By John Milton (1638)
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer…
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days…
The Pilot of the Galilean lake;
He in the midst of this our stormy world
Hath not forsook us…
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
Originally published in Poems (1638) by John Milton. Public domain.
Analysis
“Lycidas” refashions the classical pastoral elegy for a Christian poet grieving a drowned friend. The poem’s learned textures — laurel, myrtle, nymphs — are interrupted by prophecy and doctrine, so that art and faith argue within the same lament. Milton questions literary fame and clerical corruption before yielding the stage to St. Peter, then returns to the mourner who must keep living.
The pastoral landscape proves elastic enough to contain modern anxieties: ambition, vocation, and truth-telling in a fallen world. Its famous cadence — “fresh woods, and pastures new” — is not escapist but vocational, a resolve to turn grief into renewed labor. The poem shows how elegy can be both tribute and critique, rite and reorientation.