The Invocation. details
Notes:
The illustration for “The Invocation” at the start of the first book shows a person lying on the ground resting against a tree, barefoot, with a lute on the ground nearby, and an heraldic shield hung over another tree, together with a laurel wreath. The sun’s rays shine down. From the person’s mouth come the words, in Latin, Majora Canamus, which is, Let us sing of great things. On the right are the Latin words Vix ea nostra, an allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Nam genus, et proavos, et quæ non fecimus ipsi,
Vix ea nostra voco
which is, Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
“Rouse thee, my soul; and drain thee from the dregs
Of vulgar thoughts; screw up the heighten’d pegs
[Of] thy sublime Theorbo four notes high’r,
And high’r yet, that so the shrill-mouth’d quire [choir]
Of swift-wing’d seraphims may come and join,
And make the concert more than half divine.” (p. 1)
