Milton's Paradise Lost

English 203

Dr. Fike

You are reading only Book 9 of Milton's epic, and some students have difficulty jumping in at that point.  If we had more time, we would spend a full day laying the groundwork, but my hope is that this handout will serve the same purpose.  Therefore, here are some important points to keep in mind as you read.

Epic:  You ought to read the entry on "epic" in your black handbook (you may also want to read up on "romance" to help you understand how the two genres are similar and different).  Like Edmund Spenser, his literary father, who wrote The Faerie Queene, Milton had originally planned to write an Arthurian epic but abandoned the idea in order not to imitate but to overgo all previous epic literature.  He will write "Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime" (he will write blank verse, the meter of Shakespeare's tragedies), and telling of the Fall is "Sad task, yet argument / Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth / Of stern Achilles" (see 1.16 and 9.13-15).  Similarly, whereas previous poets have written of "fabl'd Knights / In Battels feign'd" (think Spenser), Milton will celebrate "the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom," which is the heroism of Christ on the cross (9.30-32).  Paradise Lost is a Christian epic.

Overview:  The first six lines of the poem give a snapshot of Milton's subject: 

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With the loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav'nly Muse. 

Here is an overview of history from Eden to Christ's resurrection.  On the one hand, Milton's primary subject will be the Fall, which is why all of us, including the poet and his narrator, are "mortal" and suffer "woe."  On the bright side, however, remember that as Adam is to the tree, so Christ (the second Adam) is to the cross.  There is thus a sense of felix culpa, literally happy culpability:  the Fall is paradoxically fortunate (see 12.469-77, quoted below).  Other compensation for the loss of Eden lies in what 12.587 calls a "paradise within," a state characterized by faith, love, charity, patience, fortitude, and temperance.  In other words, the proper inner orientation in the fallen world involves embracing various virtues.  Still further compensation is found at 12.611, where Milton notes that "God is also in Sleep, and Dreams advise."  Man will no longer commune face-to-face with angels, but not all connections to the divine have been lost:  "Dreams advise."  Moreover, hard-won gains in the fallen world have great spiritual significance.  It is one thing to be good when one is unfallen and quite another when one has to choose (think psychomachia) between good and evil.  This is why human beings are said to be above angels in heaven (angels are unfallen beings; humans get there through a crucible of trial and struggle known as life).

Satan:  There is, of course, a character in Paradise Lost who embodies the kind of heroism that Milton ascribes to Achilles, and his name is Satan (the former Lucifer), who has "courage never to submit or yield" (remember that phrase when we get to Tennyson's "Ulysses").  As the poem opens in medias res (in the middle of things; such an opening is one of the characteristics of an epic), Satan and his fellow fallen angels are in hell trying to chart a course for their future activities.  Satan is guilty of Faustus's sin—hubris.  Having been exiled to hell for waging war against God, the fallen angels now consider various possibilities—renewed war, sloth, the development of hell, and the corruption of earth.  There is no chance of reconciling with God because Satan will never submit, but he wants to do something to stick it to God.  So he says, "Evil be thou my Good," embraces "malice," and seeks "revenge" (4.110, 123).  When he arrives in Eden he either resembles or actually takes the shape of various animals (a sign of his degradation and distance from Lucifer/"light").  Of course, he eventually enters the serpent, as we will see in Book 9.  As punishment, he and his fallen buddies are all transformed into snakes when he returns to hell, and together they emit "A dismal universal hiss" at 10.508.

Adam and Eve:  The initial portrait of Adam and Eve's unfallen bliss in the garden of Eden is problematic because they are seen through Satan's eyes—the eyes of the destroyer.  This portrait also comes through the filter of the fallen narrator.  In the prelapsarian world, opposites can exist together, sex is spiritual rather than dirty, language is easy and fluent, nakedness is not an embarrassment, angels come over for dinner, and the only reason to work is to make rest more enjoyable.  The problem, however, is that Milton laces the description with portents of the fall: 

• Adam is uxorious (4.412).

• Eve has limitations akin to narcissism (4.440ff.).  When she first awakens she sees her reflection in a pool of water (Narcissus fell in love with his own image and was transformed into a flower).  The angel gets her to withdraw from the pool only by promising that she will be the mother of a race that will duplicate her facial features.

• Their relationship is partly a seeming good (4.288ff.).

• Her description links her to temptresses in previous literature (4.306).

• And she is even a Dalilah figure (9.1060). 

Hierarchy:  Satan's plan is to wreck Adam and Eve's wonderful, unfallen equilibrium by attacking the weaker partner—namely, Eve.  Whereas Adam's reason makes him a "Foe not informidable" from Satan's point of view (9.486), Eve is particularly vulnerable because she is narcissistic.  Such a strategy is good thinking on his part, as the following chart reveals:  through Satan's machinations, Adam yields the upper hand to Eve; and Eve usurps Adam's authority.  Thus the Great Chain of Being is rattled a little, as it had been when Lucifer and his cronies warred against God. 

