CHAPTER 6

Heroes and Daemons

Miscellany Poet

In the Lent term of 1629, after four years of study, Milton supplicated for his BA degree, a condition of which was signed affirmation of allegiance to the monarch and the fundamental tenets, known as the Thirty-Nine Articles, of the Church of England. Among Milton’s contemporaries at Christ’s, over half proceeded to the MA and remained for another three years.¹ The MA degree was a markedly freer experience than the BA: it was expected that the student would now work independently of a tutor and without daily supervision, and initially work towards completion of the studies that he had been unable to complete during the BA. The Cambridge statutes by Milton’s time had dispensed with residency requirements, on the grounds ‘that a man once grounded so far in learning as to deserve a bachelorship in arts is sufficiently furnished to proceed in study himself’. The Cambridge tutor Richard Holdsworth, for example, expected the graduated student to complete his reading of the Greek poets and pursue the historians Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and the biographer of philosophers, Diogenes Laertius. The independent study expected of the MA student was ‘justified on the grounds that formal schooling represented only a part of the actual educational process, which was expected to last a lifetime’. As one student who matriculated in 1668 recalled: ‘being a bachelour of arts, I was free from the government of a tutor, and wholly left to my own management and freedom, as far as was consistent with the college and university discipline’. He ‘spent most of [his] time in reading books’.² Milton undoubtedly spent much of his time in reading books, but he also spent it in writing poetry, and increasingly in English.

Milton could thus now move more or less at will between Cambridge and the family home in Bread Street. Milton’s parents moved to Hammersmith, then a village on the outskirts of London, at some point before 30 April 1631, when Milton’s father was assessed for payment of Poor Relief; but probably not before the latter half of 1630, as John Milton senior is not listed in any prior records.³ The character of Hammersmith in this period will be considered in the next chapter; it will suffice to note here that Milton may thus have been living in the comparatively rural location of Hammersmith during another, and particularly devastating, period of plague which closed the university between spring and autumn 1630. Movement between Cambridge and London was facilitated by the university carrier Thomas Hobson, who both hired out horses to students and offered weekly transport to and from London in his wagon. Milton composed two verse epitaphs in English on this famous Cambridge character, who was eighty-six when he died at the beginning of 1631. The conceit of the poems is that it must have been Hobson’s enforced rest due to the outbreak of plague which did for him. The second of the epitaphs as they were published in the 1645 Poems makes characteristic play with the vocabulary of Aristotelian natural philosophy familiar to Milton’s peers. It also employs the kind of paradoxical word-play and deliberately strained images that are a feature of his Latin prolusions, but which also have something in common with the vernacular poetic tradition of what we now call ‘metaphysical’ wit, popular in England in the aftermath of Donne, who himself died a couple of months later, in March 1631:

Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime
’Gainst old truth) motion numbered out his time;
And like an old engine moved with wheel and weight,
His principles being ceased, he ended straight
[ . . . ]
Yet (strange to think) his wain was increase:
His letters are delivered all and gone,
Only remains his superscription.⁴

The notion of time as the ‘number of motion’ comes from Aristotle’s Physics (4. 11-12). The pun here is that ‘wain’ means ‘waggon’ as well as decrease, while ‘superscription’ denotes both the address on a letter and the epitaph on a grave. The originary link of epitaph and epigram with inscription, and thus with the physical occasion of a poem, is important to much of Milton’s university verse, from the Latin epigrams to these vernacular lyrics. The rituals of university life likely encouraged this sense of poems as physical objects to be fixed in specific locations and viewed by peers: for the public disputations that comprised part of the examinations for the BA, in which students had to appear twice as Opponents and twice as Respondents, the subjects for debate were fixed to the door of the Schools three days before the disputation was to take place.

The Hobson poems may not repay much sustained attention in themselves, but the evidence of their scribal circulation indicates both that they were his most popular university poems among his peers and that Milton participated in the student culture, particularly vibrant in the first half of the seventeenth century, of collecting verse in commonplace books or manuscript miscellanies. Epigrams, epitaphs, jests, and other brief, pointed verse forms that could be quickly copied and transmitted were particularly sought out by the compilers of such miscellanies. The second of the Hobson poems, ‘Here lyeth one who did most truly prove’, appears (anonymously) in verse miscellanies associated with both Oxford and Cambridge, compiled in the period 1634–43, and its first appearance in print was (also anonymously) in the printed verse miscellany A Banquet of Jests (London, 1640). The first poem, ‘Here lies old Hobson’, appears (anonymously) in a verse miscellany compiled by Inns of Court men in the 1630s, where it appears beside a poem by Milton’s Cambridge contemporary, Thomas Randolph—who offered Milton, as we have seen, one prominent role model of the successful university poet.⁵ The manuscript copies of the Hobson poems indicate that Milton originally circulated certain of his poems in manuscript form within Cambridge, and possibly Oxford and the Inns of Court as well; the inclusion of the second Hobson poem in the 1640 printed miscellany seems unlikely to have been authorized by Milton, and indicates that eventually the poems circulated beyond his control. However the publication may have had something to do with Milton’s social life when he moved to London in 1640 and apparently dropped ‘into the society of some young sparks of his acquaintance, the chief whereof were Mr Alphry and Mr Miller, two Gentlemen of Gray’s-Inn, the Beaus of those times’.⁶ Mr Alphry and Mr Miller remained to be identified, but such participation in student scribal exchange shows once more that, while he may have privately expressed in letters his disappointment with the commitment to learning of his peers, Milton’s later representation of himself in his prose works as bitterly at odds with a Cambridge cultural life that he regarded as degenerate has little basis in the evidence from his time there.

