A frail man, old before his years, is making a journey in flight.
His work from the past 20 years has been overturned, he's rejected,
he's been imprisoned. Now free, he's an enemy of the state and he's blind.
Plague ravages London, his home city, he's got to get out.
It could be a sad end if it weren't for the fact
that this man has just finished writing the greatest poem in the English language.
He is John Milton and the poem is called Paradise Lost.
'I'm convinced that John Milton is our nation's greatest poet.'
Excuse me. 'Pretty extensive field research on a bridge reveals...' Who's that? No idea.
'..that most people can't even recognise the poor chap.'
Do you recognise that man? No.
If I was to say John Milton to you, what comes into your head? Nothing.
Has anyone here heard of John Milton? Anyone?
OK, Milton is deeply unfashionable. Why?
He wrote poetry from a very young age.
He spent 20 years at the forefront of radical Republican politics.
Then when his cause failed he finally created his masterwork, Paradise Lost.
It's an impressive CV, although I admit he doesn't look like a bundle of laughs.
What image do you have in your head of John Milton?
Gloomy. Gloomy? Yes. OK. Long-winded. Long-winded.
Miserable. Miserable. What makes you say miserable?
It's the connotation of Paradise Lost, which you think is going to be miserable. I haven't read it.
Actually, it's anything but.
Paradise Lost is an electrifying poem about love and war,
the fight between good and evil and an obsession with human freedom that speaks to us now.
Before I went into comedy,
I spent three years as a student at Oxford trying to write a PhD on Paradise Lost.
No-one was more surprised by that than me.
I'd always been interested in the funny writers,
like Dickens and Swift.
To me, John Milton seemed like a funless Protestant
who wrote a vast unread poem about biblical stories no-one was interested in any more.
To a fun-loving Catholic like myself that seemed the last thing I wanted to be spending my student grant on.
Then I read Paradise Lost and was instantly dazzled.
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.
John Milton mean anything to you? Yes. Yes, yes.
You've heard of John Milton? Of course.
When I say John Milton to you - oh, bless you, bless you -
if I say John Milton to you what do you think of?
Paradise Lost.
Have you read Paradise Lost? I have. What did you make of that?
Full of energy, absolutely wonderful. Excellent. I take if from your accent you're not native born.
I'm not native born. Where are you from? I'm an Australian.
So, we had to go all the way to Australia to find someone who is enthused about John Milton.
Absolutely. Standing on this frozen bridge across the ice cold Thames.
Bless you for remembering him. Thank you very much.
'I think we should all be celebrating Milton and celebrating his greatest poem.
'So, before we plunge in, here's a little explanation of the great tale that's about to unfold.'
Paradise Lost is basically a massive dramatic retelling of the story of Adam and Eve.
God makes the world, he makes our first parents,
Adam and Eve, and puts them in charge of the Garden of Eden.
He tells them they can do anything apart from eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Satan, a fallen angel, disguises himself as a serpent and comes along and tempts Eve to eat the apple.
She then persuades Adam to do so too, God is angry
and banishes our first parents from the Garden of Eden.
Paradise, it seems, is lost forever.
What in me is dark, illumine.
What is love, raise and support.
At the height of this great argument,
I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
Milton surprises from the very start.
He says he wants to justify the ways of God to man
so we're expecting to hear all about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
But just a few lines in we're thrown into a compelling vision of hell.
To make it work Milton coins new words,
phrases fresh to English language - Satanic, pandemonium, stunning.
We join Satan, freshly cast out of heaven,
examining his new surroundings.
"At once, as far as angels ken, he views the dismal situation, waste and wild.
"A dungeon horrible and all sides round as one great furnace flamed,
"yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible."
This is one of the most famous passages in Paradise Lost.
I remember when I first read it how memorably dramatic the language seemed.
But now the closer you examine it,
the more you realise just how booby trapped Milton's language actually is.
"At once, as far as angels ken, he views."
This is Satan. "At once, as far as angels ken, he views."
These sounds they are all very open, it's all about a view, space in front of him.
"At once, as far as angels ken, he views." Out words and then suddenly,
because the line doesn't end there, "he views the dismal situation."
"Dismal" is like a great big gate coming down.
"..dismal situation, waste and wild, a dungeon horrible..."
It's another gate coming down. "..on all sides round, as one great furnace flamed,
"yet from those flames no light..." We are led to believe "flames" is going to give us fiery and glittery.
