Lycidas
P. 167. haud procul a littore Britannico: ‘the ship having struck on a rock not far from the British shore and been ruptured by the shock, he, while the other passengers were fruitlessly busy about their mortal lives, having fallen forward upon his knees, and breathing a life which was immortal, in the act of prayer going down with the vessel, rendered up his soul to God, August 10, 1637, aged 25.’—Masson’s translation.
1-5. Yet once more: these verses express the poet’s sense of his unripeness for the exercise of the poetic gift. See his ‘English Letter to a Friend,’ p. 40; laurel, myrtle, and ivy are poetical emblems.
19-22. So may... sable shroud: these verses are parenthetical, and v. 23 must be connected with v. 18, ‘Hence with denial vain,’ etc. I have followed Keightley’s pointing; gentle Muse: high-born (nobly endowed) poet; lucky words: words that will favorably perpetuate my memory; bid fair peace: pray that fair peace be, etc.
23-36. For we were nursed: these verses express in pastoral language the devotion to their joint studies, early and late, of Milton and King, at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
‘They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands.’
—P. L., vi. 645.
‘grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades.’—Comus, 429.
Aubrey, in his ‘Miscellanies,’ 1696, Chap. XVII., says, as quoted by Todd, ‘F. Q.,’ IV. xi. 39, ‘when any Christian is drowned in the river Dee, there will appear over the water, where the corpse is, a light, by which means they do find the body; and it is therefore called the holy Dee.’
64-69. Alas! what boots it: in these verses Milton, with his high ideal of the function of poetry, laments its low state, and momentarily gives way to the thought that it would be better to conform to the prevailing flimsy taste than to ‘strictly meditate the thankless Muse,’ i.e. seriously devote one’s self to song such as meets with no favor in these days. Amaryllis and Neæra are names of shepherdesses in Virgil’s first and third Eclogues, and in other pastorals; ‘meditate the thankless Muse’ is after Virgil’s ‘Silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avenâ.’—Ecl., i. 2.
—P. L., iv. 394.
‘to make appear,
With righteous plea, their utmost vigilance.’—P. L., x. 30.
‘Yet of another plea bethought him soon.’—P. R., iii. 149.
‘Weakness is thy excuse,...
All wickedness is weakness; that plea therefore
With God or man will gain thee no remission.’
—S. A., 834.
Keightley explains that Triton ‘came, deputed by Neptune, to hold a judicial inquiry into the affair. We have the Pleas of the Crown and the Court of Common Pleas.’
100-102. It was that fatal: these verses are not part of the answer which Hippotades brings; the poet speaks in his own person.
103-107. Next Camus: Dr. Masson’s note, and the included quoted one, are the most acceptable of the numerous notes on this passage: ‘Camus, the tutelary genius of the Cam, and of Cambridge University, appeared as one of the mourning figures; for had not King been one of the young hopes of the University? The garb given to Camus must doubtless be characteristic, and is perhaps most succinctly explained by a Latin note which appeared in a Greek translation of “Lycidas” by Mr. John Plumptre in 1797. “The mantle,” said Mr. Plumptre in this note, “is as if made of the plant ’river-sponge,’ which floats copiously in the Cam; the bonnet of the river-sedge, distinguished by vague marks traced somehow over the middle of the leaves, and serrated at the edge of the leaves after the fashion of the ἀὶ, ἀὶ of the hyacinth.” It is said that the flags of the Cam still exhibit, when dried, these dusky streaks in the middle, and apparent scrawlings on the edge; and Milton (in whose Ms. “scrawled o’er” was first written for “inwrought”) is supposed to have carried away from the “arundifer Camus” (‘Eleg.,’ i. 11) this exact recollection. He identifies the edge-markings with the ἀὶ, ἀὶ (Alas! Alas!) which the Greeks fancied they saw on the leaves of the hyacinth, commemorating the sad fate of the Spartan youth from whose blood that flower had sprung.’
Milton makes here his first onset upon the ecclesiastical abuses of the time. He was destined to make, not long after, fiercer onsets in his polemic prose writings.
123, 124. their lean and flashy songs grate: their wretched sermons are wretchedly delivered with the emphasis of insincerity. Masson explains ‘scrannel,’ ‘screeching, ear-torturing.’
128, 129. the grim wolf: generally understood to mean the Church of Rome. Bishop Newton, who first understood the passage to have reference to Archbishop Laud’s ‘privily introducing popery’ afterward gave the alternative explanation, ‘besides what the popish priests privately pervert to their religion,’ which Masson conclusively supports in his ‘Life of Milton,’ and adopts in his note on the passage in his edition of the ‘Poetical Works’; the ‘privy paw’ doesn’t suit Archbishop Laud, who did everything above-board.
130, 131. But that two-handed engine: see my explanation of these verses in the Introductory Remarks.
Here ‘enamelled’ appears to mean variegated and glossy; so in Arcades:
‘O’er the smooth enamelled green.’
161-163. Where the great Vision: see Introductory Remarks.
169-171. repairs his drooping head: Milton, in these lines, compares great things with small (parvis componit magna); if they are ‘considered curiously,’ the sun makes his toilet on rising from his ocean bed!
190, 191. had... was: note the distinctive use of these auxiliaries, the former being used with a participle of a transitive verb, and the latter, with that of an intransitive; all the hills: i.e. their shadows.
Notes
5. before the mellowing year: i.e. before the mellowing year or period of his own life; ‘mellowing’ is intransitive, growing or becoming mellow; ‘year’ is not a nominative, the subject of ‘does’ or ‘shatters,’ understood, as several editors make it, but is the object of the preposition ‘before.’
6. dear: of intimate concernment; the word was formerly applied to what is precious, or painful, to the heart; it has here, of course, the latter application.
7. Compels me to disturb your season due: i.e. compels me to write a poem before I have attained to the requisite ‘inward ripeness.’ The compound subject, ‘bitter constraint and sad occasion dear,’ is logically singular, and takes a singular verb. The placing of a noun between two epithets is usual with Milton, especially when the epithet following the noun qualifies the noun as qualified by the preceding epithet; e.g. ‘hazel copses green,’ v. 42; ‘flower-inwoven tresses torn.’—Hymn on the Nativity, 187; ‘beckoning shadows dire.’—Comus, 207.
14. melodious tear: ‘tear’ is used, by metonymy, for an elegiac poem.
15. sacred well: the Pierian spring.
16. the seat of Jove: Mount Olympus.
17. loudly: i.e. as Hunter explains, in lamentation; or, perhaps, in praises.
18. Hence with denial vain and coy excuse: away with, etc., i.e. on my part; denial: refusal; coy: shrinking, hesitating, reluctant, by reason of what is expressed in the opening verses.
25. ere the high lawns appeared: i.e. before daybreak.
28. What time the grey-fly: i.e. the sultry noontide.
30. Oft till the star... had sloped his westering wheel: i.e. they continued their studies till after midnight, while in the meantime many of their fellow-students were giving themselves to music and dancing.
33. Tempered: attuned, modulated.
36. old Damœtas: ‘may be,’ says Masson, ‘some fellow or tutor of Christ’s College, if not Dr. Bainbrigge, the master.’
37. Now thou art gone: emotionally repeated; heavy: sad.
40. With wild thyme... o’ergrown: to be connected only with ‘desert caves,’ not ‘woods.’
44. to: responsively to.
45. canker: cankerworm.
49. Such: used in its etymological sense, so-like; so-like killing is thy loss; thy: of thee; the personal pronoun here, used objectively, and not the possessive adjective pronoun.
52. the steep: some one of the Welsh mountains.
53. lie: lie buried.
54. Mona: the isle of Anglesey; Mona is represented by Tacitus as the chief seat of the Druids; shaggy: densely wooded; ‘shaggy hill.’—P. L., iv. 224.
55. Deva: the river Dee; called a ‘wizard stream’ from its associations with Druidical divinations and traditions, or Milton, in his use of the epithet, may have had more particularly in his mind the belief in regard to the river as the boundary between England and Wales, that it was itself prophetic. Drayton, in his ‘Polyolbion,’ 10th Song, says of the Dee:
‘A brook, that was supposed much business to have seen,
Which had an ancient bound twixt Wales and England been,
And noted was by both to be an ominous flood,
That changing of his fords, the future ill, or good,
Of either country told; of either’s war, or peace,
The sickness, or the health, the dearth, or the increase:
And that of all the floods of Britain, he might boast
His stream in former times to have been honoured most,
When as at Chester once King Edgar held his court,
To whom eight lesser kings with homage did resort:
That mighty Mercian lord, him in his barge bestowed,
And was by all those kings about the river rowed.’
58. The Muse herself: Calliope.
59. enchanting: refers to the power he exercised, with the lyre given him by Apollo, over wild beasts, trees, rocks, etc.
75. Fury: used in a general, and not in its special, mythological sense; the allusion is, of course, to Atropos, one of the Fates; called a blind fury by reason of the rashness with which she sometimes slits the thin-spun thread of life, as in the case of his friend King; ‘slit’ now always means to cut lengthwise; here, to cut across, sever.
76. But not the praise: ‘slits’ is understood, but it doesn’t yoke well with ‘praise’; the nearest substitute would be ‘cuts off’: but cuts not off the praise.
79. Nor in: i.e. nor (lies) in, not set off in; ‘set off’ refers, not to ‘Fame,’ but to ‘glistering foil,’ i.e. the bright outside exhibited to the world.
81. by: as Keightley explains, by means of, under the influence of; he quotes Habakkuk i. 13: ‘Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil.’
85. fountain Arethuse: in the island Ortygia, near Syracuse; by metonymy for the ‘Sicilian Muse’ (v. 133), or the fountain-nymph, Arethusa, presiding over pastoral poetry, which originated in Sicily, and was consummated by Theocritus, a native of Syracuse. Virgil, in the opening of his fourth Eclogue, Pollio, invokes the Sicilian Muses (Sicelides Musæ, paullo majora canamus), and in his tenth Eclogue, Gallus, he invokes the fountain nymph, Arethusa, to aid him in his last pastoral song (Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem); and thou honoured flood, smooth-sliding Mincius: Mantua, Virgil’s birth town, or what he regarded as such (he was born in the neighboring village of Andes), is on an island in the river Mincius, a tributary of the Po; honoured flood... crowned with vocal reeds: i.e. by reason of its association with Virgil, and his fame as a pastoral poet. Lord Tennyson, in his ode ‘To Virgil, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil’s death,’ speaks of him as a pastoral poet, in the fourth and fifth stanzas:
‘Poet of the happy Tityrus
piping underneath his beechen bowers;
Poet of the poet-satyr
whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;
Chanter of the Pollio, glorying
in the blissful years again to be,
Summers of the snakeless meadow,
unlaborious earth and oarless sea.’
88. my oat proceeds: the suspended pastoral strain is resumed.
89. Herald of the Sea: Triton, with ‘wreathed horn.’
90. in Neptune’s plea: Neptune’s is an objective genitive: in defence, or exculpation of Neptune. This explanation of ‘plea’ is supported by its use in all other places in Milton’s poetry:
‘So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.’
96. Hippotades: a patronymic of Æolus, god of the winds.
98. the level brine: in v. 167, ‘the watery floor.’
99. Sleek Panope: one of the sea-nymphs, daughter of Nereus; the name (in Gk. Πανόπη) seems to indicate that the nymph is a personification of a smooth sea (‘level brine’) which affords a full view all around to the horizon. The voyager on such a sea is ‘ringed with the azure world.’ The epithet ‘sleek’ is in accord with the personification.
101. Built in the eclipse: eclipses were believed to shed malign influences (see ‘P. L.,’ i. 594-599); one of the ingredients of the witches’ hell-broth, in ‘Macbeth,’ is ‘slips of yew, slivered in the moon’s eclipse’; rigged with curses dark: ‘with,’ of course, though this has been questioned, expresses accompaniment; to understand it as instrumental, makes a crazy hyperbole of the phrase.
102. sacred head: King was dedicated to the holy office of the ministry. He is made to represent, in the poem, a pure priesthood.
107. pledge: child; Lat. pignus amoris.
109. The Pilot: St. Peter, whom, it must be understood, Milton presents as ‘the type and head of true episcopal power,’ to which he was in no wise opposed. He wished the bishop to be a truly spiritual overseer, as the word signifies.
114. Enow: an archaic plural form of ‘enough’; ‘hellish foes enow.’—P. L., ii. 504; ‘evils enow to darken all his goodness.’—Antony and Cleopatra, I. iv. 11.
117. to scramble at the shearer’s feast: to scramble for and gobble up fat benefices.
118. the worthy bidden guest: one who has been truly called to serve the Church.
119. Blind mouths: ‘mouths’ is used, by synecdoche, for gluttons, as the five preceding verses show. Ruskin’s explanation of the phrase, in his ‘Sesame and Lilies,’ is very ingenious, but it is not likely that Milton meant it to have such significance. ‘Those two monosyllables,’ he says, ‘express the precisely accurate contraries of right character in the two great offices of the Church,—those of Bishop and Pastor. A Bishop means a person who sees. A Pastor means one who feeds. The most unbishoply character a man can have is, therefore, to be Blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a Mouth. Take the two reverses together, and you have “blind mouths.”’
