Of Paradise Lost the first part, war twixt Hell and Heaven depicting, get through, slumbering not, I can. That beyond, yet, not. Try will I again: be wrong can Blake? For good reason finish you your article, Mr. Pinsky

For the struggles of mortals imperfect an equivalent stylistic: of Milton's achievement still accumulating part that is; in his work palpable and in our world pervasive. .....not.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not to me, today, like Yoda sounds.

I believe Conan Doyle had Holmes say "only a German is so unkind to his verbs..."

Evidently he was mistaken.

I found Milton to be roughly equivalent to slogging through protein sludge in hip-waders. Nutritious, but tiring.

However, having absorbed his imagery, there are a few bits that still stir by black little heart. Satan, bruised and defeated, rousing the fallen angels by the side of the great burning lake....

"a heaven of hell, and a hell of hev'n"

Maybe I was an idealistic teenager, but that scene had me daydreaming for almost a week.

Freki

The farce is strong in you, Master Falcon.

ask not what Milton can do for you; ask what you can do with Rod McKuen......"

Nah, falcon's not a Philistine, Inkberrow, just a good parodist.

I just thought I'd offer a parody of my own about the other end of Falcon's absurdist spectrum.

You lie wrapped up in embryonic sleep, beneath the painting of the Blue Fisherman....

I should point out that Pinsky has garbled all this by omitting a comma. In the poem, God has just pronounced the authority of Christ, and in this context says, "Him who disobeys, / Me disobeys." With that weird "Me disobeys" inversion going on, it's hard to be sure whether the Him at the beginning refers to any guy who disobeys Christ (Christ not being named, but implicit in context), or to Christ (directly referred to) as the object of disobedience by a "who" that means "whoever." But either way, the ultimate meaning is, as Pound said, "Who disobeys him, disobeys Me" and it's hard to see how God gains dignity from the Yoda-like contortion. Pinsky's omission of comma and context makes it even harder to guess what Milton meant, and makes Pound look wrong. But Pound was -- on this point, anyway -- right.

I should point out that Pinsky has garbled all this by omitting a comma.

So Pinsky is to blame for a typist's careless typo?

Well, that comma at the center of his argument of that point. I'd say if you can diagram a sentence you can read Milton.

MaryAnn:

I should point out that Pinsky has garbled all this by omitting a comma.

So Pinsky is to blame for a typist's careless typo?

Gosh, I guess I should have said Pinsky has garbled all this by omitting both the context and the crucial comma necessary to understand it -- or by not bothering to correct these omissions by the careless typist some people might imagine him to employ.

Comma Schemata! Let’s get back on point. Somebody dissin’ Rod McKuen around here?

Well, I feel dumb. I thought the comma was supposed to go before the last disobey. Him who disobeys me, disobeys. I was going to translate it into "He who disobeys me (in a specific sense) disobeys (the natural order in a general sense). Of course I've never really read Milton much. Still, with all due respect to Mr. Milton, I like my way better and I'm going to pretend it's correct.

A couple of points, related, I hope:

The subject of Paradise Lost is "Man's first disobedience," which makes "disobedience" alone a sin. Comma or no comma, "Him who disobeys me" is guilty of a very serious sin: Disobedience.

The English language - and it's literature, in particular - was going through radical changes in the Renaissance, as it is today, and experimentation produced many forms that either became standard partsof the language or withered on the vine. Inverted word order was actually a harkening back to earlier forms by Milton's time, and his immersion in Latin, in which he wrote many poems, may well have contributed to a final "not." Of course, as an earlier post noted, kids a few years ago were "not-ing" all over the place. You can xaggerate this sort of sentence structure to sound like Yoda, but you can do the same sort of thing with any writer's work, especially the older ones, and make that writer appear stupid or tasteless. Milton was neither.

I must admit I have read all of PL, PR, "Samson," Lycidas, and most of Milton's other poetry, plus large chunks of his indigestible prose. I hope this doesn't disqualify me. (True, it was about 100 years ago, in college and graduate school, but a lot of the stuff stuck; I often reread my ancient, marked-up Milton for enjoyment.) I'm pretty sure that he knew well how his verse sounded, and it most of it sounded just fine to him and his contemporaries.

It's always hard to put ourselves in the eye/ear/mind of another culture, or a distant past one. Huge chunks of Shakespeare are beloved - and completely misunderstood - by contemporary audiences. The language changes. No matter: Milton remains easier to read than the Elizabethans, and even when he's not completely clear to us, he's capable of amazing music and powerful images. Think "darkness visible," for one.

Reading 400-year-old verse can be difficult at times, but the fact that it's still being read means someone thinks it's worth the effort. You just have to be willing to hear the music.

I must admit I have read all of PL, PR, "Samson," Lycidas, and most of Milton's other poetry, plus large chunks of his indigestible prose. I hope this doesn't disqualify me. (True, it was about 100 years ago, in college and graduate school, but a lot of the stuff stuck; I often reread my ancient, marked-up Milton for enjoyment.) I'm pretty sure that he knew well how his verse sounded, and it most of it sounded just fine to him and his contemporaries.

Lupus62, I also read a lot of Milton in a grad school course devoted to him. And like you, it was 'way back in the last millennium..... Although I haven't touched my text since then, I'm planning to re-read PL in celebration of Milton's 400th birthday.

As for knowing how his vese sounded --- as some of us were saying in another thread, he certainly did. He was blind by the time he wrote PL, so he had to dictate the whole thing to his scribes, including his daughter and Andrew Marvell.