The Speaker

The speaker of "Lycidas" is a fellow shepherd who grew up with Lycidas and worked alongside him in the fields. The speaker mourns the loss of his friend and finds himself unable to cope with the tragedy. Instead, he searches fruitlessly for people and gods to blame, wondering what could have been done to save his friend's life. The speaker oscillates between expressing denial and desperation before finally accepting that his friend is gone on earth but alive in heaven.

It is typically considered a fallacy to equate a poem's speaker with its author, but in the case of "Lycidas," historical context actually encourages this parallelism. "Lycidas" was published as part of a collection of elegies dedicated to Edward King, Milton's friend from their time at Cambridge, who died on the Irish sea in 1637. As such, the poem encourages readers to see the connections between the lives...