Lycidas is the name of a poet-goatherd found in a poem by Theocritas. It’s also the name of the title character in a pastoral elegy written by John Milton after the shipwreck and drowning of the poet’s classmate at Cambridge, with whom he had studied to join the clergy.
In the poem, the narrator laments the gaiety and spontaneity he sacrifices for the labors of philosophy, and addresses the poet-sheperds working in the fields by telling them that Lycidas will return in his death to bless them in their quests to live lives of intellectual pursuit despite the sacrifices of certain sensual pleasures and a certain spontaneity. In this meditation on the nature of the philosopher and his place in society, Milton presents many contrasts between the thoughtful and the frivolous.
In Chapter Two, Stephen teaches the poem, but slips into a moment of almost narcissistic reverie after his student reads a passage:
“ -- Weep no more, woeful shepherd, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...” (Joyce, 25).
It is one of those intriguing moments we know so well, when the discussion of literature turns toward the personal and our conversationalist references a poem with such depth and complexity that we realize he alludes to a work of strongest importance to himself; momentarily, Stephen envisions himself as Lycidas, who blessed the would-be philosophers with consciousness, leading them from a happiness based on dismissal to an enlightened awareness.
This is certainly a difficult and fleeting peace Stephen attains; the schoolboys with whom he is surrounded, Buck Mulligan, Haines, and Mr. Deasy all challenge his conscious intellect by bullying and manipulating him or by using these tactics on one another-- in the case of the schoolboys.
“It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the
gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered
from the sin of Paris, night by night” (Joyce, 25).
The first sentence of the passage immediately following the schoolboy’s reading of the poem illustrates the deep sentiment the poem evokes in Stephen-- It brings him hope. With the first phrase, he is transported from the unpleasantness of the classroom of disruptive boys to a memory of studying in Paris.
The image of Stephen distracted and dreaming of Lycidas while surrounded by a noisy schoolroom of boys taunting one another is the first part of the novel in which Stephen is idealized as a teacher. In Chapter One, he played the half-wit to Buck’s virtuoso and struggled to assert himself; he walked away at the end, yes, and muttered “usurper”-- here he assumes a position of control.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment