Use of Conceits in Donne's Poetry

Clearly the seventeenth century had the courage of its metaphors and they made them the organic parts of its staple, imposed them on the nearest and the farthest things with equal vigour as clearly as the nineteenth century lacked this courage and was half-heartedly metaphorical or content with similes. The difference between the literary qualities of the two periods is not the difference in degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the Age of Donne, Crashaw, Lord Herbert and the time of Tennyson and Browning. It is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are the poets who think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.

A thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is equipped perfectly for its work, it is constantly amalgamating the disparate experiences. The ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, fragmentary and irregular. The latter cooks something or reads about cooking, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of the rose. In the mind of the poet, these experiences are always forming new wholes. Donne had this unique genius, which T.S. Eliot calls ‘unification of sensibility’.

The metaphysical poetry abounds in conceits. A conceit is a far-fetched comparison, a comparison between dissimilar things, a comparison between objects which have little in common with each other. Dr. Johnson called it “the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”. A conceit may be brief or it may be elaborate. The conceits used by Donne are learned. They are drawn from a wide range of subjects such as science exploration, medieval philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and others. Conceits impart an intellectual tone to the poetry. The intellectual conceits add weight and illustrate the feeling giving rise to the impression of ‘unification of sensibility’. Ransom states, “To define a conceit is to define a small-scale metaphysical poetry.” A conceit is actually a comparison, whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, that is, when two things which appear to be completely different from one another, are stated to be similar that one can be used to explain and analyze the other. Helen Gardener says, “A brief comparison can be a conceit, if two things patently unlike or which we should never think of together, are shown to be alike in single point in such a way or in such a context that we feel their incongruity.” Here a conceit is like a spark made by striking two stones together. After the flash the stones are just two stones.

Conceits in Donne’s poetry are not a piece of decoration, they are functional. They are used to persuade, define, illustrate or prove a point. A poem has something to say which the conceit explicates, or something to urge which the conceit helps to forward. They are the most effective vehicles of Donne’s mode of perception. Their farfetchedness adds a touch of miraculous to his poetry. In the words of Joan Bennett, “The purpose of an image in Donne’s poetry is to diffuse the emotional experience by an intellectual parallel.”

Another significant aspect of Donne’s metaphysical conceit is that it cannot be isolated from its context, the whole poem. Like the conceits of Shakespeare, Donne’s are born of the given dramatic movement to illustrate the relationship of characters and relationships of ideas. The conceits of Donne have an organic growth and proliferation, receiving sustenance from the intensity and complexity of the given experience. That is why even though far-fetched, they have an astonishing clarity.

It remains to be seen how Donne rushes from one intellectual hyperbole to another, including as a habit, a vivid range of speculation within a single example. In ‘The Canonization’ the two lovers moving round each other like flies or consuming themselves like tapers; or the images of the eagle and dove – the violent preying on the weak, and ultimately the riddle of the phoenix indicate the whole process of love from courtship to consummation of love. Because of sheer force of love ‘they die and rise the same’. The poem then leads to the lovers being regarded as the martyrs; saints of love will make them model of love.

To express the comprehensive nature of love, Donne makes a scintillating use of Elizabethan circle imagery and encompasses infinitude harmony like the two concentric spheres of the Ptolemic universe. Such an idea underlies the beautiful ‘A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning’. He argues and gives a proof by analogy in the most famous conceit of “the two legs of a compass”. Donne’s beloved is the fixed foot around which he moves and hence persuades his wife or beloved not to mourn.

In the poem ‘Good Morrow’ the two lovers are compared to two hemispheres which unite to form an ideal and a better world than the two hemispheres of the earth itself. They are ‘without sharp north, without declining west’. This perfect and ideal union they achieve through the eyes of each other. The sharp North implies coldness and indifference to which their love is not subject and declining West symbolizes decay and death from which lovers are free.

