‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ sounds like St. Peter, the good bishop; but again we can read other things into it. If you object to bishops, the pilot can be the good pastor, the preacher, Jesus Christ even:4 there is only one identification – the Pope – that we are clearly not intended to make.
We have then to pick up clues as we read. In 1638 Lycidas lacked the full introductory note which alerts modern readers. The words ‘and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height’ could not be added until Lycidas was reprinted in 1645, after the fall of the bishops. The geographical references
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount [St. Michael’s Mount]
Looks towards Namancos and Bayonna’s hold
have a patriotic and anti-Spanish connotation which would not be missed by readers in 1638, when the government was on friendlier terms with Spain than with the Protestant Netherlands. The line
Look homeward Angel now and melt with ruth,
has been described as ‘a cry to St. Michael to look at the state of England’.1 It has even been suggested that the famous close of the poem,
At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new,
may refer to the fact that blue was the colour of the Scottish Covenanters, already in revolt against Charles I by November 1637 when Milton wrote.2
And then there is that ‘two-handed engine at the door’, which ‘stands ready to smite once and smite no more’. Critics who complain of Milton’s obscurity here forget the censorship. He could hardly say in plain terms either that Laud should be impeached (if the engine equals the two Houses of Parliament); or executed (if it is an axe, or Michael’s two-handed sword (P.L. VI. 250–1), or a two-handed sceptre, or the ‘twa-handed sweard’ given to John Knox by the martyr George Wishart (the Scottish emphasis again); or called to account by the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. The two-handed weapon might also be the Old and New Testaments, or the law and the gospel, or ‘the sword of his mouth’ (Revelation 1:16 2:10) or a shepherd’s rod and crook – all various ways of describing the Protestant preaching which Laud was thought to be trying to suppress.3 (But then why ‘smite once and smite no more’? Preaching is surely a cumulative activity?) The whole beauty of the pastoral mode, under a strict censorship, was that meanings could be multiple, slippery, conveying an attitude rather than a precise statement. It was an art of which Milton was to become a master.
Two things about this memorial poem to a clergyman are especially remarkable. First, its fierce anti-clericalism and its covert hostility to the state church.
That fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th’eclipse and rigged with curses dark
has plausibly been identified with the Laudian church.4 In Comus the true church of the faithful, though tempted in the wilderness, had the inner resources which enabled it to survive. But in Lycidas there is no hope for the visible church in England. Individual souls, like Lycidas, may be saved when the ship founders; but the institution is doomed. This might be the attitude of a radical sectary rather than that of the relatively moderate Puritan that Milton is assumed to have been until the mid-forties. So indeed might Comus’s reference to ‘the canon laws of our foundation’, added to the text in 1637 (line 807). Milton’s later virulent hatred for the clergy is anticipated in his passionate denunciation of ‘hirelings’ who are in the ministry for what they can get out of it, as contrasted with the true pastor:
such as for their bellies’ sake
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold.
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest,
Blind mouths!
(Lycidas. 114–19)1
A second point to note is the rather perfunctory part that the consolations of immortality play in the poem (lines 165–81). The forthcoming vengeance on the Church of England and its unworthy pastors interests Milton far more. The poem ends, as so many of Milton’s greatest poems will, by reminding us that life on earth goes on. He was always more concerned with this world than the next.2 Lycidas was published in 1638 only over the initials J.M.; Milton owned it for the first time in 1645. By then times had changed.
Although I desired also to cross [from Italy, in 1639] to Sicily and Greece, the said tidings of civil war from England summoned me back. For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind while my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty.
Milton, Second Defence of the English People (1654), C.P.W., IV, p. 619
The fifteen months of Milton’s Italian journey are of crucial importance in his intellectual development. But again we have to guess at their precise significance. Milton’s route was wholly conventional: the only unusual thing about his tour was his enthusiastic and flattering reception by intellectuals of the academies in the Italian towns which he visited.1 We have no certain answer to the perplexing question of why this thirty-year-old middle-class Englishman, with virtually no publication to his credit in English or Latin, was received so ecstatically. Milton prepared very carefully for his tour. He obtained an introduction to Sir Henry Wotton doyen of British diplomats, either through Henry Lawes, with whom Milton had collaborated in Comus, or through the Diodatis.2 Wotton gave him introductions to the English embassy in Paris, and doubtless others.
Wotton had been thrice Ambassador to Venice. In the course of his efforts to win Paolo Sarpi’s republic for the Protestant cause he must have worked with Giovanni Diodati, and have made contacts with other liberal elements in Italy, as well as earning the hostility of Spain. Wotton was a keen Baconian. He knew and admired Galileo, whom Sarpi protected and whom Milton visited in Florence. Wotton’s liberalism extended to friendship with Isaac Dorislaus, the history lecturer who to Milton’s indignation had been hounded out of Cambridge by the Laudians for his radical political attitudes. Dorislaus subsequently helped to prepare and manage the trial of Charles I, and was assassinated by Royalists when he was Ambassador of the English republic in the Netherlands.1
In Paris Lord Scudamore gave Milton recommendations to English merchants in Italy. But the poet’s most important introductions probably came through the Diodatis. Thanks to Charles he must have known the English branch of the family well. In Paris he made contact with Charles’s cousin Élie, who was a translator and regular correspondent of Galileo, to whom he may well have given Milton an introduction. Élie moved in intellectual circles in Paris, acting as go-between to Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Gassendi, whose close friend Élie was; he also knew Samuel de Sorbière, Gabriel Naudé and Guy Patin, and was friendly with Peiresc and Campanella. But Milton could have been introduced to Galileo by the friend he made in Florence, Carlo Dati, a former pupil of Galileo’s. The great astronomer is
