as it looks. Good footnotes will unlock plenty of its secrets. Milton is vastly learned, of course, but he's also a ready communicator. One of his aims is "to justify God's ways to man" and you, the reader, catch the urgency. He is a performer, and a performer, despite the masks, always seeks to fire an audience with imaginative empathy. The poem, a canzone, has verse-paragraphs of varied shape and size; sometimes they resemble mini odes, with uneven line-lengths and unpredictable rhymes (another cause of Johnson's grumbles) but the fluidity is energising.from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Lycidas by John Milton
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