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Milton's “Two-Handed Engine”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald C. Dorian
Donald C. Dorian*
Affiliation:
New Jersey College for Women
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Extract

Few of Milton's lines have called forth more comment and interpretation than lines 130-131 of Lycidas, which form the climax of the denunciation of corruption in the clergy:

      But that two-handed engine at the door
      Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

For example, Professor C. G. Osgood has suggested that an allusion to “the iron flail of Talus” was intended—a supposition that would link the “two-handed engine” in an interesting way to Milton's avowed admiration for Spenser and to the uprooting of the hills in the war in heaven. This interpretation, however, while it might enrich the metaphor, would make Milton's words voice only a vague hope that some agency, as yet unknown, would punish the corruption of the clergy. And such vagueness in Milton's mind hardly agrees with his deliberate confidence in the accomplishment of the reforms he advocated—a confidence which he maintained, even in the face of an obviously changing popular attitude, until the Restoration was fully wrought.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 45 , Issue 1: American Bibliography for 1929 , March 1930 , pp. 204 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930

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References

1 Review of English Studies, I, 339..

2 (London) Times Lit. Suppl., Nov. 22, 1928, p. 909 f.

3 (London) Times Lit. Suppl., Dec. 6, 1928.

4 Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 1927, page 424.

5 A. W. Verity, Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Lycidas. Cambridge : University Press, 1918. Page 147.

6 Oliver Elton, Milton's Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso. Oxford: University Press, n. d. Page 18.

7 “Student's Cambridge Edition” of Milton's Complete Poems (p. 390).

8 The Prose Works of John Milton (J. A. St. John, editor), London, Henry G. Bohn, 1848 (Vols. I, II, and III) and 1853 (Vols. IV and V). Vol. II, page 397.

9 Prose Works, Vol. III, p. 72.

10 Elton, op. cit., p. 18.

11 Prose Works, Vol. III, p. 370.

12 Prose Works, III, 147; the italics are mine.

13 Prose Works, III, 174 f.

14 Prose Works, III, 321 f.; the italics are mine.

15 Prose Works, III, 174 f.

16 Prose Works, II, 50.

17 Prose Works, V, 236; the italics are mine.

18 The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. William Vaughn Moody, Boston, 1899, p. 75.

19 Prose Works, II, 2 and 8.

20 Prose Works, IV, 39 f.

21 Prose Works, II, 543.

22 Prose Works, II, 74.

23 Prose Works, IV, 360.

24 Prose Works, IV, 398 f.; capitals as in original.

25 Prose Works, III, 148; II, 542.

26 Prose Works, II, 113.

27 Prose Works, III, 146 f.

28 Prose Works, III, 5.

29 Prose Works, II, 418; the italics are mine.

30 Prose Works, III, 67.

31 Prose Works, IV, 398.

32 Prose Works, III, 148; II, 542 and 539; the italics are mine.

33 It may be noted in passing that Phineas Fletcher in The Locusts (Canto I, stanza 24) uses “that sharp two-edgëd sword” as synonymous with “that sacred word.”

34 Prose Works, I, 143.

35 Prose Works, III, 315.

36 Prose Works, III, 28S.

37 Prose Works, III, 2 and 3; the italics are mine.

38 G. M. Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts, N.Y. 1925, p. 180.

39 J. R. Greene, A Short History of the English People, ed. N.Y., 1900, II, 227.

40 Prose Works, III, 147.

41 Prose Works, II, 55.

42 Complete Poems, p. 75; line 5-6 and 13-20.

43 I assign the date 1649 as probably the latest for the writing of the passage of Book III of the History on the basis of Milton's own statement in The Second Defence, (Prose Works, I, 261) that he “had already finished four books” of it when he was invited to become Latin Secretary (that is, by March, 1649); and also on the basis of the close correspondence (1) between the attack on the divines in the History (Prose Works, V, 238) and the verses of 1646 “On the New Forcers of Conscience” and (2) between the references to “the sweetness of bribery” in the History (Prose Works, V, 237) and the reference to “the shameful brand of public fraud” in the sonnet of 1648 “On the Lord General Fairfax.” The conditions described in this digression at the beginning of Book III of the History would seem to apply to the situation in the years 1646, 1647, and 1648, when Milton, like many others, lost faith in the Long Parliament because it failed for so long after the cessation of actual hostilities to accomplish the reforms expected of it.

44 Prose Works, V, 239 f; the italics are mine. This digression in the History was separately published in 1681 as Mr. John Milton's Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines. In MDCXLI; according to the notice of the printer, it had been removed when the rest of the History was published in 1670.