Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

And with forc'd fingers rude

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

-- Lycidas by John Milton

Very few people I know are interested in the poetry of John Milton.

I am, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, a late convert, but the more I read his work, particularly the above poem and the sonnets (Paradise Lost is on my reading list), I begin to realise what an exceptional poet & writer he was.

(Lycidas is very much in the elegiac space and has strong overtones of the pastoral, both of which speak to me in many, many ways.)

I wonder, though, whether John Milton, like so many poets, is simply a relic of the past, and we have given up on them in favour of something much more modern. I don't say that to be churlish or to pick a fight, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer people are interested in going back to the old writers, the ancients, if you like, for inspiration. Me: I seem to find myself heading in that direction more and more, and I wonder what that says about my disposition during the latter stages of my life?

PS. This is a picture of the Church at Dean Prior (a stone’s throw from my house) where the great 17th-century poet Robert Herrick was the minister.