See Father, what first fruits are sprung / From thy implanted Grace
—Paradise Lost X.22-23¹

The phrase “first fruits” refers, in a scriptural context, to an offering made annually at the temple in Jerusalem and mandated by Moses. The commandment’s central articulation comes in Deuteronomy 26: Moses commands the Israelites to “take of all manner first fruits of the land,” put them in a basket, and give them to a priest, who will “set it down before the altar of the Lord.”[2] His instructions begin with a temporal stipulation—to perform the rite only “[w]hen thou comest into the land”—and end with a textual one—to recite a prayer thanking God for having “brought [the Israelites] out of Egypt” and into “this land, that floweth with milk and honey.” The offering of “first fruits,” in brief, occasions an expression of gratitude for deliverance into an agriculturally abundant promised land.

            What is the significance of the appearance of “first fruits” in the opening lines of Paradise Lost's (original) final book? Nearby lines’ unambiguous temple imagery —“incense,” “censer,” “golden altar,” “mercy-seat” (X.2-24, cf. Lev. 16:12-13, Exodus 30:1-8)—strengthens the interpretative link between “first fruits” and the Deuteronomy injunction. Yet the Son uses the phrase to denote prayers Adam and Eve offer in advance of their expulsion from Eden into the world of death and history: its scriptural association with deliverance seems to render it pointedly inappropriate to a dramatic moment of loss. How might one reconcile its allusive valence to the poem’s narrative needs? By implicitly substituting gratitude for lament, perhaps Milton intends to reverse the significance of the transition, or ‘fall,’ into agriculture: in Eden and desert alike, God preempts the need for farming by providing, respectively, fruit and manna. If the Hebrews trade a pre-agricultural state for Israel’s agricultural abundance (milk, honey, first fruits) does the allusion imply that Adam and Eve, too, will benefit from their new mode of sustenance? Milton frames the fall elsewhere as a felix culpa, but his reasoning has little to do with agriculture; there are richer and more plausible interpretations.[3]

            For example, the phrase can be read as exemplifying what Geoffrey Hartman calls Milton’s “counterplot,” an indirect expression of confidence in divine order or beneficence which “lodges in the vital parts of the overt action.”[4]These “first fruits” preface Adam and Eve’s exile but simultaneously connote the return to Israel and subsequent construction of the temple, Christian types for the advent and presence, respectively, of Christ on earth.[5] The phrase therefore collapses the beginning and end of Christian history into one image.

            The first book’s fourth line accomplishes a similar effect: “With loss of Eden till one greater man” condenses historical time’s beginning and end—Edenic exile and messianic deliverance—into one line. But “first fruits” clearly achieves a higher degree of the same sort of poetic compression: it suggests the extent of Christian history in two syllables rather than ten. It also figures forth a more complex compression: in evoking a proleptic injunction by Moses (“When thou comest”) to recite a prayer of thanksgiving for the exodus from Egypt, it requires the reader to consider how fall and redemption form a historical pattern that encompasses more moments than just beginning and end. These twin rhetorical collapsings of history point to two analytical cruxes—the nature of such a device and the nature of its repetition. Why—besides the straightforward reassurance of a ‘counterplot’—does Milton employ it, and why twice? I turn first to the issue of repetition, or revision.

            David Quint writes of the invocation to light in Book III that it “starts the epic anew and relegates the first two books to a kind of anti-masque”;[6] recognizing the invocation’s revisionary character helps illuminate the passage. I will consider the opening lines of Book X, regarding them as constituting a final invocation that, like its counterpart in Book III, asserts priority over all preceding books. As it comes later, it must contend with a greater number of antecedents. How does it overcome them?

