Lycidas

Lycidas

John Milton

1637

In the poem, written as eulogy for a friend who was a sailor. In the poem, Poseidon blames not his ocean but the faulty human tools that failed to navigate it: “It was that fatal and perfidious Bark⁄ Built in th’eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark,⁄ That sunk so low that sacred head of thine’ (100–2). Steve Mentz states in his paper Toward a Blue Culture Studies: The emphasis here is on the ship as hubristic technology, its rigging no match for the alien world of the sea. The oceans thus figure the boundaries of human transgression; they function symbolically as places in the world into which mortal bodies cannot safely go.

Brooke Angel

Lycidas. Milton, John. 1631. Retrieved from https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/text.shtml

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Poem