127. revelry including ‘the revels’, dances concluding a masque.
128. antique either ‘ancient’ (implying serious, allegorical pageantry) or ‘grotesque’. Cp. Il Penseroso 158. An ‘antic’ was a ‘grotesque pageant’ (OED 3).
131. anon at once, instantly (OED 4).
132. sock the low-heeled slipper of the Greek comic actor; here, a metonymy for comedy. Cp. Il Penseroso 102.
133. Fancy’s child Cp. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost I i 171: ‘child of fancy’.
135. eating cares translating Horace, Odes II xi 18: curas edaces.
136. Lydian airs Plato preferred the Dorian to the Lydian mode of music, which he condemned for its moral laxity (Republic iii 398–9). But a minority tradition saw the Lydian mode as relaxing and delightful. See Horace, Odes IV xv 30–32, and M.’s ironic remark in Areopagitica: ‘No musick must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Dorick’ (YP 2. 523).
137. Married Cp. the marriage of ‘Voice’ and ‘Verse’ in Solemn Music 2–3.
138. meeting coming forward in welcome (OED ppl. a. 2).
139. bout circuit (OED 1).
142. melting delicately modulated (OED ppl. a. 1c).
143. tie including ‘connect notes by a tie or ligature’ (OED 3c).
145–50. That Orpheus’… Eurydice Eurydice was killed by a snake on her wedding day. Her husband Orpheus sought her in Hades, and so moved Proserpine and Pluto that they permitted Eurydice to return – on condition that Orpheus should not look back at her. He did so, and lost her again. See Virgil, Georg. iv 453–527, Ovid, Met. x 1–85 and cp. Il Penseroso 105–8n.
147. Elysian Orpheus was reunited with Eurydice in Elysium after his death (Ovid, Met. xi 61–6). See Lycidas 58–63 and PL vii 32–9 for Orpheus’ murder by the Maenads.
150–51. These delights… live echoing the ending of Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (1599): ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me, and be my love’.
Il Penseroso
See headnote to L’Allegro.
1–4. Hence… joys Cp. the song praising melancholy (‘Hence all ye vain delights’) in John Fletcher’s The Nice Valour (printed 1647, but in MS collections from about 1620). Cp. also Sylvester, Henry the Great (1621) 333–4: ‘Hence, hence false Pleasures, momentary Joyes; / Mock us no more with your illuding Toyes’.
3. bestead help.
4. toys idle fancies (OED 4).
6. fond foolish.
possess *occupy the thoughts of (OED 1d).
8–10. gay motes… Morpheus’ train Cp. the Cave of Sleep in Sylvester, DWW (1592–1608), The Vocation (1606) 540–62. Morpheus, the god of dreams, is surrounded by ‘Fantastike swarmes of Dreames’ resembling ‘Th’ unnumbred Moats which in the Sunne doo play’ (554–60).
10. pensioners military retainers (OED 2b), with a possible pun on the Cambridge sense: ‘undergraduate student who is not a Scholar on the foundation of a college’ (OED 6). A sly dig at soporific Cambridge students would be typical of M.
13–16. too bright… hue Cp. PL iii 377–82: ‘Dark with excessive bright’.
14. hit suit, be agreeable to (OED 15).
17. Black, but Cp. Song of Sol. 1. 5: ‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem’.
18. Memnon’s sister Memnon was a black Ethiopian king who fought for Troy. Homer calls him the ‘handsomest of men’ (Od. xi 522). Later writers gave him a beautiful sister, Himera. See e.g. John Lydgate, Troy Book v 2887–906 and Guido de Columnis, Historia Destructionis Troiae xxxiii.
19. starred *stellified (OED 5).
queen Cassiopeia, wife of the Ethiopian King Cephalus. She was changed into a constellation because she claimed to be more beautiful than the Nereids (Hyginus, Astronomica II x). Ovid (Her. xv 36) depicts her daughter Andromeda as a beautiful black woman.
23. Vesta Roman goddess of the hearth, Saturn’s daughter, vowed to virginity. M. invents the story of her motherhood.
24. solitary Saturn Saturn was associated with melancholic, ‘saturnine’ humours through astrology. The god Saturn had reigned in the Golden Age (Ovid, Met. i 89–112), a time of sexual licence (Propertius III xiii 25–46, Tibullus II iii 69–74). M. blends the traditions, placing Saturn and Vesta in secret shades even though incest was not yet a sin. Contrast the open-air love-making of Zephyr and Aurora (L‘Allegro 17–23).
