Direct expression of sorrow distinguishes King's elegy at its finest, for even though he is writing during the period in which attitudes towards mourning are becoming more sympathetic and anxieties about grieving verse are diminishing, hyperbolic display is still the rule. It is much easier to find passages which attack artificial grief than ones which satisfy the ideal the attacks demand. King can meditate on his grief, look squarely at his loss, and describe his feelings without letting notions of what he should be feeling block them and without sacrificing metaphorical and logical complexity. Milton's elegy is not distinguished by direct expression of sorrow, although a passage in ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ and some of ‘Lycidas’ are as simple and direct as most elegy other than King's. What distinguishes Milton's elegy, especially ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Epitaphium Damonis’, is the lack of anxiety with which Milton protests against death and bereavement, the freedom with which he indulges the angry outbursts of grief. For with one early exception the Christian visions of heaven which conclude several of his elegies do not lead to a rejection of the sorrow and angry protest which precede them. A brief examination of the way in which Milton handles these visions in particular, and consolation in general, reveals his customary sympathy for mourning and is a good approach to the vexed question of the unity of ‘Lycidas’.