It is in the nature of pastoral poetry that human desires are projected into a natural setting and experienced solely through fantasy. The real world, full of unpredictability and unwanted emotions, is accessible to everyone, while the idyll of the pastoral is reserved "for the fancies of poets"; its ground must not be trampled underfoot by everyone (Ettin 43). Having failed to retreat into the traditional pastoral landscape, John Milton begins, in his poem "Lycidas", to exercise the control he does not have in the real world over the elements of the pastoral landscape, challenging the usual idyllic landscape and transforming it into one. of mourning. Andrew Ettin, author of the book Literature and the Pastoral, discusses the idea of ​​a person using the pastoral world as an “emblem of their sorrow,” in an attempt to reconcile the dichotomy of fantasy and reality (Ettin 55). Relieving strong emotions in a safe pastoral setting can also purge emotions from reality. And he explains how the pastoral represents “ordinary life, magnified,” so that the emotions experienced or displaced there can seem more extreme than their effects actually are (Ettin 31). As “Lycidas” shows, the pastoral setting can either be a place of familiarity or a place of estrangement due to the strong emotions that are muted there. At the beginning of the poem, Milton disappears into the pastoral world and begins to describe the place where he and the now deceased Lycidas were “nurtured on the same hill” (Milton 23). It is the normal site of the pastoral landscape, where "the gray fly coils its sensual horn" and the two boys fatten their "flocks with the fresh dews of the night"; a carefree and beautiful place (Milton 28, 29). Yet while Milton escapes middle of a paper... control that he cannot find in his own life, Milton creates an alternative pastoral setting in which to exercise his power in his poem "Lycidas." As Ettin explains, it is usual in pastoral care, he uses it to contain the streaming emotions. Plant life shows this throughout the poem through picturesque despair. However, Milton rises to such a great position of power in this place that he becomes able to question the gods and muses. This raises the question of why the authors of most pastorals, however powerful they may be with pen in hand, are simply unaware of their ability to place themselves above the gods. It was Milton's broken emotional state and growing anger at his lack of closure that allowed him to rise higher in his own fantasy. He surrounded himself with the greatest mourning that could exist for Lycidas, a mourning rooted in the very land he once walked and to which he has now returned..