Wiped Out

Driving home from work last Friday I was listening to one of my poetry tapes, the excellent Penguin selection of seventeenth century verse, and I'd got to a chunk of Milton when I experienced something quite odd, but not entirely unexpected or unfamiliar. It started during At A Solemn Music. The lines came vibrantly alive for me in a way they've never done before. Everything seemed to fit just so - more than fit, really. They seemed inevitable and loaded with significance at one and the same time.

Now I'm reasonably familiar with the poem. I remember years ago, probably in my teenage years, reading it and trying to 'get' Milton. I sort of enjoyed it, but definitely didn't get it. Too artificial, overblown, rhetorical. But in the car I fell in love with those very qualities. The sheer musicality of the piece washed into and through me, sort of (if music can wash, that is.)

And then came Lycidas. Of course it's always been obvious to me that this is a great poem - or, at least, I've understood why others have regarded it as great. (And quite a few, as not so. Again, overdone, overwrought, not connecting.) But this time I connected with it big time.

Just one example. The wonderfully monosyllabic (almost), And wipe the tears forever from his eyes, pinned me to the seat. The power lay not only in the limpid clarity of the line, that impossible, sad yearning for a consolation that can never be, no matter how lovely the music, the singing (it's singing that does the wiping, strangely, but the line itself, of course, sings. But hang on, it could be the angels moving as they sing that wipe.) But the power also related to the context, the general simplicity of the section, approaching the end of the poem, after the fireworks of so much of what we've had so far.

Milton wiped away almost all my tears in that moment. Almost.