“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638have given Milton senior some pause, coupled as they evidently were with re-
quests that, after supporting his son’s protracted studies for five years, he now
finance a stay at the Inns of Court and/or send him on the Grand Tour. Even if
Milton senior sympathized with his son’s inability to resolve on ordination in the
Laudian church and took pride in his poetry, he was surely voicing concern as to
what his son would finally do to support himself, and when. Though the attitudes
Milton ascribes to his father are probably exaggerated – “You should not despise
the poet’s task”; “Do not persist... in your contempt for the sacred Muses”;
“You may pretend to hate the delicate Muses, but I do not believe in your hatred”
- these lines likely register the scrivener’s expressed doubts as to where his son’s
desire to devote his life to poetry would lead, absent a patron who is nowhere on
the horizon.^80
With “Ad Patrem” Milton turned to dactylic hexameters that flow into longer
units, akin to the English verse paragraphs he used in Lycidas at about the same time.
As a defense of poetry, the poem sounds some familiar Renaissance themes: poet-
ry’s divine origins, the poet’s fellowship with the gods, the bard’s heroic and divine
subjects, and Orpheus as a figure for the poet in that his song could move stones and
trees and Hell itself. As he does also in Lycidas, Milton emphasizes the poet’s priestly
and prophetic roles and his part in heavenly song:
By song Apollo’s priestesses and the trembling Sibyl, with blanched features, lay bare
the mysteries of the far-away future. Songs are composed by the sacrificing priest at
the altar.... When we return to our native Olympus and the everlasting ages of
immutable eternity are established, we shall walk, crowned with gold, through the
temples of the skies and with the harp’s soft accompaniment we shall sing sweet songs
to which the stars shall echo and the vault of heaven from pole to pole.^81Though deeply felt, this defense is also part of Milton’s rhetorical strategy to per-
suade his father to accept and support him as a poet.
By means of a skillful construction of personae, Milton was able to handle with
tact and poetic decorum the clash between the young poet’s lofty concept of poetry
and the father’s deprecation of it.^82 He creates his father’s portrait by repeated praises
of his paternal generosity, his skill in music, and his appreciation for learning, which
led him to foster Milton’s education and self-education; such a father is simply
mistaken in thinking that he hates the Muses. Milton’s self-portrait is a complement
to his father’s: he is filled with gratitude, deferential to his father but firm in uphold-
ing the good cause of poetry, modest about his own past accomplishments but
confident of the future. The choice of Latin for this poem also honors Milton
senior as a man of education and culture who is able to appreciate learned poetry
and the son who can produce it. This is a graceful poetic tribute, but also strikingly
effective as rhetoric.
The young man who wondered, in Sonnet VII, what his lot might prove to be is