While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve. At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven.
The battles between the faithful angels and Satan's forces take place over three days. Satan's rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God's new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.Īt several points in the poem, an Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone, in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind. Belial, Chemosh, and Moloch are also present. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organise his followers he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. It begins after Satan and the other fallen angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is also called in the poem, Tartarus. Milton's story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan ( Lucifer) and the other, Adam and Eve. The poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res ( in the midst of things), the background story being recounted later. In later printing, "Arguments" (brief summaries) were inserted at the beginning of each book. However, in the 1674 edition, the text was reorganized into twelve books. In the 1667 version of Paradise Lost, the poem was divided into ten books. He also wrote the epic poem while often ill, suffering from gout, and suffering emotionally after the early death of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, in 1658, and their infant daughter. Having gone blind in 1652, Milton wrote Paradise Lost entirely through dictation with the help of amanuenses and friends. Leonard also notes that Milton "did not at first plan to write a biblical epic." Since epics were typically written about heroic kings and queens (and with pagan gods), Milton originally envisioned his epic to be based on a legendary Saxon or British king like the legend of King Arthur. However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the English Civil War interrupted Milton's earliest attempts to start his "epic that would encompass all space and time." The biographer John Aubrey (1626–1697) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Paradise Lost, the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform we must continue our course with the rest and learn to think ourselves fortunate whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.Milton Dictating to His Daughter, Henry Fuseli (1794) Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. These are the reflections of the first days but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever-that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. “I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance.
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