“Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears/ And slits the thin-spun life.”
This is the suddenness with which death can strike, slicing the fragile thread of life in a moment, as described by the great 17th-century English poet John Milton in his poem “Lycidas.”
That suddenness preoccupies Milton throughout “Lycidas,” a meditation on untimely death, unfulfilled dreams, poetic purpose, and religious restoration.
Milton wrote “Lycidas” in 1637 as an elegy for Edward King, a young man who drowned while crossing the Irish Sea. He was on his way to Dublin when his ship struck a rock and sunk. Milton was asked to contribute verses for an anthology memorializing King. Though the two men were not particularly close, they had studied at Cambridge together and shared other commonalities: Both aspired to be poets and both were on a path toward ministry in the Church of England.
This may explain the deeply personal anxieties and ambivalences critics have detected in the poem: In King, Milton saw a mirror of himself. King’s untimely death forced Milton to grapple with the possibility of his own early demise. A man with a burning ambition for poetic greatness, Milton feared dying before achieving that greatness, or at least before revealing it to the world. The abruptness and finality of death weighs over the poem and the poet. “If this kind of thing can happen, then what is it all for?” he seems to ask.
A depiction of John Milton. Public Domain
A Variety of Interpretations
Critical reception of the poem has been mixed, and its interpretation continues to be debated. Some critics don’t find “Lycidas” sufficiently elegiac for what purports to be, an elegy. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), the foremost English man of letters of the 18th century, famously said of the poem:
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“[‘Lycidas’] 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 myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of ‘rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel.’ “
“Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.”
It’s true that “Lycidas” takes a bit of an odd form: a pastoral elegy, which is a highly artificial poetic construct based on classical sources. In it, the characters are all cast as shepherds and nymphs living an idealized existence in nature among field and flock. There is something stiff about the form, and this particular instance bristles with allusions to classical mythology. Johnson found all this a bit inauthentic.
However, Johnson’s opinion has not prevailed; many critics agree that this is one of the finest elegies in the English language. Whatever certain critics might say, and despite critical disagreements, it’s difficult to deny the poem’s importance, Milton’s great skill in composing it, and the presence of moving passages beneath rich overlays of sensory language and vivid imagery drawn from the natural world. The poem is noteworthy for its use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance, which create melodious, mournful sounds.
“Pastoral Landscape,” before 1884, by Charlote Nasmyth. Public Domain
Milton’s grief may not have been particularly personal when it comes to King, yet that didn’t make it less real. Like many great poems, this one taps into the universal “lacrimae rerum,” meaning the “tears of things,” to quote Virgil, one of Milton’s poetic models.
As literature professor Dennis Quinn wrote in “Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder,” “The ‘lacrimae rerum’ [tears of things] are an expression of the sadness and compassion that abide in things, in the very stuff of nature.”
It is a universal sorrow, bigger than any particular death. I suspect that, in King’s tragic story, Milton saw a microcosm of all premature deaths, unfulfilled promises, and dashed hopes. These, he knew touched him personally since all humanity experiences such things in one form or another.
This is the real core of the poem. “Lacrimae rerum” troubled Milton, making him question the poetic vocation as well as the meaningfulness of a career in the Church of England, of which he was highly critical.
In Imitation of Virgil
Perhaps Milton felt that the pastoral genre—with its roots in ancient Greek and Roman poetry—was the best way to address this larger, more epic world-sorrow, precisely because of its ornate and artificial construction. The term “lacrimae rerum,” after all, comes directly from the Roman whose pastoral poem the Eclogue 10 appears to be the basic model for “Lycidas.” Was Milton intentionally aligning this poem with Virgil’s articulation of universal grief through subtle cues? It’s certainly possible.
The great Latin poet Virgil, holding the “Aenid” and flanked by the two muses: “Clio” (history) and “Melpomene” (tragedy). The 3rd- century mosaic was discovered in Sousse, Tunisia. Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. Public Domain
“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 be to my sable shroud!”
The poem’s double perspective becomes clear from this early stanza. The poet calls on the Muses to sing about “Lycidas”—codename for Edward King—but his mind looks ahead to his own death, hoping someone will sing a dirge for him, too. Milton sees King as his mirror image, contemplating in the cold, still face of his dead friend his own “sable shroud.”
“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 gray-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.”
These fleeting images of past joy flicker through the mind of the poet like echoes or half-remembered dreams. It’s a haunting effect that becomes even more vivid in the stanza’s final lines:
“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.”
Critics have interpreted these lines as a reference to the joyous student days spent in the gardens around Cambridge. Whether or not that’s precisely what Milton had in mind, this section certainly describes a “golden past” to which the poet can never return—a realization that brings heartache. It strikes hard at the beginning of the next stanza with an exclamation of “O!” that expresses deep anguish and a stark emotional shift.
“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.”
So profound is the loss of Lycidas that nature herself mourns, and the strains of wild, wondrous song in the prior stanza die as fading echoes in this one.
Edward Key attended Christs College, Cambridge, in the 17th century. David Hallam-Jones/CC BY-SA 2.0
Could Things Have Been Different?
A series of heartrending rhetorical questions follow as the poet—with an imagination drenched in an enchanted world where spirits and Nymphs control nature—asks why the nature spirits did not save his friend from drowning. “Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep/ Clos’d o‘er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?” Though expressed through rich imaginative and mythological language, the basic sentiment is one anyone who has experienced loss can understand: why did it have to happen? Why wasn’t there someone or something there to prevent this?
From this sorrowful thought, the poet begins to express his disillusionment with life and career—another relatable emotion for those who have gone through loss. “What boots it with incessant care/ To tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade/ And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?”
In other words, what is the point of devoting himself to poetry when it could all be snuffed out in a moment? Why suffer, seeking after the laurel crown of poetic achievement when, just as he thinks he’s about “to burst out into sudden blaze/ Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred sheras/ and slits the thin-spun life”?
“Dead Man,” Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. Public Domain
But to his own question, Milton has an immediate response: “But not the praise … Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.” Death might take the poet, but his poetry, and the fame of his poetry, lives on, with its ultimate worth being judged by God himself. A thing of beauty has its own lasting value, a value that can, perhaps, rise like a lighthouse, a steady beam of illumination even in stormy skies and stormy waters.
This hopeful note returns again at the poem’s conclusion. “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more/ For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead/ Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor.”
Milton then makes a brilliant simile to the sun, which also appears to descend into the ocean—only to rise again: “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed/ And yet anon repairs his drooping head.” Milton’s Christian worldview and hope of final resurrection becomes explicit in the following lines: “So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high/ Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.” He who walked the waves is, of course, Jesus Christ.
In a beautiful juxtaposition, Milton then imagines Lycidas in the heavenly kingdom where pure, fresh streams of water wash the ocean brine out of his hair. Saltwater is also washed away when tears are wiped from his eyes. Thus, the salty, bitter, corrupt waters symbolize this life of sorrow, which gives way to the pure waters of eternal life.
As noted earlier, Johnson complained that “Lycidas” is no true elegy, devoid of real grief over King. But, even if that is true, it perhaps adds something more. “Lycidas” is a challenging poem, with its obscure allusions, complicated rhyme scheme, and refusal to fit neatly into an expected genre. But all that complexity helps express the complexity of thought and emotion contained within the poem: the tension between disillusionment and ambition, poetic versus religious calling, and the pain of loss alongside the hope of reunion.
