IX
Savitri is in many respects unMiltonic. However, Sri Aurobindo's early blank verse which assimilates several influences into a varied vigorous originality mingles Paradise Lost most with the chief immediate influence - Stephen Phillips's Christ in Hades and Marpessa - and the principal background influence - Kalidasa's Vicramorvasie. And this blank verse is of particular interest because of a certain question raised by Sri Aurobindo in connection with Milton: "One might speculate on what we might have had if, instead of writing after the long silence during which he was absorbed in political controversy until public and private calamities compelled him to go back into himself, he had written his master work in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent and otherwise perfect."1 What exactly the ripe result would have been like may be gauged from other remarks of Sri Aurobindo's in the same context.
He speaks of the intellectual age dawning on English poetry after the Elizabethan outburst of the Life-Force. But, according to him, "we have at first an intermediate manner, that of Milton's early work and of the Carolean poets, in which the Elizabethan impulse prolongs itself but is fading away under the stress of an increasing intellectuality."2 "Milton's early poetry is the fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with the glow and beauty of a receding romantic colour, emotion and vital intuition. Many softer influences have woven themselves together into his high language and rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Sug-
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gestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian grandeur and Aeschylean sublimity coloured or mellowed by the romantic elements and toned into each other under the stress of an original personality make the early Miltonic manner which maintains a peculiar blending of sweetness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse."3 The later Milton, though achieving a greatness of speech and form, "has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness."4 Perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness have all been put away: the early sensuousness and tenderness break in at several moments. But even through them runs a sterner temper than before, and where the inspiration is not plenary a dry breath often blows over the play of sensation and emotion, preventing them from vivifying, as they should, the intellectual motive. And Sri Aurobindo is right in that whatever sensuousness and tenderness are actually there cannot be called either the high consummation of the Virgilian accent haunt-ing the youthful ventures, or the final ripening of the early romantic strain whose variegated roots were in the soil of the Elizabethan imagination.
To illustrate the sort of fulfilment on a large scale which a continuity of development from the young to the old poet would have brought about, we may be tempted to look at some lines in Paradise Lost which Milton's nephew Edward Phillips has marked as written a number of years earlier when the poem was tentatively projected not as an epic but as a tragedy. Aubrey's Memoir of Milton gives precision to Phillips's piece of information by reporting Phillips himself as putting those lines 15 or 16 years before the epic commenced. This takes us from 1658, the date of the epic's commencement, to 1642, just five years after Milton's early
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poetry had come to a close with the writing of Lycidas. The lines in question, therefore, may suggest themselves as a stage of direct growth from that poetry to the epic. But are they really so? They are ten lines standing at present in Book IV: they form part of Satan's speech on first alighting on the Earth and seeing, among the glories of the newly created stellar universe, the Sun full-blazing at noon-day. Here they are:
O thou that, with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World - at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads - to thee I call,
OSun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
Ifell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King!5
Perhaps there is a slightly tenderer, more romantic note in a few phrases of the passage, but it is hardly the promise of a temper and style much different from what we observe in Satan's first speech in Hell to Beëlzebub:
If thou beest he - but Oh how fall'n! how changed
From him! - who, in the happy realms of light,
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright - if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsel, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise,
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what highth fall'n...6
Or that description of Satan:
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
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Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.7
The temper and style which we are looking for and which Milton failed on the whole to develop from his early work are, to my mind, discoverable in Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death, written in his twenty-seventh year - discoverable everywhere except in those moments when Kalidasa's glorious voluptuousness comes to the fore. Of course, we cannot expect to illustrate our point by any passage very closely parallel in matter to anything in Paradise Lost. We can only make a suggestive comparison and what is to be seized is the difference of expressive spirit within a context of broadly affined moods. We shall take two passages from Milton. One of them is already familiar to us in part:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
O then at last relent! Is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
The Omnipotent. Ay me! they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan!8
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The other passage is Adam's outcry on being shown by Michael a prevision of "many shapes of Death" and "the ways that lead to his grim cave":
O miserable Mankind, to what fall
Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!
