would you Adam and Eve it

Sunday morning... and I don't mean, "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/ coffee and oranges in a sunny chair" - although I might. I just had tea and muesli. And I might also mean, "...But in contentment I still feel/ the need of some imperishable bliss," and possibly also, "Is there no change of death in Paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs/ Hang always heavy in that perfect sky...?"

But that is getting depressing. (Thank you, Wallace Stevens darling.)

This week, pace my earlier post about hearing vs reading poetry, I tried an experiment. It wasn't free (I recall, months ago, mentioning the possibility of money-saving tips, but am coming to realise they are an impossibility, unless anyone has any for me. And don't tell me to make my lunch at home: I never have any food in the house, and the kitchen at work is no good for so much as heating up some soup), but it didn't cost that much. What I did was, I downloaded a pay-for-it mp3 of the entirety of Paradise Lost, read by a man with a rather crisp voice, and I have been listening to it in the Tube. It's the perfect set-up for the day, and you can still hear it in the train even when it rumbles, and it means I don't have to try to read in the bad light, and I have begun being able to hear the lines, even when he scoots right over the enjambments.

I still find it hard to follow, because I am inordinately distractable by the sound in poetry - it is my downfall - even as a child, I can remember saying to Mama Baroque, "But Mommy! The form IS the substance! Don't you see?" But the other day I woke from a reverie on the bus - the 476, just heading south over Stamford Hill - to find that the reverie was, in fact, Paradise Lost. It was a beautiful and intensely literary passage about the domestic life of Adam and Eve, full of the tenderness of real domesticity, in which Eve relates to Adam a terrible dream she's had, which presages the Fall, and he reassures her that dreams are what can't happen, and that Free Will protects us from the random thoughts in our heads. It was lovely, and I stayed on top of the iambic pentameters, AND how the knit together to form this intensely beautiful chain that is Milton's blank verse, AND the story. Yes, and I did that just with my ears. The clever things.

Milton would be proud of me (well - not very; I'm sure that the merest of his daughters read a lot more Latin and Greek than I do - though not the rude bits - and could recite book after book of the Bible, not just line after line of Wallace Stevens & Dorothy Parker). Milton wrote Paradise Regained after he went blind. I have no immediate plans for actual blindness, but I am certainly regarding eyesight as a resource to be husbanded (as it were) (even if nothing else is). I may not have a houseful of classically educated daughters to use as amanuenses, but I am thinking of seeing if I can use the podcast equipment at work. Fun, eh? If not quite paradise.