“This is the month, and this the happy morn”
In the first lines of the “Nativity Ode,” Milton begins the work of confusing his poem’s chronology. He tells his reader when his poem begins, while simultaneously making it impossible to identify the exact moment it takes place. The word “this” is at once specific and vague, and when Milton points to “this” month and “this” morning, it’s unclear which month and which morning he’s describing. He could be talking about the morning Christ was actually born, or the morning on which he’s celebrating Christ’s birth with his poem. The vagueness of his opening line highlights the strange relationship any ceremony or holiday has with time: it happens again and again, every year, running on cyclical rather than linear time. With his opening line, Milton begins to break the chronology of his poem, and to build towards its central fantasy: the moment when “Time will run back.”
“And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable.”
In the final lines of the “Nativity Ode,” Milton turns from the infant in the manger to the angels waiting to serve him. By placing his angles in a “Courtly Stable,” Milton suggests that he is thinking not only of the manger where Christ was born, but of the English court where he hoped to begin his work. As he describes the angels who surround Christ, “harnessed” like a fleet of horses pushing to leap forward, Milton is also writing about his own sense of anticipation. Like the angels, Milton is eager to be “serviceable” to his cause: the revolution beginning in England at the time he wrote the “Nativity Ode.”
“But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so,
The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
So both himself and us to glorify:
Yet first to those enchained in sleep,
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,”
In these lines, Milton wrestles with the chronology of his poem. He’s eager to leap forward to the end of the story he’s telling, and reluctant to keep his poem in the present moment. After describing the end of the world, he reminds himself that “This must not yet be so” and returns his poem to the “Babe” in the manger. He tries to focus his poem on the infant Christ, but his description immediately takes him back into the future as he imagines everything that Christ will do: “That on the bitter cross / Must redeem our loss; / So both himself and us to glorify.” Milton again reminds himself that this cannot yet be so: “Yet first…” The flow of the poem, forward and backward, reflects the eagerness at the heart of the “Nativity Ode,” the sense that events cannot happen quickly enough in Milton’s timeline.
