John Milton was a prolific writer, who composed poetry and prose for a variety of reasons. My own purpose was to analyze, compare, and contrast two of Milton’s works, with an emphasis on structure and syntax. In order to meet my need, I had to choose works that were similar in length and theme. With this is mind, I searched for poems of address. I chose “Elegia Quarta” and “Ad Patrem” primarily because they were both addressed to men who were mentors to Milton, men for whom Milton felt filial devotion. The verses were composed in Latin and sent to their recipients, both of whom were familiar with the dead language. The English translation closely matched the form of the original Latin text. I analyzed the context of each separate text. Then, I compared and contrasted the elements of the poems and their overall effects.
Milton’s “Elegia Quarta” was probably written in 1627, the poet was eighteen years old. He addressed this as a letter to his former tutor, a Scottish schoolmaster and clergyman named Thomas Young, who at the time served as a Chaplain to English merchants in Hamburg, Germany. Young was part of a group of religious reformists who composed tracts under the pseudonym of Smectymnuus. Milton later supported his mentor with two pamphlets of his own. Elegies are commonly used as laments or tributes to the deceased, but Thomas Young did not die until 1665. Milton revealed in the text that Young resided in Hamburg with his wife and at least two children. He also referred to battles rumored to be fought close to Young. During the Thirty Years War, Hamburg was heavily fortified and largely unaffected by armed conflict.
“Elegia Quarta” begins with an apostrophe in which Milton tells the letter itself where to go to reach his former tutor. He next writes of his great affection for Young and laments that three years is too long to go without seeing his soul mate. He apologizes to Young for not writing sooner. He expresses concern that battles are fought close to Young as well as anger that Young could not find a position in Britain, a situation he blames on his mother country. Milton encourages Young to believe that God will protect until he comes back to Britain, wherein he will have the bright future he so richly deserves.
“Ad Patrem” is a mystery in some respects. No one is sure exactly when the poem was written, although the most popular educated guess is around 1637, five years after Milton left Cambridge. Upon leaving Cambridge, Milton resided with his father and pursued an intense program of independent study, mainly concentrating on the classical and historical texts. Milton Senior, musician, poet, and trustee of Blackfriar’s Theatre (famed winter quarters of the King’s Men, the troupe in which William Shakespeare was both playwright and performer), supported his son in his scholarly endeavors, despite an understandable parental concern regarding the path chosen by his son. Milton Senior had been unable to support his family on the proceeds form his poetry and music, so his worry was based on painful personal experience.
Milton (Junior) opens “Ad Patrem” with an invocation to his Muse, wishing that the following poem would be a work worthy of his father. He expresses gratitude for all his father has done for him and offers this poem, as the only wealth he possesses. He explains why he chose poetry as a life’s pursuit, referencing the classical belief that poets were as celebrated as heroes. Milton reminds his father of the grand poetic tradition and begs him to remember that he inherited both his talent for and his love of poetry from Milton Senior. He again thanks his father for his gifts, tangible and intangible, reminds him that there are more important things than money, and ends with the hope that this poem will last long enough for future generations to know what a wonderful father Milton had.
Comparing the forms in the selected poems requires somewhat of a detour. These poems were originally written in Latin. Reading the original verses convinced me that the works were lyric poems, as they have a recognizable rhyme scheme. Milton did not seem too concerned that his words were exact rhymes; it was enough if they were similar, as he was more concerned with the content. The English translation is a near match in rhythm, but reads as blank verse. A verse in “Ad Patrem” scans:
“Nectu vatis opus divinum despice carmen,
Quo nihil aethereos ortus, & semina caeli,
Nil magis humanam commendat origine mentem,
Sancta Prometheae retinens vestigial flammae.”
The English translation, however, scans: “Nothing so dignifies the human mind as its origin, and it possesses yet some traces of Promethean fire.” While the English version retains the style and dramatic philosophical tone, it lacks the lyric flow of the original Latin. In contrast to the musica lyrica of “Ad Patrem”, “Elegia Quarta” is closer to a blank verse chant. Milton writes:
“Charior ille mihi quam tu doctissimi Graium
Cliniadi, pronepos qui Telamonis erat.
Quamque Stagirites generoso magnus alumno,
Quem peperit Libyco Chaonis alma Jovi.”
The English verse scans: “Dearer is he to me than were you, Socrates, wisest of the Greeks, to Cliniades of the stock of Telamon; dearer even than the great Stagirite to his noble pupil, whom a Chaonian mother bore to Libyan Jove.” In translating these works from Latin to English, it was necessary that form be sacrificed for the sake of content.
Milton has a distinctive voice, as evidenced even in his early works. The reader can identify a work of Milton by the long, intricate sentence structure, the nearly seamless blend of Judeo-Christian and classical mythological references, and the selective obedience to the tradition rules governing the structure of specific poetic forms. Milton’s work is a compelling blend of reverence for tradition and scorn for arbitrary rules. For instance, a sonnet is supposed to state a problem, then resolve it, or show two sides of an issue, according to its rhyme scheme. Milton’s sonnets follow the rhyme scheme, but not the content criteria. He wrote elegies as lyric poems addressed to healthy people and included reprimands to authority figures in emotional laments. Milton showed a confidence in his technique at the age of eighteen that most people don’t feel until they reach the age of thirty or older.
