Without Lifting A Finger

“That’s like what I meant,” Smith hastened his drawl. “He really asks the questions about King. They’re his questions, but he kept himself out of the poem as much as he could.”  His questions. Did he? The professor as he opened the book felt that all things were possible, and seeing the flower passage he imagined a rustling, as if his metaphor were true, and under the passage moved the animal, the massive insight of the grieving poet. “Yet the flowers are to satisfy himself, not King. Of course, the whole elegy is in King’s honour, but I mean their pathos is less than their beauty. The melancholy is all Milton’s. Listen.  Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so, to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thought …”  At this point, an extraordinary thing happened. The professor saw the word “false” coming. FALSE. He felt as if snatched up by the throat and wrung. “False” threw its...

The maturing John Milton, tending toward his mature works, is very serious:;) As in the invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the poet calls for his mouth to be touched by ‘hallowed fire’ from the angelic altar (line 28), Milton presents himself as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by the one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7). Milton’s lips are purified by holy fire but the ‘Vulgar Amorist’, whose desire is directed towards the body, is unable to control his physical discharges and so is implicitly feminized in terms of contemporary stereotypes of woman as ‘leaky vessel’.

First sentence: Long after the professor had come to doubt whether lives held crucial points as often as the men conducting them or undergoing them imagined, he still considered that one day in early spring had made a difference for him.

YET once more, O ye laurels, and once more,  Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,  I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,  And with forced fingers rude  Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.  Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear  Compels me to disturb your season due;  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,  Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.  Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew  Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.  He must not float upon his watery bier  Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,  Without the meed of some melodious tear.  Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well  That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;  Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.  Hence with denial vain and coy excuse:  So may some gentle Muse  With lucky words favour my destined urn,  And as he passes turn,  And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!...

What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.