Reader Skye Shirley ’10, left, and Haskin in Hovey House library. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Satan walked into the wood-paneled room a few minutes late. He was in his early twenties, bearded, and looked to be not long out of bed. He sat down at a long table and began to hold forth, and though his tone was mild, his words were mighty—“The mind is its own place and in itself/Can make Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

Satan was, in reality, Geoff Wirth, a Boston College graduate student in English, and he had arrived in the library of Hovey House shortly after 8 a.m. on this Wednesday in early May for an all-day reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost—all 12 books, all 10,565 lines—marking (belatedly) the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, on December 9, 1608. The 30 or so readers were a revolving group of undergraduates and graduate students and professors, including David Quigley, the dean of Arts & Sciences, who took the part of Abdiel, God’s loyal servant. They drifted in and out, settling into armchairs at the table. Visitors occupied seats along the room’s perimeter; backpacks and notebooks littered the floor. Everyone was bent to their copies of Paradise Lost as the readers progressed through their lines at a pace of about one book per hour.

English professor Dayton Haskin, the organizer, said the reading was an element of his spring term graduate seminar, called simply “Milton,” adding that several of the seminar students “really pleased me with how well they did as readers. Their growth . . . was evident as the day unfolded, and they got better and better in their performances.”

The readers, many of whom had previously taken classes with Haskin, echoed his enthusiasm. Graduate student Emma Perry said the day altered her perspective on Milton’s verse: “We got to experience the poem as a group and could laugh, boo, or otherwise interact with it in a way we might not sitting alone in our living room with the book on our laps.”

As with many adventures, this reading involved a journey or two. Around lunchtime, some 11 students from Haskin’s graduate course collected their refreshments (cookies, fruit, and lots of bottled water) and adjourned to a seminar room in Carney Hall to finish off Book 5, which was then about half-read, while, to keep on schedule, a group of undergraduates joined Associate Professor of English Amy Boesky to start on Book 6 in the Hovey library. The library was committed for the evening, so later in the afternoon the groups came together in the fifth-floor lounge of McGuinn for Books 7 through 12, concluding shortly before 8 p.m.

The many-windowed aerie of McGuinn was the setting for what is arguably the poem’s most dramatic moment: Eve’s taking of the forbidden fruit. (“Her rash hand in evil hour/Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat.”) As the words were spoken, a graduate student named Matt Freedman hurried, grinning, to the refreshment table and began to chomp on a green apple.

Though he held tryouts for the different parts, Haskin said he wasn’t greatly concerned with the aesthetics of the readings. Performance is “an integral part” of learning literature, he said, and serves as “a rich complement” to the training in research that graduate students in particular undergo. According to Emma Perry, reading Milton aloud gave her insight into the author’s “language tricks” with meter, internal rhyme, and anaphora. “When the iambic pentameter started to fade away . . . you almost forgot it was written in such tight meter, until it was brought back for dramatic effect,” she said.

Some of the day’s more engaging moments involved cameos by English department faculty members. Assistant Professor Joseph Nugent, who specializes in James Joyce, brought his Irish brogue to the part of Beelzebub in Book 2. Department chair Mary Crane donned a set of red plastic horns during her turn as Belial, another of the devils (“than whom a Spirit more lewd/Fell not from Heaven”) advised by Satan in Book 2. Adam and Eve were introduced by married professors James Wallace and Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace (he a scholar of American literature pre-1865, she of 18th-century British literature and feminist theory).

In Book 4, as Milton writes in his preface, the readers encounter “Satan’s first sight” of the original couple and witness his “wonder at their excellent form and happy state.” The theme of Edenic innocence was underscored for the readers by the presence of a highly mobile toddler who teetered around the room clinging to her mother’s fingers. The poem’s concluding lines were still some 10 hours off:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Ken Gordon is a Boston-based writer.

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