Lycidas and Milton's Mind

LYCIDAS AND MILTON’S MIND

PROF. M. V. RAMA SARMA, M. A., Ph. D. (Wales)
Dean, Faculty of Arts. Professor of English,

S. V. University, Tirupati

The mood in which ‘Lycidas’ is written to a large extent determines the form and style of the poem. Only a month before writing LycidasMilton states in his letter to Charles Diodati,

“You ask what I am thinking of? So may the good Deity help me, of immortality! And what am I doing? Growing my wings and meditating flight; but as yet our pegasus raises himself very tender pinions. Let us be lowly wise!” (September 23, 1637). Unlike the challenging tone of Comus,

I will tell you now
What never yet was heard in tale or song
From old or modern bard in hall or bower

Milton adopts a halting, hesitating strain in the opening lines of Lycidas. Almost apologetically he pleads that he has come to pluck

Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

He is rather reluctant to write a poem at that stage of his preparation when he is still growing wings. The invitation from Cambridge Univerrsity comes to him when he is perhaps engaged in some other literary project, apparently the writing of an epic. He may not to disturb himself in his dedicated task of writing a great poem one day. Even the theme itself–of premature death, of shattering the leaves rudely and crudely before they are ripened–may not be much to his taste. Also the irksome feeling to write an elegy on someone with whom he did not have that much intimate acquaintance adds to his reluctant mood. But the elegy will have to be written, and conveniently the pastoral form used by Theocritus, Moscus, Bion, Virgil and Spenser will suit his purpose. It will have the academic distinction though it may not express passionate grief. Johnson’s irritation in this context is understandable.¹ But equally relevant for the reader is Milton’s frame of mind at that time.

Milton poses the question, ‘Who would not sing for Lycidas?’ and he answers that Lycidas himself knew how to ‘build the lofty rhyme’. That Edward King could have written some poems of promise and Milton would have read them, can safely be guessed. He projects the picture of a poet commemorating the death of a brother-poet and he also feels that in turn he too would be honoured by some gentle Muse when he is in the grave. This establishes the affinity between him and Edward King. It gives him the necessary moral force to write an elegy.

Now that he has owned Edward King as a brother-poet he tries to present a picture of their happy association at Cambridge. It is a moving picture of comradeship.

We were nursed upon the self-same hill,
Fed the same flock, by fountain; shade and rill.

They studied at the same college, Christ’s and together they moved about on the lawns. From morning till evening they pleased themselves with busy, idle sports. Together they participated in rural mirth and rustic gaiety. This descriptive account is an indication of personal grief normally bodied forth in an elegy.

Milton builds up the image of grief through the association of nature with Lycidas. The woods and the desert caves, the willows and the hazel copses–all mourn the loss of Lycidas. In a more emphatic and poignant strain Milton sums up:

As killing as the canker to the rose,
Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrope wear
When first the white-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherds’ ear.

The three images of blight and withering away, of premature death and untimely extinction bring to our mind the terrific of Edward King’s death to the poet. The canker, the taint-worm and the frost are inimical to the rose, the weanling herds and flowers. So stunning is the loss of Edward King to the Milton seems to be identifying himself with Edward King. He is involved, deeply involved in the human predicament of a promising scholar meeting with an untimely end. Even though Milton starts almost reluctantly he gets into a personal equation with Edward King. He sees him as the budding poet who could haveblossomed into dazzling brilliance if the blind Fury had not slit the thin-spun life. Aptly he compares the fate of Lycidas with that of Orpheus. What could ‘The Muse herself that Orpheus bore’ do when Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Thracian women and thrown into the swift Hebrus? If the Muse could not protect her enchanting son how could the Nymphs save Lycidas?

The image of Edward King as a poet still works on Milton’s mind. It brings him to introspective reflection. For Milton as for Sidney the poet’s profession is the noblest one.² Milton feels that the poet should lead an exemplary life, dedicated to the Muse. From the plane of idealistic speculation he swiftly glances at the contemporary scene of amorous writing in verse. This is often considered to be a digression. But the process of thinking of Milton viewing Edward King as a poet, of idealising the poet’s role, naturally leads him on to an assessment of his own position and that of king as poet-priest. A poet who scorns delights, lives laborious days and expects reward, may often like Edward King get only cruel death. Perhaps it is unwise to meditate ‘the thankless Muse’, poetry, that does not bring any reward at all. But the poet-priest in him reasserts. Triumphantly he pleads that fame is immortal, it does not depend on worldly praise. The all-seeing God should judge the work of a poet. The momentary gloom is dispelled. Typically of Milton, the interrogation ends with reconciliation. Edward King, the poet-priest, if only he lived, he would have been an illustrious poet.

This is the first section of the poem wherein Milton after having started with hesitancy and reluctance thoroughly establishes an identity and personal friendship with Edward King, and views him as a poet-priest, who could have been a poet of high seriousness and lofty thinking as he himself is. There is a world of difference the idealism of King and the ephemeral values of the poets of his day.

