“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632a naive young lover he sees courting the beautiful but faithless Pyrrha. The date is,
however, very uncertain.^44 The poem itself is a tour de force: it often succeeds in
capturing the Horatian tone; it achieves the verbal exactness the headnote claims,
“Rendered almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure,
as near as the language will permit”; and it is Milton’s only attempt to render Latin
quantitative measures into English verse.
The reformist sympathies Milton expressed to Young were probably reinforced
a few months later by the brouhaha over a lectureship in history founded by Fulke
Greville, Lord Brooke. By order of Laud and by royal injunction the lectureship
was cancelled after the incumbent, Dr Isaac Dorislaus of Leyden, delivered in De-
cember, 1627 his first two lectures on Tacitus, the classical historian often seen as a
rallying point for republicanism and resistance to tyranny. Reportedly, Dorislaus
also defended the Dutch for upholding their liberties against Spain. According to
Matthew Wren the lectures contained “dangerous passages... appliable to the
exasperations of these villanous times.”^45
During his third academic year, 1627–8, Milton claimed an English poetic voice
for the first time in an original poem. “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a
Cough” was written about his sister Anne’s daughter, according to her son, Edward
Phillips (EL 62). When he first published the poem in 1673 Milton dated it at age
17 (two years earlier), but the subject is almost certainly his 2-year-old niece, also
named Anne, who was buried January 22, 1628.^46 The error may have been a
simple fault of memory so many years later, or prompted (like the Gostlin error) by
Milton’s subconscious wish to compensate for his sense of belated accomplishment,
or else a scribal error, reading 17 for 19. The poem’s details fit Anne: her death in
winter, her birth in the throes of a plague epidemic (late December, 1625 or early
January, 1626), and her mother’s pregnancy with another child, Elizabeth, baptized
on April 9, 1628 (LR I, 152–3). English is an appropriate language choice for the
child subject and the immediate audience, Milton’s sister. The eleven-stanza fu-
neral ode finds its chief models in Spenserian poets like the Fletchers, in neo-Latin
funeral epigrams on the death of children for the use of the flower motif, and in
Pindaric odes for the myths and mythic transformations.^47 The seven-line stanzas
meld Chaucerian rime royal with the Spenserian stanza, retaining the Spenserian
final alexandrine as well as Spenserian archaisms and schemes of alliteration and
assonance. This early poem already displays Milton’s characteristic use of classical
motifs and myths to carry Christian meaning, and his habit of moving from a par-
ticular scene or event to cosmic perspectives and significances. Milton apostro-
phizes the infant as a blasted primrose, and develops a myth of her as a ‘maiden’
unwittingly destroyed by the bumbling caresses of Winter, personified as an elderly
Deity enamoured of her beauty. She is made to embody the power of innocence to
slake God’s wrath for sin and drive off “black perdition” and “slaughtering pesti-
lence.” One consolation – that the child’s redemptive “office” continues in heaven
- is perhaps too hasty and elliptic (l. 70). But Milton also urges his sister to find