Where We See Whose Fault It All Is

Paradise Lost by John Milton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's a bunch of stuff I read in college that I didn't like, but I remember liking this. I've barely touched it in the forty years since, but I decided to give it a second go. You know what? I still liked it.

The first time, I found an annotated version written by Isaac Asimov, and it was super helpful. That guy knew a bunch of stuff. (I tried to find it again, but the only copies are super expensive.) This time I just read it without supports, and I still found it very readable, especially considering the time, coming out in 1668.

Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, it just reads (to me) like everyday English, but that's probably because the author was brilliant. Sure, there are a lot of historical and Biblical references that I only kinda knew, but it doesn't impede comprehension. It helps that it isn't contorted into rhyming lines, IMO.

He had to make a case for that, though. In fact, it cracks me up that he had to write an introductory page explaining how all the really good epics in Italian and Spanish are also unrhymed, as well as the best drama. At the end of this introduction, he says:

This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.

I agree, but it's kinda funny to see it.

Most of the first half of the epic, maybe even two-thirds, is very entertaining from a fantasy point of view. It has lots of action and cool settings, lots of supernatural stuff that mere humans can usually never get a glimpse of, all packed into a tight plot. You get hell from the demons' perspective, with the fiery lake and Pandemonium, and their view of their fall. Their unrepentant evil is perversely entertaining. This is followed by Satan breaking out of hell and into Eden to cause trouble. Then, kinda out of order, we get Raphael explaining to Adam all about the fighting up in heaven, telling how the war went, how the angels eventually won by pulling up whole mountains and dumping them on the rebels. Then he tells all about how the world was created.

The imagery is very effective. It looks like a big, bright superhero movie in my head.

From that point, however, it gets pretty preachy. I almost wonder if he didn't see himself writing a bit of pseudo-scripture... Eve listens to the snake and eats the fruit, and then Adam figures he might as well do the same, and then comes the lesson. Milton has to work really hard to make the language found in Genesis--things like "in that day you will die"--make sense, since they don't actually die that die. And he has to explain why Eden was booby-trapped in the first place. (Seems cruel, doesn't it?) Also, when Michael comes to explain to Adam how badly they screwed up and how they will have to leave, he takes time to soften it by showing him all of earth's future. But it's got so much death--Cain and Abel, the great flood, wars--it's a bit hard to see why Adam is so psyched about it. I found it depressing, but whatever.

With Michael explaining more and more stuff to Adam in the last couple books, Milton goes into a lot of doctrine, taking the reader to church, and it's the dullest part. Really drags. But he had to do it, I guess.

Taken as a whole, this a very entertaining long poem. Unfortunate that the bad guys are so much more entertaining than the good guys, but I guess that's how it works.

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