Animal Love in Milton Epitaphium Damonis

Animal Love in Milton: The Case of the "Ephitaphium Damonis"
Author(s): Bruce Boehrer

Source: ELH, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall, 2003), pp. 787-811
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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ANIMAL LOVE IN MILTON:
THE CASE OF THE "EPHITAPHIUM DAMONIS"
BY BRUCE BOEHRER
In the midst of his great Latin elegy for Charles Diodati, John M
pastoral spokesman, Thyrsis, inveighs against the discontents of
self-awareness, which he contrasts ruefully to the placid acceptan
of companionship and of death that he observes in the anima
Unhappy me, how similarly the young bulls play in the meado
companions of one spirit, as a law to themselves, nor does a
them seek out one friend more than another from the herd. Thus
also the thick packs of wolves come to their food, and the shaggy wild
asses join themselves together in turns. The law of the sea is the
same: Proteus counts his pack of seals on a deserted shore. And that
humble bird, the sparrow, has another with whom he always abides
and flies freely about every source of seed, returning at length to his
nest, and if his companion dies by chance, or a kite bears him away
with its hooked beak, or a peasant strikes him with an arrow, he soon
seeks another with whom to fly as his companion.
[Hei mihi quam similes ludunt per pratajuvenci,

Omnes unanimi secum sibi lege sodales,
Nec magis hunc alio quisquam secernit amicum
De grege, sic densi veniunt ad pabula thoes,
Inque vicem hirsuti paribusjunguntur onagri;
Lex eadem pelagi, deserto in litore Proteus
Agmina Phocarum numerat, vilisque volucrum
Passer habet semper quicum sit, & omnia circum
Ferra libens volitet, sero sua tecta revisens,
Quem si fors letho objecit, seu milvus adunco
Fat tulit rostro, seu stravit arundine fossor,
Protinus ille alium socio petit inde volatu. ]1'
But for humankind, Thyrsis bitterly observes, the rule is different:
We human beings are an unhappy lot, troubled by dire fates, a race

alien in spirit, discordant of heart. Each of us scarcely finds one equal
companion in a thousand, or if at length, not opposed to our prayers,
fate has given us one, then an unlucky day steals him away in an hour
we had not hoped for, leaving an endless loss for the rest of our years.
ELH 70 (2003) 787-811 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 787
[Nos durum genus, & diris exercitafatis
Gens homines aliena animis, & pectore discors,
Vix sibi quisque parem de millibus invenit unum,
Aut si sors dederit tandem non aspera votis,
Ilum inopina dies qua non speraveris hora
Surripit, aeternum linquens in saecula damnum.]
(106-11)
This passage has been noted repeatedly for the novelty of its
departure from the conventions of pastoral elegy; as Donald Dorian
summarizes, "In every one of the leading classical laments which
might have served as precedents [to the "Epitaphium"], ... the
shepherd's death is mourned not only by the singer, but also by other
beings, human or divine, and by Nature in some form. ... But the
Epitaphium Damonis is the mourning of Thyrsis (Milton) and Thyrsis
alone. ... [T]he poem reveals Milton's pathetic loneliness in almost
every paragraph of its verse."2 Diodati's death, of course, supplies the
immediate occasion for Milton's outpouring of grief in this poem, and
Thyrsis, transported by loss, presents his dead comrade Damon as
that most precious of rarities: a friend whose presence had uniquely
compensated for the alienation unique to the human condition, and
whose absence thus generates an immedicable wound. Yet that
absence itself is, in a sense, repaired by the poem's end, through
formal consolation of pastoral elegy that situates Damon in he
"among the spirits of heroes and deathless gods" ("Heroum
animas inter, divosque perennes" [205]), where he "forever celebr
an eternal wedding" ("Aeternum perag[it] immortales hymena
[217]), his "shining head encircled with a golden crown" ("Ipse c
nitidum cinctu[m] rutilante corona" [215]). The privation at the
of human consciousness, on the other hand, remains signally
solved, constituting the "central dilemma" of Milton's poem.3
Milton seeks remedies for this dilemma throughout his life,
in his developing relationship with divine inspiration and in his the
and practice of social relations. In the former capacity, he pursues t
vocation of sacred poet until it leads him into the territor
prophecy, and to a peculiar intimacy with the "Heav'nly Muse"
"dictates to [him] slumbring, or inspires / Easie [his] unpremedi
Verse."4 In the latter, he becomes one of the outstanding
advocates for the currently dominant Euro-American practice
companionate marriage, and it is this latter field of endeavor
concerns me here.5 For throughout Milton's efforts to theorize a
satisfactory model of human intimacy, the brute society of the natural
788 Animal Love in Milton
world looms large, as it does, for the first time in the poet's career, in
the passage I have quoted above. I do not think it coincidental that
both the "Epitaphium" and the later divorce tracts define human love
in ambivalent contradistinction to animal companionship; on the
contrary, I consider this fact as representative of a fundamental
continuity between the earlier elegy and the later prose works. In
effect, I want to take seriously Barbara Lewalski's claim that the
divorce tracts reveal "the intensity of Milton's felt need for a
soulmate, a female companion who would, in some ways at least, take
Diodati's place," and I want to consider what it might mean for the
poet to regard matrimony as a substitute for the relationship he and
Diodati enjoyed. 6
If approached from the standpoint of Milton's later thinking on
matrimony, I believe the "Epitaphium" acquires greater importance
than it has usually been accorded within the poet's work and career.
For this poem presents difference of kind as the enabling condition
for a model of same-sex companionship that, in turn, prefigures the
marital concerns of the poet's middle and later years. Or, to put the
matter differently: by characterizing human intimacy as a function of
the diversity of species, the "Epitaphium" prepares for a similar
mode of characterization in subsequent Miltonic works that concen-
trate, not upon homosocial companionship (like that foregrounded in
"Lycidas" and the "Epitaphium") but upon traditional conjugal
society instead. As a result, the "Epitaphium" marks an important
point of transition in Milton's career as a whole. If Damon's death
precipitates the poem's protagonist into an awareness of the alien-
ation essential to human ego-construction, the poem itself pro
author into a preoccupation with the gender difference constitutive
of the heteronormative married estate. This point has been generally
obscured by the more obvious fact that the poem serves as a generic
valediction of sorts, marking the end of its author's early exercises in
pastoral and the formal announcement of his epic ambitions; how-
ever, Stephen Guy-Bray has recently shown the extent to which the
poem presents these generic categories themselves as respectively
"homosocial" and "heteroerotic."7 Extending this observation, I argue
here that the "Epitaphium" marks the point in Milton's career at
which a vocabulary of same-sex intimacy begins to metamorphose
into a discourse of companionate marriage, and that it marks this
metamorphosis through its ambivalent concern with the qualities that
define human society in contradistinction to that of the natural world.
Bruce Boehrer 789
I.
Thyrsis's complaint against the human condition deserves notice,

not only for its unconcealed envy of the animal estate, but also for the
particular language in which it idealizes the society of beasts. This
language is preoccupied with tropes of similarity, with affinities of the
heart and of the mind, and with same-sex pairings that acquire the
incidental markers of an erotic bond. In contrast to these terms,
Thyrsis's description of human consciousness comes to rest upon
figures of singularity and deprivation, the enabling conditions both
for his special intimacy with Damon and for his consequent bereave-
ment. These figures of singularity and deprivation, of loss and
longing, reappear in Milton's divorce tracts, where they characterize
the "rationall burning that mariage is to remedy": the spiritual and
intellectual solitude which, according to Milton, wedlock was princi-
pally instituted to repair.8 To this extent, the poet's theory of marriage
serves as a sort of response to Thyrsis's unhappy appraisal of the
human lot, for it is in wedlock that one can best turn one's intrinsic
human alienation to advantage by seeking fit society and thereby
transcending the otherwise enviable happiness of the beasts.
Thyrsis opens his reflections upon the bestial condition with an
image of contented bovinity: "Hei mihi quam similes ludunt per prata
juvenci, / Omnes unanimi secum sibi lege sodales" (94-95). Already,
within the space of these two lines, tropes of likeness and of like-
mindedness dominate the description. Thyrsis's bulls disport them-
selves "unanimi" (literally, "all of one mind" or "heart"), "similes ...
omnes" ("all alike"), constituting an undifferentiated body of compan-
ionship whose interrelations are mirrored in the golden-line syntax,
assonance, and alliteration of the phrase "omnes unanimi secum sibi
lege sodales." Here the adjectives "omnes unanimi" remain in inter-
pretive suspension throughout the entire line, modifying "sodales" as
they do; and the disrupted unit of noun and attributive adjectives,
formed by the split phrase "omnes unanimi ... sodales," thus serves
to frame a line whose interior consists of the separate yet wholly
embedded phrase "secum sibi lege." Half of this latter phrase, in turn,
consists, appropriately enough, of the third-person plural reflexive
pronoun in its accusative and dative forms, which, read literally, yield
the knotty construction "with themselves as a law to themselves." The
overall stylistic effect here-far too elaborate and too rooted in
Virgilian precedent to be coincidental-is one of enclosure, nesting,
and mirroring. Needless to say, this effect perfectly suits the undiffer-
entiated egolessness of the animal society Thyrsis here describes.
"Nec magis hunc alio quisquam secernit amicum / De grege" (96-
97), the description continues: "Nor does anyone seek out one friend
more than another from the herd." The partitive prepositional phrase
"de grege" is itself cut off by enjambment from the main body of its
clause, embodying a principle of separation that is itself appropriately
separated from the syntactic herd of which it functions as a part
apart. Likewise, as if to figure forth the notion of interchangeable
intermingling to which the phrase "de grege" is opposed, the demon-
strative "hunc," which agrees grammatically with "amicum," is sepa-
rated from its noun by most of a line and juxtaposed instead with the
"alio" to which "hunc amicum" provides a contrary to fact contrast. In
the herd, this syntax insists, there is no "hic," much less an "alius,"
which terms themselves are a product of the observer's inevitably
tormented consciousness and the linguistic distinctions within which
it comes into being. And thus, finally, the subject "quisquam" lies
suspended between "hunc alio" and "amicum," marking a nominative
position that, like the accusative and ablative (of difference, in fact),
has no place in the herd it describes. Here again, Thyrsis's language
foregrounds its inability to capture the mode of existence that serves
as its immediate object of inquiry.
Elsewhere in this extended passage, similar tropes of conjunction
and elision abound. Moreover, these provide not only a model o
what we might call social indifferentiation (or individuation, in the
root sense of the term), but also a pattern for the elision of different
kinds of companionship; in this regard, Thyrsis's words seem repeat
edly to infringe upon the traditional distinction between amicitia an
amor, 4aXL'a and 0ocr.9 Thus, for instance, we are told that "the
shaggy wild asses join themselves together in turns" ("Inque vicem
hirsuti paribusjunguntur onagri"), the precise nature of the couplin
in question rendered at least momentarily uncertain by the choice o
a main verb that refers, in one of its primary senses, specifically t
sexual union.'0 Nor is it ever far from Milton that this same verb
applies with equal immediacy both to erotic intercourse and to the
harnessing of draft-animals; the divorce tracts insist upon this etymo-
logical conjunction through their repeated allusions to the matrimo-
nial "yoke" and variants thereof (DDD, 2:258, 2:586, 2:592; and
elsewhere). Indeed, such references occur more frequently in the
divorce tracts than anywhere else in the Milton canon; Lawrence
Sterne and Harold H. Kollmeier's concordance to Milton's English
prose cites the word "yoke" and its variants 71 times within the pro
canon, as a whole, and 36 times within the divorce tracts, in
Bruce Boehrer 791
particular." This range of distribution, in turn, suggests habits of
speech and thought that go beyond coincidence or dead metaphor,
and that lend a redoubled ambivalence to Thyrsis's earlier use of the
verb "iungere" to describe the social habits of onagers.
Again, we are told that the beasts of the sea behave similarly:
"Proteus counts his pack of seals on a deserted shore" ("deserto in
littore Proteus / Agmina Phocarum numerat" [99-100]). The immedi-
ate source for these lines appears to be Virgil's tale of Aristaeus in
book 4 of the Georgics, where Proteus's seals "stretch themselves out
in sleep upon the shore" ("Sternunt se somno diuersae in litore
phocae"), as Aristaeus prepares to seize their master.'2 Yet this
Virgilian line fails to account for the particular force of the descrip-
tion within its Miltonic context, which emphasizes the character of
the seals as a closed and separate community, occasioning pathos
through their self-containment and inaccessibility. In this respect,
they arguably also recall a somewhat later passage from the same
section of the Georgics, one that evokes a similar hermeticism and
isolation, this time in the context of erotic loss:
He himself, comforting his sick love with the hollow of a tortoise-

shell lyre, would sing about you, sweet spouse, at the coming of day
and at the day's ending, you alone on the shore with him.
[Ipse caua solans aegrum testudine amorem

te, dulcis coniunx, te solo in litore secum,
te ueniente die, te decedente canebat.]
(G, 4.464-66)
Here, as Orpheus laments his deceased Eurydice against the back-

drop of a deserted shore, Virgil offers his readers a scene that agrees
with Thyrsis's lines, in terms both of mood and of occasion. In the
event, as well, this passage provides the essential backstory for the
tale of Aristaeus and Proteus, since it is on account of Aristaeus's
pursuit of Eurydice that Eurydice dies; it is on account of her death
that Aristaeus is persecuted by the gods; and it is on account of this
persecution that he seeks out Proteus for advice. The allusion to
Proteus's seals thus leads directly to the tale of Orpheus and
Eurydice, and this latter tale, when taken as part of the allusive
environment of the "Epitaphium," invites us to read Thyrsis's affec-
tion for Damon in an erotically charged context.
Likewise, as Thyrsis considers the happy lot of the birds, he lights
upon one of the more celebrated animal-figures in Latin amatory
verse, one "notorious"-as John Leonard has observed-"for lech-
ery": "Passer habet semper quicum sit, & omnia circum / Farra libens
volitet."'13 Guy-Bray has called this "the most obviously sexual refer-
ence in [Milton's] list of animals," and rightly so; the poem's vision of
passerine contentment is hard not to read against the prior example
of poem 2 of Catullus's Carmina, where the poet's beloved Lesbia
serves as the preferred companion of the sparrow in question, who
climbs into her bosom and nibbles her finger instead of grain:
Sparrow, my girl's delight, with whom she is accustomed to play,

