LYCIDAS.
Lycidas is Milton’s contribution to a volume of elegiac verses, in Greek, Latin, and English, composed by many college friends of Edward King, who was drowned in the wreck of the vessel in which he was crossing the Irish Channel.
In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains.
Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are Phœbus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton’s poetry.
Thus Lycidas is neither wholly elegiac nor wholly pastoral. From the lips of St. Peter, typifying the church, comes a speech of violent denunciation, in the true later Miltonic manner. In strange contrast to this grim invective is the famous flower-passage, the sweetest and loveliest thing of its kind in our literature.
[1-5.] To pluck once more the berries of the evergreens, or to gather laurels,—is to make a new venture as a poet,—to compose a poem. The berries are harsh and crude,—he shatters their leaves before the mellowing year, either because he is to mourn the death of a young man, or because he feels in himself a lack of “inward ripeness” to treat his theme worthily,—perhaps for both reasons. He shatters the leaves with forced fingers rude, in the sense that his subject is not of his own choosing.
[6-7.] A sad duty is imposed upon him, forbidding further delay on any personal grounds.
[8. Lycidas] is one of the stock names of pastoral poetry. The poem, though most serious in its main motive and intention, is to have a pastoral coloring throughout. Note the impressive repetitions, dead, dead, and the recurrences of the name Lycidas in the next two lines.
[11. he knew Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.] Edward King had, in accordance with the college custom of his time, written verses, apparently all in Latin. Of these verses Masson, in his life of Milton, gives specimens. They seem to be commonplace.
[13. and welter to the parching wind.] See Par. Lost II 594, I 78.
[15. Sisters of the sacred well.] Ancient tradition connects the origin of the Muses with Pieria, a district of Macedonia at the foot of Olympus. But the springs with which we associate the Muses are Aganippe and Hippocrene on Mount Helicon.
[19. So may some gentle muse.] A peculiar use of the word muse as masculine, and meaning poet.
[23-31.] We pursued the same studies, at the same college, and we studied from early morning sometimes till after midnight. The metaphors are all pastoral.
[32-36.] We wrote merry verse, bringing in the college jollities, in wanton student-fashion, and the good-natured old don who was our tutor affected to be pleased with our work.
[34. Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel.] The Satyrs, represented as having human forms, with small goat’s horns and a small tail, had for their occupation to play on the flute for their master, Bacchus, or to pour his wine. The Fauns were sylvan deities, attendants of Pan, and are represented, like their master, with the ears, horns, and legs of a goat.
[37-49.] Nature herself sympathizes with men, and mourns thy loss.
[50. Nymphs:] deities of the forests and streams.
[52. on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie.] The shipwreck in which King was lost took place off the coast of Wales. Any one of the Welsh mountains will serve to make good this allusion.
[54. Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high.] Mona is the ancient and poetical name of the island of Anglesea.
[55. Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.] The Dee (Deva) below Chester expands into a broad estuary. In his lines spoken At a Vacation Exercise, Milton, characterizing many rivers, mentions the “ancient hallowed Dee.” The country about the Dee had been specially famous as the seat of the old Druidical religion. In the eleventh Song of his Polyolbion, Drayton eulogizes the medicinal virtues of the salt springs in the valley of the river Weever, which attract Thetis and the Nereids:—
And Amphitrite oft this Wizard River led
Into her secret walks (the depths profound and dread)
Of him (supposed so wise) the hid events to know
Of things that were to come, as things done long ago.
In which he had been proved most exquisite to be;
And bare his fame so far, that oft twixt him and Dee,
Much strife there hath arose in their prophetic skill.
[56-63.] Even the Muse Calliope could do nothing for her son Orpheus, whom the Thracian women tore to pieces under the excitement of their Bacchanalian orgies. The gory visage floated down the Hebrus and through the Ægean Sea to the island of Lesbos.
[64. what boots it:] of what use is it?
[64-66.] What good are we going to derive from this unremitting devotion to study?
[67-69.] Would it not be better to abandon ourselves to social enjoyment, and to lives of frivolous trifling? Amaryllis and Neæra are stock names of shepherdesses.
[70-72.] Understand clear, as applied to spirit, to mean “pure, guileless, unsophisticated.” Sir Henry Wotton, in his Panegyric to King Charles, says of King James I.,—“I will not deny his appetite of glory, which generous minds do ever latest part from.” Love of fame, according to the poet, is the motive that prompts the scholar to live as an ascetic and to persevere in toilsome labor. This love of fame is an infirmity, but not a debasing one: it leaves the mind noble. Remember, however, that the author of the Imitation of Christ prayed, Da mihi nesciri.
