“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632wisest Fate sayes no” (l. 154). Another strategy that Milton uses to impressive effect
here, and that becomes characteristic of him, is the complex interplay of classical
myth and Christian story. The pagan gods, understood literally, are conquered by
Christ, but Christ is himself figured as the “mighty Pan” come to live among the
shepherds and as an infant Hercules strangling in his cradle the giant serpent Satan
and all his monster crew.
The final section of the poem focuses on the immediate effects of the Nativity,
beginning with the “old Dragon” bound and opening out to the prospect of all the
pagan gods fleeing from all their shrines, described in terms of their relative degrees
of darkness and disorder – from the utter blackness of Moloch to the shadowy
“Moon-lov’d maze” of the “yellow-skirted Fayes” (ll. 235–6). In this section espe-
cially, the poem’s reformist political meanings are emphasized. Milton reproves
easy speculation that the Millennium is imminent. The length of the catalogue of
idols suggests, by a kind of formal mimesis, the long and difficult process that must
precede it: completing the reformation of the church by ridding humankind of all
its idols, lovely as well as hideous. The “old Dragon” whose sway is now retrenched
and the Typhon strangled by the infant Herculean Christ point not only to Satan
but also, for contemporary Protestants, to the Roman church and its power. By
opposing Christ, the new Sun/Son, to the old Sun God Apollo and dramatizing the
silencing of Apollo’s oracles at Christ’s birth, Milton sets Christ’s power against
what Apollo the Sun-God had come to symbolize as a prominent iconographical
symbol of Renaissance popes and aggressive Vatican power and as the self-chosen
emblem of the Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.^107 Many images in Milton’s
descriptions of the several pagan gods – “consecrated Earth,” “service quaint,” “sa-
ble-stoled Sorcerers,” “Heav’ns Queen and Mother both” (suggesting the cult of
the Virgin) – register the heightened concern in 1629 over the “popish idolatry”
which Laud’s steadily increasing power was seen to promote.^108 Also, by Decem-
ber, 1629 Henrietta Maria was known to be pregnant, and the expected royal birth
was being heralded by references to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, projecting a Stuart
Golden Age.^109 Milton’s Nativity poem insists that the true Golden Age must be
foreshadowed by the divine child, and will come only at the Millennium, when
idols old and new have been cast out. The final stanza shifts the perspective back to
the Bethlehem scene and the “Courtly stable” – an oxymoron emblematic of the
poem’s paradoxical mode, but also one that transfers kingly power and state from
earthly monarchs to their only proper locus, Christ. The poem is a remarkable
achievement in conception and poetic craft for the 21-year-old poet.
The graceful, urbane companion poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, climax Milton’s
university years and his early poetic development. They explore the ideal pleasures
appropriate to contrasting lifestyles – “heart-easing Mirth,” “divinest Melancholy”
- that a poet might choose, or might choose at different times, or in sequence.^110 As
celebrations of their respective deities – the Grace Euphrosyne (Youthful Mirth)
and the allegorical figure imagined as a deity, Melancholy – both poems are modeled