The Usurper's Illustrious Secretary -- Johnson's Milton

One of the very few moments of levity in Samuel Johnson's essay on John Milton is when Johnson asks why every biographer has to make such a big deal about every single house that John Milton ever stayed in. It's almost as if, Johnson says, the act of reciting the places where Milton stayed is a ritual in itself.

If a biographer were to forget one of Milton's houses, Johnson guesses, that biographer would be charged by the other biographers with something akin to heresy.

This is one of the few points in Johnson's narrative of Milton's life where Johnson seems a little bit perplexed by his subject. Nevertheless, even before John Milton died, in 1674, his birthplace was already an attraction for foreign visitors to London. People would come to see Milton's birthplace and then go visit Milton himself.

Another point where Johnson seems to be a bit perplexed is where Milton seems to escape punishment for serving Oliver Cromwell, once Cromwell has been executed and King Charles II returns to London to restore the throne.

In 1649, Oliver Cromwell executed King Charles I. John Milton, whose public activity had been scanty at best, on either side of the Civil War, had become Cromwell's Latin Secretary. Cromwell, who had gained such strength in England at first by stating that he was helping the country fight against Monarchy and for Democracy, now dissolved parliament and took on sole rulership of England, basically as -- not a King, but an Emperor, really -- but under the title of "Protector."

Nevertheless, John Milton, who seems to have been against Monarchy and for Liberty, remained under Cromwell as his Latin Secretary. When certain groups in England had protested against Cromwell's execution of Charles I, Milton actually wrote an essay to try and get the people back on Cromwell's side. Charles II wrote an essay called "Defensio Regis," stating that murdering Royalty is abominable, regardless of the situation. Milton wrote an argument against Charles II's essay, again defending Cromwell for having committed the execution.

In addition, once Cromwell was firmly entrenched as "Protector" of England, John Milton, being Latin Secretary, wrote many of Cromwell's resolutions (official resolutions at that time being written in the basically international language of Latin).

But Milton didn't just defend Cromwell's actions against Royalty and write the laws promoting the "Protector's" policies; he also wrote propaganda-like tracts of praise for Cromwell. In one of these essays Milton even said, "Nothing is more pleasing to God or more agreeable to reason than that the highest mind should have the sovereign power."

This in itself is rather a strange thing to hear. Milton had for most of his life been staunchly against authority. Johnson says, "Milton's republicanism was, I am agraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of controul, and pride disdainful of superiority."

And yet Milton was willing to defend everything Cromwell did.

When Cromwell was killed in 1658 and it became very evident that Monarchy would be restored to England with the return of Charles II to the throne, it also became evident that those people who had been involved with the execution of Charles I would likely be put to death.

England was surprised with Charles II's announcement of the Act of Oblivion, which pardoned everybody who had sided with the rebels, except for those who had been directly involved with the execution of Charles I. However, many people who had had less of a role than Milton in defending the execution were being put to death. Milton was in danger of his life.

Milton had escaped. But he was in bad health, suffering from the gout, and already blind. He couldn't have hidden, Johnson argues, very effectively. And yet he wasn't really pursued, and, except for a rather minor run-in with the law, he was allowed to remain in the shadows until it finally became clear that he would not be penalized at all for anything he'd done.

Johnson assumes that the reason Milton had gotten away with everything he'd gotten away with was simply because he was so talented, as well as being blind and in poor health. Johnson writes, "Something may be reasonably ascribed to veneration and compassion -- to veneration of his abilities and compassion for his distresses, which made it fit to forgive his malice for his learning."

English veneration may be the reason that Milton was let go. It may also have been Milton's international reputation. At the age of thirty, Milton spend fifteen months travelling through Europe, going through France, Italy, and Switzerland, and receiving magnificent acclaim wherever he went. He really was a celebrity. And it seems that he was remembered this way through the years.

But I also think that Milton was let go because of what he stood for. Not his republicanism, or his support for the acts of Cromwell, but the ideals of life that manifested themselves in Milton's career and in what is arguably his greatest work, Paradise Lost.

Milton may actually have taken more time on his travels through Europe. In fact, he had probably, on his travels, been hoping to set himself up for constant work as some kind of an ambassador. He was, among the English, the most elegant speaker of Latin. And Latin was, at that time, basically the international language. But because of the Civil War in England, Milton decided to return home.

However, once Milton returned home, he didn't join an army. He didn't even commit himself to civil service. In fact, he set up a boarding school and spent the years up until the execution of Charles I as a schoolmaster. This is a fact which Johnson relates to us with an air of characteristic disgust.

But, as much as I think Johnson would like us to think he is disgusted with Milton's choice to be a schoolmaster, it seems pretty obvious throughout Johnson's essay that Johnson believes Milton would not have been able to write Paradise Lost had he not given himself opportunity after opportunity for taking the leisure to study just about any subject that had piqued his curiosity. Milton had to develop a colossal mind in order to write the colossal Paradise Lost.

However, I also think there was a kind of ideal developing -- domestication. As nobility had basically fallen in England, and as republicanism seemed to be rising, I would imagine, a class of people was coming to be recognized as a new type of elite mind: a mind that could live a somewhat social life, while also remaining somewhat "cloistered."

This type of elite mind would be akin to a monk, or a professor. But it would not be tied to the church or the academy. Indeed, in Milton's case, it would not even be tied to the crown, while it could be tied to a political cause -- through the political controversies in which Milton involved himself through is tracts.

The revolution which had tried to carry itself out in England simply carried itself over to America, where it became the foundation for the Democratic Republic of the United States. And it seems to me, although it may not be stated implicitly anywhere, that the ultimate ideal for American life is a kind of domestic life, where a person may be involved to a certain degree with social ideals, while also carrying out a personal, internal, home-based life.

The domestic aspect of life would be, then, more important than the broader aspect of social life. In fact, the domestic aspect of life would be the kind of source from which an individual's methods of action within the larger social realm of life would be drawn. And social life would, for the individual, be directed at two aims: first, to secure a broader social framework for the perpetuation of a continued comfortable domestic life; and second, to secure the individual means (i.e. money) for a comfortable domestic life.

I would argue that as mankind became more conscious of itself on all social levels, the domestic man became more of an ideal -- as something that could achieved by a much larger portion of the population than, say, the noble or the courtier.

And Milton stood for the domestic man, as any kind of domestic man could be. Milton was allowed to live his life because, in spite of its glaring imperfections, it was a representative life, an example of what life could be for all men, if conditions were such that all men could engage themselves in careers such as Milton's.

Milton's Paradise Lost is a domestic drama. I'm influenced by Camille Paglia in my assessment of Milton's Paradise as a Spenserian Bower. The backstory is in some ways like the glittering travels of Milton through Europe, except with the horrific episodes of darkness, which must stand for Milton's eventual descent into blindness (Milton began going blind in 1644, at the age of only 36, and was totally blind by 1652). But, just like in Milton's life, the backstory, as glittering as it is, is only the basis for the main dramatic impetus of the story, that of Adam and Eve being expelled from their Spenserian Bower.

As many people have argued, from John Dryden onward, the real hero of Paradise Lost is the Devil. But it might be possible to think of Adam as all men's conceptions of themselves before they "lose their innocence." Every man has an ideal of raising a family and having a good home. The Devil would, however, be the social man, the "business traveler," let's call him, who has to go out and conduct the dirty work to keep his family going.

