Selected Poems_Milton_Milton by John Milton

Author:John Milton [Milton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, General
ISBN: 9780141932170
Google: 0rW6gn-zcfMC
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2007-09-27T18:17:23+00:00

BOOK IX

No more of talk where God or angel guest

With man, as with his friend, familiar used

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblamed: I now must change

Those notes to tragic; foul distrust, and breach

Disloyal on the part of man, revolt,

And disobedience: on the part of Heav’n

Now alienated, distance and distaste,

Anger 10and just rebuke, and judgement giv’n,

That brought into this world a world of woe,

Sin and her shadow Death, and misery

Death’s harbinger: sad task, yet argument

Not less but more heroic than the wrath

Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued

Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage

Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused,

Or Neptune’s ire or Juno’s, that so long

Perplexed the Greek and Cytherea’s son;

If 20answerable style I can obtain

Of my celestial patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And díctates to me slumb’ring, or inspires

Easy my unpremeditated verse:

Since first this subject for heroic song

Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late;

Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the only argument

Heroic deemed, chief mast’ry to dissect

With 30long and tedious havoc fabled knights

In battles feigned; the better fortitude

Of patience and heroic martyrdom

Unsung; or to describe races and games,

Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

Impreses quaint, caparisons and steeds;

Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast

Served up in hall with sewers, and seneschals;

The skill of artifice or office mean,

Not 40that which justly gives heroic name

To person or to poem. Me of these

Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument

Remains, sufficient of itself to raise

That name, unless an age too late, or cold

Climate, or years damp my intended wing

Depressed, and much they may, if all be mine,

Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.

The sun was sunk, and after him the star

Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring

Twilight 50upon the earth, short arbiter

’Twixt day and night, and now from end to end

Night’s hemisphere had veiled the horizon round:

When Satan who late fled before the threats

Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved

In meditated fraud and malice, bent

On man’s destruction, maugre what might hap

Of heavier on himself, fearless returned.

By night he fled, and at midnight returned

From compassing the earth, cautious of day,

Since 60Uriel regent of the sun descried

His entrance, and forewarned the Cherubim

That kept their watch; thence full of anguish driv’n,

The space of seven continued nights he rode

With darkness, thrice the equinoctial line

He circled, four times crossed the car of Night

From pole to pole, traversing each colure;

On the eighth returned, and on the coast averse

From entrance or Cherubic watch, by stealth

Found unsuspected way. There was a place,

Now 70not, though sin, not time, first wrought the change,

Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise

Into a gulf shot under ground, till part

Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life;

In with the river sunk, and with it rose

Satan involved in rising mist, then sought

Where to lie hid; sea he had searched and land

From Eden over Pontus, and the pool

Maeotis, up beyond the river Ob;

Downward as far Antarctic; and in length

West 80from Orontes to the ocean barred

At Darien, thence to the land where flows

Ganges and Indus: thus the orb

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