{"id":4488,"date":"2013-07-28T03:52:31","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T03:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=4488"},"modified":"2013-07-28T03:52:31","modified_gmt":"2013-07-28T03:52:31","slug":"weekly-photo-challenge-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=4488","title":{"rendered":"Weekly photo challenge: Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Milton, I’ve read, completed his Masters degree at Cambridge in 1632 at 24 years of age and then moved back home with his parents for five years, where he worked on some of his best-loved writing.\u00a0 But it wasn’t until 1645 that any of his poetry was published; the book was called Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, compos’d at several times<\/i>.<\/p>\n

His poetry was not published again until 1667 at the age of 59 when he had been totally blind for 13 years and had been married 3 times, and after he had worked on the piece for at least 9 years. He was paid \u00a35 for a print run of 1500 copies of his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

Now came still evening on, and twilight grey
\nHad in her sober livery all things clad;
\nSilence accompany’d; for beast and bird,
\nThey to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
\nWere slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
\nShe all night long her amorous descant sung;
\nSilence was pleas’d. Now glow’d the firmament
\nWith living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
\nThe starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
\nRising in clouded majesty, at length
\nApparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
\nAnd o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.<\/p>\n

Last night I found this excerpt from Paradise Lost<\/em> in my old school poetry anthology.\u00a0 When I read the line ‘Now glow’d the firmament With living sapphires’, I remembered a 12th-century church ceiling that I recently saw in Saint-G\u00e9nis-des-Fontaines in the Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Orientales, France.\u00a0 During the day the skylight produces a simulated moon shining in a starry midnight blue sky, and the patches no longer covered in paint resemble night clouds or constellations.\u00a0 Even in this interior, the moon has thrown ‘o’er the dark her silver mantle’. The photo, left sitting on my computer screen and viewed from across a room, has fooled me more than once.<\/p>\n

Click twice on the photo to enlarge it.<\/p>\n

\"Ceiling,<\/a>
Vaulted ceiling, Saint-G\u00e9nis-des-Fontaines Abbey, France<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It does me good to read that a Cambridge Masters graduate worked on his writing for 35 years before producing a masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Milton, I’ve read, completed his Masters degree at Cambridge in 1632 at 24 years of age and then moved back home with his parents for five years, where he worked on some of his best-loved writing.\u00a0 But it wasn’t until 1645 that any of his poetry was published; the book was called Poems of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Weekly photo challenge: Masterpiece”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[358,428,2,429,33,228,430,431],"class_list":["post-4488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-photos","tag-france","tag-john-milton","tag-literature","tag-paradise-lost","tag-poetry","tag-postaweek2013","tag-st-genis-des-fontaines","tag-weekly-photo-challenge-masterpiece"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}