by John Milton
Fly to and fro, or on the smoothèd plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
New rubbed with balm, expatiate774 and confer
Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd
Swarmed and were straitened; till the signal giv’n,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons778
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that pygmean race780
Beyond the Indian mount780, or faerie elves
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees783,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress785, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.
Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms
Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large,
Though without number still amidst the hall
Of that infernal court. But far within
And in their own dimensions like themselves
The great Seraphic lords and Cherubim
In close recess795 and secret conclave sat
A thousand demigods on golden seats,
Frequent797 and full. After short silence then
And summons read, the great consult798 began.
1. The first line’s introduction of an exemplary man recalls the epics of Homer and Vergil. Milton’s theme, however, is neither martial nor imperial but spiritual: humanity’s disastrous failure to obey God counterpoised by the promise of redemption. Of man’s: The proper name Adam is also the Hebrew word for generic man or humankind. He is both an individual male and, with Eve, the entire species: “so God created man …; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1.27). Of man translates the Hebrew for “woman” (Gen. 2.23). fruit: Its dual meanings (outcome, food) are put in play by enjambment, a primary formal device by which Milton draws out sense “from one verse into another” (The Verse).
4. one greater man: Jesus, second Adam (1 Cor. 15.21–22; Rom. 5.19). Cp. PR 1.1–4.
5. blissful seat: translates Vergil’s epithet for Elysium, Aen. 6.639.
6. Sing Heav’nly Muse: the verb and subject of the magnificently inverted sixteen-line opening sentence. By invoking a Muse, Milton follows a convention that dates from Homer. Yet Milton’s Muse is not the muse of classical epic (Calliope) but the inspiration of Moses, David, and the prophets (cp. 17–18n). secret: set apart, not common. When the Lord descends to give Moses the law, thick clouds and smoke obscure the mountaintop, and the people are forbidden on pain of death to cross boundaries around the mountain (Exod. 19.16, 23).
8. shepherd: The vocation of shepherd is a key vehicle for Milton’s integration of classical and scriptural traditions. Moses encounters God while tending sheep on Mount Horeb (Oreb) and later receives the law on Sinai, a spur of Horeb (Exod. 3; 19). (Or the doubling of names may simply acknowledge the inconsistency of Exod. 19.20 and Deut. 4.10.)
9. In the beginning: opening phrase of Genesis and the Gospel of John.
10. Chaos: classical term for the primeval state of being out of which God creates, also referred to as “the deep” (as in Gen. 1.2) and “the abyss” (as in l. 21). Sion hill: Mount Zion, site of Solomon’s Temple, “the house of the Lord” (1 Kings 6.1, 13). Adding to the persistent doubleness of the invocation, Milton requests inspiration from two scriptural sites associated with God’s presence and prophetic inspiration. Both sites receive dual designations: Mount Horeb/Sinai and Mount Zion/Siloa’s brook.
11–12. Siloa’s brook … God: spring whose waters flowed through an underground aqueduct, supplied a pool near (Fast by) Solomon’s Temple, and irrigated the king’s lush garden (cp. 4.225–30). Jerome says it ran directly beneath Mount Zion (A. Gilbert 1919, 269). Scripturally, it symbolizes David’s monarchical line (Isa. 7–8, esp. 8.6). In opening the eyes of the man born blind, Jesus sends him to wash his eyes with its waters (John 9). Cp. 3.30–31. oracle of God: the holiest place in the Temple, the tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant (1 Kings 6.19). The classical Muses haunt a spring (Aganippe) on Helicon (cp. 15n), “the sacred well, / That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring” (Lyc 15–16). In identifying the spring near the “Holy of Holies” as similarly a site of inspiration, Milton again links scriptural and classical prophetic and poetic traditions.
14. no middle flight: Milton will go beyond middle air, whose upper boundary is as high as the peaks of tall mountains, and soar to the highest Empyrean, the abode of God. His soaring ambition recalls the myth of Icarus, whose failure to follow a middle flight caused him to tumble into the sea (cp. 7.12–20).
15. Aonian mount: Helicon, Greek mountain favored by the Muses (cp. 11–12n). Hesiod says that while he tended sheep on Helicon (like Moses on Horeb), the Muses called him to sing of the gods (Theog. 22).
