Paradise Lost: Summary and Critical Analysis
The fable or story for the epic
is taken from the Bible; it is the simple and common story of the fall of Adam
and Eve from the grace of God due to their disobedience of Him. Paradise Lost encompasses
a little more of the biblical story. In heaven, Lucifer (who became Satan after
his being thrown to hell), was unable to accept the supremacy of God and
led a revolt against His divine authority. After a terrible war with His
Angels, he was finally thrown to hell, where they lay for nine days in a burning
lake.
Then Lucifer arose from the
burning pitch and resolved- though at the same time despairing that “all was
not lost,” and that he would take revenge on God. Arousing his friends, he did his
best to bring them to spirits, and decided that his purposes could be achieved
by guile rather than by force; he decided to take revenge on God by spoiling
his latest creation Eden and the human beings there. The devils built an
elaborate palace, Pandemonium, in which Satan organized a conference to decide
on immediate action. Moloch advised war. Belial recommended a slothful
existence in Hell.
Mammon proposed peacefully
improving hell so that it might equal and rival Heaven. Beelzebub, second in
command, arose and informed that God created Earth, which he had peopled
with good creatures called humans. It was Beelzebub’s proposal to investigate
this new creation, seized it, and seduce its inhabitants to the cause of the
fallen angels, and saw Satan approaching Earth. God’s angel Gabriel under the
command of God, appointed two other angels to safeguard Adam and Eve, but they
arrived too late to prevent Satan. He had already influenced Eve’s dreams. Eve,
in her strange dream had been tempted to taste the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge. After the sinful act of disobedience had been committed, God sent
the angel Raphael to the garden to warn them. Raphael told Adam and Eve in
detail the story of the Great War between the god and the bad angles (much of
such stories are told in such conversations and flashbacks). He told of the
creation of the world and how Earth was created in six days and the angelic choir
singing the praises of God on the seventh day.
He cautioned Adam not to be too
curious. Adam then told how he had been warned against the Tree of Knowledge of
God and Evil, and how Eve was created from his rib. After the departure of
Raphael, Satan entered the body of a sleeping serpent. In the mourning, Eve
proposed that they work apart. Adam, remembering the warning of Raphael,
opposed her wishes, but Eve prevailed and the couple parted. Alone, Eve was
accosted by the serpent, which flattered her into tasting the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge. Eve gave the fruit to Adam, who was at first horrified, but who
in his love for Eve, also ate the fruit. Just after eating the forbidden fruit,
the couple knew lust for the first time. They knew sickening shame. The
guardian angel came to earth to pass judgment. Christ sentenced the serpent to
be forever a hated enemy of mankind. He also announced the punishment of Eve; her
sorrow would be multiplied by the bearing of children and she would be the
servant of Adam to the end of time. Adam, said Christ, would eat in sorrow,
would eat bread only by toiling and sweating. This was the curse of man.
But more important, he lost God’s
grace. As Christ announced the punishment, Death and sin, left the gates of
Hell to join their father Satan on Earth. Satan sent sin and Death as his
ambassadors on Earth. He went back to hell to see that his followers had all
become hissing snakes. God made great changes on earth. He replaced the eternal
spring with the changing seasons; he created the violence and misery of storms,
winds, hail, ice, floods and earthquakes; he sentenced Adam and Eve to
expulsion from Eden. Adam and Eve thought of committing suicide, but Michael,
the angel sent by God, gave them new hope; he gave Adam a vision of life and
death, the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, and also showed them how in
the future Adam and Eve’s progeny would go through their evil days, to the
flood when God would destroy all life except the good seeds preserved by Noah,
and be finally redeemed through Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection and
ascension as the redeemer. After Michael gave Adam and Eve this vision, they
were pacified, especially because they saw that their children would be saved.
They walked from the heights of paradise to the barren plains below.
Metaphorically, they fell from the original bliss of god’s grace to the present
state of mortality, guilt, shame and suffering.
This simple story of ‘fall’ has
become a locus of many themes after Milton used it in his epic. He took an
apparently very simple story of the “Fall from the Bible, but he blended within
it his Puritan thoughts, renaissance humanism, his political as well as
domestic ideals, and many such meanings. The ‘invocation’ is the very beginning
of the epic in which Milton prays to the Muse, the Christian spirit, to help
him write well. The ninth book is the climactic part of the epic narrative, as
well as a book that contains several thematic issues of the whole epic. This
simple story of ‘fall’ has become a locus of many themes after Milton used it in
his epic. He took an apparently very simple story of the “Fall” from the Bible,
but he blended within it his Puritan thoughts, renaissance humanism, his
political as well as domestic ideals, and many such meanings. The ‘invocation’
is the very beginning of the epic in which Milton prays to the Muse, the Christian
spirit, to help him write well. The ninth book is the climactic part of the
epic narrative, as well as a book that contains several thematic issues of the
whole epic.
The most obvious theme of
Paradise Lost is justifying the fall of man, God’s punishment and his reopening
of the path of salvation to them; in short, the epic justifies how God is right
in his treatment of man throughout all these. Milton has explored the sin which
brought about the downfall of man. The prime cause of the fall is disobedience
to God; the cause of Eve’s disobedience is her passion overwhelming her right
reason. Adam is also guilty of disobedience; his sin is dread of loneliness and
also the surrender of his God-given reason to passion. Due to love, he
immediately decides to share Eve’s fate. Milton emphasizes the importance of
reason. Man is noble by nature, but he has free will, and hence free to choose
and capable of action, morally good or bad for which he alone is responsible.
Milton does not believe in Calvinism according to which God has decided
everything, and a man’s destiny has been fixed before his birth. Milton is a
great humanist pinning his faith in the liberty and adventure of man. Milton, therefore, believes that God was justified in leaving Adam and Eve exposed to
evils, and leaving their reasoning free; only that defines human beings as
supreme creatures. God was also right in punishing Adam and Eve. The purpose of
Paradise Lost is, therefore, to assert eternal providence and justify the way
of God to men.
Milton believes in the orthodox
idea of redemption. When men will be redeemed through Christ, they will rise to
a more excellent state than Paradise from which Adam and Eve were turned out.
Thus Adam did a useful act while sinning. Tillyard says, “Paradise Lost is a
mental pilgrimage; the loss of one paradise and the finding on this earth of a
paradise within ourselves that is happier far”. The paradise in which Adam and
Eve lived before eating the forbidden fruit was like a prison. It might have
satisfied God, but it would have kept man spiritually undeveloped. So long as
knowledge was withheld from man, his obedience to God was meaningless. Moreover, the virtue which Adam and Eve possessed in Paradise was a “fugitive and
cloistered virtue”, and therefore it was no virtue in the real sense. What man
lost by disobedience was only a state of innocence and ignorance. Men gain
spiritual rebirth by controlling their passions. And they will find a Paradise
within them ‘happier far’. Man has all the powers of working out the best, moves upward, and finds paradise within himself. This could not be possible
by paying homage to God in a state of ignorance in Eden’s paradise. Eve sins
through weakness of reason whereas Adam through weakness of will.
Milton’s style in writing The
Paradise Lost has been called a ‘grand style’, which means it is elevated,
serious, highly crafted, and different from common speech. It is in fact so
unfamiliar to common language, even the usual literary language, that Dr.
Johnson accused Milton of ‘pedantry’. The charge is basically based on his
writing that was heavily Latinate. Indeed many critics have complained that
Milton spoilt the English language. But in other ways, he has contributed to the
development of the English language as a literary language. Milton’s ‘grand’,
style can be discussed under four or five heads: rhythm and music, word game and
figures of speech, diction and decorum, syntax, and remoteness and sublimity of
language and theme.
The meter or rhythm of Milton’s
epic poem is usually called the blank verse, but it is not the common blank
verse (lines in iambic pentameter without rhyme); Milton adapted it to his own
convenience and purpose. The lines in Paradise Lost do contain ten syllables
usually, but the lines contain any number of stresses from three to eight. So,
it would not be appropriate to say that this is done by using traditional
techniques of variation. Furthermore, the stresses differ in degree and
position. The pause or caesura is another even more important feature of rhythm
in Milton. The pause falls at different places of the lines, and the weight of
different pauses is also different; there are light or shorter pauses and heavy
or longer pauses give different effects to the narrative.
Milton’s diction is heavily
Latin. Even when he uses English words, they have Latin connotations
beneath. The words are so meticulously chosen that many critics have blamed his
diction as too laboured. Milton somehow ‘invented English that is extremely
unfamiliar and pedantic. He uses words in such ways that there are always both
literal and symbolic meanings, with both English denotations and Latin
connotations. His descriptions are florid and highly picturesque. He uses
images to reinforce the theme. He shifts tone along with the change of
description and setting. That usually helps him shift the emotional intensity,
or avoid monotony.
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