Order Serviceable: Milton’s Nativity Ode By Nicholas Birns John Milton was, like most writers of his era, from a well-off but not aristocratic family. He was educated at Cambridge and worked for the Commonwealth government led by Oliver Cromwell as “Secretary of Foreign Tongues,” writing tracts in Latin to justify Cromwell’s overthrow and execution of King Charles I in 1649. Milton was a convinced Protestant, and, as John Guillory has demonstrated, had a Protestant suspicion of the unreality stressed by Renaissance notions of the imagination; yet what Christopher Ricks called his “grand style” was certainly not plain or unadorned. Milton indeed was a complex polymath in his life and work. Milton was the first truly cosmopolitan English intellectual as well as the first great writer with deep philological competence in a wide array of both ancient and modern European languages. Milton was a fierce polemicist, whose idea of virtue did not mean nobly shrinking from the public fray. But Milton was also an ambitious writer, and wanted to spin the rota Virgilii, ­the wheel of Virgil, an idea that the poet should start out with apprentice work in lyric genres and then work up to the epic. The ode, a form associated with the ancient Greek poet Pindar and the idea of poetic competitiveness, with the perfect form. Milton, typically, honored this classical precedent, but insisted on infusing it with Christian content. Milton wrote “Ode On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in 1629, early in his career, at age twenty-one. Though he had written poems in Latin and brief lyrics in English, it was his first really ambitious poem, and announced the prodigious ambition of his poetic career. Oddly, though, it is a poem that, notwithstanding its great fame among academic, has never touched the general public, even though Christmas, not the theologically more significant Easter, is by far the most popular Christian holiday among the general public in the secular West in the twenty-first century, and the Nativity a subject even non-Christians find sympathetic and compelling.   This is the month, and this the happy morn   Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King   Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,   Our great redemption from above did bring;   For so the holy sages once did sing           That He our deadly forfeit should release,   And with His Father work us a perpetual peace.      That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,   And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty   Wherewith He wont at Heaven's high council-table    To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,   He laid aside; and, here with us to be,   Forsook the courts of everlasting day,   And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay. After these first two stanzas, one might suspect why the poem is unpopular. Milton is determined to put even the humblest of subjects in a high tone; his rendition of the kenosis, God’s self-emptying through Jesus, has the difficult phrase “Trinal Unity” in it and this offsets the thematic emphasis on coming down to earth. In addition, Milton insists on shadowing and punning, When he refers to the perfect Trinitarian being Christ laid aside to become incarnate, he describes it as “light unsufferable,” meaning light that the human form cannot endure; also, subsidiarily that light does not permit suffering, but also, even more tacitly, light that cannot be suffered: that is insufferable. One of the reasons, therefore, Christ might have come down to earth is because he found heaven insufferable! Milton is being perfectly orthodox than when he says this—part of Christian doctrine is to prefer the God who has been wounded and experienced suffering to the one who is perfect and has never experienced our suffering—another valance of “unsufferable.” But there is so much verbal nuance and game-laying here that the general reader probably loses patience. Moreover, Milton is confusing in that, even though he is a Protestant, and a low Protestant at that, his language is ornate and his erudition is copious and evident—traits we tend to associate with Catholicism rather than Protestantism. Part of this is our prejudice. We tend to think of George Herbert, with his deliberate simplicity, as the quintessential protestant poet of this era. But in fact many Puritan divines, including those who settled in North America, were quite verbose prolix, and even pedantic, as Samuel Eliot Morison shows in The Puritan Pronaos. In addition, we associate Protestantism with an adamant rejection of paganism and the Greco-Roman world, towards which Catholicism, inheritor of a degree of its worldly power, customarily had more ambiguous attitudes, Milton however is cosmopolitan, greatly learned in the Classics, and yearns to emulate or surpass the glory of the ancient world. “Emulate or surpass" is crucial, as Milton sees Christianity as the warrant for how he can be greater than the ancients as he is Christian and they are not. Thus even when, as below, he evokes the traditional figure of the Muse, he deliberately alters this summoning to a Christian purpose. This involves the reader possessing tremendous knowledge, and it is no surprise that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was beloved by lay protestants of the next three centuries the way Milton’s Adam-and-Eve epic Paradise Lost, the high spoke of his wheel of Virgil, for all the admiration and study it attracted, was not. We have to remember, in this context, the point that David Scott Kastan makes in his recent book on Shakespeare and religion; that we tend to have very hard-and-fast ideas of what is Catholic and what is protestant, whereas Milton, growing up before the English Civil War, did not so much (and Shakespeare even less). There was a common religious and cultural languages shared across the Catholic-Protestant divide, and as much depended on individual idiosyncrasy and intellectual mien than doctrinal affirmation.      Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein    Afford a present to the Infant God?   Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain   To welcome Him to this His new abode,   Now while the heaven, by the sun's team untrod,   Hath took no print of the approaching light,    And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?      See how from far, upon the eastern road,   The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:   O run, prevent them with thy humble ode   And lay it lowly at His blessed feet;    Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,   And join thy voice unto the Angel quire   From out His secret altar touch'd with hallow'd fire.   With this, Milton turns from the introductory argument to the Hymn itself, the lines become shorter and more musical. We should mention that the very fact Milton rhymes in this poem is an innovation upon the classical ode, as the ancient Greeks and Romans did not rhyme. Milton himself later, in Paradise Lost turned away from rhyme as a modern, barbarian innovation. (I discuss this issue at great length in my recent book Barbarian Memory). But in this poem the rhyme is on the alert: steady, linking words of from one to four syllables, ingenious, but also singsong;    No war, or battle's sound   Was heard the world around:   The idle spear and shield were high uphung;    The hookèd chariot stood   Unstain'd with hostile blood;   The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;   And kings sat still with awful eye,   As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.       But peaceful was the night   Wherein the Prince of Light   His reign of peace upon the earth began:   The winds, with wonder whist,   Smoothly the waters kist    Whispering new joys to the mild oceàn—   Who now hath quite forgot to rave,   While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave.      Milton sets up the poem’s characteristic theme here,; how the onset of Jesus changed the world, suspended the normative order of things. The stars, with deep amaze,   Stand fix'd in steadfast gaze,    Bending one way their precious influence;   And will not take their flight   For all the morning light,   Or Lucifer that often warn'd them thence;   But in their glimmering orbs did glow    Until their Lord Himself bespake, and bid them go.      And though the shady gloom   Had given day her room,   The sun himself withheld his wonted speed,   And hid his head for shame,    As his inferior flame   The new-enlighten'd world no more should need;   He saw a greater Sun appear   Than his bright throne, or burning axle-tree could bear. The sun itself is superseded by Christ; Milton reiterates the point that what the world thought had been authority and power, even up to the visible cosmic elements, were as nothing to the new, humble Lord.      The shepherds on the lawn Or ere the point of dawn   Sate simply chatting in a rustic row;   Full little thought they than   That the mighty Pan   Was kindly come to live with them below;    Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep   Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep: —      …...      At last surrounds their sight   A globe of circular light That with long beams the shamefaced night array'd;   The helmèd Cherubim   And sworded Seraphim   Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd,   Harping in loud and solemn quire   With unexpressive notes, to Heaven's new-born Heir.      Such music (as 'tis said)   Before was never made   But when of old the Sons of Morning sung,   While the Creator great   His constellations set   And the well-balanced world on hinges hung;   And cast the dark foundations deep,   And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.      The Nativity is a temporal event, discernible within history, but it also is a supernatural event and thus hearkens back to the ultimate music, that of the Creation: in a sense the Nativity restages creation in an intimate apace on a human scale. Ring out, ye crystal spheres!   Once bless our human ears,   If ye have power to touch our senses so;   And let your silver chime   Move in melodious time;   And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow;   And with your ninefold harmony   Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.      For if such holy song   Enwrap our fancy long,   Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold;   And speckled Vanity   Will sicken soon and die,   And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould;   And Hell itself will pass away,   And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.    