Paradise Lost is...slow. Not with Moby-Dicks's virtuosity, but in a run-of-the-mill way that you can expect when reading epic poetry as a 21st-century modern. My last study of poetry was half a lifetime ago, and even my private school knows better than to push their freshmen too far beyond Shakespeare, so to the extent I ever knew that blank verse is unrhymed (usually) iambic pentameter, I forgot. (I did not forget that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, probably because I had a few years of studying theater before switching gears to computer science.) I may need to switch back to The Iliad, which offers some surprises, even though I know much of what there is to know (in English) about its background and storyline. Maybe because it's been so influential, Paradise Lost isn't promising anything interesting, when I have consumed many books and podcasts covering the poem, and its historicultural associates, from all kinds of angles.
It is a very refined turgidity, though. The scrupulously identical meter of each line, without no regard to sentence or speaker, is exhausting.
On the other hand, simply anticipating reading Milton, on the way to sleep, seems to help me sleep. So, hey. Mission accomplished.
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