What personal problem did Milton examine in his poem, "lycidas"?

Question

What personal problem did Milton examine in his poem, "lycidas"?

Answer 1

The following links and sites will illustatrate the personal problem that Milton probably examines in his poem Lycidas :

JSTOR: Milton in "Lycidas"The real subject of "Lycidas," then, must be John Milton qua John Milton. ... But the two men faced the same intellectual problem, and neither was able to ...

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JSTOR: A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. Vol. 2 ...Book Reviews 435 A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton. ... far as to admit that he cannot understand Woodhouse's note to Lycidas, line 141 (p. ...

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Milton Reading Room - Bibliography R-S"Milton: Lycidas" The English Elegy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University .... Shawcross, John T. "A Contemporary Source for Some of Milton's Poems. ...

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Grief: The Idiom Milton’s Lycidasleft with a second problem about Lycidas. How can. Lycidas be both in heaven and near Land’s ..... John. Milton, The Minor English Poems, 111, ii, edited by ...

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On the Value of 'Lycidas.'Compared to the other image patterns, the face imagery in Lycidas has received ..... 13 John Milton, Lycidas, in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. ...

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Lycidas: Milton's Pastoral Elegy

Edward King was a fellow student of Milton's, a Puritan youth who had written some poetry and was intending to become a preacher. He was on a ship in the Irish Sea when it sank, and he was drowned. Several of his friends decided to write poems in his memory and publish the collection. Milton's contribution, Lycidas, belongs to a tradition going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is a pastoral. That is, the poet and the persons he writes about are all treated as shepherds (or shepherdesses) living in the hillsides and pastures of ancient Greece. Edward King is renamed Lycidas, and Milton mourns his death.

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:

Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew

himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

He must not float upon his watery bier

unwept, and welter to the parching wind

without the meed of some melodious tear....

Now thou art gone, and never must return!

Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves

with wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,

and all their echoes mourn....

The mourner goes on to ask the proper response to the knowledge that anyone can die at any time, with all his goals unachieved. Ought we to seek pleasure and forget all else? Is fame worth pursuing, and does it really convey a kind of immortality? And so through many like questions, hinted at rather than stated explicitly, so that much of the poem is not so much an examination of Milton's uncertainties as a device to bring to the forefront some of the uncertainties lurking in the mind of the reader. (A footnoted edition helps, since it is worth knowing, for example, that the site of King's drowning was overlooked (from a distance) by a mountain with a statue of the Archangel Michael--hence the reference to the "guarded mount" and the plea, "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth." However, not knowing this should not spoil the poem for you. You do not have to know very much about Eleanor Rigby to enjoy the Beatles' song of that name.) Finally, the poet compares Lycidas to the sun, which sinks only to rise again, and then concludes on an explicitly Christian note of comfort.

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

through the dear might of him that walked the waves

He speaks of Lycidas in Heaven, where all tears are wiped from his eyes, and closes with the image of the shepherd, his mourning for Lycidas ended, arising and going on his way comforted.

The poem is just under 200 lines long. One critic has said: "It may be the most beautiful short poem in the language."