                                                Heaven

                                                    /\

God                 guides               Adam               who guides                  Eve

                                                MALE aspect                                        FEMININE aspect

                                                Courage                                                narcissism/vanity

                                                Reason                                                  senses/passions

                                                Strength                                                 beauty, sensuousness

                                                                                                                   \/

                                                                                                                Earth

Here are the proper oppositions: 

• God > man

• Adam > Eve

• Humans > animals

• Head > heart

• Reason > passion

• Spirit > flesh

• Master > servant

• Masculine > feminine

Here are some passages on the hierarchical relation of Adam to Eve.  The narrator says, "Hee for God only, shee for God in him" (4.299).  See also Eve's remark after the Fall at 10.931:  "both have sin'd, but thou / Against God onely, I against God and thee."  What has Eve done?  She has transgressed not only the proper relationship between a married couple (Milton evidently believed that a woman should be subordinate to her husband; there is no doubt that some degree of the poet's misogyny is reflected in his treatment of Eve) but also the proper hierarchy between humans and beings higher on the Great Chain of Being. 

Periodicity:  Finally, a few words are necessary as regards the ways in which Paradise Lost reflects "periodicity."  We are now in the mid-17th century (the poem was published in a final version in 1674, but Milton had been working on it for decades). 

• The poem certainly reflects the new cosmology (Galileo is mentioned) and other current scientific areas like alchemy. Renaissance psychology is also here:  see especially reason, will, and passion at 9.350ff. and 9.1122-32.

• There is anti-Catholic material here (part of Pandemonium, the demons' city in hell, resembles the Vatican).  Think of PL, then, as one of the fruits of the Reformation.  In this respect, the poem is a direct descendent of The Faerie Queene; and Milton even models Sin after Spenser's Errour (both are snake-women, and Errour vomits Catholic propoganda at one point).

• There is excellent Protestant theology, for example, in Book 3 (God and the Son—you may not call him Jesus or Christ because he has not yet been born—discuss the Calvinist idea of predestination).  However, Milton disagrees with the doctrine of "double predestination," the idea that persons are predestined either to heaven or to hell.  He distinguishes between "peculiar grace," which relates to those who have been specially elected, and "Sufficient" grace, which is available to everyone else (3.183, 99).  It is like grading:  a professor might single out a few students to receive A's (peculiar grace or what Milton calls "particular grace" in On Christian Doctrine); but everybody else has a shot at getting an A (sufficient grace).

• The English Civil War, which had its source in religious division, relates to the war in heaven.  Satan has the sort of disrespect for God that Parliament and its supporters had for Charles I.  The divine right of kings no longer obtained, at least not to the same degree.  As for the poem, the main point is that the historical situation resonates in the poem in meaningfully suggestive ways, not that Milton is writing Spenserian historical allegory.  For example, the relationship between God and Satan echoes the relationship between King Charles I and those (Cromwell et al., including Milton as pamphleteer) who helped overthrow him.  But which is which?  God is to good as Satan is to evil; but Charles was not wholly evil, and those who overthrew him were not totally good.  It is clear, however, that Milton is referring to the trouble he was in during the Restoration of Charles II as a result of writing various tracts to support the overthrow of Charles I (Milton was briefly imprisoned).   The poem's narrator is "fall'n on evil dayes, / On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues; / In darknes, and with dangers compast round," as Milton puts it at 7.25-27. 

• PL reflects contemporary dream theory found in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (this text dates from 1621-51):  some dreams are from God; others are demonic (Eve's first dream is demonic; her final dream, as suggested above, is from God).  The relevant excerpt appears in your anthology on pages 1472 (Subsection VII:  Of the Inward Senses).

Book Nine

Your assignment is to identify the key points in your assigned section.  I have suggested a couple of things in each case that you might discuss, but you are not limited to them.

1. Invocation, 1-47:
   1. What is the tone here?  How is it different from the tone in Book 1's invocation?
   2. What does Milton say about his blindness?  About his muse?

2. Adam and Eve's quarrel, 205-385:
   1. Why does Eve want to "divide [their] labors" at line 214?  If you really want to be high tech, have a look at Milton's Areopagitica, which Eve paraphrases in her argument.  The key statement is "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue." 
      See the point of work at 4.325ff.
   2. What words are ominous between 248 and 385?

3. Satan, 500ff.: 
   1. What is up with Hermione and Cadmus?
   2. What kind of imagery is Milton using to describe Satan?

4. Eve's fall, 385ff.; and Adam’s, 952-59:
   1. What are the temptations in lines 567-68?
   2. How does Satan get Eve to eat the apple?
   3. Why does Adam eat the apple?

5. The Fall's results, 790-1131:
   1. In a nutshell, what do Adam and Eve say to each other?
   2. What happens to nature?

Here are two key passages:

O goodness infinite, goodness immense!

That all this good of evil shall produce,

And evil turn to good; more wonderful

Then that which by creation first brought forth

Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,

Whether I should repent me now of sin

By mee done and occasiond, or rejoice

Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,

To God more glory, more good will to Men

From God, and over wrauth grace shall abound.  (12.469-78)

Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.  (12.645-69)