altus means both “high” and “deep”).

34. the wheeling poles: the spheres of the Ptolemaic universe.

37. unshorn: stock epithet for Apollo.

38. Hebe: goddess of youth, daughter of Zeus.

40. spheres of watchful fire: The celestial spheres were manned by watchful angels.

42. lofts: layers or stages of air; pilèd: stockpiled.

48. Demodocus: minstrel who sang of the fall of Troy at the court of Alcinous (Od. 8.487–543) and brought tears to the eyes of Odysseus.

53. Milton’s abrupt return to the occasion echoes Horace’s rejection of epic Trojan tales (Quo, Musa, tendis?) in Odes 3.3.70.

53–58. Milton in the role of Ens or Father on this occasion must now introduce by name his ten Sons, the “categories” Aristotle defined in his Categories. The Muse’s bent (aim) must be to keep within the compass (limits) of her predicament, or present situation. In scholastic logic based on Aristotle, the grammatical “accidents” that befell a “substance” or particular entity were called “predicaments.”

66. walk invisible: Because substance is an abstraction known only through particular accidents, Milton jokingly suggests that his personified Substance received at birth the gift of invisibility.

71. time’s … glass: a crystal in which future events can be seen.

87–88. Cp. Aristotle, Categories 5.4a: “But what is most characteristic of substance appears to be this: that, although it remains, notwithstanding, numerically one and the same, it is capable of being the recipient of contrary qualifications.”

90. loose this Gordian knot: overcome the paradoxes of Aristotle’s logic. The knot to which the proverb alludes was originally tied by Gordius. The oracle declared that whoever untied it would rule Asia. Alexander cut it.

91. Rivers arise: Two brothers named Rivers (George and Nizel) had been admitted to Christ’s College in 1628. One of them played Relation, and is here called by his name. Milton proceeds to burlesque the catalogues of rivers found in Spenser (FQ 4.11.24–47) and often in Drayton’s Polyolbion.

92. gulfy: full of eddies.

95. sullen: flowing sluggishly.

99. The name of the river Humber supposedly came from a Scythian invader who drowned in it after being defeated by Locrine.

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SONG: ON MAY MORNING

Dates from 1629 to 1631 have been proposed for this poem in the absence of any evidence. Whenever Milton wrote this aubade or dawn song, it is a small gem. It hearkens back to Elizabethan songs such as Thomas Nashe’s “Spring, the sweet spring” (the opening poem in Francis Turner Palgrave’s famous anthology The Golden Treasury) and Shakespeare’s “It was a lover and his lass” (from AYL 5.3). Like his predecessors, and it must be said, without a hint of what is popularly known as Puritanism, Milton joins in the ritual dance of the year’s renewal, the return of flowers, the reaffirmation of “Mirth and youth, and warm desire.” The lyric is an “early song,” sung on the dawn of a May morning with the early charm of the English Renaissance song still blossoming in its shifting meters and exuberant enjambments.

As he often does, Milton saves the most remarkable effect for the end. We “wish thee long” when of course May is never long enough, and our annual wishes are doomed to disappointment. The message of the final words rolls back retrospectively through the entire poem, and we behold a second time, under the sign of “gone too soon,” the dawn of a May morning. The effect anticipates what the mature poet will achieve with the endless spring of Paradise: represent it responsively and thoroughly while all the while making us ever more hopelessly aware of its having been lost too soon.

Now the bright morning Star, day’s harbinger,1

Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her

The flow’ry May, who from her green lap throws3

The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.

      Hail bounteous May that dost inspire

      Mirth and youth, and warm desire;

      Woods and groves are of thy dressing,

      Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing.

Thus we salute thee with our early song,

And welcome thee, and wish thee long.

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Notes for SONG: ON MAY MORNING

1. morning Star: Venus.

3. Milton’s flower-throwing May recalls Spenser’s “faire May … throwing flowers out of her lap around” (FQ 7.7.34).

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THE FIFTH ODE OF HORACE, LIB. I

This famous translation appeared for the first time in the 1673 Poems. Proponents of a late date, noting likenesses between the translation and Milton’s mature style, suppose that he was deliberately studying Horace in an attempt to perfect his own literary gifts. But the fact that we have no other examples of such studious translations (unless we imagine that Milton was primarily tinkering with his style in the Psalm paraphrases) argues for an earlier date, perhaps 1629, on the assumption that the poem grew out of an academic exercise. It was not unusual for teachers to have their students compete in translating or adapting a classical work. By the eighteenth century, the practice extended to Milton’s works. Thomas Warton in his 1785 edition notes that “Mr. Benson [presumably William Benson (1682–1754), who erected the Milton monument in Westminster Abbey] gave medals as prizes for the best verses that were produced on Milton at all our great schools.”

The Horace translation was in fact immensely popular in the eighteenth century. “From 1700 to 1837,” Raymond Havens reports, “no fewer than eighty-three poems, and probably many more, were written in Milton’s Horatian stanza, which thus had a vogue almost as great, in proportion to the length and importance of the poem, as any of his own verse-forms enjoyed” (560). The best-known of the imitations is Collins’s Ode to Evening, and the influence of Milton’s unrhymed lines of shifting length can still be heard in such Victorian pieces as Tennyson’s “Tears, idle tears” and Arnold’s Philomela.

It is doubtful that Milton himself would have considered this vogue a sign of artistic health. The words of the headnote, “as near as the language will permit,” indicate his awareness that this version of a Horatian ode is not a manifesto or an exemplar but a tour de force, a fantastic one-off. For the language does not permit. English word order cannot approach the free arrangements possible in an inflected language. Nor can Latin quantitative measures be imposed but for an enchanted moment on the accentual-syllabic system native to English. The poem affords us a brief look at an ideal English classicism that never happened.