The Second Invocation: “Hail holy Light”
by Julian Darius
 Having portrayed the psychological state of the newly-fallen angels, shown us the first formation of Hell as a working polity, and brought Satan to first menace Earth, Milton seems to restart his poem. Book III begins with a new invocation, as if the poem were beginning anew, and will follow this new invocation with a change of scene, moving to Heaven itself. Indeed, the invocation here is longer and more elaborate than the one at the beginning of the poem: Book I is arguably introduced by only twenty-six lines, whereas Book III’s invocation receives some fifty-five.
Whereas the Epic Voice implores in Book I, “Sing Heav’nly Muse” (I.6), here he dramatically begins, “Hail holy Light” (III.1). The difference between these two figures -- between “Heav’nly Muse” and “holy Light” -- is maintained in the invocation itself: “I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, / Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend, / Though hard and rare” (III.18-21). Here the Epic Voice treats the Heav’nly Muse as a poetic guide, as Virgil to Milton’s Dante. Though the Epic Voice is not integrated into the narrative itself in the manner of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he speaks as if he has, saying that he has “Escap’t the Stygian Pool, though long detain’d / In that obscure sojourn” (III.14-15). There are, clearly here for the first time, two stories being told: the narrative the Epic Voice is telling, and Epic Voice’s own adventure of boldly telling.
Of course, just as the first invocation led into providing the narrative background of Satan’s fall, this invocation gives Milton the opportunity to recap, however superficially, the first two books. But Milton’s Epic Voice’s description of himself as on a journey -- “my adventrous Song” (I.13) -- personalizes not the narrative itself, as does Dante, by the writing of that narrative. The Epic Voice continues this personalization through a description of his physical blindness, referring to “these eyes, that rowle in vain / To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn” (III.23-24).
This description of blindness gives way to a claim of the spiritual and poetic insight that classically accompanied material blindness, a deep mythological typing easily observable in figures such as Homer, Tiresias, and Oedipus -- the Epic Voice mentions Thamyris, Homer, Tiresias, and Phineus, in that order. The Epic Voice implores holy Light to make him a Christian form of the blind classical poets and prophets:
... thou Celestial light
Shine inward, ...
... there plant eyes...
... that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III.51-55)
If granted, this, however, would not be the first time such inspiration had been provided in recompense. If, as the Epic Voice claims, holy Light “Revisit’st not” (III.23) his physical eyes, he is not unfamiliar with the spiritual vision it provides: the Epic Voice claims not to ascend to Heaven but to “reascend” -- and he goes further, claiming, “Nightly I visit” (III.33).
This returns us to the subject of risk, seen in the first invocation as well. Here, however, the risk is altogether more acute, as the Epic Voice is about to describe not Satan and Hell but Heaven and God Himself -- a “bolder” (III.13) though more dangerous task and another good reason for a new invocation, even a longer once, at this point. Thus, he asks frankly, “May I express thee unblam’d?” (III.3). Unlike the first invocation, this risk in depicting God, in making mistakes or failing to “justifie the wayes of God to men” (I.26) and thus condemning God through incapacity of expression, is here tied to the Epic Voice’s blindness. While self-exalting through its claim to spiritual insight, the Epic Voice’s depiction of blindness is also an acknowledgement of inability. Whereas the Epic Voice superficially denigrates worldly sight in favor of inward, divine sight, he acknowledges that the loss of physical sight entails the loss of the “wisdom” that comes with it (III.50). Indeed, this strain runs throughout the invocation’s descriptions of blindness and the accompanying religious-poetic insight. The Epic Voice acknowledges that blindness has not only left him “from the chearful wayes of men / Cut off” (III.46-47), but that it has left “Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d” (III.49). Most profoundly, the Epic Voice sympathetically recounts how he cannot see dawn or dusk, “vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, / ... or human face divine” (III.43-44). This final example -- “human face divine” -- makes the point that the physical world of Nature reflects God’s creation and thus is a legitimate source of religious understanding. Such an acknowledgement goes beyond the anti-materialism conventional to the blindness trope, admitting not only personal but spiritual and poetic loss.
There is one more such case. In the list of blind prophet-poets, Homer and Tiresias are well-known, and Phineus was a king of Thrace whose gift of prophecy, like Tiresias’s, necessitated blindness. Less known is Thamyris, a poet from The Iliad’s second book who loved the Muses as a group and who challenged them to a singing contest, only to be blinded and stripped of both his lute and his memory as punishment for his hubris. Cleverly buried in an obscure reference and decidedly not fitting the pattern of insight granted as recompense for blindness, Thamyris stands out in the list as a figure of risk, and implies Miltonic anxiety over the implicit hubris in depicting God, which the poem is about to do.
NOTES
This essay was first made available at persiancaesar.com on 4 March 2003.
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