I’m teaching my Milton seminar this spring for the first time in a couple of years, and I want to try podcasting some of Milton’s poetry and prose as (I hope) aids to comprehension.

As always, I find that recording the words forces a certain kind of attention that I might not otherwise find. This time, for example, I noticed a fantastic internal rhyme in the “Proem” (the first four stanzas of the poem, written in a different stanza form than the subsequent “Hymn) between “clay” and “say,” one that stretches across two stanzas in a very powerful echo. I also noticed that Nature’s wooing is confined to “speeches fair,” not her usual wantonness. The exception is very interesting when one considers the license the poet grants his own “speeches fair” in the race to lay a gift at the newborn child’s feet. I caught the rhyme during the reading, but I didn’t catch the latter emphasis in time to make anything of it. Some day I’ll do this poem over and achieve a better recitation–but in the spirit of blogging, better to publish a good thing than to withhold it and wait for perfection. Perhaps my efforts here will encourage someone else to do their own reading. I’d like to compare.

So here, without commentary (it’s long enough), is Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.“

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (12.8MB)