Born on December 9, 1608, John Milton became one of the towering figures of English literature, a poet whose work combined enormous intellectual ambition with political conviction, religious questioning, classical learning, and an extraordinary command of language. His epic Paradise Lost transformed the biblical story of humanity’s fall into one of the most influential poems ever written in English, but Milton’s life was much larger than a single book.
He was a scholar who mastered several languages, a traveler who met some of Europe’s leading intellectuals, a controversial pamphleteer who argued about religion, marriage, censorship, and government, and a public servant during one of the most turbulent periods in English history. He continued writing after losing his sight completely, eventually producing his greatest poetry while depending upon others to record the words he composed in his mind.
Milton could be difficult, uncompromising, politically controversial, and intensely serious. He could also create language of astonishing beauty. His poetry moves from heaven to hell, Eden to fallen humanity, public history to private grief, and enormous theological questions to the vulnerability of a single human voice.
On December 9, his birthday offers a fitting opportunity to return to the writer who set out to create an English epic worthy of Homer and Virgil—and came remarkably close to accomplishing exactly what he imagined.
🏙️ Growing Up in London
John Milton was born on Bread Street in London to John Milton Sr. and his wife Sara Jeffrey. His father was a successful scrivener, a profession involving legal and financial documents, but he was also an accomplished amateur musician and composer.
The elder Milton’s prosperity gave his son access to an unusually strong education. The household valued books, music, religion, and learning, and the young John quickly demonstrated an exceptional appetite for study.
He attended St. Paul’s School in London, where he immersed himself in Latin and Greek and began developing the scholarly habits that would define much of his life. Milton later became proficient not only in the classical languages but also in Hebrew, Italian, French, and other languages that allowed him to read widely across European and ancient literature.
Even as a young man, he appears to have imagined writing as a serious vocation rather than merely an accomplishment.
Milton did not simply want to write poems.
He wanted to prepare himself to write something important.
🎓 Cambridge and the Making of a Scholar
In 1625, Milton entered Christ’s College, Cambridge.
His university years were not entirely peaceful. Milton possessed a strong personality and apparently clashed with one of his tutors, but he remained at Cambridge and eventually earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
The period was crucial to his intellectual development.
He read classical literature, theology, philosophy, history, and contemporary poetry while beginning to produce increasingly ambitious verse of his own. His early poems demonstrate both his formidable education and his awareness that he was still developing toward something larger.
Milton thought carefully about what it meant to become a poet.
Writing required talent, but talent alone was not enough. The poet also needed knowledge, discipline, moral seriousness, and an understanding of earlier literary traditions.
That sense of preparation would remain central to his identity.
He was willing to wait for the work he believed he was capable of producing.
🎄 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
Among Milton’s important early poems is “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” written while he was still a young man.
The poem celebrates the birth of Christ while bringing together Christian theology, classical mythology, music, history, and elaborate imagery. Even at this stage, Milton was already attempting the kind of synthesis that would eventually define Paradise Lost.
Christian history exists beside pagan mythology.
Heavenly music meets earthly language.
Ancient literary traditions are absorbed into a distinctly Protestant poetic imagination.
The young poet was not yet writing his great epic, but he was assembling the tools he would eventually need.
🏡 Years of Independent Study
After leaving Cambridge, Milton did something unusual.
Rather than immediately entering a profession, he spent several years pursuing an intensive program of private study, supported by his family.
At the family homes in Hammersmith and later Horton, Buckinghamshire, Milton read extensively in literature, history, philosophy, theology, and other subjects. He treated these years almost as a self-designed continuation of university.
The decision reveals something important about his ambition.
Milton believed a great writer needed to understand the civilizations and literary traditions that came before him. He studied Greek and Roman authors, medieval and Renaissance literature, biblical texts, European languages, and history.
His reading was not casual.
He was preparing.
What he was preparing for remained uncertain.
But Milton already imagined that one day he might attempt a major work worthy of the tradition he had inherited.
🎭 Comus
During these years, Milton wrote Comus, a masque first performed in 1634.
Masques combined poetry, music, spectacle, costume, and drama and were often associated with aristocratic entertainment. Milton used the form to explore questions of temptation, virtue, freedom, and self-control.
The central figure attempts to corrupt a young woman who becomes separated from her brothers in a forest. She resists through reason and moral strength.
Themes that would later become central to Milton are already visible.
What does genuine freedom mean?
Is freedom merely the ability to do whatever one desires?
Or does it require the strength to resist desires that might enslave the person who follows them?
Milton returned to variations of these questions throughout his life.
🌿 “Lycidas”
In 1637, Milton wrote “Lycidas,” an elegy commemorating his Cambridge acquaintance Edward King, who had drowned in a shipwreck.
The poem begins within the classical pastoral tradition, imagining the lost young man as a shepherd and poet. But Milton gradually expands the elegy into something much larger.
Personal grief becomes connected with religion, vocation, mortality, fame, and criticism of corruption within the church.
This movement from one person’s death toward much larger questions is characteristic of Milton.
A private event opens into theology.
A pastoral landscape becomes a place of argument.
The poem mourns Edward King, but it also asks what any writer’s work can mean when life itself is so uncertain.
That question carried special significance for Milton, who still had not produced the great work he believed might justify his own poetic ambitions.
🇮🇹 Traveling Through Europe
In 1638, Milton began an extended journey through continental Europe.
He traveled through France and spent much of his time in Italy, visiting cities including Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice. His knowledge of Italian allowed him to participate directly in literary and intellectual circles.
The journey brought him into contact with scholars, writers, musicians, and patrons and exposed him to Renaissance art and architecture on an extraordinary scale.
In Florence, Milton also visited Galileo Galilei.
Galileo was elderly, blind, and living under restrictions imposed after his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over his support for heliocentrism.
Milton later referred to Galileo in Paradise Lost.
The meeting gained even greater resonance after Milton himself lost his sight and experienced the political collapse of the cause he had supported.
Two blind intellectuals separated by generation and nationality became linked within literary history.
🏛️ Returning to a Country in Crisis
Milton might have remained abroad longer, but political and religious tensions in England were intensifying.
He returned home in 1639.
During the following years, conflict between King Charles I and Parliament escalated until England descended into civil war in 1642.
Milton increasingly turned away from poetry toward prose.
The choice was significant.
He had spent years preparing himself for an ambitious literary career, yet he concluded that the political and religious crises surrounding him required direct participation.
Pamphlets became his weapons.
Milton wrote on church government, education, divorce, freedom of publication, political authority, and other controversial subjects.
For nearly two decades, public argument would occupy much of the energy that might otherwise have gone toward poetry.
💍 Marriage and the Divorce Pamphlets
In 1642, Milton married Mary Powell.
The marriage immediately experienced difficulties, and Mary returned to her family shortly afterward. She eventually reconciled with Milton, and the couple had several children before her death in 1652.
During their separation, however, Milton began publishing controversial pamphlets arguing for broader grounds for divorce.
His views attracted significant criticism.
Seventeenth-century English society placed severe restrictions on divorce, and Milton argued that a marriage lacking true companionship could become a form of imprisonment.
Whatever readers make of his conclusions, these pamphlets demonstrate how seriously Milton treated the idea of individual liberty.
Freedom for him was not merely a political slogan.
It affected religion.
Marriage.
Writing.
Conscience.
Education.
And government.
📜 Areopagitica
In 1644, Milton published Areopagitica, his famous argument against the licensing of printed books.
Parliament had required publications to receive official approval before appearing in print. Milton opposed this system of prior censorship.
His argument did not amount to a modern defense of completely unrestricted speech, and his views must be understood within the religious and political assumptions of his own time. Nevertheless, Areopagitica became one of the most influential historical arguments against prior restraint and in favor of intellectual freedom.
Milton believed truth gained strength through encounter.
Readers needed access to competing ideas because moral and intellectual judgment could not develop without choices.
A person protected from every dangerous thought might remain innocent.
Milton wanted something stronger than innocence.
He wanted tested virtue.
That same idea would later become central to Paradise Lost.
⚔️ Revolution and the Execution of Charles I
The English Civil Wars culminated in one of the most dramatic events in British history.
King Charles I was tried and executed in January 1649.
England then became a republic, commonly known as the Commonwealth.
