Minor Poems by Milton Part 21

153. dally with false surmise. King's body was not found. There was no actual strewing of the laureate hea.r.s.e 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 l.u.s.tre 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 sh.o.r.e. This is the same promotion that was accorded to Melicertes, son of Ino, who on his death became the genius of the sh.o.r.e under the name of Palaemon.

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 partisans.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sions. 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 s.e.xtet 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 s.e.xtet 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 superst.i.tion 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 uttered.

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 pa.s.sage 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 compa.s.sion, and it seemed to be a cruel deed to destroy and pull down a city which had been so famous, and produced such men."