16. Translates the opening of Orlando Furioso (1.2) and is reminiscent of Masque 43–45; cp. similar claims by Lucretius (De Rerum Nat. 1.925–30) and Horace (Odes 3.1.2–4).
17–18. 1 Cor. 3.16–17, 6.19. The Spirit is the Holy Spirit (l. 21). In Milton’s theology, the diverse functions of the Holy Spirit derive from “the virtue and power of God the Father,” in this case “the force or voice of God, in whatever way it was breathed into the prophets” (CD 1.6, p. 1194). The site of revelation progresses from Horeb/Sinai to Sion hill/Siloa’s brook to, finally, the individual human heart.
21. brooding: Milton thus renders the Hebrew word translated as “moved” in the AV (Gen. 1.2) but as incubabat (brooded) in St. Basil and other Latin patristic authors (see also 7.235). Cp. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici: “This is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days hatched the world” (73).
24. argument: subject matter; cp. 9.28.
25. assert: take the part of, champion.
26. justify: vindicate; cp. Pope, Essay on Man: “Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,/But vindicate the ways of God to man” (1.15–16). Milton’s word order permits dual readings: either “justify (the ways of God to men)” or “justify (the ways of God) to men.” Cp. SA: “Just are the ways of God,/And justifiable to men” (293–94).
27–28. Milton introduces the narrative with a query, an epic convention; cp. “Tell me, O Muse, the cause” (Vergil, Aen. 1.8). Homer also depicts the Muses as all-knowing: “Tell me now, ye Muses that have dwellings on Olympus—for ye are goddesses and are at hand and know all things” (Il. 2.484–85).
29. grand: great, original, all-inclusive; cp. line 122.
30. fall off: deviate, revolt (as in l. 33).
33. Cp. Il. 1.8.
36. what time: when; cp. Masque 291, Lyc 28.
44–49. Him … arms: “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness” (2 Pet. 2.4; cp. Jude 6).
45. “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10.18); cp. Homer’s Hephaestus “hurled … from the heavenly threshold … headlong” (Il. 1.591–92).
46. ruin: a fall from a great height, from the Latin ruina; cp 6.867–68.
48. adamantine: unbreakable (Gk.); cp. Aeschylus’s Prometheus, clamped “in shackles of binding adamant that cannot be broken” (Prom. 6). The myth of adamant persists today; the indestructible claws of the Marvel Comics hero Wolverine are made of “adamantium.”
49. durst: dared.
50–52. The rebel angels regain consciousness after nine days falling from Heaven (6.871) and nine days rolling in the fiery gulf. Hesiod’s Titans fall nine days from heaven to earth and another nine from earth to Tartarus (Theog. 720–25). Milton, like many Christian mythographers, deemed the Titans’ rebellion a pagan analogue for Satan’s fall.
53. Confounded: destroyed. Combined with though immortal, it neatly defines
the Christian concept of damnation.
54. Reserved: “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6; cp. 2 Pet. 2.4). In CD, Milton cites these verses and others to show that “bad angels are kept for punishment” (1.9 in MLM 1218).
56. baleful: Of Old English origin, baleful signifies evil in both its active and its passive aspects. Satan’s eyes thus brim with his own suffering and with malice toward others.
57. witnessed: Like baleful, active and passive. Satan’s eyes express spite and woe and also observe it in the surrounding scene.
59. ken: “are able to see.” Possessive apostrophes do not appear in early modern texts, so that ken here could also mean “visual range” of angels. The word is used both as a verb and as a noun elsewhere in PL (5.265, 11.379).
63. darkness visible: Judged “difficult to imagine” by T. S. Eliot, the paradox has scriptural and classical precedents. See the description in Job of the realm of the dead, “where the light is as darkness” (10.22) or, in Euripides’ Bacchae, Pentheus’s command to imprison Dionysus “so that he may see only darkness” (510). Milton previously flirted with the paradox in Il Pens (79–80). Cp. Keats’s marginalia: “It can scarcely be conceived how Milton’s blindness might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions, as a bat in a large gothic vault” (Lau 74).
