Milton's Lycidas Research Articles

The Multivocal Monody: Milton and the Poetics of Justa Edouardo King

Milton's Lycidas is often placed in the context of Milton's career, but scholars have put less emphasis on its original print setting: the 1638 university miscellany Justa Edouardo King. By attending to the ways the poem may have been received by readers of the 1638 volume, this essay reads Lycidas as a response and counter to the other poems in the volume—the work of a poet attuned to his immediate social circumstances and reception. In Lycidas Milton is simultaneously engaged and at odds with his fellow contributors, and the poem expresses a tension between individual and collective impulses that would come to characterize much of Milton's future writing.

"Who would not sing for Lycidas?": Milton's Satirical Reform of the Justa Edouardo King

This essay argues that John Milton's Lycidas is a considerably more satirical poem than has traditionally been recognized and that among the chief targets of its encrypted criticism are its fellow elegies in Edward King's memorial volume, the Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638). Historical and biographical evidence strongly suggests that the young, radicalized Milton of 1637 would have been an unlikely friend of King—an ordained Laudian and sycophantic poet—and an even more unlikely participant in King's markedly Laudian Cambridge miscellany. This essay thus reads Lycidas in close conjunction with the other Justa poems in order to show how and why Milton nevertheless did participate in a volume he ideologically opposed. As some earlier critics have suggested, Milton probably saw manuscript copies of other Justa poems prior to publication, thereby giving him an opportunity to satirically mimic and critique them in Lycidas itself, in part through his use of the enigmatic "uncouth Swain" persona. The greater purpose behind such elegiac satire, I argue, was first to reform from within, as it were, the Laudian usurpation of the English church in the 1630s; and second, to reclaim the "sad occasion dear" of King's death from the ceremonialist conceits of the Justa poets, in order to perform a harsher but ultimately more fitting, and compassionate, poetic memorial for the drowned youth.

The “Day-Star” Symbolism in Milton's Lycidas

The “Day-Star” Symbolism in Milton's Lycidas

The Pilot and the Keys: Milton's Lycidas 167-171

CRITICS have discerned in John Milton's Lycidas a protracted con flict between the outmoded imagery of Greek pastoral and its analogues in the Christian tradition. I shall argue here that this reading will be all the more persuasive if Saint Peter is not identified as the pilot who laces his praise of Edward King with a satire on the delinquent shepherds of the church. The attributes of this figure, when interpreted in the light of Milton's theology and the Protestant creeds of his day, will prove him to be Christ and hence more capable than Peter himself of redeeming the protagonist after emptying the genre of its false gods. The pilot's entrance is the grand peroration to the eulogies on King:

Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”

history of English elegy is a pouring of fresh tears into ancient vessels.--John D. Rosenberg, Elegy for an Age (1) It is a commonplace that Arnold is an elegiac poet, but not everyone would agree on what is meant by this phrase. --A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason (2) What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. Thyrsis is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais. is Thyrsis a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that Lycidas and Adonais are? Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies, he wrote. One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manque in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.' (3) Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes Thyrsis from ScholarGipsy, to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: Scholar-Gipsy, he says, is primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas ['Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed (p. 250). David Riede discusses Thyrsis along with Scholar-Gipsy under the heading Pastoral and Elegy, (4) and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the long ancestral of pastoral elegy: As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus. (5) This unproblematic classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote. often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader performs-and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it, says Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading. But some preliminary generic judgment is always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never interpret outside generic structures: 'reading'--even reading of a first paragraph-is always 'reading as.' (6) No poem, least of all one assumed to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands entirely outside generic structures, and so when we read Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions, the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually, since no work exists outside generic conventions. So the question Thyrsis presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually-there is no choice other than to do so-but rather what poems constitute the most relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way: what kind of poem is Thyrsis and in what generic tradition(s) does it participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral elegy (with Lycidas as its most influential English representative) and with the broader pastoral tradition that Scholar-Gipsy participates in, I propose to argue that the exclusive classification of Thyrsis as a pastoral elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the lyric genre that M. …

Religious Change and the Renaissance Elegy

AbstractStudy of the Renaissance English elegy can be enhanced by considering both the medieval antecedents of the genre and the shifts in religious thought and practice brought about by the Protestant Reformation and by examining continuities as well as changes. Medieval English elegies, drawing on Catholic traditions, commonly registered a sense that living and dead persons can interact with one another. In later years, Protestant reformers would claim that purgatory and the cult of saints impugned the sovereignty of God and that the Bible offered no evidence for the Roman understanding of works as a means to salvation. Therefore, a fully purified faith could find no place for purgatory, the intercession of saints, or prayers for the dead. These attacks on traditional religion would shape poetic responses to death and mourning, including Henry King's “An Exequy” and Milton's Lycidas. (S.W.)

"Pulchrum Spargitur Hic Chaos": Crashaw's Meta-Commentary

In Cambridge in 1646, Daniel Heinsius published his Crepundia Siliana, a commentary on the Punica of Silius Italicus. At the very end of the book, a note from the printer to the reader states that in order ne detur vacuum (that no gap exist; n.pag. [312])1 in the book's last quire the decision has been made to include a poem. This poem is by Richard Crashaw, now best known for his religious poetry, both in English (in particular, the poems on St. Teresa and Mary Magdalene) and, to a lesser extent, in Latin. has not received much critical attention-in The Latin Poetry of English Poets, for example, which is still the standard work in the field, the entire chapter on Crashaw is devoted to his religious poems2-and the few critical discussions that do exist concentrate on the poem as a typical exam of the Baroque and analyze the hallucinogenic nature of the description. Such a focus is not misguided, since all readers of must be struck by the oddness of Crashaw's description. Here is a sample:Illic contiguis aquisMarcent pallidulae faces.Undae hic vena tenellulae,Flammis ebria proximisDiscit purpureas vias,Et rubro salit alveo. (lines 68-73)3There by the contiguous waters pale little torches droop. Here the vein of a very delicate wave full of the neighboring flames learns the purple paths and leaps from the red channel.Here is another one, even odder, from slightly later in the poem:Hic coeli implicitus labor,Orbes orbibus obvii;Hic grex velleris aureiGrex pellucidus aetheris;Qui noctis nigra pascuaPuris morsibus atterit (94-99)Here is the intricate labor of heaven: orbs are in the path of orbs; here the herd of the golden fleece is the pellucid herd of the ether; which wear down the black pasture of night in pure bites.While the first passage can be understood as an attempt to record the everchanging play of light and color on the surface of the bubble, the second might seem to belong to an elaborate mythological allegory.One way to illustrate the description is to say that the attempt to express something indescribable quickly spirals out of control; as Mario Praz observed, [i]n Bulla Crashaw aims at an effect which would seem attainable only by a painter (250). Following Praz, we could even say that the task Crashaw sets himself in the poem is doomed to fail from the outset. Of course, a writer as intelligent as Crashaw (and one who wrote so often and so well about the visual arts) would have been aware that his goal was unattainable. But while may not accurately describe a bubble, it could certainly be argued that it provides more information than a painting could: if we take as an example of the popular Renaissance debate over the respective merits of painting and poetry we could argue that poetry wins. In any case, the poem's failure to describe a bubble does not mean that the poem itself is a failure. For one thing, as the line I chose for the main title of this paper suggests, the result, however disorganized it may be, is beautiful and may in fact be beautiful because of its disorganization. Furthermore, in being a beautiful chaos, the poem resembles the bubble it describes and in that sense it could be said to be a success. Finally, we can also read as a poem about writing and, in particular, about scholarly writing: as a metacommentary, to return to the second part of my title. In this connection, we should note that the poem was originally printed in italics, like the rest of the critical apparatus but unlike the main text of the commentary.To see as a meta-commentary we have to take its original position as the conclusion of a book of commentary seriously and the best way to do so is to consider the original preface to the poem. The printer was Roger Daniel, who was the Cambridge University printer from 1632 to 1650, during which time he oversaw the publication of, among other books, the Bible, the first English edition of Bede's Latin Historiae Ecclesiastica (an edition that included the first printed edition of the Anglo-Saxon text ever), the first edition of George Herbert's The Temple, Justo Edovardo King Naufrago (the volume in which John Milton's Lycidas first appeared), and a previous book by Heinsius (Sacrarum excercitationum ad Novum Testamentum libri XX); in 1634, Daniel also published Crashaw's first book, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber. …

The Radical Change in the Perceptionof Death in the 17th Century and Milton's Lycidas

With respect to the idea of death, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation had a great influence on the artistic and poetic imagination of 17th century England. As a result, the age saw a revolution in the expressions of bereavement and loss in art and literature such as painting, sculpture, poetry and music. Milton's Lycidas is no exception. Just like the commissioning of a painting, a tomb and the bereaved funeral, a creation of an elegy such as Lycidas should be viewed as a part of the same process of mourning. As the radical change in the attitudes towards the dead was brought about initially at the theological level in the form of the abolition of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, focusing upon this problem of Purgatory, I believe, will provide us with an interesting perspective in the consideration of the relation between the living Milton and the departed Edward King. I also believe that the refusal of the doctrine of Purgatory by reformed Protestants had accelerated the individualization in the perception of death, in their funeral customs, as well as in the manner of their emotional expression towards the departed, Lycidas being a good case in point.

The Visions of Orpheus in Milton's Lycidas

Resumo: As alusões ao mito de Orfeu em “Lycidas” de John Milton serão analisadas pela perspectiva de um signo relacional. Uma vez que o poema apresenta olhares opostos e diferentes incorporados no seu texto, a reescrita renascentista do mito de Orfeu será associada às mudanças de olhares, será acessada como a estrutura modeladora subjacente às transições entre um ponto de vista inocente e um ponto de vista iluminado e será pensada como uma tomada (fragmentada) de consciência no processo de definição de duas ordens de existência: a humana e a divina.Palavras-chave: olhar; ponto de vista; Orfeu; Milton.Abstract: In John Milton’s “Lycidas” the allusions to the Orpheus myth will be analyzed through the perspective of a relational sign. Since the poem has different and opposing gazes incorporated into the text, the Renaissance rewriting of the Orpheus myth will be associated with the changes of gazes, will be assessed as the modeling frame that underlies the transitions from an innocent to an enlightened viewpoint, and will be focused as the fragmented configuration of consciousness in the process of defining two orders of existence: the human and the divine.Keywords: gaze; viewpoint; Orpheus; Milton.

The Visions of Orpheus in Milton's Lycidas

Resumo: As alusões ao mito de Orfeu em “Lycidas” de John Milton serão analisadas pela perspectiva de um signo relacional. Uma vez que o poema apresenta olhares opostos e diferentes incorporados no seu texto, a reescrita renascentista do mito de Orfeu será associada às mudanças de olhares, será acessada como a estrutura modeladora subjacente às transições entre um ponto de vista inocente e um ponto de vista iluminado e será pensada como uma tomada (fragmentada) de consciência no processo de definição de duas ordens de existência: a humana e a divina.Palavras-chave: olhar; ponto de vista; Orfeu; Milton.Abstract: In John Milton’s “Lycidas” the allusions to the Orpheus myth will be analyzed through the perspective of a relational sign. Since the poem has different and opposing gazes incorporated into the text, the Renaissance rewriting of the Orpheus myth will be associated with the changes of gazes, will be assessed as the modeling frame that underlies the transitions from an innocent to an enlightened viewpoint, and will be focused as the fragmented configuration of consciousness in the process of defining two orders of existence: the human and the divine.Keywords: gaze; viewpoint; Orpheus; Milton.

Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (review)

184 Reviews and the schools, the 'both-and' and the 'either/or'. Perhaps the pace and flow of the writing tends to carry us forward against our better judgement. But here the footnotes and references point to hypertextual checks and balances. Not only that, they open up (for m e , at least) new and fascinating leads—from Jane Gallop on Pedagogy to the literature of medieval Castilian. Moreover, such simplification can be excused so long as it does not vitiate the main argument. After all, it was Abelard w h o said, in a passage not quoted by Brown: 'sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement' (Preface, Sic et Non). Sabina Flanagan Department ofHistory University ofMelbourne Brown, Cedric C. and Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Early M o d e r n Literature in History), Basingstoke, Macmillan and N e w York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; cloth; pp. x, 254. When travelling in foreign parts an accurate map and a decent phrase book can help us to orient ourselves and to ask useful questions, and we can usually see more if w e travel lightly. Several essays in this collection break all these rules and, encumbered by excessive theoretical baggage, bewildered by their limited grasp of the language and disoriented by their ignorance of the landscape, endure a torrid time in the foreign country that was Early Modern England. Their failure is all the more apparent because Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti introduce this eclectic collection of tourists as 'practising the kind of sociological bibliography D. F. Mackenzie has advocated' or the detailed local reading Leah Marcus has encouraged, based furthermore on the historical specificity of archival research, dubbed 'the new erudition'. With the honourable exception of Richard Dutton's essay on 'The Birth of the Author', few of these essays match up to this description, or if they do then historians and literary scholars really are speaking a different language. Dutton shows a subtle awareness of the conflict between the Reviews 185 corporate ethos of theatrical companies and the individualism of gentleman amateur poets, which underlies the contrasting publishing strategies of Shakespeare and Jonson and reveals the latter's novelty in taking pride in his 'laborious' play-writing. To a lesser extent Cedric Brown carefully historicises the versions of Milton's Lycidas, but overall this collection fails to live up to the claims of its editors. Janel Mueller, for example, spends twenty pages detailing her personal struggle with the cumbersome theoretical luggage of gender, class and race before rather shamefacedly falling back on religion to explain the differences between John Fisher and Katherine Parr's usage of the metaphor of 'the Book of the Crucifix'. Marotti lacks proof for his case that the printed accounts of the mission of E d m u n d Campion and Robert Persons assimilated some of the power associated with the martyred Campion's relics, even for Protestants, because he relies on wellread narrative rather than archival analysis, and even that narrative is dated on issues such as Protestant thinking on the Elect Nation. Pamela Neville-Singleton also relies on a largely familiar narrative for her explanation of the 'censorship' of Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, butherdiscovery ofapreviouslyunknown Archbishop ofCanterbury, George Whitgift, raises doubts about precisely which country she is describing. Certainly her weak and simplistic account of the political pressures that conditioned the state of Hakluyt's text does not resemble Elizabethan England, which m a y explain the disjunction between the body of her essay anditsconclusionthat 'reader demand' required the inclusion ofsome matter. Nor, despite her claims to forensicbibliography, does she accurately identify thecopies thatshe claims supporther case. Peter Lindenbaum fares nobetter with his attempt to prove that the declining occurrence of marginalia in the Folger copies of Sidney's Arcadia reflects its transition from a bearer of High Renaissance cultural values into a middle-class novel. Apart from doubts aboutthevalidity ofhis sample the logic ofhisclaim thatpublishers responded tosuch reader demand in reformatting theArcadia seems questionable in the lightofmarketforces, givenSasha Roberts' point (p. 131) thatreader diversity seemed evident to contemporaries. Lori Humphrey N e w c o...

ABSTRACTS

The following abstracts are from essays in Milton Studies 25 (1989), ed. James D. Simmonds. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1990.Stephen C. Behrendt. “Paradise Lost, History Painting, and Eighteenth‐Century English Nationalism.”Lloyd F. Dickson. “Against the Wiles of the Devil: Carlotta Petrina's Christocentric Illustrations of Paradise Lost.” 161–90.Steven C. Dillon. “Milton and the Poetics of Extremism.” 265–83.M. J. Doherty. “Salvation History, Poetic Form, and the Logic of Time in Milton's Nativity Ode.” 21–42.J. Karl Franson. “The Fatal Voyage of Edward King, Milton's Lycidas.” 43–67.John K. Hale. “Milton Playing with Ovid.” 3–19.Elizabeth Hanson. “To Smite Once and Yet Once More: The Transaction of Milton's Lycidas.” 69–88.Michael Lieb. “Reading God: Milton and the Anthropopathetic Tradition.” 213–43.Shirley Sharon‐Zisser. “Silence and Darkness in Paradise Lost.” 191–211.Keith W. F. Stavely. “Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost.” 125–39.Julia M. Walker. “Milton and Galileo: The Art of Intellectual Canonization.” 109–23.William Walker. “Typology and Paradise Lost, Books XI and XII.” 245–64.Robert Wiltenburg. “Damnation in a Roman Dress: Catiline, Catiline, and Paradise Lost.” 89–108.

Hiding From the Sun: The Swain in Milton's Lycidas

Hiding From the Sun: The Swain in Milton's <i>Lycidas</i>

ABSTRACTS

Steven Blakemore. “Milton's Samson Agonistes, lines 80‐82.”Explicator 42.3 (1984): 17‐18.Margaret M. Byard. “Milton's ‘On Time’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick.'”Explicator 41.4 (1983): 13‐14.Robert E. Jungman. “Milton's Lycidas, line 114.”Explicator 41.1 (1983): 11‐12.The phrase “for their bellies’ sake” most likely comes from Philippians 3:18‐19. Milton, as did Jerome and Tertullian, used the phrase to condemn Christ's enemies.Bei‐Yei Loh. “A Note on Milton's On Shakespeare.”N6Q 228 (1983): 431.Leo Miller. “The Date of Christoph Arnold's Letter.”N&amp;Q 229 (1984): 323‐24.F. Peczenik. “Fit Help: The Egalitarian Marriage in Paradise Lost.“Mosaic 17.1 (1984): 29‐48.Mary Ann Radzinowicz. “Paradise Regained as Her‐meneutic Combat.”University of Hartford Studies in Literature 15.3 (1983)‐16.1 (1984): 99‐107.Malabika Sarkar. “The Quest for Paradise:Kay Stanton. “From Jove’ To Task‐Master': The Transformation From Pagan to Christian Deity in Milton's Sonnets 1‐7.”University of Hartford Studies in Literature 15.3 (1983)‐16.1 (1984): 67‐77.Milton's first seven sonnets are interconnnected thematically by the pagan and Christian deities mentioned at each end of the group. The appearance of these two deities also explains Milton's use of two different languages in these poems. In effect, the first seven sonnets form a unified group that all attempt to gain divine approval through poetry.Kay Gilliland Stevenson. ‘“No More… No End': Paradise Lost IX.”Renaissance Papers 1983 (1984): 103‐109.The first words of Book IX are “No more,” and the last words are “no end.” Within this frame, the book is highly unified, a tragedy in five acts, but one looks in vain for the kind of epic heroism defined in the book's prologue. The framing words reappear in Eve's soliloquy after she eats the fruit, a soliloquy important for defining what has been tragically changed. The words “no end” in the final lines of the book are dreary or ironic in their meaning “to no purpose,” but as “no finis” they become optimistic, opening the way for “the better fortitude/ Of patience and heroic martyrdom” in Books X‐XII.William L. Stull. “Sonnets Courtly and Christian.”University of Hartford Studies in Literature 15.3 (1983)‐16.1 (1984): 1‐15.Herbert, Donne and Milton found a sanctification of poetic form that gave religious literature an advantage over the secular, courtly sonnet. Milton states his faith in the power of religious poetry in The Reason of Church Government and in PR IV. 334‐38 and 343‐47.Alinda Sumers‐Ingraham. “Milton's Umpire Conscience,’ the Two‐Handed Engine,’ and the English Protestant Tradition of the Divine Similitude.” Paper Presented at the Le Moyne Forum (1983).

ABSTRACTS

Joan S. Bennett. “‘Go.’ Milton's Antinomianism and the Separation Scene in Paradise Lost, Book 9.”R. F. Fleissner. “Milton's Lycidas, Lines 130–131,”Philip J. Gallagher. “Paradise Lost and the Greek Theogony.”Anthony Low. “Milton, Paradise Regained, and Georgic.”Patricia Parker. “Eve, Evening, and the Labor of Reading in Paradise Lost,”Stella P. Revard. “Milton's Muse and the Daughters of Memory.”Roslyn Richek. “Thomas Randolph's Salting (1627), Its Text, and John Milton's Sixth Prolusion as Another Salting (illustrated).”Claes Schaar. The Full Voic'd Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in “Paradise Lost.”

The Death of Righteous Men: Prophetic Gesture in Vaughan's "Daphnis" and Milton's Lycidas

The Death of Righteous Men: Prophetic Gesture in Vaughan's "Daphnis" and Milton's Lycidas

ABSTRACTS

R. A. L. Burnet. “Some Echoes of the Genevan Bible in Shakespeare and Milton.”Bill Coggin. “A Semantic Problem in John Milton's Christian Doctrine.”Robert Craven. “The Mists in Paradise Lost.” English Language NotesJohn Gorecki. “A Possible Platonic Echo in Paradise Lost, VI. 99–102.”John Hardy. “Distance and Distaste in Milton's God's ‘Ingrate,’”A. Kent Hieatt. “Eve as Reason in a Tradition of Allegorical Interpretation of the Fall.”Maurice Kelley and Leo Miller. “The Columbia Milton: Sixth Supplement.”J. F. Killeen. “A Homeric Usage in Milton's L'Allegro, 11–13.”Thomas Kranidas. “Milton's Lycidas.” The ExplicatorThomas Kranidas. “Milton's Trinculo.”Leo Miller. “Milton's Patriis Cicutis.”Malabika Sarkar. “Satan's Astronomical Journey, Paradise Lost, IX. 63–66.”Ernest W. Sullivan. “The Bible and Satanic Deceit: Paradise Lost X. 460–572.”June Winter. “The Two‐Handed Engine and the Fatal Bellman: Lycidas and Macbeth.”

