John Milton came to visit me yesterday. Or at least his revenant did. He was shorter than I would have imagined, had I imagined Milton coming to visit me, and portlier. He was as tetchy as I’d have thought, as he felt his way into the room, and demanded ‘chair’. He’s become monosyllabic in his old age, I thought, who’d have predicted that? I placed a chair behind him.
The thing is, this revenant was also speaking to a ghost, but, being blind, he couldn’t see that. The last action of my former, academic life, as I was reminded yesterday, was to submit to Oxford University Press the near-complete manuscript of an edition of Milton’s Latin prose of the 1650s, with a preface dated 30 September 2022. And there it was, embodied, when the postwoman delivered a box of pale blue volumes.
Milton coughed, feeling that he was losing my attention. ‘They were meant to fly,’ he said, ‘migrate like wagtails over Europe, copies of this book. Soar. The rhetoric was … unsupportably weightless. And yet as weighty as adamant. Mercurial.’
‘And yet?’ I asked.
‘You have immured it in a merely regional tongue, on costly paper, in a leaden body fit for library shelves. 944 pages! Drink!’ He waved his right hand, and I understood him. I poured a can of Lucky Saint into a glass. He drank and softly cursed.
‘How long must a man work for such a book.’ I didn’t know if it was a question or a statement, or if he meant how many hours and years I had spent on it, back in that former life, or how many hours living-wage labour it would take to purchase a copy of this scholarly edition.
‘Can I ask you a question, Mr Milton?’
‘If necessary.’
‘The angels, the muse. Did they come to you? Did you hear the words of the poem – Paradise Lost, I mean – as if they had been spoken aloud, or as though they had been placed in your head? Did you understand it to be real, to be true? To be inspired?’
He shook his head sadly. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about Latin prose. This is the problem with you. With you people. No one listens.’ I sought to interject, but already he was feeling his way out of the room, and before he even reached the door he had gone.
25 June 2025
Joad R Wren 