Erotic World of Faery by Duffy Maureen;

Author:Duffy, Maureen; [Maureen Duffy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1474246
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

There is nothing generous in Milton’s writings on the same subject. He accuses Charles of three things in particular which Satan accuses God of: he says that he is guilty of the innocent blood of those he caused to rebel against him and that he brought in foreigners (Irish) and relied upon evil counsellors. Charles is here acting as a political father upon whom Milton projects his personal childhood wrongs. The King is being accused for making the people rebel and for having favorites, as a father might be accused by a son for turning him against him by preferring another child. This is Satan’s position. He is made to rebel by God’s announcing the preferment of the Son, Christ, over the angels. Satan says that they are older than the Son and he himself was “of the first, if not the first Archangel.” His wrath against Adam is also against a new son.

When his brother was born Milton had been for seven years the only boy. His sister was two years older. Several other children had not lived. Now there was a new son, called, significantly, Christopher. John was an excessively good child, learning everything he was asked and often sitting at his books till midnight from the age of twelve which gave him headaches and, he believed, weakened his eyes. It sounds as if he was guiltily compensating for something and trying to win his father’s love. Milton is always quick to rationalize but sometimes he slips up. In one place he says his father destined him “from a child to the pursuits of literature” and in another to the Church. Ad Patrem shows that his father didn’t so easily accept the substitution of one for the other. He was himself a well-known composer but at the same time a successful scrivener to which the nearest equivalent today would be a solicitor-cum-broker. It was his money which kept John for much of his life.

There are at least two lost paradises in the poem: Adam’s and Satan’s. Satan has lost heaven. Milton, I suspect, felt he had lost the child’s heaven of being the worshipped young and only son when his brother was born. The exchanges between Father and Son in Book Three are as between lovers. The Son has the feminine meekness of Eve. Again in Book VI:

He said, and on his Son with Rays direct

Shon full: he all his Father full exprest

Ineffably into his face receiv’d.

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