He did not perhaps produce quite what was expected. Lycidas is ostensibly a poem about the tragedy of youthful death. Why should Edward King be cut off in his prime whilst others live? The poem calls God’s justice in question, not for the last time in Milton’s career. But this leads the poet on to ask how important worldly success is, and to assess his own life in the light of King’s death. Lycidas turns into a tremendous denunciation of the dominant clique in the Church of England, the Laudians.
Here the pastoral tradition stood Milton in good stead. Fulke Greville made it clear that the allegorical form of works like Arcadia, ‘this representing of virtues, vices, humours, counsels and actions of men in feigned and unscandalous images, is an enabling of freeborn spirits to the greatest affairs of state.’1 Sidney himself in The Defence of Poesie had said ‘sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep [pastoral poetry] can include the whole considerations of wrongdoings and patience.’2 Spenser did just that in The Shepheardes Calendar and Colin Clouts come home again. Of The Faerie Queene Spenser admitted almost in so many words that ‘I chose the history of King Arthur as … furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of present times.’ The Spenserians Browne and Wither made a similar use of pastoral. Browne directly anticipates Lycidas by his reference to ‘The prelate in pluralities asleep / Whilst that the wolf lies preying on his sheep.’3
The advantage of the pastoral mode, then, was that sharp criticisms could be made, and the key supplied to those in the know. The innocent would miss the point. The essence of pastoral was ambiguity, something perhaps forgotten by those who continue to labour at the mysteries of Lycidas. Thus everybody would know in general what Milton meant by ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’: it meant Rome, popery. But just because this is pastoral, is allegory, it need not mean only Rome. Archbishop Laud too perhaps has some wolfish characteristics? Similarly ‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ sounds like St. Peter, the good bishop; but again we can read other things into it. If you object to bishops, the pilot can be the good pastor, the preacher, Jesus Christ even:4 there is only one identification – the Pope – that we are clearly not intended to make.
We have then to pick up clues as we read. In 1638 Lycidas lacked the full introductory note which alerts modern readers. The words ‘and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height’ could not be added until Lycidas was reprinted in 1645, after the fall of the bishops. The geographical references
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount [St. Michael’s Mount]
Looks towards Namancos and Bayonna’s hold
have a patriotic and anti-Spanish connotation which would not be missed by readers in 1638, when the government was on friendlier terms with Spain than with the Protestant Netherlands. The line
Look homeward Angel now and melt with ruth,
has been described as ‘a cry to St. Michael to look at the state of England’.1 It has even been suggested that the famous close of the poem,
At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new,
may refer to the fact that blue was the colour of the Scottish Covenanters, already in revolt against Charles I by November 1637 when Milton wrote.2
And then there is that ‘two-handed engine at the door’, which ‘stands ready to smite once and smite no more’. Critics who complain of Milton’s obscurity here forget the censorship. He could hardly say in plain terms either that Laud should be impeached (if the engine equals the two Houses of Parliament); or executed (if it is an axe, or Michael’s two-handed sword (P.L. VI. 250–1), or a two-handed sceptre, or the ‘twa-handed sweard’ given to John Knox by the martyr George Wishart (the Scottish emphasis again); or called to account by the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. The two-handed weapon might also be the Old and New Testaments, or the law and the gospel, or ‘the sword of his mouth’ (Revelation 1:16 2:10) or a shepherd’s rod and crook – all various ways of describing the Protestant preaching which Laud was thought to be trying to suppress.3 (But then why ‘smite once and smite no more’? Preaching is surely a cumulative activity?) The whole beauty of the pastoral mode, under a strict censorship, was that meanings could be multiple, slippery, conveying an attitude rather than a precise statement. It was an art of which Milton was to become a master.
Two things about this memorial poem to a clergyman are especially remarkable. First, its fierce anti-clericalism and its covert hostility to the state church.
That fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th’eclipse and rigged with curses dark
has plausibly been identified with the Laudian church.4 In Comus the true church of the faithful, though tempted in the wilderness, had the inner resources which enabled it to survive. But in Lycidas there is no hope for the visible church in England. Individual souls, like Lycidas, may be saved when the ship founders; but the institution is doomed. This might be the attitude of a radical sectary rather than that of the relatively moderate Puritan that Milton is assumed to have been until the mid-forties. So indeed might Comus’s reference to ‘the canon laws of our foundation’, added to the text in 1637 (line 807). Milton’s later virulent hatred for the clergy is anticipated in his passionate denunciation of ‘hirelings’ who are in the ministry for what they can get out of it, as contrasted with the true pastor:
such as for their bellies’ sake
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold.
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest,
Blind mouths!
(Lycidas. 114–19)1
A second point to note is the rather perfunctory part that the consolations of immortality play in the poem (lines 165–81). The forthcoming vengeance on the Church of England and its unworthy pastors interests Milton far more. The poem ends, as so many of Milton’s greatest poems will, by reminding us that life on earth goes on. He was always more concerned with this world than the next.2 Lycidas was published in 1638 only over the initials J.M.; Milton owned it for the first time in 1645. By then times had changed.
Although I desired also to cross [from Italy, in 1639] to Sicily and Greece, the said tidings of civil war from England summoned me back. For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind while my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty.
Milton, Second Defence of the English People (1654), C.P.W., IV, p. 619
The fifteen months of Milton’s Italian journey are of crucial importance in his intellectual development. But again we have to guess at their precise significance. Milton’s route was wholly conventional: the only unusual thing about his tour was his enthusiastic and flattering reception by intellectuals of the academies in the Italian towns which he visited.1 We have no certain answer to the perplexing question of why this thirty-year-old middle-class Englishman, with virtually no publication to his credit in English or Latin, was received so ecstatically. Milton prepared very carefully for his tour. He obtained an introduction to Sir Henry Wotton doyen of British diplomats, either through Henry Lawes, with whom Milton had collaborated in Comus, or through the Diodatis.2 Wotton gave him introductions to the English embassy in Paris,