ABSTRACT
William Hayley, Milton’s biographer for the Romantics, has words of praise for the Seventh Elegy for showing “the youthful fancy of Milton under the influence of a sudden and vehement affection.” 1 “Vehement” is a word that Milton in Paradise Lost (his prose uses are different) never employs without consciousness of its etymological meaning of mindless, as in “vehement desire” (8.526). The penultimate sentence of the Argument to Book 9 gives an aid to reading that some critics ignore at their own peril: “Adam, at first amazed, but perceiving her lost, resolves through the vehemence of love to perish with her.” Nevertheless, taking it on its own terms, one could say that Elegia VII is a poem about disobedience to divine law, punishment, repentance, and supplication. (Compare the Argument to Book 10: “seek peace of the offended Deity by repentance and supplication.”) It is one man’s disobedience, but one line widens it out to mankind’s (“genus humanum,” 9). Suffering leads to faith, as the divinity says: “Et faciam vero per tua damna fidem” (30). God foresees that fallen Adam will be “Tried in sharp tribulation, and refined / By faith” (PL 11.63–64). The title of the future epic is anticipated, “amissum…caelum” (81) in a reference to the fall of the “proles Junonia” or Vulcan. 2 While Hughes designates Elegia VII “only a half-serious game with the traditional Ovidian theme of the poet’s conquest by Cupid,” 3 he does not characterize the lines of retraction that follow hard upon it. 4 Are they also only half-serious, and if so, do two halves make a whole?
