Last week was Shelley, here’s this week’s Discovering Poetry excerpt:
Now I’d be willing to wage at least a fiver that in the last twenty-four hours you passed on the street a nice young couple walking happily hand-in-hand. Nauseating, isn’t it? But also the most natural thing in the world. There seems to me something very touching about such modest affection. Little in itself, but enough to mean the world when done rightly. Between lovers, between a mother and her child, or in the softly squeezed hand of a friend in grief.
It’s with this most everyday act of human love that Milton ends Paradise Lost. As Adam and Eve are being expelled from Eden, they are told that God has a plan to eventually return mankind to an even greater paradise in heaven. But you don’t need to be a card-carrying Christian to be moved by these last lines.
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