Professor John Rogers:
"Lycidas" is probably the most difficult poem
that we'll be reading all semester.
But, as I mentioned briefly in the last class,
the notorious difficulties attending this poem seem to have
very little to do with Milton's grief over the death of Edward
King, which may well not have been
all that troubled or complicated.
We have no evidence, and I mentioned this before,
that there was a particularly close relation between these two
young men.The difficulty of the poem lies to a great degree,
I think, in something that Dr. Johnson had noted in his attack
or in his criticism on "Lycidas" that I mentioned on Monday.
Its difficulty lies in Milton's tendency in this poem to seek
out what Dr. Johnson wonderfully calls
remote allusions. This is by far the most learned
and the most demanding lyric poem that Milton writes.
It's a poem deeply invested in the tradition of pastoral
poetry, pastoral poetry from Theocritus and Virgil onward.
It's a poem deeply invested, in fact, in the entire Western
tradition of poetry in general. Finally, I think it can be said
that it's a poem whose deepest investment is actually in
Milton's mastery over the entire Western tradition of literature.
Milton -- this will be the working assumption that I bring
to my reading of this poem -- Milton sets out to prove
something in "Lycidas," and the most important
thing that he proves is his control over the learning that
he has accumulated.Now I spoke last time about the
familiar sense of hesitation, that apology with which Milton
had opened the elegy. We hear in the 1637
"Lycidas" those same cries of unripeness and
under-preparation that we had heard in the 1631 sonnet,
"How Soon Hath Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth."
When Milton opens "Lycidas" with that phrase,
"Yet once more," one of the things that he's telling the
reader is that yet once more he'll be making the same
argument for unreadiness; the same argument for nervous
anticipation that he'd made a number of times before.
And so as a way of understanding what at this point
is really the sheer repetitiveness of this
disclaimer, I want to propose a metaphor.
I propose that we think of Milton at the opening of
"Lycidas" as being stuck, stuck at a particular point in
the imagined, the projected or fantasized,
trajectory of his career. I'm using the word "stuck," of
course, because the Lady had been stuck so famously and so
prominently in Comus.You may
remember that I had suggested in the lecture on the Nativity
Ode that Milton may have thought of his career as if it
were something like a race. I think here that the
particular image of a career as a race still holds but with a
little bit of a difference. What seems so obvious,
at least to me here in reading "Lycidas," is that
at this point in 1637 there's a stumbling block or a hurdle that
Milton in his race simply can't get over.
Now the surest sign of a hurdle is one of those pointed literary
allusions that Milton makes in "Lycidas,"
one of those remote allusions that Johnson had
complained about. It's an allusion that has
everything to do with Milton's own sense of his unreadiness,
and I'm thinking of that. Oh, it's just -- it's
wonderful, that strange moment that happens fairly early on in
the poem. This is line seventy-six.
In the Hughes edition, it's page 122.
It's that moment in which Phoebus Apollo makes a sudden
and unexpected appearance. Now not only does Phoebus
Apollo make a sudden appearance, but he seems actually to
interrupt the speaker of the poem in order to correct
him.Let's remind ourselves what's been happening.
Milton has just been lamenting the fact that the laborious days
of the poet might not result in a sudden blaze of fame.
What good is it -- you'll remember -- what good is it,
Milton asks, "to tend the homely slighted
shepherd's trade"; that's, of course,
the vocation of poetry if that shepherd-poet is just going to
be struck down in his prime as Edward King had been?
You'll remember that Milton had complained that "the thin-spun
life" could be so easily slit -- but look at line seventy-six:
"'But not the praise,' / Phoebus repli'd,
and touch'd my trembling ears." Okay.
[laughs] What's happened? Phoebus Apollo,
the god of the sun and, not unimportant,
also the god of poetry -- Phoebus Apollo bursts in to the
text and corrects the poet, corrects the poet's youthful
interest in earthly fame: "'Fame is no plant that grows
on mortal soil.'" True fame exists only in heaven.
The only reputation that matters is the praise you
ultimately receive from God or " all-judging Jove;
/ as he pronounces lastly on each deed."
And as in all of these early lyrics, Jove conventionally
throughout the Renaissance is used as a name within these
classical fictions to signify the Christian God.Now this
moment is striking in part because we had no idea -- how
could we possibly have had an idea?
-- that Phoebus Apollo was actually eavesdropping on the
poet's discourse. I think we're taken aback here.
We're taken aback by the rude interruption in the otherwise
seamless flow of the poet's lament.
This moment is also striking because Milton has lifted this
entire scene of this interruption from somewhere
else. He has taken it from one of the
pastoral poems of Virgil. The image of a poet interrupted
and chided by the god of poetry comes straight out of the
opening of Virgil's Sixth Eclogue.
Virgil had written a poem in the Sixth Eclogue that had
touched Milton, and it had touched Milton,
I think, because it begins with Virgil's own brooding meditation
on the course of his poetic career.
Now we all know what Virgil's poetic career would go on to
look like. Virgil would go on to be a
great epic poet but not until after he had written these
pastoral eclogues and then after that,
after he had written the georgic poems,
only then does he write finally the great epic poem The
Aeneid.Now in Virgil's early poem,
the Sixth Eclogue, the speaker explains that the
writing of pastoral poetry is the stuff that young poets do.
Poets begin their careers with easy pastoral poems,
but Virgil's speaker says that he is more ambitious now.
He's starting to champ at the bit.
He's ready to write an epic poem on much more important
subjects than shepherds and shepherdesses.
He wants to write about kings and wars.
As soon as he has expressed this epic ambition -- Virgil
explains that as soon as he's expressed this Phoebus Apollo,
the god of poetry, stepped in and chided him.
So this is Virgil: "When I was fain to sing of
kings and battles, the Cynthian god" -- that's
Phoebus Apollo -- "plucked my ear and warned me."
Apollo warns Virgil that a pastoral poet simply shouldn't
overstep his bounds. This is Virgil:
"He should sing thin [little, fine]- spun lays and he should
be content feeding his fat sheep."
The god told Virgil that he wasn't ready yet for the manly,
the adult, and the public world,
the important world, of epic poetry.All of this
anxiety, and when you think of it,
all of this shame as well as the shame of ambition -- all of
this gets packed into this allusion to Virgil that Milton
brings to this very disturbing moment in "Lycidas."
It's important, I think, that this Virgilian
scene with Apollo appears so early in Milton's "Lycidas."
Milton's "Lycidas" doesn't end up all soaked in
this unhealthy brew of -- neurotic brew of anxiety and
shame and naked ambition. I think it's one of our jobs
here to figure out why that's the case.
Why doesn't -- this is one way of putting the question -- why
doesn't Apollo harass or bother Milton at the end of
"Lycidas" in the same way that he harasses Milton at the
poem's beginning? Now I think you may be
rather happy to hear that this is the last time -- I'm pretty
sure that this is the last time -- that we will have to discuss,
at least at any length, Milton's worries about his
unreadiness and his un-preparation.
It's safe to say that "Lycidas" is one of the
last poetic works of Milton's that's really consumed with his
problem, the problem of fruitless
anticipation. In some ways I think that
that's because the poem "Lycidas" seems in some ways to
solve the problem of Milton's waiting,
this problem that he has of needing to wait.
And so one of the things that needs to be explored here is why
this poem is the last poem that Milton is not prepared to write.
What does Milton do -- this is what I see as our project,
our interpretive project, as we approach this poem --
what does Milton do to get himself unstuck from this seat
of anxious anticipation? That's the project.So we
looked last time at the oddity, the peculiarity,
of Milton's choice of genre here, the pastoral genre.
Milton was the only Cambridge poet to honor Edward King in
that memorial anthology by writing a poem in the pastoral
mode. A pastoral, of course,
features shepherds and shepherdesses as its most
distinguishing characteristic. The word pastoral comes
from the Latin pastor, which literally means
"shepherd," and Milton knew perfectly well
how artificial his use of the pastoral mode of poetry would
seem as well as how out of fashion,
how completely outdated, it would seem.
One of the motives for his selection of this genre,
the pastoral genre, is the tradition -- and it's a
tradition that goes all the way back to Theocritus and Virgil --
that associates shepherds with poets.
This has always been a part of the pastoral genre.
To speak of shepherds and shepherding in a pastoral poem
seems almost invariably to be a strategy or a way to speak of
poets and their craft of poetry. This is a kind of literary
self-consciousness that we're all familiar with.But
there's another meaning given to shepherds as well.
After the long sway of Theocritus' and Virgil's
pastorals, of course Christianity entered the scene,
a new dispensation; and Christianity began to load
this pastoral literary tradition with its own set of
associations. Shepherds came to represent not
only poets. They came to stand for
ministers, they came to signify allegorically ministers as well.
So priests, ministers or pastors -- we still call them
pastors -- had long been referred to as shepherds.
They are leaders of their flocks.
