CHAPTER 12

Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’

Two Sorts of Shepherd

The draft of ‘Lycidas’ in the Trinity manuscript is dated November 1637, which is the same month that Milton wrote to Charles Diodati and told him that he had been ‘[g]rowing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings.’ Presumably Milton had the composition of ‘Lycidas’ in mind, as he had written no other poetry that survives in the previous three years, with the possible exception of the additions to the Maske for its publication at the beginning of 1638. The tone of the letter as a whole is not anxious, however, and if Milton never quite adopts the tone of youthful jocularity that characterized the earlier correspondence with Diodati, he still likes to live up to an image of himself as ‘Il Penseroso’, secluded in his scholarly cell in Horton (‘Where I am now, as you know, I live in obscurity and very cramped quarters’), pursuing his historical studies, and in constant pursuit of the Platonic ‘idea of the beautiful’ found in ‘the greatest wisdom throughout all ages’.¹ He does not, however, mention he has been writing ‘Lycidas’, which must have distracted him from his regimen of study in the preceding weeks. The invitation to Milton to contribute to a Cambridge collection of elegies for Edward King (1612–37), a Fellow of Christ’s College who had died the previous August in a shipwreck in the Irish sea, at the age of twenty-five, has sometimes been thought surprising because Milton had left the university more than five years earlier. Yet Milton had a reputation for his poetic and literary abilities in his time at Christ’s, both in Latin and the vernacular, and there is evidence of some limited scribal circulation of several of his poems. The charge of insincerity has been aimed at ‘Lycidas’, at least since Samuel Johnson’s memorable excoriation of the poem (‘where is leisure for fiction, there is little grief’), but there is no reason to doubt Milton’s description of King as his ‘learned Friend’ in the headnote added to the draft in the Trinity manuscript, which is included in the printed texts of ‘Lycidas’ in the 1645 and 1673 Poems, even if there is no other solid evidence of the friendship.²

FIGURE 14. Draft of ‘Lycidas’, in the Milton manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge.

King had matriculated at Christ’s in 1626, along with his brother Roger, and both were placed under the tutelage of William Chappell, at about the time that Milton had fallen out with him. Unusually King was appointed to a Fellowship of Christ’s in 1630, the same year as he took his BA and at the age of only eighteen: while the appointment was imposed by royal mandate and seemingly a result of King’s well-connected family background, King was appointed as the College’s ‘Graecus lector’ in 1636 and the contributors to Justa Eduardo King naufrago are agreed on his learning, particularly in Greek.³ Henry More, who was studying for his MA at Christ’s in 1637, wrote his elegy in Greek as a tribute to King’s facility in the language; one of the vernacular elegies, by Samson Briggs, a Fellow of King’s College, presents King as ‘One whome the Muses courted: rigg’d and fraught / With Arts and Tongues too fully, when he sought / To crosse the seas, was overwhelm’d’. In one of Clement Paman’s two elegies, which for some reason were not included in the printed volume, the death of King is declared to be worse for learning than if the Vatican library had been burned down or the Frankfurt book fair flooded.⁴ Other than their elegies for King, Briggs and Paman are known almost entirely as poets through a Cambridge verse miscellany compiled by Henry Soame, who matriculated at Cambridge in 1646, where they appear alongside Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, and Henry Wotton, among others.⁵ Briggs and Paman had an identity as poets primarily as part of a circle of university wits in the mid-1630s, and the elegies collected in Justa Eduardo King naufrago brought that circle into print. Milton was no longer part of such Cambridge literary communities, but his presence in the volume indicates he was still known to them and that ‘Lycidas’ in its original context of publication should in part be understood as speaking to such communities.

