Professor John Rogers:
The best way, I think, to introduce the
central issues of this wonderful poem, "Lycidas,"
is to return to Milton's Comus. So yet once
more -- and I promise this will be one of the last times that we
look back at Milton's mask -- but yet once more,
let's look at Comus. Now you will remember that
the mask Comus was everywhere concerned with
questions of the power of -- well,
the strangely intertwined questions of the power of
chastity on the one hand and the power of poetry on the other.
The two brothers in the mask engaged in that philosophical
debate about the force, or the strength,
of virginity. The Second Brother,
you'll remember, had taken what I take to be the
perfectly reasonable position, the cautious position,
that the Lady is in danger -- that she's a sitting duck,
in fact, out there in the dangerous forest.
According to the Second Brother, it's virtually
impossible for a single, helpless maiden to pass
uninjured in this wild, surrounding waste.
Now the Elder Brother, we remember,
hastily dismissed his brother's pessimism,
and then he insisted that the Lady's virginity was fully
capable of protecting her from any such physical attack.Now
to the extent that this discussion is actually about the
virginity of the Second Brother and the Elder Brother's sister,
it seems, I think, to border on the ridiculous;
but the debate, I think, we have to take
seriously. It's an important one for
Milton, and it's important because it touches on a lot of
more consequential questions. I'm thinking of the general
problem of the abstraction of virtue, an abstract notion of
virtue. Think of all the questions that
all of us at some point or other tend to associate with virtue.
Is virtuous behavior repaid with some kind of ultimate good?
Are we rewarded for our virtue and for our virtuous deeds?
Are we recompensed in some way for all of those sacrifices that
we make in the name of virtue? These are questions that Milton
will never stop asking and that he will never stop attempting to
answer. The position that Milton --
this is how I like to read it -- the position that Milton would
like to be able to take on this question of virtue's reward is
formulated by the Elder Brother in Comus.
I'm thinking of the passage near the bottom of page 103 in
the Hughes. This is Comus,
line 588 -- the Elder Brother.
The brother says: Virtue may be assail'd
but never hurt, Surpris'd by unjust force but not enthrall'd,
Yea even that which mischief meant most harm
Shall in the happy trial prove most glory.
But evil on itself shall back recoil And mix no more with
goodness, when at last Gather'd like scum,
and settl'd to itself, It shall be in eternal restless
change Self-fed and self-consum'd;
if this fail, The pillar'd firmament is rott'nness, And
earth's base built on stubble.
Virtue invariably protects itself.
Virtue is invariably rewarded with glory and evil -- and this
is the flip side of the coin -- evil is always punished.
In this amazing image, it's gathered like scum in some
eternal cesspool where it's self-fed and self-consumed --
problem solved! The Elder Brother continues,
though, "if this fail" -- by which he means,
if virtue does not in every single instance triumph over
evil, then this is a world whose
heaven, whose pillared firmament, is rotten to the
core, and whose base,
or whose very foundation, is nothing but stubble.
If virtue fails to triumph over evil, then what?
Then this simply isn't a world worth living in.
That's what I take the Elder Brother to mean here.These
are unquestionably strong words, and I think it's impossible for
us to overestimate the weight of these words.
The speech is more than just a pious bit of optimism like a lot
of the speeches, in fact, that the other brother
has given us. We have to confess that it's
more than that. This speech is a challenge.
The Elder Brother is challenging God to see to it
that some kind of justice is actually effected on this earth;
and so I'm going to be placing a particular amount of pressure
on this passage because this is the first expression in Milton
of a very particular kind of argument: a religious argument,
and it's one that becomes central to all of Paradise
Lost. The speech of the Elder
Brothers is a theodicy. Theodicy is the term
coined by the eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz,
and he applied this term theodicy to just that
kind of philosophical sentiment that's implied by its etymology.
The theodicy is an account of the justice (the dike) of
God (theos). And so, to use the words with
which Milton would begin Paradise Lost,
a theodicy is an attempt "to justify the ways of God to
men."Now for a lot of orthodox Christians in Milton's
time -- and I think we can say the same for a lot of orthodox
Christians in our own time -- to embark upon anything like a
theodicy at all can be considered heretical,
or at the very least heterodox. A theodicy can be seen as
heretical or even blasphemous for the simple reason that it --
think of what it assumes. It assumes that the ways of God
are in fact justifiable. A theodicy assumes that God's
justice can be witnessed, that it can be accounted for
here on earth. A theodicy assumes that things
on earth actually make sense and that God's ways are ultimately
rationally accessible, that they are comprehensible by
human beings, and that God can in some way --
and this is, I think, the central
implication of the Elder Brother here -- that God can in some way
be held accountable for his actions.
