amimetobios

This is the first class of a course on the close reading of poetry.  It will consist, at least for the first half, of intense reading of poems for as long as is necessary, with no time pressure.  It's not a course designed to get you reading a lot; it's designed to get you thinking a lot.  We start out with some lullabies, first with Auden's

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephermeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:

To lovers as they lie upon

Her tolerant enchanted slope

In their ordinary swoon,

Grave the vision Venus sends

Of supernatural sympathy,

Universal love and hope;

While an abstract insight wakes

Among the glaciers and the rocks

The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell,

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreadful cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:

Let the winds of dawn that blow

Softly round your dreaming head

Such a day of sweetness show

Eye and knocking heart may bless.

Find the mortal world enough;

Noons of dryness see you fed

By the involuntary powers,

Nights of insult let you pass

Watched by every human love.

A somewhat giddily desultory last class, mainly on Samson, though with some attention to Paradise Regained and much about patience and heroic martyrdom. What being patient means. Milton's amazing prosody in Sonnet 16: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Compared to Jesus standing in PR 4. Some biographical account of Milton's blindness. Milton and the Book of Job. Reading Samson instead of seeing it. What happens to the boy who guides him? Is Dalila morally reproachable? Is Samson ultimately a terrorist?

Considerations from Areopagitica for the understanding of Milton: knowing good only by means of evil. How you can only know one if you know the other. How then the double fall of Adam and Eve requires Adam to know evil (that Eve has fallen) before he's eaten the fruit because she has. After her fall, and before Adam's, humanity both has and hasn't eaten the fruit (they're one person as far as that goes), and so knows good and evil before knowing good and evil. Thus he is already ruined ("me with the hath ruined," even before he eats. He chooses with full knowledge, and (it seems to me) chooses rightly.

How it's only humans in the whole universe who thinks things through. And therefore who fall on behalf of those who think things through. They think silently, too, keep their thoughts from each other.

What kinds of judgments does God leave to us? Plot as typology: learning how to understand the climax. In Paradise Lost we learn to use our own judgment in deciding about God's. Faithfulness always a good. So when Adam judges that Eve is real and that he will stay with her, he is extending a test already given him by God, with respect to the creation of Eve. But this time God says he fails it. This lecture, alas, was cut off so the last ten minutes are missing (iPad fail). But this is essentially what it is about.

Dreams in Milton: the way dream figures are always for us and therefore allegorical, and not for themselves. But in Milton this isn't true: the point is to discover the extent to which we're dreams (like Orpheus and Calliope) and the way that beings with the ephemerality and fragility of dreams -- us -- can nevertheless suffer. All by way of reading the Invocation to Book 7.

More on the quasi-invocation to Book IV, and about Miltonic ambiguity: two different ways of coming to the same end. Here either he or God could have produced the saving voice: it doesn't matter. But neither of them does, despite the fact that John of Patmos hears a voice from the future. Invocation and prayer are similar: the request is self-granting. But not in Book IV. We then consider Satan's use of necessity, the tyrant's plea, and compare it to God's.

We look at the quasi-invocation to Book IV and compare it to Raphael's failure to have such a warning voice for Adam and Even in Books 5 ff. What are the limits of his affability? This is a continuation of the question: who judges? and its answer: only humans. We broach the question then: fallen or unfallen humans? in parallel to the question: fallen or unfallen angels?

We consider the question who can be an adequate judge of God's ways, starting with the Invocation to Book 1, and then looking at the pusillanimity of the loyal angels in Book 3. We notice the way the Son manages God, but also that none of the other angels do. So it's not only the case that the rebel angels aren't able to judge God; the loyal angels aren't either. To be continued in the next class....

We finish up with the Invocation to Book III, and discuss Protestantism's (and particularly Milton's) view of Catholicism. Worshipping anything in the external world is worshipping an idol. Imagining that anything in the external world is magic, including the fruit of the tree of knowledge is idolatry. This means that knowledge of good and evil really does come out of a recognition of the fact that one has freely eaten of the tree: freedom and guilt are correlated. This also means that there's something you might call the converse of allegory going in in Paradise Lost. The fruit isn't allegorical; it's literal. Eating it forces you to recognize yourself as allegorizing your own guilt. You eat the fruit and feel rightly guilty, so that your own action is an allegory of your sin. I thought that I explained this fairly decently, and am sorry to say that once again a technical problem cut the class off half way through. No doubt I'll repeat myself next class.