Milton’s Sonnet XV “On the Late Massacher in Piemont” (in the original spelling; it is also numbered 18, depending on how they are arranged) was a response to the slaughter of the Waldensian sect in north Italy by Catholics in 1655. The Waldensians espoused Protestant beliefs, and had long done so prior to the Reformation, though they entered into the Calvinist movement in the 1530s. Milton read about the brutal and violent oppression of the Waldensians by the Catholics in the mid 1650s—and the poem he wrote in response drew for its details on news bulletins. Milton revived the sonnet in English, and he invigorated it with political purpose. But his great innovations were formal as well as topical, as he carried into English the lessons of the Italian poets of the Counter-Reformation, especially Della Casa, as championed by Tasso. The elevated diction, decorum of style, abrupt enjambments, as well as the rhyme scheme all owed to the Italians. In the best study of Milton’s debt to Italy’s poets, F.T. Prince writes: “One of the chief virtues of Della Casa’s rhythmic innovations had been to counteract the dangerously mechanical tendency of the form, giving it a new lease of life at a time when its possibilities would have seemed to be exhausted. Milton would never have been able to make the sonnet one of the vehicles of his own type of poetry, if he had not in this respect followed Dela Casa, and not his disciple Tasso” (33).[i] To write this poem opposing Catholic power, Milton drew upon a Catholic inheritance. Perhaps the techniques of poetry transcend the ends of politics, or perhaps Milton would sow his own political and religious faith on the foundational ground of the Catholic art, reforming and redeeming it, as the Protestant churches sought to reform and redeem the Catholic faith. Here is the sonnet, in modernized spelling:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints, whose bones

       Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,

       Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

       When all our fathers worship't Stocks and Stones;

Forget not: in thy book record their groanes

       Who were thy Sheep and in their ancient Fold

       Slayn by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd

       Mother with Infant down the Rocks. Their moans

The Vales redoubl'd to the Hills, and they

       To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow

       O're all th' Italian fields where still doth sway

The triple Tyrant: that from these may grow

       A hunder’d-fold, who having learnt thy way

Early may fly the Babylonian wo.

With its first word, Milton’s sonnet implores God to “Avenge.” Perhaps God understands what such vengeance would entail, but Milton offers no elaboration. The word of violence that follows, “slaughter’d,” suggests what might be one recourse of action: kill them! Or perhaps it is in the word “scatter’d” that Milton intimates what he would have God do: break apart and scatter the offending people, expose them to the harsh elements. The poem casts a shadow of the vengeance it asks, but is not, beyond its first word, given over fantasies of destruction or revenge. Instead, the poem attends to the saints, and by the opening of the second stanza, “Avenge” has given way to “Forget not.” The third and last imperative (in the second line of the closing sestet), “sow,” contains the promise of new growth and a harvest. We might expect the poem to return, in its final line, to the thought of the opening, with a hope that those who grow from the scattered ashes rise up in violence against the Roman Babylon. Instead, the hope is that they will instead flee its reach, as if it will inevitably strike at the true faithful again.

Or could this be God’s vengeance? This regeneration of a people that had been thought to have been extinguished—converted, massacred, or driven into exile—and who would return to fly not just from “the Babylonian wo,” but from “wo” more generally, finding in their flight the redemption of their faith in hope. “Early” is invested with peculiar and elusive charge. The antonym “late” would suggest, in Biblical echoes, a failure to prepare, and there is, if not a chastisement, perhaps a mild rebuke that the Waldensians were not adequately attuned to God’s plans or the ways of the world. This need not be even a rebuke: “having learnt thy way” suggests it is through such suffering that God teaches. And “early,” though opposed to “late,” is likewise opposed, albeit less starkly, to exact timeliness.  There is no perfectly right timing: it is early or late, the right time is not to be found in this world, the poem would then suggest. Or else “early” could exist not relative to a “right time,” but instead early to the regular course of a day, with the early flight resembling that of a bird, the “early” flight being the natural and good flight. There’s no need to settle on one of these; the range of possibilities I’ve set out shows instead that with the word “early,” an element of time and timeliness is introduced into the poem at its end. Not only is the opening “avenge” uncertain in the nature of the vengeance to be doled out, but it raises the question, “when exactly?” As much as “what,” this is the question anyone seeking revenge (c.f. Hamlet) struggles with. “Early” might provide an answer to the question—not that the vengeance will happen soon, or early, but in so far as the vengeance will be in the nature of the future flight of the Waldensians, as if such a flight would be, in itself, God’s justice: fleeing early what, if not fled early, must be suffered too late. On this reading, “early” does not mean “soon,” but it has a similarly soothing effect: the Waldensians will be spared in the future, and more than spared, because they act with time to spare, even if that time to spare is a long way off.

