"But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,"
Tales of chivalry use the word "guerdon" to describe the reward given to knights. Milton uses it to describe the worldly fame his speaker might get from his poetry. By describing worldly fame through chivalry, a genre that had been in decline for over a century, Milton equates worldly fame with a tradition that is already dead. Like the knights, fame on Earth will pass quickly, but fame in Heaven will last forever.
"Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life..."
In Greek mythology, the Fates were a group of goddesses who used a pair of scissors (“shears”) to cut off the lives of the people they pursued. In Milton’s retelling of the myth, he replaces the Fates, who were just, with the Furies, who pursued their victims for revenge. The subtle shift suggests that Lycidas’s death was unjust, a violent attack with no moral explanation.
"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 forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year."
In the opening lines of "Lycidas," Milton's speaker plucks laurels, myrtle, and ivy that are not yet ripe. The speaker is killing the leaves before their prime, reenacting Lycidas's early death as the speaker collects leaves for his funeral. In this sense, the lines reflect the speaker's all-consuming grief, the way he sees the death of his friend everywhere.
There is also a second way of reading the lines. The specific leaves the speaker selects, laurels and myrtle, are representative of poetic fame. As the speaker collects them, he worries that he is plucking the symbols of success too soon, before he has fully developed his craft.
In the first reading, the leaves represent Lycidas. In the second, they represent the speaker's poetry. The double-meaning reflects the way Milton fuses creativity and grief throughout "Lycidas."
"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropp'd into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new."
In the final stanza of "Lycidas," the second speaker describes the shepherd rising as the sun drops below the horizon, returning to the metaphor Milton used to describe the death and regeneration of Lycidas. Now the grieving shepherd takes the place of the sun rising for a new day. Like the rising sun, the shepherd takes his song to new pastures. The initial image of endless life turns to one of endless grief, a sadness that never really dies.
