by John Milton
849.. Carol *celebrate in song (OED 3b).
852.. old swain Meliboeus (see line 822).
853.. clasping charm the spell with which Comus has held the Lady in his chair since line 659.
numbing spell the spell now paralysing the Lady. Stronger than the ‘clasping charm’, it deprives its victim of speech and movement. Comus must have cast the spell before exiting (Thyrsis and Sabrina both attribute it to his magic). See 815–19, 905–7, 916–17 and cp. Comus’s description of the ‘numbing spell’ at 659–62.
854.. *warbled melodiously sung (OED 1), performed with trills (OED v 2a).
856.. To aid a virgin In Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1609) a river-god rises to heal the virgin Amoret who has been stabbed and cast in his spring. See esp. III ii 149–50: ‘If thou bee’st a virgin pure, / I can give a present cure’.
858.. *adjuring OED’s sole participial instance. OED suggests ‘exorcising’, but M. probably means ‘entreating’.
862.. knitting plaiting (OED 3).
863.. amber- ambergris, an aromatic substance found floating in tropical seas. It was used as a perfume and in cooking, even though it was (rightly) suspected to be sperm whale dung. Thomas Browne comments on its source in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1658 edn., Ill xxvi): ‘Ordure makes the best Musk, and from the most fetid substances may be drawn the most odoriferous Essences’ (Robbins i 274). Other seventeenth-century authors thought that ambergris might be whale’s sperm (see OED ‘amber’ ia, 1693 citation). Cp. PR ii 344, SA 720. See also 917n, below.
864.. honour’s chastity’s.
865.. lake Virgil calls the Tiber a lacus (Aen. viii 74).
868.. Oceanus the Titan, father of earth’s rivers.
869.. earth-shaking Homer’s epithet for Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes.
mace trident (OED Ib).
870.. Tethys wife of Oceanus and mother of the rivers.
871.. Nereus see above, 835n.
872.. Carpathian wizard Proteus, the shepherd (hence hook) of Poseidon’s seals. Virgil and Ovid call him a ‘Carpathian seer’ because he lived in the Carpathian Sea, between Rhodes and Crete (Virgil, Georg. iv 387, Ovid, Met. xi 249).
873.. Triton Neptune’s herald, with his conch-shell.
winding twisting and trumpeting.
874.. Glaucus a Boeotian fisherman who became an oracular sea-god after eating a magical herb (Ovid, Met. xiii 917–68).
875.. Leucothea Greek, ‘white goddess’. Neptune transformed the mortal woman Ino into this marine deity after she leapt from a cliff to escape persecution by Juno (Ovid, Met. iv 512–42). The Romans identified her with Matuta, goddess of the dawn (cp. PL xi 135).
876.. her son Melicertes. Ino was holding him when she leapt into the sea. Neptune transformed him into Palaemon, god of harbours.
877.. Thetis a Nereid, Achilles’ mother. She has tinsel-slippered feet because Homer calls her ‘silver-footed’ (Il. xviii 127).
878.. Sirens The Attendant Spirit has so far invoked benign marine deities. Now he calls on the singers who accompany Circe and lure men to destruction (see above, 253n).
879–82. By dead… locks These lines are deleted in TMS.
879.. Parthenope one of the Sirens. Enraged by Odysseus’s escape, she threw herself off her rock, drowning herself. Her tomb was near Naples (Strabo I ii 13).
880.. Ligea another Siren (according to the twelfth-century Homeric commentator, Eustathius). Virgil makes her a river nymph with shining hair (Georg. iv 336).
884.. wily full of wile ‘in a lighter sense: an amorous or playful trick’ (OED Ic).
886.. *-paven paved.
893.. *azurn azure (cp. Italian azzurino).
894.. turkis turquoise.
897.. printless feet Cp. Shakespeare’s elves, treading ‘on the sand with printless foot’ (Shakespeare, The Tempest V i 34).
904.. charmèd band magic bonds.
907.. unblest unhallowed, wicked (OED 3).
912.. Drops… fountain pure A river-god revives a virgin with a pure ‘drop’ of water in William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (1613–16) I i 747–52, and in John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1609) III ii 149–64.
917.. gums of glutinous heat Glue was made from horses’ hoofs, which had to be heated to liquefy (hence heat). Some see a sexual significance in Comus’s hot, sticky gums. Kerrigan (47–8) infers that ‘the Lady is guilty’; Marcus (317) argues that the Lady ‘is brought into involuntary association with a pollution she despises’.
