CHAPTER 13

Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’

‘Run Amarillis Run’

The second digression in ‘Lycidas’, St Peter’s attack on clerical corruption, is not really the disruption of pastoral generic decorum that the poet suggests when he refers to St Peter as the ‘dread voice’ that shrinks the streams of pastoral lyricism (line 132). As Thomas Warton first recognized in his eighteenth-century commentary, the anti-clerical complaint of ‘Lycidas’ is indebted to the example of the May eclogue in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, in which the zealous shepherd Piers attacks his rival Palinode, the ‘false shepherd . . . under whom’, as Milton himself put it in his anti-episcopal prose work Animadversions (1641), ‘the Poet lively personates our Prelates, whose whole life is a recantation of their pastorall vow, and whose profession to forsake the World, as they use the matter, boggs them deeper into the world: those our admired Spenser inveighs against, not without some presage of these reforming times’.¹ Milton then quotes accurately twenty-eight lines from the May eclogue, including the warning that ‘under colour of Shepheards some while / There crept in wolves full of fraud and guile / That often devour’d theire owne Sheep’. Spenser perhaps echoes a well-known pun on ‘bishop’, as found John Foxe’s account in the Actes and Monuments of a Protestant martyr who told his persecutors that they had ‘become rather bite-sheeps than true bishops’.²

Milton had been paying attention to the anti-clerical moments in the poets whom he most hoped to emulate, as well as to the moments in their life and writing where they had suffered clerical persecution: among the entries that can be dated to 1637–9 in the commonplace book, Milton recorded ‘Dante, Canto 7 of the Inferno’, where he ‘aptly censures the avarice of the clergy’. The memorable image in ‘Lycidas’ of the ‘hungry sheep’ ‘swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw’ (lines 125–6) is probably indebted to Beatrice’s denunciation of corrupt and equivocating priests in Canto 29 of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘So the poor sheep that know nothing eat dross, / Return from pasture fed on wind’ (lines 106–7).³ In tracing the history of clerical abuses back to the first Christian emperor Constantine in Of Reformation, Milton would later translate into blank verse several lines from Canto 19 of Inferno:

Ah Constantine! of how much ill was cause,
Not thy conversion, but those rich domains
That the first wealthy pope receiv’d of thee!⁴

In the Inferno, Dante is hugged by Virgil for this impassioned attack on clerics who have made their ‘god of silver and gold’ and betrayed the message of St Peter (line 112). Poetic resources for the anti-clerical digression in ‘Lycidas’ can be traced to the commonplace book in moral philosophy; the same resources furnish the polemical prose of the anti-episcopal writings some three years later. ‘Lycidas’ was turned into an explicit ‘presage of these reforming times’ in the second part of the headnote added in the 1645 Poems, presumably by Milton—this addition to the headnote is not in the Trinity manuscript, but his authorship is suggested by its retention in the 1673 Poems—which claims ‘Lycidas’ as evidence both of the burgeoning powers of the poet as prophetic vates and as a response to a public as much as a personal moment: ‘And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height.’

Yet St Peter has ‘Mitr’d locks’ (line 112) and the 1638 poem does not show Milton to have yet abandoned episcopacy: rather the clerics who are arraigned for their inadequacies and corruption have failed to live up to the example of the original bishop. Given the conformist character of the other contributors to the collection in memory of Edward King— Samson Briggs was killed fighting for the royalist army in 1644; John Cleveland quickly became one of the royalist party’s most prominent polemicists; Clement Paman served as chaplain to Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, who was executed by Parliament in 1641; and Joseph Beaumont was at the heart of Cambridge Laudianism when he contributed his elegy on King—it seems unlikely that whoever compiled the anthology (most likely the Christ’s Fellow John Alsop, who was King’s executor) read anything incendiary in the religious politics of Milton’s contribution. That Milton found his poetic models of pastoral anti-clerical complaint in Dante and Spenser also indicates the reasonably conventional nature of the sentiments. One of Randolph’s popular poems in scribal circulation in the 1630s, and included in his 1638 Poems, was ‘An Eglogue occasion’d by two Doctors disputing upon predestination’, although it also circulated under the title ‘A divine Pastorall Eglogue’. The shepherds Tityrus and Alexis argue and finally insult each other over Alexis’s insistence that the black lamb should be condemned and the white one saved, even though they both come from the same mother; Thyrsis then interjects and declares that their bickering will cause them to neglect the welfare of all the lambs:

Fie, Shepheards fie! while you these strifes begin,
Here creepes the woolfe; and there the fox gets in.
To your vaine piping on so deepe a reed
The Lambkins listen, but forget to feed.⁵

The tone here is hardly that of ‘dread’, as St Peter’s voice is described in ‘Lycidas’, but Randolph’s pastoral language is obviously similar. The specific message, however, is in line with the various royal edicts issued against discussion of predestination by Charles I and enforced by Laud, and which played a part in fomenting political conflict. Laud himself was as concerned at this time about disputation in divinity in the universities giving fuel to the machinations of lurking Jesuits as seditious Puritans: in September 1637 he asked the Oxford Vice-Chancellor to pay more attention to printing at Oxford because a Jesuit controversalist named Edward Knott was paying to read proof sheets before publication, and a few months earlier Laud had expressed concerns to John Prideaux, the Regius Professor of Divinity, that William Chillingworth was writing works that were not sufficiently aggressive against Rome.⁶ Thyrsis goes on though in Randolph’s poem to outline a very non-Calvinist image of Christ’s blood flowing freely over all the pastoral characters who seek it out:

Through his pearc’d side, through which a speare was sent,
A torrent of all flowing Balsame went.
Run Amarillis run: one drop from thence
Cures thy sad soule, and drives all anguish hence.⁷

Yet while Randolph’s Thyrsis objects to the playing of ‘so deepe a reed’ as doctrinal dispute over predestination, the poet in ‘Lycidas’ laments the clerical playing on ‘scrannel Pipes of wretched straw’, to produce ‘lean and flashy songs’. The scorn here for the lack of intellectual depth displayed by the English clergy recalls the comments that Milton made to Gil the younger in his 1628 letter from Cambridge, in which Milton decried his fellow students who, ‘almost completely unskilled and unlearned in Philology and Philosophy alike’, ‘flutter off to Theology unfledged, quite content to touch that also most lightly, learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever and patching it with worn-out pieces from various sources’. This is a practice, Milton darkly adds, that makes him fear ‘the priestly Ignorance’ of the periods under Catholic rule ‘may gradually attack our Clergy’.⁸ It was an anxiety that Milton aired in Christ’s in the context of the public oration later published as Prolusion VII, when he warned that the neglect of learning in the universities risked returning England to the pre-Reformation age when ‘nothing was heard in the schools but the absurd doctrines of drivelling monks’. St Peter’s complaint in ‘Lycidas’ put into print for the first time concerns that had long bothered Milton about the standard of the clergy entering the Church of England and the possible consequences of their intellectual inadequacy for the Protestant nation: the restoration of Roman Catholic rule not by external invasion but from within, represented by ‘the grim Woolf with privy paw’ (line 128).

However, there are also signs of a turn away at the level of poetic language from devotional tastes in a Cambridge that had become increasingly under the sway of the Laudian Church since Milton had left in 1632. Several of the contributors to the collection for King apply the Baroque techniques of the Passion poetry that had been fashionable in Cambridge to their elegies, most notably Milton’s contemporary John Cleveland, whose elegy for King begins:

I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief that scans his eyes;
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses’ rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen’s the spout
Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out,
In pity of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copied out in grief’s hydrography.⁹

The imagery here is stretched to the point that it can look comically bathetic to modern eyes, however much we might enjoy Cleveland’s final couplet: ‘And that our tears shall seem the Irish seas / We floating Islands, living Hebrides’. We can compare Milton’s own rather hyperbolic images of tears as script in ‘The Passion’:

My sorrows are too dark for day to know:
The leaves should all be black wheron I write,
And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white
[ . . . ]
For sure so well instructed are my tears,

That they would fitly fall in order’d Characters. (lines 33–5, 48–9)

Cleveland drives to the verge of parody the idiom of the Baroque Passion poetry at which Milton had tried his hand at Cambridge and found not to his talent and seemingly also not to his taste.

In the final section of ‘Lycidas’, at least before the third-person coda, we are roused from our mourning by ‘Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead’ (lines 165–6). This clarion call feels like a response to all the elegies that have gone before, which dwell on the grief and tears of King’s friends and colleagues. Finally the Miltonic poet will not cry for the lost watery corpse of ‘Lycidas’ but celebrate his eternal life in heaven: ‘With Nectar pure his oozy Lock’s he laves’ (line 175). Specifically red nectar is used in the Aeneid, 19. 38, to keep the corpse of Patrocles from decaying; the red nectar in the hair of Lycidas perhaps replaces the bloody locks of Christ familiar from the Baroque ‘poetry of tears’ tradition. But Milton also raises pastoral directness and plainness over the ‘poetry of tears’ and its elaborate Baroque contortions as we find them in the epigrams of Crashaw on the dying Christ and in Cleveland’s elegy for King. In ‘The Passion’ that refusal was made essentially on technical poetic grounds; but when we get to ‘Lycidas’ it seems driven by something more—a rejection of a devotional style that had by 1637 became identified with the Laudian values of Peterhouse men such as Beaumont and Crashaw, including its by now characteristic poetics of catachresis, or exaggerated comparison. ‘Blind mouths!’: this famous exclamation of St Peter was given its definitive explication by John Ruskin in 1865, who explained that the ‘blind mouths’ are the antithesis of ‘bishop’, one who sees, and ‘pastor’, one who feeds. But Ruskin’s account of etymological irony does not quite account for the disorientating effect that the phrase has on readers, who are struck by a surreal image rather than a linguistic pun. For images of ‘blind mouths’ in the ‘poetry of tears’ tradition we could look back to Crashaw’s uncomfortable images in the opening stanza of ‘On the Wounds of our Crucified Christ’ of Christ’s bleeding wounds as at once eyes and mouths:

O these wakeful wounds of thine!

Are they Mouthes? Or are they eyes?

Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne,

Each bleeding part some one supplies.

Milton could not have read Crashaw’s vernacular rendering of this poem in 1637; but he could have read its Latin original in the 1634 Epigrammata sacra. The image of the ‘blind mouths’ of ‘Lycidas’—the most aggressive moment in the poem—associates the intellectual and spiritual decline of the English clergy with the Baroque poetics that made a poet’s name in Caroline Cambridge. We can now see how the first digression of ‘Lycidas’, in which Milton considers and discounts the attractions of a poetic career built on flashy lyrics, and the second digression, St Peter’s attack on the Laudian clergy, are thematically as well as structurally linked. As J. M. French put it many years ago: ‘Amaryllis has metamorphosed into ecclesiastical sinecure but the principle is the same.’¹⁰

Index Expurgatorious

The other powerful and somewhat abstract image in St Peter’s complaint is that of the ‘two-handed engine at the door’, the precise meaning of which has been one of the most discussed cruxes in English poetry.¹¹ The most likely meaning is the most obvious: the two-edged sword of Revelation (1: 16, 19: 15), commonly associated with the Word of God. As we have seen, Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica of 1628 had been received throughout Europe as an intellectually weighty explanation of human history as culminating in the defeat of the Antichrist in the form of the Pope. Mede’s understanding of the scene of Final Judgement described in Matthew 25: 32–3, as conveyed to his Calvinist friend Twisse in 1636, helps to explain the two-handed nature of the ‘engine’ of judgement in ‘Lycidas’:

when our Blessed Saviour shall sit upon his Throne of Royalty to judge the world; I conceive a Figure to be in that expression of placing the Sheep on his right hand and the Goats on the left, borrowed from the custome of the Jews in their Tribunals, to place such as were absolved on the right hand, where stood the Scribe who took the Votes for Absolution; and those who were to receive the sentence of Condemnation, on the left hand, where stood the Scribe who took the Votes for Condemnation.¹²

Mede goes on to underline his own conviction that the Day of Judgement is to be interpreted symbolically and will in fact last for the entire thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, before Christ cedes his kingdom to God. Mede’s identification of apocalypse and millennium and idea of two judgements are key elements of his millenarian theory of history in the Clavis Apocalyptica, where he also supposed that Christ will destroy his enemies by fire at the Last Judgement. In the account of the Second Coming in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton would follow Mede’s ‘synchronizing’ of the Last Judgement with the millennial kingdom of Christ.¹³ The readers of ‘Lycidas’ in Christ’s in 1638—including Mede himself, although he would die the following year—would surely have had little difficulty in identifying the apocalyptic provenance of Milton’s ‘two-handed engine’. The familiarity of the imagery to Cambridge readers might seem to lend substance to the recent arguments that there ‘is nothing recognizably Puritan in the poem’s attack on ecclesiastical failures’ and that St Peter’s diatribe articulates a position of ‘moderate conservatism’ in religious politics that is in line with the policies of Archbishop Laud himself.¹⁴

Yet we have seen how Mede himself published nothing more on the topic of millenarianism that had made him famous after Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, and how Laudianism came to be defined during the 1630s in part by the stigmatizing of apocalyptic ideas as characteristic of a schismatic Puritanism and in need, like discussion of predestination, of suppression. In Mede’s private correspondence in the mid-1630s, he refers acidly to the new culture of ‘immoderation’ that would no longer tolerate his ‘Speculations’ about millenarian history and how ‘publick avouching’ of positions contrary to Laudian orthodoxy is to be avoided ‘for feare of incurring such dangerous prejudice by an over-potent opposition’.¹⁵ The religious politics of the second digression in ‘Lycidas’ are also to be differentiated from Milton’s own earlier university exercises in anti-Catholic poetics, most notably In Quintum Novembris, for in ‘Lycidas’ the conventional rhetoric of anti-popish complaint is turned against the bishops of the Church of England. The ascription of Catholic forms of corruption to the Laudian Church was characteristic of the increasingly militant polemic of previously conformist Puritans, such as Milton’s friend and former tutor, Thomas Young. In 1636 Young had composed a work, Dies Dominica, that intervened in one of the issues that came to define the increasingly bitter religious divisions of Charles I’s Personal Rule: the observance of the Sabbath. In 1633 Charles had reissued the Book of Sports, James I’s official licence of Sunday sports and holiday recreations that had first been issued in 1618, when it was aimed at constraining the regional activism against Sunday recreations of ‘Puritans and Precisians’, who henceforth had to ‘conform themselves or to leave the country, according to the laws of our kingdom and the canons of our Church’. Those who did not conform to this declaration were both ‘Contemners of our authority and adversaries of our Church’.¹⁶ While the Book of Sports was in one sense itself a sabbatarian document which commanded the attendance of services on a Sunday and decreed that games could be played after the service by those who attended, James’s aggressive preface and postscript, retained by Charles in the 1633 declaration, nonetheless identified strict Sunday observance with Puritanism, Puritanism with non-conformity to the established Church, and non-conformity with seditious behaviour towards monarch and state.

The 1618 Book of Sports had disturbed the largely consensual religious politics of Jacobean England and its reissue became a focus of dissension during the Personal Rule, particularly in the years 1635–7, which witnessed ‘an explosion of printed works discussing, opposing and defending the religious policies of Archbishop Laud’.¹⁷ In 1636 Peter Heylin, the most prominent defender of Laudian policy and polemicist against Presbyterianism in these years, issued his History of the Sabbath, in which he falsely represented the notion of a morally binding Sabbath as a Puritan invention, warning that the Puritans’ opposition to Sunday sports indicated their desire to impose Judaism on the English people. In the same year the Presbyterian activists Henry Burton and William Prynne (still languishing in prison since 1634) published four works rebutting anti-sabbatarian polemic, including A Divine Tragedy Lately Acted, in which the cleric Burton listed examples of God’s judgements on the English in the years since Charles had reissued the Book of Sports. The promotion of Sunday sports was for Burton and Prynne only one aspect of the popish emphasis on ritualism fostered by the Laudian Church. Young’s Dies Dominica was presumably intended as a contribution to this controversy in 1636 but Young wrote in Latin rather than the vernacular to signal the scholarly credentials of his historical account of how ‘the observation of the Lord’s Day was from the Apostles’, including a ‘Table of the Fathers, and other Writers, out of whom this Narration is described’, that even cites the publication details of the specific editions consulted. Young interestingly defends his use of non-biblical sources in terms that are echoed in Milton’s entry in his commonplace book before April 1638 on ‘whether it be allowed to devote one’s attention to profane writers’, in which he cites the church historians Socrates Scholasticus, Eusebius, and Theoderet. Young cites Jerome in countering the objection that ‘I ascribe more to Antiquity than Truth: for that I leave to the Papists: but I am determined with St. Hierom, to read the Antients, try all things, hold fast what is good, and not recede from the faith of the Catholick Church. I run not unweaponed, that is, deprived of spiritual knowledge, revealed in Gods Word, to the Antients.’¹⁸ Nonetheless Young adopts a polemical tone even while avoiding any direct reference to contemporary controversy, condemning those who would violate the Lord’s Day with festivals and recreations ‘in this deplorable state of the church’ as ‘bewitched with the malignant spirit of Popery’. He refers to how ‘the victory in this our age inclineth to the enemies’ and how ‘we have sought unsuccessfully these twenty years, against the enemies of our liberty, that have roared in the Churches of God’. The popish enemy is not defined as an external threat and the lines of division are rather within the English Church and state. Young recounts the story of how the sixth-century king of Burgundy, Guntram, had ‘reproved the Bishops which fed not with Gospel Doctrines the people committed to them, who, by their profligate manners stirred up the wrath of a revenging God against him: to prevent which evil for the future, it was ordained in a Council, That the Lords day should be kept religiously’.¹⁹

Young’s Dies Dominica should ‘be printed shortly’, according to a note made by the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib in his diary in 1636; Hartlib had evidently seen a scribal copy, as he describes it as ‘an excellent Tract’.²⁰ Yet it was not finally published until 1639, and even then under a pseudonym (‘Theophilus Philo-kuriaces’, or ‘Theophilus Lover-of-kirks’), and with no printer or place of publication on the title-page. The delay in publication was most likely due to the alarm of Young and any potential printers at the consequences for others who had become involved in the increasingly high-stakes debate over Sabbath observation. Religious dissent had been recategorized as political subversion by the Caroline government: on 14 June 1637, Prynne, Burton, and John Bast-wick, a doctor whose various pamphlets of 1637 had identified the English bishops with the Beast of Revelation and thus with the Antichrist of Rome, were sentenced by Star Chamber to have their ears cut off, to be fined five thousand pounds, and to be imprisoned for life. Prynne, who had of course already had his ears cropped and been in prison for three years, was also branded on the cheeks with the letters ‘S. L.’ for ‘seditious libeller’, although Prynne appropriated the stigmatization to suggest that the letters stood for ‘stigmata laudis’, literally meaning ‘signs of praise’ but punning on ‘signs of Laud’. Milton’s friend Alexander Gil had narrowly escaped the same fate in 1628 for his possession of satirical libels in manuscript about Buckingham: the trial and persecution of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne—who embodied the educated classes as a cleric, a doctor, and a lawyer—for seditious libel over such matters as Sabbath observation graphically demonstrated how the full force of the state was now behind the imposition of Laudian orthodoxy.

How interested was Milton in 1636–7 in the matters of religious doctrine that had provoked previously conformist Puritans such as Young to join with long-standing Presbyterian agitators such as Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick to attack the episcopal structure of the Church of England? As we shall see in Chapter 15, even in his first major anti-prelatical prose work, Of Reformation, Milton displays little interest in the doctrinal debates between Episcopalians, Laudian and otherwise, and Presbyterians. The fundamental debate between Presbyterian and Episcopalian boiled down to philology, as Bastwick makes clear in one of his 1637 pamphlets: ‘the words Presbyter & Bishop . . . in holy Scripture, though diverse in sound, signifie one and the same thing’.²¹ The Presbyterians argued that two Greek words in the text of the New Testament, episcopos (bishop) and presbuteros (elder), signified the same rank of cleric; Episcopalians argued that they were distinct, episcopoi referring to members of a senior rank to the presbuteroi. But the political consequences of this apparently minor philological–historical dispute were grave: that the bishops’ claims to derive their authority directly from Christ and the Apostles were false and that the exclusive power held by the bishops in Church and state was thus illegitimate, and should be replaced by the Presbyterian system based on parish churches overseen by a hierarchy of church courts, consisting of elected ministers and lay elders. Bastwick, who referred to the Pope as the ‘Bishop of Rome’, mocked what he alleged was Laud’s argument against him in the court of Star Chamber:

But last of all came forth the Prelat of Canterbury, who with, a front-lesse boldnes avouched his Episcopall Autority & preeminency over his brethren to be onely from God, very much blaming Calvin for his factious Spirit, saying: That their Ecclesiasticall Autority & the power they exercised, was from Christ Jesus, and produced Timothy and Titus to prove the same assertion and that Bishops were before Christian Kings, and they held the Crownes of Kings upon their heads; For, no Bishop no King, & those that would have no Bishops, sought to overthrow all Government.

We know from his commonplace book entries that Milton was interested in 1636–7 in ecclesiastical censorship and the persecution of writers in other times and other countries—the missing ‘Index Theologicus’ likely had a heading ‘Episcopi’ under which further examples would have been gathered—and that he displayed a typically humanist interest in the effects of clerical usurpation of political power upon the intellectual and spiritual climate of a nation.²² The decline of English learning under the brief Catholic reign of Queen Mary had been a refrain of Protestant humanists such as Roger Ascham. While the satirical libels that circulated in the universities when Milton was a student remained in scribal form, and were consequently largely tolerated by the authorities, the Puritan activists of the later 1630s sought to put their criticism of the Church and court into print. Bastwick’s pamphlets had to be published abroad and John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader, was later whipped and imprisoned in April 1638 for his role in getting the Letany of John Bastwicke published in Leiden—a punishment that he represented as that of a Protestant martyr by the ‘beast’ of a popish Laudian episcopacy in The Christian Mans Triall (March 1638) and A Worke of the Beast (April 1638). The court of Star Chamber issued a decree ‘concerning Printing’ on 11 July 1637 reasserting the system of licensing of books:

No Person or Persons whatsoever shall presume to Print or cause to be Printed, either in the Parts beyond the Seas, or in this Realm, or other his Majesty’s Dominions, any Seditious, Schismatical, or offensive Books or Pamphlets, to the scandal of Religion, or the Church, or the Government, or Governors of the Church and State, or Common-wealth, or of any Corporation, or particular Person or Persons whatsoever, nor shall import any such Book or Books, nor sell or dipose of them[.]

