INTRODUCTIONS TO THE MINOR POEMS

SEVERALLY

PART I

THE ENGLISH POEMS

THE following is the order of the English Poems as published by Milton himself in the editions of 1645 and 1673, an asterisk being prefixed to those which appeared first in the later edition :—

"ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY," with "THE HYMN."

"A PARAPHRASE ON PSALM CXIV."

"A PARAPHRASE on PSALM CXXXVI."

"ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT DYING OF A COUGH."

"THE PASSION."

"ON TIME."

"UPON THE CIRCUMCISION."

"AT A SOLEMN MUSIC."

"AN EPITAPH ON THE MARCHIONESS OF WINCHESTER."

"SONG ON MAY MORNING."

"ON SHAKESPEARE."

"ON THE UNIVERSITY CARRIER."

"ANOTHER ON THE SAME."

"L'ALLEGRO."

"IL PENSEROSO."

"SONNETS:

* XVII. "Lawrence, of virtuous Father."

* XVIII. "Cyriack, whose grandsire."

* XIX. "Methought I saw."

"THE FIFTH ODE OF HORACE, Lib. I., ENGLISHED."

"AT A VACATION EXERCISE IN THE College."

"ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE UNDER THE LONG PARLIA

COMUS: "A MASK PRESENTED AT LUDLOW CASTLE, 1634."

* TRANSLATIONS OF PSALMS I.-VIII.

* TRANSLATIONS OF PSALMS LXXX.-LXXXVIII.

English pieces which did not appear in either of Milton's own editions of his Poems, but have been added in later editions, to complete the collection, are the following:

Four SONNETS :

Sonnet to Fairfax, beginning "Fairfax, whose name."

Sonnet to Cromwell, beginning “Cromwell, our chief of men.”

Sonnet to Sir Henry Vane the younger, beginning "Vane, young in years."

Second Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, beginning "Cyriack, this three-years'day."

SCRAPS OF VERSE FROM THE PROSE PAMPHLETS.

It is difficult to see on what principle Milton arranged the English pieces in his editions of 1645 and 1673. In some degree, however, he attended to chronological order, making the more juvenile pieces, on the whole, precede the later. For example,

though the piece At a Vacation Exercise in the College, which is one of the interpolations in the second edition, actually occupies pp. 64-68 of that edition, there is a statement in the "Errata" to the effect that it is out of its place there, and should have followed immediately after the Elegy On the Death of a Fair Infant, which ends at p. 21. The association thus signified in Milton's mind

VOL. I

I

between the two pieces is clearly one of time: both pieces belonging to his Cambridge days. And, on the whole, though in neither edition is the chronological principle of arrangement paramount, one can see that a subordinate respect was paid to it. The state of the case may be described by saying that in both editions we see a tendency to the chronological arrangement, interfered with by such motives as might induce an author or a publisher to depart from it in bringing out a collective volume of poems. There was the desire, for example, to open the volume with a poem of some size, like that on the Nativity, giving a sufficient foretaste of the author's quality; and there was care also to give due mechanical prominence in the sequel to such poems of considerable length as Lycidas and Comus.

As these reasons, however, need not actuate an editor of Milton now, and as a reprint of the poems in the exact order of the edition of 1673 would on other grounds be confusing, it seems desirable, in an edition like the present, to adopt throughout that chronological principle of arrangement which Milton did to some extent mark with his approval. For all purposes of a study of Milton this principle is the best, and for no purpose is it inconvenient. Accordingly, the arrangement of the Minor English Poems in this volume is, as far as one could well make it, chronological. The deviations are where certain of the poems go naturally in groups. Thus, instead of scattering the SONNETS through the rest of the poems by placing each particular Sonnet in its own chronological niche, it has been deemed best to keep all the Sonnets together, arranged chronologically in their own series.

We shall now enumerate and introduce the English Poems successively in the order in which they stand in this edition :

:

PARAPHRASES ON PSALMS CXIV. AND CXXXVI.

(Editions of 1645 and 1673.)

