Milton’s poem, “Lycidas,” written in memory of Edward King, who drowned sailing from England to his native Ireland, represents a turning point in Milton’s development, his culminating intervention in the ancient pastoral elegy tradition. Considered archipelagically, “Lycidas” narrates a crisis that is spiritual, political, and regional at the same time: A Cambridge-educated Protestant, King represents an interisland possibility for Irish reformation, lost. With “Lycidas,” Milton rereads Spenser’s "Colin Clouts," revising Spenser’s earlier poem. A new, better-educated Colin – Edward King – does not come home again. The loss of Edward King alters what Milton thinks could have been a more positive, reformed relationship on both sides of the Irish Seas.

The first movement, at least on the surface, is in the traditional form Berlioz knew well from Beethoven and others and that he had used in earlier overtures: a slow opening and a long faster movement. But the opening Largo is too long to be considered a mere ‘introduction’. Rather than beginning the Allegro with a sharply defined motive suitable for development, Berlioz presents a long melody, the idée fixe, and bases most of the movement on it, breaking it down and reassembling it in various forms, including a big climax and a wistful coda. The connection of the Allegro to sonata form has been an area of disagreement ever since, considered in more detail in Chapter 10. Major revisions undertaken after the first performance changed the movement’s proportions; the original version cannot be recovered.

Symphonies that Berlioz would have known, including Beethoven’s and those of his predecessors, usually included a dance movement (the Minuet and Trio) or, especially with Beethoven, the faster movement known as ‘Scherzo’, usually placed third after a slow movement. Having decided to put the slow movement third, Berlioz replaces the Minuet or Scherzo with a waltz. He evokes the glitter of a ballroom by introducing harps to the orchestra. The idée fixe suggests that the beloved woman is there; it is transformed to fit the waltz rhythm, acting as a contrasting section and reappearing near the end. Berlioz added a brilliant coda when rewriting the whole movement from scratch during his stay in Italy (1831–2).

Perhaps the most fecund and brilliant movement, the C minor Allegretto is a formally remarkable scherzo with a lengthy trio that takes over the bulk of the movement, leading to a greatly curtailed reprise. Hensel’s manuscript shows that the initially clear ternary design of the movement was manipulated by both intercutting two-bar snippets of the scherzo material into the development of the trio and excising the reprise of the opening bars of the scherzo, thus surreptitiously initiating the reprise amidst the ongoing trio. This leads to the dissolution of the scherzo and a tonally unstable close that prepares the world of the following movement.

Brandie R. Siegfried “considers three characteristics of [Cavendish's] volume of verse,” Poems and Fancies, arguing first that the book is "thoroughly engaged with philosophers and mathematicians, both ancient and modern: understanding the import of her poems often requires setting them in dialogue with those thinkers.” Second, Siegfried investigates the prefaces of Cavendish's poetry, further contending that they demonstrate a feminist sensibility as they explain her views for an audience that pointedly included women. Finally, Cavendish’s eclectic ideas are not simply the musings of a careless author, but rather are the works of a committed philosopher who uses the form of poetry to clarify her theories, making them more accessible to readers while “enhancing aesthetic pleasure through increased complexity and wit.” Giving special attention to Cavendish’s poetic revisions in Poems and Fancies, Siegfried further emphasizes the importance of Cavendish’s poetry for understanding the natural philosophy espoused in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical Letters, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

In 1561 Elizabeth commanded that the liturgical calendar should be revised, because the Old Testament chapters assigned to each day included many that could profitably be replaced by more edifying ones. Because thousands of 1559 folio editions were already in use, Richard Jugge was commissioned to print cancel calendars that could be inserted to replace the obsolete ones. The revisions did not, however, really implement the queen’s wishes, because although thirty-five chapters were removed from the sequence, the only new insertion was Leviticus 26. More immediately noticeable, however, was a considerable increase in the number of saints’ days and fasts listed in the ‘miscellaneous’ column. Those additions have sometimes been interpreted as a resurgence of Catholic traditions, but it has seldom been noticed that most of them had already been added in the small-format ‘popular’ editions of 1552–53 by those unimpeachable Protestants, Grafton and Whitchurch.