The Hobson poems are not the only examples from this period of Milton pursuing paths to preferment and reputation through scribal circulation. ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’—Jane Paulet, a Roman Catholic who died in childbirth in April 1631—seems to have been written for a planned volume of university elegies that never made it to print. (The poet offers ‘some flowers, and some bays, / For thy hearse to strew the ways, / Sent thee from the banks of Came’; lines 57–9.) A version of the elegy, which has six variant lines and is dated precisely to the Marchioness’s death, is found in a manuscript verse miscellany dating from the early 1630s which contains other elegies for Paulet, as well as work by poets associated with Christ Church, Oxford, one of the most flourishing centres of scribal poetic exchange in the period.⁷ This variant text, which notes Milton’s college affiliation in ascribing it to ‘Jo Milton of Chr: Coll Cambr.’, appears to be an authentic early draft that Milton allowed to circulate, presumably in the hope of attracting admiration or patronage: there is no evidence that he had any link with Paulet or her husband, the fifth Marquis of Winchester, who were close to Charles and Henrietta Maria. Ben Jonson’s fine elegy for Paulet, with its haunting opening lines (‘What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, / Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew, / And beckoning woos me, from the fatal tree / To pluck a garland for herself or me?’), circulated scribally, and Milton may be testing himself against Jonson’s example: the poem is one of Milton’s most notably Jonsonian pieces, both in terms of prosody and its ‘respectful but self-serving celebration of aristocracy’.⁸ The acquisition of both reputation and preferment was the key motivation for poets who involved themselves in the culture of poetic exchange and transmission in the universities and the Inns of Court, even if the verse collected in the miscellanies is most often unascribed.⁹

Milton’s experiments with a ‘metaphysical’ lyric mode in English also seem to have been circulated in university circles and to have attracted the attention of the compilers of verse miscellanies. The popularity of his poems in a more metaphysical style is unsurprising given the ubiquity of Donne’s poetry in manuscript miscellanies. The version of Milton’s lyric ‘On Time’ (1631?), which appears (unattributed) in Elias Ashmole’s verse miscellany, likely circulated before it appeared in print in 1645, for its title in the manuscript—‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’—is, as mentioned in Chapter 5, close to the title that Milton originally gave the poem in the manuscript notebook of drafts that he probably began around 1632 (‘. . . set on a clock case’), later scored through. This scribal version of ‘On Time’ concludes with variant lines which advertise the debt to Donne by echoing the conclusion of Donne’s tenth Holy Sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’:

Shall heape our dayes with everlastinge store
When death and Chance, and thou O tyme shalbee noe more[.]

Compare Donne’s final lines:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.¹⁰

Whether or not these variant lines, which show craft and literary knowledge, are the work of Milton or a particularly creative scribe who rewrote this part of the poem, they were designed to appeal to readers who knew their Donne.¹¹

A Monument More Permanent

That Milton also developed connections during this period to literary networks beyond the universities is evident in his first printed poem (or at least first printed poem in a commercial publication, if his act verses were distributed as printed hand-outs for the Cambridge ceremonies). ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare’ appeared in the commendatory poems for the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, but was later retitled ‘On Shakespear. 1630’ for the 1645 Poems. It must thus have been written while he was still at Cambridge, although perhaps in the period when the University was closed due to plague. As we saw in Chapter 1, the surprising inclusion of the unpublished MA student Milton in this comparatively prestigious (and expensive) book—although the poem appears anonymously—could have something to do with his father’s connections to the Blackfriars theatre, and more generally to the cultural world of Caroline London. It may also reflect the reception of Milton’s poetic performances at Cambridge and the vernacular verse that he scribally circulated. The epitaph on Shakespeare shows the young Milton weighing up the various resources of the English poetic tradition. The tribute is obviously indebted to Jonson’s elegy from the 1623 First Folio, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author William Shakespeare’, which is also included in the 1632 Folio, adopting the same metre of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter and expanding upon its invocation of the description by Horace, Jonson’s favourite classical examplar of the poet, of his Odes as ‘a monument more lasting than bronze’ (monumentum aere perennius): ‘Thou art a monument without a tomb, / And art alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read, and praise to give’ (lines 22–4). Milton’s Shakespeare ‘Hast built thyself a live-long monument’ in the form of his plays (line 8). Milton also follows Jonson in making the tension between art and nature part of his topic, although Milton somewhat simplifies Jonson’s extended meditation on the matter (‘Yet I must not give nature all: thy art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part’; lines 55–6), into a simple opposition between a lumbering, ‘slow-endeavouring art’ and the natural ‘flow’ of Shakespeare’s ‘easy numbers’ (lines 9–10). But while the poem is ‘on’ Shakespeare and imitates Jonson, it employs Spenserian diction, or at least pseudo-Spenserian archaism, in the phrase ‘star-ypointing pyramid’. (While the use of ‘y-‘ prefix is common in Edmund Spenser’s poetry, he never uses it before a present participle; some variant copies of the Second Folio, however, do have ‘ypointed pyramid’.¹²)

The most complex couplet in the epitaph also needs to be read through a Spenserian lens. Milton’s attitude towards Shakespeare has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, in part motivated by Milton’s aggressive identification of theatricality with monarchical tyranny in Eikonoklastes in 1649, and his specific charge that Charles I had spent more time reading Shakespeare than the Bible. It has been influentially argued that lines 13–14—‘Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving, / Dost make us marble with too much conceiving’—subvert the performance of epitaphic praise and disclose Milton’s suspicion, though perhaps not yet fully conscious, of Shakespearean ‘fancy’ as a notion of natural poetic creativity divorced from divine authorization (‘sweetest Shakespear fancies childe’, as Milton has it in ‘L’Allegro’ (line 133) likely written around the same time as ‘On Shakespeare’). In reading Shakespeare’s book, his words are written on our heart and our imagination is overpowered by his, turning us into memorial statues to his art; but such ‘a condition of arrest or paralysis is everywhere morally suspect in Milton’s poetry’.¹³ The recent identification of Milton’s copy of the First Folio, with the careful annotations likely dating for the most part from the early 1640s, should prompt a reconsideration of arguments for Milton’s suspicion of the Shakespearean dramatic imagination. The presence of Shakespeare in Milton’s political prose, in particular The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, suggests less a politically motivated rejection of Shakespeare as a royalist author than an appreciation of Shakespearean versions of British history as offering vivid lessons in the nature and consequences of tyranny.¹⁴

The alleged Miltonic opposition in the epitaph on Shakespeare between a secular Shakespearean ‘fancy’ and a divinely authorized inspiration fades in the light of a likely source for these lines in Spenser’s ‘Hymn of Heavenly Beauty’, published in Four Hymnes (1596), specifically its description of those deemed worthy to contemplate the face of Sapience, enthroned in Heaven:

None thereof worthy be, but those whom she
Vouchsafeth to her presence to receive,
And letteth them her lovely face to see,
Whereof such wondrous pleasures they conceive,
And sweet contentment, that it doth bereave
Their soul of sense, through infinite delight,
And them transport from flesh into the spright.¹⁵

