XVIII MILTON NOTES (1) AN UNEXPLAINED PASSAGE IN 'COMUS' (From The Athenæum for April 20, 1889) T may seem surprising that, after so much industry and Comus there should yet remain a passage imperfectly or not at all explained. Yet such appears to be the case. The passage occurs in the Lady's Song, when she is lost in the wood : Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that livest unseen Within thy airy shell, By slow Meander's margent green, And in the violet-embroidered vale Where the-love-lorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well. No one has satisfactorily explained why the Meander is mentioned here; and no one has considered whether there is, or is not, any special local reference in the lines that follow. 1. As to the introduction of the Meander, Keightley of the leading commentators seems to be the only one who makes any suggestion, and the suggestion he makes cannot be called very valuable. It is possible,' he says, 'that he assigns the bank of the Meander as the abode of Echo because its course goes backwards and forwards, returning on itself like the repercussion of an echo.' Surely this is the very type of what are termed far-fetched interpretations. Yet the real reason is obvious enough, if we remember how richly and fully Milton's memory was furnished with the poetry and the lore of the ancient classics. The real reason is that the Meander was a famous haunt of swans, and the swan was a favourite bird with the Greek and Latin writers -one to whose sweet singing they perpetually allude. There are abundant illustrations of these two statements to be found in Eschylus, Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc. Here are a few that speak of the swan as a sweet singer: Socrates, when in his last moments, as described in the Phado, he remonstrates with his friends for thinking he regarded his coming fate as a calamity, tells them they seem to give him credit for less divination than swans possess, which, though they have sung in their former days, yet sing most fully and frequently when they rejoice at the prospect of their departure to be with the god whose servants they are; that is, to be with Apollo. Ως ἔοικε, τῶν κύκνων δοκῶ φαυλότερος ὑμῖν εἶναι τὴν μαντικήν, οἱ ἐπειδὰν αίσθωνται ὅτι δεῖ αὐτοὺς ἀποθανεῖν, ᾄδοντες καὶ ἐν τῷ πρόσθεν χρόνῳ, τότε δὴ πλεῖστα καὶ μάλιστα ᾄδουσι, γεγηθότες ὅτι μέλλουσι παρὰ τὸν θεὸν ἀπιέναι οὗπερ θεράποντες. And below in this passage, which should all be read in this connexion, he speaks of the swans as τοῦ ̓Απόλλωνος ὄντες, μαντικοί, and προειδότες τὰ ἐν Αΐδου ἀγαθα, and that for these reasons they sing on their death-day more excellently (dipepóvrws) than ever before. See Cicero's reproductions of these words in the Tusculan Disputations (i. 30, 73): 'Cygni qui non sine causa Apollini dicati sunt sed quod ab eo divinationem habere videantur quia providentes quid in morte boni sit cum cantu et voluptate moriantur.' Lucretius contrasts the song of the swan with the cry of the crane; see iv. 181-the same couplet is repeated below, ll. 910-1: Parvus ut est cycni melior canor, ille gruum quam And elsewhere with that of the swallow (iii. 6): Cycnis ? Quid enim contendat hirundo With Virgil, too, it is the type of sweet singing, as the owl and the goose of cacophony; see Ed., viii. 55: Certent et cycnis ululæ. Ecl., ix. 36: argutos inter strepere anser olores. Compare ib. 29: Cantantes sublime ferent ad sidera cycni. In Æneid, i. 398, an augury is drawn from certain swans who at first, scared by an eagle, fly earthwards, but at last wing their way aloft: See Mart., i. Et cætu cinxere polum cantusque dedere. 54, 8: : Inter Ledæos ridetur corvus olores. And such quotations might be endlessly multiplied. And scarcely less abundant are passages of like tenor in the modern poets, especially in those of the Elizabethan age. Thus in Shakespeare's King John (V. vii. 21), when the fever-parched monarch has, we are told, broken out into singing, Prince Henry is represented as saying: : 'Tis strange that death should sing. So Lucrece, 1611:— And now this pale swan in her watery nest And in accordance with the old classical tradition, just as Horace alludes to Pindar as a swan ('Multa Dircæum levat aura cygnum,' Od., iv. 2, 25), and speaks of himself as about to be changed into a swan (Od., ii. 20, 15), so Ben Jonson in his noble memorial lines apostrophizes Shakespeare as the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Assuredly the swan myth deserves the attention of folk-lore students. As a fact, according to Mr Harting, this bird 'has no song properly so called,' but it has 'a soft and rather plaintive note, monotonous, but not disagreeable.' What concerns us further to notice just now is that one of its chief reputed haunts was the Meander. Thus Ovid's Heroides, vii. 1 :— Sic ubi fata vocant udis abjectus in herbis Ad vada Mæandri concinit albus olor. And that this was a favourite neighbourhood may be illustrated from Homer's Iliad, ii. 462, though the river specially named there is the Cayster, which flowed a little to the north of the Meander, just on the other side of the Messogis mountains, which divided Caria from Lydia : Τῶν δ' ὥστ ̓ ὀρνίθων πετεηνῶν ἔθνεα πολλὰ Comp. Virg., Æn., vii. 699 :— Ceu quondam nivei liquida inter nubila cycni Dant per colla modos. Sonat amnis et Asia longe Ovid's Trist., V. I, 11 :— Utque jacens ripa deflere Caystrius ales Sic ego, Sarmaticas longe projectus in oras Perhaps it is worth noticing that the modern name of the Cayster is the Little Meinder; Meinder being obviously a corruption of Meander. Conceivably, therefore, the Cayster was of old known also by the name of Meander. In any case the rivers are contiguous, and what is said of the swans haunting the one applies also to the other. Thus in the mention of the Meander by Milton there is no particular reference to the sinuous course of the river, except so far as the epithet 'slow' refers to it. What he is thinking of is the swanneries that were to be found on its banks and in its vicinity. 2. As he thought of the Meander as the haunt of the swan, what special haunt of the nightingale was in his mind in the lines that follow? Does he mean no place in particular by 'the violet-embroidered vale'? Observe the 'the.' What, then, is the vale that is present to his imagination ? I think there can scarcely be a doubt he is thinking of the woodlands close by Athens to the north-west, through which the Cephissus flowed, and where stood the birthplace of Sophocles, Singer of sweet Colonus and its child. |