ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
“Captain or Colonel.” In conjunction with the letter, I think it also helps to
illuminate matters closer at hand: the kind of imposing challenges to which
Milton opened himself not simply once Civil War was upon him and the nation
but while he was still a young poet, though not quite so youthful as he appears
in either the Nativity Ode or “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” I mean, of course,
the challenges presented by the occasions underlying the two “concluding”
works in Poems: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (often referred to as Comus)
and “Lycidas.”
For if the sonnet identifies a poet for whom a measured readiness is all, the
letter in which it was wrapped describes an author diffident at best about fame
won from hurrying into print. Indeed, in the letter to his former tutor, Milton
reveals finding in the famous parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30) and
the related parable of the Five Wise and Five Foolish Virgins (Matthew 25:1–
16) a strong argument for valuing watchfulness over haste. And perhaps in
Matthew’s injunction, “to every man according to his several ability” (25:15),
he discovered further justification to proceed at his own pace. In a sense peculiar
to Milton, it is not simply the occasions themselves that are important, but the
preparation as well. As a glance at the full arc of his career reminds us, Milton is
a poet for whom lengthy pauses are hugely significant: Paradise Lost appeared
after thirty years of his near silence as a poet.
A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle and “Lycidas”
Both A Mask and “Lycidas” have long been viewed as possessing separate claims
for pride of place among the early verse. Johnson awarded the palm to the
masque, in part because he disliked “Lycidas”; modern critics, responding to
Johnson, have often returned the prize to the elegy. Neither is for the faint of
heart, which is one way to describe both their distance from Caroline notions of
idleness and the problems they can cause for initial readers, although the masque
achieves, appropriate to its genre, a lightness of touch never again attempted by
Milton, and “Lycidas” remains among the most compelling poems in English:
deeply unsettled—and unsettling—in the fullness of its response to personal
grief. Both rank among the most complicated literary works in the early
seventeenth century; and it is surely the case that no other single work in either
genre has received anything approaching as much critical attention.
Chronologically, “Lycidas” is the later of the two. Begun sometime after
August 10, 1637, the date Milton’s Cambridge classmate, Edward King, drowned
in the Irish Sea, it was probably completed in November of that year, as
suggested by the canceled note in the Trinity Manuscript alongside the poem. A
Mask was first performed three years earlier, on September 29, 1634. But even
before appearing together in 1645, both poems had enjoyed separate publication.
“Lycidas” had been brought out in 1638, as part of a Cambridge memorial
volume for King and bearing the signature “J.M” at the end of the poem. A Mask
had appeared in print on its own in 1637, although, as the introductory epistle
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