66–67. And rest … all: The inscription above the gate to Dante’s Hell reads, “Abandon every hope, who enter here” (Inf. 3.9). Cp. Euripides, Trojan Women (681–82).
67–68. but … urges: “The devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone … and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20.10). Still: constantly.
70. Cp. “the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25.41). Dante similarly depicts the inferno as an artifice of divine justice (Inf. 3.4).
72. utter darkness: destination of those excluded from the kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 8.12, 22.13, 25.30). The AV has “outer” instead of “utter”; cp. 3.16. The Geneva gloss on Matt. 8.12 explains, “there is nothing but mere darkness out of the kingdom of heaven.”
73–74. Homer, Hesiod, and Vergil precede Milton in expressing as a ratio distances between heaven, earth, and the pit of hell (Il. 8.16; Theog. 722–25; Aen. 6.577–79).
74. center: the earth, at the center of the Ptolemaic cosmos; pole: the point on the outside of the cosmic sphere closest to heaven.
78. welt’ring: rolling on waves; cp. Lyc 13.
81. Beëlzebub: Phoenician god at Ekron consulted by King Ahaziah (2 Kings 1.2). The name in Hebrew means “Lord of Flies.” In the Gospels, he is called “prince of the devils”; he was often identified with Satan (Matt. 12.24; cp. CD 1.9 in MLM 1219).
82. Satan: Hebrew word for adversary or enemy, first applied to Satan after his rebellion (5.658). He ultimately glories in the title (10.386–87).
84. If … fall’n: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (Isa. 14.12; cp. Vergil, Aen. 2.274). The appearance of the rebel angels is altered for the worse. They are also bereft of names (ll. 361–65). Hence Satan persists in the conditional salutation (l. 87).
98. high disdain: noble scorn. A relatively common reaction in an aristocratic era (Kerrigan 2000), it is characteristic of Satan (cp. 4.50, 82, 180).
103–5. Satan’s account differs from Raphael’s; cp. 6.832–34, 853–55.
107. study: pursuit.
109. “And what else does it mean ‘not to be overcome’?”
114. Doubted: feared for.
115. ignominy: can be pronounced “ig-no-min-y” or “ig-no-my” (as it was often spelled). In the former case, the terminal y would coalesce with and. Cp. 2.207, 6.383.
116. fate: Satan makes fate the ultimate authority, distinct from the deity, as in Homer. God later defines fate as what he wills, 7.173; cp. CD 1.2 in MLM 1145–46. The portrayal of fate as an independent governing principle is a feature of Stoic philosophy specifically criticized by Jesus in PR (4.313–18). gods: “Anyone can observe throughout the whole of the Old Testament … that angels often take upon them as their own the name … of God” (CD 1.5 in MLM 1185). God himself refers to the angels as gods (3.341). Cp. Herrick, Of Angels: “Angels are called gods; yet of them, none / Are gods, but by participation” (1–2).
117. empyreal substance: fiery essence, like the substance of Heaven; cp. 2.771. Heaven (the empyrean) and Hell both are based on the element of fire: in Hell it possesses only its destructive properties, in Heaven only its salutary ones. See 63n.
123. triumphs: Emphasis on the second syllable stresses a plosive-frictive fusion, as in harumph. It was common to accent the word thus.
125–27. Cp. Vergil’s depiction of the seemingly optimistic Aeneas after he has rallied his distressed comrades: “So spake his tongue; while sick with weighty cares he feigns hope on his face, and deep in his heart stifles the anguish” (Aen. 1.208–9).
128–29. powers … Seraphim: Thrones and Powers, like Seraphim, are angelic orders. The phrase thronèd powers invokes no specific order of angel, however. It instead indicates the dignity and spiritual nature of those led by Satan, including the Seraphim.
134. event: outcome.
141. glory: effulgence or brilliant, radiant light (see 63n, 117n). Glory is a word with a broad range of meaning in the poem (cp. in Book 1, ll. 39, 110, 239, 370, 594, 612; see Rumrich 1987, 3–52). extinct: (be) put out, extinguished.
144. Of force: perforce; cp. 4.813.
147. support: endure.
148. suffice: satisfy.
