the platitudes of willful resemblance

well fuck it, I’m staying awake tonight to see if I can pull this insomnia at night thing into the more normal ‘trouble falling asleep but doing so eventually anyway’ and away from the ‘I watch the sunrise and then get sleepy’ category.
I am currently digesting Paradise Lost by Milton and am going to go through the epics before I return to normal reading. As I am not a Christian or Catholic I get to read this from a pure poetical standpoint and dig deep into his word and line – which are beyond measure beautiful and striking. Interesting is how words have changed meaning over the years, i.e. reeking – now it refers to something with foul and unappealing odor and when he wrote it it meant more of vaporizing or disintegrating.
While not as cool as Beethoven being deaf or Monet being nearly blind  – Milton was totally blind when he wrote all 12 books of Paradise Lost. being unable to see what needs to be worked and writing in iambic pentameter is astounding to me not to mention being able to keep the complicated narrative of Paradise Lost in mind while doing the aforementioned composition. oh, and he was also hated at that point in history by the powers that be so he did this in hiding and was jailed at some point around then as well, not for being a bad guy but for saying the wrong things about the powerful.
This is not to be taken for better perusal of his history and selected from my memory of a blurb I read somewhere – probably the preface to the tome I am reading.
I feel ashamed for waiting this long to read it and can only admit that I have skimmed the other epics (Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, Metamorphosis, Beowulf) some fairly heavy skimming but still. I am correcting this oversight presently.