whom she holds to her breast, to whom she extends her index finger
for kissing and urges on to sharp bites ... if I might only be able to
play with you just as she does and lighten the cares of my sad spirit!
[Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus
.........
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem

et tristis animi leuare curas!]14
Catullus's vision of domestic intimacy not only draws an implicit

parallel between the poet's relationship with Lesbia and Lesbia's with
her sparrow, it also frames the second relationship specifically in
terms of the emotional solace so conspicuously lacking in the
"Epitaphium." Lesbia's pet comforts her spirit ("tristis animi leua[t]
curas"), in ways that contrast with and lend a special poignancy to the
speaker's own heaviness of heart, which latter quality, in turn,
anticipates the peculiar malaise of Milton's Thyrsis. Thus, through its
inaccessibility and exclusivity, Catullus's woman/bird relationship
arguably elicits something like Thyrsis's envy of the bestial condition.
In any case, the elegiac quality of Milton's poem certainly recalls
the general tone and occasion of Catullus 3, with its lament for the
death of Lesbia's sparrow:
My girl's sparrow is dead, my girl's delight, whom she loved more

than her eyes. ... He now travels along that darkened way whence
no one ever returns.
[Passer mortuus est meae puellae,

passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa suis oculis amabat.
.........
Bruce Boehrer 793
qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
illud, unde negant redire quemquam.]
(C, 3-5, 11-12)
If Catullus's elegy for a sparrow seems trivial, even risible-as Ovid

parody of it in Amores book 2, poem 6 suggests-one might noneth
less consider the extent to which Lesbia's grief for the bird doubles
and foreshadows the poet's own grief over the decline of his ill-
starred infatuation with Lesbia herself. Lesbia may invest her bird
with a ridiculously heavy weight of affect, but, in the process, she
proves increasingly indifferent to the speaker's own emotional invest-
ments, for which the Lesbia-poems in general serve as a kind of
extended elegy. The result is a series of lyrics, alienated not only from
the affections of brute beasts but from those of human society as well,
poems uttered by a speaker who, in this double isolation, anticipates
the predicament of Milton's Thyrsis and figures that predicament
specifically in sexual terms.
As for the overall structure of Thyrsis's remarks about bestial
society, it too clearly presupposes an erotic source text. In this case,
the prior work in question-noted as such by the Variorum Commentary
on Milton's Latin verse, although unmentioned by most scholars-is
no less than the great original of European versified sex manuals:
Ovid's Ars Amatoria, which supplies an obvious (and obviously
eroticized) model for Thyrsis's vision of animal gregariousness:
The bird has one he may love; in mid-sea the female fish finds one
with whom to unite in pleasure; the hind follows her mate, serpent is
clasped by serpent, the hound is joined in clinging lechery to the
bitch; gladly the ewe endures the leap, the heifer rejoices in the bull,
the snub-nosed goat supports her unclean lord; mares are excited to
frenzy, and through regions far removed follow the stallions, though
streams divide them.
[Ales habet, quod amet; cum quo sua gaudia iungat,

Invenit in media femina piscis aqua;
Cerva parem sequitur, serpens serpente tenetur,
Haeret adulterio cum cane nexa canis;
Laeta salitur ovis: tauro quoque laeta iuvenca est:
Sustinet inmundum sima capella marem;
In furias agitantur equae, spatioque remota
Per loca dividuos amne sequuntur equos. ]15
If Thyrsis's complaint in the "Epitaphium" was deliberately modeled

upon Ovid (as it may well have been), such deliberateness could lend
still further prominence to the various particular erotic resonances I
have noted in Milton's verse. But deliberate or not, this correspon-
dence between Milton and Ovid runs to the lexical core of the two
passages in question; Ovid's "iungat" speaks to Milton's "junguntur,"
Ovid's "parem" to Milton's "paribus," Ovid's "iuvenca" to Milton's
"juvenci," and so forth. The result, for Milton, is a model of bestia
society that is riddled throughout with the ineluctable traces of th
erotic.
This erotic subtext exerts a certain interpretive pr

upon the overt matrimonial troping of consolation in th
and I will therefore end this essay by briefly conside
conclusion as it relates to similar passages elsewhere in the Milton
canon. In the meantime, however, one should note that Milton
assessment of the bestial condition figures prominently, not just in his
view of human companionship but in his developing sense of human
conjugality as well. This aspect of the poet's thought is sufficiently
distinctive and recurrent to constitute a central element in his
doctrine of companionate marriage, and I would argue that it derives
specifically from his understanding of same-sex relations. In Milton's
thinking about marriage, as in the "Epitaphium," the natural world
supplies a prior model of behavior to which human society is
contrasted, and against which it is therefore defined. Thus, to get a
sense of the continuity between Thyrsis's complaint for lost friend-
ship and Milton's position on wedlock, we must turn to the divorce
tracts.
II.
In developing his foundational theory of companionate marriage

and divorce, Milton famously-indeed, necessarily-redefines the
institution of wedlock, so as to conceive of it first and foremost as a
spiritual and rational rather than a carnal union. As he explains in The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643/1644), elucidating the
Pauline declaration that "it is better to marry than to burn" (1
Corinthians 7.9),
What might this burning meane? Certainly not the meer motion of
carnall lust, not the meer goad of a sensitive desire; God does not
principally take care for such cattell. What is it then but that desire
which God put into Adam in Paradise before he knew the sin of
incontinence; that desire which God saw it was not good that man
should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an
Bruce Boehrer 795
unkindly solitarines by uniting another body, but not without a fit
soul to his in the cheerfull society of wedlock. (DDD, 2:251)
Locating spiritual longing in Eden and distinguishing it from the

mere "cattell" of "sensitive desire," Milton likewise characterizes
solitude as "unkindly": in effect, as contrary to the order of nature,
which tends instead toward the "cheerfull society" embodied in the
condition of matrimony.16 The desire for this society, "deeply rooted
in the faultles innocence of nature" (DDD, 2:251), generates a state
of preordained companionship comparable-albeit superior-to that
observed by Thyrsis among the animals. Hence follow both the
particular force of Thyrsis's desolation (in losing Damon, he has also
fallen out of equilibrium with nature), and the central premise of
Milton's argument for divorce (marriage ceases to be marriage when
it fails to satisfy the divinely-instituted desire for "cheerfull society").
To this extent, Thyrsis's yearning for a friend and Milton's yearning
for a mate constitute parallel responses to the same intellectual and
spiritual dilemma: how to equal-and indeed to surpass-the con-
tentment manifest in the company of beasts.
Elsewhere in the divorce tracts, Milton lends animal society a
prominent, if somewhat ambivalent, place in his efforts to define true
matrimony and to distinguish it from "the bondage of canon law"
(DDD, 1643 and 1644 title pages, 2:220-21). On one hand, bestial
companionship figures as an emblem of the carnal degradation
imposed upon human conjugality by the primacy of sexual union
under the canon law of marriage; hence, as James Grantham Turner
has remarked, the divorce tracts frequently characterize sexuality
through a "farmyard vocabulary" that even encompasses "God's own
attitude to his creation.""7 Yet on the other hand-as both Turner and
Stephen Fallon have pointed out-we can also "glimpse a different
attitude" toward sexuality in the divorce tracts, one that "anticipates
the 'spiritual monism' of Paradise Lost," and that tends to treat the
mating of beasts as a condition with its own measure of dignity, in fact

