In “Paradise Lost,” John Milton’s burning question—how things could have gone so wrong in human affairs—is carried back to the story of Adam and Eve. But the author, born on this day in 1608, was also a deep defender of human dignity.
During the Restoration, despite a broad act of amnesty, those who had abetted and defended the killing of Charles I were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Several of Milton’s friends and associates suffered this grisly fate, and he might have as well, had it not been for the intervention of high-placed friends like Andrew Marvell.
Milton’s burning question, how things could have gone so wrong in human affairs, is carried back to the moment when “our first parents” ate the apple and brought “death into the world, and all our woe.” But Milton is carried back further than Adam and Eve. Doled out in the course of the epic, as tales within tales, is the narrative of Lucifer, the highest in a vast hierarchy of angels, who grows jealous at the promotion of God’s son to the position of Messiah.
Of course, the clash of opposing forces brought out great poetry in Milton; there is sheer delight in the face-off between Satan and Gabriel, the warrior angel charged with keeping Eden safe . The trash-talking between these two rises to glorious heights. Gabriel threatens:Back to th’ infernal pit I drag thee chained.Proud limitary Cherub, but ere thenFor all the angelic, divine, and infernal fireworks, though, it is with mankind that Milton’s sympathies lie.
Milton may not have been much of a husband, but it is the love between Adam and Eve that makes the fall endurable. I was first turned toward Milton years ago, in a required freshman English class, when the teacher—a reserved young man who had been born in China—suddenly read aloud to us Adam’s words to Eve after he has made the decision to eat the apple and fall with her.
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