On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (John Milton)

 

About the Author:

 

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ also known as Nativity Ode was written in 1629 when Milton was only twenty-one. It was published in his collection Poems of Mr. John Milton. He wrote this poem in celebration of his twenty-first birthday and in commemoration of the Nativity of Jesus.  The poem speaks on themes of coming of age and religion. Scholars often associate the composition of this work with Milton’s age and the birth of Christ. He is celebrating the nativity but also his own entry into the adult world. This piece is commonly recognized as Milton’s first great poem.

 

The poem takes the reader through a series of natural images at the beginning of the poem. The poet speaks on what the sun, stars, moon, and nature are doing. Their reactions are similar and express for the reader the power of the child’s birth. The poem then moves into a prediction of what the future is going to be like. Peace is going to cover all the lands and no one is going to war. But that can’t happen yet. First Christ has to die. Darkness comes over the poem briefly but is quickly lifted to make way for a series of pagan images. These old gods are described as leaving their abodes and traveling hastily to Hell. That is where they must stay for the rest time. In the last stanza, the poet returns to the image of the manger. 

In the introduction, the poem is seen as a nativity offering to the infant Christ. Milton uses the conceit of running before the three wise men in order to deliver his gift first. The poem is both gift and prophetic word, joining with the angelic choir. In the main section of the poem, Milton describes first the time and place of the nativity. He is determined to move away from traditional depictions, which center on mother and child, the stable, and Joseph in an intimate, enclosed scene. Instead, his imagination soars, moving into the cosmic and universal realms, and reaching into heavenly glory.

Then Milton returns briefly to the immediate locale, to describe the shepherds and the angelic choir they hear. This is the harmony made audible. Normally the sign of creation’s harmony, the music of the spheres, is inaudible to human ears; on this night, that music blends with the angelic harmony in a transforming power, which gives a promise of a restored golden age. Before this could happen, the poet realizes, Christ must die and be raised to glory, to judge the conquered Satan and his evil agents. Already their power is broken, however; the religions of Greece and Rome, which previously may have contained shadows of the truth, lose their prophetic and priestly power. Other pagan religions, such as those condemned in the Old Testament, also lose their evil hold: Their strongholds are overthrown. Milton catalogs those pagan gods in detail, from Peor and Baalim to Moloch and Typhon. Like ghosts, the false gods must return to the underworld at the dawn of the new Sun of righteousness. In the final stanza, the poem returns to the Nativity scene; the final image is not of the Christ child and Mary, but of “Bright-harnessed Angels”—that is, angels wearing armor—sitting about the stable in battle formation.

Forms and Devices:

The poem is difficult to classify generically. Although the main section is entitled “The Hymn,” it is clearly not a hymn in any traditional sense: It is not addressed to God, nor has it any explicit exhortation to fellow believers. It has features of an ode; although the Nativity is never addressed as such, it does have the elevated language associated with that genre. It also contains pastoral elements. It is best seen, perhaps, as a meditation on the transfiguring power that Christ’s birth had over the created world.

“The Hymn” consists of twenty-seven eight-line stanzas, rhyming aabccbdd, although the last two lines never work as a couplet. The stanzas are basically one-sentence units, and they already prefigure the long sentence structures of Milton’s later verse. The meter is basically iambic, but not rigidly so. The introduction consists of four stanzas of seven lines of iambic pentameter, apart from the final line, which is hexameter; it rhymes ababbcc. The complete poem thus consists of 244 lines.

There are two predominant trains of imagery. The first is of light and darkness; from the glory of “that Light unsufferable/ And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty” (lines 8-9) to the “greater Sun” (Christ) outshining the “bright Throne, or burning Axletree” of the sun (lines 83-84). Similarly, darkness depicts first the human condition—“a darksome House of mortal Clay” (line 14)—then the underworld, where “Th’old Dragon Swinges the scaly Horror of his folded tail” (lines 168, 172), and the sites of pagan religion: “twilight shade of tangled thickets” (line 188); “left in shadows dread/ His burning Idol all of blackest hue” (lines 206-207).

The second train of imagery is of music, especially of harmony: The music of the spheres and the angelic choir both suggest triumph; the weeping and lament suggest old powers broken and passing away. The poem itself becomes its own image of integrated music. Other images are pastoral and rustic, and even sexual—nature is a fallen woman, needing snow for a covering to restore the appearance of innocence (stanza II).