In John Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” the speaker mourns the death of Edward King. Milton wrote the pastoral elegy after King, a fellow student at Cambridge University, drowned in 1637.
King had studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and was preparing for a career in the Church of England. His ship sank in the Irish Sea while he was traveling from England to Ireland. Milton and other Cambridge writers contributed poems to a memorial volume, and Milton’s contribution was “Lycidas.”
The poem gives King the pastoral name Lycidas, following the classical tradition of representing deceased figures as shepherds. It combines personal grief with reflections on poetic fame, religious vocation, corruption in the church, and Christian consolation.
A frequent mistake is to identify Lycidas as a mythological figure from classical poetry. In Milton’s poem, the name is a literary disguise for King. The work was published in 1638 in “Justa Edouardo King Naufrago,” a collection commemorating the dead student.