Lycidas Literary Elements

Milton called "Lycidas" a monody—a poem written for one speaker. The poem should be a monologue, and it begins as one, but a parade of voices soon appear to interrupt the shepherd's narration.

The first is Apollo, who arrives to encourage the speaker with the promise of fame in Heaven. He is followed by a train of sea gods, including Triton and his winds. After they pass, St. Peter appears to deliver a tirade on the church. By the end of the poem, a second speaker has taken over entirely, displacing the shepherd from his elegy.

Though "Lycidas" begins as a monody, it ultimately expands to include a chorus of voices.

The poem is written in iambic pentameter. An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (for example “And STRICT-ly MED-it-ATE”). A line of iambic pentameter has five feet of two-syllable iambs (a total of ten syllables). Most of the poem follows the irregular rhyme scheme of an Italian canzone. Though canzones generally feature multiple voices, Milton calls “Lycidas” a monody. This creates some tension between the form Milton chooses and the way he categorizes his poem. By the end of “Lycidas,” we have in fact heard from many voices. When the second speaker appears in the final stanza, the rhyme scheme switches to ottava rima (abababcc). The shift from one form to the other reflects the entrance of the new voice. Unlike the canzone, ottava rima is a regular rhyme scheme. It moves back and forth between two rhymes (ababab) then ends with a couplet in a third rhyme (cc). The arc of the rhyme scheme reflects the speaker’s fluctuating emotions throughout “Lycidas,” the way he flips back and forth between dejection and consolation. After the oscillating rhyme scheme, the closing couplet in ottava rima provides a sense of closure. The entrance of a new speaker and a new form at the end of “Lycidas” reinforce the effect of the rhyme scheme’s final couplet, the sense that we are moving towards “pastures new.”

Milton often returns to the image of the sun setting and rising as a metaphor for resurrection.

"In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move"
alliteration of "s"

"Or whether thou to our moist vows denied"
repetition of "ou" sound

"swart star"
repetition of "aw" sound

Even as Milton's speaker seems to mourn, he catalogues everything he knows about the classical world, blending his resume with his grief. For this reason, some have criticized the elegy as jaded and inauthentic. Though the speaker seems to eulogize Lycidas, he's also announcing his literary ambitions. It's an irony embedded within pastoral poetry and the singing competitions between shepherds who use their grief to perform.

Pastoral Elegy

A rural landscape

The tone is both mournful and cheeky. Though the speaker genuinely mourns Lycidas, he is always skeptical of tools available to him. He is aware of the limitations of pastoral poetry, and comes close to parodying them.

speaker vs. self, speaker vs. fate

"What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore,
The Muse her self, for her inchanting son
Whom Universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His goary visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore."

The stanza alludes to the story of how Orpheus died. He was killed by followers of Bachus, a Greek god who traveled around the world sowing chaos. Orpheus's death is associated with mayhem. By emphasizing his head floating down a river, Milton links his story to Edward's King's death at sea and suggests that it too is a story of randomness and disorder.

"waft the hapless youth"
"youth" is a metonym for Lycidas.

"Next Camus, reverend Sire, went footing slow,
His Mantle hairy, and his Bonnet sedge,"
The river Camus is personified as an old man arriving to mourn Lycidas. Milton associated the river with Cambridge.

"So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,"
The sun is personified as someone with a drooping a head, a person like the shepherd who mourns Lycidas.

The whole poem is an overstatement of Milton's feelings for King. There has been some debate over whether Milton and King were truly close, and most agree that they didn't know each other well. Though Cambridge mourned the loss of King's talent, none of the poems he published were exceptional. To say that all of nature wept for him exaggerates the loss.