“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649That inclusiveness is a self-fashioning gesture by which the new reformist poet
constructs a record of his poetic growth, even of his failures. He makes frequent,
though occasionally inaccurate, notations of the age at which particular poems were
written, the errors tending to push back the dates of composition so as to under-
score both his precosity and the distance traveled. We might wonder about the
inclusion of the funeral poems for Bishop Felton, Jane Paulet, and especially Bishop
Lancelot Andrewes, who was recently a target of Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts.
But, as I have suggested earlier, he would not have considered these poems, at the
time and in the circumstances of their writing, to be in any real conflict with his
reformist agenda, so he would see no reason to exclude them now.^135 His Ovidian
love elegies he now presents as youthful folly – “These empty monuments to my
idleness” – adding after the last elegy (number 7) a recantation that stages his con-
version from Ovid to Plato.^136
By the organization of this volume Milton constructs himself as vates, not Cava-
lier lyricist. A contemporary reader who made the comparison that bookseller
Moseley suggests would quickly see that Milton is no Waller. In his prefatory
epistle Waller casts off poetry as a youthful toy, offering his Poems as “not onely all
I have done, but all I ever mean to doe in this kind.”^137 Milton offers his volume as
an earnest of greater poems to come from the future bard. Waller’s poems – all in
English and haphazardly arranged – are mostly witty or elegant love songs, poems
to or about patrons, and poems on royal personages or occasions. Milton’s – in
Latin and English, with a few in Italian and Greek – emphasize his learning, his
intellectual and poetic growth, and his self-construction as a reformist prophet–
poet. His classical poems, many of them juvenilia, are placed last: a book of elegies
and epigrams, followed by a book of Sylvae (in several meters), ending with the
Latin dirge for Diodati that bids farewell to Italy, to Latin poetry, and to pastoral,
and also reports a first attempt at epic. This classical part is preceded by A Maske,
again revised and expanded to underscore its critique of the court masque and the
court ethos. The vernacular lyric “book” is placed first – mostly English poems but
also the Italian sonnets. Waller’s lyric collection begins as do many Cavalier collec-
tions with several poems on King Charles; Milton’s begins with the Nativity Ode,
a poem celebrating the birth of the Divine King and proclaiming at the outset
Milton’s dedication of himself as prophet–poet. It is followed by his psalm para-
phrases at age 15, indicating that his earliest poetic ventures had a religious and
reformist cast. His last English lyric, Lycidas, is given a new headnote pointing to
the poem’s prophecy, now fulfilled, of “the ruine of our corrupted Clergy, then in
their height.” Far from eliding his polemics, this note formally links them to his
poetry. Milton evidently saw his 1645 Poems, not as a volume of would-be Cava-
lier poetry, but as a worthy alternative – a volume of learned, delightful, reformed
poems that would advance the project he began in several of his early poems and
formally proposed in The Reason of Church-governement: to help transform English
culture through good art.