One may venture to think that the next phase of his writing is taken up after a break. He has to invoke the aid of the Greek and Latin verse and get sustenance from the fountain Arethuse or from smooth-sliding Mincius. The pastoral strain is renewed. The investigation is conducted. But the winds and the waves plead innocence. So it is “the perfidious bark/Built in the eclipse and rigg’d with curses dark” that must have been responsible for the foul play. This poetic description based on Elizabethan beliefs may have sounded perfectly cogent to a seventeenth century reader even though the fact is otherwise. There was a tempestuous gale, the ship struck itself against a rock. ³ Others escaped but King was seen to be kneeling on the deck and praying while the ship was sinking. Perhaps he did not get the details of King’s death, or even if he did, he may have felt the inevitability of death. Like the star crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, King had to die, the way he died, for the ship was unseaworthy as it was built in the eclipse. The eclipses had a terrific impact on the age. Milton exploits the popular sentiments of the day as he does in Camusby introducing Sabrina standing for the river Severn full of popular appeal.

The poem now tends to be literary. It follows the pastoral tradition very closely. The procession of mourners is introduced. It is quite apt and fitting that Camus should come first in the procession. Cambridge University is represented. Milton’s mind now works on another phase of King’s life. King was to be ordained, as Milton himself should have been, according to his father’s plans. The head of the Church, Saint Peter, is rightly brought in as the last person in the procession. Saint Peter feels shocked that one who is good should die and others who are unworthy of being clergymen should live. Milton presents King as a model clergyman and in contrast with the wrong clergymen of his day he can see how useful he would have been to the church. The rottenness in the clergymen of the day is exposed with ruthlessness. They are ‘the blind mouths’ not knowing the simple tasks assigned to them. They enter the fold wrongly; “they creep and intrude and climb into the fold”. They spread foul contagion. In name of religion excesses are committed, but this state cannot go on indefinitely. The higher justice will prevail. The anamolous position of the good being lost and the evil surviving will be checked. Where Milton feels strongly he expresses forcibly. This is a thorough-going denunciation of the church.

Conventionally speaking this is the second digression in the poem. Most critics feel unhappy about this onslaught levelled against the church. Their contention is that an attack of this type has no place in an elegy however deserved the attack may be. For one thing Milton attacks only the wrong type of clergymen, not the whole organization as such. No one can deny the truthfulness of the picture he presents. The technique he adopts is the same in the two digressions–of glorifying King and disglorifying the poets and clergymen of his day. He now pursues the image of a shepherd who takes care of his flock, of a clergyman who offers spiritual sustenance to his fold. God himself is the shepherd, the all mighty creator loving human beings. In fact Milton is objectively and impartially viewing the picture. With the poet-priest he has achieved some kind of personal involvement. But with the picture of the shepherd he lacks that identification. One can therefore visualise the stormy protest and righteous indignation as a dramatic situation mostly solidifying in Saint Peter’s observations on the church. There is objective thinking on the part of Milton. The cogency of his reasoning lies in showing how as a shepherd Edward King would have done his duty properly unlike the shepherds of his day who are thoroughly ignorant of their duties and responsibilities. One can therefore see the reasonableness of this picture where Edward King emerges as a shepherd, exemplary in his behaviour. The passage is a part and parcel of the structural design of Lycidas, it is a thoroughly integrated piece, it is no digression at all.

From the image of the poet-priest Milton’s mind moves on to the image of the shepherd. Edward King is the poet-priest-shepherd. One can imagine a break again in the composition of Lycidas. The third phase starts with an apostrophe to Greek and Latin pastoral verse. The famous flower passage is artistically rendered. It serves as a bridge that links the two extremes of inconsolable grief and happy reconciliation. The only other flower passage of unique grandeur is the one we get in Winter’s Tale. It is suggested that the latter is far superior to that of Milton for the reason that the flowers distributed by Perdita on the sheep shearing occasion are symbolically suggestive of the youth, middle age and old age of the recipients. The flower passage Lycidas is taken to be mostly a conglomeration of all flowers with no definite connotation. It is difficult to accept this view. The rathe primrose, the pale jessamine, the white pink, ‘the cowslips wan that hang the pensive head/And every flower that sad embroidery wears’–all these are suggestive of sadness and death. The ‘amaranthus’ and the ‘daffadillies’ express their grief. The total impression of the passage is one of grief and the manner in which nature mourns the loss of one who is dearly loved. Milton’s mind runs on from flower to flower until at last he realizes that it is ridiculous to speak of ‘the laureate hearse’ for Lycidas, who is drowned in the sea. He gives a twist to this awkward feeling by adding:

For so to interpose a little ease
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise,

thereby justifying the idea of offering a garland of flowers to the corpse.

Just possible that his corpse may have floated beyond the stormy Hebrides, or it may have gone to the cornish coast towards the mount of Saint Michael. Milton refers to the two towns Namancos and Bayona on the Spanish coast, and he may have seen them in Mercator’s Atlas just published at that time with a fortress and castle indicating their significance. ⁴ It is characteristic of Milton’s love of his country that he should refer to Saint Michael, and the great vision. And he wants Saint Michael to look homeward and not towards the Spanish court for something tragic has occurred in his own country.