Yea, Truth and Justice then   Will down return to men,   Orb'd in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,   Mercy will sit between   Throned in celestial sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;   And Heaven, as at some festival,   Will open wide the gates of her high palace-hall. But Milton has to face what we all have to face on Christmas even in the midst of festival joy: that the event of the nativity is but a prelude to Good Friday and Easter: that there is a giant roadblock in the scenario of cosmic redemption that we would like to think is far more untroubled:   But wisest Fate says No; This must not yet be so; The Babe yet lies in smiling infancy That on the bitter cross  Must redeem our loss   In the Tractate on Education, Milton famously described poetry as, when compared to logic, more “simple, sensuous and passionate.” This phrase is often attributed to Milton as a recommendation of what poetry should be. This, in turn, often confuses readers, who correctly note that Milton’s poetry, though not lacking in passion, is often intricate complex, and cerebral. But Milton was only saying that poetry is more simple, sensuous, and passionate than logic, an assertion that most if not all in the previous rhetorical tradition would have found perfectly reasonable. Nonetheless at this point in the poem we have to ask, is Milton himself, simple, sinuous, and passionate, and the answer would have to be no: despite the vigor and energy of the poem, he is belaboring the point. One can see this by a contrast with another poem of the generation before Milton’s Robert Southwell’s “New Heaven, New War,” now most famous for its use in Benjamin Britten's “Ceremony of Carols,” This little babe, so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan’s fold; All hell doth at his presence quake. Though he himself for cold do shake, For in this weak unarmèd wise The gates of hell he will surprise. With tears he fights and wins the field; His naked breast stands for a shield; His battering shot are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes, His martial ensigns cold and need, And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed. Southwell, a Roman Cathie who was martyred for his faith, ironically here has all the virtues: brevity passion, fervor, zeal: that we associate with Protestantism. It is simple, sensuous, and passionate just as Milton’s is not. This is not to say Southwell was a better poet than Milton; clearly, he was not although in this one poem, one of the few of his truncated fie, he achieves a truly rare intensity, It is to stress that Milton is writing a different sort of poem, for different reasons, he is writing a poem addressed to clerics and university graduates-the only people likely to know Greek and Latin well in this era—and is delineating the classical tradition just to show how precisely the birth of Jesus interrupts, upends and explodes this tradition. Of course Milton does not believe the gods were ever literally there; he is saying more that the Nativity banishes these gods from human awareness. Yet the way he sets up his litany almost invests the pagan deities with more ontological reality than Milton thinks they actually have.    The Oracles are dumb;   No voice or hideous hum   Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.   Apollo from his shrine   Can no more divine,   With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving:   No nightly trance or breathèd spell   Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.    The lonely mountains o'er   And the resounding shore   A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;   From haunted spring and dale   Edged with poplar pale   The parting Genius is with sighing sent;   With flower-inwoven tresses torn   The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. With the mention of the nymphs, we proceed to a key part of this poem; the dismissal of the pre-Christian, pagan Gods. In the next few stanzas, Milton provides a parade, a litany, of gods who the birth of Jesus banishes, of former self-proclaimed autocrats who have to shuffle out the exit door as soon as the Good news is proclaimed.      In consecrated earth   And on the holy hearth   The Lars and Lemurès moan with midnight plaint;   In urns, and altars round   A drear and dying sound   Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;   And the chill marble seems to sweat,   While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.      Peor and Baalim   Forsake their temples dim,   With that twice-batter'd god of Palestine;   And moonèd Ashtaroth Heaven's queen and mother both,   Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;   The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn:   In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.      And sullen Moloch, fled,   Hath left in shadows dread   His burning idol all of blackest hue;   In vain with cymbals' ring   They call the grisly king,   In dismal dance about the furnace blue;   The brutish gods of Nile as fast,   Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.      