The memory of Spenser suggests that, in reading Shakespeare’s book rightly, we can glimpse on earth the wondrous face of heavenly wisdom and this can be a transformational spiritual, as well as intellectual, experience.¹⁶ The ‘deepe Impression’ (line 12) that the Folio makes on the hearts of Shakespeare’s readers transforms them into his living monument, or rather a multitude of monuments, as each reader becomes a memorial to the affective power of Shakespeare’s words. The Folio is represented as analogous to the New Testament eikon, a Greek term used to describe ‘Christ, who is the image of God’ (2 Corinthians 4: 4), when Paul explains how the converted who find God within their hearts are transformed into the living image of Christ. The status of eikon within the hearts of the English people would later be claimed by Charles I in the posthumously published Eikon Basilike (1649), the supposed record of the late king’s thoughts on his trial that appeared immediately after the regicide, and the claim would be bitterly contested by Milton in Eikonoklastes. In the 1630 poem, the wonder provoked by Shakespeare’s literary art seems genuinely to work on its readers in the manner of Christian revelation in Scripture.

The epitaph for Shakespeare displays Milton’s growing confidence in his powers as an English poet. The controlled imitation of Jonson’s elegy for Shakespeare, incorporating a Spenserian reading of Shakespeare’s achievement, is in stark contrast to the explicit solicitation of Jonson’s patronage that Thomas Randolph sought around the same time, with manuscript poems such as ‘A Gratulatory to Mr Ben Johnson for his Adopting of him to be his Son’ and ‘An Eclogue to his Worthy Father Mr Ben Johnson’. Milton had reason to be wary of Jonson from the experience of Alexander Gil the elder, who was mocked by Jonson in the play Time Vindicated (1623) for teaching his St Paul’s pupils, of whom Milton was one at the time, the satirical poetry of George Wither, with whom Jonson was engaged in a literary quarrel. There appears subsequently to have been something of a family feud, for Gil the younger circulated a libel in 1632 mocking Jonson’s career after school as an apprentice bricklayer (‘And better canst derect to capp a chimney, / Than to converse with Clio or Polihimny’). Jonson’s muscular response was focused on the punishment of ‘infamous Gill’, as he called him, at the hands of the state for his libel on Buckingham and the king: ‘A rogue by statute, censur’d to be whip’t, / Cropt, branded, slit, neck stocked, Go you are stript’.¹⁷ Milton would himself become involved in vicious, personalized invective in his political prose, in particular in his Latin political works of the 1650s; he had grown up in an educational and literary culture in which such ad hominem attacks were familiar fare. The attack on Gil was, however, one of Jonson’s final poetic blasts after having been paralyzed by a stroke in 1628. Jonson’s period of domination of the literary scene at court and in London, which endured since the early years of James I’s rule, was clearly over by the time Milton left Cambridge in 1632.

The period from 1628–9 onwards was one of increasing meditation for Milton on the English poetic tradition as he experimented with vernacular poetic forms, a freedom presumably granted by the lack of directed study on the MA degree. His earliest surviving English poem that is not a translation is probably another funeral elegy, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, said by his nephew Edward Phillips to have been written for the daughter of his sister Anne, who died in January 1628, at the age of two. It remained unpublished until the 1673 Poems, which indicates that Milton regarded it as juvenilia that did not make the cut in 1645. The poem is full of echoes of Shakespearean poetry and drama—Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, most prominently, the pseudo-Shakespearean poetry anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim—while the archaic diction and metrical form are Spenserian; or at least in the style of the Cambridge poet Phineas Fletcher and his adaptation of the nine-line Spenserian stanza, with its final, twelve-syllable alexandrine, into a seven-line ‘rime royal’ stanza with a concluding alexandrine. Fletcher had used precisely this form in his elegy for Sir Anthony Irby in 1610; although that poem was not printed until 1633, it is a further indication that Milton likely knew the poems of Giles and Phineas Fletcher in manuscript at Cambridge. The early years of his MA were a period in which Milton was evidently thinking about and experimenting with national vernaculars, and not only in English: the purchase of the Rime e Prose of Giovanni Della Casa in December 1629 and the likely composition of the canzone and five sonnets in Italian during this period show his interest in the rise of Italian as a poetic language. His close attention to the example of Della Casa, who introduced metrical and syntactical innovations to the sonnet form, is evident from the fact that he transcribed in his copy of the 1563 edition another Della Casa sonnet only included in the 1623 edition—a typical instance of how Milton liked to operate as a reader, comparing different editions of the same works and copying variant text from one edition into the other. He does the same in his copy of Euripides, for example, purchased in 1634, and in the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio that has now been identified as having passed through his hands in the 1630s and 1640s.

Milton was not only writing in the Italian language but incorporating Italian prosodic forms into English composition, and into devotional as well as profane love poetry: the religious lyric ‘Upon the Circumcision’, likely written in 1630–32, reproduces the the stanza form of Petrarch’s 137-line prayer to the Virgin, ‘Vergin bella, che di sol vestita’ (‘Beautiful virgin, clothed with the sun’), the recantation of the poet’s profane love for Laura which concludes his Canzoniere. ‘On Time’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’ are both indebted formally to the Italian madrigal, cultivated by Petrarch and then later Torquato Tasso (1544–95) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625): less formally strict than the canzone and consisting of a single stanza of irregular line, the madrigal in Italian has something of the sonorous, lofty qualities of an ode but also builds to an epigrammatic, witty close, and was consequently of interest to those writing in a metaphysical mode. The original title of ‘On Time’ tells us that it was conceived as an inscription for a clock-case, while ‘At a Solemn Musick’ consists of a bravura twenty-line opening sentence, followed by a four-line, epigrammatic coda. The conclusion of both ‘On Time’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’ with an alexandrine introduces a Spenserian note, as though to underline the English Protestant ethos of both Italian-influenced lyrics: in ‘On Time’, the final alexandrine, ‘Triumphing over Death and Chance and thee O Time’, replaces the Donne-indebted couplet of the earlier version of the lyric that was apparently in manuscript circulation. The alexandrine in ‘At a Solemn Musick’ similarly encapsulates the timelessness of salvation (‘To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light’).¹⁸ Milton’s habits of composition at this time are illustrated by the various drafts of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, much crossed-through and altered, that are preserved in his poetic notebook from the 1630s (‘endless morn of light’ was at different stages ‘ever endlesse light’, ‘uneclipsed light’ and ‘where day dwells without light’). Milton’s extant copy of Della Casa is bound with Dante’s L’Amoroso Convivio and there are signs of Dante’s Divine Comedy informing Milton’s imagery. The key theme of ‘At a Solemn Musick’—that the celestial harmonies could be heard on earth until ‘disproportioned sin’ (line 19) disrupted human capacity to hear them—may be derived from Dante’s Purgatorio, although the sentiment was commonplace; while in the conclusion to the ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’, Jane Paulet is placed, as with Dante’s Beatrice in Paradiso, with the saints in heaven alongside Rachel, Jacob’s wife (lines 71–2; Genesis 35: 16–19).¹⁹

