Much misprision of Lycidas, from Dr. Johnson down, has resulted from a failure to accept the first of these premises. We do not, it is true, know exactly what the personal relations of young King and his future elegist were, during their common term of residence within the walls of Christ's College. King was Milton's junior, however, and so far as we can judge from his preserved writings, not of a type of mind to attract an isolated and haughty personality. Milton was not a man to contract those easy miscellaneous friendships open to a less exigent nature, nor was he a man to let a genuine friendship, once contracted, go unchronicled, as his letters and poems to Charles Diodati testify. But no such a priori argument to prove the case is needed. Lycidas itself bears convincing testimony that it grew not out of a poignant personal grief, such as inspired three years later the elegy upon Diodati, but out of a passion no less intense for being more generalized and imaginative. King was, everything goes to show, one of those men upon whom there rests in youth an indefinable light of promise, the same in kind if not in degree as two centuries later touched the imaginations of another group of young Cantabrigians gathered about Arthur Hallam. His death could stand, therefore, before the eye of the poet, as a type of touching unfulfillment. No one who has studied the psychology of the poetic mind will doubt the kindling power of such an abstraction. But if this pathos of mortality had not been enough (and for a spirit of Milton's martial cast it might not have been) King's death had another symbolic significance. He had been in preparation for the ministry; he was a type of the "good shepherd" who should enter the sheep-folds of the church and save the flock from hirelings and thieves. Already in Comus Milton had given a hint of his growing indignation over the corruptions of the church, and during the three years of silence which followed the writing of that poem he had been brooding angrily upon the laxity and worldliness of the Episcopal establishment. Here was his chance to speak out. He seized upon the symbol without much regard to King's actual worth or power, broadening and dignifying the individual instance to fit the might of his denunciation. The symbolic bearing of his theme, as has been said, naturally pointed Milton to the pastoral form, which by its ideal remoteness lent itself with peculiar readiness to symbolism. It will not do, however, to press this point too far, since the fact must be borne in mind that for the expression of what was unquestionably deep personal grief, he chose, in the Epitaphium Damonis, the same general form. But between the Epitaphium Damonis and Lycidas there is this notable difference: the first is in the pure style of the early Sicilian pastoralists, and belongs, therefore, to a simple personal type of elegy; Lycidas is in the mixed rococo style of the pastoralists of the late Renaissance, and belongs to a type which had long been put to ulterior uses and overlaid with deposit upon deposit of literary second-thought. We can see, indeed, in this last particular, an additional reason why the form should have recommended itself to Milton, as well as one prime source of the wonderful beauty which gathered about the theme under his hand. For his mind was of the kind which delights to draw together into one substance the thought-material of all climes and times. Into this magic vessel of the Renaissance pastoral he gathered the mythologies of Greece and Rome, the mongrel divinities of the academic myth-makers, dim old druidical traditions, the miracles of Palestine, the symbolism of the Catholic church, the angelic hierarchies of medieval theologians, and the mystical ecstasies of the redeemed in Paradise, — all set in a frame-work of English landscape, in the midst of which a Sicilian shepherd sat piping strains of a double meaning. Surely there was never a more strangely compounded thing than Lycidas. Surely there was never a more astonishing instance of the wizardry of the imagination than this, where at a compelling word a hundred motley and warring suggestions are swept together and held suspended in airy unity. III The structure of Lycidas is unique in English verse; loose analogues are to be found in the lyric choruses in Guarini's famous play of Pastor Fido, to which Milton undoubtedly gave careful study. The form stands midway between that of the strict ode, with set stanzas, lines of fixed length, and rhymes of fixed recurrence, such as we find in Shelley's Adonaïs, and the complete lawlessness of the so-called Pindaric ode invented by Cowley and familiarized to us by Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day. Though printed without stanza breaks, Lycidas groups itself into eleven distinct sections of varying length, happily termed by Professor Masson "free musical paragraphs." These are composed of iambic five-foot lines, occasionally varied by the introduction of a line of three feet, which is subtly contrived to relieve the rhythmic monotony by imparting a kind of swirl or eddy to the onward flow of the verse. The