[75. the blind Fury with the abhorred shears.] Milton here seems to ascribe to the Furies (Erinyes) the function belonging to the Fates (Parcæ, Moiræ). The three Fates were Klotho, the Spinner; Lachĕsis, the Assigner of lots; and Atrŏpos, the Unchanging. It was the duty of Atropos to cut the thread of life at the appointed time.
A querulous thought comes to the poet’s mind. Our lives are obscure and laborious, sustained only by the hope of future fame; but before we attain our reward, comes death, and our ambition is brought to naught.
[76-77. But not the praise, Phœbus replied, and touched my trembling ears.] The Fury cannot destroy the praise, which necessarily belongs to doing well. Praise here means the essential praise, which naturally inheres in excellence, and not the being talked about by men.
The speaker is now Phœbus, the august god Apollo, the pure one, who protects law and order, and promotes whatever is good and beautiful; who reveals the will of Zeus, and presides over prophecy.
Phœbus has now an admonition to give and he touches the poet’s ears; as in Virgil, Eclogue IV 3,—Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, “The Cynthian twitched my ear and warned me.”
[79. in the glistering foil Set off.] See Shakespeare, Richard III. V 3 250,—“A base foul stone, made precious by the foil of England’s chair.”
[85-86. O fountain Arethuse, and thou honored flood, Smooth-sliding Mincius.] Arethusa was a fresh-water fountain at Syracuse in Sicily, and the Mincius is a river in north Italy, on which is situated Mantua, the birthplace of the poet Virgil. The great pastoral poet Theocritus is said to have been born at Syracuse. Thus Arethusa and the Mincius typify the pastoral tone in which Milton conceives and constructs his poem. But the intervention of the great god Apollo has frighted the bucolic muses, to whom therefore the poet explains it, line 87.
[88.] Now I am on good terms again with the deities of lower rank. Oat is a common designation of the shepherd’s pipe, or syrinx.
[89-90.] Neptune, through his herald, Triton, pleads his freedom from all complicity in the drowning of Lycidas. Triton sends to Æolus, god of the winds, requesting him to cross-question all his subjects as to what they were doing on the day of the wreck.
[95-99.] The winds prove their innocence, and Æŏlus himself comes to report to Triton that at the time of the disaster they were all at home and the air was perfectly calm. Even Panope and all her sisters were out playing on the tranquil water.
[96. sage Hippotădes.] Æolus was the son of Hippotes. See all about him in Odyssey, book X. Read also Ruskin, Queen of the Air, section 19.
[99. Panope] was a Nereid, one of the numerous daughters of Nereus.
[103.] Now comes another grand personage to make inquiry about the death of Lycidas. Camus, the deity of the river Cam, stands for the University of Cambridge.
[104. His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge.] The river god is represented as wearing a mantle made of water-grasses and reeds.
[105-106.] These lines refer to certain markings on the water-plants of the Cam, said to be correctly described here by the poet. The dimness of the figures may suggest the great age of the university, and the tokens of woe belong to the present occasion.
[106. that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.] This is the hyacinth, the flower that sprang up on the spot where the youth Hyacinthus had been accidentally slain by Apollo. The petals of the hyacinth are said to be marked with the Greek letters AI AI, which form an interjection expressing grief.
[107.] Lycidas was one of those collegians whose scholarship, character, and piety promise to make them the pride of their Alma Mater.
[109. The Pilot of the Galilean Lake.] See Matthew XIV.
[110. Two massy keys he bore of metals twain.] See Matthew XVI 19. See also [Comus 13] and Par. Lost III 485. The idea of two keys, one of gold and one of iron, is not in the Bible.
[112. He shook his mitred locks.] St. Peter wears the mitre as bishop.
[113-131.] St. Peter makes but little reference to Lycidas, and his words add almost nothing to the elegiac character of the poem. His speech is one of stern and bitter satire. The second period of Milton’s life, which is to be given up to intense and uncompromising partisanship in religion and politics, foreshadows itself in these lines.
[114. Enow] is here used in its proper plural sense. See [note on Comus 780].
[115. climb into the fold.] See John X 1. The metaphor of sheep and herdsmen is continued throughout the speech.
[119. Blind mouths!] As the relative pronoun beginning the next clause refers to this exclamation, mouths must be taken as a bold metaphor meaning men who are all mouth, or are supremely greedy and selfish. Moreover, they are blind.
