Commemorating the Dead
This poem is an anguished lament, but about what exactly? It discusses the killing and its perpetrators more vividly than it does the dead men. Is it an elegy for them? John Milton’s “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy in honor of his friend, Edward King, written in 1637 and first printed in 1638, may have formed a model for Pulter’s “On Those Two Unparalleled Friends.” Both poems lean heavily on questions, emphasizing the bewilderment sudden death occasions, whether it is the result of an execution (the shooting of Lucas and Lisle) or an accident (King’s drowning). Milton and Pulter were on opposite sides in the civil wars. Yet they both strove to reconcile lamentation with consolation, backward and forward glances, classical allusion and Christian theology. In “Lycidas,” Milton succinctly captures the paradox that will govern his exploration of a “fortunate fall” in Paradise Lost: that death, while a loss for the bereaved, is a gain for the departed: “So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, / Through the dear might of him that walked the waves” (172-73). Similarly, the last word of Pulter’s poem is “rise.” To inform the consideration of what an elegy is, and whether this poem is one, see this excerpt from George Puttenham, distinguishing the “short and sweet” epitaph from the elegy.
Chapter 28, Of the poem called epitaph, used for memorial of the dead
An epitaph is but a kind of epigram only applied to the report of the dead person’s estate and degree, or of his other good or bad parts, to his commendation or reproach, and is an inscription such as a man may commodiously write or engrave upon a tomb in few verses, pithy, quick and sententious for the passerby to peruse and judge upon without any long tarriance [delay]. So as if it exceed the measure of an epigram, it is then (if the verse be correspondent) rather an elegy than an epitaph, which error many of these bastard rhymers commit, because they be not learned nor (as we are wont to say) their casts’ masters [skillful craftsmen], for they make long and tedious discourses, and write them in large tables to be hanged up in churches and chancels over the tombs of great men and others, which be so exceeding long as one must have half a day’s leisure to read one of them, and must be called away before he come half to the end, or else be locked into the church by the sexton, as I myself was once served, reading an epitaph in a certain Cathedral Church of England. They be ignorant of poesy that call such long tales by the name of epitaphs. They might better call them elegies, as I said before, and then ought neither to be engraven nor hanged up in tables. I have seen them nevertheless upon many honorable tombs of these late times erected, which do rather disgrace than honor either the matter or maker.