Milton Matters

Milton Matters by esias ryder 2016

littlebookofjohn.com

John Milton’s praiseworthy epic poem Paradise Lost presents English heroic verse without rhyme comparable to that of Homer in Greek or Virgil in Latin, ‘Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age’ (S Simmons —  printer’s note to reader).

Ovid recommends the writer kick off a work in media rem, or in the middle of the action. In Paradise Lost we spot Satan face-down in the mud of Hell, ‘Driv’n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven’ (II:772):

Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host

Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring

To set himself in Glory above his Peers,

He trusted to have equal’d the most High,

If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim

Against the Throne and Monarchy of God

Rais’d impious War in Heav’n and Battel proud

With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power

Hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie

With hideous ruine and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine Chains and penal Fire,

Who durst defie th’ Omnipotent to Arms. (I:37-49)

Milton rewinds the shooting match in Books V and VI to show the star striker Satan illuminated under floodlights in ‘dubious battle’ against the ‘Tyranny of Heaven’ with a gang of ne’er-do-wells who are later identified as Arsenal supporters:

His count’nance, as the Morning Starr that guides

The starrie flock, allur’d them, and with lyes

Drew after him the third part of Heav’ns Host (V:705- 707)

Does Satan, the rotten runt of a riotous brood, exist permission of God? Is Satan on a mission from God? ‘... though strange to us it seemd/ At first, that Angel should with Angel warr’ (VI:91-92). Are we then the losers from the War in Heaven given a substitute’s chance? Or are we the victors from the side that fought against fascism? Have we a noble inheritance? 

Is Satan right to protest against the imposition of new match rules?  Isn’t Satan protesting pro bono democracy? And isn’t God imposing a family dictatorship in the stylie of North Korea?

... the work

Of secondarie hands, by task tranferd

From Father to his Son? strange point and new!

Doctrin which we would know whence learnt: who saw

When this creation was? rememberst thou

Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?

We know no time when we were not as now;

Knew none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d

By our own quick’ning power (V: 850-858)

Satan steaming and snorting and sporting the latest fighting fashions on the Elysian Fields of Heaven, ‘in his Sun-bright Chariot sate’ is flanked ‘in terrible array/ Of hideous length’ ... ‘On the rough edge of battel’, ‘Satan with vast and haughtie strides advanc’t/ Came towring, armed in Adamant and Gold’ (VI:100-110) and is met by Abdiel with the sword of truth: 

So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,

Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell

On the proud Crest of Satan, that no sight,

Nor motion of swift thought, less could his Shield

Such ruin intercept: ten paces huge

He back recoild; the tenth on bended knee

His massie Spear upstaid; (VI:189-195)

Devoid of grace and parachute Satan propelled by Jesus’ big boot free-falls kicking and protesting from the high grass of Heaven down into the seed-husk chaff of Space:

  Nine dayes they fell; confounded Chaos roard,

And felt tenfold confusion in thir fall

Through this wilde Anarchie, so huge a rout

Incumberd him with ruin (VI:871-874)

 Satan and the chaps are converting from the charming to the chimeric: 

  But O how fall’n! how chang’d

From him, who in the happy Realms of Light

Cloth’d with transcendent brightness didst outshine

Myriads though bright (I 84-87)

Satan’s lackeys lie lifeless in a lake of mud like lazy limp licentious lizardy insects — their modern counterparts a sickening dense mass of Arsenal supporters — and here Milton relies on the ear rather than the eye:

Thick swarm’d, both on the ground and in the air,

Brusht with the hiss of rustling wings. As Bees

In spring time (I:767-769)

Milton immerses the reader in the dire, iry, briery fiery mire of tired Satan’s new allotment tipped with the charm and imagery of Uptown Tottenham:

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed

With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d (I:65-69)

Satan writhes in a ‘Dungeon horrible, on all sides round/ As one great Furnace flam’d’ (I:61-62) roasting with ‘obdurate pride and stedfast hate’ (I:58):

