VII
His "Plane" of Inspiration and Shakespeare's
Now we may note a few examples of Milton's art. On the more obvious yet none the less genuinely expressive level we have the four rivers of Hell conjured up, each by the appropriate phrase elaborating the etymological connotation of the river's Greek name and running in the right psychologically effective rhythm of vowels and consonants:
Abhorrèd Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,
Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls
Her watery labyrinth...1
A less varied phonetic response to a situation but a more massive rush of accurate sonority gathering strength on strength as it goes on and yet collecting itself into one faultless whole, is the famous fall of Satan from Heaven:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.2
Words have never been used with such fiercely combined assaults on the ear, terribly accumulating impacts on the eye, dreadfully swelling intensities of significance, powerfully
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diversified measurings out of movement. It may be worth our while to attend to a few details. The very first foot is a trochee, a metrical inversion in the iambic line, and the opening phrase is a grammatical inversion: both suggest at the same time the hurling violence on the part of the Almighty Power and a posture preparing the fate of being hurled headlong, upside down. Also, if "Him" did not stand clearly and emphatically at the start we would not remember it enough to connect up with it without surprise the final: "Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms." And this connecting up, after the spacious suspense of four intervening lines, knits the passage together so as to make us see the beginning and the end as applying to the same being and completing the prolonged process of his fall - the same rebel Archangel who was thrown from Heaven's height is seen reaching Hell's depth. The different positioning of the pause every-where is expressive - the most memorably so is the one in the middle of the last foot in the third line, allowing the next phrase to commence at the line's utter end with the long stressed monosyllable "down" immediately after the poly-syllabic "combustion". The art of controlled vehemence could go no further than in this whole passage.
Parts of the passage, lines 3-5, figure in a discussion by Sri Aurobindo of the use of epithets. "According to certain canons, epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of images is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed - Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses."3 Quoting from Milton as well as Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo says: "Such lines... are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression."4 When a critic remarked that Sri Aurobindo showed small judgment in
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choosing his citations as examples of a wealth-burdened movement, Sri Aurobindo replied: "He says that Milton's astounding effect is due only to the sound and not to the words. That does not seem to me quite true: the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour of the downfall of the rebel angels: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the 'hideous' and flaming ruin of the downfall, and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear."5
But what is most notable about Milton is not only his capacity for such art: it is also his capacity to meet a similar situation with an art equally controlled at the opposite of vehement. We can imagine him producing a delicate effect in a different kind of scene, but we are quite unprepared to find not long after the picture of Satan's fall the picture of the fall of a comrade of his, who built Satan's palace in Hell and who, according to Milton, was the same spirit that in Greek mythology was known as having offended Zeus and been flung earthwards from Olympus. Milton, relating that he was not unheard of and unadored in ancient Greece and that "in Ausonian land/Men called him Mulciber", writes:
and how he fell
From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star,
On Lemnos, the Aegean isle.6
This is pure melody, though still with a massiveness in it, and the huge prolonged fall is like an exquisite cadence modulated so as to give again and again the sense of helpless
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plunging across space and time but still with a felicity in the movement, the changeful lights of "a summer's day" playing upon it and, before their disappearance, the falling object itself catching fire, as it were, for a moment in which its own celestial nature shows out and then fades away. We may wonder why Milton made his picture a strange and remote beauty. Perhaps the whole artistry was set off by his recollection of ancient Greece and of the land of the Italians who were known as Ausonians, and it was further influenced by his employment of the word "fabled": his imagination passed into an atmosphere of bright serene ideality and built up the picture. The disaster that overtook Satan was to Milton a terrific religious truth and could not in any way be recollected in tranquillity or mythically romanticised: it had to be expressed in all its stark elemental reality. However, there is a brief phrase in Book VI where the poet seems to combine the two moods and, by a certain effect of repeated word and re-echoed rhythm, add a magic touch to the depiction of a cosmic catastrophe. After saying that Satan and his companions, driven by God's Son, threw themselves down through a spacious gap disclosed by an opening in the crystal wall of Heaven, and after saying that eternal wrath burnt after them to the bottomless pit, Milton has the words:
Hell heard the unsufferable noise, Hell saw
Heaven ruining from Heaven...7
In these two statements, the first is splendidly powerful, the second splendidly subtle - the one foams and hisses with a mighty terror, the other rolls and rings with a profound beauty.
