Paradise Lost: Book 1

A free, full text version of Paradise Lost can be found here. However, an annotated book version of PL will probably make your life a whole lot better.

Introduction: On loving metered poetry

After the collected works of Billy Shakes, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is my favorite thing. Julie Andrews may sing about raindrops on roses and bright copper kettles, but those pale in comparison to an epic. Metered, unrhymed poetry is the perfect blend of form and function. Rhyme has it's place, for sure, but it often draws too much attention to the frame: Look at me, look at me, aren't my dressings pretty? it says. Rhyme can make it difficult to connect to the feelings, because one is distracted by the trappings. Unrhymed feels truer, more like somebody might (though not actually) bust it out in real life[1]. 

I am not, however, a free verse girl. Most of the time, free verse could just be prose and be equally productive and less reminiscent of the angsty teen poetry we'd all like to leave behind. The regularity of meter makes the words into poetry, elevates it above the quotidian  – but the lack of rhyme makes them usable, visceral. Indeed, the author of Anatomies connects our very hearts to iambic beats: “[The heart's] pulsing rhythm may underlie the pleasures of the iambic metre in poetry and the beat of rock music.”

Good epic poetry is the ocean: relentless, immense,  unstoppable. And in the ocean of metered epics, Milton sits sovereign.

His oceanscape is vast, and at times frightening. The demons, angels, men, and gods you meet in his sea can be stranger even than the blind fish or the giant squid. Paradise Lost is a weird and beautiful place – a powerful ocean of words that pulls a person under to treasure and to gods.

Let us plunge.

My copy of PL is in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, edited by William Kerrigan and company. The handy explanations that I may sometimes quote come from there. It is a huge brick of a book; carry it around and people will think you are a heavy-hitting academic.

Paradise Lost, Book I

Principle players and speech-givers: 

- Narrator

- God

- Satan

- Beëlzebub 

Key moments: 

- Expulsion of Satan and company

- Construction of Pandemonium [2]

Momentous speeches: 

- Satan's first

- That other very famous, much-quoted speech from Satan

I hope the above provides enough of a summary to follow my commentary below. To steal William Goldman's line, this is a good parts version of PL; or at least, it's a my-favorite-bits version. I'm going to write about the lines that interest me, the images that strike a chord, the moments that make me stare in awe. YMMV, and I encourage you to read or re-read PL and find your moments. 

Enough of my yammering, onto the poetry. Read it aloud, let the syllables surround you. They will sing if you give them air. 

Lines 24-26
That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence 
And justify the ways of God to man
Here, Milton is calling on his Muse (aka the Holy Spirit) to help him write this work. But all I see here is, "NBD, everybody, I'm just going to use this epic poetry to explain the Lord God Almighty." And that, lovelies, is why we read epics. 

Lines 44-49
Satan and follower's expulsion from Heaven

…Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down to

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th’Omnipotent to arms.

Lines 60-69

Description of Hell; "darkness visible" is a most evocative phrase - paradoxical, yes, but somehow capturing an essence of Milton's thoughts on punishment: what good is a punishment that you can't experience? Darkness by itself would be so much less a terror than a darkness you are conscious of, that you are sensible to. Milton's Hell is a paradox: a slippery, frightening paradox.

The dismal situation waste and wild,

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Served only to discover sights of woe,

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed

With ever-burning sulfur unconsumed…

Lines 254-5

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

A famous dictum

Lines 261-3

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

Another famous set. 

Line 330

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. 

A battle cry, one that is weirdly echoed (though in a much different setting) in Longfellow's Psalm of Life: "For the soul is dead that slumbers...Let us, then, be up and doing/With a heart for any fate"

Lines 663-9

Let’s just take a moment and appreciate this image of mighty, fallen Cherubim raging from the depths

…out flew

Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs

Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze

Far round illumined Hell: highly they raged

Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arms

Clashed on their sounding shields the din of war,

Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heav’n.

xo, 

Devo

I took a whole course on Milton, so my re-reading is undoubtedly influenced by that.

---

[1] True story, when I was reading The Inferno, I said to myself, “Something is off. Something is not right.” And then the rhymes sunk in, and I had a little bit of a snit: “BLANK VERSE. Why is this not in blank verse? What is this rhyming nonsense?”

[2] Kerrigan tells me that Pandemonium is from the Greek, 'place of all demons'. How awesome is that?