[Milton-L] Poetry Daily

[Nancy Charlton]

Today's is "Passerine" by Stanley Plumly, always an original voice:

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13755

He quotes from Milton but his poem is really 
focused on Keats. Still, it prompted me to search 
in the Bartleby online Milton concordance for 
bird, sparrow, swallow, owl, nightingale, dove, 
hawk, eagle, cuckoo. And "liquid" and "liquid 
notes." I was glad to be reminded of the Sonnet 
to the Nightingale, and I noticed in passing that 
most of the hits under "liquid" refer literally 
to water.  Offhand it would seem that JM used 
sparingly whatever is the term that describes the figure "liquid notes."

Plumly really subordinates the Milton line to 
Keats, Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworh, but the 
debt of all of them is somehow implied.   Milton 
did not employ such images as the cardinal 
shooting songbirds; when he depicted something 
horrible it is in allegorical manner such as Sin 
and Death, and it usually has an overt "moral." 
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to get at 
here, or why Milton was such an inspiration to 
the Romantics. It has been a conundrum of 
criticism for years. If it ever gets solved, it 
may be due to the good offices of poet-critics 
such as Plumly, who can allude with the best of 
them, but by introducing a sobering note of 
modern ghastliness, bring the nightingales down 
to earth. Their elegiacs have no "O!".

When the passerine become passé, as is predicted 
in the newspapers every other day, it may put a 
different spin on one of Milton's best "bird" passages:

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note.

Rambilingly on this last of summer days,

Nancy Charlton
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