Reading Notes – John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Book I

  • Compares his task to that of Moses – inspired – unlike Homer and Virgil – even like Romantic Epics – not nationalistic (Spencer) – a FIRST – on the level of scripture? – absolute originality?
  • Spirit as EMBODIED – brooding – pregnant – animism? – where does the soul reside in the body? – divinity impregnates the vast abyss – gives it freedom to create itself – corporeal freedom – creative freedom – free will
  • First narrative poem in English that didn’t rhyme – unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter – blank verse – refuses the constraints of the form or silliness of a rhyming jingle – enjambment – alive –the poem, like the human body, is infused with divine spirit – molded, etc.
  • Line 423 – flexibility of angelic bodies – “either sex assume” – embodied form of spirit – corporeal enjambment (blank verse = freed from “joints and limbs”) – God and angels are hermaphroditic – antecedents are ambiguous/multiple – gender? – undetermined?
  • Line 678 – mining hell for gold – human beings violently ransacking mother earth for gold – violation – Cave of Mammon – excavation – “spacious wound…digged out ribs of gold” – Adam – destructive and generative act? – Mammon uses this gold to construct Pandemonium
  • Architect of Pandemonium – Mulciber – creative and destructive – blurs line between – then Milton reestablishes clear poles between good and evil – all of the pagan deities originally fallen angels – Milton theorizing Christian history? – Milton suggesting his epic is pre-Homeric?
  • Milton educating the reader – similes – observer judging (moral) from outside (Coleridge) – who is it? – pedagogical correction of the fallen
  • Line 283 –Satan’s shield = moon – Galileo (“Tuscan artist”) disproves the “perfection” of the moon – Satan has metaphysical flaws despite his beauty? – Galileo views “spots” from a fallen place – happens at twilight, indistinct, blurred, liminal space/time – views from top of mountain OR from a valley? – perspective – Galileo as a figure matters – rebel artist and scientist and Satan
  • Line 292 – Satan’s spear – as big as the mast of a ship – then as a cane “wand” for an old man – then immeasurably large – we can’t imagine – imperfect human comprehension – fallen
  • Line 300 – fallen angels as “thick as autumnal leaves” – “sedge on the Red Sea coast” – Satan as Orion – brings about the ruin of other angels – Orion destroys Pharaoh – both figures are associated with Satan – heroism and menace at once – hideous demons described in beautiful verse – numberless dead – leaves are fallen – Vallombrosa = shady valley – all leaves not fallen – beauty of CHANGE – beauty of the fall – a provisional shady space – moral relativity?
  • Line 779 – “some belated peasant sees OR dreams he sees” fairy elves is DIFFERENT from demons from hell – Milton resists desire to align his universe along doctrinal good and evil – “arbitress moon”? Providence and free will?

Book II

  • Memory of Classical and Christian traditions – muses – divine authority (Moses) – pathos of Satan’s fallen condition like Milton’s own “contaminated” (intertextual/allusive) verse?
  • Lines 582-607 – Lethe – “oblivion” – fallen angels can forget their fallen state – “joy and grief” – they cannot forget – impossibility of forgetfulness – Medusa (FEMALE PRESENCE) – temptation (Tantalus) – what are all of these Classical figures doing with Christian demons in a Christian hell?
  • Line 249 – Mammon’s speech – profiteer – don’t seek revenge on heaven – economic model – parable of the talents – Puritan work ethic in response to Belial (intellectual)?
  • Satan’s flight out of hell through chaos – meets gatekeeper – interesting conversation
  • Line 648: figures of Sin and Death (weird allegorical thing here) – what happens to free will?

