Milton: Minor Poems :: NOTES. ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY.

NOTES. ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY.

From his sixteenth year Milton had been wont to write freely in Latin verse, on miscellaneous poetic themes, sometimes expressing his thoughts on events of the day, and sometimes addressing letters to his friends on purely personal matters. From these Latin poems, which therefore in some sense belong to English literature, we obtain valuable insight into his course of life and his way of thinking. What Milton wrote in foreign languages is indispensable for the information it gives us about himself—its content is important; but as poetry implies a fusing of content and form into an artistic unity, if one of these elements is foreign, the result is nondescript and cannot be ranged under the head of English literature in the strict sense of the term.

It is in one of Milton’s own Latin pieces that we find our best commentary on the Hymn on the Nativity. The sixth Latin Elegy is an epistle to his intimate college friend, “Charles Diodati making a stay in the country,” the last twelve lines of which may be freely translated as follows:—

But if you shall wish to know what I am doing,—if indeed you think it worth your while to know whether I am doing anything at all,—we are singing the peace-bringing king born of heavenly seed, and the happy ages promised in the sacred books, and the crying of the infant God lying in a manger under a poor roof, who dwells with his father in the realms above; and the starry sky, and the squadrons singing on high, and the gods suddenly driven away to their own fanes. Those gifts we have indeed given to the birthday of Christ; that first light brought them to me at dawn. Thee also they await sung to our native pipes; thou shalt be to me in lieu of a judge for me to read them to.

This means, of course, that the poet is composing a Christmas Hymn in his native language. We must note his age at this time,—twenty-one years: he is a student at Cambridge. The poem remains the great Christmas hymn in our literature. “The Ode on the Nativity,” says Professor Saintsbury, “is a test of the reader’s power to appreciate poetry.”

In four stanzas the poet speaks in his own person: he too must, with the wise men from the east, bring such gifts as he has, to offer to the Infant God. His offering is the humble ode which follows. We must take note of the change in the metric form which marks the transition from the introduction to the ode. In the stanzas of the former the lines all have five accents, except the last, which has six; while in the latter, four lines have three accents each, one has four, two have five, and one has six. Notice also the occasional hypermetric lines, such as line 47.

In connection with Milton’s Hymn, read Alfred Domett’s It was the calm and silent night.

5. For so the holy sages once did sing. See Par. Lost XII 324.

6. our deadly forfeit should release. Compare Par. Lost III 221, and see the idea of releasing a forfeit otherwise expressed in the Merchant of Venice IV 1 24.

10. he wont. This is the past tense of the verb wont, meaning to be accustomed. See the present, Par. Lost I 764, and the participle, I 332.

15. thy sacred vein. See vein in the same sense, Par. Lost VI 628.

19. the Sun’s team. Compare Comus 95, and read the story of PhaËthon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses II 106.

24. prevent them with thy humble ode. See prevent in this sense, in Shakespeare’s Julius CÆsar V 1 105, and in Psalm XXI 3.

28. touched with hallowed fire. See Acts II 3. On the meaning of secret, compare Par. Lost X 32.

41. Pollute is the participle, exactly equivalent to polluted.

48. the turning sphere. For poetical purposes Milton everywhere adopts the popular astronomy of his day, which was based on the ancient, i.e. the Ptolemaic, or geocentric system of the universe. Copernicus had already taught the modern, heliocentric theory of the solar system, and his innovations were not unknown to Milton, who, however, consistently adheres to the old conceptions. In Milton, therefore, we find the earth the centre of the visible universe, while the sun, the planets, and the fixed stars revolve about it in their several spheres. These spheres are nine in number, arranged concentrically, like the coats of an onion, about the earth, and, if of solid matter, are to be conceived as being of perfectly transparent crystal. Beginning with the innermost, they present themselves in the following order: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile. In Par. Lost III 481, the ninth sphere appears as “that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs the trepidation talked,” and the Primum Mobile, or the first moved, becomes the tenth and outermost of the series. The last two spheres contain no stars.

We see, then, what we must understand by the oft-recurring spheres in Milton’s poetry. In the line, Down through the turning sphere, however, the singular sphere is obviously used to mean the whole aggregate of spheres composing the starry universe.

50. With turtle wing. With the wing of a turtle-dove.

56. The hooked chariot. War chariots sometimes had scythes, or hooks, attached to their axles. See 2 Maccabees XIII 2.

60. sovran. Milton always uses this form in preference to sovereign.

62. the Prince of Light. Note the corresponding epithet applied to Satan, Par. Lost X 383.

64. The winds, with wonder whist. The word whist, originally an interjection, becomes an adjective, as here and in The Tempest I 2 378.

66. Make three syllables of OceÄn, and make it rhyme with began.

68. birds of calm. The birds referred to are doubtless halcyons. Dr. Murray defines halcyon thus: “A bird of which the ancients fabled that it bred about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and that it charmed the wind and waves so that the sea was specially calm during the period; usually identified with a species of kingfisher, hence a poetic name of this bird.”

71. their precious influence. The word influence is originally a term of astrology,—“a flowing in, or influent course, of the planets; their virtue infused into, or their course working on, inferior creatures” (Skeat, Etym. Dict.).

73. For all the morning light. As in Burns’s “We dare be poor for a’ that,” for meaning in spite of.

74. Lucifer. See Par. Lost VII 131-133.

81. As, for as if.

86. Or ere the point of dawn. The two words or ere mean simply before, as in Hamlet I 2 147, “A little month, or ere those shoes were old.” The point of dawn imitates the French le point du jour.

88. Full little thought they than. Than is an ancient form of then, not wholly obsolete in Milton’s day.

89. the mighty Pan. The poet takes the point of view of the shepherds and uses the name of their special deity.

95. by mortal finger strook. Milton uses the three participle forms, strook, struck, and strucken.

98. As all their souls in blissful rapture took. The verb take has here the same meaning as in Hamlet I 1 163, “no fairy takes nor witch hath power to charm.” Thus also we say, a vaccination takes.

103. Cynthia’s seat. See Penseroso 59, and Romeo and Juliet III 5 20.

108. Make the line rhyme properly, giving to union three syllables.

112. The helmed cherubim. See Genesis III 24.

113. The sworded seraphim. See Isaiah VI 2-6.

116. With unexpressive notes, meaning beyond the power of human expression. So in Lycidas 176; Par. Lost V 595; and in As You Like It, “the fair, the chaste, and inexpressive she.”

119. But when of old the Sons of Morning sung. See Job XXXVIII 7.

124. the weltering waves. Compare Lycidas 13.

125. Ring out, ye crystal spheres. See note, line 48. The elder poetry is full of the notion that the spheres in their revolutions made music, which human ears are too gross to hear. See Merchant of Venice V 1 50-65.

136. speckled Vanity. The leopard that confronts Dante in Canto I of Hell is beautiful with its dappled skin, but symbolizes vain glory.

143. like glories wearing. The adjective like means nothing without a complement, though the complement sometimes has to be supplied, as in this instance. Fully expressed the passage would be,—wearing glories like those of Truth and Justice. The like in such a case as this must be spoken with a fuller tone than when its construction is completely expressed.

155. those ychained in sleep. The poets, in order to gain a syllable, long continued to use the ancient participle prefix y. See yclept, Allegro 12.

157. With such a horrid clang. See Exodus XIX.

168. The Old Dragon. See Revelation XII 9.

173. Stanzas XIX-XXVI announce the deposition and expulsion of the pagan deities, and the ruin of the ancient religions. In accordance with his custom of grouping selected proper names in abundance, thus giving vividness and concreteness to his story and sonority to his verse, the poet here illustrates the triumph of the new dispensation by citing the names of various gods from the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian mythologies.

176. Apollo, the great god, whose oracle was at Delphi, or Delphos.

179. spell, as in Comus 853, and often.

186. Genius. A Latin word, signifying a tutelary or guardian spirit supposed to preside over a person or place. See Lycidas 183, and Penseroso 154.

191. The Lars and Lemures. In the Roman mythology these were the spirits of dead ancestors, worshipped or propitiated in families as having power for good or evil over the fortunes of their descendants.

194. Affrights the flamens. The Roman flamens were the priests of particular gods.

195. the chill marble seems to sweat. Many instances of this phenomenon are reported. Thus Cicero, in his De Divinatione, tells us: “It was reported to the senate that it had rained blood, that the river Atratus had even flowed with blood, and that the statues of the gods had sweat.”

197. Peor and BaÄlim. Syrian false gods. See Numbers XXV 3.

199. that twice-battered god of Palestine. See I Samuel V 2.

200. mooned Ashtaroth. See I Kings XI 33.

203. The Lybic Hammon. “Hammon had a famous temple in Africa, where he was adored under the symbolic figure of a ram.”

204. their wounded Thammuz. See Ezekiel VIII 14.

205. sullen Moloch. See Par. Lost I 392-396.

210. the furnace blue. Compare Arcades 52.

212. Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis. Egyptian deities, the latter figured as having the head of a dog.

213. Nor is Osiris seen. Osiris was the principal god of the Egyptians, brother and husband of Isis. His highest function was as god of the Nile. He met his death at the hands of his brother Typhon, a deity of sterility, by whom he was torn into fourteen pieces. Thereupon a general lament was raised throughout Egypt. The bull Apis was regarded as the visible incarnation of Osiris.—Murray’s Manual of Mythology.

215. the unshowered grass. Remember, this was in Egypt.

223. his dusky eyn. This ancient plural of eye occurs several times in Shakespeare, as in As You Like It IV 3 50.

240. Heaven’s youngest-teemed star. Compare Comus 175.

241. Hath fixed her polished car. Fix has its proper meaning, stopped. The star “came and stood over where the young child was.”

ON SHAKESPEARE.

The first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, known as the first folio, was published in 1623, when Milton was fifteen years old. The second Shakespeare folio appeared in 1632. Among the commendatory verses by various hands prefixed, after the fashion of the time, to the latter volume, was a little piece of eight couplets, in which some then unknown rhymer expressed his admiration of the great poet. Collecting his poems for publication in 1645, Milton included these couplets, gave them the date 1630, and the title On Shakespeare which they have since borne in his works. The fact that he wrote the verses two years before their publication in the Shakespeare folio shows that he did not produce them to order, for the special occasion. It is interesting to note that Milton at twenty-two was an appreciative reader of Shakespeare. The lines themselves give no hint of great poetic genius; they are a fair specimen of the conventional, labored eulogy in vogue at the time.

4. star-ypointing. To make the decasyllabic verse, the poet takes the liberty of prefixing to the present participle the y which properly belongs only to the past.

8. a livelong monument. Instead of livelong, the first issue of the lines, in the Shakespeare folio of 1632, has lasting. The change is Milton’s, appearing in his revision of his poems in 1645. Does it seem to be an improvement?

10-12. and that each heart hath ... took. The conjunction that simply repeats the whilst.

11. thy unvalued book. In Hamlet I 3 19 unvalued persons are persons of no value, or of no rank. In Macbeth III 1 94 the valued file is the file that determines values or ranks. In Milton’s phrase the unvalued book means the book whose merit is so great as to be beyond all valuation: a new rank must be created for it.

12. Those Delphic lines: lines so crowded with meaning as to seem the utterances of an oracle.

13. our fancy of itself bereaving: transporting us into an ecstasy, or making us rapt with thought.

14. Dost make us marble with too much conceiving. The concentrated attention required to penetrate Shakespeare’s meaning makes statues of us.

15. Make the word sepulchred fit metrically into the iambic verse.

L’ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

The year in which the poems were composed is uncertain. Masson regards 1632 as the probable date.

The exquisite poems to which Milton gave the Italian titles L’Allegro,—the mirthful, or jovial, man,—and Il Penseroso,—the melancholy, or saturnine, man,—should be regarded each as the pendant and complement of the other, and should be read as a single whole. The poet knew both moods, and takes both standpoints with equal grace and heartiness. The essential idea of thus contrasting the mirthful and the melancholy temperament he found ready to his hand. Robert Burton had prefaced his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with a series of not unpleasing, though by no means graceful, amoebean stanzas, in which two speakers alternately represent Melancholy, one as sweet and divine, and the other as harsh, sour, and damned. Undoubtedly Milton knew his Burton. But if he got his main idea from this source, he made his poems thoroughly Miltonic by his art of visualizing in delicious pictures the various phases of his abstract theme. The poems are wholly poetical, equally free from obscurity of thought and from obscurity of expression.

Each poem is prefaced with a vigorous exorcism of the spirit to which it is hostile. This is couched in alternate three and five accent iambics, preparing a delicious rhythmic effect when the metre changes, in the invocation, to the octosyllable, with or without anacrusis.

In L’Allegro we accompany the mirthful man through an entire day of his pleasures, from early morning to late evening. The melancholy man moves through a programme less definitely and regularly planned. The scenes of his delights are mostly in the hours of the night: when the sun is up, he hides himself from day’s garish eye.

L’Allegro.

2. Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born. Milton follows the example of the ancient poets in announcing the parentage of the principal beings whom he brings upon his stage. Moreover, he uses the ancient freedom in assigning mythical pedigrees, not only adopting no authority as a canon, but allowing his own fancy to invent origins as suits his purpose. He knew the Greek and Latin poets, and assumed for himself the privilege which they exercised of shaping the myths as they pleased. We are not therefore to seek in Milton a reproduction of any system of mythology. Cerberus was the terrible three-headed dog of Pluto. His station was at the entrance to the lower world, or the Stygian cave.

3. The Stygian cave is so called from the Styx, the infernal river, “the flood of deadly hate.”

5. some uncouth cell. Uncouth may be used here in its original sense of unknown, as in Par. Lost VIII 230.

10. In dark Cimmerian desert. The Cimmerians were a people fabled by the ancients to live in perpetual darkness.

12. yclept is the participle of the obsolete verb clepe, with the ancient prefix y, as in ychained, Hymn on the Nativity 155.

15. two sister Graces more. Hesiod names, as the three Graces, Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia, but he makes them the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome.

18. The frolic wind. See frolic again as an adjective, Comus 59.

24. So buxom, blithe, and debonair. See Shakespeare’s Pericles, I Gower 23. All these words are interesting to look up for etymologies and changes of meaning.

25-36. We readily accept and understand the personification of Jest, Jollity, Sport, Laughter, and Liberty, but the plurals, Quips, Cranks, Wiles, Nods, Becks, Smiles, we do not manage quite so easily, especially in view of the couplet 29-30.

28. Smiles may be said to be wreathed because they inwreathe the face. See Par. Lost III 361.

33. trip it, as you go. So in Shakespeare, “I’ll queen it no inch further; Rather than fool it so; I’ll go brave it at the court, lording it in London streets.”

41. With this line begins a series of illustrations of the unreproved pleasures which L’Allegro is going to enjoy during a day of leisure. At first the specified pleasures or occupations are introduced by infinitives, to hear, to come; but the construction soon changes, as we shall see. The first pleasure is To hear the lark, etc. 41-44. L’Allegro begins his day with early morning. Here we must imagine him as having risen and gone forth where he can see the sky and can look about him to see what is going on in the farm-yard.

45-46. Then to come, in spite of sorrow,

And at my window bid good-morrow.

It must be L’Allegro himself who comes to the window, and as he is outside, he comes to look in through the shrubbery and bid good morning to the cottage inmates, who are now up and about their work. The pertinency of the phrase, in spite of sorrow, is not intelligible.

53. Oft listening how the hounds and horn. This “pleasure” and the next—sometime walking—are introduced with present participles. There is no interruption of grammatical consistency.

57. Sometime walking, not unseen. See the counterpart of this line, Penseroso 65. Todd quotes the note of Bishop Hurd,—“Happy men love witnesses of their joy: the splenetic love solitude.”

59. against, i.e. toward.

62. The clouds in thousand liveries dight. Dight is the participle of the verb to dight, meaning to adorn. It is still used as an archaism.

67. And every shepherd tells his tale. This undoubtedly means counts the number of his flock. In Shakespeare we find, to tell money, years, steps, a hundred. So tale often means an enumeration, a number. L’Allegro finds the shepherds in the morning counting their sheep, not telling stories.

68. With this line ends the long, loose sentence that began with line 37. We now come to a full stop, and with line 69 begin a new sentence.

70. the landskip. A word of late origin in English, of unsettled spelling in Milton’s day.

71. Russet lawns. In Milton, lawn means field or pasture. See Lycidas 25.

77. In this line the subject, mine eye, is resumed.

80. The cynosure of neighboring eyes. In the constellation Cynosure, usually called the Lesser Bear, is the pole-star, to which very many eyes are directed.

81. A new “pleasure” is introduced, with a new grammatical subject.

83. Where Corydon and Thyrsis met. The proper names in lines 83-88 add to the poem a pleasing touch of pastoral simplicity and cheerfulness. They are taken from the common stock of names, which, originally devised by the Greek idyllists for their shepherds and shepherdesses, have by the pastoral poets of all subsequent ages been appropriated to their special use. Corydon and Thyrsis stand for farm-laborers, Phyllis and Thestylis for their wives or housekeepers. The day of L’Allegro has now advanced to dinner-time. Phyllis has been preparing the frugal meal, as we could surmise from the smoking chimney. As soon as the dinner is over the women go out to work with the men in the harvest field.

87. bower means simply dwelling.

90. In the tanned haycock we see the hay dried and browned by the sun.

91. The scene changes and brings yet another “pleasure.” secure delight is delight without care, sine cura. See Samson Agonistes 55.

96. in the chequered shade. They danced under trees through whose foliage the sunlight filtered.

99. Evening comes on, and a new pleasure succeeds. Story-telling is now in order.

102. Sufficient information about Faery Mab can be got from Romeo and Juliet I 4 53-95.

103-104. She, i.e. one of the maids; And he,—one of the youths. The Friar’s lantern is the ignis fatuus, or will-o’-the-wisp, fabled to lead men into dangerous marshes.

105. A connective is lacking to make the syntax sound: the subject of tells must be he. the drudging goblin. This is Robin Goodfellow, known to readers of fairy tales. Ben Jonson makes him a character in his Court Masque, Love Restored, where he is made to recount many of his pranks, and says, among other things, “I am the honest plain country spirit, and harmless, Robin Goodfellow, he that sweeps the hearth and the house clean, riddles for the country maids, and does all their other drudgery.”

109. could not end. Dr. Murray gives this among other quotations as an instance of the verb end meaning to put into the barn, to get in. So in Coriolanus V 6 87.

110. the lubber fiend. This goblin is loutish in shape and fiendish-looking, though so good to those who treat him well.

115. Thus done the tales. An absolute construction, imitating the Latin ablative absolute.

117. The country folk having gone early to bed, tired with their day’s labor, L’Allegro hastes to the city, where the pleasures of life are prolonged further into the night.

120. In weeds of peace, high triumphs hold. This must mean such things as masques and revelries among the upper classes.

122. Rain influence. See note on Hymn on the Nativity 71.

124. What is the antecedent of whom?

125. What ceremony is here introduced?

128. Do not misunderstand the word mask. Its meaning becomes plain from the context.

131. To what pleasure does L’Allegro now betake himself?

132. Among the dramatists of the Jacobean time Ben Jonson had especially the repute of scholarship. The sock symbolizes comedy, as the buskin does tragedy. Compare Il Penseroso 102.

133-134. Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild.

The couplet seems intended to convey the idea of a counterpart or contrast to the learned sock of Jonson. So considered, it is by no means an unhappy characterization.

135. The last of the “unreproved pleasures” that L’Allegro wishes he may enjoy, seems not so much planned to follow the rest in sequence of time as to accompany them and be diffused through them all. Observe the ever in this line. The eating cares are a reminiscence of Horace’s curas edaces, Ode II 11 18.

136. Lap me in soft Lydian airs. The three chief modes, or moods, of Greek music were the Lydian, which was soft and pathetic; the Dorian, especially adapted to war (see Par. Lost 550); and the Phrygian, which was bold and vehement.

138. the meeting soul. The soul, in its eagerness, goes forth to meet and welcome the music.

139. The word bout seems to point at a piece of music somewhat in the nature of a round, or catch.

145. That Orpheus’ self may heave his head. Even Orpheus, who in his life “drew trees, stones, and floods” by the power of his music, and who now reposes in Elysium, would lift his head to listen to the strains that L’Allegro would fain hear.

149. Orpheus, with his music, had succeeded in obtaining from Pluto only a conditional release of his wife Eurydice. He was not to look back upon her till he was quite clear of Pluto’s domains. He failed to make good the condition, and so again lost his Eurydice.

Il Penseroso.

3. How little you bested. The verb bested means to avail, to be of service. It is not the same word that we find in Isaiah VIII 21, “hardly bestead and hungry.”

6. fond here has its primitive meaning, foolish. Understand possess in the sense in which it is used in the Bible,—“possessed with devils.”

10. Make two syllables of Morpheus.

12. Note that while he invoked Mirth in L’Allegro under her Greek name Euphrosyne, the poet finds no corresponding Greek designation for Melancholy. To us Melancholy seems a name unhappily chosen. But see how Milton applies it in line 62 below, and in Comus 546. To him the word evidently connotes pensive meditation rather than gloomy depression.

14. To hit the sense of human sight: to be gazed at by human eyes.

18. Prince Memnon was a fabled Ethiopian prince, black, and celebrated for his beauty. Recall Virgil’s nigri Memnonis arma.

19. that starred Ethiop queen. Cassiopeia, wife of the Ethiopian king Cepheus, boasted that she was more beautiful than the Nereids, for which act of presumption she was translated to the skies, where she became the beautiful constellation which we know by her name.

23. bright-haired Vesta. Vesta—in Greek, Hestia—“was the goddess of the home, the guardian of family life. Her spotless purity fitted her peculiarly to be the guardian of virgin modesty.”

30. Whilst yet there was no fear of Jove, i.e. before Saturn was dethroned by Jupiter.

33. All in a robe of darkest grain. In Par. Lost V 285, the third pair of Raphael’s wings have the color of sky-tinctured grain; and XI 242, his vest is of purple livelier than “the grain of Sarra,” or Tyrian purple. This would leave us to infer that the robe of Melancholy is of a deep rich color, so dark as to be almost black. Dr. Murray quotes from Southey’s Thalaba, “The ebony ... with darkness feeds its boughs of raven grain.” What objection is there to making the grain in Milton’s passage black?

35. And sable stole of cypress lawn. Dr. Murray thus defines cypress lawn, “A light transparent material resembling cobweb lawn or crape; like the latter it was, when black, much used for habiliments of mourning.”

