JOHN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST (BOOK-II)

The violation of the normal English word-order and other elements in Milton’s epic blank-verse, which have upset some purists, are carefully and systematically employed in order to achieve different kinds of emotional pitch, to effect continuity and integration in the weaving of the epic design and all to sustain the poem as a poem and to keep it from disintegrating into isolated fragments of high rhetoric.

David Daiches: The Use of Blank –Verse in Paradise Lost.

It is a well-known complaint among the readers of Paradise Lost, that they can hardly keep themselves from sympathizing, in some sort, with Satan, as

the hero of the poem. The most probable account of which surely is, that the author himself partook largely of the haughty and vindictive republican

spirit, which he has assigned to the character, and consequently, though perhaps unconsciously, drew the portrait with a peculiar zest.

Josiah Conder: The Hero of Paradise Lost.

To Adam and Eve are given, during their innocence, such sentiments as innocence can generate and utter. Their love is pure benevolence and

mutual veneration; their repasts are without luxury, and their diligence without toil. Their addresses to their Maker have little more than the voice of

admiration and gratitude. Fruition left them nothing to ask, and Innocence left them nothing to fear.

Johnson.

To read Paradise Lost with appreciation and understanding, those readers of the poem who have been deprived by twentieth century doubts and denials

of the privilege of reading it with a faith comparable to its author’s must accept the story as they accept Homeric fable. Whether we believe in a

family of gods on Olympus or not, we must accept them as agents in Homer’s story. Whether we believe as Milton does, or whether we do not, in

the interference in the affairs of men of a personal God, his son, his angels and his enemies, we must accept them as agents in Milton’s story.

John S. Diekhoff: Intimate Knowledge of the Bible Necessary for a Proper

Understanding and Enjoyment of Paradise Lost.

Three poets in three distant ages born

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.

The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,

The next in majesty, in both the last.

The force of nature could no farther go:

To make a third she joined the former two.

John Dryden.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at

liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the

Devil’s party without knowing it.

William Blake

“would be quite surcharged with her own weight,

And strangl’d with her waste fertility;

Th’ earth cumber’d, and the wing’d air dark’t with plumes,

The herds would over-multitude their Lords,

The Sea o’refraught would swell…”

While the former (Shakespeare) darts himself forth, and passes into all forms of

human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other

attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things

and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while

Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.

S.T. Coleridge

OF MAN’S FIRST DISOBEDIENCE, AND THE FRUIT

OF THAT FORBIDDEN TREE, WHOSE MORTAL TASTE

BROUGHT DEATH INTO THE WORLD, AND ALL OUR WOE,

WITH LOSS OF EDEN, TILL ONE GREATER MAN

RESTORE US, AND REGAIN THE BLISSFUL SEAT,

SING HEAVENLY MUSE, THAT ON THE

SECRET TOP

OF OREB, OR OF SINAI, DIDST INSPIRE

THAT SHEPHERD, WHO FIRST TAUGHT THE CHOSEN SEED,

IN THE BEGINNING HOW THE HEAVENS AND EARTH

ROSE OUT OF CHAOS:

Of smallest Magnitude close by

the Moon.

“Since first this Subject for Heroic Song

Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late;

Not sedulous by Nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the onely Argument

Heroic deem’d, chief maistrie to dissect

With long and tedious havoc fabl’d Knights

In Battles feigned; the better fortitude

Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom

Unsung.”

-------What surmounts the reach

Of human sense, I shall delineate so,

By linking spiritual to corporeal forms

As may express them best; though what if earth

Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth in thought…

High on a throne of royal state, which far

Outshone the wealth or Ormus and of Ind,

Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand

Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit raised

To that bad eminence; and, from despair

Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires

Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught,

His proud imaginations thus displayed:

MY ANALYSIS

THE ARGUMENT

The consultation begun Satan debates whether another battle be to be

hazarded for the recovery of Heaven: some advise it, others dissuade. A

third proposal is preferred, mentioned before by Satan- to search the truth

of that prophecy or tradition in Heaven concerning another world, and

another kind of creature, equal, or not much inferior, to themselves, about

this time to be created. Their doubt who shall be sent on this difficult

search: Satan, their chief, undertakes alone the voyage; is honoured and

applauded. The council thus ended, the rest betake them several ways and

to several employments, as their inclinations lead them, to entertain the

time till Satan return. He passes on his journey to Hell-gates; finds them

shut, and who sat there to guard them; by whom at length they are opened

and discover to him the great gulf between Hell and Heaven. With what

difficulty he passes through, directed by Chaos, the Power of that place, to

the sight of this new World which he sought.

The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these

unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful ;

and where cankerworms abound, what wonder of its young flower was

blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which

appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his

susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a

blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the

succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true

greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly

inflicted.

The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats’s life were not made

known to me until the Elegy was ready for the press. I am given to

understand that the criticism of Endymion was exasperated by the bitter

sense of unrequited benefits; the poor fellow seems to have been hooted

from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise

of his genius than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his

care. He was accompanied to Rome, and attended in his last illness, by Mr.

Severn, a young artist of the highest premise, who, I have been informed,

‘almost risked his own life, and sacrificed every prospect to unwearied

attendance upon his dying friend. ‘Had I known these circumstances

before the completion of my poem, I should have been tempted to add my

feeble tribute of applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous

man finds in the recollection of his own motives. Mr. Severn can dispense

with a reward from ‘such stuff as dreams are made of.’ His conduct is a

unextinguished spirit of his illustrious friend animate the creations of his

pencil, and plead against oblivion for his name!

It is my intention to subjoin to the London edition of this poem a criticism

upon the claims of its lamented object to be classed among the writers of

the highest genius who have adorned our age. My known repugnance to

the narrow principles of taste on which several of his earlier compositions

were modeled prove at least that I am an impartial judge. I consider the

fragment of Hyperion as second to nothing that was ever produced by a

writer of the same years.

John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his twenty-fourth year on

the ---of ---1821; and was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of

the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius

and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which

formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among

the ruins, covered in the winter with violets and daisies. It might make

one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a

place.

The very subject matter of the epic lends itself to the grand manner. The

result is that Milton’s style and presentation touches now heights of

sublimity. He leaves his mark throughout the epic with his grand style and

remarkable use of blank verse.

“Poison came, Bion, to thy mouth, that thus was

poison-stained. How did it come to the lips of one like

thee and was not made sweet? And what mortal, was so

cruel as to mix for thee the poison, or give it thee, while

thou didst sing? Surely he is one who fled from music.”

Moschus: Epitaphium Bionis

It may be well said that these wretched men know not what they do. They

scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the

poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one like

Keats’s composed of more penetratable stuff. One of their associates is, to

my knowledge, a most base and unprincipled calumniator. As to

Endymion, was it a poem, whatever might be its defects, to be treated

contemptuously by those who had celebrated, with various degrees of

complacency and panegyric, Paris, and Woman, and A Syrian Tale, and

Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of

illustrious obscure? Are these the men who in their venal good nature

presumed to draw a parallel between the Rev. Mr. Milman and Lord

Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those

camels? Against what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these

literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? Miserable man! You, one

of the meanest, have not wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of

the workmanship of God…Nor shall it be your excuse that, murderer as you

are, you have spoken daggers, but used none.

Book-II of Paradise Lost is easily Milton’s most outstanding writing in

poetry. The epic poem contains high drama, crisp narrative, vivid

description and striking character portrayal.

The conclave gives Milton the opportunity to come out with realistic

portrayal of his characters. Satan sets the tone for the debate by asserting

his position as the first among the fallen angels. In this debate Milton

brings to bear his scholarship and study of oratory giving the participants

majesty of eloquence both in its sweep and dimension.

The high water mark of Book-I is its heightened narration and

description. Book II has high drama, sharp characterization and

sustained descriptive and narrative qualities. The canvas is vast and Book

II gets off the ground with a major conclave of fallen angels planning how

to salvage their fall.

….Or if Sion Hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow'd

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous songs

The most notable thing in the portrayal of the leaders of the fallen angels

is that they impress us with their indomitable courage and unflinching

determination. Milton describes the might, wisdom and eloquence of the

fallen angels with such sublime power that the defiance that they hurl

towards the vault of Heaven seems for the moment something more than

an empty boast. They actually effect one great conquest in Hell: the victory

of unconquerable will over adversity.

The fallen angels respond nobly to call of their great leader and rouse

themselves with matchless fortitude from their physical and mental

prostration. Such an undaunted struggle against the force of adverse

circumstances cannot fail to attract the deepest sympathy. Natural

tendency of human nature to sympathise with the weaker side often makes

the reader of an epic poem feel more affection and admiration for the

defeated adversary than the victorious hero.

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime

As the leaders of the fallen angels deliver their harangues it becomes clear

as its usual on such occasions that the views of the leader are going to

prevail. Satan emerges from the conclave as the unquestioned leader. In a

few deft and powerful touches Milton has given every leader a distinctive

personality and an approach of his own. The debate gives the poet an

opportunity to draw finely contoured beings. The participants are acutely

differentiated so that their speeches stand neatly on platforms of party and

principle. Each suggestion put forward by the leaders reveals the

characteristic virtues of its advocate-courage in Moloch, clarity in Belial,

self-reliance in Mammon’s plan for economic development and in

Beelzebub an echo of Satan.

Satan’s journey through Chaos has the makings of epic adventure. As he

starts on his journey he raises the hopes of the fallen angels about a turn

in their fortunes. Milton’s description of the fallen angels while their

leader is away on an expedition to the new world is one of the grandest

things in the whole epic. When their minds were lifted to some extent by

the hopes mixed by Satan, they broke up their military formation and

engaged themselves in various pursuits. Some of them spent their time on

the plain, some uplifted on the wing sported in the air, and some entered

into a race- like the Olympian or Parthian games. As armies rush to battle

in the clouds so the fallen angels contended on the plain and in the air.

Others with more fury began to rend up rocks and hills and swept through

the air like a whirlwind.

The strong point about Book Ii is its narrative which grips and sustains the

reader’s interest till the very end. Though an epic, the call to action

creates intense reader interest. The announcement about the creation of a

new world and a new type of being called ‘man’ in it has all the interest

and curiosity of science fiction. Satan throws the gauntlet before the

assembled audience that the new world should be discovered and the

creature called man should be lured to join the revolt against God.

The significance of Book II lies in the use of superb epic similes, each a

wonderful picture in itself. Moreover these similes are not merely

decorative, they have undertones of meaning. Milton’s description of

Chaos and Satin’s journey through it form one of the grandest and most

original portions of the epic. The final passage of Book II describes how

Satan passes through the gates of Hell and makes his way through Chaos

through the newly created universe. Heaven, Earth and the underworld

are traditional settings in epic poetry but Chaos, Milton’s fourth setting,

has no precedent. Mason says about Milton’s description of Chaos that

every part of this description of the deep of Chaos as seen upwards from Hell

Gates is minutely studied and considered. Altogether it would be difficult

to quote a passage from any poet so rich in purposely accumulated

perplexities, learned and political, or in which such a care is taken and so

successfully, to compel the mind to a rackingly intense conception of sheer

inconceivability. In his description of Chaos, Milton suggests that it is not

so much a place or something occupying space but a state of mind. There is

nothing innately evil about this real. Evil is the perversion of order. Hell

founded on the principle. Evil be thou my Good, is a parody of Heaven.

Chaos on the contrary is a state of simple disorder.

Milton’s style of writing has a sense of grandeur about it, a style that suits

epic poetry giving both his thought and expression the highest sublimity.

The two definitions of epic give us the elements, both of form and style of

the epic: “a narrative poem, organic in structure, dealing with great

actions and great characters in a style commensurate with the lordliness

of its theme, which tends to idealise these characters and actions, and to

sustain and embellish its subject by means of episode and amplification.”

The epic in general, ancient and modern, may be described as “a

dispassionate recital in dignified rhythmic narrative of a momentous

theme or action fulfilled by heroic characters and supernatural agencies

under the control of a sovereign destiny. The theme involves political or

religious interest of a people or of a mankind. It commands the respect

due to popular tradition or to traditional ideals. The poem awakens the

sense of the mysterious: the awful, and the sublime; through perilous crisis

it uplifts and calms the strife of frail humanity.”

Hell seemed to burst with a wild tumult. Others milder in character took

themselves to a silent valley and sang angel songs to the accompaniment

of a harp. Others sat on a hill and carried on discourses. Some others

explored the vast region of Chaos to see if they could discover a softer

climate. It has been stated that Milton was only following classical

convention in describing the occupations of the fallen angels. It must be

accepted however that Milton’s aim in giving this description was not only

to follow a classical convention but to give a significant place to this

episode in the epic. The episode is full of striking imagery that captures the

reader’s mind.

Then there is Satan’s confrontation with Sin and Death- a description that

reveals the characters of all three and is at the same time revolting.

…thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss

And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark

Certain passages in Book II have a positive moral appeal and without

being moralistic, these passages convey the meaning sought to be

conveyed. This is because Milton conveys his message discreetly and

indirectly only when there is need to do so and when the reader’s moral

strength needs to be strengthened.

In Paradise Lost, we find all the familiar features of the epic such as

war, single combats, perilous journeys, beautiful gardens, marvelous

buildings, visions of the world and the future, expositions of the

structure of the universe, and scenes in Heaven and in Hell. Yet all these

are so transformed that their significance and even their aesthetic

appeal are new. The reason is that Milton has grafted his epic manner

on to subject which lies outside the main epic tradition. By taking his

subject from the Bible he had to make the machinery of epic conform to

a spirit and to a tradition far removed from Virgil. Before him the best

literary epic had been predominately secular, he made it theological,

and the change of approach meant a great change of temper and of

atmosphere. The old themes are introduced in all their traditional

dignity, but in Milton’s hands they take on a different significance and

contribute to a different end.

Book II, like Book I, has a number of epic similes. Indeed there are as

many as ten similes of this kind here. In this kind of simile, a writer starts

with a comparison between, say A and B; but the second member grows

bigger and bigger until it eclipses the first, with the result that while the

comparison is effectively made the first, with the result that while

comparison is effectively made and the idea conveyed successfully, the

attendant imagery seem to be even more important.

Paradise Lost may properly be classed among the greatest epic poems,

though its theme is neither mythical nor historical. The theme of Paradise

Lost is biblical and religious. This poem is undoubtedly one of the highest

efforts of the poetical genius; and in respect of majesty and sublimity, it is

by no means inferior to any known epic poem, ancient or modern. It

follows the Greek model of epic poetry. The central event of this epic poem is

the fall of man. The subject is derived from the Old Testament; and it is

astonishing how, from the few hints given in that scripture, Milton was

able to raise so complete and regular a structure in his poem.

Indeed there are as many as ten similes of this kind here. In this kind of

simile, a writer starts with a comparison between, say A and B; but the

second member grows bigger and bigger until it eclipses the first, with the

result that while the comparison is effectively made the first, with the result

that while comparison is effectively made and the idea conveyed

successfully, the attendant imagery seem to be even more important.

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the heighth of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.

When the meeting of the fallen angels has come to an end, Satan’s

supremacy is described to us in words which heighten our impression of his

greatness in the midst of his infernal peers, he seems to be their mighty

paramount; he seems to be alone the Antagonist of Heaven; he seems to be

no less than Hell’s dread emperor with pomp supreme and God-like

imitated state. Round him at this time are a cluster of fiery seraphim who

carry their bright and horrendous weapons. Thus not only has Satan

spoken in a tone of self aggrandisement. But his dignity and majesty have

been emphasized by the author also. Of course, this does not mean that

Satan is the true epic hero; but this that does mean that he has been

endowed by Milton with a number of heroic traits.

One important effect of such similes is to contribute to the grandeur of the

poem and thus to heighten its epic character. For instance, the murmur of

applause which comes from the fallen angels at the end of Mammon’s

speech is compared to the sound of raging winds which have subsided. This

simile leads us to imagine hollow rocks, a storm which has been blowing

furiously over the ocean all night, a number of tired sailors who have kept

watch all night, a boat which now lies anchored in a rocky bay. A little

later, the sounds which are heard in a valley when the clouds have

dissolved and the sun has begun to shine brightly once again.

A characteristic of Milton’s literary style in Book II of Paradise Lost is the

extensive use of the epic simile to convey to his readers the grandeur and

the sweep of the epic poem. In this matter Milton has the benefit of his

predecessors like Homer, Virgil, Spenser and others. Milton was influenced

by them to such an extent that he often borrowed their similes. However, he

comes out best as the user of the epic simile when he is original and his

treatment of nature, myth and legend, travel and science and technical

arts.

And found no end in wandering mazes lost,

Here again the comparison does not just end here, but develops into an

elaborate and lovely Nature picture. In another comparison, we are made

to visualize Satan burning like a comet in the sky. Another simile brings

to our minds the fury of Hercules who, in his agony began to uproot the

pine-trees of Thessaly and who flung his servant Liches into the ocean. In

this way the epic similes or the long-tailed similes as they are also known,

add to the interest of the narrative and enrich the poem.

The first simile is seen in the murmur of applause which comes from the

fallen angels at the end of Mammon’s speech. This is compared to the

sound of dying winds after a storm, heard among the caves and rocks of

the coast that still retain the sound of the wind because though the storm

has ceased, the wind still continues murmuring among the rocks though

elsewhere it seems to have died away. An elaborate nature picture has

been drawn and this simile has drawn laudatory references from critics.

An epic simile as used by Milton is as long comparison of an event, object

or person with something essentially different. In the hands of Milton the

epic simile becomes a means to produce the desired effect. The writer starts

with a comparison say between A and B. as the comparison progresses, B

becomes bigger than A until it completely eclipses the first. This kind of

comparison is known as the epic simile, the long-tailed simile or the

Homeric simile.

Some critics have suggested that Milton makes use of the epic similes for

their own sake and as a result they are not integral to the epic. This

criticism may be discounted because the simile as used by Milton

conspicuously heightens the grandeur of the poem. Nor would it be correct

to state the similes are too highbrow or pedantic to go down well with the

general reader.

In the hands of Milton, the epic simile becomes a thing of pure joy. His art

lies in choosing the right word and packing the maximum meaning in

the minimum of words. Milton uses the simile to drive home a point

through an elaborate manner of presentation. It at once makes the

meaning clear through a vivid presentation. Milton makes use of a

natural occurrence, a classical allusion, a historical or actual event as

the basis for his similes. The means may be different in each case, but the

end is the same-the simile contributes to the epic grandeur of the poem.

In the next epic simile a comparison has been drawn between the athletic

contest of fallen angels and the strange appearances of the Aurora

Borealis in the sky which in the old days was supposed to portend wars and

which to the fanciful mind has the appearance of the armies fighting in

the sky. The simile reminds us of those strange sights which are sometimes

seen in the sky and which are supposed to signify ill fortune to human

beings. Milton here suggests by comparison the devilish activities of the

fallen angels who are no longer angels but have become devils. There is

another simile drawn from Greek mythology when due to an error

committed by the wife of Hercules he met with a painful death. The

purpose of the simile is to suggest that the angels are driven to feats of

desperation born of the agonies of hell.

Another celebrated simile compares Satan with outstretched wings to a

fleet of the largest ships then known-the Indiamen. It is an elaborate

picture that Milton has drawn and shows his love of exotic scenes and

associations. Just as a fleet of ships would appear to a distant observer to

be floating above the water and hanging in the clouds, so seemed Satan,

as he fled in the far distance pushing forward to cross the bounds of Hell.

It has been described as one of the most striking of Milton’s similes.

In the second epic simile the sounds of the joys of the fallen angels are

compared to the joyous sounds which are heard in a valley when the

clouds have faded away and the sun shines brightly again. The joy felt by

the fallen angels provides an occasion for Milton to bring before the

reader’s mind a most pleasing scene of Nature. The simile is important

because it marks a transition from the infernal debate of the fallen angels

and suggests a renewal of hope among them.

Satan has been compared to various objects. In confrontation with Death

he is compared to a comet with its horrid tail portending national

disasters and war. On another occasion the encounter between Satan and

Death is compared to two black clouds hovering “front to front”. It is a

nature picture showing nature red in tooth and claw.

In the hands of Milton, the epic simile is not a trick of style but comes alive

through a richness of comparison and an imaginative intensity of feeling.

The next simile relates to the figure of Sin. The dogs which surround the

figure of Sin at the waist are compared to the dogs which tormented the

monster Scylla and then to the dogs which attend on Hecate, the queen of

witches. Here the reference is to classical mythology.

On a third occasion Satan flying through the air is compared to the

monster Gryphon who is half-eagle and half-lion who chased the one-eyed

man who had stolen the gold kept in the custody of the Gryphon. The

comparison is brought out that Satan was travelling with the same

expectancy as the Gryphon.

As Milton depicts him there is something majestic about Satan as he sits

high on a “throne of royal estate”, ready to make the first speech to the

assembly of fallen angels gathered in the hall of Pandemonium.

Satan rises to his full height as a leader as he by turn humours, cajoles

and ultimately wins the confidence of the fallen angels. Satan may have

been expelled from Heaven with his fallen angels but it has not affected his

spirits. In fact he sees himself as the leader of the fallen angels. Yet he is

careful enough not to make the other angels feel that he has usurped this

position. As one used to the art of double speak he plays it both ways. He

lauds the fallen angels for making him their leader of their own choice.

In the same breath he talks of his leadership position almost as a matter of

divine right and in accordance with the fixed laws of Heaven. In order to

ensure that what he says goes down well with the fallen angels, he holds

forth on the hazards of his leadership where he stands exposed to greater

risks and dangers than all of them. As such he believes there will be no

need for any of them to feel jealous of his position. Ostensibly he asks his

followers to choose between an open war against God or action through

“covert guile”. But of, Satan has already made up his mind about his

strategy and is cleverly covering up his decision by giving it the

appearance of a consensus.