In his reading of Italian poets and practice of verse in the Italian language and English verse which incorporates Italian forms, Milton appears to have been studying how English might follow the example of Italian by growing into a national vernacular for poetry fit to stand comparison with Latin and Greek. His schoolmaster Alexander Gil the elder had, as we have seen, taught original English poetry as though there were equivalent writers in the vernacular for the great classical figures, and had even proclaimed in Logonomia Anglica in 1619 (in Latin) that ‘it would indeed be desirable to unify the speech of all peoples in one vocabulary; and were human ingenuity to attempt this, certainly no more suitable language than English could be found’.²⁰ The English sonnet entitled Sonnet I in 1645, ‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray’, follows the Petrarchan form of two quatrains and two tercets that Milton also adopts in his Italian sonnets, numbered II–VI in 1645. The opening line echoes that of a canzone in the Rime (Venice, 1564) of Pietro Bembo, champion of the literary eminence of the Tuscan language, ‘O rosignuol, che’n queste verdi fronde’ (‘O nightingale, who in these green branches’). The poet is drawn to Italian example in a poem that becomes less interested in the ‘amorous power’ (line 8) of the nightingale than in song; and, at the Italianate turn from octet to sestet (‘Now timely sing’), he seeks to call into existence the maturity of vernacular style that will enable him to become a worthy rival to the great Italian poets that he imitates:

Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate
Foretell my hopeles doom in som Grove ny:
As thou from yeer to yeer hast sung too late
For my relief; yet hadst no reason why:
Whether the Muse, or Love call thee his mate,
Both them I serve, and of their train am I. (lines 9–14)

Timeliness was key to early modern ideas of just and proper conduct, informed by classical precepts such as Plato’s association of virtuous action with the well-chosen occasion, or kairos, and Cicero’s praise of opportunitas, the seizing of the opportune moment, in his handbook of moral philosophy, De officiis. Choosing the right moment to speak, and in a manner appropriate to the occasion, was also a core principle of classical rhetoric.²¹

Anxiety over timeliness, a theme that Milton would have encountered in Shakespeare’s Sonnets—there are Shakespearean echoes in Sonnet I, such as ‘close the eye of Day’ (line 5), which recalls Shakespeare’s ‘eye of heaven shines’ (Sonnet 18) and ‘at the sun’s eye’ (Sonnet 25)— would become typical of several of the later English sonnets. The anxiety reaches an apparent crisis-point in ‘Lycidas’, which indeed opens with a fourteen-line verse paragraph that resembles but disrupts the Petrarchan pattern.²² As in the university exercises and letters, the figure of the eloquent speaker in Sonnet I is encompassed by the threat from ‘rudeness’, from the inarticulate and the uncultivated, here in the form of the cuckoo. This will become a familiar trope of Miltonic self-characterization. The nightingale as symbol of the poet’s song finally becomes explicit in the opening of Book 3 of Paradise Lost, where Milton’s blindness heightens its appropriateness:

Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal Note. (3. 37–40)

The image of the poet as nightingale, song attuned by the promptings of the heavens, recalls the Latin oration on the theme of the ‘Music of the Spheres’ that Milton delivered to the Public Schools, likely in his postgraduate years: ‘Why, it is quite credible that the lark herself soars up into the clouds at dawn and that the nightingale passes the night in solitary trilling in order to harmonize their songs with that heavenly music to which they studiously listen.’²³ Milton’s sense of himself as a solitary singer seeking to harmonize his song with heavenly music begins to emerge from his experiments with English verse in 1628–9.

Living with the Daemons

The English verses beginning ‘Hail native language’ that Milton wrote for the College ‘salting’ over which he presided, whether in 1628 or 1631, were first published independently of the Latin prose of Prolusion VI in the 1673 Poems under the title ‘At a Vacation Exercise in the College’. They have often been taken as some sort of public announcement to his college peers of his new commitment to vernacular poetry and even to the career of poet. The verses begin:

Hail native Language, that by sinews weak
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
And mad’st imperfect words with childish tripps,
Half unpronounc’t, slide through my infant-lipps,
Driving dum silence from the portal dore,
Where he had mutely sate two years before:
Here I salute thee and thy pardon ask,
That now I use thee in my latter task[.] (lines 1–8)

It may be that Milton looked back on the verses as such an announcement when he decided to publish them in 1673, but, when placed back in their original performative context of the salting, it is harder to take some of the lines with a straight face. Several approach doggerel, in keeping with the self-mocking comedy of the occasion, with Milton still in his role of the Aristotelian Absolute Being: ‘I have some naked thoughts that rove about / And loudly knock to have their passage out’ (lines 23–4). Thomas Randolph had shifted into English verse, also rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, to conclude his salting in 1627, so Milton may be following a set structure (although Milton does not follow Randolph in having Latin verses precede the English).²⁴

Yet the tone does become more elevated as Milton’s address to his ‘native language’ turns into a supplication that he may in future be granted ‘some graver subject’ to celebrate: ‘Such where the deep transported mind may soare / Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore / Look in, and see each blissful deity’ (lines 33–5). Inspiration is envisaged as apotheosis, with the poet soaring to receive, ecstatically, insights into the celestial affairs of the classical gods. The vision recalls the experience of apotheosis that Milton ascribed to the voice of the deceased Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely, in 1626:

in blessedness amid winged soldiers [I] am borne aloft to the stars, just as once the old prophet was snatched up to heaven, driving a chariot of fire . . . I flew past the globe of the gleaming sun . . . I am carried through the ranks of wandering stars, through the expanses of the Milky Way; often I marvelled at my newly acquired speed until I reached the resplendent entrance of Olympus. (‘In obitum Præsulis Eliensis’, lines 47–50, 55, 59–63)

As with King James in the Latin epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot, where the plotters attempt a sort of forced apotheosis on the king by blowing him up the heavens, Felton is compared to the prophet Elijah. However, the cosmic flight that the dead Felton recounts is predominantly imagined in classical terms and as an ascent to ever greater revelations of knowledge of the workings of the universe. The most striking moment in the funeral elegy for Lancelot Andrewes is when the sleeping poet has a vision of the bishop translated from his body into a ‘semi-divine soul’ (line 30; semidea anima): ‘Lo and behold, suddenly the bishop of Winchester is standing before me: a star-like radiance shone in his gleaming countenance; a white vestment flowed down to his gilded ankles; a white headband had girded his divine head’ (lines 53–6).

The gilded or golden ankles of Lancelot Andrewes in the third Elegy have puzzled commentators, who have usually passed over them in silence or read them as golden slippers or golden feet. But, peculiar as they are on a dead bishop, these gilded ankles derive from Milton’s immersion in classical, and here particularly Greek, philology. In one of the most important ancient Greek lexicons, the second-century Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, we are told that: ‘Bowls with a boss in the middle are called βαλανειόμφαλοι, circular-bottomed, from their shape, χρυσόμφαλοι, gold-bottomed, from the material, like Sappho’s χρυσαστράγαλοι, with golden ankles’. The Onomasticon, a ten-book collection of Attic words arranged by topic, was widely accessible in Caroline Cambridge; Christ’s College library has the edition published in Frankfurt in 1608 (although the date of acquisition by the College is not given).²⁵ Milton used Pollux for the translation into Greek of Psalm 114 that he sent to Alexander Gil, and it was likely one model for the Greek lexicon that Milton himself, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, compiled during the 1640s (but which, if it survives, has yet to be discovered).²⁶

While Pollux is only interested in lexicography and not the literary context from which his words are taken, the possibility that a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, in which female ankles are treated with erotic fascination, may be the source of Bishop Andrewes’ golden ankles adds to the seemingly inappropriate tone that the elegy occasionally but insistently strikes. This tone is most provocative in the final line, ‘May dreams such as this often befall me’ (line 68; ‘Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi’), which is derived from the poet’s description in Ovid’s Amores of an afternoon spent with his mistress Corinna. The final lines of Ovid’s poem as rendered by Christopher Marlowe should be sufficient to convey the nature of Milton’s source:

What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me.
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I,
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
I clinged her naked body, down she fell,
Judge you the rest, being tired she bade me kiss;
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.²⁷

Ovidian elegy is transferred to Christian funeral elegy but without losing its erotic energies, which are rather redirected ‘towards a moment of creative and poetic rapture’.²⁸ The audacious tonal oddity of the transfer underlines the extent to which a poem such as the elegy for Andrewes was an opportunity for Milton to experiment with, and display his powers over, the Latin language and poetic tradition.

Milton’s early fascination with apotheosis and cosmic flight, which reappears in different forms in later poems, derives in part from fifteenth-century Florentine Neoplatonism and its guiding notion that intellectual endeavour could propel the human soul towards divinity. In the celebrated oration of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) on the dignity of man, God tells man that:

We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, more freely and more honourably the moulder and maker of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall prefer. You shall be able to descend among the lower forms of being, which are brute beasts; you shall be able to be reborn out of the judgment of your own soul into the higher beings, which are divine.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) declared that the soul of man lives

the life of the heroes when it investigates natural things; the life of the daemons, when it speculates on mathematics; the life of the angels, when it inquires into the divine mysteries; the life of God, when it does everything for God’s sake . . . What else does the soul seek except to know all things through the intellect and to enjoy them all through the will? . . . our soul by means of the intellect and will, those twin Platonic wings, flies towards God, since by means of them it flies towards all things.²⁹

Similar ardour for knowledge infuses the vision of the ascent of the scholarly spirit to divine truth that Milton places at the centre of his seventh and likely latest Prolusion, in defence of knowledge:

How much it means to grasp all the principles of the heavens and their stars, all the movements and disturbances of the atmosphere . . . How much it means to get an insight into . . . the nature and the sensory experience of every living creature . . . and—finally—into the divine powers and faculties of the spirit, and whatever knowledge may be accessible to us about the beings that are called household gods [lares] and genii and daemons . . . So, at last, gentlemen, when the cycle of universal learning has been completed, still the spirit will be restless in our dark imprisonment here, and it will rove about until the bounds of creation itself no longer limit the divine magnificence of its quest . . . a man who is in possession of the stronghold of wisdom . . . will seem to have the stars under his control and dominion . . . Mother Nature herself has surrendered to him. It is as if some god had abdicated the government of the world and committed its justice, laws, and administration to him as a ruler.³⁰

This Platonic ideal of the intellectual ascent of the soul, rising above the stars and beyond the ‘life of the daemons’ who inhabit the elements, is exquisitely expressed in ‘Il Penseroso’ (1631?), a poem to which we shall soon return. The constant study of the solitary scholar will ultimately enable his mind to

         unsphear
The spirit of Plato to unfold
What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook:

And of those Dæmons that are found
In fire, air, flood, or under ground,
Whose power hath a true consent
With Planet, or with Element. (lines 88–96)

The rather commonplace nature of these Neoplatonic ideas of the Italian Renaissance by Milton’s time has perhaps obscured just how vitally they nonetheless shaped his sense of himself as an aspiring ‘universal scholar’ and poet. Milton never fully left behind this early conviction of the capacity of human beings to make themselves more divine through the attainment of virtuous knowledge. (That virtue is knowledge is the key moral principle of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, and the Socratic ethos will suffuse Milton’s most concerted exercise in ethical argument, Areopagitica). This capacity for ascent into a more purely spiritually refined existence is fundamental to the order of creation described in Paradise Lost, while the cosmic journey of Satan in pursuit of his ambition to dominate the Earth and dethrone God replays the Neoplatonic vision of self-deification in a parodic key.

