X
We have seen how the manifold greatness of Paradise Lost was prepared by Milton through decades and how the growth towards it can be traced from youth along middle age to the poet's fifties. Nothing interfered with its evolution: even the twenty years of ecclesiastical, social and political controversy helped it. But just the things that helped the greatness were responsible for draining out or at least thinning the psychological diversity in which they were one intermixed element, and aggrandising it at their expense. The conventions of controversy in those days permitted harsh language, but Milton the poet of Comus and Lycidas could not plunge into the mêlée of vituperation without doing something that went against his poetic grain. Not that the poet in him ran contrary to the temper of a Juvenal: savage indignation could find a natural tongue in him, as in the condemnatory passage in Lycidas about the unscrupulous pastors, the "blind mouths" that eat up instead of feeding their flock. But the sort of abuse to which Milton the pamphleteer delivered himself up with superabundant gusto, putting at its service his marvellous command of the language, could hardly foster the finer traits of the poetic mind. The vigour that went into vituperation could rise to poetry also and the prose works blaze out time and again with inspired utterance; yet this utterance is pitched through-out in the sublime key and never touches the exquisite. Power is henceforth the main attribute of Milton's genius -power variedly deployed with a massive intellectuality and a soaring imagination but not able easily to bend and soften into the sensuous, the subtle, the sweet. This difficulty was increased by the indulgence in unrestrained invective at many places of the prose-works. For the sensuous, the subtle, the sweet had been natural to Milton and the concentration of power constantly in their very opposite resulted
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in a hardening of his sensibilities which marred his later poetry inasmuch as it led to a grandly lop-sided culmination of his genius.
Another cause of this kind of development was the intense influence exercised on Milton by what we may call the poetic mind of Renaissance Europe aspiring after heroic poetry. Greatness was intrinsic to his being, and even in his youth he looked beyond the fashionable modes of verse in his day and sought for "some graver subject",
Such where the deep transported mind may soar
Above the wheeling poles.1
In contemporary Italy he found theories and experiments pointing the way. F. T. Prince in The Italian Element in Milton's Verse, has fully brought out what was hitherto a general suspicion that the Renaissance Italian idea of heroic poetry came to complete flower in Paradise Lost. Milton is indeed Greek and Roman and Hebrew and even Mediaeval Christian, but he is all these through a profound steeping of himself in the Italian response of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Classical world.
That response was twofold. First and foremost there was a preoccupation with the grandeur of antiquity as it re-sounded in the Homeric and the Virgilian epics. Already in the Mediaeval Dante we see the Virgilian epic inspiring the vision of the ancient world. When Dante presents the great figures of that world he gives them a gravity and nobility which strike a new note in Mediaeval literature. This note is absent in the rest of Europe even after Dante. Chaucer, for instance, was versed not only in Dante and Petrarch but also in Virgil. Yet except on rare occasions he has not absorbed anything of the majesty of the Virgilian word. Thus, as a critic has pointed out, he attempts in The House of Fame a few lines of paraphrase from Virgil, the start of the Aeneid. This is how he puts it:
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I wel now singen, yif I kan,
The armes, and also the man
That first cam, thrugh his destinee,
Fugityf of Troy countree.
Have we here the least sensitiveness to the tone of the Virgilian overture? –
Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
Litora...
A hexametrical approximation of the lines would be:
Arms and the man I sing, who first from the coasts
of Troya
Came to Italy, reached the shores Lavinian, high fate
Driving him...
In the ears of Renaissance Italy the advent of the arms and the man of Virgil kept a continuous clangour of epic ambi-tion. All the arts and the general conduct of life strove to model themselves by a concept of "magnificence" derived from an idealisation of the Classical world. It is this concept that is said to be active "in 'the vision of an ideal humanity' that inspires Piero's great frescoes at Arezzo" and "in the calm majestic tempo of the Farness Palace in Rome". "Raised to demonic intensity, it breathes a terrible life into the race of titans who people Michelangelo's paintings." "A man's least utterance or gesture, it was felt, should carry a Roman weight of grandeur - Sempre il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore! How much more then must epic poetry, 'the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform', be raised to the utmost pitch of splendour." Again and again an attempt was made in Renaissance Europe and especially Italy to accomplish the perfect epic. We mark it in Tasso no less than in his predecessors. But they fall short of entire success.
