Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/111

 LATER SONNETS

��From 1642, when he entered actively into the national struggle for liberty, until 1658, when the duties of his Latin secre- taryship ceased, Milton wrote no English verse except in the way of some rather wooden translations from the Scriptures, and scattered sonnets, seventeen sonnets in seventeen years. The translations may be dismissed without comment, but the sonnets are of manifold interest. They are the fugitive outcroppings of "that one talent which is death to hide," and consti- tute the only relief which he allowed him- self from his resolution to efface the singer in the fighter so long as his country's fate hung in the balance. Even in them, he does not throw off the weight of that reso- lution; for such of them as are not actual political manifestoes still cling closely to matter of fact. They are, in a word, oc- casional poetry; but they are lifted into permanence by the presence in them of the whole of a great personality, capable of giving to the most ordinary words an unac- countable resonance and distinction.

The sonnets written after 1642 divide themselves into three groups, those ad- dressed to personal friends, both men and women, those dealing with some aspect of public affairs, especially as represented by the great men of the time, and those of a purely autobiographic nature.

Of the first group, the sonnets " To a Virtuous Young Lady," " To the Lady Margaret Ley," and " To Mistress Cathe- rine Thomson," are of particular interest, as showing the poet's growth away from the mere schoolboy amorousness of the Latin elegies and the gentle troubadour gallantry of the Italian Sonnets toward

��a high Puritan ideal of womanhood. Of these, the sonnet " To the Lady Margaret " is pitched in the lowest key. It was writ- ten shortly after Mary Powell's desertion. Phillips says of Milton's relations with the Lady Margaret, that "being now as it were a single man again, he made it his chief diversion now and then of an even- ing to visit" her, and that she, "being a woman of great wit and ingenuity, had a particular honor for him, and took much delight in his company, as likewise Captain Hobson, her husband, a very accomplished gentleman." The tone of the sonnet may have beea determined by Milton's rumina- tion upon the springs of his own domestic misfortunes. Eight of the fourteen lines are devoted to a eulogy of the lady's father, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough, Lord President of the Council under Charles and one time Lord High Treasurer, whose death was believed to have been hastened by the sudden breaking up of Charles's third Parliament, as that of Isocrates was caused by news of the battle of Chaeronea. Milton deems it a sufficient encomium upon the daughter to say that she reflects the honor of the father. In other wo^d?, what attracted him in her was probably the dignity with which she bore a great and good name, a dignity thrown into relief by what must have seemed to him the low- bred and selfish impulsiveness of his own wife, the daughter of a shifting cavalier squire. It is, one may say, the civic ideal of womanhood to which this sonnet gives a celebration quite Roman in its pith and measure.

The sonnet " On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson" is perhaps

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