Milton, John - Paradise Lost (5)

John Milton

John Milton was born in London from a wealthy Puritan family in 1608, he was a committed protestant and humanist scholar who thought his poetic inspiration was a gift from God. He studied at Cambridge, he had a Master's Degree and he learnt Italian, Greek and Latin. In 1631 he started writing, he published the poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the pastoral elegy Lycidas and various sonnets. He was also politically committed, he sympathised with Cromwell and supported the Commonwealth and in 1649 he was appointed secretary for foreign tongues in Cromwell's Council of State. In the 1642 he had married Mary Powell, daughter of a royalist, she found his Puritan austerity and intellectual stature unbearable and returned home. This caused the poet to justify divorce and he wrote many pamphlets about this topic, like The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Aeropagatica about the freedom of the press. In 1652 Milton became blind, but his blindness helped stimulate his verbal richness. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 his republican writing were burned and he was imprisoned, but he later was released and pardoned. He wrote three poems during this period: his masterpiece Paradise Lost, a poem about Satan's temptation of Christ, Paradise Regained, and a tragedy on the final days of the biblical Samson, his moral recovery and self-sacrifice Samson Agonistes. Milton then died in 1674.

Paradise Lost

setting: Heaven, Hell, the Firmament (chaos), and Earth. God sits on his throne in heaven surrounded by nine orders of angels, the tenth one revolted under Satan and has been hurled down into hell, below chaos. God created Earth and fixed it at the centre of the universe out of chaos, in antithesis with heaven and God's world. Milton's solar system is the Ptolemaic design.
sources: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Virgil's Aeneid; Bible's Genesys.
main theme: the hope for redemption and the belief in divine Providence.
secondary themes:
pride it leads Satan's downfall
envy coming from Satan's pride
revenge it makes Satan tempt Eve
infidelity Adam betrays God by siding with Eve
disobedience Adam and Eve disobey God
repentance Adam and Eve repent
redemption God's sacrifice (Christ)
characters: God, the father and the son; Satan, the powerful proud angel; Adam and Eve, the first men; Gabriel and Raphael, angels; Beelzebub and other angels siding with Satan
epic conventions: invocation to the muse, he invokes the Holy Spirit, he's aware that his task is difficult to be performed and he needs help. Milton chose the epic poem because of the greatness of his subject.
style: Elevated, high – run on lines – blank verse – latinisms – antithesis of light and darkness and the corruption of the Church of England. Indeed some critics consider this play as an allegory for civil war, God is represented by the Kind and the fallen angels are the Puritans.
Satan as an epic hero: Milton altered the figure of the epic hero to suit the changing spirit of that age, the hero is no longer a warrior, but a philosophical hero who must learn to control himself before he can found an empire. After becoming blind and risking imprisonment, Milton developed the idea of rebellion against God. The characteristics of the epic hero in Satan are leadership, initiative, and the courage to refuse defeat and the willingness to escape from Hell and attack mankind. Satan represents Milton's puritan spirit, as he was a rebel against James I's tyranny.

Satan's speech

This passage is a dramatic monologue, in which Satan, who has just landed on his new kingdom, speaks to his angels in order to make them react to their defeat and seek revenge. At first the devil feels deeply frustrated and powerless, he's disgusted by the place he has been sent to, but then because of his pride he reacts and proclaimed himself the ruler of Hell and claims that that place is better than Heaven because, thanks to his intelligence, he can make Hell better than Heaven, while God, who is seen as a tyrant, has made a Hell of Heaven. It doesn't matter where they are, the mind has the power to overcome the environment. Satan feels superior to good, he knows he's more intelligent, but he's also aware that he's not as powerful as He is. Satan can be considered an epic hero because he's a charismatic leader, he has great courage which makes him cope with his defeat and escape from Hell to avenge his defeat, he's brave and self confident and he wants to provoke and challenge. This can be seen when he says “here at least we shall be free” and “our faithful friends, the associates and co partners of our loss”. He's also very arrogant indeed he said “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. Milton put himself into Satan because the poet himself was a rebel against the royal authority and the corruption of the Church, indeed Satan's rebellion can be seen as an allegory for the Puritan revolution against King James I.
The style of this monologue is very high, the author uses many latinisms, in order to make this passage suitable to an epic poem of such a great nature since it deals with God, while the rhetoric devices used are antithesis, in which the semantic area belongs to light and darkness, and a large number of run on lines, which urge the reader to go on reading, just like Satan urges the other fallen angels to react like he's trying to do. This shows his self confident and strong willed attitude which makes him a charismatic leader: he's the first one who reacts and drives the others to follow his example in order not to make them accept this defeat but to seek revenge.