In ‘Batter my Heart’ Donne compares himself to a usurped town. At the same time there is an image drawn from the purification of metal, by knocking, blowing and shining it. He has referred to God as a tinker (a mender of old pots). The third conceit he uses is the portrayal of man-God relationship through lover-beloved relationship. In this poem that poet addresses God in His three-fold capacity as Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. He calls the Reasoning faculty, the Viceroy of God. In ‘The Extasie’ the souls of the lovers are compared to two equal armies confronting and negotiating with each other. Again love without an outlet in physical expression is like a Prince languishing in prison says Donne. In ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’, unconventional imagery is used to convey the view that there is no woman in the world who is both beautiful and true.

In ‘The Flea’, the flea is a symbol of the poet’s passionate plea for physical and sensuous love. Donne compares the flea to a temple and to a marriage bed. Just as the two lovers are united in the temple into a bond of marriage, so the two bloods have been united in the body of flea. Its body is a sacred temple where their marriage has taken place. The killing of the flea would be an act of triple murder – murder of the flea, murder of the lover and her own murder. This is a sin and so she must spare the flea.

In ‘The Sunne Rising’, there is the same outburst of pride in his discovery of a new world richer than any of the Elizabethan voyagers since it is ‘both the India’s spice and Myne’. The last stanza begins with Donne’s favourite antithesis: the nullity of worldly riches as contrasted with the wealth of love. This idea links naturally with the circle imagery so that the lyric ends with the thought of the eternal union of two hemispheres, which are perfect, infinite and indestructible – like the world of love.

In the poem ‘A Valediction of Weeping’, Donne employs images from a variety of sources. The lover’s tears are like precious coins because they bear the stamp of the beloved (an image drawn from mintage). The tears are ‘pregnant of thee’ – a complex image, conveying the impression of the beloved’s reflection in the drop of tear. In ‘Good Friday’ the soul is compared to a sphere, and Donne treats the metaphor elaborately. Planetary motions are brought into the poem to illustrate feelings.

Donne has made a remarkable use of conceits in his poems. His conceits are learned, which are drawn from a wide range of subjects. His conceits impart intellectual tone to his poetry. They are not decorative but functional. They are used to illustrate or to convince. They cannot be isolated.

Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

Samuel Johnson’s Preface to 'The Plays of William Shakespeare’ is a classical document of literary criticism. It is proof enough of the qualities of lucidity, energy and individuality on the part of Johnson, who has presented before us an impartial and objective judgment of Shakespeare. He has excelled his guru, Dryden in superbly defending the tragi-comedy.
In the Preface, Johnson has enumerated the faults of Shakespeare about which Raleigh writes, “The detailed analysis of the faults is a fine piece of criticism and has never been seriously challenged.”
The first thing that needs to be observed is why the obscurities have crept into the writings of Shakespeare. The reasons are – careless manner of publication; use of colloquial English; use of many allusions, references etc. to topical events and personalities; rapid flow of ideas that often hurries him to move to the second thought before the first one is fully elaborated. Johnson in writing this Preface has performed the service to Shakespeare in making obscurities and confusing clearly understandable.
The faults of Shakespeare as elaborated by Johnson are:
• There is a lack of propriety as the jests are gross and the pleasantries licentious.

• Shakespeare sacrifices virtue to convenience. He makes no just distribution of good and evil.

• The tragi-comedies (neither comedies nor tragedies) are not in accordance with the rules. Moreover, some plots are loosely constructed and have improbable endings.

• Then there is lack of poetic justice especially in tragedies. The major figures suffer more that they deserve – the punishment inflicted on them is disproportionate to their sins.

• There are instances of Shakespeare’s violation of chronology (called anachronisms).

• As regards the faults in tragedies, Johnson was of the opinion that the display of passion which urgency forces out are for the most part striking and energetic but when he tries his own inventions the result is humour, meanness and obscurity.

• The fault in comedies is that Shakespeare is commonly gross in his jests. Neither his gentleman nor ladies possess any delicacy. They are not sufficiently distinguished from Shakespeare’s clowns by the possession of refined manners.

• Dr. Johnson is of the opinion, “In narration he affects disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few.”