Mammon is the next speaker after Belial and he more or less underwrites

whatever Belial has said. He rejects the concept of war against God and is

in favour of maintaining the status after, the expulsion from Heaven.

However, he does not subscribe to Belial’s idea that God in course of time

will have mercy and withdraw the punishment imposed on them. He comes

out with an original suggestion that having been consigned to Hell they

should exploit the hidden treasures of the place like gems and gold and

create in Hell a place, equal in magnificence to Heaven. His proposal

draws a round of applause from the fallen angels.

Belial who follows Moloch is not Milton’s favourite for Milton introduces

him with the remark that his thoughts are low, that he understandably

has no time for noble deeds. But of, Milton says he is the handsomest of the

angels. The stand he takes is contrary to that of Satan and Moloch. Both

“open war” and “covert guile” are anathema to him and he believes in

making the best of a bad situation. For him total annihilation is much

worse than eternal suffering. He argues that if they accept their present lot

submissively, God may have pity on them and reduce their punishment.

Even if this does not come about, they would in course of time get

conditioned to their suffering in Hell and then it would not be as painful

as it is now.

Moloch is the first to speak after Satan. Milton profiles him in very

impressive language. Described as the “sceptured king”, he is strongest

and the fiercest spirit who had rebelled against God. Moloch is a militant

and he stands for an open war. His stand is based in his belief that the

fallen angels have nothing more to fear from God’s wrath, for the outcome

can be only annihilation which would be preferable to their present state

or some new state of existence and since no state of existence could be

worse than the present state that would be an improvement. He is all in

favour of an all out war against God using the very method which he has

used to torture them. Like Satan he panders to the vanity of the fallen

angels by saying that according to their nature, they must ascend and

rise and not descend and fall. As Moloch speaks he dilutes his concept of

total war to a type of guerilla warfare. None the less he swears by plan of

revenge against God.

Beelzebub who is the last speaker to address the conclave acts as the echo

of Satan. He does not exactly fall in line with Satan’s call of an open war

against God but at the same time he considers the peace policy of Belial

and Mammon as one of appeasement. He is all for taking revenge against

God and supports Satan’s idea of action in the new world to turn the newly

created race of man against God. Milton portrays Beelzebub in glowing

colours. He occupies a high seat next only to Satan. He radiates wisdom in

his outlook and compels attention in his address.

Since there are no volunteers Satan takes the floor again to tell them that

he fully understood the reasons for their reluctance to undertake such a

hazardous journey. As their leader, he adds, it is his duty to undertake the

journey for his position draws not only laurels but also dangers. He ends

up by stating that they should do all they can to make their present

condition tolerable for as long as they have to stay there.

He uses the devices worked out by Satan to win over the fallen angels. He

addresses them as “Thrones and Imperial Powers, offspring of Heaven” and

congratulates the angels for supporting his proposal of an invasion of the

new world. He calls for volunteers to undertake the journey to the new

world stating at the same time that it is fraught with the gravest of

dangers.

How subtly to detain thee I devise;

Inviting thee to hear while I relate;

Chaos is shown as having complained that at first Hell stretching far and

wide was carved out of his dominion, that is God created Hell out of space

formerly occupied by Chaos. Thus Chaos loses a certain proportion of space

when God created a new place called Hell. Thus the division of space was

between Empyrean, Chaos and Hell. Chaos suffered a further loss when the

new world with its planetary spheres was created.

Soon after his address Satan terminates the meeting fearful that there

may be a volunteer for the trip and that would endanger his position.

The word Chaos denotes a formless void or a great deep of primordial

matter. There is no real bottom of Chaos and this means that it had no

fixed dimension or boundaries. All above was Empyrean, all below was

Chaos.

Chaos is made up of four elements which are the four possible

combinations of the four principles, hot cold, moist and dry which Chaos

form chance combinations. Chaos is an ambiguous world and its moral

quality is no exception. Chaos has no power to resist evil and not being a

part of the creation it exhibits a curious affinity with the evil which

conquers it, an affinity symbolized by Satan’s pact with Chaos.

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for Thou know'st ;

Milton holds that nothing once created can be annihilated by the next

chance. It will be seen there is no positive vocabulary for the description of

Chaos. Milton produces his effect by negatives; without bound or dimension

where there is no length or breadth, no time or place neither earth, air,

fire or water.

Satan’s journey through Chaos heightens not only the formless nature of

Chaos but the very hazardous nature of the journey he undertakes, no

doubt projecting Satan’s own courage, in going through with such a

mission.

Satan’s journey through Chaos requires all the courage and strength even

of Satan. He finds himself for a time falling through what was later to be

called airpocket only to be carried aloft again by a tumultuous cloud. His

ears are assailed on all sides by stunning noise. He has no idea what

direction to take until he finds the throne of Chaos and Satan’s chance

meeting with him distracts from the sense of loneliness that marks the rest

of the journey through a realm held in a sway by the monarch Chaos and

his eldest child, Night.

Satan’s meeting with the ruler of this realm is significant. Like Satan

Chaos also sits on a throne and his other name is ‘Anarch’. Like Satan he

too can be described as a prince of darkness. He shares the throne with

Night, the first of all created things. Other denizens of Chaos are tumult,

confusion, rumour and discord, making a complete mix of disorder and

desolation that Chaos is.

There is complete disorder in Chaos with the elements fighting against one

another for mastery. The elements press the embryonic atoms in their

service. The atoms are divided in their loyalties. No sooner does an

element win a victory than another civil war begins. Chaos the monarch is

himself the judge to give his decision as to which of the elements is the

winner at a particular moment. But of, Chaos being itself the

personification of confusion gives controversial decisions, thus making the

civil war an even more confused affair. Next to Chaos the highest judge is

Chance which determines the fate of everything. The confusion and

conflict in Chaos can only end if God decided to create more worlds. Only

then would harmony replace the confused fighting and disorder

prevailing in Chaos.

Milton falls back on myths and legends to chart out Satan’s journey

through Chaos. Similar journeys have earlier been undertaken by Ulysses

and Jason mainly as sea voyages. That is why we find so many allusions to

the sea in Satan’s voyage. To give him a greater dimension, Milton makes

him fly through the air also, but as he hears his destination, he is very

much like a weary seaborne traveler reaching his destination.

Chaos is agreeable to immediately come to a working arrangement with

Satan. He informs him that the new world hangs from Heaven by a golden

chain and he does not have to travel very much to reach it. Chaos is

indeed happy if Satan’s succeeds in his mission of winning over the new

world and thus taking his revenge on God.

Seeing this conglomerate in Chaos, Satan shows his caliber in not

buckling down to them. At the same time, he throws a bait to these as he

seeks their cooperation to find his way to the new world created for man by

God out of carving out a part of the empire of chaos. The bait he offers

Chaos is attractive enough. If chaos helps him find his way to the newly

created world he will find ways of restoring to Chaos, the part of the empire

that was taken away by God to create the new world.

Chaos is integral to the epic power and its significance lies in that it

becomes an ally of Satan only because they share a common hatred for

God. It gives Milton an opportunity to use his powerful imagination and

description in giving us the firm contours of this formless shape.

From Milton’s description of the ruler of Chaos the reader gets the

impression that he is opportunistic enough to let others battle for him

while he gives himself importance in proclaiming that he resides on the

frontier of Chaos so as to be in a better position to defend his empire

against encroachments.

Chaos like Hell is a state of mind and Milton has a purpose in delineating

it. While Hell has been depicted as a place of torment and torture, Chaos is

far removed from Hell and has been presented by Milton duly as a realm of

disorder. In fact Milton offers some consolation by stating that God carved

out a territory from Chaos to create his new world for Man.

Hell as described in Book I was a place of torture. Though a flaming

inferno there was in it just as much -light as to make the darkness visible.

The light also served to show the other regions of? Hell, the regions of

sorrow where a flood of fire raged fed by the ever burning sulphur that was

never exhausted. This was the Hell created by God after the revolt of the

angels in preparation for their inevitable defeat.

By indicating that Hell is both a state of mind and a place Milton gives his

conception a double dimension in accordance with prevailing religious

beliefs. He meets the religious requirements of those who believe that Hell is

an abode of damned souls along with the fallen angels. For those who

accept that Hell is a state of mind Milton gives the place a symbolic or

allegorical significance. Hell for this school of thought exists in this very

life and not the next life. When a sinner commits sin and has the remorse

of guilt on his conscience, he is already in Hell. The mental torture that

the sinner goes through is symbolized by the everlasting flames of Hell. The

fallen angels themselves symbolically represent the sinners of this earth

with one difference that while the sinners can repent for their sins, the

fallen angels are unrepentant.

In Book II Milton strengthens his description because Hell is an

inseparable party of the format of the epic poem.

In keeping with his own environment, Milton depicts Hell in the grimmest

of colours. It is the universe of death because those angels who rejected God

must experience a living death even as God is a source of life for those

angels who were loyal to him. When the fallen angels enter Hell and

discuss it as a place of evil for the first time they come face to face with the

plight of their position in Hell. This realization becomes worse with the

knowledge that this state of suffering will last for ever.

While Milton conceived the story of Paradise Lost from, the Bible, Hell had

to remain an integral part of his scheme. For his description of Hell Milton

had to rely upon two sources, the Bible itself and classical mythology. In

both he found the description adequate. In Book II of Paradise Lost he has

enriched this with the strength of his imagination. The outcome is that

hell becomes the fit dwelling place for all those monstrous and abhorrent

sinners who are considered more monstrous than the Hydras and the

Chimeras of classical mythology. By placing in it all conceivable

instruments of torture Milton has fallen in line with religious thinking on

the idea of hell because it fitted in admirably with his conceit of the

situation. That is why both sin and death have been placed in this abode

because Milton thought it proper that these figures with their horrific and

frightening shapes had to find their proper place in the configuration of

Hell. Both of them have a role to play in sending people to Hell and this

accords well with Milton’s views on the subject.

Milton’s depiction of Hell gives life to the view that Hell is a state of mind

as well as a place by his accurate juxtaposition of the mind to the place.

The freedom with which the poetry moves from the exterior to the inner

landscape obliges us to give each word in it a continuous extension of the

significance. Other poets have elaborated conventionally on the torments

of Hell but not everyone has been able to give their description an inner as

well as architectural meaning.

The thirst I had of knowledge, and vouchsafed

This friendly condescension to relate

Things, else by me unsearchable; now heard

With wonder, but delight, and, as is due,

With glory attributed to the high

Creator.

There is also a river called Lethe, a river of forgetfulness, and beyond it is

frozen continent torn by storms of whirlwind and hailstone. The continent

contains a gulf and a marsh and serbonis which has swallowed up whole

armies who tried to cross it. In the continent the damned souls feel at once

the intense cold and the scorning heat. Milton gives a purpose in placing

the river Lethe in the contours of Hell. The damned souls have to cross the

river by a boat. Though drinking the waters cause one to forget all pain

and suffering, the damned souls cannot drink the water because it moves

away from them when they try to drink it. A monster called Medusa is

another deterrent to the damned souls if they try to drink the waters.

Milton has introduced four rivers flowing through Hell and discharging

their waters into the burning lake. There is a river called Styx which is the

river of bitter hatred. There is Acheron, the river of woe the waters of which

are black and deep. There is Cocytus, a river for wailing and lamentation

and there is Phlegethon, the waves of which are made of flames of fire.

In describing the horrors of Hell, Milton puts apt descriptions in the

mouths of various speakers. Moloch refers to Hell as ‘this dark opprobrious

den of shame’ and ‘the prison of God’s tyranny’. Belial speaks of the

eternal woe which the fallen angels have to experience. In another place

he speaks of the ‘rim fires’ which are burning in Hell. There is another

graphic description of the cataracts of fire which the firmament of Hell

can spout forth. Mammon is shown as wondering what he can get out of

Hell specially from the diamonds and gold which he believes lie buried in

the soil of Hell. Like other speakers both Beelzebub and Satan are obsessed

by the flames of Hell. Beelzebub describes them as corrosive fire and Satan

refers to Hell as a ‘huge convex of fire’.

In drawing the geography of Hell Milton has departed from previous

allusions on the subject. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell is situated in the

centre of the earth but Milton has located it in the lowest regions of Chaos.

Milton tells us as much when he brings out in Satan’s talks with the

Anarch that Hell was originally a part of Chaos and was carved out by

God after the revolt of the angels to be their dwelling place fitted with all

the instruments of torture. In Milton’s concept Hell is situated below

Heaven, a fact which is confirmed with many references to the rebellious

angels who descended from Heaven after their revolt.

The disobedience of man is brought about through Satan; as an indirect

agent: he seduces man in revenge for the punishment inflicted on him

and his crew for their disobedience to God. Therefore, the action of the

poem takes place not in one spot, but in three different places separated by

infinity of distances: the Material Universe, Hell and Heaven, and

between all of them lies Chaos. The vast comprehension of the story, both in

space and in time leading up to the point of Man’s first disobedience

makes Paradise Lost unique among epics, and entitles Milton to speak of it

as involving “things yet unattempted in prose and rhyme.” Milton was

confronted with the problem of rendering all this incomprehensible

infinity plausible and credible, and he did it by presenting it symbolically

in terms of human experience. The poet himself is careful to stress the point

that he has been obliged to place the spiritual on the material plane, and

that his pictures are purely symbolical, not literal, since human language

must be employed to describe what is beyond human understanding. Once

he has thus excused and explained himself, he is quite clear in his mind as

to the divisions of Infinite Space. He proceeds about his business with

mathematical precision even. His pictures therefore are well-defined.

Book II gives the fullest picture of the deep of Chaos the “lower” part of

Infinitude, but in words which are at best symbolical. Its appearance is

struck off in about half-a dozen lines of the most beautiful poetry. It is ‘a

huge, limitless ocean, abyss or quagmire, of universal darkness and

lifelessness, wherein are jumbled in blustering confusion the elements of

all matter, or rather the crude embryons of all the elements ere as, yet they

are distinguishable. Therefore is no light there, not properly Earth, Water,

Air, or Fire, but only a vast pulp or welter of unformed matter, in which all

these lie tempestuously intermixed.’

Satan’s experience does not belie his fears. He is environed round on all

sides with these fighting elements. He is harder “beset than when Argo

passed through Bosporus, betwixt the jostling rocks, or when Ulysses on the

larboard shunned Charybdis, and by other whirlpool steered.”

It is the hoariest in Infinite Time, having existed coeval with Heaven.

From it other worlds have come into being- first Hell, later the Material

Universe. Thus it is the womb of Nature and, when these worlds shall again

be destroyed, her grave as well. Being illimitable and unbottomed, the

way through it is described as long and hard. The turbulence of the

elements in their embryonic state is so fierce that there is the danger of an

object being crushed and reduced to its atoms, if caught in their welter.

Satan fears as much when he describes the difficulties of the adventure in

the assembly.

It is possible to distinguish, though symbolically, some of the regions of this

vast abrupt from the description that Milton gives of Satan’s voyage

through it. The resistance of this nameless consistency is felt less by Satan

in the first stage of his adventure, when he seems carried upward

effortlessly, as in a cloud-chair, buoyed up by the surging smoke from the

furnace mouth of Hell. But of, soon he comes upon a region which appears

to be a complete vacuity, for “all unawares, fluttering his pennons vain,

plumb-down he drops ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour had

been falling,” were it not for an unexpected accident. In this region where

Chance rules as governor, he alights upon a “tumultuous cloud”, charged

with fire and saltpeter and signed by it, he is shot upward till another

accident drops him in a boggy Syrtis, where the flame which seemed to

consume him is quenched. Thence it is neither sea, nor good dry land, but

bog and cliff, an atmosphere which is at once “strait, rough, dense or

rare”, and Satan is obliged to use all his limbs to keep himself adrift. Here

are the frontiers of Chaos, but they are yet so far removed from Heaven

that it is darkness all round. The last lap of Satan’s journey has yet to be

passed through the warring elements, before the extremity verging on

Heaven is reached. In this farthest verge, dimly lit by Heaven’s brightness,

Chaos has retired, ‘as from her outmost words, a broken foe, with tumult

less, and with less hostile din.” Resistance here is very little, and Satan can

waft himself as it were on calmer wave in dubious light till he reaches the

outermost shell of the Material Universe.

Milton divides Infinite Space roughly into two regions, the “upper” being a

region of light, Heaven or Empyrean, and the “lower” being a region of

darkness, Chaos. The impression we get of Heaven from Book II is that it is

“undetermined square or round, with opal towers and battlements

adorned, of living sapphire.” It is the bright and boundless region of

Light, Freedom, Happiness, and Glory, which the fallen angels regret

having lost altogether. It is fortified by impregnable walls, which are

closely guarded by ever-wakeful sentries; yet the sacred influence of its

light diffuses on the verge of Chaos, so that Satan arriving here in his

flight to the world finds it more easy to traverse. In the midst of this region

the Deity, though omnipresent, has His immediate and visible dwelling.

‘He is surrounded by a vast population of beings, “the Angels” or the “Sons

of God”, who draw near to His throne in worship, derive thence their

nurture and their delight, and yet live dispersed through all the ranges

and recesses of the region, leading severally their mighty lives and

performing the behests of God, but organized into companies, orders, and

hierarchies. But of, Heaven at large, or portions of it, are figured as tracts

of a celestial Earth, with plain, hill, and valley, wherein the myriads of the

Sons of God expatiate, in their two orders of Seraphim and Cherubim, and

in their descending ranks as Archangels or Chiefs, Princes of various

degrees, and individual Intelligences.’

Such is the stupendous picture that Milton gives us of this hoary deep.

Heaven and Chaos divided the Infinite of Space between them at the

beginning of time: but soon a need arose for the creation of more worlds.

Chaos, the Anarch himself, refers with regret to it, when he speaks of God

having made inroads into his domain, and first scooped off a space called

Hell, and later “another world hung o’er my realm, linked in a golden

chain to that side of Heaven from whence Satan and his legions fell.”

The atoms being in a perpetual state of war, their collisions fill the

atmosphere with loud noises. Satan’s ears are pealed “with noises loud and

ruinous”, more clamorous than those made by the battering engines of

Bellona bent on raising a city, or by the Earth when she is torn from her

axle by the fall of Heaven. As he approaches the throne of Chaos his ears

are assailed by “a universal hubbub wild of stunning souring and voices

all confused.” These noises become still only in the confines of Heaven.

Hell is pictured as a region shut in by a “convex of fire” and barred by

thrice three-folded gates, guarded by two Shapes- Sin and Death. The

gates are described in some detail. Three folds are of brass, three of iron,

and three of adamantine rock. They are impaled with circling fire and

protected by a portcullis which none but Sin could draw up. The gates are

fastened by bolts and bars and secured by a lock of a very intricate

pattern. Sin has to turn all the intricate wards with her key, and then “on

a sudden open fly, with impetuous recoil and jarring sound the infernal

doors, and on their hinges grate harsh thunder that the lowest bottom of

Erebus shook.” The wide –open gates can give passage to a whole bannered

host with its extended wings, horse and chariots ranked in loose array.

Out of the mouth of Hell, as from a furnace belch forth, “redounding

smoke and ruddy flame.”

The ruler of this Infinite Abyss is Chaos. ‘Though the presence of God is

there potentially too, it is still, as it were, actually retracted thence, as

from a realm unorganized and left to Night and Anarchy; nor do any of

the angels wing down into its repulsive obscurities. The crystal floor or wall

of Heaven divides them from it; underneath which, and unvisited of light,

save what may glimmer through upon its nearer strata, it howls and rages

and staggers eternally.’

Of the other world, the Material Universe, there is not much of a

description in Book II. The rumour of its creation was long current in

Heaven, before it actually came into existence. The moment of its creation

arrived when a void was created in Heaven by the fall of Satan and his

crew. God then sent His Son forth, and with his golden compasses, he

centered one point of them where he stood and turned the other through

the obscure profundity around (VII-224-231) (. Thus were marked out, or

cut out through the body of Chaos, the limits of the new Universe of Man,-

the Starry Universe which to us seems measureless, and the same as infinity

itself, but which is really only a beautiful azure sphere or drop, insulated

in Chaos, and hung at its topmost point or zenith from the Empyrean.

Chaos mentions it as hung by a golden chain from that side of Heaven

whence Satan and his legions fell.

Hell is described in the book as stretching far and wide beneath Chaos. It

is a kind of Antarctic region, distinct from the body of Chaos proper. It is a

vast region of fire, sulphurous lake, plain and mountain, and of all forms

of fiery and icy torment. In the midst is the bottomless lake of fire on which

Satan and his crew were hurled down on their fall. Into it pour the four

rivers- “Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate; Sad Acheron of sorrow,

black and deep; Cocytus, named of lamentations loud heard on the rueful

stream; fierce Phlegethon, whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.”

Around the lake a vast space of dry land extends, formed of solid fire, with

mountains, fens and bogs, full of mineral wealth. On one of these hills

Pandemonium has been built entire, which rose out of it, when formed,

like an exhalation. The City of Hell is afterwards built round

Pandemonium on this dry ground of fire, and the country round the city

is broken with rock, and valley, and hill, and plain. Further on, in

another concentric band, we catch a glimpse of a desert land, “a frozen

continent”, beat with perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire hail, which

on firm land thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems of ancient pile.”

