Summary
The poem begins with the speaker collecting leaves for the funeral of Lycidas. He plucks berries and ivy that have not yet ripened, killing them before their season. Like Lycidas, the plants die too young.
After collecting leaves for Lycidas, the speaker decides to write an elegy for him, the very elegy that we are reading. In stanza 2, he calls upon the muses to fill him with song, as pastoral poets like Theocritus and Virgil do at the beginning of their own poems when they ask the muses to inspire the creation of their poetry.
In stanza 3, the speaker recalls the days he spent with Lycidas, invoking rural imagery—images that veil Milton’s own memories of his days with Edward King at Cambridge, the “self-same hill” where they learned together. He recalls that those days are over at the beginning of stanza 4, and his description of the landscape twists to fit his new mood. In stanza 5, he asks the nymphs why they were not there to help Lycidas when he died, then realizes it makes no difference: there is no scenario in which Lycidas would have lived.
In stanza 6, the speaker reaches the first major crisis of the poem. He wonders whether poetry can accomplish anything, and reflects on the limitations of fame on Earth. The god Apollo (Phoebus) arrives to console him with the promise of fame in Heaven, an early version of the poem’s final consolation in the Christian promise of resurrection.
In stanzas 7 through 9, the speaker imagines a slew of water gods arriving to mourn the death of Lycidas. They have come to answer the call the speaker made to the muses at the beginning of the poem, when he asked them to fill his urn with water and mourn Lycidas as they passed. Neptune’s son, Triton, arrives first, with his winds following behind him. None of them accepts blame for Lycidas’s death. They say the winds were good and the water was smooth. The ship sank because it was built during an eclipse and doomed to fail.
St. Peter (“Pilot of the Galilean lake”) arrives last in the procession to mourn Lycidas. The speech he gives over Lycidas’s body quickly turns into a sermon on the wrongs of church leaders, who he imagines as a group of shepherds singing broken songs while their sheep starve. The “two massy keys” represent the gates to Heaven and Hell, which St. Peter has the power to open for the saved and the damned, respectively.
In stanza 9, the speaker calls upon the flowers to mourn for Lycidas, then suddenly remembers that Lycidas’s body is somewhere in the sea, where there can be no proper funeral.
In stanza 10, the speaker imagines the sun setting only to rise again. The image is a metaphor for Christian resurrection. Like the setting sun, Lycidas has died only to rise again in Heaven. Through the image of the rising sun, the poem arrives at its final consolation.
In the last stanza of the poem, the shepherd falls silent and a new speaker takes his place. The new speaker describes the shepherd rising to explore new pastures, leaving the place where he grieved for Lycidas.
Analysis
Some have criticized “Lycidas” for being overly polished, a performance of grief rather than the thing itself. The poem has a complicated network of stories running beneath its surface, and it’s possible to read Milton’s many allusions to mythology and biblical episodes as so many bells and whistles proving his skill. To an extent, it’s true that the poem is a performance. Milton is writing in a tradition where shepherds perform their grief through song. By turning himself and Edward King into two shepherds, Milton is becoming someone else, a character who mourns rather than his actual mourning self. There’s something artificial in the transformation. It’s a little bit like theater, and Milton’s speaker is always partly a caricature of the grieving pastoral shepherd.
At the same time, the poem is also full of genuine emotion. Though Milton’s references to other works make the poem feel like a polished artifact, his form is extremely chaotic. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously complained of Milton’s “uncertain rhymes.” The stanzas are all different lengths, and the meter of the poem changes. The form is constantly in motion, liquid and malleable, chaotic as the grief it describes. Most of the poem is written in canzone, a form with an irregular rhyme scheme, but the final stanza switches to ottava rima, a form with a highly structured scheme (abababcc). The change corresponds with a change in the poem's mood, the new promise of Christian resurrection that seems to bring the speaker's grief to an end. As the speaker manages his grief, the poem formally mirrors him by moving from a chaotic rhyme scheme to a structured one. The couplet at the end of the final stanza (cc) is like a double period, a final punctuation mark. It is an overly formal gesture borrowed from the sonnet, a form of courtly poetry that also ends with a couplet. With the closing rhyme, the speaker brings state and order to the poem's chaotic form. He uses formality and structure to get above his grief, the real emotion just visible behind his calculated lines.
By putting on a performance, Milton’s speaker tries to distance himself from the well of emotion visible in the poem’s unstable form. Each new allusion to the classical world is a fresh container for his grief, a way of describing and managing something that goes beyond words—a feeling that could overwhelm him if he didn’t capture it in poetry. In the speaker’s invocation to the muses, he compares himself to an “urn,” a kind of vase, that the muses will fill with water. By writing a poem about Lycidas, the speaker will contain his river of tears in a single object. Through the image, Milton implies that poetry is a way of containing grief, putting limitations around it. In cataloging his education, the speaker is attacking grief with what he knows.
The speaker’s performance in “Lycidas” is full of cracks—it could fail at any moment, and does again and again. “Alas! What boots it with uncessant care / To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade” the speaker says after a prolonged allusion to the tale of Orpheus. For a moment, he seems to see that he cannot mourn Lycidas with “uncessant care” in his poetry—that his education will not be enough to conquer his grief.
The speaker has reached a crisis that could bring the poem to a halt. Rather than resolving the problem with a solution, the speaker distracts himself with a new question the poem can answer. By the time Apollo arrives to console him, the speaker has turned from a question about the viability of poetry to one about the value of fame. He has converted an existential crisis that could potentially end the poem into a question Apollo can answer with the promise of eternal glory in Heaven. It is one of many instances in “Lycidas” when the speaker forgets what he knows in order to move forward.
The poem is full of exclamations from the speaker that amount to the same recurrent crisis. To paraphrase: “Lycidas is dead, and nothing I say will bring him back again.” The speaker makes the first of these exclamations in the middle of remembering his happy days with Lycidas in stanza 3. For a moment he forgets that he is mourning and the poem becomes joyful, full of “rural ditties” and “fresh dews.” “But o the heavy change,” the speaker says, suddenly realizing that Lycidas is no longer living. The exclamation is the beginning of the speaker’s ongoing realization that he cannot write Lycidas back to life. He comes to this conclusion again and again, but forgets it just as quickly. “Ay me! I fondly dream,” he exclaims after imagining an alternative scenario in which the nymphs might have saved Lycidas. “Ay me!” he says again, after losing himself in a description of flowers. In writing a poem about the death of Lycidas, the speaker constantly forgets the occasion for which he is writing. By meditating on grief, turning to myths and metaphors and allusions to embellish the feeling, the speaker distances himself from the reason for his despair. He uses poetry to turn his mourning into something abstract and unreal, to distract himself from the poem’s unanswerable crisis: the fact of Lycidas’s actual death.
Though “Lycidas” seems to follow a broad arc from despair to consolation, the speaker is constantly fluctuating between the two emotions. His mood, like the form of the poem, is in constant motion. The first line of the poem catches the speaker in transition. “Yet once more…” implies the speaker has just returned to his grief after a digression, a moment of fleeting happiness like those sprinkled throughout the poem. It is an opening line that seems to say, “I am coming back to the place I have just been after a moment away.” If you turn to the line after reading the promise of happiness in the poem’s final stanza, it is possible to read “Lycidas” as a loop that repeats again and again, moving from consolation to dejection in an endless rotation. While the speaker presents the poem as an urn holding grief in place, it is also a continuous flow of fresh despair, a river of tears the speaker never truly contains.
By the end of the poem, the speaker can imagine an end to his grief. He decides that Lycidas has died only to rise again, like a setting sun that will come up in the morning. The image is hopeful, but it also describes the flow of grief throughout the poem—the way it hits you again and again, regenerating the moment you think it has finally died forever.
In the final stanza, the speaker of the poem changes. The shepherd who has been telling the story of Lycidas since stanza 1 falls silent, and another voice begins to narrate his story. The shift to a second speaker is strange, because Milton calls "Lycidas" a monody—a poem written for one voice. By suddenly turning his speaker into someone else, a person with some distance from the grieving shepherd, Milton imagines the only scenario in which his speaker could stop grieving. With the turn to another perspective at the end of the poem, he implies that he can only end the poem, and the grief of the mourning shepherd, by literally becoming another person.
Milton builds “Lycidas” around the possibility of this transformation. He begins by reimagining himself and King as two shepherds, characters with recognizable conventions for expressing their grief, a full tradition for giving words to their tears. By entering the pastoral tradition, he tries to contain a feeling he cannot suppress in life. The new names he and King wear in “Lycidas” are a performance, but the shift from one speaker to another in the poem’s final stanza is something more. The new speaker is not putting on a show. The emergence of his voice is a rebirth—a vision of Christian resurrection embedded within the poem.
