"Pastures New": John Milton's "Lycidas"

In 1638, John Milton -- whom many see as perhaps the (second) greatest poet in English -- produced what many think to be his first major poem: the pastoral elegy "Lycidas," written to memorialize the tragic death of a college classmate.  Ah!  But it's so much more than that!

Transcript

Hello again and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  Today we’re going to start what will surely be a multi-episode look at the work of John Milton, whom many rank as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare.  Some even rank him above Shakespeare, but those people are high.  No, just kidding – but I’m firmly Team Will on this one.

Regular listeners will know that we have brushed up against Mr. Milton before in our episode on the English Civil Wars.  During that turbulent period, he wrote largely as a pro-Parliamentarian polemicist, and those Puritanical sympathies will be much in evidence as we explore his work.  A more general audience will perhaps know Milton by his magnificent octopus Paradise Lost – far and away the greatest epic poem in the English language – sorry Beowulf, sorry Faerie Queene, you’re great and all, but Paradise Lost is *chef’s kiss.*

But that epic is for another day – we need to build up to it, just as Milton himself did.  You see, in the early modern period, aspiring poets followed a loosely structured progression that kind of functioned as an informal apprenticeship.  Basically, like learning any new skill or trade, one begins with the easiest, most rudimentary concepts and progressively advances to the higher, more complex concepts.  Poets of the 17th century often adapted themselves to this “career model,” which was based on arguments made by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poetry, a monumental piece of criticism written early in the 1580s and published posthumously in 1595.  Regarding this pseudo-apprenticeship, Sidney writes

The shepherd’s pipe, as sweet as any swan, gave us many days of rest. It brought us to the unspeakable high reaching of heroic poetry. These, indeed, are not men, but gods: they frame matters of virtue, wisdom, and delight. Thus, in the noblest and highest kind of writing, poesy ariseth to teach, to move, and to delight. So then, the pastoral cometh low, yet as a pretty stepping stone to higher matters.

In this passage, Sidney identifies the boundaries of poetic prestige.  He places the pastoral at the bottom end – the sweet shepherd’s pipe is the first subject of the novice poet.  Gradually, the poet attains to heroic poetry – the epic – as the pinnacle of the form.  This model was based on the career of the Roman poet Virgil, who began with his pastoral Eclogues, moved to the more didactic Georgics, and finally produced the great epic Aeneid.  So, in a similar vein, Edmund Spenser began with his Shepheardes Calendar before producing The Faerie Queene.  The grand exception to this usual grind is, of course, Shakespeare, who dabbled a bit in drama for a while, wrote a few sonnets and a couple of narrative poems.  Never produced an epic (though some argue that the Henriad is his epic, but we’re getting loose with our categories here, and I do like a good category).

I bring this up because, obviously, John Milton followed Sidney’s advice and worked in the lower pastoral forms before scaling the heights of Paradise Lost.  

Young John was the oldest child from a fairly well-to-do family and spent much of his youth devouring books, especially the classical Latin poets.  Evidently, he also loved Edmund Spenser and is said to have declared that the English poet was “a better teacher than Aquinas.”  I wonder if here are the seeds of Milton’s rather fervent and revolutionary character.  As we’ve seen, he was passionately devoted to the cause of the Puritan Revolution and devoted two decades of his life to promoting and defending it.  But his father was a Roman Catholic, and therefore probably quite a fan of St. Thomas Aquinas, and is reported to have disinherited John when the son abandoned the faith of the father.  During the civil war, John’s brother fought on the Royalist side.  Feisty John got himself expelled from Cambridge after only a year, but later returned to produce his first great poem, his calling card to the literary world that he intended to go places.  That poem is “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy written to commemorate the death by drowning of fellow Cambridge student Edward King in 1637.

 He had written two notable poems before this, in his early college days, a pair of poems called “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” meaning “The Happy One” and “The Pensive One,” respectively.  The first is a pleasing, quite charming musical pastoral in which the speaker invites the goddess Mirth to infuse his life.  We then get the rather standard pastoral fare: shepherds in idyllic scenery, a firehose of classical allusion, even a few fairies.  There’s a bit of carpe diem and an allusion in the final lines to Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd.” “L’Allegro” does give us a saying that persists down to our own day.  The nymph is invited to “trip it as you go / On the light fantastic toe.”  So, our “trip the light fantastic” to mean graceful dancing comes from Milton.  This poem also name checks Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare with two lines well-known to people who like to read 17th century pastoral verse instead of living their lives.  He speaks of Jonson’s “learned sock” (a reference to the slippers comic actors wore in the classical period) and of Shakespeare’s warbling “his native wood-notes wild.”  This latter is often taken as testimony to Shakespeare’s natural purity, unspoiled by the formal training of a university – a quality cited by the Romantics when claiming him as their literary ancestor.  