It was not unusual, as we have seen, for young men in early seventeenth-century Europe to be gripped by passionate excitement at the idea of attaining universal insight into the nature of things through scholarly endeavour. John Hall of Durham (1627–56), who would go on to work alongside Milton in the press office of the English Commonwealth and Protectorate, addressed a poem to John Pawson, his tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in which he imagines Pawson leading him on a fantastic pilgrimage in the pursuit of knowledge. The poem moves with dizzying speed from a total comprehension of the internal secrets of nature, to a panoramic contemplation of the globe, with its natural beauties and ruins of ancient kingdoms, to a rapturous Platonic ascent to the heavens and the mysteries of angelic existence:

         Come, let us run
And give the world a girdle with the sun,
         For so we shall
Take a full view of this enamalled ball
    Both where it may be seen

    Clad in a constant green,
         And where it lies,
         Crusted with ice;
Where’t swells with mountains, and shrinks down to vales;
    Where it permits the usurping sea
    To rove with liberty,
Where it pants with drought, and of all liquor fails.
[ . . . ]
         But objects here
Cloy in the very taste; O, let us tear
         A passage through
That fleeting vault above; there may we know
    Some rosy brethren stray
    To a set battalia,
         And others scout
         Still round about,
Fix’d in their courses, and uncertain too;
    But clammy matter doth deny
         A clear discovery,
Which those that are inhabitants, may solely know.³¹

There are evident similarities between Hall’s ode to his Cambridge tutor and the imagery of apotheosis in Milton’s Latin elegies for Felton and Andrewes, both notable as recent Cambridge men of learning. The appeal of this sort of invocation of the rapture of learning in a homosocial environment to educated young men is suggested by the parodic echoes of Hall’s poem that have been found in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1647–52?), the famous love lyric of Milton’s future friend and (like Hall) future colleague in the Cromwellian civil service, Andrew Marvell.³² In Prolusion VII, learning is presented as the way to master time and understand timeliness, matters of emergent anxiety in Milton’s sonnet on the nightingale (and indeed the real subject of fascination in Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’): learning enables us ‘to take our flight over all the history and regions of the world . . . This is the way to live in all epochs of history, Gentlemen, and to be a contemporary of time itself. And while we are looking forward to the future glory of our name, this will also be the way to extend life backward from the womb and to extort from unwilling Fate a kind of immortality’.³³

Milton was evidently fascinated at this point in his life with the idea of the man whose pre-eminent humanitas makes him more than human—the magnitude of whose learning gives him god-like insight. He would have found comparable notions to those of the Florentine Neoplatonic philosophers in the familiar source of Cicero’s De officiis and its account of the ‘magnanimous spirit’, or ‘great soul’. The magnus animus, or vir sapiens, as Cicero calls him in De oratore, emphasizing the degree of learning required of the ideal orator (perfectus orator), is the individual who distinguishes himself from his peers by the almost superhuman extent of his achievements and the glory which they bring to his community or commonwealth (res publica).³⁴ Milton invokes the Ciceronian magnus animus and vir sapiens in the seventh Prolusion when he presents to his audience an image of the single man of heroic learning and virtue who can lead the community away from temptation and corruption through force of persuasion and example:

The fact is, Gentlemen, that though some few outstanding scholars may have been corrupted by the bad morals of their country and the vulgarity of ignorant men, yet the illiterate masses have often been held to their duty by the efforts of a single learned and wise man [unius perdocti & prudentis viri industria]. Indeed a single family or a single individual, if he possesses knowledge and discretion [vir unus arte & sapientia præditus], may seem as if he were a gift of God endowed with power to make a whole nation virtuous.³⁵

The Ciceronian idea of the heroic actions on behalf of his commonwealth of the single man possessed of superior wisdom, eloquence, and magnanimity—the capacity to subordinate his baser passions to the rational understanding that the good of the individual depends upon that of the community—would become increasingly important to Milton after he entered public controversy, and in particular during his role as a public servant of the republican governments of the 1650s.

All grammar school boys would have read in De officiis about how the magnus animus is comparable to the ancient heros, a demigod capable of superhuman feats in defence of his patria, or homeland, and whose tomb is venerated as a shrine. Milton includes among ‘the rewards of study’ in Prolusion VII becoming ‘the oracle of many peoples’ and having ‘one’s home become a shrine’. This is not to say, however, that Milton’s comparison of the man of extraordinary erudition with ‘heroes’ and ‘daemons’ in Prolusion VII would have been entirely uncontroversial among his audience in the college chapel at Christ’s. Joseph Mede had written, possibly shortly before Milton matriculated in 1625, a brief treatise that was not published until 1641, two years after Mede’s death, as The Apostasy of the Latter Times . . . or, the Gentiles’ Theology of Daemons i.e. inferiour divine powers, supposed to be mediatours between God and man: revived in the latter times amongst Christians in worshipping of angels, deifying and invocating of saints, adoring and templing of reliques, bowing downe to images, worshipping of crosses, &c. Mede’s text evidently circulated in manuscript long before it was printed: the editor of the printed text, William Twisse, states that ‘[m]any yeers agoe I was acquainted with it, by the Authors own hand: For such was his scholasti-call ingenuity; I found him most free in communicating his studies’. This work arises out of Mede’s interest in interpreting world history as a narrative of the approaching millennium of Christ’s rule. He argues that the beginning of the ‘latter times’, the end days of the earth as prophesied in 1 Timothy 4—‘Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils’—have been heralded by the Roman Catholic veneration of saints and angels, which constitute a revival of the ‘Gentiles’ idolatrous Theology of Daemons’. Mede explains that by ‘daemons’—in Greek, ‘daimōn’, and the term used in the Septuagint Bible to translate the Hebrew for ‘idol’—he means ‘an inferior sort of deified powers [acting] as mediators and agents between the sovereign gods and mortal men’.³⁶ These beings encompass in the Greek tradition the category of heroes and are what the Romans called genii, the guarding spirits of people and places, and also lares, or the ‘household gods’ with which Milton equates ‘genii and daemons’ in Prolusion VII. Mede, citing Hesiod, Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius, distinguishes between two types of daemons in the Greco-Roman tradition: ‘deified souls of worthy men after death’, who rise to the ranks of heroes, then daemons, ‘and after that, if they deserved well, to a more sublime degree’; and a higher form of daemon, which is not a human raised to the status of spirit but a species of being that is created semi-divine. These two forms of daemon correspond respectively to ‘those which with us are called saints’ and ‘that sort of spiritual powers which we call angels’.³⁷