Milton supported the revolutionary government and defended the legitimacy of removing a monarch he believed had become tyrannical. His position placed him firmly on one side of a conflict that remained deeply divisive.
Shortly after the king’s execution, Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State.
The role made him part of the Commonwealth government.
He translated diplomatic correspondence, prepared official documents, and wrote defenses of the regime in Latin for an international audience.
The poet had become a government servant.
🏛️ Milton and the Commonwealth
Milton’s government service continued through the years associated with Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate.
His exact relationship with Cromwell’s government was complex, but Milton remained committed to republican government and opposition to monarchy.
These were not safe intellectual abstractions.
England’s political system had been overturned.
A king had been executed.
Civil war had devastated communities.
Religious factions competed for influence.
Milton believed the upheaval might produce a freer society, but he was also repeatedly disappointed by what followed.
This tension between extraordinary hopes and compromised outcomes would later haunt his poetry.
The dream of political liberty had not unfolded as cleanly as its supporters imagined.
Neither would Eden.
👁️ Losing His Sight
Milton’s eyesight deteriorated steadily during the 1640s.
By approximately 1652, he was completely blind.
The loss would have ended the literary career of many writers in an age before modern assistive technology.
For Milton, it changed the method but not the ambition.
He relied upon assistants, friends, family members, and other amanuenses to read to him and write down what he dictated.
His famous sonnet usually known as “On His Blindness” addresses the fear that losing his sight might prevent him from fulfilling the purpose he believed God had given him.
The poem does not offer a simple victory over disability.
Instead, Milton struggles with the question of service.
What does a person owe the world when the ability to work has changed?
His answer gradually moves toward patience and trust.
But the ambition remained.
The blind poet had not yet written Paradise Lost.
🕯️ Personal Loss
Milton’s blindness was only one of several painful developments during the 1650s.
His first wife, Mary, died in 1652 following childbirth.
Milton later married Katherine Woodcock in 1656, but she died in 1658 after giving birth to a daughter who also died.
Milton mourned Katherine in the sonnet “Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint,” one of his most moving shorter poems.
In the dream described by the sonnet, the lost wife appears to return to him.
Then he wakes.
The final emotional force is especially powerful because Milton was blind. The dream briefly restores a form of sight, only for waking to return him to darkness and loss.
The poet capable of imagining cosmic battles also understood intimate grief.
👑 The Restoration
In 1660, the political world Milton had supported collapsed.
The monarchy was restored under Charles II.
For Milton, the Restoration was dangerous.
He had publicly defended the execution of Charles I and worked for the republican government. Some former officials were executed, while others fled.
Milton went into hiding for a period, was arrested, and was briefly imprisoned. Friends and allies intervened on his behalf, and he ultimately escaped the far harsher punishments imposed upon several prominent republicans.
Politically, he had lost.
His government was gone.
The monarchy had returned.
He was blind.
His public influence had diminished.
From the outside, the great ambitions of his earlier life might have seemed defeated.
Instead, Milton turned back toward poetry.
🌌 The Epic He Had Been Preparing to Write
Milton had imagined writing a major poem for decades.
Earlier plans had considered subjects connected with King Arthur and British history. Gradually, however, the biblical story of humanity’s fall emerged as the foundation for the epic.
Paradise Lost would tell the story of Satan’s rebellion against God, the creation of the world, Adam and Eve in Eden, temptation, disobedience, and humanity’s expulsion from Paradise.
The material was familiar.
Milton made it enormous.
He drew upon Genesis, classical epic, theology, Renaissance literature, political thought, philosophy, astronomy, and his own experiences of rebellion and defeat.
He also faced a practical challenge unlike anything Homer or Virgil had confronted.
Milton could no longer see the page.
✍️ Composing Without Sight
Milton composed Paradise Lost while blind, dictating passages to others who wrote them down.
Accounts of his working habits suggest that lines might develop in his mind before being recorded, with the poet relying heavily upon memory and sound.
This helps illuminate the extraordinary musical quality of the poem.
Paradise Lost was composed in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, rather than the rhyming couplets common in much long English poetry of the period.
Milton defended the decision explicitly.
He wanted the freedom associated with classical epic rather than what he regarded as the artificial constraint of rhyme.
