Summary
Milton splits the “Nativity Ode” into a four-stanza introduction and a 27-stanza hymn. In the first two stanzas of the introduction, he describes the role Christ plays in Christian doctrine: how he was born to redeem our sins, and abandoned his perfect form in Heaven for a mortal form on Earth.
In stanzas 3 and 4, Milton introduces the muse who inspires his poetry, and tells her to rush ahead of the wise men traveling with gifts to the manger where Christ has just been born. Milton instructs his muse to deliver his own gift first: the hymn which encompasses the rest of the poem.
The hymn begins with a description of Christ’s birth in the manger. As Milton sets the scene, he personifies Nature as a woman cloaking her sins in white snow, a frequent symbol of purity in the Bible. His description of Nature covering her sin echoes Eve’s attempt to hide herself from God after the Fall.
In stanzas 3 through 7, Milton describes the absolute peace that follows Christ’s birth. He imagines battles ending, the ocean and the stars stopping, and the sun disappearing to make way for the greater light of Christ.
In stanzas 8 and 9, Milton turns to a group of shepherds who hear the music of Heaven from a field and listen in amazement. In stanza 10, he describes Nature bowing to the power of the music, and suggests that the music provides a better harmony than the physical laws governing the world. In stanzas 11 and 12, a group of angels appear in the sky singing and Milton compares the sound they make to the music that played during the creation of the world.
In stanzas 13 through 15, Milton calls out for the music to play again, and announces what will happen when it does: the Final Judgment, when time will stop and the gates of Heaven will open to all.
In stanza 16, Milton pulls back from his divine vision to the present moment. He reminds himself that “it must not yet be so,” because Christ has only just been born. Milton returns to the present moment, and summarizes the role Christ plays in Christian doctrine: taking on a human form to die for our sin. He then races back to the future, this time imagining the other side of the Final Judgment: how sinners will be judged in a “dreadful” trial.
In stanza 18, Milton returns to the present, describing how Christ’s birth has wounded Satan, who “not half so far casts his usurped way.” In stanzas 19 through 26, Milton imagines the false idols of Greek and Roman mythology retreating in the face of Christianity.
The poem ends with Mary looking at her sleeping son in the manger, and a fleet of ready angels surrounding them.
Analysis
Though the “Nativity Ode” is a poem about the birth of Christ, Milton spends very little time in the manger. His poem is constantly leaping forward to anticipate everything that Christ’s birth will bring, and Milton has to repeatedly remind himself to return to the moment when his poem actually takes place: the little baby in the manger.
By moving forward and back, Milton opens his “Nativity Ode” to the full sweep of Christian history. He turns a poem about the birth of Christ into a biblical epic that takes his reader from the creation of the world to the Final Judgment. More than writing an ode on Christ’s birth, Milton is sketching out a template for fusing biblical history with classical epic. The “Nativity Ode” is Milton’s first attempt at writing an epic poem on the Christian world, the template on which he eventually built Paradise Lost.
Milton opens his poem to the classical world in stanza 3, when he breaks from the template of a standard nativity ode by invoking a muse to guide his poetry: “Say heavenly Muse, shall not the sacred vein / Afford a present to the infant God?” In his invocation, Milton draws from the epic tradition, where poets begin their stories by calling upon a muse to guide their writing. By using the conventions of epic poetry to narrate the birth of Christ, Milton draws a parallel between his biblical story and poems like the Iliad and the Aeneid—epics that supported the classical world’s great empires. Milton emphasizes the connection between his poem and those classical epics by narrating the birth of Christ through the language of empire. He turns Heaven into a fortress through his description of the “high council table” where Christ once sat, the “courts of everlasting day” Christ left behind, the “blaze of majesty” at his birth, then goes on to imagine the angels as a military guard who “keep watch in squadrons bright” as the “Prince of Light” lands in the manger to begin his “reign of peace.”
