value of vulnera-

bility as an ethical category, see Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-
Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2011), 58– 61.

70.

For the argument that Samson Agonistes is about the nature of

thinking, see Radzinowicz, 56. Radzinowicz, however, describes thought
as a dialectical development toward resolution: “Synthesis and tempering,
the knowledge of good through the experience of good and evil, this is the
meaning for Samson of the laboring of his mind, to have arrived at the
place where antitheses are resolved” (62).

71.

Paradise Lost frequently uses “event” to mean “outcome,” particu-

larly in the context of the Fall: “event perverse!” (9.405); “but I feel / Farr
otherwise th’ event, not Death, but Life / Augmented” (9.983– 85). Perhaps
only fallen humans imagine events as successes or failures.

230

Notes to pages 105–15

72.

For the claim that an even number of feet in En glish results in a

monotonous meter, see Fussell, 131.

73. White, 171.
74.

Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2012), 94.

75.

For my more extensive argument about how the entirety of Samson

Agonistes erases the possibility of events outside poetry, see Ryan Netzley,
“Reading Events: The Value of Reading and the Possibilities of Po liti cal
Action and Criticism in Samson Agonistes,” Criticism 48 (fall 2006):
509– 33.

76. Anthony Low, “Action and Suffering: Samson Agonistes and the

Irony of Alternatives,” PMLA 84 (May 1969): 517.

3. What Happens in

Lycidas? Apocalypse, Possibility,

and Events in Milton’s Pastoral Elegy

David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the En glish Re nais sance,

rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 225.

John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John

Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),
2:553.

For an example of this reading, see Christopher Hill, The Experi-

ence of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Faber and
Faber, 1984), 318.

For Deleuze’s account of this reverse engineering, which we have

already discussed in the preceding chapter, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991),
98. For the argument that revelation means “pure potency,” see William
Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Lan-
guage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 52. Franke’s concept of
apocalyptic openness, however, ultimately invites the intervention of a
transcendent authority, an invitation at odds with the suspicion of au-
thoritative speakers in Lycidas: “Of course, what I am invoking here is
not any authoritatively dictated, positive protocols, but simply the open-
ness to a higher authority than our own” (86).

Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in

Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: For-
tress Press, 1980), 87.

See James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Herme-

neutics (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1– 29, 67, 159– 60.

For the argument that pastoral is a genre constituted, from its incep-

tion, as self- conscious meditation on its own self- contradictions, its own
meta phorizing and anti- pastoral pro cesses, see Judith Haber, Pastoral and

Notes to pages 115–18

231

the Poetics of Self- Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 1– 11. Although I tend to agree with Haber
that new- historicist readings of pastoral devolve into ideology critique (3),
my argument here is that contradiction and the dialectical tension it im-
plies mistake pastoral poetry’s interest in a potentiality outside of a dialec-
tic of actual and potential, a potentiality that is, ultimately, the engine of
novelty.

For the contention that poetry in itself is only potential, a possible

utterance, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How
Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 16– 17. Smith’s
account of poetic potential, however, rests upon her insistence that poems
are ahistorical and do not really occur until they are enacted or performed
(15– 17): “Every utterance, in other words, occurs within a specifi c con-
text of circumstances and motives. When a poem occurs, however, it is
unmoored from such a context, isolated from the circumstances and mo-
tives that might have occasioned it” (15). My argument throughout this
chapter is that Milton challenges precisely this presupposition: that poems
and potentiality do not occur.

For an account of seventeenth- century philosophy’s anti- Aristotelian

assault on fi nal causes that serves as the backdrop for my argument, see
Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth- Century
Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 67– 74.

10. As in preceding chapters, Agamben’s argument that the fi nal line

of the poem is not part of the poem informs my argument. See Giorgio
Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 113.

11.

Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Malden,

MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), lines 37– 38. All references to Milton’s poetry,
other than Paradise Lost, are from this edition. Line numbers will appear
in parentheses.

12.

For the argument that Milton abandons any traditionally reactive

conversion experience, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-
Representation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 54:
“Nowhere in his works does Milton acknowledge the need for a conversion
experience. The idea of a conversion experience is not resituated in terms
of the reader; it is simply absent from Milton’s vocabulary. The theologi-
cal and Puritan poet is in this way, paradoxically, not a religious poet; he
lacked the conviction of sin that is both a prerequisite to and a component
of conversion.” I argue that this is not a prideful personal idiosyncrasy but
a concerted attempt to embrace an affi rmative understanding of apoca-
lyptic events, including that of conversion.

13.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of

Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 175. Kermode also

232

Notes to pages 118–22

describes the modern notion of crisis as a transition from naïve immi-
nence to the installation of immanent ends: “And although for us the End
has perhaps lost its naïve imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of
our fi ctions; we may speak of it as immanent” (6). Of course, Kermode’s
argument revolves around fi ction, not verse. My argument here is that a
lyric that tends toward immediacy enacts an even more radical rejection
of imminence in favor of immanence.

14.

I have included the emended reading from the Trinity manuscript

and the poem’s fi rst publication in Justa Edovardo King naufrago (1638)
because I think “little” is more than just an example of a dismissible self-
censorship in the manuscript, prompted by the publication demands of
the 1638 volume. In addition to Revard’s textual note, see The Riverside
Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998), 98, 105n56.
I am indebted to Thomas Corns for suggesting that I pay more careful
attention to these textual variants.

15.

John Leonard, “ ‘Trembling Ears’: The Historical Moment of Lyci-

das,” Journal of Medieval and Re nais sance Studies 21 (1991): 79; Flanna-
gan, Riverside Milton, 98, 105n56. See also Stella P. Revard, “Lycidas,” in
A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
2001), 255.

16.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 212.

17.

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the

Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 24.

18.

Ibid., 25.

19.

See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New

York: Continuum, 2005), 192; Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understand-
ing of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42– 43. For a
Derridean account of events as unfi gurable rupture, see Richard Terdiman,
“Can We Read the Book of Love?” PMLA 126 (March 2011): 477. For
the classic Derridean passage, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5: “The future . . . is that which breaks
absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, pre-
sented, as a sort of monstrosity.”

20.

Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the En glish Re nais sance, 264.

For a similar identifi cation of the engine and the Word, but based on par-
allels with Francis Bacon, see Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton among
the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Burlington, Vt.: Ash-
gate, 2010), 137. For the argument that the engine is not the Word but the
medium for transmitting it, the printing press, see James Kelley and Cath-
erine Bray, “The Keys to Milton’s ‘Two- Handed Engine’ in Lycidas (1637),”

Notes to pages 122–29

233

Milton Quarterly 44 (2010): 124. For the argument that the two- handed
engine is the winnowing fan that separates wheat from chaff, which ex-
plains why there is both smiting and a hopeful conclusion to the poem,
see David Sansone, “How Milton Reads: Scripture, the Classics, and That
Two- Handed Engine,” Modern Philology 103 (2006): 341.

21.

Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the En glish Re nais sance, 268.

22.

For my discussion of prolepsis in Paradise Regained and the early

devotional poetry, see Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern
Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 149– 89.

23.

Edward Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pitts-

burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), 36.

24.

Ibid., 33.

25. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 74– 75.
26.

Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey, in The

Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), book 1, chap. 33, 6:627.

27.

Ibid., book 1, chapter 27, 6:535– 36, 539.

28.

For an account of a pure or present sign that informs my argu-

ment here, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77; Proust and Signs,
trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 22: “We never know how someone learns; but what ever the way,
it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the
assimilation of some objective content. . . . We never learn by doing like
someone, but by doing with someone, who has no resemblance to what
we are learning.”

29. Tayler, 55– 56.
30.

Jason A. Kerr, “Prophesying the Bible: The Improvisation of Scrip-

ture in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 47, no. 1
(2013): 28.

