Another Look

When my parents asked what I was doing I told them that I was writing an essay on works by Blake, Milton, and Pullman. They were both incredibly surprised at the diverse pieces and asked what at all I could find that these books have in common. Luckily for me though, after being in this class, I have a wealth of things to write about which these books have in common, although they might not seem so apparent at first glance.

Since Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Pullman’s His Dark Materials are both about the biblical story of Adam and Eve there are certainly many connections. Despite the subtle and blatant references to the biblical story and my schooling at a private religious school, when I read Pullman as a child I did not pick up on any of it. I did not notice the connection to the story of creation that I had studied so much in school, I did not pick up on the anti-church sentiment, nor did I understand the mature content that was present in the later parts of the trilogy.

This time reading through the trilogy I can understand so much more because we get the chance to analyze the text in class and simply because I am older and wiser than when I first read it. I have lost innocence so that I now can cringe at the gory scene in which Will looses his fingers and I understand the meaning of the “sex” scene between two daemons that went right over my head when I was a child. This loss of innocence is natural with the progression of time and allowed me to understand new things that weren’t apparent at first. Just as I believe His Dark Materials and Blake’s poetry suggests, it is natural for humans to loose innocence which means that they can come to understand what they once didn’t and that allows us all to grow .