The damned are brought hither by a “harpy-footed Furies,” and they are

make to feel “by turns the bitter change of fierce extremes, extremes by

change more fierce, from beds of raging fire to starve in ice their soft

ethereal warmth, and there to pine immovable infixed, and frozen round,

periods of time, thence hurried back to fire.” Lethe, the river of oblivion,

flows round this region, and rolls eternally her watery labyrinth. The

damned, on their way to and from the region of solid and liquid fire and

this icy desert, have to cross this sound, and, parched and fry as their

throats are, the moment they stoop to drink of its waters, they roll back

from their lips. Medusa and Gorgonian terror guards the ford, and

prevents the sufferers from allaying their thrust.

The contours of this region are thus defined by Milton-“dark and dreary

vale”, “region dolorous”, “frozen and fiery Alp”, “rocks, caves, lakes, fens,

bogs, dens, and shades of death”.

The new universe does not consist merely of the Earth, but the entire

firmament of planets, stars, etc. in mapping it, Milton adopts the

unscientific conception of the universe then current, which had been

propounded by the Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, in the second century A.D.,

and later expanded by Alphonso X king of Castile in the thirteenth

century. According to this teaching the Earth was fixed in the centre of the

Universe. It was also the centre of a system of concentric Spheres, not

solid, but of transparent space , each of which carried with it one of the

seven planets, in the following order-the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun,

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond these seven Spheres was an eighth

Sphere, containing the Firmament of the fixed Stars. The Crystalline Sphere

was a ninth Sphere that was invented to account for the very slow

“precision of the equinoxes”, one revolution of which occupied over 25,000

years; and beyond this was the last and tenth Sphere, the only one that

was material, being absolutely opaque and impenetrable. This outer shell

was called the Primum Mobile, the first moved, because it was believed to

be the first created Sphere to be set in motion.

Milton’s daring conception is yet further revealed in linking the Material

Universe with Hell. Satan had to wing his way through the abortive gulf

and run through many risks in doing so. But of, to facilitate the passage

to and fro of the human race, on the one hand, and the devils, on the

other, a bridge was built across Chaos between Hell and the Material

Universe by Sin and Death soon after Man’s fall. It is “of wondrous length,”

writes Milton, “from Hell continued, reaching the utmost orb, of this frail

world.”

There prevailed at the time, indeed, a more accurate conception of the

Material Universe, which was formulated by Copernicus, a Polish monk

and astronomer of the fifteenth century. It taught that Earth and the

other planets revolve about the Sun. Milton was familiar with it also,

through his acquaintance with Galileo. But of, in mapping his universe in

Paradise Lost, he preferred the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system,

because it was more generally known and universally adopted. ‘Yet as to

the proportions of this world to the total map Milton dares to be exact. The

distance from its nadir or lowest point to the upper boss of hell is exactly

equal to its own radius; or in other words, the distance of Hell- gate from

Heaven-gate is exactly three radii of the Human or Material Universe.’

Satan once again impresses us as being fit to be an epic hero. At the very

outset in Book II, he is described as being seated on a “throne of royal

state” in the midst of great splendor. We are told that from his despair he

has been “uplifted beyond hope” and that now he is aspiring to rise even

higher. He is insatiate to pursue his war against Heaven even though his

war is doomed to fail. He tells his comrades that he has not given up

Heaven as lost; and he gives them as assurance that they would rise again

to Heaven and would, in fact appear to be more glorious and more awful

than if they had not suffered and fall. In his second speech Satan again

impresses us greatly, this time by offering to undertake a hazardous

journey in search of the new world created by God. While none of the other

fallen angels comes forward to undertake this arduous and dangerous

task. Satan is ready to go. He speaks of the royal powers and the royal

privileges which he enjoys as their leader and he therefore believes that it

is his duty to undertake the task and that has been proposed. This

certainly raises him in our estimation. He is not even prepared to take a

companion with him: “This enterprise none shall partake with me.”

And how would the Ptolemaic theory stand? In the light of this knowledge

how much more absurd it would be that their Stellar Firmament with its

immeasurable radius of over 100, 000 light-year “turns about once every

twice twelve hours.” And if they found it difficult to believe this of the

“great round Earthly Ball,” how would they taken to the discovery that the

planet Jupiter, over 1300 times as large, turns round in ten hours?

Milton’s cosmography is not entirely imaginary. ‘For the material data

which he found necessary to his representation he restored to all manner

of sources and to his own invention, employing Scriptural suggestions

wherever possible and taking pains to add nothing which would be

directly contrary to Holy Writ. It is not to be thought that he offered such

details as the causeway from Hell to Earth, the chain by which the visible

universe depended from Heaven, or the spheres themselves which encircled

the earth and carried the planets and fixed stars, as obligatory to the

understanding. They were simply imaginative representations which

might or might not correspond to actuality. Sometimes he is deliberately

vague, as when he says that Heaven is “undetermined square or round.”

Often his concrete detail or measurement is useful only for the moment

and defies adoption into the general scheme, as where he says that the

distance from Hell to Heaven was three times the distance from the centre

of the earth to the pole of the uttermost encircling sphere.’

For these reasons it is misleading to consider the plan of Milton’s Infinite

Space as one of his deliberate convictions. One wonders how he would have

arranged his ideas in the light of modern discoveries. Distances in the

Universe (according to these discoveries), are so enormous that the mile

must be discarded entirely as the unit of distance, its place being taken by

the light-year, i.e., the distance through which a ray of light, travelling at

186,000 miles a second, is propagated in a year. Yet for star systems and

nebulae have been discovered by the camera at the inconceivable distance

of 100,000light-years, and there are others still beyond, supposed by some

astronomers to be separate universe, but still within the limits of the

material creation. What would Milton have bought had he known this?

Would not Raphael’s words to Adam (VIII, 110-114) have taken on a new

meaning?

Both Sin and death are conceived and presented with propriety. Sin which

is delectable in commission and hideous in its effect t, is aptly pictured as

a woman fair from the waist upward but foul downward, ending her

body “in many a scaly fold, voluminous and vast, a serpent armed with

mortal sting.” Around her middle cluster a pack of hounds which never

cease their barking. They are her offspring, and when disturbed they

kennel in her womb, still continuing their howls within her body. They are

described as horrid in appearance, and worse than those that afflicted

Scylla, or which accompanied the night- hag, when she came riding

through the air to dance with the Lapland witches. They feed on her

bowls, and are a constant vexation to her. The description of the

appearance of Sin reads like a visible embodiment of these words of

William Dyer, a contemporary of Milton: “There is more bitterness in sin’s

ending that there edger was sweetness in its acting- If you see nothing but

good in its commission, you will suffer only woe in its conclusion.” Whereas

in Hell-hounds that afflict her within and without, her own offspring, we

see the symbolical presentation of the consequences of sin.

These are some of the stunning discoveries made by modern astronomy

even of that Material Universe, which Milton planned with such perfect

simplicity. If these take our breath away, then what must be those

undiscovered bourns, Heaven, Chaos and Hell, about which modern

science is yet skeptical? Milton’s scheme looks insignificant and incoherent

before all this knowledge. Yet what a staggering and stupendous

conception he has given it all! The imagination is properly impressed by

the infiniteness of the conception, and, with Theseus, in Shakespeare’s play,

we are prepared to sympathise with him, and to regard “the best in this

kind” to be no more than a shadow, “and the worst no worse, if

imagination amend them.”

Into a poem which deals very largely with supernatural agents, Milton

introduces two shapes, the sinister figure of Sin and the grim and horrid

monster, Death, who meets Satan at Hell-gate, and prevents his egress. The

adequacy of their portraiture has been praised, but their consistency as

allegorical personages has been questioned. Stopford A. Brooke, for

example, writes thus: “Death’s image has claimed admiration and justly;

but if the lines, which leave him indefinite, yet ‘terrible as Hell’, are

sublime, the rest of the allegory of him and of Sin is so definite, so

conscious of allegory, that it loses sublimity.” Addison was the first critic

to draw attention to the inconsistency of the representation. While

admitting that it is a “very beautiful and well-invented allegory,” he

added, “I cannot but think that persons of such a chimerical existence are

proper actors in an epic poem; therefore, there is not the measure of

probability annexed b to them which is requisite in writings of this kind.”

Finally, Johnson regarded the allegory as ‘unskilful’’ and complained

that it is broken when “Sin and Death stop the journey of Satan, a journey

described as real, and when Death offers him battle.” “That Sin and Death

should have shown the way”, he continued,” to Hell, might have been

allowed: but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge,

because the difficulty of Satan’s passage is described as real and sensible.

And the bridge ought to be only figurative.” A careful analysis will show

that Milton has secured consistency of portraiture, though in the

allegorical significance that we read into it, the sublimity of the episode is

a little detracted.

Death, the grisly horror, which all of us dread, but which cannot be

imagined by us in any form, is properly presented as a shape that is

shapeless. The vagueness with which it is invested is in perfect keeping with

our own conception of it. “Black it stood as Night, Fierce as ten Furies,

terrible as Hell, and shook a fearful dart.” Coleridge has well remarked:

“The grandest effects of poetry are where the imagination is called forth to

produce, not a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still

offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected:

the result being what the poet wishes to impress, viz., the sublime feeling of

the imaginable for the mere images.” Such a stupendous feat of the

imagination is this animation of what man dreads most instinctively.

The allegory, here, does not consist in the mere personification of an

abstraction, but in its relation to Sin. We read in the Bible that the wages

of sin is death, and Milton had made Death the offspring of Sin, just as he

had made Sin the offspring of evil thought and the consort of the devil.

Interrupting the mortal combat of Satan with Death, which would have

ended either or both, Sin relates her history. To Satan who has forgotten

her, she recounts how she rose from the left side of his head, like Juno, on a

day in Heaven, when he was complotting rebellion against God.

But of, Milton does not stop with rendering in visual form what merely

passes in the mind. He shows also how we become reconciled to sin and

finally hardened in it. “Amazement” seized all the heavenly host, she says

continuing her narrative to Satan they reconciled in fear, and called her

Sin, and held her for a portentous sign. But of, when she had grown

familiar, she pleased “the most averse” among them, “and with attractive

graces won thee chiefly , who full oft thyself in me thy perfect image

viewing becam’st enamoured; and such joy thou took’st with me in secret,

that my womb conceived.” The allurements of sin are here well bodied

forth, and the whole passage reads like an artist’s picture of the text: “Sin

is first pleasing, then it grows easy, then delightful, then frequent, then

habitual, then confirmed.” The association with and the commission of sin

lead inevitably in the end to hideous death; and so the offspring of Sin in

the poem is the grim monster, Death. The final ruin, with all its throes and

travail, is befittingly, presented in the picture o Sin’s confinement.

Milton completes the picture of Sin and Death by remarking further that

just as sin ends in violent death, so death is passionately fond of sinners.

Hence he makes Death, as soon as he emerges from the womb of Sin fall

lustfully in love with her, and become the father of all that brood of

hounds, the affliction of sin, we have noticed above. The poet seals their

permanent union in the words he places on the lips of Sin, that Death

would have destroyed her.

Death shall cease when Sin becomes extinct. The destruction of the one

involves the ruin of the other. Milton thus a perfect picture of the origin of

sin in the mind of man, his being hardened in it, the evil consequences

that follow, and the violent end to which it finally leads him.

The adequacy of the portraiture and its vividness cannot be doubted. But

of, while genesis of sin is sublime enough, its later history is full of such

gruesome details that it tends to detract from loftiness. It cannot but be

otherwise, since there is nothing elevated in the consanguinity of Sin and

death. The representation, however, is hideous enough and impressive.

The characters of sin and death are thus firmly drawn, once their reality

is granted, all their deeds become plausible; there is nothing inconsistent

in them, as Dr. Johnson contended. It is but natural that Death, the

shadowy giant, should bar Satan’s way, and offer to fight him, for death

makes no distinction between saint and sinner. Sin does well to remind

Satan that Death’s dart is mortal, that he is unconquerable except by him

“who rules above”. Neither is it strange that Sin should be the first to fall a

victim to Satan’s temptation. He offers to bring her to the place “where

thou and Death shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen wing

silently the buxom air, embalmed with odours,” and she jumps at the offer,

while death, the gourmand, smacks his greedy lips in joyous anticipation

of the goodly feast he shall soon have. Sin hastens to open the three-folded

gates; the portcullis slides to her touch, her key swiftly turns the intricate

wards, and every belt and bar of massy iron or solid rock unfasten with

ease. There is no inconsistency either in these persons quickly spanning the

distance from Chaos to the Earth by a bridge, for they are eager to get into

the new habitation. Thus Milton’s presentation of these two characters

doesnot impinge rudely upon our credulity. On the other hand, they are

satisfying portraits of the two deadly evils of this world.

He takes the fallen angels on an ego trip when he tells them that Hell will

not be able to contain them because of their angelic nature.

At the same time pandering to their vanity he tells them that after rising

to Heaven again, they will never have to fear a second fall. And he

establishes his supremacy over them by asserting that he has risen to his

high position not only through his own merit but also because he deserved

this position according to “the fixed laws of Heaven.”

In order not to rub the fallen angels on the wrong side he at the same

time tells them that they have elected him as their leader of their own,

“free choice”.

Milton makes use of Beelzebub to bring out some of the more repulsive

facets of Satan’s character. Beelzebub rejects Moloch’s idea of an open war

and goes all out in support of a plan aimed at confounding the race of

mankind in one root and at mingling and involving Earth with Hell to

spite the great creator. To highlight Satan’s craftiness Milton tells us that

such a wicked plan could only emanate from “the author of all ill.” By

making Beelzebub come forward with the proposal, Satan wants some

devilishness of the scheme to rub on Beelzebub’s shoulders so that Satan

can comparatively shine in a better light.

Every word that Satan utters is loaded with meaning. “O Progeny of

Heaven” he calls the fallen angels in his second address to them hoping

against hope that their expulsion from Heaven will not make a dent on

them. He can almost congratulate himself on the success he has achieved

for the fallen angels bow to him “with awful reverence” and extol him

“equal to the highest in Heaven”.

Another aspect of his character is brought out in his dealings with Sin and

Death. At first Satan tried his bluff and bluster on Death but when he

realized that death was not unbearable, he pragmatically came to terms

with them. He tactfully solicits the help of Chaos to carry him to the new

world where he hopes to plan his revenge on god.

In depicting Satan’s character, Milton has deliberately not indicated

whether the logical flaws in Satan’s opening speech are the result of a

conscious effort to soothe his followers or due to a genuine self delusion.

According to one critic, the utterances of Moloch, Belial, Mammon and

Beelzebub represent not merely individual contributions to a debate but

also a train of thoughts which passes through the mind of Satan.

Macallum shows up the inconsistencies in Satan’s speech and the change it

reveals in his character. There is a contrast and a touch of duplicity

between what Satan says when he is alone with his second in command,

Beelzebub, and what he says when he is speaking in public. Milton brings

this out in a very subtle manner showing clearly Satan’s power of double

think. At one moment the leader of the fallen angels is convinced that his

fallen angels are invincible while at the same time he accepts that

constant vigilance is necessary to prevent its overthrow. Another example

of his double think is seen in the ability of the fallen angels to strike back

at God. His confident words to his fallen angels have a veneer of deception.

Quite often one gets the feeling that Satan becomes a victim of his own

propaganda and it is difficult to tell whether he is speaking out of

conviction or he becomes a victim of his deceit.

Milton’s portrayal of Satan is in conformity with the progress of the action

ion the epic.

In the early scenes of Book II Satan is portrayed as a defiant leader

shedding his charisma on the fallen angels. As the epic advances, a

gradual change overtakes Satan as he begins his downward slide from the

moments of high grandeur of the early scenes. As Satan is caught in the

work of his own self-destruction, the effects of his fall becomes evident as

the epic moves to its inevitable conclusion.

“Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught, ‘’

Many eminent critics of the twentieth century have

explained the hollowness of the romantic attitude towards the character of

Satan that was held in the nineteenth century.

Milton has endowed Satan with all the traits of double think and double

speak. In fact this comes so naturally to Satan that one could look upon

him as faithful representative of the politicians of our own day. He is cast

in this mould and his very first utterance as he opens the debate is typical

of him. He addresses the fallen angels as ‘powers and dominions’, ‘deities

of Heaven’. The address is typical of his egoism. He panders to the vanity of

the fallen angels by addressing them with the same attributes that they

once possessed. He is clever enough to adopt this posture to stress the fact

that there has been no change in their status even though they have been

expelled from Heaven.

Similarly, when Satan goes on to argue that Hell will be unable to hold

them because of their angelic nature, the assumption is that they remain

heavenly although expelled from Heaven, which seems somewhat

unrealistic. When he continues with the comment that when they do rise,

they will be more glorious than if they had fallen one notices that Satan is

confusing military glory with the true glory of Heaven.

It has been pointed out very clearly that the speech of Satan is full of

inconsistencies and his character has undergone a major change, change

for the worse. Alan Rudrum has analysed Satan’s opening speech in Book

II: “The debate is opened by Satan, seated as Chairman ‘high on a throne

of royal state’. The tone and substance of his speech is foreshadowed in the

very first line, in which he addresses his colleagues as ‘powers and

dominions’ deities of Heaven.’ This in itself contains no direct statement,

but the implication is that no radical change has occurred as a result of

their rebellion and defeat at the hands of God. It is as futile as if a

number of demoted officers were to agree that among themselves they

should keep up the pretence of retaining their former rank, a comforting

gesture but ultimately pointless because they are out of touch with reality.”

We cannot rebel against a government and at the same time derive our

position among our followers from the dignity we once held within it.

Satan seems on surer ground in pointing out that no one will envy him his

leadership in Hell because leadership there involves pre-eminence in

suffering, but note the argument he develops from this. He says that as no

one in Hell will envy him his position, there will be unity and strength

among the fallen angels, and they will therefore, be more likely to succeed

in claiming their ‘just’ inheritance than if their initial rebellion had been

successful.

From this it seems natural for him to go on to reassert his position of

leadership among the fallen angels, and we certainly concede that he is

audacious when we hear him deriving his leadership from the ‘fixed laws

against which he had rebelled.

It is difficult to decide whether the logical flaws in Satan’s opening speech

are the result of a conscious attempt to deceive his followers or due to

genuine self-delusion. At all events, Satan’s recklessness, and his apparent

inability to face facts are carried over into Moloch’s speech, which

immediately follows. One critic has usefully suggested that the utterance of

Moloch, Belial, Mammon and Beelzebub represent not merely individual

contributions to a debate, but also a train of thought which passes

through the mind of Satan. Between them they canvass all possibilities but

repentance, and the conclusion they arrive at, given their initial

assumptions, is the only feasible one. Revenge, on some terms, they must

have and as they cannot hurt God directly they will injure man instead.

Quite apart from the fact that there is no evidence that their initial

failure was due to dissensions within the ranks, this is simply ‘double

think’- unless we concede that God has treated them unfairly, had

displaced them from a ‘just inheritance’, unless in fact we can see ground

for agreeing that their rebellion had been justified. Probably Satan’s

speech should be read as a ‘morale booster’ and the true hopelessness of the

matter can be gauged from its inaccuracy as an analysis of the situation.

It will emerge later that Satan has a different idea in mind, but for the

moment he wants his followed to discuss their reascent to Heaven, and

invites their opinions as to whether open war or covert guile, will best

bring this about.

Satan has already chalked the mode of revenge he will adopt in his war

against God but he wants to make the fallen angels believe that he is

being guided by them in charting out their future course of action. Very

adroitly he says,” who can advise may speak” as he invites their opinions to

wage open war or convert guile to bring about the objectives. He doesnot

utter an unnecessary word but he ensures that what he says goes home.

Like one born to leadership he is quick to point out that no one will envy

him his leadership he is quick to point out that no one will envy him his

leadership in Hell because he would be exposed to much greater suffering

from God than any one of them. On the other hand, they had their just

inheritance to achieve if they adopted the right means.

Macallum has drawn our attention to the inconsistencies in Satan’s speech

in Book II and the change it reveals in his character. The contrast

between what Satan says when he is alone with his second in command,

Beelzebub, and what he says when he is speaking in public draws attention

to this duplicity. He is, after all, the father of lies.

Milton’s treatment of satanic description is extremely subtle and deserves

careful attention. Satan possesses the capacity that George Orwell, in his

study of totalitarianism in 1984 described as the power of ‘double think’-

the power of entertaining two contradictory opinions at the same time.

For example, the ideal member of the ruling class is convinced in part of

his mind that his party is invincible and omniscient, while with another

part of his mind he recognizes that constant vigilance is necessary to

prevent its overthrow. In a similar manner Satan both does and doesnot

believe in the ability of his army to strike back against God. His

encouraging words to his troops are half deception. Like many dictators

he shows a tendency to believe his own propaganda and it is impossible to

distinguish clearly at any given moment between his real convictions and

the sophistry by which he controls his followers. In cutting himself off from

God, Satan has rejected the sources of reason and consequently he loses his

grip on reality.

Although he still has a few moments of grandeur left, the general progress

of his development is downward. Milton shows us Satan’s admirable

qualities first, then explores the manner in which his denial of God’s

perverts his virtues and turns his power into weakness.

A further word has to be said on the paradoxical view that Satan is the

hero of Paradise Lost. This appears true only if we accept the traditional

epic idea of the hero as a great warrior and leader. But of, Milton as he

stresses everywhere in the poem, had a very different idea of the heroic.

The hero as martyr, who suffers patiently and refuses to the death to

renounce hi God, is the central idea of Paradise Regained and Samson

Agonistes as well as of Paradise Lost. His idea of the heroic, along with his

own heroic temper, is what puts Milton among the great poets of the world.

