Notes to Chapter 1ous Latin lines, “Te quoque pressa manent patriis meditata cicutis; / Tu mihi, cui
recitem, judicis instar eris,” usually translated something like this: “For you also these
simple strains that have been meditated on my native pipes are waiting; and when I
recite them to you, you shall be my judge.” Some see this as a reference to the compan-
ion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso on the ground that “cicutis” must refer to pastoral
poems; Carey thinks the reference is to the Italian sonnets as poems played on Diodati’s
native pipes – readings which involve dating those works before the Nativity Ode;
against that is the fact that they show the influence of della Casa’s sonnets, which Milton
purchased in December, 1629. The Nativity Ode itself claims the pastoral generic reg-
ister and “patriis... cicutis” may refer to Milton’s native pipes – a poem in English
rather than as so often before, in Latin. For Charles Diodati’s period of study at the
Academy (now University) of Geneva, see Dorian, English Diodatis, 130–1.
73 R. Paul Yoder, “Milton’s The Passion,” MS 17 (1991), 3–21, argues, I think
unconvincingly, that the failure is deliberately staged to make the poetic persona’s humili-
ation and the death of his poem an imitatio Christi.
74 J. H. Hanford believes this crisis had serious psychological consequences for Milton’s
epic aspirations; see “The Youth of Milton,” in John Milton Poet and Humanist (Cleve-
land, 1966), 38–40.
75 The date of the capture of Hertogenbosch proves that Milton’s letter to Gil is wrongly
dated 1628 in the 1674 edition of Milton’s Letters. See Eugenia Chifos, “Milton’s Letter
to Gil,” Modern Language Notes 62 (1947), 37–9. Gil’s poem was later published in
Parerga (1632), pp. 36–40.
76 On April 24, 1630 Joseph Mede wrote to his friend Stuteville that “our University is in
a manner wholly dissolved, all meetings & exercise ceasing; in many colleges almost
none left. In ours, of 27 messe [fellows] we have not five (BL Harleian Ms 390, f.
513v).
77 Milton senior was assessed for poor relief in Hammersmith beginning from Easter (April
10, 1631); he paid his quarterly assessments that year and the next (i.e. through March,
1633). He did not pay the assessments before that date (Chronology, 43). In 1633 he was
evidently serving as churchwarden in the Hammersmith Chapel of Ease. Chancery
Town Depositions (LR, I, 276–7, 284–7, 292–3) document his residence in Hammer-
smith from 1632 to 1635.
78 The opening lines of this sonnet are a close translation of lines 25–6 of Elegy V.
79 Parker argues for spring, 1629 for the “May Morning” song and the sonnet sequence
on the basis of similarity in theme to Elegy V. With many critics, I lean to 1630 because
Milton was newly attentive to Jonsonian lyric at this point and because his recent pur-
chase of della Casa’s sonnets suggests a new interest in that form. The name Emilia is
identified by J. M. Smart, ed., The Sonnets of Milton (Glasgow, 1921) through references
in Sonnet 2, ll. 1–2 to the river Reno and the Rubicon in the region Emilia in northern
Italy.
80 The address to Diodati might suggest that the sequence was written before his depar-
ture for Geneva (by the end of March, 1630 at the latest). But the sequence might have
been sent to him in Geneva or presented to him in England at his return.
81 These sonnets show some adumbrations of Milton’s later sonnet manner, in which the
thematic development often does not conform to the formal divisions into octave and
sestet, quatrains and tercets, and the volta, or turn in the argument, often is not placed,
Notes to Chapter 2