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Along with John Rumrich and Stephen Fallon, I have been editing Milton's complete poetry and selected prose.1 I find that he is in certain respects a new poet for me because editors must forfeit the luxury of skipping things. That was indeed a confession. Although I have taught Paradise Lost many times, and probably read it through from beginning to end more than thirty times, possibly more than forty times, and read slowly and carefully certain passages in the poem—let's say, on average, four or five per book—countless times, to prepare to teach them or write about them, still, despite more than thirty-five years of donating quality-time attention to Milton, I have done my share of skipping. I am guilty of several varieties of it. Sometimes I just plain skip—stop reading, turn a page or two, and resume. Sometimes I lapse into skimming, where the eyes look at all the words and the dull mind issues a blanket confirmation of their sense, but no reflection takes place. As an editor looking back on my carefree days of skipping and skimming I realize that specific kinds of passages inspired these habits of inattention. I often skipped, for example, those dense geographical surveys bristling with the names and place names of many languages, packed with telescoped summaries of world history. There is only one such passage in Paradise Lost, when Adam and Michael first arrive at the summit of the Mount of Speculation in Book 11, but Milton is warming up for the vast temptation of the kingdoms in Paradise Regained. I doubt whether there is a poetry more lavishly pedantic, more trying to annotators, and less to the taste of modern undergraduates. Does the former skipper now discern merit in these stretches of exhibited book learning, which have no doubt inspired some of the deepest yawns in the history of reading, which Johnson perhaps had in mind when he famously said of Paradise Lost that no one ever wished it longer than it is? He does. I can only say, with the crazed excess of a belated convert, that there are whole new kinds of poetry in Milton's most-skipped passages. [End Page 324] Here I want to write about a section of the poem that I used to skip altogether as a young Miltonist, though I began to attend to it in some detail just before, as its editor, I sank fully into both its particulars and its broadest implications.2 Perhaps other students of the poem have also given it wide berth. I speak of the most ambitious animal metamorphosis in Paradise Lost. Milton had experimented with such a thing once before in Comus, where the tempter's liquor has the power to change the human countenance into "some brutish form" (70). The conceit of Milton's masque has certainly met with its share of approval over the centuries, sometimes from surprising quarters. I recently came across a (for me at least) new and entertaining example of this popularity. In New Orleans, under American rule in the first half of the nineteenth century, the celebration of the old French Catholic pre-Lenten holiday of "Mardi Gras," or "Fat Tuesday," had deteriorated from its initially communal form. The well-to-do attended posh balls; others drank in the streets. In 1857 six prominent gentlemen announced that they had formed a semi-secret society called the Mystical Krewe of Comus. Like Milton's villain, they claimed to be descendants of Bacchus and Circe, and for the Mardi Gras would present three floats and a tableaux: now, for the first time in some while, everyone would be in the streets. After the interruption of the Civil War, other "krewes" arose to offer their own parades and ceremonies; it is to this day how Mardi Gras is organized. But the first floats drifted out of imaginations formed by Milton's masque. Comus and...
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