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Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,1
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,2
When all our fathers worshipp’d stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll’d
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans3
The vales redoubl’d to the hills, and they
To Heav’n.4 Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow
O’er all th’ Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred-fold,5 who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.6
Analysis:
“On The Late Massacre in Piemont,” is a sonnet with the theme of good, pious people trapped in a dark world. It is about the struggle of good and evil, freedom and oppression. Piedmont is a region of Italy, which especially at that time was a strongly Catholic country. Milton calls on God to avenge the martyrs, the subjects of the sonnet who are brutally murdered in Piedmont by its people. The victims are martyrs because they have been killed for their Protestant faith. This massacre is a real event that Milton is commenting on. Milton invokes images of nature to set a grim tone in the beginning of the poem, but by the end the blood of the martyrs transforms the nature around it and makes it fertile. It is an interesting transition, and Milton is not speaking of literally making the ground more fertile for plants to grow, but people.
1. The Alpines are a rigid mountain range. Their peaks are often covered in snow. The bones scattered on the cold mountains creates a grim tone, a dark world.
2. Pious people were not spared. Milton sees this event as made even more tragic because the victims were religious. The use of “pure” identifies the victims as people of light, undeserving of their fate.
3.The attack was barbaric. Innocent, pure people have become bones scattered on stone. Women and children are not spared. Milton’s style here mimics the rolling of the people. This thought ends with a period, a crafted absolute stopping point, the way the mother and infant have died, their own lives terminated.
4. A “vale” is a valley. The valleys “redouble” or grow into hills. In this image of nature, the low point of the land has become the high point, and the people whose lives have ended so tragically have been raised to heaven.
5. The ground has been made fertile by the blood of the martyrs. What grows from this event and bloodied ground will not be plants. Milton believes news of this tragedy will bring new believers to the Lord. It is the idea that when one believer dies for his or her faith, a hundred more will take his or her place. Their deaths have transformed the image of Piedmont from a bone-covered rigid and cold mountain range to a fertile field.
6. The Babylonian Exile is an infamous event of Jewish and Judeo-Christian history. The Babylonians invaded and destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem, but the religion endures. This allusion to the Babylonians’ taking advantage of the temple and the land is reflected here in the destruction of the bodies of the martyrs. Most Christian faiths hold the belief that a person’s body is a temple, sacred and to be well-kept. Additionally, many Protestants of Milton’s time identified the Catholic Church with Babylon and the Whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation.
Analysis by John Young