Notes to Chapter 195 LR I, 227, 243, 257; V, 381; Parker, II, 807.
96 Masson, I, 254–7; Mullinger, University of Cambridge, III, 114–17. Another factor was
thought to be the recent furore over the conferring of the Doctorate in Divinity on
the Laudian Edward Martin and several others, by royal mandate.
97 See chapter 1, pp. 12–13.
98 For a discussion of Milton’s self-construction as a solitary scholar, see B. Douglas
Trevor, “Learned Appearances: Writing Scholarly and Literary Selves in Early Mod-
ern England” (dissertation, Harvard University, 1999), 298–344.
99 Cambridge University Archives, Supplicats 1630, 1631, 1632, fol. 270, No. 124. On
July 3 he signed the Subscription Book, graduating as Master of Arts (Cambridge
University Archives, Subscription I, p. 377); Chronology, 46–7.
100 The term “humble” points to the poem’s pastoral elements, since pastoral traditionally
belongs to the genus humile.
101 Cf. Isaiah 6:6–7.
102 For Milton’s originality, see Robert Shafer, The English Ode to 1660 (Princeton, NJ,
1918).
103 See Phillip Rollinson, “Milton’s Nativity Ode and the Decorum of Genre,” MS 7
(1975), 165–84; Variorum 2.1, 34–8; and Revard, Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 64–90. In
Reason of Church-governement Milton listed among the kinds of poems he considered
writing, “those magnific odes and hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in
most things worthy” (CPW I, 815).
104 Milton draws upon the centuries-old Christian tradition identifying Virgil’s Fourth or
“Messianic” Eclogue as an unconscious prophecy of the birth of Christ.
105 Some important studies of the poem include Rosemund Tuve, Images and Themes in
Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 37–72; Arthur Barker, “The Pattern
of Milton’s Nativity Ode,” University of Toronto Quarterly 10 (1941), 167–81; and Revard,
Tangles of Nearea’s Hair, 64–96.
106 Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth (Oxford, 1987, 14), points to the political resonances
such apocalyptic references had in 1629, when vernacular commentaries on the Book
of Revelation were suppressed. Puritan commentary on that book typically read signs
of the last days in the present times, with alarming implications for the casting down of
kings and the rule of the Saints.
107 See Revard, Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 66–87.
108 Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth, 15–16.
109 Revard, Tangles of Neaera’s Hair, 81.
110 See, for example, Tuve, Images, 15–36; Stanley Fish, “What it’s like to Read L’Allegro
and Il Penseroso,” MS 7 (1975), 77–99; and Variorum I, 224–69.
111 In seventeenth-century anthologies Milton might have seen poems on contrasting
themes paired together, though they were not written as companion poems: e.g. John
Fletcher’s “Hence all you vain Delights” spoken by a personification of Melancholy
was often paired with a poem by William Strode called “Against Melancholy.” The
French poet Saint-Amant published his “La Solitude” in 1624, but its companion, “La
Jouissance,” postdates Milton’s poem by several years.
112 The incest of Aurora and her son Zephyr that produced Mirth, like that of Saturn and
his daughter Vesta that produces Melancholy in Il Penseroso, carries no guilt in the
myths, only allegorical significance.
Notes to Chapter 2