An opportunity to read and share, in cheerful good company, an engaged appreciation of a great English poem. Even in Milton’s own day, its central action, The Fall of Man, was losing favour in the Christian understanding. In these, our own untheological times, the concern might seem even more remote. Yet the beauty of its language and the power inhering in its tragic core is as mighty today as ever it was. Maybe the vigour of Paradise Lost, by the sort of osmosis that only great poetry can effect, may help us better weather present storms and unforeboded calamities.
Week by week we will read how the drama of our “first parents” played out, according to John Milton’s own vision. What he saw has gripped the imaginations of generations of English-reading peoples ever since it was first published in 1667. We shall also look at some of the art that the poem has inspired.
No previous acquaintance with the poem is assumed. If you have already journeyed through darkness visible and previously made your farewells to those long-lost happy fields but care again to make the journey, your company will enhance our reading. The better angels of our nature might even, on occasion, be heard to make contributions!
If, once, long ago, you discovered a strange sensation resonating within yourself, as you first set eyes on a poem by Milton and were there and then resolved, how, one day, I shall return to you and make your better acquaintance, this U3A – IGO group provides such an occasion to fulfil that determination and engage, with ease, in what could otherwise be reckoned as too daunting an endeavour for someone alone to undertake.
The picture, Peter Bruegel the Elder – The Fall of the Rebel Angels, hangs in the Royal Museum of Fine arts of Belgium, Brussels. Source: Wikipedia.