The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.

The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.
date it near the middle of 1655.  But, indeed, we should miss much of the biographic interest of the last two sonnets by detaching them from the two first.  In No. 1 we have a plaintive soliloquy of Milton on his blind and disabled condition, ending with that beautiful expression of his resignation to God’s will in which, under the image of the varieties of service that may be required by some great monarch, he contrasts his own stationariness and inactivity with the energy and bustle of so many of his contemporaries.  In No. 2, addressed to Cyriack Skinner, he treats of the same topic, only reverting with pride, as he had done several times in prose, to the literary labour that had brought on his calamity.  In both the intimation is that he has disciplined himself to live on as cheerfully as possible, taking daily duties, and little pleasures too, as they come.  What more natural, therefore, than that, some little while after those two affecting sonnets on his blindness had been written, there should be two others, in which not a word should be said of his blindness, but young Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner should find themselves invited, in a more express manner than usual, to a day in Milton’s company?  For that is the proper construction of the Sonnets.  They are cards of invitation to little parties, perhaps to one and the same little party, in Milton’s house in the winter of 1655-6.  It is dull, cold, weather; the Parks are wet, and the country-roads all mire; and for some days Milton has been baulked of his customary walk out of doors, tended by young Lawrence or Cyriack.  To make amends, there shall be a little dinner in the warm room at home—­“a neat repast” says Milton temptingly, adding “with wine,” that there may be no doubt in that particular—­to be followed by a long talk and some choice music.  So young Lawrence is informed in the metrical missive to him; and the same day (unless, as we may hope, the little dinner became a periodical institution in Milton’s house), Cyriack is told to come too.  Altogether they are model cards of invitation.[1]

[Footnote 1:  More detailed reasons for the dating of Sonnets 1, 3, and 4 (for Sonnet 2 dates itself) will be found in the Introductions to those Sonnets in the Cambridge Edition of Milton.  In line 12 of No. 2 I have substituted the word “talks” for the word “rings,” now always printed in that place.  “Of which all Europe rings from side to side,” is the reading in the copy of the Sonnet as first printed by Phillips in 1694 at the end of his memoir of Milton; but that copy is corrupt in several places.  The original dictated draft of the Sonnet among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge is to be taken as the true text; and there the word is “talks.”  Phillips had doubtless the echo of “rings” in his ear from the Sonnet to Fairfax.  The more sonorous reading, however, has found such general acceptance that an editor hardly dares to revert to “talks.”]

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The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.