Rutgers Hosts Public 'Paradise Lost' Reading During The Solar Eclipse

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — Next Monday, April 8, two Rutgers English professors will hold their own version of a solar eclipse party:

English profs Ann Baynes Coiro and Brad Evans will stage a day-long, outdoor marathon reading of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost," all 10,000 lines of it.

This will be outside on the Rutgers New Brunswick campus during the April 8 solar eclipse. The public reading will start at 9:30 a.m. to about 6 p.m. in front of Murray Hall on the College Avenue campus. Students, faculty, staff and members of the public are invited to join in the reading of the poem, which is filled with allusions to eclipses, as well as imagery of light and darkness.

Coiro said her Rutgers students love to discuss the poem.

“It’s a perfect poem for somebody who’s 20 or 21 or 22,” said Coiro, a Milton scholar in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.

Despite its age, the poem is surprisingly modern.

“It’s a love story,” she said. “It’s a brilliant portrayal of what seems like a ‘real’ couple — Adam and Eve love each other, and they have fights."

“You can drop by to listen,” Evans said. “And anyone can get in the queue to read a verse paragraph.”

"Paradise Lost" is one of Western literature’s best-known poems showcasing an epic battle between light and dark, goodness and evil. Milton starts with the biblical fall from grace of Adam and Eve. Because he was blind, Milton wrote the poem to be performative, said Coiro, meaning it was meant to be read aloud.

New Jersey residents will see a partial, not a total solar eclipse, meaning that the moon will never fully block the sun on Monday. But astronomers say it is still worth watching, as the Earth will still darken as the sun becomes partially obscured, and the sun will look as though a bite has been taken out of it.

At the peak of the solar eclipse, with maximum darkness at about 3:24 p.m. Monday, the readers will have reached Book Nine, considered to be the poem's dramatic climax: Adam and Eve’s final moments in the Garden of Eden. Eve is tempted by Satan and convinces Adam to disobey God’s instructions. They eat a piece of fruit they were forbidden to pluck from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and are forever cast from Paradise.

The Rutgers English Department has hosted public reading marathons in the past, including J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Near the start of Book One, Milton compares Satan to an eclipsed sun:

“As when the Sun new ris’n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds…
Dark’n’d so, yet shon
Above them all the’ Arch Angel…”

All attendees will be handed eclipse glasses, folding chairs, books, a microphone — and apples.