• Shakespeare has also been blamed by Johnson for not following the unities of time and place. At this point, Johnson also presents his defense of Shakespeare for failing to observe the unities. “The unities of time and place are always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction”, says Johnson, although unity of action must be maintained. Johnson actually in refuting the unities of time and place gives up his neo-classical garb and becomes a liberal critic in this regard. He justifies this by saying that the audience knows that it is only a stage and the players are mere actors and not for a moment do they believe what they are seeing is literally true. Even if they do for a moment they can easily imagine a little more – they can imagine the stage as different places.

Talking of his historical approach to literature Johnson pointed out the limitation under which Shakespeare worked, saying that Shakespeare wrote for uncultured audience and therefore his plays are full of exciting incidents and shows. His (Shakespeare’s) plots borrowed from novels – he chose the most popular, read by many. Johnson was of the view that literature is not written according to a fixed pattern but is conditioned by a writer’s age and environment.

Note: The opinions expressed here are only as expressed in Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare. I myself am a great admirer of Shakespeare's works. But we have to be objective sometimes for being true to the genre of literary criticism and take into consideration all the aspects.

Aristotle's 'Poetics' - Concept of Pity and Fear

Aristotle defines tragedy as “an imitation of action … it arouses pity and fear.” The audience becomes aware of the fact that catastrophe in a tragedy, that is, the death of the hero arouses pity and fear.  The words ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ cannot be reduced to one level of meaning. It was Aristotle who for the first time used the term ‘catharsis’ to mean the emotional cleansing – the release of the pent up overwhelming emotions of pity and fear. F.L. Lucas points out that catharsis is a medical metaphor. The end and the purpose of tragedy is purgation. In the obvious sense of the word, purgation comes to mean that some medicine is applied to the patient so that he may be purged off the superfluity of physical abnormalities which are lying in his body. In other words, purging off means complete elimination. Once something is eliminated, it will not occur again. Certainly Aristotle does not have such idea but he can point that his purpose was the purification of emotional morbidity so that audience may be able to regain its equivalent.

On the other hand, Humphrey House points out that the hero suffers from some flaw and the audience witnesses this. The scene of the suffering arouses a sense of pity. The persons in the audience feel that a similar fate may not overtake them. The main emphasis is on identification and the pathetic scene of the hero may arouse pity and fear but it is the objective centre of the subjective state of the audience. We can simplify this to self-pity. Similarly, the fear for the lot of the hero is the fear our own lot. Aristotle has also given his formula of means which refer to follow the middle path. The tragedy is intended to restore the means. In our day to day life, we find that the emotions of human beings have been inordinately charged. They may upset his nervous system. The scene of tragedy provides an opportunity to the audience to regain mental and emotional equilibrium. Hamlet suffers for no fault of his own. He becomes a victim of Claudius, Polonious and his mother. The entire society in which he is living is hostile, where he suffers and dies in the end. We can say that after observing the suffering of Hamlet on the stage, there is purification of emotional and mental state of the audience. Freud has termed this as the concept of ‘tragic pleasure’. It is labeled as ‘sadism’.

According to this viewpoint, when someone inflicts pain on others, he feels happy. The Freudian concept of sadism is true of certain human beings whose desires have not been fulfilled but this is not the whole truth. Many critics have given their own viewpoints regarding the concept of pity and fear but they do not give total explanation. In the modern age, pity and fear are treated as inferior feeling. Sydney points out that the tragedy should compel the admiration. When Tess is hanged at the end of the novel we feel a tragic haste. She could not be saved because of the ethical standards which were popular those days. When Hamlet dies, we feel “what a noble soul is overthrown.” Pity and fear have a therapeutic effect on the audience.

In Oedipus, the audience shows sympathy with Oedipus when he blinds himself with garden brooches. Though it was pre-ordained that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. The audience sees it on the stage and feels the pleasure but when the truth is revealed to him that he is the killer of his father the things become different. The audience feels pity for him. In ‘Dr. Faustus’, Dr. Faustus is without any job though he is well-read, he wants to enjoy life because he is fed up with his learning but he gives way to necromancy (which means communication with the dead). The audience feels involved and enjoys each act of Dr. Faustus, may be his slapping the Pope, his selling of the horse, his bringing of grapes, the presenting of Alexander and his paramour. But situation becomes pathetic at the end of the play when the bond comes to a close like the closure of his life. He repents and audience feels pity for him.

