Broken leg and crutch

Meaning

The unnamed first-person speaker of the 1661 Second Response is dazzled by moonlight, stumbles, breaks a leg, makes a Steltze and walks slowly. The edition renders the support as a crutch in view of the injury, while noting the word’s possible sense of a supporting stilt. The compressed next clause calls “this” a balm to inward salt and speaks of healing. It does not securely isolate the crutch, the slow gait or the preceding episode as the referent of “this”; walking slowly is explicit, but a slow rate of healing is not. Sweet sweat, compared to milk and honey, precedes burning the support to ashes. These are successive images in an enigmatic narrative, not medical advice or a documented accident. No chemical identity, explanation of the later unnamed “three,” or identity for the speaker is established by this passage.