To justify the ways of God to men is essentially to put God on
trial for the actions that he performs.
Of course in the central test case this is what we all care
about, for the unfortunate events that befall virtuous
people.The next major poem that Milton writes after
Comus is "Lycidas." You'll remember that Milton
published Comus in 1637. It's 1637, later that same
year, that Milton writes "Lycidas."
In "Lycidas," Milton looks back at the Elder
Brother's theodicy, and it's almost as if he's
attempting to test its validity. You can figure Milton asking in
this poem "Lycidas" if it's true: is it true what the Elder
Brother said, that virtue is always rewarded
and evil punished? Now "Lycidas," and this
is undeniable, is ostensibly,
and maybe more than ostensibly, an elegy.
It's a poem about a death. It mourns the loss of a friend
of Milton's from Cambridge. The young man was named Edward
King, and he drowned in a shipwreck in the Irish Sea
shortly before he took up orders as a minister for the Church of
England. Like so many -- and I mentioned
this before -- like so many of the young men studying with
Milton in Cambridge, King was being prepared to
pursue a career in the church.Now,
and I don't think this is unimportant,
King was also -- it would seem he was also a minor poet,
an amateur poet. Like Milton, he wrote verses.
There is nothing like a shred of evidence to suggest that
Edward King had any talent whatsoever.
Nonetheless, the fact that he attempted to
be a poet, I think, is important here.
Edward King, in fact, seems to have been
sufficiently well liked or admired that when news of his
death hit Cambridge, a group of his friends
organized something like an anthology of poems in his honor.
This is on the handout. The title of the book is
Justa Eduardo King naufrago, Obsequies on Edward King,
Lost at Sea or Drowned. We have no evidence that King
was a particularly close friend of Milton's, but nonetheless
Milton -- as an ambitious literary figure in college,
he was asked to contribute some verses to the anthology,
and "Lycidas" is the product of that request.
We shouldn't be surprised that Milton has to be compelled to
write this poem. He's still in that awkward
phase of unreadiness and under preparation.Now readers have
always seemed to have agreed that Milton's "Lycidas"
is an enormously admirable poem,
but for a few hundred years now there has been a controversy
over how admirable Milton's "Lycidas" is,
specifically as an elegy. The poem is obviously
magisterial. It's moving and just about
everyone concedes that at many junctures it's extraordinarily
learned -- it's obviously learned, but it's also very
moving. This is the question now:
is it properly elegiac? Is "Lycidas" an appropriate
expression of grief over the death of Edward King,
and furthermore, does it console others for
their grief over Edward King's death?
Now this is a debate that fits into the same category,
as far as I'm concerned, as the one between the elder
and the Second Brother. This is a debate that will
forever and forever be fruitless because it's unanswerable.
Nonetheless, I still think there's something
about this controversy surrounding this poem -- the
poem as an elegy -- that we need to take as instructive;
because if Milton's "Lycidas" isn't an
expression of grief over the death of Edward King,
then just what -- this is what we have to ask -- then just what
is it an expression of? So let us begin our
examination of this question with the consideration of the
poem's form. Now the most distinguishing
feature of Milton's elegy is the fact that it's a pastoral elegy.
It engages the ancient art of pastoral poetry initiated and
made famous by the great Greek poet Theocritus,
which was later imitated by Moscus and then finally by the
Roman poet Virgil in his celebrated pastoral eclogues.
You can see on the handout those poems by those classical
authors that Milton's "Lycidas" is most
indebted to. The pastoral elegy is clearly
one of the most stylized and most self-consciously artificial
of all of the poetic genres. The poet of a pastoral elegy
usually represents himself as a shepherd, a shepherd mourning
the death of a fellow shepherd, and he often explains that the
death of his shepherd friend is exerting a magical effect on the
entire natural world. This is called the pathetic
fallacy. The trees, the rocks,
and the streams are all weeping for the loss of the
shepherd-speaker's beloved companion.
