"Thus with the year, seasons return"

Our Word of the Week, season, shows up pretty frequently in the greatest poem in the English language, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Now, Milton was quite aware that the children of Israel were forbidden to make the yearly seasons into objects of idolatry. That’s what the Babylonians did, after all, and that is why they became such expert geometers and mathematicians. But the sacred author in Genesis, with a kind of deadpan understatement that the extremely terse Hebrew language encourages, says, “And he also made the stars,” that is, God made the stars after he made the two great lights, as if it were an afterthought. And the author does not even name those two lights. All the focus is on God.

Still, God did make the seasons too, and that’s well in the order of things. Milton not only understood that it was permissible to notice the seasons. He suggests that we ought to attend to them. When Adam asks the angel Raphael about the stars in the sky, so huge and so swift, wondering why all that greatness and brightness and staggering speed should serve only to give light to the infinitesimally tiny earth, Raphael does not say, “You should not notice these things.” He says, “To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heaven / Is as the book of God before thee set / Wherein to read his seasons, days, and years.” And when God creates those lights in heaven, he commands them to be for signs, “For seasons and for days and circling years.”

Milton relished the variety of the seasons, and though we can’t imagine there would be freezing rain in Eden, yet the place is like an everlasting spring and summer and fall, dancing hand in hand, where the more you harvest, the more fertile the earth grows, “which instructs us not to spare,” says Adam to Eve, when they are getting ready to entertain Raphael, their angel guest then drawing near. Everywhere Milton turned in the created world, he saw good and wild variety, not uniformity. In the long debate about what sort of garden was the best — and yes, for about a century, debates about gardens are a subject of poetry, from Shakespeare to Milton and Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell — Milton is on the side that likes those gardens best that are but nature well tended, nature amplified by human art. The flowers “worthy of Paradise” aren’t to be found in “curious beds and knots,” but are what “Nature boon / Pours forth profuse in hill and dale and plain.”

I’ve written here about spring, summer, fall, and winter, and I’ve mentioned that I enjoy the variety they bring, but I don’t think I’ve been as pointed as Milton was, in seeing the hand of the Creator more in the lush variety the seasons bring to us than in any staid and strict uniformity. But the seasons in their temporal variety reflect Creation in its variety, for God created, says Milton, “every magnitude of stars,” and “sowed with stars the Heaven thick as a field.” He made “the humble shrub, / And bush with frizzled hair implicit” — how’s that for a description of tangles! — but also “the stately trees, which spread / Their branches hung with copious fruit.” He made “Behemoth biggest born of earth,” but also the insects, with their “limber fans,” and “smallest lineaments exact,” decked in “spots of gold and purple, azure and green.” All that is good, and is to be seen as good. All the world, according to Milton, even the fallen world, is set before us for reading the goodness, the wisdom, and the power of God.

But what happens when such a man as Milton loses his sight? For you must know that Milton was quite blind when he composed Paradise Lost. Of all the literate men and women in England of his time, we can be sure that one person at least never read Paradise Lost, and that was Milton himself. He composed it in his mind, imagining it in his mind’s eye, and hearing its music in his mind’s ear, when he repeated it to himself from memory, or when he heard one of his daughters read it to him. What happens when you can no longer read the book of God, or see the seasons? Milton himself addresses the matter in his prayer at the beginning of Book 3 of Paradise Lost. He appeals to the Holy Light, which is God Himself, “for God is Light,” he says, quoting the first letter of the apostle John. He asks not to have his eyesight restored, but to have the higher and purer light imparted to him. He won’t say that he does not miss what you can see with your eyes. He misses it terribly. He misses the seasons, the varying hours of the day, the flowers and flocks and herds in their variety, and the most beautiful object in all of physical creation, the “human face divine.” Notice how the noun comes right between the two adjectives, and which of the two gets the stress: for in the face of a human person, you see intelligence; you see the image of God.

No, he prays for a higher light: he begs God to shine light upon his mind, to see things beyond our ken. For he is now going to write about heaven, not hell. It is a brave moment in a brave poem.

“Fourth Day of Creation: God Creates the Sun, Moon, and Stars,” (engraving), Nicolaes de Bruyn. Public Domain.

           Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works to me expunged and rased,
And Wisdom 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.