“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658rise up against those persecutors now. In the final line, the echo of Jeremiah 51:6 in
“Babylonian wo” – “Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his
soul: be not cut off in her iniquity; for this is the time of the Lord’s vengeance” –
predicts violent divine retribution in what may be an imminent apocalypse. In this
complex resolution divine vengeance is certain, and the human responsibility is to
learn God’s ways and flee the Roman Babylon – though perhaps as well, to help
inflict some foretaste of the prophesied “wo” now.
In this sonnet, in more striking ways even than in the first sonnet on his blind-
ness, Milton uses run-on lines and strong syntactic breaks within the lines to set the
rhetorical and emotional structure against the formal units of octave and sestet and
end rhyme. That effect is enhanced by the long “o” sounds that resound through-
out – “bones,” “cold,” “old,” “Stones,” “groanes,” “Fold,” “roll’d,” “moans,”
“sow,” “grow,” “wo” – as if to echo the martyrs’ cries.
The sonnet to Lawrence and the first sonnet to Cyriack Skinner make a pair, but
on parallel rather than contrasting themes, as was the case with Elegies V and VI or
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.^146 Both retain the formal divisions of the Petrarchan sonnet
but reconceive the genre in the epigrammatic mode of Martial and the Horatian
short ode of invitation, with perhaps some recollection of Ben Jonson’s “On Invit-
ing a Friend to Dinner.”^147 Both explore a familiar Miltonic theme: the need to seek
respite from arduous intellectual labor with interludes of relaxation and the delights
of refined and temperate pleasure.^148 Both extend invitations of gracious hospitality
and urbane companionship: they begin by praising the young men in terms of their
distinguished ancestors, then invite them to share various innocent delights, and end
by repudiating rigorous asceticism. These celebrations of good pleasure at just this
time (1655–6) challenge the mindset prompting the repression of recreations by
some of Cromwell’s major-generals. Milton’s attitude is reminiscent of his claims for
good pleasures in A Masque and The Reason of Church-governement.^149
“Lawrence of vertuous Father vertuous Son” refers in this opening line to Henry
Lawrence, the distinguished president of the council and keeper of the library at St
James House; it then proffers to his son Edward an open-ended invitation to “Help
wast a sullen day” by the fire in dank winter. The octave concludes with a biblical
allusion to “The Lillie and Rose, that neither sow’d nor spun,” suggesting the folly
of an over-rigorous approach to work.^150 The sestet proposes specific pleasures: a
“neat repast” with “light and choice” fare, wine, and after dinner a lute warbling
Tuscan airs. The invitation is couched tactfully in the form of questions, leaving
Lawrence the option of setting places and days and even the specifics of the repast.
But the final two lines are declarative, defining the attitude that should govern his
acceptance: “He who of those delights can judge, And spare [time] / To interpose
them oft, is not unwise.”^151
The sonnet to Skinner gives the first quatrain to a praise of his “Grandsire,” Sir
Edward Coke, Chief Justice of Common Pleas and Kings Bench and the greatest
legal authority of his day: he “taught our Lawes” though other judges often wrench