            Their similar imagery and dynamics of relation justify the comparison of the invocations to Books I and X. Both concern fallen people’s (Adam’s, Eve’s, Milton’s) attempts at communicating with God, and use images of flight that implicitly define rhetorical success as the surpassing of classical models. Milton seeks to “soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount,” (I.14-15), while Adam and Eve’s prayers “wing’d for Heav’n with speedier flight / Then loudest Oratorie”; the final word is interpretable, among other ways, as a reference to Roman ars oratoria.[7] Such a feat requires divine assistance: Milton asks the “Spirit” to “instruct” him and the “Heav’nly Muse” to “inspire” him; Adam and Eve are likewise “inspir’d” by “the Spirit” (I.6019, X.6-7).

            This last comparison also makes for a provocative contrast: Milton’s inspiration is wished-for, while Adam and Eve’s is actual. It is tempting, for this reason, to view Book X’s invocation as a fulfillment of Book I’s, as if God delivers, near the poem’s end, the assistance requested earlier. But this reading rests on the uncertain assumption that Book X’s invocation comes after Book I’s. Certainly, in the meta-fictive scheme of Milton’s ordering and our reading of the poem, Book X does come later. In the scheme of Christian history, however, Adam and Eve precede Milton by millenia: they pray in, or just before, the first moments of history, while the initial invocation is presumably spoken  in the mid-17th century AD. If Adam and Eve are historical figures, Book X’s invocation—as the first address to God in historical time—resembles a sort of beginning of literary tradition. Milton’s assertion of Adam and Eve’s anteriority to two Ovidian characters (X.10-14) underscores the potentially literary status of their prayers.  Book I’s invocation, then, could just as reasonably be said to culminate the trajectory Book X’s invocation starts, as vice versa.

            It is precisely this power paradoxically to reverse priority that Harold Bloom ascribes to Miltonic allusion, the device he deems Milton’s supreme “defense against poetic tradition.”[8] His allusions are designed to “make his own belatedness into an earliness, and his tradition’s priority over him into a lateness.”[9] Whom does Milton transume (Bloom’s phrase) in Book X’s invocation? If Book X alludes, against which precursors is it protecting? I have demonstrated one instance in which Book X echoes, and seeks to outdo, Book I; indeed, Bloom’s model must be employed in apprehending not Milton’s relationship to other poets but one invocation’s relationship to other originary moments in the poem. Discussing the “conjunction” of Paradise Regained andParadise Lost, John Rogers writes that the former “reveals the identity” of the latter.[10] My analysis regards the books of Paradise Lost as disjunctive. In this paradigm, an anxiety about sustaining poetic vitality over the course of the poem motivates Milton continually to seek to establish priority over—and thus displace—earlier incarnations of his poetic authority.

            Book X uses a second, more dramatic biblical allusion in amassing to itself religious and temporal priority. The first word of the Bible is בראשית, a compound construction whose first letter is a preposition meaning “in.” The word the preposition modifies can carry the meaning of “the beginning,” as most translations reflect. However, it also carries another meaning: “first fruits.” ראשית is in fact the word in Deuteronomy that Coverdale translates as “first fruits,” St. Jerome as frugibus primitias.[11] If Adam and Eve’s prayers are “first fruits,” and scripture begins “in first fruits,” then scripture could be said to begin “in” Book X’s invocation. Milton aligns the invocation with the Bible’s first word by means of what Bloom calls a “powerful reading that insists upon its own uniqueness and its own accuracy,” the sort that wins its author “priority of interpretation.”[12] Milton’s insistence on his hermeneutic skill is hugely audacious: to offer “first fruits” in the beginning—and in place of “the beginning”—is to correct the entire history of biblical interpretation; has Genesis 1:1 been misread for millenia? In the epic’s first line, “first” and “fruit” are in the proper order but not adjacent to one another; Book X’s “first fruits” reiterates Book I’s first line with a difference, finding the authority to do so in scripture’s first word, and in a Miltonic certainty about words’ meanings.

