“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632the university honors list of twenty-four undergraduates in a graduating class of
259, and the first from his college. The Oslow portrait (plate 3), generally assumed
to be of Milton at about this time, emphasizes the subject’s large serious eyes and
delicate features. He looks years younger than the age inscribed, “21.”^59
While working toward his Master of Arts degree (1629–32) Milton was not
obliged to maintain strict residency requirements, and we cannot be sure where he
was for much of that time. His academic responsibilities were simply to continue
his studies, perhaps dispute on occasion with undergraduates, and prepare for the
Master’s degree “Acts.” He probably held open the option of preparing for the
ministry, but he did not take orders as a deacon when he became eligible at age 23,
nor yet when he took his degree a year later.
In April, 1629, he wrote Elegy V, “In Adventum Veris” (On the Approach of
Spring), his most creative appropriation of Ovid and the most sensual of his ele-
gies.^60 It is one of his finest Latin poems and, along with Elegy VI, brings his
experiments with Ovidian elegy to a fitting climax. Elegy V distills classical myths
and Latin and neo-Latin poetry about springtime and love into a veritable hymn to
fertility.^61 It combines elegiac couplets and an elegiac poet’s welcome to spring
with a hymnic structure invoking and responding to Apollo as god of nature, of
lovemaking, and of poets, modeled on Callimachus’s “Hymn to Apollo” and its
imitators.^62 Milton celebrates in lush, exuberant language the vibrant erotic desire
pulsating through all nature with the coming of spring, and the potent sexual
energies unleashed in the earth itself, in the creatures, in all the pagan deities, and
in young men and women stirred to love. A central image is the passion of the
earth for the sun:
The reviving earth throws off her hated old age and craves thy embraces, O Phoebus.
She craves them and she is worthy of them; for what is lovelier than she as she volup-
tuously bares her fertile breast and breathes the perfume of Arabian harvests and pours
sweet spices and scent of Paphian roses from her lovely lips?... the wanton earth
breathes out her passion, and her thronging children follow hard after her example.^63The poem is all exuberant celebration: there is no moralizing, no carpe diem advice.
It alludes approvingly to the erotic myths of various pagan gods – Jove, Pan, Venus,
the satyrs – and prays for their continued presence: “Long may every grove possess
its deities!” (l. 133). Milton’s Muse is awakened by all this to new ecstasy of song,
the renewal of his own creative powers – “this madness and this sacred ecstasy” –
such that he joins his voice with the nightingale to welcome spring and invoke
Apollo. But he does not imagine himself sharing in the general sexual frenzy.
He may have attended Commencement exercises on July 7, 1629 to see Charles
Diodati incorporated Master of Arts^64 and to enjoy a visit with his friend. Two
undated Greek letters from Diodati to Milton may have been written that summer
or autumn; the use of Greek ostentatiously displays the learning of both.^65 One