Grief and Mourning

"Lycidas" is an elegy, which means it is a poem that remembers someone who has died. For Milton, "Lycidas" was his way of memorializing his friend Edward King, who perished on the Irish Sea in 1637. It was published as part of a collection of elegies dedicated to King's life, and remains one of the most famous representations of the elegiac form in English literature. Thus, one of the primary themes of "Lycidas" is the process of grief through which one passes after losing a loved one. The poem uses an unstable speaker to dramatize the experience of mourning and the various emotions associated with tragic loss. By the end of the poem, "Lycidas" becomes a meditation on what it means to grieve and an evaluation of funerary conventions that have persisted for the living for centuries.

The speaker of "Lycidas" is markedly changeable; he...