VIII (1642).
The occasion of this sonnet was the near approach of the royalist army to London, early in the Civil War. The people of the city had reason to fear the entrance of the cavalier troops and the sacking of the houses of citizens obnoxious to the party of the king. Milton would have been an object of special animosity to victorious royalists, and for a short time he had grounds for the acutest anxiety. It is not easy to see how, in case of actual pillage of the city, he could have made use of such an appeal as this. The sonnet is probably to be regarded as a work of art constructed when the vicissitudes which it pictures were happily past, and when the poet’s mind had regained its tranquillity.
[1.] Note that Colonel has three syllables, according to the pronunciation prevailing in Milton’s time. Look up the etymology of this word.
[10. The great Emathian conqueror:] Alexander the Great, called Emathian from Emathia, a district of his kingdom of Macedonia.
[11. bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground.] Alexander destroyed the city of Thebes in 335 B.C. Pindar, the famous lyric poet, a native and resident of Thebes, had then been dead more than a century. But Pindar’s house still stood, and was left standing by the conqueror, who destroyed all other buildings of the city.
[12. the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.] To quote from Plutarch, Life of Lysander: “The proposal was made in the congress of the allies, that the Athenians should all be sold as slaves; on which occasion Erianthus, the Theban, gave his vote to pull down the city and turn the country into sheep-pasture; yet afterwards, when there was a meeting of the captains together, a man of Phocis singing the first chorus in Euripides’ Electra, which begins,—
“Electra, Agamemnon’s child, I come
Unto thy desert home,
they were all melted with compassion, and it seemed to be a cruel deed to destroy and pull down a city which had been so famous, and produced such men.”