PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

This evening, quite unexpectedly, my grandson Brody happened to look over my shoulder at my laptop screen, on which was displayed the text of John Milton's Sonnet 19.  I first read this sonnet in the dinosaur days of 1975, in the autumn/winter of my senior year in high school.

  Brody, who is not quite four and a half years old, and in his first year of pre-school, read the first seven lines of Sonnet 19, and needed only three assists in the pronunciation of the words ("ere,"therewish," and "chide").

   Four and a half years old, and he has made the acquaintance of John Milton tonight.  

   I, myself, was nine years old when, given my first copy of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, I read and memorized the lines from Paradise Lost, Milton's great epic poem, that she used as the epigraph to her novel:

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Man, did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?"

---John Milton, op. cit. Book X

One night, during my evening bath, I began to recite these lines, and my mother, overhearing them, became quite disturbed.  Therefore, it became an amusing custom, on bath nights, to recite these lines simply for the sheer fun of aggravating my mother.  

Having seen, in an encyclopedia, that really prejudicial picture of John Milton dictating the epic to his three daughters to take down in manuscript form, I found him to be dauntingly formidable.  I did not know that the painting was based upon statements from his second daughter, Mary, who had become embittered toward him; such statements being contradicted by his youngest daughter, Deborah, who loved him.  Apparently, the manuscript, which is in the British Museum (they tell me), has been identified as the handwriting not of Milton's daughters (one of whom was unable to read or write), but of several friends, including the poet, Andrew Marvell, who was Milton's assistant while serving as Foreign Secretary during the Puritan Commonwealth (Marvell would have been the direct supervisor of my ancestor, Governor William Coddington of the Rhode Island colony).

Starward