Yet Once More: Melancholia and Amnesia in Milton’s Lycidas

Abstract

In September 1913 Sigmund Freud went for a summer walk through a smiling countryside. According to his own report, he was accompanied on the occasion by a friend and by ‘a young but already famous poet’, who ‘admired the beauty of the scene around’, ‘but felt no joy in it’ because it was, he realized, not to last: ‘fated to extinction’ with the passing of the season. In Freud’s words, ‘it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create’ (‘Transience’ 305). This observation is as incontestable as it is generalized. Not only natural beauties, like the summer flowers but also man-created beauties such as works of art eventually fall prey to the effects of time and yield to the destructive forces of material decay. Indeed, it is common: all that lives must die — why, then, does it seem so particular to this young poet that he falls into a melancholic mood and rejects all summer pleasures?

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