Milton's Sonnet XXIII: 'Methought I Saw My Late Espouséd Saint'

Ghosts, demons, blindness and death

Methought I saw my late espouséd saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

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Milton’s famous sonnet records a dream-vision of seeing his dead wife returned to him, as dead Alcestis is returned to life and to her husband, Admetus ,by the intervention of the demi-god Heracles (son of Zeus—‘Jove’—and the mortal woman Alcmene) in Euripides’ play. The irony is that Milton is blind. When he dreams, he sees his wife, but when he wakes it is to an inversion of light and dark: the dark night, in which he can see, becomes the wakeful bright day, in which he cannot.

His wife is brought to him, but she says nothing, as Alcestis is silent on her return to Admetus. Milton’s wife’s face is veiled, and yet he can somehow see her face ‘clear’, its ‘love, sweetness, goodness’. But oh! As she leans in to kiss him, he wakes up, and the whole vision flies away, leaving him darkling.

Since by this point Milton had been twice married and twice widowed, critics have argued back and forth as to which wife is invoked by this poem: ‘the speculative identifications of this dead woman have been divided among three candidates: the poet's actual first wife Mary Powell Milton (married 1642, died 1652); his second wife Katherine Woodcock Milton (married 1656, died 1658); and some such poetic ideal of woman as the traditional donna angelicata, never actually married to Milton’ [B J Sokol]. It strikes me as relevant that Milton calls her ‘my late espoused saint’; sancta desponsata, a phrase of liturgical Latin referring to Mary (‘Maria sancta desponsata fuit Ioseph’), which fits, nominally, the first wife rather better than the second (Katherine was also a saint, of course; but she was never married). But perhaps it could be either. In calling her a saint, Milton may just be saying that she was a believing Christian: a saint might be a miracle-working person of especial holiness, but it might just be a way of saying ‘faithful Christian believer’, as per 1 Corinthians 1:2 (‘to them that are sanctified in Christ Iesus, called to be Saints, with all that in every place call upon the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord’).

With respect to the Alcestis reference: Milton could read Greek, but he was much more at ease in Latin, a language in which he was perfectly fluent, in which he read widely and wrote copiously. Reading Latin was easy for him in a way that reading Greek was not. I’ve argued before that, though he surely did go through Hesiod in the original, for pleasure he was much more likely to read Mombritius’s Latin translation of Hesiod—indeed, there are elements in Mombritius’s rather free rendering that are not in the original Hesiod, but which do work their way into Milton. I wonder if something similar is true of Euripides. Milton could, and probably did, read Euripides in the original (he references Euripides in the Areopagitica and the preface to Samson Agonistes, and mentions the Alcestis specifically in Of Education); but George Buchanan’s Latin translation of the Alcestis was much more widely available throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and was much more often read than the original Greek: it was greatly admired for its fluency and elegance. Milton could have read this with complete ease, and I think he did.

So: the story of the Alcestis. Apollo, who has reasons for liking the Thessalian king Admetus, gets him a deal with the fates: when it is his time to die, he can avoid doing so if he can find somebody willing to die in his place. But this proves not easy: Admetus asks his elderly parents, reasoning that they don’t have much life left anyway and so won’t mind sacrificing themselves, but they both say they’re still enjoying life, thank you very much, and don’t fancy giving it up. He does not ask his beloved wife Alcestis, but she sacrifices herself anyway: on her deathbed she extracts a promise from her husband that he will not marry again, and that he will end the merrymaking for which his house had hitherto been famous. Admetus agrees and Alcestis dies. Then Herakles arrives: an old friend of Admetus. As per the ethics of Greek hospitality, Admetus entertains him, and doesn’t tell him of his bereavement (he is, critics note, breaking his promise to Alcestis by doing so). Herakles gets drunk and merry and irritates the servants, who resent not being allowed to tell him of the death of their mistress, whom they loved and wish to mourn. Eventually one tells Herakles what has happened, and, deeply embarrassed by his own behaviour, the demigod decides to recover the dead woman. So he goes into the underworld, wrestles the forces there, and brings Alcestis back to life and her grateful husband.

At the end of Euripides’ play, when Herakles returns Alkestis to him alive again, Admetus says: ὦ φιλτάτης γυναικὸς ὄμμα καὶ δέμας,/ἔχω σ᾽ ἀέλπτως, οὔποτ᾽ ὄψεσθαι δοκῶν. ‘O face and body of the wife I love, I have you again against all expectation, never thinking to see you again!’ In Arthur Way’s version:

O face, O form of my beloved wife,
Past hope I have thee, who ne’er thought to see thee!

George Buchanan’s Latin for this is:

O corpus, oculi, o coniugis charissimae,
Spem praeter habeo te, videre postea
Qua non putara posse me?

The Latin is: ‘o body, eyes, o wife most loved,/beyond hope do I have you, to see you again/was not what I could expect possible.’ Eyes, rather than face. I wonder if Milton, with his blind eyes, reading this Latin (or having it read to him) wasn’t struck by the thought not only of seeing with his own eyes, but of seeing, precisely, his dead wife’s eyes. His sonnet is very engaged with the dynamic of sight, of eyes, of seeing—and, in the waking world, of blind-eyes, of unseeing.

