The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas

Abstract

To most modern readers the pastoral setting of Milton's Lycidas is far from being an element of beauty. It is doubtful whether anyone, approaching Lycidas for the first time, fails to experience a feeling of strangeness, which must be overcome before the poem can be fully appreciated; and not infrequently the pastoral imagery continues to be felt as a defect, attracting attention to its own absurdities and thereby seriously interfering with the reader's enjoyment of the piece itself. The reason for this attitude lies in the fact that we have to-day all but forgotten the pastoral tradition and quite lost sympathy with the pastoral mood. The mass of writing to which this artificial yet strangely persistent literary fashion gave rise seems unendurably barren and insipid; to return and traverse the waste, with its dreary repetitions of conventional sentiments and tawdry imagery, is a veritable penance. Yet this, if we are to judge fairly of Lycidas , or if we are to remove the hindrances to our full enjoyment of it as poetry, is what in a measure we must do. For in Milton's eyes the pastoral element in Lycidas was neither alien nor artificial. Familiar as he was with poetry of this kind in English, Latin, Italian, and Greek, Milton' recognized the pastoral as one of the natural modes of literary expression, sanctioned by classic 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. It tended to idealize and dignify the expression of his sorrow, and to exalt this tribute to the memory of his friend, by ranging it with a long and not inglorious line of elegiac utterances, from Theocritus and Virgil to Edmund Spenser.