Milton's Bells

‘Adam’s Sin Heaps Guilt On/Say the Bells of John Milton’

At the beginning of Book 3 of Paradise Lost Milton addresses Light:

Hail holy light, ofspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

The irony is that Milton, here addressing God as Light, the speaker of fiat lux, is himself blind. He cannot see what he hymns.

thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that rowle in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veild.

This is not a problem, however. Milton knows that faith is, specifically, that which is not seen [Hebrews 11:1 — Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων; ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’]. He still believes, and will continue to write his poetry, like ‘Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,/And Tiresias and Phineus Prophets old’. He will, in a passage that influenced Keats, sing like the nightingale:

as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledg fair
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

I was reading this passage, and I wondered if the opening invocation, ‘Hail holy Light’, was traditional, perhaps part of church liturgy. It goes nicely into Latin: Ave sancta lux. But I wasn’t able to track any examples down: it’s not part of the liturgy of the hours, the phrase doesn’t occur in any Latin hymns. I googled to the best of my ability and found nothing: — which presumably means that Milton invented the address himself. I was ready to give up when I chanced upon a different angle: bells.