29–30. Ida’s… Jove Saturn reigned on Mount Ida in Crete, and Jove was born there. Jove ended the Golden Age by usurping Saturn’s throne. Cp. PL i 512–16.
31. nun pagan priestess (OED 1b).
33. grain dye.
35. stole long robe (OED 1). cypress lawn fine black linen.
36. decent including ‘comely’ (OED 2). Cp. PL viii 601.
38. wonted state accustomed dignity (OED ‘state’ 19).
39. commercing communicating.
42. Forget thyself to marble ‘become so entranced that you are as still as a statue’. Cp. On Shakespeare 13–14 and Thomas Tomkins, Albumazar (1615) I iv 4: ‘Marvel thyself to marble’.
43. sad grave, dignified (OED 4b).
leaden Saturn was associated with lead, cast glance, expression (OED 6).
44. fast fixedly.
48. Ay continually. Cp. the Muses singing around Jove’s altar in Hesiod, Theog. 1–10, and M.’s Prolusion ii (YP 1. 237).
53. fiery-wheelèd throne Ezekiel’s chariot. See Ezek. 1 and 10 and cp. The Passion 36–40.
54. Cherub Contemplatïon Cherubim were angels of knowledge and lived in contemplation of God. See Nativity 111–12n.
55. hist *summon silently (OED 1).
56. Philomel the nightingale. See A Masque 234n.
57. plight state of mind (OED sb2 6), with possible reference to the other Philomela’s plight after she had been raped by Tereus. See A Masque 234n.
58. Smoothing the rugged brow of Night Cp. PR ii 164 (‘smooth the rugged’st brow’) and A Masque 251–2 (‘smoothing the raven down / Of darkness’).
59. Cynthia Diana, goddess of the moon. She was sometimes identified with Hecate, whose chariot was drawn by dragons.
63. chantress songstress.
64. even-song Cp. the cock’s ‘matin’ in L’Allegro 114.
65. unseen Cp. ‘not unseen’ in L’Allegro 57.
66. smooth-shaven green Cp. Sylvester, DWW (1592–1608), The Tropheis (1607) 940: ‘new-shav’n Fields’.
73. plat patch, plot.
74. curfew bell rung at eight or nine p.m. as a sign to extinguish fires.
76. sullen of a deep or mournful tone (OED 3b).
77. air weather, climate (OED 4).
83. bellman nightwatchman calling the hours.
charm exorcizing incantation.
84. bless protect (OED v1 3).
87. outmatch the Bear both ‘outdo Ursa Major in staying awake’ and ‘watch Ursa Major until it disappears’. Ursa Major never sets. Jonson had coined ‘outwatch’ in The Fortunate Isles (1625) 35, where the ‘melancholic student’ Merefool says that he has ‘outwatched’ ghosts in the hope of summoning a planetary Intelligence. Merefool later tries to summon Plato and Hermes Trismegistus (141–55).
88. thrice-great Hermes Hermes Trismegistus, supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum (mystical writings now thought to date from the first to the third centuries AD). Neo-Platonic doctrine made Hermes the father of all knowledge. With thrice-great Hermes means ‘reading Hermetic philosophy’, but also implies that Hermes (like Plato) has been ‘unsphered’ and is now literally present in II Penseroso’s tower, from which he observes Ursa Major (a Hermetic symbol of perfection).
unsphere *summon from his celestial sphere. Cp. A Masque 3.
90. regions divisions of the universe (OED 3a).
92. nook remote part of the world (OED 4).
93. daemons spirits (not necessarily evil) presiding over the four elements and inhabiting every part of the universe in Hermetic lore. See esp. the Hermetic Definitions of Asclepius to King Amo
n xiii–xiv. Cp. PR ii 122.
95. consent harmony, accord (OED 4).
98. pall the tragic actor’s mantle (Latin palla) and a royal robe (OED 6b). Carey notes that pall and sceptre occur together in Ovid’s description of tragedy (Amores III i 11–13).
99. Thebes the city of Oedipus, and the scene of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
Pelops’ line Pelops’s descendants Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Orestes, Electra, and Iphigeneia appear in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.
100. Troy the scene of tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides. The epithet divine is Homeric (Od. xi 86, xvii 293).
102. buskined The ‘buskin’ was the high boot of the Greek tragic actor. Cp. the comic ‘sock’ in L‘Allegro 132.
104. Musaeus a mythical Greek poet and priest said to have been the son or pupil of Orpheus.
105–8. Or bid… seek See L‘Allegro 145–50n for the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. M. now omits any mention of the unhappy ending. There were versions in which Orpheus recovered Eurydice.
107. iron tears suggesting Pluto’s unyielding, ‘stony’ heart (OED ‘iron’ 3d). Cp. Spenser, FQ VX 28: ‘yron eyes’.
109. him Chaucer, whose Squire’s Tale is unfinished.
112. who had Canace to wife echoing Spenser’s continuation of Chaucer: ‘Triamond had Canacee to wife’ (FQ IV iii 52).
113. virtuous magical.
120. *more than meets the ear OED’s earliest instance of the phrase (OED ‘meet’ 2e). M. is referring to Spenser, and perhaps to Ariosto and Tasso (whose epics had been allegorized).
121. pale career moonlit course.
122. civil-suited soberly dressed. Cp. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet III ii 10–11: ‘Come, civil night, / Thou sober-suited matron’.
123. tricked and frounced adorned and curly-haired.
124. Attic boy Cephalus, an Athenian prince and hunter loved by Aurora (Ovid, Met. vii 690–865).
127. still gentle.
130. minute small. Most editors adopt Warton’s 1791 note: ‘drops falling at intervals of a minute’. Warton was presumably thinking of minute guns or bells, fired or tolled at intervals of a minute ‘as a sign of mourning’ (OED ’minute‘ IV 7). Neither existed in M.’s time.
132. flaring beams echoing Marlowe, Hero and Leander ii 332.
134. Sylvan Silvanus, the Roman wood-god.
141. Day’s garish eye Cp. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II ii 25: ‘the garish sun’.
145. consort musical harmony.
147–9. and… displayed ‘And let some strange, mysterious dream hover around Sleep’s wings, displaying itself in a stream of life-like mental images’.
148. his Sleep’s.
airy stream Cp. Night’s address to Fant’sy in Jonson, The Vision of Delight 41–6: ‘Create of airy forms a stream… / And though it be a waking dream, / Yet let it like an odour rise… / And fall like sleep upon their eyes’. The Vision of Delight was performed in 1617 and printed in 1640.
151–2. sweet music… underneath Cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest I ii 390: ‘Where should this music be? i’ th’ air or th’ earth?’
153. to mortals good Cp. Lycidas 183–5: ‘Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore /… and shalt be good / To all that wander in that perilous flood’.
154. Genius protective local deity.
155. due dutiful, obedient.
156. pale enclosure (perhaps the court of a Cambridge college).
157. embowèd roof vaulted roof of a chapel.
158. antique venerable; many editors modernize to antic (an architectural term meaning ‘fantastic, grotesque’).
massy proof massive, tested strength.
159. storied ornamented with stained glass.
dight decorated.
161. *pealing earliest instance of the sense ‘sound forth’ (OED ‘peal’ v31).
163. service musical setting of the canticles in the Anglican Church.
170–71. spell / Of *engage in study of (OED 6b), with overtones of magical spells (cp. lines 85–96).
175–6. These pleasures… live See L’Allegro 151–2n.
Sonnet I (‘O nightingale’)
Usually dated c. 1628–30. Like On May Morning, it is a poem of spring, and may have been composed at the same time.
1–2. O… still Cp. Elegia V 25–6. Many Italian sonnets begin with an address to a nightingale.
2. still quiet.
4. jolly showy, finely dressed (OED 8, 9) and amorous, good-looking (OED 7, 10).
Hours the Horae, goddesses of the seasons.
5–7. liquid notes… success in love A medieval fancy held that it was a good omen for a lover to hear the nightingale before the cuckoo in May. M.’s source may be The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, now attributed to Sir Thomas Clanvowe, but then attributed to Chaucer.
6. shallow shrill, thin (OED 4).
9. rude unmusical (OED 7).
bird of hate the cuckoo (which was associated with cuckoldry).
THE ITALIAN POEMS
M.’s five Italian sonnets and the canzone ‘Ridonsi donne’ were once thought to date from his Italian journey (1638–9), but are now usually dated c. 1629–30. They are love poems in the tradition of Petrarch, addressed to (or describing) a lady called Emilia.
Sonnet II (‘Donna leggiadra’)
1. M. reveals his lady’s name by alluding to the Italian province of ’ Emilia’, through which the Reno flows. Smart (121–7) decodes the allusion and cites Italian precedents.
2. nobil varco [famous ford] The Rubicon (made famous when Julius Caesar forded it) also runs through Emilia.
