In his poem to Shakespeare, Milton expressed similar concerns about his slow and deliberate development toward becoming the voice of a nation (however infuriating to those of us who are well past our twenties and still hoping to make a much smaller mark on the world than Milton). After making the traditional claim that Shakespeare’s Folio is the most precious monument to Shakespeare, Milton tacitly compares himself to the Bard:
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
has built thyself a livelong monument,
For whilst to th’shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow… (5-10)
Shakespeare shames “slow-endeavoring art” with the famous flow of his “easy numbers.” Young Milton measures himself against Shakespeare and finds to his consternation that he seems to have to work harder (or at least longer) to do what Shakespeare supposedly does naturally. And yet, what art Milton displays here! In what I read as a tribute to the wordplay of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in the Second Folio printing of Milton’s poem the long-s in line nine’s “slow” playfully echoes the “flow” of line ten… Milton is not only “slow-endeavouring” as he writes, but he is “flow-endeavouring” in his attempt to honor Shakespeare. Even as Milton expresses humility before Shakespeare, he masters the previous poet’s techniques.
But it is the “wonder and astonishment” of line seven that most merits our attention. Milton, a more important if not better poet than Shakespeare, signals the key impact Shakespeare has upon readers: “astonishment.” The connotations here evoke the older forms of the word we sometimes find in early-modern poetry — “astoniement”: to be made stone. Later in Milton’s poem, this is exactly what happens as readers of Shakespeare are frozen in wonder, becoming a sort of marble sculpture garden, each reader a vivid tombstone in honor of the Bard: