PAGE 80 81 82 83 509. sadly: seriously. 531, 532. crofts that brow, etc.: small enclosed pieces of land near to the houses on the hill sloping up from the valley. 560. still: always. 567. how near the deadly snare: i.e., how near to the snare. 589 ff. These lines voice Milton's deepest ethical convictions and constitute his first great poetical confession of faith. 607. purchase: booty. 621. virtuous: having power. 84 629 ff. Milton has renamed and altered the description of Homer's moly, the magic plant which protected Ulysses from the enchantments of Circe, in such a way as to suggest that more is meant than meets the ear, but no convincing interpretation of the allegory has been offered. The name Hæmony is probably from Hæmonia, Thessaly, the land of magic. 85 635. clouted: patched. 658. And some good angel, etc.: an instance of the dramatic irony common to Greek tragedy. Milton consciously throughout the masque introduces touches of style and manner characteristic of ancient drama; e.g., the single line speeches or stichomythy in lines 277 ff. with their riddling question and answer. The Euripidean prologue and the dea ex machina at the close are more essential borrowings. Stage direction. The scene changes, etc. The following passage should be compared with the similar scene at the close of Book III of the Faerie Queene, from which, perhaps, Milton received the principal suggestion for Comus. 675. Nepenthes. Nepenthe means "pain-dispelling." Helen is said in the Odyssey to have mixed with the wine of her guests in Sparta a narcotic drug given her by Polydamna, wife of Thon. 685. unexempt condition: condition from which there is no exemption. 86 698. vizored: masked. 700. lickerish: tempting to the appetite, in a vicious sense. 702, 703. None but such as are good men, etc. Christ, asked by Satan in Paradise Regained, whether he would eat if he had food, replied, "Thereafter as I like the giver." There is no intrinsic evil in the delights offered to the Lady, but they are associated with evil in their source and are therefore to be rejected. The ethical idea at the heart of Milton's Comus, and indeed of all his works, is not asceticism. He believes that all things are for man, but that there must be control and principle in the use of them. The restraining principle is often spoken of by Milton, following Aristotle, as temperance. 707, 708. those budge doctors, etc. Budge means formal, pompous, from a kind of fur worn in academic costume. The cynic tub is the tub in which Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher, lived. 88-9 786, 787. the sage and serious doctrine. The touch of mysticism in Milton's reflections on chastity is not confined to Comus. It is not altogether chance that he elsewhere applies the same two adjectives here used to the poet Spenser. 89 808. the canon laws of our foundation. Canon law is ecclesiastical law. In making Comus speak as if he were the head of a monastery, Milton is indulging in a piece of Reformation satire. PAGE Possibly he has in mind Rabelais's libertine monastery, with its motto, "Do what thou wilt." 810. melancholy blood. In the old physiology disease was supposed to result from the disordering of the four humours or fluids of the body. One of these was melancholos or black bile, the predominance of which in the blood led to "melancholy." 822. Melibœus. Milton means Spenser, who tells the story of Sabrina out of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Faerie Queene, II, x. Guendolen, wife of Locrine, King of Britain, had been supplanted by Estrildis. In a fit of jealous rage she drives the latter and her daughter, Sabrina, into the river Severn. Milton's incorporation of this local legend, a favourite one with the earlier poets, into his plot is in the best tradition of the Elizabethan courtly muse. 845. urchin blasts: blasts or strokes of sickness sent by evil spirits. 846. shrewd: malicious. Sabrina is conjured by an enumeration A characteristic Miltonic passage in which the poet revels in the musical suggestiveness of proper names. The Carpathian wizard is Proteus. 961. other trippings: i.e., a courtly dance, presumably following the next song. Such a dance is the essential and original feature of the masque. The dance of the countrymen, above, is technically the second anti-masque. 965. Thyrsis here turns to Lord and Lady Egerton, and the fiction of the masque merges gracefully into present reality, 976 ff. The spirit's epilogue promises in terms of classical myth the joys of paradise to those who follow the path of virtue. Milton's language is highly mystical. He insists in the parenthesis ("List mortals, if your ears be true") that the audience strive to penetrate to the hidden meaning of his words. The two myths, that of Adonis and the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite (the Assyrian queen), and the converse one of Psyche and the God of Love, Cupid, embody a teaching analogous to that expressed in the Christian image of the heavenly bridegroom. Of this union of the soul with God immortality and eternal bliss (Youth and Joy) are the fruit. The idea of Paradisiac love appears again at the close of Lycidas and the Epitaph of Damon, and, in another form, in Paradise Lost. LYCIDAS This poem, published in 1638 as Milton's contribution to a volume of poems written in memory of Edward King by his former college friends, bears