“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632Milton is serious about reporting his high poetic aspirations and his ode On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity as the first major realization of them. Terming it his gift
“for the birthday of Christ” written at daybreak on Christmas morning, he no
doubt saw special significance in this poem’s composition just after his own impor-
tant twenty-first birthday (December 9, 1629). Despite their differences in tem-
perament, again underscored in the parenthetical comment alluding to Diodati’s
more frivolous occupations, Milton expects his soulmate to understand him very
well – his jests, his indirections, his reach toward bardic, prophetic poetry, and the
remarkable achievement his Nativity poem is. Elegy VI finds place for the lower as
well as the higher poetic kinds, and the playful tone precludes reading it as Milton’s
decisive rejection of lighter subjects. But Milton here reaffirms in stronger terms
than in the “Vacation Exercise” his desire to attempt the highest subjects, and to
take on the role of bardic Poet–Priest. The Nativity Ode, Milton’s first major
poem, is discussed later in this chapter: its conception and technique, its reach
toward prophetic poetry, and its reformist politics, adumbrated especially in the
long catalogue of pagan gods expelled from their shrines, registering Puritan anxi-
ety in 1629 about the “papist idolatry” fostered by Laud.
Milton’s promise in Elegy VI to recite his strains to Diodati suggests that they
met sometime that winter, before Diodati left for Geneva where he studied theol-
ogy from April 16, 1630 to (at least) September 15, 1631.^72 Buoyed by his impres-
sive achievement in the Nativity Ode, Milton undertook a companion poem, “The
Passion,” probably during the Lenten season of 1630: Good Friday that year fell on
March 26. He used the same stanza as in the “Proem” to the Nativity Ode, and
explicitly invited comparison and contrast: “Erewhile” his Muse joined with angels
to celebrate Christ’s birth with “Ethereal mirth”; now he will tune his song “to
sorrow” to treat his Passion (ll. 1–8). Rejecting the epic mode of Vida’s Christiad,
he chose the “softer” strings of funeral elegy. His earlier poems in this genre did
well enough for a bishop and a university official, but an elegy on Christ’s passion
and death demands convincing expressions of profound emotion which Milton
could not produce. His Protestant imagination was not stirred by the Passion, and
he found no way in elegy, as he had in the Nativity Ode, to move from the per-
sonal and local to the universal. So his conceits become ever more extravagant and
the text becomes painfully self-referential – a poem about Milton trying to work up
the proper emotions to write a Passion poem: “I tune my song,” “my Harpe,” “my
Phoebus,” “my roving vers,” “Me softer airs befit,” “Befriend me night,” “my flatter’d
fancy,” “my sorrows,” “my tears,” “My spirit,” “my soul in holy vision,” “Mine
eye,” “my feeble hands,” “My plaining vers,” and again, “my tears,” “my sor-
rows.” After eight stanzas he broke off, but published the fragment both in 1645
and 1673, with an explanation staging his own failure: “This Subject the Author
finding to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfi’d with
what was begun, left it unfinisht.”^73 This experience – perhaps the first time Milton
fell so far short of meeting the demands of his poetic subject – evidently led him to