It's at this point in the pastoral elegy -- the
conventional, stereotypical pastoral elegy --
that the poet-shepherd sings a mournful song.
He sings a song in which he recalls all of those happy days
that he had spent with his shepherd friend in the
countryside.So we have in the pastoral elegy a generic
form that's highly predictable. Not only now,
but, I think, on some level it has always
struck some of its readers as ludicrous.
We're not being merely churlish, I think,
if we want to ask why someone would want to write a poem in
such a form. As you can imagine,
it had long been out of fashion in Milton's own day.
The pastoral genre in fact even for Theocritus,
its inventor, was always highly artificial.
Theocritus knew no more about shepherds or sheep or
shepherdesses or nymphs and satyrs than you or I know and
later urban poets -- and Theocritus was an urban poet
--later urban poets like Virgil or Milton (Milton our Londoner)
knew even less than Theocritus, we have to assume.
It's almost as if the entire point of a pastoral is that it
is set in a world that neither the urbane poet nor the urbane
reader has actually any real experience with.Another way
into this problem: let's look at the comments that
Dr. Johnson made about Milton's
"Lycidas" in the eighteenth century.
This is reading from the packet assigned for today,
and I'm going to ask you to do what you can to get through the
biography of Milton in the packet,
as well as the notes on Milton's poetry that we have
from Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Make sure you all have done that by the midterm.
Okay. Famously, Dr.
Johnson couldn't bear this poem, "Lycidas" -- Dr.
Johnson, the greatest of all literary critics of the
eighteenth century. Because Milton's poem is
probably considered to be the most important elegy written in
any language by any poet, Johnson's assessment of it has
become famous for being one of the most wrong-headed
evaluations ever made of a work of literature by a great
literary critic -- but inspired wrong-headedness,
which is what I take Dr. Johnson to be guilty of,
is invaluable. And so I want to quote Dr.
Johnson here, and this is on the handout.
["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." [The]
form [of the pastoral elegy, or the form of "Lycidas"]
is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar and therefore
disgusting… Now I have to say,
although the last word is obviously incredibly powerful
and sort of wonderful, it doesn't have quite the punch
that it does -- it didn't have quite the punch in the
eighteenth century that it has for us now.
Disgusting really means literally for Johnson merely
"distasteful." These are still strong words.
There has to be something more here than merely Johnson's
massive blunder as a literary critic.
Johnson tells us that "Lycidas" is not to be considered as the
effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after
remote allusions and obscure opinions.
It's difficult to imagine that as an expression of genuine
grief over the death of a genuinely close friend would
take the form of a poem so learned,
so filled with remote literary allusions and obscure opinions.
Johnson obviously has a point here.But we have to remember
that King himself was a poet, or thought of himself as a
poet. He was a poet who died before
he could take up his career, and it's not unlikely that --
he wasn't married -- that he was also a poet who died while he
was still a virgin. King's death provides Milton
with an occasion on which Milton is able to write the most
personal poem that he has yet written and perhaps that he will
ever write. He gets to ask all of those
questions that are most pressing to him, John Milton.
What if the virginal Milton were to die before he was able
to take up his career? What if he died before he was
able to fulfill his promise as a poet, before he could publish or
make public his talent? The very structure,
in fact, of Milton's poem here is what Dr.
Johnson would be obliged to call a remote allusion.
The poem is based most closely on Virgil's Tenth Eclogue.
This is the poem in which the speaker grieves over a death by
imagining a procession of mourners at the funeral.
This really provides the central rhetorical base for
Milton's "Lycidas." The speaker of the poem
mourns the death of the shepherd-poet Lycidas and
describes this parade, this procession of mourners who
make their tribute to the deceased.So look at line --
I'll run through some of the essential sections here.
Lines seventy-six to eighty-four.
We have the god of poetry, Phoebus Apollo himself,
who makes an appearance, and he chides Milton for being
so concerned with earthly fame -- more on that later.
Line eighty-eight, the next section:
Triton, the herald of the sea. He tries to make sense of
Lycidas' death. He asks the gods what has
happened to Lycidas and who exactly was responsible for the
sinking of Lycidas' ship. In the next line four lines,
we have Camus; the god of the river Cam
appears. He represents Cambridge
University, the alma mater, where Edward King and
John Milton had been students. And finally at lines 108
through 131, we have Saint Peter, he of the pearly gates.
Peter bursts onto the scene. Without question he's the most
terrifying of all of the mourners, and he gives an angry,
powerful, vitriolic speech about the terrible state of
England -- the terrible state of the Church of England and,
as a consequence, of the terrible state of
England in 1637.So the structure of this poem is
unquestionably Virgilian, but the sentiments that are
voiced in this poem are unquestionably Miltonic,
and we will recognize them. Who but Milton could speak the
poem's famous opening lines? Turn to the beginning of
"Lycidas." 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...
Milton is lamenting, once again, that Milton has
been compelled to begin writing. Edward King had died,
and the editor of the Edward King Memorial Anthology has
pressed Milton into service. What could the young poet do?
Bitter constraint and sad occasion are forcing him to
write, even though, of course, he's not yet ready.
The laurels and the myrtles that he addresses here are,
of course, the traditional plants classically associated
with great poets; but for Milton in this passage,
importantly these plants simply aren't ripe yet.
Their berries are still harsh and crude.
They haven't yet had time to develop.
Milton is telling us that he is himself in the process,
still in the process, of maturing.
He's not yet up to the task of a great poem yet.
The only fingers with which he'll be able to hold his pen
and write this poem are his forced fingers rude.Now
you're right: you're right if you have the
[laughs] feeling that you've heard a lot
of these same ideas before. Milton's nearly twenty-nine
years old when he writes "Lycidas." He's making
exactly the same disclaimer that he had made in Sonnet Seven.
You remember Sonnet Seven, "How Soon Hath Time," the
sonnet that he had written on the sad occasion of his
twenty-third birthday. Milton had claimed there that
he seemed to have all the outward appearances of an adult
male, of a man, but "[an]
inward ripeness doth much less appear."
His poetic talent, his poetic promise,
his poetic ripeness -- it hasn't yet burgeoned or made
itself manifest.Well, this is six years later.
Six years later when Milton writes "Lycidas," he's employing
the same fiction of unreadiness and filled with all of the same
anxiety of under-preparedness. As in Sonnet Seven,
Milton writes the first verse paragraph of this great poem,
"Lycidas" -- the first fourteen lines -- in essentially
the form of a sonnet. The lines have distinctly a
sonnet rhyme-scheme, but look closely.
It's not a perfect sonnet in quite the same way that Sonnet
Seven was. Look at line number four,
which is so clearly -- simply by looking at this,
you can tell it's deficient in the number of syllables.
There are only six syllables here rather than the
conventional ten. It's this line,
"And with forc'd fingers rude" -- this is called a broken line
or a half-line, and this broken line has been
read, I think, rightly as Milton's indication
to his reader that he's not even up to the task of writing a
sonnet at this point. Anything he writes is going to
be forced, compelled -- and with his forced fingers rude he
violates the formal prosodic, the metrical,
scheme of his elegy at its very opening.
Just like Edward King who died before his prime,
Milton has to write this poem before his own poetic prime and
so it is with this deeply apologetic,
intensely hesitant beginning that John Milton opens what many
consider to be the greatest poem in the English language.The
fact that the death here in "Lycidas" is the death of
a young, virginal poet at the very
outset of his career, as you can imagine,
resonates in a lot of powerful ways.
The very idea that a figure so virtuous could have been dealt
such a tragic and early death strikes Milton,
or Milton's speaker here, as the rankest injustice.
It's this sense of injustice that keeps pushing this elegy in
the direction of a theodicy: an attempt to justify the ways
of God. Milton has to justify or at
least understand this seemingly incomprehensible and
unjustifiable event. It's this drive to theodicy
that accounts for the poem's most painful moments.
Look at line fifty. This is where Milton asks the
ocean nymphs where they were when Edward King's boat was lost
while crossing the Irish Sea: why didn't you do anything?
"Where were ye Nymphs, when the remorseless deep /
clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?"
If you loved Lycidas so much, how could you let him die?
No sooner has the speaker asked this question -- and you see
this rhythm, this dynamic, appear continually throughout
"Lycidas" -- he asks the question, and then immediately
he acknowledges the inadequacy of the question.
