“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639with his experiences there. He first questions the value of the journey that caused his
absence from the deathbed of Damon: “Alas! what wandering fancy carried me
across the skyey cliffs of the snow-bound Alps to unknown shores? Was it of such
importance to have seen buried Rome, even though it were what it was when, long
ago Tityrus [from Virgil’s First Eclogue] left his fields to see it?” (ll. 113–16). The
Alps reference recalls the spectacular scenery of Milton’s return trip and the allusion
to “buried Rome” may register his disappointment that so many of the antiquities
were covered over. But he cannot really regret the journey or even the delay, as he
delightedly describes his participation in the Florentine academies under the figure
of a pastoral singing contest, catching up Damon/Diodati into that fellowship:
I shall never weary of your memory, Tuscan shepherds, youths in the service of the
Muses, yet here was grace and here was gentleness; you also, Damon, were a Tuscan,
tracing your lineage from the ancient city of Lucca. Ah, what a man was I when I lay
beside cool, murmuring Arno, where the soft grass grows by the poplar grove, and I
could pluck the violets and the myrtle shoots and listen to Menalcas competing with
Lycidas. And I myself even dared to compete, and I think that I did not much dis-
please, for your gifts are still in my possession, the baskets of reeds and osiers and the
pipes with fastenings of wax. Even their beech trees learned my name from Dati and
Francini, men who were both famous for their song and their learning, and both were
of Lydian blood.^125That revealing exclamation – “what a man was I” – comments with wry self-
awareness on the pleasure Milton took in these poetic exchanges, which bolstered
his self-confidence and stoked his ambition.
The refrain at line 161 brushes aside “silvae” in anticipation of the epic to come,
though with considerable anxiety. Thyrsis/Milton tells of attempting a new song
on new pipes: some nights ago he started work on it but the new pipes broke. Yet
he is ready to reenact Virgil’s course – to take leave of the forests and move beyond
pastoral verse and such small kinds.^126 He bids a fond farewell to the Latin poetry he
exchanged with Diodati and his Italian friends, citing with some regret a maxim
recognizing inevitable human limitation: one man cannot do everything. He has
now determined to write a British historical epic for his countrymen, and he sketches
out in more elaborate detail than ever before his intent to begin with the most
ancient records and the Arthurian legends:
And myself – for I do not know what grand song my pipe was sounding – it is now
eleven nights and a day – perhaps I was setting my lips to new pipes, but their fastenings
snapped and they fell asunder and could carry the grave notes no further. I am afraid
that I am vain, yet I will relate it. Give way, then, O forest.
Go home unfed, for your master has no time for you, my lambs. I, for my part, am
resolved to tell the story of the Trojan ships in the Rutupian sea, and of the ancient
kingdom of Inogene, the daughter of Pandrasus, and of the chiefs, Brennus and