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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It has been made increasingly evident by critics in recent years that the drowning of Edward King was the occasion, rather than the subject, of Lycidas. Milton's concern was generally with the life, death, and resurrection of the dedicated poet, and specifically with his own situation at the time. From this premise it follows that there are no digressions in the poem and that the form and traditions of pastoral elegy are entirely appropriate to its intentions.
1 See J. H. Hanford, “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas”, PMLA, xxv (1910), 403–447; G. Norlin, “The Conventions of Pastoral Elegy”, American Journal of Philology, xxxii (1911), 294–312; and C. G. Osgood's note in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. E. Greenlaw et al. (The Minor Poems, Baltimore, 1943), I, 399.
2 Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, tr. A. Lang (London, 1896), p. 200.
3 Milton's general familiarity with the fertility cults is attested by his references to Ashtaroth, Thammuz, Isis, and Osiris in the Nativity Ode (200–213) and to Adonis and “th'Assyrian Queen” in Comus (998–1001). His immediate source for all these might have been John Selden's De Dits Syriis (London, 1617), Syn. ii, Cap. x, but Lucian's De Dea Syrea and Plutarch's Of Osiris would have been good collateral sources. The material was also scattered plentifully through Hesiod's Theogony, the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius, and the other early church fathers and the classical historians whose works Milton studied during the Horton period.
4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, x, 512.
5 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis Attis Osiris (London, 1922), i, 313.
6 Cf. S. Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar (Oxford, 1914), pp. 5–6 (Tammuz was called “ ‘the faithful son of the fresh waters which come from the earth.‘”).
7 See C. G. Osgood, The Classical Mythology of Milton's. English Poems (New York, 1900), pp. 5, 13.
8 Cf. Theocritus, Idyll xv; Frazer, I, 224; and the discussion of Orpheus below.
9 The Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis of Milton, ed. C. S. Jerram (London, 1897), p. 81.
10 Ibid., pp. 81–82.
11 Ibid., pp. 83–84.
12 Osgood, Classical Mythology of Milton's English Poems, p. 16.
13 For the present interpretation it makes little difference whether the term “day-star” is taken to mean the sun itself or whether, as seems likely, it refers to Hesperus and Lucifer (Jerram, p. 85). If the day-star is not the sun, it accompanies the sun in its death-and-re-birth journey under the ocean. In this connection, it is interesting and perhaps significant that Selden remarked of the mourning and rejoicing in the cult of Thammuz, “Those who first instituted these laments were not thinking of anything but the approach and departure of the sun, which they mourned at one time as something lost, and which they customarily received with happy auguries after it was reborn” (De Diis Syriis, p. 246).
14 Frazer, ii, 99. Milton was undoubtedly familiar with the custom of throwing a vase woven of papyrus, with letters inside, into the sea at Alexandria, whence it floated to Byblos. There the women, who had been mourning the death of Adonis, received it with rejoicing as the reborn demigod. This ritual is described by Lucian (De Dea Syrea, vii) and cited from Lucian by Selden (De Diis Syriis, pp. 242–243), who particularly emphasizes the fact that the vase was called “a papyrus head.”
