On 2 January 1646, at the age of thirty-eight, John Milton printed his first collection of verse: Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos'd at Several Times. Printed by his true Copies. Poems 1645, as it is usually known, is a carefully structured volume of extraordinarily rangy and rich poems. It begins with a section of English verse, which modulates through the opening On the Morning of Christ's Nativity - how better to begin? - to the sombre elegiac mode of Lycidas. En route from Christian beginnings to mortal endings readers are treated to some rather wobbly undergraduate jokes in the poems On the Death of the University Carrier, some flighty musings in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and an odd youthful stub, The Passion, which breaks off before it actually musters enough energy to describe the crucifixion, its purported subject, with a prose note: 'This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.' There is a separate mini-sequence of Sonnets, English and Italian. A central section contains A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle ('Comus'), which is followed by a separate collection of Latin poems introduced by its own separate title page.