“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632with Bacon and other modernists committed to science and progress. Emphatically
denying the common notion that the world is growing old and decaying, he argues
rather that the processes of the universe are as powerful and the earth as fertile as
ever.^50 Alternatively, his poem may have been “De Idea Platonica quemadmodum
Aristoteles intellexit” (Of the Platonic Ideal Form as understood by Aristotle), a
good-natured burlesque in iambic trimeter that he described as “light-minded non-
sense.” The tone is ironic throughout as Milton assumes the role of a literal-minded
Aristotelian challenging the notion of Platonic ideal forms by looking everywhere
in vain for the Platonic archetype of man – in the stars, in the moon, in the brain of
Jove. Both poems are marked by a sophisticated use of meter, flamboyant rhetoric,
and a profusion of mythological allusions.
Milton sent the poem, one of these or some other,^51 to Gil with the letter of July
2, describing him as “the keenest judge of Poetry in general and the most honest
judge of mine,” and lamenting with some bitterness that he has found no such
friend at Cambridge – “almost no intellectual companions here” (CPW I, 314).
The letter also underscores the danger his ignorant fellow students, most of them
prospective ministers, pose to the church that Milton still, presumably, expected to
serve in that role:
There is really hardly any one among us, as far as I know, who, almost completely
unskilled and unlearned in Philology and Philosophy alike, does not flutter off to Theol-
ogy unfledged, quite content to touch that also most lightly, learning barely enough for
sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever and patching it with worn-
out pieces from various sources – a practice carried far enough to make one fear that the
priestly Ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our Clergy. (CPW I, 314)Milton nowhere mentions any Cambridge friend save for Edward King, who is
described in the headnote to Lycidas as “a learned friend.” Though clearly idealized,
that poem’s description of their life as fellow poets at Cambridge may suggest some
amicable associations,^52 but King’s strong royalist and Laudian sympathies make
intimacy unlikely, and there are no other signs of it – no exchanges of letters, no
other references to King. As the letter to Gil indicates, in his first undergraduate
years Milton seems to have been so disenchanted with Cambridge that he did not
seek or make close friends. And his often-expressed contempt for his fellow stu-
dents and the education in which they had a considerable career stake can hardly
have endeared him to them.
Nevertheless, in July or August, 1628 Milton was chosen by his fellow students
to be “Father” (writer and presenter) of the annual vacation festival at Christ’s,
replacing the student leader who had suddenly “departed” after a prank that in-
volved cutting off the water supply to the town. The selection of Milton indicates
that his peers recognized his ability to produce on demand, in Latin, what that
occasion called for: pungent satire, scurrilous puns, and boisterous humor targeted