Paradise Lost

Based on Wikipedia: Paradise Lost

The Poet Who Made Satan Interesting

Here's a question that has troubled readers for over three centuries: what do you do when the villain steals the show?

John Milton set out to write the definitive Christian epic poem. He wanted to "justify the ways of God to men"—to explain why an all-powerful, all-good deity would allow evil and suffering to exist. What he created instead was one of literature's most magnetic antagonists, a Satan so charismatic and psychologically complex that generations of readers have wondered if Milton secretly sympathized with the devil.

Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, tells the story you probably think you know: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the serpent, the forbidden fruit, the fall from grace. But Milton transforms this familiar Sunday school narrative into something far stranger and more ambitious—a twelve-book epic poem spanning the creation of the universe, a civil war in Heaven, and the entire moral architecture of human existence.

A Blind Man's Vision

Milton wrote the entire poem without being able to see it. He had gone blind in 1652, likely from glaucoma, and spent the next decade composing Paradise Lost entirely in his head, then dictating it to assistants and friends who served as his scribes. The image of Milton reciting his verses to his daughters became a favorite subject for painters, especially during the Romantic period.

His circumstances during composition were grim. He suffered from gout. His second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died in 1658, along with their infant daughter. England itself was in turmoil—Milton had been a passionate supporter of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarian cause during the English Civil War, and with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he found himself on the losing side of history, briefly imprisoned and always politically suspect.

Out of this darkness came a poem about light and its absence, about paradise and its loss.

Starting in the Middle of Things

Paradise Lost opens not in Eden but in Hell. This is a deliberate choice, following an ancient storytelling technique called "in medias res"—Latin for "in the midst of things." Homer's Iliad and Odyssey both begin this way, as does Virgil's Aeneid. The technique drops you into the action first, then fills in the backstory later.

So we meet Satan not as a proud angel before his fall, but as a defeated rebel, freshly cast into a lake of fire after losing a war against God. He's surrounded by his fellow fallen angels, dazed and despairing. And in this moment of absolute defeat, he delivers one of literature's most defiant speeches:

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

That single line has echoed through Western culture for centuries. It captures something essential about the psychology of rebellion—the preference for autonomy at any cost, the refusal to accept a subordinate role even when subordination might mean paradise.

The War in Heaven

Through flashbacks, Milton reveals what led to this catastrophe. God had proclaimed his Son as the anointed savior, which Satan interpreted as a demotion. His pride couldn't accept it. "Thought himself impaired," Milton writes—Satan felt diminished, lessened, passed over.

So he recruited an army. Fully one-third of Heaven's angels joined his rebellion. The war lasted three days, with the loyal angels fighting the rebels to a standstill. Only the direct intervention of God's Son, wielding divine power, finally ended the conflict. The rebels were hurled out of Heaven, falling for nine days through chaos before crashing into the newly created Hell.

This is epic warfare on a cosmic scale, with angels wielding mountains as weapons and the very fabric of Heaven tearing under the strain. Milton was deliberately invoking Homer's battles at Troy and Virgil's wars in Italy, but transposing them to a theological register.

Building Hell's Capital

What do fallen angels do after losing everything? They build a city.

Milton calls it Pandæmonium—a word he invented, from the Greek for "all demons." It's Hell's capital, a dark mirror of Heaven's courts. Here Satan gathers his followers for a council of war. What should they do next? Launch another assault on Heaven? Accept their fate? Or try something sneakier?

The debate that follows is Milton's showcase for different rhetorical styles. Moloch argues for immediate, suicidal war. Belial counsels acceptance and passivity. Mammon suggests making the best of Hell, building their own kingdom in the darkness. Finally, Beelzebub—Satan's second-in-command—proposes a different strategy: God has created a new world and populated it with a new kind of creature called humans. Perhaps they can strike at God by corrupting his latest project.

Satan volunteers to carry out the mission alone.

The Journey Through Chaos

Between Hell and the newly created Earth lies Chaos—formless, violent, a roiling void where the elements war against each other without order or structure. Satan's journey through this Chaos is genuinely harrowing, and Milton compares him to classical heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas who also had to brave terrible dangers in their quests.

This is where Milton does something remarkable and troubling. He uses all the techniques of heroic poetry—the grand similes, the elevated language, the comparisons to legendary warriors—to describe Satan. When Satan finally breaks through into the light of the created universe, we've been conditioned by a thousand lines of poetry to see him as an epic hero.

But he isn't. He's coming to destroy everything.

Eden Before the Fall

Milton's Garden of Eden is a place of perfect abundance and joy. Adam and Eve live there in naked innocence, tending the garden, enjoying each other's company, walking with God in the cool of the day. Their relationship is romantic and sexual—Milton is explicit that they make love before the Fall, and that this lovemaking is beautiful and without shame.

They have only one rule: don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Why this rule? Milton grapples with this question throughout the poem. The standard theological answer is that God wanted to give humans free will, and free will requires the possibility of disobedience. A creature with no capacity for wrong choices isn't truly free. The forbidden tree exists to make freedom meaningful.

But there's another tree in the Garden that Milton mentions more quietly: the Tree of Life. Eating from it would grant immortality. God, it seems, was concerned that humans might eat from this tree and live forever. This detail adds a strange note to the story—a hint that God's relationship with his creation is more complicated than simple benevolence.

The Temptation

Satan enters the Garden disguised as various animals, watching and waiting. Eventually he possesses a serpent and approaches Eve when she's alone.

His temptation speech is a masterpiece of rhetoric. He flatters her beauty. He explains that he, a mere serpent, gained the power of speech and reason by eating from the forbidden tree—so imagine what it might do for her! He suggests that God's prohibition stems from jealousy, a desire to keep humans inferior. He questions whether death is really such a threat, and whether the fruit might actually lead to something better.

Eve eats.

The moment is quiet. No thunder, no immediate transformation. Just a woman biting into fruit because someone convinced her it was a good idea.

Adam's Choice

When Eve brings the fruit to Adam, he faces his own decision. He knows exactly what eating it means. Unlike Eve, he isn't deceived—he chooses to fall.

Why? Because he can't bear to be separated from her. "Flesh of my flesh," he calls her. If she's going to die, he'll die with her. If she's cast out of paradise, he'll go too. In Milton's telling, Adam's sin is actually greater than Eve's because he commits it knowingly, but there's something almost noble in his reasoning. He chooses love over obedience.

Milton lets us sit with the ambiguity. Is this romantic devotion or foolish weakness? Is Adam a tragic hero or simply wrong? The poem doesn't resolve these questions cleanly.

After the Fruit

Immediately after eating, Adam and Eve experience lust for the first time. Milton makes a careful distinction: they had sexual desire before, but it was innocent, joyful, connected to love. Now it's something darker—an appetite that treats the other person as an object. Their lovemaking becomes "unpleasant."

They fall asleep and have nightmares. They wake up feeling guilt and shame. They look at their nakedness and feel exposed. They start blaming each other.

The psychology is painfully recognizable. Anyone who has done something they knew was wrong and then had to live with the consequences will recognize these stages: the initial thrill, the creeping regret, the inability to sleep, the desperate search for someone else to blame.

Satan's Hollow Victory

Satan returns to Hell in triumph. He ascends a great throne to announce his success to the assembled demons. Humanity has fallen! They've won!

And then, mid-speech, he transforms into a snake. His mouth that was delivering a victory oration can suddenly only hiss. His fellow fallen angels undergo the same metamorphosis, all of them becoming the serpents they used as instruments. They're hungry, and a grove of trees appears bearing fruit that looks like the forbidden fruit—but when they bite into it, they taste only bitter ashes.

It's a grotesque parody of the temptation scene. The tempters get their own punishment, trapped in the form of their crime, reaching forever for satisfaction that turns to dust.

The Vision of History

In the poem's final books, the Archangel Michael shows Adam a vision of everything that will happen to humanity: the first murder when Cain kills Abel, the wickedness that will prompt the Flood, the long history of human cruelty and suffering. Adam is devastated.

But Michael also shows him the promise: a savior will come. Humanity will be offered redemption. The damage Adam has done is not permanent.

This is Milton's answer to the problem of evil. Yes, the fall was catastrophic. Yes, suffering and death entered the world because of human choices. But the story doesn't end there. The very capacity for freedom that made sin possible also makes redemption meaningful. Grace is coming.

Leaving Paradise

The poem ends with Adam and Eve walking out of the Garden. The angel guarding Eden stands behind them with a flaming sword. Paradise is closed. But Michael has told Adam that he may find "a paradise within thee, happier far"—that the external garden matters less than the internal state of the soul.

Milton's final lines are some of the most moving in English poetry:

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.

It's sad but not hopeless. They've lost paradise, but they have each other. They've fallen, but they can still choose. The whole world—with all its dangers and possibilities—lies open before them.

The Problem of Heroic Satan

We need to return to the question we started with: why is Satan so compelling?

Part of the answer is craft. Milton gives Satan the best speeches, the most dramatic moments, the most psychologically interesting internal monologues. When Satan lands on Earth and sees the beauty of Eden, he has a moment of genuine anguish:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

That last line—"myself am Hell"—is a devastating insight. Satan isn't just in Hell; he carries it with him. His misery is internal, inescapable. No matter where he goes or what he conquers, he remains trapped in his own corrupted nature.

This complexity makes Satan fascinating, but it creates a theological problem. If the villain is more interesting than the heroes, what does that say about the poem's moral framework?

Romantic Misreadings

The Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century often celebrated Milton's Satan as a genuine hero. William Blake famously wrote that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Percy Bysshe Shelley praised Satan's "courage and majesty and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force." Lord Byron saw in Satan a model for his own rebellious heroes.

But this reading requires ignoring large portions of the poem. Satan's grandeur diminishes as Paradise Lost progresses. The magnificent rebel of Books 1 and 2 becomes increasingly petty, scheming, and self-deceived. By the time he's possessing a snake and transformed into one himself, the heroic interpretation becomes harder to sustain.

Milton seems to be making a point about how evil actually works. It starts with grandeur—with noble-sounding ideals about freedom and self-determination. But it degrades into something smaller and uglier. Satan's famous rhetoric about preferring to reign in Hell masks a deeper reality: he's not reigning anywhere. He's just suffering in a more elaborate way.

C.S. Lewis's Defense

The Christian scholar C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a devoted student of Milton, argued strenuously against the Romantic reading. Satan only seems heroic, Lewis claimed, if you stop reading partway through. The full arc of the character is a descent—from seeming nobility to revealed pettiness.

Lewis compared it to meeting someone at a party who seems brilliant and charming, only to discover over time that they're actually boring, self-absorbed, and repetitive. The initial impression was wrong, or rather, it was a performance that couldn't be sustained.

This interpretation asks us to trust Milton's stated intentions over our gut reactions. Milton said he was justifying God's ways, not Satan's. If we find Satan more appealing than God, perhaps that says something about our own fallenness—our own attraction to pride, rebellion, and self-determination over humility, obedience, and grace.

The Middle Ground

Perhaps the most sophisticated reading acknowledges the tension without resolving it. Milton created a character who exists "in more modes and greater depth" than anyone else in the poem. Satan is ambivalent by design—not because Milton was confused, but because evil itself is ambivalent.

Real wickedness rarely announces itself with horns and a pitchfork. It often comes dressed in appealing clothes, speaking beautiful words, promising freedom and pleasure. Milton wanted his readers to feel Satan's appeal so they could understand how temptation actually works. If the devil were obviously repulsive, no one would be tempted.

