The Horseless Epic
2009; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1094-348x.2009.00207.x
ISSN1094-348X
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Linguistic Studies
ResumoThe precise epic to which my title refers is Paradise Lost, although one could arguably apply the title phrase in loose fashion to all of Milton's late work. In this essay, I want to argue the following interrelated propositions: first, that Milton's epic poetry (represented here, for economy's sake, by Paradise Lost) is distinguished by an almost complete absence of the equestrian imagery and references to be found in its most important classical antecedents; second, that this virtual absence provides insight into the thematic and formal qualities that differentiate Miltonic epic from its Homeric and Virgilian forebears; and third, that in the very few cases, when equestrian references do appear in Milton's late poetry, they function consistently as invidious discriminators, associated with fallen experience, corrupt notions of sociopolitical order, and debased language and literature. Most broadly, I think, Milton's treatment of horses in Paradise Lost does not simply effect a strategic violation of epic decorum; it seeks in the process to mark off a space of Pegasean inspiration for the poem itself, and to present that space, paradoxically, as a function of the poem's pedestrian thematics. In presenting this case, I shall start by tracing some broad comparisons between Milton and his classical models and then proceed to a close reading of Milton's own equestrian references. Finally, I shall conclude with some general remarks on the literary-historical significance of Milton's approach to equine representation in his late verse. It is easy to confirm the relative horselessness of Milton's late works by comparing them to the three classical epics generally acknowledged as their most pervasive influences. Homer's Iliad employs the noun in its different inflected forms, along with such immediate variants as (horseman), some 432 times (Prendergast 208-12). The more meditative—and waterlogged—Odyssey registers 52 occurrences of the same words (Dunbar 196). Virgil's Aeneid presents approximately 147 instances of equus and closely related variants such as eques (Warwick 241-44). I must admit that these tallies are probably somewhat imprecise, for the simple reason that I have not double-checked the line citations for each of the 600-odd usages in question. But this hardly seems to matter when one notes, by contrast, that Paradise Lost employs the noun horse and all its variants precisely five times. One may define the search more broadly in the case of Paradise Lost, but even so one ends up with only two usages of chivalry and nine instances of steed and its variants. Even if one includes the poem's four occurrences of knight, the overall tally yields a mere twenty references to horses and horsemen in the entire epic (Bradshaw 174, 49, 339, 192). This amounts to somewhat more than one-third the number of analogous—and more strictly defined—references in the Odyssey, about one-seventh the number in the Aeneid, and less than one-twentieth of those in the Iliad. My main concern here is to distinguish Milton from Homer and Virgil. However, one could extend the comparison to Milton's more recent precursors in the mode of romance as well. The most directly influential of these, Spenser, offers much the same prospect; the noun “horse” and its variants appear fifty-three times in The Faerie Queene, the nouns steed and steeds occur some 128 times, and there are additional occurrences of related words such as stallion and palfrey (Osgood 426-27, 631, 812, 816-17). If anything, Orlando Furioso presents an even more marked disparity. The fourth word of the poem's opening line is cavallier; horses like Baiardo function for Ariosto as the equivalent of full-fledged literary characters; and the noun cavallo alone occurs eleven times in the first two of the poem's forty-six cantos. Consistent with this expanded focus upon romance as well as epic, one could also extend a critique of equestrian imagery beyond the familiar epic association of horses with martial heroism; by this logic, it would become necessary to consider the horse also as a figure of desire, derived ultimately from Plato's comparison of the soul to an airborne chariot in the Phaedrus.1 And by the same token, one could enlarge the range of inquiry still further, to include the “Faustian” impulse Neil Forsyth detects in Milton's poetic aspiration “beyond the bounds of what has been done before” (165). As variously inflected as these equestrian images are, I shall treat them here, for simplicity's sake, as different species of a single genus: the figure of poetic inspiration as Pegasean flight, epitomized by the mythic figure of the winged steed. This figure, in all its complexity, proves central to Milton's poetic ambitions, and he distinguishes it sharply from the figure of the flesh-and-blood, earthbound