The identification of the suffering that the tragic hero undergoes reminds the audience immediately of their own, thinking that they may not face such a situation. If the emotions do not get outlet, man may turn neurotic. So the concept of pity and fear provides a sort of balance for the psyche of the individual.

Expressionism

Expressionism is an anti-realistic mode of artistic expression that flourished in Germany from about 1910 through the 1920’s. The German Expressionist painters employed expressive devices – like sharply angular lines unknown in nature and objects endowed with unnatural colour – in an attempt to suggest a new perception of reality.
German expressionist dramatists such as Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and the early Bertolt Brecht, inspired by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, avoided depictions of individualized characters in realistic settings. Strindberg’s ‘Dream Play’ with its fragmented, stylized action and its flowering castle, had shown the way to a new theatrical symbolism.
In general, the Expressionists rejected the imitation of external reality in order to express either a private, inner vision or a wider political one of a world often depicted as bizarre and violent.
In American drama, some of Eugene O’ Neill’s plays, particularly ‘The Emperor Jones’ (1920), ‘The Hairy Ape’ (1922) and ‘The Great God Brown’ (1926), with its use of masks, were influenced by Expressionism in their departures from certain realistic conventions of drama.
The term Expressionism is problematic since it can be used to describe virtually any of the deliberate distortions or departures from reality that pervade modern literature and art. Thus, the fragmentary construction of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, the symbolic metamorphoses of characters in Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Kafka’s ‘Metamorphis’ can be regarded as examples of Expressionism, but such an imprecise designation embracing so many disparate works, casts doubt on its usefulness as a literary description.

'Impressionism' in Literature

The term ‘Impressionism’ comes from the school of mid-nineteenth century French painting, which was in reaction to the academic style of the day. The Impressionists, as they called themselves, made the act of perception the key for the understanding of the structure of reality. They developed a technique by which objects were not seen as solids but as fragments of colour which the spectator’s eye unified. The basic premise involved was that “truth” lay in the mental processes, not in the precise representation of external reality.
The literary use of the term ‘Impressionism’ is, however, far less precise. Many of the French Symbolist poets have at one time or another been called Impressionists. In England, Walter Pater, concerned with aesthetic matters, used the term ‘impressionism’ in ‘The Renaissance’ (1873) to indicate that the critic must first examine his own reactions in judging a work of art. Arthur Symons felt that the Impressionist in verse should record his sensitivity to experience, not the experience itself; he should express the inexpressible. In Wilde’s ‘Impression du Matin’, perhaps influenced by Whistler’s painting, the Impressionist technique is apparent in the subjectivity of description.
In the modern novel, ‘Impressionism frequently refers to the technique of centering on the mental life of the chief character rather than on the chief character rather than on the reality around him. Writers such as Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf dwell on their character’s memories, associations, and inner emotional reactions. In ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, for example, Joyce presents Stephen Dedalus’ unarticulated feelings but little of physical surroundings.

