Animal Love in Milton: The Case of the "Ephitaphium Damonis"

Milton's "Epitaphium Damonis", like "Lycidas" before it, crafts a vision of ideal homosocial companionship whose basic terms reappear, mutatis mutandis, in the model of companionate marriage proposed by the later divorce tracts. In both cases, Milton contrasts human intimacy with the society of brute beasts, which he presents as simultaneously inferior to and yet proleptic of the human emotional bond. As a result, we may see the poet's thinking on marriage to be informed by notions of same-species and same-sex conjugality.