[Milton-L] Milton and Gardens: queries on JM's aesthetics

[Michael Gillum]

Carl, referring to the description of Eve in the rose patch (9.425+) and
your polite dissent from my claims about it:

I am a gardener, and perhaps that predisposes me to see Eve's work as
"creative and fulfilling." But I think the text suggests that, too. Remember
this scene is externally observed, a description of what Satan sees. We are
not told what Eve looks at or thinks at this moment, only what she does. But
upstaying the drooping buds is a physical enactment of the maternal
tenderness for the flowers that Eve verbally expresses in her lament at
11.273-79:

        O flow'rs,
That never will in other climate grow,
My early visitation, and my last
At ev'n which I bred up with tender hand
>From the first op'ning bud, and gave ye names. . . .

She loves the flowers as though they were children.

The myrtle bands (knotted flexible twigs) are indeed a "new horticultural
practice," her invention (as you "crabbily" observe :) and one that would
become a traditional practice familiar to Milton. As I pointed out, Satan
passes through blooming flower borders that are Eve's handiwork  (9.438).
She is not just fighting back intrusive growth, but rather actively building
something to please herself. These are indications that the work is
creative. Then, the flowers she is handling are described in the most
gorgeous language: "Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold" (429);
she is veiled with the scent of roses and their glowing color. How could
this not be, for Eve, a "pointedly pleasant" experience?

The passage is a most poignant evocation of the joys of Paradise, now under
mortal threat; and it is a snapshot of a woman at work.

Michael Gillum




On 6/23/09 8:58 PM, "Carl Bellinger" <bcarlb at comcast.net> wrote:

> I don't see that this passage represents Eve's work experience either as
> pointedly pleasant or creative.
> 
> The "cloud of fragrance" is no doubt pleasant, and the glowing of the flower
> colors, but  Eve is "mindless the while/Herself." Of course this phrase
> refers, in the first case, not to her attentiveness to her work, but to her
> unawareness of danger and her own frailty. That withstanding, I find nothing
> in the narrative itself here that seems at odds with "mindless the while..."
> And as "delicious" as this garden may be we are not presented with an Eve
> standing there drinking it all in. Eve has not got, in this scene, what
> Flannery O'Connor phrases "a pleasure-taking eye." That keenness belongs,
> here, to Satan.
> 
> [[  Mindless the while Herself.   Wonderful how the two strong
> sense-stresses of this idiomatic construction, on "mindless" & "Herself,"
> are floating/suspended across the faintly-stressed "the while," across the
> line-end, in a kind of cadential atmospheric mindlessness. So it seems to
> me. No English poet comes anywhere near Milton in the myriad perfections of
> expression he is able to pencil across that glimmering, mysterious
> trajectory "from one verse into another!"  Please pardon the digression.
> Though come to think of it, it's not entirely off point. ]]
> 
> And how creative and fulfilling can it be, really, to be supporting drooping
> flowers with Myrtle bands? Sorry to be so crabby, but if Eve here were
> taking real pleasure inventing new horticultural procedures, Milton would be
> saying so I think.
> 
> In another passage --where A&E first breathe the morning air, then pray,
> then turn to their appointed tasks-- I recall getting the sense that,
> compared to breathing and singing, the work thing is a lesser thing, a
> merely and frankly workmanlike pastime. It's sooo nice when lunch comes
> around!
> 
> -Carl