O p e n i n g s3 1poem written in memory of his fellow poet Edward King, who was
drowned at sea and is the Lycidas of the piece:
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 forced fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing , and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat’ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.The name ‘Lycidas’ tolls dolefully through these lines like a funeral
bell. In fact, these opening words are full of echoes and repetitions:
‘Yet once more... and once more’, ‘dead, dead ere his prime’, ‘Who
would not sing... He knew Himself to sing’. This generates a ritual
or ceremonial effect, appropriately enough for a poem which is
more of a public performance than a grief- stricken cry from the
heart. Milton probably did not know King all that well, and there is
no reason to suppose that he felt in the least agonised by his early
death. In any case, King was a Royalist, while Milton himself would
later become a doughty apologist for the execution of Charles I.
The dead man was also training to be a cleric, whereas Lycidas goes
on to deliver a violent attack on the established church, a perilous