“Lycidas” Introduction

• "Lycidas" is John Milton's great elegy for his friend Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge who drowned in 1637. The poem was Milton's contribution to the 1638 memorial anthology that King's friends put together, Justa Edouardo King naufrago; Milton would reprint the poem in his later collection Poems by Mr. John Milton (1645). Drawing on the tradition of pastoral elegy—that is, poems of mourning set in an idealized countryside—Milton takes on the role of an "uncouth swain," a rustic shepherd lamenting his drowned friend Lycidas. But this alter ego's concerns range far beyond a lament for one man. "Lycidas" explores not just grief but also the nature of death, the corruption of the 17th-century Christian church, the desire for poetic fame, and the hope of immortality.

• Read the full text of “Lycidas”

“Lycidas” Summary

• Once again, you laurel trees, you brown myrtles, and you never-withered ivy, I have come to clumsily pick your berries and leaves before they're ripe. A terrible tragedy forces me to harvest you out of season. For Lycidas has died before he was ripe: the young, lovely Lycidas, who has no equal in the world. Who wouldn't sing for Lycidas? He was himself a singer, an expert in the art of poetry. He can't go to his watery grave unmourned, and his body should not be tossed around by the cruel winds; he must be honored with sweet poetic laments.

  So begin your song, you Muses, guardians of the river that flows from Mount Helicon, the throne of Jupiter. Begin your song, and strike the harp firmly. Away with my evasions and excuses! I certainly hope that some kindly poet will likewise one day honor my death. As he passes by, let him turn and wish peace upon my dark shroud.

  Lycidas and I were raised on the very same hill. We cared for the same flock of sheep and wandered by springs and shades and streams together. Even before sunrise broke over the high fields, we walked out together and together heard the first whine of the flies. Together we fed our flocks when the fresh dew came out, and stayed in the fields until the evening star crossed the heavens. Meanwhile, the songs of the countryside weren't silent. To the sound of shepherds' pipes made from reeds, the rowdy satyrs and the goat-footed fauns danced almost ceaselessly, and our old tutor Damaetas loved to hear us play.

  But oh, how different things are now that you're gone—now that you're gone, never to return! You, shepherd, are mourned by the woods and by the deserted caves overgrown with wild thyme and wandering vines, and by all their echoing sounds. The willows and the clusters of green hazel trees will now no longer wave their happy leaves to the sound of your gentle songs. As deadly as the rot is to a rose, as parasites are to the young calves, as frost on flowers dressed in their bright new petals in May when the hawthorn is blooming: just as destructive, Lycidas, is your death to the listening shepherds.

  Where were you, sea nymphs, when the merciless ocean swallowed your beloved Lycidas up? You weren't frolicking on the mountains where those ancient singers the Druids lie buried. Nor were you on the wild summit of the island of Mona, nor near the enchanted banks of the river Dee. But alas! It's only in my foolish dreams that it would have made a difference. For if you had been there, what good could you have done? Even the muse Calliope herself, the mother of Orpheus, could do nothing about her son's death—her son whom all of nature mourned when the horrible crowd of shouting women threw his bloody severed head into the river Hebrus, leaving it to float to the shores of Lesbos.

  Alas! What's the point of going on being a humble shepherd, endlessly courting an ungrateful Muse? Wouldn't it make more sense to do what other people do and chase after beautiful ladies like Amaryllis and Neaera? It's the thought of fame (the disease of otherwise grand minds) that spurs people to turn away from pleasure and toward work. But when we pursue the rewards of fame—when we think we're just about to blaze out in glory—then the spirit of death comes with her terrible scissors and cuts the fragile thread of life. "But she doesn't destroy the praise," the god Phoebus answered me, reaching out to grab me by my shaking ear. "Fame doesn't only grow during people's lives, and it isn't only like the sparkling gold foil that makes a jewel gleam brighter, and it isn't only to do with what people say about you. Fame is preserved in the wise, just eyes of Jupiter, the king of the gods. Since Jupiter has the final word on everything, we can expect the rewards of fame to come from his judgment in heaven."

  Oh, river Arethuse and noble, sweetly flowing river Mincius, whose banks grow musical reeds: Phoebus's speech was in a higher style than the one I've chosen here. I return now to my simple shepherd's piping and listen to the voice of Triton, Neptune's messenger, who has come to argue in the sea-god's defense. Triton asked the waves and the wild winds, "What terrible accident doomed that noble young rustic?"; he questioned every wing-like blast of wind that soars down from the beaky tops of mountains. They couldn't answer him. It was wise Hippotades, the god of the winds, who at last told him that he had released not one single breeze from the cavern where he keeps them. On the day of Lycidas's shipwreck, the air was still, and on the calm surface of the ocean, the sea nymph Panope played with all her sisters. It was the doomed and treacherous ship, built during an eclipse, its sails rigged with black curses, that sunk the man you loved and honored so.

  Next, the venerable old river Cam came slowly walking along, wearing his hairy jacket and his hat of weeds, his clothing woven with murky figures and hemmed with hyacinths (the sad flower grown from the blood of the god Apollo's lover). "Ah! Who has ripped away," he said, "my most beloved young acolyte?"

  Last to arrive and last to depart was St. Peter. He carried two huge keys made of different metals: the gold key opens the door to heaven and the iron key locks it. He shook his hair beneath his bishop's hat and sternly said: "In exchange for you, young Lycidas, I could easily have given up plenty of false priests who only take up the job to fill their own bellies. All they care about is stuffing their faces at the shepherds' feasts, pushing away worthier guests at the table. Those blindly greedy men! They scarcely know how to hold a bishop's crook—they haven't learned one thing about the behavior of a faithful shepherd. What does it matter to them? They get away with it all. When they play scratchy, wretched little tunes on their scrawny pipes, their hungry flock looks up to them, but doesn't get fed. Instead, they catch dreadful diseases that bloat them and rot them and spread to other sheep. That's bad enough, but the wolfish Catholic Church devours even more souls under their watch and gets away with it. But at the door stands Christ, waiting to judge, ready to strike a death blow to such false shepherds."

  Come back, oh verse inspired by the river Alpheus: the fearsome voice that frightened your streams away has gone now. Come back, Sicilian muse of pastoral Italian poetry, and call up the valleys and tell them to strew the ground with flowers of a thousand different colors. You deep valleys, where shadows and wandering winds and flowing streams whisper softly—at whose green lap the dark star of midsummer only peeks—open up the ornate eyes of your flowers, which grow in the green grass and drink up sweet rain, and make all the ground purple with spring petals. Call up the budding primrose that dies abandoned; the hyacinth; the pale jasmine; white carnations, and the pansy patterned with black; the glowing violet; the musk-rose, and the beautifully dressed woodbine; the cowslips, which seem to hang their heads thoughtfully—call up every flower that speaks of sadness. Tell the amaranth (the flower of immortality) to throw off its beauty, and daffodils to brim with tears, so that we can decorate the poet's hearse where Lycidas's body rests. For, in order to give ourselves a little comfort, we must pretend that we have his body here even though it's lost. Alas, Lycidas! While the seashore and the booming waves wash you away, wherever your bones may have been thrown—whether they've ended up far out past the Hebrides, where you might, beneath the conquering waters, see the terrifying utmost bottom of the world—or whether you, denied to our tear-stained sight, are somewhere out beyond Land's End, where the giant Bellerus was said to live, where the Archangel Michael guards the coast of England from Spanish threat—look back toward England now, guardian angel, and dissolve into merciful tenderness. And you dolphins, carry the luckless young man on your backs.

  Don't cry, you sad shepherds. For Lycidas, the man you mourn, isn't dead, although he has sunk beneath the ocean. But the sun sinks into the ocean too, and yet he soon lifts his head again, puts on his beams, and in freshly glimmering gold burns brightly on the brow of the morning. In just this way, Lycidas sunk into the waves, but rose up again through the precious power of Jesus, who walked on water. Now, among other forests and other streams, Lycidas washes his waterlogged hair in nectar and hears the indescribable wedding song of the blessed kingdom of heaven. There, all the saints host him, in grand crowds and sweet gatherings that sing together in glory—and wipe away his tears of sorrow forever. Now, Lycidas, the shepherds no longer weep: from now on, you will be the guardian spirit of the shore, in grand compensation for your loss, and you will look after everyone who roams the dangerous sea.

  The rustic shepherd sang these words to the oak trees and the rivers while the early morning walked out in its pale grey sandals. He gently played his reed pipes, singing his pastoral song as if touched with lively inspiration. Now the sun had risen and revealed all the hills—and now it had finished its journey overhead and set in the ocean to the west. At last, the shepherd stood, and pulled his blue cloak around him, ready to set out tomorrow for new woods and new fields.

“Lycidas” Themes

• 

  The Mystery and Power of Death

  "Lycidas" is John Milton's famous lament for his friend Edward King, a fellow student at Cambridge who drowned in a shipwreck in 1637. In this pastoral elegy—a poem of mourning set in an idealized countryside—the speaker (a voice for Milton) laments his young friend Lycidas (a version of King), likewise dead too soon. Overwhelmed with grief, the speaker finds himself searching for answers: he can't fathom why a tragedy like this should have struck such a promising young man. No answers are forthcoming, however. Death, he's forced to conclude, is a mystery one has no choice but to accept.

  While honoring poor Lycidas's excellent qualities as a poet, a priest-in-training, and a friend, the speaker also looks around at his pastoral world (populated by spirits and gods) to ask: why did this happen, and why did no one stop it? He accuses the "Nymphs" (sea spirits) of dereliction of duty for their failure to pluck Lycidas from the waves; he quizzes Triton (right-hand man of the sea god Neptune) about whether his master had stirred up any storms that fateful day; he grills the winds to see if they might have had any hand in the shipwreck.

  But he's forced to conclude that Lycidas's death wasn't the fault of any of these forces. "Ay me!" he cries: it's only a "fond[]" (or foolish) dream that anyone's behavior could have saved Lycidas. For if the world teaches him nothing else, it's that death comes when it's going to come. Even the muse Calliope (a powerful goddess, patron spirit of epic poetry) couldn't save her son Orpheus from being murdered, the speaker reflects; if an immortal couldn't do it, then how could any lesser power? The example of nature also demonstrates that young and beautiful things aren't immune to death, even if it feels like they should be: roses are consumed by "canker[s]" (or rotting diseases), young calves are shriveled by "taint-worm" (intestinal parasites).

