English 201
C. Knight
Advice on Reading Milton's Poems
1. Read each poem at least three times. The first time, read it aloud, paying attention to how it sounds--its meter, its rhyme scheme, the way in which vowels and consonants repeat and echo in the passage, the relation between the sound and what you can gather of the sense. But do not worry too much about interpretation. Milton sometimes goes on for lines without worrying about the sense himself. Poems do not equal their surface or paraphrasable meaning. For long poems such as Comus, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, you should read through manageable sections--speeches or paragraphs.2. The second time through, pay attention to what the poem means. If your first reading was relatively mindless, your second should be as sharply analytic as possible. Pay attention to two things: (1) the structure of the poem, especially shifts in meaning or in the speaker's attitude to what is happening; (2) major images (explicit or implicit comparisons) and their significance. Use this reading to try to puzzle out things you do not understand. Look up words in the dictionary, if necessary. Check the notes or the glossary in the back.
3. Your third reading should put together the previous two, so that you can start to experience the relationship between how the poem sounds and feels, on one hand, and, on the other, what the poem says, both directly and indirectly.
4. If you have not done so, you should try to check allusions and sources. Some of these are fairly obvious: the Book of Judges for Samson Agonistes, Genesis for Paradise Lost, Homer's Odyssey (Book X) for the story of Circe (the mother of Comus). For others you should use the notes or glossary. In some cases you may want to read the sources.
5. Who is speaking this poem or passage? What is his or her character and attitude towards the content of the speech? We can easily analyze characters in plays, but think of all poems as speeches from plays, as statements by people whose identity we can discover from what they say.6. By now, you probably have a good sense of what the poem means. Try defining its theme in some broader way? What connections can you find between this poem and other works by Milton? In what ways does the poem represent ideas or themes that seem important to the period in which it was written? To what extent do these themes and ideas continue to be important to people today--to you?
7. Now read the poem aloud again, to get as full a sense of its meaning as possible. Have you found that the way you read the poem changes as you uncover various levels of its meaning? Does the meaning change as you reread it, go back to revisit it, and discuss it in class? The meaning of poems may be unstable. Is that a good thing? (Can we generalize about how a poem reflects its period if we are uncertain as to what it means?)