in the preserved manuscript the date, November, 1637. It is, therefore, the last work belonging to the Horton period. Milton's intimacy with King is not known to have been close. He expresses in the poem a keen sense of the pathos of his death, but his main concern is with the general reflections and emotions which such an event brings home to the heart of the poet. These feelings connect themselves with Milton's own aspirations. After speaking in the opening lines of his consciousness that his poetic faculty is not yet ripe, and suggesting in veiled terms the atmosphere of his college life, he asks himself what is the use of high and strenuous efforts when life is the object of such accidents as that which has cut off one of the most promising of his companions, and answers that the true reward is God's final approval of each deed. The fact that King had, like Milton, planned to enter the Church leads the poet to denounce the corruption and worldliness of the clergy. These PAGE passages are in the larger sense not digressions, but the very heart of Milton's theme. Finally, face to face with the issue of immortality, Milton, changing the note of sorrow to one of joy, gives exalted expression to his own triumphant faith. In the last eight lines he turns to his own future, sobered and strengthened by the experience through which he has passed. Save by Samuel Johnson, who held implacable enmity with pastoral poetry and was none too friendly toward the memory of Milton himself, Lycidas has been universally acknowledged to contain the sum of poetic beauty. The strangeness to modern ears of the highly conventional pastoral form is best overcome by study of the Idyls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, together with such modern pastorals as Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. The classical allusions are meant to be recognized at sight, not painfully looked up for the occasion in a dictionary. A full appreciation of Lycidas, the "high-water mark of English poetry," is said by Pattison to be one of the last fruits of culture. 3. harsh and crude: sour and unripe (Lat. crudus). Milton implies that his poetry, symbolized by laurels, myrtles, and ivy, is not yet matured to his liking, and that but for the prompting of an urgent occasion he would not now be writing verse. As a matter of fact he wrote very little at Horton, and the most extensive work composed there, Comus, was, like Lycidas, occasional. 6. dear: hard, grievous. 17. somewhat loudly: because of the elevated character of the theme. Milton is conscious of the fact that this elegy soars above the ordinary mood of the pastoral. 18. coy. The reader must rid himself of the modern connotation of the word. It means here simply "modest," not " affectedly modest.' " 20. lucky words: words of good omen; "favour" is used in its technical Latin sense, auspicate. 30. Oft till the star, etc. The star is Hesperus, the evening planet; rose means simply "appeared" (in the west). Milton implies that they often prolonged their occupation together beyond the time of the appearance of the evening star until its setting after dark. 36. old Damætas: the conventional older shepherd or goatherd often present at the song contests of the pastoral youths in Virgil and Theocritus. It is to consider too curiously to ask whether Milton refers to some specific Cambridge tutor associated with himself and King. The pastoral phrases are intended to be merely general equivalents for college scenes and occupations. 38. The sympathetic grief of nature is a conventional motive in pastoral elegy. 45. canker: the canker worm. 50 ff. Similar appeals to the Nymphs or Muses are found in many precedent pastoral elegies ancient and modern. Here, as elsewhere in Lycidas, Milton pours his thought into long established modes and forms. The result is a certain draped formality, which nevertheless does not conceal the intensity of the personal emotion. 53 ff. The references are to places on the coast of Wales, off which Edward King was drowned. Mona is the island of Angelsey. 'The steep" is probably a hill in Digbyshire, known as the burial place of the Druids. Deva is the river Dee. These regions, in view of the fame of the ancient Welsh bards, are a non-classical but an appropriate haunt of the Muses. 66. meditate: a Latinism. Cf. Virgil, musam meditare, to com. pose poetry. PAGE 98 99 100 101 68, 69. Amaryllis, Neæra: representative pastoral names of girls. 75. the blind Fury: Atropos, the one of the three Fates whose function it was to cut the thread of destiny spun and measured by her sisters. 77. The touching of the poet's ears as a symbolic reminder was suggested by Virgil, Ec. VI, 3. The ears were held to be the seat of memory. 82. Jove. Milton characteristically uses the name of the classical divinity. He means God. 85, 86. O fountain Arethuse, etc. Milton here calls back the gentle spirit of pastoral poetry which has been transcended by the higher mood" of the words which the poet has just heard from Apollo. Arethuse, the Sicilian fountain, and Mincius, Virgil's native river, represent the Greek and Roman sources of pastoral inspiration. 88 ff. But now my oat proceeds, etc. The oat straw was the traditional instrument of pastoral song. Triton, the herald of the sea, representing Neptune, and Eolus (Hippotades), God of the Winds, are called on to report the cause of the shipwreck. 103. Camus. A personification of the river Cam, symbolizing Milton's and King's Alma Mater, Cambridge University. The hairy mantle and sedge bonnet suggest the reeds which grow along the shore. In this river personification Milton shows himself a disciple of Spenser. The allusion in lines 105-06 is to the hyacinth, said to bear the markings of Apollo's grief for the death of his friend Hyacinthus. 109. the Pilot of the Galilean lake. Saint Peter, keeper of the keys to Heaven and founder of the Church, into which King was to have entered. The procession of mourners," persons especially interested in the fate of the deceased, is a well-defined convention of pastoral elegy. 113. How well could I have spared, etc. The Biblical basis for the denunciation of the corrupt ministry under the image of shepherds is passage in Ezekiel (xxxiv). Similar ecclesiastical invectives are found in the eclogues of Petrarch and Spenser. 123 ff. their lean and flashy songs, etc. The trivial sermons of the Anglican clergy and the false doctrine inculcated by them had deeply offended Milton. The grim wolf is the Catholic Church, the secret activities of which among the English Protestants was at the time a source of much alarm. 130. that two-handed engine: the sword of God's vengeance. 132. Return, Alpheus, etc. Milton again invokes the return of the true pastoral mood, the Muse of Sicilian Theocritus, symbolized by the Greek river Alpheus. 138. the swart star: the dog star, Sirius, "swart" because the heat of summer blackens vegetation. 142. rathe: early. 152 ff. For so, to interpose a little ease, etc. Let our weak human need of paying a last tribute to the dead thus play with the false supposition that the body of Lycidas has been recovered, while, in fact, it is washed far away by the sea. 158. monstrous: Lat. monstrosus, full of monsters. 160. the fable of Bellerus. Milton coins a personal designation from Bellerium, Land's End. He had originally written "Corineus" and refers to a fabulous Cornish giant. 161. the great Vision of the guarded mount: the fabled apparition of the angel Michael in Saint Michael's chair, a craggy seat on a steep rock in Cornwall. PAGE 101 102 103 162. Namancos and Bayona's hold: places in Spain, represented in a map of 1636 by a tower and a castle. 163. Angel. Michael is bidden look, not out toward Spain, but nearer home in pity for the mourners. The angel cannot be Lycidas, as some commentators explain it, for Milton's thought is still with the lost body of his friend. The mention of a supernatural guardian suggests the transition to the idea of the survival of his spirit. 176. unexpressive: inexpressible. nuptial song: an allusion to the mystic marriage of the soul with Christ. Cf. the close of Comus. 184. good: Lat. bonus, in the sense of propitious. 186. uncouth: unknown, with a suggestion also of the modern meaning "rude," since the pastoral was conventionally supposed to be an artless song. Cf. "Doric lay," below. TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL Written in 1652. The Committee was one appointed by the Rump Parliament. The proposals had to do with the public maintenance of preachers. Milton feared the growth of the mercenary and secular spirit in the clergy and objected to this and similar measures. His admiration of the military achievements of Cromwell, who was not made Protector until 1653, is eloquently expressed at the close of the Second Defence in a passage which like this sonnet, warns him of abuses which he must remedy and implies a fear lest he fail to pursue the liberal policies which Milton held dear. As a matter of fact, Cromwell had already given grounds for such a fear. TO SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER Written in 1652. Vane, who was at this time forty years old, had been governor of Massachusetts, and a leading member of the Long Parliament. As a member of the Council he devoted himself vigorously to foreign affairs and particularly to the administration of the navy. He was an independent and shared many of Milton's political and religious opinions. Here, as in the Cromwell sonnet, Milton exalts the civil authority over the military and insists on the distinction between the religious and secular power, the confusion of which constituted, in Milton's mind, the weakness of the régime of Charles I and of the Puritans alike. 6. the drift of hollow states. This refers, with a pun in the adjective, to the plottings of Holland against the Commonwealth, which resulted in war in the year the sonnet was written. 12. the bounds of either sword: the limits of spiritual and civil jurisdiction. ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEMONT Probably written in 1655. The poem is an outburst of indignation, shared by the whole English people, at the massacre by the Duke of Savoy of three hundred of the Waldensians, living in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont in Italy. They were Protestants long before the Reformation, having, it was said, maintained the practices of primitive Christianity in an unbroken tradition from the time of the apostles. The news of the attack was the occasion of an official protest by Cromwell, and three years later Milton himself drafted a state letter to various governments as the result of another outburst of persecution. 4. our fathers: the English people before the Reformation. |