When the Devil gets home and gets to play Adam again, he finds he's not as innocent as he used to be. And he can't act as innocent as he used to act. He finds the sin of the outer world has tainted the domestic world. And this knowledge translates to his wife, Eve. God, the greatest ideal of man, ushers Adam and Eve out of Paradise. Adam and Eve, if they want to keep living, have to accept the dirty realities of the world.

But Christ, God's Son, who is the Son of Man, and therefore the ideal son of all couples, is the promise of redemption for the nuclear family. This ideal keeps husband and wife living in the broader social world in order to provide for their smaller, domestic world. Thus Paradise Lost is an allegory for the life that was developing itself through the recent events in England, and that would be the main impetus for the development of American life.

There are plenty of modern American works of art that share this theme, though on a more human level. One of the best is probably the film It's a Wonderful Life. But a more interesting one is the 1967 TV movie The Trap of Solid Gold, the screenwriter for which was best-selling mystery novelist John D. MacDonald.

(I learned about John D. MacDonald through reading Stephen King -- the novel Christine, to be precise. I agree with King that MacDonald deserves tons and tons of attention and adulation.)

By the standards of the day, and according to Johsnon's reckoning of them, Paradise Lost was a major success. "The call for books," Johnson tells us, "was not in Milton's age what it is in the present." Milton illustrates this by pointing out that the demands for the plays of Shakespeare, who, tradition relates, was wildly popular, did not call for the publication of more than 1,000 copies of the collected works from 1623 to 1664.

So, for over 41 years, 1,000 copies of the collected works of Shakespeare were sold. (This, of course, doesn't count the bootleg copies, of which, I've been told in many a Theatre class, there were plenty.) But in two years, the first edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, a total of 1,300 copies, had sold out. This seems to count, for those times, as a great success.

Johnson really only gives positive critical attention to three of Milton's works: L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Paradise Lost. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are short poems, about which Johsnon says, "Every one that reads them reads them with pleasure." Both poems take the attitude of an academic intellectual. L'Allegro looks at the more joyful side of life. Il Penseroso looks at the more contemplative side of life.

Every once in a while I get the idea in my head that I can actually make a habit out of memorizing poetry. And about ten years ago, when I got this idea, I memorized L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, which I found to be delightful poems -- both of them. Johnson says, "No mirth can, indeed, be found in his Melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth." I disagree. Both poems seem joyful to me. Il Penseroso is too colorful to be too melancholy.

However, I will state this one thing about Il Penseroso. It presents the life of a student as very similar to the life of a monk. And -- I'm not claiming to have anything like even a rudimentary knowledge of history -- but it seems to me that, in the Middle Ages and maybe for a while after that, when families had smart sons, and they wanted their sons to distinguish themselves, they sent them to monasteries.

But the life of the monastery was followed up by the life of the academician. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it seems to me, nobility was decaying and a new kind of social structure was allowing people from a wider run of life to work their way up through the world -- in the court. In addition, commerce was becoming a more and more important force in social life.

I'd believe that L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are Italianate, joyful farewells to the previous form of social life, while Paradise Lost is a kind of looking forward to the new form of social life. The social structure of Elizabeth I's reign was a kind of bridge to what would follow through and then after the reign of Oliver Cromwell.

Johnson's praise of Paradise Lost is the praise of awe. In fact, Johnson seems to have been stunned by Milton's work. Johnson, overall, seems to have two reactions to Milton as a person: indifference and loathing. As a schoolmaster, Johnson seems to regard Milton as inconsequential. Milton was born as a gentleman. He traveled Europe and was a celebrity. He came back to England during the Civil War and became a schoolmaster. Why didn't he act like a gentleman? Well -- he didn't. And, as a schoolmaster, he was, to Johnson, inconsequential.

But as Cromwell's Latin Secretary, Milton was loathsome to Johnson. It wasn't just as Cromwell's Latin Secretary, but as the writer of venomous, spiteful essays. These essays, Johnson argues, show Milton as being quite learned, but rather self-centered and, really, pusilanimous.

One of the two best examples of how Milton's tracts raised Johnson's ire would be the essays Milton wrote in favor of divorce. These treatises were written after Milton's first wife ran off from home and wouldn't return. Milton wanted a divorce, but wasn't granted one by the Presbyterians. So he wrote (without having the then-required license to do so) a series of tracts in favor of divorce. Johnson felt this kind of action was totally unnecessary.

The Presbyterians didn't allow Milton to get his divorce. But the parliament did. Milton, who'd supported the Presbyterians, now turned his back on them, saying that "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." Milton ended up not getting his divorce. He took his first wife back, and, in fact, taking good care of her family when, in the midst of the Reformation, the Royalist family experienced hardships.

Nevertheless, barring Milton's noble charity toward his wife and family, Johnson found this whole episode a repulsive example of Milton's spitefulness and narrow-mindedness.

The other great example of Johnson's distaste for Milton's overall character in public life was his reaction to the series of treatises Milton put out in defense of Cromwell's actions against Charles I, especially his retort to Charles II.

Probably the most exemplary statements by Johnson is, "The rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them."

This reaction is to Milton's preponderance to judge Charles II's arguments by the grammar and style he employed, rather than by the logic and force of the arguments themselves.

However, I'd argue that the righs of nations and of kings are, in fact, questions of grammar, at least on some level. In the United States, anyway, our set of laws is known as the U.S. Code. A Code is a language. Even if our set of laws weren't a code, they'd be a morality. And a morality is a social technology. It might not be a material technology, but it is a social one. All technologies are built out of the language used by the people who have created the technologies. And so the questions of technologies, including social technologies, are, in fact, a question of language -- especially of grammar.

I'd argue that a better understanding of grammar would not only improve the understanding of our laws and rights, but that an improved development of grammar would be one of the few things that could actually help us continue to improve our laws and enhance our rights. So questions of grammar are extremely important when dealing with questions of the rights of nations and of kings.

Not that I can say much in this regard. I know how bad my grammar is.

It really surprises me, anyway, that Johnson, who seems so adverse to any sort of entry Milton makes into the public sphere, would be so angry at him for having chosen such a reclusive career as a schoolteacher. I'd think that Johnson would consider it to be quite fortuitous -- that Milton busied himself so much with prattling at little boys that he couldn't spend even more time prattling at Britain.

Then again, perhaps Johnson simply felt that if Milton had only involved himself in public life as much as he should have felt obliged to do, as a gentleman, his understanding of the situation in England would have led him to hold an opposite opinion regarding what his role should have been in that situation.

This seems to make itself felt in one of Johnson's sole criticisms of Paradise Lost, which as I said, was a work that seemed to have stunned Johnson with awe. Johnson says that since "human passions did not enter the world before the Fall", "the plan of Paradise Lost has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners."

Johnson really doesn't see Paradise Lost to be a drama of humanity at all. In fact, any drama Milton creates, Johnson sees as inhuman -- sometimes, as in "Comus," to be absurdly inhuman.

I think Johnson looked up to Milton, because Milton held so firmly to an ideal -- the ideal, the Protestant ideal of logic and rationality as the basis for spiritual principles. I think Johnson saw Milton as being so inhumanly devoted to these principles that he was blind to the very human flaws in Cromwell. And so, in a sense, Johnson would have seen Milton as so elevated and idealistic that he simply couldn't see how the ideals he was acting on had such a dangerous human effect.