The resulting verse can move across line endings with remarkable flexibility.
Sentences expand.
Clauses accumulate.
Sounds echo.
The reader is carried through language that can be majestic, intimate, terrifying, or tender.
🔥 Satan
No character in Paradise Lost has generated more discussion than Satan.
Milton’s Satan is proud, eloquent, intelligent, resentful, charismatic, and increasingly self-destructive.
He has rebelled against God and lost.
Rather than accept defeat, he converts his pain into a determination to corrupt what God has created.
Some later readers, especially Romantic writers, found Satan so rhetorically compelling that they treated him as the poem’s true hero.
That interpretation remains debated.
What makes the character extraordinary is precisely that Milton allows evil to speak persuasively.
Satan rarely believes he is simply choosing evil because evil is attractive.
He creates arguments.
He reframes defeat as freedom.
He converts envy into principle.
He makes self-deception sound heroic.
Milton understood that temptation would not be much of a temptation if it arrived looking obviously ridiculous.
🍎 Adam and Eve
Although Paradise Lost contains heaven, hell, angels, demons, cosmic warfare, and the creation of the world, its emotional center lies with two people.
Adam and Eve.
Milton imagines their life before the Fall in unusual detail.
They talk.
Work.
Disagree.
Love.
Question.
Dream.
Make choices.
Their relationship gives human scale to the enormous theological structure surrounding them.
Eve is particularly important because Milton allows her a degree of psychological complexity far beyond a simple symbol of temptation.
She possesses curiosity, intelligence, pride, independence, affection, and vulnerability.
Adam also knows what he should do.
Yet when Eve falls, love complicates obedience.
The catastrophe is theological.
It is also deeply personal.
🌳 Eden
Milton’s Eden is among the great imagined landscapes in English literature.
It is abundant, fertile, ordered, sensuous, and alive.
Flowers, trees, fruit, water, animals, light, fragrance, and physical beauty surround Adam and Eve.
The richness matters because readers must understand what is being lost.
Paradise is not an abstraction.
It is a place.
Milton’s descriptions make the eventual expulsion emotionally powerful because the loss involves not only theological innocence but home.
Adam and Eve leave the only world they have known.
The poem ends with exile.
But not complete despair.
🐍 Temptation and Freedom
At the center of Paradise Lost is the problem of freedom.
Why would God create people capable of disobedience?
Why allow the possibility of temptation?
Milton’s answer is connected with ideas he had explored for decades.
Obedience without the possibility of disobedience would not be morally meaningful.
Virtue requires choice.
A creature incapable of doing wrong cannot truly choose to do right.
That principle connects Paradise Lost with Areopagitica.
Milton consistently preferred tested virtue to protected innocence.
Adam and Eve possess freedom.
That freedom gives their obedience value.
It also makes catastrophe possible.
📖 Publishing Paradise Lost
The first edition of Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.
It was initially arranged in ten books.
Milton later revised the structure, and the second edition of 1674 divided the poem into twelve books, bringing its organization closer to classical epic models such as Virgil’s Aeneid.
The work gradually established Milton as one of England’s great poets.
The achievement is striking when placed beside his circumstances.
The political cause to which he had devoted years had failed.
He had lost his public position.
He was blind.
He had experienced substantial personal grief.
Yet from those years came the work that secured his literary immortality.
The republican politician had lost history’s immediate argument.
The poet had created something far more durable.
🌄 Paradise Regained
Milton followed Paradise Lost with Paradise Regained, published in 1671.
The poem focuses on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.
Its scale is much smaller than that of Paradise Lost, but that contrast is deliberate.
Satan again attempts persuasion.
This time, he fails.
Christ rejects temptations involving hunger, wealth, political power, fame, and spectacle.
Heroism in Paradise Regained therefore looks very different from the military glory celebrated in many traditional epics.
Victory comes through refusal.
The hero conquers by not surrendering control of himself.
Milton’s lifelong interest in freedom once again becomes an interest in self-mastery.
⛓️ Samson Agonistes
The same 1671 volume included Samson Agonistes, a dramatic poem based on the biblical story of Samson.
The work has often invited comparisons with Milton’s own circumstances.
Samson is blind.
Defeated.
Imprisoned.
Humiliated.