warhorse, with its connections to classical epic, chivalric exploits, and aristocratic culture. This latter image of the horse, so integral to the primary epic tradition, disappears almost entirely from the late Milton. As the preceding word counts demonstrate, the contrast here could hardly be more pronounced. But in fact it is. For one thing, one of Milton's five uses of horse actually occurs in the line “The River Horse and scalie Crocodile” (7.474), which is of course a reference not to horses at all but to hippopotami. Likewise, Milton's use of the word steed seems clearly calculated to mark a difference; the angelic steeds of Paradise Lost are emphatically not horses, at least not in the sublunary, postlapsarian, everyday sense of the word. But more of them later. Beyond all this, the contrast grows sharper still when viewed against Milton's overall epic practice, which famously involves an aggressive assimilation of Homeric and Virgilian gestures. In a sense, the Miltonic program of classical emulation seems built on the principle that more is better: Paradise Lost reproduces the convention of the epic invocation not once, but in quadruplicate; it answers the Homeric catalogue of ships with a catalogue of devils; it responds to Virgil's sibylline prophecy with the Pisgah vision of Paradise Lost 11 and 12; it supplies the requisite epic questions and flashbacks and infernal descent and voyage and battle-scenes, to say nothing of the obligatory opening in medias res; it promises “to soar /Above th'Aonian Mount” (1.14-15; first italics mine).2 The resulting allusive environment, in turn, interacts with an euhemerist mythography whereby Paradise Lost corrects the errors of earlier, diabolically inspired epic verse; Milton's adaptation of epic conventions thus claims to embody the divine source narrative from which classical practice descends as a series of debased derivatives.3 On this view, the validity of Milton's poem as theodicy is roughly correlated to its comprehensiveness as a model of epic form; the more fully Paradise Lost corrects the classical epic by supplying remedial accounts of its thematic and formal preoccupations, the more fully it confirms its own originary, and therefore sacred, status. So it seems all the more remarkable that Paradise Lost should so generally neglect one of the dominant concerns of Homeric and Virgilian epic: horses and their relation to the culture of martial achievement. Even when the horse-references in Homer and Virgil are figurative—as in Aeneas's description of the Trojan horse in Book 2 of the Aeneid—or formulaic—as in the Homeric construction ‘Εκτορ‘ (“Hector, tamer of horses”)—they embody a pervasive ethic of equestrian heroism. Yet Milton seems singularly blind (for want of a better word) to this aspect of his predecessors' work. It is almost as if he had failed to notice it. Almost, but not quite: I shall argue later that Milton's few literal and figurative allusions to horses and horsemanship in Paradise Lost actually comprise a coherent response to the equestrian thematics of his epic precursors. But in the meantime, the near-absence of horses in Paradise Lost arguably marks Milton's reconfiguration of the concept of epic heroism itself, a reconfiguration that seeks “to spiritualize the heroic poem” by “retaining such conventional motifs as kingship and warfare” while “alter[ing] their traditional character by stressing their internal rather than external significance” (Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero 193). That Milton should have responded this way to earlier conventions of epic heroism is now largely taken for granted. John Steadman has discerned a “rejection of the conventional heroic argument of warfare” in Paradise Lost, along with “its displacement . . . by the ordeal of spiritual combat” (Milton and the Paradoxes of Renaissance Heroism 173). Catherine Gimelli Martin sees the poet as “educating . . . his . . . audiences about the failures of conventional heroism” (203). James Freeman has described Paradise Lost as “Milton's supreme attack on the notion of desirable conflict” and an expression of the poet's own “dislike of war” (5, 6). This view of matters has also gained critical support from the related tendency to see Milton's battle-scenes in Paradise Lost as either barbaric and inept (on the view of Voltaire and Johnson)4 or parodic and therefore intentionally “ridiculous” (this being the perspective of scholars like Stanley Fish).5 In either case, one is left with an epic poet who does not really do epic warfare. Given the inveterate association of horses with martial subject matter in the Western literary tradition,6 it makes sense that a poet so viscerally opposed to this subject matter would have trouble assimilating these beasts to his work. In fact, Milton's treatment of horses proves most intriguing when viewed from this standpoint, for it foregrounds two contradictory impulses central to the poet's overall epic practice: the instinct on one hand to out-imitate the classical tradition by reproducing its language and gestures, and the concomitant drive to assert the inferiority of the prior tradition by rejecting its aesthetic and cultural commitments. Paradise Lost negotiates this tension in part by preserving the classical epic's focus on warfare while translating it into a cross between parody and allegory. But something about the materiality of the warhorse resists such translation. In a sense this is counterintuitive. Paradise Lost proves remarkable for its protoscience-fictional willingness to theorize about extraterrestrial life, both the potential creatures “who [might] dwel[l] happy” on “other Worlds” placed “Amongst innumerable Stars” (3.570, 566, 565) and the angelic orders, whose metabolic capacities, both sexual and digestive, come in for extended discussion (5.404-50; 8.628-43). Likewise, Milton is most resourceful in adapting the traditional accoutrements of epic warfare to the metaphysical setting of his poem. The ambiguous epic similes that describe Satan's stature and armament in the poem's opening book; the “likeness of a Kingly Crown” that reposes on Death's head (or “what seem'd his head”[2.672]); the elaborate furniture of the War in Heaven: if Paradise Lost can accommodate all of these devices, together with life on other worlds and a disquisition upon the angelic digestive canal, then surely it can do something with horses as well. Yet the poet's neoplatonism, which endows humanity with the potential for spiritual transformation along the sliding scale of the Great Chain of Being, arguably resists the elaboration of a heavenly zoology. One can sense the problem here by comparing early and late versions of the neoplatonic transformational model in Milton's work, the former drawn from the Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, the latter from Paradise Lost. In the Mask, Comus's followers, who have abandoned their human self-control and therewith “chang'd / Into some brutish form of Woolf, or Bear, / Or Ounce, or Tiger” (69-71), stand in contrast to the Lady, whose chastity holds the promise of metamorphosis up the Chain of Being, Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants Begin to cast a beam on th'outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, Till all be made immortal. This notion of spiritual mobility fascinates Milton throughout his career, and it reappears in Paradise Lost, where Satan undergoes a progressive spiritual degradation concomitant with his assumption of bestial forms—cormorant (4.196), lion (402), tiger (403), toad (800), and of course serpent—all of which contrast with Raphael's suggestion that Adam and Eve might undergo a process of spiritual “improvement”: [F]rom these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit, Improv'd by tract of time, and wingd ascend Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell; If ye be found obedient. As Alastair Fowler has pointed out, this conception of the Great Chain of Being renders it “as dynamic as any evolutionary system of more recent times” (Carey and Fowler, PL 5.469-90n). But as Karen Edwards has observed, the Great Chain of Being also presupposes inevitable “comparisons of worth” insofar as it situates creatures in hierarchical relation to one another (125). Edwards has noted how patently silly this hierarchism becomes when applied to the lower levels of the Chain of Being through questions such as “Is an elephant superior to a whale? Is a crocodile superior to a butterfly?” (125). But it remains necessary as a function of the “self-congratulation” that Keith Thomas locates in early-modern discourse on the natural status of humankind, a self-congratulation that survives in Milton's bestial images of spiritual degradation, as well as in his parallel fantasies of spiritual evolution.7 In short, Milton remains invested in hierarchical distinctions between humanity and the lower orders of creation, and this investment is implicitly threatened by the presence of beasts in heaven. One may take it as axiomatic that a heavenly steed is superior to an earthly steed, but where does that same heavenly steed stand in relation to an earthly man? The question proves as annoying as it is fatuous. It complicates traditional views of man's privileged position as “The intermediary between creatures, . . . the familiar of the gods above him [and the] lord of the beings beneath him” (Pico 3) by positing another order of being that is, in some ways at least, equally familiar with the gods. Likewise it interferes with neoplatonic claims that humanity is unique in its ability “to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life” or “rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine” (Pico 7-8), for it introduces a lower, brutish form of life amidst the superior orders themselves. Given these possibilities, one can understand the refusal of some theologians to imagine animals in heaven. So horses present a peculiar