Note 10 — Early Poems (continued 4)
Reading edition
An allusion to the myth that when souls are sent to occupy a body again they drink of Lethe that they may forget their previous existence. See the famous passage towards the end of the tenth book of Plato’s Republic: “All persons are compelled to drink a certain quantity of the water, but those who are not preserved by prudence drink more than the quantity, and each as he drinks forgets everything”. So Milton, Paradise Lost, ii., 582-4.