superior to those matrimonial arrangements predicated upon "the
formalities and respects of the body" (T, 2:598).18 The result is a
decidedly mixed view of the nature of animal love, and this view, in
turn, imparts a similar ambivalence to Milton's conception of the
married estate.
Thus, for instance, Milton can argue that marriage must be
regarded primarily as a rational and spiritual institution, for "love and
peace ... only can give a human qualification to th[e] act of the flesh,
and distinguish it from the bestial" ( T, 2:606). On this reasoning, the
true doctrine of marriage stands in relation to that of the canon law,
as does human society to that of the beasts. The opposition of culture
to nature reinscribes itself in Milton's opposition to traditional
conceptions of wedlock, concomitantly with what Fallon has call
the poet's "animalization of his opponents" in the divorce debate.19
Yet elsewhere the poet denies his opponents even a place in the order
of brute nature. Hence he can insist that
a conversing solace, & peacefull society is the prime end of mariage,

without which no other help, or office can bee mutual, beseeming
the dignity of reasonable creatures, that such as they should be
coupl'd in the rites of nature by the mere compulsion of lust, without
love, or peace, worse then wild beasts. (C, 2:739)
At such moments, the divorce tracts repeatedly insist that canon law
constitutes an aberration in nature, not only beneath human dignity
but equally contrary to natural law and divine decree.
As to the particular ends of the divine institution of matrimony:
Milton, on one hand, clearly regards these as more rational than, and
hence superior to, the aims of divine decree as manifest in animal
companionship: "the prime words [of Genesis] which create the
institution ... containe the noblest and purest ends of Matrimony,
without which attain'd, that conjunction hath nothing in it above what
is common to us with beasts" (T, 2:649). Yet there is a sense in which
bestial society and human matrimony exist on a continuum, with the
former providing a humbler example of God's aims in establishing the
latter. This view of matters, in turn, confers a particular distinction
upon brute nature, endowing the beasts with something approximat-
ing a spiritual nobility of their own. Thus Milton can insist that
[w]hen love findes it self utterly unmatcht, and justly vanishes, nay
rather cannot but vanish, the fleshly act indeed may continue, but
not holy, not pure, not beseeming the sacred bond of mariage;
beeing at best but an animal excretion, but more truly wors and more
ignoble than that mute kindlyness among the heards and flocks: in
that proceeding as it ought from intellective principles, it participates
of nothing rational, but that which the feild and fould equalls. (T,
2:609)
Here, in particular, the language of the divorce tracts betrays a

certain uneasiness as to the precise character of bestial companion-
ship, which, on one hand, seems indistinguishable from the "animal
Bruce Boehrer 797
excretion" of lust, but, on the other, is endowed with its own "mute
kindlyness." Modest as this kindliness may be, it elevates the union of
beasts above that of a loveless marriage, and this second perspective
proves recurrently attractive to Milton, encouraging him to locate an
archetype of marital fidelity in the natural world:
if there be not a more human burning which mariage must satisfy, or

else be dissolv'd, then that of copulation, mariage cannot be honorable
for the meer reducing and terminating of lust between two; seeing
many beasts in voluntary and chosen couples live together as
unadulterously, and are as truly maried in that respect. (DDD, 1643
and 1644 eds., 2:252)
To this extent, the brute creation supplies Milton with a model not
of mere sensual gratification but rather of harmonious union, a union
to be improved upon by the rational society of human wedlock, but
one which nonetheless prefigures the rational ends of wedlock
through its own transcendence of carnal promiscuity. H

"Epitaphium Damonis," the company of beasts anticipat
human friendship through its voluntary and faithful c
like with like. This installation of the vocabulary of friend
the language of wedlock comprises a central feature of Milton's
thinking on the nature of marriage and divorce.20 And indeed,
Milton's repeated, ambivalent preoccupation with animal society in
the divorce tracts finds an antecedent in that most influential of
western friendship treatises, Cicero's De Amicitia. There Laelius
remarks, on the one hand, that "sensual pleasures [are] the highest
aim of brutes [literally 'wild beasts']" ("voluptates ... [b]eluarum hoc
quidem extremum"); elsewhere, however, he maintains that
[flriendship springs rather from nature than from need, and from an
inclination of the soul joined with a feeling of love rather than from
calculation of how much profit the friendship is likely to afford. What
this feeling is may be pereived even in the case of certain animals,
which, up to a certain time, so love their offspring and are so loved by
them, that their impulses are easily seen.
[(A) natura mihi videtur potius quam indigentia orta amicitia,

applicatione magis animi cum quodam sensu amandi, quam cogitatione
quantum illa res utilitatis esset habitura. Quod quidem quale
etiam in bestiis quibusdam animadverti potest, quae ex se na
amant ad quoddam tempus et ab eis ita amantur, ut facile e
sensus appareat. ]21
As it happens, however, the tradition of friendship theory deriving
from Cicero notoriously and repeatedly denies the capacity of this
spiritually superior love to develop in relationships with women.22
Cicero himself focuses upon the development of friendship "inter
viros," arguably because his insistence, that "in friendship ...
superior and inferior should stand on an equality" ("in amicitia
superiorem parem esse inferiori") is incompatible with cross-gender
relationships predicated upon mutual inequality.23 Protogenes, in
Plutarch's "Dialogue on Love" can maintain that "[1l]ove ... attaches
himself to a young and talented soul and through friendship brings it
to a state of virtue; but the appetite for women ... has for net gain
only an accrual of pleasure in the enjoyment of a ripe physical beauty"
("Epcu yadp EqvoVo0 KKai vEGau qvXa 'aCdpEuuo Eilo pET"Ve Sta
tlAlaa rEAEvT-;] TalF Sa Tpodu yvuaKau CmOvpvU[a TaTa7-atL. ...
i6Souvr rrEplEaTL Kaprro~aeat Ka drrT6avUcrtv Ipau Kai aojLpaTOo").24
Closer in time to Milton-and perhaps most famously-Michel de
Montaigne declares that "the ordinary capacity of women is inad-
equate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this
sacred bond [of friendship]."''25 Such pronouncements offer scant
support for a model of marriage predicated upon "civill fellowship of
love and amity" (T, 2:599).
Indeed, Montaigne can go so far as to insist that friendship is
specifically antithetical to marriage: "As for marriage, for one thing it
is a bargain to which only the entrance is free-its continuance being
constrained and forced, depending otherwise than on our will-and a
bargain ordinarily made for other ends." Thus, for Montaigne, the
incompatibility of marriage and friendship is only further intensified
by the inadequate nature of "the ordinary capacity of women." This
dim view of women's "capacity," in turn, echoes St. Augustine's
position in the De Genesi ad Litteram, where he asserts that Eve was
not created to assist Adam in physical labor, for
[i]f there were any such need, a male helper would be better, and the
same could be said of the comfort of another's presence if Adam
were perhaps weary of solitude. How much more agreeably could
two male friends, rather than a man and woman, enjoy companionship
and conversation in a life shared together.26
Milton, of course, is aware of this trajectory of thought, and he

