“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639last, he felt the loss of his friend, and he began to pour out his tremendous sorrow in
words like these.^120The content of the refrain marks perhaps the most striking departure from the
pastoral norm, ringing changes on the final line in Virgil’s Eclogue 10 in which the
poet bids farewell to the pastoral world by sending his young goats home fully
fed.^121 Thyrsis, however, reiterates over and over again his shocking refusal to fulfill
his pastoral duties in the wake of Damon’s loss: “Go home unfed, for your master
has no time for you, my lambs” (Ite domum impasti, domino jam non vacat, agni)
(l. 18). Though his reasons are very different, Thyrsis places himself by this refrain
with the bad shepherds in Lycidas whom St Peter excoriated for neglecting their
sheep. Thyrsis is so devastated by Damon’s death that he turns his back on the
commitment to shepherding figured both in the songs of poet–shepherds and the
labors of pastor–shepherds tending church and nation.^122 As he refuses again and
again to feed his hungry sheep he repudiates the poetic and prophetic responsibility
the Miltonic swain accepted at the conclusion of Lycidas, and that Thyrsis intended
to take up when “the care of the flock that he had left behind him recalled him”
from singing in that quintessential pastoral land, Italy (ll. 14–15).
Milton makes this refrain, repeated 17 times without verbal variation, the struc-
tural pivot of the poem and the means by which it moves from lament to consola-
tion. In an artistic tour de force, he invests it with ever-changing meaning as Thyrsis/
Milton comes to terms, by degrees, with his loss and signals his progress.^123 In its first
uses, the refrain indicates that Thyrsis finds his sheep, and the responsibilities they
figure, to be an annoying distraction that he cannot cope with in his profound grief.
He promises to secure Damon’s fame by his poem, but his attention is fixed on the
loss of the only friend who could truly share his thoughts and his emotional life:
But what at last is to become of me? What faithful companion will stay by my side as
you always did when the cold was cruel and the frost thick on the ground... Who
now is to beguile my days with conversation and song? Go home unfed, for your
master has no time for you, my lambs. To whom shall I confide my heart? Who will
teach me to alleviate my mordant cares and shorten the long night with delightful
conversation... Who then will bring back to me your mirth and Attic salt, your
culture and humor?... Alone now I stray through the fields, alone through the
pastures.... A man can hardly find a comrade for himself in a thousand; or, if one is
granted to us by a fate at last not unkind to our prayers, a day and hour when we
apprehend nothing snatches him away, leaving an eternal loss to all the years.^124Thyrsis walks undelighted through pastures and groves, and turns away the ef-
forts of other shepherds to call him back to pastoral activities and pleasures. At line
93 the refrain conveys his rejection of the Virgilian pastoral world which holds no
solace for him.
Then Thyrsis recalls Italy, finding some consolation in linking Damon closely