“L’Allegro”’s partner poem, “Il Penseroso” offers a melancholy counterpoint to the happy pastoral idyll.  Here, the speaker seeks solitude with an eye toward experiencing the divine.  Probably more classical allusions than the first poem – the speaker aspires to scholarship and wisdom, after all – and we get a similar ending to “L’Allegro,” – again, echoing Marlowe – in which the speaker chooses Melancholy over Happiness as the partner of his life.  These two are, as I say, lovely enough and there’s a real sense of musicality in the tetrameter verse, but they also seem very much – I don’t know – portfolio pieces, like, a working curriculum vitae – here’s what I can do.  They seem a summary of the first stage of apprenticeship: I know my pastorals, I know their conventions and forms, I can spit references to Greece and Rome with the best of them.  I am a serious poet.  My card.

If I’m honest, “Lycidas” has many of these qualities, too.  Bit of showboating from a gifted newcomer.  But at the same time, it seems more complex, less derivative, than his pastoral diptych. One can almost perceive Milton the man behind the speaker of this elegy.  While the occasion for the poem was, as I have said, the drowning of a fellow student, and the publication of a volume of elegies to memorialize that tragedy, Milton also uses the poem as an opportunity to muse upon his own path as a poet, to meditate upon the value of fame, and to excoriate the corruption of the Church because, you know, Puritan.  The fact that Milton does get a bit navel-gazy here has led some critics, notably the titanic Dr. Johnson, to dismiss “Lycidas” as self-indulgent twaddle.  

But it’s not twaddle, even if it’s not entirely sincere.  True, Milton hardly knew Edward King and probably found it difficult to summon the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion at the death of a slight acquaintance.  While we may find it distasteful to sublimate the deceased when analyzing an elegy on him, I think it helpful to think of Mr. King – at least as far as “Lycidas” goes – as a McGuffin.  

What’s that, you say?  Well, a McGuffin, as popularized by film director Alfred Hitchcock, is an object or event that’s necessary to drive the plot or motivate the characters, but is otherwise irrelevant.  So, think about the search for R2D2 at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie.  It’s enough to get Darth Vader and the Empire to Luke Skywalker’s planet and get Luke to meet Obi-Wan Kenobi, but actually trying to recapture the droid becomes extraneous once those pieces are in place.  That’s kind of the way I think about Edward King in “Lycidas.”  His death is the impetus for the poem, but really has quite little to do with it.  And if we look at it that way, the fact that Milton doesn’t seem emotionally distraught is no longer a critical issue.

OK, so let’s take a good close look at Milton’s first major poem.  As I said, it’s a pastoral elegy, so a poem of lament with the accoutrements of an idealized rural setting.  The name Lycidas has a long and distinguished pedigree in pastoral poetry.  I believe we first get the name mentioned in Herodotus’ 5th century BC histories of the Persian war.  I think Lycidas is a Greek counselor who gets stoned for wanting to give in to the Persians.  This is probably not the Lycidas Milton is referencing.  Neither is the centaur from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  More likely is the one mentioned by Theocritus, the goatherd with a penchant for poetry, or one of the several mentions we get from Virgil.  There’s also a Lycidas in Lucan who gets ripped off a ship.  He’s a fair candidate.  By transforming Edward King – aspiring cleric and poet – into the shepherd Lycidas, Milton takes up a quite traditional practice and, indeed, much of the poem is conventional, but so much more is not, which is why it surpasses his earlier verse.

First of all, in a headnote added in 1645, the poem announces itself as a “monody” – that is, a lament sung by a single voice.  As we’ll see, there are several speakers here.  Other eccentricities and innovations we will note in due course.

The poem opens with a conventional apostrophe to the Muses, here metaphorized as the “laurels” for the laurel crowns worn by ancient poets laureate.

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.

The “berries” of line 3 are his ripening verse, which is yet premature, he says (with some false modesty, I presume), unripe – his lines are “harsh and crude.”  And that may appear true to one expecting the regular rhythm of pentameter poetry, the smooth musicality of “L’Allegro” or “Il Penseroso.”  But look more closely at “Lycidas’” opening lines and you’ll see that Milton very rapidly abandons any predictable meter or rhyme scheme.  Line 4 is deliberately stunted at six syllables, ending with the rhyme “rude” as if to exemplify the illusion of primitivism.  Further, the speaker casts himself as a gauche interloper.  The verbs are those of bumbling interference: pluck, shatter, disturb.  But, of course, what else can be expected?  Lycidas died before his time and I, his elegist, am not yet ready to properly mourn him.

He’s not going to let a little humility stop him, obviously.  He hopes for a little forward-paying quid pro quo: 

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!

We’re not yet 20 lines in, and already the speaker betrays hints that this meditation is on himself.  He sees in Lycidas the reflection of his own aspirations for his life, his hopes for the future.  Lycidas is a foil for the speaker:

 For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill,

Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;

the Cambridge experience here rendered as caring for their flocks on an arcadian hill.  Too, both Lycidas and the speaker wrote pastoral rhymes to make the wood nymphs dance:

Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,

Temper'd to th'oaten flute.

The oaten flute here is a metonym for pastoral verse, right?  You know, like Pan flutes made out of reeds?  That kind of thing.

But Lycidas’ death violates the idyll so far constructed: “But O the heavy change now thou art gone, Now thou art gone, and never must return!”  Nature now seems chaotic, disordered and unfixed.  The speaker marvels at the “wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown” and mourns that his friend’s death, and the loss of the poetry he would write, is as “killing as the canker to the rose . . . frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear.”  The speaker blames the nature deities for failing to protect Lycidas, railing against what he sees as their incompetence or indifference.  But then he relents: “Ay me! I fondly dream / Had ye bin there'—for what could that have done?”  We feel a certain resignation here, perhaps even the recognition that he is projecting his grief.  He links Lycidas to Orpheus, whose mother was unable to protect him from a gory death at the hands of the Bacchantes.  You’ll see this a few times in the poem, this trick of Milton’s in which what might have been a moment of genuine emotion gets sublimated by a classical or Biblical allusion – almost as if he redirects an emotional response to an intellectual one.

Trouble is, this almost borders on nihilism at this point in the poem.  Line 64 begins a meditation on fame:

     Alas! what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade,

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?

The pastoral ideal is shattered, or at least questionable.  Yet still, Milton romanticizes it.  Now we are firmly in Milton’s own head.  King has pretty much been left behind: poor McGuffin!  His classmate’s death has clearly brought intimations of mortality to Milton’s mind, and so, at the age of 29, Milton is trying to figure out if the path he has planned for himself – to become a great poet – is worth the effort and deprivation in so fleeting and transient a life.  He says:

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. 

Is it all worth it?  The asceticism that poetry demands, the sacrifice of earthly (and in more classical allusions he implies sexual) pleasure?  Perhaps to die before greatness is attained and thus have wasted the thin-spun life?

Yes, he decides.  Yes, it is.  Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun and poetry and music, reprimands the speaker’s timidity:

"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."

Fame is worth it – it is better than earthly, mortal pleasure – because it outlasts mortality.  Life ends, praise does not.  We’ve seen this conceit many times before, going all the way back to Beowulf, who seeks immortality through the songs of his glorious deeds.  Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and “55” – in which poetry itself confers immortality.  What does strike me as a little odd, however, is that tension between Milton’s stern Puritanism and this pagan-cum-humanistic vision of immortality.  I wonder if we can see traces of the Puritan doctrine of “election” – whereby God has already chosen those whom he will save – in Milton’s imagining of literary athanasia.

After Apollo’s lofty speech, “Lycidas” settles back into a more rustic simplicity.  The speaker’s “oat proceeds” after Phoebus’ “higher mood.”  But strangely, the next section feels like a mythic inquest – like a coroner’s hearing to determine the conditions of blame for Lycidas’ death.  First witness: Neptune, god of the sea, who absolves himself by blaming the “fatal and perfidious bark.”  Hey, the weather was fine.  It was the crappy ship that killed Lycidas – don’t look at me!  Neptune’s alibi introduces an interesting idea here, though – that it was not Nature that took the young man’s life, but the work of humans.  People built something faulty, and therein lies the cause of death.

This tiny little germ of an idea gives Milton license, however, to do a bit of Puritanical haranguing.  St. Peter himself takes the stand – “the Pilot of the Galilean Lake” – to condemn the high church – as a human institution divorced from the will of God – as the cause of death.  He shakes his mitred locks and says:

"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!

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".

OK, so now the “pastoral” idea gets mixed up with the ecclesiastical idea.  Pastors, ministers, priests, as shepherds of God’s flock.  St. Peter says he would rather have lost many hypocritical, gluttonous, proud priests than have lost Lycidas and his simple pure faith.  I think things get a little tangled here – we have to assume that Peter is really talking about Edward King, studying for the ministry, and not the swain-persona Lycidas.  But never mind that.  Not going to let a little structural inconsistency interfere with a good anti-clerical tongue-lashing.  

