Ben Jonson was the master.  England had borrowed the idea of the masque from Italy and had used it as the chief entertainment at all festivals, until it had become to the nobles of England what the miracle play had been to the common people of a previous generation.  Milton, with his strong Puritan spirit, could not be content with the mere entertainment of an idle hour.  “Comus” has the gorgeous scenic effects, the music and dancing of other masques; but its moral purpose and its ideal teachings are unmistakable.  “The Triumph of Virtue” would be a better name for this perfect little masque, for its theme is that virtue and innocence can walk through any peril of this world without permanent harm.  This eternal triumph of good over evil is proclaimed by the Attendant Spirit who has protected the innocent in this life and who now disappears from mortal sight to resume its life of joy: 

    Mortals, that would follow me,
    Love Virtue; she alone is free. 
    She can teach ye how to climb
    Higher than the sphery chime;
    Or if Virtue feeble were,
    Heaven itself would stoop to her.

While there are undoubted traces of Jonson and John Fletcher in Milton’s “Comus,” the poem far surpasses its predecessors in the airy beauty and melody of its verses.

In the next poem, “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy written in 1637, and the last of his Horton poems, Milton is no longer the inheritor of the old age, but the prophet of a new.  A college friend, Edward King, had been drowned in the Irish Sea, and Milton follows the poetic custom of his age by representing both his friend and himself in the guise of shepherds leading the pastoral life.  Milton also uses all the symbolism of his predecessors, introducing fauns, satyrs, and sea nymphs; but again the Puritan is not content with heathen symbolism, and so introduces a new symbol of the Christian shepherd responsible for the souls of men, whom he likens to hungry sheep that look up and are not fed.  The Puritans and Royalists at this time were drifting rapidly apart, and Milton uses his new symbolism to denounce the abuses that had crept into the Church.  In any other poet this moral teaching would hinder the free use of the imagination; but Milton seems equal to the task of combining high moral purpose with the noblest poetry.  In its exquisite finish and exhaustless imagery “Lycidas” surpasses most of the poetry of what is often called the pagan Renaissance.

Besides these well-known poems, Milton wrote in this early period a fragmentary masque called “Arcades”; several Latin poems which, like his English, are exquisitely finished; and his famous “Sonnets,” which brought this Italian form of verse nearly to the point of perfection.  In them he seldom wrote of love, the usual subject with his predecessors, but of patriotism, duty, music, and subjects of political interest suggested by the struggle into which England was drifting.  Among these sonnets each reader must find his own favorites.  Those best known and most frequently quoted are “On His Deceased Wife,” “To the Nightingale,” “On Reaching the Age of Twenty-three,” “The Massacre in Piedmont,” and the two “On His Blindness.”