Perhaps Milton's art is at its most beautiful in those lines, the appreciation of whose rhythmic quality Matthew Arnold initiated with an ear for technique - the lines about "Proserpin", occurring in the midst of the long passage on the Garden of Eden. In that passage Milton employs first a positive, then a negative method; the latter throws into relief
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in the imagination what Eden must have been by telling us what wonderful fields or gardens known to song or story must not be identified with it. Milton the scholar is here at work with Milton the artist-poet. He sees to it that reference is made to every relevant place made memorable by books. The outcome, however, is not pedantic at all: rather a living profusion of ornate richness overwhelms us. And this profusion starts off with the famous phrases:
Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered - which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world...8
We begin with four emphatic words - "Not that fair field" - all with stresses, the last two with heavy ones: the mind is thus briefly fixed upon the broad general scene. Then comes a lighter and livelier movement and we pass over a particular picture of happy activity going on - but not completed: on the contrary we are led to pause over the very centre of it, Proserpin, who is brought delicately into delightful focus by being called a fairer flower than any in the fair field, and then a deep shadow is swiftly conjured up with "gloomy Dis" -the epithet quantitatively long in the first syllable and unobtrusively joining up, by its second unaccented syllable's quantitative shortness of i-sound, with the quantitatively short but emphasised name "Dis" in which the same sound occurs. There is a momentary suspense at the line's end where the name stands, but the syntactical form presses us onward to a revelation of what the Lord of the Underworld did with Proserpin. And this revelation's surprise is rendered at the same time an inevitability by a certain play of repeated sounds. The preparation of the inevitability is in the fair flowery nature of the gatherer of flowery fairness. The clinching of the inevitability comes not only with the word "gathered" in connection with what Dis does, thus harking
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back to the earlier "gathering" connected with Proserpin: it comes also with the word "gloomy" alliterating with them and thereby suggesting that one who carries gloom would most naturally gather a flower-gatherer. Thus the imaginative art is made to wield a subtle logic which persuades without any obvious intention upon our minds, without breaking the mythological spell. And the scheme of repeated sounds helps also to mount up our emotion and intensify the tragic sense of the situation, with the result that we are in the right receptive state for the explicit expression of the consequence of the tragedy - the long and lonely heart-break of Proserpin's mother, Ceres. But Milton is not content with simply rendering us receptive: he reaches the utter acme of living art in what he says here. The run of eleven mono-syllables, bearing with them the single dissyllabic proper name "Ceres", creates a pathos that is unforgettable both in individual import and in what we may term world-significance. The dissyllabic "Ceres" keeps up connection with the preceding lines which have a lot of dissyllables and a few trisyllables, several of them containing the r of this proper name. The immediate connection is, of course, with the past participle passive "gathered" in the same line. Not only do we have the common r in it: we perceive there in addition the hints of a packed disaster and of a snatching away from sight, hints that prepare us for, as it were, the continuous unfoldment of the disaster's effect and the drawn-out movement of empty earth wide search. But the supreme artistry comes in the deep and universal feeling evoked by those twelve closing words themselves:
... whích/ cóst Cé/res áll/ thát páin/
To séek/ hér thróugh/ the wórld.
Spondees and long vowels and a slow exquisitely limping movement of stressed single syllables reinforce by inspired technical means the piercing significance. One mother-heart's anguish over a length of time is caught with such a
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profound vision and on so broad a plane that it becomes the anguish of the entire race. This transmutation is helped by the use of the words "all" and "world", as well as by the long-vowelled "pain" put at the end of a line where it acquires a special emphasis and a self-sufficient prominence disengaged from the particular occasion and particular statement.
To my mind, only three times in European literature before Milton a world-cry has emerged with an equal penetration from the picture of a limited and local situation. There is the sublime phrase in Homer's Odyssey:
Zenos men pais ea Kronīonos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien...
This may be hexametricised in English:
Son of Saturnine Zeus was I, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain...
Then there is the poignant phrase in Virgil's Aeneid:
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
Again a hexametrical version would be:
Forth did they stretch their hands with love of the shore
beyond them.
Perhaps the poignancy comes out better in English by the pentameter-translation of Flecker's:
They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.
