Eve leads Adam to sin but also to repentance; blaming herself for the Fall, she
proposes suicide.
Milton types the sexes traditionally (‘He for God only, she for God in him’) but
also allegorically – Adam is intellect, Eve sense. He likes cosmology, she prefers
gardening. Although the sexes are not equal, the presentation of sexual love and of
marriage is positive and new. Central to Paradise Lost is the first good marriage in
English literature. When Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
Thus hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.Milton’s endings display his mastery of verse, syntax and sense. The sole humans,
having lost God and angel guests, are ‘solitary’ yet hand in hand; wandering yet
guided; needing rest yet free to choose. The balance is, as Milton said poetry should
be, ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’.
Milton’s Christian humanism depends on human reason, and for him ‘Reason
also is choice’. Right reason freely chooses to recognize the truths of God. Eve freely
chooses not to accept Adam’s reasoned warning; Adam freely chooses to die with
her; the Son freely chooses to die for Man. Milton held that ‘just are the ways of God,
/ And justifiable to men’, yet made God justify himself and blame mankind. ‘Whose
fault?’ asks the Father, ‘Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me / All he could
have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’
(III.97–9). The point is clear, but so is the crossness. Here, ‘God the Father’, as
Alexander Pope said,‘turns a school divine’ (an academic theologian). To represent
God the Father as conducting his own defence was a mistake. Mysteries, as Donne
wrote, are like the sun, ‘dazzling, but plain to all eyes’. Milton explains the dazzle. The
inve nted scene of the Son’s promotion to ‘Vice-Gerent’, which prompts Satan’s
revolt, is a blunder. To portray ‘what the eye hath not seen and the ear hath not
heard’ is almost impossible: in Milton the life of Heaven is too like that of Homer’s
Olympus:‘T ables are set, and on a sudden piled / With angels’ food, and rubied
nectar flows .... They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet / Quaff immortal-
ity.’ Dante does it better.
The faults are the obverse of Milton’s strength of purpose.Paradise Lostdoes in
compact form what the Mystery cycles had done. Its Bible story is rational, as the
Renaissance wished, and pictorial, in the style of Italian ceiling painters. The energy
and grandeur ofParadise Loststrike even those readers who do not know the Bible.
It is like hearing Handel’s Messiah in the Sistine Chapel; or, more precisely, how a
blind man might hear a Messiah by Henry Purcell (1659–1695), had he composed
one.
Paradise Regain’d is not about the Redemption but about the temptation in the
desert. The Son’s rejection of Satan’s offer of the (pagan) learning of Athens stands
out in a dry landscape.Samson Agonistes is a tragedy to be read, not acted. (‘A
dialogue without action can never please like a union of the narrative and dramatick
powers’ – Johnson.) Its form is Greek, with protagonist and chorus; its subject the fate
of Israel’s champion, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’. Samson speaks: ‘Why was
my breeding ordered and prescribed / As of a person separate to God / Designed
for great exploits; if I must die / Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out?’
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