challenge to Milton in Paradise Lost. On one hand his commitment to epic form and to the emulation of Homer and Virgil demands that he make at least some place for them in his poem. Yet on the other hand, his own declared reluctance “to indite / Warrs” (9.27-28) renders them problematic, and this difficulty is exacerbated by the challenge they present to an anthropocentric view of creation. Finally, to these difficulties must be added the further complication of Scripture itself, which seems in places to accommodate horses, or horselike creatures, in heaven. In 2 Kings 2.11, Elisha observes Elijah wafted to heaven in a “chariot of fire” pulled by “horses of fire,” and in 2 Kings 6.17, Elisha himself is protected from the army of the King of Syria by a heavenly host equipped with “horses and chariots of fire.” In Revelation 19.11, St. John declares, “I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.” And three verses later, John continues, “the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed . . . on white horses” (14). One could point to other such passages as well, and while they remain subject to interpretation (Elisha and John could have seen real warriors on real horses, or they could have seen spiritual warriors on spiritual horses, or they could have seen something so foreign to their experience that they had no choice but to endow it with an imaginary equine form so as to render it comprehensible), they nonetheless put pressure on Milton to admit some sort of animal presence into his depiction of heaven and hell in Paradise Lost. So when it comes to the treatment of horses in Paradise Lost, Milton finds himself drawn in various directions by his assimilation and simultaneous rejection of classical sources, by his neoplatonic understanding of humanity's placement on the Great Chain of Being, and by the text of Scripture itself. The poet's response to these matters can be summarized as follows. First, he admits equine references to Paradise Lost, but in dramatically fewer cases than one might expect, given the frequency of such matter in Homer and Virgil. Second, he disposes his references along an axis of corporeality that implicitly distinguishes the horse as physical creature from the horse as metaphysical being, a distinction advanced further through specific lexical choices. And finally, Milton alludes to earthly horses in ways that regularly associate them with Satan and his followers (both heavenly and earthly), with fallen history, and with corrupt cultural practice. The last of these points is born out every time Milton uses the word horse in Paradise Lost (apart from the “River Horse” euphemism). It occurs first in Book 2, where Sin opens the gates of hell, to describe the breadth of the passage they create: [T]he Gates wide op'n stood, That with extended wings a bannerd Host Under spread Ensigns marching might pass through With Horse and Chariots rankt in loose array; So wide they stood, and like a Furnace mouth Cast forth redounding smoak and ruddy flame. The language here is military and rather technical. The gates of hell, we are given to understand, would admit an army “with extended wings,” the wings in question being defined by the OED as “the two divisions (right wing, left wing) on each side of the main body or centre of an army or fleet in battle array” (“Wing” sb. 7). These would be deployed horizontally in order of battle, as opposed to marching order; and the lateral extent of things is further emphasized by the phrase “Horse and Chariots rankt in loose array”—for example, spread out for maximum maneuverability. Here the horse appears proleptically in its traditional capacity as an implement of war, and Milton has already introduced the military usage of “wings” in an earlier description of Satan's followers, who “enclose him round” with “doubl'd Ranks” bent “from wing to wing” as he addresses them in hell (1.617-18). However, the later martial image appears in a context of figurative rather than literal combat, as a prelude not to battle but to temptation. Moreover, it is not clear just what “bannerd Host,” human or demonic, might pass through the gates of hell, nor whether the host in question would be entering or leaving, and this uncertainty invites a conflation of the human and angelic damned—the latter preparing to issue forth in battle array to effect the destruction of humankind, the former destined to travel the opposite way. As it happens, both sides of this conflation—the demonic and the human—reappear in Milton's later references to horses in Paradise Lost. Among the demons, as Satan and his followers celebrate the successful temptation of Adam and Eve, Sin and Death emerge from hell and settle on earth: Mean while in Paradise the hellish pair Too soon arriv'd, Sin there in power before, Once actual, now in body, and to dwell Habitual habitant; behind her Death Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet On his pale Horse. Here both Sin and Death appear in a