For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky....
But it remains the common speech that is being so dignified. Milton’s diction, more eminently poetical perhaps than any other in the language, is still founded on the grave, full-syllabled Biblical idiom that we are sure was current in the ordinary enlightened speech of the time. The first readers of his poems would find a familiar tongue, however unsuspected was the beauty that it revealed to them. And in the lighter lyrists of that age, this relation of poetic to common speech, secured without any apparent deliberation—we may indeed say definitely without it—and yet achieving the magic with easy certainty, shines round us on every hand.
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind