“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638clerics and other college fellows like King himself – associate King closely with the
church and the university he served;^76 Milton sharply dissociates him from the
corrupt church, making St Peter praise him as a single good minister among the
unnumbered “Blind mouthes” who feed only their own bellies, and whose wretched
sermons leave their flocks famished and prey to the Roman Catholic wolf. Milton’s
contribution is also differentiated from the others in genre and mode as well as, of
course, aesthetic quality: it is the only true pastoral elegy,^77 and the only poem rising
to apocalyptic diatribe and prophecy. Christopher Hill suggests that Milton em-
ployed pastoral to disguise his furious attack on the Laudian church, but that seems
dubious;^78 censors and readers could hardly miss the point in 1638 – the reason,
perhaps, that Milton signed with his initials only. The volume’s compilers, the
clerical contributers, and Milton’s Cambridge audience might have been uneasy
with this passage, but they could hardly protest without seeming to identify them-
selves as likely objects of Peter’s denunciation.
Unlike the other elegists, Milton’s focus is not on King but on his own anxieties
about vocation, poetic and religious. King’s death affected Milton so strongly be-
cause King’s situation so nearly resembles Milton’s own: they had shared youthful
pleasures and poetic beginnings at Cambridge and had had common vocational
goals. Three years Milton’s junior, King was also a poet of sorts; he served the
church as an ordained minister, and he had continued a scholarly life as a fellow of
Christ’s. The fact that he (like Milton) had not yet fulfilled his youthful promise and
now would never do so forced Milton to confront the terror of mortality in relation
to the issue of vocation. St Peter’s vehement denunciation consigning the English
church to destruction from “That two-handed engine at the door” indicates that
Milton had by this time quite abandoned the idea of taking orders, though he
might not consider that decision irrevocable should a major reformation occur.
That Milton was reaching toward a role of service to God outside the church, as a
poet, is intimated in the proposition that Lycidas’s ministerial role will also be pre-
served in another form. As the “Genius of the shore” he will aid wanderers in the
“perilous flood of life” – perhaps through his exemplary story retold in Milton’s
poem.
At some point during his “studious retirement” Milton wrote “Ad Patrem,” a
sophisticated Latin verse epistle which is in part a praise of his father for fostering
his education and self-education, in part a defense of poetry against his father’s
supposed disparagement of it, and in part an implicit persuasion to his father to
accept his vocation as a poet and continue to support him in it. The various dates
assigned by scholars – as early as 1632 and as late as 1645 – are closely related to
their various speculative scenarios about Milton’s personal development during
these years.^79 I think it likely that “Ad Patrem” was written in the final weeks of
1637 or early 1638, just after publication of A Maske and Lycidas, or in immediate
expectation of their appearance. Hearing such declarations as Milton had made to
Diodati in November – that he saw himself as, above all else, a poet – might well