"Lycidas" by John Milton

PRIMARY SOURCE: "Lycidas" (pub. 1638)
Context

• Publication: Milton was invited to contribute to Justa Eduardo King, a collection commemorating his Cambridge classmate Edward King (called "Lycidas" in the poem).
• Scholarship: Ann Garbett writes that "Lycidas" is considered the greatest poem in English. More generally, scholars are interested in the poem as the product of young Milton.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon

Content

• Form: Irregular meter, like an Italian canzone. Two movements with six sections each, suggesting an epic structure.
• Genre: Pastoral elegy. 
• Conceit: Invocation of the muses, description of friendship, protest against death, pastoral, description of mourners, description of the funeral, consolation in death, adaptation to new landscape. The invocation, protest, and description of mourners use heavy water imagery. The friendship is described in pastoral terms, and the pastoral itself discusses Milton's doubt over his personal goals. The protest compares King's death to the death of Orpheus, son of the muse and dead in the river Hebrus, and the protest admits that the nymphs could not save King. After discussing mourners, the speaker lashes out against faithless shepherds. At the end of the poem, the speaker sets out for new land, possibly new poetic ground.
• Other notes:
• Dubrow suggests that the structure of the poem could be inspired by either a monody (lyrical lament for one voice) or a madrigal (polyphonic song for three to six voices) (31).
• Dubrow supposes that the shift in voice at the end signals a move from an old pastoral identity to a new one, though not a shift in speaker (135).

(NB: written with secondary sources.)
Garbett, Ann D. "Lycidas." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-2.Literary Reference Center. Web. 31 Jan. 2013. Dubrow, Heather. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.