as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable
creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image
of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is
the precious life blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life.He ends with a vision of England as Samson: ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and
puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invin-
cible locks.’
Areopagitica is traditionally held up as a classic of liberalism, prophetic of reli-
gious and civil toleration. Its advocacy transcends its occasion. Milton was not
tolerant. He would not allow Catholics to publish, and he never argued against
censorship after publication: ‘if [books] be found mischievous and libellous, the
fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy’.
Mischievous books would be burnt, and their printers and authors would suffer
cropped ears or slit noses. Parliament was unmoved; Milton later acted as a censor
fo r Cromwell. Among his other prose,OfEducation is still read. A Latin On
Christian Doctrine found in the censor’s office in 1823, translated and published in
1825,makes his unorthodoxy, darkly visible in Paradise Lost, crystal clear. (He
wrote several works in Latin, as, until the end of the 17th century, did many of those
who wanted to reach beyond a local audience, including the scientist Isaac Newton
in his Principia Mathematica(1687).)
The poet’s plan of 1642 was fulfilled twenty-five years later. He may have worked
on Adam Unparadis’d, a drama which became Paradise Lost, and on Samson, but he
returned fully to poetry only after Cromwell’s death in 1658. His causes had failed,
the millennial Rule of the Saints prophesied in Revelations had not come, the
English had returned to their regal and episcopal vomit. He had lost his eyesight in
1652, his wife and only son in 1653, a daughter in 1657, and his beloved second wife
in 1658. He was 50. He had advised the public, in vain. There remained his poetic
talent.
At the Civil War, Milton turned from poetry to reforming prose, and toughened
his argumentative powers. In his late poetry he dallied less with the ‘false surmise’ of
the classical poems which had charmed his youth and formed his style. Instead, he
mythologized himself. After the Restoration and amnesty, he presents himself as ‘In
darkness and in dangers compassed round, / And solitude; yet not alone,’ for he
was visited by the Heavenly Muse. This is from the Invocation to Paradise Lost, Book
VII.The Invocations to Books I, III and IX put epic to plangent personal use, creat-
ing a myth of the afflicted poet as a blind seer, or as a nightingale, who ‘in shadiest
covert hid, / Tunes her nocturnal note’.
In the sonnet ‘When I consider how my light is spent’, he fears that ‘that one talent
which is death to hide’ was now ‘lodged with him useless’. He asks ‘Doth God exact
day-labour, light denied’? He hears: ‘God doth not need / Either man’s work or his
own gifts’; he is to ‘stand and wait’. His sonnet ‘Methought I saw my late espousèd
saint’ ends:
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.In the Invocation to III he again makes personal protest at his blindness:
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