“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638That answer, however incomplete, encourages the swain to recall pastoral – “O
Fountain Arethuse” – and evoke a pastoral myth of fulfilled love in Arethusa’s union
with the river Alphaeus. But then, as he questions the water deities, their denial of
any responsibility for this death again places it outside the order of nature and
pastoral. It suits Milton’s purpose to ignore the rock that caused the shipwreck, so
as to portray this death as inexplicable: “It was that fatall and perfidious Bark / Built
in th’eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark, / That sunk so low that sacred head of
thine” (100–2). Those lines reverberate with dark connotations, but the primary
metaphor is that of sailing on the seas of life in the frail bark of the human body,
subject to the “curse” of mortality because of the Fall. That, the metaphor suggests,
is why Lycidas died, and why pastoral assumptions cannot deal with it.
The poem’s second central panel mourns the lost pastor whose death has re-
moved a sorely needed, worthy exception to the general greed and ignorance of
the clergy – a last chance at reformation. The River Cam offers a brief pastoral
lament for the loss of the university’s “dearest pledge,” but St Peter wholly quells
the pastoral music with his fierce jeremiad against the Laudian church and clergy.
His scornful paradox, “Blind mouthes,” brilliantly exposes the ignorance, ambi-
tion, and greediness of those bad shepherds who seek only to feed their own bellies,
leaving the hungry sheep “swoln with wind” produced by Laudian ceremony and
conformity, and subject to the ravages of the Roman Catholic “grim Woolf” rag-
ing freely in the Caroline court, especially among the queen’s ladies:^112
Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed. (ll. 119–29)Peter’s tirade and King’s death resonate with the passage in Isaiah 56:10–57:1 that
warns of blind watchmen, greedy and drunken shepherds, and the righteous man
“taken away from the evil to come” – often cited as auguries of impending national
disaster.^113 The passage holds no promise of reformation, but the very fierceness of
Peter’s invective voicing God’s wrath and promising imminent divine retribution
supplies a kind of consolation – an apocalyptic prophecy that some formidable if
ambiguous “two-handed engine” stands ready “at the door” to smite the guilty and
cleanse the church.^114
After this terrible diatribe the swain again recalls pastoral, the frightened river