“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649“Ad Joannem Rousium” continues this self-representation and directs a read-
ing of the volume in such terms. It is a verse letter sent in January 1647 to John
Rouse, librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, along with the replacement
copy of the Poems which had initially gone astray. But it is also conceived as an
ode whose several addresses and apostrophes are directed to the book itself. As
Stella Revard has noted,^138 it joins the elegiac and Pindaric modes, allowing Milton
to represent his progress from the lower to the higher lyric kinds. Milton first
presents himself as a carefree, witty, genial, and playful poet in the private elegiac
mode of Ovid, Horace, or Catullus, one who “played, footloose” and “trifled
with his native lute or... Daunian quill” (ll. 6–10).^139 But by degrees he takes on
the role of an inspired Pindaric poet who is divinely appointed to purge the land
of evils, to promote religious, political, and social order, to honor heroes, and to
serve the Muses. Beginning in a mock-epic vein with a familiar address to his lost
“Twin-membered book” (Latin and English poems within a single cover), he
imagines its adventures: stolen or lost through a messenger’s carelessness, it is
perhaps imprisoned in some den or dive or subject to “the calloused hand of an
illiterate dealer.” But now, in a new copy, it will be welcomed by Rouse, “faith-
ful warden of immortal works,” into the delightful groves of the Muses at Oxford,
to be preserved from the present “vulgar mob of readers” for a more receptive
“sane posterity.” This is the last poem Milton wrote in Latin, and it is by design
experimental. In an appended note Milton explains that he sought to imitate in
Latin the mixed formalism and freedom of Pindar or a Greek chorus, taking the
liberty of changing meters and introducing free verse. He retains the strophe–
antistrophe–epode structure but, as his note explains, rather for convenience in
reading (“commode legendi”) than in conformity to classical rules. The experi-
ment has drawn the ire of purists and the high praise of critics sympathetic to
Milton’s achievement in producing a metrical scheme consonant with the poem’s
purposes and its complex mix of tones.^140
The poem relates itself consciously to the new political circumstances. In Janu-
ary, 1647 the book will go to a liberated Oxford, from which the king and the
degenerate Cavaliers have been expelled, and that happy sanctuary of the Muses –
imagined as a Delphic temple with Rouse as its priest – will honor and preserve the
book of a true poet, Milton. Milton alternates praises of Rouse with denunciations
of the “degenerate idleness of our effeminate luxury” (vices associated with royal-
ists), of the “accursed tumults among the citizens” that banished the Muses (ll. 26–
32), and of the Harpies that fouled Pegasus’s river (Oxford had long been a bastion
of royalist soldiers and courtiers). But with peace restored, Milton can at length
assume a high poetic role. No longer terming his poems “trifles” but rather “labors”
- with intimations of Herculean labors – he expects them to find a place among the
“glorious monuments of heroes” and the sublime Greek and Latin authors (ll. 49–
50, 71–3).
The king’s trial and execution led Milton to quite another self-definition as, with