ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Marcus has appropriated; the Happy Warrior, as Wordsworth says, 'turns his necessity to glorious gain'.
Ch. 34. This beautiful chapter belongs to the consolatory strain in the Meditations. The passage of Homer to which Marcus refers was called by the poet Simonides 'the most beautiful of the sayings of the poet of Chios':
Like as the generation of leaves, even such are the children of men,
The wind scatters them on the face of the ground, but others the woodland
Brings forth again in its strength and they shoot in the season of spring;
Like to them are the children of men, one waxes, another is waning.
Marcus uses the passage to illustrate his doctrine of serial change in human life. Our mistake is to forget the brevity of human existence; we pursue or shun the temporal as though it were eternal.
Ch. 35. Health of mind is like health of the body and its senses. The understanding which rebels against its circumstance is like the jaundiced eye or squeamish stomach. The misfortunes we repine at, the death of children or the blame of men, connect the thought with the last chapter and lead on to the next.
Ch. 36. This is one of the occasional passages which are written in a vein of pleasant satire, quickly shifting to a more serious reflection.
Lord Tweedsmuir's Oliver Cromwell contains a parallel to the image of the schoolmaster: 'But to most men, after the first shock, came a half-ashamed sense of relief. They had lost their protector, but also their mentor. They had been dragged up to unfamiliar heights and they were weary of the rarefied air.'
The phrase 'the soul slips easily from its casing' is probably an allusion to a favourite representation in contemporary works of art of the disembodied spirit as winged.[1] The soul is thought of as the perfected imago escaping from the pupa, just as the word Psyche meant in Greek the moth or butterfly. Marcus here uses the diminutive 'little soul' as Hadrian[2] did in his famous poem beginning 'animula blandula, vagula',
little soul, kindly little wanderer
friend and comrade of my day.
