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  • “On the Death of a Fair Infant”: Date And Subject
  • Burton Raffel

I am concerned, here, with two closely interconnected issues, namely, when “On the Death of a Fair Infant” was composed, and who it might or might not have been written about. These matters also bear upon one’s judgment of the poem’s quality.

First printed a year before Milton’s death, in the 1673 Poems, the 77-line poem is clearly to some extent appren tice work. But whether it dates from 1625/26 or 1628, and whether or not it was written to commemorate the death of Milton’s niece, Anne Phillips, remain unsettled questions, as the three most recent editions—Flannagan, Leonard, and Raffel—clearly indicate. Flannagan (247) dates the poem to 1628, and has no doubt that “Anne Phillips . . . [is] the subject . . .” Leonard (76, 686) prints the poem with the 1673 legend, “Anno aetatis 17,” creating the assumption of a 1625/26 date, but in his Notes carefully sets out the arguments for both possible dates, and for the poem commemorating the death of Anne Phillips, coming to no firm conclusion. Raffel (5) leaves one of the issues undecided, printing both possible dates and following each with a question mark, but does not connect the poem to Anne Phillips.

It is perhaps easiest to demonstrate the interconnected nature of the two questions, dating and subject, by briefly documenting the evolution of one notable scholar’s views.

Some sixty-odd years ago, James Holly Hanford declared that the poem “has generally been assigned to the winter of 1625–26 but it almost certainly belongs to the preceding summer” (Handbook, 125). Of the quality of its verse, he wrote that “Despite its quaintly awkward title and the presence in it of strained images in the poetical fashion of the day it is a sincere and beautiful though not a particularly Miltonic composition, springing from a mood of tender grief and rising in one stanza, where the poet touches the theme of immortality, to a genuine poetic fervor.” Lacking documentary proof, discovered much later, as to the exact date of Anne Phillips’ burial, Hanford stated that “[w]e know on the authority of Edward Phillips that the infant was Milton’s own niece, the daughter of his sister Anne . . .” (125–26).

Twenty years later, in his 1953 edition of Milton’s poetry, and after the discovery by William Riley Parker that Anne Phillips had been buried on 22 January 1628, Han ford altered his ideas on the poem’s date and also on the related issues of its subject and poetic evaluation. “Milton wrote the elegy, therefore, in the late winter or early spring of 1628, at the age of 19, toward the close of his fourth year at college . . . . The poem is a religious and didactic elegy in the seventeenth-century manner, full of mythological imagery, rather stilted and immature, but containing touches of sincere emotion . . . . Milton is seeking elevation rather than forcefulness of expression, and he as yet knows no way to attain it save by abounding in the aureate rhetoric of the age” (41). Plainly, it makes a large difference whether a critic is dealing with work written by a poet (and beginning university student) of no more than sixteen or seventeen, as Hanford and most of his contemporaries had thought, or with the work of a nineteen-year old (and third-year university student), as Hanford later, apparently with some reluctance, felt obliged to conclude. This reluctance is evidenced by (1) his explaining that “Phillips tells us,” (2) his qualification, “If this is so,” and (3) his observation that the 1628 date, though “minutely determined,” must be established “against Milton’s own statement:”

Edward Phillips tells us that this poem was written on the occasion of the death of his [Phillips’] elder sister, Milton’s niece. If this is so, Milton’s date, anno aetatis 17,i.e., 1626, must be a mistake . . . This fact, so minutely determined against Milton’s own statement, is of considerable interest . . . (41). In setting out the text of the poem, further, Hanford includes, along with the title, the statement made in the 1673 edition that the poem...

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