In my last article, I looked at three Shakespeare lines from various plays, explicating why they were so particularly powerful and expressive, but avoided what I would call his almost too well-known lines (for example, “To be or not to be,” and so on). Here, I do the same for John Milton, though confining myself to one poem, “Paradise Lost.”
Why one poem? Because “Paradise Lost” is the greatest epic written in the English language. Samuel Johnson, likely England’s most distinguished man of letters, wrote in “Lives of the Poets” that “it is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.” He meant, of course, that Milton did not invent the epic form, Homer did, so first place must be given to Homer.
Be that as it may, “Paradise Lost” is certainly one of the half dozen or so greatest epic poems ever written. For that reason, considering its language carefully can be extremely rewarding.
Seraph Abdiel’s Scorn of Satan’s Rebels
My first favorite line comes from perhaps one of my all-time favorite passages of poetry. It comes at the very end of Book V: “On those proud Towers to swift destruction doomed.”
The line on its own is staggeringly good, even if one did not know its context. It’s a 10-syllable (11, depending on your pronunciation of “towers”), iambic pentameter line. But notice that the caesura (the natural pause point in reading the line) occurs nearly midway: “On those proud towers”—static and monumental—is balanced after the caesura with “to swift destruction doomed”—sudden and kinetic.
The first part is a phrase—without a verb and therefore static, that is, Satan is trapped in his own mental state; but the second is a clause. It ends with a verb, “doomed.” And so, the shattering movement that finally, at the end, destroys the towers.
Furthermore, Milton fuses architectural grandeur, martial precision, and prophetic doom into a single line. The sonic contrasts (the long vowels) of the grand “proud” and “towers” versus the military percussive consonants, the d- and t-sounds in clusters, and then the metrical weight, the inverted syntax of “doomed” coming at the end. In addition, the symbolic freight of “proud Towers,” recalling Babel, all work together to make the fall of Satan’s stronghold feel both inevitable and imminent.
The full context for this line: The Seraph Abdiel, who, having rejected Satan’s invitation to join his rebellion and being threatened all around, holds his nerve and walks through and out from the rebel army:
So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught;
And, with retorted scorn, his back he turned
On those proud Towers to swift destruction doomed.
Isn’t that purely sublime? It does not merely describe courage; it enacts it in the verse. We feel what being heroic means.
Satan’s Hell
A second favorite line—by way of contrast with Abdiel’s heroics—is from Book IV, line 20: “The Hell within him; for within him Hell.”
Here, Satan has newly landed on Earth in order to tempt and destroy humanity; in order to do so, he has escaped the literal place called Hell. But what the line reveals is that he has not escaped it at all: He has carried Hell inside himself. Wherever he is, that place is and becomes Hell.
In writing the line, Milton may well have recalled Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus.” When Faustus challenges whether Mephistopheles is a devil at all (as appearing before him meant he could not be a devil, since he was not in Hell), Mephistopheles retorts:
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
This is a stunning theological insight that Milton picks up on, too; Hell is not just a place but a state of mind. And indeed, it does give Satan an aura of tragic grandeur. We can, almost, pity him. There is a dark interiority and exposure through the language of Satan’s psychology and torment, both pithily exposed: Notice how the two pronouns, “him,” are encased—on both sides of the line— with “hell.” Whichever way he goes—to the left or the right—he is still in hell!
The figure of speech used is called “chiasmus” (or synonymously, “antimetabole”). This occurs when the word structures or even the exact words are reversed in order. A good example from contemporary management-speak would be: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” John F. Kennedy used the literary device in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It’s incredibly effective in pointing to a meaning, and here, in one line, Milton captures the essence of hell.
Christ Is at the Center
My third and final example here is in Book VI, lines 761 to 762: “Of radiant urim, work divinely wrought,/ Ascended; at his right hand Victory/ Sat …”
“Ascended, at his right hand Victory” doesn’t sound like much, after all the wonderful mimetic effects we have described previously. But let me explain why this line is so powerful. Since the time of English poet William Blake, readers have taken a view that the hero of “Paradise Lost” is Satan, not God, not Adam, not Christ, but the Devil himself.
As Blake put it—and many have gleefully seized on this: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
If this were true, it would mean the whole purpose of Milton’s epic, which he describes as “to justify the ways of God to man,” would be fatally undermined. It is certainly true that Satan is a dynamic and fascinating presence in the poem, but is he actually the hero?
Milton had a numerologist’s sensitivity to number and proportion. The final edition of “Paradise Lost” was in 12 books to align it with the classical epic tradition (“Aeneid”) and with the biblical symbolism of 12 (tribes of Israel, apostles). But originally, the first edition was in 10 books (symbolically resonant with completeness, law, and the Ten Commandments).
Some extra lines were added to compound the shift to 12, but if we go into the original version and add all the lines up, as professor Alastair Fowler discovered (citing research by Gunnar Qvarnstrom), the exact numerological center of the whole poem is “ascended … .” The center of the symmetry is the triumphal chariot of Christ. This can be no accident. Put another way, through this line, we fully understand that the hero of the poem is Christ, whatever Milton’s subconscious intentions may or may not have been.
Milton’s Power
To read “Paradise Lost” is to immerse oneself in the grandest of poetic enterprises, one that not only aspires to be epic but achieves it with a scale and precision unmatched in English literature. These three one-liners are not isolated flourishes, but flashes of brilliance within a vast, architectonic structure of profound theological, psychological, and philosophical insight.
Milton’s verse offers us more than literary beauty: It challenges us to wrestle with questions of freedom, loyalty, inner torment, and cosmic justice.
In an age often impatient with difficulty and depth, reading “Paradise Lost” is a countercultural act of attention and imagination. For those willing to enter its demanding rhythms and elevated diction, the reward is immense: a renewed sense of language’s power and of poetry’s capacity to reveal the human condition in all its grandeur and fallibility.
We should read Milton not because he is old or great, but because he still speaks. In an early prose work, written long before “Paradise Lost,” he hoped, saying that he may “perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they shall not willingly let it die.” Amen to that.
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to features@epochtimes.nyc.
