J OHN M INOT
Savoyard Savagery, Divined Divarication: Miltonʼs On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
Sonnet XVIII
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Evʼn them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones, Forget not; in the book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down on the rocks.  Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heavʼn. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
Oʼer all thʼ Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant, that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt the way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
John Milton, 1655 John Milton himself described his sonnets as occasional verse; given the general truth of that categorization together with their small number, it is no wonder that the bulk of critical attention to his works has gone to such monuments as Paradise Lost and his other long po-ems. Many of his sonnets, such as the eleventh, on the public response to the title of his treatise Tetrachordon, are delightfully executed but bear only limited interest past the reading and the understanding. This is not the rule, though, and one of the most notable counterexamples is his eighteenth, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont. Occasioned by an early sectarian cleansing shocking to readers of any age, its im-
passioned sense of outrage never fails to move us. But the poem is so rich in meaning and implication
that it works on more levels than this: there is also an ambiguity in Miltonʼs wishes brought about by the intermediate sentence bridging the octave and sestet, and this ele-ment qualifies the poem into one which may as well be meditative and burdened, not just exhortatory.
Anyone who has read Umberto Ecoʼs Name of the Rose knows of the ebb and flow around the twelfth century of the many religious movements which suffused Italy preaching poverty and simplicity. As one movement would be subdued, two more would spring up, involving the Church in great conflict. Most of these orders hoped to find their own stable positions within the Church. One which succeeded by greatly moderating (or, some said, deeply corrupting) the Churchʼs original precepts was the Franciscans. Less accommodating were the Waldenesians, or the Vaudois, excommunicated in 1215. Gradually being forced out of cities and the interior, the Vaudois, more fortunate than others, managed to set up their own small communities in the mountains around Piedmont and persist to this day. However, with the Reformation came the Counter-Reformation, a renewed wave of activity by the Church, which, among other things, began to erode the assump-tion that people in a society have a right to live within it—as reflected in the Spanish Inquisition. The influence of the counter-Reformation is seen in a new book, Holocaust: A History, by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, as the first step in the long intellectual evolution of Europe that eventually spawned the Holocaust (Hansen). So w
hen in 1655 the dukedom of Savoy, with which the Vaudois had made agree-ments of coexistence, sent in an army to forcibly expel them, the act was met all across Protestant Europe with a horror not wholly unlike that eventually provoked by the Holocaust: such activities were seen as an abomination in Godʼs sight, to be countered with as much force as could be mustered (it was even suggested that England send troops, before Savoy announced a reconciliation), something to be avenged, corrected, and never, for the sake of civilization, forgotten.
These sentiments are nimbly set down by Milton in his sonnet. It is a simple Italian sonnet, the octave being abbaabba (Milton did not use the abbacddc form), and the sestet efefef, one of the more common rhyme schemata. In terms of grammar, most of its sentences take the
form of imperatives, addressed to God: “avenge,” “forget not,” “record,” and “sow,” only introducing the actual information and images of the massacre in clauses subordinated to those imperatives: “whose bones lie scattered,” “that from these may grow,” and so on. The effect of having the narrative grammatically structured within the exhortation is to keep this cry for action on the part of God in the forefront of the readerʼs mind.
The octave is principally a recounting of the events of the mas-sacre, in harsh, though not unornament
ed, language, with a recurring interspersed image of a true faithful core surrounded on all sides by ruthless unbelievers. In the first half of the octave, this strong faith is expressed in the two lines “Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old / When all our Fathers worshipped Stocks and Stones.” Though the Vaudois rose around 1200, they had since developed the appealing tale that they had been Christians since their conversion by Paul on his way to Spain, centuries before the Catholic Church existed, when the inhabitants of the British Isles would have been worshipping pagan idols (Nardo 127), and the Vaudoisʼ supporters in other countries probably espoused the same narrative. In the sonnetʼs second half, similarly, “slain by the bloody Piedmontese” recalls the Philistines and others who had it in for the Jews in the Old Testament. Miltonʼs allusions to particular Biblical verses are numerous and well accounted for; an example is the reference to “Sheep” in line 6, which is not only the obvious “The Lord is my shepherd” metaphor but also a reference to Psalm 44:22, “Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter,” connecting to the earlier “slaughtered Saints” (Honigmann 167). Miltonʼs deep experience with and connection to the Bible (he did many poetic translations of vari-ous Psalms) make the Biblically stark, raw, yet still forward-looking style his own. At the same time, of course, he uses various English techniques that sometimes keep the poem moving along (“slaughtered Saints,” “slaughtered . . . scattered,” “Stocks and Stones,” “Sheep . . . Slain,” “The Triple Tyrant”) and sometimes help bind the poem into a whole (“t
hy truth . . . thy way”). With the convergence in the octave of the majority of these lower-level poetic techniques, the plaintive tragic narration of past (rather than future) events, and the Biblical connotations of bloody-minded enemies to be opposed zealously, this
section of the poem is the more attention-grabbing, drawing up the reader, injecting outrage into his blood, and inspiring him to continue reading.
With the octave done, though, the poem becomes less constructed around that aim and instead describes what Milton sees as the remedy. In lines 8–10, there is something of an interlude, with “Their moans / The Vales redoubled to the Hills, and they / To Heaven.” The sestet plays itself out over the final five lines with a hope that the blood of the martyrs may serve as a seed for later numerous Italian converts (a very common, perhaps over-common, metaphor, originated by the second-century Christian writer Tertullian) (Danielson 104), and that these converts would rise up against their tyrannous papal overlord, referred to as “the Babylonian woe” in the last line as a parting Old Testament reference. More complicated poetic techniques and concepts are used here, such as the definite phonetic similarity of the following words used while enacting this process: “redoubled” (line 9), “blood” (line 10), “hundredfold” (line 13), and perhaps the concluding “Baby-lonian” (line 14). The process taking place over the course of these words should be paraphrased: the moans of the Vaudois
are multiplied from the rocks where they are suffering to the forests nearby; the forests multiply them to the surrounding hills; the hills multiply them up to Heaven (while this culmination could be a simple reference to their cries being heard by Heaven, their moans are presumably poetic stand-ins for their souls). In the narrative parts of the poem, this is as far as the chain goes, but it is not the end of the chain. Milton wishes for the chain to be completed, but with God as the linking agent. Thus, in the sestet, Milton asks God to multiply the blood of the saints all across the Italian fields, the first concrete action in his wish list past the initial vague “Avenge.” He asks for more saints to grow up out of the ground, multiplied a hundredfold, to begin vengeance for the massacre.
Though the poem, with its near-constant exhortative structure mentioned above, appears to be a petition for God to do specific actions, this agenda is not necessarily the case. In Miltonʼs logic, the process of the blood of the martyrs being the metaphorical seed nourishing future converts could be, historically, a natural consequence of the attack on the Vaudois, rather than a result of a direct divine intercession. This
historical process would then directly fulfill the earlier demands, to remember and avenge the massacre. That is, it is possible that Milton is actually wishing, in Godʼs name, that future events merely transpire such that the authority of the Pope is someday challenged on his home ground—that
the actions of Savoy shall, ironically, work to the undoing of its papal overlord.
However, this interpretation raises political questions important for understanding Miltonʼs intentions. The historical-process model, as mentioned above, might make it falsely seem as if he expected his little story to naturally take place. Objectively, from our point of view, this perspective would be hard to swallow. Though true Protestantism (as opposed to the breakaway Catholicism of the late Church of England) seemed at that time to have had a bright future, at least in England, its growth was slowing elsewhere, and an Italian Reformation was and still is almost a contradiction in terms. While creating martyrs does tend in many historical settings to be counterproductive, it seems a stretch to expect affairs to turn out so in Miltonʼs instance. We gain more insight into the use he hoped his poem to serve by a more care-ful consideration of that intermediate sentence (lines 8–10) passed over above. It is in fact much, much more than an interlude. The first warning flag is that it is the only sentence that is not an imperative one. It simply narrates, and in a singularly beautiful way. There are some structural aids to this beauty: we have the internal near-rhyme of “vales” and “hills,” and the echo “to the Hills . . . To Heaven.” Ad-ditionally, it provokes much metrical interest: if we take it only as a single sentence, it can appear like this:
worshippingTheir moans the Vales redoubled to the Hills, and they to Heaven. or:
Their moans the Vales redoubled to
The Hills, and they to Heaven.
. . . which is 4-3, half of the traditional ballad meter! In reading aloud, the more one sets apart the sentences rather than the lines, the more rollingly balladlike this becomes. (Incidentally, Milton chose the ballad