37. Come; but keep thy wonted state. Compare with this passage, L’Allegro 33.

40. Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes. In Cymbeline I 6 51 we find the present tense of the verb of which rapt is the participle: “What, dear Sir, thus raps you?” Do not confound this word with rap, meaning to strike.

42. Forget thyself to marble. With this compare On Shakespeare 14.

43. With a sad leaden downward cast. So in Love’s Labor’s Lost IV 3 321, “In leaden contemplation;” Othello III 4 177, “I have this while with leaden thoughts been pressed.” So also Gray in the Hymn to Adversity, “With leaden eye that loves the ground.”

45-55. Compare the company which Il Penseroso entreats Melancholy to bring along with her with that which L’Allegro wishes to see attending Mirth.

46. Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet. Only the rigid ascetic has a spiritual ear so finely trained that he hears the celestial music.

48. Aye, as their rhymes show, is always pronounced by the poets with the vowel sound in day.

53. the fiery-wheeled throne. See Daniel VII 9.

54. The Cherub Contemplation. Pronounce contemplation with five syllables. It is difficult to form a distinct conception of the nature and office of the cherub of the Scriptures. Milton in many passages of Par. Lost follows, with regard to the heavenly beings, the account given by Dionysius the Areopagite in his Celestial Hierarchy. According to Dionysius there were nine orders or ranks of beings in heaven, namely,—seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels. The cherubim have the special attribute of knowledge and contemplation of divine things.

55. hist, primarily an interjection commanding silence, becomes here a verb.

56. With the introduction of the nightingale comes the first intimation of the time of day at which Il Penseroso conceives the course of his satisfactions to begin.

57. Everywhere else in Milton plight is used with its modern connotations.

59. The moon stops to hear the nightingale’s song.

65. Remember L’Allegro’s not unseen.

77. Up to this point Il Penseroso has been walking in the open air.

78. removed,—remote, retired.

87. As the Bear never sets, to outwatch him must mean to sit up all night.

88. With thrice great Hermes. “Hermes Trismegistos—Hermes thrice-greatest—is the name given by the Neo-Platonists and the devotees of mysticism and alchemy to the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as more or less identified with the Grecian Hermes, and as the author of all mysterious doctrines, and especially of the secrets of alchemy.” (The New Eng. Dicty.) To such studies the serious mediÆval scholars devoted themselves. To unsphere the spirit of Plato is to call him from the sphere in which he abides in the other world, or, simply, to take in hand for study his writings on immortality.

93-96. On the four classes of demons,—Salamanders, Sylphs, Nymphs, Gnomes,—see Pope’s Rape of the Lock. These demons are in complicity with the planets and other heavenly bodies to influence mortals.

97-102. Thebes, Pelops’ line, and the tale of Troy are the staple subjects of the great Attic tragedians. It seems strange that the poet finds no occasion to name Shakespeare here, as well as in L’Allegro.

104-105. MusÆus and Orpheus are semi-mythical bards, to whom is ascribed a greatness proportioned to their obscurity.

105-108. See note on L’Allegro, 149.

109-115. Or call up him that left half-told. This refers to Chaucer and to his Squieres Tale in the Canterbury Tales. It is left unfinished. Note that Milton changes not only the spelling but the accent of the chief character’s name. Chaucer writes, “This noble king was cleped Cambinskan.”

120. Stories in which more is meant than meets the ear refer to allegories, like the Fairy Queen.

121. Having thus filled the night with the occupations that he loves, Il Penseroso now greets the morning, which he hopes to find stormy with wind and rain.

122. civil-suited Morn: i.e. Morn in the everyday habiliments of business.

123-124. Eos—Aurora, the Dawn—carried off several youths distinguished for their beauty. the Attic boy is probably Cephalus, whom she stole from his wife Procris.

125. kerchieft in a comely cloud. Kerchief is here used in its original and proper sense. Look up its origin.

126. The winds may be called rocking because they visibly rock the trees, or because they shake houses.

127. Or ushered with a shower still. The shower falls gently, without wind.

130. With minute-drops from off the eaves. After the rain has ceased, and while the thatch is draining, the drops fall at regular intervals for a time,—as it were, a drop every minute. Il Penseroso listens with contentment to the wind, the rustling rain-fall on the leaves, and the monotonous patter of the drops when the rain is over.

131. The shower is past, and the sun appears, but Il Penseroso finds its beams flaring and distasteful. He seeks covert in the dense groves.

134. Sylvan is the god of the woods.

135. The monumental oak is so called from its great age and size.

140. Consciously nursing his melancholy, Il Penseroso deems the wood that hides him a sacred place, and resents intrusion as a profanation.

141. Hide me from day’s garish eye. See Richard III. IV 4 89, Romeo and Juliet III 2 25.

142. While the bee with honeyed thigh. Is this good apiology?

146. Entice the dewy-feathered Sleep. Note that sleep is represented as having feathers. These feathers, in their soft, gentle movement and in their refreshing effect are likened to dew. The figure is a common one with the poets. In Par. Lost IX 1044, Milton has,—“till dewy sleep oppressed them.” Cowper, Iliad II, 41, has,—“Awaking from thy dewy slumbers.”

148. his refers to the dewy-feathered sleep. Il Penseroso asks that a strange, mysterious dream, hovering close by the wings of sleep, and lightly pictured in a succession of vivid forms, may be laid on his eye-lids.

155-166. The word studious in line 156 determines that the passage refers to college life and not to church attendance. The old English colleges have their cloisters, and these have much the same architectural features as do churches.

157. embowed means vaulted, or bent like a bow.

158. massy-proof: massive and proof against all failure to support their load.

159. And storied windows richly dight. Compare L’Allegro, 62.

170. The best possible comment on this use of the verb spell is Milton’s own language, Par. Regained IV 382, where Satan, addressing the Son of God, thus speaks:—

Now, contrary, if I read aught in Heaven,

Or Heaven write aught of fate, by what the stars

Voluminous, or single characters

In their conjunction met, give me to spell,

Sorrows and labors, opposition, hate,

Attends thee; scorns, reproaches, injuries,

Violence and stripes, and, lastly, cruel death.

Il Penseroso’s aspiration is that as an astrologer he may learn the influence of every star and that he may come to know the virtue of every herb.

The noble persons of the family of the Countess Dowager of Derby were fortunate enough to obtain the services of the poet John Milton to aid in the composition of a mask, which they presented to her ladyship at her residence in the country. Arcades—the Arcadians—is Milton’s contribution to this performance. In date the poem precedes Comus, which is known to have been composed in 1634.

On the meaning of the term mask, as applied to a dramatic form, see introductory note on Comus.

20. Latona (or Leto) was the mother of Apollo and Diana by Zeus.

21. the towered Cybele is Virgil’s Berecyntia Mater, the Phrygian mother, who, wearing her mural crown, drives in her chariot through the cities of Phrygia. She was conceived as one of the very oldest deities, and as mother of a hundred gods. See Æneid VI 785.

28. Of famous Arcady ye are. Arcadia, in the Peloponnesus, was peculiarly the home of music and song, especially among the shepherds. See Virgil, Eclogue VII 4-5.

30. Divine Alpheus. See note on Lycidas 132.

46. curl the grove: bestow upon the grove dense, crisp foliage.

47. With ringlets quaint and wanton windings wove. The grove is intersected with a maze of circling and purposeless paths.

49. noisome: full of annoyance, injurious. See Par. Lost XI 478. blasting vapors. See note on Comus 640.

51. thwarting thunder blue. Compare Julius CÆsar I 3 50, “the cross blue lightning.”

52. the cross dire-looking planet. Cross means adverse, unfavorable. See note on influence, Hymn on the Nativity 71.

54. evening gray. See note on Lycidas 187.

60. murmurs. Compare Comus 526.

63. the celestial Sirens’ harmony. The Sirens are here advanced to a high function and given a new Epithet. Compare Comus 253.

64. the nine infolded spheres. See note on Hymn on Nativity 48.

65-66. See note on Lycidas 75.

69. the daughters of Necessity: the Fates.

72-73. which none can hear Of human mould with gross unpurged ear. Compare Merchant of Venice V 1 64.

87. touch the warbled string: the string that is accompanied with the voice. See Il Penseroso 106.

97. Ladon, a river of Arcadia, flowing into the Alpheus.

98. LycÆus and Cyllene, mountains of Arcadia.

100. Erymanth. Erymanthus is a range of mountains separating Arcadia from Achaia and Elis.

102. MÆnalus, another mountain of Arcadia.

106. Though Syrinx your Pan’s mistress were. Syrinx was an Arcadian nymph, who, being pursued by Pan, threw herself into the Ladon, where she was metamorphosed into a reed, of which the shepherds thereafter made their pipes.

AT A SOLEMN MUSIC.

The poet listens to what in the phrase of his time is a solemn music, but which we should name a sacred concert. The poem is unalloyed lyric, expressing the rapture to which the music has lifted his soul. We must remember that Milton was himself an amateur musician, and in his days of darkness found habitual diversion at his organ. Indications of a susceptible and appreciative ear for musical harmony are frequent throughout the poems.

7. the sapphire-colored throne. See Ezekiel I 26.

27. consort is the word from which we derive our concert.

COMUS.

During the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I., the mask was one of the most popular forms of dramatic entertainment. Having a function and a character peculiar to itself, it flourished side by side with the regular plays of the theatrical stage, and gave large scope to the genius of poets, composers, and scenic artists.

The mask was usually designed to grace some important occasion, in which members of the upper classes of society, or even royal personages, were concerned. When the occasion called for particularly brilliant display, and had been long foreseen, the preparations for it would involve immense outlays for costumes, theatrical machinery, for new music, and for a libretto by a play-writer of the greatest note. When the mask was purely a private one, like Arcades and Comus, it was all the fashion for the gentle youths and maidens, for gentlemen and ladies of the highest rank, to take upon themselves the parts of the drama, to rehearse them assiduously, and finally to enact them on the private stage or on the lawn in the presence of a select audience.

The mask thus differentiated itself from the stage play in that it was not given for the pecuniary behoof of a company of actors, but represented rather expenditure for the simple purpose of producing grand effects. To act in a mask was an honor, when common players were social outcasts. The mask was got up for the occasion, and was not intended to keep the boards and attract a paying public. When the august ceremonial was over, the poet had his manuscript, to increase the bulk of his works, and the composer had his score, to furnish airs that might be played and sung in drawing-rooms if they had the good fortune to be popular.

Such was the origin of the poem which Milton, in all the editions published during his lifetime, entitled simply “A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,” but which editors since his day have agreed to name Comus.

The occasion of the poem was the coming of the Earl of Bridgewater to Ludlow Castle, to enter upon his official residence there as Lord President of Wales. The person chiefly concerned in the scenic, musical, and histrionic preparations of the mask was Milton’s esteemed friend, the most accomplished musical composer of the day, Henry Lawes. Lawes composed the music and arranged the stage business. He seems to have taken upon himself the part of the Attendant Spirit. Lawes knew to whom to apply for the all-important matter of the book, the words, or the poetry, of the piece, for he had learned to know Milton’s qualifications as a mask-poet in the fragment which we have under the name Arcades. With good music even for commonplace lyric verse, and with sprightly declamation even of conventional dialogue, the thing, as we know from modern instances, might have been carried off by gorgeous costumes and shrewdly devised scenic effects. Most of the masks of the time fell at once into oblivion. But Lawes had secured for his poet John Milton; and the consequence thereof is that the Earl of Bridgewater is now chiefly heard of because at Ludlow Castle there was enacted, in the form of a mask written by Milton, a drama which is still read and reread by every English-speaking person who reads any serious poetry, though Ludlow Castle has long been a venerable ruin.

