http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/mdvll10.txt
> freak2 (fr?k), v.t. 1. to fleck, streak, or variegate: great splashes of > color freaking the sky. ¡ªn. 2. a fleck or streak of color. > [appar. introduced by Milton in Lycidas (1637), perh. as b. freck to mark > with spots (perh. back formation from FRECKLE) and STREAK] > re: Lycidas, it submits the text below & http://content.ndap.org.tw/main/dc_detail.php?dc_id=6507 In choosing "Lycidas" as the pseudonym for Edward King, Milton was clearly influenced by various pastoral eclogues, especially those of Theocritus, Virgil, and the Italian Sannazaro, in which the figure of Lycidas plays a prominent role. [1] Comparatively little study has been made, however, of the etymological complexity of the name. Most read the derivation from the Greek "lukos," or wolf, with a patronymic "idas" suffix indicating "son of." [2] The difficulties of this derivation are substantial: Milton's only reference to a wolf in Lycidas comes during his critique of the clergy: "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, / . . . / Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw / Daily devours apace." [3] To baptize Lycidas the "son of wolf," then, would seem to deconstruct the figure and the poem as inconsistent at best, hypocritical at worst. [4] One alternate possibility is that Milton does not hope to evoke the common "wolf" so much as the proper name "Lycus," or "Lukos," an appellation that appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses and fits well with other motifs in Milton's poem. In Book Fifteen, Ovid's Pythagoras discourses on the mutability of all entities, and begins to list the vicissitudes of rivers: "Here Nature, in her changes manifold, / Sends forth new fountaines; there shuts up the old. / Streames, with impetuous earth-quakes, heretofore / Have broken forth; or sunk, and run no more. / So Lycus, swallowed by the yawning Earth, / Takes in an other world his second birth." [5] Milton's Lycidas, similarly, "sunk low, but mounted high" (172), a resurrection despite his being "Sunk . . . beneath the watery floor" (167), for "So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, / And yet anon repairs his drooping head" (168-9). This "second birth" of Lycidas into another world--"the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love" (177)-- parallels that of the river Lycus, submerging and resurfacing. Moreover, it recalls two earlier Ovidian figures in Milton's poem, the river deity Alpheus and the nymph/fountain Arethusa. In Milton's apostrophe to the latter, "O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood" (85), he recalls the nymph's tortuous flight from Alpheus, whom he invokes with "Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past, / That shrunk thy streams" (132-3). In the Metamorphoses, Arethusa tells her story in terms that anticipate the river Lycus and Lycidas himself: "Why I affect this place, t' Ortygia came / Through such vast Seas; I shall impart the same / To you desire; . . . / . . . / Earth gives me way: through whose darke cavernes roll'd, / I here ascend" (5.498-503). Transformed by Diana into a current of water, Arethusa flees her pursuer below ground, only to resurface as a fountain--still intermingled with the river Alpheus. The resurrection motif is anticipated by this descent and ascent of Arethusa, and Lycidas's etymological links to another river that journeys the same path resonates with his final apotheosis. George Sandys's commentary on the tale of Arethusa also provides some insight into Lycidas. He notes that "Alpheus runs unmixt through the sea: because illustrious truth, although invironed with vices, can never be disseasoned with their bitternesse, but unpolluted falls into the bosome of Arethusa, or noble integrity." [6] Milton creates an analogue in the drowning death of Lycidas, who passes through a poem inveighing against ecclesiastical abuses and appears untouched by them, even as he sinks into the sea only to rise again and wash "With nectar pure his oozy locks" (175). The pollutions of the poem are not absolved by Lycidas, but his potential relation to the river Lycus, and by extension Alpheus and Arethusa, suggests a noble integrity around which the diverse work coheres. with nectar pure and oozy locks freak it on o sunken and mutable lycidas.¡¡
