5. The nine spheres are God, or the highest heaven, constraining and containing all the others; the Earth, around which the planets and the highest heaven revolve; and the seven planets: the revolution of all producing the “music of the spheres.”
6. Clear: illustrious, noble; Latin, “clarus.”
7. The sicke mette he drinketh of the tun: The sick man dreams that he drinks wine, as one in health.
8. The significance of the poet’s looking to the NNW is not plain; his window may have faced that way.
9. The idea of the twin gates, leading to the Paradise and the Hell of lovers, may have been taken from the description of the gates of dreams in the Odyssey and the Aeneid; but the iteration of “Through me men go” far more directly suggests the legend on Dante’s gate of Hell:—
Per me si va nella citta dolente,
Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore;
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
(“Through me is the way to the city of sorrow,
Through me is the way to eternal suffering;
Through me is the way of the lost people”)
The famous line, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” — “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” — is evidently paraphrased in Chaucer’s words “Th’eschewing is the only remedy;” that is, the sole hope consists in the avoidance of that dismal gate.
10. A powerful though homely description of torment; the sufferers being represented as fish enclosed in a weir from which all the water has been withdrawn.
11. Compare with this catalogue raisonne of trees the ampler list given by Spenser in “The Faerie Queen,” book i. canto i. In several instances, as in “the builder oak” and “the sailing pine,” the later poet has exactly copied the words of the earlier. The builder oak: In the Middle Ages the oak was as distinctively the building timber on land, as it subsequently became for the sea. The pillar elm: Spenser explains this in paraphrasing it into “the vineprop elm” — because it was planted as a pillar or prop to the vine; it is called “the coffer unto carrain,” or “carrion,” because coffins for the dead were made from it. The box, pipe tree: the box tree was used for making pipes or horns. Holm: the holly, used for whip-handles. The sailing fir: Because ships’ masts and spars were made of its wood. The cypress death to plain: in Spenser’s imitation, “the cypress funeral.” The shooter yew: yew wood was used for bows. The aspe for shaftes plain: of the aspen, or black poplar, arrows were made. The laurel divine: So called, either because it was Apollo’s tree — Horace says that Pindar is “laurea donandus Apollinari” (“to be given Apollo’s laurel”) — or because the honour which it signified, when placed on the head of a poet or conqueror, lifted a man as it were into the rank of the gods.