For his plot, the poet feigned that the young children of the earl, two sons and a daughter, in coming to Ludlow, had to pass unattended through a forest, in which the boys became separated from the girl and she fell into the hands of the enchanter Comus. The Attendant Spirit appears to the youths with his magic herb, and with the further assistance of the water-nymph Sabrina, at last makes all right, and the children are restored to their parents in the midst of festive rejoicing.

The poem is dramatic, because it is acted and spoken or sung in character by its persons. It is allegorical, because it inculcates a moral, and more is meant than meets the ear. In parts it is pastoral, both because the chief personage appears in the guise of a shepherd, and because its motive largely depends on the superstitions and traditions of simple, ignorant folk. In the longer speeches, where events are narrated with some fulness, it becomes epic. Lastly, in its songs, in the octosyllables of the magician, and in the adjuration and the thanking of Sabrina, it is lyric. With iambic pentameter as the basis of the dialogue, the poet varies his measures as Shakespeare does his, and with very similar ends in view.

The name Comus Milton found ready to his hand. As a common noun, the Greek word comus signifies carousal,—wassail. In the later classic period it had become a proper name, standing for a personification of nocturnal revelry, and a god Comus was frequently depicted on vases and in mural paintings. Philostratus, in his Ikones,—or Pictures,—gives an interesting description of a painting of this god. See EncyclopÆdia Britannica, article Comus. Ben Jonson, in his mask, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, played in 1619, presents a Comus as “the god of cheer, or the belly, riding in triumph, his head crowned with roses and other flowers, his hair curled.” The character and the name were the common property of mask-writers.

The great distinction of Comus is its beauty, maintained at height through a thousand lines of supremely perfect verse. Greatly dramatic it of course is not. It yields its meaning to the most cursory reading; it has no mystery. It is simply beautiful, with a sustained beauty elsewhere unparalleled.

The following letter of Sir Henry Wotton to the Author deserves to be read both for its engaging style as a piece of English prose and for its exquisite characterization of Comus. Wotton was a versatile scholar, diplomat, and courtier, seventy years old at the time of this letter, with a reputation as a kindly and appreciative literary critic. He was now residing at Eton College, where he held the office of Provost. Milton, thirty years of age, the first edition of his Comus recently published anonymously, had good cause for elation over such a testimonial from such a source.

“From the College, this 13 of April, 1638.

“Sir,

“It was a special favour when you lately bestowed upon me here the first taste of your acquaintance, though no longer than to make me know that I wanted more time to value it and to enjoy it rightly; and, in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts, which I understood afterwards by Mr. H., I would have been bold, in our vulgar phrase, to mend my draught (for you left me with an extreme thirst), and to have begged your conversation again, jointly with your said learned friend, over a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together some good Authors of the ancient time; among which I observed you to have been familiar.

“Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kind letter from you dated the 6th of this month, and for a dainty piece of entertainment which came therewith. Wherein I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language: Ipsa mollities. But I must not omit to tell you that I now only owe you thanks for intimating unto me (how modestly soever) the true artificer. For the work itself I had viewed some good while before with singular delight; having received it from our common friend Mr. R., in the very close of the late R.’s Poems, printed at Oxford: whereunto it was added (as I now suppose) that the accessory might help out the principal, according to the art of Stationers, and to leave the reader con la bocca dolce.

“Now, Sir, concerning your travels; wherein I may challenge a little more privilege of discourse with you. I suppose you will not blanch Paris in your way: therefore I have been bold to trouble you with a few lines to Mr. M. B., whom you shall easily find attending the young Lord S. as his governor; and you may surely receive from him good directions for the shaping of your farther journey into Italy where he did reside, by my choice, some time for the King, after mine own recess from Venice.

“I should think that your best line will be through the whole length of France to Marseilles, and thence by sea to Genoa; whence the passage into Tuscany is as diurnal as a Gravesend barge. I hasten, as you do, to Florence or Siena, the rather to tell you a short story, from the interest you have given me in your safety.

“At Siena I was tabled in the house of one Alberto Scipioni, an old Roman courtier in dangerous times; having been steward to the Duca di Pagliano, who with all his family were strangled, save this only man that escaped by foresight of the tempest. With him I had often much chat of those affairs, into which he took pleasure to look back from his native harbour; and at my departure toward Rome (which had been the centre of his experience), I had won his confidence enough to beg his advice how I might carry myself there without offence of others or of mine own conscience. ‘Signor Arrigo mio,’ says he, ‘I pensieri stretti ed il viso sciolto will go safely over the whole world.’ Of which Delphian oracle (for so I have found it) your judgment doth need no commentary; and therefore, Sir, I will commit you, with it, to the best of all securities, God’s dear love, remaining

“Your friend, as much to command as any of longer date,

“Henry Wotton.”

Postscript.

“Sir: I have expressly sent this my footboy to prevent your departure without some acknowledgment from me of the receipt of your obliging letter; having myself through some business, I know not how, neglected the ordinary conveyance. In any part where I shall understand you fixed, I shall be glad and diligent to entertain you with home-novelties, even for some fomentation of our friendship, too soon interrupted in the cradle.”

The Latin phrase, ipsa mollities, may be translated,—it is the very perfection of delicacy. The Italian words below mean,—My dear Henry, thoughts close, face open.

1. Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court. The attendant spirit not only announces himself as a dweller in heaven, but he specifies his particular function among the celestials: he is doorkeeper in the house of God.

3. insphered. Compare Il Penseroso 88.

7. Confined and pestered. Pester has its primitive meaning, to clog or encumber. In this pinfold here. Pinfold is probably not connected with the verb to pen, but is a shortened form of poundfold, and means, literally, an enclosure for stray cattle.

10. After this mortal change: after this life on earth, which is subject to death.

11. Amongst the enthroned gods. Make but two syllables of enthroned, and accent the first.

The long sentence ending with line 11 is very loose in construction: the and in line 7 is a coÖrdinate conjunction, but does not connect coÖrdinate elements.

13. To lay their just hands on that golden key. Compare Lycidas 110.

16. these pure ambrosial weeds. Ambrosial has its proper meaning,—pertaining to the immortals.

20. by lot ’twixt high and nether Jove. Neptune drew lots with Jupiter and Pluto. To Jupiter fell the region of the upper air, to Pluto the lower world, and to Neptune the sea. The ancient poets sometimes spoke of Jupiter and Pluto as the upper and the lower Jove.

25. By course commits to several government: in due order he assigns the islands to his tributaries, giving them an island apiece.

27. But this Isle is so large that he has to divide it.

29. Consider quarters to mean nothing more than divides. his blue-haired deities. The epithet is conventional, taken from the Greek poets, and probably has no special significance in this passage.

31. A noble Peer. This connects the poem with actual persons and announces its occasion. The noble peer is the Earl of Bridgewater, and the event which is to be celebrated is his appointment to the Vice-royalty of Wales.

33. The old and haughty nation are the Welsh.

34. his fair offspring are two sons and a daughter, who are to play the parts of the Two Brothers and the Lady in the mask.

37. the perplexed paths of this drear wood. Compare Par. Lost IV 176.

41. sovran. See note on Hymn on the Nativity 60.

45. in hall or bower. Hall and bower are conventionally coupled by the poets to signify the dwellings, respectively, of the gentry and the laboring classes.

46. The transformation by Bacchus of the treacherous Tuscan sailors into dolphins belongs to the established myths of that god. But Milton exercises his right as a poet to add to the classic story whatever suits his purposes.

48. After the Tuscan mariners transformed; a Latinism, meaning, after the transformation of the Tuscan mariners.

50. fell: chanced to land.

For the story of Circe, see the Odyssey X.

58. Understand that no such distinct character as Comus belongs to the received mythology. Milton is a myth-maker.

59. frolic is used as an adjective, as in L’Allegro 18.

60. the Celtic and Iberian fields. The god traversed Gaul and Spain, on his way to Britain.

61. ominous: abounding in mysterious signs of danger.

65. His orient liquor. See line 673 of this poem.

72. Note that only the countenance is changed.

87. Well knows to still the wild winds. The poem moves throughout in the realm of romance. The swain Thyrsis is in his own character a practitioner of magic.

88. nor of less faith. Thyrsis has just been described as a person of great skill.

90. Likeliest: most likely to be.

93. The transition from the stately mood of the Attendant Spirit’s exordium to the noisy exhilaration of Comus is marked by appropriate changes in the verse. Comus speaks in a lyric strain, and his tone is exultant. When he comes to serious business, in line 145, he also employs blank-verse. The lyric lines, 93-144, rhyme in couplets, and vary in length, most of them having four accents, while some have five. The four-accent lines vary between seven and eight syllables, many of them dropping the initial light syllable, or anakrusis (Auftakt). These seven-syllable lines have a trochaic effect, but are to be scanned as iambic, the standard rhythm of the poem. The star that bids the shepherd fold. So Collins, in his ode To Evening,—“For when thy folding-star arising shows His paly circlet.” See also Measure for Measure IV 2 218.

96. doth allay: doth cool.

97. The epithet steep is applied to the ocean, though really it is the course of the downward-moving sun that is steep.

99-101. Milton uses pole, as the poets were wont to do, to mean the sky; and the passage means,—the sun, moving about the earth in his oblique course, now shines upon that part of the heavens which, when it is daylight to us, is in shadow.

105. with rosy twine; with twined, or wreathed, roses.

108-109. Advice ... Age ... Severity. For these abstract terms substitute their concretes.

110. their grave saws. So Hamlet I 5 100, “all saws of books.”

116. in wavering morrice. See M. N. Dream II 1 98; All’s Well II 2 25.

118. the dapper elves. Dapper is akin to the German tapfer, but with a very different connotation.

124. Love: the Latin Amor, the Greek Eros, and our Cupid.

129. Dark-veiled Cotytto was a Thracian goddess, whose worship was connected with licentious frivolity.

133. makes one blot of all the air. Compare line 204 of this poem.

135. thou ridest with Hecat’. Hecate was a goddess of the lower world, mistress of witchcraft and the black arts.

139. The nice Morn. Nice is used in a disparaging sense, meaning over particular, minutely critical.

140. From her cabined loop-hole peep. As if morn dwelt in a cabin and clandestinely peeped from a small window.

141. descry must here mean reveal.

144. In a light fantastic round. Recall L’Allegro 34. Comus and his crew are now dancing.

147. shrouds: hiding-places. See the verb, line 316.

151. my wily trains. Trains are tricks, as in Macbeth IV 3 118.

154. The air is spongy because it absorbs his magic dust.

155. blear, usually applied to eyes, here refers to the effect of seeing objects with blear eyes.

174. the loose unlettered hinds. The hinds are farm-servants, usually with an implication of rudeness and rusticity, and they are loose because unrestrained in speech and act by considerations of propriety.

177. amiss: in wrong or unseemly ways.

178. swilled is a very contemptuous word.

179. wassailers. See Macbeth I 7 64. The word has an interesting etymology.

188. the grey-hooded Even. Milton is fond of applying the epithet gray to the evening and the dawn. See Par. Lost IV 598, Lycidas 187.

