Milton – Paradise Lost

It’s a long poem. ‘No man ever wished Paradise Lost were longer’, according to Dr Johnson. However, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ is no mean task. God, as we all know, moves in mysterious ways. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s God, as William Empson tells us, can be mysteriously repellent: ‘God started all the trouble in the first place . . . the reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad.’ It is also the reason it is so thrilling. God, as Shelley noted, is alleged to have no moral superiority over his adversary, Satan. The sheer moral courage that this required of the ‘central Protestant poet’ is sublime. Milton’s psychological insights into the soul of Satan, tortured by Freudian ambivalence, loving and hating God at the same time, makes Satan one the most enduringly tragic figures in all literature. Rage at rejection and displacement fuels his rebellion and his destruction. God, without warning, announces to all Heaven ‘This day I have begot whom I declare / My onely Son, and on this holy Hill / Him have anointed, whom ye now behold / At my right hand; Your head I him appoint; / And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow / All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord.’ And that’s an order! The penalty for disobedience? Severe. ‘Him who disobeys’ will be ‘cast out from God . . . into utter darkness . . . his place ordained without redemption.’ Satan, previously known as
Lucifer, bringer of light, fights back magnificently. He has a cause. We will be sacrificed to it. For eternity. The stakes, as they say, are high. Satan works on a grander scale than Iago, to whom he is sometimes
compared, ‘bringing down all mankind rather than one brave but limited general’: Harold Bloom at his most succinct.

Initially, Paradise Lost was planned as a drama, a stage tragedy in five acts entitled Adam Unparadised. Why did Milton change hismind? Shakespeare, Bloom suggests, was the catalyst. Milton, who was seven when Shakespeare died, knew the eternal genius of Shakespeare’s plays could never be surpassed, and perhaps an example of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ can be seen at work in Milton, who from youth longed for immortality. So he struck out in another direction, the Epic Poem. However, he would write it in blank verse, previously confined to the drama, ‘rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse’. A decision of genius. Milton is, as Eliot noted, ‘outside the theatre our greatest master of freedom within form’. Though Eliot feared the weight of Milton’s language had a deadening effect, as did Addison, he also acknowledged in his essay ‘Milton II’ that ‘the full beauty of the line is found in its context – and that is conclusive evidence of his supreme mastery’.

Within the line and form of his epic masterpiece lies literature’s most passionate intellectual argument for freedom of will, a passion grounded in a lifetime’s courageous dedication to its cause, in language of beauty and logic and wisdom – the triumph of the man blind and ill, and of the poet. In the face of his achievement we stand astonished. How did he do it? In his head. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Milton, suddenly inspired, called to his daughters to ‘secure what came’ – and thereby hangs a tale. No doubt he was a difficult man and in extreme difficulty. His gift to us was Paradise Lost.

Milton must be read aloud, according to Douglas Bush. The passages we have selected from Book I (lines 105–24; 249–63) are from Satan’s speech as he rallies his fallen angels burning in Hell. It is a hymn to courage, to independence: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n . . . Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.’ It is little wonder Blake wrote of Milton that ‘he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. In the selection from Book IX Satan, now in the guise of snake in the Garden of Eden, has resolved that ‘all good to me is lost; / Evil, be thou my good. . . .’ and plots the downfall of Adam and Eve, whom he overhears in a (celestial) argument about – what else? – freedom. Eve wishes to be free to wander alone in the garden, Adam the anxious first man is worried but surrenders to Eve – plus ça change. Eve encounters Satan, who appeals not only to her vanity but also to something more noble – her desire for Knowledge, which resides in the Tree of Knowledge, the only tree in the Garden of Eden forbidden to Adam and Eve. God at his most perverse. A fearful Eve is reassured by Satan: ‘ye shall not die: How should ye? by the fruit? it gives you life / To knowledge.’ Eve succumbs, and having eaten of the fruit she muses on the power of Knowledge – and in contemplating the first female lie she wonders whether she really ought to keep the Knowledge, i.e. the power, to herself . . . and be the superior one. On the other hand if the warning is right she will die and comes there another Eve? ‘Adam wedded to another Eve, / Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;’, a less than pleasing prospect to our first mother. Therefore Adam too must eat of the tree. If she’s doomed, he’s coming with her – a rather searing insight into female psychology. She now sets out to persuade as she has been persuaded. She understands her man. For Adam, knowing immediately Eve is doomed, sacrifices himself for love: ‘flesh of flesh / Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state / Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe’. He eats the fruit and is immediately enflamed by carnal desire to which Eve delightedly responds and, as Milton tells us, with considerable erotic power: ‘in lust they burn’. Off they go, our first parents, to a shady bank in the garden and to the inevitable. Just as inevitably, the first act of intercourse results in the first post-coital guilt followed, alas, by the first post-coital blame game – If only you had listened to me etc. – and we part from this short excerpt in the midst of a male–female battle which, like Paradise Lost, will continue for eternity.

Thousands of glorious lines later our sad banished parents are led by ‘the hast’ning Angel’ from Paradise. ‘Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon’. All, it would seem, is not lost. Milton’s strangely healing last lines tell us ‘The World was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.’

The End. And the beginning…

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