[Milton-L] John Drinkwater

[Nancy Charlton]

Hello all,

Today's Bartleby.com home page features a poem "We Willed It Not" by John Drinkwater which includes this stanza:

Beethoven speaks with Milton on this day,
And Shakespeare’s word with Goethe’s beats the sky,
In witness of the birthright you betray,        15
In witness of the vision you deny.
The name of the author resonated but faintly with me, and upon a quick googling I found that he was a playwright and director of a regional theatre at Birmingham. I took a quick look at his plays Abraham Lincoln and Cromwell, the only ones quickly available on Project Gutenberg. Cromwell ends in 1654, the scene being the deathbed of Cromwell's 94-year old mother. She speaks of Mr. Milton coming to read to her, that "He has begun a very good poem, about Eden and the fall of man. He read me some of it. He writes extremely well."

All this raises two  items worth discussing:

1. Is it dramatic license that Milton had written enough of PL at that time to read to someone? For that matter, would he have known the Cromwell family well enough to pay such
 a visit?

2. One could see Milton and Beethoven having enough in common to be linked in the same sentence, each being artists of extraordinary vision and originality. They might have shared revolutionary ideas--disparate, but still in the revolutionary column--but would Milton have embraced the ideals of brotherhood celebrated in "Fidelio" and the "Ode to Joy"? Or would Beethoven have accepted Milton's living under the great Taskmaster's eye? Were their twin deprivations (Milton, blind; Beethoven, deaf) give them a comm


Nancy Charlton

http://groups.google.com/group/paradiselostdaily



             Heav'n is for thee too high

To know what passes there; be lowly wise:. . . (PL VIII.172-173)




      
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