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Lucretius describes the position of the spectator with a special piquancy at the opening proem to his Book 2 of De Rerum Natura, and this is through a shipwreck spectacle: Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is 42 Sharon Achinstein pleasant. Pleasant is it also to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in the peril.

The quote is Marjorie Levinson’s, 560. 2 (2007): 558–69. On the problem of the routinization of historicism, see Paul Stevens, “Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Violence,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achenstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243–46. 1 (2012): 115–21. 26. Wittreich, “Afterword,” 244 in The New Milton Criticism. 27. For perhaps the most direct engagements of Miltonic orthodoxy in this volume, see Trubowitz and Mohamed on Milton and antitrinitarianism.

That investigation in Lycidas takes place through its multiple narratives, where questions of explanation and ultimate justice are advanced. II If we turn to the contemporary volume in which Milton’s ode first appeared, we may become even more worried about the failure of narrative and story to deliver consolatory belief. 20 His “yet once more” has the feel of one aware of the collected voices which had come b­efore and which form a choir of lament. For those contributing to the 1638 volume, King’s personal history rapidly achieved cosmic meaning, as was conventional for elegy, through a poetry that sought to overcome m­aterial existence through the codes of fame and salvation.