A Dictionary of Puns in Milton’s English Poetry

258 Pages·1981·15.148 MB·English

by  Edward Le Comte (auth.)

A DICTIONARY OF PUNS
IN MILTON'S ENGLISH POETRY
By the same author
MILTON AND SEX
A MILTON DICTIONARY
MILTON'S UNCHANGING MIND: Three Essays
YET ONCE MORE: Verbal and Psychological Pattern in Milton
POETS' RIDDLES: Essays in Seventeenth-Century Explication
GRACE TO A WITTY SINNER: A Life of Donne
THE NOTORIOUS LADY ESSEX
ENDYMION IN ENGLAND: The Literary History of a Greek Myth
DICTIONARY OF LAST WORDS
THE LONG ROAD BACK
HE AND SHE
THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID
THE PROFESSOR AND THE COED
PARADISE LOST AND OTHER POEMS (editor)
JUSTA EDOVARDO KING: A Facsimile Edition ofthe Memorial
Volume in which Milton's Lycidas
First Appeared (editor and translator)
A DICTIONARY
OF PUNS IN MILTON'S
ENGLISH POETRY
Edward Le Comte
© Edward Le Comte 1981
Softcoverreprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981 978-0-333-30085-5
All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1981 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-05708-5 ISBN 978-1-349-05706-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05706-1
Contents
INTRODUCTION Vll
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XIX
NOTE ON SOURCES XXI
THE DICTIONARY 1
REFERENCES 211
INDEX OF POEMS THAT HAVE PUNS 221
Introduction
There are more puns in Milton than have been thought. There are
also, probably, fewer than have been thought. The reader may make
his own, sometimes delicate, decisions. He has here uniquely much
to ponder, some 1630 puns, of which over 400 I found myself
invented in the Latin sense, if not the modern. A dictionary should, I
take it, be comprehensive. It should, like a variorum, include what
ever conjectures have found their way into print, regardless of how
far-fetched a few of them may seem. I went through editors and
annotators from Hume to Broadbent. In addition, an independent
survey from this one angle - such as has rarely if ever been made -
will predictably yield new conjectures. Some of them I feel very
tentative about, but to print them is to take responsibility for them.
I am not unaware of the danger of finding what one is looking for,
but it is time, I would argue, in this age of Joyce and depth psy
chology, to take a fresh look.
"Puns" as used here is a catch-all term for ambiguity of vocabu
lary or syntax. The leading kinds are as follows:
I. Contrary to the modern popular expectation, a pun need not be
comic. The most influential pun ever made was not comic, when
Jesus said, "Thou art Peter (Petros), and upon this rock (petra) I will
build my church" (Matt. 16.18). Paradise Lost has this pun at xi
336* (as Alastair Fowler noted in 1968), Milton saying "rock"
where "mount" would be expected-in order to get in a thrust at the
Roman Catholic Church. But our first thought with puns, the comic,
is a kind by no means lacking, in Milton as in Shakespeare (where,
to be sure, it is much more abundant, Milton being short on clowns).
The fact is, Milton's humor has often been underrated and the detail
of his jocular wordplay gone unnoticed. Addison remarked:
*Abbreviations are listed on pp. xix-xx.
vm Introduction
The only Piece of Pleasantry in Paradise Lost, is where the evil
Spirits are described as rallying the Angels upon the Success of
their new invented Artillery. This Passage I look upon to be the
most exceptionable in the whole Poem, as being nothing else but a
String of Puns, and those too very indifferent ones. 1
Are the puns "indifferent," or was this arbiter elegantiarum un
willing to admit the possibility of a good pun, since he regarded all
such ventures as a species of "false wit" (Spectator, 61), despite the
classical precedent, which he duly noted? He subsequently pointed
out puns elsewhere in Paradise Lost, such as "the small infantry"
one. Paradoxically, the early neo-classic critics, including Addison,
repeatedly singled out Book vi for praise.2 Only Voltaire, in his
Upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer to
Milton (1727), was consistent, deploring the war in heaven (which
was to give Dr Johnson so much difficulty for its "confusion of spirit
and matter"3) and "his preposterous and aukward Jests, his Puns".4
For those with eighteenth-century tastes the devils' jesting is
sometimes given the apology that it is part of their "fallen"
characterization.5 Users of Newton's edition were provided with
Thyer's view "that Milton is the less to be blam'd for this punning
scene, when one considers the characters of the speakers, such kind
of insulting wit being most peculiar to proud contemptuous
Spirits".6 But (as Richardson noted7) Raphael puns too: "portending
hollow truce" as he faces the cannon ("Unworthy of Raphael", said
Keightley).8 Just before pulling down the temple, Samson indulges
in grim pleasantry: "I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater,
I As with amaze shall strike all who behold" (SA, 1644-5). There is
little to choose between the Hebrew champion's "amaze" and
Belial's "amused" (vi 623) (which have gone unannotated).
Good characters have wordplay-there is Jesus' "gracious" in
Paradise Lost and His "me hungering more" in Paradise Regained
because Milton liked it and displayed a "gamesome mood" (vi 620)
from youth on. Dr Johnson realized, while disapproving, this: "his
play on words, in which he delights too often".9 The second poem on
