John Milton
John Milton
John Miltonwas an English poet, polemicist, and man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 December 1608
heroic life poems writers-and-writing
Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.
celestial proper smile smiles
A smile that glowed / Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue.
indeed less poetry rather rhetoric sensuous subtle
Rhetoric . . . To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate.
farewell fields hail happy joy
Farewell happy fields / Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail!
hail human mysterious offspring source true
Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring
bones fathers kept lie mountains pure scattered stocks thy truth whose worshipped
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones / Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; / Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old / When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
freely love serve stand
Freely we serve / Because we freely love, as in our will / To love or not; in this we stand or fall.
fancies garland high poet region robes singing soaring
A poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him.
bark built curses fatal rigged
It was that fatal and perfidious bark / Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.
bee doth eye flowery hide work
Hide me from day's garish eye / While the bee with honied thigh / That at her flowery work doth sing.
call half left
Or call up him that left half told / The story of Cambuscan bold.
dear deaths love
So dear I love him that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.
blown fading soft sooner
O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted, / Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.
brought shadow sin
Man's disobedience) brought into this World a world of woe, Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery, Death's Harbinger