ABSTRACT
Lycidas, in fact, is an even more original poem than Comus. When John Milton included Lycidas in the 1645 edition of his poems he appended to it the following sub-title: In the Monody the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown'd in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. A far finer poem-indeed, despite those inequalities of style which its author so seldom avoids, by far the finest English pastoral elegy before Lycidas-is Edmund Spenser's Lament for Dido in the November Eclogue of The Shepherd's Calendar. The staple diction of Lycidas, as also of Comus, is that of the more figurative and descriptive passages in William Shakespeare a little sobered and that of Spenser and his sixteenth- and seventeenth-century disciples considerably sifted and choicened. Lycidas being hurled hither and thither by the tide which had overwhelmed him-with that image, and with that image alone, Milton wished his reader's imagination to be filled.
