John Milton
17th Century England
and Paradise Lost
John Milton
1608-1675
Education—raised in London
At home, then St. Paul’s Cathedral School
1625—enters Cambridge
1630—BA
1632—MA
1632-1638 continued study
1638-1640 European travel—mostly in Italy
Milton’s travels influence his
poetry
Geography:
He circled, four times crossed the car of Night
From pole to pole traversing each colure,
On th’eighth returned and on the coast averse
From entrance or cherubic watch by stealth
Found unsuspected way. There was a place
Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise
Into a gulf shot underground till part
Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life.
In with the river sunk and with it rose
Satan involved in rising mist, then sought Where to lie hid.
Copernican Universe—and
Galileo
Some say He bid his angels turn askance
The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun’s axle: they with labor pushed
Oblique the centric globe.
Meanwhile—in English politics
1629—Charles I dissolves Parliament and begins 11 years of
personal rule
1640— “Short Parliament” opens at Westminster
1640—“Long Parliament” begins and continues until 1660
1649—Oliver Cromwell declares himself “Lord Protector”
Charles I is executed.
1660—Cromwell dies and Charles II returns to England: “The
Restoration”
Some Milton dates:
1649–marries Mary Powell
1652–Milton became totally blind, his wife dies
1656—marries Katherine Woodcock, who dies that year.
1658—begins to write Paradise Lost
1660—Milton goes into Hiding, is jailed, then pardoned
1663—marries Elizabeth Minshull
1666—Paradise Lost completed
1670—Paradise Lost published
Areopagitica: a Speech for Liberty of Unlicensed
Printing to the Parliament of England (1644)
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a
potency of life. . . they do preserve as in a vial the purest
efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred
them . . a good book is the precious life-blood of a
master-spirit.”
When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged within me useless, though my soul more bent
To Serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
1852
from Samson Agonistes
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent
Milton dies in 1675
Paradise Lost
Epic
“Sing Heav’nly Muse . . .”
—a long narrative poem on serious subject.
Vast setting, deeds of great valor, aid from
supernatural forces.
Epic Conventions
Invocation of the Muse
Opens in medias res
Lists—epic catalogue
Extended and elaborate formal speeches—called “epic
monologue”
Elaborate family backgrounds provided—epic geneology
Extended comparisons—epic simile
Stock phrases—formulaic language
What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the heighth of this great argument
I may assert the ways of God to men.
Working with some passages
(Narrator)
So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed
In serpent, inmate bad, and toward Eve
Addressed his way not with indented wave
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze. His head
Crested aloft and carbuncle his eyes
With burnished neck of verdant gold erect
Amidst his circling spires that on the grass
Floated redundant. Pleasing was his shape
And lovely
from Book IX
Eve—
and Narrator
Here grows the cure of all: this fruit divine,
Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste,
Of virtue to make wise. What hinders then
To reach and feed at once both body and mind?
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound and Nature from her seat
Sighing though all her works gave signs of woe
That all was lost
....
Greedily she engorged without restraint
And knew not eating death.
from Book IX
Eve—an epic monologue
But to Adam in what sort
Shall I appear? Shall I to him make known
As yet my change and give him to partake
Full happiness with me? Or rather not,
But keep the odds of knowledge in my pow’r
Without copartner so to add what wants
In female sex, the more to draw his love
And render me more equal and, perhaps,
A thing not undesirable, sometime
Superior: for who inferior is free?
But what if God have seen
And death ensue? Then I shall be no more
And Adam wed to another Eve
Shall live with her enjoying. I extinct:
A death to think! Confirmed then I resolve
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe.
Lucifer in dialogue with Beelzebub
Farewell happy fields
Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time!
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
....
Here at least
We shall be free. Th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for His envy, will not drive us hence.
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell that serve in Heaven!
from Book I
And why might Milton choose the
epic for his great work?
Terry Eagleton writes, “Paradise Lost is a poem
wrihen on the ruin of utopian political hopes.
Epics are master narratives which define and
delimit what is known and what is valued. They
offer a mythological history which is above all
an account of their own present. The project of
epic is to fix the values of the society.”