SOURCE: “Literature as Context: Milton's Lycidas,” in The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, edited by Bryan Loughrey, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984, pp. 205-15.

In the following excerpt, originally delivered as a lecture in 1958 and published in 20th Century Literary Criticism in 1972, Frye discusses John Milton's Lycidas as a pastoral elegy, noting the four creative principles of convention, genre, archetype, and autonomous form that Milton uses in its composition. The critic also elucidates the poem's classical and Christian mythic dimensions.

… Lycidas … is an elegy in the pastoral convention, written to commemorate a young man named Edward King who was drowned at sea. The origins of the pastoral are partly classical, the tradition that runs through Theocritus and Virgil, and partly Biblical, the imagery of the twenty-third Psalm, of Christ as the Good Shepherd, of the metaphors of ‘pastor’ and ‘flock’ in the Church. The chief connecting link between the traditions in...