Look at line fifty-five: "Ay me, I fondly dream!
/ Had ye been there -- for what could that have done?"
The nymphs, of course, are powerless,
and worse than that, [laughs]
the nymphs, as we know and of course as John Milton knew,
are merely fictions. This is all made up.
It's folly to think that we have about us protective spirits
who might actually keep us from harm.Milton continues:
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?
Why after all should we expect the nymphs to have helped poor
Lycidas? Not even the muse Calliope,
the muse of epic poetry, was in a position to avert a
human tragedy like this. Calliope hadn't even been able
to save her son, the poet Orpheus,
when the terrifying Bacchae had torn his body limb from limb --
when the terrifying Bacchae had sent his head rolling down the
Hebrus River all the way to the Isle of Lesbos.
If you've read "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," you know
that the image of the great mythological poet Orpheus is
always a loaded one for Milton. This is a myth that has and
will continue to haunt Milton all the way up through
Paradise Lost.Let's have a little review of the
career of the great poet Orpheus as we get it certainly in
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." Orpheus was
the poet who had attempted to bring his wife,
Eurydice, back from the underworld, and he did that by
charming Pluto with his song. The attempt failed and,
saddened by Eurydice's death, Orpheus spent the rest of his
life avoiding the company of women.
He kept himself solitary and chaste.
He devoted himself to poetry. He sang songs of such beauty
that the entire natural world would move and dance in
response. This is the story of Orpheus
that we have received up to this point in Milton's poetry.
This is the story of the empowerment of the poet,
his empowerment through his experience of a terrible loss.
Clearly this is a myth that Milton is identifying with very
strongly here.But the subject of "Lycidas" isn't the
empowerment of the poet. It's about the untimely death
of a poet. And so when the figure of
Orpheus appears in this poem, it's the second half of the
Orpheus story that Milton is forced to tell.
Orpheus devotes himself to his beautiful poetry,
and he keeps himself sexually abstinent.
He rejects all of the advances of the women who are attracted
to him but Bacchantes, the female followers of the god
Bacchus, are enraged by what they take to be his coyness.
They drown out Orpheus' music with the hideous roar of their
howlings and their screamings and they tear him limb from
limb. The chaste poet was unable to
pass uninjured in that wild surrounding waste.
This violence was so terrible that not even his mother,
the muse Calliope, could save him.Orpheus had
provided Milton with a paradigm of the poet,
the poet whose discipline and whose abstinence nourished and
strengthened his poetry. Orpheus in a lot of ways seemed
like the perfect model of a poet because he had the power to do
something with his poetry. His verse actually had a
physical impact on the world. The rocks, the woods,
and the trees danced in response to Orpheus' music.
In Comus, the Lady had identified with Orpheus
as she described to Comus what her speech about virginity would
do if she were actually to deliver it.
She would bring all of Comus' magic structures down around his
head. It's just this Orphic power
that Milton, like the Lady, was always anticipating for
himself. He's been waiting and waiting
for his season due so that he can ripen into a powerful Orphic
poet.How then can we justify the ways of God to men?
How can we justify the fact that the abstinent Orpheus,
the virtuous Orpheus, was so brutally assaulted and
without any aid from the higher powers?
It would seem that the Elder Brother and his sister were way
too optimistic in their assessment of the protected
status of the virtuous poet and the protected status of the
virgin, the favored role of the poet.
Virginity does nothing. Virtue does nothing.
Poetry does nothing. All of the self-discipline and
all of the self-denial in the world can do nothing -- this
seems to be one of the implications of this poem -- can
do nothing to protect the poet from an untimely death.It's
at this moment that the poem reaches a remarkable climax,
and I have to say that this is actually only one of the poem's
remarkable climaxes. This poem has amazing ebbs and
flows throughout its entirety, but without question this is
one of the most intense personal moments in the elegy.
Look at line sixty-four. Here we have Milton asking
himself all of those questions, all of those vocational
questions, that this fact -- the fact of
Edward King's death -- seems to open up for him:
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 Neaera's
hair? I think these lines at this
point -- I'm going to read them again.
They're too important simply to have been read once:
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 Neaera's
hair? At this point in our reading of
Milton, I think these lines have an amazing impact.
We've spent a couple of weeks now reading Milton's
declarations of the importance of the shepherd's trade.
