Paradise Lost

Overview

Paradise Lost is about ten and a half thousand lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, published in ten books in 1667 and rearranged into twelve for the second edition of 1674. Milton was blind by then and dictated it, reportedly in the early morning, to daughters and amanuenses. He had spent the 1640s and 1650s writing pamphlets for the English republic and serving Cromwell’s government; the Restoration left him lucky to be alive.

He rejected rhyme deliberately and said so in a prefatory note added to early copies, calling it a modern bondage. The line he uses instead is long-breathed and Latinate, with verbs held back and clauses suspended over several lines, so that the syntax itself keeps you waiting. It is the main difficulty of reading him and the main pleasure.

The structure follows Homer and Virgil. It opens in the middle of the action, invokes a muse, holds a council among the defeated, sends a hero on a journey, includes a war narrated in flashback, and ends with a vision of the future. Milton borrows the epic machinery and puts a domestic scene at the centre of it: two people in a garden, one conversation, one piece of fruit.

What happens

Books I and II. Satan and his angels wake in Hell after nine days of falling. Satan rallies them, Pandemonium is built, and a council debates renewed war, secret revenge or acceptance. Beelzebub proposes the plan Satan wanted, to corrupt the new creation, and Satan volunteers to go alone. At Hell’s gate he meets Sin and Death, who is his son and grandson, and flies out through Chaos.

Book III. Heaven, and the poem’s hardest passage: God declares that man will fall, that he made him free and therefore responsible, and that grace will be offered. The Son volunteers to be the ransom. Satan meanwhile crosses the universe and tricks his way past an angel by flattery.

Book IV. Eden, and Satan’s first sight of Adam and Eve, which produces his longest and most self-lacerating soliloquy. He overhears the one prohibition. Gabriel expels him for the moment.

Books V to VIII. Raphael comes to dinner and tells Adam about the war in Heaven: Satan’s refusal to bow to the Son, the three-day battle, the artillery, the Son’s intervention, and the fall of the rebels. Then he narrates the creation of the world. Adam tells his own story, his first waking, his request for a companion, and his admission that Eve’s beauty overwhelms his reason. Raphael warns him about this in particular.

Book IX. The temptation. Eve proposes they garden separately; Adam concedes. The serpent finds her alone and argues that the fruit gives knowledge, that God’s threat is a bluff, and that the prohibition is a way of keeping her low. She eats, deliberates whether to tell Adam, and does. He eats knowing exactly what he is doing, because he will not live without her. They quarrel for the first time.

Books X to XII. Sin and Death enter the world, nature is altered, the Son judges the pair gently, and they move from mutual blame to repentance. Michael shows Adam the future in a long sequence of biblical history, ending in the Incarnation, and tells him he may possess a paradise within, happier than the one he lost. They walk out.

How to read it

Read it aloud, or at least sound it in your head. The sentences are built for the ear and their difficulty dissolves when you follow the voice rather than the punctuation. Read a whole book at a sitting if you can; the units are designed to be heard entire.

Do not begin with Book I and stop at Book III. Many readers get through the Hell books, find Heaven dull, and quit, which produces exactly the lopsided impression of the poem that has dominated its reception. If you have limited time, read Books I, II, IV, IX and XII, and then go back for Book VIII, which is where Adam explains what Eve does to his judgement.

Keep the glosses handy but do not chase every allusion. Milton refers constantly to classical myth and biblical geography, and most editions will tell you what you need in a line. What matters more is noticing how he uses the references: pagan stories usually appear as faint or false versions of the true thing.

The central interpretive trap is the Satan question. Blake said Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it, and the poem’s first two books do give Satan the best rhetoric. But the poem also degrades him steadily, from archangel to serpent to a creature choking on ashes, and it may be that the early attraction is the point: you are being shown how rebellion sounds from the inside, then shown what it becomes.

Teskey’s Norton is the recommended classroom text. Whichever you use, get one with line numbers and footnotes on the page rather than at the back.

Questions it raises

• Does Milton succeed in justifying God’s ways, or does the poem make the case for the prosecution more powerfully?
• Satan’s arguments about liberty and merit are those Milton used against kings. What does the poem do with that overlap?
• Adam falls knowingly, out of love for Eve. Is his fall better or worse than hers?
• If God foreknows the fall, in what sense are Adam and Eve free not to fall?
• Eve asks for separate work and Adam agrees. Where in Book IX does the fall actually begin?
• What is a paradise within, and does the ending offer it as consolation or as something better than Eden?