King ‘knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’, according to ‘Lycidas’ (lines 10–11). This has again usually been assumed to be an empty compliment, but by 1637 King had appeared in print as a poet on many more occasions than Milton, whose only two commercially printed works had been anonymous (the epitaph on Shakespeare in 1632 and the 1637 edition of the Maske). Ten Latin poems by King are extant, nine of which were included in the anthologies of verse that it had become a convention for the universities to issue to mark royal occasions: seven poems mark the births of the children of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and two others celebrate Charles’s recovery from smallpox in 1632 and his safe return from Scotland in 1633. The remaining example of King’s verse is a commendatory poem for the 1633 printed text of the Latin play Odium Senile by the Cambridge dramatist Peter Hausted, whose literary reputation was in tatters after the poor reception of his anti-Puritan comedy The Rival Friends during the royal visitation to Cambridge in 1632—the event that supposedly led to the suicide of the Vice-Chancellor. But if King had appeared more often in print as a poet, Milton had written in a far greater variety of genres at Cambridge, in both English and Latin. In Justa Eduardo King naufrago, printed by the University Press, Milton appeared alongside others who had been connected to Christ’s during Milton’s time there, and who must have known something of the poetic abilities and ambitions (or pretensions) of the ‘Lady’ of Christ’s. These included More, who matriculated in 1631 and began composing Spenserian poems about Platonic philosophy in the late 1630s, and Cleveland, who was admitted to Christ’s in 1627 and by 1637 had become a Fellow of St John’s College. Despite being known for his facility in Latin, Cleveland contributed two vernacular elegies to Justa Eduardo King naufrago: the volume, as with Milton’s 1645 Poems, is divided into English and Latin (and Greek) parts, with separate title-pages. Milton presumably chose to compose his elegy in the vernacular when he could have written in Latin, the language in which he would compose his elegy for Charles Diodati two years later. Another notable Cambridge poet in the English part of the collection is Joseph Beaumont (1616–99), who in 1636 had become a Fellow of Peterhouse, the centre of Cambridge Laudianism, at the same time as his close friend Richard Crashaw. More, Cleveland, and Beaumont appear with an initial for their first name and their full surname but ‘Lycidas’ is signed merely ‘J. M.’. Milton still remained reticent about owning his work in print, and in fact the first time that any of Milton’s poems appeared in print under his full name was in the 1645 Poems. It was as a writer of prose that ‘John Milton’ first appeared in public.

Milton recalls the college life that he had shared with King through echoes in ‘Lycidas’ of the second part of ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’. The ‘Predicaments’ in Milton’s comic skit on the terms of Aristotelian logic were performed by fellow students, and the verses pun on the names of identifiable contemporaries at Christ’s. Hence the catalogue of rivers which closes the poetic part of the entertainment, which begins ‘Rivers arise’, likely alludes to one or both of the brothers at the college at the time, George and Nizell Rivers.⁶ Milton as ‘Ens’, or ‘father of the Predicaments his tens sons’, declares that the eldest son, Substance, ‘shall Reign as King’. The part is likely to have been played by Edward King, rather than his brother Roger, for Milton refracts the playful language of the college entertainment through the lament of funeral elegy. In ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, Milton as ‘Ens’ describes how fairies ‘[s]trew all their blessings on [Substance’s] sleeping Head’ (line 64) and ‘peace shall lull him in her flow’ry lap’ (line 83); in ‘Lycidas’, the poet calls on the valleys, ‘[o]n whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks’, to ‘strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies’ (lines 138, 151). The description of ‘Substance’ as one who must continually impose order on the other Predicaments and so shall ‘live in strife, and at his door / Devouring war shall never cease to roar’ (lines 85–6), even seems to be recalled in the apocalyptic warning of St Peter in ‘Lycidas’ that ‘the grim Woolf with privy paw / Daily devours apace, and nothing sed / But that the two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more’ (lines 128–31). ‘Lycidas’, as the final poem in a Cambridge anthology, plays in a different key poetic images that Milton had used in his light-hearted Cambridge academic exercises six years earlier. Characters who appear in the elegy also invite identification as figures from the time that Milton and King spent at Christ’s, where they were ‘nurst upon the self-same hill’ (line 23). Milton adopts an association between Cambridge and Mount Parnassus, home of poetry and learning in Greek myth, that had become popular among students through the trilogy of vernacular university plays performed at St John’s College in 1598–1601, Pilgrimage to Parnassus and, in two parts, the Return from Parnassus. The Parnassus plays were important in establishing in Cambridge ‘a distinct literary phenomenon of academic pastoral, offering student writers a set of conventions for representing the university as a site of retreat’.⁷ In depicting their time together as a pastoral idyll, the poet recalls how he and Lycidas would play ‘Rural ditties’ together on the ‘oaten flute’ and how ‘old Damaetas loved to hear our song’. It has been plausibly proposed that ‘old Damaetas’ is Joseph Mede.⁸

