“Nativity Ode”의 전통의 독창적 변용

Abstract

As Milton’s “Nativity Ode” was written before daylight on Christmas morning of 1629, as a birthday gift to Christ, about two weeks after his twenty-first birthday, December 9, it is said to mark not only his legal but also his poetical and vocational coming of age. He seems to compose the ode as the portrait of the artist as a young shepherd who would be a future bard (a great Christian epic poet). Milton thinks of the gist of the Christ’s birth as His kenotic descent into a human body, so he wants to sing a humble song as his gift to the birth. The song, like Pindaric victory odes, needs to introduce the specific event and to establish its larger cosmic significance. And he also finds out that Christ’s sacrificial narrative, beginning with His humiliation and ending with His exaltation, seems very similar to the Virgilian narrative of poetic development in his messianic eclogue. Milton considers his predecessors’ great works as the result of a process of constant reinterpretation and recreation of literary traditions. He wants to overcome his elders by accommodating them to his particular needs. Just as Virgil, who would potentially rival Theocritus and Homer, announces in the fourth eclogue his movement from the pastoral genre to the more elevated vein of heroic poetry, so Milton proclaims in this poem his mental dedication to the lofty range of Christian epic poet. But, in order to show his excellence in every genre, he put the song in the Pindaric victory ode in stead of the humble range of the Virgilian bucolic. In accordance with the scenic movement from the meanly wrapt Child in the rude manger, then to the implications of that Child, and finally back to the sleeping Lord in the courtly stable, Milton varies his song from the “humble ode” to the “holy song,” and then he ends the “tedious song” in order to play an activist role to His heroic acts. In a word, “Nativity Ode” can be safely said to show Milton’s willingness to adapt and vary several literary traditions so as to create his own inventive form.