Undoubtedly Milton found inspiration for the figures of Sin and Death in

a biblical passage: “Thus when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin,

and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth dead”. From this cryptic

statement Milton has visualized and etched the allegorical figures of Sin

and death. Both are drawn with a wealth of detail. Sin is part woman,

part serpent while Death a shadowy monarch who wields a dreadful dart,

is made brightening by reason of his lack of clear and solid shape. Milton

has painted both of them with lurid colours, specially their origin.

Sin and Death are no mere decorative pieces in this epic poem. Through

their presence and their allegory the poet drives home the point that evil

turns back on itself endlessly repeating the same sterile and self-

destructive acts. He adds a further significance to their characters by his

description. Death is shown to be something awful and mysterious. He

doesnot depict any details but leaves the readers with a vague terrifying

impression of a misty, shadowy but nevertheless a majestic presence.

And grace that won who saw to wish her stay,

Rose, and went forth among her fruits and flowers,

To visit how they prospered, bud and bloom,

Her nursery; they at her coming sprung,

And, touched by her fair tendance, gladlier grew.

This is the best example of what Macaulay calls “the dim intimations of

Milton”. He begins by calling Death a shape, then he qualifies this by

saying that it had no shape- a shapeless shape. Then he adds that this

shapeless shape could not be called a substance or shadow. He doesnot

speak of his head or his crown but what seemed his head had on-the

likeness of a kingly crown. The impact of the description is black and

menacing and becomes the more sinister because it just a shadow.

The portrait drawn by Milton of sin is ugliness personified. The poet has

used the female form to represent Sin and one can rightly call it Milton’s

masterpiece of filth. Sin describes how she sprang fully grown from the brow

of Satan at the moment of his rebellion in Heaven. Satan has an

incestuous relationship with her. She is mistress as well as daughter and

from this union is born death, so aptly labeled by Milton as “this odious

offspring”. The incestuous relationship continues with Death becoming the

lover of his parent. His progeny are the yelling monsters that continuously

torment their mother.

Alterbury in a letter to Pope challenged to show in Homer anything equal

to the allegory of Sin and Death. On the other hand Johnson believes that

“this unskillful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the

poem.” Hanford describes the episodes as loathsome but believes it has a

purpose by making us aware of the real ugliness of Sin and Death.

Macaffery suggests that Sin and Death inhabit a necessary borderline

between myth and allegory, “between a world where physical and spiritual

forces are identical and a world where spiritual force is merely indicated

by physical.” Summer is happy about the characterisation specially as it

places Satan in perspective and establishes the necessary relation in the

epic between the comic, the heroic and the tragic.

But well thou comest

Before thy fellows, ambitious to win

From me some plume, that thy success may show

Destruction to the rest:

Satan’s heroism, like his outward luster, grows less dazzling as the action

proceeds: the general is not as impressive a figure as the defiant

individualistic of the first scene. Milton doesnot treat Satan as a static

figure; on the contrary Satan is constantly changing because he is caught

in a process of self destruction. The effects of his fall are made increasingly

evident in the course of the action.

Milton cleverly weaves a web of intrigue between Sin, Death and Satan

when they confront each other at the gates of Hell. As Sin sees a

confrontation between Satan Death building up, she intervenes to stop the

clash. She then discloses the relationship between Satan and Death and

impresses on both the futility of their mutual antagonisms. Sin counts on

Satan to tackle her to a new world of bliss and pleasure in his company

and with this hope she opens the gates of Hell to let Satan go out.

In assessing the part of Sin and Death in the poem we have to accept that

they are integral to the poem. By depicting them in the most grotesque of

forms Milton tries to project the moral purpose of the whole episode. By

placing them in Hell he suggests that they rightly belong there. The double

incest shown between father and daughter and son and mother makes Sin

and Death all the more horrifying and repulsive. Such an impact could

only be conveyed through an allegory and Milton has done just that. It

must be remembered that Paradise Lost even if is close to the truth, is not

literally true and is at the most a symbolic poem. Milton’s portrayal of Sin

and Death has led to sharp differences among his critics. One set of critics

has led to sharp differences among his critics. One set of critics led by

Addison is of the view that though the allegorical descriptions are

arresting enough, the two figures look out of place in the epic. He raises

doubts whether persons of such chimerical existence are proper actors in

an epic poem.

By throwing magic herbs into the sea where Circe was bathing, the witch

transformed Scylla’s body from the waist down into a mass of barking

dogs.

It is through symbolism that Milton wishes to convey the horror of the

encounter between Satan and Sin and Death. Hell has become the abode

of the fallen angels. The introduction of Sin and Death and their

encounter with Satan at the gates of Hell carries the epic forward. The

figure of Sin, half-woman and half-serpent with a number of barking dogs

at her waist and creeping into her womb whenever they like has

predecessors in Elizabethan poetry. Milton also had another model before

him. This was Spenser’s description of Error- half a horrible serpent and

half a woman’s shape. Similarly Milton was beholden for his description of

Death to similar earlier descriptions. However, the difference is that

Milton’s description evokes terror and alarm by his description of a

shadowy nothing. But of, Milton does transcend the indistinct image when

he describes it as brandishing a dreadful dart just as the serpent in the

lower half of Sin is described as being armed with a deadly sting. Milton’s

model for Sin was the sea nymph Scylla after her transformation by the

witch Circe. His next argument is that of a military strategist. As a

debater, he forestalls the objection that ascent to the Empyrean on their

ruinous expedition, may be difficult. But for, no! if they bethink them how

their descent had been difficult when they fell, they can naturally infer

that ascent is their proper motion. Let them not doubt, therefore, their

ability to soar back to Heaven.

The Council in Hell has correctly been described as a superhuman

parliamentary debate, as majestic in eloquence as it is momentous in the

consequences involved. Milton brings to bear upon the account a lifelong

study of statesmanship and oratory in the leaders of the Revolution. His

council is a magnified image of those human deliberations on which the

fates of nations hang. Besides, Milton brought to his task his own mastery

in the art of dialectic which dates from his Cambridge days, when his

degree depended on his ability to argue both sides of a question. Satan

has called his council to consider how best they may revenge themselves on

the Almighty, whether by open war or convert guile. But of, Satan does not

only propound the question; it is his will that dominates secretly the

assembly. ‘Individuals may voice their convictions and display their

passions, each with a type of eloquence appropriate to his personal

character and temper, but the ultimately policy is predetermined.’ Four of

the chiefs express their views, each in his own characteristic manner, but it

is the last, Beelzebub, who unfolds the master’s mind.

His final argument shows that contempt of danger which would enable a

commander to lead his forces to victory. He doesnot allow the fear of worse

consequences to daunt him from his war path. What can be worse than

their present anguish? he asks. The worst can only be annihilation, and

that were “happier far than miserable to have eternal being.” But at, can

they ever cease to be? He has heard it said in some quarters that their

substance is eternal, and if thus there is no fear of annihilation, there can

be no fear too of a worse state than the present, since “we are at worst on

this side nothing.” Their present strength then is equal to wage war

Heaven; let them rise, therefore, and if they do not gain a victory, they

shall have the satisfaction at least of revenge.

Moloch, the belligerent type, the personification of pure and unalloyed

hatred of the Almighty, is of the die-hard cast. Deeming himself equal in

strength with the almighty, and indifferent even to his existence if he

should be regarded less, he advises open war, with all the bluntness and

outspokenness of a Colonel. Unskilled in tricks himself, he is impatient with

those who those who would sit and contrieve in Hell’s dungeon, suffering

all the pangs which God’s tyranny can inflict on them. Theirs is the

courage to do, he tells them, and therefore let them arm themselves, even

with hell flames and tortures, the weapons of destruction invented by their

enemy, and point them against himself. Let the noise of his thunder be met

by the noise of infernal thunder; his lightning be opposed with black fire

from Hell, and His very throne be surrounded by hell-fire and sulphurous

flames. Thus in the hectic fury of his vindictive hate, he draws a picture of

the destruction upon which he is bent.

Moloch’s speech is impetuous and fiery, and well may it have been the

utterance of an Ironside commander in the councils of Oliver Cromwell. It

may be worthwhile to observe,” wrote Addison, “that Milton has represented

this violent impetuous spirit, who is hurried on by such precipitate

passions, as the first that rises in the assembly to give his opinion upon

their present posture of affairs. Accordingly he declares himself abrupt for

war, and appears incensed at his companions for losing so much time as

to deliberate upon it. All his sentiments are rash, audacious, and

desperate such as that of arming themselves with tortures and turning

their punishments upon Him who in inflicted them. His preferring

annihilation to shame or misery is also highly suitable to his character,

as the comfort he draws from their disturbing the peace of Heaven, that if

it be not victory is revenge, is a sentiment truly diabolical, and becoming

the bitterness of this implacable spirit.”

Belial’s arguments partake of his nature. Gifted with a smooth tongue

that “could make the worse appear the better reason,” he delivers a

backhanded blow at Moloch. He tells the assembly that he would himself be

much for open war, if what has been urged the main reason for it, itself

doesnot dissuade him most. They have been told that even if they cannot

be victorious, their vindictiveness yet can be satisfied. But of, he asks, what

vengeance can possibly be? The towers of Heaven are impregnable, being

constantly guarded by armed angels. There is no hope of intimidating

them either, for quite dauntlessly they scout far into the regions of Chaos.

Or, were it possible for them to approach Heaven, batter its strong walls,

and force their resistless way in, and with Hell-flames and black fire

attempt to obscure the glory of “Heaven’s purest light,” still God’s mould

being of ethereal substance, it can never be stained, and by own special

virtues it will expel all baser fire and contamination. Thus, what can be

left for the rebellious angels except blank despair? Revenge, therefore, is

out of the question.

Belial, the next to rise after Moloch, is in every respect his antithesis.

While Moloch is essentially a spirit of action, Belial is chiefly a spirit of

inactivity. While Moloch has a contempt of travail and danger, Belial can

hardly think of them without a tremor passing through his frame, for he is

essentially slothful and sensual. While Moloch’s mind is wholly refractory

and bellicose, Belial’s is sometimes speculative full of those “thoughts that

wander through eternity.” Finally while Moloch is curt and plain-spoken,

Belial is specious and artful. Moloch is the aggressive militarist, Belial the

meek pacifist. Mammon’s speech reminds one of the pioneers and gold

diggers who set out of England in the seventeenth century to distant lands

and helped incidentally to fling wide the Empire of their country. His plea

is the typical gold-digger’s plea; his dream is to make an El Dorado of

Hell. Doubtless there must have been money-grabbers in the Long

Parliament, who helped Charles I to raise his ship-money, and other

obnoxious taxes. Mammon must have been drawn from one of them. There

are financiers and stock-brokers today who could vie with Mammon in

speculation. They are of true descent.

His next argument exposes the fallacy in the hope of annihilation which

Moloch had held out as a cure in their present distress. Quite pleasant-

humouredly, Belial ridicules the notion, for no one, however great his

then suffering may be, would ever like to be deprived of his intellectual

state, with all those thoughts that wander through eternity, and wish to be

swallowed up and lost in obscure extinction. Even if such an undesirable

state is devoutly to be wished for, by any freak of imagination, it is

doubtful whether God can give it to them, or even if He can, whether He

would. For, in the first place, being immortal angels, whether God can

extinguish them totally is uncertain, but, for his part, he is more than

certain that he would never destroy them. When he first routed them and

drove them into Hell, he consigned them to eternal suffering. Sure he will

not deflect from His purpose and give them the annihilation which they so

eagerly for.

The third argument of Belial is a further refutation of Moloch. He had

said that their sufferings were already the worst and they had nothing

more to fear, if annihilation were impossible. But of, is it true that what

they are going through is the worst? Let them examine their present

condition. They have been permitted to rise from the lake of burning fire;

they have recovered from their stupor, they have built Pandemonium, and

they are now sitting in deliberate council. This, surely, is not the worst

than can happen to them. They may have been worse than what they are

now, if they had lain, for instance, chained to the lake of liquid fire, or, if

worse tortures had been inflicted on them. That would have been the

worst, and they may reasonably dread them yet.

Having thus quashed his adversary’s arguments, Belial next proceeds to

formulate his plan. His answers to Moloch show a true understanding of

the current state of affairs, though they have all been inspired by his love

of slothful ease, his passion for existence, and his cowardly fear of direr

consequences. His plan too, partakes of the same characteristics of his

nature.

A war on Heaven can have only one of two objects-either to unseat God

from His throne, or to regain their lost possessions. The first is a very remote

possibility, and is never likely to happen, unless irrevocable Fate should

give up its sway to fickle Chance, and Chaos judge the strife. If Heaven’s

king cannot be unseated, it is vain to hope for the reconquest of their

possessions; for without subduing Heaven’s king what authority can the

fallen angels exercise over Him? But of, here Mammon anticipates another

alternative. If they submit (some may argue) and agree to be obedient

and loyal, God may publish grace and pardon them all. But of, Mammon

would not entertain the idea for a moment. How can they be ever so base

as to stand humbly in His presence, render implicit obedience to His

commandments, and sing under compulsion songs and hymns in His

praise, who has recently been their enemy, and who has lorded it over

them in the fashion they are now groaning under? This is all that they

can expect in Heaven, and by no amount of sophistry, can that irksome

task be called delightful. Let them reflect on the magnitude of this

irksomeness when they have to submit vilely to this laudation of One whom

they hate all though eternity.

So Mammon would not advise them to continue their vassalage in Heaven,

howsoever obtained. Rather, let them seek their good in Hell itself; let them

make the best use of their advantages, free and accountable to none,

preferring sturdy independence to slavish yoke in Heaven. And if therein

they learn by patient labour and hard endurance to create great things

out of small, to convert hurtful things into useful, and turn adverse

circumstances into prosperous, then their greatness would be more

conspicuous.

Perhaps they fear the darkness of Hell: and here Mammon’s answer to the

objection is specious. Very often, he says, Heaven’s king has been founds to

have obscured Himself in thick and dark clouds, from which He gathered

His thunderbolts to scourge His enemies with. “As He our darkness, cannot

we His light imitate when we please?” is his argument.

That argument disposed of, Mammon turns to his constructive plan. In the

First Book of Paradise Lost we have been told that even while in Heaven,

instead of Mammon’s gaze being occupied with the vision Beatific, he had

bent his looks downward admiring the golden floor. No wonder then that

his thoughts now fly to the rich mineral wealth in Hell, proof of which had

already been given, when Pandemonium was built. He now reminds them

about the manifold riches of the place and their own mining and

architectural skill. They can build an empire here, which shall be the envy

of Heaven. Besides, as Belial has suggested, there is every likelihood of

their being acclimatised in course of time to their surroundings. “Our

temper may change into their temper.” So taking everything into

consideration, it is much better to settle down in peace in Hell, and devise

schemes and measures for the improvement of their lot than plot open or

covert war in vain.

Mammon follows next, and true to his name he is acquisitive more than

aggressive. He is the type of the rapacious Imperialist, in the days when

Imperialism was yet in its infancy in England. He begins by answering

both Moloch and Belial; he is inclined to agree more with the latter than

the former, and finally builds his future plan on Belial’s suggestion.

Thus the great debate ends, and Milton carefully distinguishes between the

types of statesmanship presented by Moloch, Belial, Mammon and

Beelzebub. The first is militant and aggressive, the second suave and

submissive, the third smug and acquisitive, while the last is resourceful

and subtle. Milton must have had prototypes of them in actual life, both

among the Royalists and the Puritans, and he has made admirable use of

his first hand knowledge of parliamentary debates, as well as his study in

classical oratory and his skill in his own University exercises in the

speeches he has assigned to them.

Addison’s note on this character is instructive. “Beelzebub,” he wrote, “who

is reckoned the second in dignity that fell, and is, the First Book, the

second that awakens out of the trance, and confers with Satan upon the

situation of their affairs, maintains his rank in the Second Book as well.

There is a wonderful majesty described in his rising up to speak. He acts as

a kind of moderator between the two opposing parties, and proposes a

third undertaking which the whole assembly gives in to. The motion he

makes of detaching one of their body in search of a new world is grounded

upon a project devised by Satan, and curiously proposed by him in the

First Book, the project upon which the whole poem turns; as also that the

prince of the fallen angels was the only proper person to give it birth, and

that the next to him in dignity was the fittest to second and support it.”

War, then, open, or secret, is wholly out of picture: for the Almighty is

equally wise to frustrate their secret plans as He is strong to defeat their

open designs. But at, neither does Belial insinuate that they shall

acquiesce in their present slavish condition. He only wishes to suggest that

this is much better than bringing disasters upon themselves by an open or

secret war. Further there are a number of considerations which should

weigh with them in agreeing with their lot. First, it is Fate (the argument

of weakling) that has ordained that they should live in Hell. If they had

been wise, they could have foreseen this before they broke out in open

rebellion against the Almighty. It is ridiculous that those who had dared

to defy Fate then, should now show fear in suffering the inevitable

consequences. To abide in Hell is their doom. But of, their punishment may

be reduced by their patient sufferance. This is the second consideration. In

time their conduct “may much remit His anger”, and, perhaps, thus far

removed, finding them to be inoffensive, and satisfied that He has

punished enough, He may slacken the rage of His fury. A third

consideration is that their own purer essence may either overcome their

torments. Or by long endurance and custom they may get used to them,

and not feel their scourge. Finally, there is the hope of what the never-

ending flight of future days may bring the chance of a better life than the

present which though not happy, is far from being the worst that can be

endured. His counsel, therefore, is for meek acquiescence in their presence

lot.

Belial, the glib talker, the smooth- tongued trimmer, presents the type of

conservative statesmanship, which is cultured, self sufficient, and shows a

love of all the good things of life. He is the type which Shakespeare has

drawn in the courtier with his parmaceti, or some scented salve or other,

who meets the fiery Hotspur on the battlefield. His is the religion of

‘cultivated inaction, making its believer refuse to lend a hand at

uprooting the define evils on all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy

against the reforms and reformers which try to extirpate them’. Perhaps

Milton has drawn the character from the many cavaliers who thronged

the court of Charles I or Charles II.

His speech falls into four parts. In the first he ridicules Mammon’s

suggestion; in the second he answers Belial and Moloch’s pleas: in the

third he makes his own proposal, and finding it generally approved, in the

final part, he plans its practical operation.

As for the proposition of war, there would not be any need for them to

invade Heaven’s walls and force their way in for those walls are in no fear

of assault or siege. Then why should they not seek some easier means of

wrecking their vengeance on God? Then turning to the proposition for

peace, he reminds his audience that no terms of peace have either been

offered or sought. As far he can see no peace would be given to them:

instead severe custody, stripes and bitter punishment only. In the same

way they cannot return any honourable terms of peace themselves to

Heaven; instead, enmity and hatred as they lie in their power, and

schemes which would not allow their Torturer to rejoice in what He has

inflicted upon His enemies.

Mammon’s speech, as may be expected, wins the approval of the assembly.

‘Public opinion seems to be dangerously drifting in a direction contrary to

the intention of Satan, when Beelzebub , the type of subservient

politician, as responsive to the purpose of his master as badness could

desire, rise clad in the aspect of impressive statesmanship to stem the tide.’

First, to stem the tide of the murmur of approval which had greeted

Mammon, Beelzebub makes capital out of it by turning it into pointed

ridicule. He asks the angels whether they desire to be addressed as the “off-

spring of Heaven” or, merely as the “Princes of Hell”, for what should he

infer from their applause of Mammon’s speech? It indicates their longing

to continue in Hell and build an Empire in emulation of Heaven. A likely

thing indeed, he comments sarcastically, for, he wonders whether they are

not dreaming, having completely forgotten that Hell has not been

intended as a place of security for them to plot against Him. No! The

Almighty has intended them to dwell in it in strictest bondage as His

chosen victims. Of this there can be no doubt: for whatever they may do,

God will reign supreme both in Heaven and in Hell, and never allow any

diminution of His authority anywhere. But at, while He rules His own

angels in Heaven mildly and benevolently, He will rule them in Hell with

an iron hand. Therefore no good can ever come out of their schemes of war

and peace. Their last revolt has settled their fate, which they should

remain out of Heaven.

Having thus disposed of the arguments of Mammon, Belial and Moloch,

Beelzebub introduces into the discussion a new fact, craftily held back till

the progress of the debate demanded it. The assembly’s approval of

Mammon’s plan clearly showed that they were for peace and no war. On

this foundation of peace, and the hope of a different prosperity, Beelzebub

builds his plan.

With subtle craft he reminds them of a rumour current in Heaven, when

they had been its denizens, of a new place about to be created- the happy

seat of a new race called Man, who though less in splendor than the

angels, would be more favoured of God. That the rumour is not unfounded

is certain, for they will recollect how God promised it as His will, and

confirmed it by “an oath that shook Heaven’s whole circumference.” They

should now turn their thoughts to this new world and to its inhabitant.

They should discover his nature, his strength and his weakness, and

consider how best he may be seduced and tempted to break from his

allegiance to God. Though Heaven may be guarded well, and, therefore,

in-accessible, that new world may have been left to the defence of its new

race. Thither they shall go, and find out means of destroying him, and

driving him from his habitation, as they unavailing, they can atleast

seduce him and make him break his faith with God. “This would surpass

common revenge, and interrupt God’s joy in our confusion, and our joy

uprise in His disturbance.”

For God may repent what he has done, and abolish His own works. This is

Beelzebub’s plan, and it is for them to accept or reject it. He tactfully

pauses for their response.

