St Michael’s Mount Shipwreck of Lycidas / The Death of Lycidas—Vision on the Guarded Mount

This vignette of the Lycidas sinking off the coast of England illustrates the connection made between the sea and other worlds. It also portrays the sea as a violent force, its waves easily covering the Lycidas as the men aboard try to climb to safety.A ship is tipped towards the viewer, almost completely submerged by a wave crashing over it. Only the main mast, part of a second mast, and a sliver of the deck rise above the tumultuous water. Men climb up the mast, attempting to find shelter in the crow's nest. A single figure appears at the bottom of the image, his arms outstretched, threatened with complete submersion by the tumbling wave. At the top of the image a cliff rises out of the water, a church on its crest; a Christ-like figure stands in cruciform on its single tower, encompassed by a circle of light. At the level of the sloping ship, to the left of the image, an ambiguous darkness forms an opening in the crashing waters. What is perhaps a cave at the top of a waterfall is visible at the center of this dark culmination of waves.

Macrone, the publisher, inscribed a copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton for Charles Dickens as a wedding present in April, 1836, but it is unknown whether this was a new edition of the work. This engraving served as the title page to the final volume (volume six) of The Poetical Works of John Milton (John Macrone, 1835). The print depicts the sinking of the Lycidas, August 10, 1637. It was sailing from Chester to Ireland when it struck a rock near the English coast and sank. None of the people on board survived. John Milton wrote a poem about this shipwreck in honor of one of the victims, Mr. Edward King, a fellow of Christ’s College (Milton, vol. 6).

This vignette of Lycidas sinking off the coast of England illustrates the connection made between the sea and other realms of reality. It also portrays the sea as a violent force, its waves easily submerging the ship as the men aboard try to climb to safety. As in the case of the vignette The Temptation on the Mountain (also featured in this gallery), this image is balanced within a circular frame, reminiscent of images created using Claude mirrors. The visible mast gives the viewer a sense of scale, impressing us with the significant height of the waves and depth of the waters as the sea nearly submerges the entire ship. The sea is also implicitly presented here as a bridge to other worlds, whether it be the church on the heavenly heights or the obscure, darker place—the hellish depths—revealed to the left.