Milton's Lycidas has been considered a poem with multiple themes and subjects in a multiple-narrator structure. The poem is also thought to have contradictions and ambiguities in its syntax, making it hard not only to identify the real speaker but als...
Milton's Lycidas has been considered a poem with multiple themes and subjects in a multiple-narrator structure. The poem is also thought to have contradictions and ambiguities in its syntax, making it hard not only to identify the real speaker but also to clarify the relationships among Lycidas who is dead, the narrator who mourns, and the other characters such as Muses, Phoebus, or “the Pilot of the Galilean lake,” to name a few, who appear in various names throughout the poem. The study finds that these incoherences are something Milton intended in his poem to show us complexities of life and uncertainty of language. They only prove what the study calls Milton's immortal modernity. First, these pages analyze, though in a limited way with limited resources, the syntax of some poetic lines of Lycidas, and find that Milton's use of inversions in sentences is a tool to emphasize the transfer of the feelings among those involved in the mourning. So the poem shows the progress of the narrator's mind from the dead friend to himself, meditating upon his own life, still young but ambitious for the future. Second, therefore, the study shows the transcendence of the poem from a mere monody to meditation upon the speaker then to a religious poem, dealing with church corruption, resurrection, and various other subjects. Thus Milton's incoherences mean his superior sense of language; they provide multiple interpretations and linguistic ambiguities. This complexity is the very proof of his modernity.