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Paradise Lost Essay Research Paper Paradise LostJohn (стр. 1 из 3)

Paradise Lost Essay, Research Paper

Paradise Lost

John Milton

THE STORY

BOOK I

The first book (1) introduces the theme of the entire poem, (2) introduces us to Satan and the fallen angels, and (3) tells us that we are reading an epic poem. In order to put himself in the epic tradition of The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Milton uses devices like the invocation, epic similes, and catalogs. They’ll be explained as we come to them. They are used heavily in the first two books to establish the credentials of Paradise Lost as an epic, then they occur less often in the later books.

This book begins, as they all do, with Milton’s prose summary, “The Argument.” He is using the word in the sense of “subject matter,” not as we do meaning a verbal clash. You will see “argument” used again with this meaning in line 24. The prose summary tells you the story, so you can use it as reference.

In Book I we meet one of the story’s main characters, Satan. Whether he is the hero or the villain is one of the questions you’ll face continually in Paradise Lost. It is obvious from this first book that Satan has qualities we all admire. He is a fearless leader, eloquent, inspiring, resourceful, even sympathetic to his followers’ sufferings. Is he portrayed with these virtues because Milton wants to show us how we can be deceived by heroism? Have you found yourself attracted to “friends” who weren’t good for you?

It is (unfortunately!) easy to identify with Satan when we first meet him in the imaginary landscape of Hell. We have all felt angry, bitter, and vengeful after a brush with authority. Perhaps you’ve received an F in a class where you thought you would pass, or gotten a speeding ticket when you were sure you weren’t observed. These are small-scale personal grievances, but your feelings are intense. Satan’s grievances result from conflict with God and have universal consequences. He wants to strike back at God for throwing him into a stinking pit of darkness, and he’s going to do it by dragging us all down there with him.

LINES 1-25. THE INVOCATION

Epics traditionally begin with a call for divine help in the task the poet has set for himself. Classical epic poets usually asked for the help of the Muses, the daughters of Zeus who watched over the arts. But Milton’s muse is “Heavenly,” Urania, who inspired Moses, the author of the Biblical Book of Genesis.

Milton wants to remind us that Paradise Lost is not only an epic, it is a Christian epic, and therefore- in his eyes- superior to its heathen predecessors. Milton wants to “soar above the Aonian Mount,” that is, to exceed the accomplishment of the classical Muses. He will do this because of his “great Argument,” his subject, which is nothing less ambitious than explaining the ways of God to men. Keep asking yourself whether Milton manages to do so. If he doesn’t succeed, what has he explained?

LINES 25-83. THE SCENE IN HELL

The Holy Spirit is asked to begin the story by naming the cause of mankind’s fall. That of course is Satan, the first character we meet. Milton has told us in the Argument that the poem “hastes into the midst of things,” because this too is a classical storytelling device. We begin with Satan in Hell nine days after he lost the War in Heaven, which would be just about the midpoint of the story if it were told chronologically. We shall go forward and backward to hear how and why he rebelled and fought against God.

This kind of storytelling is quite familiar to us from flashbacks in movies, plays, and TV drama. In fact, the first book of Paradise Lost is the dramatic hook which gets you interested, so that you will want to find out what happened and why. In the flickering flames of a burning lake (a contradiction which symbolizes the chaos of Hell) we barely see Satan as he slowly becomes conscious of what has happened to him and how far he is now from Heaven, where he had hoped to reign.

He is accompanied by a vast number of followers, one-third of all the angels in Heaven. Next to him is Beelzebub, his trusted second-in-command. Beelzebub hasn’t got the same fire for revenge as Satan. He expresses the despair which you might expect from a defeated angel who has been banished forever from Heaven. Nevertheless he is always loyal to Satan and accepts his leadership without question.

LINES 84-191. SATAN AND BEELZEBUB

Satan’s defiance and his desire for revenge overcome his pain. At first he seems dismayed as he addresses Beelzebub, once like him among the brightest angels and now “O how fallen!” But as soon as he speaks of God, “He with his thunder,” Satan’s rage overtakes his sympathy. He will not repent or change. “All is not lost” while he has his “unconquerable will / And courage never to submit or yield.” He will continue the war, either by force or by guile. Because we know the story of Adam and Eve and how Satan will corrupt them, “guile” is like a wink at a knowing audience.

You may think that Beelzebub takes a more realistic view of the fallen angels’ terrible situation because he thinks further rebellion is futile. He regrets what has happened. The fallen angels may feel their strength undiminished, but perhaps God has left them that strength only so that they can work as slaves in Hell and has allowed them their immortality so that they can feel acutely their eternal punishment.

Satan is a good leader who knows when his subordinates need to be jerked out of what looks like self- pity. “To be weak is miserable” he declares, as he sets out a program of action: everything that God does must be opposed, even if God tries to bring good out of evil:

To do aught good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight.