31.

See Tayler, 48– 50; Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Vio-

lence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 55– 56; Lieb, The Sinews
of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1989), 56. Joseph Wittreich makes a similar claim and
remarks Milton’s frequent use of this formula in his other works. See Vi-
sionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.:
Huntington Library Press, 1979), 138– 40.

32.

For my account of similar double citational effects in the pinnacle

scene of Paradise Regained, and the re sis tance to interpretation that they
produce, see “How Reading Works: Hermeneutics and Reading Practice
in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 49 (2009): 146– 66.

33.

Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). In the Authorized Version
and most modern Bibles, this passage is numbered as verse 6. All citations

234

Notes to pages 129–33

of biblical passages in En glish are from this translation and edition. Book,
chapter, and verse will appear in parentheses.

34. The Greek (transliterated) reads: “Hou hē phōnē tēn gēn esaleusen

tote, nun epēggeltai legōn, Eti hapax egō seisō ou monon tēn gēn alla kai
ton ouranon. To de eti hapax dēloi [tēn] tōn saleuomenōn metathesin hōs
pepoiēmenōn, hina meinē ta mē saleuomena.” See The Greek New Testa-
ment, ed. Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger,
and Allen Wikgren in cooperation with the Institute for New Testament
Textual Research, Münster, Westphalia, 3rd ed. (New York: United Bible
Societies, 1983). I am indebted to Yasuko Taoka for her help in parsing
this passage.

35.

For the contention that Lycidas sums up the 1638 volume but

emphasizes its own novelty and modernity in the 1645 Poems, see Chris-
topher Kendrick, “Anachronism in Lycidas,” En glish Literary History 64
(1997): 19– 20. For the contrary argument that the pastoral elegy is an
outmoded genre in 1637, particularly in comparison with the other poems
in Justa Edovardo King naufrago, see Peter M. Sacks, The En glish Elegy:
Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985), 90.

36.

For a brief account of the noncausal nature of occasion and its as-

sociation with free, nonhuman choice in Margaret Cavendish’s vitalism, see
John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the
Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 190– 92, 205.

37.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. Wilhelm Pauck (Phila-

delphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 334– 35. For the contrary argument that
prophecy means “ ‘testimony’ or participation in a debate to be judged from
its results,” see Martin, 126. For the argument that history is contingency
and that prophecy amounts to a causal certainty, see John C. Ulreich Jr.,
“ ‘And by Occasion Foretells’: The Prophetic Voice in Lycidas,” Milton
Studies 18 (1983): 21: “What Milton foretells ‘by occasion’ is no accident
of history but its cause, the incarnate Word transforming the world, as the
word of the poet transforms the occasion of Edward King’s death into a
prophetic moment.” My argument here follows Luther in insisting on the
incompatibility of prophecy and certainty.

38.

For Johnson’s famous indictment, see Samuel Johnson, “Milton,”

Lives of the En glish Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon,
1967), par. 180– 81, 1:163: “It is not to be considered as the effusion of
real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opin-
ions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon
Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of ‘rough satyrs and fauns with cloven
heel.’ ‘Where there is leisure for fi ction, there is little grief.’ In this poem
there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing
new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting:

Notes to pages 133–37

235

what ever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent
improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.” See also, E. M. W.
Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), 80.

39.

Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Gram-

mar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 281.

40.

Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work,

and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008), 100, 92. I am indebted to
Jason Kerr for suggesting the importance of this problem for my reading
of Lycidas. For the claim that the 1645 edition of Poems is an ecumenical
humanist, not a radical Puritan document, see Martin 117.

41.

Cummings, 63.

42.

J. Martin Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Backwards in

“Lycidas” (Victoria: University of Victoria, En

glish Literary Studies

Monograph Series, 1983), 70. For a related version of this argument that
targets critics, such as M. H. Abrams, who read the poem as a sequence of
dramatic voices, see Robert Martin Adams, “Bounding ‘Lycidas,’ ” Hud-
son Review 23 (1970): 299, 299n3: “It might be pointed out that Mr.
Abrams himself reads the poem from back to front, by beginning with the
fact that it’s the speech of an unnamed rustic singer. Properly speaking, he
doesn’t and we don’t have the slightest reason to suspect this till the end
of the poem; and if we’re going to talk about the ‘actual order’ of the
poem, this is a fact of some signifi cance. . . . The withholding of the ‘un-
couth swain’ till the end of the poem militates, for one thing, against a
‘dramatic’ reading of it; we can’t suppose it’s the lament of one fi gment of
Milton’s fi ctional imagination for another, if we have no reason to suspect
the existence of the fi rst.”

43.

Isabel G. MacCaffrey, “Lycidas: The Poet in a Landscape,” in Milton’s

“Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides, rev. ed. (Colum-
bia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 246– 48. See also Smith, Poetic
Closure, 129– 30. Smith notes that Lycidas creates the illusion of the “con-
current passage of time,” but nonetheless regards the poem’s fi nal eight lines
as a framing device that locates the entire poem in the past (130).

44.

For the argument that Lycidas has the rough structure of a Hege-

lian dialectic, see Jon S. Lawry, “ ‘Eager Thought’: Dialectic in Lycidas,” in
Milton’s “Lycidas,” 237– 38. For an account of ritual repetition in Milton
as an endless dialectical struggle, see Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering
and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 6– 7: “While I begin this book with a fundamental
opposition, between creation and chaos, and make it my paradigm for
other distinctions— between licit and illicit knowledge, language that ritu-
ally performs and language that cannot, ritual and pathological repetition—
all of those distinctions break down in the face of the continual struggle
between oppositions.” For the argument, within a Derridean and Lacanian

236

Notes to pages 137–43

tradition, that undecidability allows one to evade the dialectic of presence
and absence, see Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 120.

45.

For the argument that any reaffi rmation of order is consoling, even

the somewhat duplicitous promise of a future that only circles back to the
past, see Rosemond Tuve, “Theme, Pattern, and Imagery in Lycidas,” in
Milton’s “Lycidas,” 176: “There is no single ‘Christian consolation’ in the
poem; the whole texture of it is replete with these, and the imagery is the
major voice carry ing that constant burden. If it seems a fantastic misuse of
words to call Peter’s ‘dread voice’ a consolation, the rest of the poem adds
its witness to our own experience that the stab at the heart of loss is that
it denies conceivable order. All that reaffi rms order consoles.” Personally,
I fi nd this last one of the most terrifying sentences in literary criticism.

46.

Evans, 71– 72.

47.

For the classic account of performative speech acts, especially the

distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force,
see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1967), 94– 107.

48.

For the argument that poetic closure “creates in the reader the ex-

pectation of nothing,” a nothing that is nonetheless populated by “ulti-
mate composure,” “stability, resolution, or equilibrium,” see Smith, Poetic
Closure, 34. It is precisely this model of fi nality that Milton’s notion of
apocalyptic potential is designed to resist: i.e., revolutions end in equilib-
rium, but apocalypses do not because they are not even reacting to, let
alone resolving tensions (3).

49.

For this notion of preservative negation, one not reducible to a

merely dismissive end or rejection, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
19, 36, 308. For my account of the value of bare, dismissive negation in
Paradise Regained, see “Reading, Recognition, Learning, and Love in
Paradise Regained,” in To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton, ed. Mimi
Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012),
117– 45.

50.

Paul Alpers, “Lycidas and Modern Criticism,” En glish Literary His-

tory 48 (1982): 479. For the related contention that the fi nal ottava rima
acts as an unnecessary coda to a poem that has already achieved closure,
see Smith, Poetic Closure, 192.

51. Alpers, 472.
52.

See Smith, Poetic Closure, 16– 17.

53.