He has lost the power and public position he once possessed.
The parallels with Milton after the Restoration are difficult to miss, although Samson should not simply be treated as an autobiographical stand-in for the poet.
What matters is the emotional territory.
How does a person understand defeat?
What remains when public power disappears?
Can someone who has failed recover a sense of purpose?
Milton had lived those questions.
In Samson Agonistes, he gave them dramatic form.
📚 Milton and the Classical Epic
Milton consciously placed Paradise Lost in conversation with Homer and Virgil.
He borrowed conventions familiar from classical epic: invocations, epic similes, battles, councils, journeys, elevated language, and an enormous historical and cosmic scale.
But he also transformed the tradition.
The central conflict is not ultimately about the founding of a city or military conquest.
It concerns obedience, freedom, temptation, and redemption.
The greatest battles occur partly inside consciousness.
The heroic ideal changes as well.
Military power can be spectacular.
Milton increasingly suggests that moral strength may be more difficult.
🗣️ The Sound of Milton
Milton’s influence cannot be separated from the sound of his poetry.
His sentences can stretch across multiple lines, accumulating clauses before reaching their conclusion. His blank verse moves with a flexibility that profoundly influenced later English poets.
The effect can initially be challenging.
Milton often expects readers to hold complicated grammatical structures in mind while moving through elaborate imagery and references.
But reading aloud helps.
The music begins to clarify the structure.
Pauses become audible.
Rhythms emerge.
Words seem to gather momentum.
Milton was blind while composing his mature masterpieces.
It is hardly surprising that sound became one of the strongest organizing forces in them.
📜 Political Milton and Poetic Milton
Readers sometimes separate Milton into two figures.
There is the political pamphleteer engaged in the conflicts of seventeenth-century England, and there is the author of Paradise Lost writing about heaven, hell, Adam, Eve, Satan, and God.
The division is misleading.
The same questions appear in both worlds.
What makes authority legitimate?
What is freedom?
When should obedience end?
How can power become tyranny?
Can rebellion be justified?
What responsibilities accompany liberty?
Why do intelligent people choose badly?
Milton spent his public life arguing about these questions politically.
His poetry allowed him to ask them on a cosmic scale.
👑 A Poet Read by Revolutionaries and Romantics
Later generations found different Miltons.
Some admired the Christian epic poet.
Others admired the republican opponent of monarchy.
Romantic writers were particularly fascinated by the rebellious energy of Paradise Lost.
William Blake famously suggested that Milton seemed to write with particular power when depicting Satan and rebellion. Percy Bysshe Shelley also responded intensely to Milton’s Satan and to the political implications of the poem.
Milton therefore became something unusual.
A deeply religious seventeenth-century writer could inspire later poets whose own religious and political ideas differed radically from his.
Great works often survive precisely because they generate interpretations their authors could not completely control.
Milton wanted to explain rebellion.
He also created one of literature’s most unforgettable rebels.
✒️ Influence on English Poetry
Few English poets escaped Milton’s shadow.
His blank verse affected generations of writers. His epic scale became a standard against which later poets measured ambition. His syntax, imagery, theological imagination, and political seriousness entered the vocabulary of English poetry.
Some writers imitated him.
Others resisted him.
Both responses demonstrate influence.
The Romantic poets repeatedly returned to Milton. William Wordsworth directly invoked him in the sonnet beginning “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.” Blake produced his own poem titled Milton. Shelley engaged with the revolutionary and rebellious possibilities he found in Miltonic poetry.
Even poets determined to sound nothing like Milton still had to reckon with what he had accomplished.
👁️ Blindness and Literary Memory
Milton’s blindness became inseparable from his later reputation.
Images of the aging poet dictating Paradise Lost to assistants became part of literary mythology.
There is a danger in romanticizing that experience.
Blindness created real difficulties. Milton depended on others for reading, writing, and many practical tasks. Family relationships surrounding that dependence could be complicated.
Yet disability did not end his intellectual life.
He adapted his working methods and produced his greatest writing after losing his sight.
The achievement should not be reduced to a sentimental story about overcoming adversity.
It demonstrates something more interesting.
The form of the work changed because the conditions of making it changed.
Milton’s poetry became deeply connected with memory, listening, dictation, and sound.
