on John Milton

London, 1802

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 ancient 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 herself did lay.

-William Wordsworth


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In his Paradise Lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve--are all John Milton.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge


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MILTON, speaking to himself.
The future is my judge and will understand my Eve, falling, as in a sweet dream, into the night of Hell. The future will understand my Adam, who is guilty, yet good. And the future will understand my indomitable archangel, who is proud of reigning over his own eternity: magnificent in his despair and in his very madness profound. See! He rises from the lake of fire and with his immense wings beats down the waves! Milton shall live in his own thoughts and console himself there. As I silently brood over my audacious, unheard-of design, an ardent genius flames in my breast. Yes! I dare to emulate the Creator Supreme. Through the power of my own words I shall create a whole world: my own Heaven, my own Hell, my own Earth.

-Victor Hugo


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O many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

-A.E. Housman

A few from Milton. I'm eventually going to go through and mark down all the sections I loved, but for now I'll only do a little (since I'm procrastinating a paper on this book as it is):

. . . From morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day, and with the setting sun
Dropped on the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos th'Aegean isle. Thus they relate,
Erring. (1.743-7)

. . . For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion? (2.146-51)

. . . Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the muses haunt
Clear spring or shady grove or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song. But chief
Thee, Sion, and the flow'ry brooks beneath
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit nor sometimes forget
Those other two equaled with me in fate
(So were I equaled with them in renown)
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return but not to me returns
Say or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose
Or flocks or herds or human face divine
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank. (3.26-48)

These then though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain. Nor think, though men were none,
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise!
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen both when we wake and when we sleep.
All these with ceaseless praise His works behold
Both day and night. How often from the steep
Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole or responsive each to other's note,
Singing . . . (4.674-83)

Dismounted on th'Aleian field I fall
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn. (7.19-20)

They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves as mountains to assault
Heav'n's heighth and with the center mix the pole. (7.211-5)