These were done, as the author himself takes care to tell us, "at fifteen years old "-ie. in 1624. They are, in fact, the only specimens now extant of Milton's muse before he went to Cambridge. They are the relics, doubtless, of a little collection of boyish performances, now lost, with which he amused himself, and perhaps pleased his

PARAPHRASES ON PSALMS CXIV AND CXXXVI

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father and his teachers, when he lived in his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside, and attended the neighbouring school of St. Paul's. They prove him to have been even then a careful reader of contemporary English poetry, and, in particular, of Spenser and of Sylvester's Du Bartas.

Du Bartas, or, to give his name more fully, Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas, was a French Protestant soldier and poet (born 1544, died 1590). His great work, left unfinished, was a religious Poem, consisting first of a description of the Seven Days of Creation, founded on the account in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, and then of a narrative of Biblical History, from Adam onwards, arranged in seven metaphorical Days, to correspond with the Seven Days of the Creative Week. It was immensely popular abroad, both before the author's death and after, and was translated into many languages. The English translator was Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), an English Puritan poet of some note by his own writings, who came to be called "Silver-tongued Sylvester." He began the translation of Du Bartas about 1590, and finished it in 1605, when it was published under the title of Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Workes. The book, which was published by Humphrey Lownes, a well-known printer of Bread Street Hill, close to Milton's father's house, was as popular in England as the original was on the Continent. It went through several editions while Sylvester lived, and there were few pious English households of literary tastes and good means that did not possess a copy. Dryden tells us that even in his boyhood (about 1650) Sylvester's Du Bartas remained a popular favourite; and Milton's acquaintance with the same book thirty years earlier cannot be doubted. It was first distinctly argued, however, by the Rev. Charles Dunster, in his volume entitled Considerations on Milton's Early Reading, published in 1800.

Sylvester's Du Bartas, with all its quaint encyclopædic learning and its real poetical richness, is a book of often uncouth and absurd taste. Dryden, quoting these lines as "abominable fustian" in his mature life, tells us that he had been "rapt into ecstasy" with them in his boyish readings of the book :

"Now, when the winter's keener breath began

To crystallise the Baltic ocean,

To glaze the lakes and bridle up the floods,

And periwig with wool the bald-pate woods."

But young Milton had a corrective in Spenser. His early familiarity with Spenser might be presumed from the fact that, from Spenser's death in 1599, on for fifty years, the Spenserian influence was alldominant in the English world of Poetry, outside the pale of the Drama. But there is more than presumptive proof. Milton's earlier poems are saturated with Spenser; in his manhood he spoke of Spenser with reverence; and, in his later life, he told Dryden that Spenser had been his first master. It may not be unworthy of remark, in this connection, that Alexander Gill, senior, the headmaster of St. Paul's School while Milton was a pupil there, was a devoted admirer of Spenser. This is shown by the number of quotations from Spenser given as examples of the figures of rhetoric in Gill's Logonomia Anglica, a curious English Grammar in Latin, first published in 1619.

ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT DYING OF A COUGH.

(First printed in the Edition of 1673.)

Over this poem Milton has himself placed the words “Anno ætatis 17," implying that it was written in his 17th year. Now, as Milton entered his seventeenth year on the 9th of December 1624, and ended it on the 9th of December 1625, this would place the poem between those two dates. But, when Milton placed Arabic figures after the phrase anno ætatis in these headings of his poems, it was his habit, as might be proved in this particular case, and as we shall see indubitably hereafter (Introductions to the second and third of the Latin Elegies and to the first piece in the Sylvarum Liber), to give himself the benefit of a year by understanding the figures as noting cardinal and not ordinal numbers. "Anno ætatis 17" meant, with him, not strictly "in his seventeenth year," but "at 17 years of age." The present poem, accordingly, was actually written in the winter of 1625-6, or during Milton's second academic year at Cambridge. It is the first of his preserved English pieces of the Cambridge period, but seems not to have been written at Cambridge, but in the course of a brief visit made to London between the Michaelmas Term and the Lent Term of the academic year,-i.e. between Dec. 16, 1625, and Jan. 13, 1625-6.

That the "fair infant" was a little girl we learn from the poem