Paradise Lost, books iii and iv

I struggled with this book. Milton mixes mythological, Christian and pagan references in ways that irritate me, though perhaps I should admire his ecumenicism. Maybe I felt the grim hand of foreboding; this book finds God watching Satan sneak back to earth, and Jesus offering himself as a sacrifice. What I consciously thought was I was tired of Milton’s vainglory. Does it serve his reader to dump everything he knows into this poem? So many of his references were simply meaningless to me without the footnotes, and subtle with them. At one point, he jumps from Comus to Kepler. Perhaps had I lived and been literate in the 17th century, I would’ve easily kept up. In the 21st century, I did not.

My first note in book iii came when Jesus questions God, building to this argument which sums up a contemporary dilemma about God’s actual power:

… wilt thou thyself Abolish thy creation, and unmake,

For him, what for thy glory thou hast made?

So should thy goodness and thy greatness both

Be questioned and blasphemed without defence. [lines 155 to 166]

I liked the phrase “umpire conscience” in line 195. It resonated for me (I wonder what that says about my own conscience).

Then Milton presents Jesus’ view of the ultimate price. Milton tells us death’s terror makes the heavenly choir stand mute. Only Jesus, of all the angels in heaven, will pay the price. Yet this excerpt makes it sound like not such a bad thing:

Though now to Death I yield, and am his due

All that of me can die, yet that debt paid,

Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave

His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul

For ever with corruption there to dwell;

But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil;

Death his death’s wound shall then receive, and stoop

Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed.

It’s like listening to Hayden’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” — it’s so beautiful you forget it’s terrible.

Later, there’s another turn of phrase I like, “heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate.” [295]

Milton also posts Saint Peter not at a gate, but at a wicket. If I knew something about cricket, I might appreciate Milton’s slyness. Instead, it provides another example of how much Milton knew that I don’t.

Footnotes do help sometimes. This phrase on Satan’s reaction to seeing Earth as he flies through space on his mission from Hell:

Such wonder seized, though after heaven seen,

The spirit malign, but much more envy seized,

At sight of all this world beheld so fair. Round he surveys, and well might, where he stood

So high above the circling canopy

Of night’s extended shade; [lines 552-557a]

draws an excited footnote about Milton’s “sophisticated optics like those of Baroque visual art,” and the care Milton takes with placing Satan on the dark side of the Earth, always away from the Sun. I felt informed.

I was bemused by Milton’s assertion on hypocrites. It seems like one of those phrases that should break the bell but instead rings true. …neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone, [lines 682-684]
Book iv

Here is a good line from Satan, in his dialogue with Gabriel: Lives there who loves his pain? [line 888]

Gabriel’s stirring speech at the end, where he denounces Satan in language so rich you can hear him declaiming in your head, provides one of several passages that made me wonder why Paradise Lost did not get made into a famous opera [a quick search shows that a composer named Penderecki wrote one in 1978, but it appears not to have been recorded.

I flagged this excerpt:

…thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seem

Patron of liberty, who more than thou

Once fawned, and cringed and servilely adored

Heaven’s awful monarch?

[957-960a]