ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
(“Look homeward Angel now”), and then to see hope further affirmed in the
context of a wider expression of faith. As the grieving mourner becomes the
good pastor, he offers the community what the bad ministers, caring only to fill
their “blind mouths,” never did, nor what Peter, in his anger and “dread voice,”
could not:
Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor,
So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas, sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves,
Where other groves, and other streams along,
With Nectar pure his oozy Locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now Lycidas, the Shepherds weep no more;
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
188
(ll. 165–85)
A pastoral elegy that did not include some sort of apotheosis of the dead person
was scarcely imaginable in the Renaissance, as the multiple acts of mourning in
Spenser’s Astrophel help to demonstrate. “The act of substitution,” as Peter Sacks
argues, and “the reattachment to a new object of love” was an integral part of
the successful mourning process. 38 But readers of Renaissance elegies, whether
of Christianized laments like Henry King’s “The Exequy” or of classical eulogies
along the lines of Jonson’s testimony to Shakespeare (a poem Milton surely
knew), may still not be prepared for the kind of celebration they meet in these
lines, so emphatic are the similes comparing Lycidas’s resurrection to the sun’s
rising, so sweeping is the Miltonic line on the subject of salvation (“Through
the dear might of him that walk’d the waves”), and so lavish are the words of
redemption: “With Nectar pure his oozy Locks he laves.” When Milton speaks
to Lycidas of “thy large recompense,” he almost understates his own case.
Almost, but not quite: for what also emphatically distinguishes Milton’s elegy at
this point from those from Virgil to Spenser and beyond is the present tense