Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) (6 page)

When the poem introduces a distinction, the difference is likely to be taken up, explored, and often complicated by the verse. In Book 4, for example, the narrator reads gender differences from the naked bodies of Adam and Eve, and the result is the greatest politically incorrect passage in English poetry. “For contemplation he and valor formed,/For softness she and sweet attractive grace” (297–98). We can see immediately that alliteration serves Eve. The poetry is already indicating its willingness to interfere with the passage’s legalism, but for now there is no time to explore the bond between Eve and poetic beauty. The law must be pronounced. Adam is formed for God, she for God in him. His forehead and eye “declared/Absolute rule” (300–301).

At this point Milton begins to describe their differing hair treatments, Adam’s first:

The two run-on lines imitate the fall of his hair (
Hyacinthine
implies that it is black), while the strong end-stop of line 303 puts a limit to its hanging down.
But not
has an almost corrective force, as if things might have been getting out of hand. They immediately do. Eve’s blond tresses introduce four straight run-on lines, followed by four more end-stopped lines:

He the cluster, she the vine. He words in their stable sense, words as law, words that set limits; she words as their sense is in transit, disheveled, drawn out variously from line to line, creeping and curling with wanton implication. Syntax flows across the unit of the line. Milton’s verse becomes femalelike in describing femaleness, then arrives at the key word
Subjection
in line 308, which mates with all the verbs to come. Enjambment stops. We have returned to the matter of the law, but in, so to speak, another semantic universe. Subjection is what is
required
, what is
yielded
, what is
best received
, and again what is
yielded. It
is their bond, and also their sexual spark. He requires and receives it; she yields and yields it. Lacking compulsion, it is no longer “subjection” in the usual sense but rather her free consent.

This passage begins with the law of gender difference, yet by its end we find that law realized in amorous love and artistic excitement. Eve yields her subjection with “coy submission, modest pride,” both phrases being oxymorons, and the first of them of particular richness in Renaissance love poetry (Kerrigan and Braden 204–18). An oxymoron naturally requires two words, a plus and a minus, a point and a counterpoint. The last line, with Eve-like luxuriance, doubles the oxymoron quotient with four perfect words, oxymoronic in various ways:
reluctant
crosses
amorous, amorous
crosses
delay, delay
crosses
reluctant
. But all of them and their nest of contradictory combinations are
sweet
, the very word that Eve will turn so memorably a few hundred lines later, enclosing the couple’s love and their lapsing days of Paradise in its embrace. They will not make love until the end of the day. Eve’s
sweet … delay
is an oxymoronic union of desire and control, consent and refusal, passion and rule, profusion and limit, fusing the various contraries of the passage. Adam also participates in this knot of contraries.
Gentle sway
is the first oxymoron of the passage, and links to
delay
through a delayed rhyme. Of “Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,/And sweet reluctant amorous delay,” Walter Savage Landor remarked, “I would rather have written these two lines than all the poetry that has been written since Milton’s time in all the regions of the earth” (Thorpe 368–69).

Milton’s style marries male and female, “which two great sexes animate the world” (8.151). There is male law. There are requirements, fixed meanings, ripe clusters of sense. But there is energy as well, and the energy in this poetry is female, vinelike, curling here and then back, various in its repetition, paradoxical, nurturing underbrushes of implication that modify and even revise the abstract fixities of law.

Johnson proclaimed that Milton “wrote no language, but has formed what Butler calls a Babylonish Dialect” (Thorpe 86). Yet his strictures on Milton are almost always wrong or exaggerated. A recent study such as John Hale’s
Milton’s Languages
is from the outset friendlier toward the multilingual characteristics of Milton’s style than would have been possible in the confines of Johnson’s linguistic patriotism. Modern statistical studies have demonstrated that the style of
Paradise Lost
is neither as archaic nor as Latinate as some of its critics have imagined (Boone). Milton is a learned author, to be sure, but a student determined to appreciate at least some of the learning in his language will be not be led away from the genius of ordinary English. T. S. Eliot, writing in the Johnson tradition, emphasized “the remoteness of Milton’s verse from ordinary speech” (Thorpe 321). But in fact Milton’s poetry enriches ordinary speech in new and surprising ways.

Now and then Milton will use a word in its classical or etymological sense, waving aside its derived meaning in English. In “There went a fame in Heav’n” (1.651),
fame
has its Roman sense of “word spoken.” An imperial Milton banishes the English sense. Similarly,
succinct
in “His habit fit for speed succinct” (3.643) has the Latin meaning of “tucked under, tight-fitted.” Christopher Ricks has shown that Milton will sometimes insist on the etymological sense when naming an unfallen world in which words with definitions involving immorality are not yet appropriate (109–17). At their creation the rivers of the earth run “with serpent error wand’ring” (7.302), but
error
in the Latin sense of “wandering” contains no taint of crime or mistake. Words too have their original innocence. In order to grasp this last example, a reader must see that the Latin definition is in meaningful dialogue with the derived sense, and that the rejection of the ordinary English meaning,
far from being arbitrary, belongs to the larger significance of the passage.

Milton “was not content,” Walter Raleigh observed, “to revive the exact classical meaning in place of the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and loaded the word with two meanings at once” (1900, 209). When the hair of the angel Uriel falls “Illustrious on his shoulders” (3.627), Milton refers at once to the luster or brightness of the hair and the august reputation of the angel. As it approaches Eve in Book 9, the snake is “voluble” (436). In its classical sense, the word denotes the coiling motion of the snake, but in its newer English sense, it announces the serpent’s forthcoming talkativeness (Ricks 108). Beelzebub refers to Chaos as “the vast abrupt” (2.409), where
abrupt
seems first of all to retain its Latin sense of “broken off, precipitous.” The rebel angels have fallen through Chaos and have some idea of what it means to traverse this abyss of indefiniteness. Whoever enters Chaos breaks off from the stabilities of Heaven and Hell. But the English meanings seem also in play when we note that Milton has transformed an adjective into a noun. Chaos itself will be a constant sequence of abrupt changes, a place where interruption is not a surprise but the norm.

There is a fund of linguistic peculiarities in
Paradise Lost
. Milton, for example, likes the sequence adjective + noun + adjective, as in
universal hubbub wild
or
vast profundity obscure
. He was not the first to try this sequence, but it is a good bet that, wherever we encounter it in subsequent English verse, Milton is probably on the author’s mind; Arnold’s “vast edges drear” in “Dover Beach” hopes to remind us of the seething Chaos of
Paradise Lost
. F. T. Prince (112–29) discussed Milton’s interest in a related sequence found in Italian verse as early as Dante: adjective + noun + and + adjective, as in “Sad task and hard” (5.564) or “Sad resolution and secure” (6.541). Does the second adjective come in as an afterthought? The
task
, let us say, is primarily
sad
, so much so that one forgets for a moment that it is
hard
as well. Or does the second adjective bear the main emotion? A
sad
task would be burden enough, but this one is, more important,
hard
. Milton enjoyed playing with this scheme. He experimented, for example, with distancing the adjectives: “pleasing was his shape,/And lovely” (9.503–4) or “For many are the trees of God that grow/In Paradise, and various” (9.618–19). In place of adjective + noun + and + adjective, he tried noun + verb + and +
noun, as in “he seemed/For dignity composed and high exploit” (2.110–11). The poet did not invent a “Babylonish Dialect.” He wrote English with a high degree of originality, and his original poetry sublime unleashes a number of effects that had never been tried before in English verse.

