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Milton's Eve and the Neoplatonic Graces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Purvis E. Boyette
Purvis E. Boyette*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Abstract

Some of Milton's classical allusions are stylistically supplemental, but more often than not they function with illuminating homology. Milton's description of Eve as Queen of the Graces is one example of what might appear a passing simple detail:

With Goddess-like demeanor forth she went; Not unattended, for on her as Queen A pomp of winning Graces waited still.

But on closer reading, one discovers that the allusion embraces large themes, especially when seen through the lenses of Neoplatonism. It is altogether apposite that Ficino regarded Venus, the symbol of love, as the mediatrix between God and man: ‘love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe: amor nodus perpetuus, et copula mundi.’ Following the precedent in Spenser of linking the Graces with flowers, the symbol of fruition, Milton identified the three Graces in L'Allegro (11-16) as the daughters of Venus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1967 , pp. 341 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1967

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References

1 Paradise Lost, VIII, 59-61. Citations are to Merritt Y., Hughes’ edition of the Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 1957) and will be given hereafter in the text.Google Scholar

2 Marsilio Ficino, De amor, III, iii. Latin text edited by Sears, Jayne and translated as the Commentary on Plato's ‘Symposium’ (Columbia, Mo., 1944), p. 56.Google Scholar

3 See Spenser's, Eclogues ‘April,’ 109-114; ‘June,’ 25-28; and the Faerie Queene, I. i. 48; VI. x. 14–15.Google Scholar

4 Quoted in Edgar, Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958), p. 39.Google Scholar

5 Wind cites numerous texts from Ficino, p. 40 n. 4.

6 Seneca, De beneficiis. Cited in Wind, p. 32 ff.

7 Cited in Wind, pp. 41-42.

8 Ficino, De amor, II, ii, in Jayne's Latin text, p. 42; translated p. 134: ‘This single circle … begins in God and attracts to Him, it is Beauty; inasmuch as, going across into the world, it captivates the world, we call it Love; and inasmuch as it returns to its source and with Him joins its labors, then we call it Pleasure. In this way Love begins in Beauty and ends in Pleasure.’ Also quoted in Wind, p. 50, whose italics I use.

9 Watkins, W. B. C., An Anatomy of Milton's Verse (Baton Rouge, La., 1955), p. 128,Google Scholar detects in Milton's ‘though terror be in Love’ a sexual meaning of orgastic helplessness and loss of control.

10 See Paul, Turner, ‘Woman and the Fall of Man,’ English Studies, XXIX (1948), 1–18.Google Scholar