Nor is Osiris seen   In Memphian grove, or green,   Trampling the unshower'd grass with lowings loud:   Nor can he be at rest   Within his sacred chest;   Nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud;   In vain with timbrell'd anthems dark   The sable-stolèd sorcerers bear his worshipt ark. Note, though, the nature of the gods Milton dismisses. They are either very minor Gods in the Greek and Roman pantheons, or Egyptian or Syro-Phoenician deities that would have been denounced by the ancient Hebrews. Anent are the major Greek gods: Hermes, Zeus, Ares, Cronos, or their Latin equivalents. Why are they absent? Because to attack them would be to attack the core of Greco-Roman learning: still valued in the West, still valued in Cambridge, still values even among Protestants. As Jean Seznec demonstrated in The Survival of the Pagan Gods, even a millennium of Christianity could not dispel the residual tug of the inhabitant of Olympus. The Portuguese equivalent of Milton, Luis de Camões, even goes so far to poetry the Greek gods as present en the Portuguese explored Africa in the fifteenth century in his epic The Lusiads. It was hard for the West to jettison the Greco-Roman pantheon, as seen by the fact that Mercury, Jove, Saturn still have their legacy in the days of the week in most Romanced languages just as Thor, Odin, and Freya do in the English days of the week. (Milton wrote in the generation before the Anglo-Saxon revival began to happen in England, so there was no need for the Norse. Germanic pantheon to also be among that which discreetly files out on learning of the coming of Jesus. .      He feels from Juda's land   The dreaded Infant's hand;   The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;   Nor all the gods beside   Longer dare abide,   Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:   Our Babe, to show His Godhead true,   Can in His swaddling bands control the damnèd crew.    The mention of “Juda's Land” raises an interesting aspect to the poem: its stress of the coming of Jesus all pertains to what happens with respect to the pagan gods, Aside from this one mention, the experience of the Jews is unmentioned: Israel is absent. This differs from “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” the Carolingian-era hymn we all sing at Advent. Here the emphasis is on how Jesus, known by the Hebrew name Emmanuel, will ‘ransom captive Israel” who “mourns in lonely exile.” Milton, on the other hand, sees Judaism as an agent that, catalyzed by Jesus, will explode the Greco-Roman world, but—again counter to our image of Protestantism, which stresses the Protestant nation’s identity with Israel. I am not saying Milton’s Protestantism is open to doubt only ha tit is very much his own.   Curtain'd with cloudy red   Pillows his chin upon an orient wave,   The flocking shadows pale   Troop to the infernal jail,   Each fetter'd ghost slips to his several grave;   And the yellow-skirted fays   Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze.      But see! the Virgin blest   Hath laid her Babe to rest;   Time is, our tedious song should here have ending:   Heaven's youngest-teemèd star Hath fix'd her polish'd car,   Her sleeping Lord with hand-maid lamp attending:   Bright-harness'd Angels sit in order serviceable. “Order serviceable.” The conventional explanation of these lines is that Milton, vying poetically with his half-itlaian friend, the more glamorous Charles Diodati, is determined to paint himself as the drudge to Diodati’s dandy. But there is much more here; there is a devotional attitude being traced here. The Angels are waiting, at the ready. They are not singing, not dancing, not celebrating. They are attending, awaiting instructions. They are humble, intent on only offering service. With this payoff line, Milton reveals why, against all intuitive suppositions, he has written the poem this way. He is not out to dazzle or to capture paradox or beauty. Indeed, he is willing, as he startlingly admits, to be tedious! How many poets describe their first major poem as a “tedious song?” Some of this is routine self-deprecation, but in another sense, he genuinely thinks it is tedious, and invites the reader to agree with him. But the tedium has a point, it is consequence is service: a willingness to be ready at hand, to know that it is more important to be at Christ’s side even than to celebrate the Nativity. Adeste fideles: the faithful are summoned, called to do service. Milton’s bunt, non-on sense dedication shows that, as a poet and a Christen, he is there for the long term.   Works Cited Birns, Nicholas, Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early medieval History in Early Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Guillory, John. Poetic Authority: Milton to Spenser (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1984). Kastan, David Scott. A Will To Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Puritan Pronaos: Studies In The Intellectual Life of Seventeenth Century New England (New York: n\New York University Press, 1936) Milton, John, “On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/nativity/text.shtml Ricks, Christopher. Milton’s Grand Style. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963_) Southwell, Robert. “New Heaven, New War,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180991 Seznec, jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. Tr. Barbara Sessions, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.) Nicholas Birns is a parishioner of Grace Church in Manhattan and the author of many books and articles          1