o raise us up

I didn't want to work, tonight. I'm not feeling so great, and I'm tired and a little grumpy, and I want to go to bed early. But my seminar tomorrow is on Milton's Areopagitica -- his treatise on censorship -- which is comparatively light reading for that class, and I've been significantly under-prepared too many times already this semester, so I dragged out my battered Riverside Milton and put on pajamas and lay on my bed to read. And after a few pages I had to put down my pen just so I would stop drawing hearts in all the margins. I just -- oh, Milton. Milton, and his brilliant, cutting sarcasm, and his faith, and his metaphors, and his sentences:

Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifl'd then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the nativity of any mans intellectuall off-spring; but if it prov'd a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea. But that a Book in wors condition then a peccant soul, should be to stand before a Jury ere it be borne to the World, and undergo yet in darknesse the judgement of Radamanth and his Collegues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provokt and troubl'd at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbo's and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned.

I am not the only person who has felt this way:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

—William Wordsworth (1770-1850), 'England, 1802', 1802 (printed 1807).

I think the sonnet ends weakly -- endings are not really Wordsworth's strength -- but on the other hand, I love it, and I know exactly what he means. (That's a truth about Wordsworth, actually: his poetry is not that difficult, and sometimes a little boring, and there remains a lot I dislike about the Romantics, but he does capture true things, moments and feelings, and they resonate.) Oh, Milton.