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John Ladd
Dr. Brian Reed
Senior English Project
22 January 2009
“Dead Ere His Prime”: Edward King and Milton’s Confrontation with Mortality
In April 1637, John Milton’s former classmate at Cambridge, Edward King, drowned in the Irish Sea. It was part of what A.N. Wilson termed Milton’s “year of deaths”: earlier that year his mother, Sara, and one of his personal heroes, the poet
Ben Jonson, also died (61). It was under the influence of these events that Milton composed “Lycidas,” one of the most famous works of his career, and an elegy of great emotional impact. Subsequently, the poem represents a turning point in
Milton’s thinking and writing which led him on a path to the most famous epic poem written in English: Paradise Lost. It is possible to show, using the psychological theories of Bernice Neugarten, Elliott Jaques, and others, that Edward King’s death became a turning point in Milton’s life that greatly affected the style and themes in these two works.
Since Samuel Johnson’s famous charge of insincerity was aimed at the noted pastoral of Milton’s youth, critics have struggled with the emotional impact of
“Lycidas” (Johnson 365-6). The conflict surrounds the nature of Milton’s relationship to Edward King, the subject of the poem, who the young Milton knew only marginally. The depth of feeling in the poem seems to indicate greater grief than would befall Milton upon the death of a classmate he barely knew. It is this discrepancy between the amount of grief Milton would have likely experienced and

Ladd 2 the emotional power of the text that caused Dr. Johnson to characterize the poem as insincere and has created a debate among critics as to why this incongruity exists.
Ways of reconciling this issue include Amy Boesky’s recognition of the effects the death of Milton’s mother had on the writing of this elegy, but what Boesky and so many other critics miss is that the death of King itself is sufficient cause for such an emotional outpouring (465).
In their paper “The Middle Years,” psychologists Bernice Neugarten and
Nancy Datan provide the basis for another possible explanation. They identify a phenomenon common among those who find that one or more members of their age group have died: “This last named phenomenon we called the personalization of death: the awareness that one’s own death is inevitable and that one must begin to come to terms with that actuality” (146). For many, this confrontation with mortality occurs at middle age, but it can be argued that Milton experienced this phenomenon in his “year of deaths,” 1637, when he was only 29. However, the deaths of Sara Milton and Jonson alone, though without a doubt traumatic to Milton, could not cause the personalization of death. Yet a peer, namely King, might awaken in Milton a psychological recognition of his mortality. His death constitutes an offtime event, which would cause the personalization of death early for Milton because he has an understanding of when peer death is supposed to occur, and because he subconsciously knows “that the course of his own life will be similar to the lives of others” (Neugarten 91). In this context the death of a peer at a relatively young age can be very traumatic. Using this phenomenon as a base, it is possible to account for the problem of emotional impact in the poem: the depth of feeling in “Lycidas”

Ladd 3 comes from Milton’s intense examination of the possibility of his own death brought on by the death of King, not from some deep sense of grief over the death of King himself. Milton is not detached from the circumstances of King’s fate like many critics would argue; he is intensely emotionally involved due to the recognition of mortality it causes in him. It is a major factor that the personalization of death occurred off-time for Milton; this intensified the experience and caused the issue to be one that Milton constantly revisited, included during the writing of Paradise Lost.
An analysis of both texts will support this claim: Milton’s personalization of death caused by the fate of King accounts for his emphasis on the similarities between himself and King in “Lycidas,” his need to deify King at the close of that elegy, his reconsideration of his poetic vocation, his use of the landscape of Hell in Paradise
Lost, his fearsome personification of Death, and his discussion of the impact of Death on humankind through the voice of Adam. This psychological phenomenon, and the fact that Milton experienced it remarkably early in life, sheds light on many contemporary critical issues surrounding Milton’s writing, including his very high opinion of his own poetic talents, the source of his religious fervor, and his preoccupation with the theme of death.
The opening of “Lycidas” provides us with some glimpse of Milton’s motivations. He takes great pains to outline every similarity he has with King, for this is the groundwork upon which his personalization of death lies. The most important of these similarities is stated most prominently:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