Book III

  • God has foreknowledge has no effect on the future – isn’t interested in predetermination – doesn’t compel behavior of human creatures, but why put the fruit in the garden in the first place? – Even though God knew Adam and Eve would eat the fruit, Milton had to have A and E choose to eat it of their own free will – Providence is problematic in the face of free will – good and evil not distinct
  • First lines Invocation to light – co-existent with God the creator? – allows Satan to escape the Stygian pool! – poet’s power – blasphemy? – Milton’s own blindness? – injustice? – blind prophets – Classical fame? Milton’s pathos
  • Line 576 – Sun “dispenses light” to other little stars – but stars “turn” themselves even as they are turned – poet feminized – universe feminized – imagery of sexual reproduction – impregnation
  • A theodicy – rational and reasonable account of the ways of God – account for the justice of God’s ways – God responsible for the fall? – Milton’s head note: “foretells” of Satan’s temptation of humanity and God’s justification of his own actions
  • Romans – St. Paul – predestinate (Calvinists) – Milton says that believers ARE the elect – usurps God’s authority – turns it into a proof of human FREE will
  • Liberal theology of FREE WILL has political and economic implications – Liberalism (anachronistic term, but politics are there) replacing Authoritarianism – Levelers – economic implications – individual merchants can set prices, not monarch – Early Modern idea
  • Weird that Father and Son are in conversation – what happened to the trinity?
  • Line 93 – domestic relationship theologized – Father moves freely between past and future tense – FALL – human ingratitude – “sufficient to have stood but free to fall” – predestination? “Freely” seemed like it would be libratory, but what follows is rigid
  • The Son asks for mercy – Father already knows what the Son will say – Line 194 – Father promises to show mercy – Father cajoled by the son out of rigid predestination mode
  • Milton’s Father asks for a volunteer to suffer/sacrifice for Adam’s sin – Son volunteers – “God shall be all in all” – liberal impulse – egalitarian – Milton cannot seem to sacrifice Son or justify a Father who would sacrifice his son – seems to find it monstrous
  • Inheritance narrative – compensation – power will shift away from the monarch and toward the subjects – will belong to the people – “all in all”

Book IV

  • Epistemological/aesthetic problem – how can the fallen poet know/represent the unfallen world? Any hint of “fallenness” in the unfallen world indicts God – Eden can’t be like anything we know – has to invert the “x is like y” pattern of the first three books (simile) – describes it in terms of what it is NOT like – forced to describe Paradise as everything it is not – Line 268
  • Line 233 - …rather to tell how, if art could tell…”; “not nice art”; “error” – free of artifice – art can’t represent an unfallen world with the instruments of fallen language – “error” here means “wandering,” but suggests a lurking sin (moral sense) in Paradise? Reminds us of a time BEFORE “error” meant moral failing – pre-fall – we are seeing the garden AFTER Satan has already overleapt the boundaries of hell
  • Line 286 – we see what Satan sees – Satan narrator? – we share his pained alienation – see “undelighted all delight” – the first society – “man” in the state of nature – Hobbes – unrecoverable, unrememberable past in Leviathan (secular – authoritarian – absolutist monarchy) – Chapter 13 “righteous mayhem” – humans in the state of nature = all are naturally equal – natural egalitarianism dangerous – perpetual state of strife (no authority) – “without a common power (tyrant or monarch)…state of war…every man against every man…and the life of the life of the natural man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Milton critiquing Hobbes?
  • Milton’s liberalism? Adam and Eve forming successful society their own? – all equally endowed with reason? Puritan revolutionaries capable of it, Milton might say – spiritually minded political philosophy – rational elite guiding less rational member of society – less rational willingly follow – patriarchal hierarchical society
  • Line 299 – “He for God only, she for God in him” – right before Milton said that they were both “lords of all” – fallen perspective on an unfallen scene – “seemed” unequal – indirect discourse from Satan about the inequality of Adam and Eve – hierarchical imagination of Satan? Patriarchy satanic? It isn’t clear whose voice is authorizing the sexist description of prefallen Adam and Eve
  • Line 297-311 – “seem” unequal – physical differences – anatomical – appearances – their HAIR! – supporters of patriarchy/male superiority – always point to the physical strength difference – Milton doesn’t concentrate on physical strength in this poem – hair length? Babies are all born with the same head of hair – if Milton wanted to argue for male superiority, perhaps he would have concentrated on the beard! – hair on the head is gender neutral – hair is gendered by culture, not nature – barber, not creator – Milton has to naturalize the difference in hair length? Milton trying to have it both ways – nature/culture? Conflicting politics of Eden – in naked majesty both are lords of all, free, rational, (egalitarian society) AND a hierarchical society where Adam is the authority (not a tyrant), but Eve is free – consents to be “swayed” by her superior? Society and Eros organized along this gendered hierarchy – Eve MUST BE ABLE TO CHOOSE – “seizing” (Adam) and “yielding” (Eve) – gentle consent – she has the “right” of resignation
  • Line 477 – The hierarchy isn’t recognized by either Adam or Eve (ESPECIALLY Eve) – Milton labors to expose the cultural indoctrination of Eve’s inferiority – cultural distinctions neither know! - fall = inevitable consequence of sexual inequality? Satan exploits the hierarchy? Milton sketches the origins of human freedom – freedom AND social hierarchy – Eve’s pathos/desire is for her own image in the reflective pool (first memory) NOT for Adam – is Milton critiquing heternormativity?