💬 Milton’s Complicated Family Life
Milton’s domestic life was not always harmonious.
After Mary Powell’s death and the death of his second wife, Katherine, Milton married Elizabeth Minshull in 1663.
Relations between Milton and the daughters of his first marriage became strained, especially during the years when he relied upon family members and assistants because of his blindness.
These details complicate attempts to transform Milton into a simple literary hero.
A writer may create profound meditations on liberty and human relationships while remaining a difficult person within his own household.
Literary greatness does not require biographical perfection.
Milton’s life, like his poetry, contains contradictions.
🌍 A World Large Enough for Contradiction
This may be one reason Paradise Lost continues to generate debate.
Milton does not make his questions small enough to solve comfortably.
Readers can admire Satan’s rhetoric while recognizing his destructive choices.
They can disagree about Eve while recognizing her complexity.
They can question Milton’s theology while admiring his imaginative achievement.
They can reject his politics while taking seriously his arguments about liberty.
His greatest work is powerful partly because it contains tensions that do not disappear after one reading.
The poem argues.
Readers argue back.
That conversation has continued for centuries.
🕯️ Milton’s Final Years
Milton spent his final years largely outside public political life.
The Restoration government remained in power, and the republican experiment he had defended was over.
His literary reputation, however, was growing.
Paradise Lost circulated among readers and writers, while Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes extended the extraordinary final phase of his career.
Milton died on or around November 8, 1674, after complications associated with gout. He was buried at St Giles-without-Cripplegate in London.
He was nearly 66.
The second edition of Paradise Lost, revised and arranged into twelve books, had appeared earlier that same year.
Milton died knowing that the epic he had spent much of his life preparing to write was finally part of the world.
🌟 Why John Milton Still Matters
Milton matters because the questions that consumed him have not become simple.
What does freedom require?
When does authority become oppressive?
Is freedom meaningful without the possibility of making terrible choices?
Why can destructive ideas sound persuasive?
How do people respond when political ideals collapse?
How does a person continue after loss?
Can language make an ancient story feel psychologically immediate?
Milton asked these questions through theology, politics, prose, drama, lyric poetry, and epic.
His answers belong to the seventeenth century.
The questions have lasted much longer.
📖 Reading Paradise Lost Today
Modern readers sometimes approach Paradise Lost with unnecessary fear.
Its reputation can make the poem seem like something to be studied rather than experienced.
The language is demanding, but the story itself contains elements readers already understand intuitively: ambition, resentment, persuasion, love, jealousy, pride, curiosity, disobedience, regret, and the loss of home.
Milton’s characters argue because they want things.
Satan wants power and revenge.
Eve wants knowledge and independence.
Adam wants Eve.
All of them convince themselves that their desires justify choices whose consequences extend far beyond what they expect.
The scale is cosmic.
The psychology is recognizable.
That combination is one reason the poem survives.
🎂 Remembering John Milton on His Birthday
December 9 offers a fitting opportunity to remember John Milton, a writer whose career joined private ambition with some of the greatest public upheavals in English history.
He began as an exceptionally educated London boy who believed poetry required years of preparation. He studied at Cambridge, immersed himself in classical and European literature, traveled through Italy, met Galileo, and returned to England as political and religious conflict moved toward civil war.
For years, poetry gave way to argument. Milton wrote pamphlets about church government, marriage, education, censorship, monarchy, and liberty. He joined the Commonwealth government and defended a political order that ultimately collapsed.
Then came blindness, bereavement, political defeat, imprisonment, and withdrawal from public power.
From that landscape emerged Paradise Lost.
Milton had lost the ability to see the page, but not the ability to imagine heaven, hell, chaos, Eden, angels, demons, the creation of the world, and the first human beings looking toward an uncertain future.
At the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve leave Eden knowing they cannot return. The world ahead contains suffering, work, history, and death, but it also contains possibility.
That image seems unexpectedly appropriate for Milton himself.
The political world he wanted had disappeared.
The life he had imagined for himself had changed.
The great poem remained unwritten until relatively late.
Yet he continued.
And in doing so, John Milton created one of the works that permanently changed what English poetry could attempt.
from On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring…
-John Milton
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