The third example I have in mind is the heroic phrase in Shakespeare's Hamlet:
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And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
Perhaps the Shakespeare-line is the nearest to Milton in expression as well as technique. Here too we have spondees and long vowels and a slow obstructed motion: here too we have both the words "pain" and "world", the former in just the same metrical position as in Milton. The sole psycho-logical difference is that Shakespeare has a certain controlled vehemence most suitable to Hamlet's dying gasp about the difficult burdened life-continuation he was requesting from Horatio; Milton brings a tenderer and more tremulous rhythm, an intenser simplicity perfectly appropriate to a mother's travail of heart over a lost and ravished daughter.
It would be interesting to speculate why Milton has filled this phrase about Ceres, the Earth-goddess, a figure of Classical mythology, with such a world-cry. It would seem that the very depths of Milton's soul were stirred in this whole passage because Proserpin got merged with Eve in his imagination, gloomy Dis was identified with Satan who "gathered" Eve into his dark design, and the sorrow of Ceres grew the anguish of the whole earth for loss of Paradise. Have we not here the same accent of emotion and attitude as in the less beautiful but no less living lines that begin Paradise Lost -
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe -
or in those deeply simple ones in Book IX where Eve's unfortunate disobedient act, loaded with cosmic consequences, is done -
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
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Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost9 –
or, again, in the finely intense exclamation of Adam when Eve tells him of her deed –
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!10 –
or, finally, in the vision which Michael gives Adam of lost humanity at last reaching home with the help of "Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call" and
who shall quell
The adversary Serpent, and bring back
Through the world's wilderness long-wandered Man
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.11
The proof, that Proserpin and Eve were fused in Milton's imagination and their far-reaching fates felt as if one, may be offered by spotlighting the lines preparatory to the account of Eve's fall. Milton starts finding Classical similitudes for her when she left Adam and "betook her to the groves". Just as the list of places which Eden was not, and which it surpassed, began with the Enna of Ceres and Proserpin, so now the list of comparisons, beginning with Oread, Dryad, Diana's attendant and Pales and Pomona, ends with a comparison
to Ceres in her prime,
Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.12
Nor does the clear association of Ceres and of her still unborn daughter with Eve the future "Mother of all Mankind", as she is called in Book XI,13 stop with the mere comparison. The mention of "Proserpina" slips Milton's mind at once from Ceres to her and we get the poet's own address to Eve:
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O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve,
Of thy presumed return! event perverse!
Thou never from that hour in Paradise
Found'st either sweet repast or sound repose;
Such ambush, hid among sweet flowers and shades,
Waited with hellish rancour imminent,
To intercept thy way, or send thee back
Despoiled of innocence, of faith, of bliss.14
Here something of the pain in store for Ceres and something of the misfortune awaiting Proserpina are mixed together, but the central suggestion of Hell's ambush for the unsuspecting maiden "among sweet flowers and shades" harks back definitely to "that fair field of Enna". A few lines further we have a touch answering to the wideness of Ceres's pain, for the "Fiend" who had invaded the Paradise of Adam and Eve was on his quest
Where likeliest he might find
The only two of mankind, but in them
The whole included race, his purposed prey.15
And soon after this we have even more direct analogues to the "fairer flower" that Proserpin was. Satan spies Eve among Eden's roses, uncompanioned by Adam and "oft stooping to support/Each flower of tender stalk":
Then she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while
Herself, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.16
Perhaps we should add a motive of purely personal psychology to that of the whole earth's longing for the paradise that was lost. Both the artistic and the moral aspirations of Milton were mixed with the Ceres-legend long before he chose the subject of his epic. He may have been led
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to make his choice by the coincidence of those aspirations with the deep religious anguish he felt within the sense of Eve's fault and its universal consequence, the anguish for the divine state forfeited by humanity. In a letter to his friend Charles Diodati on September 23, 1637 - more than twenty years before he started Paradise Lost- he wrote: "... for whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres, according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpin with such unceasing solicitude, as I have sought this perfect model of the beautiful in all the forms and appearances of things (for many are the forms of the divinities). I am wont day and night to continue my search..."17
