In the beginning there was only one word at a time. The written word was reproduced letter by letter until very modern times. Cheap and easy printing using photo processes, let alone photocopying page after page of anything that struck your fancy, was a science-fiction dream to the countless students who copied out endless lines of poetry and prose in order to study them, and to the countless teachers who assigned them. Love poems sent to objects of affection, advice from the wise sent by a parent to an absent child, a joke, a bit of verse in bad taste—if you wanted to share it, you copied out in your own hand. Scrapbooks and notebooks were full of them. Even when I was in college—not the most recent past, but modern enough for electric typewriters—line after line of quotations had to be copied out when used in papers or even for discussion.

Despite the personal resentment felt by many like me—especially those of us who had bad handwriting that got graded—the exercises had benefits. Poems I still know by heart were ones I copied out. The feel of the words under the pen or pencil—the sense of recreating something great—gave me a genuine kick. It was easy to fantasize being as good as Whitman when the margins of my biology textbook had lines of Whitman scribbled, by me, in no particular context. There they were, those lovely words (“out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” for instance) to inspire, to rescue me from taxonomy, to be my Gnostic cloak.

By the time I had to read Milton’s Paradise Lost, it was received more like a Pap Smear than a great work of art: it was good for you; you had to have it; you didn’t have to like it. Nobody admitted affection for this impossible, ponderous, plodding work. Many English majors went running to CliffsNotes, then hid the shame in petulant, name-calling (“impossible, ponderous, plodding “) condescension. It stuck with us, though. We remember Satan, we don’t think “Adam and Eve” without thinking “Paradise Lost.” I never wanted to read it again, but I do now.

Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton takes us with Dawn Potter as she experiences the self-imposed task of copying Paradise Lost, word by word. She, too, had no love for this work in particular. But she has great love for written work in general, and, more, respect for greatness that transcends petty personal taste. Early in the book she says:  “I undertook my project to copy out all of Paradise Lost after convincing myself it was time to start seriously studying great works that were antithetical to me in some inner personal way.”  She did not expect to find common ground; she did not expect to be charmed. She hoped to find a key to the craft, the meter, rhymes, and rhythms that elevate this epic work to its level of mastery. She hoped to reconcile her antipathies with her awe. But she was charmed. She was surprised again and again by how much sympathy she had for Adam and Eve, how much their chores, anxieties, and duties mirrored her own. She grew fond of Milton, although never apologetic for his crusty, haughty demeanor. As Potter moves through her memoir, she encounters moment after moment where the text is relevant to her here and now. She grows into the text, reading it more fluidly and probably more swiftly as time goes on, and she reveals the growing relevance with ruminations and meditations on everything from nitpicky displeasure with the word “clang” to the life and death issues of putting down a goat. 

The freer Potter is to dispute Milton, the more she is open to his world. Her style is both breezy and erudite. Her research is solid and presented with the same straightforward pleasure she probably got from doing it. Milton’s relationships with his wives, his daughters, the loss of his son are all brought into the mix as Potter contemplates daily life as a married woman, mother of sons, in twenty-first century Maine. She ponders Milton’s dilemmas in solving the complexities of reconciling God the father of all with God the father of an only son: 

“[Milton] endeavored to eliminate both sex and childhood from the picture. I can only guess that both arenas in some way implied a weakness that the poet was unwilling to delegate to God…. Milton thought physical love was an excellent and enjoyable benefit of ideal marriage. I suppose it was too sloppy for God, not to mention requiring a lady’s presence in the story….”

Potter knows that there is no way to eliminate sex or childhood from her family, from her goats, from her community in her century. She knows there is no way to eliminate mystery, in life or poetry. She knows that she will ponder and write and meditate and write some more. Her flexible intellect is far reaching, and braced with thoroughly modern humor. She is free to be a brat, free to be a mother who works, free to bitch and moan in the comfort of a good marriage and a good life. She has managed to write about all that in the context of Paradise Lost, the last place we would look for a sympathetic resonance. But she found it there. She has dwelt in Milton’s landscape of heaven and hell. She has used her love and knowledge of language to bridge the gaps between those worlds and this. And she has given us a beautifully written book that invites us to find it for ourselves.

TRACING PARADISE: TWO YEARS IN HARMONY WITH JOHN MILTON
By Dawn Potter
144 pp.
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. $22.95

Weslea Sidon is a writer and musician living in Seal Cove, Maine. Poems have appeared recently in Two With Water, Tongue and Taste—Off The Coast Food Issue, the anthologies Still on the Island and Paumanok, and Wolf Moon Journal.