“Yet Once More”: John Milton’s Lycidas as an Assault on the Ordinary

Abstract

This article examines a problematic of the ordinary as it emerges in the poetical theology of an early poem of John Milton. This poem, Lycidas, has captured the attention of every major critic from the 18th century to the present, who has minutely examined its odd formal and generic character, its peculiar mix of personal grief and political outrage, and its role in Milton’s own personal development at a particularly decisive moment in English history. Yet, despite this extensive interpretive history, ‘the ordinary’ has never become an extended object of critical analysis. This article accordingly seeks to uncover and examine the importance of a certain set of contemporaneous significations of the ordinary in Lycidas, which implicate the institutions of Church, state, and university in perhaps surprising ways.

This essay seeks to examine the problematic of the ordinary as it emerges in what we might call the poetical theology of an early poem of John Milton1. This poem, Lycidas, a pastoral elegy, has captured and sustained the attention of every major critic of Milton from the 18th century to the 21st, from Samuel Johnson to Barbara Lewalski and beyond. Throughout this history, Lycidas has been minutely examined and variously evaluated for its notably odd formal and generic character, its peculiar mix of personal grief and political outrage, and its role in Milton’s own personal development at a particularly volatile moment in English history.

Despite this deep history of critical attentiveness to the poem, ‘the ordinary’ has not become at any point an extended object of analysis. After all, the word neither appears in the poem, nor does it seem a particularly pertinent reference for a poem that memorialises a drowned university friend in classicising terms. Yet, Milton’s infamous imprecations against the corrupted shepherd-priests of England assume, as their condition, a latent but already well-developed (Puritan) position on reformation, prelatical episcopacy, and the reason of Church Government (see [1,2]), which on occasion implicates certain technical (as well as more familiar) senses of the ordinary, its offices, its institution, and its operations.

Moreover, another important corporation is associated with this problematic by Milton, if in an entirely different sense: the university. And while commentators have almost universally noted the university context of the poem—it is difficult, as we shall see, not to—very few have expounded its particular significance in and for the poem itself. If the Church relies constitutionally upon ordinaries to conduct its business, and those ordinaries are trained (in substantial part) by the university, the university itself is not and cannot be entirely ordinary insofar as it is also integrally concerned with matters and persons that have no office, exceeding the purview of any particular technical or vocational training. Here, then, I shall speak of a dialectic between the ordinary and the extraordinary in Lycidas that becomes the matter of the poem insofar as it itself contributes to the struggle between the spiritual poles of Church Governance and university education in a context of political upheaval that shares—at least for a young Puritan like Milton—essential features with the constitutively ambiguous elements of theatre.

What proves particularly revelatory about attending to the absent presence of the ordinary in ‘Lycidas’ is not only in the apprehension of several crucial ways in which the word, the concept, and the referent of the ordinary are being radically transformed in the seventeenth century—indeed, a confusion of competing senses is in play, not least in Milton’s poem itself—but in how attending to this confusion paradoxically enables a clarification of certain aspects of the poem that have, to date, remained enigmatic and obscure. As we shall see shortly, these obscure elements include the following: precisely how the university functions for Milton as extra-ordinary; how the poem puts discourses drawn simultaneously from the Bible, classical poetry, and near-contemporary theatre into conflict with each other by means of a semi-submerged play of allusions; and how the poem’s disposition of these discourses proposes a radical redistribution of the regimes of Church, state, university, and poetry.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word ‘ordinary’ in English is as a noun from the early fourteenth century, borrowed from the Anglo-Norman ordenarie, ordinarie, and ordinaire, the French ordinaire, and the Latin ordinarius. The attestation initially derives from the ecclesiastical circumscription of the jurisdiction of an office holder. In Canon Law, ordinary is a term for a religious functionary whose power to govern flows from the office itself. The term hence appears in its institutional signification in the various council declarations, for example, when the First Council of Lyons (1245) announce ‘If any ecclesiastical judge, whether ordinary or delegated…’ [Si quis autem iudex ecclesiasticus ordinarius aut delegatus…] [3] (p. 288). The Pope himself is a ‘local ordinary’, insofar as his divinely ordained ministry bears on territories and persons, with an integral power to legislate, judge, and govern.

The ordinary is of course integrally connected with order, the ordinal, and ordinance— not just etymologically. Take ordain, another of the word’s close relations, which also enters English at about the same time: to found, to order, to organise, to appoint (often expressly to a role in the Church), to command. It should therefore be no surprise that the figure of the ordinary in Canon Law is also intimately connected with that of ‘hierarchy’. The word hierarchy—itself a compound of archē, power, beginning, and hierōn, sacred things—was coined in the sixth century AD by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite according to a vision in which an earthly episcopal hierarchy simultaneously mirrored and received its justification from the hierarchy of the heavenly angels [4]. The Latin ecclesiastical sense of the ‘ordinary’ is therefore institutionally entwined with the Greek sense of ‘hierarchy’, and both senses enter into the movement of the word and its institutions into English. One further sense of the term that needs to be marked here, and will receive further investigation below, is, as Nicholas Heron puts it, ‘The institutionalization of the pastorate coincides with its articulation in a hierarchy’ [5] (p. 75). Pastoral power is in this sense ordinary power.

In other words, this institutional conception of the ordinary is also intimately connected with a conception of office, of the official and bureaucratic governance of the pastorate. Indeed, the concepts cannot be separated without falsifying the stakes. Accordingly, the links of ‘ordinary’ to ‘office’ are so pervasive and overdetermined in the early modern period in England that dedicated studies of the radical transformations of Church Governance such as those accomplished by the Tudors immediately encounter certain confusions. Margaret McGlynn, for instance, writes the following:

the bishops had to maintain the system which brought criminous clerks into their prisons, most crucially the system of ordinaries. All bishops appointed ordinaries to act in their stead in demanding the delivery of clerks convict and clerks attaint from the secular courts.

[6] (p. 76)

The difficulty here is that, as McGlynn immediately notes, ‘strictly speaking the title “ordinary” belongs to the bishop’. One can immediately see that the concerns of strict ecclesiastical hierarchy and its delegation is simultaneously emphasised and confused in such a usage, for the nature of an ordinary office is technically strictly distinguished from that of ‘delegated jurisdiction’, in which the authority to govern is separated from the ecclesiastical office itself. A critical remark in this context is that it is clear, from the 16th century in England, that while the inherited technical senses and operations of the ordinary are continuing to function, they are simultaneously becoming blurred in the everyday practice of church law; yet, precisely in being so, they further emphasise and exacerbate the practical and theoretical peculiarities inherent in such religious offices. In this regard, the Reformation is evidently the determining factor. From Henry VIII through to Charles I and beyond, the break with Rome delivered serious shocks to the inherited consistency of institutional forms. The entwined categories of ordinary and office are hence immediately affected, and underwent further unexpected transformations in the development of Protestantism (on which more is discussed below).

Indeed, there is a constitutive paradox of office that has been historically (and perhaps also practically) inseparable from the problematic of the ordinary in the West. As Giorgio Agamben has recently shown in an important study, the office

is more efficacious than the law because it cannot be transgressed, only counterfeited. It is more real than being because it consists only in the operation by means of which it is realized. It is more effective than any ordinary human action because it acts ex opere operato, independently of the qualities of the subject who officiates it… In office or duty, being and praxis, what a human does and what a human is, enter into a zone of indistinction, in which being dissolves into its practical effects and, with a perfect circularity, it is what it has to be and has to be what it is.

[7] (p. xiii)

While Agamben is speaking directly of the fate of the concept in the Catholic hierarchy, a version of ex opere operato also holds for the Anglican Church. Article XXVI of the decisive Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) speaks ‘Of the unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments’ [8] (pp. 16–17). Such a way of establishing offices is precisely what enables a bad or corrupt office-bearer to nonetheless continue to effectively perform their (theological, bureaucratic, governmental) duties: a perfidious priest is still able to deliver the sacraments fulsomely.

The term thereby encrypts a fundamental doctrine of Church Governance structure, and so it is no surprise to see it return at key moments. Take its apparition in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Will you reverently obey your Ordinarie, and other chief Ministers of the Church, and them to whom the charge and Government over you is committed; following with a glad mind and will their godly Admonitions’ [9]. Power, authority, and jurisdiction are conjoined in the institution of the ordinary; moreover, it remains clear that these senses remain operative in the offices of Church hierarchy and doctrine. That there is rapidly a slippage or confusion in common practice and discourse between ordinary as specifying an institutional bond between office and its inherent authority and ordinary as a delegated authority of office is then itself a significant feature of the history and uses of the term—even before we consider how its range of sense and reference expanded beyond immediately institutional matters.

Indeed, confusion perhaps constitutively afflicts the term. Almost immediately after its first bureaucratic apparition in English, it comes to be applied to the ‘book containing the ordinary of the mass’, to the ordinary of the liturgy, and from there to an entire range of customary, invariant, regular, normal, usual, or habitual behaviours. ‘Ordinary’, in other words, designates one species of unremarkable person, situation or state; it conforms to the stability and methodicality, reliability or repetition of the dominant conditions. The English literary critic William Empson should have recognised ‘ordinary’ as ‘a complex word’, one that has become, to use his own words, a ‘compacted doctrine’; that someone as attentive to the multiple ambiguities of ordinary language as Empson himself continued to use the word ‘ordinary’ in an ordinary, unreflective fashion is precisely an index of the difficulties inherent in even bringing this term to a preliminary analysis [10]. As Claire Langhamer asks in a different but related context ‘Who the hell are ordinary people?’ [11]. And, finally, is this not part of the challenge taken up by so-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to reopen the question of the ordinary, of what passes as ordinary, in order to analyse it again and differently, and perhaps even thereby show that ‘the ordinary’ is a word-concept that covers over and dissimulates a multitude of variegated acts and activities, practices and performances that may also cipher their radical differences under this inoffensive heading?

After all, the ordinary is implicitly—although also of course often explicitly—distinguished from the remarkable, the infrequent, the irregular, the exceptional, and the outstanding. The word extraordinary (at least in English) seems to emerge a little later than ordinary itself, though extraordinarius is indeed present in standard Latin; when it appears, it naturally takes on an oppositional character. Insofar as it is linked to the question of an office bearer, the ‘extraordinary’ concerns supernumerary or temporary employees, or those charged with a special mission. But just as quickly ‘extraordinary’ becomes a term for everyday life itself, we should not ‘forget that early modern people themselves regarded some things as extraordinary. Things were deemed extraordinary when they ceased to follow a prescribed or expected route’ [12] (p. 2). Moreover, even as the words ordinary and extraordinary become entirely ordinary, an unremarkable part of the common tongue, they continue to retain—however confusedly or obscurely—the technical senses that they simultaneously thereby camouflage.

Finally, it would be surprising if ‘the ordinary’—at least in the contemporary everyday sense of the word!—was not the focus of poetry, or, at least, of certain poems, insofar as a poem, or, again, insofar as certain poems, undoubtedly take it upon themselves to become or be perceived to be extraordinary. Given that a dominant lineage of ancient and modern doctrines of poetry take for granted the inspired nature of poems as well as their mnemonical function, insofar as their liveliness, force, and memorability must be tied to a singular extraordinariness, one wonders if a poem that is not extraordinary, or at least does not seek to be so, can even be a poem2. Would it otherwise not be just another regular use of language, nothing special, nothing memorable in itself—even if it takes place against a background of an ‘ordinary’ state of affairs which is itself so well known and so well remembered, it passes beneath notice? Or, alternatively, could poetry be a linguistic or translinguistic act that redraws—or attempts to redraw—the very boundaries between what counts as ordinary and extraordinary?

As John Milton—a man who would later become one of the universally acknowledged masters of English poetry, and whose epic Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, remains the single most influential poem in the language to the present day—himself phrases poetry’s destiny in the course of a famous passage from The Reason of Church Government (1642),

For although a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him might without apology speak more of himself then I mean to do, yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortall thing among many readers of no Empyreall conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of my selfe, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me.

[1] (p. 808)

Poetry is figured here—however parodically—as ‘empyreall’, in contrast to the cooler element of prose. Indeed, Milton himself had already authored a poem that would subsequently become a staple of high-school English literary education due to its ambitious nature. That poem, a pastoral elegy for a drowned friend, is Lycidas.

As Stella Revard explains in her edition of that poem,

Composed in 1637 for a commemorative volume, Justa Edovardo King naufrago, published in 1638 by Cambridge University, honouring Milton’s former classmate, Edward King, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who had been drowned in the Irish Sea off Chester. ‘Lycidas’ was the final poem in Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King, the English section of the volume and was signed only J.M. Justa contains thirty-six poems: twenty in Latin, three in Greek, and thirteen in English. ‘Lycidas’ was reprinted with minor revisions in 1645 and 1673.

[15] (n. 1, p. 74)

Posterity has been kind to Lycidas, if not to the other writings in the volume. Commentators have tended to emphasise how ‘ordinary’, unremarkable, the bulk of the compositions are, and, by contrast, how extraordinary Milton’s contribution is (a judgement dutifully repeated throughout the secondary commentary; see, for example, the commentary on this one by [16]). Lycidas has accordingly received an enormous amount of critical and pedagogical attention and support, from every conceivable angle, and even from its enthusiastic denigrators (of whom Samuel Johnson is perhaps the most famous).

In recent scholarship, for instance, we find emphases on the following, among other elements: (1) an attention to the figure of the ‘reader-speaker’ [17]; (2) the ‘experimental form’ of the poem [18]; (3) the complex relationships that the poem stages between genre and history [19]; and so forth. These studies themselves often build on some of the key critical works of the late 20th century, including David Norbrook’s groundbreaking Poetry and politics in the English Renaissance [20]. By contrast, I want to offer an interpretation of Lycidas oriented toward the vexed question of the ordinary here, that is, of the orders of place and power, of the establishment of the links between the two, of their paradoxes and potentials for radical change, and how the poem itself expressly intervenes into real, contemporaneous poetic, political, and theological struggles around these questions.

To reiterate, the purpose of this is to reopen the question of the genre of pastoral as it is transformed by Milton. ‘Pastoral’ functions here not only as an ancient mode of arcadian verse that seeks to evade the claims of the ordinary: as Vivian de S. Pinto once remarked ‘The traditional escape from everyday banality was the golden arcadia of the pastoral tradition… In Lycidas the theme had been charged with imaginative grandeur for the last time’ [21] (p. 478). If Lycidas certainly self-consciously participates in this tradition, pastoral also fundamentally functions here as a poetico-theological commentary upon the political status of the pastorate, of ordinary and delegated offices, as I have briefly sketched above.

In its initial appearance in the collection, the poem had no prefatory material, but by the time of its first republication in 1645—in Milton’s own first book of poems, Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at several times—the Civil War (or English Revolution, depending on your historico-political adherences) was already well underway. Milton, who would very quickly become the most famous polemicist on the side of the revolutionaries—writing such extraordinary animadversions against King Charles that he, Milton, would subsequently be notorious all over Europe as a proselytiser for regicide (it was not until much later that he achieved renown as a poet)—added a peculiar little prose preface. It runs as follows:

In this Monody, the Author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunatly drown’d in his Passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height.

[15] (p. 74)

There are a few points to note immediately: first, Milton’s formal self-designation of his poem as a ‘monody’, a funeral song uttered by one voice; second, that the poem is for a learned friend, which suggests the importance of acquired erudition for the value of its subject and its own work; third, that a national question concerning the oceanic limits of England is central to the poem, to its addressees, and to its site; fourth, that the poem is presented as prophetic; fifth, that the question of institutional religion—that is, of the temporal operativity of spiritual power—is part of this complex ‘by occasion’; sixth, that what the poem allegedly ‘fortels’ in 1638 has subsequently come to pass: the execrated Archbishop Laud was executed for treason at the beginning of 1645.

