ABSTRACT
In A.S. Byatt's Possession, the poet Christabel LaMotte remarks of the tradition that animals speak on Christmas night, The Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the Death of Nature - at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out, Weep. Weep. The great god Pan is dead'.1 Byatt records a conventional misreading. In Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity a new Pan comes to heal the breach between nature and spirit that dualists, mechanists, and royalists were widening, and to rescue natural imagery from the usurpation of aristocratic pastoral allegory. By dismissing the pagan Pan, the poem 'demotes its own pastoral content', Annabel Patterson suggests, because the pastoral poets of the Caroline court had 'trivialized the form and rendered it useless for devotional poetry';2 while the toppling of the sun god Apollo, Stella Revard argues, exorcizes the Renaissance Apollo of Roman and Stuart imperialism.3 These insights also apply to the ode's mourning nymphs as figurae of pastoral poetry. All of these spirits of nature return renewed in later poems; and in Paradise Lost the natural world is not rifled for detachable emblems but vivified by diverse kinds of self-activating lives, made from the originary divine substance for their own enjoyment as well as that of human witnesses whom they delight and who are responsible for their continued freedom.
