"Yet once, it is a little while": Recovering the Book of Haggai in "Lycidas"

I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing Since Adam’s Fall but needs much labouring”

Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

1

An intriguing strand of “Lycidas” commentary begins with David S. Berkeley’s 1961 note on the scriptural contexts of this poem’s opening line. ¹ The repeating phrase “Yet once more . . . and once more,” he suggests, may be a reminiscence of Hebrews 12.26–7, a text which itself alludes, in turn, to Haggai 2.6–7. Although reading “with Hebrews and Haggai in view,” Berkeley feels that the Old Testament reference “may be more interesting” (178). ² He draws a parallel between the circumstances of a poet, bitterly constrained to begin a labor for which he perceives himself as yet unripe, and the circumstances of those elderly Jews who, returning from the Babylonian exile, lament the unimpressive results of their initial attempts at rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. Comparing what has so far been rebuilt to their memories of a more glorious temple, they bemoan the new temple’s lack of ark, mercy seat, and shekinah (manifest presence of God). The prophet Haggai confronts this paralyzing grief and nostalgia directly: “Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now? is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing?” (2.3). ³ The labor of rebuilding has stalled, he implies, because they have mistaken external appearances for inner realities. To comfort them and to exhort them to continued labor, Haggai recalls God’s past mercies and prophesies a future national regeneration:

For thus saith the Lord of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;

And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts.

(2.6–7)

This prophecy, suggests Berkeley, is implicitly recalled in Milton’s “yet once more”: “Here Milton may be intimating that his being forced to write an elegy for King when he is poetically immature may, like Zerubbabel’s effort, produce . . . [an unsatisfactory temple]; but ultimately this temple—this poetry to come—will have Truth himself, the Messiah, within; and when this time comes, Milton’s poetry, by comparison, will shake the contrived verse of poets who celebrate man-made systems of thought” (178).

Berkeley’s view of a composite scriptural allusion in line 1 has found little sympathy in subsequent commentary. While a consensus of sorts has emerged that the apocalyptic contexts implicit in “yet once more” are central to Milton’s poem, critics after Berkeley have dismissed, ignored, or downplayed his interest in Haggai. Berkeley himself, in fact, provides the hint for this line of argument with his concluding remarks on the poem’s “envelope device”: “. . . with Hebrews and Haggai in view, Milton rounds off “Lycidas,” or, in other words, connects the first and last lines . . . ‘Yet once more’ coupled with ‘Pastures new’ promises distinctly Christian poetry’” (178). The structure and significance of that envelope device has since been delineated with great subtlety and precision by Michael Lieb, Joseph Wittreich, and Edward M. Tayler; none of these critics, however, endorses Berkeley’s suggestion that we read the opening of “Lycidas” “with Hebrews and Haggai in view.” In what follows, I would like to make a case for Berkeley’s position, and press a bit further some of his remarks on thematic parallels between Milton’s poem and the Book of Haggai. The composite scriptural contexts of line 1 offer us an exemplary instance of this poem’s generous recovery of its literary and scriptural precursors. While obsolescent forms, whether classical or Old Testament, are finally superseded in the eschatological progress of “Lycidas,” it is one of the elegy’s notable triumphs that they are not at the same time erased.

If we shift our attention from the poem’s theological superstructure to the thoughts and feelings of the lyric speaker, an allusion to...