takes pains in Tetrachordon (and in C, 2:739-40) to align himself with
the body of later commentary that opposes Augustine's "crabbed
Bruce Boehrer 799
opinion" (T, 2:596).27 In doing so, the poet arguably seeks to reinte-
grate the joys of erotic and spiritual union-joys that had been made
collaterally available to classical experience through the model of
friendship advanced by Plutarch's Protogenes, but that had been
sundered by the Christian tradition's simultaneous insistence upon
the spiritual inferiority of women and the unnaturalness of the
homoerotic bond. As Montaigne famously declares-while denounc-
ing "Greek love" as "justly abhorred by our morality"-
if... a relationship, free and voluntary, could be built up, in which

not only would the souls have ... complete enjoyment, but the
bodies also would share in the alliance, so that the entire man would
be engaged, it is certain that the resulting friendship would be fuller
and more complete.28
By the mid-1640s, Milton has at least begun to regard marriage as an

institution designed for the propagation of such a relationship, and he
has begun to regard the harmonious companionship of beasts as a
relatively modest, but unmistakable, antecedent of such union.
However, the Milton of the "Epitaphium" employs the fellowship
of animals as a template for a rather different kind of human bond,
one more consistent with Cicero's invocation of the natural world in
De Amicitia, and more in keeping with the vision of homosocial amity
promoted by Montaigne in his essay "Of Friendship." Hence my
thesis here: Milton's Latin elegy, if read in conjunction with the later
works on matrimony and divorce, sheds light both upon the intellec-
tual derivation of the latter and upon the erotic troping of the former.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the poet's doctrine of companionate
marriage presupposes two millenia of dialogue regarding the intellec-
tual and erotic investments of classical same-sex love, and seeks to
assimilate the ideals of such love to the heteronormative marital
bond. To gauge the precise character of this assimilation, we must
return, finally, to Milton's verse.
III.
If, for Montaigne, marriage cannot possibly serve as a medium for

the development of true friendship, perhaps friendship can nonethe-
less evolve into a kind of marriage. Milton's two great early poems of
homosocial companionship, "Lycidas" and the "Epitaphium," can
both be viewed as accommodating this possibility through the
matrimonial troping of their respective conclusions. I have already
argued that the "unexpressive nuptiall Song" with which "Lycidas"
ends may be understood as a reterritorialization of the homoerotic
impulse; this possibility, in turn, invests the final lines of the
"Epitaphium" with redoubled force.29 There, as John Shawcross has
observed, Thyrsis installs Damon in heaven amidst a celestial wed-
ding-celebration at once "sacred, and yet orgiastic":
Because the blush of shame was yours, and your youth was free from
blame, because you were given no taste of the pleasure of the
marriage-bed, behold! The honors of virginity are reserved for you;
you yourself, your head encircled with a shining crown, bearing
about the happy palm-fronds, will forever celebrate an eternal
wedding where the song of the lyre raves, mingled with sacred
dance, and festive orgies celebrate the rites of Bacchus under the
thyrsus of Sion.
[Quod tibi purpureus pudor, & sine labejuventus

Grata fuit, quod nulla tori libata voluptas,
En etiam tibi virginei servantur honores;
Ipse caput nitidum cinctus rutilante corona,
Laetaque frondentis gestans umbracula palmae
Aeternum perages immortales hymenaeos;
Cantus ubi, choreisque furit lyra mista beatis,
Festa Sionaeo bacchantur & Orgia Thyrso. ]30
("E," 212-19)
As Shawcross and Guy-Bray have noted in different ways, this

passage exhibits a particularly rich and manifest series of homoerotic
overtones, ranging from the general metaphor of apotheosis as
wedding-celebration to the particular choice of lexical items such as
"gestans" (literally "riding"), "furit" ("rages"), "Orgia," and
"bacchantur" (literally "celebrate the festival of Bacchus").31 The
resulting synthesis of classical and Christian motifs takes on a
character at once overtly sexual and avowedly pastoral, in both these
respects complementing and extending Thyrsis's remarks upon the
nature of animal sociability.
This particular passage from the "Epitaphium," p

any other, has repeatedly embarrassed readers, w
fervor of the poem's conclusion as "hyperbolical an
sacrilegious," and likely to "make ... the student
and gasp" at its "bizarre medley of beatific choru
and the thyrsus of Zion."32 The principal source
ment, in turn, is clearly Milton's conflation of the t
Bruce Boehrer 801
emphasis upon virginity, with a classical pastoralism at once pagan
and erotic. Indeed, in his 1930 edition of the "Epitaphium,"
MacKellar went so far as to insist that words like "[flurit, bacchan
Orgia are not to be taken too literally; and the thyrsus, a staff e
with ivy and vines, borne by Bacchus and the Bacchantes,... i
were, sanctified by the application of Sionaeo, and beco
heavenly standard."33 On a broader level, this distrust of the
erotic mode has arguably permeated scholarly reactions to pas
general, for instance in Samuel Johnson's memorable view
form-particularly in its Miltonic incarnations-as artific
conventional, "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting."34 To r
a sexual charge in Milton's pastoral verse is surely to open the
charges of vulgarity; from there one need only repress one
sexual responses to transfer the charge of vulgarity to the ge
whole. Denuded of its erotic immediacy by this process of rep
and transference, the pastoral form naturally emerges as an
and mechanical exercise.
However, recent scholars have demonstrated the extent to which
Milton's pastoral idiom, far from operating as a perfunctory formal-
ism, comprises an integral element of the poet's vocabulary of
personal intimacy and individual experience. Gary Bouchard, for one,
has recently argued for a direct relationship between the collegiate
background of certain early modern English pastoral poets and the
bucolic setting of their work, such that "the pastoral worlds of
[Edmund] Spenser's, [John] Fletcher's, and Milton's poetry could
stem from a reimagined Cambridge world," at least as much as from
an abstracted set of generic conventions."5 And Gordon Campbell,
dealing more specifically with Milton, has observed that the pastoral-
ism of the "Epitaphium" reproduces the rhetoric of Diodati's surviv-
ing personal correspondence with the young poet.36 There, in two

Greek letters, dense with the signifiers of pastoral contentment,
Diodati exhorts Milton to take respite from study and join him in
rural recreation:
For tomorrow all will be lovely, and the air and the s
and the trees and the birds and the earth and men
and will laugh together with us, and will dance with
[Ka' ydp cravptLov OaTaLt TdvTa KaX(CJG, Kait 6 anp, K

6 1ToTap(O', KaL &v6pa, KaL 6pvtOLa, Kal yi-, Kal dvopwT
[LV(T aUvvyTEXdoovUt.]37
And again,
The days are long, the landscape most beautiful with budding
flowers and teeming leaves, and upon every shoot is a nightingale or
goldfinch or other songbird, and it takes delight in its warblings.
[laTa IaCKpdr, TO6rTOL KClXXL(TOL avOEUL, KaL OvXXoLG KO[LJVTEU, KCL

