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Alex E

Professor S

English 227

22 August 2017

Hyacinth Blooms in Milton’s “Lycidas”

In Milton’s “Lycidas”, the hyacinth flower symbolizes untimely death, one of the

foremost themes of the poem. “Lycidas” is an elegy that mourns the premature death of King,

one of Milton’s college classmates. The concept of death is first mentioned when the titular

subject is named: “[f]or Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime” (13). Milton seeks closure for the

death of King, and tempers his anxiety regarding his own mortality by commemorating him in

poetry, hoping a poet would likewise elegize his own passing in future: “. . . may som gentle

Muse/ With lucky words favour my destin’d Urn” (25). Milton’s poem depicts an episode in

which Phoebus Apollo, Hyacinthus’s lover, mitigates the poet’s grief by providing him the

inspiration to create the poem “Lycidas” (82).

The hyacinth flower, one of the many symbols of premature death in Milton’s “Lycidas”,

is alluded to twice. The first mention of the Hyacinth flower is by the personification of the river

Camus, the patron of Cambridge students such as Milton and King. The River laments the death

of King in a manner that recalls the Hyacinth flower (111). The bloom is mentioned a second

time in Milton’s floral passage (138). In Greek myth, Hyacinthus is the young lover of the god

Apollo who is killed while the two practise throwing discus. It is said that the Hyacinth flower

grew from the blood of Hyacinthus as a memorial of Apollo’s love for him. There are two
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accounts of the fatal encounter: one in which the young boy’s death is an accident, the other in

which the jealous wind-deity Zephyrus adjusts the trajectory of the discus to kill Hyacinthus.

Both accounts are ironic as Apollo, the god of prophesy, does not foresee his young lover’s

demise. The irony of Hyacinthus’ expiration attests to the senselessness of death; how fatalities

are often unwarranted and haphazard. Milton attempts to alleviate his fear of mortality by

seeking closure for his deceased classmate, culminating in the poem “Lycidas”. There are two

monuments of mourning attributed to Apollo in “Lycidas”: the creation of the Hyacinth flower,

and his inspiring Milton to conceive the poem itself.

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Works Cited:
Milton, John. “Lycidas.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen
Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol 1. Norton, 2013. 780-786. Print.