Page 177 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes the many assemblies of heroes in both the Iliad and the Aeneid. Further the debates also seem based
on the many meetings that Milton attended in his various official capacities. In his speech, each
devil reveals both the characteristics of his personality and the type of evil he represents. For example,
Moloch, the first to speak, is the unthinking man of action. Like Diomedes in the Iliad, he is not
adept in speech, but he does know how to fight. He is for continued war and unconcerned about the
consequences.
Book III opens with a prologue, often called “The Prologue to Light,“ that is addressed to the “holy
light” of God and Heaven. In this prologue, Milton asks for God’s light to shine inwardly so that he
can reveal what no man has seen. The scene of Book III now shifts from heaven to Satan who has
landed on the border between Earth and Chaos. From this seat in darkness, Satan sees a light and
moves toward it. The light is a golden stairway leading to heaven. From this new vantage point,
Satan views the magnificence of the Earth and of the beautiful sun that illumines it. As Satan moves
toward the sun, he sees the archangel Uriel and quickly transforms himself into a cherub. Satan
deceives Uriel and asks where Man may be found. Uriel directs Satan toward Earth.
In the opening section of Book IV, Satan talks to himself, and for the first time, the reader is allowed
to hear the inner workings of the demon’s mind. This opening passage is very similar to a soliloquy
in a Shakespearean drama, and Milton uses it for the same effect. Traditionally, the soliloquy was a
speech given by a character alone on the stage in which his innermost thoughts are revealed. Thoughts
expressed in a soliloquy were accepted as true because the speaker has no motive to lie to himself.
The soliloquy then provided the dramatist a means to explain the precise motivations and mental
processes of a character. Milton uses Satan’s opening soliloquy in Book IV for the same purpose.

20.1 Book – I

20.1.1 Summary: Lines 1–26: Prologue and Invocation

Milton opens Paradise Lost by formally declaring his poem’s subject: humankind’s first act of
disobedience toward God, and the consequences that followed from it. The act is Adam and Eve’s
eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
In the first line, Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve’s sin as the “fruit” of the forbidden
tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative fruits of their actions. Milton asserts that this
original sin brought death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our home in paradise
until Jesus comes to restore humankind to its former position of purity.
Milton’s speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source of poetic inspiration, to sing about these subjects
through him, but he makes it clear that he refers to a different muse from the muses who traditionally
inspired classical poets by specifying that his muse inspired Moses to receive the Ten Commandments
and write Genesis. Milton’s muse is the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Christian Bible, not one of
the nine classical muses who reside on Mount Helicon—the “Aonian mount” of I.15. He says that
his poem, like his muse, will fly above those of the Classical poets and accomplish things never
attempted before, because his source of inspiration is greater than theirs. Then he invokes the Holy
Spirit, asking it to fill him with knowledge of the beginning of the world, because the Holy Spirit
was the active force in creating the universe.

Milton’s speaker announces that he wants to be inspired with this sacred knowledge
because he wants to show his fellow man that the fall of humankind into sin and death
was part of God’s greater plan, and that God’s plan is justified.

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