Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse. With lucky words favor my destined urn; And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud. . 18. Hence. Verb or adverb? Coy (Lat. quietus; Fr. coi), shy, shrinking. In Shakespeare this word repeatedly means disdainful, which perhaps is the true signification in this passage. 19. So may. See Virgil, Eclogue, X. 4; Horace, Odes, I. iii. 1. 20. Urn. How did the Greeks dispose of their dead? the Romans? What does the 'urn' in this verse represent? See Shakes. Coriolanus, V. vi 146; Henry V., I. ii. 228. Favor is used technically like Latin favere (Gr. evønμeîv). See Horace, Odes, III. i. 2. The word my is emphatic. 21. He passes. Muse here must mean poet; hence the masculine. It is a pretty bold use of language, and therefore Miltonic! Metonymy? 22. Can you think of a good reason for omitting the rhyme here? What is the general effect of such omissions in this poem? Why is the 'shroud' called 'sable'? Origin of the word 'sable'? 'Shroud' is A.-S. scrud, or garment. In Comus, 1. 147, 'shroud' means hiding-place, shelter, recess. Does it here mean 'grave,' or is it used literally? In Sylvester we find 'sable shroud,' 'sable tomb,' and 'sable chest' (i. e. coffin). In Horace's twentyeighth Ode, Book I., the passer-by is called upon to sprinkle a little sand upon the dead body of a drowned man, - "give him a little earth for charity." 23. For, referring back to lines 18, 19, etc. Here the allegory begins. Nursed upon the selfsame hill. Here we have the metaphorical language of pastoral poetry. A 'shepherd' is a poet. "The hill is Cambridge." The university is their nursing mother. Milton and King had been fellowstudents there, "visiting each other's rooms, taking walks together, performing academic exercises in common, exchanging literary confidences; all which, translated into the language of the pastoral, makes them fellow-shepherds, who had driven their flock afield together in the morning, and fed it all day by the same shades and rills, not without mutual ditties on their oaten flutes, when sometimes other shepherds or even fauns and satyrs would be listening." Masson. 25. Lawns (Old Fr., lande; Welsh, lan; Dutch, laen; Eng., lane; Old Celtic, lan, a place, an area or open space). "A lawn is a plain among trees," says old Camden. "The restriction of the meaning to grass kept smooth in a garden is comparatively modern." Jerram. "It is remarkable," says Wedgwood, "that lawn, an open space between woods, seems to be so called Under the opening eyelids of the morn, 30 from the opportunity of seeing through." Akin to the Norse glana, gleine, to stare, look steadily, to open (as clouds) and leave a clear space; glan, an opening among clouds; glenna, a clear open space among woods, or between cliffs. Appeared, etc. In L'Allegro, 41 to 44, Milton would "Hear the lark begin his flight, And singing, startle the dull night, Till the dappled dawn doth rise." 26. The opening eyelids of the morn. The phrase 'eyelids of the morning' is found in the marginal reading for 'dawning of the day' in Job iii. 9; also in the Antigone of Sophocles, 1. 103; also in Henry More, Sylvester, and Middleton. Comus, 1. 978; Milton's second Sonnet, 1. 5, and Il Penseroso, 1. 141, are referred to by the critics. 27. Drove afield. See in Gray's Elegy, "How jocund did they drive their team afield." “The a in ‘afield' is a dialectic form of an of the preposition on." Jerram. So 'aboard,' 'afoot,' etc. Heard. What was the sound of ea in the time of Shakes. and Milt.? See Marsh's Lectures on the English Language, First Series, pp. 477, 478, 479, etc.; also White's Shakespeare, Vol. XII., Appendix, pp. 417, 418, 419; and Earle's Philol. of the English Tongue, pp. 170178, Clarendon Press edition. 