Again, Johnson says, "The want of human interest is always felt."

This is Johnson's only major criticism of Milton's work. And it mellows down a bit, into a quote which I believe is even more telling of Johnson's attitude toward Milton. Johnson says that the perusal of Paradise Lost "is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harrassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions."

In fact, Johnson's awe-struck criticism of Milton can be seen to merge with his awe-struck praise of Milton's work. "Reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the councils of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven."

This is only one in a whole series of sparkling panegyrics Johnson devotes to Milton as the creator of Paradise Lost. I'd like to give a couple more, as I think that they not only evince the idea Johnson seemed so obstinately to hold to regarding Milton's greater personality, but that they also give some of the basic elements of what Johnson believe makes a good poem and a good poet.

"The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the progress (of the poem) are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."

And:

"From policy and the practice of life he has to learn the discriminations of character and the tendency of the passions, whether singly or combined; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images."

And:

"Nor yet is he a poet till he has attained the whole expression of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colors of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation."

Of course, in Paradise Lost, Milton is assumed by Johnson to have attained this goal. However, the greatest, most beautiful passage on Milton's achievements, is, in my opinion, the one below:

"He had done what he knew to be necessarily previous to poetical excellence: he had made himself acquainted with 'seemly arts and affairs," his comprehension was extended by various knowledge, and his memory stored with intellectual treasures. He was skillful in many languages, and had by reading and composition attained the full mastery of his own."

How Milton was supposed to have reached this level of almost sorcerer-like mastery without taking such a long time before going out into public life, and without affording himself the advantages of study which being a schoolmaster would provide him, I certainly don't know, and I'm not sure if Johnson knew, either.

Nevertheless, I think the greatest testament to Milton was the fact that people would come -- from other countries! -- to visit Milton, to read to him in his blindness, for the advantages, not only of being able to say they'd read to him, but of knowing what it was he'd read, and of being able to talk to him about it. Milton, who sat there, sideways in his elbow chair, leg slung over the arm of the chair, talking with all kinds of people, a schoolmaster for the whole world.

It wasn't just Johnson who was in this perplexed awe regarding Milton -- there were nations full of people who felt the same way Johnson did.

Well -- here's an interesting quote by Johnson. "All mankind will, through all ages, bear the same relation to Adam and Eve."

And I think this is what says it about Milton. He was writing the future. He was writing what social conditions were bringing to light. It may not have been the world people wanted to see in the future. But it was the world of the future. And people were already beginning to relate to it, to be a part of it. Milton was their spokesperson. And people honored him for it.

Satanic Nun and Shadowy Guardian -- The Mistress (Part Two)

It struck me as odd, as I read critical works from 1908 and 1932, that the measure of merit for poets was still considered to be the development of courtly speech. I was curious whether the Cambridge History meant that only the merit of Edmund Spenser and the poets of his time was considered, in 1932, to be the development of courtly speech. And I was curious whether T.H. Ward, in his Lives of the English Poets, meant that the development of courtly speech was only the measure of merit for Cowley and the poets of his time. Or did they mean that this was the measure of poets, even in 1908 and 1932?

What the statement really struck me as was an echo of old traditions. Of course, Spenser was judged not to be as successful as he could have been in his poetry, even according to Sir Philip Sidney, because his "rustick" style didn't develop the courtly language well enough.

And, of course, Samuel Johnson said that one of Abraham Cowley's main poetic failings was not developing courtly speech. Johnson often stated that Cowley had no sense of proportion or measure in his poetical metaphors, and that he would as easily compare a noble thing with a base thing as he would compare a noble thing with a noble thing.

The scholars, in following Johnson, I think, have come to assume that all of Cowley's good poetry is terrible, and that all of his bland poetry is good. This is why, in my opinion, scholars of Cowley have come to know Cowley's "Mistress" cycle as a "cold" series of love poems rather than as an explosively hot series of love poems.

The Johnsonian tradition of judging the quality of a poem by how well it maintains morality and proportion has led the scholars to choose as the best of Cowley's poems those that best illustrate his moralizing or proportionalizing tendencies. But in this, Cowley is at his worst and most boring.

It is -- to go back to the theorist who has excited me the most lately -- a lot like what Camille Paglia says about both Coleridge and Spenser. Paglia shows that Spenser had originally given a whole set of stanzas over to basically worshipping a hermaphrodite queen. But Spenser, on his moral side, was frightened by the immoral implications of these stanzas. So he took them out.

Paglia also discusses the very pagan imagery in Coleridge's poem Christabel, which is basically a lesbian vampire romance. But Coleridge couldn't, on his moral side, stand the fact that he'd written a lesbian vampire romance. So he wrote a second part to the poem, moralizing out the frightening aspects of the feminine world he'd created, and, in effect, created a very boring second part to his poem.

If you look at the poems T.H. Ward has collected in the section of his Lives devoted to Cowley's poetry, you will see that Ward was justified, because of his critical beliefs, in choosing what poems he chose, but that he chose poems which, because of their moralizing nature, ended on images of coldness, loneliness, and despair.

In the poems Ward collects, there is a definite movement, through each poem, from the discovery of love, to the encounter with an overly-moralizing father figure. Cowley, consistent with some of his reactions in the "Mistress" cycle, bounces away from this moralizing father figure, and ends up, quite often! -- alone in a quiet universe of distant stars and cold fires.

In the same sense I believe that John Milton, though he seems to me to have been profoundly influenced by Abraham Cowley, has, at least in the metaphors he has taken directly from Cowley, to remove the amoral or immoral aspect of a lot of them. But in doing so, he also manages to send those metaphors into heatless, often even lightless, regions.

In "Il Penseroso" Milton describes the light of Melancholy, the moral champion of the poem. This light shines so brightly that nobody can see it, and that the uneducated take it to be complete darkness. And, again, in Paradise Lost, hell is a land of visible darkness and fires without heat.

I think Milton tried to avoid giving credit to Cowley's influence partly because, as Johnson says, Milton just doesn't like giving anybody credit for anything; but also partly because Milton was afraid (even in his hell) of producing metaphorical images so markedly immoral.

Given all this, what I was expecting to see in the second half of Cowley's "Mistress" cycle was the same kind of development, a kind of permanent turning-away from love and an envelopment in the cold, icy world of morality.

But I found something a lot different. In the second half of this poem cycle, Cowley finally gives over to his anima. He allows his anima to be a woman, though he himself still seems to take pleasure in being a woman as well. So the poems are often still filled with lesbian imagery.

This woman, Cowley's anima, is charged with even more powers of witchcraft than she had been charged with in the first half of the poem. Cowley quite often rages against his anima. He quite often calls her a whore. But he accepts her -- his own personal witch-whore.

The queen's animus is pretty much gone in the second half, though Cowley occasionally refers to him in some of the poems. But now another male figure arises: The Shadow.

In the first half of the poem, the real problem was Cowley being able to accept his anima as being feminine, not masculine. But once he has gotten over the fact of having a feminine anima, he now has to deal with one of the elements of his psychic life which has caused him to put up a defense against allowing the feminine anima into his life: his own masculine shadow.