[122. What recks it them?] See note on [Comus 404]. They are sped: they have succeeded in their purpose. See Antony and Cleopatra II 3 35. Note also the phrase of greeting, bid God speed, as in 2 John I 10, 11, King James version.
[123. their lean and flashy songs:] their sermons.
Evidently Milton can cull words of extreme disparagement and vilification as well as words of unapproachable poetic beauty.
[125-127.] The congregations are not edified. The miserable preaching they listen to fails to keep them sound in doctrine. They grow lax in their faith, and heretical opinions become fashionable.
[128. the grim wolf with privy paw] is undoubtedly the Roman church.
[130-131.] These lines evidently denounce some terrible retribution that is sure ere long to overtake the corrupt clergy described in the preceding passage. The two-handed engine at the door, that stands ready to smite once and smite no more, has never been definitely explained. We naturally think of the headsman’s axe, which, however, does not become applicable till the execution of Archbishop Laud, an event not to take place till eight years after the composition of the poem. It has been suggested that Milton had in mind the two houses of Parliament, or the Parliament and the Army, as the agency through which reform was to be effected. We must remember that Milton in 1637 could not foresee the Civil War. He may have meant to combine certain scriptural expressions into a mysteriously suggestive and oracular prediction, without having in view any single and definite possibility.
[132. Return, Alphēus.] The Alpheus was a river of the Peloponnesus, said to sink underground and to flow beneath the sea to Ortygia, near Syracuse, where it attempted to mingle its waters with those of the fountain Arethusa. See [note on lines 85, 86]. See also Shelley’s poem, Arethusa.
The pastoral tone of lightness and simplicity could not be maintained while St. Peter spoke. But now the Sicilian Muse returns, all the more lovely for the contrast with the stern malediction that has gone before.
[134-151.] Milton is fond of thus collecting names of persons, places, and things, choosing them as well for their effect on the ear as for their significance. The botany of this passage is of little consequence: it matters not whether all these flowers could, or could not, be collected at the same season, or whether they could be found at the time of the year when Lycidas died. The passage offers a picture of exquisite beauty to the eye, and to the ear a strain of perfect melody.
[136. where the mild whispers use.] The verb use, in this intransitive sense, with only adverbial complement, and meaning dwell, is now obsolete.
[138. the swart star:] the star that makes swart, or swarthy; i.e. the sun.
[139. enamelled eyes] are the flowers generally, which are to be specified. Scattered over the turf, the flowers seem to be looking upward, like eyes.
[142. rathe] is the adjective whose comparative is our rather.
[149. amaranthus], by its etymology, means unfading.
[150. Daffadil] is derived from asphodel, with a curious, and altogether unusual, prefixed d.
[153. dally with false surmise.] King’s body was not found. There was no actual strewing of the laureate hearse with flowers.
[156. the stormy Hebrides:] islands off the northwest coast of Scotland.
[160. Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old.] The fable of Bellerus is the fabled Bellerus, or Bellerus of the fable. He was a mythical giant of Cornwall in old British legend. Bellerium was the name given to Land’s End, where he was supposed to live.
[161. the great Vision of the guarded mount.] St. Michael’s Mount is a pyramidal rock in Mounts Bay on the coast of Cornwall. This was guarded by the angel, St. Michael, whose gaze was directed seaward, toward Namancos and Bayona, in northwestern Spain. In some unknown place between these widely sundered limits, the body of Lycidas is tossed.
[170. with new-spangled ore.] Ore, from its original meaning of metal in the natural state, comes to signify metallic lustre generally. See Comus [719], [933].
[173.] See Matthew XIV 25.
[175.] Compare [Comus 838].
[176. the unexpressive nuptial song.] See [Hymn on the Nativity 116]. See also Revelation XIX 7-9.
[181. And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.] See Revelation XXI 4.
[183. Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore.] This is the same promotion that was accorded to Melicertes, son of Ino, who on his death became the genius of the shore under the name of Palæmon.
[186. uncouth;] a self-depreciating expression meaning unknown or obscure.
[187.] Milton applies the epithet gray both to evening and to morning.
[188. various quills] are the tubes of the shepherd pipe.
[189. Doric] means simply pastoral, because the idylls of the first pastoral poets were written in the Doric dialect of Greek.
[190. had stretched out all the hills:] had caused the shadows of the hills to prolong themselves eastward on the plain.
The poet seems to feign that he spent a day in the composition of Lycidas.