Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/425

 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

��383

��Lord St. John of Basing, afterwards Duke of Bolton. 26. Lucina ; goddess of child-birth.

28. Atropos; the Fate who clips the thread of life ; her sisters were Clotho and Lachesis.

50. Sweet rest seize thee : the verb is used in the legal sense, to put in possession of.

63. Syrian shepherd ess, Rachel, wife of Jacob.

Page 19. ON HIS BEING ARRIVED TO THE AGE OF TWENTY-THREE.

5. Perhaps my semblance ; an allusion to the extreme youthfulness of Milton's appearance after he reached the age of manhood.

Page 26. L'ALLEGRO.

1-3. Having personified Melancholy, Milton invents a parentage for her, and assigns as her place of birth a cave like that of her father Cerberus, on the banks of Styx, the "river of deadly hate." Erebus, not Cerberus, was prop- erly the spouse of Night.

9. Ragged; rugged.

10. Cimmerian desert; the Cimmerians are placed by Homer in a waste land far to the west, perpetually involved in mist and darkness.

12-16. The first parentage assigned to Eu- phrosyne (on the strength of a scholiast's com- mentary to a passage of the ^Eueid) makes her the half-sister of Comus, who was the son of Circe by Bacchus. Euphrosyne represents in- nocent pleasure ; Comus represents evil, sensual pleasure. In the double parentage Milton has in mind two ideals of innocent pleasure that which springs from Wine and Love, and that which springs from Dawn and the light breezes of summer.

24. Buxom ; spritely, lively. It originally meant pliant, yielding (German biegsam), and is so used by Milton elsewhere, in the phrase " buxom air."

29. Hebe, cup-bearer to the gods, and person- ification of eternal youth.

36. Liberty is probably called a "mountain- nymph " because of the traditional association of the love of freedom with mountain-dwell- ers.

40. Unreproved ; unreprovable, innocent.

43. Watch-tower; a metaphor which partakes of the nature of a pun ; the word is suggested by " tour," which means soaring flight.

45-48. Then to come, etc. ; a much-disputed passage. What is the construction of the infini- tive ? Grammatically it seems to be parallel with " to hear " just above, in which case it is L' Allegro who comes to the window of his room. But in that case, to what or whom does he bid good morrow, unless, indeed, it be to the waking world in general? If we suppose "lark" to be the understood subject of the infinitive, the construction is very irregular, and Milton ought to have known that larks do nothing of the kind. Mr. Masson cuts the knot by supposing L'Allegro to have emerged from the house, and to look in at the window to greet some one in- side. The reader is at liberty to choose.

45. In spite of sorrow ; in order to spite sor- row ; the idea seems rather awkwardly intro- duced.

��48. Twisted eglantine; eglantine is identical with sweet-briar; in calling it "twisted" Mil- ton appears to have confused it with some vine, perhaps the honeysuckle.

55. Hoar hill ; covered with hoar-frost, since the hunting season is in the autumn.

60. State ; triumphal progress, like that of a monarch, with the clouds " in thousand liveries dight ' ' as the sun's attendants.

67. Tells his tale ; the common interpretation of this phrase is "tells his story." But tale may be used in the sense of " number," and tells in the sense of " counts ; " in that case the phrase would mean, " counts the number of his flock," to see that none had been lost during the night, certainly a more realistic morning occupation than story-telling.

71. Lawns; open fields: fallows; ploughed land left untilled.

77. Towers and battlements ; probably a remi- niscence of Windsor Castle, which is not far from Horton.

80. Cynosure ; the constellation of the lesser Bear, which contains the Pole-star. The Tyr- ian (not the Greek) sailors steered by this con- stellation. Cynosure means literally " dog's tail," the name referring to the fancied shape of the constellation. The secondary meaning of the word, is of course, "something much looked at."

80-88. The names are common ones in both classic and modern pastoral poetry. The intro- duction of them here gives a touch of unreality which is of questionable appropriateness.

91. Secure ; from Latin securus, care-free.

94. Rebeck ; a kind of rude fiddle or crowd, the precursor of the violin.

102-114. A maid of the company tells of the mischievous doings of Mab, who was tradition- ally the patron and tormentor of servant maids. A man then tells of two characters famous in folk-lore, Friar Rush, or Jack-a-lantern, as he was variously called, and Robin Goodfellow. The latter performed for farm-laborers much the same offices of capricious good-will, sprin- kled with mischief, as did Mab for the maids.

110. Lubbar-fend, i. e. lubbar-fiend. Cf " Lob-lie-by-the-fire."

114. Matin ; matin or morning song.

120. Weeds ; garments. The word was origi- nally of universal application, though now con- fined to the mourning garments of widows.

131. Well-trod; this allusion to the actors is an incidental proof that L'Allegro is supposed to view the plays on the stage of a theatre, not merely to read them.

132. Jonson's learned sock; "sock" implies comedy, from the soccus, or low slipper, worn by actors in comedy, in contrast with the cothurnus, or high boot (buskin), worn by actors in tragedy. The learning displayed by Jonson in his great comedies much impressed his contemporaries.

133-134. Sweetest Shakespeare, etc. ; this characterization applies better to some of Shakespeare's scattered songs than to his ro- mantic plays or his comedies as a whole. In spite of the epitaph, it is extremely doubtful

�� �