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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
Despite its sovereign status among English elegies and within English poetry in general, two strictures upon Lycidas continue in some degree to shadow the poem: the one would hold with Dr. Johnson that its pastoral apparatus is a flaw in terms both of art and of personal expression; the other would agree with G. Wilson Knight that the work lacks order or unity. Both strictures have become increasingly untenable in the light of one type of study which has helped to make reavailable the form and power of the pastoral elegy in itself, and of another type which has marked the structural and affective unity of Milton's poem. Yet some readers still may feel that Milton sets cool pastoral against impassioned personal outcry, and will consider the two modes of expression to be in direct conflict. Milton editors and critics therefore will continue to face the question of unity in Lycidas. Recently Douglas Bush and Merritt Y. Hughes, for example, delivered defenses of the poem in the course of registering adverse charges made against it.
1 The Burning Oracle (London, New York, and Toronto, 1939), p. 70.
2 Notably James Holly Hanford, “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas,” PMLA, xxv (1910), 403-447, and A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Milton's Pastoral Monodies,” in Studies in Honour of Gilbert Norwood, ed. Mary E. White (Toronto, 1952), pp. 261-278. These general studies have been supplemented with others that consider particular pastoral elements, such as that of the Orpheus legend in pastoral by Caroline W. Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,” PMLA, lxiv (1949), 189-207, and that of the tradition of consolatio by Don Cameron Allen, The Harmonious Vision (Baltimore, 1954), pp. 43-58. An extensive appreciation of Milton's use of pastoral appears in Rosemond Tuve, Images & Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 76-111.
3 The classic statement is that of Arthur Barker within his study “The Pattern of Milton's Nativity Ode,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, x (1940-41), 167-181. See also Woodhouse, “Monodies,” pp. 273-277; Allen, Vision, pp. 63-70; and J. Milton French, “The Digressions in Milton's ‘Lycidas’,” SP, l (1953), 485-490.
4 See Wayne Shumaker, “Flowerets and Sounding Seas: A Study of the Affective Structure of Lycidas,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 485-494; John Edward Hardy, “Reconsiderations: I. Lycidas,” Kenyon Review, vii (1945), 99-113; and Richard P. Adams, “The Archetypal Pattern of Death and Rebirth in Milton's Lycidas,” PMLA, lxiv (1949), 183-188.
5 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1957—copyright 1932), pp. 263-264; Merritt Y. Hughes, in his edition of Milton's Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 1957), p. 116. (The quotations from Milton which appear in the present study are taken from the Hughes edition.)
6 Masson's comments upon this point are suggestive: he held that Lycidas is a “lyric of lamentation, rendered more shadowy and impersonal by being distanced into the form of a narrative and descriptive phantasy” (The Life of John Milton, Cambridge, 1895, i, 611). He missed, however, the powerful immediacy of the so-called digressions and of the conclusion.
7 “It is the pastoral tradition that allows Lycidas to be a lament for the death of Poetry”: Tuve, Images & Themes, p. 93. One should probably add that the cause for lament runs exactly counter to the poetry which expresses the lament; that is, fear of the death of poetry is discovered in the nonpastoral sections of Lycidas rather than in the ideally poetic pastoral areas. Only the impotence of pastoral—not pastoral itself—makes company with the fear that poetry, like the poet, will die.
8 Allen, Vision, pp. 4-19, terms the poet in the twin poems “as lonely as God,” sharing His “stasis”; he finds the slumber invoked to be a “poetic sleep filled with ‘strange, mysterious dreams’ ”; and he describes the active movement into music at the close of “Il Penseroso” as a marriage of verse and music in which “common experience fades away but the music continues.” Something of the same use of music appears in Lycidas, but, until the very end, only in the pastoral sections: the Muses “sweep the string,” an “Oaten Flute” was used lovingly by both Lycidas and the speaker, and the Heaven eventually perceived resounds to the “unexpressive nuptial Song.” Elsewhere, discordant experience and wretched worldly pipings mar the pastoral harmonies, for in this poem the speaker is heavily involved with reality direct.
9 Continually drawn to the Orpheus myth, Milton in Lycidas looks to the brutal death of Orpheus; his awareness that the melodious singer who controverts reality later must become its victim is another measure of the pressure of actuality in the poem. However, Orpheus later should be recalled in the resurrection assigned to Lycidas, for Orpheus also mystically triumphed over water. The Orpheus myth lies close to the heart of the dialectic in Lycidas. See further Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image,” and Allen, Vision, pp. 62-63. Allen notes analogies which permit the association of King and Milton not only with Orpheus but with Christ.