And so it seemed a natural move for early Christian writers to
use this existing pastoral form when they wanted to speak on
subject of priests or ministers or affairs of the
church.Milton is essentially inheriting both of these
traditions, both of these sets of
associations with pastoral poetry.
When we consider the particular circumstances that occasioned
the poem "Lycidas," we can see why Milton,
I think, chose this pastoral form.
Edward King, the young man,
the elegized deceased, was a minor poet on his way to
begin his career as a minister, and the figure of the shepherd,
the pastor, fuses into one person or into one figurative
entity both of these callings: the vocation of the poet and
the vocation of the minister. We've looked before at Milton's
Reason of Church Government.
That's the political treatise written in 1642.
We've seen Milton's account there of how he had attempted to
reconcile, on the one hand, his obligation to become a
minister and his desire, on the other hand,
to become a poet.I want to back up now because I think it's
important to fill in a little bit of the historical context
behind that long but important prose treatise.
It's not irrelevant to our understanding of "Lycidas."
The subject of The Reason of Church Government
is Milton's feelings about the hierarchical structure of
the Church of the England. In the early years of the
English Revolution, one of the hottest flash points
of political contention was the degree of appropriate state
involvement in the church. As with almost all of the
issues of contemporary and political struggle in the
seventeenth century, Milton's own views really pull
decidedly to the left, to the progressive end of the
political spectrum. Beginning in the late 1630s at
the moment in which "Lycidas" is being written,
Milton is becoming increasingly radical.
We can think of it -- this is an anachronistic term -- but
increasingly leftist, and he's becoming one of those
figures that we can now identify with this label of
"Puritan."Puritans at this moment in English history were
placing, when thinking about how things
should work at church, more and more emphasis on the
sermon, the institution of the sermon.
The act of preaching sermons for Puritans was becoming more
important, actually, than following the ceremonial
rituals of the Church of England.
So in the years just before 1637, the English court under
James I and then later under Charles I -- the English crown
had been cracking down on the delivery of Puritan sermons in
the church. In 1633, William Laud had been
appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he had been
granted an extraordinary set of arbitrary powers of suppression,
actually, by the monarch. Laud took his mission as
the head of the Church of England to be the squelching of
this Puritan opposition. The most outrageous action in
Laud's crackdown was his move to ban -- his attempt to ban
preaching in churches. So under Archbishop Laud,
only the official liturgy could be recited in church.
As you can imagine, this was controversial.
A struggle breaks out in the church, and Milton naturally
takes the Puritan position in favor of preaching.
The church shouldn't be under the control of the bishops --
this is Milton's argument -- or prelates,
a common seventeenth-century word for bishops,
but the church should be led by preachers: men who were chosen
by their congregations to preach.
Eventually this is where we get the notion of
congregationalism.So given all of the controversies raging
around the question of the proper government of the church,
and Milton is deeply invested in these matters,
Milton feels obliged to do something.
This is one of the reasons that he writes The Reason
of Church Government, this intense sense of
obligation that he feels. He feels duty-bound to
participate materially in this political controversy rather
than merely remaining in his studious retirement,
however pleasant that is, at his father's house.
Were Milton not to fight in some way to defend what he takes
to be the true church, he would simply not be
investing those talents that God had given him.
This is the Miltonic logic that we're familiar with.So this
is the situation that Milton finds himself in as he's writing
"Lycidas." He's under the greatest pressure of his life to
do something with his talent. He wants of course -- at least
we assume that he still wants to be a poet.
At the same time, he fears that being a poet
means -- and this is a fear that literate young men and women
have to this very day -- to be a poet means in some way not to be
acting responsibly or politically.
So Milton explains in The Reason of Church Government --
he tries to mend this breach and so he argues in this
treatise that "Poetry has" -- and I'm quoting him here --
"Poetry has a power beside the office of the pulpit."
Milton even claims that poetry is equal to preaching in its
ability to move people, to get them to do something,
to make things happen in the world.
Of course, this is a lot of pressure to
put on poetry and especially a lot of pressure to put on a
pastoral elegy that's ostensibly about shepherds and sheep;
but it is the duty of this poem "Lycidas" to show that
poetry can exert a power beside the office of the pulpit,
that it can do the same kind of work that a preacher is able to
accomplish behind the pulpit. Milton has to develop a poetic
voice that can actually combine those two vocations,
the two offices, the office of poetry and the
office of ministry. If we want to think of it in
the more familiar domestic context, Milton has to begin a
career that could please both himself and his father.Now
last time I mentioned the dramatic structure of this poem.
