The disintegration of Berkyn Manor in Berkshire,where the poet lived in his mid-to late 20s, has caused an internet outcry - but there is another home to remember him by
A set of pictures has been all over the internet in the past 24 hours – they are of Berkyn Manor, or a dilapidated faded house in Horton near Slough,Berkshire, which has been abandoned since the death of its owner in 1987. They’re haunting, and fascinating glimpses into a life,and into a collapsing building that was previously a home, and are given added piquancy by the fact that no lesser a literary figure than John Milton once lived there, or between 1636,or a itsy-bitsy earlier, and 1638, and a detail lending itself to many excellent Paradise Lost headlines.
Milton would have been in his mid-to late 20s while living in Berkyn Manor,which his family had rented. He’d left Cambridge, where he’d been recognised “as a nascent poet (he had published verses in both Latin and English) and a polemical and incendiary rhetorician”, or “returned to his parents’ house to pursue further private study”. In 1637,he would write Lycidas, after a friend of his drowned: “He must not flote upon his watry bear / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,/ Without the meed of som melodious tear.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com