Analysis of On the Memory of Mr. Edward King, Drown'd in the Irish Seas

I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
   His artificial grief that scans his eyes;
   Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
   Confine them to the Muses' rosary?
   I am no poet here; my pen's the spout
   Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out,
   In pity of that name, whose fate we see
   Thus copied out in grief's hydrography.
   The Muses are not mermaids, though upon
  His death the ocean might turn Helicon.
  The sea's too rough for verse; who rhymes upon 't
  With Xerxes strives to fetter th' Hellespont.
  My tears will keep no channel, know no laws
  To guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause,
  Run with disturbance till they swallow me
  As a description of his misery.
  But can his spacious virtue find a grave
  Within th' imposthum'd bubble of a wave?
  Whose learning if we sound, we must confess
  The sea but shallow, and him bottomless.
  Could not the winds to countermand thy death
  With their whole card of lungs redeem thy breath?
  Or some new island in thy rescue peep
  To heave thy resurrection from the deep,
  That so the world might see thy safety wrought
  With no less miracle than thyself was thought?
  The famous Stagirite, who in his life
  Had Nature as familiar as his wife,
  Bequeath'd his widow to survive with thee,
  Queen Dowager of all philosophy:
  An ominous legacy, that did portend
  Thy fate and predecessor's second end.
  Some have affirm'd, that what on earth we find,
  The sea can parallel in shape and kind:
  Books, arts, and tongues were wanting, but in thee
  Neptune hath got an university.

We'll dive no more for pearls; the hope to see
  Thy sacred reliques of mortality
  Shall welcome storms, and make the seaman prize
  His shipwreck now, more than his merchandise.
  He shall embrace the waves and to thy tomb
  (As to a royaler exchange) shall come.
  What can we now expect? Water and fire
  Both elements our ruin do conspire.
  And that dissolves us which doth us compound,
  One Vatican was burnt, another drown'd.
  We of the gown our libraries must toss
  To understand the greatness of our loss;
  Be pupils to our grief and so much grow
  In learning as our sorrows overflow.
  When we have fill'd the rundlets of our eyes
  We'll issue 't forth, and vent such elegies
  As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas,
  We, floating islands, living Hebrides.