The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Milton · a pastoral elegy of 193 lines · written in November 1637, first printed in 1638 · scored on the text of Milton’s Poems of 1645, with the headnote added there, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Pastoral elegy, which the 1645 headnote calls a monody: a lament in the person of a shepherd for a drowned shepherd, broken three times by a higher strain
Mythos
Orpheus torn and his head sent down the Hebrus; the day-star sinking into the ocean and rising; Christ who walked the waves; Alpheus under the sea to Arethusa; the drowned friend made the genius of the shore
Phase
One day’s song, for Edward King, drowned on 10 August 1637 on the passage from Chester to Ireland, written that November; from the forced plucking of the laurels to the swain rising to go
Presentation
Poem of 193 lines, mostly iambic pentameter with short lines among them, rhymed irregularly after the Italian canzone with some lines left unrhymed, and closed by one stanza of ottava rima in the third person
Register
From the harsh, clotted opening and the hard monosyllables of St Peter to the open vowels of the sea and the hush of the consolation
Scale
One singer on one day, a drowned friend, the sea, the English Church in the year of Laud’s ascendancy, and heaven
Governing Proposition
A young poet who has scorned delights for a life of labour sings for a friend drowned at sea before his harvest, and three times the song breaks off into a higher strain: on what fame is worth, on a clergy that does not feed its flock, and on where the drowned body lies; three times a voice answers, and only the last answer holds. The wager of the poem is that the most worn of conventions can carry vocation, theology and public anger at once, and that a mourner who lets his grief break its decorum can be brought, by form, to composure and to the next day’s work.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Edward King, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, drowned on 10 August 1637, when his ship went down off the Welsh coast on the passage from Chester to Ireland. Cambridge made a memorial volume for him, Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, printed in 1638, and Milton’s poem, written that November, was in it. Milton was twenty-eight, a poet still preparing himself. The poem opens on that unreadiness: “Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more / Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere”. He has come back to the evergreens of poetry before he meant to, and he says so.
“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, / And with forced fingers rude”: the song is plucked before its season, and the verse makes the force audible. The sounds are clotted and the rhymes harsh, and the reader hears a hand working against its own unripeness. Then the occasion is given in the pastoral figure the whole poem keeps: Lycidas has died young, and the singer and he were two shepherds who fed their flocks together. The convention was old and worn, and the volume it appeared in was full of it. Milton takes it whole and makes it bear everything the poem will ask.
The desk scores the poem as Milton printed it in 1645, in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, where it gained a headnote: the author, it says, bewails a learned friend drowned on the Irish seas in 1637, and by occasion foretells the ruin of a corrupted clergy then at its height. The Trinity College manuscript, where Milton drafted and revised it, the flowers among the revisions, is the poem’s workshop and is not scored. The poem is 193 lines, most in pentameter with short lines among them, rhymed at irregular distances after the Italian canzone, some lines left without a rhyme, and closed by one regular stanza. It is weighed at its own scale.
Movement II
The lament moves through the conventional places, and nature mourns the singer it has lost. Orpheus enters, torn, his head sent “down the swift Hebrus”, the singer “Whom universal nature did lament”, and the question beneath the convention breaks through. If the Muse could not save her own son, what is a life given to her worth? The poet has chosen that life, in a discipline against pleasure: “To scorn delights, and live laborious days”.
And then, just as the reward is in sight, “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears” comes, “And slits the thin-spun life”. The short line is placed for the cut. This is the first of the poem’s three waves, and its subject is not King. A young man who has disciplined himself for a great work sees that the discipline can be cut off by an accident at sea, and the dead friend is the figure of his own exposure. The poem says it plainly enough that Johnson took it as proof there was no grief in it.
A voice answers: Phoebus touches the singer’s ear. “Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil”: it is judged in heaven, not on earth. The answer is placed outside the world, and it holds. Then the singer turns back to his own key: “That strain I heard was of a higher mood”, and he calls on Arethusa to restore the pastoral. The poem has shown its way of thinking. Grief breaks the decorum of the song, a higher voice speaks, and the lower key is recalled. Each wave goes higher than the last.