Attacks on Milton’s verse early in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and A. J. A. Waldock sparked a debate that eventually came to be known as the Milton Controversy (Murray 1–12). Although the notion of Milton’s artistic greatness had never before been questioned so systematically, this was hardly an isolated incident. Historically Milton is by some measure the most controversial of the great English poets. He has given rise to an inordinate number of critical debates, altogether too many, in fact, for us to suppose that his poetry is itself innocent of contentiousness. Certainly in his prose Milton liked to mix it up. He was among the greatest controversialists of the day. The decades he spent fighting the wars of truth, Coleridge suggested, added a “controversial spirit” to his youthful character (Thorpe 91). But the early poems are also imbued with the love of argument. When Milton in the first invocation to
Paradise Lost
refers to “this great argument,” the word
argument
primarily means “plot,” as in the prose “Argument” or plot summary attached to each book of the epic. Yet the great argument of the plot is wed to an “argument” of another kind, a rational contention, since Milton vows that “to the highth of this great argument” he will, if inspired, “assert eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men” (1.24–26).

Emerson wrote that no man in literary history, perhaps in all history, excelled Milton in the power to inspire: “Virtue goes out of him to others” (
Early Lectures
1:148). No doubt some of the controversies about Milton have not demonstrated much of the poet’s own idealism, but the generally high quality of Milton debates over the centuries is arguably the finest of the poet’s gifts to our culture, as Christopher Ricks has pointed out. It is for good reason that Milton is “the most
argued-about poet in English.” He brings out the serious and passionate advocate in us:

Milton’s argumentative art refuses to stay within aesthetic boundaries, however they may be drawn. Virtue goes out of him to his readers. His arguments come to life, and participating in them both pleases and elevates us.

One of the oldest of the Milton debates swirls about the character of Satan. Is he the hero of the epic? Is he so attractive as to upset the standard moral balance of Christianity? The first of these questions is the more easily answered. Early in the poem, Milton deliberately places Satan in the roles occupied by classical epic heroes. He founds a civilization in Hell. He undertakes a long and arduous journey. Compared to Odysseus, Addison observed, Satan “put in practice many more wiles and stratagems, and hides himself under a greater variety of shapes and appearances” (Shawcross 1:152). To some extent, Milton uses his Satan as a diagnostic test of the moral health of classical epic.

In the beginning of the poem especially, Satan exudes glamour. His appearance—huge, ruined, thunder-scarred, darkened, but still able to evoke the memory of his former luminescence in Heaven—makes a tremendous impression. The Satan glimpsed in Tasso’s
Jerusalem Liberated
has, like the cheap special-effects devils of modern supernatural thrillers, massive horns, red eyes, a huge beard, an open mouth filthy with red blood and spewing rancid fumes (4.6–7). As William Hazlitt put it, the Satan of
Paradise Lost
“has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there.… Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot” (Thorpe 109; see also Newton in Shawcross 2:154). Satan is proud, obstinate, the rebel of rebels. He
speaks thrillingly of his “unconquerable will.” For Milton, part of giving the devil his due is having the devil give God his due. Satan several times concedes the omnipotence of his foe. When he finds himself cursing the “free love” God gave to all the angels because it did not prevent him from falling, Satan fiercely, and in the name of truth, recoils on himself: “Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will / Chose freely what it now so justly rues” (4.71–72).

William Blake took the romantic exaltation of Satan to an extreme in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is, because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake was something of a Gnostic, for whom Milton’s God the Father was an evil and inferior God, and his satanic opposition the force of true deity (Nuttall 224). But readers whose imaginations remain responsive to the ordinary polarities of Christianity will probably not leave the poem with the favorable impression of Satan with which they began. As the work continues, they realize that Satan’s cannonlike recoils inevitably issue in a fatalistic resolve to go on being himself and fulfill his initial plan of corrupting mankind. His speeches remake the same decision over and over again. Readers come to understand that conceding the omnipotence of God, far from being magnanimous, is the only way Satan can reconcile his pride with his defeat. Heroic resistance begins to look like habitual stubbornness. Satan would desperately like to believe that he is self-created. But his image of his own greatness is also his enemy, the uncreated Father. Satan sits in “God-like imitated state” (2.511). Declaring that evil is his good, he dreams of sharing “divided Empire with Heav’n’s King” (4.111)—in other words, of being the equal of God in a Manichaean universe.