[993.] Dr. Murray gives other instances of blow as a transitive verb.
[999. Adonis] was a young shepherd, the special favorite of Venus. His death was caused by a wild boar. The story is told in various forms. Observe that Milton makes him wax well of his deep wound.
[1002. the Assyrian queen.] The worship of Aphrodite (Venus) was brought into Greece from Assyria.
[1005. Holds his dear Psyche.] Psyche—the personification of the human soul—was a mortal maiden, beloved of Cupid. Venus, in her jealousy of Psyche, compelled her to pass through a long series of hardships and toils. Cupid at last succeeded in reconciling his mother and his beloved, and in having Psyche advanced to the dignity of an immortal.
[1015. Where the bowed welkin slow doth bend:] where the curvature of the vault of the sky seems less than higher up toward the zenith.
[1021. the sphery chime.] See notes, Hymn on the Nativity [48] and [125].
LYCIDAS.
Lycidas is Milton’s contribution to a volume of elegiac verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, composed by many college friends of Edward King, who was drowned in the wreck of the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Channel.
In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains.
Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are Phœbus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton’s poetry.