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“DICTATES TO ME SLUMBRING” — DICTATION AND INSPIRATION IN PARADISE LOST
draw on the contexts in which the noun “dictate,” i.e. an “authoritative utterance
or pronouncement attributed to a particular person or source” (OED sw. “dictate”
3a) occurs to describe or explain a range of psychological activities.
In the corpus of texts under scrutiny (LION), we may often come across
expressions about the dictates of Conscience, Love, Lust, Nature (i.e. human
nature), or Virtue, to name just a few of the dozens of possible concepts and
faculties associated with the word. Only in a few of these cases is it possible to
interpret the expression literally, denoting an utterance to be committed to
writing. Interpreted against this background, the celestial Muse’s dictation to
the slumbering poet would amount to driving or prompting, or, in short, “mov¬
ing” the poet with the force of a command to compose the epic. Indeed, the
other verbs Milton uses to invoke the aid of the muse, “instruct” and “govern”,
express not so much the narrator’s need for information (the “copious matter”
of the song (PL 3.413)), as his attempt to get the right bearings. But however
abstract Milton’s conception of inspiration by the Celestial Patroness might be,
the poet’s choice of words does evoke—at least temporarily—the literal sense
of the word, the actual activity of taking dictation from the Muse. This sense is
revised in the course of the reading experience: as soon as readers establish the
grammatical function of “slumbring,” they are bound to realize that the peda¬
gogical or secretarial conventions of dictation simply do not apply here. When
the Celestial Patroness “dictates to [the epic narrator] slumbring,” she in fact
“inspires” (PL 9.23), as the continuation of the line (in which Milton uses the
conjunction “or” in the sense of sive, i.e. to “conflate difference”)”° suggests. In
other words, readers realize that (somewhat paradoxically) taking dictation from
the Muse, an activity which one would normally associate with the surrender
of individual creativity, actually contributes to the creative process, resulting
in Milton’s ambitious project, the “unpremeditated Verse” (PL 9.24). Needless
to say, this effect is indirectly amplified by the narrator’s frequent references to
blindness, a disability that presupposes a reverse role (i.e. that of the one dictat¬
ing) for the narrator than that described in the proem. As a result, the motif
of dictation in the description of inspiration, while fully retaining its potential
to confer authority on the creative process, is disentangled from its traditional
associations of a concrete activity of committing a verbal utterance to writing.
This reinterpretation of dictation complements other aspects of Milton’s self¬
presentation in Paradise Lost (e.g. the reference to the “unpremeditated Verse”
a,
or the Muse’s “easy” inspiration), but it is important to note that we also finda
20 HERMANN, Peter C., Paradise Lost, the Miltonic “Or,” and the Poetics of Incertitude, Studies
in English Literature 1500-1900, 43 (2003), 185.
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