You'll remember it features a succession of four mourners,
and we could think of each of these mourners providing Milton
with an opportunity to try out a different voice.
One of the voices utterly mops the floor [laughs]
with all of the others. Certainly, it stands far
outside the generally pastoral framework of the poem.
The most striking, the most powerful,
of all of the mourning voices here is that of Saint Peter.
This is the figure that Milton refers to in line 109 as the
Pilot of the Galilean Lake.Now what's Saint Peter
doing in this poem? The very mention of Saint Peter
naturally violates the classical, pastoral fiction of
the poem. Up to this point,
the Christian God has been referred to as Jove.
That's how the poem works since it's within the pagan world,
the pagan fictional world of the classical pastoral that this
Christian poem is set. To speak both of Jove and of
Christ is obviously in some ways to mix your metaphors and the
effect can only be disorienting. The character of Peter brought
directly out of the New Testament is really slicing
through the poem's fictive veneer.
Peter cuts a figure so daunting and so terrifying that we're
almost led to forget that the poem we're reading is a pastoral
elegy at all, so unbelievable is Peter's
discourse. Okay, line 109:
Last came, and last did go, The Pilot
of the Galilean Lake. Two massy Keys he bore of
metals twain (The Golden opes, the Iron shuts amain).
He shook his Mitred locks, and stern bespake…
Now this is important to Milton. This is decidedly the last of
all the funeral mourners, and Peter provides Milton's
poem with an important element of finality, of closure.
Peter wields the keys of the kingdom of heaven and can open
and shut the doors of personal salvation,
just as he can open and shut the doors of the church.
That's his function. It's the sentiments that Peter
utters that, I think, most powerfully grab us,
and they grab us because they are so angry -- they're so
violent in their anger. As the head of the true church,
Peter's voicing here his disgust that the virtuous Edward
King, soon to become a minister, had been lost at sea.
Think of the logic of what Peter's saying here.
He would gladly have traded dozens -- he would have traded
dozens of corrupt Anglican ministers for the simple and
honest King. Look at line 113.
This is where Peter is addressing Edward King himself:
How well could I have spared for thee,
young swain, Enough of such as for their bellies' sake,
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold?
The corrupt clergy of today, under the malign influence of
the horrible Archbishop Laud, are interested only in
satisfying their own greed. In order to fill their own
bellies, so greedy are they, they intruded into the church's
fold and devour for themselves -- this is how the allegory
works -- devour for themselves the nourishment that of course
they should be sharing with their flock.But this wish
that [laughs] other shepherds had died and
not Edward King is so strange. You can't deny it.
There is something here of a kind of indecorous tone of
malice, that the priests and the prelates of the church are so
corrupt according to Saint Peter that we're led to assume almost
-- not that this is a direct charge but implicitly,
I think, this is what Peter is conveying -- it's almost as if
they're responsible for Edward King's death;
as if by creeping into the church's fold,
somehow they've managed to push poor Edward King out of the
fold. It's a hint at the malevolent
agency of these priests, and it should point us to the
true outrageousness of this speech, maybe its irrationality.
We already know that Edward King -- of course he wasn't
killed by the prelates of the Church of England!
He was drowned and the drowning was an accident.
The poem never questions that, and it's ridiculous to lay his
death at the church's door. The poem nonetheless harbors
this wonderfully primitive and irrational accusation.
There's a lapse in logic here, and this lapse should focus our
interest all the more on the urgency that we feel in Saint
Peter's speech. This isn't just a speech.
This is a vitriolic tirade, and it gets ugly.
Milton needs to get ugly here. He needs to voice this tirade,
and he needs to write this politically motivated
harangue.As you'll see it starts to pick up more and more
enemies as it moves along. Look at line 119:
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!"
The faithful herdman's art in "Lycidas" is a double one.
It's the Christian art of ministering to a religious
flock, it's that of the pastor, and it's the more classical art
of poetry. The men against whom Saint
Peter is really spitting his venom are bad pastors in every
sense of the word. They're corrupt not only as
ministers but they are also corrupt as poets.
They're bad poets. Look at line 123.
These are such great lines: "And when they list,
their lean and flashy songs / grate on their scrannel Pipes of
wretched straw." I have to read these lines
again: "And when they list, their lean and flashy songs /
grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw."
It seems to be the case that Milton's made this word up,
this wonderful word scrannel.
It seems to mean something like "scrawny."
At least that's what the OED tells us;
the only example that they can find of the word scrannel
is in Milton's "Lycidas."This last line
that I've read seems itself to have been grated on a scrannel
pipe. It's such an unpleasant line.
It's always worth asking yourself what a line of poetry
that is as aggressively unpleasant as this one is doing
in a poem. The sheer cacophony of the
clustered consonants in this line sets off -- or has the
potential to set off -- a powerful cluster of feelings.
The anger here is directed against the superficial,
the flashy, liturgies read by the Laudian priests,
but I think it's also being directed at the lean and flashy
songs that are being written by Milton's poetic contemporaries,
his rival poets. Saint Peter has arrived from
heaven into this poem to express perhaps for the first time the
envy and the anger that Milton seems successfully to have
suppressed up to this point: envy and anger not only at the
state of the Church of England in the late 1630s but also the
state of poetry in England at this time.So Saint Peter
concludes with -- it goes on, and he concludes with a couplet
that is as terrifying in its threat of finality as it is for
me utterly baffling in its significance.
Look at the last two lines: "But that two-handed engine at
the door / stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."
Now we will never know, and don't let anyone ever
suggest to you that you will ever know,
what Milton could possibly mean by this deliberately perplexing
image of the two-handed engine at the door.
If you ever want to take a look at -- and I urge you to --
The Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton in
the CCL collection, you should peruse it.
It's a massive, wonderful multi-volume work
that catalogs all of the critical commentary on Milton's
shorter poems up until some point in the ‘70s.
There are no less than twenty pages devoted to the critical
debate on these two lines: what the hell Saint Peter's
two-handed engine is, what it looks like,
what it [laughs] does, what -- and everything
about it. We have no idea what this
menacing contraption actually is supposed to look like or what
it's actually intended to signify,
but we can know, I think, with some certainty
that it's not scrannel. Size matters here;
and this -- the two-handed engine -- is big,
and it works, and it's able to put an
apocalyptic end to all corruption and in fact it's able
to put something like an apocalyptic end to all life.
It stands ready to smite once and smite no more.Now we
began this poem with the sense of the dreary repetitiveness in
that opening phrase, "Yet once more," but here very
close to the poem's end we have a vision of an end to all those
fruitless exercises of repetition.
Milton corrects -- it's as if he's correcting the sense of
monotony with which he had begun the poem,
and he corrects that sense of monotony by rewriting that
initial phrase. Whatever the two-handed engine
is, it will smite once and smite no more.
It's incapable of repeating itself.Now,
I think there's a deliberate confusion here about these lines
because their precise historical significance isn't what's most
significant. What may be most important here
is the mere fact that Milton is expressing these political
convictions at all. The speech of Saint Peter
seems, I think, in a lot of ways to be a lot
more like a fire and brimstone sermon than it is a passage in a
pastoral poem. The strangely sermonic tone
that this speech assumes is, I think, exactly the point.
Milton is able in this speech to combine, I think,
for the first time the two associations borne by that Latin
word pastor. So in this guise with the mask
of Saint Peter on he's -- Milton's -- able to be both poet
and minister. He's investing his rhetorical
talent in an art that's actually doing something.
It's capable of moving people to action, or so Milton may have
believed. It's as if Milton is saying,
"Look at me. I may be a poet.
I may actually -- I'm simply writing a pastoral poem,
but I'm actually doing something in the world.
I'm ministering to a flock. I'm preaching just as my father
and just as all of my Cambridge classmates had advised me to
do." This outburst allows Milton to
solve what may have seemed up to this point an insoluble
conflict: the insoluble conflict between the two meanings of the
word vocation that we've been exploring.
So this passage is extreme and Milton's poem,
wonderfully, is perfectly able to identify
it as such.Look what happens next.
After the passage is over, Milton addresses Alpheus,
a river god -- the god who was noted for plunging the course of
his river underground in order to chase the nymph Arethuse who
had been turned into a fountain. Alpheus is also the god of
erotic pastoral poetry, it turns out,
and this god is literally gone underground during the
terrifying appearance of Saint Peter.
It's here although we didn't know the god was there.
[laughs] This is another familiar and
strange feature of this poem. We didn't know the god was
there, and we didn't know he was underground until Milton tells
us that he's coming up now. It's here, once that speech is
over, that Milton can bid Alpheus return,
line 132: "Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is
past / that shrunk thy streams…"The dread
voice of the angry sermonic Milton,
the ministerial Milton, has passed.
It has passed and it is past. It's part of the past.
And it's at this point, and I think it's,
importantly, not before this point,
that Milton's able to throw himself fully into that
eroticized conjecture, that catalog of all the flowers
that was to be thrown onto the hearse bearing Lycidas' body
that we looked at last time. I mentioned in the last lecture
that the famous flower passage here of course is -- this is
pure fantasy. Lycidas' body is nowhere to be
found, and there's nothing, of course, to throw the flowers
on; but I think we can see now a
way in which Milton has permitted himself the fantasy of
this -- of a recovered body or, as he says, this is line 153,
he has allowed his "frail thoughts to dally with false
surmise." Milton can allow himself a
literary indulgence in the rich sensuality of this passage
because he has mastered the dread voice,
he has mastered the fatherly sternness of Saint Peter.
It's as if Milton -- we can think of Milton as having paid
his dues. He's accomplished his
ministerial duty as a zealous and a politically oriented poet,
and now he's earned the right to dally with false surmise.
He's earned the right to treat himself to this absolutely
lovely -- what must have been an extraordinary amount of fun to
write -- lovely catalog of flowers.
It's almost as if the flower passage is Milton's reward for
having written the Saint Peter passage.
And I'm trying to suggest that Milton's composition of this
poem is actually doing something for him,
that it gets him somewhere, and that it's functional in a
genuine sense.It's our obligation now to look at the
poem's conclusion. Where does "Lycidas" lead
Milton? Look at line 183.
Milton imagines Lycidas in heaven now.
It's a Christian poem. Then it imagines Lycidas a
little differently as the genius loci,
the natural classical spirit of the place,
the genius loci of the Irish Sea.
This is line 183: Henceforth thou art the
Genius of the shore, In thy large recompense,
and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous
flood. [Period.]
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th'Oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray;
He touch't the tender stops of various Quills, With eager
thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the Sun had
stretch't out all the hills, And now was dropt into the
Western bay; At last he rose,
and twitch't his Mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh
Woods, and Pastures new. I want to draw your attention
to line 186. This is the line that begins
the poem's final verse paragraph and it has to be one of the most
amazing moments in all of English literature.
"Thus sang" -- these five words: "Thus sang the uncouth
swain." Okay.
What are we being told here? This poem, this entire poem
before this point hasn't been sung by John Milton at all.
We naturally thought that it was the poet John Milton who was
speaking the first 185 lines of the poem.
We naturally assumed that it was Milton himself who was
describing his college friendship with "Lycidas"'
Edward King. We naturally assumed that the
poet was speaking, even behind the pastoral mask,
because we'd been given no idea whatsoever of any alternative to
the poet's responsibility for all of these words being uttered
over the course of this admittedly very long poem;
but with little ado [laughs] this just happens.
Milton suddenly and unexpectedly shatters all of our
assumptions. He tells us that everything
that we've read up to this point that has been spoken by a
third-person narrator. We didn't know this.
It has been spoken by the uncouth swain,
a rustic shepherd. Everything that we had thought
that Milton was telling us in the lyric present -- telling us
directly, now -- suddenly gets shoved
back into the narrative past: "thus sang the uncouth swain."
The past tense is important there.
This is the first moment, right now, "thus sang the
uncouth swain." This is the first moment that
the poet John Milton is actually speaking in his own voice,
and he's speaking directly to us.
We don't actually hear John Milton until we hear this line:
"Thus sang the uncouth swain."Well,
we should be shocked, and I think beyond that we have
every right to feel a little bit betrayed,
because Milton quite simply has -- and he's doing this
deliberately -- he has just violated an important law.
We could think of it as the contractual relation that a
writer makes with his reader. When there's a speaker of a
poem who is not to be confused with the poet himself,
there is typically a framing device.
You can easily imagine Milton employing a framing device here.
He could have begun "Lycidas" with this,
with something like a description of the uncouth
swain: "Oh, let me tell you about this
uncouth swain." Then he could tell us the
mournful lay that the uncouth swain sang, and then he could
say, "Thus sang the uncouth swain."
There would be an opening framing device and then,
of course, an end frame device. But Milton's framing device
[laughs] in "Lycidas" only frames the
end of the poem. It's asymmetrical.I think
we're fully entitled to ask why: why Milton waits for the last
eight lines of his poem to tell us that there's a difference,
that there's a difference between the poet and the
speaker. Why hadn't Milton pressed on
this possible distinction earlier?
