Lycidas by Milton
LYCIDAS
This poem first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies entitled Edouardo Naufrago, commemorating the death of Edward King, a college-mate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned in a shipwreck in 1637. Milton, who had not been very close to King, volunteered or was asked to make a contribution to the collection, and used the occasion to reflect on his own current emotional conflicts, specifically about poetry. King, who like Milton, had apparently devoted his short life to poetry, became the basis for Milton's searching questions on the with of such a life, in the face of the unpredictability of death. The two poets are imagined as shepherds in the poem, following the conventions of the classical pastoral, tending the arts of poetry, and Milton's lament is that such a profession is futile if the muses of poetry cannot guard their shepherds.
Milton is here drawing on two traditions of allegorisation of the shepherd: the classical, in which shepherds are poets, and the Christian, in which shepherds are spiritual and religious leaders. The shepherds in the poetry thus represent both poets and religious guides, and it is in envisioning the poet as a combination of these roles that Milton is most comfortable
This lament goes on to line 76, when Phoebus interrupts the lament to console the poet, that fame achieved through poetry lingers beyond the mortal life of the poet.
This then becomes the basis for consolation, which ends with the poet's celebration of Lycidas' life and fame
Milton's epigram labels Lycidas a 'monody': a lyrical lament for one voice. But the poem has several voices or personae. Milton may have meant that the poem should be regarded more as a story told completely by one person.
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