“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632tions. In Prolusion VI (July or August, 1628) Milton refers to an earlier oration
which he thought would elicit “hostility and dislike” from his fellow students due
to “disagreements concerning our studies,” but which instead met with “quite
unusual applause on every hand” (CPW I, 267). That was probably Prolusion I,
delivered in college, in which Milton was assigned to defend the affirmative to the
question “Whether Day or Night is the Most Excellent,” and in which he antici-
pates audience hostility. He meets it by witty abuse of his opponents – a rhetorical
ploy which also reveals his scorn for those fellow students who engage in disputa-
tions with only a few shards of learning,
who lack all intelligence, reasoning power, and sound judgment, and who pride them-
selves on the ridiculous effervescing froth of their verbiage... once they have come
to the end of their stock of phrases and platitudes you will find them unable to utter so
much as a syllable, as dumb as the frogs of Seriphus. (CPW I, 220)Heaping insults upon those ignorant enough to oppose him might seem an unlikely
strategy, but apparently it was successful: the students perhaps enjoyed Milton’s
flagrant challenge to the first rule of rhetoric drummed into all of them, to seek the
good will of the audience.
For his unpromising subject Milton employs the traditional six-part structure –
exordium, narration, division, confirmation, refutation, peroration – but relies chiefly
on a rhetoric of association, linking Day with classical myths and images that have
joyful and heavenly connotations, and Night with those evoking misery, darkness,
death, and Hell. This may have been Milton’s first major public disputation; the
references to midwinter point to delivery in December or January, 1627–8. Milton
describes Prolusion II, “On the Harmony of the Spheres,” as a brief rhetorical
prelude to a disputation on that topic in the Public Schools (the general university
assembly), and as part of a day-long “festal train of eloquence” (CPW I, 234) –
possibly some students’ commencement acts for 1628. Milton’s speech challenges
the hegemony of Aristotle at the university by defending the truth of poetry, spe-
cifically the poetic and allegorical truth of the Pythagorean music of the spheres,
against Aristotle’s literal-minded, “scientific” disparagement of that myth. The tone
hovers between seriousness and banter.
By the end of his third undergraduate year Milton had won recognition and
respect. On July 2, 1628 he wrote to Gil that he had been invited by one of the
fellows of Christ’s to supply the comic or parodic verses in Latin customarily printed
and distributed at a philosophical disputation for the graduate commencement on
July 1. He implies that such an invitation carried some cachet and was not often
extended to undergraduates. His verses may have been “Naturam non pati senium”
(That Nature does not suffer from Old Age) – perhaps the topic of the day’s exer-
cise. In this 19-line poem in dactylic hexameters, with allusions to Lucretius’ De
rerum natura, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Du Bartas’s Semaine, Milton aligns himself