“sober certainty of waking bliss”

Seriously, with all my confusion and interpreting and questions I have really neglected to enjoy Milton’s poetry and his unbelievable relationship with words. I thought I’d briefly share this. Sometimes when I was reading Book 3 I would just stare at the page for a few seconds in utter amazement at how cool the lines sounded, the images they evoked, etc. The phrase above (in the title) is from Book 3, Lines 377 - 383:

“…but when thou shad’st
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud
Drawn round thee like a radiant shrine,
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,
yet dazzle heaven, that brightest seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.”

I mean…come on! I can feel the radiant beams; I actually feel lighter while reading that passage. I know that’s not very useful interpretively, but I think it’s important to step back sometimes and consider how the words make you feel. It is a poem after all. Anyway, I love this part. The Father’s (or are they talking about the Son here, I can’t always tell, it’s really hard to tell who is being talked about sometimes) glory is so great it cannot be looked at directly (or seen at all unless He shows himself).

As I’ve been sitting here reading this passage over and I realized I had no idea what “that brightest seraphim” referred to. The angels? So I looked it up in the OED and it has several meanings, one being the name of an angel or a class of angels. In Biblical tradition they are supposedly the six-winged creatures that hover over God’s throne. The most interesting thing is that the word “seraphim” is etymologically related the meaning “fiery serpent.” Satan? Even if Milton was just referring to plain old angels, that relationship is really cool.