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He must not float upon his wat’ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear. (lines 10-14)
Dismissed by many as an exaggeration of King’s poetic inclinations, Milton’s insistence on elevating this trait above the others is logical considering his current psychological state. Milton’s prominent recognition of King’s poetic talent is the primary way in which Milton is able to tie their two identities together. The death of a poet of his own age would be extremely traumatic for the young Milton, who is beginning to see his own death as an inevitability. The next lines, then, which insist upon a “melodious tear” to commemorate King are as much a reflexive call for others to remember Milton as they are directed toward King himself.
Furthermore, Milton stresses their common upbringing: “For we were nurst upon the self-same hill, / Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill” (“Lycidas”
23-24). The pastoral setting gives Milton the perfect vehicle to stress his similarities with King. For Milton, the fact that they did not know each other personally is immaterial to the matter at hand. They were “nurst upon the self-same hill” and are therefore more intimately tied to one another than serious friends could be. In fact,
Boesky notes a common reading of this line that indicates just how intimate this bond is: “It is true that the ‘self-same hill’ is suggestively associated with maternal succoring: it is here that Lycidas and the swain ‘batten’ their flocks with ‘the fresh dews of night,’ learning from its shades and moistures how they themselves can nourish and create” (471-2). This suggestion that the two have a mother in common elevates the connection between Milton and King to at least that of brotherhood.

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Taking it a step further, it may be that Milton attempts to suggest that the two are the same person. Regardless, the reference to nursing and a common mother underscores Milton’s need to stress the similarity between himself and King.
The next stanza seems to be a pastoral analogy for the educational life of both young men; Milton, constantly committed to his educational background, can easily feel closely connected to anyone taught under the same circumstances
(“Lycidas” 25-36). The reference to “old Damaetas” in line 36 suggests that having the same Cambridge tutors is another essential similarity for Milton. In addition, it seems that Milton has shifted from a more maternal, natural setting in the previous stanza to a paternal, educational one in this stanza. It may be that the reference to
Damaetas is a suggestion that Milton and King have a father in common as well as a mother, further emphasizing their connection.
It is clear that Milton devotes a significant portion of the poem to the similarities between himself and King; to characterize these lines as insincere and egotistical is to miss how important these similarities were to Milton. It is only because of his similarities to King that Milton is awakened to the realization of his own mortality. Therefore the young poet finds it essential to solidly establish these similarities early in the poem in order to fully express the range of feeling he is experiencing upon his own personalization of death. A.N. Wilson recognizes that
“[i]t is always disturbing for a young person when a contemporary dies” (62). What the evidence suggests is that Milton thought of King as much more than a mere contemporary. King’s poetic talents, his similar upbringing, and his Cambridge education were all factors which intensified for Milton the recognition of mortality

Ladd 6 that King’s death had awakened. Milton makes it clear in his opening stanzas that he is justified in mourning so deeply for King due to their many similarities. What he does not state openly is that memorializing King is a way of working through his own anxieties about death.
It is worth taking a moment here to consider a statement made by Elizabeth
Hodgson: “In works from ‘Lycidas’ to Samson Agonistes, the potency of grief, disillusionment, and loss is fundamental to Milton’s literary self-fashionings.”
Hodgson, by way of talking about mourning in Paradise Lost, identifies this imagining and reimagining of death as originating with “Lycidas.” Certainly this stands to reason, once one realizes King is the source of Milton’s anxieties about death. Through his poetry, Milton has provided us with a unique record of a lifelong struggle with death fully personalized and constantly imminent. When looking at
Milton’s almost obsessive need to draw out every similarity between himself and
King, it becomes apparent that such a fascination begins here. These opening lines of “Lycidas,” in which Milton, in some ways, stakes a claim to the death of King by stressing their similarities, is the beginning of a theme of dealing with the personalization of death that extends through the rest of the poem and indeed for the rest of Milton’s major works.
After solidly establishing his connection to King, Milton begins a long string of allusions to Classical figures in a reconsideration of his poetic vocation. Milton finds it necessary, at this point in the poem, having confronted the fact that his own death could come at any moment, to reassess his life’s work and justify it. He does so using classical and pastoral imagery:

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Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep
Clos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old Bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream:
Ay me, I fondly dream! (“Lycidas” 50-56)
Here he begins a calling out to those who should have stepped in to save Lycidas, but did nothing. Both the Nymphs and the Druids are associated with song, and the songs of neither could save Lycidas, the poet, from his fate. Milton is confronting the adequacy of his profession: he wonders in a metaphoric way whether poetry is really worth as much as he previously thought. His reflection upon the inadequacy of the Nymphs and Druids to affect a rescue of their beloved Lycidas reveals his own concerns about the power of poetry to preserve his memory after death.
He likens this uncertainty to the inability of Calliope to save Orpheus from his grisly fate in the succeeding lines. Martin Dawes notes that this gory allusion to
Orpheus further reveals Milton’s morbid preoccupation, and echoes the assertions of Virgil and Ovid, “neither of whom grant the mournful lyricist any sort of success”
(189). This assertion shows that Milton finds in his classical sources a tradition of uncertainty about the ability of the poet to transcend death. Certainly this notion would have been increasingly unsettling for Milton, as the death of King has caused him to search for answers in his own poetic tradition about how one deals with death. He includes this tale of Orpheus to further underscore the crisis he faces.