The answer to the question, I think, gets at the very heart
of the meaning of this elegy. I think the answer may involve
the possibility that at the beginning of the poem,
there simply wasn't a clear distinction between the poet and
the speaker. It's as if the distinction
between John Milton and the speaker of "Lycidas"
wasn't really operative. There wasn't an uncouth swain
at the beginning.You'll remember that I mentioned
several minutes ago that Milton appears -- literary historians,
I think, have rightly seen the Milton who had written "Lycidas"
as a different figure than the poet before having written
"Lycidas." Milton seems to have
accomplished something in writing "Lycidas," almost
as if he accomplishes it over the course of this very poem;
and one of the things that he's accomplished is his ability to
see himself as someone who has accomplished something.
He's just written this poem. And instead of this continual
anticipation of writing something great,
Milton's able to look back and find closure in something
already written. At the very end of the poem,
the uncouth swain "rose, and twitch't his Mantle blue:
/ tomorrow to fresh Woods and Pastures new."
You get an image of Milton here twitching his blue mantle,
his cape over his shoulder, and dusting his hands and
letting us know that that's over.
He's finished. He has completed this lyric
poem. He's finished with his pastoral.
Perhaps, even, he has completed the youthful
phase of his literary career.Now we began
"Lycidas" with an image of a poet who could only write
this poem -- this is what we were told -- with forced fingers
rude. This was an act of compulsion,
and the poet had to be forced to press this lyric out of
himself. By the end of the poem we have
progressed from the image of "forc'd fingers rude" -- this is
an argument that's been made brilliantly by the critic Peter
Sacks, the author of a book called
The English Elegy -- we've progressed from the
image of "forc'd fingers rude" to an image of the poet who
"touch't the tender stops of various Quills."
The poet's fingers by the end of "Lycidas" aren't forced or
rude. They're capable of these
extraordinarily delicate feats of dexterity,
and that's because the poet has mastered his touch.
This tactile mastery attests to something remarkable that's
happened over the course of the poem,
somewhere below the surface of the poem, somewhere between the
lines. Milton has mastered his poetic
touch, perhaps because Milton himself has been touched.Let
me remind you of that other intrusive moment in the poem,
the moment when a figure whose presence we hadn't been aware of
suddenly made -- suddenly asserted himself.
That was, of course, Phoebus Apollo,
the great god of the sun and the god of poetry,
who touched the trembling ears of the ambitious young Milton
much as he had a couple of centuries before touched the
ears of the ambitious young Virgil.
Apollo had touched Milton in a way that I think we can actually
measure by the end of this poem because Milton at the conclusion
of "Lycidas" seems to have assumed the authority of Apollo.
It's as if he's become Apollo as he himself takes over the
action of touching. The speaker has internalized
the authority of the god of poetry.
First he was touched and now he touches.
He touches the stops of various quills.
Look at the final lines: And now the Sun had
stretch't out all the hills, And now was dropt into the
Western bay; At last he rose,
and [touched -- no: At last he rose and]
twitch't his Mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh Woods,
and Pastures new. I'm interested in the temporal
clause "and now." Milton shows us he's fully
escaped from the repetitiveness of the "yet once
more"-beginning. This coda suggests something
like a victory over all of those worries of unpreparedness as the
worried rhetoric of "not yet there" gives way to a much more
confident language of present completion,
the "now." And now the Sun had
stretch't out all the hills, And now was dropt into the
Western bay; At last he rose…
[Laughs] "At last he rose":
at last who rose? Who rose?
The sun that was just dropped into the west or the uncouth
swain? This is my question to
you.Now we learn, of course, by the second half
of this line that it has to be the uncouth swain who rose and
twitched his mantle blue; but for a moment the "he" in
line 192 seems to be able to refer to either the poet or the
sun. Maybe it could refer to either
the poet or the sun throughout the entire line,
if you think of the mantle blue as being the actual sky that the
sun is able to twitch over his shoulder.
I don't know. It's at this point of a
possible confusion, at least a momentary,
provisional confusion, that we know that the poet has
identified with the sun. He's absorbed the touching
authority of Phoebus Apollo, the god of the sun.
Milton -- why is that important? Milton can no longer be chided
or be criticized by Phoebus because he's become
Phoebus.This momentary switch-off between the sun and
the poet is just one of this poem's many substitutions.
You saw earlier Saint Peter making a related set of
substitutions, and it was crazy.
Peter was lamenting Edward King's death,
and he claimed that he would gladly have spared an entire
slew of corrupt Anglican priests.
He would gladly have sacrificed them in order to keep the much
more virtuous and pure Lycidas -- a gruesome proposal,
but it's a gruesome proposal that suggests a primitive desire
for a quid pro quo. It's the same desire for some
kind of sacrificial substitution that, I think,
is fueling the poem's ending. The dynamic of the entire poem
is one of sacrifice and recompense.