PPUOVTECa iGTL TraVTL KXdaL)8 d(i&t I daKavOLic, i 'XXo TT 6pVL'OOV
8itLUC, KtL [NLvvpLtOgtOL E[I4LXOTLTELTat.] (LR, 1:104)
At the very least, such language endows the pastoral mode with a
personal immediacy that prefigures the psychodynamics of Milton's
Latin elegy.
Nor is it therefore surprising, from the standpoint of my present

argument, that Diodati should voice only one specific complaint
amidst the locus amoenus he describes:
I have nothing with which to fault my way of life at present, apart

from one thing, that I am deprived of a noble spirit with which to
exchange conversation, and I yearn to be given such an understanding
mind. ... If to all this were added a fitting and well-educated
companion, with a good memory of things, cut out from the herd, I
would be happier than the King of Persia.
[O16)v EX) XELV T VUV 6Ltayyl lLOVU, EKTiO TOVTOU ~V)aG, 6TL
oTEPLTKO[LCL 1UVX TVOO yEVVaLcLtJ X6yov aTELV, KaL 6i66vaL
uETrLTraiEVTIa TOL1]V TOL KE~aXl 1Tro0o ... i a0X6v TLVU tTalpOV
TO1TE(TTL TrEat(L8eVIivOV, KGCi rNEpVfqpElVOV E1'TL TOUTOLT, EKTWR0IIV,
TO) TOV WTrEpdrV ctaiXGLX60 EiaLatOViCTEPOC av yevo (LR, 104-5)
This, after all, is a version of the same complaint to which Thyrsis

gives voice in the "Epitaphium"; as he surveys the contentedly paired
beasts that surround him, Thyrsis laments the difficulty of securing
such a mate for himself, and he mourns the absence of one found and
now lost. Likewise, Diodati's letters contrast the emotional poverty of
solitude with the harmony of a united natural world, in whose
pleasures he and Milton may participate as a couple. The polysyndeton
of "KaGl 6 Gdrp, KaL 6 XLvcr, Kai 6 rTOTa)[LU; the choice of verbs like
"cruvyv'adw" and "ovvXopPVoW"; the depiction of nature as an all-
encompassing, teeming unity; all these contrast with Diodati's own
yearning for someone special, "EKTOrT]v" (translated by French as
"select" [LR, 105], but more literally "cut out"), whose rare compan-
ionship will allow him to participate fully in the surrounding har-
Bruce Boehrer 803
mony. If indeed the pastoral mode supplies Milton with a particularly
intimate vocabulary through which to express his grief for Diodati-
and that is what the foregoing correspondence suggests-then it does
so, in large part, by offering the natural world as a context within
which to articulate this desire for select society.
In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton gives voice to a
similar desire, directed this time toward consummation of the
heteronormative marital bond:
Moses tells us ... that Love was the Son of Lonelines, begot in
Paradise by that sociable & helpfull aptitude which God implanted
between man and woman toward each other. (DDD, 2:252)
As should be clear by now, this essay traces the poet's language here,
together with the model of companionate marriage it presupposes,
most immediately to the similar language and gestures of the
"Epitaphium," and, through them, to a lengthy tradition of homosocial
and homoerotic friendship discourse that distinguishes true human
companionship from that of the lower creation, by virtue of the
unique intellectual and spiritual fulfillment afforded by the former.
This discourse arguably derives from what Turner has described as
the assimilation of "pagan philosophy and Greek homosexuality" into
a Platonized Christianity; and if this derivation is even partially valid,
we must acknowledge the influential marital thinking of Milton's
middle and later periods as bearing within it the trace of the
homoerotic, constituted as it is through the introduction of a same-
sex model of ideal companionship into the discourse of
heteronormative wedlock.38 When, in a much discussed passage from
book 4 of Paradise Lost (PL, 4.440-91), Eve describes her introduc-
tion to Adam via a rewriting-and re-righting-of Narcissus's homo-
erotic fascination with his own image, we may thus understand her
narrative as reenacting the transference of homoerotic desire to
heteroerotic union that Milton's own work has already effected in its
transition from the friendship vocabulary of the early poems to the
marriage theory of the divorce tracts.39
IV.
But to return to where this essay started: how, then, do we account

for the recurrence of images of bestial companionship in this pattern
of literary development? I take the persistence of such images to be
an index of the interrelation between the early poems of friendship
and the middle-period theory of marriage; however, for this very
reason the persistence of animal imagery in these works must register
something more than mere coincidence. In the event, I believe this
imagery embodies two disparate views of the relation between
human society and the lower creation, and that these views coincide
with the ambivalence of Milton's own thought on the nature of
human erotic and spiritual companionship. On one hand, as
study has already pointed out, Milton's work tends to invoke t
animal world as a marker of difference, by employing it as the grou
against which the rational and spiritual qualities of human fellow
differentiate themselves. Yet by the same token, animal compan
ship comes in Milton's work to adumbrate human amity and wedl
by serving as a paradigm of contentment and harmonious integra
with the surrounding order of things. Thus, in these varying cap
ties, the lower creation operates as a master trope, both of liken
and of difference, of homogeneity and of discrimination, figuring t
concurrent-and sometimes contradictory-importance of both these
principles for Milton's understanding of human intimacy.
In the vision of prelapsarian wedlock of Paradise Lost, most
particularly, the language of sameness and difference collides in ways
at once fruitful and disconcerting, embodying the tension between
"ecstatic-egalitarian and patriarchal relationships" that Turner has
apprehended at the heart of Milton's doctrine of marriage.40 The
poem's assertions of difference (and consequent inequality) between
the sexes, numerous and notorious as they may be, find a counter-
weight in its repeated emphasis upon the spiritual and rational
complementarity of woman and man.41 Thus Eve's creati

tive-to return to an already cited case-frames itself with
promising declarations of sexual difference and incommen
as Eve declares to Adam at the beginning of her story, "I
So farr the happier Lot, enjoying thee / Praeeminent by
odds, while thou / Like consort to thy self canst no where
4.445-48). Yet her story itself moves from declarations of d
to assertions of likeness, as the Son encourages Eve to aba
mirror-image in favor of "h[im] / Whose image thou art"
72), Adam, through whom she is to bear "Multitudes like
(PL, 4.473). This emphasis upon the true specular complem
of Adam and Eve (as opposed to the false resemblance of Ev
mirror-image) serves as a necessary corrective to Eve's dec
difference and inequality between the sexes, for the
insisting that Adam can nowhere find "[l]ike consort to [h
Bruce Boehrer 805
comes dangerously close to denying him fit spiritual and intellectual
companionship in Eden.
As for the precise nature of that fit companionship, Adam himself
is quite specific as to what it entails, and his understanding of it owes
much to the language of Milton's divorce tracts, to say nothing of the
"Epitaphium." When, in book 8 of Paradise Lost, the Son presents
the newly created Adam with sovereignty over the beasts of Eden,
Adam responds by registering a sense of personal isolation: "Thou
hast provided all things," he declares to the Son, "but with mee / I see
not who partakes" (PL, 8.363-64). To counter this complaint, the Son
emphasizes the organic diversity of the natural world in which Adam
is placed-itself the distant antecedent of similar settings in the
"Epitaphium" and Diodati's correspondence with Milton:
What call'st thou solitude, is not the Earth