189. Like a sad votarist in palmer’s weed. The votarist is one who has made a vow. In this case he goes on a pilgrimage, carrying a palm branch, and wearing the pilgrim garb.

203. the tumult of loud mirth was rife. As to the meaning of rife compare Sam. Ag. 866 and Par. Lost I 650.

204. Yet nought but single darkness do I find. The darkness is unbroken by any ray of light.

210. may startle well, but not astound. Astound is a strong word. See Par. Lost I 281.

212. a strong siding champion: a champion who sides with the virtuous mind.

222. her silver lining. Note Milton’s avoidance of the possessive its. In all his verse he uses its but three times.

231. Within thy airy shell. The airy shell in which Echo lives must be the “hollow round” of the atmosphere. Compare Hymn on the Nativity 100-103.

232. The Meander is the river of Asia Minor, famous for its windings.

233-237. The mention of the nightingale and Narcissus in this passage suggests that it may be a reminiscence of the chorus in the Oedipus Coloneus,—“Of this land of goodly steeds, O stranger.”

237. Echo’s passion for the beautiful Narcissus was not requited, and she pined away till she became a mere voice, which she could not utter till she was spoken to.

241. Daughter of the Sphere: daughter of the air, which forms a hollow sphere about the earth.

243. And give resounding grace to all Heaven’s harmonies: by echoing back the music of the spheres.

249-252. Even darkness smiled, as if acknowledging itself agreeably caressed by the strains of the lady’s song.

251. At every fall. Fall, as a musical term, is “a sinking down or lowering of the note or voice; cadence” (New Eng. Dict.).

253. the Sirens dwelt on an island near Sicily, and by their sweet song allured mariners to destruction. See Odyssey XII.

254. the Naiades were nymphs attendant on Circe and the Sirens.

257. And lap it in Elysium. Compare L’Allegro 136.

257-259. Scylla and Charybdis were dangerous rocks and whirlpools on opposite sides of the strait of Messina. They were personified as cruel sea-monsters.

260. Yet they: Circe and the Sirens.

267. Unless the goddess. Supply thou art.

273. extreme shift: a pressing necessity of devising some expedient.

289. Were they of manly prime or youthful bloom? Were they in the prime of adult manhood, or in the bloom of youth?

277-290. These fourteen lines are an instance of “stichomythia, or conversation in alternate lines, which was always popular on the Attic stage. This scheme of versification is used chiefly in excited discussions, where the speakers are hurried along by the eagerness of their feelings.”—Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks.

292. An ox in traces would now be a rare sight.

294. a green mantling vine. See Par. Lost IV 258.

299. gay creatures of the element: creatures of the air,—supernatural beings.

301. And play i’ the plighted clouds. Probably the poet means the plaited, or pleated, clouds, conceiving the clouds as appearing folded together. I was awe-strook. See Hymn on the Nativity 95.

316. Or shroud within these limits. Shroud as a noun we saw above, line 147.

318. From her thatched pallet rouse. The lark builds on the ground, seeking a spot protected by overarching stems of grass or grain, which may be called a natural thatch; and if this protection is destroyed by mowers or reapers, the bird will at once take pains to build a roof or thatch over the nest, completely covering it, and for a door will make an opening on the side.

325. where it first was named. The derivation of the words courteous and courtesy from court is obvious.

327. Less warranted than this, or less secure. The lady says that she cannot be in any place less guaranteed than this against evil, and that she cannot anywhere be less free from anxiety. Her situation she conceives to be as bad as it can be.

329. square my trial To my proportioned strength: make my trial proportionate to my strength.

332. That wont’st to love. Wont’st, in the present tense, means, as we say, art wont.

333. Stoop thy pale visage. Stoop is thus used, transitively, Richard II. III 1 19, “myself ... have stooped my neck.”

334. And disinherit Chaos, that reigns here. Chaos, “the formless void of primordial matter,” is personified by Milton here and, much more conspicuously, in Par. Lost III.

338. a rush-candle: a candle made with a rush for a wick,—the cheapest kind of light. from the wicker hole Of some clay habitation. Imagine a hut whose walls are made of wattled twigs plastered with clay. This clay when dry is apt to fall off in spots, leaving holes through which the light within can be seen from without. A wicker hole is a hole in the wicker-work, perhaps made intentionally, to serve as a window.

341-342. The star of Arcady is the constellation of the Greater Bear, and the Tyrian Cynosure that of the Lesser Bear. Stars in these constellations served as guides to Greek and Tyrian mariners.

345. Or sound of pastoral reed with oaten stops. Compare Collins’s Ode to Evening,—If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. The shepherds of the Greek idylls made their musical pipes of reeds or oat-straws, and the oat has therefore been adopted by the pastoral poetry of all ages.

349. innumerous boughs. Compare Par. Lost VII 455.

358. Of savage hunger, or of savage heat: of hungry savages, or of lustful savages.

361. grant they be so: grant that they are real evils.

365. Make four syllables of delusion.

366. I do not think my sister so to seek: I do not think she has her seeking, or learning, still to do: I do not think her so inexperienced.

373-375. Is this practical doctrine?

377. Make five syllables of Contemplation.

380. Were all to-ruffled. The particle to—Anglo Saxon tÔ, Modern German zer—has disappeared from Modern English. In Old English it was often used with the force of the Latin dis. So still in Chaucer, to-bete, to-cleve, to-rende, and many others.

386. affects: likes, has an affection for.

390. weeds, as in line 84.

393. the fair Hesperian tree. See line 983.

394. had need the guard. An elliptical expression. Need is a noun, but is treated as if it were a verb.

395. The dragon Ladon was not able to defend the apples of Hesperides against Hercules.

401. will wink on Opportunity: will fail to see its chance.

404. it recks me not. The verb is thus used, impersonally, also in Lycidas 122.

407. The line has two hypermetric syllables, one after the third foot, and one at the end.

413. squint suspicion. An epithet applicable only to a physical infirmity is applied to a mental act.

422. quivered: bearing a quiver.

423. unharbored: furnishing no shelter.

424. Infamous hills. Accent infamous as we do now and as Milton does elsewhere. Verses thus beginning with trochees are common.

429. Look up the origin of the word grots.

430. unblenched: unstartled.

434. Blue meagre hag. The hag has the livid hue of hunger.

436. swart faery of the mine. A malignant demon dwelling under ground,—a gnome.

441. the huntress Dian. The powerful goddess Diana, or Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, was figured bearing a bow and arrows.

448. wise Minerva. Minerva, or Pallas Athene, is usually represented as wearing on her breast the Ægis with a border of snakes and the Gorgon’s head in the centre.

460-462. Note the different modes in begin and turns, where we should look for similar constructions.

487. The ellipsis of we had is readily supplied. Draw and stand are infinitives.

494. Thyrsis, a stock shepherd-name. The spirit henceforth appears to his fellow-actors in the mask as the shepherd with whom they are familiar.

495-512. These lines express sudden emotion, and approximate lyric in character. Hence the rhyme.

508. How chance she is not. Supply the ellipsis.

517. Chimeras is here used vaguely in the plural to mean dangerous monsters.

526. With many murmurs mixed. The enchanter spoke or sang forms of incantation over his mixing and brewing. Recall Macbeth.

529. The word mintage has an interesting history. The human countenance is conceived as an imprint, like the characters on a coin.

530. Charactered in the face. The noun character Milton pronounces with accent on the first syllable, as does Shakespeare. Probably he also agrees with Shakespeare in pronouncing the verb with the accent on the second syllable, as this verse suggests.

531. crofts. The word is still in use in England, meaning a small farm.

540. by then the chewing flocks: by the time when, etc.

547. To meditate my rural minstrelsy: to play on my shepherd-pipe and to sing. To meditate the muse is a standard expression of the pastoral poets. See Lycidas 66.

552. What do we know was the cause of this unusual stop of sudden silence?

553-554. The cessation of the din gave to the steeds of sleep, and to people who were trying to sleep, relief from annoyance.

557-560. Be sure you understand the figure.

560. Still, in its very frequent sense, always.

562. Under the ribs of Death: in a skeleton.

575. such two; describing them.

586. Shall be unsaid for me: it is not necessary for me to make any change in my opinion to make it harmonize with this new aspect of affairs.

595. Gathered like scum, and settled to itself. The two metaphors thus combined make a rather strange mixture.

598. The pillared firmament. By the firmament is usually understood the sphere of the fixed stars. How to introduce the conception of pillars is not clear.

604. Acheron. See Par. Lost II 578.

605. The Harpies were monstrous birds with women’s heads. Their doings are described Æneid III. The Hydra was a monster serpent with a hundred heads.

607. his purchase: his acquisition.

610. I love thy courage yet, though thou hast spoken most unwisely.

611. can do thee little stead: can avail thee but little.

617. utmost shifts: most carefully devised precautions.

620. Of small regard to see to: of very insignificant appearance.

621. A virtuous plant is a plant which has virtues, i.e. powers or qualities.

624. Which when I did. The modern English has lost the power of beginning a sentence thus, with two relatives.

626. scrip, a word in no way connected with script.

627. And show me simples of a thousand names. Compare Hamlet IV 7 145, “no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon.”

634. Unknown and like esteemed: neither known nor esteemed.

635. Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon. See 2 Henry VI. IV 2 195,—“Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon,” and Hamlet IV 5 26,—“By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.”

636. The story of Hermes’ giving Ulysses the Moly read in Odyssey X. “Therewith the slayer of Argos gave me the plant that he had plucked from the ground, and he showed me the growth thereof. It was black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. Moly the gods call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig; howbeit with the gods all things are possible.”

638. He called it HÆmony. HÆmony is a nonce-word of Milton’s own coining. He may have derived it from a Greek word meaning skilful or from another meaning blood.

640. mildew blast, or damp. Blast is defined by Dr. Murray: “A sudden infection destructive to vegetable or animal life (formerly attributed to the blowing or breath of some malignant power, foul air, etc.)”; and damp: “An exhalation, a vapor or gas, of a noxious kind.”

641. Or ghastly Furies’ apparition: or the appearance of terrifying ghosts.

646. Entered the very lime-twigs of his spells. Lime was a viscous substance, spread upon the twigs of trees and bushes to entangle the feet of birds. The figure is frequent in Shakespeare. See Hamlet III 3 68, “O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged.”

657. apace: quickly.In the stage directions, goes about means, makes a movement.

661. as Daphne was, Root-bound, that fled Apollo. The great god, Apollo, pursuing the nymph Daphne, Diana saved her by transforming her into a laurel tree.

672. this cordial julep. Julep is a word of Persian origin, meaning rose-water. Note the poet’s skill in culling words of delicious sound.

675. Not that Nepenthes which the wife of Thone In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena. See Odyssey IV: “Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, cast a drug into the wine whereof they drank, a drug to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow.... Medicines of such virtue and so helpful had the daughter of Zeus, which Polydamna, the wife of Thon, had given her, a woman of Egypt.”

685. the unexempt condition: the condition from which no one is exempt.

695. These oughly-headed monsters. Perhaps by this peculiar spelling, oughly, Milton meant to add to the word ugly a higher degree of ugliness.

698. With vizored falsehood: falsehood with its vizor, or face-piece, down, to conceal its identity.

700. With liquorish baits. Liquorish, now usually spelled lickerish, is allied to lecherous, and has no connection with liquor or with liquorice.

