April 21, 2011

Blag!

Kitten updates her blog daily, while I shoot for weekly. This led to TaxAnt saying recently, "I look at your blog and your sister's blog everyday....yours is a disappointment." (It was a, um, joke.)

It disappoints me when I let more than a week go by without posting anything, but SOMETIMES IT IS HARD TO BE FUNNY OR INTERESTING. Sometimes the bucket of creativity is empty. Sometimes it has been wastefully sloshed over a work project. Lately, I've been laboring to use my daily allowance of interestingness to complete final projects for my grad class—a paper on the distribution of the character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and a presentation on what Milton thought about extraterrestrial life (seriously).

So today, you're getting something curtesy of one of my favorite poets. In class we discussed the final two books of Paradise Lost. This led to a discussion about whether Milton accomplishes his goal—to justify the ways of God to man. (He doesn't, and the more interesting question is, Could he have?)

Then, by delightful chance, I happened upon this four-line poem by A.E. Housman in the supplementary material in the back of my Norton edition of Paradise Lost:

       O many a peer of England brews
       Livelier liquor than the Muse,
       And malt does more than Milton can
       To justify God's ways to a man.

More proof that A.E. Housman is completely underrated.

2 comments:

  1. Snoozefest.

    Just kidding. I liked the poem--mainly the third line because it has "malt" in it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is the best blog, ever.

    ReplyDelete