John Milton
Minor Poems by John Milton
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Table of contents
PREFACE.
OUTLINES OF THE LIFE OF MILTON.
MILTON’S MINOR POEMS.
ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST’S NATIVITY.
The Hymn.
ON SHAKESPEARE. 1630.
L’ALLEGRO.
IL PENSEROSO.
ARCADES.
AT A SOLEMN MUSIC.
COMUS.
LYCIDAS.
SONNETS.
NOTES.
PREFACE.
The
purpose held in view by those who place the study of Milton in high
school English courses is twofold: first, that youth may seasonably
become acquainted with a portion of our great classic poetry; and,
secondly, that they may in this poetry encounter and learn to conquer
difficulties more serious than those they have met in the literature
they have hitherto read. It is for the teacher to see to it that both
these aims are attained. The pupil must read with interest, and he
must expect at the same time to have to do some strenuous thinking
and not to object to turning over many books.The
average pupil will not at first read anything of Milton with perfect
enjoyment. He will, with his wonted docility, commit passages to
memory, and he will do his best to speak these passages with the
elocution on which you insist. But the taste for this poetry is an
acquired one, and in the acquisition usually costs efforts quite
alien to the prevailing conceptions of reading as a pleasurable
recreation.The
task of pedagogy at this point becomes delicate. First of all, the
teacher must recognize the fact that his class will not, however good
their intentions, leap to a liking for Comus or Lycidas or even for
the Nativity Ode. It is of no use to assign stanzas or lines as
lessons and to expect these to be studied to a conclusion like a task
of French translation. The only way not to be disappointed in the
performance of the class is to expect nothing. It will be well at
first, except where the test is quite simple, for the teacher to read
it himself, making comment, in the way of explanation, as he goes on.
Now and then he will stop and have a little quiz to hold attention.
When classical allusions come up requiring research, the teacher will
tell in what books the matter may be looked up, and will show how
other poets, or Milton elsewhere, have played with the same piece of
history or mythology. Thus a poem may be dealt with for a number of
days. Repetition is, to a certain extent, excellent. The verses begin
to sink into the young minds; the measure appeals to the inborn sense
of rhythm; the poem is caught by the ear like a piece of music; the
utterance of it becomes more like singing than speaking. In fact, the
great secret of teaching poetry in school is to get rid of the
commonplace manner of speech befitting a recitation in language or
science, and to put in practice the obvious truth that verse has its
own form, which is very different from the form of prose. But
repetition may go too far. Over-familiarity may beget indifference.
Other poems await the attention of the class.The
teacher who really means to interest his classes, and begins by being
interested and interesting himself, will rarely fail to accomplish
his purpose. The principal obstacle to success here is the necessity,
that frequently exists, of conforming to the custom of examining,
marking, and ranking—a practice that thwarts genuine personal
influence, formalizes all procedures, and tends to deaden natural
interest by substituting for it the artificial interest of school
standing. The Milton lesson must be a serious one because it is given
to the study of the serious work of the gravest and most high-minded
of men; and it must be an enjoyable one because it deals with the
verse of the most musical of poets, and because one mood of joy is
the only mood in which literature can be profitably studied.As
to the difficulties which the learner first encounters when he comes
to Milton, these grow sometimes out of the diction, sometimes out of
the syntax, and sometimes out of the poet’s figures and allusions.
Some difficulties can be explained at once and completely. Others
cannot be explained at all with any reasonable hope of touching the
beginner’s mind with matter that he can appropriate. Often the
young reader slips over points of possible learned annotation without
the least consciousness that here great scholarship might make an
imposing display. Perfectly useless is it to set forth for the pupil
the interesting echoes from ancient poets which generations of
delving scholars have accumulated in their notes to Milton, pleasing
as these are to mature readers.The
rule should be to expound and illustrate sufficiently to remove those
perplexities which really tease the pupil’s mind and cause him to
feel dissatisfaction with himself. In many cases our only course is
to postpone exposition and to trust that the learner will grow up to
the insight which he as yet does not possess and which we cannot
possibly give him. A learned writer, like Milton, who has read all
antiquity, and who has no purpose of writing for children, inevitably
contemplates a public of men approximately his equals in culture, and
expects to find “fit audience, though few.”But
many of the difficulties that confront the beginner in Milton ask
only to be explained at once by some one who has had more experience
in the older literature. Archaic forms of words and expressions, with
which the ripe student is familiar, worry the tyro, and must be
accounted for. Often the common dictionaries will give all needed
help; but the best means of acquiring speedy familiarity with
obsolete and rare forms is a Milton concordance—such as that of
Bradshaw—in connection with the Century Dictionary, or with the
Oxford Dictionary, so far as this goes. These means of easy research
should be at hand. I find that pupils often need a pretty sharp spur
to make them use even their abridged dictionaries. But so far as
concerns acquaintance with the vocabulary of poetic diction, nothing
will do except the dictionary habit, accompanied by an effort of the
memory to retain what has been learned.Difficulties
that lurk in an involved syntax the pupil may usually be expected to
solve by study. But such a peculiar construction as that in
Sonnet X 9
will probably have to be explained to him.In
the puritan theology and its implications he cannot take much
interest, and will of course not be asked to do so. But high school
students of Milton will ordinarily, in their historical courses, have
come down to the times in which the poet lived, will understand his
relation to public events, and will appreciate his feeling toward the
English ecclesiastical system. Puritanism, a phenomenon of the most
tremendous importance at a certain period of English history, has so
completely disappeared from the modern world, that the utterances of
a seventeenth-century poet, professedly a partisan, on matters of
church and state, no longer exasperate, and can barely even interest,
students of literature.To
read either Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy we must find the
poet’s cosmical and his theological standpoint. We have no right to
be surprised or shocked at his conceptions. We must take him as he
is, and let him lead us through the universe as he has planned it. So
long as we set up our modern views as a standard, and by this
standard judge the ancient men, we fail in hospitality of thought,
and come short of our duty as readers.This
consideration suggests yet another purpose in setting youth to the
reading of Milton. By no means an ancient poet, he takes us,
nevertheless, to a world different from our own, and in some sense
helps us out of the modern time in which our lives have fallen, to
show us how other ages conceived of God and Heaven. The mark of an
educated man is respect for the past; the old philosophies and
religions do not startle and repel him; his ancestors were once in
those stages of belief; in some stage of this vast movement of
thought he and his fellows are at the present moment. This largeness
of view can be fruitfully impressed on youth only by letting them
read, under wise guidance, the older poets.
OUTLINES OF THE LIFE OF MILTON.
John
Milton was born in London on the ninth of December, 1608. Queen
Elizabeth had then been dead five years, and the literature which we
call Elizabethan was still being written by the men who had begun
their careers under her reign. Spenser had died in 1599. The theatres
were yet in the enjoyment of full popularity, and the play-writers
were producing works that continued the traditions and the manner of
the Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare had still eight years to live, and
at least four of the great plays to write. Bacon’s fame was already
great, but the events of eighteen years were to cloud his reputation
and establish his renown. Jonson, great as a writer of masks, was to
live till he might have seen, in Comus, how a young and scholarly
puritan humanist thought that a mask should be conceived.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!