With various living creatures, and the Aire
Replenisht, and all these at thy command
To come and play before thee, know'st thou not
Thir language and thir wayes, they also know,
And reason not contemptibly; with these
Find pastime.
(PL, 8.369-75)
And it thus falls to Adam, from his position of perceived but

paradoxical solitude amidst the fruition of the pastoral locus amoenus,
to voice history's originary longing for human companionship. He
does so in terms that parallel Thyrsis's lament from the "Epitaphium":
Among unequals what societie

Can sort, what harmony and true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Giv'n and receiv'd; but in disparitie
..............
Canno
Tedio
Such
All ra
Cannot be human consort.
(PL, 8.383-91)
When viewed from the perspective of sacred history, Adam's

complaint precedes those of Diodati and Thyrsis; when viewed from
the standpoint of Milton's own career, it inherits the terms and
sentiments of its pastoral predecessors, while likewise echoing Milton's
understanding of companionate marriage in the divorce tracts. To
this extent it returns us precisely to the like-with-like logic of the
"Epitaphium." Adam requires an "equal" partner who can share "[a]ll
rational delight" (my emphasis); despite the fact that they "reason not
contemptibly," the beasts prove insufficient to his needs. On the
contrary, like their counterparts in the "Epitaphium," the animals in
the garden pair off appropriately with their own equals, thus marking
the natural ground of Adam's parallel impulse:
they rejoice
Each with thir kinde, Lion with Lionesse;
..............
Muc
So w
Wor
(PL, 8.391-98)
Here, in the natural institution of desire for one's own "kinde," one
encounters among the lower creation the foundational impulse for
Milton's emphasis upon rational equality within wedlock. As Linda
Gregerson has noted, the interplay of "likeness-with-difference" in
Miltonic marriage theory requires Adam to "establish that he is too
unlike the animals to find adequate companionship with them, but
like them in requiring a consort."42 Under the circumstances, the very
quality that Adam employs to distinguish himself and his putative
mate from the beasts-the capacity for "all rational delight"-resists
the more authoritarian language of gender hierarchy that elsewhere
pervades Paradise Lost. In terms of its theoretical derivation, this
emphasis upon "rational delight" arguably owes as much to homosocial
friendship theory as to the book of nature; however, it is the latter
that serves as Milton's acknowledged source, both here and else-
where. In effect, animal love gives Milton a naturally grounded,
divinely sanctioned model for the desire of like for like, and this gift
allows him to rehabilitate the male-male love of classical antiquity
within a heteronormative erotics of the same.
Florida State University
NOTES
1John Milton, "Epitaphium Damonis," in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Fla
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 94-105. Hereafter abbreviated "E" and
parenthetically by line number. Translations from Milton, Virgil, Catul
Charles Diodati are my own; others are as indicated below.
Bruce Boehrer 807
2 Donald Clayton Dorian, The English Diodatis (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 1950), 178. For this argument, see also A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Milton's Pastoral
Monodies," in Studies in Honour of Gilbert Norwood, ed. Mary E. White (Toronto:
Univ. of Toronto Press, 1952), 261-78, esp. 267-68; and W. A. Montgomery, "The
Epitaphium Damonis in the Stream of Classical Lament," in Studies for William A.
Read: A Miscellany Presented by Some of His Colleagues and Friends, ed. Montgom-
ery (1968; reprint, Baton Rouge; Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1940), 207-20, esp. 217.
3Ralph Waterbury Condee, Structure in Milton's Poetry: From the Foundation to
the Pinnacles (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974), 113.
4 Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, 1.6 ("Heav'nly Muse"), 10.24-25
("dictates"). Hereafter abbreviated PL and cited parenthetically by book and line
number. For the standard treatment of Milton vis-a-vis the prophetic tradition, see
William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Pres,
1974), passim. For Milton's relation to his muse, see William B. Hunter, The Descent
of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946-1988 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989),
31-45; and Stanley Fish, "With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends Against the Muse,"
ELH 62 (1995): 509-27, which has been more recently reprinted in How Milton
Works (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 281-304.
5 For Milton's contributions to the developing ideology of companionate marriage,
see, among others, James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and
Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 188-309; John
Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony: A Study of the Divorce Tracts and
"Paradise Lost" (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 1-30; Philip J. Gallagher,
Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990), 33-44;
and Diane K. McColley, "Milton and the Sexes," in The Cambridge Companion to
Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 147-66,
esp. 153-64.
6 Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (O

Blackwell, 2000), 165-66.
7This is a central observation of scholarship on the "Epitaphium Dam
perhaps best exemplified by Albert Labriola, "Portraits of an Artist: M
Changing Self-Image," Milton Studies 19 (1984): 179-94, esp. 184-88; an
Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1654
(Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1997), 228-30. See Stephen Guy-Bray,
erotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: U
Toronto Press, 2002), 117-32, for a particularly fruitful reading of the juxtap
of literary and erotic concerns in Milton's poem, which "talks about sex at l
often as it talks about poetry" (118).
8 Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643/1644), in The Complete
Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1953-1982). All references to Milton's prose are to this edition, hereafter abbrevi-
ated DDD for The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, T for Tetrachordon, and C for
Colasterion and cited parenthetically by volume and page number.
9 For an influential summary of the shift in this word's signification from
"indivisible" to "distinct ... from others," see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 133. For
a recent discussion of Milton and the rise of modern individualism, see Nancy
Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellec-
tual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1992), 47-68. The poet is accustomed to using the term in its archaic sense, as when,
in Paradise Lost, Adam refers to Eve as his "individual solace dear" (PL, 4.486).
From the standpoint of this study, the "Epitaphium" may be read as dramatizing the
inherent conflict between the older sense of the word (as represented by the
companionship of the animals Thyrsis observes) and the newer sense (as represented
by Thyrsis's own isolated condition).
10 The Oxford Latin Dictionary thus gives "to unite sexually" as a sense of iungere,
encountered "usu[ally in the] pass[ive]" (see under the verb "iungo, iungere" in
definition 3b of "iungere").
"11 A Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton, ed. Laurence Sterne and
Harold H. Kollmeier (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies, 1985), 1488.
12 Georgics, vol. 4 of P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1969), 4:431. Hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page
number and abbreviated G. For the relation of this passage to Milton's "Epitaphium,"
see Douglas Bush, "The Latin and Greek Poems," in A Variorum Commentary on
the Poems of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1970), 1.1.309 n. 95.
13John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998),
969 n. 101.
14 Guy-Bray, 122. Catullus, in C. Valerii Catulli Carmina, ed. Mynors (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1958), 2.1-4, 9-10. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parenthetically by
poem and page number.
15 See Bush, 309. Walter MacKellar's and G. B. A. Fletch

