Paradise lost – John Milton
TYPE OF WORK Poem
GENRE Epic
LANGUAGE English
TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN 1656–1674; England Published in 1667
DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION First Edition (ten books), 1667; Second Edition (twelve books), 1674
NARRATOR Milton
POINT OF VIEW Third person
TONE Lofty; formal; tragic
TENSE Present
SETTING (TIME Before the beginning of time
SETTING (PLACE) Hell, Chaos and Night, Heaven, Earth (Paradise, the Garden of Eden)
PROTAGONIST Adam and Eve
MAJOR CONFLICT Satan, already damned to Hell, undertakes to corrupt God’s new, beloved creation, humankind.
RISING ACTION The angels battle in Heaven; Satan and the rebel angels fall to Hell; God creates the universe; Satan plots to corrupt God’s human creation; God creates Eve to be Adam’s companion; Raphael answers Adam’s questions and warns him of Satan
CLIMAX Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
FALLING ACTION The Son inflicts punishment; Adam and Eve repent; Adam learns about the future of man
THEMES The Importance of Obedience to God; The Hierarchical Nature of the Universe; The Fall as Partly Fortunate
MOTIFS Light and Dark; The Geography of the Universe; Conversation and Contemplation
SYMBOLS The Scales in the Sky; Adam’s wreath
FORESHADOWING Eve’s vanity at seeing her reflection in the lake; Satan’s transformation into a snake and his final punishment
It carried the simple moral meaning of something terribly bad or unfortunate. Christians since the Middle Ages had always considered the falls of Lucifer and Adam tragic. But "tragic' also refers to the dramatic concept of tragedy as first defined by Aristotle and developed through the centuries to its high achievement in Elizabethan England. Milton knew the nature of dramatic tragedy from his study of the Greeks as well as from reading Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists.
The 17th century is divided into two by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and the temporary overthrow of the monarchy. With the return of Charles II as King in 1660, new models of poetry and drama came in from France, where the court had been in exile. In James I’s reign, high ideals had combined with daring wit and language, but the religious and political extremism of the mid-century broke that combination. Restoration prose, verse, and stage comedy were marked by worldly scepticism and, in Rochester, a cynical wit worlds away from the evangelicalism of Bunyan. When Milton’s Paradise Lost came out in 1667, its grandeur spoke of a vanished heroic world. The representative career of Dryden moves from the ‘metaphysical’ poetry of Donne to a new ‘Augustan’ consensus.
Book IX brings the drama to its climax, for Eve encounters Satan in the body of a serpent marvellously able to speak, to flatter, to indicate how a being can rise above its own nature. A serpent, he claims, may become virtually human, a human being virtually divine: the secret is the fruit of a certain tree. Eve is taken to see it, knows it for the forbidden tree, but nevertheless accepts the diabolical guarantee of its virtue: <So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost.> Returning to Adam, she induces him against his better judgement to eat as well. Shame, lust and quarrelsomeness overtake them.
The protagonists here are not martial heroes but a domestic couple who must, both before and after their Fall, deal with questions hotly contested in the seventeenth century but also perennial: how to build a good marital relationship; how to think about science, astronomy, and the nature of things; what constitutes tyranny, servitude, and liberty; what history teaches; how to meet the daily challenges of love, work, education, change, temptation, and deceptive rhetoric; how to reconcile free will and divine providence; and how to understand and respond to God's ways.
The history of England in the seventeenth-century also shows that Milton did not live in a secular society: religion was a matter of national, political importance, and politics was frequently conducted on religious grounds. The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 was partly due to religious divisions. On the one hand, King Charles I, wanted his subjects in Scotland and England to conform to his own religious preferences. Charles wished to emphasise “the beauty of holiness”: church buildings needed to look beautiful, like the Baroque churches in Europe, with a solemn, dramatic style of worship to match. In order tomake these changes Charles put more political power in the hands of senior clergymen. On the other hand, Charles’ opponents, including Milton, believed that this dictatorial approach was going too far. To be forced to worship in such a way was a contravention of English liberty. Also, the style of worship that Charles desired was thought to be idolatrous and against “true religion.” In the end, for those involved, there could be no peaceful solution to this political argument because religious truth was at stake. So, to summarise, the religious aspect of Paradise Lost is conceptually complex, cultural, and political. But what does this have to do with the status of Paradise Lost as a work of literature? Milton himself was convinced that poetry had a religious purpose. He discusses this in a controversial prose pamphlet called The Reason of Church Government , which waspublished in January 1642. He writes that
Paradise Lost, however, seeks to preserve the complexity of its Christian subject matter. It seeks to encourage its readers to engage with its argumentsincerely and intelligently.
Milton wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance, though his major epic poems were written in the Restoration period, including Paradise Lost.
The ease with which Satan persuades Eve to sin paints an unflattering portrayal of woman, one that accords with Milton’s portrayal throughout the poem of women as the weaker sex. Eve allows the serpent’s compliments to win her over, demonstrating that she cares more about superficial things such as beauty than profound things such as God’s grace. Furthermore, that Eve gives in to the serpent after only a few deceptive arguments reveals her inability to reason soundly. Not only is she herself corruptible, however, but she also seeks to corrupt others: her immediate reaction upon discovering her sin is to lure Adam into her fate. Rather than repent and take full responsibility for her actions, she moves instinctively to drag Adam down with her to make him share her suffering. Eve thus comes across as an immoral and harmful being, one whose values are skewed and who has a bad influence on others.
Satan’s argument that knowledge is good because knowing what is good and evil makes it easier to do what is good wrongfully assumes that knowledge is always good. This flaw in his argument is the theological thrust of this book: though the intellect is powerful and god-like, obeying God is a higher priority than feeding the intellect. Milton believes that one cannot first obey reason and then obey God; rather one must trust God and then trust reason.
Eve overestimates the powers of her ability to protect herself and to resist temptation, and Adam underestimates the need to protect Eve and share his knowledge with her. Both must suffer from each other’s shortfalls.
The wreath of flowers he makes for Eve symbolizes his love for her. When he sees that she has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, he drops the wreath, symbolizing her fallen state. The dropping of the wreath may also hint at Adam’s disappointment in Eve as a spiritual lover and companion, and even his falling out of pure love with her. After Adam eats from the apple, his attraction to Eve changes subtly, and he looks at her more like a connoisseur, eager to indulge. The sexuality the two display is now perverted, their love in the dark forest more lustful and animal-like than their earlier love in the lush, bright bower. Their arguing and blaming of each other demonstrate their lack of unity and peace, and demonstrate, as does the Earth’s sighing, their fallen state.
Milton wrote this epic poem to "justify the ways of God to men," as he asserts in the opening of Book 1. Although he eschews the traditional subject matter of epic poetry—"fabled knights / In battles feigned" (9.30—31)—he follows many conventions of the epic form, including the beginning in medias res ("in the middle of things"), the invocation of a muse (a request for divine aid in the writing of the poem), the division of the poem into twelve books, the use of epic similes (extended and elaborately detailed comparisons that temporarily draw the reader's attention from the subject at hand), and the epic catalog (as of ships in Homer's Iliad and fallen angels in Paradise Lost). While Milton establishes that his poem is part of an epic tradition that includes Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, he questions some assumptions of that tradition (he introduces, for example, a different concept of heroism) and incorporates other generic elements such as pastoral and drama.