Milton: Minor Poems

Chapter 90: XXIII.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A selection of shorter lyrical and occasional poems that range from paired pastoral meditations on mirth and melancholy to dramatic masques, sacred odes, elegy, and sonnets. The pieces contrast urban and rural imagery, classical myth and Christian cosmology, and explore themes of imagination, music, grief, and spiritual vision. Formal experiments include rhymed and blank-verse odes, pastoral elegy, and masque dialogue; several poems praise other artists or reflect on mortality and poetic vocation. The tonal shifts move between buoyant celebration, contemplative solitude, moral allegory, and solemn religious reflection, offering compressed examples of the poet's diction, rhetorical energy, and moral imagination.

1. this three years’ day: three years ago to-day.

10. Milton’s duties as Latin secretary to the government were exceedingly arduous.

XXIII.

Milton’s second wife died in February, 1658; her child lived but a short time. At the time of his second marriage Milton had been blind several years. Notice the reference in the sonnet to the sense of sight: in his dream he saw.

2. like Alcestis. Read the story of the Love of Alcestis in William Morris’s Earthly Paradise; and read in Euripides, “That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his, Alkestis.”

6. Purification in the Old Law. See Leviticus XII.