Paradise Lost Book I: The Soaring Song
The most basic story of our civilization is embedded in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The narrative is in the most demanding genre of the time—in epic form, that man had developed and elaborated. Anticipating too much from this piece is nearly unconceivable; rather expecting the inaccurate things is not difficult. Paradise Lost has its similarities to the classics: The Aeneid, The Odyssey, and The Illiad; however, reading this blazing work of art only through its predecessors is nearly a crime. For doing so prevents the reader to live its artistic originality and its pedantic resoluteness. For Milton, “Truth is his aim and the elimination of untruth is essential” (French 470). The cognition of truth and beauty is the suitable way to patch the blemishes of humanity. The chronology of events in this work is crucial for observing significant effects and helps to draw parallels and contrasts throughout the epic. It is not an easy task to hold the events of Paradise Lost, particularly Book I, in mind and approach the piece as a coalesced body of work. Sin, death, and deception mould together as one entity and venture forth for more destruction. Bringing Satan to the reader’s attention as the Fiend of Book I, Milton clearly deprives him of being the hero; although that is not the case in Books II to IV. Milton justifies the ways man has disobeyed God, but at the same time emphasizing the significance of obeying the Omnipotent.
Only God has both the sovereignty and the worry for man that is indispensable, if connotation is to be made of the conspicuous rudimentary. The first twenty-six lines of the poem are like the prelude to an oratorio; they hold the intonations and dominant designs that appraise its thematic tautness. The lines display Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience and the paradise that soon to be lost. “The beginning corresponds to the sequence in Virgil’s Aeneid, from the fall of Troy through the journey to the founding Rome” (Kerrigan, et. al 12). The lines “At last within a land delectable/Their journey lay, through pleasurable bowers/Of groves where all is joy,—a blest abode!’ (Virgil 6.639-41) correspond with “Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,” (Milton 1.5). By translating Virgil’s epithet, Milton is acknowledging he is informed of the classics and indicating that he has mastered their format. Later, Milton invokes the “heavenly Muse” (1.6) as the divine entity of the Trinity showing that his muse (poetic inspiration) is above the classics and surpasses Virgil, Homer, and others. On the other hand, Milton’s supplication is exceedingly modest, indicating his everlasting dependence on God.
The purpose of the beginning of the poem is apparent to the reader: “. . . justify the ways of God to men” (Milton 1.26). However, some critics are not so sure of this utterance. C. S. Lewis asserts that “the real function of these twenty-six lines is to give us the sensation that some great thing is now about to begin” (41). Along with the sensation of the good thing to come, there is also the spiritual preparation: “And chiefly thou O Spirit, that dost prefer” (Milton 1.17), and also perpetuating in “. . . what in me is dark” (Milton 1.22). Milton’s optimistic views on humanity are heartening; nevertheless, Miltonic metaphors and similes do not always succor furnishings what it pretends to be furnishing. Although it has been asserted that Milton is justifying the ways of God to men; sometimes the idea seems hazy and dubious. Many times it takes on a polar form which will assert: justifying man’s ways to God. “[The infernal serpent] first seduced them to that foul revolt?” (Milton 1.33) suggests that Milton defends the faulty humans. His word “seduces” is chosen carefully, in which Milton tries to indicate the humans’ partial innocence. However, the word also connotes a deviation of the will and a turning from the right reason. Its physical connotations are to be developed in two aspects: first, Satan’s conversation with Eve while seducing her, instigates nightmares of serpents engaging sexually with women; yet the other view is more unambiguous: Adam is not deceiving or deceived, but plainly overcomes with female allurement. In this remark, another possible conflict is instituted: reason and order versus passion and chaos. According to David M. Miller, Milton’s argument is, “the fall occurs not because the flesh gives pleasure but because sense usurps the place of reason and lures the will to act against man’s best interest” (83). This tentatively answers the question “Why did they commit the sin?” implying the illogicality and the contrariness of disobedience.
Despite the fact that one of the themes of Book I, especially the opening part is man’s disobedience, Milton refuses to start his poem with man. His poem begins in medias res, pushing all the existence theories beyond the known in a strenuous attempt to have the macrocosm of evil and agony comprisable, and an extraterrestrial agent is customarily at fault. The serpent is the agent in Genesis, yet there is no clue whether the serpent embodies the Fiend. Milton impels the evil canon a step further, for not only the snake is a physical, sensual organism—an animal and beyond human analysis, it is undeniably possessed by Satan: “[God] had cast [the serpent] out from Heav’n, with all his host/Of rebel angels . . .” (Milton 1.37-8). Milton here is concerned with serious metaphysical question as how is it possible for such a celestial entity as God to have created such an imperfect being as man?