120. the least: connect with ‘aught else’ rather than ‘belongs.’
122. What recks it them: what does it concern them; They are sped: they’ve been successful in obtaining rich livings.
123. list: please; in earlier English generally used impersonally with a dative; when they list: i.e. when it suits them, not otherwise. They don’t act from any sense of duty.
126. wind and the rank mist they draw: i.e. the mere wind of some sermons and the poisonous doctrines of others, which their flocks inhale and drink in, and then impart the resulting spiritual disease to others.
132. Return, Alpheus: he invokes the return of the pastoral Muse when the dread denouncing voice of St. Peter has ceased. Alpheus, the chief river of Peloponnesus, flowing through Arcadia and Elis. The river-god loved the nymph Arethusa, of Elis, whom, in her flight from him, Diana changed into a fountain which was directed by the goddess under the sea to the island of Ortygia, near Syracuse. The river followed under sea and united with the fountain. See note on v. 85.
136. use: frequent.
138. whose: refers to ‘valleys’; the swart star: understood by editors to mean the dog-star Sirius. But it may mean, and I think it does, the day-star, the sun. See v. 168; ‘diurnal star.’—P. L., x. 1069; swart: used causatively; sparely looks: i.e. by reason of the shades.
139. quaint enamelled eyes: flowers of curious structure and of variegated glossy colors (?); the words are more enjoyable than distinctly intelligible; in the ‘P. L.,’ ix. 529, it is said of the serpent:
‘oft he bowed
His turret crest, and sleek enamelled neck, fawning.’
141. purple: an imperative, to be construed with ‘throw.’
142. rathe: early, soon; the old positive form of ‘rather,’ sooner. Tennyson uses the word in his ‘In Memoriam,’ c. ix. 2, ‘The men of rathe and riper years’; and in ‘Lancelot and Elaine,’ 339, ‘Till rathe she rose,’ etc.; that forsaken dies: forsaken by the sun.
153. with false surmise: i.e. that we have the body of Lycidas with us.
158. monstrous world: the world of sea-monsters.
159. moist: tearful.
160. the fable of Bellerus old: i.e. the scene of the fable.
164. O ye dolphins: an allusion to the story of Arion.
166. your sorrow: used objectively, he who is the object of your sorrow. ‘Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead.’—Shelley’s Adonais.
167. watery floor: what is called the level brine, v. 98; ‘the shining levels of the lake.’—Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, suggested, no doubt, by the classical æquora.
172. sunk... mounted: any one reading this verse for the first time would be likely to get the impression that these words are participles; this would not be the case if ‘sunk’ were ‘sank,’ originally the distinctive singular form of the preterite, ‘sunk’ being plural; AS. sanc, suncon.
173. Him that walked the waves: a beautiful designation of the Saviour, in accord with the occasion of the poem; and so St. Peter is designated as ‘the Pilot of the Galilean Lake.’
174. along: beside.
176. unexpressive: inexpressible.
184. thy large recompense: ‘thy’ is the personal, not the possessive adjective pronoun, being used objectively,—the large recompense thou hast received, in which is included thy becoming the genius of the shore; good: kind, propitious; ‘sent by some spirit to mortals good.’—Il Pens., 154.
185. in that perilous flood: ‘in’ is more poetic than ‘on’ or ’o’er’ would be; ‘that perilous flood’ is spoken of as a domain in which is included the atmosphere with its winds and storms; so, to wander in the desert.
186. uncouth: used, it is most likely, in its original sense of ‘unknown,’ Milton so regarding himself, as a poet; there may be involved the idea (supported by the opening lines of the Elegy) of wanting in poetic skill and grace.
188. tender stops: poetic transference of epithet, ‘tender’ being logically applicable to the music; various quills: used, by metonymy, for the varied moods, strains, metres, and other features of the Elegy; eager thought: perhaps meant to signify as much as sharp grief; Doric: equivalent to pastoral, the great Greek bucolic poets having written in the Doric dialect.
192. twitched: Keightley explains, ‘pulled, drew tightly about him on account of the chilliness of the evening.’ Jerram explains, ‘snatched up from where it lay beside him.’