rhyme system is very free. Sometimes the lines rhyme in couplets, sometimes alternately; again, as in the eight lines at the close, they interlace themselves in the Italian form known as ottava rima. The boldest and most successful device which Milton used, however, was the prolongation of a single rhymesound through a whole passage, in rich replications and echoes. An example of is occurs in the opening passage of the poem. Another daring innovation is illustrated by the first line of all, which stands detached, with no rhyme-word to answer it. A number of these isolated lines occur throughout the elegy: to a sensitive ear they heighten the poignancy of the music by introducing an element of momentary dissonance or unfulfillment, which is at once lost in the wealth of concord, with an effect somewhat like that of a suspension and resolution in instrumental music. IV Through the succession of these "free musical paragraphs" the thought and imagery unfold themselves, capriciously, even incoherently, it would seem to the hasty glance. Let us try to trace this unfolding scheme, and to perceive the intellectual framework upon which the poet has woven his music. Such analysis is more than ordinarily needful in the study of Lycidas, because its unity is compounded of so many simples, and the thought moves from group to group of imagery through such subtly modulated transitions. The poem opens without any warning of its pastoral character, cr of the fact that the author is concealing his personality under the figure of a shepherd plaining for his lost companion: ... "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" Just beneath the surface of the passage there is a plain autobiographic intention. For three years (since the manuscript of Comus had been sent to Lawes) Milton had written no poetry, and here he declares that only "bitter constraint" and "sad occasion dear" compel him to break silence now. From other sources we know the reason of his silence, namely, that he was "mewing his mighty youth," and strengthening himself for a flight beside which his previous efforts would dwindle into insignificance. The myrtle boughs with which he hoped one day to bind his brow were still harsh and crude, unmellowed by the long year of his preparation. But sorrow for his friend is a theme too cogent to be resisted, and the Muses must come, in spite of their denials. Then, to make tangible the sources of that sorrow, follows a picture of the life which the two friends had led together. Under the beautiful pastoral imagery, Milton conveys a veiled description of their college pursuits. It is not wise to push the dual meaning very far. If we are too eager to translate the Satyrs and clovenheeled Fauns who dance to the oaten pipes of Lycidas and his companion, into Cambridge undergraduates applauding Milton's and King's Latin exercises, and old Damotus into the tutor Chappell or Sir Henry Wotton, we shall spoil the poetry beyond repair; but, on the other hand, we shall quite fail to appreciate the spirit of the pastoral unless we manage to see behind the veil of imagery a quaint procession of fact. A stanza of lament over the "heavy change" which the death of Lycidas and the ceasing of his song has brought upon the countryside, leads naturally into a querulous questioning of the Muses which should have protected him, as to their whereabouts at the moment of his danger: "Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? The artistic intention behind this is to bring before the mind, indirectly and tentatively, the tragic circumstances and romantic surroundings of Lycidas's death. At the same time it subserves a further purpose. It enriches the classical theme by suggestion drawn from a dim barbarian cycle of poetry and myth, and it prepares the reader for the more magnificent and shadowy apparition, further on, of the "fable of Bellerus old," and the great vision of St. Michael keeping guard upon his mount. One idea in this passage is sufficiently curi ous in itself and sufficiently significant of Milton's habit of mind, for us to linger over, even at the risk of losing the thread of the analysis. Milton calls the Druid priests bards of the classic Muses, not in the general sense, because they practised poetry, but with reference to a legend which he afterward elaborated in his Latin poem to Manso. There, defending England against the imputation of poetic barrenness, he says: "We, too, worship Apollo; of old we sent him gifts to his island, borne by a chosen band of Druids. Often, in memory of this pilgrimage, the Greek girls circle the altars in grassy Delos, and in glad songs commemorate Loxo, and prophetic Upis, and Hecaërge of the yellow hair, Druid maids, whose nude breasts were stained with Caledonian woad." This idea of a physical connection between the legendary singers and seers of Britain and the gods of Greek song and prophecy, had a peculiar fascination for a mind like Milton's, which constantly craved to bring the diverse elements of the world's thought into unison. In its position here, the allusion aids greatly in making plausible the picture of Greek divinities disporting themselves upon the shores of the Irish sea. Ah me, I fondly dream ... 