703. The goodness of the gift lies in the intention of the giver.

707. those budge doctors of the stoic fur. Budge is defined by Dr. Murray: “Solemn in demeanor, important-looking, pompous, stiff, formal.” Cowper, in his poem Conversation, has the couplet: “The solemn fop; significant and budge; A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge.” A doctor of the Stoic fur is a teacher of the Stoic philosophy, who wears a gown of the fur to which his degree of doctor entitles him.

708. fetch their precepts from the Cynic tub: teach doctrines learned from the Cynic Diogenes, who is reputed to have lived in a tub.

719. hutched: stowed or laid away, as in a chest or hutch.

721. pulse; conceived as the simplest kind of food.

722. frieze; to be pronounced freeze.

724. and yet: and what is yet more.

728. Who refers back to Nature.

734. they below: the people of the lower world.

737. coy. See Lycidas 18. cozened. See Merchant of Venice II 9 38.

744. It refers back to beauty.

748. homely; in the modern disparaging sense.

750. grain: color.

751. To ply, or make, a sampler, as a proof of her skill with the needle, was, until very modern times, the duty of every young girl. The old samplers are now precious heirlooms in families. to tease the huswife’s wool. To tease wool, or to card it, was to use the teasle, or a card, to prepare it for spinning. Carding and spinning were common duties of the huswife and her daughters.

753. In what respect can tresses be said to be like the morn?

760. when vice can bolt her arguments. There are two verbs, spelled alike, bolt. One means to sift, and is used often of arguments and reasonings. To bolt arguments is to construct them with logical care and precision. The other bolt means to shoot forth or blurt out. We may take our choice of the two words.

773. How is the line to be scanned?

780. Or have I said enow? In the edition of Comus published in 1645 this passage reads, Or have I said enough? In the edition of 1673, the latest that he revised, Milton changed enough to enow. Grammatically, enough is the better form, as the Elizabethan usage favored enough for the form of the adjective with singular nouns and for the adverb, and enow as the adjective with plurals. It would seem that the poet must have had some motive of euphony for the change he made.

788. thou art worthy that thou shouldst not know. A Latinism: dignus es qui non cognoscas.

793. the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause: the invincible power inherent in the cause by virtue of its nature.

804. Speaks thunder and the chains of Erebus To some of Saturn’s crew: pronounces sentence upon his foes, condemning them to the punishments named. Erebus—Darkness—is one of the numerous names of the lower world, the kingdom of Pluto.

808. the canon laws: the fundamental laws, or the Constitution. Canon law, generally speaking, is ecclesiastical law, or the law governing the church.

817. And backward mutters of dissevering power. The “many murmurs” with which his incantations have been mixed must be spoken backward in order to undo their effect. This backward repetition of the charm has the power to break the spell which the charm has wrought.

822. Meliboeus is yet another of the stock names of pastoral poetry.

823. The soothest shepherd. The ancient adjective sooth means essentially nothing more than true.

826. Sabrina is her name. The story of Sabrina is told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose history is included in the volume of Bohn’s Antiquarian Library, entitled Six Old English Chronicles. The book is easily accessible.

827. Whilom is derived from the dative plural hwÍlum of the Old English noun hwÍl, and originally meant at times.

831. What does Sabrina do in this line?

835. aged Nereus was one of the numerous Greek deities of the water. He and his wife Doris had fifty or a hundred daughters, who are called Nereids.

838. In nectared lavers strewed with asphodel. The nectar of the gods, which we usually think of as their drink, was also applied to other purposes, as when Thetis anoints with it the body of Patroclus, to prevent decay. Asphodel is a flower in our actual flora; but in the poets Asphodel is an immortal flower growing abundantly in the meadows of Elysium.

840. ambrosial here means, conferring immortality.

845. Helping all urchin blasts; i.e. helping the victims of the blasts against their baleful influence. See note on line 640. See Merry Wives of Windsor IV 4 49.

851. The word daffodil is directly derived from asphodel, with a d unaccountably prefixed. The English daffodil is the narcissus.

858. adjuring: charging or entreating solemnly and earnestly, as if under oath.

868. Oceanus is the personified Ocean, a broad, flowing stream encircling the earth.

869. Earth-shaking is a Homeric epithet of Neptune. The mace of Neptune must be his trident.

870. Tethys is wife of Oceanus and mother of the Oceanids. She reared the great goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter. Her pace is suitable to her dignity.

871. hoary Nereus. See note on line 835.

872. the Carpathian wizard’s hook. Proteus, son of Oceanus and Tethys, herded the sea-calves of Neptune on the island of Carpathus. As a herdsman he bore a crook, or hook. He had the gift of prophecy, and so is called a wizard.

873. Scaly Triton’s winding shell. Triton was herald of Neptune and so carried a shell, which he was wont to wind as a horn. His body was in part covered with scales like those of a fish.

874. The soothsaying Glaucus was a prophet, and gave oracles at Delos. He is represented as a man whose hair and beard are dripping with water, with bristly eyebrows, his breast covered with sea-weeds, and the lower part of his body ending in the tail of a fish.

875. By Leucothea’s lovely hands,

And her son that rules the strands.

Ino, after she had slain herself and her son Melicertes, by leaping with him into the sea, became a protecting deity of mariners under the name Leucothea, or the white goddess. So she came to the aid of Ulysses when he was passing on his raft from Calypso’s isle to PhÆacia. She there appears “with fair ankles,” and when she receives back from him her veil, which she had lent him, she does it with “lovely hands.”

Melicertes becomes a protecting deity of shores, under the name PalÆmon. The Romans identified him with their god Portunus.

877. By Thetis’ tinsel-slippered feet. Thetis was the wife of Peleus, and the mother of Achilles. In Homer she has the epithet silver-footed.

878. the songs of Sirens. See note on line 253.

879. By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb. Parthenope was one of the Sirens. At Naples her tomb was shown.

880. And fair Ligea’s golden comb. Ligea was probably also a siren. In Virgil, Georgics IV 336, we find a nymph of this name, spinning wool with other nymphs, “their bright locks floating over their snowy necks.” The name Ligea means shrill-voiced.

887. In the reading make in an adverb.

892. My sliding chariot stays. Compare this use of stay with that found in lines 134, 577, 820.

893. the azurn sheen. With azurn compare cedarn, line 990.

908-909. Be careful what inflection you give these lines in the reading.

913. of precious cure: of precious power to cure.

921. To wait in Amphitrite’s bower. Amphitrite was a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. She was goddess of the sea, had the care of its creatures, and could stir up the waves in storm.

923. Sprung of old Anchises’ line. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Brutus the Trojan was the grandson of Æneas and founder of London. Anchises, in the Homeric story, is the father of Æneas. This fable plays an important part in the ancient British myth.

924. thy brimmed waves. A river is happiest when full to its brim.

930. Of what parts of speech are torrent and flood?

933. It is very curious that our word beryl and the German Brille come directly from the same source.

937. And yet this river is the English Severn!

957. Note the impressive effect of the five-foot line ending the scene.

The shepherds have their dance in rustic fashion. The words describing this dance are the familiar peasant words, jig, duck, nod. The playful tone in which the spirit calls upon the swains to give place to their betters is charming.

964. With the mincing Dryades. “The Dryades were nymphs of woods and trees, dwelling in groves, ravines, and wooded valleys, and were fond of making merry with Apollo, Mercury, and Pan.”

980. I suck the liquid air: I inhale the upper air,—the Æther liquidus of the poets. So Ariel, Tempest V 1 102, “I drink the air before me.”

981. the gardens fair Of Hesperus and his daughters three. The number of the Hesperides and their parentage are differently given in various legends. The story of their garden in some mysterious place in the far west, where they guarded the tree that bore the golden apples, assisted by the dragon Ladon, is one of the best known in the classic mythology.

984. Along the crisped shades and bowers. Milton applies crisped to brooks, Par. Lost IV 237. Herrick has,—“the crisped yew,” and the American Thoreau,—“A million crisped waves.”

985. spruce. A very interesting account of the origin of this word is given by Skeat in his Etymological Dictionary.

986. The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours. See note on L’Allegro 15. “The Graces were guardians of the vernal sweetness and beauty of nature, friends and protectors of everything graceful and beautiful.” The Hours were goddesses of the seasons, daughters of Zeus and Themis. They were the door-keepers of Olympus, whose cloud-gate they open and shut: thus they preside over the weather.

990. About the cedarn alleys: about the pathways through cedar groves. Coleridge, in Kubla Khan, has the line, “Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover”; and Tennyson, Geraint and Enid, the line,—“And moving toward a cedarn cabinet.” So also William Barnes, in his Rural Poems, uses the expression, “stonen jugs.”

992. Iris is the messenger of the gods: her path is the rainbow.

993. Dr. Murray gives other instances of blow as a transitive verb.

999. Adonis was a young shepherd, the special favorite of Venus. His death was caused by a wild boar. The story is told in various forms. Observe that Milton makes him wax well of his deep wound.

1002. the Assyrian queen. The worship of Aphrodite (Venus) was brought into Greece from Assyria.

1005. Holds his dear Psyche. Psyche—the personification of the human soul—was a mortal maiden, beloved of Cupid. Venus, in her jealousy of Psyche, compelled her to pass through a long series of hardships and toils. Cupid at last succeeded in reconciling his mother and his beloved, and in having Psyche advanced to the dignity of an immortal.

1015. Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend: where the curvature of the vault of the sky seems less than higher up toward the zenith.

1021. the sphery chime. See notes, Hymn on the Nativity 48 and 125.

Lycidas is Milton’s contribution to a volume of elegiac verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, composed by many college friends of Edward King, who was drowned in the wreck of the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Channel.

In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains.

Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are Phoebus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton’s poetry.

Thus Lycidas is neither wholly elegiac nor wholly pastoral. From the lips of St. Peter, typifying the church, comes a speech of violent denunciation, in the true later Miltonic manner. In strange contrast to this grim invective is the famous flower-passage, the sweetest and loveliest thing of its kind in our literature.

1-5. To pluck once more the berries of the evergreens, or to gather laurels,—is to make a new venture as a poet,—to compose a poem. The berries are harsh and crude,—he shatters their leaves before the mellowing year, either because he is to mourn the death of a young man, or because he feels in himself a lack of “inward ripeness” to treat his theme worthily,—perhaps for both reasons. He shatters the leaves with forced fingers rude, in the sense that his subject is not of his own choosing.

6-7. A sad duty is imposed upon him, forbidding further delay on any personal grounds.

8. Lycidas is one of the stock names of pastoral poetry. The poem, though most serious in its main motive and intention, is to have a pastoral coloring throughout. Note the impressive repetitions, dead, dead, and the recurrences of the name Lycidas in the next two lines.

11. he knew Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme. Edward King had, in accordance with the college custom of his time, written verses, apparently all in Latin. Of these verses Masson, in his life of Milton, gives specimens. They seem to be commonplace.

13. and welter to the parching wind. See Par. Lost II 594, I 78.

15. Sisters of the sacred well. Ancient tradition connects the origin of the Muses with Pieria, a district of Macedonia at the foot of Olympus. But the springs with which we associate the Muses are Aganippe and Hippocrene on Mount Helicon.

19. So may some gentle muse. A peculiar use of the word muse as masculine, and meaning poet.

23-31. We pursued the same studies, at the same college, and we studied from early morning sometimes till after midnight. The metaphors are all pastoral.

