[88. nor of less faith.] Thyrsis has just been described as a person of great skill.
[90. Likeliest:] most likely to be.
[93.] The transition from the stately mood of the Attendant Spirit’s exordium to the noisy exhilaration of Comus is marked by appropriate changes in the verse. Comus speaks in a lyric strain, and his tone is exultant. When he comes to serious business, in [line 145], he also employs blank-verse. The lyric lines, 93-144, rhyme in couplets, and vary in length, most of them having four accents, while some have five. The four-accent lines vary between seven and eight syllables, many of them dropping the initial light syllable, or anakrusis (Auftakt). These seven-syllable lines have a trochaic effect, but are to be scanned as iambic, the standard rhythm of the poem. The star that bids the shepherd fold. So Collins, in his ode To Evening,—“For when thy folding-star arising shows His paly circlet.” See also Measure for Measure IV 2 218.
[96. doth allay:] doth cool.
[97.] The epithet steep is applied to the ocean, though really it is the course of the downward-moving sun that is steep.
[99-101.] Milton uses pole, as the poets were wont to do, to mean the sky; and the passage means,—the sun, moving about the earth in his oblique course, now shines upon that part of the heavens which, when it is daylight to us, is in shadow.
[105. with rosy twine]; with twined, or wreathed, roses.
[108-109. Advice ... Age ... Severity.] For these abstract terms substitute their concretes.
[110. their grave saws.] So Hamlet I 5 100, “all saws of books.”
[116. in wavering morrice.] See M. N. Dream II 1 98; All’s Well II 2 25.