ABSTRACT
The 1645 Poems opens with an epigraph in which John Milton declares himself a “future bard,” and thus at a stroke converts the entire contents of that volume into elements in a scheme of self-preparation. As the sonnets on his blindness suggest, Milton tends to view himself from the projected point of a later reckoning. In Milton’s “Nativity Ode,” the story of Christ’s birth strongly parallels the micro narratives of the mirror stage, offering both a myth of incarnation and a salvational quest-romance. The infant Christ serves Milton as an orthopaedic image through which he may invest his nascent poetic subjectivity with a preliminary form. Christ enables Milton to mediate his own relationship with literary history by providing a model for that history and for his place within it. The eclogue is, then, Milton’s poetic “form of a servant,” for which he pretends to sacrifice the epic, his “form of God.”.
