Omniana/Volume 1/Milton and Ben Jonson

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

127. Milton and Ben Jonson.

Those who have more faith in parallelism than myself, may trace Satan's address to the Sun in Paradise Lost to the first lines of Ben Jonson's Poetaster:

"Light! I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness!"

But even if Milton had the above in his mind, his own verses would be more fitly entitled an apotheosis of Jonson's lines than an imitation.