“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632Milton’s poem wittily sets his own holiday asceticism against Diodati’s indulgence:
On an empty stomach I send you a wish for the good health of which you, with a full
one, may perhaps feel the lack.... You would like to be informed by a song how I
return your love and how fond I am of you. Believe me, you can hardly learn it from
this song, for my love is not confined by narrow meters and it is too sound to use the
lame feet of elegy. (ll. 1–8)^69The tone is urbane and playful as Milton analyzes their different modes of life and
poetry, associating Diodati’s festive life with the light elegy, and his own present
abstemious life with epic or sacred subjects.
Elegy VI is a counterstatement to Elegy V, replaying some of its motifs in an-
other key: here the festivities, banquets, wine, dance, love, and song of “hilarious
December” counter nature’s erotic pleasures in springtime, and the denizens of the
springtime groves are replaced by patrons of winter festivals. Elegy VI also contrasts
two kinds of poetry and the lifestyles appropriate to each – staging, it might seem,
a young poet’s “Hercules choice.” Milton identifies Diodati with the festive life
and elegiac verse, and locates himself with epic and hymnic poets – Homer, Tiresias,
Linus, Orpheus – whose high subjects require an ascetic and chaste life. The gay
elegy and the epic (or the lofty literary hymn) he identifies as countergenres, arising
from and expressive of contrary modes of life:
For many of the gods patronize the gay elegy and she calls whom she will to her
measures.... For such poets, then, grand banquets are allowable and frequent potations
of old wine. But he whose theme is wars and heaven under Jupiter in his prime, and
pious heroes and chieftains half-divine, and he who sings now of the sacred counsels
of the gods on high, and now of the infernal realms where the fierce dog howls, let
him live sparingly, like the Samian teacher, and let herbs furnish his innocent diet....
Beyond this, his youth must be innocent of crimes and chaste, his conduct irreproach-
able and his hands stainless. His character should be like yours, O Priest, when, glori-
ous with sacred vestments and lustral water, you arise to go into the presence of the
angry deities.... For truly, the bard is sacred to the gods and is their priest. His
hidden heart and his lips alike breathe out Jove. (ll. 49–78)^70He ends by describing his Nativity Ode as an example of the latter kind, mixing
epic, hymnic, and pastoral topics:
If you will know what I am doing (if only you think it of any importance to know
whether I am doing anything) – I am singing the heaven-descended King, the bringer
of peace, and the blessed times promised in the sacred books – the infant cries of our
God and his stabling under a mean roof who, with his Father, governs the realms
above. I am singing the starry sky and the hosts that sang high in air, and the gods that
were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines. (ll. 81–6)^71