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Some poetry
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Author:  Anonymous [ Sun Jan 08, 2006 9:29 pm ]
Post subject:  Some poetry
I am trying to write a poem about the following line: 'Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime' which is a quote from John Milton / Paradise Lost. The passage goes like this

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme

While the interpretation (taken from a Milton site) is as follows:

The beginning of Paradise Lost is similar in gravity and seriousness to the book from which Milton takes much of his story: the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The Bible begins with the story of the world’s creation, and Milton’s epic begins in a similar vein, alluding to the creation of the world by the Holy Spirit. The first two sentences, or twenty-six lines, of Paradise Lost are extremely compressed, containing a great deal of information about Milton’s reasons for writing his epic, his subject matter, and his attitudes toward his subject. In these two sentences, Milton invokes his muse, which is actually the Holy Spirit rather than one of the nine muses. By invoking a muse, but differentiating it from traditional muses, Milton manages to tell us quite a lot about how he sees his project. In the first place, an invocation of the muse at the beginning of an epic is conventional, so Milton is acknowledging his awareness of Homer, Virgil, and later poets, and signaling that he has mastered their format and wants to be part of their tradition. But by identifying his muse as the divine spirit that inspired the Bible and created the world, he shows that his ambitions go far beyond joining the club of Homer and Virgil. Milton’s epic will surpass theirs, drawing on a more fundamental source of truth and dealing with matters of more fundamental importance to human beings. At the same time, however, Milton’s invocation is extremely humble, expressing his utter dependence on God’s grace in speaking through him. Milton thus begins his poem with a mixture of towering ambition and humble self-effacement, simultaneously tipping his hat to his poetic forebears and promising to soar above them for God’s glorification.

MY poem thus far is as follows

Although such form was a convention of his time
History has made a mockery of this line
He tried to hide his vanity through his muse
But we are seeing through that pompous ruse
The classical bards whose legacy was put to the flame
Proved sterner than any attempt to diminish their name
Was irony the ripest fruit of his conviction
That all along his god the greater fiction
Author:  Goat [ Mon Jan 09, 2006 3:35 pm ]
Post subject: 
Pretty good. Milton's a genius.
Author:  Carnifex Umbris [ Mon Jan 09, 2006 4:04 pm ]
Post subject: 
Milton > everything else

To my mind, Milton stands the test of time just as well as Virgil, Homer, and the rest of the Greco-Roman masters. His work is just as epic and complex, and he succeeds in what he set out to do. There is Christian conceit, of course, but the idea of a fundamental loss of innocence is a deep one in all Western cultures, including the Greeks and Romans. Christianity has the apple, they have Pandora's box. Although both stories originally appear as fables, Milton took a simple story and turned it into one of the most beautiful works in the English language. It's much easier to write an epic about a war than a simple story.
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