Subjects and Objects in Lycidas

Abstract

treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself.1 Accordingly, recent criticism of Lycidas (so often the paradigmatic example of elegy) tends to focus on the individual subjective voice, whether it reads the poem as exemplifying, calling into question, struggling against, or failing to pull off its emergence.2 These concerns with individualist subjectivity inform the three major clusters of modern writing about Lycidas. Psychologically oriented analyses highlight the subject's psychic responses to loss; the ego has to be freed from its investments in the psychic of mourning in order to move on.3 Historically oriented readings of the poem (including literary-historical ones) look for ways that the poem's individual voice can transcend such limitations as censorship, occasional constraint, or poetic inexperience in order to autonomously speak truth.4 Generically and vocationally oriented readings also focus on the individual poetic voice's telic negotiations with pastoral convention, with the Miltonic voice either succeeding or failing in its bid to emerge and gain strength in the course of the poem.5 Lycidas certainly calls attention to the activity of the elegizing subject, perhaps most obviously by way of the final framing move of the outer narrator. But the Coleridgean model of a transcendentally selfreflective subject cannot account very well for the poetic activity Lycidas foregrounds. I shall argue that Lycidas offers two distinct models of poetic subjectivity. One model does indeed advance the kind of emergent, autonomously human voice taken up in previous critical discussions. The other model, however, is entangled with objects with inanimate, nonhuman things to such an extent that objects actually seem to cosponsor the poetic utterance. Lycidas presents itself, after all, as a co-production of the assertive subject come to seize unripe vegetation (I com to pluck your berries harsh and crude [3]) and of the berries and leaves themselves, which the speaker compelled to harvest (7) -