Milton Paradise Lost (adapted from the guide by Al Drake)
“The Verse”
What arguments does Milton use in explaining his choice of blank verse?
Before you read:
The epic poem is a codified genre and Milton uses a number of poetic devices which are inextricably connected with it:
- the poet starts with stating his theme
- invocation
- the narrative opens in medias res, not ab ovo (find out what it means)
- extended formal speeches by main characters
- epic simile (a very extended comparison)
- catalogue (a long list, e.g. the list of all Greek ships that arrived at Troy in The Iliad)
Try to spot as many of them as you can and also consider how Milton adapts them to his own purposes.
Book One
1. Examine the narrator's invocation (lines 1-25) and his epic question and answer (lines 26-49).
a) What is the source of the narrator's authority?
2. What purposes do the lines (50-83) serve that immediately follow the invocation and question and answer?
3. Examine the first speech that Satan makes, the one he makes only to his arch-lieutenant, Beëlzebub. Also examine the latter's response to this speech as well as Satan's counter-response to Beëlzebub's words. (84-124, 128-55, 157-91)
a) Work out what the arguments of these two speakers are.
b) Is Satan a skilled rhetorician? How so?
c) Try to explain some of Satan's errors in logic.
d) Does Beelzebub know something Satan doesn't; or does he admit something that Satan will not admit?
4. From lines 195-210, we are treated to Milton's first major extended simile. Actually, it is a series of similes, and a complex one at that. Examine these lines - in what way are they relevant, even vital, to the task of Milton and his narrator in describing heavenly things that really are not describable from a fallen human perspective?
5. Examine Satan's poetic elegy - lines 242-55. What purpose/s does it serve? What resolution or statement does this elegy lead Satan to make?
6. Yet another extended series of similes occurs from lines 283-313. Again, how do these similes dramatize the situation in which Milton and his narrator find themselves?
7. Read Satan's speech to his whole army from lines 622-62.
a) This speech is in part a "revisionist" history of the bad angels' fall - explain how this is so. Why is Satan's version in error?
b) What is Satan's basic plan for the "future?"
Book Nine
1. From lines 205-384, Eve and Adam debate whether or not to separate.
a) What arguments does Eve make for parting?
b) What arguments does Adam make for remaining together?
c) What is the attitude of each to the other at parting?
d) Eve wins the argument and goes to work alone. What are the implications of this act, especially in the context of the subsequent Fall? Is Eve to be more blamed, according to Milton?
2. From lines 410 - 472 Satan enters the Garden of Eden. How does he feel in it? What does the epic simile in 445 - 451 imply? And how about the moment towards the end of this passage when Satan feels “stupidly good”?
3. From lines 532-732, Satan, in the form of a serpent, tempts Eve. Follow Satan's rhetoric to its conclusion. What arguments does Satan use? What is his best argument or appeal?
4. Around l. 635, in another simile, the serpent is compared to a will-o'-the-wisp. What does this comparison suggest? What were these fires and what was believed to be their cause in European foklore?
5. Eve tells the serpent in ll. 653 - 4 that the commandment forbidding her and her husband to eat of the tree of knowledge is the only commandment they need. Why?
General questions (from Norton website https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/17century/topic_2/welcome.htm It contains a huge library of additional texts, images etc. which you may want to explore)
In writing Paradise Lost, Milton drew on an immense reserve of biblical, classical, and other learning. Yet many of those who read and admired Milton's poem in the next two centuries were not learned; Paradise Lost was often one of the very few books found in British and American households. While it is clearly possible to enjoy Paradise Lost on its own, how necessary is an understanding of Milton's learning and his sources to an informed appreciation of the poem? How, if at all, has reading the texts gathered on this Web site changed your way of reading Paradise Lost?
How far does Milton rely on Genesis, and which elements of his narrative have no basis in Genesis? What might account for Milton's inclusion of these episodes? (Choose one and analyze it in depth.)
Why does the Fall happen, and is God at all responsible for it, according to the earlier commentators and according to Milton?
As revealed in The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty (NAEL 8, 1.1811-16), Milton had long considered the composition of an epic poem based on British history and modeled on the works of Homer, Virgil, and Tasso. Yet by the time he came to write Paradise Lost, his chosen theme and his relation to the epic form had altered considerably.
How does Milton undertake to reconceive the epic subject?
How does he reconceive the epic poet's relation to his muse?
Like the classical epics of Homer and Virgil, represented here in modern translations, Paradise Lost is written without rhyme. Yet most early modern translations of Homer and Virgil, such as Chapman's Odyssey and Dryden's Aeneid made use of rhyme, a device Milton attacked in his note on The Verse of Paradise Lost.
Do you find Milton's objections valid in respect to these rhymed translations?
Do these rhymed translations sound and feel more or less "classical" than modern ones? Why do you think this is?
Paradise Lost includes one striking instance of rhyme, at the moment Eve takes the forbidden fruit: "Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat. / Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat . . ." (Book 9, lines 781-82). What, in view of the significance of Eve's act, and Milton's comments on rhyme, might explain this startling couplet?
To Romantic poets such as Blake, Shelley, and Byron, Satan could be seen as the true hero of Paradise Lost. The Satanic/Byronic hero had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century literature and continues to influence our way of reading Paradise Lost.
Is there anything in Milton's sources, or in the events of his own life, which could have suggested the idea of Satan as hero? Is there anything to suggest that Milton consciously intended such a portrayal?
Is it conceivable that a man of Milton's learning and reflectiveness could have been, as Blake claims, "of the Devil's party without knowing it"?
To what extent do Blake's and Shelley's comments on Satan's character accord with your own response to Paradise Lost? If you have seen Satan as a hero, are you "of Blake's party without knowing it"?