Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/101

 LYCIDAS

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��then is nobly transcended. Phoebus, con- ceived of suddenly in his mystical and uni- versal character, touches the poet's ears, the seat of memory, with a gesture of sa- cred significance :

' ; ' But not the praise,'

Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears." . ..

It is difficult to render clear to one's con- sciousness what it is which makes this transition so thrilling. Perhaps the phrase " trembling ears " suggests a kind of ex- quisite sensitiveness to the presence of the god, such as an animal would feel at an invisible human presence, which makes more intense the words of mystical com- fort, as the mind is led upward to that place where the poet's fame lives and spreads aloft by the pure eyes of the ever- lasting Judge.

The theme has now been lifted too high above the pastoral key, and is brought back by an invocation of Aretlnisa, the fountain of Theocritus, and Mincius, Vir- gil's river. Then there passes across the scene a weird procession, Triton, come from Neptune to hold a court of question concerning the death of Lycidas; yEolus, defender of the Winds against the imputed crime; Father Camus, a personification of the college river, bewailing the loss of his child; and last, the figure of St. Peter, bearing the mitre of spiritual sovereignty and the keys of power to bind and loose. Then, by a curious blur, the conception of the dead man as a shepherd under Apollo merges into the conception of him as a shepherd of the flocks of Christ. In the perfect ease of the transition there is more than a hint of Milton's exalted theory of the poet's function. For him, the poet and the preacher are one voice. The shallow ornateness of a hireling's sermon and the scrannel pipings of a rhymester are alike profanations of the temple. Here, without a word of warning, he transfers the whole apparatus of pastoral imagery from its re- ceived meaning as symbolic of the poetic

��life, and applies it to the life of Christian ministry. At the same time the expression takes on a biblical fervor of denunciation and the metaphor becomes hurried and tur- bid. The wonderful anathema of " blind mouths," and the confusion of image which makes the preaching of a corrupt ministry at once a flashy song and a rank mist, pre- pares the mind for the apocalyptic vague- ness of the " two-handed engine at the door," which may mean anything from the two-edged sword of Revelations to the two houses of the English Parliament.

The next transition is abrupt but exqui- site. The theme has again, as it were in the poet's despite, risen above the pastoral tone into a region of fiery thought, from which the river-gods and the mild Muses of pastoral poetry shrink in fear. So, as the visionary shape of St. Peter departs mut- tering vague menaces, the poet calls,

"Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past That shrunk thy streams ; return, Sicilian

Muse,

Aiid call the vales, and bid them hither cast Their bells and flowerets of a thousand

hues," . ..

and the roll-call of the flowers which fol- lows, with its delicate characterization and sweet fancy, brings back gradually the pastoral atmosphere. But to the poet him- self it is only a device " to interpose a little ease," to cheat into momentary quiet his imagination, which keeps tending passion- ately outward toward the tragic and per- turbed suggestions of his theme. The sud- den breaking away from these pretty floral fancies to follow the drowned body beyond the stormy Hebrides and through the mon- strous world of the ocean depths, is the finest enharmonic change in the poem ; and the nine lines which close in shadowy diapa- son with " the fable of Bellerus old," and the " great Vision of the guarded mount," are among the miracles of imaginative utterance.

Throughout the elegy we have noticed a constant struggle of the thought to break

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