It is the aged river-god Camus, personifying the river Cam, who concludes the train of mourning figures—other than the ‘pilot of the Galilean lake’, St Peter—for the loss of Lycidas. Milton took the occasion of composing an elegy for his ‘learned friend’ King to recall an idyllic intellectual life in Caroline Cambridge; but does so to contrast that past—however idealized—with the contemporary reality of growing schism in the nation’s religious life, for which King’s dismembered body becomes emblematic. Boccaccio, in his life of Dante that Milton was closely reading in 1637, had distinguished between ‘two sorts’ of the ‘shepherds of the soul’: the ‘prelates, preachers, priests’ who should ‘feed the souls of the living with the Word of God’, and those extraordinary scholar-poets like Dante who use their ‘great learning’ to write ‘anew that which appears to them to have been omitted’, and in doing so ‘teach the minds and intellects of their hearers and readers’.⁹ In comparing the uncut edition of Boccaccio’s account of the suppression of Dante’s treatise on the proper relationship between secular and religious authority with the edition censored by the Inquisition, Milton had encountered a double illustration in different centuries of the impact of ecclesiastical oppression on intellectual and literary culture. In ‘Lycidas’ the poet considers in two digressions from his main elegiac purpose how the early death of King / Lycidas and the corrupt behaviour of England’s prelates embody different but linked threats to his ambition to become that second and much rarer sort of shepherd, the great Dantean scholar-poet whose words can shape the ‘minds and intellects’ of his readers.

‘Bacchic Howlings’

When Milton turns from the idealized past of leisured academic play in Christ’s to the reality of King’s violent death in lines 37–8—‘But O the heavy change, now thou art gon, / Now thou art gon, and never must return!’—he invokes the helplessness of the archetype of poetic power, Orpheus, before the frustrated desires of the Thracian Baccantes whose sexual invitations he had rejected:

Had ye bin there—for what could that have don?
What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore,
The Muse her self, for her inchanting son
Whom Universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His goary visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? (lines 57–63)

This is not the powerful Orpheus of Ad Patrem and elsewhere in Milton’s early writing, who can control nature with his song and has access to the divine truths embodied in nature; the Orpheus of ‘Lycidas’ has been drowned out and become the pathetic figure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose music is drowned out by ‘Bacchic howlings’ and whose ‘words had no effect’ on the scorned women: ‘Dead to all reverence, they tore him apart and, through those lips to which rocks had listened, which wild beasts had understood, his last breath slipped away and vanished in the wind’.¹⁰ These Ovidian images of the live dismemberment of the archetypal chaste poet by the forces of uncontrolled passion, an enactment of the Dionysian sacrificial ritual of sparagmos, haunted the background of the Maske in the form of Comus’s Bacchic rituals and the Lady’s Orphic associations.¹¹ The poet later imagines how Lycidas’s bones are ‘hurld’ perhaps ‘beyond the stormy Hebrides’, denying him the formal burial rites for which Milton’s poem compensates (lines 155–6).

As a Fellow of Christ’s, King had turned away from the world of marriage and active sexuality to live in the world of scholarship and devotion. The anxious thought that those who subordinate their lower desires to the higher calling of service to learning and poetry are as likely to die young as those who indulge themselves—indeed that in doing so they might actually be provoking the vengeance of malign forces— prompts the first digression in ‘Lycidas’:

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slight Shepherds trade,
And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?