To mortal men, he with his horrid crew

Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe

Counfounded though immortal: But his doom

Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain

Torments him (I:51-56)

The star-studded Satan ‘Majestick though in ruin’ (II:305) soothes his mercurial mind with the balmy resolution to continue his ‘Errands in the gloomy Deep’ (I:152), ‘Which if not Victory is yet Revenge’ (II:105), to ‘suffer and support’ his pains, and to work in the ‘heart of Hell’ a ‘mightier service’. The mentality of the abuser quickly adopts the demulcent demur of a doleful victim: 

That with sad overthrow and foul defeat

Hath lost us Heav’n, and all this mighty Host

In horrible destruction laid thus low,

As far as Gods and Heav’nly Essences

Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains

Invincible, and vigour soon returns,

Though all our Glory extinct, and happy state

Here swallow’d up in endless misery (I:135-142)

Satan and his swinging soul band of sad creatures conspire against the common cause with the coarse, caustic, sanctimonious poison of a Conservative Party conference:

Fall’n Cherube, to be weak is miserable

Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,

To do ought good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight,

As being the contrary to his high will

Whom we resist. (I:157-162)

Satan counts himself ‘the king of infinite space’, ‘bounded’ like Hamlet in a ‘sterile promontory’ and festering in a ‘foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ ‘in which are many confines, wards and dungeons’ (Hamlet II ii):

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (I:254-255)

When the best quotes come, they come not single lines but in battalions.

  To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. (I:262-263)

Satan, glorying in the new-kindled kingdom of a playground bully, conjures lines that could have come from Hamlet at the court of King Claudius:

... how wearisom

    Eternity so spent in worship paid

   To whom we hate (II:247-249)

The world’s a prison but all the players are free to strut their stuff on the Stage of Life:

  Our own good from our selves, and from our own

Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,

Free, and to none accountable, preferring

Hard liberty before the easie yoke

Of servile Pomp (II:253-257)

We uncover God in Book III chilling in the mother of all armchairs with Jesus, the first-born, on God’s right wing, both spectators of the Big Match of Hell as if engrossed in a football match on a giant wide-screen television:

Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage

Transports our adversarie, whom no bounds

Prescrib’d, no barrs of Hell, nor all the chains

Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss

Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems

On desperat revenge, that shall redound

Upon his rebellious head. (III:80-86)

God finds no fault with His own fatherless lack of refereeing skills:

  ... whose fault?

Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of mee

All he could have; I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall (III:96-99)

But a reasonable parent does not sit idly by while an offspring’s spat turns into a cannon-shoot with engines of war. And a child makes an informed decision when properly educated and supervised. The cuddly Manson Family were a soft-hearted bunch of flower-power charmers by comparison:  

  So were created, nor can justly accuse

Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;

As if Predestination over-rul’d

Thir will, dispos’d by absolute Decree

Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed

Thir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,

Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault (III:112-118)

A reasonable parent does not hoof the third part of his children into the long grass of Hell and relegate the loyal rest to a not-fit-for-purpose nightmare of a planet the far side of the universe.

If Life were the Jeremy Kyle show we’d be grilling God on stage as the abusive parent.

  They trespass, Authors to themselves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose; for so

I formed them free, and free they must remain,

Till they enthrall themselves. (III:122-125)

The victims of this bonfire of the innocents, the mass loss of innocence, will welcome the relief of the crumbs and the drippings from an indolent God’s high table, but the giving of grace is severely rationed:

Men therefore shall find grace,

The other none ...

But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine. (III:131-132 &134)

Was War in Heaven a prerequisite of God’s holy masterplan? Is God comfortable with the creation of Hell? 

The reader discovers in a private moment with God the reason for having been farm-raised like the pods from the film Alien:

  What thinkst thou then of mee, and this my State,

Seem I to thee sufficiently possest

Of happiness, or not? who am alone

From all Eternitie, for none I know

Second to mee or like, equal much less.

How have I then with whom to hold converse

Save with the Creatures which I made, and those

To me inferior (VIII:403-410)

Has God massacred the miscreant branches of a dysfunctional family tree, or has God committed them to the asylum of Highbury Fields? Is God claiming to be sole surviving victor of evolution? Verily, even the Addams Family is seeded by an evolutionary common ancestor. 

Where is our Heavenly mother? Has mother gone AWOL against God’s domestic violence? Is God’s bad brood bound to germinate into heavy-metal head-bangers? And why is God so dead-keen to get shot of His family?   

Meanwhile, downtown at the heavy-metal head-bangers’ drum, the band leader Satan leads the Great Escape from Hell. The ‘fatal key’ has been entrusted by God to the ‘Snakie Sorceress that sat/ Fast by Hell Gate’ (II:724-725). Satan the action man, hot barium meal of courage coursing his veins, faces one small step to hunt man, one giant leap for Satan-kind:

Th’ unfounded deep, & through the void immense

To search with wandring quest a place foretold (II:829-830)

Space the final frontier: these are the voyages of the star-tripper Satan, to fly or not to fly a fiendish errand, to boldly fleece the fresh-faced human race, and ‘to gorge the flesh of Lambs or yeanling Kids’ (III:434), upon the ‘firm opacous Globe’ (III:418):

Me miserable! which way shall I flie

Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

O then at last relent: is there no place

Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?

None left by submission; and that word

Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame

Among the spirits beneath, whom I seduc’d

With other promises and other vaunts

Then to submit, boasting I could subdue

Th’ Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know

How dearly I abide that boast so vaine,

Under what torments inwardly I groane ...

The lower still I fall, onely Supream

In miserie (IV:73-88 & 91-92)

Satan’s grand tour on ‘A violent cross wind’ (III:487) of Earth’s highlights include of course the Spurs’ temple at White Hart Lane and the training ground at the Garden of Eden:

Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse

With easie intercourse pass to and fro

To tempt or punish mortals, except whom

God and good Angels guard by special grace (II:1030-1033) 

The full-blooded exploits of Satan are for ever fuelled with the throbbing, pumping fast food of pain:

But pain is perfect miserie, the worst

Of evils, and excessive, overturnes

All patience. (VI:462-464)

The terrible temptation of McDonald’s — the lowest point of human existence — is irresistible to Satan and his ravenous brood of Arsenal supporters:

My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth

Which mans polluting Sin with taint hath shed

On what was pure, till cramm’d and gorg’d, nigh burst

With suckt and glutted offal, at one sling

Of thy victorious Arm. (X:630-634)

When passing the rancid pit of a fast-food joint the reader will have witnessed with horror the rabid rat-lines of customers crowding from door to counter, and Milton serves the ready answer:

Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth

Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep (IV:677-678)

Satan, ever the deep-fried whinger, broiling behind the counter of his new job at Snakes-R-Us at downtown Garden of Eden:

O foul descent! that I who erst contended

With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind

Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime (IX:163-165)

A counterpart to the serial customers at McDonald’s, Satan the offender digests a foetid lesson: ‘The miserie, I deserv’d it’ (X: 727). 

And musing with more honesty than any gristle-headed politician:

But what will not Ambition and Revenge

Descend to? who aspires must down as low

As high he soard, obnoxious first or last

To basest things. Revenge, at first though sweet,

Bitter ere long back on it self recoils (IX:168-172)

The stoic heroes of a human race despite ratty inbred faults incubate a raw-throated protest against a stoat-hearted God. ‘Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not’ (X:762). The toxic tannins of Life pulsating the pain of survival through the sewers and culverts of a tainted system:

... O fleeting joyes

Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes!

Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay

To mould me Man, did I sollicite thee

From darkness to promote me, or here place

In this delicious Garden? (X:741-746)

The helpless addict of a higher God will always adduce the wonder of the lowly flower as evidence of a marvellous uplifting Life but never the violated, starving child blinded by a worm burrowing through the blue innocence of the eyeball:

  Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold

The good I sought not. To the loss of that, 

Sufficient penaltie, why hast thou added

The sense of endless woes? inexplicable

Thy justice seems (X:751-755)

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