“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632butions to the spate of collegiate versifying prompted by the death of Hobson the
carrier on January 1, 1631, at almost 86 years of age.^88 Milton used the same meter
as the Shakespeare tribute for both epitaphs, which turn on the conceit that Hobson
died from inactivity forced on him by the plague. In the first poem Death, unable
to catch Hobson while he drove his cart, finds him at home and, like a kindly
chamberlain, settles him down for the night. The second is more outrageously
witty, filled with puns, paradoxes, and word-play: “Too long vacation hastned on
his term” (l. 14); “One Carrier put down to make six bearers” (l. 20); “Ease was his
chief disease” (l. 21); “his wain was his increase” (l. 32). The facetious and irrever-
ent tone of these poems – modified by some warmth of feeling for the old man – is
geared to a student audience, but the poems found a much wider audience in
manuscript and print anthologies.^89
Another English poem of that year, Milton’s 75-line “Epitaph on the Marchion-
ess of Winchester” honors Jane Paulet, eldest daughter of Thomas, Viscount Savage
of Cheshire, wife of the fifth marquess, and kinswoman of the university chancel-
lor. She died on April 15, 1631 at age 23, following a stillbirth but from an infection
caused by lancing an abscess in her cheek. Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and
several other poets produced elegies for her, and Milton’s reference to “som Flow-
ers, and som Bays /... Sent thee from the banks of Came” (ll. 57–9) suggests that
a university miscellany was projected. Milton probably intended this poem to call
his gifts to the attention of likely aristocratic patrons. If he had qualms about cel-
ebrating the wife of a prominent Roman Catholic, they may have been quieted by
rumors that “she was inclining to become a Protestant.”^90 This poem tries on an-
other Jonsonian style: octo- and heptasyllabic couplets, but with complex shifts
between iambic and trochaic rhythms.^91 Though longer than most epitaphs, it be-
gins conventionally by seeming to voice the inscription on the tombstone: “This
rich Marble doth enterr / The honor’d Wife of Winchester, / A Viscount’s daugh-
ter, an Earls heir.” The speaker then describes the Marchioness, emphasizing the
pathos of her early death and that of her stillborn infant: Atropos came instead of
Lucina, “And with remorseles cruelty, / Spoil’d at once both fruit and tree” (ll. 29–
30). Then he addresses her in heaven, placed with Rachel who also died in childbed;
this is apparently Milton’s first allusion to Dante, who (for the same reason) located
Beatrice with Rachel in the third rank of the celestial rose.^92
In Prolusion VII Milton indicates that he spent the summer of 1631 in some
delightful village that greatly stimulated his intellectual and poetic growth – prob-
ably Hammersmith, the “country place” that his father moved to permanently at
about this time.^93 The brilliantly inventive companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso
were most likely the poetic fruits of that summer.^94 These delightful poems (dis-
cussed in the second section of this chapter) appear to turn aside from the lofty
purposes of the Nativity Ode, but in fact they stage a choice of life and literary
kinds, and also seek to reclaim some kinds of art and poetry from what Milton saw
as their degraded uses as court poetry and in Laudian worship. These months also