After Fuseli: “Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters”
He was an early riser, four o’clock
mane, even after sight was lost.
He had a man to read to him: the first
language he heard was the Hebrew Bible,
at half-past four. Then he contemplated.
At seven his man came to him again,
reading still, and writing for him, until
dinner, now as much writing as reading.
Of his three daughters, it was Deborah,
the youngest, who could read to him as well,
Italian, French, and Latin, also Greek.
After dinner he would walk some three hours:
he always had a garden where he lived,
and there his exercise was walking till
he went to bed, often-times about nine ..
ANNE:
Deborah will serve, will also serve,
bearing his mild yoke ’til even she
suffers from what our father likes to call,
when either of us ventures to complain
of lassitude in eye or hand-or mind! –
a bestial and sublunary burning;
then it is my turn. Mary will not come
when we are called, I know not how it is
with her-she manages to stay apart,
and it is always I who must relieve
my sister where she stands, taking the words
from him, terrible words out of the air
as they come, unceasing, to us. I sit,
sewing the while, until our Deborah
fails, and when the silence falls, I begin.
DEBORAH:
Come girls, it is time: I want to be milked!
such is his humor, so he summons us
– he would be cheerful, even in gout-fits —
but no frolic for me, the faery pen
he favors over Anne and Mary, far
the better scriveners (nothing he cares
for letters he cannot see, theirs or mine):
Wake to be the word that is your name,
Deborah, bearer of glad tidings, born
through death and known to me by darkness, wake,
utter a song . . . This to my thirteen years.
What does it mean that he will call me his
Cordelia, heart of hearts? Am I the more his
without a mother, and are these sisters
– merely for knowing her- Regan, Goneril?
MARY:
There is so much to be hidden, so much
hiding goes along . . . . But who calls it such,
a merely surreptitious exploit, when
we know he cannot see what we would hide?
I will not come to this. Let my sisters
wear the red slippers even as they take
down the words of Eve. It shall not be
seen by my hand that she rhymes with deceive.
Father is cheerful, his sight not so much
lost as retired, “withdrawn into myself,”
he says, “where it sharpens rather than dulls
the edge of my mind.” Acuminated thus,
let Anne and Deborah scriven him out,
for I will have no part of secret things,
the scandal of the story. I shall wait
and wipe no tears – neither from his blind eyes
nor from my own that see my sisters go
their ways. Deborah looks very like
her father. I am on the distaff side.
What difference can it make or matter?
There is another wife to tend him now,
to wipe the tears forever from his eyes.
I watch them all from my unsuspected
corner in the dark (did I not say there was
hiding done?). Even father hides something,
though we do not share the things we shroud:
Anne darning her rags, Deborah at the desk,
catching each word upon her cunning quill,
forbidden scarlet on their pretty feet,
and father like some prelate in his chair,
luminous as a gargoyle, and as blind …
. . . All the time of writing his Paradise Lost,
his vein began at the equinox
each autumn, leaving off at the vernal,
or thereabouts – it was generally May
pale as the candle that he studied by.
And this for a lustrum at least of his
doing, two years before the king came in,
finishing about three years after
the famous Restoration. Much visited
by the learned, more than he did desire,
and by the gout as well, autumn and spring,
but with this he was blithesome, and would sing.
His widow has his portrait, very like,
which ought to be engraved, the images
before his Works doing him no honor.
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