28. What time. Latin quo tempore, at the time when. This use of the Latin idiom is very common in Milton and other poets. We still use it in direct and indirect questions. The gray-fly. The trumpet-fly? Its 'sultry horn' is the loud buzzing of its wings in the heat of noon. "A writer in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1868) suggests that the gray-fly may be the grig or cricket, Old. Eng. graeg-hama, gray-coat." 29. Battening, making fat by feeding. The word may be akin to better. See Wedgwood's Dict. of Eng. Etymology. Batten in Shakes. (Coriolanus, IV. v. 35, and Hamlet, III. iv. 67) means to grow fat. See note on boots, line 64. Flocks. Poetical fancies? or studies? or what? 30. In the first draft Milton wrote 'Oft till the even-star bright.' 'The star' is any star that so rose. See, however, Faerie Queene, III. iv. 51; Comus, 1. 168; the Argonautica of Apollonius, IV. 163; which passages tend to show that the poets erred in their astronomy. Milton's change of the language looks as if he sought to avoid the error. To what does 'bright' belong? Toward heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel. Meanwhile, the rural ditties were not mute, Tempered to the oaten flute; Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel 38 35 31. Sloped. So Shakespeare uses the word 'slope' in the sense of bend down, in Macbeth, IV. i. 57. Note how beautifully Milton draws out the time of these poetical and studious occupations; they begin before daylight, they continue at noon and at evening; they are prolonged till the star that twinkled on the eastern horizon at nightfall has passed the meridian! Westering. Some of the dictionaries mark this beautiful word as obsolescent. But it is used by Hillhouse, as also by Whittier, and other recent poets. It would be discreditable to let it drop out of the language. Chaucer uses westrin; Burns, westling; Cook's Voyages, westing. Milton's first draft has " 'burnisht.' 33. Tempered, modulated to a certain key, attuned, adjusted. So in Par. Lost., VII. 1. 598. In Shakespeare we have 'ink tempered with love's sighs' (Love's Labor's Lost, IV. iii. 347). The Italian temprar, and Lat. temperare are so used (Gr. Téμvw, to cut, divide, distribute). Oaten flute, a rude musical instrument fashioned from oaten straw? Virgil's Silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena, You practise rural minstrelsy upon a slender oaten pipe," will be recalled by all lovers of Latin. More familiar is Shakespeare's, "When shepherds pipe on oaten straws" (Love's Labor's Lost, V. ii. 913). So repeatedly we have 'oaten pipe' in Spenser. But was the pipe or flute made of oaten straw? See on this point a valuable note in Jerram's edition of Lycidas, 1. 33. He thinks that our older poets took the expression 'oaten pipe' or 'oaten straw' from an over-literal rendering of avena. 34. Satyrs (Lat. satýri). How pronounced? Satyrs were a kind of semideity, in form half man and half goat, inhabiting forests. They had the feet and legs of goats, short budding horns behind their ears, snub nose, a goat's tail, and the body covered with thick hair. They had a lascivious, half-brutal nature. They were companions of Bacchus, and formed the chorus of a species of drama named from them. Perhaps they were originally the rustics who danced in goatskin dresses at the festivals of that jolly deity. Fauns (Lat. fauni). These, too, were country deities, very like the satyrs, but developed to a nearer resemblance to human beings. They are usually 'young and frolic of mien, with round faces expressive of merriment, and not without an occasional mixture of mischief.' See Hawthorne's Marble Faun. "The Satyrs and Fauns may be the miscellaneous Cambridge undergraduates; and old Damotas may be some fellow or tutor of Christ's College, if not Dr. Bainbridge, the master." Masson. But see Spenser's Pastoral Eclogue on the Death of Sir Philip Sidney, lines 116, 117. 36. Damætas. Milton found this name in several Eclogues of Virgil, who But oh the heavy change, now thou art gone, The willows, and the hazel-copses green, Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 4) 45 Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, took it from the sixth Idyl of Theocritus. Masson thinks the word "has in it a sound of Meade," who was a noted fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Damotas in Sidney's Arcadia is a 'suspicious, uncouth, arrant, doltish clown'; and it has hence been suggested that Milton meant his old tutor Chappell, with whom he had had trouble at college in 1626! 