The most interesting character in the first two books of Paradise Lost, and

one who most engages our attention, is Satan. He appears as ‘a great and

sublime figure, the heroic antagonist of God, the great fiend who, in spite

of the hopelessness of conflict with that power “whom thunder hath made

greater,” continues to fascinate us and compel our admiration.’ The

technical form which Milton cast his theme required that he should present

his characters on a lofty scale. Besides Satan was an Archangel, who, at

the commencement of the poem, had only recently transgressed, and whose

“form had not yet lost all her original brightness; he had still left in him

all those supramundane virtues of a “fixed mind”, an “unconquerable

will”, and a “courage never to submit or yield”. Milton was obliged to lay

on these heroic qualities rather thickly in order to distinguish his

antagonist from the “puny race of mankind.” Yet there haven critics who,

carried away by the weight and emphasis attached to these qualities, have

regarded Satan as the hero of the poem. Some have even pretended to see a

certain political affinity between Satan and Milton. A more recent critic,

Denis Saurat, set out to prove elaborately how Satan and Milton were

personal enemies and how the poet took a keen delight in visiting

acrimonious vengeance upon his foe. Nay, Milton, according to this critic,

“had Satan in him and wanted to drive him out. He had felt passion,

pride and sensuality. The deep pleasure he takes in his creation of Satan is

the joy…peculiar to the artist… hence the strange monster Satan. Whereas

inferior artists build their monsters artificially, Milton takes his, living

and warm with his own life, out of himself.” But at, these criticisms hit

beside the mark. Satan’s heroism may lie in his daring and his

dauntlessness, in his willingness to undertake perilous risks and his

readiness to go through them; but the motive behind them all is personal

ambition, in the gratification of which he displays qualities which are far

from heroic- a subtle and crafty mind, and a specious and hypocritical

behaviour.

Beelzebub had been merely the willing tool to put forth the plan: he had

been content to be his Master’s Voice.

The assembly, whether they recognized it as the plan of the master or not,

agree to it unanimously. Beelzebub mightily pleased congratulates them

on the wisdom of their choice, and commends its virtue further. It would

lift them up from Hell, he continues, and place them much nearer their

ancient seat of happiness, perhaps in the very vicinity of Heaven and

within the circle of its golden light. Thus much conciliation for Belial and

Mammon! And being in such close vicinity to Heaven, with timely

excursions, they may even get access into Heaven, without hazarding a

war. So much palliation for Moloch! But of, they should decide first whom

they shall send on this dangerous expedition, for full of dangers it show.

Their leader must be sufficiently brave to ransack the infinite the new

world. Mere strength alone would not suffice, though it is highly the spies

and sentries of Heaven. He would have need of all his resourcefulness. Let

the assembly choose such a spirit. Needless to say that none was either

proposed or volunteered. Satan alone came forward “whom now

transcendent glory raised above his fellows,” and he undertook the heroic

adventure.

The physical sports they engaged in, whether on the plain or in the air,

were like the Olympian or Pythian games of the Greeks. Some rode their

fiery steeds, or engaged in chariot races, being very careful to narrow

their circuit closer and closer so that they might traverse the least

distance, and at the same time very cautious not to touch the stone

barriers lest they should be dashed against them to pieces. A few occupied

themselves in military drill and feats of war. In this they resembled the

aery champions whom superstition imagined to appear in the clouds in

the van of their armies, and with feats of arms cause the entire welkin to

burn from either end of heaven. Another band, wild with hellish rage at

their acute sufferings, tore up rocks and hills, and hurled them down in

great fury, or rode the air in as whirlwind. In this they resembled the

great Hercules, who returning victorious from Aechalia, was roused to the

bitterest rage by his wife, and in his agony tore up the Thessalian pines,

and hurled Lichas himself into the Euboic Sea.

The milder and the more cultured among the angels disported themselves

differently. Some among them gathered in a silent valley and turned

troubadours. They sang of their heroic deeds in “notes angelical to many

a harp.” Their songs were not unmixed with their complaints, that destiny

have subjected them to become the slaves of Force or Chance. The subject

matter of those songs was no doubt biased, but their harmony was divine.

It suspended Hell, and ravished all the listening multitude.

Another group sat on a retired hill, and discussed sweetly on subjects of

great import and dignity, such as Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, Fixed

Fate, and absolutely Foreknowledge. They initiated the chief subjects of

speculation and anticipated the main trends of all secular philosophy. But

of, in their attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, they lost themselves in

strange mazes of reasoning and discourse. They argued at length on the

abstract doctrines of good and evil, of happiness and misery, of passion

and apathy, and of glory and shame. It was all vain wisdom and false

philosophy; still it had power to charm them all out of their pain and

distract them from their misery.

Milton is careful at this stage to point out the plan was not out of

Beelzebub’s invention, for whence but from “the author of all ill”, could a

plan so diabolic and so fraught with mischief for the human race issue.

Porter:

“Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it

takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an

equivocator with lechery: it makes him, mars him; it sets him on, and it

takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him, makes him stand to

and not stand to.””

The fallen angels in Hell after the departure of Satan on his heroic

adventure of the discovery of the new world and the seduction of its sole

inhabitant amused themselves in a variety of ways. In describing their

diversions, Milton draws freely from the epic recreations of classical heroes

as they are described both by Homer and Virgil. The lower sort of angels

indulged in physical sports, the higher in song and poetry, the noblest of

all in philosophical discourse. The adventurous were bent on exploration

and discovery. As always, their doings are patterns and types of the varied

activities of men.

Another set of rebellious angels interested themselves in exploration. In

bold and adventurous march they tried to discover whether any part of

that dismal habitation was more endurable than the burning lake, or the

plain of solid fire. They discovered the sources of the Styx, Acheron,

Phlegethon and Cocytus, the four rivers of Hell, which poured waters into

the lake of fire. They also discovered the river Lethe, which flowed far away

from them, and the region it bounded , the frozen continent, to which the

demand were brought periodically to undergo its icy torment. Thus, all

the endeavours of the fallen angels to find some easier habitation than

their present abode proved abortive. In despair, mingled with great fear,

they traversed through many a dark valley and fiery mountain, ‘caves,

lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death’. The places they passed through

seemed veritable places of death. Nothing flourished in them, everything

died, and nature lived there only in monstrous and uncouth and ugly

shapes which were more abominable, inexpressible, and worse than the

gorgons, the hydras and the chimaeras about which fables have spoken in

the most terrible terms and figures.

Among all the fallen angels, Satan is the supreme egoist, giving the “I”

undue supremacy in his thoughts. From first to last his chief concern is

himself, how best he may thrive and exalt himself. He has a lust for power,

which makes him seek pre-eminence not only among the angels, but

presumptuously claim parity with God. He must be great whether he is in

Heaven or in Hell. Punished for his presumption in Heaven, and hurled

down to Hell, he arrogates to himself the leadership of his community on

the principle that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Or, as

Masson puts it, “Having a third of the Angels away with him in some dark,

howling region, where he might rule over them alone, seems infinitely

preferable to his puny sovereignty of an Archangel in the world of gold

and emerald.” Hence, whenever he refers to his eminence, there is a

noticeable pride bordering on vain-glory, which ill becomes the mouth of

any genuine leaders of men. In his opening address of the conclave in

Hell, for example, there is tone of self-granulation.

But of, he is not content to be merely the king of Hell. Untaught by

experience, he “aspires beyond thus high”. He is equally jealous in

defending his position against any rival; he exaggerates the defending his

position against any rival; he exaggerates the risks of the exalted state he

occupies to those who have but recently tasted the bitterness of God’s wrath.

Thus it is place and power that he loves most not for the benefits they may

confer on others, but solely that he may be foremost.

Thus did the fallen angels disport themselves; each as his nature and

inclination led him. But at, their amusements were on a much more

colossal scale than human words can express. Milton leaves it all to be

filled in by our imagination.

Milton does not leave the reader in any doubt on the matter. He

introduces Satan in all the ostentation of his power. The similies by which

he refers to his appearance on his throne liken him to any absolute

monarch of the Orient. Later, again, when Satan interferes in the debate,

volunteering his service in the perilous expedition to the new World, he is

described as having been raised to transcendent glory above his fellows,

and speaking with “monarchal pride”. There is a passage, indeed, in his

speech, which seems to exonerate him, and present him in the light of the

selfless leader of his host. But of, examined in its context, it merely proves

his anxiety to secure all the glory to himself. None shall share the honours

of the enterprise with him. Being their imperial monarch, it is his duty to

risk himself in their behalf. He would be unworthy of his high place, if he

merely content to rule them in peace; he must share the hazards of his

office as he does its glory. His duty becomes greater by virtue of the higher

eminence he enjoys. Thus speciously he thrusts his absolute will upon his

subjects, and without giving them further opportunity to speak, he

dismisses them.

Milton sets this scene in Hell in direct apposition with another in heaven

where God Almighty announces his foreknowledge of the Fall of Man, and

proclaims that he shall be saved if one among them will “pay the rigid

satisfaction, death for death.” “Which of ye,” He asks, “will be mortal to

redeem Man’s mortal crime?” None volunteers, and “silence was in

Heaven.” But of, the Son of God comes forward finally, and undertakes the

atonement for Man. His is not the tone of self-assertion that Satan’s is, but

meek and gracious. And the behavior of either at the conclusion of their

speeches is a further contrast. “Thus saying, rose the Monarch (Satan),

and prevented all reply; Prudent lest, from his resolution, others among

the chief might offer now.” This is superciliousness excelsior, the conduct of

a hypersensitive absolutism. On the other hand, “His (Christ’s) words here

ended, but his meek aspect Silent yet spake, and breth’d immortal love to

mortal men, above which only shone Filial obedience.” This is absolute

detachment from self, perfect devotion to a public cause. The same contrast

is still further emphasized in the reaction of the audience to the two

speeches. “Admiration seized all Heaven”, but the crew of Satan “bend

towards him with awful reverence prone, and as a god extol him equal to

the Highest Heaven.” Satan need not have taken the trouble of shutting

out all further discussion about the enterprise , for not one of these devils

dared to oppose him; ‘they dreaded not more the adventure than his

forbidding.’ They had been cowed into such meek and abject submission.

Satan tyrannous hold upon his subjects in nowhere else so much

emphasized. Like the tyrant that he is, yet eager to preserve the formality

and appearance of a republic in his government, he imposes his will upon

his subjects in a very subtle manner. He has his own tool in Beelzebub, and

having summoned the assembly and desired them to deliberate on the

revenge they have taken on God, he uses Beelzebub to propose his plan.

Milton makes it plain that the enterprise of seducing man did not

originate with Beelzebub, but with Satan; and if the latter did not propose

it himself, it was only his eagerness to appear that he was guided in all his

actions by the will of his subjects. All the evidence so far examined thus

makes it perfectly clear that Satan was an archangel ruined, greedy for

power and jealous to preserve what he had acquired, ambitious of more,

ostentatious, self-willed and tyrannical. This is first impression that Milton

is careful to produce at the opening of his Second Book.

To confound the race

Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell

To mingle and involve, done all to spite

The greater Creator.

The Old Testament provides Milton with a considerable part of his

narrative material in Book I. He believed that the fallen angels lost the

names they had borne in heaven before their fall and had taken the

names of heathen idols, by which names they were worshipped by the tribes

with whom the Hebrews came into contact, like the Ammonites, the

Moabites and the Philistines. These gods parade in epic style in Book I.

381-505, and two of the most important, the first and the last, Moloch and

Belial, appear again as principal speakers in the great debate in Book II.

The next trait that we note in him is his passion for restless activity. In his

very nature, says Mason, Satan was the most active of God’s archangels:

ever doing some great thing, ever thirsting for some greater thing to do.

Hence “uplifted high from despair” he schemes and plans, and resolves on

the expedition which Beelzebub outlines in the poem. He has discussed it

thoroughly with his bosom- companion, and having decided to venture on

it, in spite of its dangers, he orders the building of Pandemonium,

summons all the angel orders into it, and sits in council over them. Eager

to carry out the plan himself, he first makes Beelzebub stress on the nature

of the perils, then he himself proceeds to enlarge on them, and thus

succeeds in getting himself approved as the prosperous spirit to venture on

it. And no sooner does he dissolve the council, than he puts on swiftest

wings, and he is gone. But of, all his activity is vindictive. It is to work

out malice on God. His mission is to destroy what God has brought into

being. He “represents cosmical negativity incarnate”. Hence he promises

Sin and Death to glut their maw immeasurably by seducing the race of

mankind, and to Chaos, the Anarch, he holds out the hope of reducing

Earth “to her original darkness and your sway, and once more erect the

standard there of ancient Night.” His is a destructive genius, maliciously

bent on ruining God’s fair creation, merely to gratify his spite. “Yours be

the advantage all, mine the revenge!” expresses with force of an epigram

this trait of his character. Malice prepense against the Almighty leads him

to be unscrupulous in this means and methods. Milton has made him

propound the grand principle of his existence in Book-I..but he had reaped

bitterly the fruits of an open revolt; therefore, in this book, he plans “covet

guile”, and to achieve this end he studiously cultivates the arts of

hypocrisy in overcoming all intermediate obstacles. Disdainful as he is of

rout whose ruin he has brought about, he flatters and cajoles them into

approving him for their leader in the enterprise. Despising as he does their

weaker intelligence and their love of ease, he extols the harmony they have

achieved amongst themselves, and bids them be merry the while he is

absent from Hell.

While these qualities are scarcely worthy of sympathy yet there are certain

other traits in him which evoke our spontaneous admiration. They are his

intrepidity, on the negative side, and his daring, on the positive. The deep,

illimitable Abyss, the perils of which he speaks so assuredly about to his

followers , does not daunt him. With rare courage and impetuous speed, he

sets out alone into the unknown. Never once does he lose heart as he

battles his way through the fierce impact of the atoms on him and around

him. Milton enhances the grandeur of the struggle by the similies he

employs on the occasion. Equally dauntless and undismayed is Satan in

the presence of that grisly terror, Death. He could not understand what the

Shape was as it came striding heavily and menacingly towards him.

Confronted by Sin and Death, when he realises that his swaggwer may

lead him to abandon his addresses her as ‘dear daughter’ and him as

‘fair son’,-the very Shapes, whom he has a moment ago despised and called

out in vilest terms. Perhaps it is the memory of this meeting that makes him

more courteous in his address of the Anarch, Chaos. Time is fleeting; he is

all agog top reach the Material Universe. He has been caught in the welter

of the warring elements and he is ignorant how farther he is yet to travel.

Not to waste words, then, he is brief and courteous with the ruler of the

Abyss. His apprenticeship to hypocrisy, here stands him in good stead later

when he reaches the universe of man. His degradation has only

commenced; it is to be completed later.

He hurled words of high disdain on his head, and when he was answered

too insolently, “incensed with indignation”, he burned like a comet that

fires the length of Ophiuchus huge in the Arctic sky. Intrepid courage, such

as this, is bound to win admiration for it-self. The whole episode deserves

the eulogy that Sir Walter Raleigh has expended on it. But of, Satan is of

absorbing interest not by virtue of his matchless courage alone. His

inordinate ambition, his self-aggrandisement, his love of ostentation, his

very power for evil and all that is embraced by that term-all these, too,

have been rendered attractive by the poetic genius of Milton. Yet the secret

of his charm is only in part due to his poetic timbre; the other part of it lies

in the reader’s own psychological reaction to his character. All the world

loves an exhibition of power, whatever be its nature. The strong whether

virtuous or wicked, have the power to attract and to charm. Satan is the

very embodiment of a volcanic energy which sweeps everything before it. He

is “the image and type of those great and selfish conquerors whose pride it

was to draw the admiring world after them; and whom Milton detested

more than any other man.”

The Bible provides Milton with something more than narrative material;

his illustrative material, the content of his epic similies and other

comparisons, is often taken from the scriptures. For example, when the

speaks of the vast numbers of fallen angels, he compares them to the army

with which Pharaoh pursued the Israelities to the shores of the Red Sea (I.

306-13), a passage which also illustrates Milton’s relish for the sound

values is shown by his choice of the alternative form ‘Alcides’ for ‘Hercules’

‘Herakles’.

There are, however, some differences in Milton’s use of his two main bodies

of source material, slight though these are in comparison to the

similarities. Milton was deeply learned in both, but whereas Old Testament

material predominates in Book I in the much longer list of heathen idols

and the greater number of scriptural authority. Milton relies almost

exclusively on classical references even in his epic similes.

This must therefore be our conclusion. In Books I and II of Paradise Lost,

Milton makes extensive and almost equal use of biblical and classical

references reinforce or supplement each other in both narrative and

illustration, and nowhere in this work is the conflict to be found between

the two which unhappily occurs elsewhere, though Milton leaves us in no

doubt that for him it is the bible which has the advantage of being

divinely inspired.

To Milton and many of his contemporaries, using the Bible as a literary

source was a matter of grave concern: could the divinely inspired word of

God be altered to the slightest extent in the interest of art? Milton decided

that it could, although he considered the Bible, individually interpreted,

to be far greater authority than any organized Church. Certainly, he

considered the Old Testament to be much superior to the literature of

ancient Greece, not only in its content, but also in its form: this he states

clearly both in the Reason of Church Government (Bohn, Vol. 2, p 479) and

in Paradise Regained IV. 331-50. in Paradise Lost, I and II, however,

there is no direct conflict between these two major sources of literary

inspiration, the biblical and classical.

Thus Milton uses his biblical and classical material for two identical

purposes: the fallen angels become both the heathen idols of the Old

Testament and the pagan deities of classical mythology; and the

resounding proper names of Milton’s epic similies are taken mainly from

these two sources-when he wants size, he thinks of Levathian or these two

sources- when he wants size, he thinks of Levathian or Briareus and

Typhon, when quantity, Pharaoh’s armies, the leaves of Vallambrosa, or

the barbarian hordes invading the Roman Empire. Both sources, too, can

be drawn on for discussion of themes less obvious than the principle ones:

the New Testament for the nature of the Holy Spirit whom Milton invokes in

I.17; the colours of classical rhetoric for the variations in tone in the

speeches of Book II, and Latinised syntax and vocabulary of the whole

work.

Urania, the mighty mother, was not by the side of Adonais when he died.

She was in a sleep-like trance of extreme joy in her Paradise, listening to

the melodious poetry of Adonais sung by one of her attending Echoes.

Adonais was the youngest of the sons of Urania. He was a tender, lovely

youth-her last hope; he was cut off just when he was showing signs of doing

something much greater than he did. Adonais, however will not wake any

more. In the place where his dead body lies-not yet covered under earth-

the shadow of Death seems to spread itself. Corruption wants to make her

way into the grave, but dare not touch the dead body but of pity till the

darkness of the grave closes over it. Another luminious Dream kissed his

cold mouth, the mouth from which she used to draw her strength. The

Dream instead of drawing life from his lips now died because of contact

with it, only lightning up the body for a moment.

England wailed for Adonais more woefully than the nightingale

mourning her dead mate and the eagle crying piteously over her empty

nest. May the unknown critic who caused the death of Adonais suffer the

curse inflicted on Cain!

Urania rose like an autumnal night following a windy autumnal day.

Wrapped in sorrow and fear, she made her way to the side of the dead

Adonais. Spring season has become so wild with grief that it sheds all its

buds. Since Adonais was gone, spring did not care to wake up Nature’s

beauty. Narcissus, Hyacinth and other flowers stood pale and withered for

grief. Kubla Khan cannot be dismissed as an incoherent opium dream

(i.e. as mere incoherence). It is a meaningful poem.

In the second part the poet speaks in his own person. He has a vision of an

Abyssinian maid playing on her dulcimer and singing. Of Mount Abora.

Mount Abora is Mount Amara and Mount Amara is a fabled paradise. “So

the Abyssinian maid is singing”, as Graham Hough says, “of a paradiseal

landscape very much like that of the opening lines- singing in fact of the

same cluster of ideas under a different name and guise.” If the poet can

relieve her song in his imagination, he himself can build the magic

pleasure-dome as Kubla Khan has done. Thus in the second part of the poet

makes us an attempt to realize the dream-to give it a concrete form. The

second part does not hang independently of the first part. Both the parts

are related, and they complement each other. J.B. Beer rightly says,

“certain it is difficult to see how the poem could be carried on after the last

stanza: the argument is there brought to an end with overwhelming

finality.” The poem as it stands does present a meaning consistent both

with itself and with that we know of Coleridge’s mind. Moreover, the

images of the poem are so tightly drawn together and so closely

interlocked that any addition will upset the balance.

From the history of the composition of Kubla Khan it is obvious that the

poem was left unfinished. Though the poem is a fragment, we hardly feel it

is so. “We have a satisfying sense of completeness of the wheel having come

full circle, of the magic of words and images having cast their plenary

spell upon us. It is a dream conforming to the laws of dream-logic and

carried to its full climax of suggestiveness; as much of a rounded and

perfect whole as a vision is a capable of being.”(Dr. S.K. Banerjee & A.D.

Mukherji).

O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

Kubla Khan is a succession of images dressed in the colours of the rainbow

and evocative of a world of mystery and enchantment. The images

Coleridge uses in the poem are of opposing nature. The images of light and

darkness, sunny dome and sunless sea or caves of ice. Paradise garden

and hints of hell succeed one after another. The dome is the image of

pleasure and the river that of life. The deep romantic chasm is the image

of fear and mystery and the mighty fountain that of inexhaustible energy,

now falling, now rising, but persisting ever. Then we have the homely

images of ‘rebounding hail’ and ‘thresher’s flail’ both of which suggest the

vigour of life. The image of ‘mazy motion’ suggests the spiritual

complexities of life. The caverns measureless to man is the image that

suggests the awesome mystery of human life, and the caves of ice finanal

annihilation.