Milton’s vocabulary makes it unclear whether the birth in the manger is a true miracle or a meticulously engineered political event. By bringing the language of empire into the manger, he suggests that the birth of Christ is another version of the wars recounted in the Iliad and the Odyssey—that there’s no difference between this scene and the military campaigns on which Greece and Rome built their national identities. It’s a cynical view of Christian history, a retelling of the nativity scene in which religion is only a guise for conquest, and the new king resembles the old monarchs.
More than this cynicism represents what Milton believed about Christianity, it reflects his anxiety about what was happening in English churches in the seventeenth century. Milton was a devout Christian, but he was skeptical of the many ways in which religion was used to advance different political interests. At the time he wrote the “Nativity Ode,” King Charles was attempting to roll back reformation in English churches by standardizing services, bringing back old ceremonies, and instituting a more rigid church hierarchy. Milton viewed all of these changes as barriers between worshippers and their personal relationship with God. Like many members of parliament, he feared that King Charles was forcing the English court into the church, and his anxiety is reflected in the political language he uses to describe the birth of Christ in the “Nativity Ode.” He frames his nativity scene with empire in order to condemn the state of religion in England and the king’s encroaching power over the way the country worshipped.
Milton believed that the church was regressing, slipping back into the forms the reformation sought to destroy, and he stages its failure by using the conventions of the classical world to describe the birth of Christ. In the Christian tradition, the birth of Christ brought the classical world to an end. At his birth, the classical seers lost their ability to see into the future and the pagan idols were destroyed. Milton dedicates an exceptional portion of the “Nativity Ode” (stanzas 19 - 25) to a description of how these idols fell. By cataloging the pagan gods as they are stupefied by Christ’s entrance into the world, Milton emphasizes that Christ's birth was a religious revolution, that it marked a transformation in the way people worshipped. Milton’s description of the idols falling draws a subtle parallel between the birth of Christ and a more contemporary religious revolution—the reformation in England, which obliterated the iconography and ceremony of the Catholic church, much like Christ’s birth overthrew the pagan statues and ceremonies of Classical religion. Though Milton emphasizes that the classical world ended with Christ’s birth, the old religion never truly vanishes from his poem. David Quint has pointed out that Milton continues to narrate through the conventions of classical poetry, even after the idols have fallen. The old forms seep back into his poetry almost imperceptibly. By blending classical poetry into his depiction of Christ’s birth, Milton stages a failed revolution—a version of the nativity scene that emphasizes the regression he saw taking place in King Charles’s court, England’s return to an archaic form of worship.
The “Nativity Ode” reflects Milton’s fear that the reformation was unraveling, as well as his skepticism about revolution more broadly. Milton was eager for a revolution against King Charles at the time he wrote the “Nativity Ode,” but he was also concerned that overthrowing the king would not lead to enduring change. Throughout his political career, Milton remained dubious of politicians who presented themselves as radically different, and feared that new governments would eventually return to the old forms. Though Milton was hopeful about the possibility of revolution, he was constantly deflating his own enthusiasm.
In the “Nativity Ode,” Milton writes his anxieties through a poem that is continually reaching and failing, shooting forward to a perfect future only to fall back into a flawed present. Through the flow of his poem’s chronology, he stages a failed revolution.
The poem first jumps forward in stanza 14, when Milton compares the music that played during Christ’s birth to the music that will play at the end of the world. His description of the end of the world is a fantasy of total unity, the sort of daydream at the bottom of revolutions. He loses himself in the imagery, then forces himself back to reality in stanza 16, when he recalls that this final chapter in Christian history is not yet possible because Christ has only just been born. Like a failed revolution, the poem returns to the place it began: a description of Christ in the manger. Milton holds to the present for a few lines, then shoots forward again in the same stanza, taking the poem back into its unattainable fantasy. The poem continues in this pattern, reaching for the future and falling back into the present. The flow of the poem reflects Milton’s anxiety at the time he wrote it—both his eagerness to join a revolution, and his fear that it was destined to fail.
