Notes to Chapter 141 Milton’s unique use of the Latin ordinal “undevigesimo” in dating this poem suggests that
it means “in his nineteenth year,” i.e. 1627; his usual form, anno aetatis 19, would have
meant “at the age of 19,” i.e. 1628. Parker’s date, May, 1630, rests on the dubious
assumption that the arrangement of the Elegies in the 1645 edition must be chronologi-
cal, and the also dubious presumption that a compositor misread Milton’s “uno et vigesimo”
as “undevigesimo.”
42 “Nec mora, nunc ciliis haesit, nunc virginis ori, / Insilit hinc labiis, insidet inde genis: /
Et quascunque agilis partes jaculator oberrat, / Hei mihi, mille locis pectus inerme ferit. /
Protinus insoliti subierunt corda furores, / Uror amans intus, flammaque totus eram.”
(Translation, Carey.)
43 Revard, Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 29–30, suggests that the elegy’s focus on one girl who
appears and disappears recalls Joannes Secundus’s Odes, 1.xi.5. Also see Anthony Low,
“Elegia Septima: The Poet and the Poem,” in Urbane Milton, ed. James Freeman and
Anthony Low, MS 19 (1984), 105–26.
44 The poem was not published in 1645, but was included in the 1673 volume, with
Horace’s Latin ode on the facing page. Donald Clark in John Milton at St Paul’s School:
A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948), 178,
argues that the poem may have been a school exercise, later revised. He points out,
plausibly, that the claim of verbal exactness in translation is meritorious in a school
exercise, but that the mature Milton did not value that practice, or ever again attempt it.
Most critics, however, assign a later date, assuming that the poem’s artfulness would be
beyond Milton’s schoolboy capacities; a later date also gains force from Milton’s failure
to date it to an early age, as was his wont with his juvenilia. Shawcross, exceptionally,
dates the poem very late, in 1645–6. See Variorum II.2, 502–5.
45 Mullinger, University of Cambridge, III, 87, 83–9.
46 No other deaths of Phillips’s children are recorded at Milton’s date. Their first child,
John, was baptized January 16, 1625 and buried March 15, 1629 (the John Phillips who
was Milton’s pupil was born about 1631). Anne was baptized on January 12, 1626 (LR
I, 103).
47 Revard (Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 56–61) points to epigrams by Giovanni Pontano and
Marcantonio Flaminio, and the mythic transformations in Pindar’s Olympians I and II.
48 CPW I, 314. In Prolusion VI (July or August, 1628) he mentions that he has just
returned from London and intends to spend the summer at Cambridge (CPW I, 266).
49 In 1642 he explained that some of the studious gentry support the prelates because the
“monkish and miserable sophistry” of their university education has incapacitated them
for “all true and generous philosophy” (Reason of Church-governement, CPW I, 854). In
Of Education (1644) he forcefully charged the universities with bringing students to a
“hatred and contempt of learning,” producing “an ambitious and mercenary, or igno-
rantly zealous Divinity,” lawyers who know nothing of justice and equity,”and states-
men “unprincipl’d in vertue, and true generous breeding,” who are thereby susceptible
to tyranny (CPW II, 374–6).
50 The poem may have been prompted by George Hakewell’s recent, much-discussed
modernist treatise, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God (London, 1627), which
contrasts sharply with the poetic vision in Donne’s First Anniversary, describing the
world as moribund and decaying.
51 Conceivably, both these poems were written for other occasions, and the poem for this
Notes to Chapter 2