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Updated: June 20, 2025
Lycidas clasped the bracelet on his arm, as with a proud and joyous step he quitted the goatherd's hut. "Stay, Lycidas," expostulated Zarah, following him over the threshold; but then arresting her steps, and watching his receding form for a moment with a smile as radiant as his own. "How could he fear a rival!" was the thought flitting through Zarah's mind as she gazed.
"Hark!" cried Hadassah, suddenly; "was that a groan that I heard?" Zarah had heard the sound also, and was on her feet and at the door before Hadassah had ended the sentence. "Oh, mother it is he the stranger he is dying!" exclaimed Zarah, trembling as she bent over the form of Lycidas, which lay stretched on the ground, close to the threshold.
But Lycidas opens up a deeper vein of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical. The passage which begins "Last came and last did go", raises in us a thrill of awe-struck expectation which.
A Test If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read aloud or better, recite from memory three of the best-known English poems: Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality." The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the third in 1817.
If the Cid, the Vita Nuova, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Lycidas pall on a man; if he care not for Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the Red Cross Knight; if he thinks Crusoe and the Vicar books for the young; if he thrill not with The Ode to the West Wind, and The Ode to a Grecian Urn; if he have no stomach for Christabel or the lines written on The Wye above Tintern Abbey, he should fall on his knees and pray for a cleanlier and quieter spirit.
Johnson of not having done justice to the Allegro and Penseroso. He spoke disparagingly of both. I praised Lycidas, which he absolutely abused, adding, "if Milton had not written the Paradise Lost, he would have only ranked among the minor Poets. He was a Phidias that could cut a Colossus out of a rock, but could not cut heads out of cherry-stones." See post, June 13, 1784.
And in the Latin elegy there is more tenderness than in the English. Charles Diodati was much nearer to Milton than had been Edward King. The sorrow in Lycidas is not so much personal as it is the regret of the society of Christ's. King had only been known to Milton as one of the students of the same college; Diodati was the associate of his choice in riper manhood.
This, it is true, is about all that can be said for such criticism as that on Lycidas, which is a delicious example of the wrong way of applying strong sense to inappropriate topics. Nothing can be truer in a sense, and nothing less relevant. "In this poem," he says, "there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new.
Zarah's apprehensions were also awakened on account of Lycidas; she could not but fear that very serious obstacles might arise to prevent her union with the Greek. Generous as Maccabeus might be, it was not in human nature that he should favour the claims of a rival; and determined opposition from her kinsman and prince must be annihilation to the hopes of the maiden.
There let the pealing organ blow To the full-voic'd choir below, In service high, and anthem clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstacies, And bring all Heaven before mine eyes." In Lycidas Milton mourns the death of a friend who was drowned while crossing the Irish Channel. He took the name from an Italian poem, which told of the sad death of another Lycidas.
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