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
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
The Possibility of Possibility
"Might could” is a Southern expression meaning “maybe I could” or “I might be able to,” conveying…
The False Promise of No Contact
Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that…