149–50. thralls/By right of war: slaves by conquest. “The effects and consequences of this right are infinite so that there is nothing so unlawful but the lord may do it to his slaves … there are no torments but what may with impunity be imposed on them, nothing to be done but what they may be forced to do by all manner of rigor and severity.” (Grotius, Rights 481; cp. CD 1.11).
152. deep: chaos; see 10n.
153–55. The question crystallizes Satan and Beëlzebub’s developing awareness of their plight: what possible advantage is there in being a mighty entity eternally sustained only to absorb eternal punishment?
158. Doing or suffering: The Stoic counterpoise of suffering and doing was a literary commonplace, with suicide sometimes seeming the active option. So Hamlet ponders whether it is nobler “to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.56–58). The antithesis is regularly and variously invoked in the first two books (see, e.g., 2.199) and later approaches personification in the characters of the aggressively suicidal Moloch and the craven Belial.
167. fail: err.
172. o’erblown hath laid: having blown over (or, having blown down from above) has calmed.
178. slip: neglect, miss.
182. livid: black and blue, like a bruise; furious.
186. afflicted: struck down, routed.
196. rood: a measure of length that varies from 5.5 to 8.0 yards (5.0 to 7.3 meters); a measure of land equal to a quarter acre, or 40 square rods (0.1 hectare).
198–99. Titanian … Typhon: In Greek myth the Titans, children of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaia), were of the generation before the Olympian gods. The Giants, monstrous and huge, were also Earth-born. The Titans and Giants warred against the Olympian gods on separate occasions, but the two battles were often confused. See 50–52n. Briareos was a Titan with a hundred hands; Typhon, a hundred-headed Giant, “the Earth-born dweller of the Cilician caves,” in Aeschylus’s phrase (Prom. 353–54; cp. Homer, Il. 2.783, Pindar, Pyth. 1.15).
200. Tarsus: the capital of ancient Cilicia.
201. Leviathan: gigantic sea beast, symbolic of God’s creative power (Job 41), but in Isa. 27.1 a target of divine judgment, identified as Satan by commentators. Cp. 7.412–16.
203–8. Tales of enormous sea creatures and of mariners who mist
ook them for islands were common, as were moral applications of such stories.
204. night-foundered: sunk in night.
207. lee: the side away from the wind and thus sheltered from it.
208. Invests: cloaks.
210–15. Chained … damnation: Cp. lines 239–41. Some readers regard this providential logic with disapproval. See Tennyson’s response, as recorded by his son Hallam: “I hope most of us have a higher idea in these modern times of the Almighty than this” (881).
224. horrid: bristling, spiky (as pointing spires suggests).
226. incumbent: pressing with his weight (cp. recumbent); cp. Spenser’s description of the dragon’s flight, FQ 1.11.18.
230. hue: not simply color but also form or aspect. Cp. Shakespeare, Sonnets (20.7).
230–35. as … winds: Milton’s account of Etna erupting echoes Vergil in diction (thund’ring, entrails), but unlike Vergil, he describes a geological process rather than trace the eruption to a pent-up giant (Aen. 3.571–77). The seismic violence attributed to wind trapped underground is similarly described by Ovid (Met. 15.296–306) and Lucretius (On the Nature of Things 6.535–607). Cp. 6.195–98; SA 1647–48.
232. Pelorus: Cape Faro, promontory of northeastern Sicily, near Etna.
234. fueled … fire: combustible interior (entrails) igniting from the force of the wind and spreading.
235. Vaporized (sublimed) by the intense heat of burning rock, the fuel-laden interior becomes hot mineral gas that augments the wind expelled from the shattered side of the mountain.
239. Stygian flood: body of water like the river Styx; the fiery gulf (52).
240–41. Satan and Beëlzebub contradict the narrator’s explanation (ll. 210–15). Cp. Homer’s Aias, who, having been saved from the sea by Poseidon, “declared that it was in spite of the gods that he had escaped the great gulf” (Od. 4.504). Poseidon immediately kills him.
244. change: exchange.
252. possessor: one who occupies without ownership (a legal term).
253. Cp. Horace, “the sky not the mind changes in one who crosses the sea” (Epist. 1.11.27). Young Milton adopted this as his motto (Hanford 98).
