Lycidas (1637). Lycidas is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, friend of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed. While many of the other poems in the compilation are in Greek and Latin,Lycidas is one of the poems written in English. Milton republished the poem in 1645. Herodotus in his Book IX mentions an Athenian councilor in Salamis, a man named Lycidas, who proposed to his fellow citizens that they submit to a compromise offered by their enemy, Persian King Xerxes I, with whom they were at war. Suspected of collusion with the enemy for suggesting the compromise, Lycidas was stoned to death by those in the council and those outside, were so enraged. ith all the uproar in Salamis over Lycidas, the Athenian women soon found out what had happened; whereupon, without a word from the men, they got together, and, each one urging on her neighbor and taking her along with the crowd, flocked to Lycidas' house and stoned his wife and children. The name later occurs in Theocritus's Idylls, where Lycidas is most prominently a poet-goatherd encountered on the trip of Idyll vii. The name appears several times in Virgil and is a typically Doric shepherd's name, appropriate for the pastoral mode. A Lycidas appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses as a centaur. Lycidas also occurs in Lucan's Pharsalia, where in iii.636 a sailor named Lycidas is ripped by an iron hook from the deck of a ship. By naming Edward King Lycidas, Milton follows the tradition of memorializing a loved one through Pastoral poetry, a practice that may be traced from ancient Greek Sicily through Roman culture and into the Christian Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Milton describes King as selfless, even though he was of the clergy-a statement both bold and, at the time, controversial among lay people: Through allegory, the speaker accuses God of unjustly punishing the young, selfless King, whose premature death ended a career that would have unfolded in stark contrast to the majority of the ministers and bishops of the Church of England, whom the speaker condemns as depraved, materialistic, and selfish. Authors and poets in the Renaissance used the pastoral mode in order to represent an ideal of life in a simple, rural landscape. Literary critics have emphasized the artificial character of pastoral nature: The pastoral was in its very origin a sort of toy, literature of make-believe. Milton himself recognized the pastoral as one of the natural modes of literary expression, employing it throughout Lycidas in order to achieve a strange juxtaposition between death and the remembrance of a loved one. The poem itself begins with a pastoral image of laurels and myrtles, symbols of poetic fame; as their berries are not yet ripe, the poet is not yet ready to take up his pen. However, the speaker is so filled with sorrow for the death of Lycidas that he finally begins to write an elegy. Yet the untimely death of young Lycidas requires equally untimely verses from the poet. Invoking the muses of poetic inspiration, the shepherd-poet takes up the task, partly, he says, in hope that his own death will not go unlamented. The speaker continues by recalling the life of the young shepherds together in the pastures' of Cambridge. Milton uses the pastoral idiom to allegorize experiences he and King shared as fellow students at Christ's College, Cambridge. The university is represented as the self-same hill upon which the speaker and Lycidas were nurst; their studies are likened to the shepherds' work of dr a field and Batt'ning flocks; classmates are Rough satyrs and fauns with clov'n heel and the dramatic and comedic pastimes they pursued are Rural ditties / Temper'ed to th' oaten flute; a Cambridge professor is old Damoetas lov'd to hear our song. The poet then notes the heavy change' suffered by nature now that Lycidas is gone, a pathetic fallacy in which the willows, hazel groves, woods, and caves lament Lycidas's death. In the next section of the poem, The shepherd-poet reflects that thoughts of how Lycidas might have been saved are futile turning from lamenting Lycidas's death to lamenting the futility of all human labor.