Del.icio.us MiltonThe discussion today about Milton’s consideration of self-doubt and self-esteem really caught my attention. Milton knows he has a gift, and he knows that God has given him this gift in order for him to use it; he sees that there’s no point in denying this. Denying it would, in fact, be a refutation of [...]
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I actually waited to post this until right before class so it wouldn’t spoil the surprise. Not like it’s a big surprise.
Anecdote first. When my mother was young, her aunt (my great-aunt) made a batch of dog biscuits and cut them up and distributed them among the children. My mom, believing that anything called “dog [...]
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Well to begin, I have to say that I strongly prefer Milton’s poetry to his prose. I, too, question whether I belive some of the arguments that Milton makes for The Reason of Church-Government. For starters, Milton draws his immediate Biblical justification from the Old Testament, which while his arguments are strong, they seem to [...]
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Knowledge is a precious obligation, not to be taken for granted, but to be shared. (I have a feeling Milton’s thoughts on the sacred necessity for sharing knowledge—in the pursuit of Truth, I guess—will come into play tomorrow, with Areopagitica.) Milton, having received that treasure, is now in the ‘uncomfortable’ position of having to repay [...]
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One of the most interesting aspects of Milton’s poetry to me is the vast amount of allusions that occur in each. Though his poetry often has a religious context, it filled with constant references to greek and roman mythology and consistently reminds me of other writers (though perhaps it is the other writers that are influenced by [...]
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One of the most beautiful aspects of these poems is the musical cadence that occurs throughout. After taking eight years of piano, itis impossible for me to read these without applying musical features to both. The diction and syntax of the poems unite perfectly with their musical counterparts.
Allegro pieces are generally played at middle C [...]
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I have to be honest and say that I am really unsure about “Apology for Smectymnuus” and “The Reason of Church Government.” The sentences go on and on, often somewhat awkwardly (I found this especially in ‘Reason’) and I had so much trouble finding Milton’s meaning while wading through the verbiage. It might just be [...]
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Initially when reading Milton’s “The Reason of Church-Government”, I was able to see where he felt that God had given him a gift that he should use for the betterment of his country; whether, protecting the people from the oppressive church, or protecting the Church from it’s enemies (51-52). This argument made sense, as Milton is [...]
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These are musings of probably a more personal than topical nature, so don’t feel obligated to read them in any great depth.
First, I had the misfortune to suffer two migraine headaches this week, both at times when I couldn’t nap, but had to be doing homework. I saw the words on the pages turn blurry [...]
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Intuition is useful for a lot of reasons. Social cues are an easy example; we don’t consciously examine stance, facial expression, and so forth, we just intuit mood (and even thought, to some extent) from these hints. Genre gives us these cues too, using lighting, setting, soundtrack, and of course content. In some ways, intuition [...]
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Along blue water and pale calm skies, the peace of a high sun, and lapping waves, Fortune’s wheels is carefully turning, clicking gear by gear toward the ever approaching chance for disaster. Milton is very aware of this, that tragedies are always beneath the surface, pushing at the seams of [...]
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I understand Milton’s anguish, frustration, anxiety, and fear. I do. And his poetry is both beautiful and moving. However, as a reader, something about Lycidas strikes me as very frustrating. In some ways, Milton takes a random, meaningless event and then ascribes meaning to it—King’s death becomes a message about the poetic vocation. It becomes [...]
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It is interesting that the poem seems to provide, in part, a portrayal of a lady resisting the movement toward her own sexual maturity. Despite great beauty and her singing a beautiful song as if she were a nymph, she is very naive. She strolls by Comus, and within minutes, he is asking her to [...]
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The question posed to us in class was”What do you do with ambition, if life can end at any time?”, or put another way “What do you do if you devote yourself to careful planning, and the future never arrives?”
Milton had these very questions thrust upon him when his good friend Edward King is [...]
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“The very act of restraining growth creates growth.”
We see this everywhere, from the pruning of a plant to damming water. Deny something and it’s liable to burst forth further, at least if it’s a true thing. From experience I can say that trying to squash something you’re worried of and scared of, if [...]
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What a beautiful poem. I love the beginning and the end. The middle I am still pretty unsure about; I don’t know if I like it, I don’t know if I understand what it’s about yet. The destruction and despair in the first part of the poem is so heartbreaking. The speaker’s desire to destroy [...]
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First, I want to talk a little about the poet’s vocation in the Ludlow Masque, because the figure of the shepherd is a prominent one and we all know how Milton felt about that. The Attendant Spirit says the swain is capable of calming the wilds—like Christ on the morning of his birth, perhaps—and is [...]
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I began reading this “masque” (my first experience with this genre, as I guess it would be called) searching for some of Milton’s energizing principles. I struggled to find good examples of them though, which slightly concerned me because they were pretty obvious traces of them in the poetry we read the night before. [...]
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I found it interesting that the content of A Masque,would in today’s world be considered inflammatory; if the parts were played by children. However, in Milton’s day the message was a moral lesson that went deeper than the surface of the attempted rape. The issue wasn’t the seduction , it was the overcoming of [...]
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What do you do with an imagination that can bring a vision before your eyes that you cannot inhabit?
For reference, the five Milton fascinations: beginnings, loss, delay, ambition and choice.
We can all imagine things. Even the sadly unimaginative can see the ways the future might go. When you’re trying to figure out what [...]
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