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Milton, with a poetic gift surpassing theirs, inherited their dream and, as Prince states it, "brought to this literary heritage the full heroic temper it required". Consequently, the aspiration of several centuries flowered in him with a plenitude of grandeur in which all gentler and more delicate motions were almost submerged.
We spoke of a twofold response in Italy to the Classical temper. Over and above the straining after heroic poetry, there was the stress on art as the essence of the poetic expression. Virgil, who had been in antiquity the supreme master of poetry as an art, obsessed the Italian mind of the Renaissance with the importance of literary discipline, the need to mould deliberately a fitting diction of choice word and resonant rhythm. The poet as "maker" bulked larger than the poet as "seer". In the Middle Ages the poems of Virgil constituted a book of inspired wisdom: we hear of the sortes Virgilianae, divination by chance selection of passages from Virgil. The Renaissance did not neglect the Latin poet's substance, but it was more the heroic quality of it than the seerhood that was emphasised, and this quality was almost indissolubly bound up with the texture of the verse, the high language serving as its representative body, the noble structure of phrase in which it made itself felt. Poetry was not just the common language intensified: it was a sifted, refined, special speech prepared for ceremonial uses. Milton did not quite agree with the Italian emphasis, he was too religious-minded to be a devotee of Art instead of a high priest of divine mysteries. To him the heroic quality itself was part of the Seer's function which was to turn the vision of the Divine into a power on earth. However, he accepted the necessity of unremitting attention to Art, the call for a lofty poetic diction scrupulous in its cast of word, rhythm, syntax, sentence, paragraph. Thus we find Paradise Lost far removed from day-to-day speech. Also, it employs no more than about nine thousand different words, in contrast to Shakespeare's free handling of over twenty-three thousand. People imagine that Milton's vocabulary was rather limited. But we have only to
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look at his prose-works to see his enormous vocabulary and linguistic daring no less than his expressive gusto and the uninhibited torrent of his abuse. The energy that is there is of course undeniably present in the poem: if the range of words is smaller, the restriction is voluntary and due to the selectiveness of speech that the idea of poetry as a ceremonial art demanded. The choice words themselves have also to keep up a stately motion: their structure and their sound must answer to the heroic religiosity so typically Milton's and with a superb stiffness devote themselves single-mindedly to the theme of high seriousness he had adopted - Man's first disobedience and the fruit of the God-forbidden tree - so that he might rise both verbally and conceptually
... to the highth of this great argument...
We may, however, note that none of the Renaissance poets - neither the Italian Tasso who wrote Gerusalemme Liberata, the epic of the Crusades, nor the Portuguese Camoës who penned Os Luciados, the epic of Vasco de Gama and Portuguese colonisation in the East - raised so dense an edifice of song as did Milton. There is more softness in them. Milton has less of it not because the ideal Renaissance epic has to crush out all softness but because of his own pheno-menal strength of soul which got its sensibilities considerably hardened by those twenty years of acrimonious and thunder-throated controversy. All the factors in operation we have to take together in order to understand why Milton became so great and in the achievement of a unique greatness sacrificed the more opulent, more uniformly perfect masterpiece that he could have produced.
And there is one further factor to be assessed. We may hold it responsible at the same time for the frequent out-wardness rather than inwardness of finished expression which Paradise Lost has in some of its later Books and for the entry of the old subtlety and richness and tenderness at several places in the poem in spite of the pervading rigour
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and grandeur. The factor I am speaking of has a double aspect: on the one side it is Milton's loss of sight and on the other his keen ear for music. The blindness which overtook him in his forty-second year led to some want of freshness in imaginative response to visual objects. The varied impact which the details of Nature make on a poet's eye under different conditions of atmosphere and different circumstan-ces of mood was necessarily lacking in Milton: the old sensitiveness of language following the actual impression does not occur often in Paradise Lost. There are fine or majestic generalities. They are quite enough on very many occasions where distinct and detailed seeing is not needed and the effect as a whole rather than in its minutiae is aimed at. The long rolling paragraphs which sweep us along shift naturally the emphasis from particularities. But when the energy in these paragraphs has not the plenary inner impul-sion and we are not carried off our feet we become aware of the somewhat undistinguished descriptive phrases. Also, when the vagueness is part of what we have considered semi-occult dream-vision mixing with Milton's outer mind which was used to a blind man's blurred contact with shape and colour, we have a positive quality. When, however, the inspiration seizes mostly on the outer mind, it shows up a defect by the conventionalism of the descriptions. A man not blind might have provided to the inspiration an outer mind sufficiently pricked with sensitive observation to be capable of vivid response even on its own plane.
But, while the reader feels a comparative drop in the poetry, Milton himself seems never to have realised that he fell short anywhere. Perhaps fundamentally the constant sense he had of Urania rushing all the words through him prevented any diffidence from creeping in. And what helped his confidence and failed to keep his self-critical power sharp enough was the application almost exclusively of his keen ear for music as a test to his own poetry. The greatest of poetic rhythmists, he appears often to have been content if his verses sounded well. There is an anecdote illustrating how
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his ears were eyes to him. Once he heard a lady sing finely and he said: "Now will I swear this lady is handsome." Provided his ear was satisfied with what he composed, on many occasions he felt he had created the perfect form. And the satisfying exercise of the auditory imagination tended to cover up the deficiency in the visual.
Yes, the preoccupation with the sound of verse is often responsible for the outwardness rather than inwardness of finished expression which some of the later Books of Paradise Lost exhibit. But it serves on the other hand to evoke at times a few of the characteristics of Milton's early poetry. For, the musical sense is closely connected with the emotional being as well as with a feel for the subtle shade, the delicate suggestion. And on the wing-waft, as it were, of this sense Milton the poet of heroic religiosity brought something of the old tenderness into his epic and cut by the exquisite edge of that tenderness into significant depths of the soul to make up for whatever disadvantages of insight might result from the blind man's fate of being
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works,2
and to counteract the general hardening of sensibilities by those controversial years. The lines on "Proserpin", which are at once intense music and intense emotional significance conveyed with a rare delicacy and subtlety, are an outstanding instance. But there are other instances too. Even in the midst of the most sublime passages of Book I a wonderful emotional touch makes its appearance, creating one of the finest no less than greatest dramatic moments in all poetry. This moment is concerned with Satan's first speech after all his hosts have assembled:
He now prepared
To speak; whereat their double ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
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With all his peers: Attention held them mute.
Thrice he essayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn,
Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way...3
To match this moment there is in Paradise Lost another which is to my mind unforgettable in the opposite way. In place of the mood of heroic devilry melting into poignant soulfulness we get the mood of absolutely human gentleness rising to a heavenly heroism in the words of Eve after Adam has uttered a harsh condemnation of her for bringing about the fall of them both and provoking God's anger and punishment:
"Forsake me not thus, Adam! witness Heaven
What love sincere and reverence in my heart
I bear thee, and unweeting have offended,
Unhappily deceived! Thy suppliant
I beg, and clasp thy knees; bereave me not
Whereon I live, thy gentle looks, thy aid,
Thy counsel in this uttermost distress,
My only strength and stay. Forlorn of thee,
Whither shall I betake me, where subsist?
While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace; both joining,
As joined in injuries, one enmity
Against a foe by doom express assigned us,
That cruel Serpent. On me exercise not
Thy hatred for this misery befallen –
On me already lost, me than thyself
More miserable. Both have sinned; but thou
Against God only; I against God and thee,
And to the place of judgment will return,
There with my cries importune Heaven, that all
The sentence, from thy head removed, may light
On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe,
Me, me only, just object of His ire."4
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I cannot think of a more beautiful piece of tender and profound pathos than those words:
Between us two let there be peace...
And how apt is the artistry! A simple movement at the beginning, then a succession of four stressed monosyllables - "scarce one short hour" - as if the words were sobbed out with some effort, then the adverb "perhaps" releasing the tension and suggesting by its h a small outflow of the breath in a sort of controlled sigh and then the final phrase, smooth yet with a subtle tug of emotion by means of the semi-inverted accent in the third foot - "let there" - and the general inversion, very naturally managed, of the two parts of the expression - namely,
Between us two let there be peace,
instead of
Let there be peace between us two.