For the argument that criticism mistakenly focuses on subjects

at the expense of objects in the poem, see Lauren Shohet, “Subject and
Object in Lycidas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47 (2005):
101– 2.

Notes to pages 143–44

237

54.

For infl uential examples of this critical strain, see Stanley Fish,

How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap / Harvard University
Press, 2001), 261, 276; M. H. Abrams, “Five Types of Lycidas,” in Mil-
ton’s “Lycidas,” 226. For the contention that Abrams and Fish mistakenly
oppose convention and individual voice, see Alpers, 469. For the more
general argument that drama and fi ction represent events, whereas lyric
only represents discourse, see Smith, Poetic Closure, 122

55.

Kendrick, 16– 17. More generally, my argument here is at odds

with Kendrick’s description of the poem as shot through with retroactiv-
ity (18). Kendrick also quotes a short story by John Berryman that aptly
sums up the voraciously acquisitive author and subject at the root of most
modern criticism of the poem. See John Berryman, “Wash Far Away,” in
The Freedom of the Poet, ed. idem. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1976), 372. In the story, a professor is brushing up on Milton’s allusions
prior to his customary lecture on Lycidas: “As Milton’s imitations and
telescopings multiplied, he commenced to feel restless, distant, smaller.
What one editor neglected, another observed, and he began to have a
sense of the great mind like a whirring, sleepless refi nery— its windows
glittering far out across the landscape of night— through which poured
and was transformed the whole elegiac poetry of Greece and Italy and En-
gland, receiving an impress new and absolute. Mine! it seemed to call,
seizing one brightness, another, another, locking them in place, while their
features took on the rigidity and beauty of masks. Through the echoing
halls they posed at intervals, large, impassive, splendid; a special light
moved on their helms, far up, and shadows fell deep between them. The
professor collected himself and glanced at the time.”

56.

Elizabeth Hanson, “To Smite Once and Yet Once More: The

Transaction of Milton’s Lycidas,” Milton Studies 25 (1989): 72. Raymond
MacKenzie makes a similar claim about Epitaphium Damonis, maintain-
ing that the pastoral fantasy involves not the sublation of tension but the
evacuation of it. See Raymond N. MacKenzie, “Rethinking Rhyme, Signi-
fying Friendship: Milton’s Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis,” Modern
Philology 106 (2009): 552: “If it is not condescending to call this vision a
fantasy, then we should stress the quality of the fantasy: the removal of
opposition. The tension between Christian and pagan is not resolved in
dialectical manner, for there is no synthesis, no compromise in which one
pole dominates or supersedes the other, nor one in which both poles give
up something of their essence in order to reach some new stage. Instead,
the poles of opposition are allowed to coexist; all that has changed is the
removal of the tension between them.”

57.

For a succinct account of the Hegelian argument that only the dia-

lectic allows for self- transformation, see Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the
Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),

238

Notes to pages 144–46

122– 23: “The absence of internal negativity [in Spinoza] robs agents of
the motor of self- transformation. Change comes from the outside. . . .
Negation is necessary for true positivity, for self- determination through
self- correction.”

58.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 237.

59.

For an account of the difference between disavowal and negation,

already discussed in Chapter 2, see Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness
and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31. For
Agamben’s account of “autosuppression,” which also informs much of
this paragraph, see Agamben, The Time That Remains, 24– 25. Agamben’s
most compelling example of this phenomenon comes from Marx: “The
proletariat [is] only able to liberate itself through autosuppression. . . .
The fact that the proletariat ends up being identifi ed over time with a de-
terminate social class— the working class that claims prerogatives and
rights for itself— is the worst misunderstanding of Marxian thought” (31).

60.

For this formulation, I am indebted to Don Beith’s question at the

panel “On Shame in Philosophy and Politics” (papers by Anthony Steinbock
and Fabricio Pontin, commentary by Ryan Netzley) at the Philosophical
Collaborations Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale,
March 24, 2011. For the contention that the poem itself transforms the
pastoral tradition but does so via a logic of negation, see Ulreich, 14: “The
renewal of pastoral, however, requires a radical transformation; the cre-
ation of a new world requires the destruction of the old. . . . That which
has been ‘received by tradition’ is precisely the pastoral vision which Lyci-
das fi nally transcends, not by rejecting images of shepherds feeding their
fl ocks, but by transforming their ‘rural ditties’ (32) into the ‘unexpressive
nuptial Song’ (176) of the Lamb” (14). I fi nd these sentences puzzling in-
sofar as the latter eschews the negation that the former insists is requisite
for the production of novelty.

61.

For the argument that Lycidas stages Milton’s concern with his

own poetic vocation, see William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:157, 163; John T. Shawcross, “Milton’s
Decision to Become a Poet,” Modern Language Quarterly 24 (1963):
21– 30.

62.

For the related argument that Paradise Lost stages a confl ict between

vitalist auto genesis and authoritarian rule, see Rogers, The Matter of Rev-
olution, 103– 76.

63. The Greek, again transliterated, is “en astheneia teleitai.” For discus-

sions of this motto in the context of Sonnet 19, see Russell M. Hillier, “The
Patience to Prevent that Murmur: The Theodicy of John Milton’s Nine-
teenth Sonnet,” Renascence 59 (summer 2007): 254– 55; William R. Parker,
“The Dates of Milton’s Sonnets on Blindness,” PMLA 73 (June 1958):
198– 99.

Notes to pages 147–53

239

64. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 135. For the contrary conten-

tion that Milton transforms pastoral’s conventional pro cession of mourn-
ers into a trial of suspects, adding a juridical element that ultimately
heralds the coming of class, see Kendrick, 4, 30– 31.

65.

For an argument that the fetishization of work and productivity

infl ects and infects many critical denigrations of pastoral, see Linda
Woodbridge, “Country Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral- Bashing
Impulse,” in Re- Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Orn-
stein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004),
189– 214. For Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between work and free
use, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capital-
ism and Schizo phre nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 397. For Hegel’s competing account of a “pure
action” derived from and superseded by work, see Phenomenology of
Spirit, 244– 45.

66.

Ricoeur, 117.

67. Alpers, 486– 87.

4. How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol,
and the Event of Ending in “Upon Appleton House”

See Nigel Smith, “The Boomerang Theology of Andrew Marvell,”

Re nais sance and Reformation 25 (2001): 143: “Marvell capitalizes on the
energies of contrary forces as both a theme and an embodiment, at every
level of poetic construction. They are usually fi gured as one kind of dou-
bleness or another: a reversal, an instance of refl exivity, or a ‘self- inwoven
device.’ They are self- conceived more than once by Marvell as an ‘echo-
ing song,’ and very recently they have even been labelled a ‘boomerang’
method.” My argument here is that Marvell is interested in the nonreac-
tive forces at work within such reversals, not the more comforting results
of such inversions. See also Rosalie Colie, My Echoing Song: Andrew
Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 1970),
188, 276; Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in
En glish Re nais sance Narrative Poetry (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998), 216.

For the argument that “Upon Appleton House” depicts the present

as potentiality, see Joan Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The
Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 39: “Mar-
vell, then, uses his liminal position in the Fairfax house hold to create in
‘Upon Appleton House’ a realm of mutual possibility in which the past is
referenced, the future is promised, but the present is pure potential.” My
study attempts to anatomize the temporal and symbolic forces at work
within such potentials.

240

Notes to pages 153–56

3. Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” in The Poems of An-

drew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2007),
stanza 49, lines 385– 86. All references to Marvell’s poetry are to this edi-
tion. Line numbers, and stanza numbers where appropriate, will appear in
parentheses.

For the contention that “Upon Appleton House” is a masque, but

one that does not justify Fairfax’s retirement, see Ann E. Berthoff, The
Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell’s Major Poems (Prince ton: Prince ton
University Press, 1970), 170– 71.