Better end here unborn. Why is life given
To be thus wrested from us? rather why
Obtruded on us thus? who, if we knew
What we receive, would either not accept
Life offered, or soon beg to lay it down,
Glad to be so dismissed in peace. Can thus
The image of God in Man, created once
So goodly and erect, though faulty since,
To such unsightly sufferings be debased
Under inhuman pains?9
Now, keeping both the passages in mind, with the turns of manner in which the thought and the emotion are expressed, let us appreciate the stylistic spirit of Ruru's exclamation in Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death at the piteous sight of the people in the Underworld where he has ventured in search of his prematurely lost Priyumvada:
O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here. Oh my sweet flower,
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?
Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge
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Into its hopeless pools and either bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,
Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom
And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries
Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs;
Then we shall triumph glad of agony.10
The Miltonic mode of speech is quite evident. Enjambment is freely practised: the grand style is at command (especially from line 6 to the middle of line 11): exquisite yet power-suffused rhythm is constant and reaches a climax in
We may put together a series of exclamations too. The one in the opening line of each passage is quite evident; there are also "O then at last relent" and "Ay me!" in the first Milton answered by "O bargain hard!" and "Ah me!" in the Sri Aurobindo. But, in the midst of resemblances to Paradise Lost, we have a most distinct play of colour and grace and sweetness, an absolutely unmistakable Virgilian accent. Caught up into the general classical sense of form, the disciplined language and technique, now come to us the romantic poignancy, the emotional vital intuition: it is as if Milton matured the rare rich promise of his life's dawn within the spacious "intellectual being" of its evening - it is as if, recalling and addressing that promise, he worked with the resolution of Ruru, to bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars.
No doubt, the "intellectual being" is more active in Paradise Lost than in Love and Death: the latter is not charged directly with philosophical values, its temperament is more akin to the Elizabethans than to the poets of the next age, but just as in the early Milton the intellect and its imagination manage to make the moods of the Life-Force a material for
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reflective brooding, so also Sri Aurobindo in Love and Death infuses the play of idealistic passion and aesthetic sensation with thought-values though as yet the intellectual vision has not fully detached itself to bring a poetry of its own. In some places we find even a subtler operation of thought-values assimilated into the sweep of high emotion, than in Milton's more clearly intellectual poetry. Look at those verses of Milton on old age, Michael's words to Adam:
So may'st thou live; till, like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease
Gathered, nor harshly plucked, for death mature.
This is old age; but then thou must outlive
Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change
To withered, weak, and grey; thy senses then,
Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo
To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry,
To weight thy spirits down, and last consume
The balm of life.11
Now listen to the lines on old age in Love and Death:
Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit
Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,
Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is bound,
But called unborn into the unborn skies.12
Even the extreme note of intellect transfigured into intensest spiritual movement that we have in
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Those thoughts that wander through Eternity
seems compassed by Love and Death amidst its other qualities:
Long months he travelled between grief and grief,
Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind.
And his heart cried in him as when a fire
Roars through wide forests and the branches cry
Burning towards heaven in torture glorious.
So burned, immense, his grief within him; he raised
His young pure face all solemnised with pain,
Voiceless. Then Fate was shaken and the Gods
Grieved for him, of his silence grown afraid.13
Here, together with the pervading majesty, there comes the sheer transcendent revelation of word and rhythm which that Miltonic line examples: I mean Sri Aurobindo's phrase –
And perhaps the whole passage illustrates most completely, though in a somewhat subtler fashion than those already quoted, what Paradise Lost might have been if Milton had written it in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision instead of putting the romantic glow of the Elizabethans far behind him. I say "most completely" be-cause one of Milton's grandest passages can be picked out for comparison to it as a whole. The ones we have so far juxtaposed with citations from Love and Death have shown Milton in a slightly mixed form, Milton ascending and descending, his top not quite constant. Now we can represent him by lines which have been considered some of the loftiest in the language - the description of Satan's army of rebels:
Cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
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The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss), condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain –
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt - yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered; as, when heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed top their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.14
It is impossible to decide which passage is more nobly conceived and executed, and which of the two analogous similes more stupendously splendid in originality of application. It is even difficult to distinguish the Aurobindonian grand style from the Miltonic. Yet a very sensitive perception can feel that there passes through the Aurobindonian a faint quiver of beauty, a secret breath of sweetness, a touch part Virgil part Shakespeare and part Spenser, which the Miltonic with its austerer accent has all but lost to power and greatness.
Not that Milton's passage is the least bit inferior in poetic quality, nor can we regret that Milton wrote it with the temper and style characteristic of his old age. All we can say is that if he had retained, more actively than he occasionally did, the earlier double-strained soul and manner - if he had kept as a regular element the glow and grace which his semi-romantic youthful verse carried in a blend with the clear cogency of the classical intelligence turning upon life from its own centre of reflective vision - the poetic level of Paradise Lost would have been more opulent in the bulk and more equally sustained in perfection of living speech. For, although Milton never fails as an artist, the art-intensity tends to be less inward in many parts as Paradise Lost progresses. In his early work, in spite of the fact that his substance is often slight because as yet his imagination rather than his whole self and mind is using the poetic form, the art-intensity is
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such as can be more consistently alive. This is due to the drive and warmth of the colourful Life-Force caught by him from the just preceding Elizabethan age. That Life-Force, if it had continued in the later work, would not only have brought a richer expression: it would also have saved him from stumbling time and again over what Sri Aurobindo terms "the rock of offence that always awaits poetry in which the intellectual element becomes too predominant, the fatal danger of a failure of vision". The Life-Force has a more natural impulsion than the thinking mind: hence the sight and insight needed for genuine poetry can be stirred more continually when the poetic part in one is functioning from within the vital being or in close contact with it even when the intellectual being is lord of one's self.
And there is one particular element which the intellectual Milton, by outgrowing his vital being's Elizabethan inspira-tion, lost to the radical detriment of the substance of his great epic. A poem dealing with Heaven and Hell requires in its substance a more than conceptual-imaginative sense of worlds other than earth: it may achieve fine poetry without such super-sense, but it will not be heavenly or hellish enough, its truth will lack the lights and shadows belonging to the inner dimensions of reality. We have already noted two things about Milton vis-à-vis these dimensions. First, although there is a Kubla-Khan quality in parts of Paradise Lost, a quality not sufficiently appreciated by critics, what we get is not so much the occult seizing the outer consciousness as the outer consciousness infusing itself into the occult and almost taking away the sting of strangeness. Secondly, Milton's mind at the time of his epic is powerful in thought but with little subtlety in the matter of the supra-intellectual; it has hardly the mystical bent, it is more philosophico-theological and ethical than genuinely spiritual: usually it has, as Sri Aurobindo has said, "no subtle echoes, no deep chambers". And yet the early Milton held the promise of something subtle, something deep, a strangeness beyond or behind the mind. We have inklings of it in a felicitous phrase like
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Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss,15
or,
And looks commercing with the skies,
The rapt soul sitting in thine eyes,16
where, by the way, "commerce" is piquantly used for the first time in English as a verb signifying "commune". And we get hints of the same strangeness in the rhythmic no less than verbal suggestions of the couplets,
Oft, on a plat or rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar17
or those blank verses,
What might this be? A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses18
or just the line:
And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell...19
Then there is that conceit transfigured into rich and strange about musical "raptures" breathed into the air:
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled!20
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Of course, we must realise that Milton is not speaking of darkness as a raven, a crow-like bird, being smoothed down by the musical cadences as by soft stroking fingers. Such an image would lead to the grotesquerie of the raven smiling. "Raven" here is an adjective, standing for "glossy black" and qualifying the noun "down" which means "soft hair": the down belongs to darkness and it is darkness that is caressed into smiling. A queer yet fascinating secret presence is conjured up and the music which is the theme becomes too a live thing. Nor does Milton's Comus stop with them. He goes on to compare the ravishing effect with what super-natural creatures like his mother "Circe with the Sirens three" used to produce in "prisoned souls", lapping them in Elysium:
Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense,
And in sweet madness robbed it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now.21
In lines 3 and 4 here we have an extremely apt pointer to a state of being which a mystic who has made God a constant glow and intensity in his heart might well speak of. No doubt, Comus is far from any sainthood: still, the words show the simple yet subtle precision of a verbal artistry which may prove adequate to profound spiritual purposes.