8. Là [there] in her eyes.
10. A comparison of the lady to Orpheus (Ovid, Met. xi 45–6).
11. A comparison to Homer’s Sirens. Cp. Sonnet IV 14.
Sonnet III (‘Qual in colle aspro’)
10. Arno the river of Florence (here a figure for the Tuscan dialect, as the Thames represents English). Cp. Canzone 7.
Canzone
A canzone is an Italian lyric consisting of several long stanzas, with lines of irregular length, and a short concluding stanza. Its structure influenced Spenser’s Epithalamion and M.’s Lycidas. The present poem consists of only one stanza and an envoy.
1. The youths and maidens who tease M. for writing in Italian are English and in England.
7–12. Rivers again represent languages (cp. Sonnet III 10). The altri rivi (‘other streams’) are English and Latin. Cp. Lycidas 174–5, where the ‘other groves and other streams’ are those of Heaven. That meaning might be implicit here, but the ‘immortal guerdon of unfading leaves’ (L’immortal guiderdon d’eterne frondi) is primarily poetic fame on earth (cp. the ‘fair guiderdon’ of Lycidas 73). Since the youths and maidens are teasing M., there may be an ironic allusion to Ariosto’s Limbo of Vanity, where Astolfo saw ‘other lakes and rivers, other rills / From ours down here on earth’ (Orl. Fur. xxxiv 72).
13. It was common practice for a poet to address his own canzone in the envoy. Cp. Spenser, Epithalamion 426–32.
Sonnet IV (‘Diodati, e te’l dirò’)
1. Diodati Charles Diodati, the closest friend of M.’s youth. M. addressed his first and sixth Latin elegies to him, and commemorated his early death in Epitaphium Damonis. Diodati died while M. was in Italy, so Sonnet IV must antedate M.’s Italian journey.
6. idea including the Platonic sense.
12. faticosa suffering eclipse. Cp. PL ii 665.
14. Odysseus put wax in the ears of his crew so that they would not be allured by the song of the Sirens (Homer, Od. xii). Cp. Sonnet II 11–12.
Sonnet V (‘Per certo i bei vostr’ occhi’)
6. quel lato [‘that side’], i.e. the left, where his heart is.
Sonnet VII (‘How soon hath Time’)
Date: either 9 December 1631 (M.’s twenty-third birthday) or, as Parker (784–7) argues, 9 December 1632 (when M. ceased being twenty-three). Parker’s revised date has been widely, but not
universally, accepted. In December 1631 M. was in the middle of his last year at Cambridge; one year later he was pursuing solitary studies at his father’s house. In 1633 he enclosed the sonnet in a letter ‘To a Friend’. The friend (perhaps M.’s old tutor, Thomas Young) had warned M. against excessive study and had urged him to join the ministry. M.’s reply acknowledges ‘a certaine belated-nesse’, but cites the parables of the vineyard and the talents to justify his ‘not taking thought of beeing late so it give advantage to be more fit’ (YP 1. 320). Hunter (179–83) points out that twenty-three was the earliest age for being ordained as deacon, and that many of M.’s classmates had already been ordained by 9 December 1632. It may be that the more timely-happy spirits of line 8 are these classmates, and not rival poets (as has often been assumed). But M.’s poetic calling is not irrelevant to Sonnet VII. Line 4 implies poetic productivity, and the poetic and priestly vocations were closely associated in M.’s mind.
2. Stol’n on his wing including the intransitive sense ‘steal (himself) away’. Cp. Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592) III xi 46: ‘Then time steales on, And steales, and steales’.
3. hasting *speeding (OED 1), with wry overtones of the older sense ‘ripening early’ (OED 2).
full career full speed (with a play on the active life M. is not leading).
4. bud or blossom a common metaphor for poetry (from Latin flos). Cp. Lycidas 1–5.
5. semblance outward appearance. deceive misrepresent.
8. timely- seasonable (OED 2) and ripening early (OED 1).
endu ’th *is inherent in (OED 9b), with overtones of’endow with dignities’ (OED V) and ‘clothe or cover’ (OED IV) playing against inward.
9. it inward ripeness (7).
9–12. Yet… Heaven Cp. Pindar, Nemean Odes iv 41–3: ‘But, whatsoever excellence Lord Destiny assigned me, well I know that the lapse of time will bring it to its appointed perfection.’
10. still always.
strictest *most precise (OED 8a).
even / To both ‘level with, neither higher nor lower’ (OED a 5a) and ‘fully’ (OED adv. 7) as in ‘even to the edge of doom’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI). Cp. Latin usque ad.