1
00:00:07,200 --> 00:00:11,520
A frail man, old before his years,
is making a journey in flight.

2
00:00:13,880 --> 00:00:18,520
His work from the past 20 years has
been overturned, he's rejected,

3
00:00:18,520 --> 00:00:23,560
he's been imprisoned.
Now free, he's an enemy
of the state and he's blind.

4
00:00:24,040 --> 00:00:28,560
Plague ravages London, his
home city, he's got to get out.

5
00:00:30,200 --> 00:00:32,600
It could be a sad end
if it weren't for the fact

6
00:00:32,600 --> 00:00:36,920
that this man has just finished
writing the greatest
poem in the English language.

7
00:00:38,960 --> 00:00:43,960
He is John Milton and the
poem is called Paradise Lost.

8
00:00:55,440 --> 00:01:00,200
'I'm convinced that John Milton
is our nation's greatest poet.'

9
00:01:00,200 --> 00:01:05,200
Excuse me. 'Pretty extensive field
research on a bridge reveals...'
Who's that? No idea.

10
00:01:05,200 --> 00:01:09,880
'..that most people can't even
recognise the poor chap.'

11
00:01:09,880 --> 00:01:12,440
Do you recognise that man? No.

12
00:01:12,440 --> 00:01:16,240
If I was to say John Milton to you,
what comes into your head? Nothing.

13
00:01:16,240 --> 00:01:21,200
Has anyone here heard
of John Milton? Anyone?

14
00:01:21,200 --> 00:01:26,000
OK, Milton is
deeply unfashionable. Why?

15
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:28,280
He wrote poetry
from a very young age.

16
00:01:28,280 --> 00:01:33,040
He spent 20 years at the forefront
of radical Republican politics.

17
00:01:33,040 --> 00:01:37,920
Then when his cause failed
he finally created his
masterwork, Paradise Lost.

18
00:01:37,920 --> 00:01:43,000
It's an impressive CV,
although I admit he doesn't
look like a bundle of laughs.

19
00:01:43,480 --> 00:01:45,800
What image do you have in
your head of John Milton?

20
00:01:45,800 --> 00:01:50,880
Gloomy. Gloomy? Yes. OK.
Long-winded. Long-winded.

21
00:01:50,880 --> 00:01:53,840
Miserable. Miserable.
What makes you say miserable?

22
00:01:53,840 --> 00:01:58,120
It's the connotation of Paradise
Lost, which you think is going
to be miserable. I haven't read it.

23
00:01:59,880 --> 00:02:02,040
Actually, it's anything but.

24
00:02:02,040 --> 00:02:07,040
Paradise Lost is an electrifying
poem about love and war,

25
00:02:07,760 --> 00:02:12,800
the fight between good and evil
and an obsession with human freedom
that speaks to us now.

26
00:02:15,760 --> 00:02:17,760
Before I went into comedy,

27
00:02:17,760 --> 00:02:22,760
I spent three years as
a student at Oxford trying
to write a PhD on Paradise Lost.

28
00:02:25,240 --> 00:02:28,920
No-one was more
surprised by that than me.

29
00:02:28,920 --> 00:02:31,640
I'd always been interested
in the funny writers,

30
00:02:31,640 --> 00:02:33,720
like Dickens and Swift.

31
00:02:33,720 --> 00:02:37,720
To me, John Milton seemed like
a funless Protestant

32
00:02:37,720 --> 00:02:42,720
who wrote a vast unread poem
about biblical stories
no-one was interested in any more.

33
00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:48,800
To a fun-loving Catholic like myself
that seemed the last thing I wanted
to be spending my student grant on.

34
00:02:49,240 --> 00:02:54,080
Then I read Paradise Lost
and was instantly dazzled.

35
00:02:59,440 --> 00:03:04,480
Of man's first disobedience, And
the fruit of that forbidden tree.

36
00:03:04,840 --> 00:03:07,720
Whose mortal taste brought
death into the world.

37
00:03:07,720 --> 00:03:10,720
And all our woe. With loss of Eden.

38
00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:14,440
Till one greater man restore us,
And regain the blissful seat.

39
00:03:14,440 --> 00:03:17,320
Sing heavenly muse.

40
00:03:20,520 --> 00:03:24,840
John Milton mean anything to you?
Yes. Yes, yes.

41
00:03:24,840 --> 00:03:26,840
You've heard of John Milton?
Of course.

42
00:03:26,840 --> 00:03:30,400
When I say John Milton to you -
oh, bless you, bless you -

43
00:03:30,400 --> 00:03:32,560
if I say John Milton to
you what do you think of?

44
00:03:32,560 --> 00:03:34,720
Paradise Lost.

45
00:03:34,720 --> 00:03:38,600
Have you read Paradise Lost?
I have. What did you make of that?

46
00:03:38,600 --> 00:03:43,120
Full of energy, absolutely wonderful.
Excellent. I take if from your
accent you're not native born.

47
00:03:43,120 --> 00:03:45,120
I'm not native born. Where are
you from? I'm an Australian.

48
00:03:45,120 --> 00:03:49,880
So, we had to go all the way
to Australia to find someone
who is enthused about John Milton.

49
00:03:49,880 --> 00:03:54,920
Absolutely. Standing on this frozen
bridge across the ice cold Thames.

50
00:03:55,520 --> 00:03:58,520
Bless you for remembering him.
Thank you very much.

51
00:04:01,600 --> 00:04:06,680
'I think we should all
be celebrating Milton
and celebrating his greatest poem.

52
00:04:07,120 --> 00:04:12,120
'So, before we plunge in,
here's a little explanation of the
great tale that's about to unfold.'

53
00:04:13,760 --> 00:04:18,840
Paradise Lost is basically
a massive dramatic retelling
of the story of Adam and Eve.

54
00:04:21,160 --> 00:04:23,440
God makes the world,
he makes our first parents,

55
00:04:23,440 --> 00:04:26,120
Adam and Eve, and puts them
in charge of the Garden of Eden.

56
00:04:26,120 --> 00:04:29,960
He tells them they can do
anything apart from eat of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge.

57
00:04:29,960 --> 00:04:34,960
Satan, a fallen angel, disguises
himself as a serpent and comes along
and tempts Eve to eat the apple.

58
00:04:36,120 --> 00:04:39,640
She then persuades Adam
to do so too, God is angry

59
00:04:39,640 --> 00:04:42,800
and banishes our first parents
from the Garden of Eden.

60
00:04:42,800 --> 00:04:46,240
Paradise, it seems, is lost forever.

61
00:04:51,520 --> 00:04:54,360
What in me is dark, illumine.

62
00:04:54,360 --> 00:04:56,760
What is love, raise and support.

63
00:04:56,760 --> 00:04:58,880
At the height of this great argument,

64
00:04:58,880 --> 00:05:03,920
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

65
00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:13,240
Milton surprises
from the very start.

66
00:05:13,240 --> 00:05:17,200
He says he wants to justify
the ways of God to man

67
00:05:17,200 --> 00:05:21,960
so we're expecting
to hear all about Adam and Eve
and the Garden of Eden.

68
00:05:21,960 --> 00:05:27,000
But just a few lines in we're thrown
into a compelling vision of hell.

69
00:05:27,320 --> 00:05:30,760
To make it work
Milton coins new words,

70
00:05:30,760 --> 00:05:35,800
phrases fresh to English language -
Satanic, pandemonium, stunning.

71
00:05:37,840 --> 00:05:42,280
We join Satan, freshly cast
out of heaven,

72
00:05:42,280 --> 00:05:45,000
examining his new surroundings.

73
00:05:47,160 --> 00:05:52,200
"At once,
as far as angels ken, he views the
dismal situation, waste and wild.

74
00:05:52,960 --> 00:05:58,000
"A dungeon horrible and all sides
round as one great furnace flamed,

75
00:05:59,200 --> 00:06:04,240
"yet from those flames no light,
but rather darkness visible."

76
00:06:09,000 --> 00:06:13,000
This is one of the most famous
passages in Paradise Lost.

77
00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:16,960
I remember when I
first read it how memorably
dramatic the language seemed.

78
00:06:16,960 --> 00:06:19,320
But now the closer you examine it,

79
00:06:19,320 --> 00:06:24,360
the more you realise
just how booby trapped
Milton's language actually is.

80
00:06:24,360 --> 00:06:27,040
"At once,
as far as angels ken, he views."

81
00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:30,480
This is Satan. "At once,
as far as angels ken, he views."

82
00:06:30,480 --> 00:06:35,480
These sounds they are all very open,
it's all about a view,
space in front of him.

83
00:06:37,280 --> 00:06:42,320
"At once, as far as angels ken, he
views." Out words and then suddenly,

84
00:06:44,640 --> 00:06:47,760
because the line doesn't end there,
"he views the dismal situation."

85
00:06:47,760 --> 00:06:51,000
"Dismal" is like
a great big gate coming down.

86
00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:55,920
"..dismal situation, waste
and wild, a dungeon horrible..."

87
00:06:55,920 --> 00:07:00,920
It's another gate coming down.
"..on all sides round,
as one great furnace flamed,

88
00:07:01,560 --> 00:07:06,640
"yet from those flames no light..."
We are led to believe "flames" is
going to give us fiery and glittery.

89
00:07:09,160 --> 00:07:14,200
"No light, but rather..." and here's
the surprise, where the phrase
says "..rather darkness visible."

90
00:07:15,920 --> 00:07:19,400
That's an extraordinary
expression - "darkness visible".

91
00:07:19,400 --> 00:07:24,120
We can sort of see the darkness,
but yet we know we can't see it
because it is darkness.

92
00:07:26,120 --> 00:07:30,080
Milton's language here
is so ambiguous.

93
00:07:30,080 --> 00:07:34,080
And the same is true of his
characterisation of Satan,

94
00:07:34,080 --> 00:07:38,080
who can seem noble at times,
even heroic.

95
00:07:39,120 --> 00:07:44,160
When Blake read Paradise Lost,
he wondered if Milton was of the
Devil's party without knowing it.

96
00:07:45,640 --> 00:07:50,680
Blake should have given
Milton more credit -
he's a lot cleverer than that.

97
00:07:50,960 --> 00:07:56,040
"One who brings a mind," this is
Satan talking of himself, "a mind
not to be changed by place or time,

98
00:07:57,960 --> 00:08:03,040
"The mind is its own place
and in itself can make a heaven
of hell, a hell of heaven."

99
00:08:05,200 --> 00:08:09,280
That's Satan saying,
"I can take words, words that
mean the opposite of each other,

100
00:08:09,280 --> 00:08:13,440
"and yank them together,
and somehow they will impress you,

101
00:08:13,440 --> 00:08:18,440
"they will make you feel
that I've somehow come up with
an argument that is persuasive."

102
00:08:18,600 --> 00:08:21,160
"..Make a heaven of hell,
a hell of heaven."

103
00:08:21,160 --> 00:08:26,200
Here is the start of spin,
this is poetry telling us
what spin and argument is all about.

104
00:08:28,120 --> 00:08:30,160
The sort of politician who says,

105
00:08:30,160 --> 00:08:35,160
"Forward to the past, let us
start building our tomorrows today,
victory in defeat!"

106
00:08:37,200 --> 00:08:40,800
It all sounds great, especially
if you do that with your finger,

107
00:08:40,800 --> 00:08:43,400
but it is meaningless nonsense.

108
00:08:43,400 --> 00:08:48,200
All those people are literally
doing the devil's work.

109
00:08:48,200 --> 00:08:53,200
And this sort of play with language,
this use of words without really
caring what they mean

110
00:08:54,240 --> 00:08:58,760
as long as they sound impressive,
even though the words are
the opposite of each other,

111
00:08:58,760 --> 00:09:03,680
ends up in the sort of pure evil
that you see in phrases like

112
00:09:03,680 --> 00:09:07,040
"work sets you free"
on the gates of concentration camps.

113
00:09:08,120 --> 00:09:13,120
Milton makes us feel that we are
not being told that this is wrong,

114
00:09:14,200 --> 00:09:18,400
or this is bad,
or this is manipulative, it allows
us to work it out for ourselves.

115
00:09:22,320 --> 00:09:26,280
From hell we go to heaven,
via Slough.

116
00:09:26,280 --> 00:09:31,320
In a Portakabin by the A4
a class of 11 year olds are
gathering to discuss Paradise Lost.

117
00:09:36,560 --> 00:09:41,600
I have at last put up
all your pictures to do with
Milton's description of hell.

118
00:09:42,920 --> 00:09:47,880
Now, we are going to pick
that work up today and we
are going to look at the opposite.

119
00:09:48,120 --> 00:09:52,440
So, what's the opposite of hell?
Heaven. Yeah, heaven.

120
00:09:55,040 --> 00:09:58,160
Milton's not ragingly
popular in schools these days.

121
00:09:58,160 --> 00:10:00,960
He's often considered too difficult.

122
00:10:00,960 --> 00:10:05,640
But I watched this lot relish
getting their sleeves rolled up.

123
00:10:05,640 --> 00:10:09,080
And I had a brief go
of being a teacher's assistant.

124
00:10:09,080 --> 00:10:12,640
Have you come across
any strange words?

125
00:10:12,640 --> 00:10:16,160
Jubilee. Jubilee?
Hang on, I've got my book here.

126
00:10:16,160 --> 00:10:19,880
Jubilee is like a big celebration,
but I think for someone special.

127
00:10:19,880 --> 00:10:24,920
Hosanna. Hosanna, it's like a hurray,
it's like an angel saying hurray.

128
00:10:25,320 --> 00:10:27,720
We didn't know what "raptures" is.

129
00:10:27,720 --> 00:10:32,160
Raptures are sort of if you are
really happy, really ecstatic.

130
00:10:32,160 --> 00:10:33,760
We know all the rest.

131
00:10:33,760 --> 00:10:38,160
You know all the rest. Well, you
don't need me. I'll leave you to it.

132
00:10:39,280 --> 00:10:42,880
'You have to start with
individual words of course,

133
00:10:42,880 --> 00:10:47,280
'but it's the way Milton
puts them together,
that's the really stunning bit.

134
00:10:47,280 --> 00:10:52,280
'The class thought it was great that
Milton described heaven has having a
river of bliss running through it.

135
00:10:53,400 --> 00:10:55,120
'A river of what?'

136
00:10:56,960 --> 00:10:58,640
It feels so real.

137
00:10:58,640 --> 00:11:03,680
But while it feels so real,
it's also difficult to put
your finger on every little detail.

138
00:11:06,080 --> 00:11:10,240
You came up with this phrase,
"river of bliss",
which sounds great,

139
00:11:10,240 --> 00:11:12,440
but you can't actually imagine
what bliss looks like,

140
00:11:12,440 --> 00:11:17,400
so to have a whole river of it
is like unimaginable,
yet it feels real.

141
00:11:17,520 --> 00:11:22,600
And I think what
I found about Paradise Lost
is it's magical like that,

142
00:11:23,160 --> 00:11:26,000
you feel as you're reading it,
you sort of know what's going on

143
00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:30,720
yet the more you think about it,
the more you think of it
in different ways.

144
00:11:30,720 --> 00:11:35,760
Even when you're 78,
you still see it as something
you're reading for the first time.

145
00:11:36,560 --> 00:11:40,280
I'm still learning, I've learnt
a lot today from going around.

146
00:11:40,280 --> 00:11:43,960
Thank you for teaching me more about
Paradise Lost. Thank you very much.

147
00:11:43,960 --> 00:11:45,960
Thank you for coming.

148
00:11:50,920 --> 00:11:55,920
They are all happy to make time for
the poem in between bouts of Club
Penguin and Nintendo Wi crazy golf.

149
00:11:58,080 --> 00:12:00,400
But what was John Milton doing
at their age?

150
00:12:08,400 --> 00:12:12,120
Well, Milton was born in
the dynamic heart of London.

151
00:12:12,120 --> 00:12:15,400
Here on Bread Street in 1608.

152
00:12:16,600 --> 00:12:21,680
His family had to work for their
money and they brought their son up
in a truly urban environment.

153
00:12:23,040 --> 00:12:27,400
It's not overrun with Milton
memorials round here now,

154
00:12:27,400 --> 00:12:31,120
so I've got to use
my imagination a little bit.

155
00:12:31,120 --> 00:12:36,080
They are actually constructing
a giant 500 foot tower
depiction of God.

156
00:12:37,040 --> 00:12:40,280
These are God's
ankles that we can see.

157
00:12:40,280 --> 00:12:43,680
It's an initiative
from Boris Johnson.

158
00:12:43,680 --> 00:12:47,080
And there
we can see a depiction of hell,

159
00:12:47,080 --> 00:12:52,120
the lower regions,
the massed ranks of the fallen,

160
00:12:52,600 --> 00:12:57,680
living in a sort of an eternal
torment of pain and sadness,
I think, really.

161
00:13:01,240 --> 00:13:03,960
Ah, at last, a sign.

162
00:13:03,960 --> 00:13:06,120
John Milton Passage.

163
00:13:09,480 --> 00:13:11,480
There it is.

164
00:13:11,480 --> 00:13:13,600
It's basically...

165
00:13:13,600 --> 00:13:16,720
It's basically
an office underpass...

166
00:13:19,080 --> 00:13:23,040
..or the road to hell,
as I like to think of it.

167
00:13:23,040 --> 00:13:28,080
OK, it's all corporate
and thrusting and run on money
that simply doesn't exist

168
00:13:30,480 --> 00:13:33,400
but it's still
full of activity round here.

169
00:13:33,400 --> 00:13:37,600
Not that different from the
London Milton grew up in really.

170
00:13:37,600 --> 00:13:40,840
Down there, round
the corner there, is St Paul's.

171
00:13:40,840 --> 00:13:43,320
Not just the church and the school,

172
00:13:43,320 --> 00:13:48,360
but St Paul's at the time
was the great thoroughfare
where people would go to gossip.

173
00:13:49,040 --> 00:13:53,040
It was the centre of the book trade,
it was also the red light district.

174
00:13:53,040 --> 00:13:56,960
We had the Blackfriars Theatre
further over there,

175
00:13:56,960 --> 00:14:01,960
where Milton's father was a trustee,
and at the time Shakespeare was
putting on his very last plays.

176
00:14:06,520 --> 00:14:11,560
Milton's dad was a successful
businessman and he had serious
ambitions for his little boy.

177
00:14:14,240 --> 00:14:18,240
In the middle of his massive second
defence of the English people,

178
00:14:18,240 --> 00:14:22,760
there's a tantalising glimpse
by Milton of his childhood,
where he writes,

179
00:14:22,760 --> 00:14:26,120
"My father destined me in early
childhood for the study
of literature,

180
00:14:26,120 --> 00:14:29,360
"for which I'd so keen an appetite
that from my twelfth year

181
00:14:29,360 --> 00:14:33,720
"scarcely ever did I leave
my studies for my bed
before the hour of midnight."

182
00:14:33,720 --> 00:14:37,920
He spent his nights
up in his candlelit room

183
00:14:37,920 --> 00:14:42,120
learning French and Italian
and Hebrew, studying the Bible

184
00:14:42,120 --> 00:14:47,200
and working his way methodically
through all the great English
classics of prose and poetry.

185
00:14:48,600 --> 00:14:51,640
He was, at that early age,
in his own head,

186
00:14:51,640 --> 00:14:56,640
trying to make himself become
the great English poet
that he wanted to be

187
00:14:57,440 --> 00:15:02,480
and this can sometimes add
to that image we have of him
as someone withdrawn,

188
00:15:03,480 --> 00:15:06,800
withdrawn from the world,
spending his days indoors
rather than outside.

189
00:15:10,680 --> 00:15:14,160
But nothing could be further
from the truth.

190
00:15:14,160 --> 00:15:18,200
There was nothing prissy
or priggish about Milton.

191
00:15:18,200 --> 00:15:23,240
He believed that poetry should be
simple, sensuous and passionate,

192
00:15:29,600 --> 00:15:32,760
It's really quite a randy place.

193
00:15:34,960 --> 00:15:37,520
Here's a description of
Adam and Eve doing the gardening,

194
00:15:37,520 --> 00:15:40,280
which you think it quite
an innocent little activity.

195
00:15:40,280 --> 00:15:45,280
But the description of the trees and
the flowers suggest that even they
have only one thing on their mind.

196
00:15:46,760 --> 00:15:51,840
"Where any row of fruit trees
over woody reached too far
their pampered boughs

197
00:15:52,600 --> 00:15:56,160
"and needed hands
to check fruitless embraces.

198
00:15:56,160 --> 00:16:01,240
"They led the vine to wed her elm,
she spoused about him twines
her marriageable arms."

199
00:16:02,320 --> 00:16:07,320
This is just a vine going round
an elm tree branch, but it sounds
like they're at it like knives.

200
00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:11,000
"She spoused about him twines
her marriageable arms,

201
00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:16,000
"and with her brings her dower
the adopted clusters
to adorn his barren leaves."

202
00:16:16,720 --> 00:16:20,480
It's a whole marriage ceremony
just going up a tree.

203
00:16:20,480 --> 00:16:23,840
I was looking for another passage,
but on the way I came across this,

204
00:16:23,840 --> 00:16:28,160
which is a description of Eve
serving dinner to the
archangel Raphael.

205
00:16:28,160 --> 00:16:32,640
It says here, "Meanwhile,
at table Eve ministered naked

206
00:16:32,640 --> 00:16:37,720
"and their flowing cups
with pleasant liquors crowned,
O innocence deserving Paradise!

207
00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:43,320
"If ever, then, then had the sons
of God excuse to have been
enamoured at that sight,"

208
00:16:43,320 --> 00:16:46,760
"but in those hearts love
unlibidinous reigned,

209
00:16:46,760 --> 00:16:51,440
"nor jealousy was understood,
the injured lover's hell."

210
00:16:51,440 --> 00:16:56,440
That's a description, basically,
of the angels in heaven
potentially lusting after Eve.

211
00:16:58,160 --> 00:17:03,200
But we're told by Milton
that they didn't because they
were nice and they hadn't fallen.

212
00:17:05,600 --> 00:17:10,600
Milton makes his celestial
creatures so human, so tangible.

213
00:17:12,160 --> 00:17:17,200
He even dazzles us with details
of the angel's digestive systems.

214
00:17:18,320 --> 00:17:22,640
The archangel Raphael comes and
visits Adam and Eve in the garden

215
00:17:22,640 --> 00:17:26,240
and tells them the story while
he sits and has dinner with them.

216
00:17:26,240 --> 00:17:29,800
Yes, in Paradise Lost
angels can eat food.

217
00:17:29,800 --> 00:17:34,760
There's a description of how food
is broken down within
angels' digestive tracts,

218
00:17:34,760 --> 00:17:37,280
then emitted
as a sort of celestial gas.

219
00:17:37,280 --> 00:17:42,360
"Tasting, concoct, digest,
assimilate and corporeal
to incorporeal turn."

220
00:17:44,680 --> 00:17:49,520
That's the very first depiction in
English literature of angel farts.

221
00:17:49,520 --> 00:17:51,960
Now, I don't know how seriously
you are meant to take it.

222
00:17:51,960 --> 00:17:57,040
Milton is depicting
a slightly crazy world, a world
that's slightly hippy, really.

223
00:17:57,640 --> 00:17:59,520
Nothing is quite what it seems.

224
00:17:59,520 --> 00:18:02,680
Milton, I think,
is like some Hollywood producer

225
00:18:02,680 --> 00:18:07,680
taking the story of the Bible,
the word of God, the word that
at the time, when he was writing,

226
00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:12,720
he was told, he was indoctrinated
to think was literal truth.

227
00:18:12,720 --> 00:18:17,760
He's taking that story and he's
chucking a lot of it away and
re-writing bits of it for himself.

228
00:18:19,240 --> 00:18:22,240
He's making the Bible
in his own image.

229
00:18:22,240 --> 00:18:24,800
Now, that's an incredibly
daring thing to do.

230
00:18:24,800 --> 00:18:27,080
It makes it much more human,

231
00:18:27,080 --> 00:18:30,400
but it also makes it
a little bit more...

232
00:18:30,400 --> 00:18:34,360
ambitious, arrogant, dangerous.

233
00:18:42,040 --> 00:18:47,040
In 1625, John Milton went up
to Christ's College, Cambridge.

234
00:18:47,440 --> 00:18:52,480
It was a rather boorish place,
and Milton, the sensitive poet
with long hair, didn't fit in.

235
00:18:53,920 --> 00:18:58,920
He hated it and when he left
he moved back in with mum and dad.

236
00:18:59,960 --> 00:19:04,960
And they moved here.
Horton in Berkshire.

237
00:19:05,240 --> 00:19:10,280
Milton was now a jobless
20-something living with his
parents in the middle of nowhere.

238
00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:17,080
Milton wrote to his old school
friend, Charles Diodati, that he
was having a great time here.

239
00:19:18,040 --> 00:19:23,040
He was given a chance to think,
to read and to write.

240
00:19:24,400 --> 00:19:28,880
But I just wonder whether that's
him being slightly too defensive.

241
00:19:28,880 --> 00:19:31,000
I'm not sure...

242
00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:34,880
I'm not sure he would
want to have died here.

243
00:19:36,640 --> 00:19:40,040
Soon there are signs
of restlessness.

244
00:19:40,040 --> 00:19:45,120
In an early poem called Lycidas,
Milton rages against
corruption in the Church.

245
00:19:46,920 --> 00:19:51,920
Later he began to loath
the bishops and denounce the
interlinking of Church and state.

246
00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:57,480
Milton wanted to determine
his own relationship with God,

247
00:19:57,480 --> 00:20:01,360
he didn't want anyone else
telling him how it was done.

248
00:20:04,280 --> 00:20:08,960
Something happened in Horton
that may have stirred him further.

249
00:20:10,240 --> 00:20:15,240
When his mother died,
she was buried here in St Michaels,
but the wrong way round.

250
00:20:15,760 --> 00:20:20,800
Her gravestone was criticised
by Church of England inspectors
who wanted to enforce uniformity,

251
00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:26,600
but the Miltons never did turn
the grave the right way round.

252
00:20:28,520 --> 00:20:33,560
I like to think that Milton's
contempt for the bishops, which
happened round about this time,

253
00:20:34,800 --> 00:20:39,640
may well have been the product
of theological enquiries
going on in his own head,

254
00:20:39,640 --> 00:20:43,840
and conclusions he'd come to anyway,
or may well have been set off

255
00:20:43,840 --> 00:20:47,600
by this little petty dispute
that was going on,

256
00:20:47,600 --> 00:20:52,360
being told that his mother's
remains were buried squinty.

257
00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:59,000
It can be the personal things
that radicalise a young mind and
galvanise it against authority.

258
00:20:59,920 --> 00:21:03,520
John's mind was bubbling,
he needed to get away.

259
00:21:09,560 --> 00:21:13,080
So, in May 1638, aged 29,

260
00:21:13,080 --> 00:21:18,120
John Milton sailed off in search of
himself, making his way to Italy

261
00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:23,800
and beginning what must surely
have been one of the most
pivotal experiences of his life.

262
00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:27,440
It was, to use one of Milton's
enduring expressions,

263
00:21:27,440 --> 00:21:31,400
a journey to
"fresh woods and pastures new."

264
00:21:40,440 --> 00:21:45,440
The first city he spent
any significant amount
of time in was Florence.

265
00:21:46,040 --> 00:21:48,320
He was enraptured by it.

266
00:21:52,320 --> 00:21:57,200
For Milton to see all this for
the first time, especially after
coming from...you've seen Horton,

267
00:21:57,200 --> 00:22:02,240
the contrast must have been
startling, quite dramatic.

268
00:22:05,840 --> 00:22:10,880
And here in Florence suddenly
for Milton the Bible comes alive.

269
00:22:11,320 --> 00:22:16,240
God is built large and painted fresh
and vivid in stone and on canvas.

270
00:22:17,480 --> 00:22:22,520
But so is flesh,
vast pink puddles of flesh,
painted on Renaissance ceilings,

271
00:22:24,120 --> 00:22:29,040
and hanging from tapestries
and carved from stone,
in gardens and public squares.

272
00:22:29,040 --> 00:22:34,080
This whole city is a celebration
not just of spirituality,
but of the human form, of humanity,

273
00:22:35,360 --> 00:22:38,200
in an intensity that Milton would
never have experienced before.

274
00:22:38,200 --> 00:22:43,240
It must have completely
transformed his whole conception
of what you could do as an artist.

275
00:22:46,600 --> 00:22:50,000
Here, finally, he seems happy.

276
00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:54,720
He makes friends, he attends private
academies with the city's wits.

277
00:22:54,720 --> 00:22:59,760
He reads them poems he's
written in Latin and Italian
and they love them.

278
00:22:59,880 --> 00:23:02,600
They still do.

279
00:23:15,160 --> 00:23:20,200
Well, thank you very much
for reading out the Milton,
it sounded beautiful. Thank you.

280
00:23:21,200 --> 00:23:23,560
Of course, it was in your honour.

281
00:23:23,560 --> 00:23:25,720
I've got the English
translation here.

282
00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:30,760
"Since I am a young simple
and candid lover, in doubt
how to escape from myself, lady,

283
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:34,880
"I will devoutly give you
the humble gift of my heart."

284
00:23:34,880 --> 00:23:37,680
It is very sort of romantic.

285
00:23:37,680 --> 00:23:40,320
It is very romantic

286
00:23:40,320 --> 00:23:45,400
because this is a sonnet
not to a real woman,
but to love, love itself.

287
00:23:47,680 --> 00:23:51,080
That's interesting in that at
that age his most passionate stuff,

288
00:23:51,080 --> 00:23:54,840
most emotional stuff was
expressed in other languages.

289
00:23:54,840 --> 00:23:57,440
Maybe he didn't want
people back home to know.

290
00:23:57,440 --> 00:24:00,280
I don't know.

291
00:24:00,280 --> 00:24:03,240
I don't know. Who knows?

292
00:24:08,160 --> 00:24:12,320
Paradise Lost was finally
published almost 20 years later.

293
00:24:12,320 --> 00:24:14,920
But it may have begun life here.

294
00:24:16,000 --> 00:24:21,040
Around now Milton makes some
tantalising early notes on
Paradise Lost as a five-act drama.

295
00:24:25,440 --> 00:24:29,880
He may have been further inspired
by an extraordinary meeting...

296
00:24:32,960 --> 00:24:38,000
..because in Florence, the young
John Milton met old, blind Galileo,

297
00:24:38,880 --> 00:24:42,480
the revolutionary astronomer.

298
00:24:49,440 --> 00:24:53,320
The meeting may have taken
place here at Galileo's villa,

299
00:24:53,320 --> 00:24:58,320
where he was under house arrest
for challenging the traditional
teachings of the Catholic Church.

300
00:25:00,960 --> 00:25:05,560
Galileo wasn't afraid
of experimenting,
of asking difficult questions

301
00:25:05,560 --> 00:25:10,560
and offering up answers
that shook the establishment.

302
00:25:16,120 --> 00:25:21,200
In Paradise Lost, Milton's
depiction of God in the heavens
seems almost scientific.

303
00:25:23,120 --> 00:25:25,320
It has a curious distancing effect.

304
00:25:27,080 --> 00:25:32,040
I am just looking here at Milton's
description of the heavens
in Paradise Lost

305
00:25:32,400 --> 00:25:37,480
and it is very mechanistic,
scientific, very rational, physical
description of how the heavens work.

306
00:25:39,920 --> 00:25:44,280
It's almost like Galileo
is trying to not only describe,

307
00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:48,440
but explain the movement
of the stars and of the angels.

308
00:25:48,440 --> 00:25:50,360
He describes here,

309
00:25:50,360 --> 00:25:54,760
"Meanwhile, upon the firm
opacous globe of this round world,

310
00:25:54,760 --> 00:25:59,080
"whose first convex divides
the luminous inferior orbs,

311
00:25:59,080 --> 00:26:04,080
"enclosed from chaos
and the inroad of darkness old,
Satan alighted walks."

312
00:26:04,880 --> 00:26:08,480
"Opacous globe", "convex",
"luminous inferior orbs",

313
00:26:08,480 --> 00:26:13,520
its like walking through a museum
yet this is a description of the
division between heaven and hell.

314
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:20,760
The same mechanistic
language applies to Milton's
characterisation of God.

315
00:26:21,880 --> 00:26:26,920
Whereas Satan gets all the good
speeches, God comes dangerously
close to sounding incomprehensible.

316
00:26:31,640 --> 00:26:36,720
This is God talking about
how if Adam and Eve are going
to eat the apple and fall,

317
00:26:37,640 --> 00:26:42,640
it's their own fault, not his,
even though he knows in advance
that they are going to do it.

318
00:26:43,000 --> 00:26:48,080
It's all about him trying to
explain away his foreknowledge
of their sin.

319
00:26:48,720 --> 00:26:53,720
God says, "Their will disposed
by absolute decree
or high foreknowledge,

320
00:26:54,280 --> 00:26:57,560
"they themselves decreed
their own revolt, not I.

321
00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:01,880
"If I foreknew, foreknowledge
had no influence on their fault,

322
00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:05,160
"which had no less
proved certain unforeknown."

323
00:27:05,160 --> 00:27:10,240
I've no idea what that means.
I'm sure you don't either.
I'm not sure you're meant to.

324
00:27:11,760 --> 00:27:16,480
It's a very, very elaborate,
long-winded justification by God

325
00:27:16,480 --> 00:27:20,760
in very abstract theological
language of his whole system.

326
00:27:20,760 --> 00:27:25,760
Now, I am intrigued
as to why Milton writes about
God and heaven like this.

327
00:27:26,240 --> 00:27:31,280
It's a little bit...dull, really,
it's a bit boring.

328
00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:38,840
Is it because he feels a little bit
guilty about how carried away
he got with himself

329
00:27:38,840 --> 00:27:43,160
and his own powers and abilities
in describing Satan earlier on.

330
00:27:43,160 --> 00:27:46,080
He was almost too good
at describing evil,

331
00:27:46,080 --> 00:27:51,160
and as a penance,
has he decided to be a little bit
less ostentatious in describing God?

332
00:27:52,600 --> 00:27:55,640
I can't quite accept that.

333
00:27:55,640 --> 00:28:00,680
I was once asked on a Radio 4
programme why it was I gave up very
early thoughts of becoming a priest.

334
00:28:02,560 --> 00:28:07,600
Part of the reason I said was
that for all of my study
of theology and religion

335
00:28:08,480 --> 00:28:13,400
and interest in spiritual matters,
no-one had actually explained to me

336
00:28:13,400 --> 00:28:17,880
why it was that
Jesus had to die to save mankind.

337
00:28:17,880 --> 00:28:22,880
I had heard that phrase again and
again, and in church services it's
assumed that you can understand it.

338
00:28:23,760 --> 00:28:28,720
But I couldn't and
I couldn't find any actual
explanations to why that happened.

339
00:28:28,720 --> 00:28:33,680
I said in the programme
that no doubt in saying that
I'd get lots of letters and I did.

340
00:28:34,320 --> 00:28:39,360
And these are all very, very
well meaning and understanding
attempts to resolve my dilemma.

341
00:28:40,920 --> 00:28:45,960
Someone here says, "I was surprised
to hear you couldn't understand
why God had to die for our sins.

342
00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:51,720
"God doesn't have to do anything,
that is what being God means."

343
00:28:52,160 --> 00:28:57,160
Another one here, it says,
"The short answer is Hebrews 214."

344
00:28:59,240 --> 00:29:04,200
Someone sent in a diagram,
someone else said,

345
00:29:04,200 --> 00:29:08,200
"Please find enclosed brochure
distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses,

346
00:29:08,200 --> 00:29:10,880
"you'll find the answers
on pages six and seven."

347
00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:15,520
So, the answer to the question is
don't ask the question.

348
00:29:15,520 --> 00:29:18,200
Yet in Paradise Lost that's
precisely what Milton does.

349
00:29:18,200 --> 00:29:22,320
He is so ambitious, he says he's
going to write things that are
unattempted yet in prose and rhyme.

350
00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:26,640
He's going to justify the ways
of God to man. Yet he doesn't.

351
00:29:26,640 --> 00:29:28,960
His God is a dull God.

352
00:29:28,960 --> 00:29:30,720
Is that deliberate?

353
00:29:30,720 --> 00:29:35,240
Does Milton write a boring
God because God bores him?

354
00:29:35,240 --> 00:29:40,240
I wonder whether in the battle
in Milton's own head between
the theologian and the poet,

355
00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:43,600
the poet was beginning to win out.

356
00:29:47,160 --> 00:29:52,200
John sailed back to England in 1639
and the rumblings of discontent

357
00:29:52,680 --> 00:29:56,840
that had started back in Horton
began to get a lot louder.

358
00:29:56,840 --> 00:30:00,320
He didn't like
the way the country was being run.

359
00:30:00,320 --> 00:30:02,000
So, he did something about it.

360
00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:05,440
He put his poetic
ambitions to one side

361
00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:08,880
and plunged into politics.

362
00:30:14,200 --> 00:30:18,880
Print was exploding in the 17th
century, like the web is today.

363
00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:22,800
A revolutionary way to get
your message to the masses.

364
00:30:22,800 --> 00:30:26,760
Milton seized it by the horns.

365
00:30:26,760 --> 00:30:31,760
As the civil war against Charles I
gathered on the horizon, he began
writing political pamphlets,

366
00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:36,680
a one man opposition,
interrogating values

367
00:30:36,680 --> 00:30:41,720
and challenging beliefs with
radical Republican thinking.

368
00:30:43,160 --> 00:30:47,320
Milton's most famous
pamphlet is this, Areopagitica.

369
00:30:48,520 --> 00:30:53,600
It's his passionate response
to new laws designed to ban the
work of pamphleteers like him.

370
00:30:57,280 --> 00:31:02,320
Areopagitica is the most perfect
expression in English of
the defence of freedom of speech.

371
00:31:04,200 --> 00:31:09,200
It's the greatest attack
on state censorship
that has ever been written.

372
00:31:09,280 --> 00:31:14,360
He starts by arguing, the books
in themselves always have something
of intrinsic merit in them.

373
00:31:14,560 --> 00:31:19,560
If we ban a book we might ban
something that is important that we
don't know the implications of yet.

374
00:31:21,280 --> 00:31:24,640
He says here, "Books are
not absolutely dead things,

375
00:31:24,640 --> 00:31:29,720
"but do contain a potency of life
in them to be as active as that
soul was whose progeny they are."

376
00:31:30,760 --> 00:31:35,800
And he gets more and more
passionate, he argues vociferously
the value of any book there is

377
00:31:36,480 --> 00:31:38,600
and in quite a
violent and aggressive way.

378
00:31:38,600 --> 00:31:42,920
"As good almost kill a man
as kill a good book."

379
00:31:42,920 --> 00:31:46,880
Basically what Milton is saying
is that our freedom to think,

380
00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:51,320
our freedom to engage
in political and religious thought

381
00:31:51,320 --> 00:31:56,320
is nothing unless we have
the ability to meet head on
our opponents.

382
00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:01,120
Unless we are challenged
by the opposite point of view,

383
00:32:01,120 --> 00:32:05,920
there is no way we can test how
firmly we hold our own opinions.

384
00:32:05,920 --> 00:32:11,000
Areopagitica is fundamental
to Milton's work and to our
interpretation of that work

385
00:32:12,040 --> 00:32:17,080
because in it Milton, for the very
first time, manages to articulate
what the point of Milton is.

386
00:32:19,560 --> 00:32:24,520
It's to write
because writing has a point.

387
00:32:28,080 --> 00:32:33,120
As battles raged across the country,
Milton fought his civil war
with words...

388
00:32:36,200 --> 00:32:40,640
..arguing vociferously
against the status quo.

389
00:32:40,640 --> 00:32:45,640
On January 30th, 1649,
King Charles I was executed.

390
00:32:47,320 --> 00:32:49,960
The Republicans had won.

391
00:32:53,480 --> 00:32:57,880
Oliver Cromwell took control
and he hired John Milton,

392
00:32:57,880 --> 00:33:02,920
whose revolutionary ideals and
language skills made him the perfect
Secretary for Foreign Tongues.

393
00:33:05,040 --> 00:33:10,040
Basically, Milton was in charge
of an embryonic Foreign Office,

394
00:33:10,680 --> 00:33:15,440
but the nation's hearts
and minds were not yet won.

395
00:33:15,440 --> 00:33:18,560
The new regime needed to exploit
one of Milton's other gifts,

396
00:33:18,560 --> 00:33:23,520
the ability to write fiery,
brilliant polemical prose.

397
00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:27,520
And it was to take him to
the very centre of political power

398
00:33:27,520 --> 00:33:32,480
as Oliver Cromwell's chief
propagandist and effectively the new
British Government's spin doctor.

399
00:33:34,840 --> 00:33:39,880
Milton was 41,
he had always been a solo maverick
now he was paid to spin for Britain.

400
00:33:41,640 --> 00:33:46,720
He even became a Government censor
at one point, exactly what he'd
railed against in Areopagitica.

401
00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:51,520
In Westminster, reality bites.

402
00:33:54,080 --> 00:33:59,160
I'm just interested
in the fact that he suddenly went
from being a public idealist

403
00:34:00,720 --> 00:34:04,760
to someone who was then
in the heart of power.
What does that do to your ideals?

404
00:34:04,760 --> 00:34:09,800
People lose their evangelisms, they
lose the ability to be able to...

405
00:34:10,080 --> 00:34:15,160
paint a big picture of where
they are going, what they stand for.

406
00:34:15,160 --> 00:34:18,000
You struggle to ensure
you've got an anchor,

407
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:23,000
that you are holding on to what it is
you came in to do, why you are there.

408
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:30,240
I'm sure. We all have a bit of that.

409
00:34:30,240 --> 00:34:35,200
Yes, I really don't want to draw the
parallels between you too strongly.

410
00:34:35,200 --> 00:34:37,440
I'm not a Milton.

411
00:34:37,440 --> 00:34:40,080
As they say, he's no Milton.

412
00:34:42,200 --> 00:34:46,880
I just wonder how Milton
would have felt as the
Republican cause began to fail.

413
00:34:46,880 --> 00:34:50,600
You think you've got somewhere
and there's a change.

414
00:34:50,600 --> 00:34:55,040
You know, the banks collapse
or something calamitous like that.

415
00:34:55,040 --> 00:34:59,360
What you would have been arguing
becomes meaningless
in the public view

416
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:04,080
and you get swept aside as
his arguments were at the time. Yes.

417
00:35:06,200 --> 00:35:11,200
After 11 years of justifying
the word of Cromwell to men,

418
00:35:11,720 --> 00:35:16,240
Milton wasn't just out of a job,
he was persona non grata.

419
00:35:16,240 --> 00:35:21,320
The Republic was finished.
The Monarchy was restored
under Charles II.

420
00:35:22,360 --> 00:35:26,080
Milton must have been wondering,
had it all been worth it?

421
00:35:32,720 --> 00:35:36,640
In Paradise Lost, there's an
enormous set piece battle in heaven

422
00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:40,040
between God's side
and Satan's forces

423
00:35:40,040 --> 00:35:45,000
who revolt because God's
created his son, the Messiah.

424
00:35:45,200 --> 00:35:49,560
But Milton seems to be
telling another story here.

425
00:35:51,040 --> 00:35:56,040
"Strange to us it seemed at first,
that angel should with angel war
and in fierce..."

426
00:35:57,320 --> 00:35:59,680
"Angel should with angel war".

427
00:35:59,680 --> 00:36:04,160
This is a civil war, Milton's
absolutely clear about this,

428
00:36:04,160 --> 00:36:09,080
you get the parallel, you get
the meaning, what he's describing
is a civil war in heaven.

429
00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:12,480
But who is Cromwell and who
is Charles, that's the problem.

430
00:36:12,480 --> 00:36:14,400
You can't tell which is which.

431
00:36:14,400 --> 00:36:16,920
Here's a description of Satan.

432
00:36:16,920 --> 00:36:21,920
"Satan with vast and haughty
strides advanced, came towering
armed and adamant and gold."

433
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:28,080
He's described there as someone
very regal, someone aspiring
to kingly authority.

434
00:36:28,240 --> 00:36:33,240
Is Satan Charles? Is he Charles
or is Satan what Cromwell was like
at the end Cromwell's reign,

435
00:36:34,280 --> 00:36:36,480
because Cromwell aspired
to be like a king.

436
00:36:36,480 --> 00:36:40,160
Didn't want to call himself a king
so was crowned Lord Protector.

437
00:36:40,160 --> 00:36:43,400
And then Satan,
speaking to his troops,

438
00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:48,440
speaks almost a defence of liberty
and freedom from authoritarian rule

439
00:36:50,080 --> 00:36:55,080
that is like a standard argument
for Republicanism.

440
00:36:55,600 --> 00:36:59,800
"For orders and decrees jar not
with liberty, but well consist,

441
00:36:59,800 --> 00:37:04,240
"who can in reason then
or right assume monarchy

442
00:37:04,240 --> 00:37:07,080
"over such as live
by right his equals.

443
00:37:07,080 --> 00:37:10,600
"If in power and splendour less,
in freedom equal."

444
00:37:10,600 --> 00:37:13,920
These are the arguments
of the Republic movement.

445
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:20,840
In a parody of modern warfare,
Satan and his crew invent gunpowder.

446
00:37:21,720 --> 00:37:26,440
Then the other side come up
with a really unique weapon.

447
00:37:26,440 --> 00:37:28,680
It reaches the point of absurdity

448
00:37:28,680 --> 00:37:33,400
when the good angels decide
they're going to come up with
a better weapon.

449
00:37:33,400 --> 00:37:38,440
Hills! They are going to go and run
and pick up hills and mountains and
drop them on Satan and his troops.

450
00:37:40,840 --> 00:37:45,880
"The arms away they threw
and to the hills light as the
lightning glimpse they ran.

451
00:37:46,600 --> 00:37:51,640
"They flew from their foundations,
loosening to and fro,
they plucked the seated hills

452
00:37:51,960 --> 00:37:56,960
"with all their load, rocks, water,
woods and by their shaggy tops
uplifting bore them in their hands.

453
00:37:58,440 --> 00:38:03,400
"Amazed be sure and terror
seized the rebel host
when coming towards them

454
00:38:03,400 --> 00:38:08,080
"so dreadly saw the bottom
of the mountains upward turned."

455
00:38:08,080 --> 00:38:11,240
It's quite, quite ridiculous,

456
00:38:11,240 --> 00:38:16,320
it's a grand, magnificent,
huge custard pie fight
going on in the sky.

457
00:38:20,160 --> 00:38:24,080
Its all very entertaining as
I'm sure Milton meant it to be,

458
00:38:24,080 --> 00:38:29,080
but he makes this war so absurd
that I actually find this part
of the poem rather unsettling.

459
00:38:31,560 --> 00:38:36,560
He's almost questioning
the whole point of war.

460
00:38:36,920 --> 00:38:40,400
Given what he's been through and
given the disillusionment he's felt,

461
00:38:40,400 --> 00:38:44,240
in his head he's almost
coming at the poem saying,

462
00:38:44,240 --> 00:38:49,280
"Was all that just a complete
waste of time from start to finish?

463
00:38:49,280 --> 00:38:53,520
Was the whole civil war,
doesn't matter which side
you were on, was it all pointless?

464
00:38:58,880 --> 00:39:03,880
When you read Paradise Lost,
you start questioning everything.

465
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:08,600
While he was writing it, Milton knew
he had lost his political battle,

466
00:39:08,600 --> 00:39:12,040
but he was also coming to
terms with an inner tragedy -

467
00:39:12,040 --> 00:39:16,640
that he had gone slowly,
agonisingly blind.

468
00:39:18,360 --> 00:39:21,240
What happened to you
when you lost your sight?

469
00:39:21,240 --> 00:39:25,520
Blindness forces you
back into yourself.

470
00:39:25,520 --> 00:39:28,960
You do in a very real
sense lose the world.

471
00:39:28,960 --> 00:39:34,000
I suppose what I miss most, if that
is the right word, would be the
printed page and the human face.

472
00:39:35,400 --> 00:39:37,360
Both of those disappeared.

473
00:39:37,360 --> 00:39:40,880
And both of those were absolutely
vital to Milton, weren't they?

474
00:39:40,880 --> 00:39:44,960
Absolutely. Was your loss of sight
a sudden thing?

475
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:47,720
No, it was very gradual, like his.

476
00:39:47,720 --> 00:39:51,360
And that in a way
makes it more desperate.

477
00:39:51,360 --> 00:39:54,680
My dream life became extremely vivid.

478
00:39:54,680 --> 00:39:59,680
I was alive in a wonderful world
of colour and action at night.

479
00:40:00,080 --> 00:40:03,680
When I woke up, every time
I woke up, I went blind again.

480
00:40:03,680 --> 00:40:08,760
But the face is very important,
the loss of the face. You mention
a poem he'd written about that.

481
00:40:10,600 --> 00:40:15,640
That's right, yes. He wrote this
sonnet in memory of his second wife,
Katherine,

482
00:40:20,640 --> 00:40:25,680
Sonnet 19. "Methought
I saw my late espoused Saint...

483
00:40:26,480 --> 00:40:31,480
"Methought I saw my late
espoused Saint, brought to me
like Alcestis from the grave,

484
00:40:32,480 --> 00:40:37,560
"whom Joves great son to her glad
husband gave, rescued from death
by force though pale and faint.

485
00:40:39,880 --> 00:40:43,480
"Mine as whom washed
from spot of child-bed taint.

486
00:40:43,480 --> 00:40:48,520
"Purification in the old law
did save, and such, as yet
once more I trust to have,

487
00:40:48,880 --> 00:40:51,880
"full sight of her in heaven
without restraint,

488
00:40:51,880 --> 00:40:56,920
"came vested all in white,
pure as her mind, her face was
veiled, yet to my fancied sight,

489
00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:04,800
"love, sweetness, goodness
in her person shined, so clear,
as in no face with more delight.

490
00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:09,880
"But O as to embrace me
she inclined,

491
00:41:09,880 --> 00:41:14,240
"I waked, she fled,
and day brought back my night."

492
00:41:14,240 --> 00:41:16,600
Oh!

493
00:41:16,600 --> 00:41:19,680
It's just that last line, it's so...

494
00:41:19,680 --> 00:41:23,320
"I waked, she fled and day
brought back my night."

495
00:41:23,320 --> 00:41:28,360
Just so monosyllabic
and sparse, as well.

496
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:33,120
I remember what you were
saying about...

497
00:41:33,120 --> 00:41:35,640
Every time I woke up,
I was blind again.

498
00:41:43,320 --> 00:41:48,360
In Paradise Lost, Milton
says he wants to tell us of
things invisible to mortal sight.

499
00:41:50,520 --> 00:41:55,560
One of his greatest
poetic revelations is the way
he writes the Fall itself

500
00:41:56,560 --> 00:42:00,680
when Satan tempts Eve to eat
the fruit of the tree of knowledge,

501
00:42:00,680 --> 00:42:03,520
the single thing
God has forbidden her to do.

502
00:42:05,440 --> 00:42:09,040
So, we come to the moment itself,
where the fall of man occurs.

503
00:42:09,040 --> 00:42:14,080
"So saying her rash hand in evil
hour forth reaching to the fruit,
she plucked, she ate."

504
00:42:15,760 --> 00:42:20,120
That's it, that's the description,
it's all over in, what, two lines.

505
00:42:20,120 --> 00:42:24,840
Four words even - "she plucked,
she ate," - four monosyllables.
That's it.

506
00:42:24,840 --> 00:42:29,880
Milton, who has a great command of
all the biblical stories and myths,

507
00:42:29,880 --> 00:42:34,880
great powers of rhetoric and
language, great flowing monologues
and soliloquies and great epics.

508
00:42:36,440 --> 00:42:39,280
It's all down to,
"she plucked, she ate."

509
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:42,680
The sheer devilish bravery

510
00:42:42,680 --> 00:42:47,760
in attempting something
so bold like that is
absolutely gobsmacking.

511
00:42:48,800 --> 00:42:50,840
If this was a Hollywood film,

512
00:42:50,840 --> 00:42:55,920
there'd be a slow motion move
of the apple up to the mouth and
great swelling orchestral climaxes.

513
00:42:57,600 --> 00:43:00,800
Probably a close up of the teeth and
maybe a camera from inside the mouth

514
00:43:00,800 --> 00:43:04,480
watching the apple come
closer and the great jaws shut.

515
00:43:04,480 --> 00:43:08,800
But, no, "she plucked, she ate,"
that's it, work it out for yourself,

516
00:43:08,800 --> 00:43:12,080
that's all I'm going to say,
"she plucked, she ate."

517
00:43:12,080 --> 00:43:15,840
It's the most momentous moment
in history according to this poem,

518
00:43:15,840 --> 00:43:20,880
and yet it's given and
delivered in the barest of lines,

519
00:43:23,160 --> 00:43:25,000
Great!

520
00:43:26,240 --> 00:43:31,240
Milton wants us to understand that
Eve freely chooses to eat the apple.

521
00:43:32,040 --> 00:43:35,760
It's entirely
her own responsibility.

522
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:38,920
The narrative is gripping.

523
00:43:38,920 --> 00:43:43,440
When Eve comes to visit Adam,
he can see what's happened,

524
00:43:43,440 --> 00:43:48,440
she doesn't have to tell him, he
can see that the one thing he hoped
wouldn't happen has happened.

525
00:43:51,000 --> 00:43:55,320
"Adam, soon as he heard the
fatal trespass done by Eve,

526
00:43:55,320 --> 00:44:00,360
"amazed, astonied stood and blank,
while horror chill
ran through his veins,

527
00:44:01,520 --> 00:44:04,440
"and all his joints relaxed.

528
00:44:04,440 --> 00:44:09,480
"From his slack hand the garland
wreath for Eve down dropped
and all the faded roses shed.

529
00:44:11,800 --> 00:44:14,360
"Speechless he stood, and pale

530
00:44:14,360 --> 00:44:19,400
"till thus at length, first to
himself the inward silence broke."

531
00:44:19,720 --> 00:44:22,640
It's the energy,
the life has gone out of him.

532
00:44:22,640 --> 00:44:27,640
The sounds are sort of empty -
"down dropped and all
the faded roses shed."

533
00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:33,960
the rhyme...slows down to
a very, very stately, quiet end,

534
00:44:35,840 --> 00:44:38,200
and then "speechless he stood,"

535
00:44:38,200 --> 00:44:42,240
after all the language and talk
of speeches and rhetoric,
"speechless he stood."

536
00:44:42,240 --> 00:44:47,240
Then, just as suddenly as Eve
ate the apple, so does Adam.

537
00:44:48,680 --> 00:44:53,720
"For with thee certain," he says,
"my resolution is to die."

538
00:44:54,080 --> 00:44:58,240
They are the tragic couple,
they fall but they fall together

539
00:44:58,240 --> 00:45:01,240
and their world changes forever.

540
00:45:04,560 --> 00:45:09,040
Out in the real world,
John Milton was in grave danger.

541
00:45:10,760 --> 00:45:15,840
He was an unrepentant Republican
who had defended
the beheading of Charles I,

542
00:45:16,960 --> 00:45:22,040
but now Charles II
was on the throne,
Milton was on the wrong side.

543
00:45:24,280 --> 00:45:29,280
He couldn't take any chances.
Milton went into hiding,
he let London conceal him.

544
00:45:33,560 --> 00:45:38,600
It really is a bit of labyrinth,
little lanes, little alleyways,
where no-one could see him.

545
00:45:39,920 --> 00:45:44,960
This is Bartholomew Close,
hidden somewhere in this area,
up some dark little stairwell,

546
00:45:47,080 --> 00:45:50,880
Milton was bundled away
by his friends.

547
00:45:50,880 --> 00:45:55,960
But seeing it for the first time
does make you realise how
frightening it must have felt

548
00:45:57,040 --> 00:45:59,120
to have been...

549
00:46:00,560 --> 00:46:04,440
..pushed away from your home
to somewhere strange.

550
00:46:04,440 --> 00:46:09,480
And inside knowing that all you'd
fought for, all you'd written about,

551
00:46:10,400 --> 00:46:15,400
all that you'd worked for and
believed had been overturned.

552
00:46:15,680 --> 00:46:20,640
King Charles II issued a
proclamation on August 13th 1660

553
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:26,280
declaring that many of Milton's
pamphlets were tantamount
to treason.

554
00:46:26,480 --> 00:46:29,280
He ordered them
to be publicly burned.

555
00:46:31,560 --> 00:46:35,960
Milton wrote in Areopagitica
that you might as well kill a man
as kill a good book,

556
00:46:35,960 --> 00:46:40,440
and yet now his works were being
burned outside the Old Bailey

557
00:46:40,440 --> 00:46:44,760
and many of his associates
were being put to death.

558
00:46:47,640 --> 00:46:52,600
Soon the new regime caught up
with Milton and they threw
him in the Tower of London.

559
00:46:53,360 --> 00:46:56,720
He was a political prisoner.

560
00:46:56,720 --> 00:47:00,000
Milton was blind,
far from his friends and family,

561
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:04,960
trapped between four walls
with only his thoughts for company.

562
00:47:07,240 --> 00:47:12,320
Can you imagine what must have
been going through Milton's mind
and personality being imprisoned?

563
00:47:13,800 --> 00:47:18,120
Inside him,
what would have been happening?

564
00:47:18,120 --> 00:47:20,840
My experience
having spoken to prisoners,

565
00:47:20,840 --> 00:47:23,760
whether from Guantanamo
or Northern Ireland,

566
00:47:23,760 --> 00:47:27,840
is that they often question things

567
00:47:27,840 --> 00:47:30,600
in a way that they'd
never done so before.

568
00:47:30,600 --> 00:47:34,800
I think Milton's experience
would have been something similar

569
00:47:34,800 --> 00:47:38,520
and particularly because...

570
00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:43,560
I think when you are unable to
express yourself to anybody other
than the four walls round you,

571
00:47:44,560 --> 00:47:47,240
that makes you sharper, it
makes you want to express more,

572
00:47:47,240 --> 00:47:52,320
it makes you want to do it through
writing because your words will
be written and recorded forever.

573
00:47:54,160 --> 00:47:59,160
And why perhaps the result
that he turns rather than
to polemic or to memoir,

574
00:48:01,360 --> 00:48:04,120
he turns to poetry.

575
00:48:04,120 --> 00:48:09,200
I remember the prisoners from the
Arab world in Guantanamo would write
amazing poetry to express themselves.

576
00:48:11,400 --> 00:48:14,000
I had been held
in solitary confinement

577
00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:18,320
so I didn't know until I met some
near the end of my time in solitary

578
00:48:18,320 --> 00:48:21,360
that we had all
come to the same conclusion.

579
00:48:21,360 --> 00:48:26,400
Poetry had been written in Guantanamo
in English, in Arabic, in Pashtu,
in Farsi, in Turkish,

580
00:48:28,440 --> 00:48:33,480
and people had come to their own
conclusions as to how they wanted
to express themselves

581
00:48:34,360 --> 00:48:38,000
and it seemed like
the common denominator was poetry.

582
00:48:43,080 --> 00:48:47,960
Released from the Tower
after a couple of months,
with no charges to face,

583
00:48:47,960 --> 00:48:51,120
the poetry
finally flowed from Milton.

584
00:48:54,920 --> 00:48:58,800
He had been thinking about
Paradise Lost since his early 30s.

585
00:48:58,800 --> 00:49:03,720
Now at 53, with an extraordinary
series of life experiences
behind him,

586
00:49:03,720 --> 00:49:08,760
Milton was at last able
to focus on getting the poem
out of his head and onto the page.

587
00:49:15,920 --> 00:49:21,000
Living a quiet life somewhere here
on Bunhill Row, known then
as Artillery Walk,

588
00:49:21,920 --> 00:49:24,600
that's exactly what he did.

589
00:49:24,600 --> 00:49:28,040
Milton claims that
the words to Paradise Lost

590
00:49:28,040 --> 00:49:31,880
came to him as divine inspiration
in the middle of the night,
in his dreams.

591
00:49:31,880 --> 00:49:36,440
Whether that is true or not,
we do know Milton would rise
very early in the morning

592
00:49:36,440 --> 00:49:39,720
with vast chunks of the poem
already composed in his head.

593
00:49:39,720 --> 00:49:44,680
The problem was he was blind
and he would have to wait until
a member of the family stirred

594
00:49:44,680 --> 00:49:49,080
or a friend came to call
and ask them to write it down
in the form of dictation.

595
00:49:49,080 --> 00:49:54,080
So, it was a complex, complex task,
one that he had to absolutely
focus all his attention on.

596
00:49:55,600 --> 00:49:59,520
And while that was going on,
another great drama came along.

597
00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:04,600
Plague was engulfing the city.

598
00:50:04,600 --> 00:50:09,640
The poet, his family, and his
precious manuscripts, the sum of his
life's work, had to get out of town.

599
00:50:15,520 --> 00:50:20,560
The Miltons sought refuge here,
Chalfont St Giles
in deepest Buckinghamshire.

600
00:50:22,160 --> 00:50:26,440
It's no Stratford upon Avon,
there isn't a Milton industry here.

601
00:50:26,440 --> 00:50:29,960
No Satan sausages,
no Adam and Eve toby mugs,

602
00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:34,680
but Chalfont St Giles
is the hub of the very modest
Milton tourist trade

603
00:50:34,680 --> 00:50:38,680
because its home to the only house
he lived in that's still standing.

604
00:50:40,280 --> 00:50:44,560
While Milton was here he gave a
copy of the Paradise Lost manuscript

605
00:50:44,560 --> 00:50:49,600
to his friend, Thomas Elwood,
a nervous moment for any author.

606
00:50:49,840 --> 00:50:54,880
Milton called for the first copy of
Paradise Lost, handed it to Elwood,

607
00:50:55,320 --> 00:50:58,360
and if you did, just as
we're talking about this,

608
00:50:58,360 --> 00:51:01,800
if you press the little button
by the fireplace there. Yeah.

609
00:51:02,880 --> 00:51:06,400
RECORDED VOICE:
He asked me how I liked it,

610
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:08,640
and what I thought of it,

611
00:51:08,640 --> 00:51:13,680
which I, modestly,
but freely told him.

612
00:51:13,880 --> 00:51:17,960
Thou has said much here
of paradise lost,

613
00:51:17,960 --> 00:51:23,000
but what has thou to say
about paradise found.

614
00:51:24,960 --> 00:51:28,000
He made me no answer,

615
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:32,200
but sat some time in a muse.

616
00:51:33,320 --> 00:51:38,160
Then broke off that discourse,
and fell upon another subject.

617
00:51:38,160 --> 00:51:40,800
What a rude man!

618
00:51:40,800 --> 00:51:43,880
After all that work.

619
00:51:43,880 --> 00:51:48,920
I'm just amazed by the reaction -
you spend all that time writing
and say, "What did you think?"

620
00:51:50,560 --> 00:51:55,600
"That's all very well, but have you
got anything else about paradise?
How about the sequel?"

621
00:51:56,600 --> 00:52:01,320
and Milton just goes,
"Right, OK, yes, fine." I know.

622
00:52:01,320 --> 00:52:03,960
Writing it and coming back.

623
00:52:03,960 --> 00:52:09,040
We're lucky to have that.
That all happened here? That all
happened here, in this very room.

624
00:52:14,120 --> 00:52:18,320
Milton had to wait two years
between finishing the poem

625
00:52:18,320 --> 00:52:23,320
and actually publishing
it because the Great Fire of London
decimated the city's print trade.

626
00:52:26,480 --> 00:52:31,480
Paradise Lost finally came out
in 1667 and it looked like this.

627
00:52:35,560 --> 00:52:40,560
I've never seen inside
a first edition of Paradise Lost.

628
00:52:41,160 --> 00:52:43,920
It's very, very exciting.

629
00:52:45,240 --> 00:52:50,240
"Man's First Disobedience, and
the fruit of that Forbidden Tree,
whose mortal taste brought death..."

630
00:52:53,400 --> 00:52:55,560
This is great.

631
00:52:55,560 --> 00:53:00,600
But what you get is a sense
of how compact the poem is.

632
00:53:01,640 --> 00:53:05,720
The publisher,
Simon Symonds, said to him,

633
00:53:05,720 --> 00:53:08,760
"We've noticed it doesn't rhyme."

634
00:53:08,760 --> 00:53:13,800
The thing... Rhyming couplets
at the time Milton was writing
was very popular

635
00:53:15,080 --> 00:53:20,040
and he's been asked by his
publisher to put in a justification
for why it doesn't rhyme.

636
00:53:20,160 --> 00:53:25,200
So Milton writes a defence of the
fact that the poem doesn't rhyme.

637
00:53:25,560 --> 00:53:30,560
I say defence, it's really
just a very big, articulate wah
to those who do use rhyme.

638
00:53:31,400 --> 00:53:36,440
"Rhyme being no necessary adjunct or
true ornament of poem or good verse,

639
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:41,760
"in longer works especially, but
the invention of a barbarous age

640
00:53:42,040 --> 00:53:45,160
"to set off wretched matter
and lame meter.

641
00:53:45,160 --> 00:53:49,560
"Graced indeed, since by the use
of some famous modern poets

642
00:53:49,560 --> 00:53:53,200
"carried away by custom,
but much to their own vexation,

643
00:53:53,200 --> 00:53:56,320
"hindrance and constraint
to express many things otherwise

644
00:53:56,320 --> 00:54:00,480
"and for the most part worse
than else they would have
expressed them."

645
00:54:00,480 --> 00:54:02,880
So he is basically saying,

646
00:54:02,880 --> 00:54:05,200
"Sod rhyme, I don't need it.

647
00:54:05,200 --> 00:54:07,720
"People who use rhyme
are using it as an easy way out

648
00:54:07,720 --> 00:54:12,800
"to get round the fact that they
can't push their creativity
in other directions."

649
00:54:13,600 --> 00:54:15,640
How exciting!

650
00:54:19,240 --> 00:54:24,280
Sorry, I've started reading it now,
which I imagine is bad television,

651
00:54:24,920 --> 00:54:27,600
but I can't help myself

652
00:54:27,600 --> 00:54:32,640
because I've got Milton's
first edition in my hands,
so I'm going to read it.

653
00:54:36,360 --> 00:54:41,360
Milton spent his final years
completely absorbed
in writing and thinking.

654
00:54:41,800 --> 00:54:46,840
He produced many more great works of
poetry and prose in a short time.

655
00:54:50,880 --> 00:54:55,880
He died in November 1674
and is buried here at St Giles,
Cripplegate,

656
00:54:57,080 --> 00:55:02,160
in the heart of London,
the city in which he spent
the vast part of his life.

657
00:55:02,760 --> 00:55:07,760
It's not much of a shrine so I
suppose the best way to remember
Milton is by reading his words.

658
00:55:15,040 --> 00:55:19,520
The ending of Paradise Lost
is Milton's masterstroke.

659
00:55:19,520 --> 00:55:23,240
It's a beautifully simple piece
of poetry about Adam and Eve

660
00:55:23,240 --> 00:55:28,280
as they are expelled
from the Garden of Eden
and walk out into the real world,

661
00:55:28,680 --> 00:55:30,320
our world.

662
00:55:32,040 --> 00:55:34,600
These are the closing
lines of the poem.

663
00:55:34,600 --> 00:55:38,440
Listen how everything goes
not pitiful, not subdued,

664
00:55:38,440 --> 00:55:42,880
but accepting and quite noble

665
00:55:42,880 --> 00:55:47,280
in how this couple
take on their fate,

666
00:55:47,280 --> 00:55:51,200
accept their humanity,
all that they have got left,

667
00:55:51,200 --> 00:55:56,280
and face the fact that this
is what they have to deal with
for the rest of their lives.

668
00:55:56,920 --> 00:55:59,600
"Some natural tears they dropped,

669
00:55:59,600 --> 00:56:03,320
"but wiped them soon,
The world was all before them,

670
00:56:03,320 --> 00:56:07,840
"where to choose Their place of
rest, and providence their guide.

671
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:12,800
"They hand in hand
with wandering steps and slow,

672
00:56:12,920 --> 00:56:17,880
"Through Eden
took their solitary way."

673
00:56:18,040 --> 00:56:23,040
The epic religious
verse of heaven and hell,
war and battles, now disappears.

674
00:56:25,280 --> 00:56:28,320
What we are left with
are these bare words.

675
00:56:28,320 --> 00:56:32,960
"They hand in hand
with wandering steps and slow,

676
00:56:32,960 --> 00:56:36,200
"Through Eden
took their solitary way."

677
00:56:38,720 --> 00:56:43,800
It's a very daring ending here
for Milton to have used,
because it is so intensely secular.

678
00:56:44,800 --> 00:56:47,800
There's no mention of God and
angels in these last few lines.

679
00:56:47,800 --> 00:56:50,160
It's all very earthy,

680
00:56:50,160 --> 00:56:55,200
an anticipation of the life Adam and
Eve are going to lead without those
fixed certainties of religion.

681
00:56:57,160 --> 00:56:59,760
There aren't going to be
any more visits from angels.

682
00:56:59,760 --> 00:57:02,400
Instead, they have to make
their own way out in the world.

683
00:57:02,400 --> 00:57:07,400
I think it's because in the end
Milton didn't want to justify
the ways of God to men,

684
00:57:08,480 --> 00:57:12,520
he wanted to justify
the ways of men to us.

685
00:57:12,520 --> 00:57:17,600
He wants to leave us with that final
image of an intensely human couple,

686
00:57:18,000 --> 00:57:23,040
a couple who have to make
their own choices and decisions,
a couple who are fallible.

687
00:57:26,360 --> 00:57:31,400
The final effect of getting to the
end is to want to go back to the
beginning and read it all again.

688
00:57:32,440 --> 00:57:36,440
This is because Milton
puts us in charge.

689
00:57:36,440 --> 00:57:38,640
At the end of the poem
he lays down his pen,

690
00:57:38,640 --> 00:57:43,400
the florid language disappears,
and he wants us, like Adam and Eve,

691
00:57:43,400 --> 00:57:47,760
to go out into the real world
and to deal with it.

692
00:57:55,440 --> 00:57:59,440
I never did finish
my PhD on Paradise Lost.

693
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:03,800
Maybe that's because the poem defies
any definitive interpretation.

694
00:58:05,800 --> 00:58:10,840
After everything that Milton
went through, he's urging us
to keep examining things,

695
00:58:11,040 --> 00:58:16,080
to keep celebrating our freedom
to think for ourselves
as sentient, fallen human beings.

696
00:58:21,400 --> 00:58:23,560
If you want to be
inspired, disturbed,

697
00:58:23,560 --> 00:58:27,120
confronted with your failings
and reminded of your strengths,

698
00:58:27,120 --> 00:58:31,640
if you want to read what it
feels like to love and to be free,

699
00:58:31,640 --> 00:58:36,640
then you have to, you simply
have to read Paradise Lost.