For the contention that it is not clear that Fairfax’s retirement is

permanent in 1651 and that, as a result, the poem is not simply a celebra-
tion of retirement or solitude, see Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Litera-
ture and the En glish Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 170.

For the suggestion that, unlike Jonson, Marvell embraces solitude,

see Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian En gland: John
Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 54. For Jonson’s depiction of the country house as a
restful space, see Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst,” in The Complete Poems,
ed. George Parfi tt (New York: Penguin, 1975), 98, lines 99– 102: “Now,
Penshurst, they that will proportion thee / With other edifi ces, when they
see / Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing

else, / May say, their

lords have built, but thy lord dwells.” All references to Jonson’s poetry
are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. Marvell also
reconceives these “heaps” in the fi nal lines of “Upon Appleton House,”
presenting the entire world, and not just other denigrated houses, as over-
thrown heaps.

7. Thomas Fairfax, “Upon the New- built House att Apleton” (Bodleian

MS Fairfax 40), in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith,
218n71.

For the related contention that Marvell’s verse grapples with Descartes’

challenge to an analogical cosmos, see Donald M. Friedman, Marvell’s
Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 24.

For Deleuze’s account of disavowal and its distinction from negative

reversal (already cited in Chapter 2), see Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Cold-
ness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31.
For the limitations of self- refl ective reversal as a conception of thinking,
see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135– 36. For the argument that
Marvell actually escapes existential dread and the reactive anxiety that
attends it, see John Creaser, “Marvell’s Effortless Superiority,” Essays in
Criticism 20 (1970): 408: “These poems are the mind’s declaration of
in de pen dence from the Fall and the causes of dread which weigh on the
human consciousness.”

Notes to pages 157–61

241

10.

See Creaser, “Marvell’s Effortless Superiority,” 419, 423n22; A. B.

Chambers, “ ‘I Was but an Inverted Tree’: Notes toward the History of an
Idea,” Studies in the Re nais sance 8 (1961): 291– 99.

11.

Colie, 252– 53.

12.

Ibid., 182– 83.

13.

Ibid., 252, 261.

14.

For the contrary contention that Marvell embraces a tolerant

skepticism, see Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and
the Politics of Imagination in Mid- Seventeenth- Century En gland (Wood-
bridge, Suffolk, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 56, 66. Contrary to Yoshinaka,
I would contend that Marvell does not skeptically suspend judgment but
rather disavows it.

15.

For an argument that charts Marvell’s distaste for Levellers and

Diggers, see Wilding, 121– 23, 154– 55.

16.

See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1975), 28: “This declaration by negative and contrast,
not now with city and court but with other country houses, is enough in
itself to remind us that we can make no simple extension from Penshurst
to a whole country civilisation. The forces of pride, greed and calculation
are evidently active among landowners as well as among city merchants
and courtiers. What is being celebrated is then perhaps an idea of rural
society, as against the pressures of a new age.”

17.

For a more positive account of individuating energies within the

Marxist tradition, see Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” in
Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:52– 53: “If the subject is
to genuinely resist reifi cation in solitude here, it may no longer even try to
withdraw into what is its own as though that were its property; the traces
of an individualism that has in the meantime delivered itself over to the
market in the form of the feuilleton are alarming. Instead, the subject has
to step outside itself by keeping quiet about itself; it has to make itself a
vessel, so to speak, for the idea of a pure language. . . . He overcomes its
alienation, which is an alienation of use, by intensifying it until it becomes
the alienation of a language no longer actually spoken. . . . Only by virtue
of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own differ-
ence, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the hu-
miliation of isolation, in the par

tic u lar does lyric language represent

language’s intrinsic being as opposed to its ser vice in the realm of ends.”

18.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietz sche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 61.

19.

For the argument that eschatology amounts to such reversals, see

Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seven-
teenth Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 61– 63.

242

Notes to pages 162–65

20.

Katherine O. Acheson, “Military Illustration, Garden Design, and

Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ [with illustrations],” En glish Literary
Re nais sance 41, no. 1 (January 2011): 179.

21.

For the contrary argument that “Upon Appleton House” stages the

secularization of religious idioms and typology, see Clinton Allen Brand,
“ ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the Decomposition of Protestant Historiog-
raphy,” En glish Literary Re nais sance 31 (2001): 510: “As erstwhile subjects
of the King struggled to comprehend what it could mean to be subjects of
history, theological idioms were politicized, nationalized, and historicized
in unpre ce dented ways by a pervasive kind of cultural catachresis: provi-
dence became a way of talking about policy; divine election signifi ed po liti-
cal authority; the great chain of being underwrote social order; prophecy
and mysticism voiced marginalized perspectives; millennium and apoca-
lypse articulated the hopes and fears of historical existence.” The problem
with such an equation of transformation and catachresis is that it ends up
maintaining that all change is an effect of meta phor and its misuses: i.e.,
there can be no transformation without a violently reactive misuse that is
also a substitution.

22.

For the related argument that the diagrammatic abstraction of

fortifi cation illustration informs Marvell’s spatial understanding in this
poem, see Acheson, 156. In contrast to Acheson, I characterize this proce-
dure not as dehumanization in the ser vice of imposing a schematic order
on a recalcitrant nature (159) but rather as an attempt to examine rela-
tional force as such, or to take this force as the object of examination.

23.

For a description of the concept of positive distance that informs

these sentences, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 173. For a description of this in- between relation as a
forceful becoming that does not obey the logic of reversal, see Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo phre nia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
293: “A line of becoming is not defi ned by points that it connects, or by
points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes
up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points fi rst perceived,
transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.”

24.

Robert Herrick, “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton,” in The

Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), 200, lines 95– 102.

25.

For the contention that one can expect rhyme only after it has

already occurred, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study
of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48:
“One cannot say that the second rhyme- word in Jonson’s couplet has
fulfi lled an expectation set up by the fi rst because there is nothing in the

Notes to pages 165–70

243

lines to create such an expectation (always excepting the effect of the
reader’s previous experience with En glish distichs). . . . The expectation
arises only when the principle of rhyme has been perceived as such, and
it thus takes at least one couplet (or rhyme) to create the expectation of
another.”

26.

Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Enclosed Garden and the Apoca-

lypse: Immanent versus Transcendent Time in Milton and Marvell,” in
Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 144, 152, 163.

27.

Ibid., 154– 55. For the related claim that Marvell reacts against a

Puritan providentialism because he ultimately equates it with the notion
that might makes right, see Yoshinaka, 95– 96. I would argue, contrary to
Yoshinaka, that Marvell does not subscribe to a hierarchy of value that
elevates ends over means.

28.

See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary

on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 82; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 173.

29.

Donald M. Friedman, “Rude Heaps and Decent Order,” in Marvell

and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1999), 124, 133, 135. For the related argument that Mar-
vell’s pastorals are open- ended, not closed, see Paul Hamilton, “Andrew
Marvell and Romantic Patriotism,” in Marvell and Liberty, 86. For the con-
trary contention that “Upon Appleton House” never offers a standard refer-
ence point against which decency could be judged, see Colie, 184: “In ‘Upon
Appleton House’ Marvell presented a world with no fi xed reference- point,
no text like Sebonde’s against which to mea sure the world under scrutiny,
so that its shiftiness and its peculiarities seem in Appleton’s nature, intrin-
sic to it rather than the result of a par tic u lar astigmatism or par tic u lar
perspective.”

30.

For Deleuze’s contention that disorder is an illusion and that we

are only really dealing with competing orders, see Gilles Deleuze, Berg-
sonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone,
1991), 18.

31. Acheson, 147.
32.

Colie, 227.

