It has been well said by Dr. Orchard[167] that “this passage affords us an example of the sublimity of Milton’s imagination and of his skill in adapting the grandest phenomena of nature to the illustration of his subject.”
What I alluded to in saying that extrinsic interest attached to this quotation, is the fact that these lines might have caused the suppression of the poem as a whole. Mrs. Todd puts the matter thus:—“Paradise Lost was begun probably in 1658, although not finished until 1663, nor its thorough revision completed until 1665. The censorship still existed, and Tomkyns (one of the chaplains through whom the Archbishop gave or refused license), although a broader-minded man than many of his day, found this passage especially objectionable. The poem was allowed to see the light only through the interposition of a friend of Milton. Upon such slender chances may hang the life of an incomparable work of art! But it is easy to see that in the turbulent days when Charles the Second had returned to power, after the death of Cromwell, these lines should have been deemed dangerously suggestive, in imputing to monarchs ‘perplexity’ and ‘fear of change.’”
Other allusions to eclipses by Milton will be found as follows:—
Through the air she comes,
“Lur’d with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring Moon
Eclipses at their charms.”
—Paradise Lost, Bk. ii. lines 663-6.
“So saying, he dismiss’d them; they with speed
Their course through thickest constellation held,
Spreading their bane; the blasted stars look’d wan,
And planets, planet-struck, real eclipse,
Then suffer’d.”
—Paradise Lost, Bk. x. lines 410-14.
“O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of Noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day!”
—Samson Agonistes, Lines 80-2.
“It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in th’ eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred heart of thine.”
—Lycidas, Lines 100-2.
Pope, in the following lines, may be presumed to mean that the covering up of the Sun by the Moon, during a total eclipse, results in the Moon becoming visible, at the cost of the Sun’s disappearance:—
“For Envy’d wit, like Sol eclips’d, makes known
Th’ opposing body’s grossness, not its own.”
—Essay on Criticism, Lines 469-70.
I have not attempted to pursue this matter through the pages of our modern poets, but it is not unlikely that Scott and Tennyson (especially) would have something on the subject of eclipses.