Coming immediately after allusions to the treacherous Ulysses and murderous Lady Macbeth,
this injunction bears the stamp of one who, using like rhetoric, exhorted his comrades
to throw off a similar despondency: "Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" (Paradise
Lost, I.330). Satan, too, standing on his perseverance in a lost cause, represents
himself as being
one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same. . . (I.252-256).