(no subject)

A thing I just noticed about R. Browning's "Memorabilia":

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
   And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
   How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,
   And you are living after,
And the memory I started at--
   My starting moves your laughter!

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
   And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
   'Mid the blank miles round about:

For there I picked up on the heather
   And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather--
   Well, I forget the rest.

--is that "How strange it seems, and new!" is so verbally close to "Strange point and new!" in Paradise Lost Book V. Satan is mocking the fact that God's Son, a newcomer, is being retroactively credited by God's party (including Abdiel, who Satan's addressing) with creating Heaven and the angels. This he rejects, along with the whole notion that the angels were created--after all, none of them remember the process:

That we were formed then say'st thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? Remember'st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?

Might easily be a coincidental choice of adjectives. I can't really think of another case where they're paired in verse, though--strange strongly implies new, new weakly implies strange, so you usually just use one. The significance of the link, if link it be, is Bloomian, as this Satanic speech goes on:

We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course
Had circled his full orb, the birth mature
Of this our native heav'n, ethereal sons.

For Bloom, this passage, and the first line most acutely, is the motto of any ambitious modern poet, since the need to have originated the crucial elements in one's own art is apparently absolutely necessary if one is to devote one's life to that art. This purposeful forgetting of Satan's, in order to deny an excessive debt, may have struck Browning as rather like his own need to "forget the rest" of what Shelley had meant to him and done for him, past the symbolic reduction of the feather, relic of an awesome but irrelevant-because-other order. 

(The "but you were living before that" stuff resonates weirdly with the Milton passage, too, from this perspective.)

I'm led further (after thinking of that hawk-shooting poem by Warren) to wonder about Milton's strange-and-new, and his earlier fresh-and-new pairing in the last line of "Lycidas." Could the famous dirge from The Tempest (quoted by Hunt on Shelley's tombstone) have fed that diction?

Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are corals made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Ding-dong
Ding-dong
Hark now I hear them
Ding-dong bell

"Rich and strange." This seems like less of a stretch when you remember that "Lycidas" is also a song of lament for a drowned man--one who undergoes a change himself, into the "genius of the shore". 

In Milton the lamentation of the nymphs is futile, whereas the saints of heaven wipe away Lycidas' tears forever: a swipe at the disquietingly pagan Shakespeare? No, that's certainly taking it too far, if the rest didn't.