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From here he begins to work through doubts of his own poetic sympathies.
In lines 64-69, Merritt Hughes’ footnote tells us that Milton references the erotic tradition of poetry, which he was known to despise, and wonders whether it would not be better, in the face of death, to descend into a more licentious and less highminded brand of poetry (122). Not only does Milton’s personalization of death cause him to question whether or not his profession in general is the right place for him, but he stops to consider whether his own specific mode of writing poetry is the right one, given the immediacy of death. Milton’s speaker is quick to answer this question without much time for deep consideration: “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise /… To scorn delights, and live laborious days” (“Lycidas” 70-2).
Milton intentionally inserts a simplistic answer here to the great question that is plaguing him. If his kind of poetry is that which brings fame, then fame is what will allow him to overcome death. This was the first solution that Milton came across when confronted with his mortality, but he certainly realized the limitations of this outlook.
What follows is the address of Apollo, who Milton uses to attempt to put to rest this proposed solution of fame:
‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumor lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

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Of so much fame in Heav’n expect they meed.’(“Lycidas” 78-84)
Apollo asserts in these lines that fame alone cannot do the things that the speaker asserted above; it is the judgment of Jove that determines the very existence of fame.
This is Milton’s first suggestion in the poem that a solution to the problem of death can come from a source other than the poet. Milton’s Apollo seems to force upon the speaker deference to almighty divine power that did not exist in the poem before.
For Milton himself, it seems to be suggested here that his solution to the problem of facing death can be found in religious belief.
God, for Milton, becomes the answer to how one escapes death in one way or another, whether by earthly fame or heavenly reward. This explains what some may consider to be an abrupt transition between a remembrance of Lycidas and a discussion of religious matters. For Milton, if religion is to be the answer to the problems he is facing caused by his personalization of death, then religion as it exists on Earth must be pure and free of corruption. It is for this reason that the interjection of St. Peter becomes so important to the underpinnings of the poem.
For Milton a discussion of death becomes inseparable from a discussion of religion.
This becomes very apparent in the middle section of “Lycidas,” as well as when
Milton wrestles with the problems death causes in Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and much of his other writing.
At the close of the poem, Milton synthesizes these two ways of overcoming death, through God and through poetry, by illustrating Lycidas’ rise to heaven, and affecting a near deification of him. He begins this passage with the line “Weep no more, woeful Shepherds weep no more,” which seems to indicate that not only the

Ladd 10 audience, but also the poet himself, will find the next lines consoling (“Lycidas” 165).
Milton ostensibly states that a solution to the great question of the text, overcoming death, will be answered in the lines to follow. He paints for us a picture of Lycidas ascending into heaven, and this image is replete with references to song:
With Nectar pure his oozy Locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial Song,
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.
That entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. (175-181)
Not only does the “nuptial song” lead Lycidas into heaven, but heaven is characterized as a place of song, tying poetry to the divine. When it may have seemed that Milton took power away from the poet with Phoebus’ speech, it is clear in these lines that this is not the case. Milton shows a natural synthesis of poetry and religious salvation, each incorporated with the other in saving Lycidas from death. Milton here has laid out his ideal situation for reconciling death. In these lines is not a mere hyperbolic expression of respect for King, but a wholehearted wish on the part of Milton that this is indeed true, and will happen upon his death.
At the end of the work, King becomes for Milton more than just a foreboding symbol of his own death, but a hope that he will be memorialized, and indeed raised up.
Milton even takes his hopes that extra poetic step by elevating King to the level of deity:

