PARADISE LOST BOOK 1 -- JOHN MILTON
John Milton is a foremost poet of the neo-classical age. He was born 1608 into the family of a serious-
minded legal practitioner who turned John into a phenomenal book-worm at a very tender age. As a teenager, John Milton had already vowed to leave behind, by his death, a work of art of such monumental proportion and excellence that mankind would not be in a hurry to forget it. Paradise Lost, a long epic poem of twelve books, is a clear fulfillment of this ambition both in scope and in style. It took him nine years to compose it (and in five of those years he was, like Homer, blind). The epic was published 1667 and bears heavy hallmarks of his studies in classics and of his intense personal study and ceaseless research. The poem is a dossier of classical allusions deftly intertwined with biblical ones. He, thus, utilized his scholarship in his adopted task of explaining the mysterious ways of God with regard to the then much-debated questions of free will, the fall of man, the place of Satan in the history of mankind and the Christian salvation of creation. He was a Protestant Puritan to the core and set out to exonerate God's utilization of the philosophy of Felix Culpa to forge out of evil exceeding good. Those who suspect he has been unsuccessful in this task point to his Commonwealth leanings and daring pro-divorce tracts and suggest that he was libertine if not out-right rebellious in spirit. Of course, John Milton was a well-known pro-Cromwell Republican pamphleteer but it would be far-fetched to imagine that all one needed to nurse pro-Satan sentiments were to be a Roundhead. As a Roundhead, nouveau-riche Londoner, he was naturally an advocate of freedom but even if he had sympathies for those who fought against despotism, it would be taking it too far to imagine that he was an implicit Satanist. His less-than-ideal marriage to an opportunistic Mary Powel from a Tory (King's party) family also explains his seemingly post-traumatic reactions to the then near-sacrilegious issue of divorce. His seventeen-year old wife had left him (he was thirty-three) after just a month of marriage to visit her parents, in the heat of the Tory-Whig civil strife, and kept away for three years. He might have died a blind disillusioned man in 1674 (after three serial marriages terminated by deaths and lack of idealism or romanticism hoped for) but the question of whether he was of the Devil's party in Paradise Lost without knowing it (Blake) or not can only be answered from a dispassionate intellectual examination of the text itself.
It was the literary norm, in the neo-classical era, to imitate the works of ancient Roman and Greek writers. This explains the heavy presence of classical allusions. But an epic is necessarily a poem narrating with stylized ornamentation the grand achievements of a heroic ancestry. Allusions are actually part and parcel of the epic tradition. Milton's apocalyptic story is about the fall of man through the agency of Satan and his eventual restoration through Christ. Christ is actually the epic hero, not in a militant Homeric sense but in a Virgilian virtuous sense. Starting from Satan's abortive rebellion against God, he goes on to trace what is essentially the history of human civilization (especially through the numerous classical allusions) and how it came under his (Satan's) influence and malignant manipulation. Satan's imagined victory over the Saviour of mankind coincided ironically with the victory of love (and, therefore, of mankind) over Satanic hate.
But because the action starts with the audacious and captivating rhetoric of the fallen angels, readers often have the uneasy feeling that Milton was in the Devil's party without knowing it, despite his acclaimed desire to justify the ways of God to man: 272-279 (Satan's inspirational call to continued resistance and sheer heroic stature; Satan described as 'great Sultan'(248) 'great commander'(358) and the fallen angels as 'Godlike shapes and forms/Excelling human, Princely Dignities' (358/9). The human values of relief at liberty from unwanted rule and resilience of (Aeschylus' Promethean?) spirit in the face of inevitable adversity are seemingly evoked by the fallen Spirits, despite the gloom in which they are imprisoned, as Satan, 'gently rais'd/ Their fainted courage and dispell'd their fears'(529/30). The unfurling of Satan's 'mighty standard' is a 'proud honour' claimed by Azazel, 'a cherub tall'. As it is unfurled from 'the glittering Staff', 'The Imperial Ensign', 'shone like a Meteor streaming in the Wind/With Gems and Golden lustre rich imblaz'd,/Seraphic arms and trophies'. As all these go on, 'Sonorous metal' blows 'Martial sounds'. The description of the fallen angels that follows (541-621) reveals a mighty army of epic proportions, moving in perfect phalanx, with heroic temper and resolution.
The Homeric brilliance apart, their pathetic remorse paradoxically yoked with faithfulness in the face of defeated rebellion, very well threaten to evoke in us lasting human pathos. Especially seductive are Satan's tears for the misery of his defeated followers. As Coleridge has observed, 'The angels are human passions invested with a dramatic reality'. He also talked of their 'ruined splendour'. This presentation is then followed by Satan's compelling oratory which motivates the fallen angels to spontaneously build, with 'ribs of gold'! their palace, Pandaemonium, of unequalled magnificence. By the way, this combination of the sinister and the beautiful also features in Milton's 'Nativity Ode'. It is not enough that the heroic, even if barbaric, splendour of the fallen Spirits assail humanistic sensibilities but Milton must go on to use a touching homely image to describe the industrious 'swarming crew' (770) (populous newly hatched bees poured forth in spring time flying to and fro among fresh dews and flowers) William Blake, in fact, felt that the poem only moved when it came to the Devil and ground to a halt when God came in. Shelley was of the view that Paradise Lost's Satan was a great hero in rebellion against injustice and tyranny. After all, tyranny was, throughout Milton's life, an object of great detestation. There is also the fact of his somewhat daring canonical departures (like the depiction of Chaos as material from which new worlds could evolve in the future and from which earth was formed; his positioning of hell below Chaos rather than below the earth and the assumption that the Son was not from the beginning)
However, it is pertinent to note that symptomatic of what is to come at the end of the poem, the Spirits suddenly turn diminutive in their moment of triumph. In fact, before this, they had been negatively likened to Mulciber's 'industrious crew' (751) flung down from Zenith by Zeus like a falling star and implicitly to the, at the time, suspect fledgling hankering after 'industrialization'. Even the description of Satan with oriental and heathen imagery carries these same negative connotations in occidental consciousness. It is this recurrent resort by Milton to subtle pejorism that help tone down the valour and magnificence of his otherwise heroic personae. Milton, in fact, utilizes his classical (heathen) scholarship as a tool to uphold Christian doctrines. Parallels like the fall of the Titans from Olympus, adumbrations of Dante's hell, are aptly introduced in contexts that cast Satan in bad light. It has been observed that Milton intentionally distends man's (and Satan's) faults so the reader can become persuaded of the propriety of divine justice. There are also instances where Milton appears to eulogize Satan when he is actually being merely biblically accurate: for example, Pandemonium's rise is accompanied 'with the sound/Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,' (712) precisely because the Holy Bible hints that Lucifer was the head of the heavenly orchestra before his rebellion. And, by the way, instances where Satan is denigrated in the poem abound and are, in fact, more than those in which sympathy or admiration is inadvertently evoked for him.
