Her encouragement enables them to approach God, and sue for grace, bowing on supplicant knee, to receive forgiveness. Thus, they share the same punishment, as they shared the same guilt.Įve appeals to Adam for reconciliation of their actions. As he finishes his speech, however, the fallen angels around him become hideous snakes, and soon enough, Satan himself turns into a snake, deprived of limbs and unable to talk. He tells them about how their scheme worked and Mankind has fallen, giving them complete dominion over Paradise. Meanwhile, Satan returns triumphantly to Hell, amid the praise of his fellow fallen angels. Realizing that they have committed a terrible act against God, they engage in mutual recrimination.

However, they soon fall asleep and have terrible nightmares, and after they awake, they experience guilt and shame for the first time. At first, Adam is convinced that Eve was right in thinking that eating the fruit would be beneficial. In this manner, Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure, but also as a greater sinner than Eve, as he is aware that what he is doing is wrong.Īfter eating the fruit, Adam and Eve have lustful sex. He declares to Eve that since she was made from his flesh, they are bound to one another – if she dies, he must also die. Adam, learning that Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin. Satan, disguised in the form of a serpent, successfully tempts Eve to eat from the Tree by preying on her vanity and tricking her with rhetoric. They have passions and distinct personalities.

Adam and Eve are presented as having a romantic and sexual relationship while still being without sin. The story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one. While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve. At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven. The battles between the faithful angels and Satan’s forces take place over three days. Satan’s rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God’s new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.Īt several points in the poem, an Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and God’s new and most favoured creation, Mankind. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organize his followers he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. Belial and Moloch are also present. It begins after Satan and the other rebel angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is also called in the poem, Tartarus. Milton’s story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan (Lucifer) and the other following Adam and Eve. The poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res (Latin for in the midst of things), the background story being recounted later. Paradise Lost influenced many authors throughout history, including John Steinbeck, C.S. Milton believed that all poetry served a religious purpose and wrote his epic poem to help people become better Christians (“Paradise Lost in Popular Culture.”). By 1652, Milton was completely blind and wrote Paradise Lost by reciting it to his daughters in their home in England (“SparkNote on Paradise Lost”). It is considered to be Milton’s major work, and it helped solidify his reputation the poem concerns the biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books (in the manner of Virgil’s Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout (“Paradise Lost”). It is an epic poem in blank verse the first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. Paradise Lost was written by John Milton, who is considered to be one of the greatest English poets of his or any age.

“Watercolor Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost” by William Blake, 1807.

Paradise lost figure