Part 21 (1/2)

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.