33. Williams, 30: “Indeed there is more than a hint, in the whole tone

of this hospitable eating and drinking, of that easy, insatiable exploitation
of the land and its creatures— a prolonged delight in an organised and cor-
porative production and consumption— which is the basis of many early
phases of intensive agriculture: the land is rich, and will be made to provide.
But it is then more diffi cult to talk, in a simple way, of a ‘natural order,’ as
if this was man in concert with nature. On the contrary: this natural order
is simply and decisively on its way to table.”

244

Notes to pages 171–77

34. Aemilia Lanyer, “The Description of Cooke- ham,” in The Poems

of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 134, lines 103– 10. Subsequent references to Lanyer’s verse
are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses.

35.

See Gilles Deleuze, “Nietz sche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John

of Patmos,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50.

36.

See Williams, 28– 32. Williams, of course, notes that Marvell’s poem

does include repre sen ta tions of labor, but he characterizes these repre sen-
ta tions as aestheticized appropriations: “The magical country, yielding of
itself, is now seen as a working landscape fi lled with fi gures. . . . All these
are seen, but in a fi gure: the conscious look at a passing scene” (56). I main-
tain that Marvell’s verse never really worries about the aestheticization of
politics, primarily because it rejects the notion that one could resist a fas-
cistic aestheticized politics with a transcendent judgment. Instead, aesthetic
and po liti cal events operate at the same immanent level, and it is only at
this level that the work of po liti cal transformation can occur.

37.

Berthoff, 174.

38.

For the argument that the apocalypse amounts to an optimistic

dialectical reversal and synthesis of the narratives of providence with his-
tory, see Stocker, 42. Stocker also acknowledges that a dialectical model
entails treating evil as “necessary to the purposes of God” (42). However,
the quotation she adduces as evidence of Marvell’s support for this position,
from The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Second Part, claims that God is “com-
placent” in allowing evil, not that evil is necessary. See The Rehearsal
Transpros’d, The Second Part, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson,
in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 1:1672– 73, ed. Patterson, Dzelzai-
nis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas Von Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 323: God has “distinguish’d the Government of the World
by the intermitting seasons of Discord, War, and publick Disturbance. Nei-
ther has he so order’d it only (as men endeavour to express it) by meer
permission, but sometimes out of Complacency.” The point of the passage is
that God chooses and wills this order, not that it is necessary. See Chernaik,
The Poet’s Time, 29: “Yet to Marvell as to Milton, God takes plea sure in the
working out of his own justice, even though men, aware only of their own
suffering, are unable to recognize the divine pattern.”

39. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 70. Agamben also argues that

spatialized time sacrifi ces thinkable time to representable time and, in-
versely, that experienced time sacrifi ces the representable to the thinkable
(64). I argue here that Marvell throws in his lot with experiential time.

40.

Ibid., 82.

41.

See Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 228n407– 8. It is also

worth noting that the allusion itself is ambiguous, evoking the positive

Notes to pages 177–82

245

providence in Exodus 16:13– 15 and the punishment for gluttonous dis-
obedience in Numbers 11:31– 34. For the contention that Thestylis is a
fi gure for a resurgent millennialism among the army in 1651, see Derek
Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17.

42.

Berthoff, 174.

43.

Grossman, 213. For a contrasting account of Hobbes’s materialist

and historical understanding of eschatology, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Time,
History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics,
Language, and Time: Essays on Po liti cal Thought and History (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 184– 85: “God is not to be known
through understanding of his nature, but rather as will or power and through
the revelations or prophecies— themselves words— which he wills to make
known to us; and a further consequence is that these words may not be
fully intelligible, and that what matters is rather the faith by which we ac-
knowledge them to be God’s words than the reason by which we appre-
hend their meaning.” Pocock’s account informs my reading of Marvell,
particularly insofar as he maintains that interpreting and understanding
words is not what one does with prophecy. The rejection of interpretation
seems the result of Pocock’s contention that Hobbes reduces all of salva-
tion to statements about time: “The whole structure of faith and salvation
has been reduced to a system of statements in and about time” (186).

44.

Grossman, 216.

45.

For variations on this claim, see Dominic Gavin, “ ‘The Garden’ and

Marvell’s Literal Figures,” Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 224– 52; Lynn
Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early
Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 150, 158,
368n36; and Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 12; Colie, 79.

46.

For this sequence, see Stocker, 235.

47.

Colie, 287.

48.

For example, the speaker makes Daphne’s transformation into the

laurel the successful goal, not the thwarted consequence of Apollo’s pur-
suit: “Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that she might laurel grow” (29– 30).
For the argument that this passage amounts to an “unmeta phoring” of
fi gures that replaces erotic with poetic desire and ultimately amounts to a
critique of fi guration, see Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 150, 158, 368n36:
“I fi nd Colie’s term particularly useful since it preserves the very sense of
suspension this technique produces— one recognizes the unmeta phor or
unfi gure by contrast to the fi gure on which it plays; however literal these
one- time meta phors become, there is no systematic way to be sure whether
the image in question is ‘in’ or ‘without’ the fi gural register” (368n36).
Colie’s concept of unmeta phoring also treats literalization as an ironic cri-
tique of fi gurative power. See Colie, 79: “The fi gures, then, are so naturalized

246

Notes to pages 182–88

within the pastoral as to lose their fi gurative power: the poet mocks their
cliché quality by taking their fi ction literally. Such ‘unfi guring’ and ‘unmeta-
phoring’ characterizes much of Marvell’s practice and is, I think, a function
of his critical analysis. He turns back, as it were, to actualize the charged
language of poetic traditions. . . . Again and again, he pushes against the
devices of his craft to fi nd the literal truth they contain. He cleans them of
their conventional meta phorical associations to begin anew.”

49.

For the distinction between enargia, vividness, and energia, force

or movement, see Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric
Poetry and Early Modern En gland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007), 112– 13; and of course, Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poetry,
in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 246.

50.

For the contention that Marvell seeks to escape the logic of corre-

spondence and difference, as well as the logic of comparison, see Enterline,
The Tears of Narcissus, 178, 183.

51.

Stocker, 31.

52.

For the contention that Marvell “immanentizes the eschaton,” see

Brand, 502.

53.

Stocker, 61.

54.

Colie, 246.

55.

Ibid., 269.

56.

Stocker, 239.

57.

Ibid., 163– 64. See also Oxford En glish Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v.,

“epitome,” accessed February 8, 2014, http:// www .oed .com .

58.

For the contention that “The Mower’s Song” dramatizes a local

apocalypse enacted in the name of preserving pastoral traditions, see Colie,
33: “Insisting upon his rights as a pastoralist, the Mower ruins his envi-
ronment, destroys the dream, to keep intact the hyperbole to which he is
accustomed. The pastoral contract is thus made to recoil upon itself, the
tradition’s self- destruction made to seem a natural implication of its own
convention.” I argue that Colie’s account here is precisely of an apocalypse
transformed by the categories of identity and reversal into nothing more
than dialectical development.

59.

For the contention that Marvell seeks to “summarize and surpass”

his pre de ces sors in a wide variety of genres, see Joseph H. Summers, intro-
duction to Andrew Marvell, ed. Summers (New York: Dell, 1961), 13.

60.

For the description of this phenomenon as “a metamorphosis in

which an object becomes its own essence,” see Friedman, Marvell’s Pasto-
ral Art, 223. I maintain that this formulation still ties metamorphosis too
closely to teleological fulfi llment and mutes the emphasis on transforma-
tive becoming in Marvell’s poems. However, Friedman does conclude his
study by presenting meta phor as a solution to the endless oscillations in

Notes to pages 188–94

247

“Upon Appleton House”: “The fl uctuation of the poem between poles of
realism and symbolic extravagance refl ects the constant oscillation be-
tween these two poles of moral action. If there is any resolution it is in the
meta phors themselves that form the substance of ‘Upon Appleton House’ ”
(246). My argument here is that “meta phors themselves” means treating
symbols as temporal events, not commemorative tokens of resemblance.

61. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and

Windus, 1950), 124– 26. For the contention that “straight” as an adjective
means both “correct” and “constraining,” see Enterline, The Tears of Nar-
cissus, 168.

62.

Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, 178, 183. Enterline reads both “The

Garden” and “Upon Appleton House” as failed attempts at such transcen-
dence, whereas I argue that Marvell repurposes symbolic force to such an
extent that one is not always bound to the dialectical wheel of failure.

63.

For the contention that the fi nal stanza pushes readers into an am-

biguous present and that the rational amphibii represent the immanence
of a “refl ective moment,” see Hirst and Zwicker, 30.

64.

For the contention that “Upon Appleton House” repeats “now” so

often that it ultimately evacuates fi nality, see Colie, 252: “The effect of
that fi nal ‘now,’ after so many others, is to diminish our sense of fi nality, to
suggest that there will be another and another ‘now,’ that the per for mance
is over only for this par tic u lar summer’s day.”

Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom
and the End of Crisis

Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (Jan 2008): 202. This

sequentialism seems the upshot of Culler’s contention that narrative is
always about what happens next.

For my earlier discussion of a similar phenomenon in seventeenth-

century devotional verse, see Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eu-
charist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2011), 193– 96.

For Foucault’s description of archaeology as a mechanism for de-

scribing change, outside mystical vitalism or narrativized causation, see
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 173: “Rather than refer to the living
force of change (as if it were its own principle), rather than seek its causes
(as if it were no more than a mere effect), archaeology tries to establish
the system of transformations that constitute ‘change’; it tries to develop
this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analyzable
status of transformation.” Although I would not characterize my study as
participating in this archaeological method, the general motive— treating

248

Notes to pages 194–200

change as something more than a black box at the center of time or history—
certainly informs my project.

I borrow this formula from Terry Ea gleton’s characterization of

Stanley Fish’s reading strategies as an inverted Marxism. See Terry Ea gleton,
The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 45:
“The point is to interpret the world, not to change it.” Ea gleton’s attempts
to unify literature and literary theory around the concept of problem-
solving strategies (175– 76, 223) seems at odds with Milton’s and Marvell’s
consistent suspicion of such dialectical unfoldings.

For the related contention that the concept of crisis promotes a de-

bilitating “negative occupation of the immanent world,” see Janet Roitman,
Anti- Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 9.

For an account of the work of “crisis” in recent economic discourse,

see Roitman, Anti- Crisis, 48– 54.

See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

(New York: Macmillan, 2007).

For the threefold defi nition of crisis, as the permanent crisis of the

world on trial, a transitional phase, and an end or fi nal decision, see Re-
inhart Koselleck, “Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of
‘Crisis,’ ” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts, trans. Todd Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
240. In Koselleck’s view, all of these notions share a model of immanent
interpretation, one that does not have recourse to divinity, despite their
theological roots: “Despite their theological impregnation, what is com-
mon to all three models is that they make the claim to offer historically
immanent patterns of interpretation for crises that are theoretically able
to do without the intervention of God” (241). In other words, despite the
limitations that I describe here, crisis enables an immanent history, instead
of an Augustinian appeal to some other transcendent narrative.

For Schmitt’s denigration of the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,”

borrowed from Donoso Cortés, see Carl Schmitt, Po liti cal Theology: Four
Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 59.

10.

For the liberal defi nition of literature as tending toward self- critical

openness, see Ea gleton, The Event of Literature, 68– 70, 104. Ea gleton
also heaps suspicion on Pierre Macherey’s Althusserian- Marxist account
of literature’s essentially subversive character (96).

11.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 136.

12.

For an example of the presupposition that only natural regular-

ity, not apocalyptic disruption, can ground freedom, see John Rogers,
The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of
Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 159– 60. Rogers,

Notes to pages 200–3

249

of course, considers apocalyptic events to be little more than authoritar-
ian capriciousness.

13.

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical

Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 9. Koselleck’s
argument here turns on the fact that when the Thirty Years’ War ends in
1648 with a po liti cal settlement and not Armageddon, one must abandon
eschatological thinking. I contend, however, that this event causes Milton
and Marvell to rethink the notion that the apocalypse is a battle or a system
of analogies.

14.

For Milton’s portrait of a servile mind that desires its own enslave-

ment, regardless of the external governmental form to which it is subject,
see The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in The
Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 7, rev. ed., ed. Robert W. Ayers
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 357– 63. For Spinoza’s pre sen-
ta tion of the related position, culled from Machiavelli, that there is no
point in liberating a people who will only clamber for more subjection, see
Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological- Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 5.7.

15.

Ea gleton, The Event of Literature, 140– 41.

16.

Ibid., 142– 43.

17.

Ibid., 166.

18.

Ibid., 141.

19.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 135.

20.

For this description of modern narratival history, in which events

are made to speak for themselves, and an account of its development from
more partisan chronicle histories, see Hayden White, “The Value of Nar-
rativity in the Repre sen ta tion of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Nar-
rative Discourse and Historical Repre sen ta tion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987), 19– 23.

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265

Abraham, Lyndy, 217n36
Acheson, Katherine, 161–62, 169,

242n22

actualization. See possibility
Adams, Robert Martin, 235n42
Adorno, Theodor, 229n65, 241n17
Agamben, Giorgio, 10–12, 19–20, 81,

120–21, 126, 147, 174–75, 209–
10n22, 212n41, 224–25n17,
231n10, 238n59, 239n64, 244n39

agreement, 29–30, 38, 41, 47, 49
allegiance, 22, 26–27, 29, 34, 37–38,

41, 45, 49–50, 65, 133–34, 178

allegory, 5, 13, 96–97, 113, 210n26
Alpers, Paul, 140–41, 142, 149–50
ambiguity, 37–38, 49, 56, 80–81
Anderson, Thomas P., 52, 219n55
antinomianism, 23, 56, 138, 143, 145,

148, 202–3. See also freedom

apocalypse: and anticipation, 63,

89–90, 194–95; and contemplation,
97–99; in English Reformation
thought, 12–14; and force, 21–22,
28, 30, 49, 56, 158, 175–76,
186–87; and learning, 24–25, 71,
104–5, 195–96, 198–200, 203–5;
and modernity, 3–5, 31; and novelty,
14, 16, 20, 27, 97–98, 112, 121–22,
124, 127–30, 135–36, 139, 152–53,

183, 187–88, 191–92; and possibil-
ity, 1–3, 14–16, 88–94, 104,
113–15, 117–18, 236n48; and
presence/immanence, 1–3, 14–16,
27, 81–83, 88–89, 95–96, 110–11,
115–16, 121–22, 125–26, 159, 162,
178–80, 188–89, 197, 221–22n4,
229n67, 230n4, 246n58; and
revolution, 4–6, 13–14, 29–30,
112–13, 121–23, 171–72, 186, 191,
197, 208n8, 236n48; and temporal-
ity, 10–12, 15–17, 20–21, 24, 54,
62–64, 71, 125–26, 158–59,
167–68, 174–75, 187–88, 193–94,
204–5, 208n7, 210n26, 212n41. See
also endings; force; messianism;
possibility; revelation; revolution;
temporality

autonomy. See freedom

Badiou, Alain, 7–8, 11, 12
Bale, John, 13, 122
Barton, Carol, 88
Benjamin, Walter, 30
Bergson, Henri, 221n1, 225n23
Berthoff, Ann E., 174, 178
Booth, Stephen, 226n31
Bower, Thad, 38
Brand, Clinton Allen, 242n21