the University Carrier packs more than a score of puns into thirty
four lines. Addison (who went to Oxford} said of Cambridge in his
"false wit" essay: "I must not here omit, that a famous University of
this Land was formerly very much infested with Punns."10 He could
have been thinking of Milton, the Milton of the Carrier poems and
Introduction IX
"At a Vacation Exercise" and Prolusio VI. Later the same Cam
bridge wit sliced with a double edge his opponents in English and
Latin prose.11 Typically, Thomas Warton refused to provide notes
for the Carrier pieces: "I wonder Milton should suffer these two
things on Hobson to appear in his edition of 1645". Even in its own
century some of the points of "Another on the Same" were lost by
misquotation or omission.12 Landor, who belonged in spirit to the
eighteenth century, said: "It appears then on record that the first
overt crime of the refractory angels was punning: they fell rapidly
after that."13 A 1975 editor says of "understand" (vi 625): "an
excruciating pun: Belial deserved hell for it".14 No editor has pinned
down all the thrusts in vi. As B. A. Wright observed: "they do not
stoop to explication".15 This is unfair to anyone who wishes to
understand before he condemns.
II. By far the most frequent kind of pun is the etymological. Most
common are the usages that recall Latin derivation while maintain
ing the modem meaning as well, as in "With hideous ruin and
combustion down", where "ruin" has its modern meaning and
"combustion" is a synonym for fire, but there is very much the Latin
force of "ruin" as "fall" and "combustion" as "burning together":
the exact situation of a third of the erstwhile inhabitants of heaven.
This scholar-poet is an inveterate etymologist and lexicographer,
which is the apologia for "ravens ... though ravenous", which
happens to be based on a wrong derivation. An interesting case is
the oxymoronic description of Eve's speech in the midst of her fatal
difference with her husband that precedes the fall: "With sweet
austere composure" she "thus replied" (ix 272). Milton knows very
well - and expects us to know - that in Greek austeros is sour, the
opposite of glukus, sweet: Eve has turned sweet-sour.
The Hebrew comes in with names. Moloch is "king". Mammon is
"riches", Dagon, "fish". Satan, repeatedly, is "the Adversary", or a
synonym. Abdiel is "servant of God", lthuriel"search" (of God). Eve,
q.v., receives some subtle innuendoes. Eden is "pleasant", Tophet
"drums". Harapha has three appropriate Hebrew meanings. Manoa
lives up to his name, rest, in what he urges on his son. A 1975 article
by John T. Shawcross fills surprising gaps for, inter alia, Jesus,
Mary, Genezaret, Ramoth. Other Hebrew names are latent in
"declined", "exaltation", "flies", "nation", "rebellion", "sedge",
"separate",just as "fiery" goes with seraphim.
x Introduction
For Paradise Lost Patrick Hume, 1695, gave many Latin, Greek
and Hebrew derivations or meanings, and James Paterson limped
after in 1744 with A Complete Commentary, with Etymological,
Explanatory, Critical and Classical Notes on Milton's "Paradise
Lost". But only with the availability of the Oxford English Diction
ary did it become possible to explode an old canard, namely, that
Milton's diction was not English, that he foisted an artificial
Latinity upon his native language. Tillyard had said that he would
not be surprised "if a good deal of it turns out to be English after
all".16 Such scholars as Boone and Wright and Emma began docu
menting this.17 Carey and Fowler in 1968 systematically cited the
OED to prove that Milton's root meanings were, once, legitimate
English. Raleigh's statement needs correcting: "He was not content
to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak
English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word
with two meanings at once".18 In "With hideous ruin", ruin has two
senses, but they are both English senses: OED I, 1b: "The act of [a
person] falling to the ground or from a height" (with an illustrative
quotation from Caxton, 1483); and 11, 6: "The downfall or decay of a
person or society; utter loss of means, position, or rank". Within
Milton's own works, usage I is not poetic diction only. Of Education
asserts: "The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first
parents by regaining to know God aright."19 Here meaning II is
dominant over I, but the pun is there. Nor is it gone from the same
phrase I have encountered in a rare recusant spiritual directory of c.
1602 (not listed in the Short Title Catalogue): "how we may repayre
againe the ruine & wofull state of our soules, by sinn". 20
III. There are secondary meanings that Milton presumably did not
intend, but that are felt to be there. This kind of pun will present no
difficulty to those who subscribe to "the intentional fallacy". We
pass, like Tillyard in his 1930 book, 21 from "the Conscious Meaning"
to "the Unconscious Meaning". Naturally, these conjectures are
among the most provocative and doubtful. At risk, attention is
called to "asperses", "disarmed", "end" (in a sexual sense), "fal
lacious", "Gaza", "gazed", "hoarse", "lies", "recess" (cf. "plat"),
"secrets of the hoary deep". Some are the accidents or jokes of
language, not Milton's jokes: "dismounted", "ewe", "hornets", "joint
pace", "season" (the last worthy of Thomas Hood). "Sprung" perhaps
belongs here ("Spring is sprung"). The poet had second thoughts