Lycidas

Lycidas is a self-deprecating singer who calls himself a goose among swans yet cannot stop urging Moeris to remember Menalcas's songs. He presses for the poetry that once made the countryside bearable, even as Moeris insists that songs and rhymes prevail as much in these hard iron times as a flock of trembling fowl against a swooping eagle. His hunger for verse against his friend's grief sets the poem's central tension between the need to sing and the world that makes singing nearly impossible.