POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL AND AT COLLEGE
It is hardly wrong to say that the English poems which Milton wrote before his twenty-third year are interesting chiefly because of their defects. Although he attained very early a sense of his individual power and a conviction of his mission as a singer, he was surprisingly tardy in finding his voice. Many poets have done their most characteristic work at an age when Milton was still speaking in the borrowed accents of a debased school. During the first half of the seventeenth century English poetry lay under the spell of an enthralling personality, that of John Donne. This singular man, known in mature life by the staid titles of Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, and Prolocutor to the King's Convocation, the author of sermons and religious poems which are still read for their mystical fervor, had had a wild youth, and had produced a body of love poems of unexampled intensity. Unfortunately, along with a power of direct impassioned expression which instantly imposed itself, he had an intellectual perversity, a delight in far-fetched analogies and wire-drawn conceits, which made him the evil genius of young poets. His was the chief among many influences contributing during the reign of James and the first Charles to fill the garden of the Muses with growths of fantastic tastelessness, which all but smother the "plants and flowers of light." To see how far this perversion went even in the case of real poets, one has only to read such a production as "The Tear," by Richard Crashaw, where the eyes of the Magdalen, after being compared to everything else conceivable, are rapturously addressed as
Portable and compendious oceans."
That Milton's boyish admiration was attracted to the tinsel gewgaws of this "metaphysical" school of poetry, as Dr. Johnson oddly named it, is plain in all his early verse. The lack of humor which was his one great congenital fault, exposed him especially to the temptations offered by the conceitful manner. His verses "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough," with its drolly humorless title, is a perfect example of emotional and imaginative falsity, such as the school of the concettisti was sure to engender in a juvenile bard who had not yet arrived at artistic self-knowledge. Even in the "Passion," written after the "Ode on the Nativity," he relapses oddly into conceitfulness. Perhaps the worst length to which he was ever tempted occurs in the closing stanzas of this poem. Speaking of the tomb of Christ, he says,—
That was the casket of Heaven's richest store,
And here, though grief my feeble hands uplock,
Yet on the softened quarry would I score
My plaining verse as lively as before;
For sure so well instructed are my tears,
That they would fitly fall in ordered characters."
The note with which he excused himself for not completing this poem, saying that he was "nothing satisfied with what he had done," has a touch of pathos. He failed to see the difficulty, which was not that the subject was "above the years he had when he wrote it," but that he was benumbed
