Evidence: |
[Marginalia in Keats's annotated copy of "Paradise Lost" in Book 2, lines 546-61]: Keats underlines the following: the lines from 'Others, more mild, /Retreated in a silent valley' to 'By doom of battle'; 'Their song was partial, but the harmony'; 'Suspended Hell'; 'in discourse more sweet/ (For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense)/ Others apart sat on a hill retired'. He writes: 'Milton is godlike in the sublime pathetic. In Demons, fallen Angels, and Monsters the delicacies of passion, living in and from their immortality, is of the most softening and dissolving nature. It is carried to the utmost here - "Others more mild" - nothing can express the sensation one feels at "Their song was partial" etc. Examples of this nature are divine to the utmost in other poets - in Caliban "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments" etc. In Theocritus, Polyphemus, and Homer's Hymn to Pan where Mercury is represented as taking his "homely fac'd" to heaven. There are numerous other instances in Milton - where Satan's progeny is called his "daughter dear", and where this same Sin, a female, and with a feminine instinct for the showy and martial is in pain lest death should sully his bright arms, "nor vainly hope to be invulnerable in those bright arms." Another instance is "pensive I sat alone". We need not mention "Tears such as Angels weep."' |