This is the vocation of poetry in this pastoral lexicon.
You remember he's written his father in "Ad Patrem"
that the trade, the vocation of poetry -- it
may be homely and slighted in his father's eyes,
but it was of course worth all of Milton's time,
all of Milton's uncessant care and investment.
And now Milton's in the position of asking,
"What for? What's this all about?
Look what happened to Edward King.
What's the point of all of this study, all of this work,
all of this self-denial if I could just wind up" -- this is a
good question -- if I could just wind up dead tomorrow?
And now that I'm thinking of it, why deny myself sexually?
Why deny myself physical gratification if I could just
instead sport with Amaryllis in the shade or with the tangles of
Neaera's hair?" And Milton's asking in these
lines not simply about actual erotic entanglements -- although
I think that's there, a relation with women -- but
it's a question about erotic poetry as well.
Why can't he write love poetry, secular poetry,
instead of this much more disciplined,
much more difficult mode of sacred and prophetic poetry that
he seems already to have wedded himself to?
What's the point of making life so hard for himself?Look
now, and this is on the handout, at the letter that Milton had
written to his friend, Charles Diodati.
This letter was written at nearly the same time that Milton
was writing "Lycidas." He wrote -- and this too is in the
packet -- he wrote: Listen,
Diodati, but in secret lest thy blush, and let me talk to you
grandiloquently for a while. You ask what I am thinking.
So help me, God, an immortality of fame.
And we would read -- can you imagine getting such a letter?
Milton may well blush at this extraordinary confession.
He is courting poetic fame more shamelessly at this point in his
career than he has before and perhaps that he will after.
The death of Edward King is really forcing him to question
the point of his pursuit of greatness, of poetic fame,
and all of his ambition. The poem continues at line
seventy: 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.
It's the pursuit of fame, the noble pursuit of fame,
that spurs us to scorn delights and to live laborious days.
Fame spurs us to pursue the abstinent life of the poet.
It's the guerdon, the reward, the prize of fame
that we're continually anticipating will burst out
someday in a sudden blaze of glory.
But as soon as we hope to find that guerdon,
the golden ring, comes the blind Fury with the
abhorred shears -- ouch! -- and slits the thin-spun life.
The blind Fury here is the mythological figure Atropos;
this is the Fate that cuts the slender thread by which our
lives dangle. Milton lends a special horror,
I think, to this image of a blind Fury, and I hope you will
agree with those critics -- I didn't make this up -- who find
embedded in these lines something like a figurative
intimation of castration. Like the furious Bacchae,
the furious Atropos emasculates the man who dares to aspire to
poetic greatness. With the abhorred shears she
cruelly punishes the virgin poet for his failure on the one hand
to use the sexual body that God has endowed him with,
but you also have the image here of the poet's death.
You have the image of the cutting off, the castration,
of the power of generativity. All poetic potency,
all power to assert oneself in the world, can be severed and
that's it.I don't think that the critics who see here an
image of castration are just imagining it,
because there is such a weird and such a persistent interest
in the human body, and especially in the poet's
body, throughout this poem -- Milton's focus on the body,
on the entire realm of the corporeal.
I'm hoping that it feels a little strange to you and it
seems strange, I think,
when you consider what is obviously here the Christian
context of Milton's "Lycidas." Orthodox Christianity teaches
us to put aside our concerns for the body when we consider our
death. The Old Testament prophet had
said, "All flesh is grass," an important verse for the new
dispensation of Christianity. The only thing that matters is
the salvation of the incorporeal, the bodiless soul,
but Milton is so unorthodox, or at least heterodox,
in his insistence on the importance of the body in this
poem.Look at the verse paragraph that begins at line
132. Oh, this passage!
Milton asks the Sicilian muse -- this is the muse of pastoral
poetry -- asks the muse to help him strew the flowers over the
hearse, to strew with flowers the
casket in which Lycidas' body lies.
The body of Lycidas, even in death,
is of an unusual interest to our poet.
The speaker employs -- this is an amazingly physical,
and I think it's even a sensual,
language as he catalogs the flowers that he imagines will
cover Lycidas' body. Line 135:
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 enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied
showers… Okay: maybe the Elder Brother
in Comus was wrong. The virgin's body can't -- you
remember that amazing counterfactual fantasy -- the
virgin's body can't, perhaps we're acknowledging
here, can't be transmuted into spirit or soul.
