Milton describes Satan’s spear as “equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast / of some great Ammiral.”
In his translation of the Iliad , Pope describes the death of Sarpedon: “as some mountain Oak, or Poplar tall / or pine (fit mast for some great Admiral) / Nods to the Ax . . . Thus fell the King.”
So, we get Homer borrowing a line from Milton, who had originally borrowed it from Virgil’s description of Polyphemus ( Aeneid 3) and perhaps also from Abraham Cowley’s description of Goliath in his Davideis (“His Spear the Trunk was of a lofty Tree / Which Nature meant some tall Ship’s Mast to be”).
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Restoring Man at Notre Dame
It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…
Deliver Us from Evil
In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…
Natural Law Needs Revelation
Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…
