February 10, 2005
On "Lycidas"
Many people consider Milton's "Lycidas" one of the best poems in English. It's not necessarily an easy poem to gain entry into, but it's definitely worth the effort. I'd recommend Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem as a starting place. It has a lot of classic essays that you have to read if you want to know where the conversation about this work began. For now, if you want to read a slight piece of commentary on the poem, you can read mine. It's not something I'm completely happy with, but I thought I'd share nonetheless.
Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,
And slits the thin spun life.
(75-76)
As Rosemond Tuve notes, to speak of any part of Milton's "Lycidas" requires one to speak of the whole. The nearly fractal nature of the poem implies a useful corollary: to speak of the whole of the poem, one may begin with the merest snippet. Indeed we find many of the poem's ideas come together in the lines quoted above. Perhaps the most immediately noticeable part of these lines is the word "slits." When describing the action of "shears" most would undoubtedly use the word "snips" rather than "slits." Although the use of unexpected words is a hallmark of great poetry, the choice here is a particularly excellent one as it embodies one of the poem's strongest motivating ideas—violence. While "snips" implies a mundane and quick cutting across a thread, "slits" disturbs us far more. The word suggests a length-wise cutting akin to how a suicide slits his wrists. The liquid sound of "slits" imparts an abrupt speed to the action, mirroring the suddenness with which the young King was lost. The string of monosyllabic words and the prevalence of the vowel "i" force the reader's mouth into a tight grimace, the very expression one wears once fully aware of the line's mimetic violence. However, the brutality of this line would not be so readily apparent if it lacked something with which to contrast it, a role which the previous line fills admirably. Although Milton inverts what would be line 75's first iamb into a trochee in order to stress death's approach, the line as a whole is more noticeably iambic and hence rhythmically tamer than the following line. That is not to say there is no violence in "th'abhorred shears," only that death is not enacted by the very sounds of the words. By recasting Atropos as a Fury rather than a Fate, Milton increases our sense that death results not from an unalterable plan against which it is futile to rail, but from a wild power that stalks the world. Although the weaving of life's pattern continues, Atropos transforms from the natural last step in a calm and domestic scene into a personification of "blind" rage. Death becomes arbitrary and unplanned. We note that "th'abhorred shears," like many other parts of the poem, perform multiple functions. The phrase calls to mind both the apocalyptic "two-handed engine" and the images of clothing that appear through the poem. Furthermore, the "shears" require a hand to wield them. In a poem so consistently focused on the body (or absence thereof), we cannot fail to feel the hand of the "blind Fury" being woven into the larger tapestry of the poem.
Indeed, we may easily see how the images and ideas inherent in these two lines branch out through the rest of the poem. As we expect in a pastoral, serene nature and simple life figure prominently. The "high lawns," "hazel copses green," and "flowerets of a thousand hues" strewn across poem combine with idyllic human activity—"batt'ning [the] flocks," "footing slow," and sporting "in the shade"—to create a current of peacefulness appropriate to the genre. Against this, however, are the stronger currents of danger and death, the impetus of the poem. From the first lines we discover verbs similar to "slits" in their depiction of violence. At the start of the poem Milton writes, "I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, / And with forc'd fingers rude / Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year." Like the combination of peaceful weaving with "blind Fury," these lines yoke a typically calm scene to destruction. From the very start hands "pluck" and "shatter," agents of death intruding on the natural world. Likewise, the "gory visage" of Orpheus pollutes the Hebrus, a scene recalled towards the end of the poem:
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled;
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world.
(154–8)
How can we not hear "Hebrus" in "Hebrides"? With irreverence like that shown to Orpheus's head, the bones of Lycidas are "hurled," yet another brutal verb depicting the world's lack of concern for humanity. Like the first lines we considered, these also sound like the violence they depict. The repetition of sibilants and aspirates beat against us until the waves close over our heads.
Like the contrast in sound and rhythm between lines 75 and 76 "Lycidas" presents a contrast between pervasive violence and the idyllic pastoral that enhances our sense of both. More specifically, the images of thread, scissors, and weaving inherent in the "thin spun life" ripple through the poem to other sections. Clothing figures prominently in the poem, beginning with the speaker's "sable shroud" which like the "thin spun life" combines death with cloth. Notably, both images also appear in passages wherein Milton considers the role of poetry, almost as if the former proleptically answers the questions of the latter. What "boots it?" "The meed of some melodious tear" that "with lucky words [favors his] destined urn." In the flower passage towards the end of the poem, we again find clothing important. The poet calls not only "the well-attired woodbine," but "every flower that sad embroidery wears" to mourn the death of Lycidas. By personifying the flowers Milton links the passage to earlier ones in which clothing appears while paradoxically highlighting the absence of any human figure, an echo of the absence of the drowned corpse. Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, the "false surmise" of the passage—the poet only bids the flowers to mourn Lycidas—comes aground against Lycidas's ocean-hurled bones, yet another juxtaposition like that of "the thin spun life" with "th'abhorred shears."
Like Camus, another personification of nature in which clothing figures prominently, we may go "footing slow" throughout "Lycidas" tracing the many ramifications of lines 75–76. Although many critics have seen the structure of the poem as a tripartite one, an observation that is nearly indisputable, we may also note the subtler warp and woof of the poem's structure in its many interlocking sections. Like the embroidered vegetation which blankets the fields, "the thin spun life" spreads its tendrils vine-like throughout the poem until we cannot disentangle one line from the others. Despite the complaint raised by some critics that attempting to prove that "Lycidas" is a unified whole through an examination of its imagery is merely indicative of the prejudices of our time, it is nevertheless an inescapable fact that nearly every part of the poem recalls the whole, an astounding achievement in a poem so diverse. Just as, in the words of Harold Bloom, "criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem," so may criticism profitably walk the hidden roads that run through a single poem. How else, after all, are we to understand the paradox that a poem with so many apparent digressions feels so coherent?