*****
It’s
been twenty years since I read any of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In 1992 I was a college sophomore in Major British
Writers I, and selections from Paradise
Lost were on the syllabus. I know that I did the reading; I also know that
I neither understood nor enjoyed what I read, and the paper that I wrote was
probably awful and certainly careless. When I got my essay back, I saw marginal
notes from the professor pointing out where I’d misquoted Milton; I remember
thinking “How could she have noticed? This poem is about a million lines long,
and she notices that I get a word or two wrong?!”
I
hadn’t yet fallen in love with poetry, because I had not yet learned how to
read it. It was the following semester (in Major British Writers II) that poetry
“happened” for me, because my professor read the poems out loud to us. Robert
Browning, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins - the music of
poetry sank in, deeply, and after that I continued to read poetry and find the
ways in which it showed me the world in new ways, and showed me the truth of my
own heart.
But
apart from teaching the sonnet “On His Blindness,” I never returned to Milton.
I’d filed Paradise Lost under the
heading “Works of Literature That Are Somehow Important But Certainly Not
Interesting.” With so many other things to read, why go back to a poem I’d
found dull?
Then
I started to get some inklings that the failure was mine, not Milton’s. C.S.
Lewis, whose writing has been and is so important to my own life and work,
intensely admired Paradise Lost and
even wrote a book about it: A Preface to
Paradise Lost. As I began to read and study Charles Williams, I realized
that Milton was extremely important to him as well.
This
past winter, I had a Miltonic paradigm shift. I was visiting my friend Malcolm
Guite in Cambridge, and in the course of an afternoon’s conversation about
poetry, he pulled out a copy of Milton’s poem “Comus” and proceeded to read aloud
to me a long extract from the poem.
I
was spellbound. Here was music, philosophy, wit, beauty - wow!
And
so when I got home I read “Comus” for myself - and loved it. But it wasn’t just
that I’d been encouraged to read what I’d formerly dismissed: what made all the
difference in my encounter with the poem was that I had heard the poem being
read with vitality and understanding; the words had been incarnated for me,
given to me in all their richness as something to be savored and rejoiced in right now as a present experience -- the
complete opposite of ‘studying’ an ‘important poem’ and ‘understanding its
significance’ and the like. A quarter-hour of hearing Milton read aloud that
way opened the door to understanding his poetry in a way that countless hours
of reading books about Milton’s
poetry never could.
I
knew I needed to read Paradise Lost -
and now I wanted to as well.
But
this time, I also knew I needed a friend to help me engage with the poem. So I
turned to Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost
- because although Lewis is dead, through his writing he is almost as present
to me as a living friend. He loves the poem; he tells me why, and he explains
how I can best come to love the poem too: by understanding what it is. It’s an
epic, not a lyric: to enjoy it, I should read it in long stretches, feeling the
sweep of it, being caught up in it - not stopping to analyze or linger over
particular lines or images. Each of the poem’s twelve books has its own arc
from beginning to end, and within each book there are long scenes of
description or action, and long speeches by various characters, all of which
are much more powerful if read through steadily - a book or at least a
half-book at a time.
And
that is how I have been reading Paradise
Lost - and oh, it is a delight.
Reading
it in a steady flow gets me into the rhythm of the blank verse and the music of
the language, so that Milton’s words call up vividly in my imagination the
scenes he describes: war in heaven, with Michael the Archangel leading the
heavenly hosts against the rebel angels; the creation of the world and all its
creatures, with the animals bursting forth from the womb of the earth; the
conclave of Satan and the other fallen angels, each in their own twisted way
attempting to justify their place in hell as better than heaven.
Reading
it steadily has also helped me see the spiritual depth of the poem. If one
reads just short extracts, Satan seems to have a certain grandeur and dignity;
“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” seems almost plausible. But the
grand sweep of Paradise Lost builds
up, layer by layer, a clear-eyed and vivid picture of Satan that shows us the
enemy of God as a constant liar, a vindictive spirit who would rather destroy
anything he cannot rule, a narcissist who constantly returns to his
self-created grievances with pettish indignation. It is a powerful picture and
a chilling one, because everything that Milton puts into his character of Satan
can be found close to home, in the human heart.
Now
that I’ve been swept up by this grand poem, I know I’ll be back again, many
more times: this, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, is not a book to read once and
then shelve for another twenty years. I look forward to those future readings:
all the more so, because now I know that I am reading in the glad company of
friends: past, present, and future.
Audio References
For your listening pleasure:
- NPR Books: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97831678
- University of Cambridge: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/668015
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