The Pilot and the Keys: Milton's Lycidas 167-171

Critics have discerned in John Milton's Lycidas a protracted conflict between the outmoded imagery of Greek pastoral and its analogues in the Christian tradition. I shall argue here that this reading will be all the more persuasive if Saint Peter is not identified as the "pilot" who laces his praise of Edward King with a satire on the delinquent shepherds of the church. The attributes of this figure, when interpreted in the light of Milton's theology and the Protestant creeds of his day, will prove him to be Christ and hence more capable than Peter himself of redeeming the protagonist after emptying the genre of its false gods.

The pilot's entrance is the grand peroration to the eulogies on King:

Last came, and last did go,The pilot of the Galilean lake,Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)He shook his mitred locks and stern bespake.¹

The scholarly consensus, which identifies the pilot with Saint Peter, is succinctly defended by Douglas Bush in his notes to the Oxford edition of Milton's poems: "St Peter, the Galilean fisherman (Luke 5.3), traditionally the first bishop (mitred locks), to whom Christ gave the keys of heaven (Matthew 16.19)."² R. P. Hone's dissenting article of 1959,³ which proposes Christ as the referent of these lines, is not thought worthy of more than perfunctory refutation, even in the most ample of recent commentaries.⁴ Hone argues that this figure is not Saint Peter, but Christ, who is described as a bishop in 1 Peter 2:25 and in Milton's Animadversions, who carries keys in Revelation 1:18, and who saves the disciples' boat from shipwreck in John 6:15-21. The keys that Christ gives to Saint Peter (Matt. 16:19) seem to fit the description here, however, better than those of Revelation 1:18. Peter denounces false teachers at 2 Peter 2.⁵

These critics of Hone, however, since they canvass less of the evidence than is needed to turn assertion into proof, invite more questions than they have settled. Of Bush we may ask (as Milton would ask) when Peter was a bishop and why this should confer the privilege of the miter. Carey and Fowler may reasonably be challenged to say whether Peter was ever the pilot of a vessel and in what respect the keys resemble those of Peter rather than those of Christ. It may be that Hone shows only that another exegesis than the prevailing one is conceivable, without showing that it is superior; I would argue, however, that it can be proved if we take into account not only his garner of biblical texts but the handling of these same texts by the poets of Milton's time and by interpreters to whom Protestants in England customarily appealed against Roman doctors who professed to be speaking under the authority of the keys.

Master and Disciple

It seems that, in all, five pillars support the argument for Peter: (1) the pilot's "mitred locks" proclaim his episcopal office; (2) he bears the two keys that tradition associated with the apostle; (3) the second of two canonical letters ascribed to Peter upbraids false teachers; (4) it was Peter, alone of the disciples, who "walked the waves";⁶ and (5) since Peter earned his livelihood by fishing, he will have been an experienced sailor and hence perhaps a pilot. I hope to show that neither the traditions of exegesis to which the poet subscribed nor the evidence of his own prose suggest that he would have recognized any of his own beliefs in these five propositions:

(1) No text from the Bible, and no authority that was likely to convince a Protestant of Milton's day, has been adduced for Peter's wearing of the miter. If the argument is that the miter is the sign of episcopal office and that Peter was the first bishop of Rome, it has yet to be shown that either of these assumptions would have been...