BOOM:

• Vol. 4. COMPLETE POEMS IN ENGLISH, MILTON
  

At this pace, I’ll be doing good to finish these suckers by my 30th birthday.

For those who have only started reading and hanging out on here this year, I’m actually in the middle of a Harvard Classic read-through. I started out sprinting like Seabiscuit but slowed to this War Horse pace.

See if you’re doing a food-eating contest, you want to work with something like hot dogs or chili or even pizza. But fudge? Fudge is the sort of thing you take in little bites throughout the course of the season. If you bought a pound, it’ll take a year to finish. A ten-pound brick?

You’ll be eating fudge for the next decade.

Milton’s words read like fudge and because of my savoring, I haven’t written a post on Milton since May  30th and haven’t written a post on a previous volume of the Harvard Classics since November, 2011. It’s my fudge, I can take as long, but it took months for me to be okay with that.

Here are ten ways I tried to read Milton’s Poetry (vol. 4 of HVC) before I settled on my current method:

1. Reading quietly to myself in long stretches. Milton wrote in the 1500s and therefore thinks nothing like me. Not to mention it’s an older form of poetry. Not to mention it’s MILTON. This failed.
2. Reading without a pen. At first, as some know, I felt guilty about marking up my 1st edition copies of the Harvard Classics, but then I realized that these books are literally wasting away. Why not mark them up so as to preserve an unique legacy of reading for my kids? A pen suppressed is a thought digressed.
3. Reading long passages to Kiddo. Like many of the wives of my more academic friends, my bride seldom gets up in the morning thinking, “Gee, I hope Lance reads me an extended passage from Paradise Regained.” Now she’s gracious enough to listen quietly as I rant about things I found, even asking questions when I quote a line at a time, but she asked more than once this year, “How can you read that stuff straight through?” Thus, the insanity of the Harvard Classic read through.
4. Reading to my parents or siblings. Same as above, only exacerbated by Southern Illinois culture.
5. Reading with friends. Normally I say, “this is the course for reading the classics.” Reading in community helps you pick up on themes and symbols you would otherwise miss because different parts stick out differently to different people. We end up helping each other limp along through the old books. HOWEVER, the guys who were reading Paradise Lost along with me abandoned ship a few chapters in, so that failed. I’m not critiquing this method, I’m just saying I ran out of reading buddies for this one.
6. Reading in a bumpy car. The typeface on this book is a hundred and five years old. Headaches like you wouldn’t believe. And car sickness. Oh the car sickness…
7. Reading to my class. The students I teach will occasionally stomach a passage or two, like Kiddo, but they need context and a modern story immediately afterward–I’m not teaching the classics or a class on Milton, after all. Because of this, I got many many glazed over looks when I quoted JM at length.
8. Reading aloud while pacing around the house. This started out well, but my spaniel Echo thinks when dad’s pacing around shouting things like, “However many books, wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads incessantly, and to his reading brings not a spirit of judgment equal or superior, (and what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?) uncertain and unsettled still remains, deep-versed in books and shallow in himself, crude or intoxicate, collecting toys and trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, as children gathering pebbles on the shore,” she thinks that means it’s time for her to bark alongside. Thus her namesake. Vetoed that style.
9. Reading along with Scripture. Though I tried for a time to make some sort of parallel, this slowed me down even further and I quit reading for weeks on end. Does anyone know if a searchable index exists? Like for the Scriptures referenced in Milton?
10. Reading along with MIT lectures. Remember that attempt? Yeah, after one lecture I was mad enough to quit reading altogether for another month. Why? Because literary criticism should begin WITH THE LITERARY TEXT not with history. That Yale prof ticked me off because he read so much history into Milton’s work and so completely ignored basic literary context, that he marred much of Milton beyond recognition.

So I landed on reading aloud while soaking in the bathtub. There was risk involved: at any moment I could drop that hundred-year-old book in hot water and watch all my work dissolve. But with the door closed, with the tub full of hot water, on my back with the book above me, I could invoke Milton’s lyrics into the hollow of our wider-than-necessary shower stall and let the acoustics reverberate truth back to me.

This, I believe, is the only way to read Milton: aloud, alone, and in a room where the acoustics give the words the weight they deserve.

Kind of like eating fudge in front of the Christmas tree.

Words I learned:

• doleful – causing grief
• vaunting – boast about or praise
• pernicious – having a harmful effect
• nathless – nevertheless
• rowling  – ?
• fesole – ?
• valdarnd – ?
• abashed – cause to feel embarrased
• uxorious – having or showing an excessive or submissive fondness for one’s wife
• scurf – flakes on the surface of the skin that form as fresh skin develops below, occurring especially as dandruff
• aequinoctial – ?
• vacuity – lack of thought or intelligence
• fardest – ?
• maugre – ?
• ensigns – a flag or standard
• gonfalons – a banner or pennant, with streamers, hung from a crossbar
• ineffable – too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words
• obloquy – strong public criticism or verbal abuse
• circumfused – pour a liquid so as to cause it to surround something
• obsequious – obedient to an excessive or servile degree
• subducting – the sideways and downward movement of the edge of a plate of the Earth’s mantle beneath another plate
• hesperean – concerning Hesperides, a group of nymphs who were guardians with the aid of a watchful dragon, of a tree of golden apples.
• maugre – ?
• redound – contribute greatly to a person’s dignity or honor
• quadrature – the process of constructing a square with an area equal to that of a circle
• plenipotent – a person, esp. a diplomat, invested with the full power of independent action on behalf of their government, typically in a foreign country.
• ravin – violent seizure of prey or property; plunder.
• maw – the jaws or throat of a voracious animal
• amarantin – ?
• orisons – a prayer
• volant – able to fly or glide
• allayed – diminish or put at rest (fear, suspicion, or worry)
• chaunt – ?
• interdict – ?
• viands – an item of food
• loth – reluctant, unwilling
• abrogate – repeal or do away with (a law, right, or formal agreement)
• staid – sedate, respectable, and unadventurous
• importunity – persistent, esp. to the point of annoyance or intrusion
• swage – a shaped tool or die for giving a desired form to metal by hammering or pressure.
• diminuation – ?
• vitiated – spoil or impure the quality or effectivity of