“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638lent queen,^30 a gesture that associates the better aesthetics he is promoting with the
virtues of a soundly Protestant aristocracy. Milton’s Entertainment seeks both to
confirm and to educate these aristocrats in these virtues. There is no evidence,
however, that he had any personal contact with them, nor is it at all likely that he
saw Arcades presented at Harefield.
On or shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday (December 9, 1632) Milton wrote
an anxious sonnet that begins “How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, /
Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth yeer!”^31 Though its date has been con-
tested (1631 or 1632) Milton’s usual way of referring to his age in dating his poems
makes 1632 probable.^32 The poem marks a breakthrough in Milton’s use of the
Petrarchan sonnet. While Sonnets I–VI treat conventional love themes in some-
what novel terms, Sonnet VII explores a psychological and spiritual crisis occa-
sioned by Milton’s birthday. He laments his tardy development in relation to more
“timely-happy spirits” – Diodati perhaps, or Edward King – in terms broad enough
to refer to personal, career, and poetic development. This sonnet characterizes Time
as a thief stealing away his youth: his “late spring” has brought no “bud or blossom”
of accomplishment. At age 24 he sees himself as not yet a man: his external sem-
blance belies his lack of “inward ripenes” – intellectual and spiritual maturity – as
well as his lack of the achievements that should attend maturity. The sestet proposes
a resolution in God’s predestinating will: his lot is fixed, “however mean, or high,”
his own “ripenes,” fast or slow, must accord with it, and Time is thereby refigured
as a guide leading inexorably to it. Some consolation for late bloomers is provided
by allusion in the sestet to the parable of the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16), in which
a Master sent latecomers as well as early arrivals to work in his vineyard, rewarding
them according to his will, not their labors. But the sonnet’s final lines introduce
new anxieties: the Miltonic speaker must have “grace” to use his Time and God’s
gifts well, under the ever-watchful eye of a strict and exacting God, “my great task
Master.”^33 The perfectly regular Petrarchan metrical pattern of this sonnet – a sharp
turn between octave and sestet and strong end-stops at lines 2, 4, 8, and 12 – departs
from the enjambments more usual with Milton, so that by formal mimesis the
theme of exact fulfillment of a divinely predestined lot is imaged in a sonnet form
that is itself “in strictest measure eev’n.”
Milton included this sonnet in a 1633 letter to an unidentified older friend,
almost certainly a clergyman, whom Milton met from time to time, probably in
London.^34 In an encounter just past, Milton states, this man criticized his delay in
taking orders (he became eligible on his twenty-fourth birthday), ascribing it to
self-indulgent and excessive study, and an inclination to seek obscure retirement
(CPW I, 319–21). Milton’s letter is in English, not Latin, suggesting that the friend
was not Thomas Young and not a Cambridge academic acquaintance. It is com-
posed directly into the Trinity manuscript as the third item, in two much-corrected
versions that register Milton’s difficulty in explaining himself. He offers excuses for
his present way of life in terms that range from earnest to jocular, but he is curiously