921.. Amphitrite a Nereid, wife of Neptune.
923.. Anchises ancestor of Brutus, Locrine and Sabrina (see 828n, above).
924–37. May thy… cinnamon River gods who have rescued virgins are blessed in octosyllabic couplets in John Fletcher (The Faithful Shepherdess III ii 229–40) and Browne (Britannia’s Pastorals I ii 266–86).
928.. singèd scorching.
930.. torrent *torrential (OED B cites no adjectival usage before PL ii 581, ‘torrent fire’).
934.. head source of a river (OED 16), with a glance at the goddess Cybele, whose head was crowned I With many a tower.
937.. TMS and BMS have the note Song ends after this line. 1637 and 1645 have a space. No music has survived for lines 922–37.
941.. device cunning trick.
942.. waste unnecessary.
949.. gratulate give thanks for (OED 4), welcome.
959.. sunshine holiday Cp. L ‘Allegro 98.
960.. duck or nod curtsy or bow.
961.. trippings dances.
962.. court guise courtly deportment.
963.. Mercury… devise Mercury introduces the final dances in Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (performed 1618, printed 1640) after ‘the voluptuous Comus’ is ‘Beat from his grove’ (146–7). Jonson associates Mercury with dancing Dryads in Pan’s Anniversary (performed 1620, printed 1640) 176–8.
964.. mincing ‘a dancing term that meant doubling the time to make twice as many steps to a musical measure’ (J. Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition, 1968, 119).
Dryades woodland nymphs.
965.. lawns… leas glades… meadows.
969.. three fair branches Cp. Spenser on the brothers Priamond, Diamond and Triamond (FQ IV ii 43): ‘Like three faire branches’.
970.. timely early (OED 1).
971.. patience enduring of suffering (OED 1).
972.. assays trials (OED i), tribulations (OED 2).
976.. Ocean Plato’s river Ocean flows on the outer surface of the True Earth, above our atmosphere (Phaedo 112E).
978.. Where day never shuts his eye Night was thought to be the earth’s shadow. The sky above this shadow was bright blue and all the stars were visible. See PL iii 556–7n and C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (1964) 112.
979.. broad fields of the sky Cp. Lucretius, De Rerum Nat. v 553: ‘the broad pastures of the sky’.
980.. liquid clear, bright (OED 2).
982–3. Hesperus… tree See above, 393n. The garden of the Hesperides was on the edge of Ocean, far to the west. M. (following Plato) locates Ocean above our atmosphere, so the garden of the Hesperides is in the heavens. Cp. PL iii 568.
984.. crispèd shades trees with curled leaves.
985.. spruce lively.
986.. Graces three naked goddesses (Euphrosyne, Aglaia and Thalia) who attended Venus and presided over the joys of domestic life. Cp. L ‘Allegro 12–16.
Hours three goddesses who presided over the seasons. They opened heaven’s gate (PL vi 3) and yoked Phoebus’s horses at morning (hence rosy-bosomed). The Graces dance with the Hours at PL iv 267.
988.. That so that. The 1673 errata say ‘leave out that’, but it is included in 1637, 1645 and the revised TMS.
990.. *cedarn composed of cedars (cp. azurn, 893).
991.. Nard… cassia aromatic plants. See PL v 293n.
992.. Iris goddess of the rainbow and messenger of Juno.
993.. blow cause to bloom.
995.. purfled va
riegated.
996.. Elysian of Elysium, the classical abode of the blessed dead.
997.. (List… true) a warning that what follows is allegory.
999.. Adonis a hunter loved by Venus (th’ Assyrian queen). He was killed by a boar, but restored to life in the Garden of Adonis. Cp. PL ix 440 and Spenser, FQ III vi 46–8. Spenser’s Garden of Adonis is on this earth, and Venus and Adonis make love there; M.’s Adonis sleeps in a paradise above our earth.
1003.. spangled sheen Cp. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream II i 29: ’spangled starlight sheen’.
1004–8. Cupid… bride See Apuleius, The Golden Ass iv 28–vi 24. Cupid loved the mortal woman Psyche, whom he visited in darkness. He fled when Psyche discovered his identity. Psyche (Greek, ‘soul’) endured many trials until Jove allowed her to marry Cupid in heaven. Boccaccio in De Genealogiis Deorum v 22 allegorizes the story, taking Psyche to be the soul and Cupid to be pure Love. M.’s Celestial Cupid may be Christ as Bridegroom of the soul (Matt. 25. 1–13).
