“The Dread Voice is Past”: Death and Guilt in Milton's Lycidas

If we are fortunate enough to know something of an author's life, we may begin to unravel how a literary work came to be created. Indeed, we may come to see another world, as it were coexisting, almost transparently, as if in another plane and another time, with that presented in the text before us. Milton's beautiful poem on death, Lycidas, is one that takes on this extra dimension when we examine his early life in the context of what is known today about the effect of early traumatic losses.1 Rather than reducing a poem to a few dry facts about its creator, our knowledge of Milton's life ultimately enlarges our appreciation of his work. Because we see an almost invisible world glimmering beyond the text, we are even more touched by the poignance of those shadowy figures who played on in Milton's unconscious, to guide his hand in later life, when seemingly he wrote of other things, such as Edward King, who is, I believe, only the nominal subject of Lycidas.2

The formative years of John Milton, who lived from 1608-1674, were punctuated by many significant deaths. According to his most reliable biographer, W. R. Parker (Vol.  1, pp.  7-8,  149,  154-55), the poet was two years old in 1610 when his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Ellen Jeffrey, who lived with the family, died. When Milton was three, his baby sister, Sara, named for his mother, was buried. When Milton was seven, his infant sister Tabitha, died.

Then, in 1638, seven months after the death of his mother, when the poet was 30, Lycidas was published. In the grieving process for his mother, it is very likely that the earlier unresolved deaths from childhood were reawakened, so that rather than Edward King's