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Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood. (“Lycidas” 183-185)
A surface reading of these lines would simply indicate that Milton, out of respect, has elevated King to the status of a god-like protector of the Irish Sea. However, for one who has personalized death as Milton has, the impact of these lines is much greater. If Lycidas were to become a deity, albeit a minor one, this would have an extraordinary effect on Milton’s outlook. It is here that Milton’s insistence on comparing himself to King becomes as important as ever. If his fate is so tied to
King, then deifying one seems to indicate that the other will one day be deified as well, for the same reasons. Milton consoles himself, and deals with his newly personalized concept of death, by showing that he will one day be given this highest of honors through his respect for God and his dedication to poetry, in accordance with “the dear might of him that walk’d the waves” (“Lycidas” 173).
Milton’s opinion of himself is higher here at the close of “Lycidas” than ever before, but what is more interesting is the contrast between this and the beginning of the poem, when Milton seems very unsure of his poetic abilities and whether or not they are sufficient to provide either King or himself with any sort of remembrance. Milton’s personalization of death confronted him with crisis but left him with not a diminished but an increased sense of self-worth and dedication to his poetic vocation. By using his writing to resurrect Lycidas, and by making him “the
Genius of the shore,” Milton even goes so far as to do things with his poetry that only
God would do. Milton is not only confirming his value as a writer but is almost

Ladd 12 deifying himself, demonstrating the god-like creative and resurrecting power that he can have as poet. In this way the pastoral elegy that is “Lycidas” is much more than just a warm-up exercise along the road to epic: it is an affirmation, at a time of personal crisis in Milton’s life, that in the face of death, faith in God and poetic talent will allow him to be remembered in a very profound way, elevating him to a status far beyond that of a common person.
Exactly thirty years after the publication of “Lycidas,” Milton completed and published the penultimate work of his lifetime: the epic poem Paradise Lost. Though the circumstances of his life were vastly changed at this point, evidence of the “offtime” event of King’s death is still very much present in Milton’s writing. Paradise
Lost is replete with examples of how important death has become to the way Milton thinks of the world, himself, and his poetic profession.
In some of the first lines in the poem, Milton sets out the landscape of Hell, which is to be the setting for much of the early parts of the epic:
A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed yet from those flames
No light but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all but torture without end
Still urges and a fiery deluge fed
With ever-burning sulfur unconsumed. (Paradise 61-9)

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Of all the settings Milton uses in his epic, including the gold-paved streets of Heaven and the lush Garden of Eden, it is the grim, foreboding, utterly empty landscape of
Hell that opens the story. This is a potent reminder that the driving force of the epic is death, sin, and evil. By opening his epic in a place “where peace / and rest can never dwell, hope never comes,” Milton underscores the importance of Hell in his worldview: death and evil are major parts of life that are very real, and they color all that happens in one’s life course. It is a conscious choice to begin the epic in hell rather than with the creation of Earth, as the biblical story begins. Helen Vendler observes, “As Milton revolved within himself his own bafflement, pain, misery, and shame… [he] began to investigate Aftermath in all its forms: we can say that
Paradise Lost is in its entirety a meditation on Aftermath” (522). During most of his adult life, unlike others, Milton lived in the aftermath of death. Paradise Lost’s postbellum hellish landscape becomes for Milton the backdrop of his own experience, and the world’s chance at redemption through Christ is the same has his chance at being rescued from death through poetic remembrance. For someone whose life was overshadowed by an early personalization of death, such a choice to put death at the center of the major work of his life makes perfect sense.
Any conversation about mortality in Paradise Lost cannot be had without mention of the personified character Death in the poem. In fact, it is arguable that there is no character in the epic who is more fearsome than Death, who even Satan finds repulsive: “I know thee not nor ever saw till now / Sight more detestable than him and thee” (Paradise 744-5). More interesting than Death’s frightening nature is his relationship to Satan: they are father and son (Paradise 726-7). This sets up

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Death in direct opposition to Christ, which underscores the antagonism between the two that will ultimately resolve the conflict between God the Father and Satan.
Because of Milton’s experiences, death has become far more for him than just the end of life, it is a fully personified player in the cosmos that has as much influence over the lives of humankind as Christ does. Furthermore, only Christ is equipped to defeat Death, which underscores Milton’s assertion of God’s power over death in
“Lycidas,” mentioned above. These characterizations of Death are consistent with a psychological rendering of how one who is well past midlife thinks of dying. In his breakthrough essay on the midlife crisis, Elliot Jaques observes this phenomenon:
“Death—at the conscious level—instead of being a general conception, or an event experienced in terms of the loss of someone else, becomes a personal matter, one’s own death, one’s own real and actual mortality” (506). Milton actualizes Death to the point of making him a character in his epic, a physical player in the origin of the world. King taught Milton that death was real, personal and couldn’t be avoided, only overcome. It is this lesson that underscores Milton’s character Death, who is fearsome and seemingly indefatigable, but whose influence will ultimately be curtailed by the awesome might of the Son.
In Book 11, Adam gets his first glimpse of death when Michael shows him the murder of his son Abel (Paradise 429-46). The despair that Adam expresses when he grasps what has happened echoes some of the elegiac language of “Lycidas,” but the tension is more palpable now than in the earlier work:
O miserable mankind! To what fall
Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!