The slightly belated intercalated prose note thus indicates that the poem is about the ordinary in the sense of the vicissitudes of various forms of governance: governance of poetry, governance of the world, governance of the Church. But which Church? As already noted, the word is introduced into English through the ministry of the Catholic Church itself. By Milton’s time, the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I had not yet banished the spectre of Catholicism. If the Church of England had been founded by Henry VIII as a break from Rome, it was not all for the right reasons, as Milton will expressly remind his readers in Of Reformation: ‘Henry the 8. was the first that rent this Kingdome from the Popes Subjection totally; but his Quarrell being more about Supremacie, then other faultinesse in Religion that he regarded, it is no marvell if hee stuck where he did’ [1] (p. 528). Indeed, Henry’s concerns for supremacy are precisely what make the Anglican Church unique: unlike Catholicism and unlike the general ruck of Protestant churches, the monarch of England is also the head of the Anglican Church.

The political effects of this compression of secular and spiritual power into the same figure cannot be overstated. It means, aside from anything else, that an attack on the established church is also a direct attack on the monarch themselves. Yet there is also—particularly given the specificities of the English experience of warring Catholic and Protestant monarchs throughout the 16th century—the inexpungible suspicion that the Church is covertly inducing the monarch into a catholicising spiritual recidivism; if that is the case, then it would be treasonous not to point it out, yet doing so could in turn be considered just an alibi for an attack on the monarch, and so on and on, thereby contributing to a vast whirligig of complex, confused, and highly confrontational struggles, such as we abundantly find in 17th century English political and theological libels and pamphlets [22,23,24,25].

Moreover, by the time that Milton is writing Lycidas, the situation has come to an exceptional crisis point. As Elizabeth Sauer notes of some of the local factors driving the exceedingly turbulent situation into which Milton is intervening, ‘The programme of theology instituted in the late 1620s became increasingly Arminian through Charles’s installation and promotion of bishops, notably William Laud (1573–1645), the Bishop of London. In the next decade, Laud was named Archbishop of Canterbury, and he and his disciples imposed their own ecclesiastical policies on the national church’ [26] (p. 198). The 1630s would famously see this struggle played out in a very public frame through such personages as King Charles, Archbishop Laud, John Lilburne, and William Prynne in a serious of trials and extraordinary events that would directly contribute to the start of the English Civil War in the early 1640s.

The figures—more precisely, the offices—of poet, prophet, politician, and priest (if not only these) are therefore from the first instance implicated in Milton’s poem, and the question of the legitimacy of their own binding of power comes with particular positions. We could anticipate a little that the very ‘corruption’ of the clergy is because their powers do not accord with their positions. In a phrase, the ordinary is out of joint, as Hamlet did not quite put it. Yet, the trouble is not just that the ordinary has been corrupted. For a Puritan like Milton, that institutional religion has become ordinary at all is already a corruption—of both religion and the everyday as well. As Claire Colebrook notes, it is ‘this problem of the relation between divine law and its worldly expression that dominated Milton’s political theory and his poetry’ [27] (p. 21), and, more particularly, his ‘rejection of jurisdiction as an ecclesiastical function’ [27] (p. 40). For Milton, insofar as power and place are united in an ordinary office, they are illicitly united and constitutionally corrupt; no matter the doctrines that support the utility and desirability of such a union, they must be false and they must be harmful. Whatever the disputes concerning Milton’s supposed early Laudianism or the peculiarities of his break to a singular Puritanism, Lycidas itself already exhibits such a position on the ordinary (see the revisionist account, for example, given in [28], or indeed the subsequent response in [29]; also, see [2]).

This little prose epigraph thus comes to present the poem as an attack on the ordinariness of office as such. Is there, counter to such an instatement of the institution, a ‘good’ office, one in which power and position can be properly united with the person? Could it be that here, poetry faces off against official doctrine, the poet against the priest, regarding what and whom might best ordain the order of the ordinary?

The poem opens with one of the most famous apostrophes in English:

• Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
• Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
• I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
• And with forc’d fingers rude,
• Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
(15, l. 1–5)

The opening apostrophe is self-consciously erudite, classicising, and biblical, as undoubtedly befits the tenor of the Cambridge University memorial volume itself. It addresses itself to a trinity of plants traditionally designating poetic success, a triple synecdoche for poetic ambition and achievement. Despite the Greco-Roman flavour of the nominated vegetable matter, scholars have identified the provenance of the phrase ‘yet once more’ as deriving from St Paul (Hebrews 12: 26–28), lending the invocation a messianic Christian flavour [30], unmistakable in the contemporaneous context.

Indeed, the very first word ‘Yet’ plays upon multiple senses of itself. Yet is an intensifier of the ‘once more’ that immediately follows. Milton is thereby announcing to us, his readers, by means of a variant of the humility topos, that he has tried his hand at poetry before—and with little success. ‘Poet’ is not an office that can be ordained; there is no institutional place for a poet in advance of the poems; a potential poet moreover needs to come at the right time. The office of poet is not and cannot be an ordinary office—it cannot be officially assigned without falsification. Yet, is there not also, in the very desire to be, to become a poet, to be recognised and acknowledged as a poet, something indecent, something inappropriate, something ungodly? Might the ambition to become a poet not be as theologically corrupt as that of the clergy now besetting England?

Yet, in any case marks, both the continuation of a sequence of failures—the aspiring poet has tried this before—and the potential interruption of that sequence—for this time, God willing, the not-yet-poet will be or become or will have become a poet. To cite the OED yet once more, yet can express repetition, temporality, and contrast; here, it does all three simultaneously. Moreover, each of these aspects is further split. The repetition indexes an indecent or hubristic desire, but also an admirable commitment; the temporality is that of the encore-without-original, yet again, not yet, yet still, etc., all at once; the contrast bears particularly in the problems of modality, of possibility, necessity, impossibility, and contingency.

Here, we should also note, in addition to the Christian messianism, the classical allusions. As Anne Carson notes of the adverb dēute in classical erotic poetry (including Alkman, Sappho, and Anakreon),

Deute combines the particle dē with the adverb aute. The particle dē signifies vividly and dramatically that something is actually taking place at the moment. The adverb aute means ‘again, once again, over again’. The particle dē marks a lively perception in the present moment: ‘Look at that now!’ The adverb aute peers past the present moment to a pattern of repeated actions stretching behind it: ‘Not for the first time!’.

[31] (pp. 118–119)

This extraordinary attention to the paradoxes of re-beginning-something-that-cannot-yet-but-must-already-have-begun is therefore integrally linked to two major modes of imagery that govern the poem, the classical and the Christian. Much of the history of the interpretation of the poem has rightly vacillated between the relation between the two. After all, as a self-confessed monody and an elegy, the poem’s structuring picks up on the classical forms: an elegy is traditionally defined by certain formal characteristics, that is, poems in elegiac couplets (usually a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter line); by the link between such a form and the work of mourning (above all, for the dead); and by a material substrate, elegies often being performed orally, but also inscribed on monuments [32]. Elegies might accordingly bind form, matter, and affect at once.

Lycidas takes up the elegy as one of its models, but rather than following such a model stringently, also departs from it. Certainly, it is dedicated to mourning, and, certainly, it sometimes directly offers asymmetrical couplets that clearly invoke the elegiac couplet (e.g., ‘I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude/And with forc’d fingers rude’, l. 3–4), but it never simply follows the routines of classical elegy. For instance, it is self-consciously neither simply an oral performance nor a writerly one; it presents itself as between the two, at once that of a living voice and a paper inscription. And the import of this is, as we shall see in more detail, precisely because the question of materiality is itself at stake in the poem, where it is linked to the question of mortality. The affect of mourning, or its formal presentation, is also not sustained throughout; as the prose epigraph already suggests, a certain politico-theological prophetic rage is also brewing, a rage against the ordinary in the senses to which I have already indicated.

In fact, the strongly classicising opening will soon give way to anti-classical meditations on the complex status of earthly affairs, whereby the pastoral shepherds familiar from the Idylls and Eclogues of great ancients such as Theocritus and Virgil will be confronted and supplanted by the messianic pastors of Biblical provenance, above all the Shepherd Christ Himself. Moreover, aside from all the other kinds of allusions operating in this notoriously, almost flashily erudite poem, theatrical enthusiasts of the time—and we know that Milton was one of them, despite the Puritanism that often conditioned an anti-theatrical animus [33,34,35,36]3—would not have missed the reference to the famous battlefield exhortation of Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;/Or close the wall up with our English dead’ [37] (3.1.1-2). Indeed, it is a staple of commentary to note the Shakespearean allusions throughout the poem, perhaps most famously the catalogue of flowers (l. 142–151) calqued onto Perdita’s famous floral lament in A Winter’s Tale [37] (4.4. 110–129).

Yet, the theatrical allusions have particular significance in this context. One of the first acts of the Puritan Long Parliament in 1642, just at the start of the Civil War—that is, after the first publication of Lycidas in 1638 but before the second in 1645—was the closure of the theatres on the grounds of their lasciviousness, a closure that would be further extended in 1647, and not reversed until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Certainly, as scholarship has shown, this ban did not mean that plays did not continue to be performed in one guise or another, or, indeed, that theatrical techniques were not sublated into apparently non-theatrical forms, such as political pamphlets, closet dramas, or, of course, poetry. Indeed, Milton’s first published poem in English had been—of all things—an anonymous appearance in Shakespeare’s Second Folio of 1632, titled ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare’ [38] (pp. 122–123). Clearly, Milton himself did not entirely share the anti-theatrical hostility of the Puritans, although he undoubtedly understood the tactical and strategic value of shutting down the stage in times of stasis, that is, Civil War (see [39]).

However, this particular allusion to the Henriad is especially significant. It is self-evidently nationalistic and military at once, drawn from Shakespeare’s sequence of plays on the great warlord who had crushed the French at Agincourt. Here, its suppressed apparition (so to speak) serves to reinforce Milton’s own attempts to render his own poetry a form of warring discourse in defence of England. Whereas Henry’s apotheosis depends on his triumph over the French in France in the Hundred Years’ War, however, here, Milton’s sublimation of Shakespeare’s line is bound to a different kind of national project: to a war against the breach of theological corruption, on the soil of England itself. The King drowned in the Irish Sea and not on the earth at all—hence in no-man’s no-land—and this fact has the most serious consequences for the poem. This war will not be prosecuted with swords and arrows, but by intellectual means.

As Nicholas McDowell proposes, Lycidas ‘articulates Milton’s developing anxiety that the accomplishment of great feats of learning and literature in a nation must be inextricably linked to whether or not that nation is subject to the intellectual tyranny of clerical rule’ [29] (p. 292). Let us also underline that the stakes of the allusions in Milton’s poems are not only to show his erudition, to draw from great dead writers as inspiration and authorisation, but also to go beyond them too, that is, to turn himself into a real poet and not just a pretentious one. Here, then, the ‘yet’ also literally modifies as it adds to Shakespeare’s lines. But it also again brings Milton up against a central problem: to want to be great is potentially already to be the unconscious mirror of your own crooked enemies.

To the extent that this is the case, the world itself, the so-called ‘real’ world, must indeed be thought of as a kind of stagecraft: as Shakespeare’s Jaques famously proclaims, ‘All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players’ [37] (2.7). Indeed, Milton’s own Platonic–Puritanical conception of the world as a playhouse necessarily renders actions in and upon that world essentially otiose, a mere prolegomenon to the world-to-come; in this, he participates in a generalised reformist anti-theatricalism. On the other hand, not only does Milton not reject theatre altogether, but he also acknowledges that there must be some action in the world that is not just playacting; this action, however, must in turn not be able to be reincorporated by Catholic doctrines of good works. Hence, Milton’s own peculiar, ambivalent vision of the world-as-stage also necessarily makes reference to an institution—in this case, the university—foreign to Shakespeare’s own sensibilities4. For Milton, the value of this institution, unlike that of the theatre, is that it is a potential institution insofar as it institutionalizes potential. And, insofar as this is the case, then the university is not an ordinary institution and its destiny cannot be to institute the ordinary; it is not a captivating staging of profuse mundane simulations but intends to enact the purifying reparation of wayfaring spirit.

Although it remains in essential ways dependent upon both Church and State for its continued existence and raisons d’être, the university can nonetheless sustain a relative autonomy with regard to Church and state insofar as it offers a place propitious for potential as such. If Church and state remain in the ambit of the theatrical insofar as their offices are concerned with temporal action, and therefore also in the end with sentimental and passionate falsehoods—‘frail thoughts’ that ‘dally with false surmise’ (l. 154), as Milton puts it later in Lycidas concerning his own fictional images of earthly redemption—the university concerns itself with study, with learning. As Milton will later say,

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

[41] (pp. 366–367)

As such, the study the university harbours proposes another destiny than simply servicing the world as it is. This certainly does not mean that it is a wholly admirable institution, but that it can, even does, present—however minimally—possibilities for a rupture with the violent indecencies of worldly theatricality through its reparative ambitions.

But such a rupture–reparation is itself difficult, afflicted by the paradoxes that the invocation’s compacted allusions themselves draw upon, above all those I have briefly discussed above, which simultaneously implicate messianic Pauline temporality, the erotics of classical pastoral, and the ambivalences of theatrical staging. To put it in a vernacular way, it is all about timing. Yet, in accordance with the dictates of the humility topos, Milton also asserts—‘admits’ is not quite the correct word here—that this is not the right time for him to be writing. Rather, he declares that he, much like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, has come too soon. Why then write at all, knowing that the time is not right, that the times are not propitious? Because:

• Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
• Compels me to disturb your season due:
• For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime
• Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
(l. 6–9)

Milton, in other words, has not wilfully chosen to try to become a poet again; he has been forced to it due to this extraordinary event, the unexpected death of a friend. Alongside, however, the formal character of Milton’s hyperbole—elegiac lament typically extolling the lost object in the most glowing terms (that is, in terms appropriate to the form but not necessarily to the object)—we have a very interesting emphasis. This has not always been explicitly remarked by commentators, undoubtedly in part because it has, over the intervening centuries, become such an ordinary structure of modern European experience that we no longer find it that remarkable. For, in Lycidas, it is not just that the death is sudden and unexpected; it is not just that the death seems undeserved; it is not just that the death is upsetting; it is not just that the death occurred in notable circumstances… it is rather that what makes this death extraordinary is that this dead man never had a chance to prove himself extraordinary.

‘Dead ere his prime’: I have already touched on Milton’s topical anxieties about his own (lack of) poetic achievement, but it is with this line that the governing problematic of time-out-of-joint as a challenge to personal potential and power merges with the nominal object of the poem itself, the missing body of Edward King. Milton, though himself ‘ere his [desired potential poetic] prime’ will be compelled to write poetry again (hence, again, circumventing the possible accusation of hubris) because King himself never reached his potential, a loss to the future that—as Milton will immediately go on to elaborate—is so great that it even summons ancient deities from the depths to mourn. Loss or failure of potential: this in itself can now be a topic as worthy of public memorialisation as the gestes of the heroes or apostles.

Whatever the formally obeisant poetic hyperbole, it nonetheless speaks to real situational, institutional and historical novelties. As John R. Ladd explains, there are still enigmas surrounding the appearance of this odd memorial collection:

Justa Edouardo King itself is exceptional not just retrospectively and not just because of Lycidas. The typical subject of these elegiac or panegyric volumes is an aristocrat or, during the Interregnum, one of the Republican elite. And when the subject is not an aristocrat, a long exemplary life will do. But this volume honours a member of the Cambridge community: a young man of gentle but not noble birth who was a student at Christ’s College, became a Fellow of the same after graduation, and was intended for a life in the clergy. The volume mourns potential rather than accomplishment—not of course an uncommon topic for poetry in general (pastoral especially), but unusual for a Cambridge or Oxford volume.