  Lycidas's ship, he ultimately reasons, was simply "fatal," or doomed—an image that might also symbolically suggest that Lycidas's mortal body, carrying him over the seas of life, was always going to be wrecked. The poem thus presents death as a mystery outside human control or comprehension, determined by unseen forces. And while grief makes the speaker long for answers, the only conclusion he can reach is that there is no real answer. Death—especially accidental, tragic, premature death—seems cruel and arbitrary to mortals, but there's nothing to do but accept it.

  Curiously, such an acceptance at last brings the speaker to a kind of peace—a resolution to move on "tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new," to keep on going in spite of the awful mystery of mortality.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.
• 

  Immortality and Resurrection

  While the young shepherd Lycidas's untimely death is a mystery and a torment to the poem's speaker, it's also an occasion for a new kind of hope. Breaking outside the pagan world of classical pastoral poetry, Milton infuses this elegy with a Christian vision of a glorious afterlife. Lycidas might have drowned before his time, the speaker says, but his reward will come in heaven—and, eventually, in resurrection and eternal life.

  Lycidas's death, the speaker says, isn't a real ending. Rather, it's like the setting of the sun. Just as the "day-star" descends into its "ocean bed," only to raise its "drooping head" again in the morning, Lycidas has drowned only to rise again one day. The "dear might of him that walk'd the waves"—in other words, the power of Christ, who was said to walk on water—will resurrect Lycidas (and everyone else) on Judgment Day at the end of the world.

  What's more, Lycidas lives even now. The speaker pictures Lycidas in heaven among "all the Saints above," joining in the "unexpressive nuptial song" (that is, the joyous wedding song of souls metaphorically married to Christ, "unexpressive" because there's no way to convey its beauty in words). In paradise, Lycidas even still seems to have a body, with "oozy locks" (or muddy hair) to wash clean in heaven's "nectar" and eyes from which the saints can tenderly wipe away tears. This image of heaven as a tangible, physical place also hints at Christian ideas of resurrection, in which bodies are just as much a part of eternal life as souls.

  The whole shape of the speaker's religious faith, in other words, tells him that Lycidas isn't truly dead and gone. Still living on in heaven, he can be the benevolent "Genius of the shore," a protective spirit watching over those who (as he did) travel by sea—until, one day, he and everyone else will rise again. These ideas offer the speaker deep consolation and hope. Death might seem arbitrary and frightening, but a faith in immortality allows the speaker to believe that it might be part of a great and beautiful divine plan.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.
• 

  The Corruption of the Church

  Midway through "Lycidas," a surprising mourner visits the poem's pastoral world: St. Peter, the apostle to whom Christ is said to have entrusted the Church. St. Peter doesn't just mourn the lovely young Lycidas (a pseudonym for Milton's friend Edward King) because he died too soon, but also because he was in training to be a priest—and a good priest, too. Such priests, St. Peter darkly declares, are in limited supply: the Anglican clergy is riddled with corruption and falsity. "Lycidas" thus becomes not just a celebration of King's virtues but also a condemnation of priestly greed, ignorance, and fraudulence in the 17th-century Church of England.

  More often than not, the enraged St. Peter says, the bishops of the Anglican church are nothing but false shepherds—supposed caretakers who are in fact just greedy "blind mouths," more concerned with filling their "bellies" than with protecting and guiding their sheep. (He draws, here, on the traditional metaphor of priest as shepherd and congregation as flock—a metaphor from which we get the word "pastor," meaning "shepherd.") This critique expresses Milton's own rage and horror at corruption in the Church of England, an institution that he felt was straying far away from the Protestant Christianity it claimed to uphold.

  Worse even than priestly self-interest, St. Peter rages on, is priestly falsity. A bad priest is as misleading as he's selfish. His "flashy songs," his teachings, only pepper his listeners with falsehoods that "rot [them] inwardly"—and then spread like a "foul contagion." In other words, rather than offering nourishment or wisdom, these men's false preachings work like deadly diseases, spreading far and wide and eating away at the souls they touch.

  Again, St. Peter is very much in line with Milton here. Milton was a staunch Puritan, a member of a hardline branch of Protestantism that had many doctrinal disagreements with the state Church, seeing many of its practices (for instance, music during services) as dangerously, decadently Catholic.

  And the dangers of Catholicism are the final and worst of St. Peter's warnings. A Protestant church that's so lax about its priests, he says, only makes room for "the grim wolf with privy paw"—a metaphor for the Catholic church—to devour more souls. If bad Protestant priests are selfish, incompetent shepherds, they only make way for an even worse foe to destroy the people they should be guiding to heaven.

  With characteristic boldness, then, Milton puts his own convictions into the mouth of no lesser authority than St. Peter himself—and in doing so, outlines the Puritan side of the central Christian debate of the 17th century. The conflict between hardline Puritanism and high church Anglicanism would go on to fuel the English Civil War; this moment shows Milton declaring the loyalties he would later live out during that epochal conflict.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.
• 

  Poetry and Fame

  In "Lycidas," poetry isn't just a career or a hobby but a vocation, a calling from God. True poetic triumph, the poem suggests, has nothing to do with worldly success, but with God's judgment on one's works. And art that earns divine approval offers rewards far greater than the temporary "glistering" of an earthly reputation: it can grant immortality to its authors and to the people they write about.

  Pondering his friend Lycidas's drowning, the poem's speaker—a very literary shepherd, Milton's own alter ego—wonders why on earth anyone keeps writing poetry in a world where death strikes without warning. Poetry is difficult, and it keeps one away from more earthy pleasures like chasing pretty girls. Worst of all, dedicating yourself to the "thankless Muse" (the ungrateful spirit of poetry) offers absolutely no guarantees of success. Lycidas, the speaker's recently deceased friend, is the no-longer-living proof: his life was cut unexpectedly short before he could burst out in the "sudden blaze" of poetic fame and glory he aspired to.

  The god Phoebus (another name for Apollo, patron of poetry) interrupts the speaker's questioning with an answer. Poetic glory, he tells the speaker, has nothing to do with what one achieves on earth. It doesn't matter whether one earns "broad rumour" (that is, widespread popularity) while they're alive; fame doesn't grow in "mortal soil," in the little world of people. Real achievement and meaningful fame, rather, can only be judged and awarded by Jove (a.k.a. Jupiter or Zeus), the king of the gods, who "pronounces lastly on each deed," giving the final word on what one's work (and life) was worth.

  Phoebus's explanation suggests that literary fame isn't just a nice-but-uncertain reward for a poet's hard work, but a high divine honor. How one's work is received during one's lifetime hardly matters; immortal fame can only be awarded by an immortal judge.

  Art that achieves such divine fame can immortalize its subjects as well as its authors. As the fact that people are still reading and studying this poem attests, poetry has the power to create a lasting memory. By honoring each other's "destined urn[s]" (the funereal vases their bones are fated to fill) with "lucky words," the speaker says, poets can preserve themselves and each other in deathless verse.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Lycidas”

• Lines 1-14

  Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
  Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
  I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
  And with forc'd fingers rude
  Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
  Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
  Compels me to disturb your season due;
  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
  Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
  Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
  Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
  He must not float upon his wat'ry bier
  Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
  Without the meed of some melodious tear.

  "Lycidas" begins with a symbolic image of its own creation. Plucking leaves and fruits from a clump of "laurels," "myrtles," and "ivy," the poem's speaker apologizes for harvesting them before the "mellowing year" has fully ripened them. He needs their sour berries and new leaves, he says, to make a suitable funerary wreath for "young Lycidas"—a man who, like the plants, has been plucked "ere his prime," before he had the chance to grow to maturity. This poem itself, then, will be a kind of funerary wreath, a tribute to a friend dead too young.

  The lost Lycidas has a real-life counterpart:

  • John Milton's good friend Edward King, a promising scholar and priest-in-training, died in a shipwreck at the age of 25.
  • Shaken and grieving, a group of King's friends put together a volume of memorial poetry in his honor, Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638).
  • Milton's contribution mourns King in the tradition of the pastoral elegy. A pastoral elegy is a lament for the dead set in an idealized classical countryside, modeled on the works of Greek and Roman poets like Hesiod and Virgil. Such elegies imagine a landscape of natural beauty and harmony that is nevertheless shadowed by mortality.

  This form is a canny choice for Milton's purposes here. The pastoral world is traditionally populated by happy shepherds—young men whose major occupation, aside from watching their sheep, is making music on simple reed pipes. King and Milton were both poets; as the speaker puts it, Lycidas knew "himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme." It's only fitting that "some melodious tear," some teardrop of sweet poetry, be shed over this lost singer.

  This won't just be a poem about a tragic loss, then, but about a tragic loss to poetry. And as is often the case when one poet writes an elegy for another, this will also be an occasion for the survivor to exercise his own powers—a spur, perhaps, to make poetry while the sun shines.

  The plants the speaker chooses for his wreath foreshadow the poem's deepest concerns:

  • Laurels, sacred to the god Apollo, are traditional symbols of poetic greatness.
  • Myrtles, sacred to the goddess Venus, symbolize love.
  • And evergreen ivy, sacred to the god Bacchus, symbolizes immortality.

  All of these are suitable plants with which to mourn a young poet: laurels for his talent, myrtles for the love his friends bore him, ivy for the Christian hope of resurrection and eternal life. But they're also images of the poem itself and what it hopes to achieve. Through his expression of love for the lost Lycidas, the poet hopes to earn his own laurels and his own ivy: poetic brilliance, artistic immortality.

  The young Milton flexes his poetic muscle in an inventive, virtuosic form:

  • Though "Lycidas" uses plenty of rhyme, it never falls into a regular rhyme scheme. The first stanza, for instance, rhymes ABCCBBDEBDEBFB—a weaving, wandering series of rhymes that one couldn't quite call a pattern.
  • And though the poem uses a consistently iambic meter (that is, lines built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "unwept"), it dances back and forth between iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, as in "Without | the meed | of some | melo- | dious tear") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "And as | he pass- | es turn").

  Harmonious without being uniform, this form feels as organic as a rambling sheep-track over green hills.

• Lines 15-22

        Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well
  That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;
  Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
  Hence with denial vain and coy excuse!
  So may some gentle muse
  With lucky words favour my destin'd urn,
  And as he passes turn
  And bid fair peace to be my sable shroud!

  

  

  

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• Lines 23-36

        For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill,
  Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;
  Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd
  Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
  We drove afield, and both together heard
  What time the grey-fly winds her sultry horn,
  Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
  Oft till the star that rose at ev'ning bright
  Toward heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel.
  Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,
  Temper'd to th'oaten flute;
  Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel,
  From the glad sound would not be absent long;
  And old Damætas lov'd to hear our song.

  

  

  

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• Lines 37-49

        But O the heavy change now thou art gone,
  Now thou art gone, and never must return!
  Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,
  With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
  And all their echoes mourn.
  The willows and the hazel copses green
  Shall now no more be seen
  Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
  As killing as the canker to the rose,
  Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
  Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear
  When first the white-thorn blows:
  Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.

  

  

  

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• Lines 50-55

        Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep
  Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?
  For neither were ye playing on the steep
  Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,
  Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
  Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.

  

  

  

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• Lines 56-63

  Ay me! I fondly dream
  Had ye been there—for what could that have done?
  What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
  The Muse herself, for her enchanting son,
  Whom universal nature did lament,
  When by the rout that made the hideous roar
  His gory visage down the stream was sent,
  Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?

  

  

  

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• Lines 64-76

        Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
  To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade,
  And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
  Were it not better done, as others use,
  To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
  Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?
  Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
  (That last infirmity of noble mind)
  To scorn delights and live laborious days;
  But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
  And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
  Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,
  And slits the thin-spun life.

  

  

  

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• Lines 76-84

  "But not the praise,"
  Phoebus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears;
  "Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
  Nor in the glistering foil
  Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies,
  But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
  And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
  As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
  Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed."

  

  

  

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• Lines 85-88

        O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood,
  Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds,
  That strain I heard was of a higher mood.
  But now my oat proceeds,

  

  

  

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• Lines 89-102

  And listens to the herald of the sea,
  That came in Neptune's plea.
  He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon winds,
  "What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?"
  And question'd every gust of rugged wings
  That blows from off each beaked promontory.
  They knew not of his story;
  And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
  That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd;
  The air was calm, and on the level brine
  Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd.
  It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
  Built in th'eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
  That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

  

  

  

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• Lines 103-107

        Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
  His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
  Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
  Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
  "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?"

  

  

  

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• Lines 108-121

  Last came, and last did go,
  The Pilot of the Galilean lake;
  Two massy keys he bore of metals twain
  (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).
  He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake:
  "How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain,
  Enow of such as for their bellies' sake
  Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold?
  Of other care they little reck'ning make
  Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast
  And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
  Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
  A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least
  That to the faithful herdman's art belongs!

  

  

  

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• Lines 122-131

  What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
  And when they list their lean and flashy songs
  Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,
  The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
  But, swoll'n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
  Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
  Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
  Daily devours apace, and nothing said,
  But that two-handed engine at the door
  Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."

  

  

  

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• Lines 132-141

        Return, Alpheus: the dread voice is past
  That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
  And call the vales and bid them hither cast
  Their bells and flow'rets of a thousand hues.
  Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
  Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
  On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
  Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes,
  That on the green turf suck the honied showers
  And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.

  

  

  

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• Lines 142-153

  Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
  The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
  The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
  The glowing violet,
  The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine,
  With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
  And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
  Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
  And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
  To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
  For so to interpose a little ease,
  Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.

  

  

  

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• Lines 154-164

  Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
  Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurl'd;
  Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
  Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
  Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world,
  Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
  Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
  Where the great vision of the guarded mount
  Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold:
  Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth;
  And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

  

  

  

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• Lines 165-173

        Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
  For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
  Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor;
  So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
  And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
  And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
  So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high
  Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves;

  

  

  

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• Lines 174-181

  Where, other groves and other streams along,
  With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
  And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
  In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
  There entertain him all the saints above,
  In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
  That sing, and singing in their glory move,
  And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

  

  

  

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• Lines 182-185

  Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:
  Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
  In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
  To all that wander in that perilous flood.

  

  

  

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• Lines 186-193

        Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills,
  While the still morn went out with sandals grey;
  He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
  With eager thought warbling his Doric lay;
  And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
  And now was dropp'd into the western bay;
  At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:
  To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

  

  

  

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“Lycidas” Symbols

• 

  The Funereal Wreath

  The wreath of laurels, myrtles, and ivy that the speaker weaves in the first lines of "Lycidas" becomes a symbol of the poem itself. Like the wreath, this poem is an artful monument to a dead friend—a tribute to be laid on a grave.

  The specific symbolism of each of the named plants here also reflects what this poem will be about, not just what the speaker sees in Lycidas:

  • Laurels, sacred to the god Apollo, are the traditional symbol of poetic glory.
  • Myrtles, sacred to the goddess Venus, symbolize love.
  • And ivy, sacred to the god Bacchus, symbolizes resurrection and immortality (because it's "never sere," never withered—evergreen, in other words).

