“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632lines mix the heroic and the grotesque, florid expressions of awe and horror with
irony and mockery. There are four parts: Satan surveys the earth and determines to
subvert peaceful, religious England where alone he is thwarted; in Rome, disguised
as a Franciscan friar, he incites the pope to destroy the English parliament; the pope
summons “fierce-eyed Murder” and “double-tongued Treachery” from their alle-
gorical cave and dispatches them to the task; but God, betimes, stirs up many-
tongued Fame to reveal the plot. Seventeen-year-old Milton may have thought to
emulate sixteen-year-old Virgil in writing a brief epic, but he looked past Virgil’s
Gnat to the Aeneid for heroic conception and many motifs: aerial surveys, dream
visitations, the epithet “pius” for King James, a cave with allegorical inhabitants,
and Fame. Milton’s Tower of Fame owes something to Ovid and perhaps also to
Chaucer; the allegorical portraits of Murder and Treason evoke Spenser; and the
plotting in Hell recalls Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.^36 In this Satan we at times
glimpse anticipations of his magnificent namesake in Paradise Lost, but most ele-
ments of this poem are stock features of anti papist satire: the devil personating a
Franciscan friar, the foolish ceremonies of Roman liturgy, the pope as hypocrite
and whoremonger. The capture of the plotters and the Guy Fawkes celebrations
are crowded into the last seven lines, keeping the emphasis on the danger and threat
from diabolic Catholic powers – which continue in the Thirty Years War.
Milton wrote four undated Latin epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot titled “In
Proditionem Bombardicam,” perhaps for this or another Guy Fawkes Day; the
second must postdate November 1625 since it mentions the death of James I. They
ring satiric changes on the theme of the papists’ vicious attempt to dispatch James to
the other world. A related epigram on the inventor of gunpowder, “In inventorem
Bombardae,” is probably but not certainly a Guy Fawkes poem based on ironic
praise. All are in elegiacs, with striking images of sulphurous fire, smoke, and pow-
erful explosions.
In March, 1627, the new chancellor, Buckingham, visited Cambridge, feted by
ceremonies, banquets, and tributes. Milton, typically, wrote no verses for this royal
favorite, but that same March he composed Elegy IV, a graceful Latin verse letter to
his admired former tutor Thomas Young, now a pastor at Hamburg and a volun-
tary exile for his Puritan views. Associating himself with Young’s Puritanism, Milton
constructs Young as the victim of a harsh regime, exposed by Stuart policies to the
dangers of the continental religious wars:
You are living among strangers, in poverty and loneliness, while all around you ech-
oes the horrifying noise of war. In your need you seek in a foreign land the sustenance
which your ancestral home denied you. O native country, hard-hearted parent... is
it fitting that you should expose your innocent children in this way?^37Expressing concern for Young’s safety and anger over his exile, Milton invites him
to compare himself with Elijah and Paul, persecuted by rulers but protected by