Quotes from work
Lycidas

John Milton

"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, friend of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed. While many of the other poems in the compilation are in Greek and Latin, "Lycidas" is one of the poems written in English. Milton republished the poem in 1645.

“Without the meed of some melodious tear.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 14

“Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 156

“He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 10

“Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 163

“For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed;
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 166

“Blind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 119

“Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freakt with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attir'd woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 139

“It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 100

“Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 78

“Last came, and last did go,
The Pilot of the Galilean lake;
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 108

“Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 1

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 123

“Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield; and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 26

“Alas! what boots it with incessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera'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' abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.”

John Milton Lycidas

Source: Lycidas (1637), Line 64; comparable to: "Erant quibus appetentior famæ videretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur" (Translated: "Some might consider him as too fond of fame, for the desire of glory clings even to the best of men longer than any other passion"), Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 6; said of Helvidius Priscus.