ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
The great paradox of “Lycidas” as a work of art can be glimpsed in these lines. A
poet claims to be doing, once more, what he seems to be doing here for the first
time, a claim that lies at the heart of most criticism of the poem, from Johnson’s
early attack on “Lycidas” for its artificiality (“Where there is leisure for fiction
there is little grief”) to the many modern defenses of the poem as an authentic
act of mourning, as an original response to a “crisis,” whether personal or
political or some combination of the two, as the elegy eventually insists. 31 A
poem as luxurious and ecstatic as “Lycidas” will never become too familiar, in
spite of its frequent appearance in the classroom or its often decried canonical
status. Nor is it possible to offer here anything approaching another “full”
reading. But the connections to, as well as the departures from, the masque do
not often receive the emphasis they perhaps deserve. The most useful criticism
of “Lycidas” from this angle tends to emphasize the prophetic connections
between the masque and the elegy, the emerging sense of the poet’s public
“voice.” 32 Audible in the Lady’s “sacred vehemence,” it can be heard to climb to
an even sharper pitch in St. Peter’s diatribe against the clergy quoted partly
above, still referred to in the Hughes edition as a “digression.” If a digression, it
burns long with corrosive anger. Only one other verse paragraph in the poem
exceeds this one in length, and it ends by sounding a catastrophic warning in
one of literature’s most charged images, enigmatic in the mysterious precision of
its vehicle, but unmistakable in the tenor of its finality:
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
184
(ll. 128–31)
“Lycidas” rhymes irregularly, but to great effect, closing the door here on the
ravenous wolves now altogether out of their sheep’s clothing. The force of
Milton’s apocalyptic smiting at this point helps to justify the view that, among
the many “sources” figuring into the poem, an important place should be
allotted to one of the most notorious instances of Laud’s program for
ecclesiastical conformity carried out just two months before King’s death: the
dramatic ear-cropping (and subsequent martyrdom) in early June of the
Puritans Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne. 33 “Lycidas” is a
poem of retaliation.
Casting grief in the form of a pastoral elegy allows Milton to activate the rusty
machinery of political satire with greater force than Drayton ever dreamed. But
the guise of a fellow pastoral singer—an “uncouth Swain” we learn at the end—
also sanctions a roughness of expression, a bewailing, well beyond anything
explored in the earlier poetry including A Mask, indeed far beyond anything yet
written in English, if we take John Crowe Ransom’s summary point that “there