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Say, doth the......green groves? (Book II, Lines 217—220)
Summary
This is an extract from the speech of Oceanus, addressed to his fellow Titans at the council of the fallen gods. He advises them to accept their final defeat in the name of good sense because the children are always going to prove themselves as better than their parents and the Titans also are good to be succeeded by their children only. To authenticate his point, Oceanus gives a tree metaphor saying that the green groves are always superior to the dull soil though they get their nourishment from soil itself and soil on its part always accepts the superiority of the groves (which happen, to be the children of soil), and continues to feed them without entering into the controversy of who is superior and who is inferior. Still more interesting is the fact that the soil feeds her children, more fairly than she feeds herself, So the fallen Titans must accept the superiority of their children who have already established it by defeating their parents.
Critical Analysis
This passage gives expression to one of the fundamental ideas of the poem that it is the law of nature for the old order to yield place to new.