Deborah Milton speaks

I’ve been reading Nicholas Basbanes Every Book its Reader. More accurately I’ve been trying not to read too much of it because it’s absolutely gorgeous and I want some of it to read on the flight home. This might be a hopeless quest. Anyway, he writes a bit about Milton and his daughters, and got me Googling Sam Johnson’s Life of Milton to learn a bit more.

After he went blind, John Milton dictated his prose and poetry to his youngest daughter, Deborah. She and her older sister Mary were also required to read to their father, not only in English but also in languages they could not understand – even though, according to Samuel Johnson, by this time Milton had men who spoke those languages practically begging to read to him, for their own education as well as his. Eventually, according to Johnson, the “irksomeness of this employment could not be always concealed” and the daughters were “sent out to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture, that are proper for women to learn; particularly embroideries in gold or silver.”

Being a sensible old crab, Johnson also wrote, “In the scene of misery which this mode of intellectual labour sets before our eyes, it is hard to determine whether the daughters or the father are most to be lamented. A language not understood can never be so read as to give pleasure, and very seldom so as to convey meaning. If few men would have had resolution to write books with such embarrassments, few likewise would have wanted ability to find some better expedient.”

And so the following happened to me.

Deborah Milton Speaks

I work my tapestries in gold and silver;
My father plots his in syllables and sentences,
Then leaves them for me to stitch into concrete form
My pen for a needle, shining black ink for a thread.

He has me read to him as well. I chafe
At speaking sounds without sense, gibberish,
But properly pronounced, for hours on end
Then gladly do I ‘scape back to my needle.

I wonder, though. My father at least has heard
His tapestries as I embody them, yet never
Has he seen ours, those my sisters and I
Stitch of our precious threads to our own designs.

With what labour we acquired our mastery, I do not think
He knows. Did he but grasp our skill, our art,
The hours spent on our practise, would he deem
It simpler, learning languages instead?

And better for both, if I but understood
The sense as well as sound in what I read?
Surely, understanding, I could give
More pleasure by far, to both myself and him.

Or would he still believe the Puritan claim
That women must be shielded lest they learn
Too much, and like Eve, yield unto temptation
And fall prey to the serpent’s acumen?

If I could learn this art – as I have done
I could have learned what men learn in its stead.
I do not know what I could have done more,
Or how my knowledge might have been employed.

But – my father knows the depths of good and ill
And he is known as England’s paladin,
A great soul. With his blood and his example,
Who can say what I might, or might not, have been?

Instead, I stitch my thoughts in gold and silver
My father’s words alone flow from my quill.
My life is most demurely circumscribed
No dangerous knowledge comes within my ken.

I will not sin great sins. Kept from the edge
Of that precipice, neither will I build a bridge
Across, and help to smooth the path to Glory
Nor help my fellows on.
Is the trade worth it, then?

Of course, she could just have asked him, but somehow I don’t think they had that sort of relationship.