CHAPTER V THE ELEGIAC POEMS WHILE Milton as the author of "Lycidas" and the “Epitaphium Damonis" is assuredly the greatest English elegist, it does not follow that he is the most typical. That honor is reserved for Gray. Milton seldom or never fails to lay the tender and melodious flute aside for a moment to give us more inspiring strains upon the trumpet or the lyre. This fact has given some purists occasion for inept criticism-especially with regard to "Lycidas." They seem to think that because the strictly elegiac note of lament (querimonia) is not kept throughout, the poem ceases to be harmonious, and hence to be a work of art. They forget that there is such a thing as fusion of diverse elements in art as well as in chemistry. A mechanical mixture of inharmonious elements will certainly not produce a work of art; a mechan ical mixture of merely diverse but not necessarily inharmonious elements will certainly detract from, if not completely mar, a work of art. But a fusion of such diverse elements may, under favorable circumstances, produce a new form of artistic product, or modify an old and well-known form. The idyllists of Alexandria, while preserving the metre and some other features of the older and the newer epic, nevertheless, by the fusion of new elements, produced a separate and distinct form of poetry. The fusion of this form, the idyll, with the elegy, modified the older form, and produced what we know as the pastoral elegy. Whether now Milton was able to modify this last form and still preserve its artistic qualities and nature, is a question that must be discussed when we consider "Lycidas." able As we have seen, Milton's first elegiac was almost his first poetic effort. In the autumn of 1626, when he was not quite eighteen, his sister, Mrs. Anne Phillips, lost her first child, a daughter, and the young collegian lamented the event in the well-known poem, "On the Death of a Fair Infant, dying of a Cough." If it were not for the fact that such contentions are always unnecessary, because always incapable of settlement, one might well maintain that this is the most remarkable poem ever written by a boy of equal age. It seems to be even better than Lamb's famous and admirable lines “On an Infant dying as soon as born," and it is certainly better than Lovelace's "Elegy " on the Princess Katherine, "born, christened, buried in one day" with both of which poems one naturally compares it. If it has not the subtle tenderness of Lamb's lines, it has a dignity and elevation worthy of the Milton of riper years. This elevation warrants certain writers in treating the poem as an ode. It is, indeed, an elegiac ode, complete in eleven of those modified rhyme-royal stanzas that have been already described, and it is one of the best English poems of its kind, although manifestly inferior to Dryden's masterpiece in the same class of composition, the splendid and imperishable "Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew." As has just been intimated, it is not difficult to trace in this youthful poem qualities that were never to be absent from Milton's work. There is the wonderful mastery of language and rhythm, the high seriousness, the free and unpedantic use of classical allusion, that have distinguished Milton as an artist from all other English poets. There is, it is true, as in most of the early poems, a marked leaning toward the Fantastic School, yet there is so much stateliness of manner that the extravagances are overlooked. But a quotation or two will obviate the necessity for further comment: "O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted, are verses that any poet, even the greatest, might be proud to call his own. The elevation proper to the ode form appears plainly in the following stanza, the fourth: "Yet art thou not inglorious in thy fate; For so Apollo, with unweeting hand, Young Hyacinth born on Eurotas' strand, power." Certainly there was no other poet living in Jacobean England save Ben Jonson who could have paralleled this stanza, nor in the quarter of a century to follow was there to be one capable of equalling it, although it was to be a period of considerable activity in the composition of elegiac verse. Perhaps, however, an exception to this statement must be made. in favor of the eight immortal lines in which the great Marquis of Montrose poured forth the passion and the anguish of his soul at the execution of his royal master. But Milton was soon to use use his elegiac powers to better purpose than in this poem, or in the Latin elegies that will be discussed later. In 1630 he composed his splendid epitaph on Shakspere, thus fairly measuring his strength against Ben Jonson in the latter's strongest point. Although it hardly seems that the epitaph on "the admirable dramatic poet," which was published anonymously in the Second Folio of 1632, is equal in human appropriateness and in perfection of workmanship to the best of Jonson's epitaphs, such as that on Philip Gray, or that it is as important |