In this last scene of the play, Admetus asks how Herakles was able to bring his wife back to him, and the hero answers: μάχην συνάψας δαιμόνων τῷ κυρίῳ. ‘I fought with the lord of the daimones’ or possibly ‘I fought with one of the daimones who is lord’. Buchanan version of this line is: deproeliatus cum tyranno Manium: ‘I warred violently with the ruler of the Manes.’ The daimones, οἱ δαίμονες [from δαίομαι, daíomai, “to divide, to cut”] were creatures something like gods: “while δαίμων was sometimes used interchangeably with θεός (theós), when used together in a context, a δαίμων is usually a lower god than a θεός. Even though it is attested mainly as a philosophical divine or spiritual entity (often with a negative sense), its earlier meaning should be semantically related to its root, giving us “ruler who divides [the supplies]” Compare the word Λᾰκεδαίμων (Lakedaímōn), meaning literally “the Laconian distributor [of the supplies]”.

Manes are different. Saint Augustus says of them: ‘Apuleius says, indeed, that the souls of men are demons, and that men become Lares if they are good, Lemures or Larvae if they are bad, and Manes if it is uncertain whether they deserve well or ill.’ [City of God, 9:11]. Buchanan’s Latin tells us that Alcestis is not a larva (he has Admetus ask: ne larva ab umbris missa sit? ‘Is this some larva sent by the shades?’ To which Hercules replies that he is no magus—wizard, necromancer—to conjure such a thing: cave esse credas hospitem tuum magum, ‘beware of believing that your house-guest is a mage’ ). Buchanan’s Latin then again calls Alcestis a Mane, importing the term into the Euripidean text. In the original Admetus asks: τί γάρ ποθ᾽ ἥδ᾽ ἄναυδος ἕστηκεν γυνή; ‘But why does my wife stand silent?’ To which Heracles replies:

οὔπω θέμις σοι τῆσδε προσφωνημάτων
κλύειν, πρὶν ἂν θεοῖσι τοῖσι νερτέροις
ἀφαγνίσηται καὶ τρίτον μόλῃ φάος.

You are not yet allowed speech of hers
to hear, not until the nether gods see her
purified, when the third day brings its light.

In Buchanan, this exchange is:

AD. Quid muta tandem perseverat foemina?

HE. Nondum tibi fas ejus alloquio frui,
Diis antequam sese expiarit Manibus,
Terrisque lucem tertia ostendet dies.

ADMETUS Why does my wife persist in her silence?

HERCULES: You have not yet the right to engage with her in speech,
Until she expiates the gods of the Manes
When the earth sees the light of the third day.

Rendering Euripides’ θεοί νερτέροι, ‘nether gods’, as Manes is not exactly a mistranslation, but neither is it exact. And what’s interesting is that, in Milton’s sonnet, the wife is a mane, and is not a θεός νερτέρος. The play ends with a five-line anapestic song by the Chorus:

πολλαὶ μορφαὶ τῶν δαιμονίων,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ἀέλπτως κραίνουσι θεοί:
καὶ τὰ δοκηθέντ᾽ οὐκ ἐτελέσθη,
τῶν δ᾽ ἀδοκήτων πόρον ηὗρε θεός.
τοιόνδ᾽ ἀπέβη τόδε πρᾶγμα.

There are many forms of the daimones, and many things the gods accomplish against our expectations. What men anticipate is not brought to pass, but a god finds a way to achieve the unexpected. Such was the outcome of this story.

Buchanan, this time, doesn’t render daimones as Manes: instead turning that first line into two:

Fortuna vices lubrica versat,
Varias docilis sumere formas.
Inopina dei plurima peragunt:
Non succedunt, quae fore speras;
Quae fore nemo posse putaret,
Saepe expediunt numina: qualem
Haec sortita est fabula finem.

Fortune twists through slippery turns,
taking various teachable forms.
The gods do the most unexpected things:
matters do not follow, as you hope;
and what no one thought could be possible
divine forces often make happen: of such
is this, the end of the story.

Milton’s sonnet says that his wife was ‘brought to him, like Alcestis’. Brought by whom? By some dream-Hercules. One thing the Buchanan Alcestis has that the original Euripidean text does not is an epilogue: a 36-line poem by Petro Albino that explicitly reads the play as an allegorical apprehension of the coming of Christ, who saves us from death: addressing ‘tu Christe, noster Hercules’. Albino praises Admetus for his hospitality: by hosting Hercules we host Christ (‘verum Herculem hospes quotidie Christum excipia’: truly, the host of Hercules may receive Christ every day).