sort of ontological transition, a transition that leads specifically to their embodiment. Sin's incorporation registers the move from potential to “actual” disobedience in Eden; as Adam and Eve realize their transgressive desires by eating the forbidden fruit, they generate a “body of sin,” in St. Paul's phrase (Rom 6.6),8 which simultaneously provides a body for Sin. Death, on the other hand, is still evolving from a spiritual to a physical form, a process to be completed in Book 11 of Paradise Lost when Adam responds to his prophetic vision of Abel's murder by asking Michael, “But have I now seen Death?” (12.462). Michael's response—“Death hast thou seen / In his first shape on man, but many shapes / Of Death, and many are the ways that lead / To his grim Cave” (11.466-69)—adumbrates a “body of death” correlative to Paul's “body of sin.” While Michael notes that the human embodiment of death takes “many shapes,” Death's proper iconic form is rendered in the language of Revelation 6.8 that endows him with a “pale Horse,” a horse he will presumably mount when he assumes “his first shape on man” with the death of Abel. So much for the equine associations of demons: but fallen humanity comes in for the same sort of linkage later in Book 11, as Adam observes the offspring begotten by the union of the “sons of God” and “daughters of men” described at Genesis 6.2: Part wield thir Arms, part curb the foaming Steed, Single or in Array of Battel rang'd Both Horse and Foot, nor idely mustring stood; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With cruel Tournament the Squadrons joine; Where Cattle pastur'd late, now scatterd lies With Carcasses and Arms th'ensanguind Field. Adam's vision of postlapsarian history returns us, ironically, to the transhistorical tableau of Satan, Sin, and Death at the gates of hell. The “Horse and Chariots rankt in loose array” that could pass through those gates now confront Adam on earth, “in Array of Battel rang'd,” providing a physical counterpart to the host of Satan's demonic followers. It is an image that Milton recalls in Paradise Regained, when Satan tempts Christ with the promise of temporal power: either that of the Parthian host, “All Horsemen, in which fight they most excel” (3.307), who “issue forth” (305) from Ctesiphon against the Scythians; or that of Rome, whose “Legions and Cohorts, turmes of horse and wings” (4.66) may also be seen “issuing forth, or entring in” to the city's gates (63). For a reader familiar with Paradise Lost, these later gates insist upon their status as terrestrial manifestations of the gates of hell. In such later passages, the equestrian imagery of Paradise Lost acquires both a temporal location and a spiritual derivation. And if any doubt remains as to the precise ethical valence of this imagery, we may contrast it to the poem's only other direct reference to horses, this one a marker not of their presence but of their absence. As Adam goes forth to greet the visiting Raphael in Book 5 of the epic, we are told that [O]ur Primitive great Sire, to meet His god-like Guest, walks forth, without more train Accompani'd then with his own compleat Perfections, in himself was all his state, More solemne then the tedious pomp that waits On Princes, when thir rich Retinue long Of Horses led, and Grooms besmeard with Gold Dazles the croud, and sets them all agape. The force of the reference here is clearly disparaging, and it characterizes Adam's prelapsarian excellence—his “compleat / Perfections”—through contrast with a degenerate social order in which retinues, horses, grooms, and gold seek to function as markers of excellence while ironically serving as just the opposite: a composite emblem of spiritual and political corruption. For Milton, paradise would seem to be a place without horses, or at least without horses as we know them. But what, then, of heaven and hell? How does Milton accommodate Scripture's own apparent placement of horses in the heavenly host? The first step in answering this question is to note that whatever creatures the heavenly host may ride, Milton does not call them horses. His preferred word for them—in fact, the only one he uses in connection with what we might call metaphysical, as opposed to earthly, saddle-stock—is steed. This lexical practice is consistent enough to suggest a deliberate distinction. The word horse refers in Paradise Lost only to earthly quadrupeds. Steed, for its part, appears five out of nine times as a marker of what the angels and devils ride; three out of nine times in what we might call a writerly capacity—that is, to refer to poetic inspiration, to function as the vehicle of a simile, or to allude to literary subject matter; and only once in direct reference to horses as we know them. (This last construction occurs at 11.643, in the “Sons of God” passage discussed earlier.) The writerly usages tend to be conventional. In Book 9 the poet distinguishes his own work from the “tedious havoc” of “fabl'd Knights” in