To sum up, Kubla Khan is not mere incoherence or a fragment.

In the second part the nature of imagery changes. The images are all

related to poetic creation and inspiration¸ and they wear the hazy,

remote semblance of symbolism. The damsel with a dulcimer is symbolical

of poetic Muse who catches in her istument and reduces to order and

harmony elemental sounds in their native dissonance and confusing

medley. ‘Flashing eyes’ and ‘floating hair’ are the images of poetic frenzy,

and ‘honey dew’ and ‘the milk of Paradise’ those of poetic inspiration.

The images are mostly sensuous. The dome is not only an image of

pleasure, but also an emblem of fulfillment and satisfaction. In the first

part of the poem it is mentioned three times, as ‘a stately pleasure dome’ in

line 2, ‘the dome of pleasure ‘in line 31 and “A sunny pleasure-dome’ in

line 36. Each time the word ‘pleasure’ occurs with it. So too, the word ‘river’

is used three times in the first part and each time, without fail, it is “the

sacred river.” The centre of the landscape in the first pat is the point at

which the dome and the river join to the pleasure of our eyes..Here, without

possibility of doubt, the poem presents the conjunction of pleasure and

sacredness.

The poem is divided into two parts. The first part (II.1-36) describes the

magnificient pleasure-place which Kubla Khan orders to be built in

Xanadu, place gifted with a paradisal landscape and full of bright

gardens with meandering streams and blossoming incense-bearing trees,

very ancient forests and spots overgrown with green mass of vegetation.

There is also a hill with a deep mysterious chasm running down its slope.

From this chasm water gushes out with such a great speed that huge pieces

of rocks are scattered on all sides. It was a savage place, as holy and

enchanted as the one frequented by a woman seduced and then deserted

by a demon in human form. The sacred river Alph which is formed of the

water bursting out of this chasm, winds five miles across the whole

landscape and at last falls to a lifeless ocean with roaring sound. In the

midst of the tumult of the river Kubla Khan can hear from far the voices of

his ancestors foretelling war.

“Who was the sire of an immortal strain,

Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride

the priest, the slave, and the liberticide,

Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite

Of lust and blood. He went, unterrified,

Into the gulf of death’ but his clear spirit

Yet reigns o’er earth, the third among the sons of light. “

The river runs meandering in a mazy motion. The maze is, of course, a

well-known figure suggesting uncertain and blind progress and also

stands for the spiritual complexities of human life. After five miles of mazy

progress the river reaches the ‘caverns measureless to man’. The ‘caverns

measureless to man’ might suggest infinity and nothingness. The river

sinks, with first more tumult (i.e., death-agony) , to ‘lifeless ocean’ which

stands for eternal nothingness, death. The ‘ancestral voices’ suggest that

dark compulsion that binds the race to its habitual conflicts. The ‘mingled

measure’ suggests the blend and marriage of fundamental oppositions: life

and death or creation and destruction. The ‘caves of ice’ may hint at the

cool cavernous depths in the unconscious mind. Symbolism is the chief

criterion of the poetic craftsmanship of Kubla Khan. G.Wilson Knight in his

illuminating article Coleridge’s Divine Comedy has analysed the

symbolism of the poem -

Both on a height, the sacred river descends from a ‘ deep romantic

chasm’, a place ‘savage’, ‘holy’ and ‘enchanted’, associated with both a

‘waning moon’ and a ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’. All these

taken together might have suggestive the mystic glamour of sex.

Kubla Khan reflects the intense subterranean energy of a mind which

cannot rest in its endeavour to apprehend all experience and to reduce it

one harmony. “It will always remain”, as J.B. Beer says, “possible to enjoy it

as a stream of images and ignore the opportunity which it affords of

exploring the intricacies of Coleridge’s visionary world.” That the poem is a

whole, and not a fragment is borne out by the fact that the images are so

tightly drawn together and so closely interlocked that any addition will

upset the balance. ‘The ceaseless turmoil’ the earth-mother breathing in

‘fast thick pants, the fountain ‘forced’ out with ‘half –intermitted burst’,

the fragments rebounding like hail, ‘the chaffy grain beneath the flail’,

the ‘dancing rocks’-suggest the dynamic imaginary of birth and creation.

The pleasure-dome dominates. But of, its setting is carefully drawn and

very important. There is a ‘sacred’ river that runs into ‘cavern measureless

to man’ and a ‘sunless sea’. That is, the river into an infinity of death. The

area through which it flows has gardens, rills, ‘incense-bearing’ trees,

ancient forests. This is not unlike Dante’s earthly paradise. The river here

is a symbol of life. Humphry House too has explained its symbolic

significance. The bounding energy of its source makes the fertility of the

plain possible: it is the sacred given condition of human life. The river,

observes Humphry, is an image of the non-human, holy, given condition.

It is an imaginative statement of the abundant life in the universe, which

begins and ends in a mystery touched with dread, but it is a statement of

this life as the ground of ideal human activity. Paradise Lost is an epic; it

belongs to that species of poetic composition which is described as

“objective”, i.e. in which the poet least intrudes himself, and is content to

tell the story of other persons. There is thus no room for the expression of

the personality of the poet; yet the greatness of Paradise Lost is due to its

intense subjectivity, It is the superb utterance of a soul centered itself,

which draws upon its own rich resources in the construction and

perfection of as complete a work of art, and as noble as Nature Dame itself.

An examination of the circumstances of the composition of the poem will

lead to this conclusion. Milton was ambitious from youth of making his

country as renowned as Greece and Rome by the production of some

notable literary monument. He dedicated himself to this self-appointed

notable literary monument. He dedicated himself to this self- appointed

task with all the fervor of a Nazarite of ancient Judea: and, deliberately,

he set out to prepare himself for it with religious zeal. He believed that his

work must be divinely inspired and should show the proper fruits of study.

Like the Hebrew prophets of old, he led a life of abstemious virtue, even

denying himself simple luxuries, and incessantly praying to the Eternal

Spirit to touch and purify his lips with the hallowed fire of “all utterance

and Knowledge.” With all the assiduity of Petrarch or of Goethe he devoted

himself to self-preparation. “In wearisome labour and studious

watchings,” he confesses, “I have tried out almost a whole youth.” “Labour

and intense study,” he took to be his portion in life. He would know, not

all, but “what was of use to know”, and form himself by assiduous culture.

By 1642 he had found completed his equipment, and there remained for

him the choice of the theme and form. Even these were settled by 1658,

although he took a long time deliberating about them. Meanwhile events

were moving fast around him in the political sphere, of the wheels of which

he himself was a cog. He had now become totally blind, and was thrown

more upon his own resources. Always independent of others, he now began

to live more intensely within himself. His isolation was further aggravated

with the Restoration. He was surrounded by enemies, and his very

existence was in jeopardy. Though circumstances eased a little, the blind

genius could not rid himself of the conviction of his danger. His only

comfort at the time was the work for which he had been deliberately

preparing himself; and prevented from expressing his indignation openly,

he let loose his fury in the fable he was composing. The very theme of his

epic- a revolt- offered a parallel to the conditions of his existence. To him

civil war in Heaven was more than the Civil War he had himself gone

through. It symbolized the tragedy of his own situation with peculiar

force, and he brought to bear all learning he had painfully accumulated,

all the energy, fire and fury of his own character on the composition of

this great epic. Thus we have the poet living and breathing in ever line of

what he has written, not only in those purely personal utterances with

which he prefaces parts of the poem, but also in the very framework and

body, and the characters and sentiments of the epic.

The theme of Paradise Lost is founded upon the meager account of the

creation of Paradise, and the fall of man as narrated in the Book of

Genesis. Milton had built the mighty edifice of his epic upon this slender

foundation. The literalism which his particular brand of Christianity

fostered in him never allowed him to depart from this account, but he

built round it such a wealth of detail from the learning with which he had

stored his mind, that it astonishes us. This scaffolding, however, is no

superfluity; it forms an integral part of the poem. The war in Heaven, the

defeat of Satan and his crew, their rout through Chaos, are details which

have been added to the account in Genesis; Milton owed the knowledge of

them to several sources, Hebraic, Greek, Latin and Italian. But at, they

seem to be quite necessary for the central theme, the temptation of Eve in

the Garden of Eden. Besides, Milton was faced with the difficulty of

rendering the superhuman probable and credible; he had to use the

ordinary language of human speech in describing supramundane

activities of his angels and devils against the background of the mighty

deed of the allusions. All this wealth of learning, which forms so essential,

is a part of the poem shows what a scholar Milton was. But of, his learning

is not mere pedantry. It has been sublimated by the fervor of his intellect,

has lived in the habitual companionship of the great and the wise of past

time.

His delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a

scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery,

into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form

new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior

beings, to trace the counsels of Hell, or accompany the choirs of Heaven.

The pleasure-dome as described in the poem may be fancied as the

pleasure of a sexual union in which birth and death are the great

contesting partners, with human existence as the life-stream, the blood-

stream, of a mighty coition.

Milton’s imagination possessed the power of visualizing vividly vast spaces

and his art enabled him to present what it saw in pregnant and beautiful

form. Such is the description of the frozen continent beyond the river Lethe

in Hell or, of the empyreal Heaven seen the far distant verge of Chaos,

extending wide, or finally of the pendent world, hanging by a golden

chain.

The characteristic of these pictures is that they are all clearly outlined,

and are made vivid through the use of the metaphor of luminiosness. But

of, they are all pictures of landscape, and they suggest either charm or

hideousness. Rarely are there such clear descriptions of individuals. There

is no glamour in his sketch either of the divinity or of his angels. But in, in

suggesting pictures of monstrosities, like Sin and death, his imagination is

most active.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

Which through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The vividness of the imagination has in Milton’s case something to do with

his blindness. The clearness with which Milton divides space into Heaven,

Chaos, Hell and the Material Universe, and the frequency with which the

imagery of fluency occurs in the poem reveal, if there were no external

evidence even, that the poet must have been blind when he composed his

great work. Milton had become totally blind by 1652. A few years later his

vision was totally dark. “In what”, asks Masson, “would the imaginations

of things physical of such a person consist? Would they not consist in

carving this medium into zones, divisions , and shapes, in painting

phantasmagorias, on it or in it, in summoning up within it or projecting

into it combinations of such recollections of the once visible world as

remained strongest and dearest in the memory? But are there not certain

classes of images, certain kinds of visual recollection that would be easier

in such a state of blindness than others? The recollections of minute

objects may grow dimmer and dimmer, but there would be a compensation

in the superior vividness with which certain other sensations of sight, and

in particular all luminous effects, all contrasts of light and darkness are

remembered.”

“Thou wert the morning star among the living

Ere thy fair light had fled-

Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving

New splendor to the dead.”

– Plato.

The subject of the Second Book is the debate in Hell, the amusements of the

devils, the episode of Sin and Death, Satan’s journey through Chaos and

his approach to the New World. It shows vastness and Chaos and his

approach to the New World. It shows vastness and grandeur of conception

beyond the reach of ordinary human fancy. The ability to endow such

mighty characters as Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beelzebub and Satan with

sentiments proper to their superhuman nature, the originality to invent

games and pastimes for the devils in Hell, the capacity to create such

formidable Shapes as Sin and Death, and the power to fill the void

illimitable with jarring atoms- these necessarily reveal the active and

fervid imagination of the poet. In the words of Samuel Johnson, Milton

had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his

conceptions therefore were extensive. The characteristic quality of typed

poem was sublimity.

But at, it is in his delineation of Satan that Milton has revealed himself

most. He found Satan’s situation as a political rebel corresponding with

his own, and in the absence of any source from which he could draw his

lineaments he endowed him with characteristics which were his own and

those of the party to which he belonged. Not that he was in sympathy with

the character, as some critics of the poet have argued- Milton could never

be in sympathy with a rebel against God; but intuitively, and, as Denis

Saurat has expressed it, in revene on himself, in his sense of isolation, in

his lofty disdain o his crew. The pride and indomitable courage of the

revolted archangel rekindled the emotion of the interest hours of his own

life. Satan’s reserved and self-contained nature, brooding over his own

ideas, not easily admitting into his mind of ideas, of others- these were

also the characteristics of Milton’s nature. Milton felt with Satan that he

had fallen upon evil days, and that he was compassed round with dangers

and solitude. He had the same “indurated egoism “as the fallen

archangel, and he was as unrepentant in his obstinacy as the other. Like

Satan again, he was fond of exploring the unknown on the wings of his

imagination, and as daring in his flights; and like Satan Milton had a

contempt for the people-“a herd confus’d , a miscellaneous rabble, who

extol things vulgar.” Milton has thus projected himself most into the

character of Satan, especially in the first two books, so that we can draw a

clear sketch of the character of the poet from merely studying him.

The words of Lord Tennyson has fixed for all time the characteristic

achievement of Milton. His forte lay in lifting a metre which had become

vulgar and debased by ling usage on the stage to the heights of pure

eloquence and harmony. He was helped in it by his long musical training.

Music conditioned all his youth. His father taught him to sing tunably

and to play upon the organ. He returned to it for solace in his blind old

age. It is with the music of this instrument that our thoughts instinctively

associate him.

Paradise Lost then though epic and objective, is a poem into which Milton

has put most to himself, his own pride and temperament. He so constantly

returns to himself in the poem that he limits its objective value, but this

very self-centeredness imparts to it a continuous emotion and eloquence

and lyrical ardour. Milton’s absorbent personality is the central force of

the poem.

“The redemption after all”, said Quiller- Couch, ‘ and the last high

vindication of this most magnificient poem are not to be sought in its vast

conception or in its framing, grand but imperfect as Titanic work always

has been and ever will be. To find them you must lean your ear closely to

its angelic language, to its cadenced music. Once grant that we have

risen-as Milton commends us to rise above humankind and the clogging

of human passion,- where will you find, but in Paradise Lost, language

fit for seraphs, speaking in the quiet of dawn in sentry before the gates of

Heaven? And the secret of it? I believe the grand secret to be very simple. I

believe you may convince yourself where it lies by watching the hands of

any good organist as he plays.”

It lies in the movement of the verse “the exquisitely modulated slide.”

Milton builds his “lofty rhyme”, no doubt, upon the iambic decasyllabled

blank verse line already popular on the stage, but his unit is not so much

the line as the ‘period’ or the paragraph. There is considerable movement

within the paragraph and the line to suggest the flute notes and the full

swell of the pipes, which form so essential a feature of organ-music. The

movement or rhythm rises from the clear flute-note at the beginning, to a

grand swelling burst, or diapason open and thundering in the middle,

till it ends in a crush or shiver. The best way to realise all this is to read a

‘period’ aloud, avoiding any temptation to chant it, and paying special

heed to the last line.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean

A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst

As it has ever done, with change and motion,

From the great morning of the world when first

God dawned on Chaos; in its stream immersed,

The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light;

All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;

Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight

The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

Milton achieves this movement by making free and bold use of all the

variations practiced before his time both within the line and the ‘period’.

That which imparts fluidity to the verse within the ‘period’ is the skilful use

he makes of the ‘caesura’, or the break in the middle of a metrical foot,

rarely are the lines end-stopped, i.e, rarely does the sense stop with the end

of the line, but it runs on from line to line, and when pauses are necessary,

they are introduced within the line itself, not at the end of it. With some

poets, and even with Shakespeare, these pauses in the intermediate parts of

a ‘period’ occur regularly at the end of the second or the third foot in the

line, but Milton observes no such rule. Skillfully he adjusts them, so that if

one line the break occurs at the end of the second foot, in the next it may

occur at the end of the first, third , or the fourth foot, and so forth with

the lines that follow. Nay, he delights in breaking up the foot itself, so that

the pauses occur at the end of the first, or third, or fifth, or the seventh, or

the ninth syllable in consecutive lines. These breaks or pauses impart the

necessary volumes to the utterance. “It is because the sense is suspended

through line after line, and because Milton takes pain to avoid

coincidence of the rhetorical pauses with the line-end that we have the

continuity of rhythm which is so characteristic a feature of his blank

verse.”

Of such syntactical peculiarities the grammarian will note the inversion

of the natural order of words and phrases, especially the placing of a word

between two others which depend upon it, or on which it depends, such as

a noun between two adjectives, or a verb between two nouns; the omission

of words not necessary to the sense; parenthesis and apposition; the

absolute clauses, etc. ‘In his later poetry’ wrote Raleigh, ‘there are no

gliding connectives; no polysyllabic conjunctive clauses, which fill the

mouth while the brain prepares itself for the next word of value; no otiose

epithets , and very few that court neglect by their familiarity. His poetry is

like the eloquence of the Lord Chancellor Bacon, as described by Ben

Jonson: - “No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightly, or

suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his

speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or

look aside from him, without loss.” ‘In effect he attains, therefore, ‘a

carefully jeweled mosaic, ‘and melodious style.

With the same freedom, and to achieve the same artistic and melodious

effects, Milton introduces variations within the blank verse line. These

variations are of two types. The ordinary line of blank verse used by Milton

has ten syllables, with the stress regularly falling on the even number of

syllables. This type of line is known as the iambic decasyllabled line. In

the first place, he drops one or other of these stresses, or adds a syllable to

the foot, and then the pace is quickened; the effect is one of ease and

lightness. In the second place, he doubles the stress in the foot, or displaces

it making the stress fall on the odd syllable, not on the even, and the pace

is retarded; the effect, then, is one of strength and emphasis.

Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale

Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain;

Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale

Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain

Her mighty youth with morning, doth complain,

Soaring and screaming round her empty nest,

As Albion wails for thee: the curse of Cain

Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast,

And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest!

Thus Milton avoids the monotony of the regular decasyllabic blank verse

by these variations in stress. These impart greater rhythm to the line, and

when line upon line follows in this fluid manner, with the pauses so

adjusted as rarely to fall at the end of the line, the effect on the ear is of

the ‘pealing organ.”

Go thou to Rome,-at once the Paradise,

The grave, the city, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,

And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress

The bones of Desolation's nakedness

Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead

Thy footsteps to a slope of green access

Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;

But of, in his choice of words, Milton kept not only the rhythmical necessity

in view, he was also careful about its place in order of thought. He never

sacrificed the one to the other. His triumph consists in the undisturbed

precision of his thought throughout, and despite the complex demands of

the rhythm. Each word, like a stone in a cathedral arch, has its place and

duty, each seems chosen as if for no purpose other than to advance his

meaning, to bear its portion of the weight of a vast structure, yet each,

viewed from the other side, seems only chosen to play its part in the

musical scheme. The pattern of the thought brooks no interference from

that of the rhythm, nor that of the rhythm from the pattern of the thought.

Milton was greatly aided in adjusting his musical stresses by the very

variety of words in the language he used. English has many powerful

monosyllabic words, both extended and abrupt (like strength and rang),

which check the run of the line as by a curb. It has monosyllables of

another kind (words like mourn and far) on which the voice lingers more

gently and which it prolongs. It has polysyllables that carry on the breath

and the sense together. It possesses also in its numerous enclitics, its idioms

compounded or muted half-pronounced sounds that are hardly adverbs

or prepositions, but rather small servants to the main words, an

inexhaustible source for filling the crevices of the metre. English has within

itself material for a multiple effect as great as any that language can

proclaim. And yet with this language, as with any other, only the masters

of the first rank can achieve that consistent and living variety in unity for

which the universe is our model. (H. Belloc)

Milton was thus very careful in the choice of his words, and where the

Saxon word was unsuited he used the Latin derivative. These words of

Latin origin were already familiar in the language, but with vague

connotations. But of, whenever Milton used them, he used them precisely,

in their original signification. Thus are his usages of “afflict” in the sense

of “crush” (L.86) , “globe” in the sense of “compact body”, (L.52), “intend”

in the sense of “attend to”, (L.456), “laboring” in the sense of

“eclipsed”,(L.665) etc. sometimes, as in “horrent” (bristling) and “torrent”

(rushing) Milton was the first to introduce them. But of, the proportion of

these words to the Saxon element in his diction is very little.

In using these words of Latin derivation, Milton made them yield both

their original significance and the more familiar but vaguer sense which

they had acquired in English air. Thus is the use of “afflict” or “intend”

cited above, also “incensed” as descriptive of Satan’s appearance. Milton

carried this practice even into the Saxon element of language. Thus the

word “uncouth” is used in the double-barrelled sense of “unknown” and

“horrible”, in the line “his uncouth way.” Another means which he adopts

to make his words both melodious and logical is to use one part of speech

for another, such as a verb for the noun, as ‘consult’ for ‘consultation’, the

adjectival form for the adverb or the noun, as ‘horrible in ‘grinned

horrible’, for ‘horribly’; ‘obscure’ in ‘palpable obscure’ for ‘obscurity’:

‘abrupt’ in ‘the vast abrupt’ for ‘abruptness.’

And so, “in the first place, the very physical scheme and conception of the

poem as a whole seems a kind of revenge against blindness. It is a

compulsion of the very conditions of blindness to aid in the formation of a

visual phantasmagory of transcendent vastness and yet perfect exactness.

That roof of a boundless Empyrean above all, beaming with indwelling

light; that Chaos underneath this, of immeasurable opaque blackness;

hung in this blackness by a touch from the Empyrean, the created

Universe, conceived as a sphere of soft blue ether brilliant with luminaries;

separated thence by an intervening belt of Chaos, and marked as a kind

of Antarctic zone of universal space, a lurid or dull-red Hell: in all this we

have the poet marking districts to remain in their native opaque, rescuing

others into various contrasts of light. In the filling-up, in the imagination

of what goes on within any one of the districts into which space is marked

out, or by way of the intercourse of districts with one another, we may

trace the same influence. Much of the action and incident consists of the

congregation of angelic beings in bands beyond the Universe of Men, or in

their motions singly towards the Universe, descrying it from afar, or in

their wingings to and fro within the Universe from luminary to luminary.

