Milton’s imagines Shakespeare memorialized by an array of frozen readers, a grander memorial than terracotta warriors attending a king because it is constantly refreshed with new readers made into new monuments. Milton recalls these lines in Il Penseroso as he describes the result of serious contemplation. Milton invites Melancholy:
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step, and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:
There held in holy passion still,
Forget thyself to marble, till
With a sad leaden downward cast,
Thou fix them on the earth as fast. (37-44)
Contemplation (particularly of the heavens) makes us forget ourselves and turn to “marble” as we stand and muse. It is the same effect Shakespeare has upon his readers.
The lines in “On Shakespeare,” invoking legions of readers made marble, are high compliment to Shakespeare, but they also suggest a sort of chilling effect on future poets. Perhaps these lines hint at why Milton never finished his tragedy about the Fall, outlined in his surviving manuscripts, but instead turned to epic to treat his greatest subject, safe from the shadow of all those monuments.