courtly romance, with their “Caparisons and Steeds” (30, 35). In Book 4 Satan, confronted by Ithuriel and Zephon in paradise, “repli'd not, overcome with rage; / But like a proud Steed reind, went hautie on, / Chaumping his iron curb” (861-63)—an image that recalls traditional references to the spirit and mettle of warhorses while also implicitly depicting Satan, in Roy Flannagan's words, as “stupid and stubborn as a horse, even while controlled by reins and curb bit” (Milton 468n238). In the invocation to Book 7, the poet refers to the “flying Steed unrein'd” (17) of his inspiration. The remaining five occurrences of steed all appear in the context of angelic warfare or transportation, all to describe the apparatus of heavenly conflict or of movement between heaven and the physical universe. As such, these uses of the word clearly mark a distinction of species; whatever else the fallen and unfallen angels may ride, they do not seem to be horses in any conventional sense of the word. At 2.531-32, Satan's followers, engaged in war games, “curb thir fierie Steeds, or shun the Goal / With rapid wheels,” their steeds of fire arguably recalling the “horses and chariots of fire” of 2 Kings 6.17. These beasts reappear in Book 3, where we are reminded of Elijah's ascent to heaven “Rap't in a Chariot drawn by fiery Steeds” (522). The same imagery recurs in Book 6, where Abdiel encounters the heavenly host preparing for war with Satan's followers: “thick embattled Squadrons bright, / Chariots and flaming Armes, and fierie Steeds / Reflecting blaze on blaze first met his view” (16-18). Later, the first day of the War in Heaven ends in “foul disorder; all the ground / With shiverd armour strow'n, and on a heap / Chariot and Charioter lay overturnd/ And fierie foaming Steeds” (389-91). And in Book 11, Michael refers to Enoch's translation to heaven “Rapt in a balmie Cloud with winged Steeds” (706)–an image not found in the account of this event at Genesis 5.24 but clearly assimilating Enoch's ascent to that of Elijah in 2 Kings. The ultimate model for all these references to fiery steeds and chariots is to be found, in turn, in the Merkabah–the chariot of God described in the Book of Ezekiel 1 and 10. Here God appears to the prophet in a conveyance of amber light propelled by four elaborate creatures, each with four faces (of a lion, a man, an ox, and an eagle), four wings, the hands of a man, straight feet with the soles of a calf's foot, and an appearance “like burning coals of fire” (1.13). In Milton's hands, this vision translates into the “Chariot of Paternal Deitie” (6.750) ridden by the Son on the final day of the War in Heaven: [F]orth rushed with whirlwind sound The Chariot of Paternal Deitie, Flashing thick flames, Wheele within Wheele undrawn, Itself instinct with Spirit, but convoyd By four Cherubic shapes, four Faces each Had wondrous, as with Starrs thir bodies all And Wings were set with Eyes, with Eyes the wheels Of Beril, and careering Fires between. The description continues in comparable detail, but this is the heart of it, and three points need to be made about it in its relation to epic conventions of equestrian warfare. First, this chariot clearly sets the standard for the war chariots of Milton's angels and devils, all of which are described in similar albeit diminished terms. As Michael Lieb has suggested, the “Chariot of Paternal Deitie” provides “the transcendent expression of the ‘mighty Quadrature’ formed by the host of the saints,” while Satan's artillery in Paradise Lost and his “sulphurous chariot” in In Quintum Novembris serve as “debased” counterparts to the heavenly thunder and lightning that accompany the Merkabah (296). Lieb has studied the iconography of Ezekiel's vision in seventeenth-century Europe, and his research gives us a fair idea of how Milton seems to have imagined the chariot (291-300 and figs. 14, 15, 16, and 21). It serves (and this is my second point) as a composite emblem of “holy war” in the Old Testament, war whose “most dominant feature . . . involved the simple act of standing still” and thereby revealing “faith in God's providence.”9 This is the posture to which the Son himself calls his followers at the conclusion of the War in Heaven (“Stand still in bright array ye Saints, here stand / Ye Angels arm'd, this day from Battel rest”[6.801-02]), and it contrasts sharply with the exertion and kinesis of more conventional epic warfare. My third and most important point is that within this model of warfare-as-standing-still, the chariot becomes superfluous as a vehicle of physical mobility. It functions as a figurative rather than literal conveyance, and in fact its purpose as figuration is to mark a space of paradox, a motion beyond motion, as it were, and even more than that, a space in which the instrumental distinction between object and vehicle of conveyance itself ceases to exist. In exploring Milton's treatment of the Merkabah, Ja
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