Book V

  • Ironically Satan gives carefully articulated authoritative line – monism v Cartesian division of body and spirit – cosmos is made up of both – a sort of ball of spirit and matter – “all in all”
  • Line 404 and 469 – Adam and Eve EATING with Raphael! – Milton’s angels anthropomorphic – difference between humans and angels is one of degree, not of kind - eating is important
  • Line 493 – a time may come when humans and angels are the same (eat the same things) “if ye be found obedient” – humans can metabolize themselves into angels if they obey nutritional mandates? - physiological equality = social equality?
  • If Adam and Eve hadn’t fallen, they would never have needed an outside redeemer/messiah – no sacrifice of son – like science fiction – radical theology that does away with God – we had been “good” eaten obediently
  • Line 600 – cause/origin of Satan’s fall – first events are important in this poem – Satan was one of the first “sons of God” – may have been THE FIRST – God calls the son at his right hand (not Christ, not Jesus – predates that) his ONLY son – seems to arbitrarily place THIS SON at the help
  • Line 832 – modern, liberal individualism?
  • Line 855 – IMPORTANT – angelic self-creation – ref. Book I “the mind is its own place” – can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell – Milton says that there’s no such thing as fate – Satan’s claim that angels are “self-begot, self-raised/by our own quick’ning power” – condition of self-determination? Rational self-determination? Egalitarian?

Book VI

  • Story of the war in heaven – not in holy scripture
  • Line 344 – Raphael says angel’s bodies are vital throughout – invulnerable unlike human bodies

Book VII

  • Poem obsessed with processes of digestion? Knowledge as digestion – last judgment as digestive process, etc. – organic processes – natural – not God’s arbitrary will? – then what is creation?
  • Line 234 – creation as digestion? Holy spirit impregnates chaos – also “purges” something (“dregs”?) from chaos – where do “dregs” come from? All matter should be spirit/energy/life?
  • Line 30 – Muse of Astronomy (gendered female, of course) in biblical account of creation? Natural Science and Bible – knowledge claims – a new muse? Unorthodox discourse – new language of science – competing forms of knowledge and images of authority
  • Line 387 – sometimes a word-for-word translation of King James Version of Genesis – if Rafael came before Moses, why would he quote Moses?
  • Line 454 – replaces the Genesis account with naturalistic images – FEMININE images – Ovid? – the BIRTH of these living things – “the grassy clods now calved”

Book VIII

  • Line 382 – Adam asks for an “equal” partner – Rafael “contracts his brow” when Adam idolizes Eve – God doesn’t seem interested in supplying Adam with an equal
  • Line 148 – this book also interested in a cosmological hierarchy – Raphael (“affable angel) doesn’t seem any more certain of the movements of the cosmos than Adam! – Milton genders the Sun as masculine and the earth and moon as feminine – “lords of all” – relation of “the two great sexes” might be configured entirely differently on “different” moons and suns, etc. – shuts Adam down – questions of sexual superiority are implicit and Rafael is confused about this hierarchy, too? Doubt and uncertainty about hierarchies