[42] (p. 26)

The poem was written for an anthology entirely dedicated to a university student who had—as almost every critic of the poem has fervently agreed—as yet accomplished nothing of repute. This fact ought to alert us once more to the peculiarities of the university as an institution and, furthermore, to how Milton sees the university’s relationship to the ordinary in this poem. If Milton seems to have been ambivalent about his time at Cambridge, there is no question that it was a determining experience for him. Admitted into Christ’s College as a ‘minor pensioner’ in February 1625, Milton is sometimes held to have been rusticated after a squabble with his tutor William Chappell (by whom he was reputedly whipped), before returning chastened to his studies; he was allegedly referred to by his fellow students as ‘the Lady of Christ’s’ (possibly for his patent self-regard and disrespect for manly sports); he seems to have been disappointed by the quality of scholarship that he had been expecting to find.

In any case, Lycidas paints quite a different picture of Milton’s experience at university, and in terms that go beyond the expectations of a Cambridge anthology, indeed well beyond standard accounts of a university sojourn. After a sequence that imagines King and himself as the most authentically hardworking of apprentice fraternal scholar shepherds (i.e., ‘nurst upon the self-same hill’, and working towards possible ordainment as clergy in the church), toiling from dawn to after midnight, Milton writes:

• Mean while the Rural ditties were not mute,
• Temper’d to th’Oaten Flute,
• Rough Satyrs danc’d and Fauns with clov’n heel,
• From the glad sound would not be absent long,
• And old Damoetas lov’d to hear our song.
(l. 32–36)

Poetry, then, in Greek and Latin (hence both Satyrs and Fauns, really the same creature) accompanies the theological toil, supported by a tutor (Damoetas, whose ‘real’ identity, if he has one, is still disputed). In the midst of Milton’s studies, there is a split, between the concern for a professional church career and the diversions of classical poetry; one could not be more serious, insofar as it concerns one’s potential future labour in the governance of human souls; the other’s seriousness is in some doubt, potentially being nothing more than light diversion (‘ditties’).

Milton wrote and even performed a good number of elegies, prolusions, and other poems while enrolled Cambridge, with some success. One of these, the Latin First Elegy, whether written in rustication or simply on vacation for his friend Charles Diodati in 1626, turns out to be eerily prescient of the circumstances of King’s death: ‘At last, dear friend, your letter has reached me. Messenger-like its paper has carried your words to me from the western bank of Chester’s river, the Dee, where it flows down towards the Irish Sea’ [38] (p. 22). The elegy-letter gives an Ovidian account of Milton’s own daily studies of ‘the mild Muses’ (predominantly poetry and theatre), before proceeding to a rather purple description of Milton’s (merely visual) encounters with alluring English girls.

This bathetic description sent as a learned poetic letter by a young middle-class man to a friend about his daily life in London is perhaps of merely specialist interest today. But Milton’s sequence of elegies to Diodati are also places in which he rehearses in poetry his ongoing meditations about the sense, reference and value of poetry itself. (Significantly enough, Diodati himself died young, in 1638—the same year as the publication of Lycidas—and Milton in his memory also wrote another Latin epitaph.) But the import of Milton’s epistles to Diodati in the context of Lycidas derives from their anxieties about the uses and abuses of poetry for life:

• What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore,
• The Muse her self, for her inchanting son
• Whom Universal nature did lament,
• When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
• His goary visage down the stream was sent,
• Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.
• Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
• To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,
• And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,
• Were it not better don as others use,
• To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
• Or with the tangles of Neoera’s hair?
• Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
• (That last infirmity of Noble mind)
• To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
• But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find,
• And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
• Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
• And slits the thin-spun life…
(l. 58–76)

This passage is one in which Milton seeks to forge a transition from a classical poetics to a Christian poetics while remaining within classical imagery itself. Orpheus, the very paradigm of the great pagan lyric poet, son of the Muse, could not be saved despite his manifestly exceptional accomplishments; indeed, he was torn apart by Maenads, and his severed head washed up on the shores of Lesbos. But he is not an appropriate model for a Christian poet, insofar as Orpheus epitomises a poetry of disorder, of rapture; he dies as he lived, torn apart in a violent pagan sparagmos. Too successful a poetic ‘inchantment’ is morally and theologically dangerous, to the poet as to nature and society more generally.

Why bother then with poetry at all? It’s not a career. It’s not properly Christian. It’s morally threatening or, at least, morally suspect. And why undertake the laborious supplementary effort necessary to succeed in poetry, when one could dally more easily and pleasurably with nymph-like mistresses? Achieved fame in poetry is at once empty and perilous, and cannot ward off the reality of death. Yet the very emptiness of the hope for poetic fame—‘that last infirmity of Noble mind’—still paradoxically connects it with mind, that is, with God’s reason, that is, with an urge to self-betterment in a moral order. In fact, poetic fame has a properly spiritual destiny:

• Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
• Nor in the glistering foil
• Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,
• But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,
• And perfet witness of all judging Jove;
• As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
• Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.
(l. 78–84)

While classical images and allusions dominate this passage, we have already a covert redirecting of these images in favour of the true religion that is Christianity. The desire for fame according to the models of classical poetry—affective, natural, chaotic, destructive, worldly (which remain within the ambit of the theatrical)—must be transformed into a divine witnessing of a Christian life. Of course, this self-aggrandising conclusion to this first part of the poem expressly dedicated to the powers of poetry—some poetry can be godly too!—evidently cannot function as any kind of proof.

