“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638Know that I cannot help loving people like you. For though I do not know what else
God may have decreed for me, this certainly is true: He has instilled into me, if into
anyone, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not so diligently is Ceres, according to the
Fables, said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as I seek for this idea of the
beautiful, as if for some glorious image, throughout all the shapes and forms of things.... Whence it happens that if I find anywhere one who, despising the warped judg-
ment of the public, dares to feel and speak and be that which the greatest wisdom
throughout all ages has taught to be best, I shall cling to him immediately from a kind
of necessity. But if I, whether by nature or by my fate, am so equipped that I can by
no effort and labor of mine rise to such glory and height of fame, still, I think that
neither men nor Gods forbid me to reverence and honor those who have attained that
glory or who are successfully aspiring to it. (CPW I, 326–7)
He praises Diodati here as one of a choice band of noble spirits. And Diodati’s
example, as one who gave over ministerial studies for medicine, may have prompted
Milton to declare for the first time unambiguously – albeit diffidently and with self-
deprecating humor – that he is first and foremost a poet seeking the Idea of Beauty
and immortal fame:
Listen, Diodati, but in secret, lest I blush; and let me talk to you grandiloquently for a
while. You ask what I am thinking of? So help me God, an immortality of fame.
What am I doing? Growing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises
himself on very tender wings. (CPW I, 327)The new flight he was practicing in November, 1637 was the pastoral elegy
Lycidas. Confronting a world in which Edward King could be cut off at age 25 with
his aspirations, talents, and promise unfulfilled, the Miltonic speaker calls into ago-
nizing question the value of undertaking the arduous vocations of poet and minis-
ter. The poem is dated “Novemb: 1637” in the Trinity manuscript, and is heavily
revised.^72 The Cambridge memorial volume, Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, prob-
ably appeared early in 1638.^73 The first part, twenty Latin and three Greek poems,
includes contributions by Edward’s younger brother Henry King and by the future
Cambridge Platonist Henry More; the second part, thirteen English poems with
separate title page, includes verses by Joseph Beaumont, John Cleveland and (again)
Henry King. Lycidas came last, the longest poem in Part II and the crown and
climax of the volume. As did some others, Milton signed his poem with his initials
only, J. M. It was not carefully printed, and two extant copies bear corrections in
Milton’s hand.^74 Lycidas is discussed on pages 81–6.
Milton’s readiness to contribute to this Cambridge volume might seem surpris-
ing, given that King was not a close friend and that by 1637 King’s royalist and
Laudian sentiments were evident in his court poems.^75 Milton deals with King’s
politics by entirely eliding them, constructing him instead as the last best hope of
reform, now lost. The other contributors to Justa Edouardo King Naufrago – chiefly