Book IX

  • This book of the fall seems to acknowledge the doubt about hierarchies suggest in the previous books – there’s an actual conversation between Adam and Eve – a conversation involving two people who do not already know what the other is going to say!
  • Line 3 – consequences are mythic and psychic – cosmic shifts – bad weather (seasons, etc.) – also the change in tone – “talk”
  • Milton rejects the genre of Romance – but characters “wander”
  • Subject of dialogue is LABOR – Milton looks at two scriptural visions (political economy?) – parable of the talents and parable of the workers in the vineyard – Adam as nervous voice of the poems orthodoxy/Eve as radical polemical voice - Eve wants to divide labor/separate for more efficient labor
  • Line 201 – narrator opens subject of work – Eve will have children (labor) – garden requires work
  • Line 223 – Eve says our adorable smiles distract each other – Eve embraces the Protestant work ethic! – “unearned supper”/parable of the talents – Adam counters with parable of workers in the vineyard – willingness to serve is what counts – none of the work in the garden is toward productivity – ornamental labor – garden seems to be growing exponentially BECAUSE of their pruning – “luxurious by restraint” – “tending to wild” – garden is growing out of control because of their WORK! – effects on nature of the imposition of culture – cultivation of the land – Eve’s theory of culture? Understanding of the fall not as a theological problem, but as a cultural problem – not growing “disobedient” out of nature, wildness seems to grow out of unnatural “restraints” imposed by Adam and Eve – SUBVERSIVE – (refrain from eating fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil) imposition of law doesn’t control disorder, it produces disorder – sets in motion a process it cannot stop – officially, the fall is an act of free will, but Even suggests it is not – pruning a tree forces new growth – organic necessity of the fall
  • Line 320 – Adam says they should work together because he needs to guide her – censure – information always mediated – knowledge always filtered through arbitrary laws/distinctions – Eve says, “how are we happy still in fear of harm?” – she resists Adam’s paternal solicitude – God’s paternal solicitude – she says I must be free to resist temptation alone – virtue comes from resisting vice – no vice, no virtue – “Eden were no Eden thus exposed” – If I am not free to resist temptation alone, God is not a justifiable God – Eve makes a case for God’s arbitrary law as the source of Eden’s imperfection – exposes Eden’s structural flaws – Eve is tempted by the very desires (or some version of them) that Eden’s hierarchical culture has tried to suppress – prohibition necessitates fall – poem does this even while it celebrates the orthodoxy of God’s law
  • Line 538 – Satan plays on just the “temptation” that Eve’s first memory at the reflecting pool suggests – suppression of her admiration of her own image – not narcissism – instinctive admiration for the image in the pool – she doesn’t know it’s her – mysterious voice imposed from above produces/creates something like narcissism in her! – culture/nature – responsiveness to a sympathetic gaze is censured – pleasure she derived from the image in the pool (infants pleasure at interacting with face of mother) is denied her – theory of human development? – Eve does not have a mother – role of the mother has been systematically excluded from the poem – Satan tempts eve with precisely the natural phenomenon/instinct that has been denied her – uses simile of mothers’ milk to describe the smell of the forbidden fruit – Eve mothering herself at the pool? – source of her own creation? – absolute self-possession (Satan raised by his own “power”) – Adam thinks of Eve as self-sufficient, self-determined, maternal self-sufficiency – Rafael warns Adam against this admiration – same thing with questions of the cosmos
  • Line 602 – serpent claims fruit awakens of the power of reason – part of the allure of the fruit of the tree – serpent says the fruit has allowed him the freedom of speculation – Eve is tempted by the aspect of her being that the poem has denied her, equality with Adam
  • Line 687 – promise of equality in the fruit – “you will be come greater” – serpent is proof!
  • Line 692 – the serpent tells Eve that she’s like a heroine in a chivalric romance – Eve might have been rewarded rather than punished!
  • Line 816 – “but to Adam what sort shall I appear…to add what wants in female sex…render me more equal…sometime superior” – official insistence on social hierarchy – if we are all equally endowed with reason, we are all free – natural instinct suppressed by hierarchical culture of Eden – denial of equality makes us desire more than equality! “more equal” – “sometime superior”! - narrative seems to counter a belief in Edenic perfection/freedom – Adam and Eve never free?
  • Line 1051 – wake up after the fall – “guilty shame” – awakened to a new form of consciousness – play between imagery of darkening and enlightenment – paradox – innocence was the veil? Notion that Adam and Eve ever lived in innocence was the veil – the fiction – echoes Eve’s hair from book IV – hair as a veil associated with Eve’s subjugation – never a moment at which Adam and Eve were free from what we associate with fallen culture – structural flaw – veil of dogma
  • Adam and Eve begin to argue about causes of fall – Adam blames Eve’s wandering – figurative meaning – straying – morally pejorative – in earlier books (Belial and rivers), wandering is innocent and it’s an act of freewill – liberty
  • Line 634 – serpent leads Eve to the tree – she’s a wandering, amazed being –
  • Line 1134 – Adam argues that the moment Eve begins to bring about the fall is when she follows her “strange desire of wandering” – Adam has narrowed his understanding of freedoms – Eve is disgusted by Adam’s reductive logic

Book X