I have always had a great fondness for Milton’s poetry, but never felt I

knew enough about it, or him. So my latest purchase from The Teaching Company has been Prof. Seth

Lerer’s lectures on “The Life and Writings of John Milton.”

Now, Housman said that the true test of a good poem is, if you recite it to

yourself while shaving, it makes the bristles stand up. In the first

lecture of this series, Prof. Lerer reads Milton’s Sonnet XIX, on his

blindness. I have

some quibbles with the Prof’s reading style, but it was good enough: the

bristles stood up on my chin, and on the back of my neck too. It’s an old

chestnut, of course — but what a poem!

[Not an easy one, either: try a grammatical parsing of that first sentence,

lines 1 to 8. The structure is: “When I consider X, and Y (though Z),

‘Doth…?’ I fondly ask.” Here X is from “how…” to “…wide,” Y is from

“that one…” to “…useless,” and Z from “my soul…” to “…chide” (the

parentheses inserted by me). Also remember that in Milton’s time the

adjective “fond” meant something like “foolish,” or “weak in understanding,

in the way that a child is weak in relation to a parent.” Sorry: once a

schoolmaster, always a schoolmaster…]