I n d e x

266 Index

15–16, 23–24, 54, 69, 115, 118,
122, 156, 175, 193; and resolution,
16, 77–78, 84–85, 114–16, 127,
145–46, 185, 188, 193–94. See also
under lyric; see also retrospection

ends. See means
Enterline, Lynn, 190, 219n53, 245n48,

246n50, 247n62

epideictic. See encomium
eschatology. See apocalypse
Evans, J. Martin, 136–38
events: and contemplation, 58, 61–62,

97–100; and historical signifi cance,
3–4; within literature, 1, 14, 17, 20,
22, 24, 51, 67–72, 78, 84, 101,
106–11, 115, 140, 145, 181–83,
247–48n60; and novelty, 2–3, 14, 24,
32–33, 58, 95, 127–29, 147–48, 161,
167, 190, 195–97; and presence/
immanence, 1–2, 5, 9–12, 20, 28–30,
62, 71–72, 86, 92, 104, 114, 116–17,
135–36; and reversal, 152–53, 156,
159, 162; and singularity, 6–10,
20–21, 33, 58, 165–66, 209n15,
215n17. See also crisis; kairos;
means; occasion; temporality

Fairfax, Mary, 167–68, 184–86, 188
Fairfax, Thomas, 152, 154–55,

183–84, 240n5; “Upon the New-
built House att Apleton,” 155

Fallon, Stephen M., 231n12
fascism, 30, 32, 222n9
Faust, Joan, 239n2
fi nality. See endings
Fish, Stanley, 98–99, 101, 228n56,

228n63

Flannagan, Roy, 119
Fleming, James Dougal, 114, 223n12
Fletcher, Angus, 70, 71–72
Flyer, Jordan, 226n31
force, 31, 35, 46, 123, 159–61, 172,

189, 216n26, 218n46, 220n65; and
evaluation, 31–33, 40–41, 47–49,
53, 60–61, 65, 155, 214n9; as
present event, 13, 22, 43, 53, 58, 62,
176, 183; and purpose, 27, 30–31,
42, 44, 63. See also under apoca-
lypse; Deleuze, Gilles

formalism, 211n33
Foucault, Michel, 210n27, 247–48n3
Foxe, John, 13

Campbell, Gordon, 133
Catholicism. See Reformation
change. See novelty
Charles I, 3–4, 33–34, 52
Chernaik, Warren, 57, 218–19n51,

244n38

Colie, Rosalie, 158–59, 169, 182, 185,

219n56, 245–46n48, 246n58,
247n64

community, 170–72, 175–76
contemplation, 76, 82–83, 101, 108,

229n70. See also under apocalypse;
events

Corns, Thomas N., 133
country-house poems, 24, 160,

162–65, 170–73, 175–76. See also
lyric; pastoral

Crampton, Georgia Ronan, 86–88, 107
Crashaw, Richard, 86–88
Creaser, John, 217n39, 240n9
crisis, 93, 195–98, 232n13, 248nn5–6,

248n8. See also events; kairos;
occasion

Cromwell, Oliver, 22, 26–27, 34–37,

42–43, 45, 47–48, 53–57, 58–59, 63,
76–77, 153, 182, 188, 213n2

Culler, Jonathan, 17, 193, 247n1
Cummings, Brian, 133, 134

Deleuze, Gilles, 8–9, 18–20, 171,

211n30, 225n23, 226–27n37,
233n28, 242n23; and force, 31–32,
60–61, 161; and possibility, 75–76,
93, 100, 120, 228–29n65; and
recognition, 199, 203

Derrida, Jacques, 9, 61, 208n11,

209n18

dialectic, 18–20, 33, 47, 83, 135–36,

145, 229n70, 235n44, 237n56,
237–38n57, 244n38, 248n4

Dubrow, Heather, 224n16, 226n32,

229n66

Eagleton, Terry, 199, 200–3, 211n29,

248n4, 248n10

elegy, 52–53, 130, 135, 144, 170,

234n35. See also lyric

Eliot, T. S., 34, 215–16n23
encomium, 16, 21–22, 37, 42–43,

52–53, 194, 216n28. See also lyric

endings, 7, 44, 102, 167, 183,

231–32n13, 247n64; and deferral,

Index 267

Kendrick, Christopher, 143–44,

234n35, 237n55

Kermode, Frank, 118, 231–32n13
Kerr, Jason A., 128
Klein, Naomi, 196
Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 213n2,

227n49

Komorowski, Michael, 30–31
Koselleck, Reinhart, 4–6, 97, 200,

208n7, 210n26, 248n8, 249n13

Lanyer, Aemilia, 178; “The Description

of Cooke–ham,” 170–73, 175

learning, 198–205, 233n28; and

modern universities, 199–200. See
also under apocalypse

Leonard, John, 119
Lieb, Michael, 129
literalization, 23, 51–53, 153–54, 178,

182, 245–46n48

literary criticism, 48–49, 97, 219n55
Low, Anthony, 108
Luther, Martin, 132, 134
lyric, 12, 16–18, 84, 193–94, 224n16,

237n54; and endings, 20–21, 117,
142–43, 183–85; and immediacy,
1–2, 68, 72, 79, 199, 203–5. See also
country-house poem; elegy; enco-
mium; narrative; pastoral; sonnets

MacCaffery, Isabel, 137
MacKenzie, Raymond N., 237n56
Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 165–66,

187, 232n20

martyrdom, 30, 198, 214n9
Marvell, Andrew, 26–66, 152–92;

aesthetic politics of, 29–32, 52, 56,
59–60, 172, 214–15n14, 219n60,
244n36; “An Elegy Upon the Death
of My Lord Francis Villiers,” 50–51,
187; “The First Anniversary,” 27,
45–46, 53–56, 62–64; “The
Garden,” 39, 51–52, 182, 184,
189–90, 245n48, 247n62; “An
Horatian Ode,” 26–29, 33–48, 52,
61, 64–66, 213n2, 213–14n7,
220n66; compared to Milton, 45,
52, 57–62, 165–66; “The Mower’s
Song,” 186–87, 246n58; “A Poem
upon the Death of his Late Highness
the Lord Protector,” 56–57; The
Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Second

Franke, William, 221–22n4, 229n67,

230n4

freedom, 54, 56–57, 82, 146, 198–200,

221n1, 248–49n12; and autonomy,
143–44, 150–51, 196, 200–5

Friedman, Donald M., 34, 167–68,

216n26, 218n45, 246–47n60

fulfi llment. See endings
Fussell, Paul, 73–74, 225n20
future. See temporality

Gavin, Dominic, 219n53, 245n45
Girard, René, 38–39
Goldberg, Jonathan, 10
Greene, Roland, 222n6, 222n8
Greene, Thomas M., 39–40
Gregory, Tobias, 92
Grossman, Marshall, 178, 181
Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, Gilles

Haber, Judith, 230–31n7
Hall, John, 26, 31
Hamilton, Paul, 48, 217n43
Hanson, Elizabeth, 144
Hegel, G. W. F., 17–19, 144, 211n32,

