Elegia quinta. English translation. Back to Latin text. Open Latin text in new window.

Introduction. Elegy 5 brings a distinctly Ovidian erotic tone to a traditional genre celebrating spring. New growth, and love-making of all kinds — animal with animal, stars with earth, gods with mortals and nymphs, and humans with humans — serve as figures for poetic inspiration.

The translation follows that of Walter MacKellar with a few changes based on consulting The Columbia Milton and Merritt Y. Hughes.

perennis. 1645 has "quotannis" here; quotannis, an adverb, means "annually". 1673 has "perennis," which appears an intentional correction since perennis is an adjective and so modifies "Musa".

Littus. 1673 has "Litus".

Virgineos. 1645 has "Virgineas"; I have adopted the 1673 correction.

Zephyrs. Westwinds.

Castalian spring. A spring near Mt Parnassus favored by the muses for inspiration. See Paradise Lost 1.15 for a similar reference.

Parnassus. The twin peaks of Parnassus in Aonia, the legendary seat of the muses. See Paradise Lost 1.15 for a similar reference.

Pirene. Another version of the Castalian spring referred to earlier. Hesiod's Theogony 52-59 imagines the muses born to Zeus by Mnemosyne on Mount Pierus in Macedonia.

Delius. That is, Phoebus Apollo, the god of Delos.

Penean laurel. Daphne, daughter of Peneus the river god, was Apollo's first love. According to the story Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses 1.452-567, he chased her until she turned into a laurel tree. As tokens of his continued love for her, he entwined his brow, lyre, and quiver with laurel.

Philomela. The nightingale. Milton alludes to the story, told in Ovid's Metamorphoses 6.424-674, of the transformation of Philomela into a nightingale as she flees her rapist brother-in-law, King Tereus.

from Ethiopia. That is, crossing the equator at the vernal equinox. Milton employs Ptolemaic concepts of the cosmos.

Tithonian fields. The fields of Tithonia, according to myth, are the place far in the east where Aurora, Tithonus's wife, has her home.

Lyconian Boötes. In English the star is known as the Bear driver or herdsman. Lyconian here implies northern.

wain. Charles's Wain or the Great Bear constellation.

giants. The "earthes sonnes," as in the poem, "On a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough" 48, according to legend, once stormed Olympus and threatened the gods. See the story of the "sons of heaven and earth" in Hesiod's Theogony 149-59, and a reference to the giant's assault on Olympus in Ovid's Metamorphoses 1.150-59.

Cynthia. The moon personified as the hunter Diana or Cynthia.

Luciferean rays. That is, the rays of the dawn and the morning star just before dawn.

your aged husband. That is, Tithonus, who, according to myth, was granted immortality but not eternal youth, so he grows ever older and more impotent, eventually becoming a cicada; see Ovid's Amores 1.13.35-40.

Aeolian hunter. That is, Cephalus, the son of Aeolus and husband of Procris. The story of Cephalus and Aurora (the dawn) is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses 7.700-13.

Hymettus. A mountain range in central Greece.

Paphian roses. Roses from Venus's temple at Paphos.

Ops on Ida. Ops was an ancient fertility goddess and, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses 9.498, the wife of Saturn. Ida is the classical name of the highest mountain of Crete, site of the cave where Zeus was said to have been reared.

Sicanian goddess. Pluto, god of the underworld, kidnapped Proserpina as she spread flowers across Sicania, known now as Sicily. See Metamorphoses 5.385-408.

god of Taenarum. Pluto, god of the underworld.

Cerulean mother. The blue mother, the ocean.

Tethys. A sea-goddess and mother of rivers in Hesiod's Theogony 337-62.

Tartessian waves. The Atlantic Ocean, the ocean past Spain and the strait of Gibraltar.

Semele. Semele, daughter of Cadmus, bore to Zeus Dionysius. Hera, jealous of her intimacy with her husband, arranged her demise. See Ovid's Metamorphoses 3.253-315.

Phaethon's steeds. Apollo's son, Phaeton, wanted to prove he was indeed the son of Phoebus, by driving the chariot of the sun. He had to be killed before he destroyed the earth by his incompetence. See Ovid's Metamorphoses 2.19-328.

Hymen. The god of marriage and nuptial pleasures.

Cytherea. An epithet of Aphrodite, Venus, referring to the fact that she rose from the sea near the island of Cythera, and where she was particularly worshipped. See Boticelli's famous painting of Venus's birth (1485-86).

Phyllis. A shepherd who appears frequently in Virgil's Eclogues: Eclogues 3, 5, and 7.

Sylvanus. God of the fields and woods, Milton appears to conflate him with Pan who was said to be half-goat, half-man.

Dryads. Forest nymphs.

Maenalian Pan. The Maenalian mountains in ancient Arcadia were sacred to Pan, a fertiity deity often conflated by Romans with Faunus.

Cybele and Ceres. Cybele was the ancient Oriental and Greco-Roman deity, known by a variety of local names; the name Cybele or Cybebe predominates in Greek and Roman literature from about the 5th century BCE onward. Her full official Roman name was Mater Deum Magna Idaea (Great Idaean Mother of the Gods). Ceres, in Roman religion, was the goddess of the growth of food plants, worshiped either alone or in association with the earth goddess Tellus.

Faunus. An ancient Italian rural deity whose attributes in classical Roman times were identified with those of the Greek god Pan . Faunus was originally worshiped throughout the countryside as a bestower of fruitfulness on fields and flocks. He eventually became primarily a woodland deity, the sounds of the forest being regarded as his voice. He appears in Virgil's Aeneid 7.47-48.

Oread. A mountain nymph.