“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638Alphaeus and the Sicilian muse, producing a flower passage exquisite in its delicacy
and beauty. He imagines Lycidas’s funeral bier heaped with the various flowers into
which heroes of classical myth were transformed, providing for them a kind of
immortality in nature. But this consolation soon collapses, based as it is on a “false
surmise” of harmony between humankind and nature. Lycidas’s body is not here to
be honored but is subject to the horrors of the monstrous deep:
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world. (ll. 154–8)From this spiritual nadir the movement from inadequate or false to true consola-
tion begins, catching up earlier intimations of resurrection in the myths of Orpheus,
Hyacinthus, Amaranthus, and Peter. The tone modulates from horror to hope,
from the violence of “bones hurld” to the peace of “Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus
old” (160). The swain now sees St Michael’s Mount off the Cornish coast where
Lycidas drowned as an image of heavenly protection (warding against Spain), and
finds similar import in the myth of the poet Arion saved by dolphins (a type of
Jonah). The line, “Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more” (165) – an
echo of the poem’s first line – marks the turn to true consolation. The swain reads
nature’s symbol of resurrection from the sea – the sun sinks into the ocean at night
and rises from it at dawn – as a type of the divine Son who walked the waves and
through whose power St Peter, and now Lycidas, were “sunk low, but mounted
high” (172). At length he calls up an ecstatic vision of a heavenly pastoral scene in
which Lycidas enjoys true otium beside heavenly streams (from the Book of Rev-
elation), with both his vocational roles preserved. As poet he is now a participant in
the “unexpressive nuptiall song” (177) of the Lamb and the harmonies of heaven.
As pastor he is now the “Genius of the shore” (183), a guide (by means of his
exemplary story immortalized in the poem) to all who wander in the “perilous
flood” of human life. Also, mythologized as a classical Genius or place deity, he can
be imagined as a protector of English Protestants crossing the Irish sea (like King’s
family) to conquer and colonize the rebellious Catholic Irish.^115 Pastoral has col-
lapsed again, but now into the higher mode of prophetic vision, which reclaims it.
Though painfully inadequate to the fallen human condition, pastoral is seen to have
its true locus in heaven.
The new voice introduced in the eight-line coda may be the most surprising
feature of this always surprising poem. A more mature poetic self has been voicing
the “uncouth” swain’s monody; and he now places in wider perspective the swain’s
hard-won movement from despair to affirmation of life, which the poet’s readers
have been led to share: