Lycidas Essay Questions

How are Christian values in conversation with the pastoral tradition in "Lycidas"?

Though Milton's speaker is performing as a shepherd from the pastoral tradition up until the poem's final lines, other speakers arrive to bring Christian values into the poem. When Apollo enters the poem to console the shepherd, he delivers a promise of eternal fame in heaven that evokes Christian resurrection; and St. Peter later joins a train of Greek gods to preach about the church.

In both instances, the shepherd resists the voices that bring Christian ideas into the poem. Though he praises their speeches, he simultaneously attempts to bring the poem back to pastoral poetry by reverting to rural imagery. Milton uses the image of his grieving shepherd to suggest that the pastoral tradition does not have Christianity's power to console. While the poem changes, the shepherd remains the same, locked in his grief.

Is "Lycidas" an autobiographical poem?

Though Milton wrote "Lycidas" in response to the death of his friend Edward King, the poem is about much more than King's death. By reimagining himself and King as two shepherds, Milton makes it clear from the start that he's posing as someone grieving, not speaking of his actual grief for King. He's exploring how poetry has attempted to manage grief in the past through the figure of the mourning shepherd in pastoral poetry, and his ideas in "Lycidas" are only loosely connected with his dead friend.