Milton

When Richard J. DuRocher, a professor of English at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn., told one of his classes that he was running a marathon, everybody cheered. Then he told them what kind of marathon: a straight-through, out-loud reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost — all 12 books of it, from Satan's fall to Adam and Eve's eviction from the Garden of Eden.

If that sounds eccentric, even masochistic, consider that December 9 is the poet's 400th birthday. What better way to mark the quatercentenary than to read his greatest work aloud? Marathons are happening at the University of Cambridge, Milton's alma mater; at the University of Richmond; and at dozens of other places, notes Mr. DuRocher.

If it's good enough for James Joyce, whose Ulysses gets a public airing every Bloomsday (June 16), it's good enough for John Milton. But is it heaven or hell for the participants?

At 9 a.m. on a blustery Saturday in late October, Mr. DuRocher kicked off the Milton marathon in the two-story atrium, or Crossroads, of Buntrock Commons, St. Olaf's student center. The quiet-enthusiast type, he had corralled a crowd of about 30 to get things started, including the students in his seminar on Milton and ethics. Most people brought their own copies of Paradise Lost, but the professor had a stack of extras handy.

Paula Carlson, a vice president at the college, took the microphone and delivered the famous opening lines: "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the World, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,/Sing, Heavenly Muse... ."

A red apple made the rounds, each reader tempting the next. By 9:53 they'd made it to Book II. Students traveled the stone stairs to the second-floor cafeteria like angels ascending to and descending from the celestial realm.

In between his reading stints, Chad Goodroad, a senior majoring in English and political science, hawked black "Milton Marathon" T-shirts at a card table. Someone asked him how sales were. "Crazy," he said. "Actually, kinda slow." A student in one of the shirts knitted her way through Book III. A professor's toddlers played nearby on a harvest display of pumpkins and sheaves.

By Book IV, the lunchtime crowd had begun to wander into the Commons, making it hard to hear, but Milton's blank verse was unstoppable. The marathon relocated to a gable room in the campus library. New readers showed up; others left for sports matches, then wandered back a couple of hours later. Mr. DuRocher estimated that 200 people had shown up over the course of the day.

Participants fortified themselves with coffee and Subway sandwiches. Another English professor contributed a devil's-food cake and a pair of devil's horns. Somebody drew a picture of the archangel Michael on the chalkboard.

"It's cool," Mr. Goodroad observed midafternoon, when the group had made it to Book VI. "It's kind of like a purging."

Miraculously, nobody's energy flagged. It wasn't just the coffee and sandwiches; read out loud, Milton's blank verse can be propulsive, and the readers had caught the rhythm.

At 5 p.m. a student passed around a basket of apples, just in time for Book IX and the temptation of Eve. A colleague of Mr. DuRocher's with just the right British accent turned up to read the part of Satan. When Eve took a bite, everyone else did, too. The apples tasted pretty good.

Around 7:30 and Book XI, there were still 15 people in the room. A few had been along since the beginning, including Mr. Goodroad and Johanna Ruprecht, a senior English major from Lewiston, Minn., who were two of the most enthusiastic readers. Charles Drotning, of the Class of 1970, was another. A thin man with an Old Testament beard, Mr. Drotning appeared determined to stick it out until the bittersweet end.

"Have we hit the wall yet?" someone asked.

"Oh, we're way beyond the wall," Mr. DuRocher joked.

At 8:16, the end of Book XI arrived. By 9 p.m. the readers had reached the finish line: Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise, at the end of Book XII. Everybody, including Mr. Drotning, clapped and cheered. Then Mr. DuRocher and a handful of students went out for ice cream. Somewhere, Milton smiled.

Here are some of the things you learn when you participate in a Milton marathon:


Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings' archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material. "It's a really cool story, which I wasn't expecting," said Anna Coffey, a sophomore who took part in the reading to get a jump on her homework for a "Great Conversations" core-curriculum course.


Milton is not that hard to read out loud. As Mr. DuRocher pointed out in a set of "Guidelines for Reciting" he handed out before the marathon, "Paradise Lost is written in modern English." Compared with Beowulf, Paradise Lost is a walk in the park.


Milton is really hard to read out loud. Very few people get words like "puissance" right on the first try. Milton loved a runaway sentence and just about any now-obscure classical or geographical reference he could get his hands on, many of them polysyllabic nightmares. Partway through Book VI, Mr. DuRocher offered advice to the tongue-tied. "Whenever you encounter a word you don't know, that's a word to pronounce with special certainty," he said. "It's probably best to mispronounce demonic names anyway."


It's worth it. "It's really a good poem," said Mr. Goodroad. "It's a lot better to hear it than to read it."