Edward King gave his life, and he's recompensed by his new
status as the genius of the shore.
But John Milton is also recompensed and,
by the weird sacrificial logic that Saint Peter has already
sketched out for us, you can see a really [laughs]
disturbing way in which Milton has benefited as well.
It's as if Lycidas has died so that Milton could live to become
a great poet. Lycidas' untimely death seems
to enable Milton to master his own fears of untimeliness.
Lycidas' death -- remember this is the poem that Milton didn't
want to write, he was "forc'd" to write it --
Lycidas' death allows the uncouth swain to grow up and to
move on. The last eight lines announce
the course of this new poet's life -- announce the fact that
this poet's course in life is about to undergo a drastic
change.In fact, biographically this is what
happens to Milton. Finally, John Milton leaves his
father's house. He moves out and he goes on --
and of course, he's still being supported
quite generously by his father -- nonetheless,
he goes on an extended tour through France and Italy.
He manages to discard that youthful, that uncouth,
affection for chastity that had been such a part of his
imagination, and he marries a young woman
named Mary Powell. Now it's still going to be
another twenty-five years before Milton writes the great epic,
but Milton will no longer express the same degree of
anxiety about under-preparation to write the great epic.
In fact, this is an argument that's been made a number of
times, and I think there's a lot of sense to it -- the last eight
lines of "Lycidas" are written in a very specific line
form: the Italian scheme of the ottava rima.
It's the ottava rima in which all of the great Italian
romance epics by poets -- favorite poets of Milton's like
Ariosto and Tasso -- had been written.
The appearance of this semi-epic rhyme scheme here at
the end of Milton's poem suggests his readiness,
and he's ready only here at the end of "Lycidas" to embark on
the epic project.Okay, quickly I'm going to ask you to
turn to the very beginning of "Lycidas," page 120 in the
Hughes. So "Lycidas" was
published along, as you know,
with the other poems about Edward King in 1637,
but Milton himself publishes the poem a second time in his
own volume of poems that he publishes in 1645.
It's for this second printing that Milton adds the headnote
that you see here that now begins the poem:
"In this Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend,
unfortunately drown'd in his Passage from Chester on the
Irish Seas, 1637." It's interesting that Milton
certainly begins this headnote with suggesting directly to us
that it's Milton speaking and not a fictional uncouth swain.
That aside, let me continue: "…
on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretells the
ruin of our corrupted Clergy, then in their height."Eight
years after its initial composition,
Milton looks back at this elegy, rereads it,
and picks out the Saint Peter passage on the corrupted clergy
as that specific feature of the poem worth singling out and
introducing. Of course, in a lot of ways
this is just good marketing. Since the poem's initial
appearance, the institution of episcopacy, or church hierarchy,
has been seriously eroded. The first English civil war has
already broken out, setting Puritans like Milton
against the royalists and the supporters of the state control
of the church, like the king and like the
king's dread Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.
When Milton writes this little headnote in 1645,
Archbishop Laud has been executed.
He's been sacrificed to the Puritan cause.
And Milton reasonably alerts his reader to the timeliness of
a lot of the material that would be covered in this poem.But
this headnote goes a lot further simply than that:
"And by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted Clergy."
Milton is -- this is outrageous! He's actually claiming that
this poem had been prophetic, that "Lycidas" foretold
the ruin of the clergy. It's possible that Milton's
actually suggesting, I think, that this poem helped
bring that ruin about. You know that Milton had been
entertaining this fantasy of becoming a great biblical
prophet like Isaiah as early as the Nativity Ode.
He'd seen himself as a Jeremiah or as an Isaiah,
and there were all those early gestures of prophecy.
But now he's able to tell us that he has already become
prophetic. He throws his high prophetic
talents into the construction of the Saint Peter speech;
and in 1645, historical circumstances being
what they were, he was able to look back at
this passage and actually claim that it had been a genuinely
prophetic utterance. He's made good on all of his
promises.Of course, it's a sleazy move for Milton
to have made, to claim [laughs]
that he had actually prophesied, let's say,
the execution of Archbishop Laud -- but Milton will
capitalize and exploit any evidence he can possibly find to
assure himself that he is on the appropriate path to become the
great prophetic poet that he knows he is entitled to become
and that he has been chosen to become.
Finally, Milton has revised and undone the anticipatory logic of
the great career narrative.
