OCCUPY PARADISE

How radical was John Milton?

- MERVE EMRE

"Paradise Lost" has long proved popular with revolutionary thinkers.

On winter nights in the early sixteensixties, a blind poet lay awake in his bed and dreamed of the universe. Before his eyes swam suns and stars. A celestial light, visible to him alone, revealed a procession of images: first, a great battle in Heaven, between Satan's rebel angels and the armies of God, who chased the rebels into a new realm, Hell; next, God's creation of Earth and the inhabitants of Paradise, chief among them Adam and Eve; then a glimpse of Satan, who flew from Hell to tempt Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; and, finally, man's exile from Paradise. Into the poet's mind flowed twenty or thirty unbroken verses. Alas, his blindness meant that he had to wait until morning for an amanuensis to arrive and preserve them in writing. The poet would sit impatiently, one leg flung over the arm of his chair, and cry, "I want to be milked!"

Such is the legend of John Milton's "Paradise Lost." It may be an apocryphal story but feels true to the poem; it was as if God had filled the poet to the brim, until he had to be drained by the hands of mere mortals. Onto the page spilled more than ten thousand lines of the richest and most resourceful blank verse in the English language, arranged into ten books in 1667, then rearranged into twelve in 1674. The subject was nothing less than the whole of human history, as proposed by the thunderous invocation of Book I:

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....