Paradise Found?
Anna Goodall pushes the Oyster to its limits in search of blind genius
Chalfont St Giles: not London in the strictest sense of the word – or, indeed, any sense of the word – but Pen Pusher needed a ‘team building’ exercise, just to make sure we were still on ‘the same page’ (perhaps even, in ‘the same paragraph’). And so, on a blazing hot Saturday morning in June, we embarked upon our first ever day trip.
Having rumbled to the Metropolitan Line’s farthest outpost, Amersham, we walked through rolling fields of corn to reach Chalfont St Giles (via a post-prandial nap that was rudely interrupted by a herd of enthusiastic ramblers). It was in this small Buckinghamshire village that John Milton (1608–1674) took refuge from plague-ridden London and completed his epic blank verse poem, Paradise Lost (1667). (Milton went completely blind in 1652 and Edward Dawson, the Milton’s Cottage museum curator, is clearly gratified at our astonishment on learning that Milton held up to fifty lines of the poem in his head to dictate to an amanuensis each morning.)
The museum’s focus is on Milton’s significant socio-political achievements. Dawson reminds us of Milton’s many polemical tracts and pamphlets – Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defence of the freedom of the press; his pro-regicide text, Eikonoklastes (1649); and a short but significant tract, On Education (1644) – that confirm his status as a restless liberal whose views were far ahead of his time. He is especially keen that Milton’s part in the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s government should not be underestimated: Milton took a salary as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues and wrote extensively in defence of the Commonwealth. And his work was highly influential: in the cottage the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) is displayed near a copy of King Charles I’s death warrant. In Tenure…, Milton defends the legitimacy of regicide, and the tract is said to have been instrumental in securing the fifty-nine signatures on the warrant.
Paradise Lost was written many years later as Milton despaired over the failure of the Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 – which many consider the ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve in the poem to represent. But Satan, in his glorious starring role as the deposed but resilient military leader whose rebellion against God’s absolute power has failed, is unwilling to fit into a neat dichotomy of good and evil. And rarely has the Devil been given such great tunes. In particular, Chapter IX is wonderful in its description of Satan’s temptation of Eve. The language trips and turns off the page in a luxuriant linguistic oozing that is, quite rightly, irresistible:
So glozed the Temptor, and his proem tuned;
Into the heart of Eve his words made way
And we can well believe it.
Milton’s career was spent in using language to persuade and elucidate, and questions of knowledge are at the heart of the poem. It throws up ideas about knowledge, religious belief, sin, and individual desire. William Blake’s famous quote about Milton says it best: ‘He was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’
By the end of the day, on our way to sourcing the village’s finest bitter shandy, we could certainly relate to Satan’s thoughts when he re-enters Paradise in the body of the serpent to tempt Eve:
Much he the place admired, the person more
As one who long in populous city pent
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms.
Milton’s Cottage
Chalfont St. Giles
Buckinghamshire
HP8 4JH
T 01494 872313
www.miltonscottage.org