echoes in the poem, for instance, do not mention this
John Milton, ed. MacKellar [New Haven: Yale Univ. Pre
"Milton's Latin Poems," Modern Philology 37 [1940]: 3
do the more recent editions produced by Flannagan, Leon
Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 2nd ed. [
Dorian goes so far as to claim that, "in all the ... lines
[Milton] frees himself from models and precedents to e
over Diodati's death in a series of original images" (180).
turn, may exemplify the broad disinclination of trad
instance, in the critical response to the conclusion of th
the pagan erotic context of Milton's elegy. Ovid, The Ar
trans. J. H. Mozley, 2 vols. (London: William Heinema
16 OED, "Unkindly," adj. la, ib, 2a; adv. 2b, the last def
3.456.
17 Turner, 197.
18 Turner, 199. See also Stephen Fallon, "The Metaphysics of Milton's Divorce
Tracts," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein
and Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), esp. 73-77.
19 Fallon, 73.
20 For an opposing opinion, see Mary Nyquist, "The Genesis of Gendered
Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost," in Re-Membering Milton:
Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New
York: Methuen, 1987), 99-127, esp. 112.
21Cicero, De Amicitia 6.20, in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans.
William Armstead Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979). Cicero's
Bruce Boehrer 809
remarks here derive, in turn, from Aristotle's argument in the Nicomachean Ethics
that the natural companionship of beasts with their own kind parallels the natural
impulse to friendship among human beings (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence
Irwin [Indianapolis: Hackett,1999], 8.1.3 [1155a]).
22 For a discussion of this literature, and its exclusion of women from the purview
of true friendship, see Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A
Cultural Poetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 33-41. For a discussion of
the classical tradition of friendship, transmitted from Aristotle to Cicero, see Irving
Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther, 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1984), 1:88-110, who remarks that "Aristotle has scant regard for the society that
sexual love effects" (1:92). For the erotic troping of homosocial friendship in the
Renaissance, see, among others, Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male
Friendship in Elizabethan England," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan
Goldberg (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 40-61.
23Cicero, 6.22 ("inter"), 19.69 ("in friendship").
24 Plutarch, "The Dialogue on Love," 750d, in Plutarch's Moralia, trans. Edwin
Minar, Jr., F. H. Sandbach, and W. C. Helmbold, 15 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1927-1973), 9:301-441, 9:741-71 ("[1]ove").
25 Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne,
trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 138.
26 Saint Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, ed. and trans. John Hammond
Taylor, 2 vols. (New York: Newman, 1982), 2:75.
27For a summary of the opposing views on this issue, see Arnold Williams, The
Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527-1633
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1948), 85-86.
28Montaigne, 138.
29 Bruce Boehrer, "'Lycidas': The Pastoral Elegy as Same-Sex Epithalamium,"
PMLA 117 (2002): 222-36.
30John Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: Univ. Press o
Kentucky, 1993), 35.
31Shawcross, 33-36; Guy-Bray, 129-30.
32 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 87. Sukhant
Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon,
1989), 417. Montgomery, 218.
33MacKellar, 352-53 n. 219.
34 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, in Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry an
Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press
1977), 426.
35 See Gary Bouchard, Colin's Campus: Cambridge Life and the English Eclogu
(Selinsgrove: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 2000), 38-61, for the general outline of this
argument; and Bouchard, 120-33, for its particular application to Milton.
36 Gordon Campbell, "Imitation in Epitaphium Damonis," Milton Studies 19
(1984): 165-77.
37 The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 4 vols. (New Brunswick:
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1949-1958), 1:98-99. Hereafter abbreviated LR and cited
parenthetically by page number.
38 Turner, 40.
39 For recent commentary on this passage, see, among others, Christine Froula,
"When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," in Canons, ed. Robert
von Hallberg (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 149-75; McColley, Milton's
Eve (Champaign-Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), 74-86; Nyquist, 119-123;
Marshall Grossman, "Servile/Sterile/Style: Milton and the Question of Woman," in
Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press,
1988), 148-68, esp. 150-52; Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language
of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 38ff.; Linda Gregerson, The Reforma-
tion of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 148-63; Lynne Greenberg, "A Preliminary Study of
Informed Consent and Free Will in the Garden of Eden: John Milton's Social
Contract," in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles
Durham (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 2000), 99-117.
40Turner, 281.
41The association of Milton with patriarchalism and misogyny, dating at least from
Dr. Johnson's attribution to the poet of a "Turkish contempt of females" (424), ha
course undergone extensive scholarly discussion over the past quarter-century
addition to the relevant works on this subject, see, among others, Sandra Gilber
"Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," PMLA 9
(1978): 368-82; Lewalski, "Milton on Women-Yet Once More," Milton Studie
(1974): 3-20; and Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Pre
1987), esp. 1-15.
42 Gregerson, 166.
Bruce Boehrer 811

Animal Love in Milton Epitaphium Damonis

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Animal Love in Milton: The Case of the "Ephitaphium Damonis"

Author(s): Bruce Boehrer

[Hei mihi quam similes ludunt per pratajuvenci,

But for humankind, Thyrsis bitterly observes, the rule is different:

We human beings are an unhappy lot, troubled by dire fates, a race

788 Animal Love in Milton

define human society in contradistinction to that of the natural world.

Bruce Boehrer 789

Thyrsis's complaint against the human condition deserves notice,

790 Animal Love in Milton

Bruce Boehrer 791

He himself, comforting his sick love with the hollow of a tortoise-

[Ipse caua solans aegrum testudine amorem

Here, as Orpheus laments his deceased Eurydice against the back-

792 Animal Love in Milton

Sparrow, my girl's delight, with whom she is accustomed to play,

[Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem

Catullus's vision of domestic intimacy not only draws an implicit

My girl's sparrow is dead, my girl's delight, whom she loved more

[Passer mortuus est meae puellae,

Bruce Boehrer 793

If Catullus's elegy for a sparrow seems trivial, even risible-as Ovid

[Ales habet, quod amet; cum quo sua gaudia iungat,

If Thyrsis's complaint in the "Epitaphium" was deliberately modeled

794 Animal Love in Milton

This erotic subtext exerts a certain interpretive pr

In developing his foundational theory of companionate marriage

Bruce Boehrer 795

Locating spiritual longing in Eden and distinguishing it from the

mating of beasts as a condition with its own measure of dignity, in fact

796 Animal Love in Milton

a conversing solace, & peacefull society is the prime end of mariage,

Here, in particular, the language of the divorce tracts betrays a

Bruce Boehrer 797

if there be not a more human burning which mariage must satisfy, or

through its own transcendence of carnal promiscuity. H

[(A) natura mihi videtur potius quam indigentia orta amicitia,

798 Animal Love in Milton

Milton, of course, is aware of this trajectory of thought, and he

Bruce Boehrer 799

if... a relationship, free and voluntary, could be built up, in which

By the mid-1640s, Milton has at least begun to regard marriage as an

If, for Montaigne, marriage cannot possibly serve as a medium for

800 Animal Love in Milton

[Quod tibi purpureus pudor, & sine labejuventus

As Shawcross and Guy-Bray have noted in different ways, this

This particular passage from the "Epitaphium," p

Bruce Boehrer 801

ing personal correspondence with the young poet.36 There, in two

[Ka' ydp cravptLov OaTaLt TdvTa KaX(CJG, Kait 6 anp, K

802 Animal Love in Milton

[laTa IaCKpdr, TO6rTOL KClXXL(TOL avOEUL, KaL OvXXoLG KO[LJVTEU, KCL

Nor is it therefore surprising, from the standpoint of my present

I have nothing with which to fault my way of life at present, apart

This, after all, is a version of the same complaint to which Thyrsis

Bruce Boehrer 803

But to return to where this essay started: how, then, do we account

804 Animal Love in Milton

complementarity of woman and man.41 Thus Eve's creati

Bruce Boehrer 805

What call'st thou solitude, is not the Earth

And it thus falls to Adam, from his position of perceived but

Among unequals what societie