Lycidas

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1638

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“Thyrsis” by Mathew Arnold (1866)

“Thyrsis” is a pastoral elegy by 19th-century English poet Matthew Arnold. It was written to memorialize another English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, who had been Arnold’s friend. Clough died in Italy in 1861. The speaker returns to the rural area near Oxford, where he recalls his friendship with Clough, who is referred to as “Thyrsis.” The poem expresses nostalgia and loss, but toward the end, the poet also finds hope that the youthful ideals that inspired both him and Clough have not entirely vanished.

“Adonais” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)

This pastoral elegy by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is a tribute to John Keats, his fellow English poet, who died in Rome, Italy, in February 1821. Keats is memorialized as Adonais, a figure in Greek mythology who was loved by the goddess Venus but was killed by a boar. The link to Keats is that Shelley believed that a hostile review of Keats’s poem Endymion had driven him to an early death. (Shelley makes reference to the reviewer in stanza 37.) The poem follows the conventions of the pastoral elegy, including the invocation of the Muse, the succession of mourners, the fact that the whole of nature participates in mourning, and finally the consolation—the envisioned immortality of the deceased poet.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray (1750)

This famous poem does not have the traditional form of the pastoral elegy but it also contemplates death and offers consolation. In a country graveyard at sunset, the speaker thinks of the dead who are buried there, imagining how they might have been in life. Unlike Lycidas, who aspired to fame as a poet, they were poor and unknown to the wider world, but they were of no less value for that, and death comes to all alike. Perhaps some of these dead, the speaker muses, had talents that went unrecognized, and he praises them for the honesty with which they lived.

Further Literary Resources

The Cambridge Introduction to Milton by Stephen B. Dobranski (2012)

In this overview of Milton’s life, his times, and his work, Dobranski presents new readings of Milton’s major pamphlets and poems, including “Lycidas.” In Dobranski’s view, “Lycidas” “remains one of the most forceful pastoral poems written in English and one of the most compelling meditations on death and vocation in any language” (p. 152). In his analysis, Dobranski paraphrases each stanza and explores allusions and imagery.

Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry by Iain Twiddy (2014)

The pastoral elegy is sometimes regarded as an obsolete form, but Twiddy shows that it is alive and well in contemporary British and Irish poetry. He analyzes examples from poets including Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn, and Peter Reading. Twiddy also explains how the pastoral elegy developed and why it has proved so popular and enduring. He also offers observations about the future of the form.

“Poem of the Week: Lycidas by John Milton” by Carol Rumen (2010)

In this very readable journalistic piece published in the Guardian newspaper, Rumen takes issue with 18th-century critic Dr. Samuel Johnson’s negative opinion of the elegy and explores the many ways in which Milton approached his themes. She writes of Milton’s “daring fusions: elegy and foreign politics, Christian and classical imagery.” She concludes that although it “all seemed an indecent mix-up to Johnson […] the harsh discords of one age or one ear are often the rich harmonies of another.”

“The Pastoral Elegy and Milton’s Lycidas” by James Holly Hanford (1910)

This article from PMLA is still useful even though it was published over 100 years ago. It shows that even then, the pastoral elegy was considered by many to be an outdated, artificial form that readers might find hard to appreciate. The author aims to reacquaint people with the pastoral tradition and to see the poem through Milton’s eyes: “Milton recognized the pastoral as one of the natural modes of literary expression, sanctioned by practice, and recommended by not inconsiderable advantages of its own. The setting of Lycidas was to him not merely an ornament, but […] an essential element in the artistic composition of the poem.”