THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

familiar with all these works, was ready to assume neither a nationalistic nor an optimistic stance in the scheme of
Paradise Lost. His subject was the failure of humankind to live according to divine order and its slow but providential
deliverance from the consequences of the Fall. The myth with which he chose to deal, and in which he believed
literally, was, like many other parallel myths and folk-tales, an exploration of the moral consequences of
disobedience. The discovery of the knowledge of good and evil is neither accidental nor happy. The central
‘character’, Adam, has no heroic destiny. Through his, and Eve’s corruption all humankind is corrupted and, as both
are finally obliged to understand, the spiritual struggle to regain Paradisal equity and equability extends through each
generation of their descendants. In a profound sense Adam and Eve fall from the ideal into the human condition. The
great theme of the poem is obedience to the behests implicit in the creative order of an omnipotent God. The will of
God is imprinted in the harmony of nature, and the disaster of the Fall is as much ecological as it is moral. Despite
the temptation presented by the poem itself to see the rebellion of Satan as a heroic gesture of liberation and the Fall
of Adam as a species of gallantry towards his wife, Paradise Lost insistently attempts to assert to a reader the ultimate
justness of a loving God’s ‘Eternal Providence’.
Although Milton plays with heroic parallels and allusions throughout the poem, in the case of Satan such
references help to place both the fallen angel’s sense of himself and the reader’s sense of him. Satan is also negatively
defined by his standing in antithesis to the accumulated ideas of Christian heroism which run through the poem.
Elsewhere, echoes of older epics, such as the extended similes or the idioms derived from Greek and Latin, help to
forge a new, sustained, variable, weighty, and to some extent artificial language appropriate to the poem’s ambitious
scheme. Even the structural parallels with the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, such as the battle in Heaven, the
formal debates, and Satan’s exploratory journey through Chaos, are given a new
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cosmic context. Milton deals with what are ostensibly incomprehensible perspectives stretching outwards and upwards
in time and space, and his language, remote as it frequently is from everyday discourse, both challenges earth-bound
concepts and relocates received images. In vastly elaborating the bald account of Adam’s Fall in the Book of Genesis,
he extends his viewpoint beyond the acts of Creation and Eden to an imaginative history of how the peccant angels
fell from Heaven, how Satan evolved and perfected his scheme to mar Creation, and how God’s promise of
redemption will be realized. The structure of the poem breaks both with simple sequential chronology and with
conventional perceptions of time and the measurement of time. Neither Adam nor any of the angels conceives of
mortality, and though Adam knows days and nights in Eden, neither Heaven nor Hell recognizes such divisions. Light
itself is described as more than simply the radiance of a sun on which Satan can land as if he were one of Galileo’s
sunspots (III. 588-90). If Hell is characterized by lightless penal flames and by ‘darkness visible’, Heaven blazes with
inextinguishable divine effulgence which both is and is not conterminous with that of the sun. The blind poet
addresses this light in his induction to Book III:
Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is Light,
And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate
Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? ...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou
Revisitst not these eyes, that roul in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veild.
The narrator dwells on his human disability in the face of the blazing perfection of an unseen, but imagined,
Godhead; he can neither see in normal human terms, nor properly comprehend in Heavenly terms.
Milton’s avoidance of precise definition here is typical of his acceptance of the limitations of human knowledge
throughout his poem. In Book VIII Adam, who ‘thirsts’ for knowledge, is advised by the visiting archangel Raphael
of the likely nature of his defective fumbling for ‘scientific’ truth: