That is how one modern writer told this great story. It will certainly be told many times again, and each time differently. I think it is the central story of our lives, the story that more than any other tells us what it means to be human. But however many times it is told in the future, and however many different interpretations are made of it, I don’t think that the version created by Milton, blind and aging, out of political favour, dictating it day by day to his daughter, will ever be surpassed.
INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TWELVE BOOKS OF PARADISE LOST
Book I
I love the audacity of this opening—the sheer nerve of Milton’s declaring that he’s going to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” to “justify the ways of God to men.” How could anyone fail to thrill to a story that begins like this? How could any reader not warm to a poet who dares to say it?
As the story begins, we meet the rebel angels as they lie stunned and vanquished on the burning lake in hell. Surely there’s no way out for them? But when we read the great description of Satan calling his legions together, with his shield hanging on his shoulders like the moon and his spear mightier than the tallest pine, we realise that the story is in safe hands. The rebels raise the palace of Pandemonium, with its monstrous grandeur, and gather to decide what they should do. They haven’t been destroyed: “war / Open or understood must be resolved.”
Book II
The leaders of the rebel angels debate their next course of action, and decide to take their revenge by seducing the “new race called Man” to their party.
Satan sets off alone to undertake this great task, and the rest of the book concerns his journey to the gates of hell and out into the chaos beyond, and ends with a glimpse of the distant new world hanging in a golden chain, no bigger than a star beside the moon, beautiful and ignorant of the malice moving towards it.
Apart from that magical cliffhanger of an ending, what never fails to thrill me in Book II is the sensuous power of the language, from the opening “where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,” through the savage wilderness that Satan traverses with such labour and determination: “O’er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, / With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, / And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.” No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.
Book III
We open with an invocation to light, and a reminder of the poet’s own blindness; but with magnificent confidence, Milton evokes the names of blind poets and prophets of classical antiquity, including no less a name than Homer (Maeonides), and calmly, despite his tactful disavowal (“were I equalled with them in renown”) assumes his right to be counted in their company.
In this Book we meet God the Father, and begin to see what Blake meant; for almost the first thing God does is to forecast the Fall of man, and immediately go on to say, “Whose fault? / Whose but his own?” in that unattractive whine we hear from children who, caught at a scene of mischief, seek at once to put the blame on someone else.
Satan, meanwhile, lands in our world, deceiving the angel Uriel, “For neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible”—another indication that Milton is concerned in this story with psychological truth as much as any other kind.
Book IV
The psychological theme continues, as Book IV opens with Satan’s savage self-examination: “Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell,” and his resolution, “Evil be thou my good.” This great speech functions exactly like a Shakespearian soliloquy, both advancing the story and plumbing the depths of self-exploration. It’s a reminder, perhaps, that Milton originally thought of making this story into a drama. However, no scenery for the stage of Milton’s time could ever have depicted the landscape of Paradise—the breadth of it, and all its myriad details—as richly as his verse does here.
The setting established, Milton brings on Adam and Eve, “with native honour clad / In naked majesty”: something else, perhaps, that would have been difficult to show on the stage at that period, essential as it is to the story. As Satan watches their innocent loveliness and delight in the physical world, his self-torment turns to self-delusion, and he advances political reasons—“public reason just…compels me now / To do what else though damned I should abhor”—to justify his action.
The angels under the command of Gabriel, uneasy and watchful, discover Satan in the form of a toad whispering in the ear of the sleeping Eve, and he confronts them in a scene that both expresses his romantic defiance of their authority and reveals his psychological complexity: “abashed the devil stood, / And felt how awful goodness is, and saw / Virtue in her shape how lovely, saw, and pined / His loss.” Stage or no stage, Milton’s storytelling is intensely dramatic.
Book V
Unease: that is the tone that begins Book V. Satan’s whispers have brought Eve disturbing dreams. Satan himself is absent from this Book in a direct way, as he is from the next three, although his actions have set everything in motion, and the talk is of no one but him; there is no doubt who is dominating the narrative.
Adam and Eve pray, and God sends the angel Raphael to warn them of the danger lurking nearby, and to make sure, by telling them clearly, that they won’t be able to plead ignorance later on. Again, something in Milton leads him to show a petty and legalistic side of God the Father, which is quite different from his view of the Son. When Raphael is welcomed by Adam and Eve, there is a curious passage where Milton becomes unnecessarily (it seems to me) literal about whether angels can eat, and if so, what, and what happens to the food once eaten. That’s the sort of thing that happens when a storyteller takes his eye off the impulse of the story for a moment.
The rest of the Book is Raphael’s account of the origins of the war in heaven: of how God’s announcement that he had begotten the Son provoked the envy of Satan and some other angels, and of how they withdrew to the north to plot their rebellion, and of how one among them, Abdiel—“Among the faithless, faithful only he”—defied them and set off back to the armies of God.
Book VI
Raphael continues his account of the war: he tells of how Abdiel, a champion of God now, challenged Satan and stuck him a mighty blow, and how Michael gave the order for the heavenly hosts to engage the enemy, and himself dealt Satan a grievous wound, which humbled his pride.
Raphael’s account goes on to tell of how the rebel angels, in that first night of the war, dug mines, extracted metal, mingled “sulphurous and nitrous foam” to make gunpowder, and made great guns. The description of their effect is very powerful: their roar “Embowelled with outrageous noise the air, / And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul / Their devilish glut, chained thunderbolts and hail / Of iron globes.” At first thrown back by these weapons of mass destruction, Michael and his forces retreated in confusion, but soon rallied; and so another day of battle passed.
On the third day, as God the Father had ordained, the Son triumphed, and hurled the rebels down into hell, which is where we found Satan and his hosts at the beginning of Book I.
Once again, for this reader at least, it’s difficult to warm to a God who watches complacently while his forces suffer terrible punishment, deliberately waiting before letting the Son rout the enemy so as to make his triumph seem more splendid: “that the glory may be thine / Of ending this great war.” That’s not divinity: it’s public relations. We don’t have to think that this was a deliberate strategy on Milton’s part; it’s not uncommon for writers to be unaware of exactly what effect their portrayal of this character or that is having on the reader. Blake’s point was that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.
Book VII
Milton invokes the aid of Urania, once known as the Muse of Astronomy, but then immediately denies that s
he is one of the classical nine: this is some other muse, the sister of Wisdom. Astronomy would have been appropriate, because this Book contains Raphael’s account of God’s creation of the world—not just our earth, but the whole universe, “Of amplitude almost immense, with stars / Numerous, and every star perhaps a world / Of destined habitation.”
Once again Satan is offstage, and the chief interest of this Book is in the glorious description of the emerging natural world: “last / Rose as in dance the stately trees, and spread / Their branches hung with copious fruit.” And it is in the invocation to Urania that Milton speaks of his own difficult, almost desperate situation, “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.” But he is comforted by the thought that Urania will govern his song, and (in a phrase that has sustained many a solitary writer) will “fit audience find, though few.”
Book VIII
The four central Books of Paradise Lost, ending with this one, function as a sort of flashback in the main story. Strictly speaking, they’re not, because the main framing narrative continues to move forward in time, but we experience them as a flashback, because all that the main narrative shows us is characters who tell each other what happened at an earlier stage.
Here in Book VIII Adam and Raphael continue to talk about the origins of things, and Adam manifests that curiosity that is already a dominating human characteristic. Raphael’s advice about that is to curb it: “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid; /…be lowly wise.” Easier said than done, we might think. And Raphael himself displays some of this quality when he asks Adam to tell him about his own creation, which happened when Raphael was elsewhere; so Adam tells of his awakening, his wish for a companion, and the creation of Eve. Again comes a warning from Raphael, who advises Adam not to be intoxicated by her beauty, which is “worthy well / Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, / Not thy subjection.” However, when Adam asks whether angels themselves express their love in a physical way, Raphael blushes: not only do angels eat, as we saw in Book V, it seems that they can experience a gaseous kind of sexual intercourse. And with that, the long digression comes to an end.
Book IX
This is the longest Book in the poem, and in some ways the most astonishing. Milton’s powers as a dramatic storyteller come to their highest point as he deals with the encounter between Satan and Eve. His account of the psychological and moral progression of the seduction scene itself, as well as of the ensuing reactions of Adam and Eve and their mutual recrimination, are unsurpassed in any novel or drama I know.
Once again we see how much more interesting, as a character, Satan is than God: for instance, when he gazes at Eve’s innocent beauty, and finds that:
her every air
Of gesture or least action overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good.
[LINES 459–465]
And all the imagery of which Milton is a master is fully deployed: Satan moves towards Eve
with tract oblique
At first, as one who sought access, but feared
To interrupt, sidelong he works his way.
As when a ship by skilful steersman wrought
Nigh river’s mouth or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail.
[LINES 510–515]
Their encounter is the point towards which all the rest of the story has moved. I imagine Milton looking forward to this great scene from the moment he first conceived it; I imagine him measuring his powers against it, and finding them equal to the magnitude of the task, and working with a fierce and sober joy.
Book X
And now all the sorry consequences begin to unfold. God has seen everything, and forgives the angels who were set to guard Paradise, because they could not have prevented Satan’s deed. The Father sends the altogether more sympathetic Son to judge the fallen pair, and he pronounces a curse on the serpent.
Apart from the continuing psychological interest of the course of guilt and repentance in the minds of Adam and Eve, and their saddened understanding of the new state of things, all of which is very subtly conveyed, we see how the whole framework of nature is unsettled by their action; because God commands the angels to tilt the axis of the earth so as to cause the seasons, and bring “pinching cold and scorching heat” where previously a perpetual spring “smiled on earth with vernant flowers.”
Furthermore, Sin and Death have been building a stupendous bridge between this universe and hell, and they enter the world and begin to sow discord among the animals: “Beast now with beast gan war, and fowl with fowl, / And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, / Devoured each other.”
In this Book we see the last of Satan, who returns to hell, as he thinks, in triumph, only to hear his speech greeted with “A dismal universal hiss, the sound / Of public scorn.” He and all the devils find themselves changed into serpents, and are tormented further by the appearance of a tree exactly like the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise, whose fruit, to them, tastes like nothing but ashes. This medieval comic-grotesque scene of degradation is a pitiful comedown for a great romantic hero. From now on, all the interest in the poem belongs to humanity, and to history.
Book XI
God decrees that Adam and Eve shall leave Paradise, and sends the angel Michael to drive them out. But before they go, Michael shows Adam a vision of all that is to come, and reveals everything that will happen to his descendants up to the time of the Flood. This may or may not be fascinating to a modern reader; what remains absorbing to me is the growing humanity of Adam and Eve, and the subtle play of emotions—fear leavened by hope, sorrow tempered by resolution—that characterises their new and fallen state.
Book XII
Michael continues his foretelling of history up to the life and death of Christ, and beyond, including a severely Protestant view of the development of the church: “Wolves shall succeed for teacher, grievous wolves. / Who all the sacred mysteries of heaven / To their own vile advantages shall turn / Of lucre and ambition.” However, finally after long ages all shall be well: “New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date / Founded in righteousness and peace and love / To bring forth fruits joy and eternal bliss.” Eve, who has been sleeping, wakes to tell of a comforting dream: “By me the promised seed shall all restore.”
And then come the final twenty-five lines of this great poem, which we can only read and wonder at. “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon” is so simple, so truthful, and so generous that it reminds us that no work can be truly great if it is not about ourselves, and unless it tells us what it is like to be alive.
Afterword
There are many ways to read this poem, but if you fall under its spell you will want to understand it as well as you can; and that means, at the very least, seeing all the patterns of imagery, discovering the meanings of all the classical references, untangling the occasionally complicated cosmology, and understanding the structures of rhetoric that shape the whole work. In a reading like this one, ten thousand jewels have had to lie untouched.
Sparse notes are better than none, if they are accurate. But in my own reading I have found no better and fuller guide than Alastair Fowler’s annotated edition in the Longman series. Fowler’s notes are rich, complete and unfailingly helpful; they are a model of what annotations should be, and of the luminous understanding that a critical intelligence can reach.
THESE INTRODUCTIONS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS IN THEIR WORLD’S CLASSICS EDITION OF PARADISE LOST (2005).
The classroom as a
torture chamber, interrogating poetry until it confesses: I stand by that image.
The Origin of the Universe
THE STORYTELLING OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO A LECTURE BY STEPHEN HAWKING
On origin myths and origin accounts, the excitement of science, the misreadings of fundamentalists, and our responsibilities
Stephen Hawking’s account of the origin of the universe told a story of great brilliance and clarity. The questions “Why are we here?” and “Where did we come from?” are very good ones, and we all find ourselves asking them on the day we begin to grow up. When we’re children, other questions occupy us; we want to know why we can’t have more ice cream, and why we have to go to bed right now, and why nothing is fair; but on the day we begin to grow up, which is usually in our early adolescence, we find Professor Hawking’s questions becoming more and more interesting. Of course, some people stop growing up, and then they stop asking those questions. They ask other questions instead, such as “What’s on TV tonight?” or “Where can I get the best return for my investments?”
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