The Spectator’s Notes | 20 December 2008

John Milton is 400 years old this month, and there is justified lamentation that nobody reads him for pleasure. Although Milton is renowned for his learning and complexity, he was also the master of simplicity. Almost my earliest memory of poetry of any kind is singing Milton’s version of Psalm 136 at my kindergarten. ‘Let us with a gladsome mind/ Praise the Lord, for he is kind’, it begins. I liked it, aged four or five, because of its depiction of nature — the ‘golden-tressèd sun’, ‘the hornèd moon that shines by night,/Mid her spangled sisters bright’. (I only wish the hymnal version had included some of the exciting other verses like ‘The floods stood still like walls of glass,/While the Hebrew bands did pass’ or ‘And large-limbed Og he did subdue,/ With all his over-hardy crew’.) Milton’s intellectual sophistication did not prevent his love of the physical, his directness.