In Jungian terms, the shadow is the dark side of the self. Usually, when we are conscious, there are parts of us, which, if we realized they were parts of us, and that we even act using these parts of our personality, would disgust us. We would think of them as morally bad. So we hide them from ourselves. They become unconscious. This evil-twin side of ourselves takes on a "shadowy" character.

Cowley's first problem was to accept the feminine side of himself. And the queen's animus, for some reason or another, was able to step in and cooperate with Cowley's own anima in order to make that happen. But how on earth that kind of Mystical Participation ever took place -- in the words of Tootsie Roll, "The world may never know."

In my opinion, the psychological history of Cowley may be something like this: Cowley was born after his father had died. He never got to know his father. And he had his mother all to himself. But the mother may have been a bit emotionally removed from Cowley, though at the same time intending to bring Cowley up so that he could be very successful in life.

Cowley felt like he had his mother all to himself. So on some level, he may not have seen that he, too was actually subject to the Oedipus complex: the desire of a boy to kill his father and have sex with his mother.

He also didn't have to face, in the real world, the natural process of the father "blocking" the son from this desired father-murder and mother-love. There was no father. The Oedipus complex was never "blocked" in real life. So it didn't really have to be faced. It could become the shadow side of Cowley.

However, in external life Cowley actually had to deal with a spiritual Oedipus complex, which was terribly blocked. The father in this complex was inside Cowley's mother. Cowley's mother had a husband-image inside herself, to which she probably, in my opinion, devoted too much reverence and love.

This inner husband-image of Cowley's mother was a far harsher father than a physical father could have been. Not because he more effectively blocked Cowley from his mother in the role of a lover, but because while he blocked Cowley, he didn't provide the additional thing that a physical father would have provided: the channeling of Cowley's sexual energy into the role of a son who will, in the course of time, become a man who will mate with a woman other than his own mother and, in turn, become a father.

So Cowley didn't have to face the Oedipus in himself. And, in fact, the Oedipus within himself was so removed from the activity of his family life, that it seemed to have starved itself to death, to have disappeared altogether. But the Oedipus did, of course, not die. It continued to live. As did Oedipus' father -- the father with which the Oedipus figure within Cowley wished to do battle -- the Laius.

As to who the shadow actually is in this poem cycle, I unfortunately cannot say, at least not at this point. Is it Oedipus? Is it Laius? Is it a combination of both -- both locked away and hence fused together, as many images of psychic opposites are when they are shoved into the unconscious?

At present I'm not totally sure. But the shadow does appear. And so, as Cowley comes to terms with his anima, and that part of his conflict ends (somewhat), and as the "Mistress" cycle ends, a new conflict in Cowley's own psychic life is shown to arise -- the conflict between Cowley and his shadow.

But, I hope, as Cowley's conflict with his anima was a conflict leading to integration, so will be Cowley's conflict with his shadow. However, this conflict and possible integration do not play out in the "Mistress" cycle, as far as I can see.

Below I am going to give a brief summary of each poem in the second half of the cycle. These summaries are along this very particular theme. But the poems of the cycle have a lot of other themes and merits. So this is not a full exploration of the poem cycle.

Also, the passages I quote below are from the collected works of Abraham Cowley. This collection can be found on Google Books.

ECHO -- In the previous poem, Cowley has re-stated that he is devoted to the task of bringing his anima back into his life, as she is.

In this poem, Cowley is in a deep, dark cave. He encounters a nymph there, who is compliant to all his wishes. But she is pale, thin, and blind. She's in a condition, in other words, of underdevelopment.

This matches with what Carl Jung says about the anima, as it begins to be integrated into psychic life. The anima starts out in an underdeveloped, almost larval state, as if it needs to be fed and given strength.

THE RICH RIVAL -- In this poem, Cowley addresses his father figure. Obviously he never felt good enough, through his life, to match his dead father. So he berates his father in his poem, saying that he, too, is good enough to have a female love.

AGAINST HOPE -- Cowley says that hope defeats itself in one of three ways, all the time. Either it is totally disappointed, whereby it becomes despair; or, it vanishes once a hope is fulfilled; or, it becomes disillusionment, when the thing hoped for and attained is found not to be so great after all.

This is Cowley's fantasy about women. He has become so tired of trying to "woo" his mother, and receiving nothing but coldness, that he's afraid to woo any other women. Thus he fantasizes that he never has to. He can just hope for a woman to love him. His hope will keep him constantly distanced from any woman who might inflict the same kind of pain on him that his mother did.

The poem has the lines:

"Leading them still insensibly on,
By the strange witchcraft of 'Anon!'"

I believe that this means "the strange witchcraft of a nun." A nun is a woman in a church full of women with only one physical man in her life: an abstinant priest, and only one man in her heart: the unreachable God. Yet Cowley believes that all women have the same power of magical spells that his mother seems to have. So they all must be witches. His mother is a nun and a witch. And, thus, she practices "the strange witchcraft of a nun."

FOR HOPE -- One would think this poem would have the opposite theme of its predecessor. But it doesn't. Cowley still looks at hope as the distancer. It keeps attainment away, and thus allows Cowley to avoid emotional pain.

Interestingly, in the second line, Cowley calls hope "cheap," the kind of (un)fortuitous usage of words Johnson keeps us on the lookout for. Hope is, really, cheap in Cowley's mind. Distancing from pain isn't worth it.

Again, Cowley tries to justify distancing himself from his love objects by saying that "fruition" (which could also mean the sex act leading to pregnancy, pregnancy itself, or birth) is not as good as hope, since every time a man attains something he's hoped for, he heads out, hoping for something else.

Hope is also described as "manna," which I believe is, for Cowley a word condensing "man" and "mama," in other words, father and mother. Cowley's mother, who should give him that first, syncretistically perceived food of her breast, the "manna," has withheld her own nourishing mother-love, as well as the role she, as bearer of her own animus, would play in nourishing Cowley with father-love.

LOVE'S INGRATITUDE -- Cowley first complains that his anima has filled up his heart again. But he then goes on, as he often does, to change his sex. He becomes not only a woman, but his anima's own mother. In this way he has the ability to nourish his anima back to strength.

"At mine own breast with care I fed thee still,
Letting thee suck thy fill;
Abs daintily I nourished thee
With idle thoughts and poetry! (Very Blakean lines)
What ill returns dost thou allow! --
I fed thee then, and thou dost starve me now!"

One of Cowley's complaints becomes that he had no idea his poetical fancy would lead him into the emotional turmoil of psychological transformation. But "idle thoughts and poetry" though they may seem to be to Cowley, these feedings Cowley has given his animus have all been Rationality, nothing that would help his anima survive. And so she can't possibly feed him in return.

Cowley needs to learn how to feed his anima correctly.

At the end of the poem, Cowley once again consents to let his anima have her place in his psychic life.

THE FRAILTY -- Cowley complains about having to deal with femininity and sexuality, calling it "sordid and low," but understanding that he just has to do it.

COLDNESS -- This poem explains how Cowley's mother was cold and frigid to him as he was young. Not having a father to block his Oedipal passions, he at least had a frigid mother. But, not having a father to teach him how to channel his passions, whenever a loving woman confronts him, he is overwhelmed by the violent tide of his emotions. Thus he fantasizes that he will always love a woman that will keep his rivers frozen.

