“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669story. He associates himself with, but also departs from, the experience of Orpheus,
Dante, and Satan as he recounts his poetic journey through Chaos and Hell and
back to the regions of light: “Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down / The
dark descent, and up to reascend, / Though hard and rare.” Then he describes a
psychological journey through changing emotional states. His moving complaint
that the light of God “Revisit’st not these eyes” is followed by a hauntingly evoca-
tive pastoral description of classical and biblical sites of poetic and prophetic inspi-
ration where he hears the nightingale sing “darkling” and imagines himself among
the great blind bards and prophets of Greece: “Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
/ And Tiresias and Phineas Prophets old.” Then follows a poignant lament for Milton’s
own paradise lost – the light and beauty of the natural world and the access to
wisdom and human companionship it provides:
Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men
Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Natures works to mee expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. (3.40–50)The hymn’s peroration begs for Celestial Light, the divine illumination even
sighted authors must have to treat the subjects he now turns to – Heaven, unfallen
Eden, and the Godhead – “things invisible to mortal sight.” He does not expect the
extraordinary visions of a John of Patmos, but he hopes for the illumination needed
to imagine and represent worthily these ineffable places and things.
In the Proem to Book VII (1–39), a hymn to his heavenly Muse, he apostro-
phizes her by the name Urania, but then qualifies, “The meaning, not the Name I
call.” To suggest that meaning he devises a myth in which she, along with her
“sister” the Eternal Wisdom described in Proverbs 8, plays continually before the
almighty Father who delights in her “Celestial Song.” Identifying her thus as a
figure for inspiration in sacred poetry both in heaven and on earth, the Bard im-
plores her to “govern” his song and “fit audience find, though few.” Her nightly
visits to the Bard’s slumbers represent the inexplicable and subconscious element in
poetic creation, as well as Milton’s nocturnal habits of composition. Continuing his
identification of his authorial labors with his poem’s heroic action, he presents
himself as a successful Bellerophon, favored by God in his ascent to the heavens on
the winged horse Pegasus, symbolizing inspired poetry, but now in danger of
Bellerophon’s ultimate fate: falling to earth and wandering blinded. Contrasting his