“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632Charles Diodati, portraying him as a Platonic soulmate who shares his love of learn-
ing and poetry, a “charming companion” with a “heart that loves me and a head so
true.” Milton describes himself as having a very good time in London, and waxes
eloquent about the joys of girl-watching and the beauty of English women. Sound-
ing the notes of youthful rebellion and protesting a little too much, he declares
himself happily freed from a harsh tutor and a university atmosphere inimical to
poetry: “I am not pining away for my rooms, recently forbidden to me.... How
badly that place suits the worshippers of Phoebus! I do not like having always to
stomach the threats of a stern tutor and other things which my spirit will not toler-
ate (ll. 12–16).^24
Elegy I echoes but rings changes on Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto,^25 con-
structing a narrative of erotic awakening and chaste resistance against the model of
Ovid, in terms that suggest an experience more literary than passionate. It fashions
a witty cross-comparison between Ovid’s unhappy exile from Rome at Tomis
where he lacked books, pleasures, and poetic stimuli, and Milton’s delightful exile
from Cambridge to London, where he enjoys “welcome leisure” devoted to the
“mild Muses,” as well as “books, which are my life,” walks in the nearby country-
side, the theater, and other pleasures that nourish the poet. Milton’s references to
plays, however, smack of the study rather than the stage – tragic plots from Aeschylus
and Sophocles and stock characters from Latin comedy.^26 The poem is a witty put-
down of the university, whose “reedy fens” recall the swamps of Ovid’s Tomis, and
whose clamorous disputations and harsh tutors are as destructive as Tomis was to a
poet’s soul. The cross-comparison makes Milton’s place of exile idyllic and his
university “home” the true exile. Elegy I develops the classic elegiac motifs of
springtime, attraction to female beauty, and danger from Cupid, but in a playful
and strikingly un-Ovidian reversal, this speaker does not surrender to a lady or to
Cupid but preserves his chastity.^27 At poem’s end, London is reconceived as the
haunt of Circe from which, “with the help of divine moly,” Milton will soon
escape back to Cambridge, to “the hum of the noisy Schools” (l. 90).
The exile was over by Easter term. Milton’s new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, then
about 27 years old, was a Calvinist and a Ramist; his friendship with Chappell and
his family connections with the Diodatis may have eased the reassignment.^28 Dur-
ing Easter term the university was much exercised over two issues that heightened
the conflict between Laudian Arminians and Calvinists. A book by Richard Montagu,
a former fellow of King’s, provocatively linked Cambridge and the church as a
whole with Arminianism, depicting recent Calvinist predestinarianism as an aberra-
tion in both institutions.^29 Also, elections for a new university chancellor, an hon-
orific but politically symbolic post, were being hotly contested: the king backed his
favorite, Buckingham, then under indictment by the House of Commons, while
the Commons itself and those Cambridge Masters of Arts with Calvinist sympathies
supported Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire.^30 At Christ’s the master, Thomas
Bainbridge, supported Buckingham, and the fellows split about evenly. With many