The decree also stipulated that nothing could be published that had not first been licensed and entered in the Stationers’ Register, the record book maintained by the Stationers’ Company of London. The power of licensing works even of philosophy and poetry, as well as divinity, was reaffirmed as the task of Laud and the episcopal hierarchy: all books ‘whether of Divinity, Physick, Philosophy, Poetry, or whatsoever shall be allowed by the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, or Bishop of London for the time being’.²³ In Canterburies Doome, published to justify the execution of Laud in 1645, Prynne made much of the Laudian regime’s application of what he regarded as popish policies of censorship under this 1637 decree, including a lengthy ‘English Index Expurgatorious’ of censored books:

having given you this large account of what popish doctrines and positions both [Laud] himselfe, his Chaplaines, Agents, printed, authorized to corrupt the peoples judgement; we shall next present you with a large English Index Expurgatorius, of what passages he and they expunged out of sundry English Writers, tendered them to license, before they could passe the Presse; which will most clearly discover his and their Jesuiticall practises, confederacies and designes to introduce the whole body of Popery among us with little or no opposition.²⁴

By the time that Prynne published this complaint against Laudian censorship, Milton had come to regard him as a rank hypocrite: in 1644 Prynne cited Milton’s writings on divorce as illustrative of the need to suppress the ‘late dangerous increase of many Anabaptisticall, Antinomian, Hereticall, Atheisticall opinions’ through the imposition of Presbyterian Church government.²⁵ In ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’, one of the three satirical sonnets that he composed in 1646–7 on the hostile Presbyterian reaction to his ideas on divorce, Milton reminded the Presbyterians that they themselves were imitating both the Inquisition of Rome and the persecutory regime under which they suffered under Laudian rule in seeking to force the consciences of the English people:

But we do hope to find out all your tricks,
Your plots and packing worse than those of Trent,
         That so the Parliament
May with their wholesom and preventive Shears
Clip your phylacteries, though bauk your Ears. (lines 13–17)

The Westminster Assembly, dominated by Presbyterian clergy, is deemed ‘worse’ than the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, whose repressive policies were detailed by Paolo Sarpi in his history of the Council, while the reference to Presbyterian ears invokes the infamous punishments meted out to Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne in 1637. The version of the sonnet quoted above is the printed text of 1673, in which Milton emphasizes that Parliament will subdue the Presbyterians but not physically persecute them, so distinguishing its rule from the religious tyrannies of the past. However in line 17 of the first draft of the sonnet in the Trinity manuscript, later scored out, Milton looked forward to other Presbyterian clerics suffering the same punishment as Prynne had twice received in the 1630s: ‘Cropp ye as close as marginall P[rynne’]s eares’.²⁶

The rhyme of ‘shears’ and ‘ears’ echoes that in ‘Lycidas’ of the ‘abhorred shears’ of the ‘blind Fury’ with the ‘trembling ears’ of the poet (lines 75, 77). The self-echo in the sonnet suggests a link in Milton’s mind between the shears coming to cut short the poet’s time in ‘Lycidas’ and the state persecution meted out on Prynne’s ears earlier in 1637.²⁷ The threats to the poet’s envisaged ascent in ‘Lycidas’ to the composition of heroic and epic verse are seemingly not only internal—the temptation to ease represented by Amaryllis and Neaera; the anxiety about both prematurity and belatedness—but external, in the form of a religious and political culture of censorship and persecution. Milton’s collation of censored and uncensored copies of Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante offered a material example, after all, of the cutting away by the clerical state of episodes in literature, history, and ideas. Prynne’s loss of what remained of his ears in June 1637, after they had initially been cropped for his comments about female performers in theatrical entertainments, may even have had a bearing on Milton’s reluctance to put his name to the published text of the Maske at the end of that year. To appear in print as the author of an aristocratic masque, the lead role of which had been performed by a fifteen-year-old girl, was implicitly to take a side in the culture wars that had become part of the sharpening religious divisions in England.

Milton and his family had also had recent experience of Laudian efforts to enforce conformity of spatial organization and devotional practice in parish churches through episcopal visitations. These visitations were intended most notably to confirm that communion tables were removed to the east end of churches, enclosing them with rails, and that parishioners were required to receive the sacrament while kneeling before these newly restored ‘altars’. Pewing arrangements were another aspect of the Laudian reorganization of the material space of the parish church: the position of pews in the church was reflective of social hierarchy in the parish, but the Laudian reforms tended to disrupt this organization of seating by changing the position of the communion table. One of the arguments made for placing the communion table against the east wall and railing it in was to change seating arrangements that, in the words of the pro-Laudian Bishop of Bath and Wells, William Piers, in 1634, allowed ‘the People to sit above Gods Table’.²⁸ As we saw in the previous chapter, the visitation by the archdeacon of the diocese of Lincoln to Horton parish church on 8 August 1637 led to the rector, Edward Goodall, being cited for partial non-conformity in his preaching practice. The visitation also resulted in the Milton family’s pew being ordered lowered, having been declared ‘to[o] high’, while the tombstone of Milton’s mother, Sarah, was cited for ‘being laid the wrong waye’, or not facing east. The orders were at least partially followed by Goodall and the Milton family: on 21 February 1638, the church court records noted that ‘mr Goodall hath cutt his seate and so hath mr Milton’; however the tombstone of Sarah Milton remains to this day facing west rather than the altar.²⁹

It may seem unlikely that such seemingly minor issues of parish church organization could play a significant part in shaping Milton’s intellectual attitudes towards the Laudian Church, but pews were ‘more than simply a piece of church furniture’ in seventeenth-century England: ‘To those who sat in them pews represented a piece of personal property and a stake in the local community, to some a marker of their wealth, political status, and property, to others a fragment of one’s own identity and lineage.’³⁰ The Milton family would have been one of the more wealthy and notable families in Horton in 1637, and the order to lower their pew may have caused Milton and his father some offence; it also seems psychologically plausible that the requirement to reposition his recently deceased mother’s tombstone may have disturbed Milton, and that the visitation thus constituted a particularly personal encounter with a Caroline episcopal order that appeared to him to be increasingly despotic in its demands for conformity. In his polemical history of how episcopal power has subjected monarchs in Of Reformation, Milton recounts how, when the Emperor Theodosius sought to do public penance before the altar for his sins, having been excommunicated by Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, ‘a bold Archdeacon comes in the Bishops name, and chaces him from within the railes telling him peremptorily that the place wherein he stood, was for none but Priests to enter, or to touch’.³¹ The scornful allusion here is to the Laudian visitations of the 1630s, and the Horton visitation was performed by an archdeacon coming in the bishop’s name to pronounce on the proper organization of sacred space in the church. The passage suggests the Horton episode may have lingered in Milton’s memory as a personal encounter with the tyrannous behaviour of the Laudian Church.

St Peter’s apocalyptic attack on episcopal inadequacy and corruption in ‘Lycidas’, for all the conventionality of its pastoral anti-clericalism, does suggest Milton’s emerging sense in late 1637 that Laudian England would not offer a context in which the great intellectual and poetic feats for which he had prepared through years of arduous study could be attempted and achieved. This sense was shaped by a combination of factors in 1636–8: his reading, as partially recorded in his surviving commonplace book, about the effects of censorship, persecution, and the branding of books as heretical in other cultures and periods, particularly Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy; public events such as the persecution of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, which bloodily embodied the sharp religious and cultural divisions in the country, and the decrees of Star Chamber on licensing and control of the circulation of books; private experiences such as the episcopal visitation of the Horton parish church, which gave personal shape to Laud’s national drive to impose religious conformity; and perhaps conversation with his former tutor Young, a man for whose learning and spiritual integrity he had great respect and who, though still outwardly conformable, was now increasingly involved in Puritan opposition to the policies of a Laudian Church that had redefined the boundaries of religious orthodoxy in matters of both doctrine and discipline. If Boccaccio’s first sort of the ‘shepherd of the soul’, the prelates and the clerics, were not fulfilling their vocation to nourish spiritually their flock, then neither could the second sort, the Dantean scholar-poet, fulfil his vocation and write the vernacular epic that would instruct his nation.

Genius of the Shore

The final section of ‘Lycidas’, after the ‘dread voice’ of St Peter has died away, reasserts the magnitude of that poetic ambition, and the final rewards of the studious dedication and abstinence required to achieve that ambition (line 132). The darker side of pagan ritual had earlier overshadowed ‘Lycidas’ in the images of sparagmos, applied to Orpheus, Lycidas, and, potentially, the poet himself; in the final section of the poem, the poet looks to the sacrifice of Christ, which has purchased eternal life for the virtuous and virginal King:

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 Lock’s he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptiall 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. (lines 172–81)

A series of allusions to Revelation emphasize the release both from mourning and from the cyclic movements of pagan naturalism into the linear narrative of apocalypse. ‘[O]ther groves, and other streams’ alludes to the tree of life (7: 17) and ‘living fountains of waters’ (12: 2), while the ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’, which echoes the ‘unexpressive notes’ of the angelic choir greeting the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’ (line 116), invokes the ‘marriage of the Lamb’ (19: 7). King’s earthly virtue has been rewarded with marriage to Christ, with whom he shall reside eternally in the heavenly paradise where there ‘shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain’ (21: 4). The ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’ that Lycidas hears in heaven also invokes the reward of virginity in Revelation 14: 3–4: ‘no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb.’³²

In the revisions that he made to the Maske in the version published at the beginning of 1638, Milton heightened the identification of virginity with the virtuous transformation of flesh into spirit, and the closing section of ‘Lycidas’ further suggests the hold of that identification over his mind in 1637. The idea of the daemonic also continues to hold sway over his poetic imagination: Lycidas / King is transformed into the ‘the genius of the shore’, a tutelary spirit who guards the Cornish coastline along the Irish Sea (line 183). One of Erasmus’s dialogues in his enormously popular Colloquies (1518) that might have come to Milton’s mind in contemplating King’s death in a shipwreck was Naufragium, or ‘Shipwreck’, which mocked the superstitious invocation of saints by recounting how most of the men on a sinking ship drowned because they spent their time making vows to the Virgin Mary and various saints that were thought to protect the sea rather than trying to save themselves.³³ Yet the young Milton’s fascination with the notion of becoming daemonic through virtuous and studious earthly existence suggests that the transformation of Lycidas into a ‘genius of the shore’ was not simply a poetic flourish but an aspect of Milton’s personal soteriology of virtue.

‘Lycidas’ begins ‘Yet once more’, with the poet locked in a cycle of recurrence that is finally broken by ‘smite no more’ and ‘weep no more’, echoing not only Revelation but the description of apocalyptic judgement by St Paul in Epistle to the Hebrews, 12: 25–7: ‘For if they escaped not who refuse him that spake on earth, much more shall we not escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven: Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken.’ The Epicurean randomness of King’s death in the first digression, which causes the poet such (apparent) anxiety, has been qualified in the digressions and finally replaced in the apotheosis passage by the Christian economy of eternal reward and punishment. The movement which ‘Lycidas’ works through from pagan and pastoral cycles of death and rebirth to apocalyptic linearity informs the remarkable final eight lines, and their sudden introduction of a third-person narrator into what the reader has assumed to be a first-person poem:

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Okes and rills,
While the still morn went out with Sandals grey,
He touch’d the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:
And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew.
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (lines 186–93)

The celestial rebirth of Lycidas finds a parallel in the sense here of the poet leaving behind the lyric self who sang the pastoral elegy; but if the movement of the poem becomes abruptly teleologic, the process is as much Virgilian as apocalyptic in the renewed echoes of Virgil’s tenth and final eclogue and its own concluding lines:

My muses, here your sacred raptures end:
The verse was what I owed my suffering friend.
[ . . . ]
Now let us rise; for hoarseness oft invades
The singer’s voice, who sings beneath the shades.
From juniper unwholesome dews distil,
That blast the sooty corn, the withering herbage kill:
Away, my goats, away! For you have browsed your fill.³⁴

The debt to the conclusion of Virgil’s last eclogue is combined with the adoption of ottava rima, the stanzaic form of the great Italian epic romances, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and of their Elizabethan translations by John Harington and Edward Fairfax—a regularity always threatened but never quite obtained earlier in ‘Lycidas’, which in its metrical swells and billows seems to take literally John Cleveland’s insistence in Justa Edouardo King naufrago that ‘The sea’s too rough for verse; who rhymes upon’t / With Xerxes strives to fetter th’Hellespont’. The metrical disruptions of the poem prior to the final eight lines are variations on the complex patterns of the Italian canzone, which Milton had been practising both in Italian (‘Canzone’) and English (‘At a Solemn Musick’).³⁵ In their sudden regularity the final eight lines look forward to the next step on the Virgilian cursus: Milton would declare in print within four years that he sought to follow Ariosto’s example in becoming ‘an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect’. There is a recollection also of the opening of ‘E. K.’s preface to The Shepheardes Calender, announcing Spenser as ‘this our new Poete, who for that he is uncouthe (as said Chaucer) is unkist, and unknown to most men, is regarded but of few. But I doubt not, so soone as his name shall come into the knowledg[e] of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of fame, but that he shall be not only kiste, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondred at of the best.’³⁶

The fusing of apocalyptic historical process and the poet’s Virgilian literary progress in the conclusion to ‘Lycidas’ underlines, retrospectively, the inadequacy of Apollo’s resolution of the first digression, at least for Milton—that fame is only truly found in heaven rather than in earthly achievement. The Virgilian and Spenserian career model ‘foregrounds the poet’s public role in the multi-sphered life of the nation’.³⁷ In this respect St Peter’s attack on clerical corruption represents the birth of Milton’s career as a public writer; or at least that is how Milton wanted his readers to view it when he added the headnote in the 1645 Poems that turned the funeral elegy into a response to a public as well as personal moment. It has been wittily observed by Christopher Ricks that ‘many of the original readers in 1638 are unlikely even to have known who “J. M.” was, let alone to have been on the look-out for Personal Column announcements hidden in the poem’.³⁸ And indeed some Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ by ‘J. M.’ who had not known Milton at Christ’s would have been more likely to appreciate the allusion to the popular digression on the lowliness of scholars in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander than any claims to a personal poetic trajectory. But sophisticated readers who had known Milton as a student, such as Mede, More, and Cleveland, would have recognized the Virgilian pretensions of the ‘Lady’ of Christ’s, even if they may have been surprised by the aggressive and apocalyptic anti-clericalism in his poem after a year of mounting ideological tension in England.