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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, “moving” 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 pedagogical 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 dictating) 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 selfpresentation 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. + 83 +
