Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 1-49

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, dist inspire
That Sheperd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos:

(ll 1-10)

Foregrounded throughout this passage is the notion of origin - man's first disobedience (eating of the fruit in the garden), the shepherd who first taught the chosen seed (Moses and the Israelites). Also emphasized is Death - the fruit has a mortal taste, that taste welcomes woe including Death into the world. A simple hierarchy of good v. bad is established: disobedience (vs., uh, obedience), loss of Eden vs. promised restoration and regaining of that "blissful Seat". Moreover, ascension - as always - is better: the Muse sings from one of the mountaintops, and of course the beginning of the earth is ascent out of Chaos.

What of Oreb and Sinai? The lovely Merritt Y. Hughes refers me to Exodus XIX-XX; and me without my bible. Thank God for readbookonline.net, which has far too many suggestive pop-up ads for me to take the Bible seriously. Moses received the law on "Mount Oreb, or its spur, Mount Sinai," Hughes says; of particular interest from chapters XIX-XX is this line, after Moses receives the 10 commandments: Exodus 20:18-21 reads,

"And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not. And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was. "

Milton invokes the aid of the Muse to help him sing ... something. Arguably Milton is comparing himself to Moses, which makes the quoted passage very interesting - Milton argues for a proximity with God such as that which Moses and God shared, where he might have the best vantage point by which to, ahem, justify the ways of God to man, which I'll get to later. Who wouldn't draw back from the mountain if it was trumpeting and smoking, covered in stormweathers? Only Milton, who thinks himself uniquely qualified to give the whole Genesis-and-before tale a reboot, because he is a particularly creative exegite.

Or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.

(ll. 10-16)

Awfully fixated on mountains - Oreb, Sinai, now Sion, and the Aonian Mount. Of both Sion and Siloa Hughes argues for a good ol' procrastinative cf for Book III; and I prefer flipping backwards to skipping forwards, so that will have to wait. But there is a pool of Siloam in John 9.7; apparently Siloam means sent. Jesus cured a man of his blindness while the dude was getting dunked in it. Milton's own blindness while writing Paradise Lost (I know, right!) seems to again specially qualify him; he argues for a Biblically based restoration of sight for his undertaking. As for Sion, consider Psalm 65.1-3: "Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Sion: and unto thee shall the vow be performed. O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come. Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou shalt purge them away." So is Paradise Lost just a particularly epic kind of worship? Oh, probably. And once again, Milton is invoking the Muse to, in no middling terms, let 'im fly. There's quite a bit of self-assurance here - he intends to soar, above the mountains, confident that what he is about to do hasn't ever been done before. That he characterizes his song as adventurous promises something akin to a rollicking good time; sell it, Johnny, sell it.

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temple th'upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with might wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
(ll. 17-26)

The special qualifications of Milton's muse come to light; it seems righteous in its choice of the inspired, and even holy (frover) ghost like - it has been around since the beginning; it sits like a dove, a common manifestation of that holy ghost; it gets the Abyss pregnant. Via the OED, pregnant did mean to be with child back in Milton's day, but it also meant full of promise, potential, significance and momentousness - the act of creation itself. He asks of the Muse knowledge, light where once there was darkness, and ascension of whatsoever is low within him. Ascension is proving to be one of the dominant themes of these opening lines, in contrast to the rest of the book which seems to be only concerned with falling - Satan's fall from Heaven, and Adam and Eve's fall from grace. "Justify the ways of God to men" is one of the most famous lines of Paradise Lost and is also probably its most - I hestitate to say pretentious. No doubt it is a lofty goal, but do God's ways need justifying? Milton is full of himself, certainly, but whether or not God needs a press secretary to spin his actions into justified moves with pallatable motives, the scope and grandeur of Lost suggests that if anyone can be the Lord's own C.J. Cregg, it's our boy John.

Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
or the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favor'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt?
(ll. 26-33)

I'd like to say right now that I hate Milton's syntax. For the sake of the pentameter he'll jumble verbs and nouns, and make his referents not just ambiguous but incoherent. It takes a number of readings to figure out just what he is trying to say sometimes; the ideas are there but it can be difficult to figure out just what that random-ass noun is doing in the middle of nowhere.

With that in mind, I'm relatively certain he's saying that the deep Tract of Hell hides nothing from the Muse's view, just as Heaven hides nothing. That Muse, still, I'm thinking, the Spirit, is omniscient; Milton wants its aid in discovering why those Grand Parents of his (Poppa Adam and Granny Eve) would ever transgress against the ONE THING that they didn't hold dominion over? (Again the messy syntax.) They are Lords of the World beside that one restraint, the Tree and its Forbidden Fruit, whose mortal taste dooms not just them but their progeny to Death and woe and a whole infernal host of other sufferings.

This passage, then, is just fodder, or maybe patter - dramatic patter, because Milton did not write this for people who did not know who caused man's fall. Obviously. Without Hughes's annotations and my handy dandy internet connection, I would be lost in Lost, allusions flying over my head. Milton wrote this for an educated audience; we are not suspenseful, as of these lines, as to who Fell Mom & Pop; we are not asking, what's going to happen? We are asking, how are we going to get there?

A foregone conclusion suggests that the journey is what is sought, and of course the journey within Paradise Lost is Milton's verse, as syntactically messy and allusion-heavy as it is. It is pride; it is presumption; it's also (probably) justly so.

Th' infernal Serpent; hee it was, whose guile
Stirr'd up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd
The Mother of Mankind; what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host
Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in Glory above his Peers,
He trusted to have equall'd the most High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim
Against the Throne and Monarchy of God
Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battle proud
With vain attempt.
(ll. 34-44)

Throughout PL, there's a lot of opportunities to accuse Milton of misogyny, but oddly this isn't one. The blame is squarely laid on the ... shoulders of the serpent, Satan, for causing the downfall of Eve, whom he deceived, and she - apparently - not willfully. We get a brief rundown of Satan's history, his infernal army bent on the ascendence of Satan. He would, in glory, be above his peers - the other angels - and even to have equalled god, "the most High." Of course, this story would be worlds different if Satan's hadn't been a "vain attempt," but of particular interest is Satan's motivation: envy, and revenge; and his characterization: ambitious, proud, impious (duh). Satan's war in heaven is really original impiety - from the OED, "want of reverence for God". No kidding. It seems redundant, or at least self-explanatory, which sort of reduces it to its essence - this is no defiled alter but attack against the person of God Himself. It's gutsy. Satan's the underdog, which is another thing that goes without saying, as his ascendance fails and he is relegated to the underworld. But it's not hard to sympathize with Satan if only because he lost before he started.

Him the Almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defy th' Omipotent to Arms.
(ll. 44-49)

Already Milton has established an incredible spatial metaphor, of ascent and descent; for trying to ascend, Satan is hurled downwards. For combat against "the most High", he is hurled into "bottomless perdition". There is a definite ceiling in this building but no ground floor. God is infinitely far away not because he is ever higher, but because Satan is ever lower. His despair is that distace from god.

We can't ignore in this passage the fire imagery surrounding Satan in his new dominion of hell; Satan, on his fall, is flaming, with combustion, to dwell in perdition with "penal Fire". That his ruin is hideous seems to me to add insult to injury; and the nature of his chains has not allowed me, since "reading" this last fall, to ever look at Wolverine's skeleton the same way again.

Also: what kind of idiot are you to defy the Omnipotent to arms? That is all power; He has all power, including the power you possess and then some. That aspect of the fight makes it hard to sympathize with Satan just because it seems so damn stupid.