Dryden’s allusions place this poem in a grand old tradition of elegies for dead youths and paint an indirect portrait of Dryden himself as a courtly, educated classicist. Oddly enough, they also make some quiet jokes.
The first of Dryden's allusions draws on a story from Virgil’s Aeneid, the great epic that describes the founding of Rome:
- Here, Dryden casts Oldham as Nisus, a soldier in the Aeneid who lost a footrace when he slipped in the blood of an animal sacrifice. (That's the ancient world for you.)
- On the plus side, he was able to trip up another guy so that his young friend Euryalus could win instead.
- Like Nisus, Oldham was in the poetic lead in some ways, publishing his most famous works before Dryden was well known. But now, Dryden suggests, he's slipped, his metaphorical race over before his time. And like Euryalus, Dryden has come up from behind, becoming by far the more prominent poet as well as the longer-lived.
All at the same time, then, this allusion laments Oldham's fall, allows Dryden to pat himself on the back, and adds a note of satirical grossness to an otherwise solemn poem. Those educated readers who were familiar with Virgil wouldn't just recall a tale of unfortunate fate here, but a moment of broad physical comedy, complete with pratfalls, cheating, and a cow-blood slip 'n' slide. Dryden practices what he preaches in this moment, keeping even this sorrowful elegy a little "rugged" around the edges (in an elevated, learned way, of course). This, the rest of the poem suggests, is just what a satirist like Oldham would have wanted.
Dryden turns to the classical world again when he quotes a famous line from an earlier elegy: the Roman poet Catullus's lament for his dead brother. Catullus salutes his beloved brother with the words "ave atque vale": that is, "hail and farewell." This (translated) quotation places both Dryden and Oldham in a grand tradition. Oldham gets to be the archetypal lovely young man dead too soon; Dryden gets to be the immortal poet! (And indeed, plenty of elegies mysteriously end up being as much about the brilliance of their writers as the virtues of the dearly departed.)
Similarly, when Dryden calls Oldham a "Marcellus of our tongue," he paints his friend as a golden youth lost in his prime. Marcellus was a nephew (and favorite) of the Roman emperor Augustus. His noted prowess in battle didn't keep him from getting killed young. Once again, there's a role for Dryden here as well as for Oldham: the mournful emperor grieving the bright youth.
A final classical allusion is a straightforward one. The crowns of "ivy" and "laurel" that Dryden awards Oldham are old symbols of immortality (the ivy, because it’s evergreen) and poetic triumph (the laurel, sacred to the poet-god Apollo). Oldham has won poetic immortality, Dryden thus suggests, even if he’s now languishing in “gloomy night,” an afterlife that sounds a lot more like the classical underworld than the Christian heaven.