Poem Of The Week : On His Dead Wife By John Milton (1606-1674)

John Milton’s heartbreaking formal sonnet would likely make a ‘Top 20’ appearance in any radio inventory dedicated to quantifying the popularity of poems in numbers of audience votes. The making of charts admits of a resoundingly unpoetical attitude of mind; which is not to belittle the exercising of a franchise by those many who are touched by what remains one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. And if my own view is a de facto corroboration of the process of evaluation, I can only ask that we consider how almost unbearably affecting Milton’s lines are, in the context of bereavement.

The finding of deceased loved ones in dreams, or imagined on street corners, is neither unusual nor surprising. More especially significant to the grieving, this intensely personal examination of grief is a study of absence as much as presence. Wrought in a furnace of loss, the purity and innocence of the apparition are as vivid to the beholder’s imagination as to deliver him to a state of despair the moment she is fled. And the vision is angelic, a refracted version of the life, as emotionally charged as Rossetti’s pictorial reinvention of Beatrice for a Victorian audience, and as visceral as the brief return of Alcestis in Greek myth.

Pure and utterly unsullied, emblematic, again like Beatrice, of goodness without condition, the dream image is supposedly of Milton’s second wife, Katherine Woodcock , who died in childbirth at the age of twenty nine. The poem was conceived in 1658, some short time after Katherine’s death and it is clear that the visitant exercises an enduring power, sufficient to confound the emotional senses, but extraordinarily moving when distilled with the rhythmical aplomb and syntactical awareness of a master technician.

Milton’s bittersweet rendering of the reality of loss is one characteristic of the greatness of his art: the surety of reunion with the sanctified figure - ‘I trust to have / Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint’ - is compromised in the crushing final lines, where dejection is complete, measured in resonant pauses which can bring no consolation:

But O as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

‘On His Dead Wife’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse : 1250-1950 and is published by the Oxford University Press (1972)