10 Mayerson, “The Orpheus Image,” p. 204: “The pastoral landscape represents the serene world of the poet's desire; the turbulent ocean is a symbol of the disorder which circumstance and self-analysis have revealed.”
11 These oppositions are total, in one sense, as the poem opens. The poet is a voice for dispassionate melody, but is also a man personally involved in loss, if only by projection to his own death. But the very telescoping of these oppositions into grammatically interdependent terms forecasts the unity which will be wrought from seemingly discrete attitudes, much as the metaphysical conceit could yoke seeming opposites; much as “two eyes make one in sight.”
12 The speaker, too, is for the moment despairingly drawn toward the world's satisfaction with fleshpots or with amatory verse. If the conditions of existence truly destroy the poet through either death or inattention, poetic surrender or suicide seems inevitable.
13 The reconciliation implied by Phoebus and by his counsel is made doubly strong if, as Michael Lloyd asserts in “The Fatal Bark,” MLN, lxxv (1960), 103-109, Phoebus is to be firmly associated with the “day-star” of the conclusion and with Christ. Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy, however, hold the answer of Phoebus to be of little comfort (Poems of Mr. John Milton, London, 1957, p. 179, no. 5).
14 Michael Lloyd, “The Fatal Bark,” pp. 103-105, identifies the “bark” with man born in sin: “The curses with which it is rigged are those which Adam brought on man, among them subjection to death.” The analogy, if perhaps fanciful, nevertheless offers reinforcement to the sense that actuality is guilty, if considered only within its own terms.
15 Ralph E. Hone, “ ‘The Pilot of the Galilean Lake’,” SP, lvi (1959), 55-61, argues that Christ, not St. Peter, is alluded to as the Judge in this section. However, his position should be weighed with studies which develop the conventional interpretation, such as those of John M. Steadman, “St. Peter and Ecclesiastical Satire: Milton, Dante, and ‘La rappresentazione del dì del giudizio’,” N&Q, v, n. s. (1958), 141-142, and Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, “Milton and the Protestant Aesthetic: the Early Poems,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, xvii (1947), 359.
16 D. C. Allen, “Milton's Alpheus,” MLN, lxxi (1956), 172-173, cites the figurative meaning assigned to Alpheus and Arethusa by Bishop Fulgentius, adding that the allusion at this point in the poem might “remind the good priest of the virtues of the river and the fount, and also . . . suggest to them that they, too, could flow through an ocean of evil and corruption without being tainted.”
17 “False surmise” is lodged in a thoroughly ambiguous position in the poem, from which multiple references are possible, even necessary: that the flower section offers false comfort, that a “Laureate Hearse” for the corpse can never be hoped for, that the speculations about King's physical whereabouts are not aware of their own connotations (which will lead toward the resurrection statement), and that the lament is unjustified—for the poem will swing almost immediately to “Weep no more, woeful Shepherds.” Perhaps we can best say that all the partial attitudes, still awaiting the triumphant reconciliation, are involved in “false surmise.”
18 The poem may also justify the argument that another water-image has throughout held the terms of reconciliation. The Olympian or Parnassian “sacred well. . . beneath the seat of Jove” transcends both actuality and pastoral, for Jove is potentially a synonym for God—who guarantees right judgment upon the poet's life and poetry. In terms of Christian poetry, Jove-Jehovah produces, justifies, and rewards. To a lesser extent, Phoebus also guarantees poetry by Christianizing its conditions and rewards. The both Grecian and more than Grecian “sacred well” reflects in brief measure much of the argument of the poem: the union of Christianity with pastoral, the transformation of physical reality through the lens of divinity, and the eternal reconciliation offered by the resurrection theme.
19 Michael Lloyd, “The Fatal Bark,” 104-105, holds instead that St. Michael's Mount is also Paradise, and that the good man, redeemed by grace through Christ, looks homeward to either Eden or Heaven. I am more inclined to take “Genius of the shore” in its traditional reading, but to recognize the analogue with Christ who, through death, offers salvation. Lycidas at least offers the lesser “salvation” of the works (including Christian song) that he performed in life, and of the exemplary image of his own resurrection.
20 I am indebted to Professor Alfred H. Marks for the suggestion that “Pastures new” may indicate both new pastoral and a newly-accepted Christian pastorate, thereby confirming again the synthesis which has been achieved. I am not persuaded that the final lines forecast a leavetaking of minor poetic forms and of pastoral. Rather, they seem to me to indicate continuing future use and expansion of traditional poetic forms with Christian materials.
