Entertain yourself
What do *you* think?
(Something to do when there's nothing to do)
Milton's poetry is often allusive. But how much of the meaning which
we find in his allusions would have been conscious to him? Are we entitled
to put it in for ourselves unless we make it clear what is his meaning
and what is our own? And what tests of probability can be used to decide
where he stops and we are taking over?
The VALLOMBROSA Conundrum
Next comes an example, made famous by the disputes it set going at
the International Milton Symposium meeting in Vallombrosa in 1988. Suitably
enough, the example is Milton's allusion to Vallombrosa. At PL I. 303
Satan 'stood and called / His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced
/ Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where
the Etrurian shades / High overarched embower'.
Why must it be Vallombrosa, not any other place-name having the same
rhythm? The fact that the rhythm is a falling one will be felt as fitting
by most readers; but why wouldn't 'Pratolino' or 'Dicomano' - Etruscan
places nearby, having the same rhythm - do equally well? ('Amagansett,'
'Nether Stowey', 'Wolverhampton' . . .)
The usual explanation given is twofold.
- (i) Milton visited Vallombrosa on his 1638-39 visit, so he had seen its leaves falling or fallen for himself.
- (ii) 'Vallombrosa' means 'shady valley' in Italian, and so the name has the right resonance for its context, dead leaves in 'valley of the shadow of death' (Psalm 23 verse 4 being also brought into view).
One can accept (ii) without (i), but the reverse seems pointless. Against
(i), however, is the doubt whether Milton did visit Vallombrosa.
Biographical?
A written record of his having stayed at the monastery of Vallombrosa
may be a later fake. (Many things have been fathered on Milton, including
a snuff-box, a walking stick, a knife and fork, and other such items
of great spiritual import.) And if you go to Vallombrosa now, will you
see deciduous trees? Does it make any difference whether Milton saw
Vallombrosa for himself or not? Some would say it does: Milton rather
insists on having had personal knowledge of Galileo. Would it therefore
be best for someone on behalf of us all to check whether Vallombrosa's
trees were deciduous in 1638-39, regardless of what grows there now?
Or is all of this merely wasted effort?
Literary?
To name a modern, Italian place instantly sets up active links between
the extreme otherness of the angels fallen into Hell and our own world.
Italy is both remote and near; remote to stay-at-homes, near to readers
of epic. Italian literature was for Milton the greatest vernacular literature.
His epic seeks to rival those by Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. He says
so.
Rhetorical?
All the same, does a reader feel more excluded or impressed by the learning
of the traveller-poet, the man who has 'been to'? The place-naming invites
a small swirl of potential disagreement. As such, rhetorically, we are
getting a key instance of how Milton engrosses his readers even at the
risk of aggravating some. What did he think the choiceof name would
do for his readers,or was he expressing rather than communicating?
Aural?
Factual, literary, rhetorical . . . Suppose none of these clues to the
allusion is the fittest; suppose it is the sound that matters most.
Suppose 'Vallombrosa', of the falling rhythm, and of the rounded vowels
of Italian and music, may just have sounded right to Milton. Elsewhere
he shows an inscrutable preference for /S/ over /Z/ in Hebraic names:
was he guided by a gut-feeling for the sound in the present instance?
If it was such an instinct for him, are we given licence to explain
the instinct, or should exegesis stop right there?
What do YOU think?
Let readers NOW write down whether the factual, literary, rhetorical
or aural qualities of the allusion come uppermost for them.
Or are we all wrong, because a sceptical reading is after all best:
the feeling that no allusion so brief should prompt such a range of
comment? Is this just too much meaning for too brief an allusion, and
does such a minute attention to detail make a reading of the whole poem
(so replete with allusions) impossible? Does close reading defeat its
own purpose? Is academic analysis barking up the wrong tree, deciduous
or evergreen?
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