Grief
More than “Lycidas” is about Milton’s grief for the death of his friend Edward King, it’s about the history of writers mourning through poetry. By writing a pastoral elegy, Milton connects his poem to a long tradition of poets writing in response to death through invented conversations between shepherds. The form is performative, and Milton exaggerates the performance almost to the point of parody in “Lycidas.” By taking the form to an extreme, Milton draws out the limitations of pastoral elegy, and poetry more broadly. His performance emphasizes the irony in writing about grief. It’s difficult to imagine his speaker genuinely mourning, while also making calculated allusions to myths and biblical episodes. In “Lycidas,” Milton is constantly asking whether poetry provides the tools you need to mourn. When his speaker exclaims, “What boots it,” he lays out one central thesis of the poem: in the face of death, why write poetry at all?
Conciliation
“Lycidas” is a poem in search of conciliation: some lasting reassurance to bring an end to its speaker’s grief. The poem seems to find its answer in a vision of Lycidas’s new life in heaven, the Christian promise of resurrection, which moves Milton’s speaker to leave the site of his grief in search of new pastures. Through this final image, Milton implies that the speaker has found his final consolation and moved beyond his despair. At the same time, Milton fills “Lycidas” with consolations that only last a few lines. His speaker is constantly finding momentary relief from his grief, only to plunge back into despair after a line break. Though Milton’s poem ends with a final consolation, it’s unclear whether the relief will last or vanish like all the false consolations that preceded it. The poem’s final rhyme, “blue” and “new,” links the new pastures where the shepherd is going with all the sadness imbued in the color blue. Milton leaves it deliberately vague whether “Lycidas” is a poem about finding consolation, or one about the impossibility of ever being truly consoled.
