"Lycidas" begins with a symbolic image of its own creation. Plucking leaves and fruits from a clump of "laurels," "myrtles," and "ivy," the poem's speaker apologizes for harvesting them before the "mellowing year" has fully ripened them. He needs their sour berries and new leaves, he says, to make a suitable funerary wreath for "young Lycidas"—a man who, like the plants, has been plucked "ere his prime," before he had the chance to grow to maturity. This poem itself, then, will be a kind of funerary wreath, a tribute to a friend dead too young.
The lost Lycidas has a real-life counterpart:
- John Milton's good friend Edward King, a promising scholar and priest-in-training, died in a shipwreck at the age of 25.
- Shaken and grieving, a group of King's friends put together a volume of memorial poetry in his honor, Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638).
- Milton's contribution mourns King in the tradition of the pastoral elegy. A pastoral elegy is a lament for the dead set in an idealized classical countryside, modeled on the works of Greek and Roman poets like Hesiod and Virgil. Such elegies imagine a landscape of natural beauty and harmony that is nevertheless shadowed by mortality.
This form is a canny choice for Milton's purposes here. The pastoral world is traditionally populated by happy shepherds—young men whose major occupation, aside from watching their sheep, is making music on simple reed pipes. King and Milton were both poets; as the speaker puts it, Lycidas knew "himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme." It's only fitting that "some melodious tear," some teardrop of sweet poetry, be shed over this lost singer.
This won't just be a poem about a tragic loss, then, but about a tragic loss to poetry. And as is often the case when one poet writes an elegy for another, this will also be an occasion for the survivor to exercise his own powers—a spur, perhaps, to make poetry while the sun shines.
The plants the speaker chooses for his wreath foreshadow the poem's deepest concerns:
- Laurels, sacred to the god Apollo, are traditional symbols of poetic greatness.
- Myrtles, sacred to the goddess Venus, symbolize love.
- And evergreen ivy, sacred to the god Bacchus, symbolizes immortality.
All of these are suitable plants with which to mourn a young poet: laurels for his talent, myrtles for the love his friends bore him, ivy for the Christian hope of resurrection and eternal life. But they're also images of the poem itself and what it hopes to achieve. Through his expression of love for the lost Lycidas, the poet hopes to earn his own laurels and his own ivy: poetic brilliance, artistic immortality.
The young Milton flexes his poetic muscle in an inventive, virtuosic form:
- Though "Lycidas" uses plenty of rhyme, it never falls into a regular rhyme scheme. The first stanza, for instance, rhymes ABCCBBDEBDEBFB—a weaving, wandering series of rhymes that one couldn't quite call a pattern.
- And though the poem uses a consistently iambic meter (that is, lines built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "unwept"), it dances back and forth between iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, as in "Without | the meed | of some | melo- | dious tear") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "And as | he pass- | es turn").
Harmonious without being uniform, this form feels as organic as a rambling sheep-track over green hills.