The Passion (Milton) - Themes

Themes

The Passion with On the Morning of Christ's Nativity and Upon the Circumcision form a set of poems that celebrates important Christian events: Christ's birth, the feast of the Circumcision, and Good Friday. The topic of these poems places them within a genre of Christian literature popular during the 17th century and places Milton alongside poets like John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert. However, Milton's poetry reflects the origins of his anti-William Laud and anti-Church of England based religious beliefs. The topic of The Passion is of Christ's Crucifixion. Although Milton was a Christian poet, he rarely discusses this event within his poetry.

In the poem, he ignores the suffering by diverting attention to a discussion of himself and his own understanding of poetry in a similar way to Donne's "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward". Milton's emphasis is on the nature of Christian poetry, and Stanza V contains a self-referential discussion of writing elegiac poetry, which is a baroque technique similar to the work of Bernini or Herbert in "Good Friday". However, the narrator constantly focuses on himself and his own grief, and this is a common trait in the contemporary Christian poetry of the poem. Unlike many of his contemporaries' works, each aspect of the poem emphasizes that the narrator is unable to actually discuss Christ's crucifixion, and the poem was left incomplete.