The Young and Restless Milton
The Paideia Press Gives Us A New Translation of Milton’s Latin Elegies
Few poets intimidate readers more than John Milton (1608–1674). Despite his three marriages, Hollywood would never greenlight a film called Milton in Love; we simply do not relate to the forbidding Milton in the way that we relate to Shakespeare.
Paradise Lost dominates our view of the poet. We think of him as a grim, aloof ideologue who inhabited a magnificent but joyless world. Many of his political tracts and mature poems reinforce that image. Most readers find it hard to imagine the younger poet who was insecure, lovesick, and even raunchy. It is even harder to imagine Milton joking about the Trinity as he does in Elegiarum Liber (“The Book of Elegies”).
Trying to understand the young Milton is essential to trying to understand the mature legend. His insistent Latinity in tone, vocabulary, and allusiveness results from his intense early study of classical literature as part of his preparation to be a great poet — in Latin.
Milton’s initial choice of poetic language was not as odd as it seems today. Latin had been the common language of European literature for over fifteen hundred years; poets hoping to leave a permanent legacy were still wary of writing in the vernacular. Petrarch, for instance, went to his grave confident that his legacy was his turgid Latin epic Africa, not his striking and inventive sonnets in Italian.
As late as the Romantic era, such poets as Walter Savage Landor were still hedging their bets by writing Latin poetry. This tradition ended, perhaps fittingly, with the great poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, who wrote a romantic yet heartbreaking love elegy for the unrequited love of his life, Moses Jackson.
The young Milton worked hard to master the great works of the classical tradition; he blamed his weak vision on late nights studying those texts. Before long he moved past translating assigned English texts into Latin poetry as an exercise and began writing original Latin verse. Milton matriculated at Cambridge at the age of sixteen, and most scholars date his elegies from his undergraduate years of 1625–1629. His first published poem (perhaps involuntarily published) was On Shakespeare in the Second Folio of 1630.
By the time the teenaged Milton started writing his elegies, the term “elegy” had long ago lost its exclusive association with love poetry and had taken on its most familiar contemporary sense — a lament for the dead. Note Milton’s use of this sense of the term in Elegy 2.23–24:
And let despondent Elegy diffuse sad tones,
And let sad dirges sound in all the schools.
Elegies 2 and 3 fit this definition of elegy, although Milton seems diffident, at best, about his task in Elegy 2.
Elegies 1, 4 and 6 play with conventions of the love elegy. They are not love elegies in the conventional Ovidian sense, but intimate epistles to the two men who seem to have been important to Milton: his closest friend Charles Diodati (1609/1610–1638) and his tutor, Thomas Young (c.1587–1655). These poems replace the frustrations that come from emotional distance in Ovid’s love elegies with distance of geographical separation. In these three elegies Milton’s often borrows from Ovid’s poems of exile, his Tristia, for tone, trope and language.
Elegies 1 and 6 of The Book of Elegies are the ones most discussed by scholars. Some of them argue that there are homoerotic undertones in Milton’s letters and poems to and about Diodati. The closest that Milton veers toward this territory occurs at Elegy 6.7, where he refers to “noster amor” (literally “our love” — although Latin literary conventions allows it to be translated as “my love”), which is followed by a punning line-and-a-half that declares that noster amor is not restricted by modulis…arctis (“strict measures”).
Elegy I is Milton at his most Ovidian. He wrote it when he was in exile for an infraction at Cambridge — although scholars do not agree on the details of that infraction or the punishment. A future bishop, his strict yet religiously suspect tutor, William Chappell (1582–1649), may have physically disciplined him for whatever that infraction was. Milton’s joy at his separation from Christ’s College at Cambridge — whether a suspension or a voluntary departure — is palpable:
To bear a callous master’s threats and other things
Repugnant to my nature does not please me.
If this is “exile” — back again with household gods
And seeking welcome leisure free of care —
I have not shunned the label, nor protest my lot,
And gladly celebrate my exiled state. (1.15–20)
After mulling his own “exile,” Milton makes the associational leap to his idol Ovid:
O how I wish a poet had not borne far worse —
That mournful exile in the realm of Tomis — (1.21–22)
He even goes so far as to argue (surely with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek) that Ovid would have surpassed Virgil as a poet but for Ovid’s exile in Tomis, for offenses that scholars still debate (Milton clearly saw a parallel to his own more minor offenses at Cambridge).