Perhaps the most famous image from Peter’s polemic here is when he calls the priesthood “blind mouths.”  The quality of blindness – a lack of sight signifying ignorance, both wilful and unwilful – is conflated with “mouth” as a metonym for gluttony, consumption without conscience.  It’s kind of an example of what literary scholars call linguistic synesthesia, which is when a writer renders one of the physical senses in terms of another.  Like when in King Lear, Shakespeare writes of warmth (detected by the sense of touch) as being “gorgeous, which is, of course, associated with vision.  Anyway, it’s a pretty damning metaphor for a clergy charged with the oversight (which is at the root of the word “bishop,” for those of you keeping score at home) and care of God’s flock.  The clergy are ignorant shepherds, not true shepherds like the swains.  And, it’s a condemnation of the institutional church by the guy who founded the institutional church!  Heavy, brother. 

Another rather well-known image from Peter’s speech comes at its very end.  The Apostle speaks of a “two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”  Perhaps “well-known” is an inapt phrase.  Well, people know about it, but no one’s really sure they know what it means.  It’s clearly a warning of an impending, apocalyptic ass-thrashing, but we only have guesses as to what Milton’s “two-handed engine” actually is: the two houses of Parliament? a sword so big you need two hands to wield it? the gospel’s double-edged sword? St. Michael’s sword?  the sword of justice? an executioner’s ax?  No one’s really nailed it down.  Opportunity awaits for any grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic!

After the “dread voice” of Peter’s wrath, Milton once again settles into comfortable pastoral convention.  We are treated to a reverdie, a burgeoning Nature returning to life, a resurrection.  Flowers of a thousand hues burst forth, showers are like honey, and the brooks gush down the hillsides.  Among the blooming flowers is the amaranthus, which, according to legend, never fades and is thus immortal – just like Lycidas.  And just like Milton's speaker.

We get one more kind of classical allusion in which Lycidas is likened to the “day-star” – like the sun that dips beneath the ocean's horizon each night but rises from it each morning.  OK, bog-standard archetypal symbol; ties in nicely with the Phoebus Apollo thing earlier.  But then there’s a little shift – maybe, if I wanted to push it, a sun/son pun.  Milton writes that Lycidas

sunk low, but mounted high

Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves.

Aha!  Lycidas will rise again like Jesus (who famously took a stroll on the stormy Sea of Galilee and blew his disciples’ minds!).  So, here at the end of the poem, Milton abandons his classical allusions, which it seems now are only useful in conveying the experience and reality of death, and turns to Christian metaphor.  Christ is the Good Shepherd who did not fall into the waters, as Peter did through his doubt.  Now the poem favors resurrection motifs that it finds lacking in its understanding of classical mythology.

The poem ends by pulling one more fast one.  The last stanza begins: “ Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills.”  Wait a minute!  That means that the speaker we’ve been listening to isn’t even the real speaker!  It’s a speaker overhearing another speaker, who heard Peter and Camus and Neptune and all the other babblers in this so-called monody!  Pretty tricksy, Milton.

The last image in the poem, of a second speaker observing the singing swain, who has risen and “twitch'd his mantle blue: / To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new” troubles many readers, who see in it the root of the poem’s failure.  For these readers, this closing scene indicates a distance, an emotional gap between what we’ve read and what we are supposed to experience.  The poem feels cold to many readers – its constant reference to classical literature seems like intellectual signalling, its language feels overblown, sometimes even hyperbolic (really, King was not that good a poet).  Many find the mixture of subtopics confusing and ill-balanced.

That great bear of a man, Samuel Johnson, as I mentioned in the introduction to this episode, greatly despised “Lycidas.”  His 1781 critical work Lives of the Poets takes a brickbat to Milton’s pastoral elegy.  Everyone likes a good takedown, don’t they? It’s the only reason most people read restaurant reviews, to hear a place get trashed.  So let’s sample a few items from Dr. Johnson’s plate:

Regarding the pastoral form itself, the good doctor sees it as having been moribund even a century and a half earlier, when Milton worked in it:

Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.

Therefore, obviously, Johnson argues

It 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. In this poem, there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new.

Well, no mincing words there.  But Johnson’s denunciation stands out because it is so much the voice of the minority.  Most critics, while bowing to certain complaints about the elegy, regard it as a masterful and slyly innovative piece of work, addressing the conventions of the form but unafraid to transgress those conventions when meaning or effect could be amplified.  Everything one says about “Lycidas” is true: it’s grand, it’s pompous, it’s nuanced, it’s cliched, it’s revolutionary, it’s bombastic, it’s gentle.  That plenitude is what makes it great, and why Milton would go on to become one of the language’s greatest practitioners, and why the fame he sought is so deserved.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I certainly hope you enjoyed it.  If you did, please like, subscribe and follow the show.  Tell a few friends about it.  Word of mouth is a great way to build our community.  If you feel like buying me a beer, click the support the show button.  I’m always thirsty and always grateful.  I hope the next couple of weeks are absolute magic for you.  Tell me all about them when we get together again.  Bye now!