Whatever the psychological motives behind the lines about Proserpin and Ceres in Paradise Lost, they are perhaps Milton's art-peak of austere poignancy. What shall we put up as his art-summit of austere sublimity? In my opinion it is a passage in the devil Belial's speech during the debate in Hell. Moloch has said: "My sentence is for open war." And he has argued that at the worst God would either abolish the very existence of the rebel angels, which would be far happier than having everlasting misery, or, if their substance is divine and immortal, they would be merely defeated but they would have disturbed Heaven and at least taken revenge. Belial questions the sense of such revenge, for it would bring greater punishments: he advises cessation of further activity so that God may relent or at least they themselves may get inured by the help of their purer essence to whatever Hell at the moment holds of torture. As for the idea of being destroyed by God, it is not likely that God could or would let them be annihilated. But if they are sure to be defeated and further punished, it should be the most logical thing to want annihilation, and yet would the logi-cal be also the enjoyable? This problem is thus stated by Belial:
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Our final hope
Is flat despair: we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage;
And that must end us; that must be our cure –
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense or motion?18
Here, as in the Proserpin-passage, is also a profound suggestion of sorrow and loss, there is even the phrase "full of pain" matching "all that pain". But everything is pitched high in place of exquisite, and that phrase which I have already quoted separately and praised –
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity –
has a verbal turn and a cast of rhythm which Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Mantra, the rare type of utterance we often meet with only in the Vedas and the Upanishads. "Its characteristics," says Sri Aurobindo, "are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into the Infinite and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all."19 Technique in the Mantra, more than technique in any other kind of poetry, is submerged in what is heard beyond the actual sounds, the intonation to which we listen in a bespelled and ulumined inwardness - in, as the Upanishads put it, śrotrasya śrotram, "the Ear behind the ear". But, more than technique elsewhere, technique here has to be the very embodiment of the significance-soul. Nothing can be
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altered in the least. For, though the poetry may still remain fine, the specific accent which makes the Mantra would disappear. Not only is it impossible to replace "those" by "these" or "the", or "Eternity" by "Infinity": it is also impossible to change "wander". If we substitute "voyage" or "travel", the meaning will persist in addition to the note of grandeur, but the rhythmic undertones and overtones that are the soul of the Mantra will not be the same: the needed significant resonance, the required suggestive plungingness and spreadingness will not be present arty more. The inexpressibly spiritual will be missed.
I should explain here that the Mantra which Milton attains by the austerely sublime is not a monopoly of poetic austerity. It can manifest in a style whose temper is one of vibrant exuberance, the style of Shakespeare. Shakespeare too captures the Mantric music on a few occasions: we listen to it, according to Sri Aurobindo, when we get:
In the dark backward and abysm of Time.
We may add:
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
What differentiates for our present purpose these acmes of sublimity from that line of Milton's is a certain leap in their very temper, an urge of overflow in their essential spirit. The severity and serenity behind the outer form are absent. However, we must take care to set apart the Shakespearean spirit of overflow from that of a poet like Chapman. Both have the Romantic passion and not the Classic self-possession; but, while Chapman in his best lines like those in his translation or rather transposition of Homer –
When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose
her light,
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or,
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate
his eyes -
has an explosive effort, a muscular or nervous wrestling, in order to break out into poetic brilliance, both Homer in ancient Greek and Shakespeare in Elizabethan English achieve their tremendous effects with a godlike ease. Homer, like Milton, is self-gathered behind all his surge of "many-rumoured ocean". Shakespeare passions forth, yet with no gesticulation, no furious shouting: always a mighty natural-ness he brings at his greatest, he bursts as if by innate right to disclose his lustre: limits fall before him with the very breath of his poetic power, he does not have to hammer at them in order to flow over.
To feel better how the austerity au fond varies from the inner exuberance we may take up more than single lines and pit against that whole passage from Milton two from Shakespeare which have a motive not far removed. "To be no more" is the theme of Belial's speech. Here is Hamlet on the same subject:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:...
... To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life...
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of!
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...
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A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where!
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.
Now recollect Milton. To get the full edge of the contrast let us add to the passage its full sequel:
And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire,
Belike through impotence or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger whom his anger saves
To punish endless? 'Wherefore cease we, then?'
Say they who counsel war; 'we are decreed,
Reserved and destined to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse?' Is this, then, worst -
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
What when we fled amain, pursued and struck
With Heaven's afflicting thunder, and besought
The deep to shelter us? This Hell then seemed
A refuge from those wounds. Or when we lay
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse.
