“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632a crucial insight that he wished to mark formally, for himself and others. This failure
is probably the “frustration” he alludes to later in the Apology, as confirming his
belief that maturity and experience of life are needed to treat the highest subjects.
He turns next to secular subjects, but not, I think, from acute distress over this
failure or disabling doubts about the role of prophet–poet he claimed in the Nativ-
ity Ode.^74 He could, after all, reasonably hope to achieve the requisite maturity in
due course.
On May 20, 1630 Milton answered a letter from Alexander Gil inviting criticism
of an accompanying Latin poem, apparently In Silvam-Ducis, a long celebration of
Protestant Henry of Nassau’s capture of Hertogenbosch (September, 1629).^75 Milton
ends his high praise of that poem – “really great Verses, everywhere redolent both
of truly Poetical Majesty and Virgilian genius” – with the hope that Gil might soon
have cause to celebrate “our own affairs, at last more fortunate” (CPW I, 315–17).
With that wish, Milton associates himself explicitly with reformists urging greater
English militancy in the international Protestant cause. It responds to a spate of
recent discouraging events: parliament had been dismissed on March 4, 1629, be-
ginning what was to become Charles’s 11-year personal rule. Laud was clearly in
control of the nation’s ecclesiastical policy, directing it toward Arminianism and
Catholic ceremony. The king continued lukewarm in supporting the embattled
European Protestants in the Thirty Years War, and his ongoing negotiations with
Spain for the return of the Palatinate were an exercise in futility.
That spring brought another terrible visitation of plague to London and Cam-
bridge. By the end of April most of the colleges were formally closed and all univer-
sity exercises adjourned.^76 While the university was closed Milton probably lived in
the London suburb of Hammersmith, where his father had recently taken up resi-
dence.^77 Spending spring and summer in a rural retreat prompted Milton’s return to
familiar poetic topics – springtime, love, death – but now in other genres and styles.
The lighthearted English song “On May Morning” is an aubade with close affini-
ties to Elizabethan lyricists and the lyric Jonson. May, personified as a girl in a May-
day processional dance led by Venus, embodies “Mirth and youth and warm desire,”
and the poet, as spokesman for all nature, welcomes her with an elegant, carefully
crafted song: two quatrains of five-stress and four-stress lines respectively, and a
final couplet. Also, Milton’s first English sonnet, “O Nightingale,” has affinities
with nightingale sonnets in Italian, with medieval debates between the nightingale
as harbinger of love and the cuckoo as emblem of infidelity, and also with the
celebration of spring in Elegy V.^78 Begging to hear the nightingale’s song, the speaker
defines himself in Petrarchan terms as both lover and poet: “Whether the Muse, or
Love call thee his mate, / Both them I serve, and of their train am I.” As he did in
Elegy V and will often do again, Milton makes the nightingale a multivalent symbol
for the poet.
A Petrarchan mini-sonnet sequence in Italian – two sonnets, a one-stanza canzone
or song, then three more sonnets may also date from this time.^79 In it Milton stages