Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/99

 LYCIDAS

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��piping strains of a double meaning. Surely there was never a more strangely com- pounded thing than Lycidas. Surely there was never a more astonishing instance of the wizardry of the imagination than this, where at a compelling word a hundred motley and warring suggestions are swept together and held suspended in airy unity.

Ill

The structure of Lycidas is unique in English verse ; loose analogues are to be found in the lyric choruses in Guarini's famous play of Pastor Fido, to which Mil- ton undoubtedly gave careful study. The form stands midway between that of the strict ode, with set stanzas, lines of fixed length, and rhymes of fixed recurrence, such as we find in Shelley's Adonals, and the complete lawlessness of the so-called Pindaric ode invented by Cowley and fa- miliarized to us by Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day. Though printed without stanza breaks, Lycidas groups itself into eleven distinct sections of varying length, happily termed by Professor Masson " free musical paragraphs." These are composed of iambic five-foot lines, occasionally varied by the introduction of a line of three feet, which is subtly contrived to relieve the rhythmic monotony by imparting a kind of swirl or eddy to the onward flow of the verse. The rhyme system is very free. Sometimes the lines rhyme in couplets, sometimes alternately; again, as in the eight lines at the close, they interlace themselves in the Italian form known as ottava rima. The boldest and most success- ful device which Milton used, however, was the prolongation of a single rhyme- sound through a whole passage, in rich replications and echoes. An example of this occurs in the opening passage of the poem. Another daring innovation is illus- trated by the first line of all, which stands detached, with no rhyme-word to answer it. A number of these isolated lines occur

��throughout the elegy: to a sensitive ear they heighten the poignancy of the music by introducing an element of momentary dissonance or unfulfillment, which is at once lost in the wealth of concord, with an effect somewhat like that of a suspension and resolution in instrumental music.

��IV

��Through the succession of these " free musical paragraphs " the thought and im- agery unfold themselves, capriciously, even incoherently, it would seem to the hasty glance. Let us try to trace this un- folding scheme, and to perceive the intel- lectual framework upon which the poet has woven his music. Such analysis is more than ordinarily needful in the study of Lycidas, because its unity is compounded of so many simples, and the thought moves from group to group of imagery through such subtly modulated transitions.

The poem opens without any warning of its pastoral character, or of the fact that the author is concealing his personality under the figure of a shepherd plaining for his lost companion :

" 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". ..

Just beneath the surface of the passage there is a plain autobiographic intention. For three years (since the manuscript of Comus had been sent to Lawes) Milton had written no poetry, and here he declares that only " bitter constraint " and " sad oc- casion dear " compel him to break silence now. From other sources we know the reason of his silence, namely, that he was " mewing his mighty youth," and strength- ening himself for a flight beside which his previous efforts would dwindle into insig- nificance. The myrtle boughs with which he hoped one day to bind his brow were still harsh and crude, unmellowed by the long year of his preparation. But sorrow

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