Nevertheless, Cowley has progressed enough in his work with his anima to realize that he can control himself: a part of his river is actually a diamond, which cannot melt like ice into water, and which will always retain its integrity. Cowley has found the diamond center of his Self. The imperishable. This will give him strength through the rest of his journey.

ENJOYMENT -- Transsexual lesbian landforms, in my opinion. Cowley calls England Albion, a man's name, as far as I know. He then calls Albion a woman. He says the shore of the woman Albion is a white breast. Shores were defined as feminine in the poem "The Return," so Albion's shore is feminine. A masculine woman.

But in this poem, Cowley plays the Ocean, which he names as a man. But Cowley has constantly described "inconstant waves" as feminine. So the Ocean is a feminine man.

The Ocean and the Shore make passionate love with one another. So this is another one of Cowley's lesbian fantasies, strangely transsexualized, and transferred into the image of landforms instead of people.

However, Cowley says that, because of his love for his anima (the feminine Albion), even the "proudest planet" (Mars, I'd guess) could not move his love. Thus Cowley has given over his love for his father-figure and become true to his anima-love instead.

The poem is really full of emotional eroticism, kind of odd. And it has the very interesting line: "I'll kiss thee through, I'll kiss thy very soul."

SLEEP -- Again, Cowley complains that he cannot control the flood of emotions when his loving desires melt from an icy condition. His "flame's so pure that it sends up no smoke." I think this means to say his anima is no longer hidden from him, no longer obscured by smoke or clouds. But the fire, like the sun, is a masculine image. So this kind of confuses me.

Cowley invokes Sleep. He never invoked the Muses, Cupid, or Venus -- but he does "invoke" Sleep, literally. So that should point to what this poem cycle really is.

Cowley calls Sleep (not Death) the great equalizer, and asks him, for the night, to equalize him with his anima -- in other words to make him a woman. He wishes to have lesbian sex with his anima, as he still feels that's the only way she'll accept him, until Love (Cupid) shows Cowley his favor. In other words, Cowley has the anima in him, but is still dealing with the animus-based rejection of his mother. And he's trying to find a male figure in himself who will help him get his anima's approval.

BEAUTY -- Cowley despairs of being loved by his anima, so he calls female love ("beauty") beastly.

Cowley then tries to re-decorate the Bower. But the anima has control over it. So he tries to re-light it, at least, with masculine, Apollonian light, so that he can at least see the feminine Bower in a masculine way.

Cowley thinks of love as being nothing more than anima projection onto a female body:

"Pretending to dwell richly in the eye,
When thou, alas!, dost in the fancy lie."

Cowley also calls the anima a devil and a murderer.

THE PARTING -- This, I believe, is a poem in memory of "The Welcome" and "The Heart Fled Again." Cowley now recognizes that he does need to find a male figure which would have been his father-figure to be a counterpoint for his animus.

Cowley sees himself as parting from his father in the guise of his anima. But he sees himself as a male Sun as well. Cowley imagines that this male figure can help him and his anima create a fully integrated personality in Cowley:

"Thou truly who, in many a propriety,
So truly art the sun to me,
Add one more likeness, which I'm sure you can,
And let me and my sun beget a man."

MY PICTURE -- Another poem from the viewpoint of Cowley's father. (Maybe this and the father of "The Parting" are actually the Queen's animus?)

In this poem, the father gives Cowley a picture of himself. The father says that as Cowley concentrates on the picture, the picture and the father will change places:

"This will the substance, I the shadow be."

Interestingly, the Queen's animus again acts to lessen the fear in Cowley by saying he will be the shadow, while Cowley's shadow will be the benevolent father.

"Ah! be not frighted if you see
The new-soul'd picture gaze on thee."

I love these lines. They remind me of the picture of the dead boy that winks at the other boy in Stephen King's It.

But what's also interesting is the word "soul'd." Cowley often indicates that his anima is a prostitute by saying she's "sold." Here a soul is "soul'd." So Cowley's anima is a prostitute because Cowley still has a hard time discriminating between being "sold" and "soul'd."

There's a little jab at Cowley's inability to integrate his personality in the following stanza:

"But thou who (if I know thee right)
I'th' substance dost not much delight,
Wilt rather send again for me,
Who then shall but thy picture's picture be."

THE CONCEALMENT -- Cowley's passions are still too strong for him, and he fantasizes again of the rejecting mother.

However, Cowley also makes himself a sacrifice to his anima. When his anima opens Cowley up, she finds he's breathed out his heart. Of course he has! She's his heart!

But Cowley believes his anima, who he still sees as a rejecting mother, will take pity on Cowley, and that she:

"Shall grace my funerals with this truth;
' 'Twas only Love destroy'd the gentle youth!'"

Again, Cowley sees not the anima as the missing ingredient now -- she just engaged in a big ritual sex-murder fantasy with him. Cowley now sees the missing ingredient to be the Love (Cupid). Love in Cowley's mother's heart destoy'd the youth Cowley. Now Cowley needs to find a new Love to share love with his anima. This would be the shadow, I'd guess.

THE MONOPOLY -- Cupid has his very forge in Cowley's heart. Cowley stops calling Love Love and starts calling him Cupid. Love, in my opinion, now starts showing up in these poems as -- Venus: the anima. But Cupid, here, finally has his name spoken.

"Ah cruel God! and why gave you to me
This cursed monopoly?"

Monopoly is, I think, here, a synthesis of "man," "mom," "monarchy," and "polis."

Cowley complains that if he were Cupid, he'd really sink his dart into a girl. But his Cupid doesn't allow him to do anything except get girls faintly interested in a woman and then run off. Cupid doesn't kill women, like he did Cowley, i.e. in the previous poem:

"Curse on thy goodness, whom we find
Civil to none but womankind!"

Cowley still thinks of the animus in his mother as rejecting. And Cowley thinks the only way to find real love is to be a woman. Hence all the lesbian fantasies (which are hot anway, so thank goodness for them):

"Thy broken arrows 'twixt tha sex and ours
So unjustly are distributed
They take thy feathers, we the head."

THE DISTANCE -- This poem is a reference to the Queen, who Cowley may have thought of as a mother. But it's also a reference to Cowley's process of transformation. Distance would seem to refer to the father again. But I don't think it does in this case.

THE INCREASE -- This is an encouraging poem, in contrast to the previous one, where Cowley seemed exhausted and in despair. Now he says he's willing to continue his process of transformation

"A real cause at first did move;
But mine own fancy now drives on my love
With shadows from itself that flow."

I'd assume the shadow is another reference to the shadow, the Jungian shadow, which is the next part that Cowley is trying to integrate into his personality.

"All violent motions short do prove;
But by the length 'tis plain to see
That Love's a motion natural to me."

I can't say for sure whether this is Love as Cupid or Venus or both. I'm guessing it's Venus, since Cowley's anima is now integrating with him, so that her motions are becoming natural to Cowley.

LOVE'S VISIBILITY -- Love, here as Cupid, is accepted like the anima as nymph had done in the cave. Cowley complains he has tried to hide his Cupid, in this case his shadow, from the outside world. But while his shadow has remained unconscious to him, the people around him have seen it -- often making Cowley look like a fool!

"Love's of a strangely open, simple kind,
Can no arts or disguises find,
But thinks none sees it cause itself is blind."

