Milton looks suspiciously young here… The oval frame surrounding him states, ‘John Milton of England, pictured at age twenty-one’, but when this book was published, Milton was actually in his late 30s! Milton famously states in the epigram below that this picture looks nothing like him. However, frontispieces functioned much like the pictures of authors we see on dust jackets today. Perhaps the publisher wanted to create an image of Milton that made him seem young, handsome, and full of fresh new ideas. 

One of Milton’s hands is tucked into an academic robe. His pose is very similar to that popularised by Van Dyk’s portraits of the court of Charles I. Although Milton may have approved of his academic appearance in this depiction, it’s hard to imagine he would have been pleased with its associations with the royal court! 

This Greek epigram was thought to have been written by a disgruntled Milton. It translates: ‘Looking at the form of its original, you might say perhaps that this likeness had been drawn by the hand of a novice artist. But, friends, since you do not recognise what is depicted here, have a laugh at this caricature by an inept, talentless scribbler.’ 

Milton is obviously aware that the portrait was not particularly reflective of his current appearance; however, it was often convention to add a poem saying what a bad likeness these portraits were to their authors. By writing in Greek, Milton produces an educated image of himself and creates an in-joke with his fellow readers. The use of the personal address in ‘you’ and ‘friends’ speaks to the reading culture at the time. Literacy rates were low, and this epigram suggests that it was mostly Milton’s educated acquaintances that were reading his books.

The woodland scene probably alludes to Milton’s earlier pastoral work, Lycidas, which is revised for this volume of poems. Pastoral was a genre poets often used at the beginning of their careers, before moving onto ‘greater things’, like epic. As the woodland lays behind Milton, perhaps this symbolises his movement away from this genre. This collection of poems was published in 1645, and by this point Milton was beginning to play with the themes he would later revisit in his epic, Paradise Lost. It was in 1640 that he imagined ‘Adam Unparadiz’d’ as a five-act tragedy. 

The frame’s corners are occupied by four Muses: Melpomene (Muse of tragedy), Erato (Muse of lyric or love poetry), Urania (Muse of astronomy), and Clio (Muse of history). In the classical world, the Muses were a sisterhood of nine goddesses who inspired different kinds of creativity in men. It was a common convention to begin an epic poem with an invocation to a Muse.