But we can still tend, and we can nurse,
the dead body. We can lovingly care for it and
ornament it here in our very corporeal way on earth.
It's an intensely erotic passage, this image of
decorating King's tomb with flowers.
And it's at the height of this vision of our floral decoration
of Lycidas' hearse that the speaker is suddenly caught up
short. Look at line 154.
We read line 154 and we realize we have been had.
We have just -- we've been sucked in.
We have just participated in one of the biggest cheats that
poetry can offer. "Ay me!"
he says as he realizes, of course, there will be no
flowers. There's not going to be a
hearse. Why not?
There's no body! There's no body to decorate.
What have we been thinking? Lycidas was drowned.
His remains are unrecoverable. This is a terrible moment of
realization on the part of the speaker.
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… Milton's confronting here the
awful fact that Lycidas' bones -- they've been hurled to the
four corners of the sounding seas.
They could be anywhere. And as if that weren't terrible
enough a realization, he goes on to envision an even
more grotesque end for Lycidas' body.
He conjures -- surely this is indecorous.
This is wildly inappropriate, I think, in such a pious poem.
He conjures the indecorous image of the dead Lycidas under
the whelming tide visiting the bottom of the monstrous sea.
It's that word "visit" that gets me every time.
It's so inappropriate and ghoulish, I think,
in this already sufficiently ghoulish context.
First of all, it's like a parody of the epic
journey to the underworld that we have in so many
great classical texts, and it forces us to think,
at least for a moment here, of Lycidas as some ghastly
underwater visitor: a skeletal,
monstrous version of Jacques Cousteau peering into the
unknowable monstrous, mysterious depths of the bottom
of the world.This intensely intimate focus on the human body
is out of place in a Christian elegy and this,
of course, Milton knows. It's because the investment in
the bodily world is so great here that Milton ultimately
turns to the Christian vision, the more familiar Christian
vision, of a bodiless afterlife. This is how this logic goes --
we are all familiar with this: our body remains to molder in
the earth or welter in the ocean (where'ere),
but our incorporeal spirit rises to heaven where it can
enjoy an ethereal, a bodiless,
world of eternity. And so Milton concludes
"Lycidas" with this standard vision of Christian consolation.
On some level this is textbook Protestant or Catholic
Christianity. 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.
This image of the afterlife is founded on the orthodox figure
for eternity. The body stays to the earth
while the soul, like the day-star,
rises to the sky. But when you look a little more
closely at this conclusion, I think you realize that
Milton's heaven is almost as invested in the human body as
Milton's earth had been. The heaven imagined here is
able actually to supply us, in fact, with a better body
than the one we had down here. When the speaker writes that
the day-star "… yet anon repairs his drooping
head," we are reminded of Orpheus.
We have an image here of the reconstituted,
repaired body of Orpheus whose gory,
severed head had been sent down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian
shore. It's as if Milton can't let go
of this most un-Christian attachment to the human body.
I think it's fair to say that Milton can't really imagine or
fully invest himself in the Christian heaven until he can
fully corporealize it and imagine it bodily.
This is exactly, of course, what he will do in
Paradise Lost. Everyone in Milton's heaven
has a body, even God Himself. God Himself in Paradise Lost
is nothing but body. His body is the universe
itself.Listen to the physicality of the rest of the
description of Milton's heaven in "Lycidas." This
is line 172: So Lycidas,
sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him
that walk'd the waves, 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
forever from his eyes. Clearly, the other groves and
the other streams are different in heaven.
They are different from the groves and streams we have down
here, but they don't seem necessarily to differ,
I submit, in their degree of physicality.
Lycidas is going to shampoo his hair in heaven much as he
shampooed his hair on earth, except in heaven there's always
a difference. It will be a nectar pure with
which he laves his oozy locks. And even more important,
Lycidas will continue to sing in heaven just as he had sung on
earth, except now he can hear the
unexpressive -- that means "inexpressible" -- nuptial song.
We remember this song. This is the song mentioned in
Revelation 14 that Milton is continually alluding to and we
saw him allude to just this passage in "Ad Patrem."