LOOKING ON, AND DISCOURSING WITH, HIS MISTRESS -- Cowley despairs that he'll never find the animus which will allow him to manage the passions of his anima, and that he will have to keep his passions frozen.

"They then sit down and weep in vain,
And there in darkness and despair remain."

RESOLVED TO LOVE -- I'd assumed this poem would be like the "Resolved To Be Beloved" poem in the first half, and mention the compass needle and big North Pole. But it was more like the conversation with the old man in "The Soul," which I have concluding the first half of the cycle.

In this poem however, it's not the transmigration of souls that baffles the wise men, but the emotional power of love. The wise men don't understand love's pain. But the wisest man (Solomon, I'm guessing?) did. So Cowley feels okay.

MY FATE -- Now the compass needle and pole appear!

"Go bid the needle his fair North forsake."

Cowley has forsaken the quest for an animus that would replace the rejecting mother. He has accepted the anima as she is. But he is still searching for her counterpart, the shadow.

Nevertheless, Cowley has accepted his anima as one of his guiding powers on his quest, even so that his superstition regarding father figures no longer frightens him so much, as shown here:

"You, who men's fortunes in their faces read,
To find out mine, look not, alas!, on me;
But mark her face, and all the features heed;
For only there is writ my destiny."

And here:

"If thou find there kind and propitious rays,
What Mars and Saturn threaten I'll not fear."

Mars is the god of war (and the husband of Venus?). Saturn is the father who ate his children.

THE HEART BREAKING -- This may sound like romance. But I think it's demon possession. Cowley is not feeling the passions of Venus here, but the passions of his personal Cupid, his shadow.

So far, the shadows have flowed through Cowley. In a later poem, we'll see that Cowley calls his shadows Legion -- the thousands of Devils that possess a man. Cowley here in fact says that many Loves (in this case, many Cupids) rule him, changing his inner life from a British Monarchy to a Greek Tyranny. This makes sense. Cupid's "forge" does sound a bit Hephaestian.

THE USURPATION -- On a number of occasions in the first half of the poem, Cowley's anima overwhelmed him. Now it seems that the shadow is overwhelming Cowley. I don't know if Cowley thinks this is actually his anima doing this to him, though. But I'm pretty sure it's the shadow, not the anima. But since the effect, a feeling of enslavement, seems to follow on Cowley's having accepted the anima, Cowley must blame this all on the anima, for now, not quite able to see the shadow.

"I was mine own, and free,
Till I had giv'n myself to thee;
But thou hast kept me slave and prisoner since."

Cowley sees the shadow as a dragon, which he must slay in order to rescue the anima, as seen here:

"Thy presence, like the crowned basilisk's breath,
All other serpents puts to death."

And here:

"Alas, alas! I hope in vain
My conquered soul from out thine hands to gain."

MAIDENHEAD -- Cowley complains that before he'd accepted his anima, she'd been frozen, like a hymen protecting her chastity and Cowley's burning desires. But now Cowley had let his anima live more freely, she's brought forth shadow dragons to attack her!

"Yet barren quite, didst thou not bring
Monsters and serpents forth thyself to sting!"

Cowley still equates his shadow with his anima, and thus transforms his anima into a kind of hermaphroditic uroboros.

But Cowley sees that his nun-witch anima is actually prisoner to the shadow:

"Thou that bewitchest men whilst thou dost dwell
Like a close conjurer in his cell."

Here's an interesting quote, where Cowley complains that he had to give up his father figure to gain his anima, but that he now has to deal with a Confused Mass of shadow figures. The thing lost is Cowley's father, whom Cowley's mother couldn't keep alive.

"Thou thing of subtle, slippery kind,
Which women lose, and yet no man can find!"

Cowley, however, will fight to find his shadow.

"Although I think thou never found wilt be,
Yet I'm resolved to search for thee."

Here the shadow takes on a human form, as guardian (Laius, in this strange kind of Laius-Oedipus configuration). The image reminds me of the Vermeer painting where the woman is sleeping while the shadowy man stands in the doorway.

"Say what thou wilt, chastity is no more
Thee, than a porter in his door."

IMPOSSIBILITIES -- Cowley feels certain he will win this fight and integrate his personality. But he still seems a little ambivalent about the passions his anima inspires in him, and he still seems to wish for distance.

"True lovers are by Fortune oft envied;
Oft earth and hell against them strive;
But Providence engages on their side,
And a good end at last does give;
At last, jusf men and lovers always thrive."

And here:

"Such seas betwixt us easily conquer'd are;
But, gentle maid! do not deny
To let thy beams shine on me from afar."

SILENCE -- Cowley feels that by accepting his anima, he has allowed her vaginal opening to allow demons, or shadows, to flow or be born into his life.

Cowley considers closing up this vagina, so that no more demons can be born. But he resolves not to do so. In fact, he believes that:

"It will ne'er heal; my love will never die,
Though it should speechless lie."

A fact Cowley already knows all too well.

THE DISSEMBLER -- Cowley calls Cupid, his shadow, the Devil:

"But now I feel thy mighty evil:
Alas! there's no fooling with the devil."

Cowley reflects on this whole transformative process being the result of his having challenged Cupid with Medean curses at the beginning of the "Mistress" cycle. It was all just a joke, just fancy, he says. But, boy, is he ever paying for it now!

Cowley feels like all this work has dulled and dampened his poetic life. Characteristic of depression. But his art has become something more than he'd intended:

"The play at last a truth does grow."

THE INCONSTANT -- The shadow is presented as Cupid, and Cupid as Legion:

"Love, thou'rt a devil, if I may call thee one;
For sure in me thy name is Legion."

Cowley compares himself to a honeybee returning home with no honey. He's still a drone for the Queen.

Cowley also reflects on his mother's rejection blasting his passions to tinders. Now, any small passion will burst into flames of excitement for Cowley. And this is obviously what he's trying to cure in himself.

THE CONSTANT -- Cowley remains committed to keeping his anima alive, as she is.

HER NAME -- This poem says "Her Name." But I think it's really about the shadow. Nevertheless, I'm confused by it. So I won't guess. Here are two interesting lines:

"With more than Jewish reverence as yet
Do I the sacred name reveal."

But, if memory serves me right, the Jewish reverence doesn't conceal the name of Lilith. It conceals the name of God, the male. In other words Cowley's shadow. But this time Cowleys shadow is God, not the Devil. Perhaps Cowley has managed to identify the shadow negatively and thus separate him in his mind from the anima. But now that he can also identify the shadow positively, he has a hard time, all over again, separating the shadow from the anima.

WEEPING -- Cowley addresses a "charming maid," who is weeping. The maid is probably the anima, less enslaved to the shadow, but still in a subdued position. However, Cowley warns the maid off fro weeping, lest Sorrow think she's so beautful doing so that she comes and possesses the maid.

Cowley seems to be identifying the shadow with a woman, as he'd previously identified the anima with a man. I think this makes sense of the "sunshine and rain together." The maid is bright. Her crying is wet. It's like the sun shining behind the clouds. Previously that signified the anima possessing Cowley's masculine conception of her. Now I think the reality of the shadow is attempting to shine out from the anima.

DISCRETION -- Cowley commits himself to his anima.