Finally, we may instance those famous verses from Lycidas whose exact meaning has not yet been determined by critics. They come soon after Milton has talked of the greed of the new clergy, the failure of the pastors to look after their flock of believers. After recounting this clergy's slothful wickedness Milton caps the description of the harm done with the semi-mysterious lines -
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing done22
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lines which perhaps have the Church of Rome in view: the word "wolf" may be an allusion to the legendary she-wolf which suckled the founders of Rome. But the real "baffler" arrives soon on the heels of these lines. Milton breaks out into a most sombre warning:
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.23
This is terrific. The presence of an unerring and inevitable doom as if from weird regions beyond the human confronts us. Various explanations have been offered, including the extremely prosaic one that makes the two-handed engine the Parliament with its two Houses - the Commons and the Lords. Whatever Milton may have had in mind, he has given us a most stirring symbol through which something beyond all earthly authority gets manifested: a touch of the Omni-potent is felt in a profoundly mysterious manner.
There is nothing in Paradise Lost like it: the nearest approach to it is the vaguely awesome ending of the phrase about Satan when he collects all his might and poises himself to oppose the angelic squadron trying to hem him round:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed...24
Next to this phrase in dreadful suggestion is the more elaborate passage on the second of the two Shapes Satan meets at Hell's gate when he tries to get out:
The other Shape -
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in number, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either - black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.25
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Later we come to know that this Shape is Death. The picture is very impressive and deserves the praise of Coleridge for its abstract vagueness whose appeal to the imagination has a subtle force which concrete, clearly defined imagery would lack altogether. But the depths in us are not directly shaken: the outer mind shudders and transmits some shadow of its feeling to the depths. The same thing happens when we read of Satan and Death ready to fight:
So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell
Grew darker at their frown...26
And it is interesting to note that in this context Milton has words harking back to part of the "engine"-verses in Lycidas:
Each at the head
Levelled his deadly aim; their fatal hands
No second stroke intend...27
But there is not the mystery of the two-handed engine's single smite to end anything. And a more relevant compa-rison, showing the same lack, is made possible by two passages in another context in Paradise Lost. The first actually lends some precision to the Lycidas-image by its picture of the angel Michael, the leader of God's armies, fighting against Satan and his rebel hosts:
the sword of Michael smote and felled
Squadrons at once: with huge two-handed sway
Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down
Wide-wasting.. 28
This is magnificently formidable yet not mysteriously so; and, although we know Michael to be a divine warrior and we cannot identify the retributive power in the Lycidas-lines, we feel a greater and more fundamental wrath conveyed by them. The force of this wrath goes home deeper also in their
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reference to the decisiveness of the blow than in what Milton says soon after the mention of the angel wielding his long heavy sword with both hands. Now Michael and Satan are pictured as opposed, their swords about to slash down:
Together both, with next to almighty arm
Uplifted imminent, one stroke they aimed
That might determine, and not need repeat...29
Here we have the exact equivalent of
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.
But with all its power it has not the same reverberations in the secret places of the heart.
Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death has something of them in the midst of the later Miltonic manner. We may cite a few passages:
He turned and saw astride the dolorous flood
A mighty bridge paved with mosaic fire,
All restless, and a woman clothed in flame,
With hands calamitous that held a sword,
Stood of the quaking passage sentinel.30
... caverns
That into silent blackness huge recede....31
Shapes he saw,
And heard the hiss and knew the lambent light
Loathsome, but passed compelling his strong soul.32
He entered and beheld a silent hall
Dim and unbounded; moving then like one
Who up a dismal stair seeks ever light,
Attained a dais brilliant doubtfully
With flaming pediment and round it coiled
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Python and Naga monstrous, Joruthcaru,
Tuxuc and Vasuki himself, immense,
Magic Carcotaca all flecked with fire...33
How wanting in the occult atmosphere, though poetically powerful and mythologically significant, is Milton's account of Satan and his devils in Hell changed into serpent forms! –
Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick-swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail -
Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydras, and Ellops drear,
And Dipsas (not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa); but still greatest he the midst,
Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the Sun
Engendered in the Pythian vale on slime,
Huge Python...34
To return to Sri Aurobindo - a passage which is perhaps the most successful in Love and Death in the genre we are illustrating:
He held the flower out subtly glimmering.
And like a living thing the huge sea trembled,
Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves,
Converging all its giant crests; towards him
Innumerable waters loomed and heaven
Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved
Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound
All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in,
Curving with monstrous menace over him.
He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed
Descending, saw with floating hair arise
The daughters of the sea in pale green light,
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare,
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And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld
A mute stupendous march of waters race
To reach some viewless pit beneath the world.35
Not weird, but semi-spiritually suggestive like some of the early-Milton effects, is the line in the above passage:
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare...
Love and Death has other subtleties too, with a pointer soft or strong to strange profundities of which the young Milton held the vivid promise:
This passionate face of earth with Eden touched.36
But Love has joys for spirits born divine
More bleeding-lovely than his thornless rose....37
He heard
Through the great silence that was now his soul,
The forest sounds...38
And the young mother's passionate deep look,
Earth's high similitude of One not earth...39
Men live like stars that see each other in heaven,
But one knows not the pleasure and the grief
The others feel: he lonely rapture has,
Or bears his incommunicable pain.40
Wonderful age with those approaching skies.41
Enough of what Milton might and could have written! We may now ask why he did not write it and what interfered with the natural curve of his development.
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Notes and References
1.The Future Poetry (1953), p. 116.
2.Ibid., p. 112.
3.Ibid., pp. 114-5.
4.Ibid., p. 116.
5.Bk. IV, 32-41.
6.Bk. I, 84-92.
7.Ibid., 591-9.
8.Bk. IV, 73-88.
9.Bk. XI, 500-11.
10.Collected Poems and Plays (1942), Vol. I, pp. 106-7.
11.Bk. XI, 535-46.
12.Op. cit., p. 111.
13.Ibid., p. 92.
14.Bk. I, 604-15.
15.On Time, 11-12.
16.Il penseroso, 39-40.
17.Ibid., 73-6.
18.Comus, 205-9.
19.Ibid., 250-3.
20.Ibid., 260-4.
21.Ibid., 536.
22.Lycidas, 128-9.
23.Ibid., 130-1.
24.Bk. III, 488-9.
25.Bk. II, 666-73.
26.Ibid., 719-20.
27.Ibid., 711-3.
28.Bk. VI, 260-3.
29.Ibid., 316-8.
30.Collected Poems and Plays, I, p. 107.
31.Ibid., p. 106.
32.Ibid.
33.Ibid., p. 109.
34.Bk. X, 521-31.
35.Op. cit., pp. 104-5.
36.Ibid., p. 110.
37.Ibid., p. 87.
38.Ibid., p. 91.
39.Ibid., p. 97.
40.Ibid., pp. 100-1.
41.Ibid., p. 112.
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