Then he draws Beelzebub’s attention to the fact that God has recalled his forces and left the fallen angels to suffer in Hell. Things now seem calm enough for them to leave the lake and hold a meeting of their troops on a “dreary plain,” to plot their revenge strategy.

LINES 192-375. THE EPIC SIMILES.

As Satan prepares to rise, Milton gives us the first physical description we have of the Archenemy. To do this, he makes use of another classical device, the epic simile.

NOTE: EPIC SIMILES

A simile is a comparison of one thing or idea to another; an epic simile is an extended comparison, often taking up several lines, in which the epic poet elaborates so much that additional ideas are brought in. Epic similes often occur in clusters, as they do here. Satan is so big that his trunk covers “many a rood,” a rood being about a quarter acre. He is as big as the Titans and Giants who rebelled against Jove (Zeus), the supreme god of classical mythology. But it isn’t a simple comparison of size- like Satan, the Titans and Giants were rebels against authority.

Giants and Titans aren’t enough to emphasize Satan’s size; he’s also like a whale. Again this isn’t a simple statement. This whale, like Satan, is a deceiver, because he seems to be an island and attracts a lost sailor to anchor in his hide. We can imagine what happens when the whale goes down. This story would have been well known to Milton’s first readers, who had been brought up on “bestiaries,” descriptions of animals in terms of the moral lessons they provide for mankind.

As Satan raises his huge head, Milton explains that he can move because God grants him free will: “Left him at large to his own dark designs.” This is an important theme throughout Paradise Lost. (In Book III, God explains the doctrine of free will in his first speech.) God created all beings capable of action- angels and men- with free will, so that they can choose what to do. However- and this is the difficult part for us to accept- God knows their choices in advance, as he knows everything. You will have to make up your mind as you read the poem whether you find this a plausible explanation.

What Milton explains here is that God could have made it impossible for Satan ever to lift his head from the burning lake’s surface, but instead he allowed Satan to follow his own course of action. Because Satan chooses to continue the battle through deceit, God has a chance to shower “infinite goodness, grace, and mercy” on man when Satan has ruined him.

Satan raises himself from the lake and with Beelzebub begins a flight to solid ground. The landscape of Hell looks like the devastation caused by an earthquake or volcanic eruption. More important than its physical appearance is Satan’s reaction to the scene. He doesn’t waste much time bemoaning the horrors of his kingdom. Hell may be miserable, but it is Satan’s realm, where he is second to no one, not even God.

In any case, Hell and Heaven are mental states: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” This is a familiar psychological truth. We all know someone who retains self-confidence and serenity in spite of failure and bad luck, while others are never happy despite all kinds of advantages.

Satan is beginning to emerge as a complex character. He has a rational understanding of his situation, for he certainly brought about his own Hell. He is apparently quite determined to think of it as his own personal Heaven. It’s interesting to think about Satan as a reverse God, especially when you see him acting responsibly, as he does now, leading his unhappy followers to the shore. His physical stature is impressive: how do you feel about his moral qualities? Can evil have aspects of good?

LINES 376-520. THE CATALOG OF FALLEN ANGELS

For the listing of the fallen angels, Milton needs further help from his muse, the Holy Spirit. The listing is like a panoramic shot of the huge forces moving from lake to shore, with faces in the crowd picked out as Milton comments on them.

While dramatic, the list is also another device of classical epic. In The Iliad there is a famous catalog of ships, and in The Aeneid there are catalogs of the armies and their leaders who help Aeneas. These catalogs make the scale of the epic enormous: by naming everyone, the poet gives the impression that anybody who was anybody was there.

Don’t try to follow every name in the catalog of fallen angels. To do so will only get you lost in a maze of Old Testament history. Instead, read parts of the catalog aloud to appreciate how impressive the names sound.

But you should know why the fist is there. It shows that Milton had none of our multicultural appreciation for other religions or other mythologies beside the Christian one. In the later history of mankind, recorded in the Old Testament, the fallen angels become the false gods who turned the Israelites from the true God. The list includes the Egyptian gods and the gods of Greek and Roman mythology, “the Ionian gods” (line 508), who were also worshipped by people who Milton thinks ought to have known better. For him, all other deities except the Christian God are companions of Satan.

LINES 522-669. SATAN REVIEWS THE FALLEN ANGELS

Satan shows us again just how inspiring a leader he can be. He first “gently raised / Their fainting courage and dispelled their fears.” Then he orders a military review with a brass band (”Sonorous metal blowing marital sounds”) and a parade of all the divisions with their banners flying.

He proudly surveys the numberless army, by the side of which any other army would look like the pygmies fighting the cranes (line 575). A group of epic similes stresses the army’s size: it is greater than the forces on both sides in the Trojan War, greater than any forces King Arthur or Charlemagne could command.

As he looks at the army (the similes have made it seem a cause for pride), Satan chokes with tears. His first few words express his affection and sympathy for his followers. How could such a “united force of gods” be defeated?

