“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632another love experience which may be wholly literary, although the sonnet lady’s
name (Emilia) and the specific characteristics ascribed to her – black eyes,
multilingualism, a ravishing singing voice – suggest an actual person, possibly a
kinswoman or family friend of Diodati’s to whom Milton was attracted, or to whom
he wished to pay a graceful compliment. The fact that the fourth sonnet is ad-
dressed to Diodati strengthens that assumption.^80 Whether or not such a lady urged
him to write love sonnets in Italian as he claims in the “Canzone,” the more impor-
tant reason for that language was surely literary: having mastered the Ovidian love
elegy in Latin, he evidently decided to try out the other major mode of love poetry
in the European tradition in its original language, which he can now use accurately
and flexibly, though with occasional archaisms. Sonnet IV stages a formal opposi-
tion in genre and attitude to the elegies, as the speaker repudiates his former praises
of English beauties and his former defiance of love, acknowledging that he is now
captivated by this foreign dark beauty. The sequence is indebted to Petrarch, Tasso,
and Bembo, but especially to Giovanni della Casa (whose sonnets Milton pur-
chased the previous December) for the pervasive use of parallelism, balance, and
antithesis and for a structure in which the rhetorical argument plays off against the
sonnet form.^81 The rhyme scheme follows the Italian sonnet paradigm, though
with a concluding couplet (abba abba cdcdee).
The sequence employs familiar Petrarchan topics: the lady’s name, Emilia, is
revealed cryptically by reference to that region of Italy; her beauty and “high vir-
tue” are “the arrows and bows of love”; potent fire flashes from her eyes which are
like suns; and the humble, devoted lover sighs painful sighs and suffers from love’s
incurable dart. But this speaker resists and redefines conventional Petrarchan roles,
revising Petrarch as he did Ovid. His sonnet lady is not coy or reserved or forbid-
ding, but “gentle” and gracious; her eyes and hair are alien black, not blue and gold;
and she is no silent object of adoration but charms her lover with bilingual speech
and enthralling songs. Also, this lover–poet carefully avoids Petrarchan subjection
to the bonds of Cupid and the lady’s power. His is no all-encompassing Petrarchan
passion: only at a single point is his heart found “less unyielding” to love’s dart.
Moreover, Emilia is not his Muse, like Petrarch’s Laura and other sonnet-ladies; to
the contrary, the Italian love poetry she inspires diverts him from the greater poetic
achievements in English which promise, his friends remind him, an “immortal
guerdon” of fame (the Canzone). More surprising still, the last sonnet (VI) is a
curious self-blason, praising the speaker’s own moral virtues and poetic aspirations
- “the mind’s gifts, high courage, and the sounding lyre and the Muses”^82 – rather
than the physical beauties of the lady. In this Petrarchan staging of desire, the Miltonic
speaker retains his autonomy and insists on his own virtue and worth.
In August 1630 Milton’s sister Anne Phillips gave birth to the son, Edward, who
was to become his uncle’s pupil, amanuensis, and biographer (LR I, 221). The
plague had abated in Cambridge by October, but when Joseph Mede returned to
Christ’s shortly before October 20 he found “neither scholar nor fellow returned