Table Of ContentPARADISE LOST
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JO H N M I LTON
PA RA D I S E
L O S T
Introduced by
PHILIP PULLMAN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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Paradise Lost taken from the Oxford World’s Classics edition edited by Stephen Orgel and
Jonathan Goldberg
Introductions © Philip Pullman 2005
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First published 2005
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CONTENTS
(cid:1) 1
Introdu ion by philip pullman
PARADISE LOST
13
Book I
41
Book II
75
Book III
101
Book IV
135
Book V
165
Book VI
195
Book VII
219
BookVIII
243
Book IX
281
Book X
317
Book XI
347
Book XII
371
Afterword
(cid:2) 373
A Note on the Illu rations
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INTRODUCTION
by
philip pullman
Acorrespondent once told me a story—which I’ve never been
able to trace, and I don’t know whether it’s true—about a
bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire two hundred years ago
fi
or more, sitting by his reside listening to Paradise Lost being read
aloud. He’s never read it himself; he doesn’t know the story at all;
but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a
fi fi
gouty foot propped up on a stool, he nds himself trans xed.
Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims ‘By God! I
know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned
fi
ne fellow, and I hope he may win!’
Which are my sentiments exactly.
I’m conscious, as I write this introduction to the poem, that I
have hardly any more pretensions to scholarship than that old
gentleman. Many of my comparisons will be drawn from popular
fi fi
literature and lm rather than from anything more re ned. Learned
critics have analysed Paradise Lost and found in it things I could
never see, and related it to other works I have never read, and
demonstrated the truth of this or that assertion about Milton and
his poem that it would never have occurred to me to make, or,
having made, to think that I could prove it.
But this is how I read this great work, and all I can do is describe
that way of reading.
(cid:3) (cid:2)
he ory as a poem
So I begin with sound. I read Paradise Lost not only with my eyes,
but with my mouth. I was lucky enough to study Books I and II for
A Level many years ago, and to do so in a small class whose teacher,
Miss Enid Jones, had the clear-eyed and old-fashioned idea that we
2 Introdu(cid:1)ion
would get a good sense of the poem if, before we did anything else to
it, we read it aloud. So we took it in turns, in that little Sixth Form
fl
classroom in Ysgol Ardudwy, on the at land below the great rock of
Harlech Castle, to stumble and mutter and gabble our way through
it all, while Miss Jones sat with arms comfortably folded on her
desk, patiently helping us with pronunciation, but not encumbering
us with meaning.
fi
And thus it was that I rst read lines like this. Satan is making his
way across the wastes of hell towards the new world he intends to
fl
corrupt, and a complex and majestic image evokes his distant ight:
As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply stemming nightly toward the pole. So seemed
Far off the flyingfiend...
(Book II, lines 636–43)
That passage stayed with me for years, and still has the power to
thrill me. Ply stemming nightly toward the pole—in those words I could
hear the creak of wood and rope, the never-ceasing dash of water
against the bows, the moan of the wind in the rigging; I could see the
dim phosphorescence in the creaming wake, the dark waves against
the restless horizon, the constant stars in the velvet sky; and I saw the
vigilant helmsman, the only man awake, guiding his sleeping ship-
mates and their precious freight across the wilderness of the night.
To see these things and hear them most vividly, I found that I had
to take the lines in my mouth and utter them aloud. A whisper will
do; you don’t have to bellow it, and annoy the neighbours; but air
has to pass across your tongue and through your lips. Your body has
to be involved.
through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
Introdu(cid:1)ion 3
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire.
(Book II, lines 618–28)
The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully
understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s like suddenly
discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of
sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command;
and as you utter them you begin to realize that the sound you’re
releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re
there. The sound is part of the meaning, and that part only comes
alive when you speak it. So at this stage it doesn’t matter that you
don’t fully understand everything: you’re already far closer to the
poem than someone who sits there in silence looking up meanings
and references and making assiduous notes.
By the way, someone who does that while listening to music
through earphones will never understand it at all.
We need to remind ourselves of this, especially if we have any-
thing to do with education. I have come across teachers and student
teachers whose job was to teach poetry, but who thought that poetry
was only a fancy way of dressing up simple statements to make them
look complicated, and that their task was to help their pupils trans-
ff
late the stu into ordinary English. When they’d translated it, when
ff
they’d‘understood’ it, the job was done. It had the e ect of turning
the classroom into a torture-chamber, in which everything that
made the poem a living thing had been killed and butchered. No
one had told such people that poetry is in fact enchantment; that it
has the form it does because that very form casts a spell; and that
when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were in
fact being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchant-
ment and enjoy it, they would eventually understand much more
about the poem.
But if they never learn this truth themselves, they can’t possibly