While Milton’s underlying voice remains the same in all of his various forms of poetry and prose, his tone changes frequently, even within a single line of a poem. Both “Elegia Quarta” and “Ad Patrem” have overtones of love and gratitude toward the mentors in his life. In “Ad Patrem”, he writes: “I pass in silence over the common kindness of a loving parent; greater matters call me.” These matters concerned the education his father both paid for and encouraged him to expand upon. In “Elegia Quarta”, Milton praises Thomas Young as “my guide when I was first threading the Aonian shades, and the sacred greenswards of the cloven hill; he first led me to drink of the Pierian water, and favored by Clio I thrice wet my lips with Castalian wine.” Essentially, the tone of both works emphasize the value Milton placed on his classical education, especially as it pertained to his study of poetics, as well as his admiration for the two men who influenced the direction of his studies.
The purpose of the verse has the strongest influence on the poem’s tone. In “Elegia Quarta”, Milton expresses admiration, love, loneliness, worry, and reassurance. Its entire construction is emotional, from the apostrophe that comprises the first fifty lines of the poem to the reminder of hope at the very end. Milton, in lengthy sentences filled with emotional angst, compares his relationship with Thomas Young to that of three classical mentor/student pairings, claiming that he loves his teacher as much as these legends did. His phrases throughout the poem (“I am forced to live half my life without him…my eyes were permitted to feast on his face, or my ears to drink in the sweet music of his voice…fix your shy glances…a faithful hand…I thus confess and crave your favor…now love will suffer him no longer to delay”) are filled with emotional resonance. His emotion-evoking word choices (“shy glances…modest lips…faithful hand…trembling prey…cowering victim…ravaging armies…blare of the blazing trumpet…you dwell alone and helpless…resounds the horrors of war…wan fear sends a shudder through your weary bones…radiant aegis of God…high-souled courage”) and repetition of the word ‘dearer’ support my hypothesis that this verse is essentially a plea.
“Ad Patrem”, on the other hand, is clearly a persuasive argument. Milton attempts to put his father’s fears to rest and explain why he is meant to be a famous poet. Milton starts his poem with an invocation, thus inviting his father to read the verses as a scholar. It is a clever way to influence the reader to set aside his emotions and pay attention to the argument. This verse is framed as a tribute to his father, but the content is a list of reasons why Milton Junior made the right decision. He starts of with gratitude and flattery in the first stanza. The opening lines of the next six stanzas (“Scorn not the poet’s song, a work divine…Poems were wont to grace the banquets of kings…Do not, I pray, persist in contemning the sacred Muses; think them not vain and poor, by whose gift you yourself are skilled…Although you pretend to hate the gentle Muses, I believe you do not hate them, for you did not bid me go, father, where the broad way lies open…I pass in silence over the common kindness of a loving parent; greater matters call me…Go now, gather wealth, fool, whoever you are”) read as rebuttals of a debate. The final two short stanzas are more conciliatory, implying (or simply hoping) that Milton Junior won the debate.
Milton used two different rhetorical strategies in “Elegia Quarta” and “Ad Patrem”. Was each strategy equally effective? The answer, for the most part, is subjective. Examining the strategies required several close readings, and I cannot be sure that I have recognized all of the nuances in the texts. Still, rhetoric requires a relationship between the one who composed the text and the one who reads it, so I feel I must include my response to the messages conveyed by Milton’s words. I have a bias regarding Milton’s frequent classical references, as I was raised to believe that showing off one’s education was rude. When Milton mentions the Pierian fountains, I wince as though I saw someone spit in public. Bias aside, I was enthralled by the modulation and rhythm of both verses (although I preferred “Ad Patrem”). I found “Elegia Quarta” to contain many beautiful phrases and little real substance, but I admit to having no emotional stake in Thomas Young’s well-being. “Ad Patrem” was my favorite of the two poems, although my sympathies are with Milton Senior, who had learned the hard way that one cannot eat a sonnet.
Milton had a way with words, in Latin and English alike. In comparing two of his poems, “Elegia Quarta” and “Ad Patrem”, I noted that Milton has a confident and distinctive voice. He wrote the two texts as lyric poems, but they are just as powerful when rendered as blank verse. Milton follows poetic traditions, but breaks arbitrary rules in his work, as evidenced in the fact that the verses in “Elegia Quarta” do not rhyme. His use of lengthy sentences and diction suited to evoking emotional responses worked to convey the poet’s worried plea that his former tutor return home safe. The use of the Muses as a metaphor for poetry as a career in “Ad Patrem” was also well-done, especially as it also serves the purpose of deflecting any residual emotional negativity toward the fictional beings (as opposed to the free-loading offspring). Overall, I learned a lot about how Milton constructed his rhetoric during this comparative analysis.
