Of innocence and experience

It’s a tough listen, Paradise Lost on Radio 4 at the weekend. In bold defiance of the demands of a broad audience, Milton’s 10,000 lines of high-flown, complex verse runs for two-and-a-half hours (broadcast in two parts on Saturday and Sunday). You need to concentrate and take in every word, not be busy with something else, ears half-cocked to gather the general meaning. But, if you stay with it, the majesty of the subject, that galactic struggle between good and evil, and the mighty flow of words will ensure that all foolish thought is thenceforth banished (at least until the next Trumpian tweet or fallacious Facebook rumour).

The poet Michael Symmons Roberts, who has shaped the epic poem for radio, juxtaposes Milton’s verses, set in the cosmic world of God, Satan, Raphael and Beelzebub, with the blind poet’s efforts to wrestle them from his imagination and on to the page. The battle of the angels is brought down to human level by the pathos of Milton’s situation in 1667, shuffling feet, blind man’s stick, the way in which without sight he is forced to live inside his head, brooding on the chaos he has witnessed through the years of the Civil War.

His mythic tale about our loss of innocence in a universe controlled by God but embattled by sin might seem to have little connection with 2018. The language is cloaked in religious assumptions; the imagery straight out of medieval monster tales. And yet as I listened it did feel very much in tune with our own obsessive fears, not just of violent war and insidious temptation, but also of a Manichaean otherworld lying just beyond our cognisance.

Ian McKellen, who voices Milton, has said after recording the production, ‘Being written by a blind man, Paradise Lost has special relevance for a radio audience, as it is all in the sound of the words, not in the look of the words on the page.’