sing the Irish
Channel.

In its main intention, Lycidas is an elegy, because it professes to mourn
one who is dead and extols his virtues. In its form it is almost wholly
pastoral, because it feigns an environment of shepherds, allegorizing
college life as the life of men tending flocks, and the occupations of
earnest students as the careless diversions of rustic swains.

Four times the pastoral note is rudely interrupted by the intervention of
majestic beings who speak in awful tones from another world, and whose
voices instantly check all familiar rustic speech, compelling it to wait
till they have announced their messages from above. The supernal powers
who thus descend to take their parts in the office of mourning are
Phoebus, Apollo, Hippotades, god of the winds, Camus, god of the river
Cam, and St. Peter. This mingling of classic, Hebrew, and Christian
conceptions is a marked characteristic of all Milton's poetry.

Thus Lycidas is neither wholly elegiac nor wholly pastoral. From the lips
of St. Peter, typifying the church, comes a speech of violent
denunciation, in the true later Miltonic manner. In strange contrast to
this grim invective is the famous flower-passage, the sweetest and
loveliest thing of its kind in our literature.

1-5. To pluck once more the berries of the evergreens, or to gather
laurels,--is to make a new venture as a poet,--to compose a poem. The
berries are harsh and crude,--he shatters their leaves before the
mellowing year, either because he is to mourn the death of a young man,
or because he feels in himself a lack of "inward ripeness" to treat his
theme worthily,--perhaps for both reasons. He shatters the leaves with
forced fingers rude, in the sense that his subject is not of his own
choosing.

6-7. A sad duty is imposed upon him, forbidding further delay on any
personal grounds.

8. Lycidas is one of the stock names of pastoral poetry. The poem, though
most serious in its main motive and intention, is to have a pastoral
coloring throughout. Note the impressive repetitions, dead, dead, and the
recurrences of the name Lycidas in the next two lines.

11. he knew Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme. Edward King had,
in accordance with the college custom of his time, written verses,
apparently all in Latin. Of these verses Masson, in his life of Milton,
gives specimens. They seem to be commonplace.

13. and welter to the parching wind. See Par. Lost II 594, I 78.

15. Sist