This general inversion is quadruply effective. For one thing it throws into relief that semi-inverted third foot: without it we should have "let there" at the very start of the line where it would be hardly noticed as anything unusual. Again, the balanced sounds at the commencement and at the termination of the phrase - "between" and "be peace" - would be absent and in their place we should have a crowding of the same combinations of short and long sounds: "be peace between..." Further, without the general inversion, the long sound of "peace" would break upon us suddenly - with some violence, instead of peacefully, whereas at present it is prepared by the second syllable of "between" and comes like a crowning inevitability as though it were an absolute need of the occasion once "between" has started the rhythmic movement. Finally, the hushing sibilance with which we are
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left at the phrase-end in a culmination of a series of terminal s-sounds running through the rest of the phrase ("scarce", "perhaps", "us") would have disappeared and most of the value of the word "peace" as well as of the total emotional gesture would have been lost.
I may add one more remark. In the midst of an individual situation what I have called in another connection the world-cry enters here with "scarce one short hour perhaps". For, this turn catches the uncertainty of all life lived under the shadow of death: the stab of the brevity threatening human existence everywhere is felt and a statement directly apply-ing to Adam and Eve grows prototypal and fills with a universal tone.
Possibly the lines acquire a special intensity because a personal reminiscence steals both into the drama appropriate to Adam and Eve and into the sense of the ubiquitous human condition. Indeed, the whole passage bears to my mind an autobiographical note. The lines immediately preceding it and expressing Adam's condemnation of Eve and his broad vision of the discord which Woman would bring into Man's life throughout history have been regarded by most commentators as an echo of Milton's own bitter experience at the beginning of his first marriage. But not many care to remember that what commenced as a sort of tragic farce ended in an entirely different strain and that Adam's speech is only one part of Milton's personal expression here: it must be taken together with Eve's speech in order to give a true and complete autobiographical picture.
Let us attend a little to Milton's early married life, all the more with the aim to dispel the common idea that Milton was a rather unpleasant husband to his first wife. Milton was thirty-four in 1642 when he suddenly took a journey into the countryside, nobody knowing why. He went there a bachelor and after a month returned a married man. He brought home Mary Powell, the seventeen-year old daughter of a Royalist Justice of Peace. A little later war broke out between the Royalists and the Roundheads (the Puritans) to whose
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party Milton belonged. Just before the war Mary's parents invited her to their house. Hardly a month had passed since the marriage. Milton consented to her visit on condition that she would return soon. But Mary prolonged her stay at her parents' place and refused to come back when Milton wrote pressing letters. She shared her parents' Royalist views and it was political difference that was largely the cause of the breakdown of the marriage: some responsibility should be ascribed also to Mary's rather gay upbringing and Milton's rather serious temperament. Milton was extremely incensed for a while and took the occasion to publish two pamphlets, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon, in which he vehemently argued that incompatibility of mind is more destructive of married happiness than adultery itself which in law is the main ground conceded for divorce. Although his pamphlets came out on the heels of his marital failure we must not imagine that he cooked up his views on divorce to suit his own needs. There is evidence5 that he held advanced views even earlier and had already projected books on the subjects of ecclesiastical and civil and domestic liberties, all of which he wrote in the course of a few years.
The divorce pamphlets made Milton very unpopular by their bold position and did not bring his wife back. However, when Oxford, her home-town, was in danger of falling to the Roundheads and the King's fortunes were in decline every-where, her people thought it politic to patch up differences. They were further encouraged in this by the rumour that Milton, considering himself virtually unmarried, was paying court to a gifted young woman, a Miss Davis. So Mary was sent to London, and one evening when Milton was on a customary visit to a relation of his, Mr. Blackborough, she waited in another room. Suddenly she entered. Edward Phillips tells the story: "He was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him. He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation
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than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion, and a firm league for peace for the future..." Mary herself may well have pleaded Eve-like for peace between them.
Three children were born in the rest of their married life. "But," as Phillips writes, "it was not only by children that she increased the number of the family." For, after the fall of Oxford, many of Mary's kindred - her father and mother and several brothers and sisters - came to live with Milton. They got badly on his nerves yet he let them be until Mary's father died, shortly after which the Powells moved out. It showed remarkable magnanimity on the poet's part not only to shelter the pack of his wife's relatives but also to live cheek by jowl for four years with a family temperamentally no less than politically at odds with him. And if he had not been particularly attached to Mary, he could hardly have succeeded in being so magnanimous for so long.
What about his life with Mary up to the time she died in 1652? Is any analogy possible between it and his depiction of Adam's life with Eve? Adam and Eve are shown as most harmonious after their quarrel and reconciliation. But it is generally supposed that Milton's relations with Mary were not particularly happy at any period: she is often looked upon as the model for Dalila in Samson Agonistes. This is an error. Milton's nephews have reported that Mary lived in good accord with her husband until her death. And there is the sonnet on "my late espoused Saint", in which Milton speaks with much feeling apropos of a dream about his dead wife, and in which the dead wife bends to embrace him. The sonnet is said to be on his second wife Katharine Woodcock because of two reasons. In it he speaks of his wife having died in childbed and Katharine is said to have died after giving birth to a daughter. Again, the sonnet speaks of his wife's face being veiled: Milton had married Katharine nearly five years after his total blindness and the dream reflected his lack of physical sight of her. Un-
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fortunately, both the arguments are ineffective.
Professor W. R. Parker has submitted that the sonnet refers to Mary and not Katharine. For, in the first place, while Mary actually died as the result of childbirth, just three days after her daughter Deborah had been born, Katharine died four months after giving birth to her child and the immediate cause of her death was consumption though the disease may have been brought on by the birth of that child. In the second place, we are being fanciful in interpreting the veiled face as a pointer to the fact that Milton had never seen Katharine physically: the sonnet itself unequivocally indicates that the poet had seen his wife in reality, for his dream brought her to him
... such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of Her in Heaven without restraint...6
Now there is no evidence that Milton had seen Katharine five years earlier than his marriage to her, while the biographical fact is that Mary, whom he had married almost ten years previous to his blindness, died a year subsequent to his loss of sight. The lines above bear all this out convincingly: they have the words "once more" which clearly imply that in Heaven he would have "full sight" of her a second time and the phrase "without restraint" suggests that he would resume in Heaven what had been interrupted on earth by his blindness even before her death. If nothing else were there, the turn "once more" would be enough to rule out Katharine as the subject of the poem. And if she is ruled out, who else than Mary can remain? The veiled face can be of none else than her. And since we know that she whom Milton had seen for over nine years was obscured to his eyes for a year or so before her death, the veiling could very easily be under-stood as symbolising this later obscuration. On a deeper level which is suggested by the whiteness and luminosity associated with her -
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Came vested all in white, pure as her mind...
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight7
the veiling could symbolise an element of divine or heavenly mystery entering into the dream-figure of the woman who belonged no longer to the earth.
So Milton's relations with Mary in the wake of their quarrel and reconciliation may be traced in those of Adam with Eve. And a personal tone may be considered vibrant in the last passage of Paradise Lost which displays their harmony all the more touchingly because its subject is their expulsion from the happy Garden, and which finds the epic Milton in another of his tenderer and most beautiful spells. Archangel Raphael and the Guardian Cherubim of Eden have been missioned by God to see the human pair out of Paradise, not urgently yet with the brandished sword of God blazing high in front and the bright array of Cherubim closing in behind. Raphael personally takes them to the frontier of common earth:
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain - then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.8
So wonderfully appropriate a close, in every detail, is this that it should come as a surprise indeed that anybody was
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not satisfied with it. And yet ever since Addison there has been discussion over the final lines. Addison proposed to omit the last two. He said that they strike a note of sadness which is not in keeping with an epic theme: an epic should, in his view, end cheerfully. Perhaps he meant that there should be an accent of calmness or fortitude and no pathetic touch. But I think Milton has here so subdued a pathos that both fortitude and calmness are conjured up. Four elements have to be considered. The steps of Adam and Eve are slow, because they are not in a hurry to leave Paradise where they have spent a delightful life before the Fall and where they would have best been able to forget the punishment incurred for the falling. The steps are wandering, because there is as yet no fixed goal to their journey beyond and a wide world is before them, through which there can be a great deal of moving about. The pair is now all on its own, the Angels do not keep it company and God will not be directly talking to Adam as He used to do prior to the Fall. But, against the force of the word "solitary" and encompassing all the other suggestions, we have the ruling initial phrase: " hand in hand." Adam and Eve were never so united in heart as they are at this moment: hence a deep and happy though humble strength is in them and its presence, put by Milton at the very start of his final phrase, subdues the pathos of the situation and leaves us with a serenity in the sadness, a sweet courage in the ache of exile. To omit the couplet would be to sacrifice poetic subtlety and fineness and a profoundly imaginative precision in picturing La condition humaine.
Peck, in opposition to Addison, felt that to omit the last two lines would maim the expression, but he was one with Addison in regarding them as an unsuitable ending. So he proposed putting them before and not after
I suppose the phrase "and Providence their guide" gives a
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religio-moralistic colour which appeals to a certain type of mind. And in itself its final position would not be anything objectionable. But we would be shutting the book with a last impression on the mind instead of with a last movement in the heart: perhaps there might also be a soupgon of smugness. The close which Milton himself has provided is far better. And how will Peck's transposition assort with the line which would now precede the real close? Just see the new combi-nation:
Through Eden took their solitary way.
We have a succession of gestures without any aptness in the series. In the version made by Milton, after the act of wiping the tears, comes the phrase about the world being all before them to choose the place of rest from, and about Providence being their guide. That is a sort of reason for not weeping much. And when Providence was their inner or secret guide, they might well find a silent happiness not only in each other but even in their solitude or outward and seeming God-forsakenness; the words "hand in hand" follow quite felicitously where Milton has placed them and would interrupt the inward logic of the whole situation if transposed anywhere else. Peck's proposal takes off with one hand what it concedes with the other: it is really as gauche as Addison's.
But, as noted by F. L. Lucas, perhaps it is Bentley who really takes the cake in gaucherie. He holds up the adjective "wandering" and comments in effect: "Erratic steps? Very improper. Was not Providence their guide? Then how can one say 'wandering'? Milton's mind must have been wandering." Bentley falls foul also of "solitary". His opinion is that, since after all Adam had Eve and nobody else and Eve had nobody except Adam, the two of them could not be more solitary out of Paradise than in it. Raising his eyebrows over everything in the couplet, he proposes an emendment
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which, according to him, is "as close as may be to the author's words and entirely agreeable to his scheme"; he wishes us to read thus
Then, hand in hand, with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heavenly comfort cheered.
I wonder if even Addison would have concurred with Bentley, despite the word "cheered" by which he literally satisfies Addison's demand for a cheerful termination to an epic.
All attempts to improve Milton are bound to fail: his whole final passage is perfect. And it carries us back to the very beginning of the poem where the theme is enunciated. The "happy seat" in our passage harks back to the "blissful seat" there. Similarly, we have both there and here the mention of "Eden". And Milton gives a further echo in "Providence their guide" and in "solitary way" to the lines with which ends the overture of the epic, the invocation to the Heavenly Muse and the Spirit of God:
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
The "argument" in this context has the Latin meaning of "theme" and we are led by its presence to take the two lines after it as part of the Miltonic theme - a procedure which is supported by the recurrence of "Providence" in the epic's terminal passage. On the other hand, the "ways" of the initial passage throws a light on the "way" in the terminal and subtly counteracts the adjective "solitary": it is as if, even in the "solitary way" of Adam and Eve, God's "ways" were still present as true justice: thus "solitary way" is brought into rapport with the guidance of Providence mentioned a little earlier. So we have an interesting and helpful crosslight between the two ends of Paradise Lost and a general illumination of the depths of the theme.
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We shall now discuss briefly these depths. But before we do so, let me note that "paradise" and "Eden" are not synonymous as we usually suppose. After leaving the gate of "Paradise", Adam and Eve are still in Eden, taking their solitary way through it. The fact is that the "blissful seat" was only a part of the land of Eden, it was situated in Eden's eastern side, as may be gathered from several lines in Paradise Lost and most definitely perhaps from these in Book IV:
for blissful Paradise
Of God the garden was, by him in the east
Of Eden planted; Eden stretched her line
From Auran eastward to the royal towers
Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings
Or where the sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar.9
In Milton's vision, as detailed earlier in the same Book,10 the garden of Paradise is the top of a mound in the midst of a plain: hence in the closing passage Adam and Eve are led by the Angel
down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain...
The adjective "subjected" has the force of the Latin "subjectus", meaning "lying under, bordering".
Notes and References
1.At a Vacation Exercise, 33-4.
2.Bk. III, 48-9.
3.Bk. I, 618-24.
4.Bk. X, 915-36.
5.Cf. Kenneth Muir, Milton, pp. 64-72, 77-8.
6.Sonnet on "my late espousèd Saint", 7-8.
7.Ibid., 9, 11-12.
8.Bk. XII, 637-44.
9.Bk. IV, 208-14.
10. Ibid., 132-5.
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