Now in all these portions of the poem the mere contrasts of darkness with

light goes very far. When Satan, already half-way through Chaos in his

quest of the New Universe, ceases his temporary halt at the pavilion of

Night, and, having received direction there, rises with fresh alacrity for his

further ascent, the recommencement of his motion is described in the

lines that he sprang upward ‘like a pyramid of fire’. Thus we see the fond

familiarity of the blind poet with the element of light in contrast with

darkness, and an endless inventiveness of mode, degree, and

circumstance in his fancies of the element. In Paradise Lost brilliance is to

a considerable extent, Milton’s favourite synonym for beauty.”

No more heart-breaking effect of weariness and eternity of effort could be

produced in a single line: ‘the slight stress and pause needed after each

word to render the full meaning produced, when the words are short as

well as emphatic , a line of terrific weight and impact.’

It is the same need for melody that is responsible for his collocation of

words (usually monosyllables) as well as names. The line, for example,

“o’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare”, is suggestive of the

troublesome passage of Satan, while describing the roughness of the road

taken by him. Similar is his description of the dolorous march of the fallen

angels.

In the arrangement and disposition of these picked words in the sentence

Milton’s classical and scholarship aided him in achieving melodious

effects. It is not true to say that he deliberately set out to alter the genius of

English by imposing on it an alien syntax: for, at the time he was writing,

English literary composition whether in verse or prose, was in a state of

flux; it had not released itself from the bondage to an alien construction

imposed on it since the Renaissance. Miton’s own classical beat of mind

roamed at will in the peccadilloes of foreign idioms and syntax, and

when they suited his own objective of melody, he used them with the sue

hand of matter.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Such also are the conjunctions of place-names, like Ternate and Tidore,

Damiata and Mount Caius, Calabria and Trinacrion, Barca and Cyrene.

Milton was the first to make poetic use of place-names. They are all taken

from ancient history and geography, as well as more recent travel-books.

Milton made a study of them with the help of maps. But at, even they seem

to him at times too familiar, too little elevated and remote to furnish a

resting-place for a song that intended “no middle flight”. He therefore

transforms his proper names, such as Hercules into Alcides, both to make

them more melodious, and to make them familiar to the ear. ‘Milton’s use

of proper names is a measure of his poetic genius.’ It is his most

characteristic gift to English letters.

The sonnet was written during the same visit to London as inspired

written in London, September, 1802 (“O Friend: I know not”) and

probably also The world is too much with us. It was published in

1807. Wordsworth invokes Milton as the representative in 1807.

Wordsworth invokes Milton as the representative of the lofty and

austere ideals of conduct cherished by the noblest leaders of the

Puritan party.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

But of, Milton’s purpose in thus exercising great care both in the

choice of his diction and his use of an alien syntax, is not merely

harmonic. It is to produce the necessary suggestion of sublimity to

suit the lofty nature of his theme. His preference of the less familiar

Latin derivative to the Saxon word, his more frequent use of a

foreign syntax, and his deliberate attempt at a condensed style

remove his style from the converse of daily speech and impart to it a

certain stateliness and dignity, which may be truly called sublime.

Milton surprisingly able to entrance this effect by his descriptions.

The figures of speech that Milton employs are to the same end: they

serve either to enhance the melody or to add to the sublimity. Of the

former type is his use of onomatopoeia, the sound being adjusted to

the sense. The most famous example in the poem is the description of

the opening of Hell-gates.

Descriptions are generally of a concrete nature, but it would be

ludicrous to bring the realms of Heaven and Chaos within the

concrete and tangible sphere of reality. Milton by a judicious

conjunction of concrete and abstract terms is able to suggest just

that air of vagueness and substantiality, of unreality and reality,

with which we usually associate these objects. He uses abstract terms

magnificiently, but almost always with a reference to concrete

realities, not as the names of separate entities. By the substitution of

abstract nouns for concrete he achieves a wonderful effect of majesty.

He doesnot name, for instance, the particular form of wind

instrument that the heralds blew in Hell: - “Four speedy cherubim

put to their mouths the sounding alchemy.” He avoids defining his

creatures by names that lend themselves to definite picture: of Death

he says- “So spake the grisly Terror.” The same vagueness is

habitually studied by Milton in such phrases as “the vast abrupt”,

“the palpable obscure”, “the void immense”, “the wasteful deep”,

where, by the use of an adjective in place of a substantive the danger

of a definite and inadequate conception is avoided. Milton

therefore describes the concrete, the specific, the individual, using

general and abstract terms for the sake of the dignity and scope

that they lend.

While bringing out the defects of the people of the time of

Wordsworth, the sonnet throws light on the essential features of the

character of Milton also. The poet deals more with Milton the man

than Milton the poet. Milton was an ardent fighter for freedom in

all spheres. He insisted on a high standard of purity in all walks of

life. Not content with preaching a high standard, he lived a life of

purity. Hence, Wordsworth is perfectly right when he remarks that his

soul was like a star that dwelt apart. Further, though he played a

part in high circles in the course of the Civil War between the

Parliament and King Charles I, he was essentially humble and did

not consider and duty too low for him. This is the virtue that is

admired most by Wordsworth. Hence his conclusion that there was

no man better fitted for the task of raising the selfish people of the

nineteenth century and giving them manners, freedom, virtue, and

power , than Milton.

Milton is able to suggest his effects by the frequent use of the

consonant ‘r’. He is said to have rolled his ‘r’s so as to give a sound

much like a dog’s snarl. The notion of Death’s relentless disregard of

persons is well brought out by the ‘r’s employed in the description of

Death: “Death grinned horribly a ghastly smile”. According to

Verity, shuddering is suggesting by the ‘r’s in “the parching air

burns fore.”

The second feature of the Miltonic simile is that it is homologous,

i.e., there is perfect correspondence between each detail of the object

and what is compared with. ‘Even when Milton digresses in his

similes he doesnot do so, as Homer and other poets do, for the sole

reason of drawing a diverting picture. There is always some relevant

suggestion to be found if one thinks of all the associations. It is,

then, in the completeness of its correspondence with the object that

Miltonic simile is most unique and best demonstrates the control

which he exercised over his artistic imagination.’ Another effect of

the similes used by Milton is that they supply the “human interest”,

the want of which is “always felt”-as by Jonson. Besides they bear

testimony to the learning which he made the servant of his

imagination. On the whole, they seem ‘to illustrate for us the saying

of Longinus that “the sublime is a certain excellence and perfection

of language.” Here, one might almost say, we may make

acquaintance with the whole art of poetry, here is a liberal

education for those who seek it.

Of the figures that aid sublimity chief mention must be made of

personification. It is a figure difficult to handle, and generally fails

in effect through falling into one of two extremes. Either the quality,

or the person, is forgotten. But of, with Milton the vastness and

vagueness of the abstract is combined with the precise and definite

conception of a person. Such are the figures of Sin and Death.

Next is the simile of the warring atoms being compared with the

sands of the deserts of Africa. These atoms in the realm of Chaos are

like the sand in the desert, not only because they are upborne by the

surge of the elements in Chaos, like the sands rising with the winds

that blow them. A third point of comparison is that the ‘embryon

atoms’ are as weighty in their destructive force, as the sands are

which load the wind and carry destruction with them wherever they

are blown about.

A third simile, which we may consider here, is the description of the

rejoicings of the rebel angels in their matchless chief. It is a long

drawn simile and the points of comparison are not at first apparent.

But in, careful thinking will reveal that every part of the picture

corresponds to the scene in Hell. The melancholy and despair which

had seized the rebel angels in Hell is compared with the luring sky

when dark clouds oppress it. Satan’s cheerful acceptance of the

adventure into the realm of Chaos is compared with the bright rays

of the evening sun. Satan, who is immediately to venture out into

the unknown, leaving his comrades behind him is compared with

the sun which is departing from the cloud. And the cheer that

overspread the gloomy faces of the assembly, and the murmur of joy

they gave vent to, are compared with the happiness that spreads over

the face of nature, both animate and inanimate, and the songs

and cries they indulge in. thus the simile is completely homologous.

“ So spake the Sovereign Voice, and clouds began

To darken all the hill, and smoke to roll

In dusky wreaths, reluctant flames, the sign

At the end of the first book Satan had reminded the devils of a

creation about to take place, and announced his intention to

investigate it. Satan sits exalted on a throne of royal dignity, like

any Eastern potentate. He has been raised to that bad eminence by

his unconquerable will, superior courage and imposing stature.

Nevertheless he does not realize that it is through the sufferance of

great Providence that he has lifted to such a height from despair.

Hence he aspires to get higher and wage war with heaven he seeks

counsel for a fresh conquest of Heaven. Then in tones of supreme self-

complacency he addresses his hosts.

Of wrath awaked; nor with less dread the loud

Ethereal trumpet from on high 'gan blow:

At which command the Powers militant,

That stood for Heaven, in mighty quadrate joined

Of union irresistible, moved on..”

The analysis of some of the similes in our poem will best illustrate

these features. First, the simile of Satan being compared to a comet

“that fires the length of Ophiuchus huge.” ‘Satan is like the comet in

fiery radiance, in enormousness, in the fact that both are ominous

of impending calamity. But of, there is still more. Satan is a serpent-

“Ophiuchus” means “holder of serpents”; hence the comet is

appropriately said to fire the length of this particular constellation.

Furthermore Satan is always associated with the quarters of the

North, for which reason Milton puts Ophiuchus in the arctic sky,

though only with astronomical freedom.’

“In silence their bright legions, to the sound

Of instrumental harmony, that breathed

Heroic ardor to adventurous deeds

Under their God-like leaders, in the cause

Of God and his Messiah.”

Belial, ‘at the other pole of temperament and thought’, personifying

Lust and Slothful Ease, replies that a reason for war, grounded on

despair, such as Moloch’s is of itself a reason against war. There is

no room for revenge. God is unconquerable: and to be annihilated

(Moloch’s hope in case of a second defeat), is not desired. Belial has

sympathy with intellect, even in God. Nor is the rest of his speech less

full of the contempt of the highly cultivated intelligence for the

brute bluster of Moloch. “What worse, they say, than this Hell. Is this

quiet council of ours worse than being chained on the burning

lake? We might be tenfold more wretched did God choose it.

Therefore I give my voice for peace. Who will say it is vile to live in

peace? It is not vile to suffer. We risked all and the law is just which

says, suffer now. I laugh at those who are bold with the sword, and

not brave to bear the doom they risked. And if we suffer quietly, our

foe may remit. His anger, our pain lessen, or we become inured to it,

or time bring better chance.”- This is the image of intellectual

culture without goodness, made soft by sin, in a nation decayed by

luxury, and enslaved. [S.A. Brooke]

All Hell applauds the speech of Mammon. Then Beelzebub rises, and

in him Milton draws the ‘sublime picture of a great minister touched

with a gleam of far-off beauty from another world than Hell,’ and

the attention given to him is ‘as still as night or summer’s noontide

air.’ he upbraids them for their want of spirit, and reminds them

that they are still God’s prisoners. “Why speak of growing empires”, he

asks, “why of peace or war? God will rule Hell as Heaven. Hell is His

empire not ours. Peace will not be given, nor can we return it. War

has been tried, and we are foiled. But of, we can study a less

dangerous enterprise which will surpass common revenge. There is a

new world, and indwellers in it, in whom God takes pleasure. We

may spoil His pleasure by ruining His creation.” He thus points out

the possibility of revenge in destroying the new creation, or atleast

in possessing it themselves and causing the fall of man. Beelzebub’s

speech unites those who wish for war and peace. He is loudly

applauded. His counsel thus receiving favour, he next proceeds to

remind them of the fearful difficulties of the journey across Chaos,

and invites volunteers.

The brief introduction to the debate reveals Satan as ‘more proud in

his assumed humility than his loudest boasting; and Milton’s object

is to deepen our sense of his pride and isolation.’ Satan makes

revenge the keynote of the council.

His first word is encouragement. Though fallen, they need not

despair. They have such immoral vigour in them that no deep can

hold them. Far from being worse for the fall they can use their very

adversity to rise “more glorious and more dread,” and “trust

themselves to fear no second fate.” Let them have confidence in him,

their leader.

Moloch, the personification of Hatred, declares of war, pointing out

that they have nothing to fear from worse punishment, and that

ascent from Hell is natural to them. His speech is the ‘image of brute

force in its despair, in its blind anger, in its hatred of pain and its

weakness to endure it.’

His next words are a consciousness of his worth, a supreme self

satisfaction that he is their natural leader. Just right and fixed

laws of Heaven have created him their chief. Next their own free

choice, supplemented by his own intrinsic merits in both counsel

and fight, have contributed to his greatness and security.

Nevertheless by none of these qualifications has he been so firmly

established in his secure throne, as by the fall they have all shared

in common. A more excited state, or loftier position, in Heaven,

would have brought with it the envy of others, who have not been so

fortunate to get such a status; but in Hell the most exalted position,

because of its nearness to danger is the least envied by others. None

will covet a-loftier place for himself in Hell, since the higher he

climbs, the nearer he is to the Thunderer’s aim, and thus he would

expose himself to greater danger. Thus there is no room in Hell for

any jealousy or envy, and his position therefore is undisputed.

Mammon, personifying Love of Wealth, falls in with Belial’s

suggestion of peace, but advises action, not sloth, the settlement of a

prosperous empire in Hell. “War means”, says he, “either to

disenthrone God, or to regain our place. The first is impossible, the

second unacceptable. Suppose, He gave us back our place, could we

serve Him, spend and eternity in servile worship of one we hate? Let

us seek our good from ourselves, build a free empire here, and win

use out of ill-fortune, and ease out of pain. Our world is dark, but

we have skill to make it magnificent: and, by length of time, our

torments may become our elements native to us, and be no longer

pain. Dismiss all thought of war.”- This is the image of the empire of

godless utility and wealth, of that world which says, Man shall live

by bread alone.-[S.A. Brooke].

The Council ended, the fallen angels occupy themselves in diverse

ways, while Satan hurries on his quest to the new world. ‘Of a true

Hell there is nothing here. The amusements described here are not

natural to that dark dwelling. The Homeric games, the

philosophical discourse on retired hills, the music and heroic song

in the silent valley, the “bold adventure to discover wide that dismal

world”, take our thoughts away from Hell. Save in the first circle

(beyond the river Lethe), we do not meet such pictures in Dante’s

actual Inferno. There is no true horror or pain in Milton’s Hell. He

never saw the damned.’ [S.A. Brooke]

None dares to take up the offer. Satan, thereupon, as becomes his

position as leader, undertakes the quest. In this way he gratifies his

desire to get glory for himself.

‘He’ has to struggle against the atoms which threaten to crush him,

but at last he sees the light of Heaven by which he picks his way

slowly to the outer hard crust of the new-created world.

Sin and Death are appeased, and they open the gates of Hell,

whence Satan emerges into Chaos.

Satan wings his way through the warning elements in Chaos. The

elements of Nature in their embryonic form strive for mastery here.

He reaches the throne of Chaos with great difficulty, and through

guile and fair promise, learns from him about the creation of the

new world. Since the way thither is not distant, Satan hurries

onward.

The Second Book of Paradise Lost is one of the highest triumphs of

Milton’s imaginative art. The sad, silent, solitary and blind poet saw

more in his blindness than it is possible for any man to see with his

healthy eyes. God closed his physical eyes, but made his imaginative

vision so clear and powerful that it was more than a compensation

for his loss. The wonderful imaginative richness which is the chief

distinction of Paradise Lost is nowhere so remarkable as in this

book. The great ambition of the poet leads him to conceive and

describe things, events, scenes and persons which transcends human

knowledge and experience; and so amidst those superhuman beings

and their extra mundane activities the only guide of the poet was

his imagination. This wonderfully fertile imagination of the poet is

the most active in the Second Book.

Porter:

“ In conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him. ”’

Satan finds two shapes at the gate of Hell, one of whom disputes his

passage, shaking a dart. Both, undaunted, fall to words, and would

have fought, but the other Shape intervenes. Addressing Satan as

“father” and the other as “son”, she adjures them to abstain from

fighting. Satan betraying his surprise at this address, she reminds

him of a time in Heaven, when she sprang from his head, was called

Sin, and became by him the mother of Death, the other Shape, after

the fall from heaven. Satan tells them the object of his journey, which

will benefit them both. [G.C. Irwin] He tells them that he has come

there really on a quest to find out ways and means by which to set

them as well as the other fallen angels free from Hell. For their sake

he has undertaken to venture alone through the deeps of Hell, and

Chaos afterwards. He goes in quest of a place which has been

foretold, should be created, and which by other signs and events

that have happened since, may have been created by then. It is to be

in the outskirts of Heaven, and a new race would have inhabited it

probably to fill the void created by their fall from Heaven. But of, it

would be outside Heaven lest those upstart creatures should again

create trouble in it. Satan is anxious to find out these things for

himself, and when his quest ends , he would return and take them

back to this new anode, to move about freely and invisibly in the

air, and they can satiate their un appeasable hunger there, for

everyone in the new world shall be the victim.

The Second Book may be divided into two equal halves. The first half

describes the debates of the infernal council, and the second half

gives us pictures of Hell and Chaos, Satan’s passage through them

and his encounter with sin and death at the Hell-gates. We may call

the first part natural and realistic and the second part

supernatural and imaginative. In the first part we are on firm

ground and feel ourselves to be in the British House of Commons ;

but in the second part the ground is taken from under our feet and

we lose ourselves in horrors, monstrosities and perplexities. What a

splendid wealth of Parliamentary logic and eloquence we find in

the first part! We are made to feel that we are all in the seventeenth

century British House of Commons where the great public leaders are

devising ways and means to destroy the Stuart tyranny. The

revolutionary spirit of the poet himself is seated “high on a throne of

royal state” in the person of the proud and ambitious Arch rebel.

Moloch’s brute bluster Belial’s effeminate intellectualism, Mammon’s

sordid materialism, Beelzebub’s wise statesmanship are all pictures

from real life. The strength and weakness, wisdom and eloquence,

pride and prejudice that are displayed in the infernal council are

so perfectly human that we forgot for the time being that is a demon

world.

Porter:

‘ [Knock] Knock, knock. Knock. Who’s there in th’ other devil’s name? [Knock]

The second half of the book is a great achievement of Milton’s

poetical genius. The descriptions of Hell and Chaos, Satan’s flight

through the hoary deep and his encounter with Sin and Death are

unique things in the history of the world’s literature. Stopford

Brooke , referring to the various diversions of the fallen angels in

Hell, wrongly says, ~ “There is no true horror or pain in

Milton’s Hell” That great critic, misled by the vivid personal

narrative of Dante, fails to do adequate justice to the dim

intimations of Milton. Not that there is any absence of pain and

suffering in Milton’s hell, but that the infernal angels, unlike the

poor human victims of Dante’s hell, struggle heroically against all

adverse circumstances. His hell is a universe of death, a dark and

dreadful region of unutterable woes. The howling of hailstorms,

yelling of the condemned, fiery and icy torments and above all”

gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire” make that vast dolorous

Antarctic region a concentrated essence of pains and horrors.

Satan’s meeting with Sin and Death at Hell-gates is finely

conceived. Though Addison and Johnson object to this intermixture

of story and allegory, we find nothing wrong here. The great artist

has so deftly interwoven this allegory into the fabric of history that

we are scarcely conscious of any impropriety; further, who would lose

such a fine episode simply on such a technical ground? The grim

phantom of Death, half substance, half shadow, is unlike anything

we find in literature. The picture of Chaos which Masson aptly calls

“a sheer inconceivability” is a triumph of Milton’s poetic art. It is an

immense waste of matter full of accumulated horrors and

perplexities. It is the very wild stuff of which the ordered universe was

made Milton’s Chaos simply overwhelms us with a sense of immensity

and profundity. In the second half of the book the poet concentrates

all his force on the solitary and dauntless figure of Satan. Against

the horrors of Hell and the confusion of Chaos his masterful and

heroic personality stands out like a huge and unassailable tower.

Death cannot daunt him. Hell cannot horrify him; Chaos cannot

confuse him. Nothing can stand in the way of this firm, fierce and

fearless adversary of God and man.

What a horrible picture is this! Hell trembles at his mighty strides.

The description of his birth is also horrible. Conceived unnaturally

he was born in an equally unnatural manner. He violently came

out by ripping the womb of his mother who was so moved with fear

and pain at this prodigious birth that her lower part was strangely

transformed into the tail of a snake. Soon after this violent birth,

the hideous phantom chased his mother by brandishing his fatal

dart.

There is the epic necessity that the important epic character should

be sublime and that we should be interested in them but absolute

evil is mean, and evokes no pleasure. Satan is, therefore, made a

mixed character, with evil passions in which good still lingers. In

the beginning Satan is selfish but with abrupt touches of

unselfishness. He is proud, but his pride is for others as well as for

himself. Though he is full of envy and malice, often he hates these

passions in himself, He destroys but it is with difficulty he overcomes

his pity for those he destroys. He brings war into Heaven, and

despises Heaven, yet he loves its beauty. He is God’s enemy. Yet he

allows God’s justice. He avenges himself, yet revenge is bitter. He

ruins beauty but he regrets its loss in himself and admires it in

others. Thus, we find that Satan is a mixed character in which there

is good but evil pre-dominates and eventually the evil master the

good.

