The Poor Snake!
Oct. 11th, 2008 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJun 2008
Paradise Lost - John Milton, ed.Gordon Tesky - Norton, 2006
* * *
A perhaps surprising title from an avowed ophidiophobe, but bear with me.
My view of John Milton has been forever influenced by Robert Graves' book Wife to Mr. Milton, which portrays him as a brutal Pater Familias who made the life of his spouse an utter misery. Having now read his magnum opus, I am prepared to admit that Graves may have traduced him - whilst the Puritan idealogue is definitely in evidence, there is also a strong argument for freedom of thought and a rather endearing concern for the logical consequences of his flights of fancy that frequently leads to bathos. The result is a poem that is magnificently absurd in its contradictions. It seeks to promote conventional Christian biblical interpretations but ends up undermining them.
Milton's first problem is that the entire text on which his epic is based is all of 42 verses long. His solution is the classic one of back-story development, in particular of the character of Satan (who of course does not appear in the original story). Characteristically, he goes to extremes, making him far too charismatic and noble, and necessitating some hasty interpolations reminding the reader that he is a rebel angel who is being punished. But they don't work - to a twenty-first century western reader, Satan's championing of freedom and independence of thought against a remote, vengeful, arbitrary and all-powerful despot makes him a hero:
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same
And what I should be: all but less than He
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free. Th' Almighty hath not built
Here for His envy, will not drive us hence.
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!
(Bk 1, 254-263)
Even if, as the angel Raphael subsequently reveals to the dreary Adam, Satan's rebellion turns out to be a quixotic act motivated entirely by jealousy at being passed over for promotion, the nobility of the sentiments expressed is captivating.
Satan's allure is increased by Milton's depiction of God, who is very much Old Testament and indeed as arbitrary and vengeful as Satan describes him. For example, in Milton's version, the serpent is just a poor dumb beast who is taken over by Satan for the purposes of tempting Eve. This doesn't stop God from punishing it for taking part in the Fall despite the fact that it had no choice in the matter.
Then there is of course the matter of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a problem in the original story which the poem puts into painful focus. Why did God put Adam and Eve in the one place where they could be tempted? And, as Satan points out, what exactly is wrong with acquiring a sense of right and wrong anyway? God has imposed an arbitrary rule and expects it to be obeyed without question, despite having giving human beings the faculties of curiosity and freedom of choice. What did he expect to happen? God's commands, however lovingly couched, boil down to "obey or die", a choice which Satan - rightly in our eyes - resists.
In part, God's meanness is to contrast him with the Son, who is portrayed as a mediator who seeks to mitigate some of God's more wrathful actions, offering to bear Adam and Eve's punishment for their transgressions (who decided that the punishment was necessary? Why, God of course). The result, however, is that we end up rooting for Satan all the more.
A similar problem of sympathy afflicts the other supposed villain in the piece, Eve. She is, of course, an airhead (reflecting Milton's low opinion of women generally), but shows a spirited independence that makes her a natural ally of Satan. And when her lord and master Adam is such a drip, it's not surprising (to 21st century eyes) that she decides to strike out on her own, even though she comes a cropper in doing so. Milton also undermines the idea of conjugal love that he otherwise praises by making it clear that it is Adam's passion for his wife that makes him give in to temptation and thereby trigger the sorrows of humanity.
Similar absurdities emerge from Milton's attempts to rationalise the background of the Adam and Eve story. He justifies the creation of earth and of humanity as an attempt by God to re-populate heaven after Satan's rebellion deprived it of a goodly number of its heavenly host. But God presumably magicked angels into existence in the first place, so why go through this palaver when he could (metaphorically) snap his fingers and make it so? It's like the elaborate plans that Bond villains come up with to dispose of the hero when simply shooting him in the head would suffice.
The strong sense of place - of whole worlds spinning in a void - is one of the poem's best features, but Milton's concern for logic does lead to some unintentional comedy. For example, when Satan leaves Hell to fly to Earth, he encounters his daughter Sin, who was born Athena-like from his head while he was lying stunned after falling from heaven, and Death, the monstrous product of their incestuous union (yes, in Milton's universe, angels can have sex, though as Sin has to remind Satan of who she is, one can only presume that the act causes angelic amnesia). Satan's epic flight to earth through the wastes of chaos is well-described, but obviously raised in Milton's mind the question of how the damned souls would travel from earth to hell. His allegorically ingenious solution is to have Sin and Death build a bridge between the two, but in my head this raises the absurd image of these supposedly monstrous and powerful entities slapping bricks together at high speed like builders in a cartoon.