            Book X mines the first invocation’s rhetorical and allusive features, turning them to its own advantage. But while the first book represents an obvious rival to Book I—if only because of its conspicuous placement—a less structurally prominent passage mounts a comparable challenge: Book V’s fruit feast. Fruit is an apt image for beginnings, given its connotations of biological, dynastic, or agricultural generation (OED 5, 6, 2). No coincidence, then, that “fruit” is the verbal thread joining the three passages under consideration, nor that Milton imbues it, in the semantic world of the poem, with the additional connotation of poetic generation. In the Book V scene, fruit unites the twin motifs of fertility and poetic discourse. Eve both begets, or begins, the human race, and composes a meal that is epic not just in form and scope, but in its relationship to the epic poetic discourse of Books VI-VIII. If the first and final invocations are examples of fallen address to God, the structural middle of the poem depicts unfallen creative communion and so a ‘type’ of a supreme poetics.

            Eve’s preparation of fruit becomes in Book V an allegory for the composition of epic poetry. The legend required for decoding the scene is Milton’s note on the verse, which gives the outlines of a critical paradigm: variety (“the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another”) combines with proportion (“apt numbers” and “fit quantity of syllables”) to create “true musical delight” (a2). Eve resolves to follow this formula, alternating food and drink to produce pleasure: she will serve“fruits, of taste to please / True appetite, and not disrelish thirst / Of nectarous draughts between,” interspersing “taste after taste upheld with kindliest change” in order to produce “delicacy best” (lexically close to ‘delight’). Her ambition extends not to form alone, but to subject matter as well: she prepares a meal of epic range, traversing continents—India, Asia (“Pontus”) and Africa (“Punic”)—literary canons (“Alcinous” of Greek myth) and species (“in coate, / Rough, or smooth rin’d, or bearded husk, or shell”) in order to gather “[w]hatever Earth all-bearing Mother yields” (V.338-342). Milton dignifies her composition with something like a Homeric catalogue. But Book X appropriates this critical vocabulary in order to lavish praise on itself and retrospectively diminish Book V. Christ judges Eve’s devotional ‘first fruits’ superior to her earlier, ‘epic’ fruits: they are “of more pleasing savor” than whatever “all the Trees / of Paradise could have produced” (X.26-29). Book X demeans Edenic fruit with an appeal to the same critical value—pleasure—with which Book V exalted it.

            Book V’s palimpsest of biblical allusion also merits comparison to Book X’s. Adam and Eve—him, by sitting outside on a hot day and descrying an angel, her by preparing food inside the tent for the visitor—imitate Abraham and Sarah as portrayed in Genesis 18, which narrates an angelic visit whose purpose is to announce Sarah’s impending pregnancy. The alluded-to story marks the genealogical beginning of the Jewish people, an epic moment of origin; we are thus reminded that Eve, besides an epic poet, is the founder of the human race.

            Her influence extends yet further, because her meal is the ‘material cause’ of the chronologically earliest and most formative episodes in Paradise Lost’s fictive scheme:  “when with meats and drinks they had sufficed / Not burdened Nature, sudden mind arose” (V.450-451); thus the discourse that spans Books VI-VIII begins. The link between “meats” and “mind” is not just poetic but ontologically real, as Raphael explains: digestion raises or “sublimes” food through a series of progressively more spiritual realms of matter that ends in discursive reason (V.479-490). If Raphael is right, Eve’s epic meal in a literal sense is the poetic discourse of the next three books; in a loose sense, she ‘composes’ them. The feast scene, therefore, lays claim by a variety of means to genealogical and poetic pride of place.

            Book X, however, ventures to recast even the discourse of Books V-VIII as inferior to its own mode of expression. The opening lines of Book X form, strangely, a wordless invocation: the first couple’s prayers are “mute” (X.31) and “unutterable” (X.6). Two avenues of interpretation lead to one conclusion: that muteness, in Paradise Lost, is highly valuable. It has, first, a rational or supra-rhetorical value. Raphael parses two kinds of reason, “Discursive, or Intuitive,” the former “oftest yours, the latter most… ours” (V.488-489). Given that conversation with Raphael is synonymous in Books V-VIII with discourse, Adam and Eve’s mute prayers to God must, conversely, be an example of intuition. If intuitive reason “most” belongs to angels, presumably it is more angelic, closer to God, and more truly reasonable than—or at least broadly preferable to—discourse.

