ABSTRACT
Milton’s Elegia III, on the death of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, is extraordinarily interesting on two counts—for its echoes of Ovid and for its anticipation of Milton’s English poetry. To take up the latter first, the dream vision of the bishop in Heaven looks forward to the sonnet on the “late espoused saint” who came down from Heaven to visit the poet, her husband, in his sleep (which in turn connects with Adam’s dream of Eve, VIII. 474 ff.). 1 The wife’s countenance shines through a white veil, as the Bishop’s does despite a white fillet encircling his head. In both cases the poet very much regrets the end of the dream. Heavenly song greets the transfigured Andrewes as it does Lycidas. For the picture of paradise the gardens of Alcinous are invoked, as they are in V. 340–41 and IX. 441. “Lapsus praetereuntis aquae” (22) is the forerunner of “liquid lapse of murmuring streams” (VIII. 263), as “Flumina…argentea” (45) is of “silver…rivers” (VIII. 437). Line 30 has, as Todd noted, resemblance to a line in what will be Milton’s first English poem, “On the Death of a Fair Infant,” 21: “Unhoused thy virgin soul from her fair biding-place.” “King Lucifer” in the Elegy (50) is still the benign sun (not, as Thomas Warton thought, the devil), but a terrible Horatian figure, Death, knocks on the walls of princes and dispatches them with his scythe: it is a time of plague, as it will be when “that two-handed engine” is “at the door” eleven years later.
