Also known as Lucifer, Satan was a fallen angel who was banished to Hell. This decision is known as ‘the fall’ because it is the moment when the couple – and all their descendants – fell from God’s grace.Īs well as telling the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall, the poem also narrates the story of Satan. The poem illustrates how He considered Adam and Eve to have within themselves the capacity to withstand temptation, but that they chose not to. This is key because, as the poem states, Milton wanted to use the events to demonstrate the ‘ways of God’ to people. The couple had the power to rule over everything on Earth with the only caveat that this particular fruit was out of bounds, and God expected this rule to be kept on trust as a sign of their obedience to Him. While Eve was seduced by the serpent, she still chose to eat the fruit, as did Adam in turn. Instead, it shows that the couple exercised their free will. Many people assume that that fruit was an apple, and like other writers before him, Milton calls the ‘fatal fruit’ in Book 9 an apple, but the Bible itself doesn’t name the type of fruit.Ī key aspect of Paradise Lost is that Milton does not portray the couple’s decision to eat the fruit as inevitable. This episode is so well-known that the phrase ‘forbidden fruit’ is widely used in society to refer to something tempting which is often morally dubious. Eve then tells Adam what she has done and he too tastes the forbidden fruit. The ‘first disobedience’ comes about when the devil, in the form of a serpent, tempts Eve to take and eat some fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. No: everyone who heeds God’s message and waits for God’s plan to unfold is, as it were, doing their bit."Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe."Īnd in doing so it briefs the reader about the whole plot of the epic tale it is about to relate. Milton gives Patience (a personification of this virtue) not only the last word but much of his sonnet’s concluding sestet, so that she (Patience is always a ‘she’) can reassure the poet that he should lose his obsession with action and speed as markers of true faith in God. The word ‘patience’ comes from the Latin for ‘suffer’: patience isn’t meant to be easy. Standing and waiting cannot be equated with ‘doing nothing’, but is instead about learning forbearance and accepting one’s own (physical) limitations, the better to achieve spiritual purity. Or, to put it more pithily, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’Īs the word ‘wait’ suggests, patience is a virtue, and especially a Christian one. There are thousands of people travelling all over the world, who are able to work and who work hard serving God but those who merely stand and wait patiently (instead of running about actively serving in other ways) also serve God just as well as those who go out into the world and work hard to please him through their great deeds. In other words, God does not require work or gifts from mankind, because God is a king. But then, in the early 1650s, his sight began to fail him in a serious way, and he knew he would soon be completely blind. He was an influential pamphleteer for Cromwell during the English Civil War. As a young man he had written acclaimed poems such as his celebrated elegy ‘Lycidas’ (about the death of his university friend, Edward King, who had drowned) and the pair of poems ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. Milton had first developed a reputation for poetry while a student at Cambridge, where he was also renowned for his looks. But Paradise Lost was in many ways the crowning achievement in what had already been a long and impressive literary career. He names this capital city Pandemonium – meaning literally ‘all demons’ – from which we get the word more commonly used to denote a state of chaos and disorder. Milton (1608-74) is now best-remembered for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) about the Fall of Man, which, in Milton’s telling, comes about when Satan is cast out of heaven and sets up his capital in Hell.
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