The Passion (Milton) - Poem

Poem

"The Passion" deals with Christ's Crucifixion but first two stanzas discuss how the narrator can no longer discuss the happiness of Christ's nativity:

Wherewith the stage of air and earth did ring,

And joyous news of Heav'nly infant's birth

My muse with angels did divide to sing

...

For now to sorrow must I tune my song,

And set my harp to notes of saddest woe (lines 2–4, 8–9)

Although he is to introduce the Crucifixion, the third stanza emphasizes the nature of Christ and the Incarnation.

He sov'reign priest, stopping his regal head

That dropped with odorous oil down his fair eyes,

Poor fleshly tabernacle entered (lines 15–17)

The fourth stanza continues to ignore the Crucifixion by discussing the poetic tone required for such a poem:

These latter scenes confine my roving verse,

To this horizon is my Phoebus bound,

His Godlike acts, and his temptations fierce;

...

Me softer airs befit, and softer strings

Of lute, or viol still, more apt for mournful things. (lines 22–24, 27–28)

The fifth stanza continues this focus and discusses the printing of an elegy:

My sorrows are too dark for day to know:

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,

And letters where my tears have washed a wannish white. (lines 33–35)

The emphasis on poetry is dropped for an emphasis on the soul of the narrator in Stanza VI:

My spirit some transporting cherub feels,

To bear me where the towers of Salem stood

...

There doth my soul in holy vision sit

In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit. (lines 38–39, 41–42)

The moment of the Crucifixion passes as the poet focuses on himself, and the poem transitions discussing to Christ's sepulchral in Stanza VIII:

Mine eye hath found that sad seplchral rock

That was the casket of Heav'n's richest store,

And here though grief my feeble hands uplock,

Yet on the softened quarry would I score

My plaining verse as lively as before

For sure so well instructed are my tears,

That they would fitly fall in ordered characters. (lines 43–49)

The final stanza ends with the poet focusing on his own sorrow:

Or Should I thence, hurried on viewless wing,

Take up a weeping on the mountains wild,

The gentle neighborhood of grove and spring

Would soon unbosom all their echoes mild

And I (for grief is easily beguiled)

Might think th' infection of my sorrows loud

Had got a race of mourners on some pregnant cloud.

Attached to the 1645 publication of the poem are three lines which Milton wrote to state that the poem is incomplete and is abandoned because the poet was unable to deal with the Crucifixion as the subject matter:

This subject the author finding to be above the

years he had when he wrote it, and nothing

satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.