John the Divine had written in Revelation 14 -- you know this:
And they sung as it were a new song before the
throne… and no man could learn that
song but the one hundred and forty and four thousand,
which were redeemed from the earth.
These are they which were not defiled with women;
for they are virgins. And it's virgins who get to
sing the nuptial song at the wedding of the lamb that John
also envisions. Milton can't allow himself to
embrace the wonderful fiction, that beautiful fiction that had
been espoused by the Elder Brother: the fantasy that
virgins don't even die, that their bodies are simply
reconstituted somehow [laughs] as angelic spirits.
That went too far. It was too pagan,
way too unorthodox. But Milton does permit himself
the closest scriptural version of that fiction,
and that's John's image in Revelation 14 of the special
heavenly rewards for virgin poets.Now you also looked at
for today the Latin poem that Milton wrote not long after
"Lycidas." That's the poem "Damon's Epitaph,"
the "Epitaphium Damonis," written on the very sad
occasion of the death of Milton's best friend,
Charles Diodati, who died the next year,
1638. You remember this is the young
fellow that Milton had confessed his desire for immortal fame to.
Look at the end of that poem. This is page 139 in the
Hughes. This is where Milton
imagines -- you have to turn to this.
He imagines Diodati just as he had imagined Edward King,
enjoying at last his heavenly reward.
This is the English translation because the poem is in Latin:
Because you loved the blush of modesty and a stainless
youth and because you did not taste the delight of the
marriage-bed, lo!
the rewards of virginity are reserved for you.
Your glorious head shall be bound with a shining crown and
with shadowing fronds of joyous palms in your hands you shall
enact your part eternally in the immortal marriage where song and
the sound of the lyre [can you even believe what I'm about to
say?] are mingled in ecstasy with
blessed dances and where the festal orgies rage under the
heavenly thyrsus. Now we recognize the song.
This is the song from Revelation of the virgins who
could learn and sing the new song before the throne of the
Lord, but Milton has obviously taken
John's image here and exploded the implications of its erotic
potential. It's not just that virgins are
entitled to sing a heavenly song as Milton is saying Diodati is.
The heavenly reward in this poem involves all of the
sensuality, all of the sensual experience, that was denied and
repressed on earth. This [laughs]
-- "Damon's Epitaph" ends with a virtual orgasm
of Christian consolation as Milton gives his best friend the
most unbelievable sendoff that is possible to give.
The heaven in this poem is so far from being the incorporeal
-- the spiritual heaven of orthodox Christianity that you
have an image of an actual orgy, the festal orgy raging under
the thyrsus (that's the phallic wand).
Who's holding this wand? Presumably none other than the
orgiastic leader, God himself.
There's no other way to interpret these lines which,
as you can imagine, critics simply pretend don't
exist, [laughs]
because who can figure out what to say?In "Lycidas" Milton
doesn't let himself, thank God, go quite so far as
he does in this amazing ending to "Damon's Epitaph." In
fact nowhere else do we see Milton literally [laughs]
bursting out at the seams as he seems to in this poem.
But the unmistakable physicality of the heaven
imagined in the poem about Diodati gives us some idea,
I think, of how to read the end of "Lycidas." The
corporeality of "Damon's Epitaph" illuminates we
can see the unorthodox direction in which Milton's "Lycidas" is
tending.So let me conclude here.
Milton has wrenched this poem away from Christianity,
and he's forced it into a direction that we could loosely
call paganism. There has been a slippage from
Christian spirituality into something like a pagan
naturalism, and it's a world in which all things are physical.
All spirits, like the genius loci,
are physical, palpable presences in the
natural world. The human body,
the world of flesh and blood that we all inhabit,
has in some way at the end of this poem reasserted itself.
In this final assertion of the body Milton, I think,
is able to recover his theodicy, his attempt to justify
the ways of God here on earth. Milton's Lycidas' body is still
in some way a physical one. To the extent that Lycidas'
body has been recovered, that it's been redeemed,
Milton is able -- perhaps successfully,
Milton is able to justify the ways of God to men.
He's able to justify the ways of God to men here on the
physical -- on this intimately bodily earth.This is the
last thing I will tell you. As you have no doubt
experienced, this is a dense and difficult poem,
so please reread it innumerable times for Wednesday's class,
and in addition to that do the other readings assigned.
Okay.