The term manes is an archaic term which originally meant ‘the Good Ones’; its antonym survives in the Classical period and after in the adjective immanis, ‘not good’ with overtones of ‘monstrous in size or aspect’. The manes in inscriptions and in Lucretius, our first literary reference to them, are always coupled with the noun Di; thus Di manes or Dis manibus. The term manes, with one exception, is always found in the plural. The manes were evidently originally the collective spirits of the dead. They were undifferentiated, and, until the Republican period, were not conceived of as having individual personalities of dead persons. The living had obligations to the manes during certain festal occasions: the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May. The Parentalia was obviously a time when each family was concerned with its own dead; Ovid, Fasti 2.37-64 glosses Parentalia as animas placate paternas. During the nine days of the festival, the dead rise again, wander about, and feed upon the offerings left for them by the family. The rites of Lemuria, in early May, indicate another aspect of the dead. Ovid once again provides the pertinent information regarding the rites, Fasti 5.25-26. Under the name Lemures, the spirits of the departed return to their home they must be confronted and appeased, then dispersed. Unlike the spirits of the Parentalia, those of the Lemuria seem to be able to carry away a living person into the realm of death, if not appeased properly. Although the manes are attached to specific households, being the spirits of deceased family members, they are not generally individualized in terms of personality, as one would expect from our contemporary notion of ‘ghosts’. Cicero was the first to use the term manes as referring to a specific personality, as far as can be determined. Vergil and Livy also make use of manes as referring to a specific personality; its use in such a way becomes popular in post-Republican literature and inscriptions. [Kristina P. Nielson, ‘Aeneas and the Demands of the Dead’, The Classical Journal, 79:3 (1984), 201]

Milton’s mane is both personalised—a specific person, his dead wife—and, in a sense, not individuated: first wife, second wife, generic ‘wife’, folded in together. Cicero, in De Legibus, 2,9,22, has more: ‘the rituals surrounding the Di Manes are to be held sacred; furthermore, those (parents, spouses, family members) who have died are to be considered divus, having properties belonging to divinity’. Hence, in Milton’s sonnet, espoused saint.

But it’s uncanny, too. Milton’s wife is brought back to him, but not fully brought back: unlike Alcestis, she does not rejoin the living, she returns to the land of the dead. She is still a Mane, under the command of the Dii Manibus. Both Milton’s wives died from complication of child-birth, so his vision of her (whichever wife it was he saw) is of a woman ‘as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint/Purification in the old Law did save.’ Critics generally read this as a reference to Jewish law, and the rituals of purification women were obliged to undergo after childbirth; but Ancient Greece had similar obligations and rituals, childbirth being considered an impurity that necessitated cleansing. Theophratus [Characters, 16:9] has his superstitious man equate childbirth with death: ‘καὶ οὔτε ἐπιβῆναι μνήματι οὔτ᾽ ἐπὶ νεκρὸν οὔτ᾽ ἐπὶ λεχὼ ἐλθεῖν ἐθελῆσαι, ἀλλὰ τὸ μὴ μιαίνεσθαι συμφέρον αὑτῷ φῆσαι εἶναι’; ‘he will not step upon a grave, or approach a corpse, or a woman giving birth or having just given birth [λεχὼ] , for all these things have the same risk of pollution.’ In the case of Milton’s wife the pollution is doubled, for all that he hopes she has been washed and purified from it. For forty days after birth a woman would confine herself, as unclean, for seven days or ten days, after which she would be cleansed at the festival of the Amphidromia, and the baby would be paraded around the house. Some restrictions remained: she was not allowed to enter sacred spaces for forty days after the birth, and a ritual involving a sacrifice, possibly of a dog to Hecate, to finalise her purification. Milton’s wife was neither pagan nor Jew, but Christian: although Christianity celebrates Candlemas, which records the time when Mary was purified of having given birth to Jesus. She is, as per the first line, a saint: although the sonnet’s rhyme words for this—faint, taint, restraint—suggest cross-currents to this sanctity. I’d say line 5’s ‘as whom’ implies more wishful thinking than actuality: Milton hopes that this vision has been purified of her doubled uncleanness, as he hopes, in line 7, that he will see her again when he dies. He sees her, she ‘inclines’ to embrace him—is minded to embrace him, but also literally leans in—and at that moment of potential consummation Milton wakes, his vision disappears and he is blind in the daylight.

Death is a mode of blindness. When someone dies, we are struck that we will not see them again. And the Greek underworld is a murky and lightless place. Not that Milton believes in such a place: he has the bright-lit Christian heaven to which to look forward, when he hopes to see his wife again. But as of now he is in darkness. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (Book I Chapter VI), Milton contrasts the perfect love spirits enjoy in heaven with the imperfect connection ‘in this dark region here below’—the world, he means, although he could be talking about the Greek underworld. It is about impairment to vision:

Love, though not wholly blind, as Poets wrong him, yet having but one eye, as being born an Archer aiming, and that eye not the quickest in this dark region here below, which is not Loves proper sphere, partly out of the simplicity, and credulity which is native to him, often deceiv'd, imbraces and consorts him with these obvious and suborned striplings, as if they were his Mothers own Sons, for so he thinks them, while they suttly keep themselves most on his blind side. … For strait his arrows loose their golden heads, and shed their purple feathers, his silk'n breades untwine, and slip their knots, and that original and firie vertue giv'n him by Fate, all on a sudden goes out and leaves him undeifi'd, and despoil'd of all his force.

Buchanan’s eye, the half-blind Love, the darkness into which Milton wakes. A poem about seeing and unseeing.