  These are all fitting plants with which to honor a young poet, dead too soon: laurels for his artistry, myrtles for the love his friends feel for him, ivy for the Christian hope that death isn't the end for him. But they're also images of the poem's own themes and aspirations. "Lycidas" is about Milton's hunger for literary glory as much as it's about the late lamented Mr. Edward King. The poem, like the wreath, will weave together all the themes the symbolic plants suggest.

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• 

  The Rivers

  Over and over, the poem's speaker calls on rivers, fountains, and streams to inspire him. These symbolic waters represent pastoral poetry. In reaching out to Greek and Roman rivers and asking them to direct the song of his "oaten flute," the speaker is also calling on a spirit of place and a poetic tradition: these rivers flow through the birthplaces of the pastoral style.

  For instance, the speaker at various times calls on the "Arethuse," the "Mincius," and the "Alpheus":

  • The Arethuse was a Sicilian fountain once believed to grant poetic inspiration.
  • The Mincius is the river that flows through the Roman poet Virgil's hometown (and is thus connected to one of the greatest of pastoral poets).
  • The Alpheus is a Greek river (straight out of the land from which pastoral poetry first sprang).

  In asking these waters to inspire him, then, the speaker hopes that the poetic traditions associated with them will flow out in his verse, smoothly, sweetly, and pastorally.

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“Lycidas” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Allusion

  "Lycidas" is filled with allusions. As a pastoral elegy, the poem's very form alludes to a long history of classical poetry. From the Greek writer Hesiod on down, pastoral poets have written tales of shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs living in an idyllic countryside.

  Milton's allusion to a wealth of classical gods and goddesses anchors this poem in the pastoral tradition. By calling on the "Sisters of the sacred well" (the Muses) for inspiration, lamenting that the "Nymphs" (female sea-spirits) couldn't save Lycidas from drowning, and fearing the wrath of the "blind Fury with th'abhorred shears" (Atropos—more usually called a Fate, not a Fury—the goddess in charge of severing the threads of human lives), the poem's speaker places this story of untimely death in a traditional Greco-Roman context.

  He makes this clear, not just through his allusions to the old gods, but also through his allusions to old poetic traditions. When the speaker calls on the spirits of rivers to guide his pen—summoning the "fountain Arethuse" and the "smooth-sliding Mincius," for instance—he's also calling on poetic spirits of place, waters symbolically associated with the pastoral tradition. The Arethuse is a Sicilian spring; the Mincius, the river that runs through the great Roman poet Virgil's hometown. (And Virgil is important to this poem: his Eclogues inspire several major moments, like the shepherd's departure in this poem's final lines.) These allusions suggest that pastoral poetry flows from a particular time and place, that Milton is channeling an ancient, elemental kind of verse.

  Rather than sticking strictly to the ancient world, however, the poem makes bold, surprising forays into other realms. For all that this poem follows a classical tradition, it's also tremendously British. Milton casts the coast off which Lycidas drowned in epic terms, speaking of mountains guarded by Druids (ancient Celtic priests and wise men) and the "wizard stream" of the Deva (that is, the river Dee, which marks the border between England and Wales).

  He worries, too, about the threat to this enchanted coastline from "Namancos and Bayona[]"—that is, from Spain. That worry places the poem squarely in Milton's own time: a post-Reformation era in which Europe was torn between warring Protestant and Catholic factions.

  Milton was a radical Protestant, a pious Puritan, and he felt that he was living through a war for the world's souls. His convictions become abundantly clear when he invites no lesser authority than the "pilot of the Galilean lake"—St. Peter himself, traditional guardian of the Christian church—into his poem. This deliberate anachronism makes it clear that Milton is turning the pastoral form to his own purposes. St. Peter's angry denunciation of corrupt Protestant clergy (not to mention his image of the Catholic church as a prowling wolf ready to snap up unguarded souls) transforms this into a contemporary political poem, not just an elegy.

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• Repetition

  

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

  

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“Lycidas” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Laurels, myrtles, and ivy
• Mellowing
• Bitter constraint
• Wat'ry bier
• Welter
• Meed
• Sisters of the sacred well
• Jove
• Sweep the string
• Hence with denial vain and coy excuse!
• Fed the same flock
• Batt'ning
• The star that rose at ev'ning bright
• Rural ditties
• Temper'd to th'oaten flute
• Satyrs and fauns
• Old Damætas
• Gadding
• Copses
• Lays
• Canker
• Taint-worm to the weanling herds
• The Druids, Mona, and Deva
• Fondly
• The Muse herself that Orpheus bore
• The rout that made the hideous roar
• What boots it
• Homely
• Strictly meditate the thankless Muse
• Amaryllis and Neaera
• That last infirmity of noble mind
• Guerdon
• The blind Fury
• Phoebus
• Glistering foil
• Broad rumour
• Arethuse and Mincius
• The herald of the sea
• In Neptune's plea
• What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?
• Beaked promontory
• Hippotades
• The level brine
• Panope
• That fatal and perfidious bark
• Built in th'eclipse
• Camus
• The Pilot of the Galilean lake
• Enow
• Climb into the fold
• What recks it them?
• Scrannel pipes
• The grim wolf with privy paw
• That two-handed engine at the door
• Alpheus
• The swart star
• Rathe
• Amaranthus
• False surmise
• Hebrides
• Bellerus
• The guarded mount
• Him that walk'd the waves
• Unexpressive nuptial song
• The Genius of the shore
• Large recompense
• Uncouth swain
• He touch'd the tender stops of various quills
• His Doric lay
• His mantle blue

