"Lycidas," Petrarch, and the PlagueAuthor(s): Edward S. Le ComteSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 69, No. 6 (Jun., 1954), pp. 402-404Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039739 .

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402 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, JUNE, 1954

part of Raphael's attempt to prepare Adam for his coming tempta- tion, the implication of this instruction is that the test of Adam will not be beyond his capabilities, and that Adam is strong enough to stand alone as the good angels had done-if he but will.

EVERETT H. EMERSON Louisiana State University

" LYCIDAS," PETRARCII, AND THE PLAGUE

Citing Aristotle on sheep-rot in illumination of lines 126-127 of "Lycidas," William B. Hunter, Jr., cautiously concludes: " Surely either this is the direct source of Milton's lines or he was following its substance in some renaissance adaptation.":' The latter alterna- tive is the likelier in view of the detailed verbal connection with the ninth of Petrarch's Latin eclogues.

Milton says of the neglected sheep that they,

swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.

The relevant passage in Petrarch's " Querulus " is: Illuc, heu, cupidi (stimulat sua quemque libido!)

Pervenit pars una gregis, sucosque veneni Et diras gustavit aquas: atque inde revertens Mox peritura cohors late contagia fudit. Pastorem pastor, pecudem pecus inficit aegra: Spirat enim saniem inclusam pulmonis adusti Alitus, infaustis aspirant flatibus Euri.2

Whatever the possible difference in the disorder-Virgil 8 and Thomas Hardy 4 doubtless knew more about that first-hand than

'MLN, T,xv (1950), 544. 2 Petrarch, Poemata Minora, ed. Domenico Rossetti (Milan, 1829), I,

166-168. Cf. " might breath a pestilentiall murrein into the other sheepe," Columbia Milton, ill, 157.

s Georgicon, iII, 441 ff., where, however, there is no "wind" and no dis- cernible influence on " Lycidas."

' See Far From the Madding Crowd, Ch. XXI, on the "blasted" sheep that die if they are not promptly and skilfully punctured.

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" LYCIDAS," PE'TRARCH, AND THE PLAGUE 403

Milton-the verbal resemblance is striking. " Contagion spread " translates with maximum accuracy "late contagia fudit." With " Alitus " (for halitus) there is a textual variation: the only two Renaissance editions I have seen read, "' Ad latus": 5 whicheve.r reading Milton had before him, "Rot inwardly" can be seen as his recollection of " saniem inclusam." The English poet is not, like Petrarch and Aristotle, so clinical as to name organs (the lung or the kidney), but, besides deriving from Petrarch the words for line 127, he has sufficient authority in the above passage for line 126-for all but the "rank mist." And "rank mist" trans- lates literally the "gravem . . . nebulam" of an earlier line! 6 It all adds up to one of the clearer cases of direct, bilingual in- fluence of a pastoral poem on a pastoral poem.

The eclogue goes on to be interesting in another direction, since, after the above lines from Philogeus ("the lover of earthly things ") and eleven more from him on the deadliness and geo- graphical reach of the plague, the other interlocutor, Theophilus, points upward: "iusta et sera merentes/ Pastores ferit ira Dei. . . ." " The just and overdue wrath of God smites the guilty shepherds! " This is Milton's direction, too. Petrarch's eclogue concludes with a vivid glimpse of hell as warning to those who do not take the " via recta," steep and narrow though it is, to heaven.

Our present subject, however, is the plague. Petrarch is memo- -rializing the terrible Black Death of 1348-50, which carried off L-aura and many of his friends. Petrarch, Boccaccio, and nu- merous others could not help but interpret the plague as a visita- tion from heaven, a supernal punishment for the sins of men. In the year of " Lycidas " the plague had been raging in Horton

,5Francisci Petrarchae Florentini . . . Opera quae extant omnia (Basel, 1581), tomus iiI, p. 18; loannes Oporinus, Bucolica (Basel, 1546), p. 114. Neither Rossetti nor Antonio Avena (ed. Petrarch's II Bucolicum Carmen e i suoi Commenti Inediti, Padova, 1906) records this variant.

6 The line reads, "Adde gravem morbos nebulam mortesque pluentem." iRossetti, p. 164. It is interesting to compare William Hogg's 1694 trans- lation of "Lycidas" into Latin hexameters (reprinted in C. S. Jerram's edition of The " Lycidas " and " Epitaphium Damonis " of Milton, London, 1881, pp. 101-107). Hogg (or Hog) has for the two lines:

" Sed ventis nebulisque tument, sensimque putrescunt Interius, sparguntque sui contagia morbi,"

thus lacking the proper adjective for "mist" that Petrarch gives!

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404 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, JUNE, 19,54

and elsewhere 7-a fact which Masson 8 documents and which Tillyard 9 asks us not to forget in reading "Lycidas." Milton could have heard the body-searchers knocking on the doors of houses.10 He too could not help but think of the plague as a visitation, in some such way as Burton did: I name covetousness in the first place, as the root of all these mischiefs, which, Achan-like, compels them to commit sacrilege, and to make simo- niacal compacts (and what not), to their own ends, that kindles God's wrath, brings a plague, vengeance, and an heavy visitation upon them- selves and others.1"

The sheep are dying of this. The bad air is at once the bad air of the plague and the bad air of the shepherds' wretched " songs " or sermons, offered instead of wholesome spiritual food. The sheep are, in the phrase of a greater poet than Petrarch, " pasciute di vento," 12 which in itself, apart from " the rank mist " (a topical allusion), is enough to kill them literally and spiritually.

EDWARD S. LE COMTE Columbia University

iMILTON., MENDOZA, AND THE CHINESE LAND-SHIP

In a famous simile in Pa'radise Lost (iii, 431-442), Milton makes his vulture pause

. . . on the barren Plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With Sails and Wind thir cany Waggons light.

7See young Marvell's Latin poem of 1637, the parallel between which and "Lycidas" is discussed in my Yet Once More: Verbal and Psycho- logical Pattern in Milton (New York, 1953), p. 192.

8Life of John Milton (New York, 1946), I, 638ff. "Milton (New York, 1930), p. 80. 10 For a suggestive bit of background see John W. Spargo, " The Knock-

ing at the Gate in Macbeth, an Essay in Interpretation," Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948), pp. 269-277.

11 The Anatomy of Melancholy, Everyman's Library, I, 314. Burton cites "Serrarius in Josuam, 7 ": " Deum habent iratum, sibique mortem ae- ternam acquirunt, aliis miserabilem ruinam." Ibid., p. 502.

12 Paradiso, Canto xxix, 107 (cited by Peck and the older editors.)

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