“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638swain then questions the nymphs, the muses, and the classical gods as to why they
did not prevent the death. There is a procession of mourners, associated appropri-
ately with water: Triton who excuses the sea deities from responsibility for the
shipwreck; Camus, God of the River Cam; St Peter as “Pilot of the Galilean Lake.”
There is also an extended flower passage in which nature is urged to pay the tribute
of its beauty to the dead shepherd’s bier. The first collapse of pastoral obliterates the
poignantly nostalgic pastoral scene enjoyed by the youthful companion shepherds,
in which nature, humankind, and poetic ambitions seem to be in harmony,
unthreatened by the fact or even the thought of mortality. Lycidas’s death shatters
this idyl, revealing in nature not the ordered seasonal processes of mellowing and
fruition that pastoral assumes, but rather the wanton destruction of youth and beauty:
the blighted rosebud, the taintworm destroying the weanling sheep, and the frost-
bitten flowers in early spring. Elsewhere, Milton signals the collapses of pastoral by
genre shifts, as when the oaten flute is interrupted by notes in a “higher mood” –
the epic speech of divine Apollo and the “dread voice” of St Peter.
In the poem’s first central panel the swain identifies passionately with the plight
of the lost poet: the Nymphs do not protect their Bards who may be subject to the
savagery and mindless violence symbolized in the myth of Orpheus. So often in-
voked as the type of poets, Orpheus here figures their extreme peril: even the Muse
Calliope could not save her son from horrific death and dismemberment by the
Maenads, who embody the dark forces of nature and savagery that so easily over-
come the fragile civilizing arts.^110 If poetic talent, labor, and the noble desire for
fame can be so early and so easily snuffed out, why not live a life of ease and
pleasure and pastoral love: why not “sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with
the tangles of Neaera’s hair?” instead of devoting “laborious dayes” to “the thankles
Muse?” (66–7). The swain’s anger and frustration are rendered in graphic, appalling
metaphors of the “blind Fury” and the “thin-spun life”:
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes;
But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life (ll. 70–6)The swain finds some typically Miltonic consolation as he relives (with a difference)
the experience of another great poet, Virgil, and feels his “trembling ears” touched
by Apollo.^111 Figuring God in the aspect of true critic, Apollo assures the living
swain and the dead Lycidas of fame in the Platonic sense – not praise of the masses
but of the best, the “perfet witnes of all judging Jove” (82) that promises enduring
fame in Heaven.