"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies, entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, friend of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637. The poem is 193 lines in length, and is irregularly rhymed. While many of the other poems in the compilation are in Greek and Latin, "Lycidas" is one of the poems written in English. John Carey is emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the Universityof Oxford, and is acknowledged as one of the world's leading Miltonists. He has written extensively on Milton's life and poetry and translated his treatise 'On Christian Doctrine' for the Yale "Complete Prose Works of John Milton