The paradox of good and evil appears to be ineluctable as one might as well ask the question as to why God creates an angel who tempts him? The malicious being exists prior to the creation of mankind; therefore, the worry should not be concentrated upon the origins of evil, but upon man’s foremost encounter with a given power of wickedness. There is nearly no information on Satan’s fall until we are solidly fixed in Eden; pride is what leads Satan, previously known as Lucifer, to envy God and therefore to revolt, revolt to be expelled from heaven. The poem does not begin with Satan’s rebellion, although it would make more sense in terms of chronology. However, Milton’s goal is not in starting the poem with the origin of evil, but trying to teach of man’s disobedience. Milton does not attempt to justify God’s ways to devils. Satan is already fallen: “Nine times the space that measures day and night/To mortal men, he with his horrid crew/Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf” (Milton 1.50-52). The fall of the demonic angel manifests the evil’s existence in opposition to good. If the epic is to prolong our curiosity, a credible controversy must exist to divert the notion that the Fiend might succeed. At least in the upcoming Books, Milton describes Satan as the hero. However, a solution to the paradox is adroit. The strategic outcome of the conflict is given, absolute in the nature of Milton’s universe, Satan has to lose. On the other hand, the tactical product of the conflict is also given, Satan has to win.
A simile intended to focalize our prospect of the countless stunned legions of hell, right before they are stirred by Satan, at the same time focalizes our sense of the tranquil order of the creation, and of coming of the dark clouds, also and of man’s endurance through God’s prudence and his will. Satan, positioning himself clear of the rout, contrives to provoke his legions to novel evil deeds: “Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called/ His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced/Thick as autumnal leaves . . .” (Milton 1.300-03). The scenes Milton indicates, mimic hell’s defeat before the Fiend’s voice is heard. Whatever seeks to demolish the tranquility of “autumnal leaves” lies lifeless as “scattered sedge” (Milton 1.304). The continuity of the similes hinges on the middle image of Orion, which sketches both Satan’s power to rouse the fallen hordes and God’s power to scatter and destroy them: “Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed/Hath vexed the Red Sea coast,” (Milton 1.305-06). A further instance compares the legions of hell to “bees in springtime” (Milton 1.768-69). It is plainly a simile that diminishes hell while it amplifies creation. The absurdity of Satan’s condition makes him to submit to the destructive element. Milton’s cosmos is nothing if not purposive; liberty and independence lie in obedience to God, living under his providence, not in self-assured rebellion. Decisively, the Fiend is caught in a paradox: he only exists in self-assurance, yet for this assurance not to be fake, there must be no God; and if God does not exist then what is the Fallen Angel doing in hell? Milton, through his verse, tries to assert that nothing and no-thing exist outside of God.
The significance of Milton in the literary tradition cannot be overestimated. In his Paradise Lost, he adapts the diminished view of man’s place in the grand scheme of universe. The posing of eternal, paradoxical questions as to the nature of man, of his place in the cosmic mass, and his relationship to transcendence seem to be Milton’s greatest achievement, at least in Book I. The integration of fundamental questions into a talking piece is starkly modern. Milton’s blank verse has so many interwoven patterns that at some instances one may regard the work as non-English verse. As one editor puts it: “The way the world is imaged in Paradise Lost, in passionate fullness of detail, isoriginal. Milton’s cosmos; however, orderly, has always something of life’s capacity to surprise” (Carey et. al. 447).
Works Cited
Carey, John, and Alastair Fowler, eds. The Poems of John Milton. London: Longman
Group Ltd., 1968. Print.
French, Milton J. “Milton as a Historian.” PMLA 50.2 (1935): 469-79. Print.
Lewis, C. S. “The Stule of Secondary Epic.” Paradise Lost: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Louis L. Martz. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Print.
Miller, David M. John Milton: Poetry. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Print.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. John Leonard. London: Penguin Group, 2000. Print.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Eds. Kerrigan, William et. al. New York: Modern Library,
2007. Print.
Vergilius, Publius Maro. The Aeneid of Virgil. Trans. John Connington. Ed. Edgar S.
Shumway. Boston: The Macmillan Company, 1910. Print.