1004.. advanced elevated, raised on high.
1009.. unspotted Cp. Eph. 5. 25–8: ‘Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it… that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing’.
1010–11. twins… Youth and Joy Spenser and Apuleius give Cupid and Psyche one child, Voluptas or ‘Pleasure’ (FQ. III vi 50). Plato calls wisdom and virtue the twin progeny of the soul (Symposium 209A). Cp. M.’s An Apology for Smectymnuus (1642): ‘the first and chiefest office of love, begins and ends in the soule, producing those happy twins of her divine generation knowledge and vertue’ (YP 1. 892).
1015.. bowed welkin arch of the sky.
1017.. comers of the moon the moon’s horns (Latin cornu). Cp. Shakespeare, Macbeth III v 24: ‘Upon the corner of the moon’.
1021.. Higher… chime above the Music of the Spheres, hence to Heaven.
1022–3. Or if… stoop to her M. wrote these lines in the guest book of the Cerdogni family in Geneva on 10 June 1639. Cp. Marlowe, Hero and Leander i 365–6: ‘hands so pure, so innocent, nay such / As might have made heaven stoop to have a touch’.
ENGLISH POEMS ADDED IN 1673
On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough
Date: M.’s caption Anno aetatis 17 means ‘at the age of seventeen’ (not ‘in his seventeenth year’). Cp. M.’s use of the same caption in Elegia II and Elegia III (which were certainly written when M. was seventeen). M.’s caption would therefore place the date of composition between 9 December 1625 and 8 December 1626; however, Edward Phillips, M.’s nephew, wrote in 1694 that the poem was occasioned by ‘the Death of one of his Sister’s Children (a Daughter), who died in her Infancy’ (Darbishire 62). W. R. Parker has identified this daughter as Anne Phillips (12 January 1626–22 January 1628), and so argued for 1628 as the date of composition. M. might have misdated the poem (as he misdated In Obitum Procancellarii medici).
1–2. O fairest… fading Cp. The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) x 1–4: ‘Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pluckd, soon vaded, / Plucked in the bud and vaded in the spring!’
1. blown in bloom.
blasted balefully breathed upon.
2. primrose a symbol of swiftly-fading beauty. Cp. Lycidas 142.
*timelessly unseasonably.
6–7. thought to kiss / But killed a common conceit. See e.g. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis 1110.
8. Aquilo Boreas, the north wind. He wooed the Athenian princess Orithyia in vain, then carried her off in storm and darkness (Ovid, Met. vi 682–710). M. makes him the driver of Winter’s chariot.
9. boist’rous savagely violent (OED 9a) and rough in weather (OED 8).
13. eld old age.
15. icy-pearlèd car chariot covered with hailstones. Cp. hail as ‘Ice-pearls’ in Sylvester, DWW, The Vocation (1608) 293.
16. middle empire of the freezing air the cold middle layer of the earth’s atmosphere. Cp. PL i 516, PR i 39f
19. chair chariot (OED sb2).
20. cold-kind both ‘cold by nature’ and ‘kind in intention, but cold in effect’.
23–7. Apollo… flower Apollo accidentally killed his beloved Hyacinthus, a Spartan prince, when his discus bounced and struck the boy. The hyacinth flower sprang from Hyacinthus’s blood. See Ovid, Met. x 162–216 and cp. Lycidas 160. Other versions state that Zephyrus or Boreas diverted Apollo’s discus.
23. unweeting unwitting.
25–6. Young Hyacinth… Young Hyacinth Cp. Spenser, Astrophel 7–8: ‘Young Astrophel, the pride of shepheards praise, / Young Astrophel, the rustick lasses love’, and FQ III vi 45: ‘Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late, / Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore / Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate’. See also Lycidas 8–9n.
25. Eurotas a river in Laconia, flowing by Sparta.
31. wormy bed Cp. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream III ii 384: ‘wormy beds’.
39. first-moving sphere the primum mobile, the outermost sphere of the Ptolemaic universe, which communicated movement to the lower spheres. Cp. PL iii 482 3, viii 133–6.
40. Elysian fields abode of the blessed dead, which Homer placed in the western Ocean (Od. iv 561–9) and Plato placed above the earth (Phaedo 112E).
45. behoof benefit, advantage (OED 1).
47. Earth’s sons the Giants, who warred against the gods, causing them to flee to the earth, where they adopted various disguises (Ovid, Met. v 321–31).
48. *sheeny having a shiny surface.
50. that just maid Astraea (Justice). See Nativity 142n.
53. The line is short a foot, presumably due to a printer’s error. Suggestions for the missing disyllable include: ‘Mercy’, ‘Virtue’, ‘Peace in’, and ‘Temp’rance’.
54. white-robèd the traditional garb of Truth. See e.g. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1611) 530.
57. golden-wingèd host the angels.
58. weed our ‘garment’ of flesh (OED sb2 3).
59. prefixèd preordained.
62. set… on fire perhaps playing on ‘Seraph’, which was associated with Hebrew saraph, ‘to burn’. Cp. PL ii 512.
66. his God’s.
68. pestilence The plague had broken out in London in 1625. Carey therefore concludes that the poem was written in 1625–6, and that Anne Phillips cannot be its subject. But M. might be anticipating a future plague (such as came in 1630 and 1637). Anne’s birth in January 1626 might be said to have ‘driven away’ the plague of 1625. See Parker (738).
75. render give back (OED 3).
76. will an offspring give Cp. Isa. 56. 5: ‘unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off’.
At a Vacation Exercise
Date: July 1628. M. had been chosen to preside as ‘Father’ or ‘Dictator’ at the College assembly set near the beginning of the long vacation (July – early October). M.’s poem accords with the festive tone of the occasion. It was delivered as a public oration, immediately following M.’s sixth Latin Prolusion (which had argued that sportive exercises are sometimes not inconsistent with philosophical studies).
1. Hail native language When M. spoke these words, he had just ended Prolusion vi by announcing (in Latin) that he will now ‘overleap the University Statutes as if they were the wall of Romulus and run off from Latin into English’.
4. infant including ‘unspeaking’ (Latin infans).
8. latter task the present English poem (as distinct from the preceding Latin oration).
12. thither into the preceding Latin.
16. neglect of placing English after Latin.
19. toys fancies, conceits (OED 4).
trimming slight sparse adornment.
20. late fantastics those recently given to wild or fanciful notions (OED ‘fantastic’ sb 1). M. might be thinking of bad metaphysical poets who prefer wit to the richest robes of Spenser’s decorative st
yle.
27. suspect suspicion.
29–52. Yet had… captivity These lines are a digression from the task in hand (see below, 54n). In them M. confides to his audience his high poetic vocation.
32. fancy imagination.
33. deep high (Latin altus).
34. wheeling poles axes of the rotating Ptolemaic universe, above which was the unmoving empyreal Heaven. Cp. PL vii 23: ‘rapt above the pole’.
36. thunderous throne of Jove.
37. unshorn a common classical epithet for Apollo.
38. Hebe goddess of youth.
40. spheres of watchful fire spheres of the stars and planets keeping perpetual watch in the universe. Cp. Nativity 21: ‘all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright’.
42. lofts both ‘upper floors of a warehouse’ (OED 5a) and ‘upper regions of the sky’ (OED 1). The image is of clouds used as a storage space for Jove’s thunderbolts.
pilèd both ‘laid in piles’ and ‘armed with pointed heads’ (OED a1 2).
46. beldam grandmother, aged woman.
48. Demodocus the bard at the court of King Alcinous. His songs about the Trojan war moved Odysseus to tears (Homer, Od. viii 487–543).
53. But fie… stray So Horace turns from a high epic subject in Odes III iii 70: qua, Musa, tendis? desine pervicax / referre sermones deorum (‘Muse, where are you going? Cease wilfully reporting the debates of the gods’).
54. another way M. (as ‘Father’ and Ens) must now return to his task of introducing his ten ‘sons’, the Aristotelian ‘categories’.
56. Predicament one of ten Aristotelian categories ‘predicated’ of any particular entity. M. also puns on his own ‘predicament’ of having to talk about them. Aristotle’s categories were ‘Substance’ and its nine ‘Accidents’. Four of these (Substance, Quantity, Quality, and Relation) are represented in the portion of the performance M. has preserved. M. played the part of ‘Father’ and ten fellow students played the ‘sons’.
65. still always.
66. invisible As an abstraction, Substance is perceived only through accidental attributes (quantity, quality, etc.).
69. Sibyl prophetess.
71. prospective glass magic crystal for seeing the future.