“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674become a staunch royalist), and no letter from Wotton addressing Milton as an
unknown, novice poet. Also, Comus is not now set off as a separate section but
follows immediately after Lycidas. With a few exceptions such as the tribute to
Lawes which needs the name to make sense of the praise, Milton excises titles that
had linked poems to particular individuals or situations that will not mean much, or
will be offputting, to a 1670s audience. He retains a few dates, including the some-
times erroneous indicators of his age to mark his juvenilia, but, as before, his or-
ganization owes more to genre, desired self-presentation, and politics than to
chronology. The English part now ends with Milton’s translation of Psalm 88,
whose final lines make an appropriate envoy for Milton, almost 65 years old and
witness to many deaths of family and friends:
Lover and friend thou hast remov’d
And sever’d from me far.
They fly me now whom I have lov’d,
And as in darkness are.The Latin section ends, not with the Diodati elegy as before, but with the elegant
ode to Rouse, with its structure of three strophes, antistrophes, and epodes clearly
designated. It retains the date, January 23, 1646, when this poem presented the first
edition of Milton’s Poems to the Bodleian, to be enjoyed by future readers; now it
can offer this second edition to those readers directly.
When this edition was in preparation, the Catholic crisis was escalating. Charles
II’s Roman Catholic brother James, heir presumptive to the throne, had resigned
his post as Lord High Admiral in June, 1673 rather than comply with the Test Act,
and on September 30 had married the Italian Catholic princess, Mary of Modena,
opening up the prospect of Catholic sons and a settled Catholic succession.^82 Milton’s
new volume offers some covert testimony in these circumstances. As before, the
first poem in the English section is the ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,”
with its forthright claim to prophetic voice; and it is followed by the two schoolboy
psalms calling for God’s vengeance on tyrants. Lycidas retains its headnote referring
to the poet’s prophecy of “the ruine of our corrupted Clergie then in their height,”
inviting comparisons with the post-Restoration Anglican clergy who “shove away
the worthy bidden guest” even more fiercely, and with the greatly increased danger
from the papist “grim Woolf.” Only two sonnets retain titles that point to specific
occasions: “On the late Massacre in Piemont” recalls that notorious example of
Roman Catholic treachery and persecution; and the sonetto caudato, “On the new
forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” tacitly invites comparison with
the present parliament’s forcing of conscience. The English segment concludes with
Milton’s two psalm sequences but reverses their chronological order. The more
meditative group from 1653, Psalms 1–8, is placed first; Psalms 80–8, written dur-
ing the anxious months of the Second Civil War (1648), are given the climactic