As a student, Milton equated the decline of learning in English society with the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, and he made this equation in Prolusion VII; but in this Prolusion he did not follow Mede, renowned for his erudition, in identifying pagan theories of the daemonic with latter-day Catholic idolatry. The one notable exception in the treatment of daemons in the early writing is the 1629 devotional poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, in which, as we shall see in the next chapter, Milton does portray the scattering of the Roman spirits, including the lares, in a manner that speaks to Mede’s connection of pagan and Catholic idolatry. For the most part in the late 1620s and early 1630s, Milton’s thought is characterized by a fusion of Ciceronian notions of the perfectus orator and magnus animus with ancient Greek, particularly Platonic, ideas of the daemon and Florentine, Neoplatonic visions of self-deification through knowledge. The result of this mixture of philosophical influences is a conception of the truly learned and eloquent individual as one who can realize an insight into the nature of things in the manner of the ancient heroes who made their nation virtuous through their great feats. The references in this period to Orpheus, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plato show him to be a believer—at least on an imaginative if not a theological level—in the supposed line of heathen philosophers, the prisci theologi, who obtained insights into the nature of the one true God prior to the advent of Christ, either through revelations from observing the book of nature or via the writings of Moses and the prophets. Mede’s good friend Thomas Jackson (1579–1640), who became President of Corpus Christ College, Oxford, in 1630, was the most intellectually powerful and controversial proponent of this Neoplatonic philosophy before Henry More, who matriculated at Christ’s in Milton’s final year at the College. Jackson was clear that the writings of the prisci theologi offered access to the power of the demiurge, the creative power behind all things in the Platonic tradition:

Now such as were well read in Plato or Trismegist, or would be willing to read them, could not be ignorant of an eternall logos which they called the sonne of the eternall minde or essence. And this logos the word or image of the eternall minde was not in their apprehension meerly notionall or representative only but demiourgos a Word or reason (or however we expresse it) truly operative, the invisible cause or maker of all things visible.

Such ideas were academically respectable, if controversial: Jackson was taken to task by Twisse, the Calvinist editor of Mede, who responded that if the truth of a non-scriptural statement was sufficient to give it the status of one in the Scriptures, then Plutarch’s Moralia must be as worthy a guide as the Bible.³⁸

Milton’s academic exercises and poems from this period represent the poet—who must, according to humanist theory, work to master universal learning to attain the highest level of eloquence in epic verse— as one who can achieve the status of an intermediary spirit between heaven and earth, and become a kind of Christian daemon channelling inspired song. Milton’s poetry in this period is full of daemons and genii, from the elemental daemons and ‘unseen Genius of the Wood’ of ‘Il Penseroso’ (line 154), to the roles of the Genius and the Attendant Spirit in the dramatic entertainments that he wrote for aristocratic occasions after completing his MA, Arcades (1633) and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle (1634). These latter figures are closer to the second, higher type of daemon described by Mede, whereas the semi-divine souls (semidea anima) of Felton and Andrewes are the first type, ‘deified souls of worthy men after death’. The young Milton’s fascination with the idea of daemons, whether as ‘deified souls’ or sky-born mediators between the divine and the human, and of the true poet as potentially a type of daemon, metaphorical or otherwise, helps to explain the prevalence in his poetic imagination of representations of the celestial—the several attempts to evoke the glorious beauty and epic scale of the heavens which of course reach their zenith in Paradise Lost. He repeatedly returns in his early writing, both Latin and English, to the Pythagorean and Platonic notion of the music of the spheres, according to which the revolution of the planets traces in perfect musical harmonies a divine pattern of wisdom and power that is nothing less than the keynote of creation.

In his oration on the topic in the University Schools in Prolusion II, he reminds his listeners that ‘Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony—unless he was a genius or a denizen of the sky who perhaps was sent down by some ordinance of the gods to imbue the minds of men with divine knowledge and to recall them to righteousness’. Pythagoras, in other words, may have been a higher kind of daemon who took human form. The Cambridge oration may have been on a set topic, but it was one which enflamed Milton’s poetic imagination. ‘At a Solemn Musick’ transfers the pagan music of the spheres to a Christian heaven as the poet prays that the earthly music to which he is listening might rise to the heights of the celestial harmonies:

And to our high-raised phantasy present,
That undisturbed song of pure concent,
Ay sung before the sapphire-coloured throne
To him that sits thereon
With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee,
Where the bright seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow,
And the cherubic host in thousand choirs
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,
Hymns devout and holy Psalms
Singing everlastingly [.] (lines 5–16)

The imagery here is biblical—the sapphire throne is from Ezekiel (1: 26) and the ‘just Spirits’ from Revelation (14: 3–4)—but with that shift from pagan to Christian comes the acknowledgement of original sin characteristic of a Protestant sensibility:

That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer with that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion’d sin
Jarr’d against nature’s chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord. (lines 17–22)

The notebook of literary ideas and poetic drafts that Milton began after he left Cambridge, now known as the Trinity manuscript, shows Milton to have worried over this section of the poem, and the printed version of 1645 incorporates significant revisions that he may have made several years after the initial draft of the poem around 1631–3. There are two heavily corrected versions, followed by a rewrite of lines 17–28 only, and a final fair copy. In the initial draft, lines 18–19 read: ‘by leaving out those harsh chromatick jarres / of sin that all our musick marres’. The second draft replaces ‘chromatick’ with ‘ill-sounding’ and makes sin ‘clamorous’, but the sense remains that the disharmony of sin is something that can be overcome by the human capacity to respond to heaven’s example. In the rewriting of lines 17–28 only, which is more or less retained in the final fair copy and printed text, line 19 now firmly puts that human agency in a pre-lapsarian past: ‘as once we could, till disportion’d Sin / jarr’d against natures chime’. ‘Could’ is emended to ‘did’ in these latter drafts and in the text of the 1645 Poems, emphasizing that there will be no return of this agency: original sin has become an unalterable condition that locks the human will, not something that can be conquered by that will.