Movement III
The second wave asks why he died. A procession comes to answer: Triton for the sea, Aeolus for the winds, Camus, the river of Cambridge, and last St Peter, with “two massy keys”. River-god, sea-god and apostle walk in one pageant, and with the apostle the elegy turns to its second question: why the faithful shepherd drowns while the false ones live and feed.
Peter’s speech is invective. The false shepherds are “blind mouths”; their songs “Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw”; “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed”, while the “grim wolf with privy paw” devours the flock and nothing is said. The hard monosyllables are the sound of the charge. This was written in 1637, the year of Laud’s ascendancy, of the mutilation of Prynne, Burton and Bastwick in June, and of the riots over the Scottish Prayer Book, by a young man without position. The headnote of 1645 names what it foretold. The passage is the elegy’s second question, and the poem’s own law answers it: the shepherd who does not feed his flock against the shepherd who was drowned.
It ends in the poem’s great crux: “that two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more”. The engine has been read as the two Houses of Parliament, as the keys, as the sword of Michael, as the axe laid to the root of the tree in Matthew, and in dozens of other ways, and none has settled it. What is not in doubt is the force: a judgment single, final and at hand. Then again the singer turns back, and calls Alpheus, the river that runs under the sea to Arethusa, to return, and the pastoral with it.
Movement IV
The flower passage is the poem’s loveliest and its lowest. “Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies”: the catalogue strews the hearse with flowers, each with its colour and its grief, and the verse slows to the pace of a hand laying them down. It was a later insertion in the manuscript. And the poem cancels it: “Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise”. There is no hearse. The flowers are for a body that is not there, and the singer admits that he has been comforting himself.
The body is in the sea. It “Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world”, or lies near “the great vision of the guarded mount”, which looks out toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold. “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth”. The line is at the lowest point of the poem, the lost body under the whole weight of the sea, and from there the third wave turns. “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more”: the repetition does the consoling before the argument begins.
“So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, / And yet anon repairs his drooping head”. The sun goes down into the sea and comes up again, and King, sunk low, has mounted high, through the might of “him that walked the waves”. The sea that killed him becomes the medium of his rising. In heaven he hears “the unexpressive nuptial song” among the saints, and on earth he becomes “the genius of the shore”, the guardian of those who sail where he drowned. This is the third voice from beyond, and the only one of the three the poem lets stand. It holds by vision more than by argument, and Johnson’s charge falls hardest here.
Movement V
Then the voice changes. “Thus sang the uncouth swain to th’ oaks and rills”: the last eight lines are a single stanza of ottava rima, rhymed abababcc, the only regular stanza in the poem, and they are spoken by someone else. A narrator has stood outside the song all along. He tells of a swain who “touched the tender stops of various quills”, “With eager thought warbling his Doric lay”, and of the day ending. The irregularity of the whole is closed in order: form arrives as the mourner arrives at composure.
The coda turns the lament into a performance seen from outside, one man’s song on one day, and it shows the singer as a performer on purpose. It has been asked ever since who speaks it, and whether the turn makes the grief truer or confesses it a fiction. Ransom found the poem nearly anonymous, Fish found it finally anonymous, and Abrams counted five ways of reading it. The poem leaves the question open. What it settles is the singer’s next act: he rises and goes. “Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new”.
The line passed into the language, and the poem into the line of the English elegy: Shelley’s Adonais and Arnold’s Thyrsis are written after it, and later elegists measure themselves against it. On this desk it stands below Paradise Lost (9.5) on every axis, as the rehearsal stands below the work: the vocation, the fall, the providential answer and the wanderers going out are already here, in little. It stands above Paradise Regained (8.6) on every axis but The Encompassed. A poem of 193 lines holds the vocation of its poet, a church and a nation in a dangerous year, the classical world and the Christian heaven, and closes on a man getting up to go on.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing idle in 193 lines, and the poem is built of the parts a critic would try to cut first: two digressions and a catalogue. Remove the passage on fame and the poem loses its first question, what a dedicated life is worth when “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears” cuts it before its harvest; King’s death matters because it might be Milton’s. Remove St Peter and it loses its second, why the faithful shepherd drowns while the “blind mouths” feed: an elegy for a cleric needs the indictment of the clergy. Held at 9.0 by the flowers, a later insertion in the manuscript, which the poem itself calls “false surmise”: ornament it must then cancel.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. A vocation chosen in discipline against pleasure, “To scorn delights, and live laborious days”, is exposed to an arbitrary death, and the only answer that holds is placed outside the world: “Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil”. Beside it the poem discloses a pastorate that does not feed its flock, “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed”, which still holds of any institution living on its charges. Of grief it discloses, more contestably, that elegy is a work of self-recovery. Johnson’s charge, “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief”, holds the axis down: the dead man is a name on which questions hang, and the consolation is asserted by vision more than earned by argument.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height and frequency are both great for so short a poem: it rises in nearly every paragraph, from the tender to the terrible. The terrible: the Fury’s shears; St Peter’s “two massy keys” and “that two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more”; the body that “Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world”. The grand: “the great vision of the guarded mount” and “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth”. The transport of the close, where King hears “the unexpressive nuptial song”, and then the calm of the coda, which is itself an elevation. Held below the top because the poem’s scale gives each height a few lines only, and its loveliest passage, the flowers, is deliberately low.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The pastoral convention is the load-bearing structure: two shepherds who fed their flocks together, one drowned, the other left to sing. Over it the poem lays three archetypes and makes each carry the argument. Orpheus, his head sent “down the swift Hebrus”, the poet whom even the Muse could not save. The sun: “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, / And yet anon repairs his drooping head”, descent and return made the figure of resurrection. And Christ, “him that walked the waves”, who turns the sea that killed King into the medium of his rising. Lycidas ends as “the genius of the shore”, a local myth born in the poem. Held a step from the top because King is never a particular man.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the whole pastoral elegy: Theocritus’s first Idyll, the Lament for Bion, Virgil’s fifth and tenth Eclogues, Sannazaro, Spenser’s November eclogue and Astrophel. By 1637 the convention was worn, and the volume for King was full of it. The swerve is threefold: a verse form taken from the canzone and broken further, so that the poem sounds improvised within the strictest of genres; the invective of St Peter, which Spenser had licensed but never pressed so hard, delivered in the year of Prynne’s mutilation by a young man without position; and the coda, which turns the lament into a performance seen from outside. The stake was real. Held below 9.0 because each element has a precedent, and the wager was placed inside the most honoured form.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poem knows grief as a mind that breaks its own decorum and must be called back: twice a higher strain interrupts the pastoral, “That strain I heard was of a higher mood”, and twice the singer recalls Arethusa or Alpheus to restore the lower key. The irregular rhyme is the instrument, lines reaching for a rhyme that comes late or not at all, as the consolation does. Three waves each rise to a voice from beyond, Phoebus, Peter, the vision of the saints, and only the third holds. Then the one regular stanza closes the irregularity in order, form arriving as the mourner arrives at composure. Held a tenth off the top because the flowers are a container the form must then disown.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, and for a poem of 193 lines a great deal of it. Johnson’s attack in the Life of Milton (1779), “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing”, opened a quarrel over sincerity and convention that has not closed. The poem has been read under every method of the last century, each finding a different poem: John Crowe Ransom’s “A Poem Nearly Anonymous”, M. H. Abrams’s “Five Types of Lycidas”, C. A. Patrides’s casebook, and Stanley Fish’s answer to Ransom, “Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous”. The two-handed engine remains a crux with dozens of proposed readings. Who speaks the coda, whether the consolation is earned, how the pagan and the Christian stand to each other: all still open. Held below the top only because the field of questions is narrower than a long work’s.