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires,
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage,
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And plunge us in the flames; or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us? What if all
Her stores were opened, and this firmament
Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire,
Impendent horrors, threatening hideous fall
One day upon our heads; while we perhaps
Designing or exhorting glorious war,
Caught in a fiery tempest, shall be hurled,
Each on his rock transfixed, the sport and prey
Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk
Under yon boiling ocean, wrapt in chains,
There to converse with everlasting groans,
Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved,
Ages of hopeless end? This would be worse.
Our lengthy quotation, with several parts bearing a resemblance - in particular verbal turns as well as in general expressive eloquence - to portions in the speeches of Hamlet and Claudio, is sufficient to demonstrate our point about Milton's underlying restraint and Shakespeare's basic leapingness. But it will help also to bring out another difference between Milton and Shakespeare - the difference of "plane" of inspiration over and above "style" of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo has characterised Shakespeare's plane as that of the Life Force, Milton's as that of the Mind. Not that Shakespeare always feels or senses and never thinks or that Milton does the opposite. Milton could not be the poet he is if he never felt or sensed; but what separates him from Shakespeare and puts him with poets like Lucretius and Dante and Wordsworth and even Shelley whose style differs so much from his own is that the mind of thought works directly in him. He is a poet who puts into his poetry the passion of thought. He is an intellectual who is also an intense poet because in him thought is passionate. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, passion is thinking. He seems time and again to set going a fireworks of ideas, but
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actually we have ideas thrown up by a seething of sensation and emotion. Sri Aurobindo has well observed: "While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result."20 Hamlet who is Shakespeare's closest portrait of the thinking mind is yet all the time a-quiver with the élan vital. We may not perceive this when he is insufficiently worked up, but the moment his expression gets intense as in
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
we feel the grey cells vibrating in tune with the guts rather than vice versa. In Belial's speech there is nothing of this phenomenon of getting into the entrails, as it were, of an experience: the grey cells find their own voice in that speech and with it the emotional and sensational being is stirred. Or take the words of Adam after his condemnation, words which join up from afar with both Hamlet and Claudio in their general drift:
Why do I overlive?
Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality, my sentence, and be earth
Insensible?21
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A little later Adam has the phrases:
OConscience! into what abyss of fears
And horrors hast thou driven me; out of which
Ifind no way, from deep to deeper plunged!22
Surely, Adam is not talking in abstractions, but he is worlds away from Hamlet's and Claudio's thrilled vitalism.
(By the way, "conscience" here and in the Hamlet-solilo-quy have different shades. Hamlefs "conscience" means "consciousness", "awareness", and not the supposed moral instinct telling right from wrong. I may also remark in passing that Hamlet's "mortal coil" is not, as commonly believed, the body serving as a shell for the soul, but the turmoil and commotion of physical life. It is surprising how the word could be understood as "shell". The dictionary affords no ground. It gives us a choice between the archaic sense of "disturbance, much ado, noise" or the common one which may be summed up as: "a ring, or a series of rings, winding rope, wire, pipe, etc." Perhaps a snake which can turn itself into a ring or a series of rings can be said, with the ordinary meaning in mind, to shuffle off its mortal coil. But it beats me how creatures with shapes like Hamlet and our-selves can be spoken of as doing so. The sole exception may be somebody like Hamlet's uncle who had killed the old King, Hamlet's father, and usurped his throne. By a snake-like twist of metaphorical ingenuity which would not be untypical of Shakespeare's sinuous imagination we may describe that uncle as shuffling off his mortal coil in the ordinary meaning of the word, because the old King's ghost, apropos of the canard spread by the murderer that he had been stung to death while sleeping, declares to Hamlet:
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.)
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Notes and References
1.Bk. II, 577-84.
2.Bk. I, 44-9.
3.Savitri (1954), pp. 852-3.
4.Ibid., p. 853.
5.Life - Literature - Yoga (Revised and Enlarged Edition, Pondicherry, 1967), p. 93.
6.Bk. I, 740-6.
7.Bk. VI, 867-8.
8.Bk. IV, 268-72.
9.Bk. IX, 781-4.
10.Ibid., 900-1.
11.Bk. XII, 311-14.
12.Bk. IX, 495-6.
13.Bk. XI, 159.
14.Bk. IX, 504-11.
15.Ibid., 514-16.
16.Ibid., 530-33.
17.A Milton Handbook, p. 26.
18.Bk. II, 142-51.
19.Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), p. 97.
20.The Future Poetry, p. 100.
21.Bk. X, 773-7.
22.Ibid., 842-4.
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