32-36. We wrote merry verse, bringing in the college jollities, in wanton student-fashion, and the good-natured old don who was our tutor affected to be pleased with our work.

34. Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel. The Satyrs, represented as having human forms, with small goat’s horns and a small tail, had for their occupation to play on the flute for their master, Bacchus, or to pour his wine. The Fauns were sylvan deities, attendants of Pan, and are represented, like their master, with the ears, horns, and legs of a goat.

37-49. Nature herself sympathizes with men, and mourns thy loss.

50. Nymphs: deities of the forests and streams.

52. on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie. The shipwreck in which King was lost took place off the coast of Wales. Any one of the Welsh mountains will serve to make good this allusion.

54. Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high. Mona is the ancient and poetical name of the island of Anglesea.

55. Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream. The Dee (Deva) below Chester expands into a broad estuary. In his lines spoken At a Vacation Exercise, Milton, characterizing many rivers, mentions the “ancient hallowed Dee.” The country about the Dee had been specially famous as the seat of the old Druidical religion. In the eleventh Song of his Polyolbion, Drayton eulogizes the medicinal virtues of the salt springs in the valley of the river Weever, which attract Thetis and the Nereids:—

And Amphitrite oft this Wizard River led

Into her secret walks (the depths profound and dread)

Of him (supposed so wise) the hid events to know

Of things that were to come, as things done long ago.

In which he had been proved most exquisite to be;

And bare his fame so far, that oft twixt him and Dee,

Much strife there hath arose in their prophetic skill.

56-63. Even the Muse Calliope could do nothing for her son Orpheus, whom the Thracian women tore to pieces under the excitement of their Bacchanalian orgies. The gory visage floated down the Hebrus and through the Ægean Sea to the island of Lesbos.

64. what boots it: of what use is it?

64-66. What good are we going to derive from this unremitting devotion to study?

67-69. Would it not be better to abandon ourselves to social enjoyment, and to lives of frivolous trifling? Amaryllis and NeÆra are stock names of shepherdesses.

70-72. Understand clear, as applied to spirit, to mean “pure, guileless, unsophisticated.” Sir Henry Wotton, in his Panegyric to King Charles, says of King James I.,—“I will not deny his appetite of glory, which generous minds do ever latest part from.” Love of fame, according to the poet, is the motive that prompts the scholar to live as an ascetic and to persevere in toilsome labor. This love of fame is an infirmity, but not a debasing one: it leaves the mind noble. Remember, however, that the author of the Imitation of Christ prayed, Da mihi nesciri.

75. the blind Fury with the abhorred shears. Milton here seems to ascribe to the Furies (Erinyes) the function belonging to the Fates (ParcÆ, MoirÆ). The three Fates were Klotho, the Spinner; Lachesis, the Assigner of lots; and Atropos, the Unchanging. It was the duty of Atropos to cut the thread of life at the appointed time.

A querulous thought comes to the poet’s mind. Our lives are obscure and laborious, sustained only by the hope of future fame; but before we attain our reward, comes death, and our ambition is brought to naught.

76-77. But not the praise, Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears. The Fury cannot destroy the praise, which necessarily belongs to doing well. Praise here means the essential praise, which naturally inheres in excellence, and not the being talked about by men.

The speaker is now Phoebus, the august god Apollo, the pure one, who protects law and order, and promotes whatever is good and beautiful; who reveals the will of Zeus, and presides over prophecy.

Phoebus has now an admonition to give and he touches the poet’s ears; as in Virgil, Eclogue IV 3,—Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, “The Cynthian twitched my ear and warned me.”

79. in the glistering foil Set off. See Shakespeare, Richard III. V 3 250,—“A base foul stone, made precious by the foil of England’s chair.”

85-86. O fountain Arethuse, and thou honored flood, Smooth-sliding Mincius. Arethusa was a fresh-water fountain at Syracuse in Sicily, and the Mincius is a river in north Italy, on which is situated Mantua, the birthplace of the poet Virgil. The great pastoral poet Theocritus is said to have been born at Syracuse. Thus Arethusa and the Mincius typify the pastoral tone in which Milton conceives and constructs his poem. But the intervention of the great god Apollo has frighted the bucolic muses, to whom therefore the poet explains it, line 87.

88. Now I am on good terms again with the deities of lower rank. Oat is a common designation of the shepherd’s pipe, or syrinx.

89-90. Neptune, through his herald, Triton, pleads his freedom from all complicity in the drowning of Lycidas. Triton sends to Æolus, god of the winds, requesting him to cross-question all his subjects as to what they were doing on the day of the wreck.

95-99. The winds prove their innocence, and Æolus himself comes to report to Triton that at the time of the disaster they were all at home and the air was perfectly calm. Even Panope and all her sisters were out playing on the tranquil water.

96. sage Hippotades. Æolus was the son of Hippotes. See all about him in Odyssey, book X. Read also Ruskin, Queen of the Air, section 19.

99. Panope was a Nereid, one of the numerous daughters of Nereus.

103. Now comes another grand personage to make inquiry about the death of Lycidas. Camus, the deity of the river Cam, stands for the University of Cambridge.

104. His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge. The river god is represented as wearing a mantle made of water-grasses and reeds.

105-106. These lines refer to certain markings on the water-plants of the Cam, said to be correctly described here by the poet. The dimness of the figures may suggest the great age of the university, and the tokens of woe belong to the present occasion.

106. that sanguine flower inscribed with woe. This is the hyacinth, the flower that sprang up on the spot where the youth Hyacinthus had been accidentally slain by Apollo. The petals of the hyacinth are said to be marked with the Greek letters AI AI, which form an interjection expressing grief.

107. Lycidas was one of those collegians whose scholarship, character, and piety promise to make them the pride of their Alma Mater.

109. The Pilot of the Galilean Lake. See Matthew XIV.

110. Two massy keys he bore of metals twain. See Matthew XVI 19. See also Comus 13 and Par. Lost III 485. The idea of two keys, one of gold and one of iron, is not in the Bible.

112. He shook his mitred locks. St. Peter wears the mitre as bishop.

113-131. St. Peter makes but little reference to Lycidas, and his words add almost nothing to the elegiac character of the poem. His speech is one of stern and bitter satire. The second period of Milton’s life, which is to be given up to intense and uncompromising partisanship in religion and politics, foreshadows itself in these lines.

114. Enow is here used in its proper plural sense. See note on Comus 780.

115. climb into the fold. See John X 1. The metaphor of sheep and herdsmen is continued throughout the speech.

119. Blind mouths! As the relative pronoun beginning the next clause refers to this exclamation, mouths must be taken as a bold metaphor meaning men who are all mouth, or are supremely greedy and selfish. Moreover, they are blind.

122. What recks it them? See note on Comus 404. They are sped: they have succeeded in their purpose. See Antony and Cleopatra II 3 35. Note also the phrase of greeting, bid God speed, as in 2 John I 10, 11, King James version.

123. their lean and flashy songs: their sermons.

Evidently Milton can cull words of extreme disparagement and vilification as well as words of unapproachable poetic beauty.

125-127. The congregations are not edified. The miserable preaching they listen to fails to keep them sound in doctrine. They grow lax in their faith, and heretical opinions become fashionable.

128. the grim wolf with privy paw is undoubtedly the Roman church.

130-131. These lines evidently denounce some terrible retribution that is sure ere long to overtake the corrupt clergy described in the preceding passage. The two-handed engine at the door, that stands ready to smite once and smite no more, has never been definitely explained. We naturally think of the headsman’s axe, which, however, does not become applicable till the execution of Archbishop Laud, an event not to take place till eight years after the composition of the poem. It has been suggested that Milton had in mind the two houses of Parliament, or the Parliament and the Army, as the agency through which reform was to be effected. We must remember that Milton in 1637 could not foresee the Civil War. He may have meant to combine certain scriptural expressions into a mysteriously suggestive and oracular prediction, without having in view any single and definite possibility.

132. Return, Alpheus. The Alpheus was a river of the Peloponnesus, said to sink underground and to flow beneath the sea to Ortygia, near Syracuse, where it attempted to mingle its waters with those of the fountain Arethusa. See note on lines 85, 86. See also Shelley’s poem, Arethusa.

The pastoral tone of lightness and simplicity could not be maintained while St. Peter spoke. But now the Sicilian Muse returns, all the more lovely for the contrast with the stern malediction that has gone before.

134-151. Milton is fond of thus collecting names of persons, places, and things, choosing them as well for their effect on the ear as for their significance. The botany of this passage is of little consequence: it matters not whether all these flowers could, or could not, be collected at the same season, or whether they could be found at the time of the year when Lycidas died. The passage offers a picture of exquisite beauty to the eye, and to the ear a strain of perfect melody.

136. where the mild whispers use. The verb use, in this intransitive sense, with only adverbial complement, and meaning dwell, is now obsolete.

138. the swart star: the star that makes swart, or swarthy; i.e. the sun.

139. enamelled eyes are the flowers generally, which are to be specified. Scattered over the turf, the flowers seem to be looking upward, like eyes.

142. rathe is the adjective whose comparative is our rather.

149. amaranthus, by its etymology, means unfading.

150. Daffadil is derived from asphodel, with a curious, and altogether unusual, prefixed d.

153. dally with false surmise. King’s body was not found. There was no actual strewing of the laureate hearse with flowers.

156. the stormy Hebrides: islands off the northwest coast of Scotland.

160. Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old. The fable of Bellerus is the fabled Bellerus, or Bellerus of the fable. He was a mythical giant of Cornwall in old British legend. Bellerium was the name given to Land’s End, where he was supposed to live.

161. the great Vision of the guarded mount. St. Michael’s Mount is a pyramidal rock in Mounts Bay on the coast of Cornwall. This was guarded by the angel, St. Michael, whose gaze was directed seaward, toward Namancos and Bayona, in northwestern Spain. In some unknown place between these widely sundered limits, the body of Lycidas is tossed.

170. with new-spangled ore. Ore, from its original meaning of metal in the natural state, comes to signify metallic lustre generally. See Comus 719, 933.

173. See Matthew XIV 25.

175. Compare Comus 838.

176. the unexpressive nuptial song. See Hymn on the Nativity 116. See also Revelation XIX 7-9.

181. And wipe the tears forever from his eyes. See Revelation XXI 4.

183. Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore. This is the same promotion that was accorded to Melicertes, son of Ino, who on his death became the genius of the shore under the name of PalÆmon.

186. uncouth; a self-depreciating expression meaning unknown or obscure.

187. Milton applies the epithet gray both to evening and to morning.

188. various quills are the tubes of the shepherd pipe.

189. Doric means simply pastoral, because the idylls of the first pastoral poets were written in the Doric dialect of Greek.

190. had stretched out all the hills: had caused the shadows of the hills to prolong themselves eastward on the plain.

The poet seems to feign that he spent a day in the composition of Lycidas.

SONNETS.

Of poems in strict sonnet form, that is, containing neither more nor less than fourteen decasyllable iambic lines, interlocked by some scheme of symmetrical rhyme, not in couplets, Milton left twenty-three, of which five are in Italian. Of the three sonnets in English omitted from this edition, two have reference to the violent controversy occasioned by Milton’s publications in advocacy of greater freedom of divorce, and are rough and polemic in style; the third is omitted on account of its unimportance and lack of distinction.