Milton moves on from his thoughts on Virgil and Ovid to a discussion of the theatre. Until recently many scholars read this passage as a puritanical dismissal of the theatre based solely on his reading. That reading ignores line 39 (“I…love what I have watched”) and the extrinsic evidence of Milton’s first published poem, On Shakespeare, which was published with Shakespeare’s Second Folio in 1630.
Recent scholarship also shows that in 1620 Milton’s father, a successful London businessman, became a trustee of the Blackfriars Theatre; he might have been the person responsible for the inclusion of his young son’s poem in the Second Folio. There is also some evidence that the elder Milton composed one of the anonymous poems included in Shakespeare’s First Folio. Despite longstanding academic opinion to the contrary, it appears that Milton’s early immersion in Elizabethan theatre influenced the dialogues and characterizations of Paradise Lost and his other mature poems.
In Elegy VI a slightly older Milton continues playing with tropes of exile and isolation, this time more playfully as he suffers at home and teases Diodati for frolicking abroad. This poem is warmer and wittier than any other poem by Milton, but it also contains a hint of Milton’s later grimmer persona when, in closing, he tries (mostly jokingly?) to upstage Diodati with claims of piety:
But if you ask me what I’m doing (if, at least
You think it worthwhile knowing what I do),
I celebrate the King of Peace from heaven’s seed,
And happy eras promised in the Scriptures,
And God’s first cries, while stabled under the poor roof,
Of He who graces Heaven with his Father,
And the star-spawning sky, and singing throngs above,
And gods abruptly shattered in their shrines.
I gave these gifts to Christ, however, for his birthday,
Bestowed on me before the dawn’s first light.
My sober strains from native pipes await you too;
You, to whom I recite, will be my judge. (6.79–90)
Note in line 89 his reference to music, another diversion which Milton had not yet rejected. Milton grew up in a house alive with music; his father wrote at least twenty musical compositions.
The elegies include many surprises: religious visions inspired by Dante, dissertations about love, satirical takes on university administrators, and a tribute to spring with erotic undertones. A slightly older Milton also wrote two groups of epigrams in elegiac couplets; both groups have a passion lacking in the longer elegies. One group of three epigrams reinforces the importance of Italian literature and culture to the young Milton, and reminds us that he wrote five superb sonnets in Italian. In these poems Milton rapturously celebrates his love for the voice (and perhaps more) of an Italian opera singer, Leonora Baroni (1611–1670). Milton listened to her in London while attending at least one of her 1638–1639 London concerts.
The other group of five epigrams comments on the failed plot of Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) to blow up Parliament. They seem to be presented in chronological order because the first two, direct addresses to the dead Fawkes, are filled with rage. Once Milton vents that initial anger, they become less personal and more allusive — while still retaining much of their ferocity.
The middle-aged Milton took great pains to publish his elegies — even highlighting them as a separate text within his 1645 Poemata. His Latin juvenilia, to a far greater extent than his early English poems, created a problem for him because their subjects and opinions were at odds with Milton’s later political, religious and esthetic views. To insulate himself from potential criticism for publishing his earlier work, Milton semi-apologized for The Book of Elegies with an untitled epigram that holds his youthful Latin poems at arm’s length.
It is remarkable that Milton took the risks of publishing these elegies in a violent and volatile political climate. With his most admired poems not yet written until fifteen years after his first publication, Milton undoubtedly felt that his poetic legacy was uncertain, and probably still had doubts about English as an enduring language of literature. For these reasons, he wanted The Book of Elegies preserved and read.
[John Milton’s Book of Elegies, translated by A.M. Juster, is available today from the Paideia Press. Of this translation Emily Wilson writes, “A.M. Juster’s translation of Milton’s elegiac verse, rendered in elegant English elegiacs, provides Latin-less readers with a readable, accurate, metrical rendering of this important and undeservedly neglected set of poems, accompanied by useful notes and introduction. By writing these poems, the young John Milton defined himself as a master of Latin verse form, but also explored love, friendship, poetics, obedience and revolution, in ways that are related to, but fascinatingly different from, his later English-language poetry. Juster makes the young Milton live again, in a fresh and contemporary idiom.” All proceeds go to benefit the Reginald Foster Scholarship Fund.]
A.M. Juster is the author of nine books, including five translations of Latin poetry and overtweets @amjuster.