236n49

hermeneutics. See interpretation
Herrick, Robert, “A Panegerick to Sir

Lewis Pemberton,” 163–64

Hirst, Derek, 35, 61–62, 219n51,

220n66, 245n41, 247n63

Hodge, R. I. V., 218n46
hope, 21, 23; as present event, 12,

67–68, 85, 191–92, 195, 204–5

hypotaxis. See parataxis

imagination, 149–51. See also

contemplation

interpretation: as present event, 24,

52–53, 58, 130, 139, 164, 176–77,
181, 183–84. See also under
retrospection

irony, 34, 36, 38, 49

James, Susan, 75, 82, 227n42, 231n9
Jonson, Ben: “To Penshurst,” 163–64,

170, 171–72, 240n6

Kahn, Victoria, 59, 214–15n14
kairos, 92–93, 95, 123, 135, 148–49,

174. See also crisis; events; occasion

Kant, Immanuel, 207n1

268 Index

187–88, 193; and history, 13–15,
249n20; and retrospection, 62–64,
94, 128, 134, 152–53, 166, 176–80.
See also lyric; retrospection;
teleology

negative theology, 17, 110
Neelakanta, Vanita, 227n49
new. See novelty
Norbrook, David, 51, 112, 121–23,

214n9

novelty, 6, 60–61, 97, 118, 147,

211n30, 238n60. See also under
apocalypse; events

occasion, 72–73, 79, 131, 134–35,

234n36. See also crisis; events;
kairos

parataxis, 67, 77, 89–92, 96, 99, 104,

116, 119–20, 165, 228n51

Parker, William Riley, 79
past. See temporality
pastoral, 21, 144, 161–62, 169,

187–88, 194, 230–31n7, 237n56,
238n60, 246n58. See also country-
house poems; lyric

Patterson, Annabel, 63, 216n28,

221n75

pedagogy. See learning
performativity, 127–28, 138, 147
Petrarchism, 67–70, 85, 102. See also

sonnets

Pincus, Steve, 3–4, 5, 208n8
Pocock, J. G. A., 245n43
possibility, 143–51; and actualization,

75, 83–85, 97, 100–1, 113–14, 120,
129, 219n57, 231n7; as present
event, 53, 75, 79, 101, 104–5, 115,
118, 125, 140, 231n8, 239n2. See
also under apocalypse

postapocalyptic, 193
potential. See possibility
present. See temporality
prolepsis, 94–95, 124–26, 127
prophecy, 131–32, 207n1, 234n37
prosody, 39–41, 49, 84, 165
Protestantism. See Reformation

Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 224n16,

229n70

Reformation, 4, 13, 20
regicide, 3, 33–34

Marvell, Andrew (cont.)
Part, 244n38; “To a Friend in

Persia,” 57; “Upon Appleton
House,” 16, 29, 152–70, 172–86,
188–92, 247–48n60, 248nn61–64

McCarthy, William, 78
meaning. See interpretation; symbol
means: versus ends, 22, 27, 32–33, 37,

40–41, 45, 48, 54, 60, 64–66,
166–67, 172, 243n27. See also force

Mendelsohn, J. Andrew, 217n36
messianism, 10–11, 120–21. See also

apocalypse

metaphor, 23–24, 169–70, 182,

188–90, 245n48, 246–47n60. See
also symbol

metonymy, 47–48, 50–51, 155, 185,

187, 190

millennialism. See apocalypse
Milton, John, 67–111, 112–51; An

Apology Against a Pamphlet, 82; De
Doctrina Christiana, 126–27;
Eikonoklastes, 52; “How soon hath
time” (Sonnet 7), 79–81, 83–85;
Lycidas, 16, 78, 112–24, 129–51,
232n14, 234n38; compared to
Marvell, 45, 52, 57–62, 165–66;
“Methought I saw my late espoused
Saint” (Sonnet 23), 102; Nativity Ode,
125; “On the late Massacher
in Piemont” (Sonnet 18), 70–71;
Paradise Lost, 86–88, 220n65,
229n71; Paradise Regained, 57–58,
228n56, 233n22, 233n32; The Readie
and Easie Way, 249n14; Samson
Agonistes, 59, 103–10, 230n75; A
Second Defense of the English People,
88; “To the Lord Generall Cromwell
May 1652” (Sonnet 16), 58, 76–78,
225n27; “Upon the Circumcision,”
94–95; “When I consider” (Sonnet
19), 88–92, 95–97, 99

modernity, 3–4, 6, 207n2. See also

under apocalypse

Mohamed, Feisal G., 32, 209n15,

214n12, 215n17, 229n69

Mueller, Janel, 71–72

Nardo, Anna K., 58–59, 73,

223–24n13

narrative, 17, 26–27, 86, 223n10,

225n23; and deferral, 71, 176,

Index 269

subjectivity, 12, 31, 35, 45–47, 69,

101, 138, 140–44, 147, 160, 184,
194, 197–98, 209n15, 222n9,
236n53, 241n17. See also under
retrospection

symbol, 123, 132, 153–54, 163–64,

172, 182–83, 185, 187–89, 247n60

Tayler, Edward, 125, 127–28, 129
teleology, 1–2, 5, 10, 23, 27–28, 41, 64,

83, 91, 114, 117, 178, 204, 246n60

temporality, 1–2, 64–65, 164–70; and

present events, 17–18, 52–54, 71,
125–26, 190–91, 204–5. See also
under apocalypse

Thickstun, Margaret, 92
Thirty Years’ War, 4, 249n13
time. See temporality
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 208n8
Toliver, Harold, 34–35
transformation. See novelty
typology, 1–2, 10–11, 23, 117–18,

125–26, 155–56, 182–84, 186, 190

Ulreich, John C., Jr., 234n37, 238n60
university. See learning
utopianism, 123, 145, 187, 201–2,

217n36

virtuality. See possibility
von Maltzahn, Nicholas, 34

Wallace, John M., 218n51
Warley, Christopher, 222n8, 226n33
White, Hayden, 208n7, 249n20
White, R. S., 223n10
Wilding, Michael, 217n36, 240n5,

241n15

Williams, Raymond, 160, 170,

241n16, 243n33, 244n36

Woodbridge, Linda, 239n65
Worden, Blair, 26, 38, 213n2, 216n30,

219n59

Yoshinaka, Takashi, 34, 213–14n7,

220n69, 241n14, 243n27

Zwicker, Steven N., 35, 61–62,

219n51, 220n66, 245n41, 247n63

representation, 14–15, 110, 204,

210n27

resolution. See under endings
retirement, 152–55. See also reversal
retrospection, 28, 71–72; and

interpretation, 51–53, 74, 109–10,
134–36, 157–58, 183; and subjectiv-
ity, 7–8, 11, 41, 113, 118. See also
under narrative

revelation, 8, 14–15, 27–28, 96, 112,

125, 133, 179, 183, 203–4, 210n27.
See also apocalypse

Revelation, Book of, 13, 15, 97, 113,

174, 200

reversal, 23, 33, 68–69, 156–62, 167,

171, 191, 239n1, 242n23. See also
under events

revolution, 3–6, 23–24, 123, 152, 160,

207n2, 208n8. See also under
apocalypse; see also reversal

Ricoeur, Paul, 114, 147–48
Rogers, John, 214n8, 234n36, 238n62,

248n12

Russell, William M., 218n51

Sansone, David, 233n20
Schmitt, Carl, 31–32, 207n2, 219n60
Schwartz, Regina M., 235n44
Shakespeare, William: Troilus and

Cressida, 38–39

Sharp, Hasana, 237–38n57
Shohet, Lauren, 236n53
Shore, Daniel, 106
Sidney, Philip, 68, 246n49
Silver, Victoria, 80, 228n61
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 91, 102,

212n41, 228n51, 231n8, 235n43,
236n48

Smith, Daniel W., 8–9, 61, 209n18
Smith, Nigel, 37, 218n48, 239n1
sonnets, 16, 21, 84–85, 194, 224n16,

229n66; defi nition of, 69–74, 101–2;
Italian versus English, 74–75, 77,
225n22. See also lyric; Petrarchism

Spinoza, Benedictus de, 227n41,

237–38n57, 249n14

Spurr, John, 218n50
Stocker, Margarita, 34, 174, 183, 185,

186–87, 241n19, 244n38

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