This is an occasional political poem, drawing its details from news bulletins. Yet it asks us to imagine an experience of time that far exceeds that of occasional political action. Even its rhyme schemes suggest what must be a gradual and far-off redemption and vengeance. With the exception of “they,” “sway,” and “away,” the rhyme words return to the long “o” that is given its fullest voicing in the final word, “wo.” But the rhymes are not uniform throughout: the two quartets follow the echoing “old” and “oan” sounds, but this evolves, slightly, in the final sestet, into the “oe” of “sow,” “grow,” and “wo,” even as it is set against what is a new pattern of sound in the poem: the long “a” of “they,” “sway,” and “way.” The original rhyme pattern persists in its slow course of adaptation, but it is set against, or runs between, a different pattern, and that new pattern arises at the point where the poem looks “to heaven” and to what it prays will come to pass. The Waldensians’ “groanes” and “moans” have “redoubled” in the quartets (quite literally, since each quartet doubles each rhyme and the second quartet redoubles the first), and the final sestet carries a last echo of the “o” of “moan” and “groan” into the future, where it runs on, through the new, contrasting rhyme scheme. Thus, we may think, the groans will echo through time, despite the world’s changes, until those who rise from the sown remains flee from the “wo” and beyond the poem itself. The poem remains occasional but measures an occasion of greater span and duration than the massacre itself; the occasion is a new vector of historical consciousness.