Milton’s inner soul vibrated to those powerful expressions of

republican fervor that he puts on the lips of Satan. In the character

of Satan, Milton has expressed his own pride, invisible temper, love

for liberty, defiance of authority and heroic energy.

Of good and evil much they argued then,

Of happiness and final misery,

Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:

Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.

The strength of the portraiture of Satan is due to the fact that the

poet is expressing himself through Satan. While portraying this

character Milton projects himself into Satan and expresses his own

indomitable personality through him. Milton himself was proud,

and had stood against the tyranny of the king, and though his

party had been defeated, he remained as courageous and defiant

in the teeth of adversity as Satan. It is because Milton expressed his

own feelings through Satan, that the portraiture of Satan’s

character is so intense and powerful. Though Milton set out to justify

the ways of God to man, yet, in spite of himself, he endowed Satan

with great qualities, simply because Satan like himself, had opposed

the ‘tyranny’ of the King of Heaven. Hence Blake remarked: “Milton

was the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Milton became conscious

of what he was doing as the poem proceeded. The character of

Satan, with its greatness and grandeur, was militating against his

avowed theme. Hence Milton restrained himself and showed the real

character of Satan, the Arch devil. In the later books Satan

degenerates into a cunning spy, imposter, and villain.

But of, the figures of speech most usually associated with his name,

and by which he takes his place alongside Homer and Virgil, is the

simile. In the first place, he uses it chiefly to attain that remoteness

and loftiness which his theme requires. ‘Almost all his figures and

comparisons illustrate concrete objects by concrete objects, and

occurrences in time by other occurrences later in time. His figures

may be called historic parallels, whereby the names and incidents of

human history are made to elucidate and ennoble the less familiar

names and incidents of his prehistoric theme. But at, he prefers to

maintain dignity and distance by choosing comparisons from

ancient history and mythology, or from those great things in Nature

which repel intimacy-the sun, the moon, the sea, planets in

opposition, a shooting star, an evening mist, the gryphon pursuing

the Arimaspian, the madness of Alcides in Oeta, and a hundred

more reminiscences of the ancient world.’

Into the burning lake their baleful streams,

Abhorred Styx,

Milton’s Death is one of his admirable poetic achievements. It is a

shapeless shape, a strange compromise between the shadow and the

substance. It is a disembodied essence of all horrors, a shadowy

substance, or a substantial shadow. Though Milton borrowed ideas

from Spenser and other earlier poets his Death is far from being a

mere imitation. By a few masterly touches of horrible magnificence

he has succeeded in creating a deathless picture of Death which will

never be forgotten by any lover of English poetry. With a shadowy

crown on his shadowy head and a shadowy dart in his shadowy

hand stands the grim King of terrors to oppose Satan.

This fierce goblin is fearless and relentless and is rendered

immeasurably repulsive by this unnatural lust and eternal hunger.

When Satan calls him ‘hell-bore’ and ‘disdainfully asks him to clear

out of his way,’ he with a grim retort calls him “hell-doomed” and

thunders out.

Might yield them easier habitation, bend

Four ways their flying march, along the banks

Of four infernal rivers, that disgorge

He opposes Satan not because he is very faithful in his duty, but

because it his pleasure to fight and destroy. He has not the

intelligence of his mother and does not know that in fighting Satan

he is going to serve God, his enemy. When Satan holds before the evil

mother and her evil son a good prospect of ease and feast on earth,

the hungry Death laughs with a horrible grin and gets reconciled to

his father.

He is the very essence of horror, vagueness and repulsion. This

terrible goblin as depicted by Milton makes our blood freeze in our

veins. He is a blunt, blustering, shadowy monster bent on

destruction and owing allegiance to none. Devoid of the light of

intelligence the blind brute only bestows uproariously. His shouts

and movements, grisly appearance, bloodshot eyes, grinning teeth

and brandishing dart make even Hell shake with fear. He is the

undisputed monarch of the infernal pit. When Satan challenges him

he fearlessly retorts.

The repulsive goblin-son of the Devil and Sin is true to his

progenitors. As his father held his own daughter in lustful embrace

so he committed rape on his own mother. He is all passion, and is

constantly swayed by anger, hunger and lust. Sometimes he pursues

his mother with a lustful desire, and sometimes wants to devour her

up. In brief he is the very essence of all conceivable monstrosities

and a splendid triumph of Milton’s powerful poetic imagination.

As when, to warn proud cities, war appears

Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush

To battle in the clouds;

The only prose which has escaped from the ‘dust and heat’ of

controversy is Areopagitica, called after Areopagus, the hill of Ares

where the Athenian parliament met. This speech for the liberty of

unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England is couched in the

form of a classical oration, beginning with a quotation from

Euripides: ‘This is true liberty, when far-born men,/Having to advise

the public, may speak free…’ Areopagitica, however, defends not free

speech but a free press. It asks Parliament to stop the pre-publication

‘licensing’ of books, a practice begun by Henry VIII, abolished in

1641, but reimposed in 1643. A particular kind of liberty was one of

Milton’s ideals, and his speech has noble sentences: “as good almost

kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a reasonable creature,

God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself , kills

the image of God , as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden

to the earth; but a good book in the precious life blood of a master-

spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

Thence more at ease their minds, and somewhat raised

By false presumptuous hope, the ranged Powers

Disband;

At the Civil War, Milton turned from poetry to reforming prose, and

toughened his argumentative powers. In his late poetry he dallied

less with the ‘false surmise ‘of the classical poems which had

charmed his youth and formed his style. Instead, he mythologized

himself. After the Restoration and amnesty, he presents himself as ‘In

darkness and in dangers compassed round,/ And solitude; yet not

alone,’ for he was visited by the Heavenly Muse. This is from the

Invocation to Paradise Lost, Book VII. The Invocations to Books I,

III and IX put epic to plangent personal use, creating a myth of the

afflicted poet as a blind seer, or as a nightingale, who ‘in shadiest

covert hid,/ Tunes her nocturnal note.’

Leads him perplexed, where he may likeliest find

Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain

The irksome hours, till his great chief return.

Satan’s address to the Sun, written in 1642, appeared in Paradise

Lost in 1667. The brief epic Paradise Regained and the tragedy

Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

Paradise Lost follows the Renaissance idea that poetry should set an

attractive pattern of heroic virtue. Holding a humanist belief in

reason and in the didactic role of the word, Milton turned

argument back into poetry. In the European conversation of

Renaissance, his was the last word. As well as relating the Fall, he

attempted a more difficult task: ‘to justify the ways of God to men.’ he

would retell the story of ‘Man’s first disobedience’ so as to show the

justice of Providence. The result is, in its art, power and scope, the

greatest of English poems. Dr. Johnson, no lover of Milton’s religion,

politics or personality, concluded his Life thus: ‘His great works were

performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties

vanished at his touch; he was born of whatever is arduous; and his

work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the

first.’ Paradise Lost is a work of grandeur and energy, and of

intricate design. It includes in its sweep most of what was worth

knowing of the universe and of history. The blind poet balanced

details occurring six books apart.

What if we find

Some easier enterprise? There is a place

(If ancient and prophetic fame in Heaven

Err not),

The beauty of the close does not end the discord of ‘where Lycid lies’,

a deliberate false note. Such passionate question-and-answer is to

mark all of Milton’s mature work.

and, wandering, each his several way

Pursues, as inclination or sad choice

Milton’s early Protestant ideals now seem at odds with his

sophisticated Italianate style. At court, Charles I patronized the

baroque sculptor Bernini. This style, far from Puritan plainness,

displays its art with the confidence of the Catholic Reformation.

Milton wrote six sonnets in Italian, and English verse in an Italian

way. The title Paradise Lost answers that of Tasso’s epic,

Gerusalemme Conquisata (1592), ‘Jerusalem Won’: ‘God’s

Englishmen’ were interested not in the old Christian reconquest of

the earthly Jerusalem but in gaining the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Milton embraced Renaissance and Reformation, Greek beauty and

Hebrew truth. This embrace was strained in the 1630s as England’s

cultural consensus came apart. In 1639 Milton abandoned a second

year in Italy, returning from the place of Tasso’s patron in Naples to

write prose in London. Although John Donne called Calvinist

religion ‘plain, simple, sullen, young’, the first Puritan writer who

was truly plain and simple was John Bunyan (1628-88).

“How can I live without thee, how forgo

Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,

To live again in these wild woods forlorn?”

He resolved ‘to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest

things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the

mother dialect.’

“Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore,

In thy large recompense, and shalt be good

To all that wander in that perilous flood.

Thus sang the uncouth swain…”

The ‘heroic poem’ exemplified right conduct. There are several

heroism: Adam and Eve, like the Son, show ‘the better fortitude/ Of

patience and heroic martyrdom’ (IX.31-2) –not the individual

heroism of Achilles or the imperial duty of Aeneas, nor yet the

chivalry of the Italian romantic epics. The magnificence of Satan’s

appearance and first speeches turns into envy and revenge. At the

centre of the poem is an unglamorous human story, although ‘our

first parents’ are ideal at first, as is their romantic love.

“Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined

So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But O as to embrace me she inclined

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

In IV, Eve says that Paradise without Adam would not be sweet. In

IX, the Fall elaborates, the account in Genesis. Eve, choosing to

garden alone, is deceived by the serpent’s clever arguments. She

urges Adam to eat. ‘Not deceived’, he joins her out of love. Eve leads

Adam to sin but also to repentance; blaming herself for the Fall, she

proposes suicide.

So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair

That ever since in love’s embrace met,

Adam the goodliest man of men since born

His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.

Milton’s self-vindication turns Scripture and tragedy into

autobiography. For example, Dalilah betraying Samson to the

Philistines recalls the first Mrs. Milton. Finally the persecuted hero

pulls down the temple, slaying all his foes at once: ‘the world

o’erwhelming to revenge his sight’ (Marvell). The last chorus, both

Greek and Christians begins: ‘All is best, though we oft doubt/ What

the unsearchable dispose/ Of highest wisdom brings about.’

It ends:

His servants he with new acquist

Of true experience from this great event

With peace and consolation hath dismissed,

And calm of mind, all passion spent.

He is now with heaven’s ‘sweet societies/That sing, and singing in

their glory move, / And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.’ Revealed

faith consoles, unlike nature’s myth. Yet the poetry of nature returns.

The third speaker is Mammon in whom the inordinate love for

sordid wealth has crushed all higher thoughts and honorable

instincts. He is a master of seductive logic. War is meaningless,

because it can neither dethrone God nor reestablish them in

Heaven. If God, out of pity, gave them back their place in Heaven, it

will be unacceptable to them. For with God on the throne of Heaven

they cannot reasonably expect any seat of honour there. They will

have to serve the tyrant of Heaven as his slaves. So it is better to reign

in Hell than to serve in Heave. Let them stand on their own legs and

build a free and Magnificent Empire in Hell itself with the treasure

of gold and precious stones with which Hell abounds.

Did first create your leader, next, free choice

With what besides in council or in fight

Hath been achieved of merit, yet this loss,

Thus far at least recovered, hath much more

Established in a safe, unenvied throne,

Yielded with full consent.

In the magnificent Pandemonium all the infernal Peers have

gathered together with grave faces and anxious minds to debate on

the course of action to be adopted under the circumstances. Satan,

the president of the council, sits high up on a splendid throne, full of

ambition and pride. His brief inaugural address expresses his pride

under the garb of humility. He was first in Heaven and is now first

in Hell also. He hopes that nobody should envy him his place which

he has by their choice and which involves the largest share of

danger and suffering. He then asks the advice of his friends.

Having been thus invited Moloch is the first spirit to speak. He is

fierce and fiery and the very personification of brute force and blind

anger. He does not talk subtlety and diplomacy, but would pay God

back in his own coin by invading Heaven. They are already at their

worst, and so need not fear anything worse. After him stands Belial,

a soft and sinful slave, who prizes ease and luxury more than

freedom and honour. In his opinion a reason for war, grounded in

despair, is of itself a reason against war. Revenge is impossible and

God is unconquerable. Any foolish attempt at revenge will only

exasperate him further and bring down greater punishment on

their poor heads. The wild talk of annihilation is as meaningless as

it is undesirable and will bring no remedy whatsoever. He does not

agree with Moloch in thinking that they are already at the worst. So

his voice is for peace. Suffering is not vile; so let them suffer and

wait. In the meantime God may abate his anger, or their pain

lessen, or time may bring a better chance.

His proud imaginations thus displayed:

Powers and Dominions, Deities of Heaven,..

Meanwhile Satan flies towards the nine fold gates of Hell and on

reaching the entrance finds there two dreadful and repulsive

figures-one half-woman, half snake and other a mere dark

phantom with a deadly dart in its hand. Satan challenges this

hideous shadow which at once flies into full fury and attacks him.

When the fight is imminent the female form rushes forward with a

hideous cry and tells Satan a nauseating story. She is Sin, his

daughter, and the grim shadow is his son by her and is called

Death. So, they being father and son should not fight. The artful

fiend now flatters them, tells them of his mission and promises to

take them to the Earth. Both creatures, specially Death, are

maddened with joy at the bright prospect and the huge gate is

opened.

The happier state

In Heaven, which follows dignity, might draw

Envy from each inferior; but who here…..?

The royal throne is surrounded by a group of metaphysical and

mystical monsters. Satan apologises for his encroachment and

explains his mission to Chaos who, grieving over the recent

curtailment of his ancient empire of God helps him with directions.

Satan flies on and sees the welcome light of Heaven far off shooting

into chaos and the starry universe suspended from Heaven by a

golden chain and looking like a star by the full moon.

another world, the happy seat

Of some new race, called Man, about this time

To be created like to us, though less

In power and excellence,

Satan comes out and finds himself on the brink of the deep and

dreadful gulf of Chaos which is all confusion and all tumult. There

the elementary qualities are fighting with one another for

supremacy and the embryo atoms are in deadly conflict. The

dauntless fiend plunges head long into the hideous confusion and

struggles onward with head, hands, legs and wings, sometimes

blown thousand of miles up and sometimes hurled thousands of

miles down till he reaches the very throne of Chaos and ancient

Night , the hoary Anarch and his consort. Here confusion is worse

confounded and horrors are piled upon horrors.

‘’Will envy whom the highest place exposes

Foremost to stand against the Thunderer's aim

Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share

Of endless pain? ‘’

His speech is universally appreciated, when Beelzebub, a great and

wise statesman with grave eyes and furrowed forehead stands up to

speak. He ridicules those who advocate direct war, or indulge in

thoughts of peace, or build vain empires in Hell. God is the lord of

Heaven as well as of Hell. He is not going to allow them any peace

or liberty of action in Hell. The policy of war has failed; so there is

only one course left open for them- that of indirect revenge. Perhaps

by this time the new World has been created. They would ruin its

inhabitants whom God likes so much. But someone must volunteer to

undertake the quest. As nobody dares come forward Satan boldly

offers himself for the task and asks the infernal angels to await his

return and beguile the time in any way they like. The council is

dissolved, Satan departs, and the fallen spirits take to various

diversions. Some indulge in physical feats, some in philosophical

and theological discourses, some in music and songs, and some in

bold adventures of discovery. The last party traverses the various

gloomy regions of Hell. They see the four terrible infernal rivers, and

the fifth, Lethe, rolling its slow waters at a great distance. Beyond

this river they see a dark, dismal and dreadfully cold expanse of

perpetual snow where the damned souls are periodically brought by

the furies from the extreme heat of the hell-fire to be tormented by

extreme cold.

Milton’s Satan is endowed with heroic qualities. The outstanding

trait of his character is courage. He may be wrong headed: but he

has infinite courage in himself. As the poem, Paradise Lost begins,

we find Satan in a hopeless situation. He and his companions have

been hurled down into b the bottomless pit of Hell. He lies dazed and

stunned in the Lake of liquid fire and so do his companions, the

rebel angels. Heaven is lost to Satan and his companions, and they

are doomed to live forever in the darkness of Hell. But of, this

gloomy prospect of the future does not fill Satan with despondency

robbing him of his power of action. When Beelzebub, his lieutenant,

tells him that their situation is hopeless beyond redemption, he

replies. Satan is determined not to be weak under any

circumstances. If one retains his courage and strength of mind, he

“can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Even in Hell Satan

discovers an advantage.

High on a throne of royal state, which far

Outshone the wealth or Ormus and of Ind,

Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand

Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit raised

To that bad eminence;

Satan alone occupies a prominent position in the narrative.

According to the strict rules of dramatic art, Satan should be the

villain of the piece. To a certain extent, Paradise Lost is symbolic of

the never ending, conflict between good and evil in the life of man.,

and Satan is thus the type of universal evil and wickedness. In one

sense, Satan is the most important character in the poem because it

is from his agency that practically all the action of the narrative

arises. The revolt which Satan stirs up in Heaven leads to the fall of

the angels in the first place; the decision which he comes to, to tempt

the newly created human pair, leads to further action in Paradise

Lost. Such being the case, Milton had to necessarily bring Satan

prominently before the reader more prominently indeed than any

other character. So we might say that the theme or narrative which

Milton selected for Paradise Lost depended for its action on the

deeds of a wicked character, rather than a hero. The problem for

Milton was the manner in which he was to present such an evil

character. The sight of pure, and undisguised evil is never pleasant,

and the acts of a wicked person cause feelings of disgust and

repulsion to right-minded readers. So Milton would have risked

losing the sympathy and interest of his readers had he presented

Satan as an unattractive study in wickedness. It seems then, that

Milton realized this danger and refrained from blackening the

characters of Satan unduly. Not only so, but he depicts Satan as

possessing many qualities which are good, noble and wholly

admirable. It is this point which has made the character of Satan

unique and has aroused so much discussion among critics.

Celestial virtues rising will appear

More glorious and more dread than from no fall,

And trust themselves to fear no second fate.

There can be no doubt that Satan is meant to be the villain. He is

throughout called names like “arch-fiend”. “arch-enemy”, “apostate

angel” “the adversary of God and man”, “the author of all ill”, “the

spirit malign”,” the fraudulent imposter foul”, etc. His rebellion

against God was due to Pride and his desire to continue the war of

Envy, Revenge and love of Evil. He is crafty, - “the warie fiend”- and

his plan to corrupt mankind is one of “covert guile”. He is cunning

in his appeal to his followers which has only a “semblance of worth.”

Satan embodies evil because he is the embodiment of disobedience to

God. God allows him to work his “dark design” in order to give

further scope, for divine goodness and to bring worse punishment on

him.

Satan has great anxiety for his followers. It is the trait of a great

general of any army, to think of the welfare of his followers even

before he think of his own safety. All great warriors and conquerors

were able to inspire their followers with loyalty and devotion which

make them ready to suffer and die for their leader. In return, the

chief guard cherishes them as if they were all his own brothers or

children. This feeling of chivalry overcomes Satan as he sees his

unconscious friends lying in profound slumber all round him. He

cannot forget that they had met this cruel fate because of their

devotion to him. He cannot forget that they had met this cruel fate

because of their devotion to him. He sees their self-sacrifice as heroic

in its essence. So he, is represented as shedding tears of sympathy for

them-Tears such as angels weep. This is pathetic fallacy since angels

cannot weep at all.

Satan flatters them on the concord they have thus easily attained,

which would never have been possible in Heaven. Let them design

therefore with one mind how best to regain their lost positions.

Whether the best way should be open war, or secret deceit, let them

determine, and he affords the opportunity now for others to speak.

‘These, then, here outlined slightly and imperfectly, are some of the

most noteworthy features of Milton’s style. By the measured roll of

this verse, and the artful distribution of stress and pause to avoid

monotony and to lift the successive lines in a climax; by the

deliberate and choice character of his diction , and his wealth of

vaguely emotional epithets; by the intuition which taught him to

use no figures that do not heighten the majesty, and no names that

do not help the music of his poem; by the vivid outlines of the

concrete imagination that he imposes on us for real, and the

cloudy brilliance that he weaves for them out of all great historical

memories, and all far-reaching abstract conceptions, he attained to

a finished style of perhaps a more consistent and unflagging

elevation that is to be found elsewhere in literature. There is

nothing to put beside him. “His natural port,” says Johnson “is a

gigantic loftiness.” And Landor: “After I have been reading the

Paradise Lost, I can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem

to have left the music of Handel for the music of the streets, or, at

best, for drums and fifes.” The secret of the style is lost; and no poet,

since Milton’s day, has recaptured the solemnity and beauty of the

large utterance of Gabriel, or Belial, or Satan.’ (Masson)

Even in defeat he will never dream of submission. The fierceness of

the punishment inflicted on him is mitigated by the greater

fierceness of his pride.

..and, from despair

Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires…

!

SELF SETTING, DEVELOPMENT, ON-CONTEXTS, EDITING, THOUGHTS

AND MORE ALIKE, -WORDS AND SENTENCES FROM DR.S.SEN, WEB-

LINKS OF THE ORIGINAL POEM AND IMAGES, BOOKS ON

WORDSWORTH AND SHELLEY AND COLERIDGE’S POEM, A HISTORY OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE…

RITUPARNA RAY CHAUDHURI.

“….The second book is full of great ‘things’ (to use Saintsbury’s

favourite phrase), the debate, Satan’s heroic choice of the phrase,

Chaos, his encounter with Sin and Death:

“on the other side

Inces’t with indignation Satan stood

Unterrifi’d, and like a Comet burn’d

That fires the length of Ophiucus huge

In th’ Artick sky, and from his horrid hair

Shakes pestilence and war.”….

H.J.C. Grierson

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