“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639Latin poet. The choice of Latin is appropriate, since Milton’s poetic and epistolary
exchanges with Diodati were always in the classical languages. Yet this choice must
also have been prompted by Milton’s realization that he could not hope in English
to surpass Lycidas, though he wanted to produce a superlative funeral poem for his
dearest friend. So he set himself a different poetic challenge, not only in language
and meter but also in the conception and treatment of the pastoral mode. As the
final poem in the Latin–Greek section of Milton’s 1645 Poems, Epitaphium Damonis
stands as a counterpart to Lycidas, the final poem in the vernacular section; and it
explores a different problem posed by death. In Lycidas the issue for the speaker is,
how can he and why should he devote himself to poetry and God’s service when
Lycidas’s death seems to indicate that the world is chaotic and life is meaningless? In
Epitaphium Damonis the speaker’s problem is, how can he bear to go on with his
life, his duty to God and country, and his new plans for heroic verse, given his
terrible loneliness with Damon gone?
The meter is dactylic hexameter, not the elegiacs Milton chose twice before for
Latin funeral poems. The title aligns Milton’s poem with the Greek epitaphios, a
generic label that often designates laments expressing a strong sense of personal
loss.^117 Even more than Lycidas this poem reverberates with echoes from the entire
pastoral tradition – most insistently Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, but also Theocritus
and his Greek successors, Castiglione’s Alcon, and many more.^118 Like Lycidas also,
this poem is energized by striking departures from and challenges to pastoral norms,
culminating here in a renunciation of pastoral.
One major departure, in line with the poem’s intense focus on the grief of Thyrsis/
Milton, is the absence of the expected pathetic fallacy. Nature does not mourn for
Damon/Diodati. The crops and the sheep do not suffer because of their own sor-
row for Damon but because Thyrsis neglects them. The several shepherds and
shepherdesses do not form a procession of mourners to lament for Damon, but seek
vainly to console Thyrsis. Nor do any figures from the classical or Christian super-
natural answer questions or offer any consolation. In this regard, Epitaphium Damonis
is the antithesis of Lycidas. There the swain cries out, “Who would not sing for
Lycidas?” and many do; but this poem is truly the lament of a single singer.^119 Struc-
turally, however, both poems use a framing device introducing the voice of a dif-
ferent speaker. Lycidas ends with a coda in which the Miltonic speaker records what
has happened to the swain who sang for Lycidas; Epitaphium Damonis begins with a
proem in which the Miltonic speaker introduces the swain Thyrsis and sets the
stage for his song. That proem explains that this poem is belated because Thyrsis
was detained by the poetic delights of Florence, but when he returned home, fa-
miliar places intensified his sense of loss:
Love of the sweet Muse detained that shepherd in the Tuscan city. But when he had
filled his mind full and the care of the flock that he had left behind him recalled him
to his home, and when he sat down under the accustomed elm, then truly, then at