• The plants the speaker plucks at the beginning of the poem have classical symbolic meanings:

  • Laurels were sacred to the god Apollo; laurel crowns were traditionally awarded to great poets.
  • Myrtles were sacred to the goddess Venus, and thus honored love and beauty.
  • Ivy was sacred to the god Bacchus and represented immortality and resurrection (since, as the speaker points out, it's "never sere," never withering: evergreen, in other words).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Lycidas”

• Form

  "Lycidas" is a pastoral elegy, a form that began in ancient Greece. A pastoral poem is set in an idealized countryside: a place populated by happy shepherds, lovely nymphs, and forest spirits. And an elegy is a lament for the dead. A pastoral elegy, then, is a poem in which death intrudes into even the most idyllic setting.

  In turning to this form, Milton was both reaching back to the works of ancient poets like Virgil and participating in a contemporary poetic conversation. In the generation of poets just before Milton, writers including Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe revived an interest in classical poetry and made the pastoral form fashionable—though more often through poems of love than poems of mourning.

  The style was still going strong by Milton's time. Poets like Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick used pastoral verse not just to discuss the pleasures of love or the joy of nature but also to reflect on and critique their society. Milton pointedly does just that in "Lycidas," using the death of his friend—a pious priest-in-training—as an opportunity to decry corruption in the Christian clergy.

  The poem unfolds over the course of 193 lines divided into 11 unequal stanzas. (Some editions present the poem as one long stanza broken into "verse paragraphs" by indentations.) Both its meter and rhyme scheme are unpredictable. The poem is full of rhyme, but never settles into a pattern; it's mostly written in iambs (metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Compels"), but jumps between pentameter (five iambs in a row) and trimeter (three iambs in a row) wherever Milton so chooses.

  All of these choices make the poem unfold like the pastoral landscape it's set in: its shape rolls easily, naturally, and irregularly, like grassy hills.

• Meter

  "Lycidas" uses two types of iambic meter—that is, lines written in iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "I come." The bulk of the poem is written in iambic pentameter, or lines of five iambs, as in line 14:

  Without | the meed | of some | melod- | ious tear.

  (Note that "melodious" should be scanned as having just three syllables here to fit the meter—mel-OH-jus, not mel-OH-dee-us.) As is often the case in iambic pentameter, there's some variation in this rhythm—as, for instance, in line 8, where the speaker laments:

  For Lyc- | idas | is dead, | dead ere | his prime,

  The spondee (a foot with two strong stresses in a row, DUM-DUM) on "dead ere" means the word "dead" gets stressed twice—a moment of drama that emphasizes the speaker's shock and grief. The extra stress on the word "ere" (or "before") lends the moment even more power.

  From time to time, though, the speaker introduces a short line of iambic trimeter (just three iambs), as in line 56:

  Ay me! | I fond- | ly dream

  These short lines, like rocks in a stream, introduce eddies in the poem's current, slowing its flow.

  The varied meter here makes this pastoral poem sound suitably natural, as organic and varied as the countryside itself.

• Rhyme Scheme

  While "Lycidas" uses plenty of rhyme, it never resolves into anything so orderly as a rhyme scheme. Instead, the poem's rhymes wander around wistfully, sometimes aligning for effect, sometimes drifting off altogether.

  When the speaker calls on the Muses in lines 15-22, for instance, the rhymes run like this:

  ABBCCDDE

  The passage begins and ends with a loose word: "well" and "shroud" find no partner. In between, the rhymes stride along in couplets, a bold effect that feels all the more striking framed with non-rhyme. Perhaps, by ending this stanza on a lonely, rhymeless "shroud," the speaker summons up the incomprehensible tragedy of Lycidas's death: it makes no sense, it just doesn't rhyme, that this talented and noble-spirited young man should have died so young.

  By the same token, sometimes a swell of rhyme marks a particularly moving moment. For instance, consider the ninth stanza (lines 132-164):

  • In this passage, which is full of meandering and unpredictable rhyme, the speaker imagines a flower-strewn valley as Lycidas's tomb—though, alas, he knows it's imaginary.
  • In fact, Lycidas has no known grave: his drowned body is being tossed around by the waves, who knows where.

  The stanza climaxes in these famous lines, in which the speaker begs the guardians of land and sea to look out for that beloved body:

  Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth;
  And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

  That ringing couplet raises this poignant vision a little above the swirling sea of rhyme that came before.

“Lycidas” Speaker

• The poem's speaker is an "uncouth swain"—that is, a rustic shepherd—lamenting his beloved friend (and fellow shepherd) Lycidas. He's also, however, the alter ego of John Milton, mourning his drowned friend Edward King.

  On the one hand, then, this shepherd is part of the pastoral tradition: he's a simple man living in a world of idealized sheep-herders, and he spends his days frolicking with nymphs, playing tunes on reed pipes, and sleeping under the stars amongst his flock. On the other, he's an educated speaker who's very conscious of the pastoral tradition he supposedly inhabits.

  The poem often ducks into a different mode through intrusions from other speakers: a high epic intervention from the god Apollo, for instance, or a thunderous denunciation of corrupt priests from St. Peter. After each of these episodes, the speaker summons his own pastoral world back, calling on symbolic rivers (like the Mincius, the river said to have inspired Virgil to write his great pastoral Eclogues) to redirect his language into a more suitably shepherd-like course.

  This supposedly uncouth swain, then, is also a scholar keenly aware of the poetic world he lives in. His elegy for his friend becomes a reflection on what it is to be a poet—as well as a denunciation of corrupt clergymen, a declaration of Christian faith, and a statement of Milton's own poetic genius. Like many elegies written by poets for their fellows, this poem shows off the surviving writer's powers as much as it mourns the loss of their comrade's; the speaker, after all, goes right on playing his pipe now that Lycidas is gone.

“Lycidas” Setting

• "Lycidas" is set in the world of pastoral poetry. In other words, it takes place in an idealized, make-believe Greco-Roman countryside, a place of green fields, flowers, gleefully wicked satyrs, and beautiful nymphs. Life in such a world is, for the most part, kind; here, shepherds tend their flocks and play lovely music on reed pipes.

  But the world of "Lycidas" is not exclusively pastoral. The poem also takes in religious debates from Milton's own 17th-century England—for instance, in the passage where St. Peter puts in an appearance to rail against the corrupt priestly "shepherds" who abuse their authority for selfish gain.

  Complicating matters further, the poem's green world can be seen as an image of Cambridge, the university where Milton and King both studied. The great university town, in this vision, is itself a green paradise for young men, populated by characters as quaint and vivid as those in any Grecian dreamworld. Besides casting himself and King as an "uncouth swain" and lovely "Lycidas," Milton nudges a tutor in the ribs: the "old Damaetas" who delights in the young shepherds' songs, named after a ridiculous clown in Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance Arcadia, has been identified with several of Milton's professors.

Literary and Historical Context of “Lycidas”

Literary Context

John Milton (1608-1674) is honored as one of the greatest of the English poets, most famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost. "Lycidas" first appeared in the 1638 memorial volume Justa Edouardo King naufrago, which Milton and some friends put together to honor their colleague Edward King, who had died at sea. "Lycidas" responds not just to King's death but also to a revived interest in pastoral poetry that began during the 16th-century English Renaissance.

Modeling themselves on ancient Greek and Roman poets like Hesiod and Virgil, the pastoral poets of the 16th and 17th centuries used an idealized countryside backdrop to muse on love, nature, and death. "Lycidas" is by far the most famous of the pastoral elegies that this era produced (and perhaps the most famous pastoral elegy, period).

It would be hard to overstate Milton's enduring effect on literature. His poetry has been a touchstone for generations, from 19th-century Romantics like Blake and Byron (who delighted in the charismatic, rebellious Satan of Paradise Lost) right up to contemporary writers like Philip Pullman.

Historical Context

"Lycidas" responds to a personal tragedy. In 1637, Milton's friend and fellow Cambridge student Edward King was drowned in a shipwreck not far off the coast of Wales. He was only about 25. His shocked, grieving friends put together a volume of memorial poetry honoring him—and perhaps, as often happens in unexpected deaths, mythologizing him a little, too. The story began to get around that King had died kneeling in prayer on the deck of the sinking ship.

King's piety plays an important role in Milton's elegy. Milton himself was a passionately pious man, and England in the 17th century was a time when to be pious was to be embroiled in religious controversy. Milton lived in the wake of the Reformation, the 16th-century Christian schism in which Protestantism split off from Catholicism, rejecting the papacy and claiming that the Bible, not any pope, was the ultimate source of Christian authority. Confusion and bloodshed ensued.

By Milton's time, Protestantism (in the form of the Church of England, founded by Henry VIII) was the English state religion. But Milton was a committed Puritan, a member of a hard-line branch of Protestantism that rejected the state Church's doctrine on a number of key issues. (For instance, they abhorred the use of music and incense during services, seeing such fripperies as dangerously Catholic.) As this poem's tirade against the clergy suggests, Milton feared that Christianity itself was in dire danger: insincere, greedy Protestant churchmen, he felt, were opening the door to a resurgence of "wolf[ish]" Catholicism.

More “Lycidas” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to a lively (and wonderfully tweedy) reading of the poem by author Malcolm Guite.

  • A Brief Biography — Learn more about Milton's life and work via the British Library.

  • Milton's Legacy — Read an article on Milton's power and his literary afterlife.

  • Justa Edouardo King naufrago — See images of Milton's own annotated copy of Justa Edouardo King naufrago, the memorial volume in which "Lycidas" first appeared.

  • The Young Milton — See a portrait of Milton when he was a student at Christ's College, Cambridge—not so long before he composed "Lycidas." He was known as the "Lady of Christ's" for his fastidiousness and his delicate looks.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by John Milton

  • On Shakespeare. 1630

  • Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent (On his blindness)

  • Sonnet 7: How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth