Paradise Lost

John Milton's Paradise Lost was inflicted on me in 12th grade, and it left enough scars that it's taken a long time for me to return to it.  I use the term "inflicted" advisedly; as I recall, we were given minimal preparation, and such as it was was about Renaissance cosmology (the relationship between Heaven, Hell, and Earth).

This time, I decided to give myself the advantage of an annotated edition (sorely missed in high school), but the passage of time has been helpful as well.  In addition to having more familiarity with the Bible, I find the Latinate language and syntax less challenging than I did back then.  And, with no pressure to earn a grade, I could concentrate on enjoying Milton's epic.

It's a hard poem to write about, and not just because lots of people have already written better things than I ever could.  The real problem is that it's an easier poem to admire than it is to like.  It's a more unified epic than, say, The Faerie Queene, as well as having more distinctive characters, a flexible mastery of meter, and so on.  But I had more fun reading the latter work, even as I see the former's brilliance.

One thing I did really like was the way Milton uses the same word twice in a line (or sometimes even more within the space of a couple of lines) in different forms, or in different stress patterns.

For example,

...what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained,
And in her looks

(italics mine, to show stress)