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Better end here unborn. Why is life giv’n
To thus be wrested from us? Rather why
Obtruded on us thus? Who if we knew
What we receive would either not accept
Life offered or soon beg to lay it down,
Glad to be dismissed in peace. (Paradise 500-7)
Adam’s assertions here are those of a man, Milton, whose life has been defined by the boundaries of death, beginning with his mother, Ben Jonson, and most importantly Edward King. The idea that one may rather not live at all than face death is made more poignant coming from a man whose deep thought about death began much earlier than most.
Furthermore, in this passage Adam goes through the same process, experiencing Abel’s death as Milton did experiencing King’s: Adam personalizes death. In this way, at the end of his epic, Milton draws out and evokes in his characters and readers exactly the kind of loss and despair he himself has worked through. In Not So Much a Teaching as an Intangling, Stanley Fish observes Milton’s desired effect: “Milton’s method is to re-create in the mind of the reader… the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not deceived’” (542). Nowhere does Adam exhibit this “troubled clarity” more than in the above passage, when he wrestles with death.
Having had an off-time personalization of death, Milton is uniquely equipped to evoke these same feelings in his readers. This passage of Paradise Lost was

Ladd 16 intentionally designed to give the reader the same experience Milton had at King’s death.
The source of emotional impact in any work is difficult to pinpoint. In the case of Milton, the reflective and sometimes self-aggrandizing nature of his work gives us unique insight into his process and intentions. In “Lycidas” a 29-year-old man wrestles with a fully realized concept of earlier than he or anyone else expected, all because of the untimely death of a classmate, Edward King. “Lycidas” is an extraordinary poem, but none would expect that the themes expressed therein would follow Milton for the rest of his life and poetic career. But follow him they did, and the same emotions, of desolation in the face of death, of hope in God for eternal life, and of unabashed surety that the life and work of poets live on after their deaths, carries through Milton’s writing all the way up to Paradise Lost. This phenomenon extends far beyond grief: Milton intensely wrestles with his own mortality, with how he will make an impact and be remembered. Likewise, it extends far beyond mere contemplation of death: in order to resolve his issues with his own mortality, Milton must gather his thoughts about the function of poetry and the metaphysical underpinnings of the world. We see this issue of personalized death at play from all angles in both poems. Milton stresses his similarity to King as he wrings his hands about the implications of that similarity. He confronts both
Classical and Christian ideas of how a poet can and can’t achieve fame while indicating that he has every intention of achieving it regardless. He finds comfort in his Puritan worldview and the supremacy of God while elevating Lycidas, and by association himself and poets in general with the divine. He begins his epic not in

Ladd 17 heroic and bright Heaven or heavenly Eden, but in the despair-filled and hopeless
Hell. He personifies Death, making him the most fearsome character in the epic and putting him in direct opposition to Christ. Milton even uses the character of Adam and the death of Abel to imbue in the reader the same personalization that he experienced so many years before. In short, Milton embraced complexity and thoughtfulness about death in the writing of “Lycidas” in a way that he never had before, but he carried those thoughts with him all his life, to Paradise Lost and beyond.

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Works Cited
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Modern Philology 95.4 (1998): 463-483. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16
Nov. 2008.
Dawes, Martin. “An Orphic Lament for Orphic Lament: ‘Lycidas’ and the Persistance of Orphic Desire.” Milton Quarterly 38.3 (2004): 188-198. Academic Search
Complete. Web. 16 Nov. 2008.
Hodgson, Elizabeth M.A. "Mourning Eve, Mourning Milton in Paradise Lost.” Early
Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 16 Nov. 2008.
Fish, Stanley. “From Not So Much a Teaching as an Intangling.” Teskey 542-5.
Jaques, Elliott. “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis.” The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 46 (1965): 502-514. Print.
Johnson, Samuel. “Life of Milton.” A Johnson Reader. Ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. and
George Milne. New York: Random, 1964. 360-426. Print.
Milton, John. “Lycidas.” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y.
Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. 120-125. Print.
---. Paradise Lost: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton,
2005. Print.
Neugarten, Bernice L. and Nancy Datan. “The Middle Years.” The Meanings of Age:
Selected Papers of Bernice L. Neugarten. Ed. Dail A. Neugarten. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1996. 135-159. Print.
Vendler, Helen. “From Milton’s Epic Poem.” Teskey 521-7.
Wilson, A.N. The Life of John Milton. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.