Fame is the spurre that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. (lines 64–76)

These lines have been received as the most intensely personal in the poem because they return to topics of timeliness, the cost of the life of ‘studious retirement’, and risk of the unfulfilled poetic career that concerned Milton in the 1633 ‘letter to a friend’ and its accompanying sonnet, and that he would later air publicly in the prose of The Reason of Church-government in 1642. It might fairly be objected to such a biographical reading of the poem that it would hardly have been apparent to Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ by ‘J. M.’ in 1638; and yet Milton’s Virgilian ambitions were known to his contemporaries at Christ’s, as we know from his nickname of the ‘Lady’, to which Milton had himself drawn attention in his public academic orations at the college and that he seems to have encouraged because of its Virgilian associations. Moreover, educated early moderns were saturated in Latin poetry, in particular Virgil and Ovid, from such an early age and to such an extent that other contributors to the anthology for King—skilled poets in Greek, Latin, and English such as Cleveland, Beaumont, More, Briggs, and Paman—would have been alert to the ways in which ‘Lycidas’ is a poem which is constantly allusive to other poems, mostly to classical, neo-Latin, and vernacular pastoral. These many allusions—a mode of poetic repetition signalled by the opening phrase, ‘Yet once more’—serve to elevate the death of the relatively obscure King into an archetypal event and to lend symbolic resonance to the self-analysis of the poet.¹²

‘[M]editate the thankles muse’ alludes to musam meditaris in the opening of Virgil’s first Eclogue, but Virgil’s Tityrus is quite content to be singing of his love for Amaryllis:

Beneath the Shade which Beechen Boughs diffuse,
You Tityrus entertain your Silvan Muse:
Round the wide World in Banishment we rome,
Forc’d from our pleasing Fields and Native Home:
While stretch’d at Ease you sing your happy loves:
And Amarillis fills the shady Groves.¹³

Amaryllis and Neaera, who is also a shepherdess in the Eclogues, were adopted as generic names in classical and Renaissance pastoral, both in neo-Latin and the vernacular: Milton’s striking image of the ‘tangles of Neaera’s hair’ recalls the classical ‘nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets’, with their ‘flower-inwoven tresses’, who are expelled from earth with the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’ (lines 197–8). ‘Beuteous Amaryllis’ has a speaking part in Randolph’s Amyntas, his pastoral drama acted before the Caroline court in 1632, as a shepherdess who ‘may make a Bride worthy the proudest shepheard / In all Sicilia’.¹⁴ What has been called the ‘amatory dimension’ of ‘Lycidas’ tends to be overlooked given its generic identity as a funeral elegy, although at the beginning of the poem Milton’s shepherd plucks the myrtle leaves, the emblem of Venus, as well as the laurel of Apollo and the ivy of Bacchus. Milton also makes sustained allusion to Virgil’s tenth eclogue (itself derived from the first Idyl of Theocritus), in which the shepherd–poet Gallus laments his betrayal by the unfaithful Lycoris as he nears death from a broken heart.¹⁵ In Elegia sexta the type of poetic career is for Milton connected in an essential way with the lifestyle of the poet, and ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ catalogue the different forms of poetic inspiration required of the elegiac and epic poets, even if ‘L’Allegro’ is curiously sexless. By invoking the names of Amaryllis and Neaera, Milton raises the question not only of the alternative, sexually active lifestyle that he might have led and might still lead, but of the alternative career path that he might have pursued as a different type of poet, a poet of amatory lyric and erotic elegy.

The anxiety provoked by King’s apparently undeserved death initially forces a reconsideration of the temptation to ease, both poetic and bodily, signified by the names Amaryllis and Neaera. It is the prospect of fame, the poet then maintains, which girds him ‘To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes’. The line inverts the concluding invitation of Marlowe’s pastoral lyric, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, also echoed in the final lines of L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me and be my love’. The structure of the passage, however, recalls the speech of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, in Edmund Spenser’s Teares of the Muses (1591): ‘What bootes it then to . . . strive in vertue others to excel; / If none should yeeld him his deserved meed, / Due praise, that is the spur of doing well?’ (lines 445, 452–4). ‘Fair Guerdon’ is a distinctively Spenserian archaic phrase for ‘reward’—‘That glorie does to them for guerdon grant’—and Spenser provided Milton with the English Protestant example of a poet who had followed the Virgilian cursus from pastoral in The Shepherdes Calender to vernacular Christian epic in The Faerie Queene.¹⁶ It has been argued that Marlowe consciously adopted the model of Ovid’s ‘counter-Virgilian’ literary career—love elegy in his translations of Ovid’s Amores, tragic drama, and erotic ‘minor epic’ in the deeply Ovidian Hero and Leander (1593; first published 1598)—in reaction to, and critique of, Spenser’s Virgilian pretensions to the title of Elizabethan England’s national and imperial poet.¹⁷ Whether or not such grand intentions can be plausibly ascribed to Marlowe, the notion of an ‘elegiac anti-career’, defined against the Virgilian model of a linear career trajectory towards national epic, was associated in the Renaissance with Ovid—it is to be found, for instance, in Boccaccio’s representation of his erotic prose narratives in the Decameron (c. 1353). The terms of the first digression in ‘Lycidas’ suggest that Milton could think about his career path in opposing Ovidian and Virgilian terms, translated into vernacular literary history as Marlovian and Spenserian.¹⁸

The echoes of Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ in the companion poems and ‘Lycidas’ suggest that when Milton thought of Marlowe in the early verse, he thought of carpe diem poetics and the expression of an Epicurean, materialist philosophy of pleasure. Marlowe’s association with Epicurean values was of course not confined to his works: Milton would have known something of the various godly accounts of Marlowe’s sensational early death, in a bar brawl in Deptford at the age of twenty-nine, as a providential punishment for his libertine life. Edmund Rudierde, in his chapter on ‘Epicures and Atheists’ in The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath (1618), emphasized Marlowe’s learned origins as ‘a Cambridge Scholler’ but was concerned to turn the episode of his violent early death into a warning specifically to ‘braine-sicke and prophane Poets and Players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities’. Yet fellow poets tended to distinguish the poetry from the life. In the first part of the Return from Parnassus, the Cambridge audience heard that

Marlowe was happy in his buskin[e]d muse,
Alas unhappy in his life and end.
Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell,
Wit sent from heaven but vices sent from hell.¹⁹

In the lives of Virgil by Donatus and Dante by Boccaccio, Milton found recommendations of the virtues of sexual temperance, even celibacy, for the aspiring epic poet. The abbreviated life of Marlowe offered a counter-Virgilian example both in terms of moral character and poetic career. Randolph was an example of a Cambridge contemporary who had made a name for himself, lived a supposedly libertine life, and wrote a range of amatory verse, before dying young in 1635. The chaste academic life led by King had brought him no better fate and considerably less renown. The ‘blind Fury’ had cut him down regardless.

Digression and Desire

Milton’s strange, terrifying image of the ‘blind Fury with th’abhorred shears’ may owe a debt to Hero and Leander, Marlowe’s version of the most famous classical episode of the drowning of a young man. The story of Hero and Leander was encountered by all Renaissance schoolboys in their study of Ovid’s Heroides, a standard text on which students practised their imitative skills and which includes verse epistles addressed by the doomed lovers to each other. There are ironic echoes of Hero’s flimsy resistance to Leander’s efforts at seduction in Marlowe’s poem in the Lady’s rebuttals of Comus in the Maske, while Marlowe’s depiction of Hero later ‘supplied Milton with some felicitous raw materials’ for the treatment of Eve’s nakedness in Paradise Lost.²⁰ The allusion in ‘Lycidas’ is not though to Marlowe’s main narrative, which (whether by design or due it being left unfinished) portrays the consensually surrendered virginity of the lovers rather than their subsequent deaths, but to the mythopoeic digression which follows the first section of the poem. Marlowe’s dislikeable narrator asks us to give him our full attention as he explains the origins of the enmity between the Fates and Cupid. Mercury was once enflamed with desire for a beautiful ‘country maid’. As ‘All women are ambitious naturally’, this maid demanded that Mercury steal her a ‘draught of flowing nectar’ from Jove’s cup before she would submit (lines 428, 432).²¹ The lust-driven Mercury agreed and was expelled from heaven by Jove for his transgression. Cupid, sympathetic to Mercury and his desire, then wounded ‘those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, / I mean the adamantine Destinies’ — the three sisters who turn, according to Plato, the adamant spindle of Necessity around which the universe is wrapped (lines 443–4). In thrall to their desire for Mercury, the Fates offered him

    the deadly fatal knife
That shears the slender threads of human life;
At his fair feathered feet the engines laid,
Which th’earth from ugly Chaos’ den upweighed. (lines 447–50)

As all editors point out, Milton’s ‘blind Fury’ who holds the shears which cut the thread of life is not a Fury at all but Atropos, one of the three Fates; and neither Atropos nor the Furies are blind. In ‘Lycidas’ the blindness of Fortuna and the bloodlust of the Furies, born in Greek myth from the blood that fell to the earth when Cronus castrated his father Uranus, are merged with the figure of Atropos and her whirling (perhaps castrating) shears to conjure a terrifying image of unstoppable and seemingly indiscriminate violence. It hardly seems to be a slip on Milton’s part, given that in the ‘Epitaph for the Marchioness of Winchester’ (1631) Milton writes of how, when Jane Paulet died soon after giving birth to a stillborn child, ‘Atropos for Lucina came / And with remorseless cruelty / Spoiled both fruit and tree’ (lines 28–30). In Arcades, the ‘Genius of the Wood’ refers to ‘those that hold the vital shears, / And turn the adamantine spindle round, / On which the fate of gods and men is wound’ (lines 65–7). Milton doubtless recalls in ‘abhorred shears’ his own ‘vital shears’ in Arcades. Yet the image in Arcades is static and unthreatening, and lacks the alliterative slice of Marlowe’s line (‘shears . . . slender’), echoed in ‘Lycidas’ (‘shears . . . slits’), while Marlowe’s ‘slender threads’ are compressed into Milton’s ‘thin-spun’. The ‘engines’ that are offered to Mercury—the pillars that prevent the earth from falling into the abyss of Chaos—may provide yet another perspective on the notorious crux in the second digression in ‘Lycidas’, the nature of the apocalyptic ‘engine at the door’ invoked by St Peter.

Marlowe’s Mercury refuses the ‘deadly fatal knife’, with which, presumably, he could kill Jove, but asks the Fates ‘that Jove, usurper of his father’s seat, / Might presently be banisht into hell, / And aged Saturn in Olympus dwell’ (lines 452–4). The request is granted and ‘Murder, rape, warre, lust, and trechery, / Were with Jove clos’d in Stigian empery’ (lines 457–8). But this renewed golden age is short-lived, for Mercury

    did despise
The love of th’ everlasting Destinies.
They seeing it, both Love and him abhor’d.
And Jupiter unto his place restored. (lines 461–4)

This myth of Mercury and the country maid is Marlowe’s invention. He imitated the structure of the Spanish poet Boscán’s Leandro (1543), which takes the form of a triptych with a digressive centrepiece. English readers of the late sixteenth century who used Boscán as a study in eloquence were particularly interested in his invented mythopoeic digression explaining why Aeolus, god of the winds, would not hear Leander’s prayers. This interest suggests that humanist readers such as Marlowe and Milton were trained to pay particular attention to, and to emulate, set-piece moments of rhetorical elaboration and digression in a poem, whether classical, neo-classical, or vernacular.²² Such a model of humanist imitation may explain why the digressions in ‘Lycidas’ are so poetically powerful, as opposed to the weaker claim that Milton was more interested in analysing his own state of mind than lamenting the death of Edward King.

A provenance for lines 75–6 of ‘Lycidas’ in Marlowe’s invented myth is fitting given Milton’s anxiety at this point about the obscurity of the scholar-poet who devotes his life to the cultivation of learning and virtue. For the narrator’s digression in Hero and Leander becomes as much an explanation of the lowliness of scholars as of the pain of lovers. Mercury is the Roman Hermes, god of orators and wits, learning and scholarship, and symbolic of the ‘mercurial’ human intellect—an identity that Marlowe emphasizes by using the names Mercury and Hermes interchangeably. There are long-term consequences of the sexual behaviour of Mercury / Hermes for the status of the ‘Muses’ sons’ in society:

And but that Learning, in despite of Fate,
Will mount aloft, and enter heaven gate,
And to the seat of Jove itself advance,
Hermes had slept in hell with Ignorance.
Yet as a punishment they added this,
That he and Poverty should always kiss.
And to this day is every scholar poor;
Gross gold from then runs headlong to the boor.
Likewise the angry Sisters, thus deluded,
To venge themselves on Hermes, have concluded
That Midas’ brood shall sit in Honour’s chair,
To which the Muses’ sons are only heir:
And fruitful wits that in aspiring are
Shall discontent run into regions far. (lines 465–78)

If Learning finally takes its rightful place in heaven, ‘in despite of Fate’, the scholar still languishes in an earthly condition of material deprivation and social exclusion, his virtue unrecognized by the powerful:

And few great lords in virtuous deeds shall joy,
But be surprised with every garish toy,
And still enrich the lofty servile clown,
Who with encroaching guile keeps learning down.
    (lines 479–82)

Marlowe’s digression begins as an erotic pastoral narrative and ends as a mythic explanation of society’s disregard for wit, learning, and poetry: of why the ‘shepherd’s trade’ is ‘slighted’. Marlowe’s complaint against a society in which true humanist virtue goes unrecognized and unrewarded was well known in Cambridge and extracted from the erotic narrative of which it was a part. There are paraphrases of Marlowe’s complaint in the opening scenes of the Pilgrimage to Parnassus, when Consiliodorus advises the two new Cambridge students about to commence the BA, Philomusus and Studioso, about the material disadvantages of the scholarly life:

There may you scorne each Mydas of this age,
Each earthlie peasant and each drossie clowne
[ . . . ]
Though I foreknewe that gold runns to the boore,
He be a schollar, though I live but poore.
[ . . . ]
They will be poore ere their last dying daye,
Learninge and povertie will ever kiss. (lines 54–5, 63–4, 75–6)

By the end of the play, Studioso echoes this early advice: ‘Yea, Midas brood fore eare must honoured be, / Wile Phoebus followers live in Miserie’ (lines 1579–80). The Parnassus plays are full of in-jokes and literary allusions and became, as we have seen, a touchstone of Cambridge literary culture. The plays follow two undergraduates who set out on their intellectual ‘pilgrimage’ to complete the BA degree full of lofty dreams of the universal learning and poetic power to which they will attain through their study; however they end up bitter and disillusioned, working as shepherds in Kent who, rather than singing the joys of the real pastoral life, lament the deprivations they have endured in failed pursuit of the scholarly ideal. The representation of the academic and literary life in terms of pastoral retreat is ironically literalized as the dreams of Parnassus dissolve into a rather more prosaic reality: ‘Weel chant our woes upon an oaten reede / Whiles bleating flock upon their supper feede’ (lines 2157–8). Given Marlowe’s inset narrative had been used to articulate the failure of humanist ambition in the well-known Parnassus plays, Milton could have expected discerning Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ to recognize the echoes of Marlowe’s digression on the origins of the hardships faced by scholars and poets in his own digression on the ‘thankles Muse’.

An aspect of the art of ‘Lycidas’ is to give the impression of agonized internal struggle and debate occurring in the moment of writing; but, in a similar movement to the sonnet ‘How soon hath time’, these passages are retrospectively written from a position of assurance: the poet’s mind is already made up about the virtue of scorning delights in favour of ‘laborious dayes’ in study.²³ The sentence of social inferiority pronounced on the Muses’ sons in Hero and Leander is finally a consequence of the destructive erotic desire both of Mercury and the Fates: the digression acts as a commentary on the portrayal of unrestrained desire in the main narrative. If the drowning of Edward King made Milton remember the fate of Leander, Milton looked to Marlowe’s pastoral digression and its exemplary potential rather than the main erotic narrative of Hero and Leander, with its comic lack of moral closure. A similar pattern can be observed in Milton’s insistent allusions to Virgil’s tenth eclogue, despite the apparent incongruity of its amatory subject-matter. Virgil’s Gallus concludes his death-bed lament by affirming the ultimate sovereignty of profane love: ‘In hell, and earth, and seas, and heaven above, / Love conquers all; and we must yield to Love’. In contemporary commentary, however, this eclogue was read as ‘a warning, not an affirmation’.²⁴ According to the Jacobean schoolmaster John Brinsley, when Virgil asks, ‘What lawns or woods withheld you from his aid, / Ye nymphs, when Gallus was to love betrayed [?]’ (lines 13–14), echoed in Milton’s ‘Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Closed o’ere the head of your lov’d Lycidas?’ (lines 50–1), he ‘accuseth the Muses that they were so careless of Gallus, to let him so to leave his studies and to perish in such unbeseeming love’. Gallus could have found relief from his love sickness, according to Brinsley’s marginal commentary, ‘by giving his mind to the studie of Poetrie’. Brinsley takes this reading from continental Reformation authorities that Milton would more likely have known, Ramus and Philip Melanchthon.²⁵ While ostensibly questioning in the first digression of ‘Lycidas’ the point of the life devoted to chaste virtue and promiscuous learning—the life he had been leading since leaving Cambridge—Milton incorporates poetic models that oppose, or were read as opposing, the pursuit of learning and poetry to the distracting and destructive power of erotic desire.

In Virgil’s tenth eclogue Phoebus Apollo, Roman god of poetry and music (and prophecy), interrupts Gallus’s lament to scold him for making the false Lycoris his only care when she cares nothing for him. In ‘Lycidas’ it turns out that Apollo has been listening to the poet’s lament about the ‘thankles Muse’ and interrupts line 76 to dispel the image of the ‘blind Fury’ and her ‘abhorred shears’:

    But not the praise,
Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfet witnes of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed. (lines 76–84)

Apollo’s intervention would seem designed to allay the anxiety raised by the thought that King’s violent early death shows his chaste and ‘clear’ life, his ‘strain’ in the cause of learning, to have been for nothing—perhaps also any anxiety raised by the memory of poets such as Marlowe and Randolph, who had obtained poetic fame in a short and supposedly godless existence. The poet looks forward to judgement in the afterlife and is reassured by Apollo that the virtuous life, no matter if it ends early and bloodily and obscure, will receive eternal reward. The conclusion of the first digression thus anticipates the Christian apotheosis of Lycidas, beginning ‘Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more’ (line 165). Yet Apollo’s plucking of the poet’s ears to remind him that true fame is only found in heaven alludes to Virgil’s sixth eclogue, in which Apollo actually advises the poet against moving too hastily from pastoral to heroic and epic verse:

But when I try’d her tender Voice, too young;
And fighting Kings, and bloody Battels sung,
Apollo check’d my Pride; and bade me feed
My fatning Flocks, nor dare beyond the Reed.²⁶

Or as Milton put it to Diodati in the same month that he completed ‘Lycidas’: ‘my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings’. Once more the allusion works to confirm the correctness of the poet’s dedication to ‘laborious dayes’ in preparation for future earthly fame as an epic poet, even as the surface movement of the poem appears to put the legitimacy of such ambition in doubt and elevate instead the rewards in heaven.