THE WAITING MAID -- Cowley seems to be attempting to separate the positive side of his shadow from his anima. Legion has become a choir of angels. But they still seem to be embodied in the anima. The anima, still bound to the shadow, is seen as a maid. But she wants to be a mistress. Cowley wishes to comply, and he's trying to figure out how to do so.

"The minist'ring angels none can see;
'Tis not their beauty or face,
For which by men they worshipp'd be;
But their high office, and their place;
Thou art my Goddess, my Saint she;
I pray to her, only to pray to thee."

COUNSEL -- Cowley has healed to the degree that his passions are no longer small kindling. They have the ability to be strong, and thus, I would assume, constant.

Interestingly, the previous "Counsel" was a poem on assuaging grief through the tongue. In this case, "Counsel" is denied. Cowley is not in grief. He is determined in his passions. And counsel against his passion will only make him more passionate.

THE CURE -- Cowley makes himself, apparently, the sacrifice of a male witch: a doctor. Cowley wishes to be cured of his love, but not by healing up and closing his anima's vagina, as in "Silence," but by being tortured and gouged all over again!

THE SEPARATION -- Cowley wishes to separate his shadow from his anima. But his anima, as his beloved, is still identified with his mother. Cowley's mother's animus was very strong. Cowley still seems to be dealing with trying to reclaim some of his shadow from whatever portion of it (probably the Laius portion in Cowley's strange Laius-Oedipus configuration) he's lost.

But Cowley thinks this separation means a separation from the anima. If he separates the anima from what's in the anima, he'll lose what the anima loves. Is this the only part of Cowley that the anima loves? And if it leaves, will the anima stop loving Cowley? Is it only able to love Cowley while the love is internalized in this way?

These are the questions Cowley ponders. He ends by imagining this aspect of his shadow hovering around his (actually his anima's) grave. This is what Cowley fears: a return of silence to the anima.

THE TREE -- A Satanic reversal of the crucifixion of Christ. Cowley goes back to the bower, which the anima possesses. He carves the sacred name of his shadow in the tree. The poisonous passion of the shadow's name actually manages to burn down the tree! Cowley says, "Love, I see now, a kind of witchcraft is."

The shadow has managed to free itself of the anima. Identification with the anima would now only kill the anima. In other words, Cowley feared that if the shadow was completely individuated from the anima, the anima would be silent and dead. Instead, Cupid shows Cowley that unless he is free of the anima, he can't integrate into Cowley's personality alongside the anima.

HER UNBELIEF -- Cowley says his mistress is blind to his shows of love. He offers her smoky sacrifices, as if to a deity. But she won't take them.

I'd guess the smoky sacrifices -- the smoke itself -- is the shadow, which Cowley is now trying to put back inside of the anima. But she won't take it! So Cowley is conflicted.

I think Cowley's real conflict here is a fear. His previous encounters with the negative side of the shadow were scary enough. Now the positive shadow wants to emerge. But this is what thwarted Cowley's relationship with his mother in the first place. This seems a lot scarier than beating up dragons. Wouldn't it be nicer to keep the shadow inside the anima?

THE GAZERS -- Cowley tells the mistress to stop being a statue. I think the statue portion of the anima comes from the positive shadow remaining in the anima for too long.

The poem is mainly, though, about physical love between a man and a woman. Cowley is trying to beckon his mistress away, so they can make love, as a man and a woman. That's a pretty big step, for Cowley. He says that love dead as an infant is better than love living in constant childhood. Which means he wants to grow up.

Cowley actually, then is performing a magic spell to remove the shadow from the anima altogether. The anima is no longer a statue. She is a woman.

THE INCURABLE -- The poem "The Cure" was to a male witch, a doctor, whom Cowley charged with giving him a sex-change. Cowley was hoping that masculine, conscious Reason could make a substitute for femininity. In this way, Cowley wouldn't have had to face his task, which was to separated the positive side of his shadow from his anima.

But Cowley now realizes his error. He knows that to act only with the reason of the wise-men (who constantly show up befuddled throughout the "Mistress" cycle!) is to act blindly. So Cowley must face his fears and allow his shadow and anima to live side by side, not merged.

HONOUR -- So who does Cowley meet in this poem? His shadow -- as Honor! Butr Honor doesn't wish to leave the anima. And it appears the anima (as Io?) has to fight to rid herself of the shadow. The anima might actually be the burning town into which the victorius fighter (Io?) enters.

I'm not sure if Io is the Io I'm thinking of, or if I've even identified the Io in my head correctly. I'm thinking of the woman cursed by Hera for loving Zeus, who was then chased to the ends of the earth by a gadfly that drove her crazy.

The fact is, if this is the correct Io, my theory would be that Cowley, having finally decided to dis-identify his positive shadow from his anima, cannot do so as a man. He seems to need to wear the guise of a woman to do things for the first time a lot of times. So Cowley takes on the guise of Io, a woman persecuted by the mother-god with a gadfly.

If the mother-god is Cowley's mother, and the gadfly the shadow, it would be easy to see how the anima could identify with Io. Then Cowley would fight for the anima as the anima (fighting for lesbian love). And he would fight to take the shadow out of the anima's castle.

This is interesting. First, the shadow is seen as a serpent. That's the negative side. Cowley has to remove that from the anima. Now the positive shadow is a male warrior, Honor. It's a development of the shadow's own personality. Also, where the negative shadow had been keeping the anima prisoner, the anima, as city walls, is now holding the positive shadow against her will.

THE INNOCENT ILL -- The positive shadow, as Saint, is now out of the anima. But this seems to disgust Cowley with the anima again, and he says how she holds a brothel in the hearts of all men!

DIALOGUE -- I think this answers Cowley's disgust. Without Honor habored inside the anima, Cowley is unsure of the anima's honor. In this "romantic" dialogue, the anima asks Cowley:

"What have we done? What cruel passion mov'd thee,
Thus to ruin her that lov'd thee?"

Cowley's anima answers her own question -- she isn't ruin'd. She has no Honor, but she is still honorable:

"Curse on thine arts! methinks I hate thee now.
And yet I'm sure I love thee, too."

Interestingly, Cowley has, right here, chosen to create a dialogue between himself and his mistress. The fact of this is, I feel, clear evidence that Cowley has been attempting at, and has finally attained, the liberation of his anima.

VERSES LOST UPON A WAGER -- Cowley "moralizes" on his struggle, which has now, for the present, seemed to have concluded. He says that reason is no guide in the feminine world of the anima, and that poetry is no guide either:

"If Nature gave me power to write in verse,
She gave it me thy praises to rehearse."

BATHING IN A RIVER -- Cowley's strange marriage poem to the anima. She shines like the light of the moon and attracts fish. She would apparently be ithyphallic. But I think what's really happening is that the anima is the only light. The fish are the shadow. Now that they are separate from the anima they need to integrate into the shadow again, and then integrate into Cowley's own personality.

LOVE GIVEN OVER -- I believe Cowley is done for now. I think he hopes he's done for good. The thought of having to integrate a whole other psychic element into his personality seems like way too much! And he fantasizes that he won't have to do it again:

"But death and love are never found
To give a second wound."

Oh, they don't, do they? Well, let's give Cowley the rest he deserves. His efforts have gotten him quite far.

