[189. Doric] means simply pastoral, because the idylls of the first pastoral poets were written in the Doric dialect of Greek.
[190. had stretched out all the hills:] had caused the shadows of the hills to prolong themselves eastward on the plain.
The poet seems to feign that he spent a day in the composition of Lycidas.
SONNETS.
Of poems in strict sonnet form, that is, containing neither more nor less than fourteen decasyllable iambic lines, interlocked by some scheme of symmetrical rhyme, not in couplets, Milton left twenty-three, of which five are in Italian. Of the three sonnets in English omitted from this edition, two have reference to the violent controversy occasioned by Milton’s publications in advocacy of greater freedom of divorce, and are rough and polemic in style; the third is omitted on account of its unimportance and lack of distinction.
In their dates the twenty-three sonnets range from the poet’s twenty-third to his fiftieth year. They are the only form of verse in which he indulges during that middle period of his life which was abandoned to political partisanship on the side of the Parliament in the Civil War, and to the service of the government during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. If, as is now widely believed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are artificial and tell us little or nothing about their author, those of Milton are purely natural and subjective and tell us nothing else but what their writer was thinking and feeling. Their themes are his veritable moods and passions. The mood is now friendly, amiable, and serene, now bitter, strenuous, indignant, vindictive.
Wordsworth, in his sonnet, Scorn not the Sonnet, thus refers to Milton’s sparing use of this poetic form:—
and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew