The Cessation of the Oracles: The History of a Legend

Abstract

1 Elegia VI, 11. 8i-6: 'I am hymning the King of Heavenly Seed, Bringer of Peace, and the blessed generations covenanted by the holy books, and the infant cry of God, and the stabling under a poor roof of Him who with his Father cherishes the realms on high, and of the star-begetting skies, of the companies attuning their strains in the high heavens, and of the [heathen] gods, of a sudden crushed, at their own fanes' (trans. Charles Knapp, in The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Paterson (New York, 1931), I, 2I3-15). I quote Milton's poetry from Helen Darbishire's edition (Oxford, 1952-5), 2 vols. 2 Nativity Ode, 11. 173-80. Appropriately enough this stanza (xix) is quoted by H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell in their standard work, The Delphic Oracle (Oxford, 1956), I, 289. There is an indispensable commentary on the poem by Albert S. Cook, 'Notes on Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity', Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, xv (I909), esp. 335-8, 349-50.