The redraftings of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, which may have been done over a number of years, ‘record a steadily darkening sense of the effects of the Fall. What in the first draft was our present choice is replaced by the last with Adam’s irrevocably preterite act’.³⁹ The initial drafts are written with the optimistic sense of man’s retained capacity to comprehend the divine that is also found in the second Prolusion, where the example of Pythagoras offers hope that it might be possible for a mortal of superlative moral purity to hear again the music of the spheres: ‘If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras’ was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars.’⁴⁰ Although the dating of Milton’s various revisions of ‘At a Solemn Musick’ remains uncertain, their ‘darkening sense of the effects of the Fall’ may be taken as emblematic of the movement of Milton’s mind and art over the course of his life. The enraptured, Platonic, and daemonic young Milton portrayed in this chapter could hardly be more different from the agonized Puritan of long-standing biographical tradition; but that may be a consequence of previous biographers looking through the lens of Paradise Lost and from the perspective of the later Milton, who checked his early pagan energies with an increasingly sharp sense of human fallenness. That sense was always a component of Milton’s poetic thought, as the discussion of his ‘Nativity Ode’ in the next chapter will show, but it is played in a minor key in the early writ-ing—and it is never entirely clear if it encompasses Milton himself.

Domina

Given how often this imagery of daemonic insight into celestial harmony is found in the early Milton, we should probably take reasonably seriously the vision in the English verses of Prolusion VI of the vernacular poet’s ‘deep transported mind’, soaring ‘[a]bove the wheeling poles’ of the ten spheres of the Ptolemaic universe to hear the heavenly harmonies of Apollo’s ‘golden wires’ (line 38)—the same phrase used in ‘At a Solemn Musick’ to describe the ‘immortal harps’ of ‘the Cherubick host’ in a Christian heaven (lines 12–13)—and then bringing this music back to earth in the form of epic song. Milton’s example of such a singer of epic in ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ is the Homeric bard Demodocus, who makes Odysseus weep ‘with his melodious harmonie’ and holds the souls of his audience ‘[i]n willing chains and sweet captivity’ as he recounts the events of the Iliad—just as Shakespeare’s works, according to Milton’s epitaph, put his readers into an ecstatic trance, in the original Greek sense of ek stasis, of drawing the soul outside of the motionless body (lines 51–2). In the second of the drafts of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, the poet calls on the music to which he listens to work in this same way as Shakespeare’s poetry, to ‘snatch us from earth a while / us of our selves’; in ‘Il Penseroso’, the nun who personifies contemplative Melancholy is ‘held in holy passion’ and urged to ‘[f]orget thyself to Marble’ (lines 41–2). The nightingale appropriately makes its first Miltonic appearance in the second Prolusion, passing ‘the night in solitary trilling in order to harmonize [its song] with that heavenly music to which they studiously listen’.⁴¹ In Ad Patrem, where the facility of Milton’s father with music finds its perfect accompaniment in his son’s poetic talents, father and son are imagined walking ‘through heaven’s regions with golden crowns, uniting our sweet songs to the pleasant sounds of the lyre, songs with which the stars and the vaults of the twin hemispheres will resound’ (lines 32–4).

The playful, joco-serio context of the ‘salting’ should not be forgotten and, given that Mede may well have been in attendance at both the salting and Milton’s delivery of what became the seventh Prolusion, both performed in Christ’s, we might assume that Milton expected some of his audience, primarily Mede himself, to recognize and even take some umbrage at the very open exaltation of the daemonic and vision of a kind of self-deification. Mede’s interests in, and apocalyptic theories about, daemons must have been known in Christ’s during Milton’s time there: Prolusions VI and VII may thus have been more knowingly provocative in their subject matter than has been assumed, especially given Mede’s view that Roman Catholic idolatry was a reincarnation of pagan daemon worship. Milton celebrates the beauty and wonder of what Mede condemns as pagan and idolatrous, and expresses his own desire—and the speaker of these ‘exercises’ cannot be separated from Milton himself, even though he is performing a conventional role, especially in the salting—to become daemonic through the acquisition of knowledge and the practice of poetry. In ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’, Milton could take advantage of the licence afforded to him in his role as ‘Father’ of the revels to push what he knew to be a controversial notion of the universal scholar and the epic poet as possessing the potential to transform themselves, while still alive, into daemonic figures of the second order: to turn themselves into, as Lancelot Andrewes is described in the third Elegy, semidea anima, a semi-divine soul (line 30).

In the Latin oration of the salting, Milton had already taken advantage of the playful format to joke self-deprecatingly about his apparently well-known ambition among his peers to become a poetic hero, while at the same time asserting this very ambition in the English verses which follow it. He calls attention to the irony that though ‘some of late have called me “the Lady” (domina)’, he is now acting as the ‘Father’ of the new students in delivering their traditional induction speech. Whether or not the nick-name of ‘the Lady’ initially came about because ‘his complexion [was] exceeding faire’, as reported by John Aubrey, or because of his perceived effeminacy, as many modern commentators have preferred to assume, one reason why Milton may have been happy enough to appropriate the label was its associations with the greatest poet of Latin antiquity.⁴² According to Aelius Donatus’s fourth-century life of Virgil, familiar to early modern schoolboys as it was commonly prefixed to editions of the poet, the young Virgil’s exemplary moral conduct led to him being called Parthenias, ‘maidenish’ or virginal. Milton goes on to suggest that he has attracted the epithet of ‘the Lady’ because ‘I never showed my virility in the way these brothellers do’—presumably at this point he gestured, with more or less seriousness, depending on how he regarded some of his peers, to a particular section of the audience.⁴³ ‘At a Vacation Exercise in the College’, as Milton later to chose to call the English verses of his sixth Prolusion, was a display of his literary ambition to his fellow students, who, if ‘the Lady’ nickname does indeed derive from Donatus, were all too aware of that ambition. It was also a piece of institutional, occasional verse that Milton deemed interesting enough to include, detached from the Latin prose that originally prefaced it, in his 1673 Poems. He chose to do so because it contributed to his self-mythologizing as an English Virgil, offering evidence of his quest from an early age to imitate the careers of the great poets of antiquity and post-classical Europe by writing elevated verse in his mother tongue. That self-mythologizing appears to have been not merely retrospective, but on-going at least from his time at Cambridge. The explanation of the persistence of ‘the Lady’ nick-name as an aspect of Milton’s youthful self-fashioning as a Virgilian poet of epic, who might mediate between his nation and heaven, is persuasive because his early preoccupation with the preservation of his chastity was increasingly bound up with his sense of poetic vocation.