It is a hortatory
lyric, a trumpet-call to his party in the moment of victory to
remember the duties which that victory imposed upon them. It is not
without the splendid resonance of the Italian canzone. But it can
scarcely be called poetry, expressing, as it does, facts directly, and
not indirectly through their imaginative equivalents. Fairfax was,
doubtless, well worthy that Milton should have commemorated him in a
higher strain. Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only dwells
on two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many fights--he
had been three times dangerously wounded in the Yorkshire
campaign--and his superiority to sordid interests. Of his generalship,
in which he was second to Cromwell only, and of his love of arts and
learning, nothing is said, though the last was the passion of his
life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps in 1648
Milton, who lived a very retired life, did not know of these tastes,
and had not heard that it was by Fairfax's care that the Bodleian
library was saved from wreck on the surrender of Oxford in 1646. And
it was not till later, years after the sonnet was written, that the
same Fairfax, "whose name in arms through Europe rings," became a
competitor of Milton in the attempt to paraphrase the Psalms in metre.
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