'Religion and Literature' - T.S. Eliot

The essay ‘Religion and Literature’ written by T.S. Eliot can be viewed as a reaction against the tradition of viewing a literary work from purely aesthetic point of view. Many critics, especially the New Critics, believed that literature is not to be valued for its ethical and theological significance. But T.S. Eliot held the opinion that only literary criticism was not sufficient. After a literary work has been viewed as a work of imagination, it should also be considered from ethical and theological point of view. It is all the more important in our age when there is no agreement on ethical and theological values. For ascertaining the greatness of a literary work, that work of imagination should be appreciated from ethical and theological angles.
Although literature has been judged from moral standards, yet it has been believed for a long time that there is no relationship between religion and literature. T.S. Eliot believes that there is and should be a relationship between the two. In his essay ‘Religion and Literature’ he has discussed the application of religion to literary criticism. According to Eliot the essay is not about religious literature, but he as a degression, mentions three types of religious literature. First, is the religious literature, which has literary qualities in it. For instance, the authorized version of the Bible or the works of Jeremy Taylor. Those persons, who describe Bible only as a literary work and talk of its influence on English literature, have been referred to as ‘parasites’. According to Eliot, Bible is to be considered as ‘word of God’. Secondly, he mentions devotional poetry. A devotional poet he says is not the one who treats the subject matter in the religious spirit, but the one who treats a part of the subject matter. Eliot considers poets like Spencer, Hopkins, Vaughan and Southwell as minor poets while Dante, Corneille and Racine as major poets. Thirdly, he states, are the works of authors who want to forward the cause of religion. These types of works come under propaganda, for instance, Chesterton’s ‘Man who was Thursday’ and ‘Father Brown’.
Eliot laments over the irrationality behind the separation of our literary and religious judgment. Exemplifying literature by the way of novel (as it has the effect upon the greatest numbers), he says this secularization has been a gradual process for the last three hundred years. Since Defoe the process has been continuous. The process can be divided into three phases. In the first phase fall the novels in which Faith is taken for granted and omitted from its picture of life. The author belonging to this phase are: Fielding and Thackeray. In the second phase novels, Faith is doubted, worried about and contested. It includes authors like George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. The third phase is the age in which we are living and authors included are all contemporary novelists except James Joyce.
This secularization is evident in the way a reader reads a novel – without caring for the effect it has upon one’s behavior. The common factor between religion and literature is behavior. Our religion imposes upon us ethics, judgment and criticism of ourselves, and our behavior with our fellow men. Literature too has an effect on our behavior. Whatever the intentions of the author, his works affect us wholly as human beings. Even if we read a literary work purely for aesthetic purposes (keeping our ethics and morality in a separate compartment), it affects us as human beings, whether we intend it or not.
Modern readers have lost their religious values. They don’t have the wisdom to be able to obtain knowledge of life, comparing one view against the other. Moreover, the knowledge of life that we obtain from fiction is not of life itself but is knowledge of other people’s knowledge of life. What adds to the problem is that there are too many books and the reader is confused. Only modern writers of eminence have an improving effect, otherwise the contemporary writers have an effect that is degrading. The reader must keep in mind two things – ‘what we like’, that is, what we really feel; and ‘what we ought to like’, that is, understanding our shortcomings. As honest men we must not assume that what we like is what we ought to like; and as honest Christians we should assume that we do like what we ought to like.
Eliot is mainly concerned with secularization of literature. It does not concern itself with things of spirit. It is simply oblivious or ignorant of the primacy of the supernatural over the natural world. Most of the books are written by people who have no real belief in supernatural order. Moreover, they are ignorant of the fact that the world has still many believers. It is the duty of the Christians to use certain standards in addition to those used by the rest of the world. If a Christian is conscious of the gulf between him and contemporary literature, he won’t be harmed by it.
Majority of the people consider economic ills as cause of all the problems and call for drastic economic changes, while others want more or less drastic social changes. Both types of changes are opposed to each other but a common point is that they hold the assumption of secularization. Some want the individual to subordinate his interests to those of the state. But Eliot does not agree with these people. Eliot does not complain about modern literature because it is immoral or even amoral but because it instigates people to try out every kind of experience and not to stay back or miss any. A Christian reader should add to the literary criticism followed by the rest of the world. He should, in addition, apply ethical and theological standards to it.

Thomas Carlyle - 'The Grand Old Man of Victorian Literature'

A Painting of Thomas Carlyle (www.paintingall.com)

Thomas Carlyle, famous for his ‘Sartor Resartus’, ‘The French Revolution, a History’, ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’, was a Scottish essayist, satirist and historian. Born on December 4, 1795, he was highly influential as a writer in the Victorian age.
David Gascoyne, a British poet, analyses in detail the writings of Carlyle in his book ‘Thomas Carlyle’ published in 1952, decades after the death of Carlyle in 1881. Gascoyne has called him as the “grand old man of Victorian literature”.

According to Gascoyne, "Thomas Carlyle was one of the sternest critics of the nineteenth century's special pride, the rise and progress of Democracy, yet he himself was one of the most striking examples of a kind of triumph which is thought to be one of Democracy's chief justifications."
In his book , ‘Chartism’ Carlyle expressed his views strongly on the topic of education in Britain:
“To impart the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in that case think: this, one would imagine, was the first function a government had to set about discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an empire the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs, each strong man with his right arm lamed? How much crueler to find the strong soul, with its eyes still sealed, its eyes extinct so that it sees not! Light has come in to the world, but to this poor peasant it has come in vain. “
As far as his writings are concerned, Gascoyne places Carlyle between Soren Kierkegaard on the one hand and Walt Whitman on the other. He is of the opinion that both Carlyle and Kierkegaard were poets who wrote in prose.
Gascoyne concludes his book by categorically stating that “Carlyle cannot be claimed by the Left or by the Right. He was too faithful to the vision of ‘the Divine Idea of the World’ to be a partisan of any hard-and-fast ideology; more that heroism, he worshipped the Objective. This briefest of introductions to his writings to his writings has not attempted to give any idea of ‘The French Revolution’ or to do justice to Carlyle’s conception of History and the art of the Historian. Social and Literary Historians in general cannot yet be said to have done this fully either.”

For detailed study visit: Thomas Carlyle (Writers and their Works: No. 23)

The Concept of 'Myth' in Literature

The word ‘myth’ is derived from the Greek word ‘mythos’, which means a traditional tale common to the member of a tribe, race or nation. It usually involves the supernatural elements to explain some natural phenomenon in boldly imaginative terms. Today myth has become one of the most prominent terms in contemporary literature analysis. It was Northrop Frye, one of the most influential myth critics (others including Robert Graves, Francis Fersusson, Richard Chase, Philip Wheelwright), who discovered certain formulas in the word order. He identified these formulas as the “conventional myths and metaphors” which he calls "archetypes". C.G. Jung was of the view the materials of the myth lie in the collective unconscious of the race.
Writers have always been attracted towards the elements of remoteness, mystery and the heroism of myth. But the application of the term ‘myth’ is very wide as there is a large variety of applications in contemporary criticism. We also need to understand the difference between myth, legend and folktale. M.H. Abrams has clearly defined all of these. “If the protagonist is a man rather thatn a supernatural being, the story is usually not called myth but legend; if the story concerns supernatural beings, but is not part of a systematic mythology, it is usually classified as a folktale.” As mentioned earlier a myth is characterized by the supernatural elements.
D.H. Lawrence made use of the myth in his ‘The Plumed Serpeant’, Melville in ‘Moby Dick’. William Blake created a mythology of his own. He was inspired by John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise Regained’, to name only a few of the sources.

Archetypes and Milton's 'Lycidas'

The term 'archetype' has been frequently used in literary criticism. But it was especially used since the publication of Maud Bodkin's 'Archetypal Patterns in Poetry' (1934). The word 'archetype' has been derived from the Greek 'arche' meaning 'original' or 'primitive' and 'typos' meaning 'form'.

The term was employed by C.G. Jung (the psychoanalyst). It has been used by the New Critics since 1930s to refer to a specific pattern fo plot or character which gives rise to what Jung calls a “racial pattern”. Generally in criticism ‘archetype’ is applied to narrative patterns, type of character or images, which are common to a variety of literary works, myths or dreams. The followers of archetypal criticism are Maud Bodkin, G.Wilson Knight, Robert Graves, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, Philip Wheelwright.

In this post I am only going to talk about the archetypes in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ is an elegy in the pastoral convention. It has been written n commemoration of Edward King, who died having drowned in the sea. In this poem, Lycidas is not an individual but an archetype. He is an archetype of Edward King. Although the use of a flower in poetry is not an archetype, yet the ‘sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe’ is one. This is so because of the tradition of associating a red or purple flower with the death of a young man.

In addition to it, Lycidas is not only the representation of Edward King, he is based on the same conventional form of Shelley’s Adonais, Daphnis of Theocritus and Virgil, and Milton’s own Damon. Then there are archetypes of the King as a poet and as a priest, Orpheus and Peter respectively. Further, there is the image of a dolphin, a conventional type of Christ.Milton’s Lycidas has been dealt in detail by Northrop Frye in his essay ‘Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas’.