
Published online:
24 January 2013
Published in print:
29 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780191740756
Print ISBN:
9780199698707
Contents
Chapter
11 11 That Two‐Handed Engine and the Millennium at the Door
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Pages
252–279
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Published:November 2012
Cite
Leonard, John, '11 That Two‐Handed Engine and the Millennium at the Door', in Edward Jones (ed.), Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642 (Oxford , 2012; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Jan. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698707.003.0011, accessed 13 May 2025.
Abstract
The two‐handed engine of Lycidas is not a winnowing fan (as recently argued by David Sansone) but more likely a threshing‐flail since flails (unlike fans or oars or sieves) smite the grain (not just toss it) and so accord better with the words ‘smite once and smite no more’. Critics should be mindful that Milton's phrase ‘at the door’ is not, and never has been, a mystery. A common biblical locution that invariably refers to the imminent Last Judgement and not to a physical door, the term would have caused no bewilderment whatsoever to a seventeenth‐century reader and was pellucid to Milton's early editors.
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