He soon talks himself out of weakness as he inspires his followers with hopes of regaining Heaven. They can’t do it directly, since they obviously underestimated God’s forces before. Instead he hints that a new world with beings equal to the angels is about to be created. There may be the chance to continue the fight through guerilla warfare.

The speech is so successful that the fallen angels flourish their swords and bang them against their shields as they hurl defiance at Heaven.

LINES 670-798. THE BUILDING OF PANDEMONIUM

NOTE: We use the word “pandemonium” to mean any kind of confused, noisy gathering. Here we see where the word comes from and what it really means. It is a house for all devils, “pan” being the Greek word for “all” and “demon” the Greek for devil.

Summoned by heralds and trumpets, the enormous army surges toward Pandemonium, which has been designed by Mulciber with materials mined by Mammon, the god of gold. Milton reminds us that angels are creatures with wings by using an epic simile that compares them to bees assembling outside their hive. At a signal, they all shrink so that they can fit into Pandemonium. They now look like pygmies or the fairies that appear to drunken peasants on their way home at night. The association suggests the deceitful nature of the fallen angels.

But the leaders of the fallen angels do not shrink. They are meeting privately in another part of Pandemonium to decide their strategy.

BOOK II

LINES 1-298. THE DEBATE IN PANDEMONIUM

As suits his position, Satan presides over the debate from a high throne, “that bad eminence.” But the debate is really a setup. Three fallen angels (later, the gods who deceive the Israelites into worshipping them instead of the true God) offer what you might think are reasonable alternative strategies; but Beelzebub, like a well-trained staff officer, brings out the plan which we know will be agreed on, and then Satan takes on the job of carrying it out.

Moloch blusters that open war is preferable to remaining in Hell. We can’t be worse off than we are, he says. If God wins again, we will be put out of our misery: God will “reduce / To nothing this essential, happier far / Than miserable to have eternal being.” But it may be impossible even for God to annihilate them because they may be divine and therefore immortal (lines 99-100). In that case, they already know the worst.

Belial is also unsure whether as fallen angels they are immortal, but he makes a different argument. If we can be annihilated, why take the chance? We might not be because God might not even give us that relief. And it is certainly better to have some “intellectual being / Those thoughts that wander through eternity” than nothing. War against God will not only risk annihilation, it will also hurt their chances of getting back into God’s grace through good behavior (lines 208-213).

Mammon’s position is much less subtle than Belial’s and more directly opposed to Moloch’s. Instead of continuing to fight against God, let us make our kingdom here. There are plenty of resources, as Mammon knows because in Book I he mined the materials to build Pandemonium. Hell could eventually become a place rivaling the magnificence of Heaven; the torments they now feel will diminish with time.

Do you find any of these arguments convincing? It’s obvious that Milton despises Belial, who “Counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth.” This comment, addressed directly to us, may help us to understand one of the reasons why Satan seems attractive whether Milton intended him to or not. Satan is active. He doesn’t just accept his fate, he thinks of ways to change it.

The other fallen angels like Moloch’s idea best, fearing another defeat. But it isn’t what the leadership wants.

LINES 299-505. SATAN’S MISSION

Beelzebub, not approving of Mammon’s speech or the applause it receives, quickly dismisses its arguments. God is not going to let the fallen angels make a home for themselves in Hell- he designed it as a punishment, and it will never be otherwise. On the other hand, open war is hopeless because God will win again.

What about something easier? Beelzebub elaborates the rumor of the creation of man, mentioned briefly by Satan in Book I. These creatures are equal to angels- perhaps they were intended to fill the gap caused by the expulsion of the rebellious one-third- but they will receive God’s special favors. At least the place should be investigated, in hopes of finding a weak spot in God’s armor, where he can be annoyed if not defeated. Some trick may deliver the new creation into their hands, so that the inhabitants of earth may join the fallen angels in Hell.

Satan puts the finishing touch on this managed debate by praising their judgment in adopting the plan he had in mind already. And then he raises the essential question: who is going to be the spy?

Their cowardly silence gives Satan his chance. He alone will take on the task of spying on God’s new creation. Such an assignment best fits a leader, who should be prepared to take on any danger. A leader can’t accept the honors due his position without also accepting the hazards.

He stands up and ends the debate right there, knowing very well that some other fallen angel would try to claim the difficult job, thus detracting from Satan’s glory. They all bow to him and praise him for his heroism, prompting an epic simile in which their harmony is compared to a beam of sun lighting up the evening sky after a storm.

Milton now adds his own comment: how shameful it is that devils can agree among themselves but men cannot (lines 496-505). Milton had lived through a civil war and all the horrors of revenge when Charles II reestablished the monarchy. There were wars in Germany and France almost continually during his lifetime. If only mankind would unite against its common enemy, “hellish foes,” and stop destroying each other! We can heartily agree, for things are no better three hundred years after Paradise Lost.