Spenser, Circe, and the Civil War: the contexts of Milton’s ‘Captain or Colonel’

Abstract

This article offers a new reading of John Milton’s ‘Sonnet VIII’ or ‘Captain or Colonel’ (1642). The modern critical consensus is that the poem is classical in its form and allusions, ironic in its address to an unknown Cavalier soldier, and best understood in the context of its original manuscript heading, which states that it was fixed to the door of Milton’s house in advance of a Royalist attack on London. This article argues, however, that the sonnet’s diction is demonstrably more Spenserian than classicist, that its narrative tracks that of the ‘Bowre of Blisse’ episode in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and that the allusion to Pindar at the poem’s close may have been prompted by one of E. K.’s notes from the October eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender. In offering this fresh reading of the poem and its sources, this article for the first time situates Milton’s sonnet within his longer poetic trajectory, arguing that the poem must be read against Milton’s artistic predicament in the early 1640s, as a yet unrecognized poet and as an unpopular pamphleteer. Such an approach allows us to integrate this poem into Milton’s oeuvre in a new and surprising way.

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