In their dates the twenty-three sonnets range from the poet’s twenty-third to his fiftieth year. They are the only form of verse in which he indulges during that middle period of his life which was abandoned to political partisanship on the side of the Parliament in the Civil War, and to the service of the government during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. If, as is now widely believed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are artificial and tell us little or nothing about their author, those of Milton are purely natural and subjective and tell us nothing else but what their writer was thinking and feeling. Their themes are his veritable moods and passions. The mood is now friendly, amiable, and serene, now bitter, strenuous, indignant, vindictive.

Wordsworth, in his sonnet, Scorn not the Sonnet, thus refers to Milton’s sparing use of this poetic form:—

and when a damp

Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew

Soul-animating strains,—alas too few.

The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet,—the usual English form up to the seventeenth century. Milton adopted the Italian, or Petrarchian model, which has continued to be the standard sonnet form in our modern poetry. In the Miltonic, or Italian, sonnet a group of eight lines, linked by two rhymes each occurring four times, is followed by a group of six lines linked by three rhymes each occurring twice. The octave and the sextet are severed from each other by the non-continuance of the rhymes of the former into the latter. At the end of the octave, or near it, is usually a pause, marking the culmination of the thought, and the sextet makes an inference or rounds out the sense to an artistic whole.

Read Wordsworth’s sonnets, Happy the feeling from the bosom thrown, and Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.

I.

The date of this sonnet is unknown. From the fact that it comes first in the series as arranged by the poet, it is inferred that it is the earliest sonnet he chose to publish.

4. the jolly Hours. See note on Comus 986.

5-6. To hear the nightingale before the cuckoo was for lovers a good sign. This superstition is a motive in the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, a poem formerly attributed to Chaucer, and as such “modernized” by Wordsworth, but now known to be the work of Sir Thomas Clanvowe. Stanza X of this poem is thus given by Wordsworth:—

But tossing lately on a sleepless bed,

I of a token thought which Lovers heed;

How among them it was a common tale,

That it was good to hear the Nightingale

Ere the vile Cuckoo’s note be utterÈd.

9. the rude bird of hate. This gives to the cuckoo altogether too bad a character. The bird has on the whole a fair standing in English poetry. We must think of the very pleasing Ode to the Cuckoo,—written either by Michael Bruce or by John Logan,—as well as of the passage in which Shakespeare makes Lucrece ask (line 848),—

Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?

Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?

Look up other nightingale and cuckoo songs; for example, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, and Wordsworth’s The Cuckoo at Laverna.

II (1631).

This sonnet Milton appears to have sent with a prose letter to a friend who had remonstrated with him on the life of desultory study which he was so long continuing to lead. In this letter he professes the principle of “not taking thought of being late, so it gave advantage to be more fit.” He adds, “That you may see that I am something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza, which I told you of.”

8. timely-happy: wise with the wisdom proportionate to one’s years. Similar compounds of two adjectives in Shakespeare are very frequent; for example, holy-cruel, heady-rash, proper-false, devilish-holy, cold-pale.

10. even: equal, adequate.

VIII (1642).

The occasion of this sonnet was the near approach of the royalist army to London, early in the Civil War. The people of the city had reason to fear the entrance of the cavalier troops and the sacking of the houses of citizens obnoxious to the party of the king. Milton would have been an object of special animosity to victorious royalists, and for a short time he had grounds for the acutest anxiety. It is not easy to see how, in case of actual pillage of the city, he could have made use of such an appeal as this. The sonnet is probably to be regarded as a work of art constructed when the vicissitudes which it pictures were happily past, and when the poet’s mind had regained its tranquillity.

1. Note that Colonel has three syllables, according to the pronunciation prevailing in Milton’s time. Look up the etymology of this word.

10. The great Emathian conqueror: Alexander the Great, called Emathian from Emathia, a district of his kingdom of Macedonia.

11. bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground. Alexander destroyed the city of Thebes in 335 B.C. Pindar, the famous lyric poet, a native and resident of Thebes, had then been dead more than a century. But Pindar’s house still stood, and was left standing by the conqueror, who destroyed all other buildings of the city.

12. the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. To quote from Plutarch, Life of Lysander: “The proposal was made in the congress of the allies, that the Athenians should all be sold as slaves; on which occasion Erianthus, the Theban, gave his vote to pull down the city and turn the country into sheep-pasture; yet afterwards, when there was a meeting of the captains together, a man of Phocis singing the first chorus in Euripides’ Electra, which begins,—

“Electra, Agamemnon’s child, I come

Unto thy desert home,

they were all melted with compassion, and it seemed to be a cruel deed to destroy and pull down a city which had been so famous, and produced such men.”

IX (1644).

Who the virtuous young lady was is not known.

2. See the gospel of Matthew VII 13.

5. See Luke X 40-42; Ruth I 14.

8. Note the “identical” rhyme. The effect of such a rhyme is unpleasant. Modern poets avoid it.

9-14. See Matthew XXV 1-13.

X (1644 or 1645).

Lady Margaret’s father was the Earl of Marlborough, who had been President of the Council under Charles I. Milton attributes his death to political anxiety caused by the dissolution of Charles’s third Parliament in 1629.

6-8. that dishonest victory at ChÆronea. The victory of Philip over the Greeks at ChÆronea, B.C. 338, is called by the poet dishonest because obtained by means of intrigue and bribery. that old man eloquent is the orator and rhetorician Isocrates, who, in his grief over the defeat of his countrymen, committed suicide.

9. later born than to have known: too late to have known. Serius nata quam ut cognosceres.

XIII (1646).

“In these lines, Milton, with a musical perception not common amongst poets, exactly indicates the great merit of Lawes, which distinguishes his compositions from those of many of his contemporaries and successors. His careful attention to the words of the poet, the manner in which his music seems to grow from those words, the perfect coincidence of the musical with the metrical accent, all put Lawes’s songs on a level with those of Schumann or Liszt.”—EncyclopÆdia Britannica.

See introductory notes to Comus and Arcades.

3-4. not to scan With Midas’ ears. The god Apollo, during the time of his servitude to Laomedon, had a quarrel with Pan, who insisted that the flute was a better instrument than the lyre. The decision was left to Midas, king of Lydia, who decided in favor of Pan. To punish Midas, Apollo changed his ears into those of an ass.

4. committing short and long: setting long syllables and short ones to fight against each other, and so destroying harmony.

5. The subject is conceived as a single idea, and so takes the verb in the singular. exempts thee: singles thee out, selects thee.

8. couldst humor best our tongue: couldst best adapt or accommodate itself to our language.

10. Phoebus’ quire: the poets. Quire is Milton’s spelling of choir.

12-14. Read the story of Dante’s meeting with his friend, the musician Casella, in the second canto of Purgatory.

XV (1648).

The taking of Colchester by the parliamentary army under Fairfax, Aug. 28, 1648, was one of the most important events of the Civil War.

7. the false North displays Her broken league. The Scotch and the English accused each other of having violated the Solemn League and Covenant, to which the people of both countries had subscribed.

8. to imp their serpent wings. To imp a wing with feathers is to attach feathers to it so as to strengthen or improve its flight. The word is originally a term of falconry. See Richard II. II 1 292. See also Murray’s New English Dictionary.

13-14. Valor, Avarice, Rapine; personified abstracts, after the manner of our earlier poetry.

XVI.

As Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State of the Commonwealth, Milton saw much of Cromwell, and came under the influence of his voice and manner. Whether the great general had ever taken note of the poems written by the secretary who turned his despatches into Latin, or whether he gave any special heed to the man himself, with whom he must have come into some sort of personal relation, we have no means of knowing. We know, however, perfectly well what the poet thought of the victorious general. Though by no means always approving his state policy, Milton retained to the end the warm personal admiration for Cromwell which he expresses in this sonnet.

7-9. Darwen stream, usually spoken of as the battle of Preston, was fought Aug. 17, 1648; Dunbar, Sept. 3, 1650; Worcester, Sept. 3, 1651.

12. to bind our souls with secular chains: to fetter our religious freedom with laws made by the civil power.

14. hireling wolves. Milton applies this degrading appellation to clergymen who received pay from the state. His appeal to Cromwell was not successful. Cromwell was to become the chief supporter of a church establishment.

XVII (1652).

Sir Henry Vane was member of a committee of the Council of State appointed in 1649 to consider alliances and relations with the European powers. Milton, as Secretary of the Council, had abundant opportunity to observe Vane’s skill in diplomacy, his ability to “unfold the drift of hollow states hard to be spelled.” Both Vane and Milton held to the doctrine, preËminently associated with the name of Roger Williams, of universal toleration, based on the refusal to the civil magistrate of any authority in spiritual matters.

1. Vane, young in years: Vane was born in 1613.

3. gowns, not arms: civilians, not soldiers. The expression is a Latinism, the gown standing for the toga.

4. The fierce Epirot and the African bold: Pyrrhus and Hannibal.

6. hard to be spelled. Compare Il Penseroso 170.

XVIII (1655).

The historical event which furnishes the occasion of this sonnet is the persecution of the Protestant Waldenses by the Piedmontese and French governments, at the time of Cromwell’s Protectorate. Cromwell’s vigorous and successful intervention was the means of staying this horror, and gives evidence of the respect entertained for his government among the states of Europe.

4. when all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones. Christianity had been introduced into the Waldensian country while Britain was still pagan.

5. their groans Who were thy sheep: the groans of those who were.

12. The triple Tyrant. The Pope, who wore a triple crown.

14. the Babylonian woe. The puritans interpreted the Babylon of Revelation as the church of Rome. See Revelation XVIII.

XIX.

The sonnet, says Masson, may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655.

2. Ere half my days. Milton’s blindness is considered to have become total in 1652, when he was at the age of forty-four. How shall we understand these words?

3. See the Parable of the Talents, Matthew XXV.

8. I fondly ask. See note on Il Pens. 6.

XX.

Probable date, 1655. Of the Mr. Lawrence to whom the sonnet is addressed nothing is certainly known.

6. Favonius is the Latin name for Zephyrus, the west wind.

10. Attic: refined, delicate, poignant.

13. and spare To interpose them oft: refrain from too free enjoyment of them.

XXI.

The second sonnet to Cyriac Skinner determines its own date as 1655, and this one is probably to be assigned to the same year.

But little is known of the person to whom this sonnet and the next one are addressed, except what we learn from the sonnets themselves,—that he was an intimate and esteemed friend of Milton. He may have been one of Milton’s pupils; and he may, when his old teacher had become blind, have rendered him important services as amanuensis or as reader.

1-4. Cyriac Skinner’s mother was daughter of the famous lawyer and judge, Sir Edward Coke.

2. Themis is personified law, this being the meaning of the Greek word.

7. Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause: intermit for a day your severe mathematical studies.

8. And what the Swede intend, and what the French: and pay no heed to foreign news.

XXII (1655).

1. this three years’ day: three years ago to-day.

10. Milton’s duties as Latin secretary to the government were exceedingly arduous.

XXIII.

Milton’s second wife died in February, 1658; her child lived but a short time. At the time of his second marriage Milton had been blind several years. Notice the reference in the sonnet to the sense of sight: in his dream he saw.

2. like Alcestis. Read the story of the Love of Alcestis in William Morris’s Earthly Paradise; and read in Euripides, “That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his, Alkestis.”

6. Purification in the Old Law. See Leviticus XII.

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