Lycidas

About “Lycidas”

"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It was published in 1638 in a collection titled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, which honored the memory of Edward King, a friend of Milton at Cambridge who died when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines long and has an irregular rhyme scheme. While most poems in the collection were written in Greek and Latin, "Lycidas" was one of the few in English. Milton later republished the poem in 1645. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.)