A word on the text and the edition. The whole poem is written in heroic couplets which go (thank you Stephen Fry):
Ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum,
Ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum.
Milton is a very clever poet, and his expression of complex ideas in long sentences while maintaining the metre is an extremely impressive technical achievement. But artistically, I'm not so sure. The problem is that English doesn't naturally fit the heroic rhythm. The emphases in English words are on arbitrary syllables - sometimes the first, sometimes the last, sometimes elsewhere - which is why good English, with its rushes and flows and unexpected juxtapositions, is such a pleasure to read and listen to. Forcing it into the straitjacket of the heroic mode is a painful process involving unnatural word order ("enclosure green", "distempers foul", "thicket overgrown") and contractions that can make the intended meaning almost impossible to discern. It also results in a booming saminess in the poem's tone which makes it good bedtime reading. It doesn't surprise me that despite being one of the most famous poems in the English language, public recitations of Paradise Lost are rare.
This edition is generally well edited with some helpful footnotes, but could have done with fewer explaining exactly which syllables in a phrase need to be elided to fit the rhythm, something that is obvious to most native English speakers. There is also an extensive collection of extracts from commentaries on various aspects of the poem by CS Lewis, Voltaire, TS Eliot and others, some of which are illuminating. Though I have to say that two hundred pages of them is a bit much.
So why have so many gallons of ink been expended by some of the smartest people of the last three hundred years on what most would agree is a technically impressive but artistically and logically flawed poem? Obviously a lot of it is a battle between literary critics pointing out the flaws and Christian thinkers attempting to rationalise them. But this seems to me to be a bit silly, for the poem's faults are simply reflections of Milton's own bifurcated and self-contradictory personality. To take one man's imaginings and attempt to draw from them grand principles of theology or reason seems almost as mad as having Sin and Death build a bridge between earth and hell. And whilst I still agree with Robert Graves that Milton the man was a monster, his - sometimes unwitting - support for independence of thought and expression is to be admired. Take this marvellous passage from the Areopagitica, an essay in which Milton argues for freedom from censorship, which elegantly explains why books matter (and why I write this blog):
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss: and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse."
Paradise Lost - John Milton, ed.Gordon Tesky - Norton, 2006
* * *
A perhaps surprising title from an avowed ophidiophobe, but bear with me.
My view of John Milton has been forever influenced by Robert Graves' book Wife to Mr. Milton, which portrays him as a brutal Pater Familias who made the life of his spouse an utter misery. Having now read his magnum opus, I am prepared to admit that Graves may have traduced him - whilst the Puritan idealogue is definitely in evidence, there is also a strong argument for freedom of thought and a rather endearing concern for the logical consequences of his flights of fancy that frequently leads to bathos. The result is a poem that is magnificently absurd in its contradictions. It seeks to promote conventional Christian biblical interpretations but ends up undermining them.
Milton's first problem is that the entire text on which his epic is based is all of 42 verses long. His solution is the classic one of back-story development, in particular of the character of Satan (who of course does not appear in the original story). Characteristically, he goes to extremes, making him far too charismatic and noble, and necessitating some hasty interpolations reminding the reader that he is a rebel angel who is being punished. But they don't work - to a twenty-first century western reader, Satan's championing of freedom and independence of thought against a remote, vengeful, arbitrary and all-powerful despot makes him a hero:
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same
And what I should be: all but less than He
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free. Th' Almighty hath not built
Here for His envy, will not drive us hence.
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!
(Bk 1, 254-263)
Even if, as the angel Raphael subsequently reveals to the dreary Adam, Satan's rebellion turns out to be a quixotic act motivated entirely by jealousy at being passed over for promotion, the nobility of the sentiments expressed is captivating.
Satan's allure is increased by Milton's depiction of God, who is very much Old Testament and indeed as arbitrary and vengeful as Satan describes him. For example, in Milton's version, the serpent is just a poor dumb beast who is taken over by Satan for the purposes of tempting Eve. This doesn't stop God from punishing it for taking part in the Fall despite the fact that it had no choice in the matter.
Then there is of course the matter of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a problem in the original story which the poem puts into painful focus. Why did God put Adam and Eve in the one place where they could be tempted? And, as Satan points out, what exactly is wrong with acquiring a sense of right and wrong anyway? God has imposed an arbitrary rule and expects it to be obeyed without question, despite having giving human beings the faculties of curiosity and freedom of choice. What did he expect to happen? God's commands, however lovingly couched, boil down to "obey or die", a choice which Satan - rightly in our eyes - resists.
In part, God's meanness is to contrast him with the Son, who is portrayed as a mediator who seeks to mitigate some of God's more wrathful actions, offering to bear Adam and Eve's punishment for their transgressions (who decided that the punishment was necessary? Why, God of course). The result, however, is that we end up rooting for Satan all the more.
A similar problem of sympathy afflicts the other supposed villain in the piece, Eve. She is, of course, an airhead (reflecting Milton's low opinion of women generally), but shows a spirited independence that makes her a natural ally of Satan. And when her lord and master Adam is such a drip, it's not surprising (to 21st century eyes) that she decides to strike out on her own, even though she comes a cropper in doing so. Milton also undermines the idea of conjugal love that he otherwise praises by making it clear that it is Adam's passion for his wife that makes him give in to temptation and thereby trigger the sorrows of humanity.
Similar absurdities emerge from Milton's attempts to rationalise the background of the Adam and Eve story. He justifies the creation of earth and of humanity as an attempt by God to re-populate heaven after Satan's rebellion deprived it of a goodly number of its heavenly host. But God presumably magicked angels into existence in the first place, so why go through this palaver when he could (metaphorically) snap his fingers and make it so? It's like the elaborate plans that Bond villains come up with to dispose of the hero when simply shooting him in the head would suffice.
The strong sense of place - of whole worlds spinning in a void - is one of the poem's best features, but Milton's concern for logic does lead to some unintentional comedy. For example, when Satan leaves Hell to fly to Earth, he encounters his daughter Sin, who was born Athena-like from his head while he was lying stunned after falling from heaven, and Death, the monstrous product of their incestuous union (yes, in Milton's universe, angels can have sex, though as Sin has to remind Satan of who she is, one can only presume that the act causes angelic amnesia). Satan's epic flight to earth through the wastes of chaos is well-described, but obviously raised in Milton's mind the question of how the damned souls would travel from earth to hell. His allegorically ingenious solution is to have Sin and Death build a bridge between the two, but in my head this raises the absurd image of these supposedly monstrous and powerful entities slapping bricks together at high speed like builders in a cartoon.
A word on the text and the edition. The whole poem is written in heroic couplets which go (thank you Stephen Fry):
Ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum,
Ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum.
Milton is a very clever poet, and his expression of complex ideas in long sentences while maintaining the metre is an extremely impressive technical achievement. But artistically, I'm not so sure. The problem is that English doesn't naturally fit the heroic rhythm. The emphases in English words are on arbitrary syllables - sometimes the first, sometimes the last, sometimes elsewhere - which is why good English, with its rushes and flows and unexpected juxtapositions, is such a pleasure to read and listen to. Forcing it into the straitjacket of the heroic mode is a painful process involving unnatural word order ("enclosure green", "distempers foul", "thicket overgrown") and contractions that can make the intended meaning almost impossible to discern. It also results in a booming saminess in the poem's tone which makes it good bedtime reading. It doesn't surprise me that despite being one of the most famous poems in the English language, public recitations of Paradise Lost are rare.
This edition is generally well edited with some helpful footnotes, but could have done with fewer explaining exactly which syllables in a phrase need to be elided to fit the rhythm, something that is obvious to most native English speakers. There is also an extensive collection of extracts from commentaries on various aspects of the poem by CS Lewis, Voltaire, TS Eliot and others, some of which are illuminating. Though I have to say that two hundred pages of them is a bit much.
So why have so many gallons of ink been expended by some of the smartest people of the last three hundred years on what most would agree is a technically impressive but artistically and logically flawed poem? Obviously a lot of it is a battle between literary critics pointing out the flaws and Christian thinkers attempting to rationalise them. But this seems to me to be a bit silly, for the poem's faults are simply reflections of Milton's own bifurcated and self-contradictory personality. To take one man's imaginings and attempt to draw from them grand principles of theology or reason seems almost as mad as having Sin and Death build a bridge between earth and hell. And whilst I still agree with Robert Graves that Milton the man was a monster, his - sometimes unwitting - support for independence of thought and expression is to be admired. Take this marvellous passage from the Areopagitica, an essay in which Milton argues for freedom from censorship, which elegantly explains why books matter (and why I write this blog):
"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss: and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse."