literary passport

paradise lost #4

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will.

Finishing up week one — 250 lines into the poem. What I'm seeing is "self-consciousness gained." Herein lies the problem with Satan’s character — he's self conscious and wants to fulfill his desires. Do we here start to think, as William Blake told us to, that Milton is of the devil's party without knowing? My simple belief is that we read Satan as sympathetic because of our overly sinful ways and Milton was setting us up to teach us a big old lesson. (Please don't sue me, Mr. Fish, you did have a very good idea and I'm just borrowing it.) To start wondering about Milton's intent opens a can of psychological, biographical worms that while they writhe and slither in interesting ways lead us, as readers, upon a centripetal journey wherein the poem is just a fading star in the twilight of former thoughts. In other words, I ain't going there.

Satan decides to set himself up as an absolute opposite to everything God represents. By definition, this is evil, vengeance, etc. Crawling out of the fiery lake, Satan calls upon his minions to help him wreak havoc on creation as a whole. Consciousness seems to be awareness of yourself in relation to another. "Hell is other people." That’s good, but first Hell is setting yourself up against God. It seems that Satan woke up one day realizing he was a separate entity within creation and wanted to define himself. Oops! He defined himself as better than God. Was that the problem? Nope, he just gained self-consciousness and saw himself as an other — not as an unmoving piece of God's creation. Sounds like he found his own tree of knowledge and created evil as a desire to free himself from control.

paradise lost #3

And justifie the wayes of God to men...

As I read through the invocation to the Muses here in Book I, one thing in particular strikes me. This is a poem by, for and about MAN (pacê feminist types, the operative word should by human or person, but let's stick to Milton's language here). The whole poem opens with the phrase "Of Man’s first disobedience. . ." and the first verse paragraph ends with the word Man ("to justify the ways of God to Men"). Putting mankind at the center of this argument brings you and me straight into the story and focuses all the events in the poem on "us" as readers. Milton is going to teach us a lesson and it is supposed to change our lives. Putting the reader at the center of the story is a great move.

But before we get to all of that there is another fall that took place before Adam and Eve got the boot. Satan fell from heaven and wound up a very unhappy creature in a newly created Hell. Milton's Satan is one of the great characters in literature. Milton does such a good job drawing his character that he becomes somewhat sympathetic and interesting. Satan's punishment is so vile and deplorable, and he is rhetorically so powerful that we can start to believe the speeches he gives. But this makes total sense. We are people — we fall for Satan's stories all of the time and have been since. . .

paradise lost #2

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree

So, as we go off tripping the light fantastic into Paradise Lost, first I'm wondering what this poem is going to be about. Yes, Eve and Adam eat the apple and get kicked out of Eden into the life of woe we know as day to day existence, but that's just the story. What is going on behind the story? Milton is not just telling us the Bible story because it's a good yarn. He knows that we all know the story. Sure, he's going to throw in details to fill in the gaps, but we all know (even today) the story of Adam and Eve getting booted out of Paradise. 

Milton is not telling us how to behave either. "Don't eat the apple" is something even the most cursory reading could come up with. He's not bothering us with telling us not to choose evil. Again, he knows that we know that. Milton wants to dig to the very heart of the matter and explain why evil exists in the first place. Why, if there is an all powerful deity lurking around is there such a thing as evil? Milton lived in a horrendous time of civil war and strife. People were getting their heads cut off, people were being tortured, people were being thrown into prison on the slightest suspicion (including Milton for a while) all in the name of some form of civil/religious/economic dispute. If that sounds a lot like today to you, then we're on the same page. Things haven't gotten much better in 400 years. In fact, since we now experience these problems on a global scale, you might suppose things have gotten much worse. Therefore, the ways of God still need to be justified to man. 

paradise lost #1

Things unattemped yet in Prose or Rhime...

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608. That is a merry 400 years ago and deserves some sort of celebration. I asked myself what would Milton like me to do most to celebrate this special day. What would any poet want? The answer came easily — read his poetry. There is surely nothing a poet likes more than having their poetry read and talked about. I'm afraid, and maybe I'm wrong, that people don't pick up Milton's poetry with the intention of having just a whale of a good read. The works, I fear, have been tainted as those infamous required items we are forced to read in school. Milton is read by college students who wish they could be doing anything else, or by college professors who, while at one time might have loved the written word, are struggling to make the 17th century master-bard relevant in a world of post-clomial eco-criticism. (Not much room for an analysis of 10,000 plus lines of iambic pentameter there.) I propose that we (that's anybody who wants to join me) stop all of this silliness and just sit down and read Milton's masterpiece Paradise Lost. A chink of it each week (about 250 – 300 lines) and we'll wrap up just in time for the great poet's 400th birthday.