In thee all flowers and roses spring,
Mine only died,
comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt to spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes—extravagant eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissance strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the more simply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision of a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such as Lycidas, the poet was able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into a sequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton's thought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Milton extracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death the only touch of pathos in the poem:
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
and some of his loveliest allusions:
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.