Does Milton's Lycidas rightly honor his deceased friend?Milton was unconvinced about writing a poem in the wake of Edward King's death, but the poet had no other choice. Edward King, Milton's friend at Cambridge University and fellow poet, died prematurely, drowning at sea before he could be ordained as an Anglican priest. In Lycidas, Milton is reminded of why God caused such a tragedy and is forced to question his own poetic efforts. This poem was written in 1967, three years after Comus was performed at Ludlow Castle and about six years after he wrote Sonnet 7 ("How Soon Hath Time") on the occasion of his twenty-third birthday. Even though Milton had matured as a poet in his mid-twenties, he still felt he was not ready to praise King. In the lines “Bitter compulsion, and sad dear occasion / Compels me to disturb thy due season” (Lycidas 6-7), Milton is speaking to the laurel tree from which he is plucking berries before they are ripe. This is a metaphor both for how Lycidas – the name given by Milton to the king in the poem – died too young and for Milton having to deal with a serious subject before his poetic potential has fully blossomed, a sentiment expressed in Sonnet 7 : “That I may become manly” I have come so close,/And inner maturity appears far less” (Sonnet 7 6-7). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Lycidas also addresses topics of virtue and ways of God that the Lady's brothers discussed in Comus. While the Elder Brother states that virtue is always rewarded, and “if it fails,/The colonnaded firmament is rot,/And the foundation of the earth built on stubble” (Comus 597-599), Milton questions the validity of a unshakable justice. He evokes mythological characters and wonders why they didn't intervene to save King. “Where were you nymphs when the merciless abyss / closed over the head of your beloved Lycidas?” (Lycidas 50-51), Milton wonders, but then admits that it is foolish to expect that the nymphs could have helped her, since not even “the very Muse that Orpheus bore” (58) could save her son. . Milton tries to blame “the herald of the sea” (89) for letting King drown, but Triton is actually just as desperate to understand the tragedy as Milton: “He asked the waves, and he asked the criminal winds/'What hard Has accident doomed this gentle suitor?'” (91-92). Ultimately, Milton cannot know why God let his friend die so soon, but that does not stop him from challenging himself and the Church with theodicies throughout his career in order to rationalize a virtuous life. Lycidas has been heralded as one of the greatest poems in the English language. Yet Samuel Johnson, an 18th-century literary critic, accused Lycidas of what he considered a lack of passion, “for passion does not run after remote allusions and obscure opinions” (Johnson). While Johnson's criticism has merit, denouncing Milton's pastoral elegy as unsuited to the occasion seems extremely harsh and limiting. Milton knew King very well and, no doubt, felt pain when he died. If Milton had composed a seemingly more personal and emotional poem, devoid of mythological references and digressive criticisms of the corrupt English clergy through metaphor, - a poem that Johnson would have approved - some might still have criticized his work as equally unsuitable, since poetry can only express emotion to a certain extent, and time spent writing poetry is time in which one is not purely grieving. Approaching Lycidas from Johnson's perspective, 239)..