Brief Autumnal Essay

So take that word, autumnal.  It is stately and sonorous. For an American, it is more British sounding, because we call autumn the fall. Except in fixed the phrase autumnal equinox, it is more connotative than denotative. It is used for its metaphorical associations rather than as a neutral designator.

Then take the word noodle. It is comic, both as the designator of pasta and as slang for the head, or to describe aimless playing on a musical instrument as a verb. So an autumnal noodle would be doubly comic, more so than a wet noodle or some other funny adjective + funny noun. Now we are not just perceiving the particular heft of each word, but also seeing there combinatory possibilities.

In the middle of a lyrical passage, a poet writes "a woman undergoing radiation treatment." There's nothing wrong with the phrase per se, but in the context it sticks out as being tonally wrong. There is nothing wrong with being prosaic, but it has to be for a purpose. This same poet, with prodigious talents for beautiful writing, ruins another poem by ending it with the line: "Isn't this the most mysterious of all possible worlds?" All the concrete particulars disappear in this abstraction. Can you imagine this poem: "petals on a wet, black bough / Isn't this marvelous?"  ??  

Achieving a pretty, lyrical language is something valuable in itself, maybe. In the sense that if a poet couldn't even do that... But usually we ought to think of things with more sophistication. So each word and phrase has its particular colors and textures.

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Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son...  Here we have an emphasis on masculinity. Vir is Latin for male.  The repetition of the heavy sounding Latinate word and the use of two words for male relatives. The line is emphatic in rhythm.

Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste the sullen day, what may be gained
From the hard season gaining...   

What words stand out here? For me it is the words with a strong negative charge: dank, mire, waste, sullen, hard. Sullen is usually used for a person, so applying it to the day is brilliant. To help someone waste something is paradoxical. They say adjectives are not as strong as verbs and nouns, but we see that this is not true. We can note that the writing is beautiful but is not representing something that is beautiful in and of itself.  This is harder to do than simply writing purple prose about something easy on the eyes.

In the next part of the poem I hear an echo of Horace: "solvitur acris hiems vice veris et Favoni." The description of of the coming spring is actually as compelling as the harsh evocation of late fall:

                                             ...Time will run 
On smoother, till Favonius reinspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun. 

It's still brilliant, especially that last line, with the twin nouns and verbs.  Adding the rose to the biblical allusion is a nice touch. Notice that the language of the poem shifts according to the particular mood. It isn't just one kind of rhetoric applied indiscriminately in a uniform way.  

The next four lines describes a series of pleasurable experiences. Here I think the adjectives are still doing the heavy lifting:

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?   

Every word has been picked up and tested for its weight and color. We still have the Horatian mood, mixed with an Italianate flavor. The diction here feels more stately and formal than "fields are dank." We have more French / Latin words, like "artful voice" / "immortal notes." The way Milton writes about it, his own style, reflects exactly the aesthetic that we would imagine being present in the lute playing and singing: it is an aesthetic of refined taste. I particularly like the verb "touched" with its tactile value, when he could have simply said "played."

I would have to look in the OED to see the exact way words like neat are being used here. I am responding as a contemporary reader without worrying too much about the 17th century usages. I still get an emotional feeling from neat, of something clean and pure, like nítido in Spanish, especially when it is associated here with light, choice, and Attic, and artful. The effect is not one produced by one adjective alone, but by the combined mood of all of them.

The last two lines (not a rhyming couplet since Milton is writing an Italianate sonnet) have a sententious feel:

He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.      

"He who..." is a traditional way of beginning a proverb. The emphasis fall on judiciousness. The ending is famously ambiguous. Some read it as "find time to interpose these pleasures often" and others as "refrain from interposing these pleasure too often." Tonally, and historically, it seems that we shouldn't do this too often, right? But the negation of a negation and the tricky syntax make it a bit indirect in expression. It is not a stern warning not to waste too much time in idle pursuits. In any case, they are interposed, alternating with more serious manly pursuits.  

So the entire sonnet we can perceive as heavy or light, smooth or shaggy, in parts. Breaking it down this way it might not seem even coherent, but that is simply the effect of focussing on its parts with the microscope. Actually it hangs together very neatly as a rhetorical performance.    

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As a reader, too, I have the advantage over Milton's contemporaries, of having read Keats too. So I have parts of my experience as a reader that I can associate with Keats or Wordsworth, anachronistically, thinking about how they could have read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton.  If something in an earlier poet reminds me of a later one, it is because of the ways in which they learned from these earlier poets. This is now part of my experience too: seeing the triangular relation.