Lycidas

Along blue water and pale calm skies, the peace of a high sun, and lapping waves, Fortune’s wheels is carefully turning, clicking gear by gear toward the ever approaching chance for disaster. Milton is very aware of this, that tragedies are always beneath the surface, pushing at the seams of even to the most undeserving man or woman, pushing at the seams of anything good, and full of love or beauty or honor. Milton shows that it is these unfortunate, disastrous events by which human beings can truly understand the significance of humanity. That humans must advocate for their beliefs, they must be ambitious and use that drive everyday, that they cannot look back, because if they do, it will vanish.

Being such an activist, an extremist, an artist and lover and great man, Milton’s personality appears through the point that he makes with the writing of the story of Lycidas. Milton views ambition as a choice we must make when living each day. That Lycidas is so wonderful is very important, because it allows Milton to make his point in a way that a character with flaws could not. The effect is in Lycidas’ superb life because our social structures operates around reaching such heights, having perfect expectations of poetry and rhetoric, of perfect political power and knowledge. The chance for that to be gone in an instant keeps the world going on ambition, because without extremes, we’d be walking in a faceless, gray world.

And Milton would have none of that gray, faceless world stuff.