Discuss The Representation Of Nature In Milton's Lycidas

John Milton's Lycidas (1637) has been widely interpreted as both a pastoral elegy and, conflictingly, as a subversion of the genre as critic Seamus Perry has argued , and Milton seems to vacillate between illustrating nature as compassionate one moment and ruthless the next. Despite this apparent inconsistency, however, the overriding bitter tone of the poem communicates Milton's sense of alienation from nature's cyclical eternity, his realisation of the merciless supremacy of natural forces in comparison to 'thin spun [human] life' and, most painfully for Milton, nature's capricious indifference to poetic virtue or ability. Lycidas, despite its pastoral features, illustrates a 'neglectful and bitter world' in which no amount of natural personification or beautiful, restorative natural imagery can provide comfort and no amount of poetic genius can protect one from fate or consumption by the 'remorseless deep' (50). In this way Milton undermines the pastoral genre, reducing any belief in nature's healing, consolatory power to 'fon[d] dream' (56) and 'false surmise' (153).

The 'neglectful and bitter world' of the poem is vividly created in Milton's expert manipulation of sound and syntax which produce a poetic flow that mirrors the current of the 'whelming tide' (157) under which King has perished, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime (3-8). In this opening stanza Milton demonstrates a mastery of reader and poetry, using the AABB rhyme scheme and loose iambic pentameter to create a regular syntactic flow which he strays from violently at moments such as the repetition of 'dead, dead' in order to forcefully halt or reverse word-flow to destabilising and disorienting effect. The use of alliteration emphasizes poetic force, contributing to the aggressive tone of the speaker who appears almost to spit the harsh sounding consonants, 'Bitter constraint', 'com', 'pluck' and 'harsh and crude'. The ruthless, bitter tone of Milton's control mirrors and emphasises the destructive changeability of the 'gushing' (137) waters which permeate the elegy's imagery. These waters echo through the entire poem in the infiltration of the stanzas with sibilance to create a continued sound resonation of these destructive 'gushing' waters, particularly effective in tumultuous, onomatopoeic moments such as 'Shatter', on which stress is placed by the trochaic line-beginning which roughly reverses syntactic flow. The poetic forcefulness of these phonetic and syntactic techniques creates a sense that Milton is literally thrashing and hurling his reader about in the violently shifting poetry, mirroring the wanton 'sounding seas' in which Kings' 'bones' are 'hurld' (154-155). The result of this tyrannical poetic control, however, is to highlight the emptiness of such power and the helpless subjection of man and poet to natural strength. In his reference to Orpheus; the 'inchanting son' of 'the Muse' (58-59), Milton aligns himself and King as poets with this figure of Greek mythology whose musical charms 'held streams spell bound' and in doing so he establishes a direct struggle between the power of the poet and the flowing forces of nature. This emphasises the helplessness of the poet in the world of natural forces reflected in the poem as the waters in Lycidas still very much flow, unaffected by and indifferent to the poetry of King or himself. Milton's portrayal of nature's devastating ferocity stands at odds with the seemingly benevolent illustrations of nature as compassionately 'mourn[ful]' (41) and 'nurs[ing]' however Milton's hyperbolic tone in this descri ption effects more an undercutting of the pastoral elegy than a sincere representation of it, For we were nurst upon the self-same hill...... Under the opening eye-lids of the morn (23-26) This idealistic imagery of Milton and King frolicking happily together in childhood naivety; believed at the time to be a state of pre-fall innocence which allowed the deepest state of proximity to and oneness with nature, is stereotypically pastoral but superficial due to its factual inaccuracy as they were never 'nurst upon the self-same hill'. The image is further undermined by the exaggerative personification of the 'morn' with kindly, winking 'opening eye-lids', giving Milton's tone an ironic edge which almost parodies this pastoral technique, drawing attention to the emptiness and falsity of such humanised presentations of nature. This quasi-satirical tone is continued in the moments of feigned realisation of his own 'fond[ness]' in this benevolent presentation of nature, the first of which comes in lines 50-57 in which he addresses nature directly through the 'Nymphs', asking 'Where were ye' when King was consumed in the 'remorseless deep'. His subsequent undercutting in the arrestingly melancholic moment of comprehension 'Ay me!' stressed through use of exclamation and the trochaic interruption of syntax, reduces this tradition of portraying nature as alive with the magical protective forces to 'fon[d] dream'. The second of these 'Ay me!' moments (154) occurs at the crux between the direct pictorial juxtaposition of nature as renewing, rich and stereotypically pastoral (135-150), and the 'stormy' roughness of the 'whelming tide' which Milton appears at the mercy of, and in which he sees King physically 'hurld' (154-158). His language in the build up to this pivotal moment, describing natural fruitfulness and vibrancy, is rich and illustrative of the kaleidoscopically opulent imagery of flowers 'of a thousand hues' (135) which Milton presents as plentiful and calls to cyclically seasonal nature for in order to 'strew the Laureat Herse' (151) and 'to interpose a little ease' (152). This descri ption highlights human alienation from the rich plenty of nature's seasonal, cyclical eternity in its richness of life, contrasting the preceding allusion to the 'two-handed engine' which he sees ominously waiting and 'ready to smite once, and smite no more' (130-131); the repetition of 'smite' emphatically highlighting the violent finality of death. This illustration of the lack of human control in this cycle of life and our powerlessness to determine or resist our own fate becomes more painful for Milton as he juxtaposes it with the following linguistically rich descri ption of the regenerative capacity of nature from which we are isolated, in its power to self-replenish and 'cast' its own 'Bels, and Flourets'(135). Therefore, this idea of natural beauty as ceremonial and consolatory is completely denigrated to 'frail' and 'false' (153), reversed and translated into the whelming tide (154) and therefore the complete opposite. The natural descri ption also, in its evocation of eternal natural cycles of growth in the reference to 'the green terf' through which these vibrant plants 'such honied showres' (140), links pictorially and thematically to Milton's reference to 'Fame' as 'no plant that grows on mortal soil' (78) which he sees as the human route to immortality. However this is merely a spiritual immortality which, in the consistent alliterative bitterness of Milton's tone, he seems to lament as inferior to the physically eternal regenerative capacity of nature because poetic consecration will not bring King or himself back, though poetry may 'favour [his] destin'd Urn' (20). Milton's self-elevation, positioning himself in tyrannical dominance of nature at the start of the poem, threatening with sonic alliterative force to 'pluck' and 'Shatter', hereby becomes entirely arbitrary and foolish as the 'Laurels' and 'Myrtles' are participants in this cyclical eternity of nature which will replenish and re-grow. Moreover, even if their 'season due' is 'disturb[ed]', there will be an eternity of natural seasons to come, in contrast to the 'thin spun life' which is 'slit' finally and irrevocably. Lycidas demonstrates the fallacy of pastorally conventional presentations of nature as renewing, consolatory and benevolent as Milton demonstrates a painful realisation of his own powerlessness and exclusion from the eternity and strength of nature. It is for this reason that critics such as Johnson , who famously found absence of emotional sincerity in Lycidas, overlook the fundamentally personal core of the poem as Milton's grief is not rooted in the loss of King but in his own mortality, of which he is made acutely aware by King's death at the hands of indifferent, ruthless natural force. Milton is grieving, not for King, but for the loss of faith in his ability as a poet to achieve immortality, firstly because nature will not 'nurs[e]' (23) or protect him and secondly because the eternity that 'Fame', being 'no plant that grows on mortal soil' (78) provides can never grant physical inclusion in this cyclical eternity of nature. Milton undermines each of the stereotypical pastoral methods of presenting benevolent, compassionate nature one by one, and underlies any affection or consolation that might be evident in nature in the poem, with the overriding phonetically and syntactically crafted bitter tone, reflecting in his poetic flow the capricious violence of the seas that unrepentantly await their next victim.

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