That it was good to hear the Nightingale
Ere the vile Cuckoo’s note be utterèd.
[9. the rude bird of hate.] This gives to the cuckoo altogether too bad a character. The bird has on the whole a fair standing in English poetry. We must think of the very pleasing Ode to the Cuckoo,—written either by Michael Bruce or by John Logan,—as well as of the passage in which Shakespeare makes Lucrece ask (line 848),—
Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?
Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?
Look up other nightingale and cuckoo songs; for example, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, and Wordsworth’s The Cuckoo at Laverna.
II (1631).
This sonnet Milton appears to have sent with a prose letter to a friend who had remonstrated with him on the life of desultory study which he was so long continuing to lead. In this letter he professes the principle of “not taking thought of being late, so it gave advantage to be more fit.” He adds, “That you may see that I am something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza, which I told you of.”
[8. timely-happy:] wise with the wisdom proportionate to one’s years. Similar compounds of two adjectives in Shakespeare are very frequent; for example, holy-cruel, heady-rash, proper-false, devilish-holy, cold-pale.
[10. even:] equal, adequate.