But there is another possible proof: if God wishes the poet to be a prophet, then the poem will be more than diversion, more than delusion, more even than a vital rung on the Platonic ladder that leads one from earthly beauty to the beauty of Heaven. The poem will, with righteous rage, condemn the ordinaries of the present with a more-than-ordinary judgement, and, in doing so, help to direct the polity towards a rectified future. Hence the ambiguity of the little prose preface of 1645, which at once explicitly retrospectively repurposes the poem and yet nonetheless enables us to see—in all its self-justificatory glory—that the incipient traces of a truly radical vision were already there.

In brief, then: Milton is a student of poetry; he is (has been) a student of the university. Such a student is, to be blunt, studying for preferment and professional placement, for an office. But this very possibility, of personal transformation and public success through study, is held open by the university in principle, as a principle of the university: that one can change one’s own life according to extra-worldly ambitions. Within the official curriculum of the university system, it offers a practice of other possibilities for life which cannot be official or public outcomes, and the paradigm of those extraordinary possibilities is poetry. Even more strongly: the university is a machine for actualising potentials, as well as inculcating potentials that may and perhaps should never be fulfilled (à la Orphic success). But that this double movement of actualisation and repotentiating is itself the essence of potential is revealed by the untimely death of a student who was never really actualised nor repotentiated: the drowned King, whose body was never recovered. No wonder Camus, the god of the Cam River, i.e., as a figure for the University, turns up amongst the funeral mourners to sigh: ‘Ah! Who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?’ (l. 107). Ah, indeed.

In fact, all supposed ‘bishops’ are therefore to be condemned; their offices being those of false theatre, not true religion:

• Anow of such as for their bellies sake,
• Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold?
• Of other care they little reck’ning make,
• Then, how to scramble at the shearers feast,
• And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
• Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
• A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d ought els the least
• That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
• What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
• And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
• Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw…
(114–124)

While exegetical tradition has, especially since the 19th century, strongly tended to identify these accursed figures with Catholicism, such an identification is surely a defence mechanism against the extremity of Milton’s vision, which here clearly directs its animosities at Anglicanism, and above all at the widely loathed Archbishop Laud, member of the Star Chamber and privy councillor (‘the grim Woolf with privy paw’, l. 128).

There is one exception:

• Last came, and last did go,
• The Pilot of the Galilean lake,
• Two massy Keyes he bore of metals twain,
• (The Golden opes, the Iron shuts amain)
• He shook his Miter’d locks, and stern bespake…
(109–112)

It is crucial that St Peter—here ‘miter’d’, that is, wearing a bishop’s headpiece—expressly received his office from Christ Himself: ‘And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16: 18, King James Bible). Peter’s, then, is the only ‘ordinary’ office with any legitimacy; he alone holds the keys to the kingdom, that is, determines who will cross the threshold of heaven. No other person on earth can lay claim to such an office and, if they do so, they are manifestly idolators. As none other than John Ruskin notes, citing these very lines: ‘is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very types of it which Protestants usually refuse most passionately?’ [43] (p. 70). Ruskin’s commentary—which, as I have also done, emphasises very carefully the ‘great offices of the Church’ (my emphasis)—rigorously demonstrates, by means of etymology and close-reading, that Milton’s animadversions against the bishops turn on their being ‘wicked teachers’. This is also why, in the little tract Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Milton later refuses to Timothy the title of ‘Prelaticall Bishop’ in order to renominate him ‘an Apostles extraordinary Vice-gerent’ (my emphasis) [1] (p. 711). However, holy Timothy might be, he’s no Bishop.

In the end, then, Milton is against the ordinary: the ordinary as the power of established offices, the ordinary accord of church with state, and the concomitant ordinary subordination of spiritual ambitions to temporal ones. In contrast, the writing of poetry becomes for Milton an extraordinary undertaking that, while threatened by its own disordering powers—those of Orpheus—and compromised by its desire for earthly fame, is still able to induce an orientation to transcendence insofar as it constitutes a work of sublimation in and of the things of the theatre of the transient material world and, hence, a means of transformation for the better that may have improving public and private outcomes… even, at the limit, exhibiting the powers of ancient prophecy. And such (rare) poetry does so by showing that the ordinary is not ordinary, that offices cannot be ordinary without corruption and usurpation, and that ordinary life itself is violent theatre.

Certainly, Milton’s is also an historical assertion of the rise of the new bourgeois order, of the necessity for social possibilities of self-fashioning that go beyond the control of Church and State, of the emergence of new forms of economic and political oppression. Yet the unheralded radicality of Milton’s position on poetry in poetry is linked also to new ways of thinking about human equality and potentiality: that it is neither inherited position nor celebrated acts that determine human life, but powers of the inexistent and the unactualizable that are simultaneously sub-ordinary and super-ordinary. This is why the university for him is not simply a school: the former, unlike the latter, introduces desirable divisions and divergences into the orders of existence in the name of new forms of delirium—poems—that may have no earthly outcomes whatsoever but may, now and then, by God’s grace, touch on the real. This is of course once more to underline the extraordinary force of the ‘yet’ that opens the poem proper.

It is just these torsions that already coil their way throughout the Lycidas of 1638, erupting in Milton only a few years later as a fully fledged justification for full-blown revolution against both Church and State—a decision which the Lycidas of 1645 fully confirms. The rest, as they say, is history.