Page 16 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

Her mythic melody 3⁄4 sacrosanct refuge 3⁄4 entwines him, dispelling all fog the woods caress; it does not, as his mother Circe’s and the Sirens’ songs entice, madly lull nor rob the sense that “take the prison’d soul,/And lap it in Elysium” (256-7). Lady Virtue’s crystalline song is to Comus a ‘sacred home-felt delight’ (262) of ‘such sober certainty of waking bliss,’ (263), weaving what delirious beauties wild vines breathe. In what immanent stillness, Comus seems to invoke, implicitly, Lethe’s river. Forgetting his lusty self in nostalgia’s river, his lofty instincts for Apollonian idyll swell. What does her song stir? It stirs vast mountains, landscapes within, a wave, a sea, a bliss upon bliss; it stirs the greenest thing it stirs; it stirs his hidden home within stirring it to unfold nearing what clearings of being.19 It spurs Comus’ soul. He suspires in eternal presence near its electric spark, divine 3⁄4 in this time, in this space 3⁄4 urged and roused, so as to refrain it from fleeting towards Circe’s and the Sirens’ haunting songs that beckon nether journeys his spirit yet desires not; resisting what asphodels of Elysium, what roses of Isles of the Blessed promise and profess.
To Comus, she arrives as a sudden flash, a luminosity 3⁄4 a presence 3⁄4 that does not conceal, but reveals being in the fugitive hours: an irresistible opening within the verdant clearing 3⁄4 Heidegger’s clearing near the “sable cloud...that casts a gleam over this tufted Grove” (224). This light in the
19 Heidegger. On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
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