37. Now, includes the reason; because. Scott calls attention to the peculiar and very appropriate 'languid melody' of the next twelve lines. 39. Shepherd, Lycidas. Caves rhymes to nothing here. Why the omission ? 40. Gadding, straggling, erratic. Warburton says that the vine married to the elm is like too many other wives, fond of gadding abroad! 'Gadding vines' is found in Marvell. Gad, from go (yede and yode in Spenser) was a common word. Chaucer has gadlyng= vagrant. Stevens and Morris derive it from Old Eng. gad, the point of a weapon, the same as goad; hence gad-fly, and the verb to gad, to go restlessly about. So Wedgwood, Dict. Etym 41. Echoes. In Spenser's Epithalamium we have all their echoes ring'; also in Moschus' Elegy on Bion, 30, and Shelley's Adonais, XV., Echo mourns. The lines 39 to 44 are very similar to lines 23 to 28 in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Again. In Ovid's Met., Book XI. Fable i. 43, woods, rocks, animals, mourn for Orpheus. 45. Canker, canker-worm, a caterpillar; so often in Shakespeare, as, "Hath not thy rose a canker?" Henry VI., III. iv. 68. So Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. i. 43, and elsewhere. 46. Graze, from grass. Note the change of the sound of s when the noun is changed to a verb. Similar changes in use, excuse, rise, etc.? Taint-worm. Some of the critics think this worm was "a small red spider"! They quote from Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors, Book III. c. 27. Weanling, a diminutive of weanel, from wean (Old Eng. wenian, A.-S. wunian, Ger. gewohnen, to accustom); not the same word as eanling in Shakespeare. Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? For neither were ye playing on the steep Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream. 51 55 47. Wardrobe, apparel. Its etymology? The first draft had buttons.' 48. When first. The white-thorn (hawthorn) blooms in May, the 'maytree.' Lines 48, 49 are an echo of Midsummer Night's Dream, I. i. 185, 186. 50. Nymphs, Muses. In lines 50 to 55 Milton closely imitates, as Virgil in his tenth Eclogue had done, a passage in the first Idyl of Theocritus. The passage is greatly admired. Milton, as usual, outdoes his predecessors. Similar passages are pointed out in Spenser's Astrophel, Lord Lyttelton on the Death of his Wife, Shelley's Adonais, and Ossian's Dar-thula. 52. The steep. This, says Masson, may be any of the Welsh mountains where the Druids lie buried. "Mr. Keightley suggests Penmaenmawr." This overhangs the sea, between Conway and Bangor in Carnarvonshire, opposite Anglesey. It is 1400 feet high, and is crowned with ruins of ancient fortifications. Warton suggests the sepultures of the Druids at Kerig-y-Druidion mentioned by old Camden, among the mountains of South Denbighshire. The legends favor the latter supposition. 53. Druids (Gaelic druidh, magician; from deru, oaks, and gwydd, knowledge?) of this order, at once priests, bards, and philosophers, see the accounts in the classical dictionaries, the encyclopedias, and the works there cited. 54. Mona. Not here, as it sometimes is, the Isle of Man, but Anglesey. “The shaggy top is the high interior of Anglesey, the island fastness of the Druids, once thick with woods." Masson. "The sacred groves, stained with the blood of human sacrifices," were destroyed by the Roman general Paulinus (see Tacitus, Annals, 14, 29, etc.). The old poet Drayton (1563–1631) in his Poly-Olbion (1613), twelfth Song, speaks of the 'shaggy heaths' of Anglesey. 6 55. Deva. The river Dee, elsewhere called by Milton the 'ancient hallowed Dee,' and by Drayton the ominous flood,' forms the old boundary between England and Wales. It was once believed that by some changes in its bed or current the river gave the inhabitants intimations of coming good or ill. It is about seventy miles long, and in the lower part of its course it 'spreads' into an estuary about 14 miles long and from 2 to 6 miles wide. "Many Arthurian legends and other superstitions belonged to it, and hence it was often |