The danger, which Milton may have underestimated, is that some readers would feel the appeal without seeing through it.

Why Blank Verse Matters

Paradise Lost is written in blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter. Each line has ten syllables with alternating stresses, but the lines don't rhyme with each other. This might seem like a technical detail, but it matters for how the poem sounds and what it can do.

Rhyme creates a certain music, but it also creates constraints. If every line has to end with a rhyming word, you're constantly steering your meaning toward words that sound right rather than words that mean right. Blank verse liberates the poet to let meaning flow more naturally, to build sentences that span multiple lines, to create complex syntax without the interruption of rhyme.

Milton's sentences can run for ten or twenty lines before reaching a period. The thought keeps unfolding, clause building on clause, the way a piece of music develops its themes. When you listen to Paradise Lost read aloud—which is how Milton himself experienced his own poem, given his blindness—this wave-like movement of thought becomes hypnotic.

Before Paradise Lost, blank verse in English was primarily used for drama. Shakespeare wrote his plays in it, but non-dramatic poetry usually rhymed. Milton's choice to use blank verse for an epic poem was innovative, and his success made it the standard for serious English poetry for the next two centuries. When later poets wanted to sound elevated and important, they reached for Miltonic blank verse.

Hidden Messages in the Text

Milton embedded acrostics—words spelled out by the first letters of consecutive lines—at key moments in the poem. In Book 9, during the temptation scene, the first letters of five lines spell out "SATAN." Elsewhere in the same book, Milton spells "FFAALL" and "FALL."

These aren't accidents. Milton was blind, but he knew his poem letter by letter, and these acrostics are deliberate signatures at crucial moments. The double F in "FFAALL" probably represents the double fall—Eve's fall and then Adam's. The word "SATAN" appears right when the serpent is at his most seductive.

It's a reminder that even in his blindness, Milton maintained extraordinary control over his text. He couldn't see the words on the page, but he could hear them, count them, shape them into patterns.

The Poem's Afterlife

Paradise Lost has never stopped being controversial, but it has also never stopped being read. It shaped how English speakers imagine Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, the Garden of Eden and the Fall. Even people who have never read Milton have absorbed his imagery through centuries of cultural transmission.

When you picture Satan as a proud, charismatic rebel rather than a cartoon devil with horns, you're thinking of Milton's Satan. When you imagine Eden as a garden of perfect beauty and innocent sexuality, you're imagining Milton's Eden. When you think about free will as central to what makes us human, you're engaging with Milton's theology.

The poem also raised questions that theology is still wrestling with. If God is omniscient, did he know Adam and Eve would fall? If he knew, why didn't he prevent it? If humans can only be truly free when they can choose wrongly, what does that say about Heaven, where presumably no one can sin? Milton offered his answers, but the questions remain open.

A Personal Epic

There's something deeply personal about Paradise Lost that emerges when you know its circumstances. Milton was blind, grieving, politically defeated. The world he had hoped for—Cromwell's godly commonwealth—had collapsed. The monarchy was restored. His cause had lost.

And yet he wrote a poem about losing paradise and finding hope anyway. About being expelled from everything you knew and walking into an uncertain future. About the possibility of a "paradise within" that no external defeat can destroy.

For Milton, the fall of man wasn't just theology. It was lived experience. He knew what it felt like to have everything stripped away and to have to start again with only faith remaining.

That's why the poem still speaks to readers who don't share Milton's Christianity. Paradise Lost is about loss and resilience, about the costs of freedom and the possibility of redemption, about the seductive appeal of rebellion and the deeper satisfaction of acceptance. These are human themes, whatever you believe about God and Satan and gardens in the Middle East.

Three and a half centuries later, we're still arguing about whether Satan is a hero, still quoting "better to reign in Hell," still moved by Adam and Eve walking hand in hand out of Paradise into an uncertain world. The blind poet achieved something that transcended his blindness, his grief, his political defeat. He made a poem that refuses to be forgotten.