            Muteness also is granted priority according to the poem’s thematics of sound and silence. Leslie Brisman traces the motif of silence through the poem and finds it an indication of divine order and grace, the salient example being God’s exclamation of “Silence!” to commence the creation of the world out of chaos.[13] In this auditory polarity, the discourse of Books VI-VIII is reduced to discord, and Book X again converts a perceived weakness into a strength. Adam and Eve may seem at first to communicate more directly with heaven when they dine with an angel in Book V than in Book X, when they must pray across the distance between earth and heaven. But the poem’s manipulation of sound’s significance prompts us to recognize that their earlier communication was mediated by language, as opposed to unmediated and pure, and that whereas they addressed a mere archangel in Books V-VIII, they now address God himself, albeit through the intermediary of the Son. Book X compels us, in a word, to revise our estimation of language’s unsacred din.

            If the Latin root of “discourse” means “the action of running off in different directions,” intuition implies angelic or divine order. “The restoration of silence,” as Brisman writes, signals something similar: “the restoration that is grace.”[14] Why, though? What connects intuition, order, silence, grace? Brisman helps us follow the chain of associated images and ideas: “‘Grace’,” he argues, “makes existence in time a grace period between the Fall and the final judgment… existence in time becomes not the penalty, but the ‘interposed ease’ between necessitated and actualized finititude.”[15]  His account of grace returns us to the mystery—abandoned earlier—of the Miltonic effect of collapsing time, and its opposite, the effect of repetition, allowing us to associate the former with an epic projection of omnipotence, the latter with a Christian introjection of freedom. The poetic will, in other words, collapses time in order to impose its god-like vision; but it repeats in order to interpose the time for readerly choice.

            Looking with fresh eyes at the whole set of repetitions heretofore considered— between scripture and poem, and among poetic subsections—we might view them not as revisions or aggressive tools of supersession, but rather as means of prolonging history, prolonging choice, prolonging time. That is, we might view repetition as a means of finding first fruits even in endings.




Bibliography



Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Brisman, Leslie. Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Greenslade, S.L., ed. The Coverdale Bible, 1535. Folkestone: Dawson, 1975.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Milton’s Counterplot.” In Milton, edited by Louis Martz, 100-108. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Leland Ryken. “Promised Land.” “Temple.” Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall." ELH4, no. 3 (1937): 161-79. doi:10.2307/2871531.

Milton, John. Paradise lost, in ten books. The text exactly reproduced from the first edition of 1667. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873.

Quint, David. Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Rogers, John. “Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost.” In The Oxford Handbook of Miton, edited by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Swift, Edgar. The Vulgate Bible. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

[1] John Milton, Paradise lost, in ten books. The text exactly reproduced from the first edition of 1667 (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873). I cite the 1667 Paradise Lost, as my concern is with a structural feature Milton obscured somewhat in dividing Books VII and X.

[2] S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Coverdale Bible, 1535 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1975). Spelling modernized.

[3] Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall," ELH4, no. 3 (1937): 161-79. doi:10.2307/2871531.

[4] Geoffrey Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” in Milton, ed. Louis Martz (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 101-102.

[5] Leland Ryken, “Promised Land,” “Temple,” Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988).

[6] David Quint, Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 60.

[7] "oratory, n.2". OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132213?rskey=VSAcC9&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed April 26, 2018).

[8] Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 125.

[9] Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 126.

[10] John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Miton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 608.

[11] Swift Edgar, The Vulgate Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[12] Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 132.

[13] Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 85-93.

[14] Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice, 86.

[15] Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice, 170.