Lycidas on The Work of Mourning Essay Discuss how “Lycidas” performs what Freud calls “the work of mourning.”
Again, be sure to make interpretive claims rather than merely cataloguing the work.
Argue a question and look deep into it to answer that question through the work that was given.
Secondary source (Sigmund Freud “Mourning and Melancholia“) will be added to build an argument. One of his accusations is that the poem is artificial, and therefore lacks passion. The artifice can’t be denied. That’s the nature of pastoral. Theocritus, who provides the model for Milton, didn’t portray real shepherds, either. That’s the nature of pastoral. Theocritus, who provides the model for Milton, didn’t portray real shepherds, either. Whether all-singing, all-dancing, engaging in a dialogue of the dispossessed, or bewailing a lost companion, the shepherds and nymphs of pastoral poetry were figments of imagination from the start.
