“Lycidas” Handout

English 513/622

Dr. Fike

Outline

Introduction:  1-24

Meditation on true fame:  25-84

• Happy section, 25-36
• Lament for L’s death, 37-49
• Regret that the nymphs could not protect him, 50-63
• Risk of death before great work is completed, 64-84

Prophecy of the run of the corrupted clergy:  85-131

Bridge/transition:  132-64

Deification of Lycidas:  165-84

Conclusion:  186-93

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: 

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance.  It cannot be inherited.  It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.  This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.  And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

Bible Verses

Line 1, cf. Hebrews 12:26-28:  “His voice then shook the earth; but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.’  This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of what is shaken, as of what has been made, in order that what cannot be shaken may remain.  Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.”  Cf. Reason of Church Government, pages 922 and 924 (left column in both cases).

Line 110, cf. Matthew 16:19:   “‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’”  Cf. PL 2.327-28 and page 503, note 249.

Line 115, cf. John 10:1:  “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.’”

Line 118, cf. Matthew 22:8:  “they that were bidden [to the feast] were not worthy.”

Line 119, Isaiah 56:10-57.1:  “His watchmen are blind…The shepherds also have no understanding…..The righteous man perishes….”

Line 128, re. wolves, cf. PL 4.182-92 and 12.507-14.  The arms of St. Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) included two gray wolves.

Line 193, cf. Exodus 28:31:  “‘And you shall make the robe of the ephod all of blue.’”

Elements of Pastoral Elegy

• Invocation of the muse (15)
• Expression of grief felt at the loss of a friend (37-49)
• Procession of mourners (85ff.)
• Digression (on the church 108-131)
• Consolation—stuff happens, but everything turns out for the best (165-85); consolation—strengthened belief in God
• Poet as shepherd (shepherd = someone who guards sheep + a pastor in the religious sense)
• Praise of the dead “shepherd” (25-36)
• Pathetic fallacy (39-41)—nature is given human qualities
• Questioning of the nymphs (50ff.)
• Flower symbolism (64-84)

The “Two-Handed Engine”

• The two houses of parliament
• The temporal and Spiritual authority of the Court of High Commission
• The destructive power of the imminent civil war
• Puritan zeal
• Combined forces of England and Scotland or of France and Spain
• The Catholic Church
• The pastoral staff or sheep-hook
• The keys of Heaven and Hell given to St. Peter (Matthew 16:19)
• The lock on St. Peter’s door
• St. Peter’s sword (Matthew 20:51, John 18:10)
• The “Sharp two-edged Sword” of the Johannine vision (Revelation 1:16, 2:12)
• The Sword of Divine Justice (Ezekiel 21:9-17), especially as wielded by Michael “with huge two-handed sway” (PL 6.251)
• The axe in general, especially the one “laid unto the root of the trees” (Matthew 3:10, Luke 3:9)
• The rod of Christ’s anger
• The Word of God
• The Son of God
• The scythe of Time
• Man “in his dual capacity of labour and prayer”
• The iron flail of Talus in FQ V
• The temple of Janus

From Virgil's 3rd Eclogue:

Menalcas.
O every way
Unhappy sheep, unhappy flock! while he
Still courts Neaera [nee AIR ah], fearing lest her choice
Should fall on me, this hireling shepherd here
Wrings hourly twice their udders, from the flock
Filching the life-juice, from the lambs their milk.

........

Damoetas.
Well, then, shall we try our skill
Each against each in turn? Lest you be loth,
I pledge this heifer; every day she comes
Twice to the milking-pail, and feeds withal
Two young ones at her udder: say you now
What you will stake upon the match with me.

.......

Thou him in singing? or hadst thou ever a waxen-bound pipe? Wert not wont in the cross-roads, blockhead, to mangle a wretched tune on a grating straw?