The epic is essentially the story, therefore, of the fall of man from innocence, from bliss and companionship with God, through disobedience, into sin and corruption until Christ comes as second Adam to redeem him from damnation. Why this theme appears obscured is probably due to the stark absence of a causal-chronological plot (as in the novel) where motives for action are graphically unfolded. Without such motives for actions, there would remain the tendency to see God's weighty punishment for a single breach of divine law by the infantile couple as less than cricket (I borrow here my lecturer's words)
CLASSICAL FEATURES
Away from the above interminable argument, we should attempt to outline the features that make the Book a successful epic. First, there is the language. It is magniloquent. This is because an epic tells the story of extra-ordinary events and it is, thus, perfectly in place for the language to be extra-ordinary. The use of classical rhetoric, parenthetical structures and extra-ordinary imagery would thus be seen as only furthering the cause of the epic:
Milloins of Spirits for his fault amerc't
Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendours flung
For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory wither'd. As when Heaven's fire
Hath scath'd the Forest Oaks, or Mountain Pines
With singed top their stately growth though bare
Stands in the blasted Heath.
(609-615)
O Myriads of immortal Spirits, O powers
Matchless, but with th' Almighty, and that strife
Was not inglorious, though th' event was dire,
As this place testifies, and this dire change
Hateful to utter:
(622-626)
To work in close design, by fraud or guile
What force effected not: that he no less
At length from us may find, who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
(646-649)
Men also, and by his suggestion taught
Ransack'd the Centre, and with impious hands
Rifl'd the bowels of their mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Open'd into the Hill a spacious wound
And digg'd out ribs of Gold.
(685-690)
Both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have criticized the language as being too sylized and ornamented, too much of a neo-classical artifact and, therefore, too remote from the language of ordinary men spoken at any time in British history. My teacher, J.P.Clark, possibly quoting some literary critic, called the poem a great monument, a great cathedral among a people who had lost their faith but justifies the language as being appropriate to the public theme it examines. He sees the often-praised personal language of John Donne in comparison to Milton as only appropriate for Donne's kind of themes. How does the language strike you? Language is essentially thought shaped for communication. Does this language fulfill that assignment or does it inhibit the process of intellectual communication? Is the language conducive for the creation of thought processes? You could, in fact, criticize the language in your assignment rather than illustrate what you find attractive. You are permitted. Remember to submit before March.
Other language characteristics include the use of periphrases, 'Thus spake' and the long-tailed (so-called Homeric or epic) simile which compares and contrasts two things at various points of similarity or dissimilarity beyond the normal. There is also the use of the paronomasia (classical punning). Milton also uses the so-called classical iambic pentameter which came to be known as the English decasyllable or English heroic verse. This is the main cause of the several forced elisions in his prosody. Finally, epics are replete with allusions. As already pointed out, the poem is a dossier of classical allusions deftly intertwined with biblical ones.
A second epic feature of Paradise Lost is its use of the invocation. It starts with the traditional epic invocation where the subject is established and the Muses called upon to inspire, in the onerous task. Rather than invoke one of the nine muses of Greek mythology, he calls on Urania, a heavenly Muse, and the Holy Spirit, for assistance, as a Christian writer.
The epic also starts, like the classical epic, in media res: in the middle of events, in the thick of action, at a critical phase in the plot. It is this quality of the epic that gives it its retrospective narrative structure: full of flashbacks. In order for this structure not to lead to slack passages with the potential of dissipating emotions, the narrator ensures that his presentation is taut to the extreme. The traditional epic resort to dialogues and soliloquies introduces a dramatic quality that also aids in the sustenance of narrative tension. Not only is the past invariably interwoven with the narration of the present, there is also, usually, the element of prophecy.
Possibly the most distinctive of epic qualities is its concern with great and exceptional subjects. Most epics tell of usually mythopoeic tribal or national founding fathers. Milton in Paradise Lost tells of something much larger. As Dr. Johnson puts it:
His subject is the fate of worlds, the revolutions of heaven and earth; rebellion against the Supreme King, raised by
the highest order of created beings'. He goes on to point out that Milton has 'the power of displaying the vast,
illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful: he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of extravagance.
No doubt, therefore, Milton's subject is appropriately of great significance. He dwells on the fate of the world, not of individuals. The proportions are vast and in the tradition of the epic, they are 'dramatized' with great emphasis and fullness and through the agency of extreme language.
MILTON'S WORKS: Some of his other works include 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', 'Comus', 'Lycides', 'Samson Agonistes' and 'Paradise Regained'
ANCIENT MARINER
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