"No light, but rather..." and here's the surprise, where the phrase says "..rather darkness visible."
That's an extraordinary expression - "darkness visible".
We can sort of see the darkness, but yet we know we can't see it because it is darkness.
Milton's language here is so ambiguous.
And the same is true of his characterisation of Satan,
who can seem noble at times, even heroic.
When Blake read Paradise Lost, he wondered if Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.
Blake should have given Milton more credit - he's a lot cleverer than that.
"One who brings a mind," this is Satan talking of himself, "a mind not to be changed by place or time,
"The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
That's Satan saying, "I can take words, words that mean the opposite of each other,
"and yank them together, and somehow they will impress you,
"they will make you feel that I've somehow come up with an argument that is persuasive."
"..Make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Here is the start of spin, this is poetry telling us what spin and argument is all about.
The sort of politician who says,
"Forward to the past, let us start building our tomorrows today, victory in defeat!"
It all sounds great, especially if you do that with your finger,
but it is meaningless nonsense.
All those people are literally doing the devil's work.
And this sort of play with language, this use of words without really caring what they mean
as long as they sound impressive, even though the words are the opposite of each other,
ends up in the sort of pure evil that you see in phrases like
"work sets you free" on the gates of concentration camps.
Milton makes us feel that we are not being told that this is wrong,
or this is bad, or this is manipulative, it allows us to work it out for ourselves.
From hell we go to heaven, via Slough.
In a Portakabin by the A4 a class of 11 year olds are gathering to discuss Paradise Lost.
I have at last put up all your pictures to do with Milton's description of hell.
Now, we are going to pick that work up today and we are going to look at the opposite.
So, what's the opposite of hell? Heaven. Yeah, heaven.
Milton's not ragingly popular in schools these days.
He's often considered too difficult.
But I watched this lot relish getting their sleeves rolled up.
And I had a brief go of being a teacher's assistant.
Have you come across any strange words?
Jubilee. Jubilee? Hang on, I've got my book here.
Jubilee is like a big celebration, but I think for someone special.
Hosanna. Hosanna, it's like a hurray, it's like an angel saying hurray.
We didn't know what "raptures" is.
Raptures are sort of if you are really happy, really ecstatic.
We know all the rest.
You know all the rest. Well, you don't need me. I'll leave you to it.
'You have to start with individual words of course,
'but it's the way Milton puts them together, that's the really stunning bit.
'The class thought it was great that Milton described heaven has having a river of bliss running through it.
'A river of what?'
It feels so real.
But while it feels so real, it's also difficult to put your finger on every little detail.
You came up with this phrase, "river of bliss", which sounds great,
but you can't actually imagine what bliss looks like,
so to have a whole river of it is like unimaginable, yet it feels real.
And I think what I found about Paradise Lost is it's magical like that,
you feel as you're reading it, you sort of know what's going on
yet the more you think about it, the more you think of it in different ways.
Even when you're 78, you still see it as something you're reading for the first time.
I'm still learning, I've learnt a lot today from going around.
Thank you for teaching me more about Paradise Lost. Thank you very much.
Thank you for coming.
They are all happy to make time for the poem in between bouts of Club Penguin and Nintendo Wi crazy golf.
But what was John Milton doing at their age?
Well, Milton was born in the dynamic heart of London.
Here on Bread Street in 1608.
His family had to work for their money and they brought their son up in a truly urban environment.
It's not overrun with Milton memorials round here now,
so I've got to use my imagination a little bit.
They are actually constructing a giant 500 foot tower depiction of God.
These are God's ankles that we can see.
It's an initiative from Boris Johnson.
And there we can see a depiction of hell,
the lower regions, the massed ranks of the fallen,
living in a sort of an eternal torment of pain and sadness, I think, really.
Ah, at last, a sign.
John Milton Passage.
There it is.
It's basically...
It's basically an office underpass...
..or the road to hell, as I like to think of it.
OK, it's all corporate and thrusting and run on money that simply doesn't exist
but it's still full of activity round here.
Not that different from the London Milton grew up in really.
Down there, round the corner there, is St Paul's.
Not just the church and the school,
but St Paul's at the time was the great thoroughfare where people would go to gossip.
It was the centre of the book trade, it was also the red light district.
We had the Blackfriars Theatre further over there,
where Milton's father was a trustee, and at the time Shakespeare was putting on his very last plays.
Milton's dad was a successful businessman and he had serious ambitions for his little boy.
In the middle of his massive second defence of the English people,
there's a tantalising glimpse by Milton of his childhood, where he writes,
"My father destined me in early childhood for the study of literature,
"for which I'd so keen an appetite that from my twelfth year
"scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight."
He spent his nights up in his candlelit room
learning French and Italian and Hebrew, studying the Bible
and working his way methodically through all the great English classics of prose and poetry.
He was, at that early age, in his own head,
trying to make himself become the great English poet that he wanted to be
and this can sometimes add to that image we have of him as someone withdrawn,
withdrawn from the world, spending his days indoors rather than outside.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
There was nothing prissy or priggish about Milton.
He believed that poetry should be simple, sensuous and passionate,
It's really quite a randy place.
Here's a description of Adam and Eve doing the gardening,
which you think it quite an innocent little activity.
But the description of the trees and the flowers suggest that even they have only one thing on their mind.
"Where any row of fruit trees over woody reached too far their pampered boughs
"and needed hands to check fruitless embraces.
"They led the vine to wed her elm, she spoused about him twines her marriageable arms."
This is just a vine going round an elm tree branch, but it sounds like they're at it like knives.
"She spoused about him twines her marriageable arms,
"and with her brings her dower the adopted clusters to adorn his barren leaves."
It's a whole marriage ceremony just going up a tree.
I was looking for another passage, but on the way I came across this,
which is a description of Eve serving dinner to the archangel Raphael.
It says here, "Meanwhile, at table Eve ministered naked
"and their flowing cups with pleasant liquors crowned, O innocence deserving Paradise!
"If ever, then, then had the sons of God excuse to have been enamoured at that sight,"
"but in those hearts love unlibidinous reigned,
"nor jealousy was understood, the injured lover's hell."
That's a description, basically, of the angels in heaven potentially lusting after Eve.
But we're told by Milton that they didn't because they were nice and they hadn't fallen.
Milton makes his celestial creatures so human, so tangible.
He even dazzles us with details of the angel's digestive systems.
The archangel Raphael comes and visits Adam and Eve in the garden
and tells them the story while he sits and has dinner with them.
Yes, in Paradise Lost angels can eat food.
There's a description of how food is broken down within angels' digestive tracts,
then emitted as a sort of celestial gas.
"Tasting, concoct, digest, assimilate and corporeal to incorporeal turn."
That's the very first depiction in English literature of angel farts.
Now, I don't know how seriously you are meant to take it.
Milton is depicting a slightly crazy world, a world that's slightly hippy, really.
Nothing is quite what it seems.
Milton, I think, is like some Hollywood producer
taking the story of the Bible, the word of God, the word that at the time, when he was writing,
he was told, he was indoctrinated to think was literal truth.
He's taking that story and he's chucking a lot of it away and re-writing bits of it for himself.
He's making the Bible in his own image.
Now, that's an incredibly daring thing to do.
It makes it much more human,
but it also makes it a little bit more...
ambitious, arrogant, dangerous.
In 1625, John Milton went up to Christ's College, Cambridge.
It was a rather boorish place, and Milton, the sensitive poet with long hair, didn't fit in.
He hated it and when he left he moved back in with mum and dad.
And they moved here. Horton in Berkshire.
Milton was now a jobless 20-something living with his parents in the middle of nowhere.
Milton wrote to his old school friend, Charles Diodati, that he was having a great time here.
He was given a chance to think, to read and to write.
But I just wonder whether that's him being slightly too defensive.
I'm not sure...
I'm not sure he would want to have died here.
Soon there are signs of restlessness.
In an early poem called Lycidas, Milton rages against corruption in the Church.
Later he began to loath the bishops and denounce the interlinking of Church and state.
Milton wanted to determine his own relationship with God,
he didn't want anyone else telling him how it was done.
Something happened in Horton that may have stirred him further.
When his mother died, she was buried here in St Michaels, but the wrong way round.
Her gravestone was criticised by Church of England inspectors who wanted to enforce uniformity,
but the Miltons never did turn the grave the right way round.
I like to think that Milton's contempt for the bishops, which happened round about this time,
may well have been the product of theological enquiries going on in his own head,
and conclusions he'd come to anyway, or may well have been set off
by this little petty dispute that was going on,
being told that his mother's remains were buried squinty.
It can be the personal things that radicalise a young mind and galvanise it against authority.
John's mind was bubbling, he needed to get away.
So, in May 1638, aged 29,
John Milton sailed off in search of himself, making his way to Italy
and beginning what must surely have been one of the most pivotal experiences of his life.
It was, to use one of Milton's enduring expressions,
a journey to "fresh woods and pastures new."
The first city he spent any significant amount of time in was Florence.
He was enraptured by it.
For Milton to see all this for the first time, especially after coming from...you've seen Horton,
the contrast must have been startling, quite dramatic.
And here in Florence suddenly for Milton the Bible comes alive.
God is built large and painted fresh and vivid in stone and on canvas.
But so is flesh, vast pink puddles of flesh, painted on Renaissance ceilings,
and hanging from tapestries and carved from stone, in gardens and public squares.
This whole city is a celebration not just of spirituality, but of the human form, of humanity,
in an intensity that Milton would never have experienced before.
It must have completely transformed his whole conception of what you could do as an artist.
Here, finally, he seems happy.
He makes friends, he attends private academies with the city's wits.
He reads them poems he's written in Latin and Italian and they love them.
They still do.
Well, thank you very much for reading out the Milton, it sounded beautiful. Thank you.
Of course, it was in your honour.
I've got the English translation here.
"Since I am a young simple and candid lover, in doubt how to escape from myself, lady,
"I will devoutly give you the humble gift of my heart."
It is very sort of romantic.
It is very romantic
because this is a sonnet not to a real woman, but to love, love itself.
That's interesting in that at that age his most passionate stuff,
most emotional stuff was expressed in other languages.
Maybe he didn't want people back home to know.
I don't know.
I don't know. Who knows?
Paradise Lost was finally published almost 20 years later.
But it may have begun life here.
Around now Milton makes some tantalising early notes on Paradise Lost as a five-act drama.
He may have been further inspired by an extraordinary meeting...
..because in Florence, the young John Milton met old, blind Galileo,
the revolutionary astronomer.
The meeting may have taken place here at Galileo's villa,
where he was under house arrest for challenging the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church.
Galileo wasn't afraid of experimenting, of asking difficult questions
and offering up answers that shook the establishment.
In Paradise Lost, Milton's depiction of God in the heavens seems almost scientific.
It has a curious distancing effect.
I am just looking here at Milton's description of the heavens in Paradise Lost
and it is very mechanistic, scientific, very rational, physical description of how the heavens work.
It's almost like Galileo is trying to not only describe,
but explain the movement of the stars and of the angels.
He describes here,
"Meanwhile, upon the firm opacous globe of this round world,
"whose first convex divides the luminous inferior orbs,
"enclosed from chaos and the inroad of darkness old, Satan alighted walks."
"Opacous globe", "convex", "luminous inferior orbs",
its like walking through a museum yet this is a description of the division between heaven and hell.
The same mechanistic language applies to Milton's characterisation of God.
Whereas Satan gets all the good speeches, God comes dangerously close to sounding incomprehensible.
This is God talking about how if Adam and Eve are going to eat the apple and fall,
it's their own fault, not his, even though he knows in advance that they are going to do it.
It's all about him trying to explain away his foreknowledge of their sin.
God says, "Their will disposed by absolute decree or high foreknowledge,
"they themselves decreed their own revolt, not I.
"If I foreknew, foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
"which had no less proved certain unforeknown."
I've no idea what that means. I'm sure you don't either. I'm not sure you're meant to.
It's a very, very elaborate, long-winded justification by God
in very abstract theological language of his whole system.
Now, I am intrigued as to why Milton writes about God and heaven like this.
It's a little bit...dull, really, it's a bit boring.
Is it because he feels a little bit guilty about how carried away he got with himself
and his own powers and abilities in describing Satan earlier on.
He was almost too good at describing evil,
and as a penance, has he decided to be a little bit less ostentatious in describing God?
I can't quite accept that.
I was once asked on a Radio 4 programme why it was I gave up very early thoughts of becoming a priest.
Part of the reason I said was that for all of my study of theology and religion
and interest in spiritual matters, no-one had actually explained to me
why it was that Jesus had to die to save mankind.
I had heard that phrase again and again, and in church services it's assumed that you can understand it.
But I couldn't and I couldn't find any actual explanations to why that happened.
I said in the programme that no doubt in saying that I'd get lots of letters and I did.
And these are all very, very well meaning and understanding attempts to resolve my dilemma.
Someone here says, "I was surprised to hear you couldn't understand why God had to die for our sins.
"God doesn't have to do anything, that is what being God means."
Another one here, it says, "The short answer is Hebrews 214."
Someone sent in a diagram, someone else said,
"Please find enclosed brochure distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses,
"you'll find the answers on pages six and seven."
So, the answer to the question is don't ask the question.
Yet in Paradise Lost that's precisely what Milton does.
He is so ambitious, he says he's going to write things that are unattempted yet in prose and rhyme.
He's going to justify the ways of God to man. Yet he doesn't.
His God is a dull God.
Is that deliberate?
Does Milton write a boring God because God bores him?
I wonder whether in the battle in Milton's own head between the theologian and the poet,
the poet was beginning to win out.
John sailed back to England in 1639 and the rumblings of discontent
that had started back in Horton began to get a lot louder.
He didn't like the way the country was being run.
So, he did something about it.
He put his poetic ambitions to one side
and plunged into politics.
Print was exploding in the 17th century, like the web is today.
A revolutionary way to get your message to the masses.
Milton seized it by the horns.
As the civil war against Charles I gathered on the horizon, he began writing political pamphlets,
a one man opposition, interrogating values
and challenging beliefs with radical Republican thinking.
Milton's most famous pamphlet is this, Areopagitica.
It's his passionate response to new laws designed to ban the work of pamphleteers like him.
Areopagitica is the most perfect expression in English of the defence of freedom of speech.
It's the greatest attack on state censorship that has ever been written.
He starts by arguing, the books in themselves always have something of intrinsic merit in them.
If we ban a book we might ban something that is important that we don't know the implications of yet.
He says here, "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."
And he gets more and more passionate, he argues vociferously the value of any book there is
and in quite a violent and aggressive way.
"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book."
Basically what Milton is saying is that our freedom to think,
our freedom to engage in political and religious thought
is nothing unless we have the ability to meet head on our opponents.
Unless we are challenged by the opposite point of view,
there is no way we can test how firmly we hold our own opinions.
Areopagitica is fundamental to Milton's work and to our interpretation of that work
because in it Milton, for the very first time, manages to articulate what the point of Milton is.
It's to write because writing has a point.
As battles raged across the country, Milton fought his civil war with words...
..arguing vociferously against the status quo.
On January 30th, 1649, King Charles I was executed.
The Republicans had won.
Oliver Cromwell took control and he hired John Milton,
whose revolutionary ideals and language skills made him the perfect Secretary for Foreign Tongues.
Basically, Milton was in charge of an embryonic Foreign Office,
but the nation's hearts and minds were not yet won.
The new regime needed to exploit one of Milton's other gifts,
the ability to write fiery, brilliant polemical prose.
And it was to take him to the very centre of political power
as Oliver Cromwell's chief propagandist and effectively the new British Government's spin doctor.
Milton was 41, he had always been a solo maverick now he was paid to spin for Britain.
He even became a Government censor at one point, exactly what he'd railed against in Areopagitica.
In Westminster, reality bites.
I'm just interested in the fact that he suddenly went from being a public idealist
to someone who was then in the heart of power. What does that do to your ideals?
People lose their evangelisms, they lose the ability to be able to...
paint a big picture of where they are going, what they stand for.
You struggle to ensure you've got an anchor,
that you are holding on to what it is you came in to do, why you are there.
I'm sure. We all have a bit of that.
Yes, I really don't want to draw the parallels between you too strongly.
I'm not a Milton.
As they say, he's no Milton.
I just wonder how Milton would have felt as the Republican cause began to fail.
You think you've got somewhere and there's a change.
You know, the banks collapse or something calamitous like that.
What you would have been arguing becomes meaningless in the public view
and you get swept aside as his arguments were at the time. Yes.
After 11 years of justifying the word of Cromwell to men,
Milton wasn't just out of a job, he was persona non grata.
The Republic was finished. The Monarchy was restored under Charles II.
Milton must have been wondering, had it all been worth it?
In Paradise Lost, there's an enormous set piece battle in heaven
between God's side and Satan's forces
who revolt because God's created his son, the Messiah.
But Milton seems to be telling another story here.
"Strange to us it seemed at first, that angel should with angel war and in fierce..."
"Angel should with angel war".
This is a civil war, Milton's absolutely clear about this,
you get the parallel, you get the meaning, what he's describing is a civil war in heaven.
But who is Cromwell and who is Charles, that's the problem.
You can't tell which is which.
