Notes to Chapter 1luxuriosa sinus, / Atque Arabum spirat messes, & ab ore venusto /... Sic Tellus lasciva
suos suspirat amores; / Matris in exemplum caetera turba ruunt.” (Translation, Hughes.)
64 This was a pro forma honor granted by one university to those who earned a degree
from the other; Diodati had earned his Master’s degree at Oxford the previous year.
65 Diodati’s letters are now in the British Library, Add Ms 5016, fols. 5, 71.
66 John T. Shawcross, “Milton and Diodati,” MS 7 (1975), 141, 156–7, argues for some
overt homosexual experience, probably in 1628–9, followed by some rupture in the
relationship; more cautiously, in John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington, 1993),
43–59, he suggests that Diodati was clearly homosexual, but that Milton probably re-
pressed such urges, except, perhaps, with Diodati. These speculations seems to me to
rest on a strained overreading of the poems and letters exchanged between them. I
agree with William Kerrigan in The Sacred Complex (Cambridge, Mass., 1983, 49) that
had Milton recognized or acted upon a sexual attraction to men, he would not have
idealized youthful virginity (his own and that of the Lady in A Maske), nor would he
have routinely listed sodomy among the acts “opposed to chastity” in the Christian
Doctrine (CPW VI, 726–57). Milton’s consistent habit is rather to justify his own im-
pulses and experiences, sexual or otherwise – a disposition that prompted him to write
defenses of chastity and arguments for polygamy and divorce.
67 He bought della Casa’s Rime & Prose (Venice, 1563) for tenpence and inscribed his
name and date on the title page. This work, bound with Dante’s L’Amoroso Convivio
(Venice, 1529) and Benedetto Varchi’s Sonetti (Venice, 1555) is now in the New York
Public Library (KB 1529). Maurice Kelley, “Milton’s Dante–Della Casa–Varchi Vol-
ume,” New York Public Library Bulletin 66 (1962), 499–504, argues that marginalia in the
della Casa and Varchi volumes, and probably in the Dante as well, are Milton’s.
68 Translation, Hughes, as are subsequent translations from Elegy VI.
69 “Mitto tibi sanam non pleno ventre salutem, / Qua tu distento forte carere potes. / At
tua quid nostram prolectat Musa camoenam, / Nec sinit optatas posse sequi tenebras? /
Carmine scire velis quàm te redamémque colámque, / Crede mihi vix hoc carmine
scire queas. / Nec neque noster amor modulis includitur arctis, / Nec venit ad claudos
integer ipse pedes.”
70 “Namque Elegia levis multorum cura deorum est, / Et vocat ad numeros quemlibet illa
suos; / Liber adest elegis, Eratoque, Ceresque, Venusque, / Et cum purpurea matre
tenellus Amor. / Talibus inde licent convivia larga poetis, / Saepius &veteri commaduisse
mero. / Ad qui bella refert, & adulto sub Jove caelum, / Heroasque pios, semideosque
duces, / Et nunc sancta canit superum consulta deorum, / Nunc latrata fero regna
profunda cane, / Ille quidem parcè Samii pro more magistri / Vivat, & innocuos praebeat
herba cibos; /... Additur huic scelerisque vacans, & casta juventus, / Et rigidi mores,
& sine labe manus. / Qualis veste nitens sacra, & lustralibus undis / Surgis ad infensos
augur iture Deos. /... Diis etenim sacer est vates, divumque sacerdos, / Spirat &
occultum pectus, & ora Jovem.”
71 “At tu siquid agam, scitabere (si modo saltem / Esse putas tanti noscere siquid agam) /
Paciferum canimus caelesti semine regem, / Faustaque sacratis saecula pacta libris, /
Vagitumque Dei, & stabulantem paupere tecto / Qui suprema suo cum patre regna
colit; / Stelliparumque polum, modulantesque aethere turmas, / Et subitò elisos ad sua
fana Deos.”
72 Like many critics I believe that Milton refers to the Nativity Ode in his rather ambigu-
Notes to Chapter 2