ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
directive to Lycidas and its accompanying burden: “Now Lycidas, the Shepherds
weep no more.” The vision of joy and love described in the next world is seen
to have effectively canceled the sorrows caused by the loss of Lycidas in this one.
It is as if the phrase, “That sing, and singing in their glory move,” flows beyond
its own reflexive boundaries and “moves” the immediate audience of Shepherds,
just as, in his new station as “Genius of the shore,” Lycidas shall “be good/To all
that wander in that perilous flood.” Not even Jonson’s Shakespeare could claim
as much.
From the full sweep of its mourning to its triumphantly orchestrated
“recompense,” “Lycidas” shows “what religious, what glorious and magnificent
use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things,” to use Milton’s
phrasing in Of Education. 39 One purpose of the eight-line coda is to provide some
implicit limits to these claims:
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals gray;
He touch’t the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the Sun had stretch’t out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’t his Mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.
189
(ll. 186–93)
But readers have rightly felt, too, that the formal conclusion is also Milton’s
characteristic way of making an ending, yet again, into a new beginning. As
passions are tempered through the introduction of a single pattern of alternating
rhyme and a concluding couplet, as the setting and speaker are identified, as a
full day has passed, Milton drops a curtain on the performance, but only to
suggest a poet thinking about “fresh Woods, and Pastures new.” And few readers
have resisted following Milton into the future, seeing in the figure of the
“uncouth Swain” the epic poet in chrysalis, registering in the formulaic
transition to “Thus sang” the distancing effect of epic narrative. Pastoral is the
genre of promise, but the most suggestive connection to a future even Milton
could not have known is perhaps contained in the smallest of words that also
leaves almost everything potentially open. “All,” as in “To all that wander in
that perilous flood,” permits not just the possibility of the wide reach of epic—a
subject for everyone, not just for a nation 40 —but the idea of a readership
restricted at the outset only by membership in the general and the knowledge of
its own need of guidance. To put a different spin on Johnson’s remark quoted at
the outset of this chapter, “Milton never learned the art of doing little things
with grace.”