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is English poetry of the seventeenth century, and with it the European pastoral elegy since Theocritus. The intrinsic force: the poem took a worn convention and made it the vehicle of vocation, theology and public anger, and showed that English verse could be irregular in the Italian manner and still be monumental. After it the elegy was the place where a poet tested his calling against death. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Shelley’s Adonais (1821) and Arnold’s Thyrsis (1866) are written in its line; the elegiac tradition through Tennyson measures itself against it; “fresh woods, and pastures new” passed into the language, and Thomas Wolfe took a novel’s title from it. Held below 9.0 because its reach runs largely within one genre, and the larger pressure Milton put on the field came later, with Paradise Lost.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over nearly four centuries. The text survives whole, in two authorised printings, 1638 and 1645, and in the poet’s own working manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, with nothing lost; there is no charge on form or fabric. Presence: in print in Milton’s poems continuously since 1645, taught without break wherever English poetry is taught, among the most argued-over short poems in English criticism, and with phrases that live outside the academy. The charge is on presence. The poem is read today mainly in the academy and by readers of poetry, its classical and ecclesiastical apparatus increasingly needs annotation, and its church politics of 1637 is a surface fixed to its moment. Its life in the language keeps the charge small.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Milton’s English. The command is of sound and placement: the clotted, harsh opening, “I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, / And with forced fingers rude”, enacting a song forced before its season; the open vowels of the sea; the hard monosyllables of Peter, “Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw”; the hush of “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more”, where the repetition does the consoling. The irregular rhyme is controlled to the line. The short lines are placed for weight: “And slits the thin-spun life”. The verse paragraph is managed like a period of music, the sentence carried across a dozen lines to its fall, and the closing ottava rima is exact. Johnson heard the harshness as a fault; it is design. Held a step off the top for the few lines of learned geography by the guarded mount, where allusion clogs the movement.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the flower catalogue, “Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies”, and Peter’s “grim wolf with privy paw” devouring the flock. One law governs them: the shepherd’s care, true or false, for what is given into his keeping, whether a flock, a corpse, a gift of song or a church. Pastoral, invective and apocalypse are the same figure at three heights. The procession holds river-god, sea-god and apostle in one pageant, and the poem makes its mixture the subject: each voice brings its answer, and the poem ranks them. Johnson’s objection, that sacred truth is mixed with trifling fiction, holds a little. The step from Camus to Peter is sudden, and the “false surmise” confesses a seam. Held at 9.0 for those two seams.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as a single poem of 193 lines, it holds more than its length should allow. Consciousness: the poet’s own vocation, ambition and fear of early death. The sacred: the apocalypse, the communion of saints, the keys. The Church as an institution, and the state of the nation in 1637. The natural order: the sea, the flowers, the day-star, “the shores and sounding seas”. The classical inheritance as a whole system of meaning, held against the Christian. Death, and the body lost. They are integrated, not listed: the shepherd’s care joins them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family, labour except as a figure, love and the common life are absent, the dead man has no life the poem shows, and every order passes through one singer on one day.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.3. A command of sound and placement that puts the harshness where the lines ask for it, carries the verse paragraph like a period of music and closes on an exact stanza; a form that lets grief break the decorum of the song three times and brings it, by the one regular stanza, to composure; and a quarrel over sincerity, convention and the two-handed engine that has not closed since Johnson.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6, held by the count and the vantage: family, labour, love and the common life are absent, the dead man has no life the poem shows, and every order passes through one singer on one day. Among the gated axes The Unconcealment is lowest, at 8.7, on Johnson’s charge that the dead man is a name on which the questions hang and the consolation is asserted more than earned.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 107.6, two tenths above the least sum the upper tier admits, and the poem stands at 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Milton’s Lycidas, scored as the text printed in Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), with the headnote first added there. The poem was written in November 1637 and first printed in the Cambridge memorial volume Justa Edouardo King Naufrago (1638). The Trinity College manuscript, with Milton’s drafts and revisions, is named as context and is not scored. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in modernised spelling, and cited without line numbers; the headnote is paraphrased. No translation is involved. Matters that could not be verified, among them line numbers, the count of verse paragraphs, the counts of short and unrhymed lines, the poem’s place and signature in the volume of 1638, the dates of the twentieth-century critical studies and the extent of its presence in anthologies, are not given.