Here's a description of Satan.
"Satan with vast and haughty strides advanced, came towering armed and adamant and gold."
He's described there as someone very regal, someone aspiring to kingly authority.
Is Satan Charles? Is he Charles or is Satan what Cromwell was like at the end Cromwell's reign,
because Cromwell aspired to be like a king.
Didn't want to call himself a king so was crowned Lord Protector.
And then Satan, speaking to his troops,
speaks almost a defence of liberty and freedom from authoritarian rule
that is like a standard argument for Republicanism.
"For orders and decrees jar not with liberty, but well consist,
"who can in reason then or right assume monarchy
"over such as live by right his equals.
"If in power and splendour less, in freedom equal."
These are the arguments of the Republic movement.
In a parody of modern warfare, Satan and his crew invent gunpowder.
Then the other side come up with a really unique weapon.
It reaches the point of absurdity
when the good angels decide they're going to come up with a better weapon.
Hills! They are going to go and run and pick up hills and mountains and drop them on Satan and his troops.
"The arms away they threw and to the hills light as the lightning glimpse they ran.
"They flew from their foundations, loosening to and fro, they plucked the seated hills
"with all their load, rocks, water, woods and by their shaggy tops uplifting bore them in their hands.
"Amazed be sure and terror seized the rebel host when coming towards them
"so dreadly saw the bottom of the mountains upward turned."
It's quite, quite ridiculous,
it's a grand, magnificent, huge custard pie fight going on in the sky.
Its all very entertaining as I'm sure Milton meant it to be,
but he makes this war so absurd that I actually find this part of the poem rather unsettling.
He's almost questioning the whole point of war.
Given what he's been through and given the disillusionment he's felt,
in his head he's almost coming at the poem saying,
"Was all that just a complete waste of time from start to finish?
Was the whole civil war, doesn't matter which side you were on, was it all pointless?
When you read Paradise Lost, you start questioning everything.
While he was writing it, Milton knew he had lost his political battle,
but he was also coming to terms with an inner tragedy -
that he had gone slowly, agonisingly blind.
What happened to you when you lost your sight?
Blindness forces you back into yourself.
You do in a very real sense lose the world.
I suppose what I miss most, if that is the right word, would be the printed page and the human face.
Both of those disappeared.
And both of those were absolutely vital to Milton, weren't they?
Absolutely. Was your loss of sight a sudden thing?
No, it was very gradual, like his.
And that in a way makes it more desperate.
My dream life became extremely vivid.
I was alive in a wonderful world of colour and action at night.
When I woke up, every time I woke up, I went blind again.
But the face is very important, the loss of the face. You mention a poem he'd written about that.
That's right, yes. He wrote this sonnet in memory of his second wife, Katherine,
Sonnet 19. "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint...
"Methought I saw my late espoused Saint, brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
"whom Joves great son to her glad husband gave, rescued from death by force though pale and faint.
"Mine as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint.
"Purification in the old law did save, and such, as yet once more I trust to have,
"full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
"came vested all in white, pure as her mind, her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
"love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined, so clear, as in no face with more delight.
"But O as to embrace me she inclined,
"I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."
Oh!
It's just that last line, it's so...
"I waked, she fled and day brought back my night."
Just so monosyllabic and sparse, as well.
I remember what you were saying about...
Every time I woke up, I was blind again.
In Paradise Lost, Milton says he wants to tell us of things invisible to mortal sight.
One of his greatest poetic revelations is the way he writes the Fall itself
when Satan tempts Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
the single thing God has forbidden her to do.
So, we come to the moment itself, where the fall of man occurs.
"So saying her rash hand in evil hour forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate."
That's it, that's the description, it's all over in, what, two lines.
Four words even - "she plucked, she ate," - four monosyllables. That's it.
Milton, who has a great command of all the biblical stories and myths,
great powers of rhetoric and language, great flowing monologues and soliloquies and great epics.
It's all down to, "she plucked, she ate."
The sheer devilish bravery
in attempting something so bold like that is absolutely gobsmacking.
If this was a Hollywood film,
there'd be a slow motion move of the apple up to the mouth and great swelling orchestral climaxes.
Probably a close up of the teeth and maybe a camera from inside the mouth
watching the apple come closer and the great jaws shut.
But, no, "she plucked, she ate," that's it, work it out for yourself,
that's all I'm going to say, "she plucked, she ate."
It's the most momentous moment in history according to this poem,
and yet it's given and delivered in the barest of lines,
Great!
Milton wants us to understand that Eve freely chooses to eat the apple.
It's entirely her own responsibility.
The narrative is gripping.
When Eve comes to visit Adam, he can see what's happened,
she doesn't have to tell him, he can see that the one thing he hoped wouldn't happen has happened.
"Adam, soon as he heard the fatal trespass done by Eve,
"amazed, astonied stood and blank, while horror chill ran through his veins,
"and all his joints relaxed.
"From his slack hand the garland wreath for Eve down dropped and all the faded roses shed.
"Speechless he stood, and pale
"till thus at length, first to himself the inward silence broke."
It's the energy, the life has gone out of him.
The sounds are sort of empty - "down dropped and all the faded roses shed."
the rhyme...slows down to a very, very stately, quiet end,
and then "speechless he stood,"
after all the language and talk of speeches and rhetoric, "speechless he stood."
Then, just as suddenly as Eve ate the apple, so does Adam.
"For with thee certain," he says, "my resolution is to die."
They are the tragic couple, they fall but they fall together
and their world changes forever.
Out in the real world, John Milton was in grave danger.
He was an unrepentant Republican who had defended the beheading of Charles I,
but now Charles II was on the throne, Milton was on the wrong side.
He couldn't take any chances. Milton went into hiding, he let London conceal him.
It really is a bit of labyrinth, little lanes, little alleyways, where no-one could see him.
This is Bartholomew Close, hidden somewhere in this area, up some dark little stairwell,
Milton was bundled away by his friends.
But seeing it for the first time does make you realise how frightening it must have felt
to have been...
..pushed away from your home to somewhere strange.
And inside knowing that all you'd fought for, all you'd written about,
all that you'd worked for and believed had been overturned.
King Charles II issued a proclamation on August 13th 1660
declaring that many of Milton's pamphlets were tantamount to treason.
He ordered them to be publicly burned.
Milton wrote in Areopagitica that you might as well kill a man as kill a good book,
and yet now his works were being burned outside the Old Bailey
and many of his associates were being put to death.
Soon the new regime caught up with Milton and they threw him in the Tower of London.
He was a political prisoner.
Milton was blind, far from his friends and family,
trapped between four walls with only his thoughts for company.
Can you imagine what must have been going through Milton's mind and personality being imprisoned?
Inside him, what would have been happening?
My experience having spoken to prisoners,
whether from Guantanamo or Northern Ireland,
is that they often question things
in a way that they'd never done so before.
I think Milton's experience would have been something similar
and particularly because...
I think when you are unable to express yourself to anybody other than the four walls round you,
that makes you sharper, it makes you want to express more,
it makes you want to do it through writing because your words will be written and recorded forever.
And why perhaps the result that he turns rather than to polemic or to memoir,
he turns to poetry.
I remember the prisoners from the Arab world in Guantanamo would write amazing poetry to express themselves.
I had been held in solitary confinement
so I didn't know until I met some near the end of my time in solitary
that we had all come to the same conclusion.
Poetry had been written in Guantanamo in English, in Arabic, in Pashtu, in Farsi, in Turkish,
and people had come to their own conclusions as to how they wanted to express themselves
and it seemed like the common denominator was poetry.
Released from the Tower after a couple of months, with no charges to face,
the poetry finally flowed from Milton.
He had been thinking about Paradise Lost since his early 30s.
Now at 53, with an extraordinary series of life experiences behind him,
Milton was at last able to focus on getting the poem out of his head and onto the page.
Living a quiet life somewhere here on Bunhill Row, known then as Artillery Walk,
that's exactly what he did.
Milton claims that the words to Paradise Lost
came to him as divine inspiration in the middle of the night, in his dreams.
Whether that is true or not, we do know Milton would rise very early in the morning
with vast chunks of the poem already composed in his head.
The problem was he was blind and he would have to wait until a member of the family stirred
or a friend came to call and ask them to write it down in the form of dictation.
So, it was a complex, complex task, one that he had to absolutely focus all his attention on.
And while that was going on, another great drama came along.
Plague was engulfing the city.
The poet, his family, and his precious manuscripts, the sum of his life's work, had to get out of town.
The Miltons sought refuge here, Chalfont St Giles in deepest Buckinghamshire.
It's no Stratford upon Avon, there isn't a Milton industry here.
No Satan sausages, no Adam and Eve toby mugs,
but Chalfont St Giles is the hub of the very modest Milton tourist trade
because its home to the only house he lived in that's still standing.
While Milton was here he gave a copy of the Paradise Lost manuscript
to his friend, Thomas Elwood, a nervous moment for any author.
Milton called for the first copy of Paradise Lost, handed it to Elwood,
and if you did, just as we're talking about this,
if you press the little button by the fireplace there. Yeah.
RECORDED VOICE: He asked me how I liked it,
and what I thought of it,
which I, modestly, but freely told him.
Thou has said much here of paradise lost,
but what has thou to say about paradise found.
He made me no answer,
but sat some time in a muse.
Then broke off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.
What a rude man!
After all that work.
I'm just amazed by the reaction - you spend all that time writing and say, "What did you think?"
"That's all very well, but have you got anything else about paradise? How about the sequel?"
and Milton just goes, "Right, OK, yes, fine." I know.
Writing it and coming back.
We're lucky to have that. That all happened here? That all happened here, in this very room.
Milton had to wait two years between finishing the poem
and actually publishing it because the Great Fire of London decimated the city's print trade.
Paradise Lost finally came out in 1667 and it looked like this.
I've never seen inside a first edition of Paradise Lost.
It's very, very exciting.
"Man's First Disobedience, and the fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought death..."
This is great.
But what you get is a sense of how compact the poem is.
The publisher, Simon Symonds, said to him,
"We've noticed it doesn't rhyme."
The thing... Rhyming couplets at the time Milton was writing was very popular
and he's been asked by his publisher to put in a justification for why it doesn't rhyme.
So Milton writes a defence of the fact that the poem doesn't rhyme.
I say defence, it's really just a very big, articulate wah to those who do use rhyme.
"Rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse,
"in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age
"to set off wretched matter and lame meter.
"Graced indeed, since by the use of some famous modern poets
"carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation,
"hindrance and constraint to express many things otherwise
"and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them."
So he is basically saying,
"Sod rhyme, I don't need it.
"People who use rhyme are using it as an easy way out
"to get round the fact that they can't push their creativity in other directions."
How exciting!
Sorry, I've started reading it now, which I imagine is bad television,
but I can't help myself
because I've got Milton's first edition in my hands, so I'm going to read it.
Milton spent his final years completely absorbed in writing and thinking.
He produced many more great works of poetry and prose in a short time.
He died in November 1674 and is buried here at St Giles, Cripplegate,
in the heart of London, the city in which he spent the vast part of his life.
It's not much of a shrine so I suppose the best way to remember Milton is by reading his words.
The ending of Paradise Lost is Milton's masterstroke.
It's a beautifully simple piece of poetry about Adam and Eve
as they are expelled from the Garden of Eden and walk out into the real world,
our world.
These are the closing lines of the poem.
Listen how everything goes not pitiful, not subdued,
but accepting and quite noble
in how this couple take on their fate,
accept their humanity, all that they have got left,
and face the fact that this is what they have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
"Some natural tears they dropped,
"but wiped them soon, The world was all before them,
"where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide.
"They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
"Through Eden took their solitary way."
The epic religious verse of heaven and hell, war and battles, now disappears.
What we are left with are these bare words.
"They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
"Through Eden took their solitary way."
It's a very daring ending here for Milton to have used, because it is so intensely secular.
There's no mention of God and angels in these last few lines.
It's all very earthy,
an anticipation of the life Adam and Eve are going to lead without those fixed certainties of religion.
There aren't going to be any more visits from angels.
Instead, they have to make their own way out in the world.
I think it's because in the end Milton didn't want to justify the ways of God to men,
he wanted to justify the ways of men to us.
He wants to leave us with that final image of an intensely human couple,
a couple who have to make their own choices and decisions, a couple who are fallible.
The final effect of getting to the end is to want to go back to the beginning and read it all again.
This is because Milton puts us in charge.
At the end of the poem he lays down his pen,
the florid language disappears, and he wants us, like Adam and Eve,
to go out into the real world and to deal with it.
I never did finish my PhD on Paradise Lost.
Maybe that's because the poem defies any definitive interpretation.
After everything that Milton went through, he's urging us to keep examining things,
to keep celebrating our freedom to think for ourselves as sentient, fallen human beings.
If you want to be inspired, disturbed,
confronted with your failings and reminded of your strengths,
if you want to read what it feels like to love and to be free,
then you have to, you simply have to read Paradise Lost.