Chapter 11

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.