Fire without Heat -- The Scholars' Cowley

The most interesting comment I've ever found in favor (it seems to me) of Paradise Lost is from Michael Aquino, former Magus in the Church of Satan and then founder of the Temple of Set. As I remember it, Aquino says that Paradise Lost is Satanism in disguise.

That at least makes reading Paradise Lost an intriguing proposition.

Yesterday I found another interesting statement in the Cambridge History of English Literature, which says that Milton used a pagan style to explore a Christian theme. This was said to explain the kind of through-line from Spenser's poetry to Milton's poetry, and it was in an essay about Spenser.

When I'd posted my earlier entry, my reactions to Johnson's awesome and hilarious essay on Abraham Cowley, I'd tried to draw a parallel between Cowley's life and Spenser's life. Anybody so attached to Spenser as Johnson paints him to have been is of interest to me, since I was also attached to Spenser for a while. My first big "own initiative" project in life, about fourteen years ago, was to read and take notes on the six and change books of Spenser's romance, The Faerie Queene. My second was to read the Nicomachean Ethics, since Spenser said at one point that he had based his poem on Aristotle's Ethics.

At that point in time I'd read a life of Spenser -- in fact, I believe, the very one I read yesterday: the Cambridge one. And when I made my previous post, I was working with whatever shadowy knowledge of Spenser's life I still retained after fourteen years.

The biggest two mistakes I made were to call The Faerie Queene an epic -- which is sheer ignorance; and to say that Spenser had been exiled to Ireland. Spenser had not been exiled to Ireland. He went with a Lord on a campaign to Ireland, and his career basically kept him in Ireland.

Spenser had been involved in a controversy at Cambridge, whic roiled with Catholic-Protestant controversy in his day. But he didn't stand against the Protestants during the controversy -- though he didn't stand for them, either. So Spenser was basically a marked man, doomed to the glass ceiling of custom, for not rooting for the winning team.

So Spenser went to Ireland with Lord Grey, where, while engaged in a number of political offices, he wrote his poetry. He came back to England twice, bringing his poetry with him, and hoping to get preferments, specifically in England. He was never given his preferments. In fact, tradition even says that the Queen herself ordered Spenser his preferments, but that the Lords who disliked Spenser refuted them so powerfully, that Spenser was never given them.

So Colin Clout went back home to Ireland. And, in his poetry, he spoke of himself as an exile.

My weak, little mind thought of Spenser as actually having been an exile. But he wasn't.

But in this way, Colwey's story parallels very much with Spenser's story, and I think it really reinforces the idea that Spenser was a hero-figure, if not a father-figure, for Cowley. Cowley went to Cambridge. He was often a bit bombastic about "turning Puritan," he went into a foreign country to serve a Lord (Lord Jermyn, in France, where Cowley encoded letters from the Queen to the King), he was involved in a Protestant-Catholic controversy which put a glass ceiling on his career, he wasn't given preferments, and he considered himself an exile.

Now, after reading the Cambridge history, I consulted another work: The English Poets, edited by T.H. Wood. This book is basically a selection of poetry by the notable poets in British history. There T.H. Wood contributed a critical essay to preface the selection of Cowley's poems.

The essay is basically a re-hash of Johnson's essay, minus any of the whimsical asperity which makes Johnson's bitchy essay so fun. The most interesting thing, to me, though, about the essay is that it mentions, like Johnson mentioned, the fact that Cowley did more than a little, if not to inspire, than at least to lay the groundwork for the possibility of Milton's creation of Paradise Lost.

Johnson's essay actually seems to lump Milton together with the metaphysical poets, even though Johnson goes on to point out that Milton despised the metaphysical poets. But Johnson also shows how Milton's description of Satan's spear as a tree tall enough to have been used as the mast of a ship comes directly from lines in Cowley's poem of the Davideis, where Goliath's spear is described as big enough to have been used as the mast of a ship.

You'd think that Ward, whose essay is not much more than a toned-down facsimile of Johnson, would simply have used the same example. But he doesn't. Instead, Ward uses a different example to play up the fact that Milton had greater powers of poetic condensation than Cowley. He uses Cowley's description of hell, which is almost like a circus of horror, counterpoised, with similarities, by Milton's more succinct description.

This description of Milton's, though, I think, is important to note, however, because it talks of the fires of hell being without heat and light. Milton's hell is full of cold fire and visible darkness. And this is the attitude, I believe, a lot of scholars try to take when presenting the "good" works of Cowley.

However, Ward goes even further than Johnson in connecting the ideas of Cowley with Milton's covertly Satanic verses. I think that everybody has always wondered *why* Cowley tried to write his poem, the Davideis. Most people seem to find the Bible an unfit subject for epic poetry. But the exceptions have been Milton, whose poem was a pagan re-telling of the Bible story, and Cowley, whose decision nobody understands.

Personally I feel that Cowley's decision to write the Davideis makes a lot of sense. He was fatherless and somehwat poor, as Johnson likes to paint him. But he was also a poetic prodigy, and known for his skills by the age of fifteen. King David was also a poetic prodigy, and known for both his poetic and martial abilities from a young age. But the difference between Cowley and King David is that King David's life was abolutely replete with father figures! Not only did King Davidb have his father Jesse: he had Samuel, Saul, Goliath, Jonathan, Uriah, and Nathan!

David even had God as a father figure. It's obvious that Cowley was moved by this relationship, as his severe metaphors and constant calling out to loved ones who are absent is very much like King David's thundering expressions of pain and suffering and his constant calling out to a God who seems to ignore more often than he answers.

Plus, although Spenser may have been Cowley's father figure, I think Cowley identified with King David. King David might be the prototype for what Camille Paglia calls the male heroine. King David really is like a male diva. And Cowley is also quite a diva.

So I think the sensational life of the male heroine King David appealed as a dramatic subject for the diva Cowley. But scholars must feel differently than I. Cowley himself seems to have felt different. Ward notes a statement by Cowley that he feels the epic verse has been too long in the hands of pagan poets, and that now the Christians must take it for their own uses. Cowley's statement was made later in his life, as a preface to this poem, which had been written in his youth. Cowley, in fact, says that he is only publishing this poem because he wants to leave the door open for poets who wish to use his poem as an example for how to take the pagan form and use it for Christian ends.

Ward comments ominously that only eleven years after Cowley published this preface, Milton published his Paradise Lost.

However, Ward's selection of poetry includes the elegy for Mr. Crashaw. I could absolutely be mistaken in this assumption, but it appears to me that in the last lines of the quote below can be found the inspiration for the title of Milton's great poem:

"Nay with the worst of heathen dotage we
(Vain men!) the monster woman deify;
Find stars, and tie our fates there in a face,
And paradise in them, by whom we lost it, place."

The concept of a paradise lost is as old as human consciousness, I'd imagine. But consider these other lines, from Cowley's poem on Solitude:

"Oh Solitude, first state of human-kind!
Which blest remain'd till man did find
Even his own helper's company.
As soon as two, alas! together join'd,
The serpent made up three."

Combine these two verses and, for all Ward's praising of Milton's gifts of condensation, you have title and summary (up to redemption) of Milton's epic.

Why would Milton despise the metaphysical poets? Probably because he didn't want to recognize the influence they had on him? Why? Because he didn't want to have to admit the influence Cowley's poetic ideas had on him. Again, why? Well... that will wait until my next post.

Theoretical cliffhanger? I certainly hope so.