ABSTRACTS

Heather Asals. “Echo, Narcissus, and Ambiguity, in Lycidas.”Gordon Campbell. “Milton's Theological and Literary Treatments of the Creation.”Eugene R. Cunnar. “Milton's Two‐Handed Engine: the Visionary Iconography of Christus in Statera.”Huston Diehl. “Teaching Milton's Early Poetry.”Albert C. Labriola. “‘Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt’: The Christology of Paradise Lost.”Mary Ann McGuire. “Milton's Arcades and the Entertainment Tradition.”John Mulryan. “Milton's Lycidas and the Italian Mythographers: Some Suggestive Parallels in their Treatment of Mythological Subjects.”Jason P. Rosenblatt. “The Angel and the Shepherd in Lycidas.”Raymond Waddington. “Here Comes the Son: Providential Theme and Symbolic Pattern in Paradise Lost, Book III.”Anthony Yu. “Life in the Garden: Primal Innocence and the Image of God in Paradise Lost.”

The Thematic Significance of the Flower Catalogue in Milton's Lycidas

It is now generally recognized that Lycidas was written not merely to memorialize death of Edward King, a young clergyman and fledgling poet who had been drowned at sea: it simultaneously manifests Milton's concern that death might also end his own life prematurely, whether by plague (which had taken its toll at Horton in 1637), by drowning (Milton was already looking forward to a tour of continental Europe), or by some other cause. Milton's doubts about his own future may not have been primary topic of his poem; but depth of real feeling in monody seems to have originated less in a sense of loss of someone who, however virtuous, had been little more than a college acquaintance, than in unsettling reflection that years of laborious study and frustrating self-discipline, devoted to training himself as both a poet and a teacher of men, might turn out to have been spent in vain.' At first level of accessibility, poem is an elaborately developed lament for King, both in his capacity as a poet (the first major movement, lines 15-84) and as a potentially influential Christian pastor (second movement, 85-131). Varieties of flowers are pictured as being strewn upon hearse (third movement, 132-64); but then lament gives way to elated mood of final section, that representing apotheosis of Lycidas and describing ecstasy of his new life in the blest Kingdoms (fourth movement, 165-85).2 These major divisions at primary level of meaning reveal Milton's concern at sub-textual level with his own potential for fame as a poet, as he moves from immaturity to maturity,3 and with his potential success as a dedicated Christian teacher, whether through projected Arthurian epic or through reform pamphlets.4 These concerns are made clear near beginning of Lycidas, in passage where Milton, after customary invocation of muses, expresses hope that another poet will one day write an elegy for him (18-24). And concluding lines of

ABSTRACTS

J. Copley. “Cowper on Johnson's ‘Life of Milton.’”Notes and Queries, NS 24 (July‐August, 1977), 311‐317.Thomas N. Corns. “Punctuation in Milton's Vernacular Prose.”Notes and Queries, NS 25 (February, 1978), 18‐19.J. Martin Evans. “Lycidas and the Dolphins.”Notes and Queries, NS 25 (February, 1978), 15‐17.Sandra M. Gilbert. “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey.”PMLA, 93, No. 3 (May, 1978), 368‐382.John E. Gorecki. “Milton's Sonnet XXIII and Aeschylus' Agamemnon.” Notes and Queries, NS 25 (February, 1978), 17.John Hollander. “Influential Echoes.” A paper presented at the MLA convention in Chicago, 1977, at the division meeting on the Seventeenth Century.Thomas F. Merrill. “Paradise Lost and the Hazards of Semantic Idolatry.”Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 77 (1976), 387‐410.George Eric Miller. “Dismissive Comparisons as a Descriptive Technique in Paradise Lost.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78 (1977), 57‐61.Mary I. Oates. “Faire Aemulation No Envy: The Serenity of Influence in Seventeenth‐Century Poetry.” A paper presented at the MLA convention in Chicago, 1977, at the division meeting on the Seventeenth Century.H. J. Real. “The Sum of Things Once More.”Notes and Queries, NS 24 (December, 1977), 547.Joanne M. Riley. “Milton's Lycidas: New Light on the Title.”Notes and Queries, NS 24 (December, 1977), 545.Paul Sherwin. “Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion.” PMLA, 93, No. 3 (May, 1978), 383‐395.J. J. M. Tobin. “Samson and Sea Imagery Again.”English Language Notes, 15, No. 1 (September, 1977), 23‐27.J. G. Turner. “Milton's Hollow Cube.”Notes and Queries, NS 25 (February, 1978), 17‐18.