'Had ye been there' .. for what could that have done?" Behind the gracious divinities of song looms a darker figure, omnipotent to destroy. Wistfully for a moment the poet turns to watch the gay hedonists of his generation, and to question whether it were not better done to distil the earthly happiness of love than to watch and agonize for the guerdon of the "clear spirit," since the blind Fury waits to "slit the thinspun life" at the very instant of its fulfilment. The ignoble despondency lasts only for a moment, and It is difficult to render clear to one's consciousness what it is which makes this transition so thrilling. Perhaps the phrase "trembling ears suggests a kind of exquisite sensitiveness to the presence of the god, such as an animal would feel at an invisible human presence, which makes more intense the words of mystical comfort, as the mind is led upward to that place where the poet's fame lives and spreads aloft by the pure eyes of the everlasting Judge. The theme has now been lifted too high above the pastoral key, and is brought back by an invocation of Arethusa, the fountain of Theocritus, and Mincius, Virgil's river. Then there passes across the scene a weird procession,- Triton, come from Neptune to hold a court of question concerning the death of Lycidas; Eolus, defender of the Winds against the imputed crime; Father Camus, a personification of the college river, bewailing the loss of his child; and last, the figure of St. Peter, bearing the mitre of spiritual sovereignty and the keys of power to bind and loose. Then, by a curious blur, the conception of the dead man as a shepherd under Apollo merges into the conception of him as a shepherd of the flocks of Christ. In the perfect ease of the transition there is more than a hint of Milton's exalted theory of the poet's function. For him, the poet and the preacher are one voice. The shallow ornateness of a hireling's sermon and the scrannel pipings of a rhymester are alike profanations of the temple. Here, without a word of warning, he transfers the whole apparatus of pastoral imagery from its received meaning as symbolic of the poetic life, and applies it to the life of Christian ministry. At the same time the expression takes on a biblical fervor of denunciation and the metaphor becomes hurried and turbid. The wonderful anathema of “blind mouths," and the confusion of image which makes the preaching of a corrupt ministry at once a flashy song and a rank mist, prepares the mind for the apocalyptic vagueness of the "two-handed engine at the door," which may mean anything from the two-edged sword of Revelations to the two houses of the English Parliament. The next transition is abrupt but exquisite. The theme has again, as it were in the poet's despite, risen above the pastoral tone into a region of fiery thought, from which the river-gods and the mild Muses of pastoral poetry shrink in fear. So, as the visionary shape of St. Peter departs muttering vague menaces, the poet calls, "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 flowerets of a thousand hues,' ... and the roll-call of the flowers which follows, with its delicate characterization and sweet fancy, brings back gradually the pastoral atmosphere. But to the poet himself it is only a device "to interpose a little ease," to cheat into momentary quiet his imagination, which keeps tending passionately outward toward the tragic and perturbed suggestions of his theme. The sudden breaking away from these pretty floral fancies to follow the drowned body beyond the stormy Hebrides and through the monstrous world of the ocean depths, is the finest enharmonic change in the poem; and the nine lines which close in shadowy diapason with "the fable of Bellerus old," and the "great Vision of the guarded mount," are among the miracles of imaginative utterance. Throughout the elegy we have noticed a constant struggle of the thought to break through the pastoral conventions. It is largely this struggle on the one hand and repression on the other, which gives the poem its remarkable intensity. At the close the poet abandons himself entirely to his impulse, and the theme soars softly into a region of mystical light, where all that is most gracious in the Hellenic conception of Elysium and all that is most touching in the Hebraic dream of Heaven, meet in lovely unison, after which the lines, "Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood" LYCIDAS (1637) ... lead the mind down again by a matchless gradation to the picture of the solitary shepherd piping in the evening fields; and the poem comes to a close on the quiet pastoral levels where it began. Of the language of Lycidas perhaps the less said the better, for no analysis can hope to capture its secret. In its union of the soft and the thrilling, of the exquisite and the august, of music and might, it has not been surpassed, even by Milton himself. Indeed, the oftener one reads Lycidas, the more inclined one is apt to be to accept Mark Pattison's dictum, that here Milton touched the high-water mark of his poetry. |