The Arvon Blog

By Freya McClelland

Tuesday night I found myself rushing up the staircase at Somerset House late for the RSL lecture where Claire Tomalin and Philip Pullman would be discussing the magic of Milton’s poetry. Sneaking in, I found a spot on the stair as the place was rammed with people aged from 8 to 80.

Milton can be said to have the ‘Marmite effect’. While Dr Johnson loathed the ‘gigantick loftiness’ of his poetry, T.S. Eliot claimed that he wrote English ‘like a dead language’ and Dryden thought of Paradise Lost as ‘one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which this nation has produced’.

Tomalin and Pullman were firmly in this camp but for different reasons, and both fell in love with his poetry as a teenager.

The chair A.N. Wilson championed Milton’s non- fiction writing: on politics as an ardent supporter of Cromwell; on his personal experience of blindness; and his advocacy of freedom. After his disastrous marriage, Milton also wrote passionately for divorce (which A.N Wilson suggested may have amounted to the same thing anyway!). I always like hearing about this aspect of Milton. It provides a contrast to his luminous descriptions of divine life and shows us how firmly he was grounded on earth.

But for Tomalin, it is Milton’s sonnets that are most glorious. She described them as little beads on a necklace, perfect in their own right and flagged the last sonnet Milton ever wrote as an excellent example. She read the small dramatic poem ‘On His Deceased Wife’ which is about his second wife (not the one he divorced, but who he loved and who was lost in childbirth). At first it seems Milton is confident of being reunited with her finally in heaven, and enjoying the “full sight” of her denied him on earth. The allusion to Alcestis, the wife in Euripides’ play rescued from death by Hercules and restored to her husband Admetus, conjures up the paradox of this particular drama, that tragedy, however harrowing, can end with joy.

But Milton knows there is no real parallel here: his wife is not restored to him, except to his “fancied sight” in a dream. The physical rapture of Euripides’ Admetus in holding his lost wife once more is denied to Milton “I wak’d, she fled, and Day brought back my night.” It sends shivers down my spine every time I read it but for me, it is the reality which makes this sonnet and Paradise Lost so beautiful and relevant.

After briefly discussing Milton’s influence on the Romantic and in his Satan, the invention of the Byronic hero, Philip Pullman who studied Paradise Lost for A’ level, was asked to clarify how the poet had influenced him. He described his reaction to his first reading: ‘My heart beat faster, the hair on my head stirred, my skin bristled.’ Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, is, in his own words, ‘a version of Paradise Lost in three books for teenagers’. The younger members of the audience pricked their ears.

He wanted to explore ‘the north face of Paradise Lost’. Lyra became his Eve who must face the seduction of knowledge and experience beauty and betrayal. The ever-present mysterious threat of another world takes from the texture of Milton’s descriptions of Hell.

The panel could not decide on the highlight and starting point in Paradise Lost. For Pullman it is book 9 (The Temptation) and for Tomalin, book 4 (The Dream). Everyone agreed the resulting fall, was the fall to experience the full difficulty and wondrous complexity of human relationships. Tomalin added that Adam and Eve emerge as equals at last and Pullman and Wilson acknowledged the love story: Adam choose Eve over paradise. The last point made was that ultimately it is the magical sound of the language that makes Milton’s poetry so enchanting.