Milton, Donne...Nas?

Jllian's post below was great.

I have to say that I'm a Milton novice and am mostly unfamiliar with the majority of his work, but something as self-reflexive as this, as introspective and internal in its analysis of the writer himself (although, of course, there's that inherent line between writer and their adopted persona) makes me want to dig deeper into his catalog.

What I appreciate most about the poem, though, is his humility. We live in a world where all sorts of religious people will claim to be doing things in the name of God, for the glory of God, etc., when all they're really doing is adding a marketable byline to something that would otherwise be completely (and, often, rightly) ignored. Milton, on the other hand, acknowledges that he himself doesn't have anything to offer God that God doesn't have already (after all, he is God), and I think that's a pretty beautiful thing.

Also, Milton's use of the phrase "mild yoke" is really interesting. At first, I thought it was problematic, as some people (probably the majority of us, myself definitely included) have problems that we believe to be so all-encompassing, but we probably know exactly where our next meal is coming from.

I was speaking with a friend the other day about a particularly rough personal situation that's sort of thrown me for a loop in both its intensity and pain it's caused. We were discussing the nature of God in relation to what He/She/It allows to happen, versus what He/She/It causes to happen, and we both agreed that, assuming a monotheistic Judeo-Christian God exists, He/She/It worries about all of His/Her/Their children equally, and it would take a literally God-like sense of perspective and love in order to be able to actually deal with that, and it seems like Milton is at least partially acknowledging that our problems on Earth are relatively minimal, in the grand scheme of things.

In any case, my brain tied this poem back to something I said about King Lear and how everybody dying at the end of a story isn't necessarily a "sad" ending, because everybody dies in real life, and while that's hard for those left behind, that's often a good thing for the one that actually died. And that's a statement that then goes back to that Donne poem about death being a form of rest, and then I think about the Nas song "N.Y. State of Mind," where he raps "I don't sleep/because sleep is the cousin of death," and then I get sad, until I remember that I'm listening to good hip-hop and then I feel better.

This rambles. Sorry 'bout that.