Stella P. Revard, editor of  the excellent Wiley-Blackwell edition of Milton’s shorter poems, states of the final sestet: “Milton here conflates the parable of the sower (Matt. 13.8), where the good seeds sown brought forth a hundredfold, with the mythical account of Cadmus’ sowing of dragon teeth from whence sprang up armed men (Ovid, Met. 3.101-10).”[ii] Added to that might be the Ovidian tale of rocks scattered by Pyrrha and Deucalion becoming a new human race. But the solid bones that are scattered in the first quatrain, which would resemble teeth or rocks, are not what is sown in the final sestet, which is instead “martyr’d blood and ashes.”  Blood and ashes differ from bones both because the phrase unites two religious rites, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” as well as the sacrifice of Christ—the word “bones” on the other hand recalls the relics of the saints, cherished by Catholics, but left scattered by Milton. The more interesting difference between “martyr’d blood and ashes” and what comes before is the tangible quality of both—one a substance akin to water, the other akin to soil. “Ashes and blood” are also materially, sensually nearer to flesh than bones, fading more rapidly after death and softer to the touch. With the very feel of “martyr’d blood and ashes,” the poem leaves behind the arid hardness of the first two quatrains: “bones,” “mountains cold,” “stocks and stones,” “down the rocks.” The opening quatrains do not only memorialize, and ask God to memorialize—as a form of vengeance—a tragic waste of life, but they present a landscape that conspires in that waste. The Waldensians are admirable because in so barren a place, they “kept thy [God’s] truth so pure of old.”  That “kept” reaches ahead to “thy sheep and in their ancient fold,” because the Waldensians are both sheep and shepherds, as God himself—in Christ the lamb—is both sheep and shepherd—and “the truth” likewise keeps and is kept by them: they are “so pure of old” and they preserve the truth in its purity. Milton achieves a Homeric grandeur: in their simplicity, the Waldensians exemplify the noblest qualities, set apart from those who “worship stocks and stones,” not confusing the sheep-hold for the sheep within. Nor, in the first two quatrains, does the ground receive their bodies: it denies them, brutally, indifferently: “Roll’d | Mother with Infant down the Rocks” is terrible (in the old sense) as a description of the act itself because we expect the rocks to roll down the mountains, because to roll down rocks is to be further bruised, and because “with” cruelly, falsely unites what violent death has sundered. In all of these lines and phrases, Milton does something that very few English poets can or have done. He writes in an elevated style that attains the utmost simplicity. Wordsworth will later accomplish the same. But Milton’s style not only simple here, but harsh and hard, the earth refusing comfort, memorialization, or vindication—it offers nothing. Only God, the poem suggests, can do that. And when he does, it brings with it a change to the material substance of the poem, which had been rocky and earthbound, subject to the gravity of history, but also resistant to touch, inexorably separate from the person who touches. In contrast, “blood and ashes” overcome the solidity of earth, absorbed into it, swept by and into the wind above it; of course they are subject to the downward pull of the ground, but they do not settle on it or meet it with the same harsh force. Nor do they repel the touch as rocks and mountains and bones do: they stain the flesh, stick to it, are carried with whoever touches them. This quality of “blood and ashes” is not directly exploited in the poem, but it inheres in the things themselves, and it is carried into the poem as a part of what sets the sestet apart from the quatrains. It might be that these qualities of “blood and ashes” are at work as Milton moves to ask God that he “sow | o’er all the Italian fields.” We can either imagine a divine intervention, God’s hand directing them over the fields, or else we can picture, without much strain, blood that runs down the ashes and into the Alpine rivers, and ashes that are scattered by the wind, will both be transported to the lowlands of the Italian fields; ashes and blood become a natural element in  the fertile ground of Italy’s farmland. They will grow a “hunder’d-fold” there, the people of Italy converted not by their direct example but by their undetected influence, and, rather than rebel, they will fly the Babylonian woe, and in so doing leave Italy’s fields barren as the mountains. “Hunder’d-fold” itself registers the chnge: for the word refers to the bounty of the harvest and growth, but it also echoes “their ancient fold” and so transforms the stones of an Alpine sheepfold into something living. This is, very lightly, an Ovidian metamorphosis of language in and by the verse.

I’ve suggested that what God offers is vengeance that somehow consists of remembering and sowing for the future, but it might also be thought that what God offers in response both to the event and to Milton’s prayers actually evolves over the course of the poem—“avenge” to “forget not” to “sow,” with God changing in time to become creator rather than judge, with God the chronicler as the middle term, so that the sequence moves: avenge, remember, renew. Here in miniature is something like the process of grieving, of moving on. It might be that the sonnet occasions Milton to work through his own grief, moving from anger to sorrow to hope, revising what he asks of God, but it might also be that this progression is natural or proper to what he should ask God, so that the alteration in Milton is dictated by faith that knows what God is prepared to do.

“Forget not” is the strangest of the three terms, because it is the least God-like in its implication. But it is also an indication that the progression of the imperatives follows a change in God, for if God can be asked to “Forget not,” then God can also be assumed to be subject to forgetfulness (Poignantly and strangely what he records in his book are their “groanes,” less than and more than words, bare sounds of agony, as animal as human). This is preposterous within any view of God’s omnipotence. There need not be a wholesale unmoving first creator, as in Aristotle, for it to seem a stretch that God could ever lose something to time, but Milton’s view of eternity is also temporal. Somewhat infamously, in Paradise Lost, Milton has God suggest that there are days in heaven, albeit counted differently (“Two dayes, as we compute the dayes of Heav’n,” VI.685). This can be thought a narrative convenience, clumsily allowing Milton’s God to recount a dramatic battle—no narrative is possible outside of time. But the need is deeper than this: for not only is no narrative possible outside of time, but it is difficult to conceive of an action or even the identity of things holding together without time (we know that a tree is what it is because it grows as it does; things are what they do; they are what happens to them, or what might or might not happen to them)[iii]. Better, I think, to assume that Milton in some way knows this, and, though he had profound theological investments, he did not feel the need to argue theology in order to make his imagination work. If making God and eternity somehow temporal is paradoxical, or contradictory, it does not introduce a paradox or contradiction into a system of faith where none had existed before. Instead, it relocates the paradox; there’s no getting around one appearing somewhere or other. Milton, then, is content not to separate God from time and change; God is time, perhaps, and changes with time, inseparably from it. This makes a political God possible for Milton to imagine without conceiving of politics as bound by God: God is expressed in political action that alters with the world over time.

That difference is crucial and makes meaningful, or palatable, what is otherwise a religious faith foreign to my sensibility. For If God is inherent in political experience—suffering oppression and enduring and regathering in its wake—then it is not correct to say that “this is what God wants” or “that this is what God permits,” no matter what happens, since what happens might be judged right or wrong, good or bad, and would entail a God of self-contradiction. A radical 20th century Protestant theology might accept this, but it doesn’t seem to be what Milton, with his stern sense of morality, is getting at. Instead, in Milton’s conception of the temporal God, or divine temporality, the human working out of the “good,” in politics as well as individual life, is how God is known. “God” is not subsumed beneath normative concepts, but he also does not regulate them, as if “God” were a separate concept from “truth” and “goodness”: what would such a concept be in thought? Like goodness itself, Milton’s God inheres in, and is only knowable through, actions in time and change in time. A recurring lesson of philosophy is that there is no extra-worldly, side-on measure of value or truth, beyond human experiences, from outside the scope of the language, reason, and consciousness that arise within individuals and societies. Faith offers an escape: an alternative to the human that is an alternative to our internally developed understanding of the good and the true, which are inseparable from our ways of speaking and acting and making sense of both action and speech. In this poem at least, Milton’s God does not occupy that side-on position, standing outside of human thought (he would be inaccessible to thought, language, and poetry if this were the case)—though God is not in this world, for Milton, the measure of God’s goodness is knowable within it, a function and feature of its flux. From one perspective, this is prey to the fallacy of zealotry: God is on our side and so what we do is godly, so long as we benefit from it. But from another point of view, and both points need to be admitted, the poem cannot but suggest that our own standards of what is good must guide us in our conception in what it means for God to be good; the good of human action, within time, is the only way in which to know God’s goodness. I do not know if, historically, it is accurate to call this a humanistic faith, but it is humane—more humane than we might expect from Milton who makes God laugh only sardonically in Paradise Lost.

Put another way, the God of this poem does not determine political justice but is a political actor. It is a political rather than a religious poem because it holds God to an ideal of history, retribution, memorialization, and renewal, pacific rather than martial in escaping to the future. William Hazlitt wrote that this is “the most spirited and impassioned” of all of Milton’s sonnets, finding it “inspired with a sort of prophetic fury.” My first thought in response to Hazlitt is that, granting that it is spirited and impassioned, its passion is not only for violence, its spirit not only stirred in the reaction that is anger. Fury is a note in it, but not the scale on which it is played. That scale includes other tenderer notes also. But I can be more generous to Hazlitt: the sonnet is inspired with fury, but does something with—makes something of—that fury, and it succeeds because it shows how what is spirited and impassioned need not be static. The impassioned spirit can endure beyond its occasion and, managed aright, can become something unexpected and magnanimous.

Christopher Ricks, writing of the sonnets generally, comments:

There is an idealistic fervour in the sonnets, but not an idealizing away of people and things. Perhaps the praise ought not to be that ‘the Thing became a trumpet’ [Wordsworth’s praise for Milton’s renewal of the sonnet form] but that the sonnet became a thing—instead of an essence or a shimmer (273).

This is apt and just; the sonnet became a thing instead of an essence, and like all things, it not only was subject to change, and a part of a process of change beyond itself, but it also bears within itself a record of changes, and it is the thing that it is because of the principle of change it obeys. Call that principle here a principle of justice, and of justice in history, and of God in both, and we come close to what Milton has achieved.