Happy 400th birthday, John Milton

I am a baffled and awe-inspired fan. He has the kind of genius that is best not talked about too much. Just leave it be. Don’t try to ask why, or HOW … (I can’t help it: HOW????????) Just accept that in this day and age of mortal man, giants still walk the earth on occasion. JUST ACCEPT IT. Every now and then, once every three or four centuries, a giant walks the earth. DEAL.

Milton was born on this day in 1608. He went to Oxford for a bit – but ended up leaving – and studied, basically, all of human nature and history and mankind on his own. The depth and breadth of his work, and his inquiry, is remarkable. I find myself in a state of blank wordlessness here.

I guess, on a personal note, my own terror of going blind (it’s not a “fear” – that is way too mild a word – I wake up screaming from nightmares because of it on a regular basis) makes me feel a strange fearful kinship with John Milton who went blind, and had to dictate his great works to others. He dictated Paradise Lost to his daughter.

What?

Honestly. I go blank. I can’t speak.

There are some people who seem to be vessels of a higher being. Whatever you want to call it. You could tie them up, and throw them in a basement for 75 years, and they would STILL scratch out their epic on the basement wall. This is something that cannot be easily explained. It just is.

I’ll just end with a poem that ranks among my favorites of all time. My fear of losing my sight is so deep and so profound that it is hard to even admit to, because I feel like it will come true if I speak it out loud. Milton stands before me, as a beacon – of someone this happened to – and yet he persevered. But oh. To live in darkness. To have the world of Paradise Lost in your head … and to have to wait … to WAIT … as someone else takes it down in dictation … is terrifying.

And so …. echoing this terrifying image of having to WAIT while your head is crammed full of Paradise Lost I’ll end with Milton’s sonnet to his own blindness.

Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask; But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

I don’t care how many times I have read it. It still brings me to tears.

Ms. Baroque has a goosebump-worthy post up right now about Milton’s language. Not to be missed.

Here are some quotes I’ve compiled about (and from) Milton:

“Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience, and to invent a language of his own remote from the spoken word.” — W.H. Auden

Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
Over the highest Alps of mind he marches,
And far below him spring the baseless arches
Of Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.
— Walter Savage Landor

“His harmonicall and ingeniose Soul did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. He was a spare man … He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire – he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray.” — John Aubrey

“Yet for two and a half centuries – even for a ‘speaker’ like Wordsworth – Milton’s virtue was this language, which engaged and developed subjects difficult to combine, moral verities and the created world. The language of speech is not the only, or first, language of poetry. To criticize work in terms strictly irrelevant to it is of little value: a critical act of “brute assertive will”, or a prejudice so ingrained as to be indistinguishable, for uncritical readers, from truth itself. With the decline of literacy, Milton, like Spenser, becomes a more difficult mountain to scale, more remote from the ‘common reader’. Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare, the only poets in the tradition who are Milton’s superiors, both grow and recede in the same way and are not dismissed. They seem more accessible. In the end Leavis’s hostility, like Empson’s and Richards’s in other areas, is to the Christian content of the poems, and in Milton it is obtrusive and central. We read Herbert’s and Donne’s divine poems even if we are unbelievers: there is their doubt to engage, and the framed drama of specific situations. But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancieng English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself lay.
— Wordsworth

“In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable … What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact that men of culture and intellect will be able to engage in rational discussion and agree to disagree, had been displaced by faction and sometimes violent intolerance. The moderate had stood down and the fanatic had taken his place, in the pulpit, in Parliament, and on the very peaks of Parnassus.” — TS Eliot

“I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” — John Milton

“I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments – the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, the noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage, SATAN.” — Robert Burns

“He was much more admired abrode than at home.” — John Aubrey

“My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception than arises from the contemplation of this greatest man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted: ‘Darkness before and danger’s voice behind,’ in an age in which he was as little understood by the party for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended, and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or, if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
… argue not
Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d
Right onward.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“True musical delight consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another.” — John Milton