The poem ends on a note of regeneration. Lycidas is not dead though he is drowned. Milton exercises his creative and poetic imagination by taking the analogy of the sun going down the sea in the evening and coming up in the morning. Similarly Lycidas will be regenerated. He is one with the blessed. He is with the saints above. He is the genius of the shore. He will be the guardian angel of the sea protecting all others from harm. This lurid picture of spiritual resurrection especially after the spasmodic utterances of gloom, despondency and doleful strife comes as a relief. The Christian concept of man’s spiritual regeneration is artistically dovetailed with the pagan element. Milton’s great belief in the possibility of man becoming divine expresses itself through the pastoral tradition of reconciliation.

Milton closes the poem with the sun setting and the shepherd twitching his mantle blue so that he may go “tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” The oft quoted line is interpreted as a suggestion of Milton’s going abroad. It may also mean that he is moving to the Inns of court in London as he states in his letter to Charles Diodati in September, 1637. Or it may even be suggested that the shepherd no longer can stay in these familiar surroundings for they sadly remind him of his dear, departed friend. So he has to move to other pastures now.

Lysidashas a unique grandeur. It is artistically designed with the three clear streams of thought–identification, dissociation and reconciliation–working in Milton’s mind. Milton succeeds in establishing a rapport with Edward King in the first section of the poem. He is so deeply involved in King as poet-priest that the grief tends to be almost personal. Only when he moves to the second part of the poem he is more detached. The poem takes a new turn as it comes to the close. This is made possible by the introduction of the flower passage which, in addition to being decorative, tones down the feeling of bitterness and wretchedness engendered in the opening part of the poem. It becomes easier for the poet to express reconciliation with death, for it only recreates and regenerates a new life and a new faith. The earthly suffering is transmuted into something spiritual and sublime. Death of this type only ennobles a person and becomes an agent of resurrection. The elevation of man from a purely earthly existence to a diviner element is of peculiar interest to Milton and this transcendence is hinted at in almost all his poems.

The view that Lycidas lacks personal grief is therefore untenable.⁵ It does express grief of an intensive type. It may not have been spread throughout the poem, but definitely in the first section one realises the poignancy of the situation. Milton the humanist is not just content with the expression of personal grief. So he makes the grief universal.⁶ The elegy is not merely for Edward King but for all unfortunate young men who may die prematurely before they realise their ambitions. Comus soars beyond the occasion even though it was primarily written for an occasion. Similarly Lycidas transcends the limitations of an elegy expressing personal grief. It universalises grief. Viewed as a pastoral elegy it is in close conformity with the tradition. The image of a shepherd mourning the loss of another shepherd, the procession of mourners nature as the chief mourner and ultimately the happy feeling that the person is not dead–all these make Lycidas a typical pastoral elegy. But it is more than that. It presents Milton’s concept of a priest-shepherd and the transfiguration of man’s earthly life into a spiritual one.

¹ Jhonson in the Life of Milton states that the grief expressed in Lycidus“is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myystle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” This is not quite true. In the first section Milton definitely establishes an identification with Edward King as a poet-priest. And as Prof. Daiches suggests in Milton, the theme of Lycidas“is the fate of the poet-priest in all his aspects, both as individual and as social figure.”
² Milton in his Apology for Smectymnus says “And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he has in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.” One can understand the vigour with which Milton pleads for the poet’s exalted mission. The poet, according to him, is a seer blessed with prophetic vision.
³ In the Cambridge collection Henry King, Edward King’s brother, refers to the vessel having struck against a rock during a gale:

He, the fairest arm,
Is torn away by an unlucky storm.
Nowhere is it mentioned that the ship is unseaworthy.
⁴ The 1636 edition of Mercator’s Atlas was the first to be printed in England. Important places were marked not merely by name, but also by some illustration of a castle or a fortress. In the 1636 edition Namancos is signified by a fortress and Bayona is represented by a castle. It is reasonable to suppose that Milton writing Lycidasin 1637 would have noticed these two places on the northern coast of Spain.
⁵ Dr. Tillyard (in his book Milton) goes to the extreme of maintaining that “fundamentally Lycidasconcerns Milton himself; King is but the excuse for one of Milton’s personal poems.” He suggests that Milton must be thinking of his own projected Italian tour with misgivings, lest premature death should come to him also while going on the sea. This seems to be far fetched for there is no indication, at that time, of Milton going abroad and his letter to Charles Diodati in September 1637 does not make reference to this. So we cannot possibly think that Milton would be obsessed with the thought of premature death.
⁶ As Prof. Hanford says, that grief expressed in Lycidas“is not of the kind that cries aloud; it soothes and rests us like calm music.” (From ‘The Pastoral Elegy and Milton’s Lycidas’ –Publications of the Modern Languages Association XXV, 1910.)