Summary: Lines 1–26: The Prologue and Invocation
Milton opens Paradise Lost by formally
declaring his poem’s subject: humankind’s first act of disobedience
toward God, and the consequences that followed from it. The act
is Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,
as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the first line,
Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve’s sin as the “fruit”
of the forbidden tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative
fruits of their actions. Milton asserts that this original sin brought
death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our
home in paradise until Jesus comes to restore humankind to its former
position of purity.
Milton’s speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source
of poetic inspiration, to sing about these subjects through him,
but he makes it clear that he refers to a different muse from the
muses who traditionally inspired classical poets by specifying that
his muse inspired Moses to receive the Ten Commandments and write
Genesis. Milton’s muse is the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Christian
Bible, not one of the nine classical muses who reside on Mount Helicon—the “Aonian
mount” of I.15. He says that his poem, like
his muse, will fly above those of the Classical poets and accomplish
things never attempted before, because his source of inspiration
is greater than theirs. Then he invokes the Holy Spirit, asking
it to fill him with knowledge of the beginning of the world, because
the Holy Spirit was the active force in creating the universe.
Milton’s speaker announces that he wants to be inspired
with this sacred knowledge because he wants to show his fellow man
that the fall of humankind into sin and death was part of God’s
greater plan, and that God’s plan is justified.
Analysis
The beginning of Paradise Lost is similar
in gravity and seriousness to the book from which Milton takes much
of his story: the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
The Bible begins with the story of the world’s creation, and Milton’s
epic begins in a similar vein, alluding to the creation of the world
by the Holy Spirit. The first two sentences, or twenty-six lines,
of Paradise Lost are extremely compressed, containing
a great deal of information about Milton’s reasons for writing his
epic, his subject matter, and his attitudes toward his subject.
In these two sentences, Milton invokes his muse, which is actually
the Holy Spirit rather than one of the nine muses. By invoking a
muse, but differentiating it from traditional muses, Milton manages
to tell us quite a lot about how he sees his project. In the first
place, an invocation of the muse at the beginning of an epic is conventional,
so Milton is acknowledging his awareness of Homer, Virgil, and later
poets, and signaling that he has mastered their format and wants
to be part of their tradition. But by identifying his muse as the
divine spirit that inspired the Bible and created the world, he
shows that his ambitions go far beyond joining the club of Homer
and Virgil. Milton’s epic will surpass theirs, drawing on a more
fundamental source of truth and dealing with matters of more fundamental
importance to human beings. At the same time, however, Milton’s
invocation is extremely humble, expressing his utter dependence
on God’s grace in speaking through him. Milton thus begins his poem
with a mixture of towering ambition and humble self-effacement,
simultaneously tipping his hat to his poetic forebears and promising
to soar above them for God’s glorification.
Milton’s approach to the invocation of the muse, in which
he takes a classical literary convention and reinvents it from a
Christian perspective, sets the pattern for all of Paradise
Lost. For example, when he catalogs the prominent devils
in Hell and explains the various names they are known by and which
cults worshipped them, he makes devils of many gods whom the Greeks,
Ammonites, and other ancient peoples worshipped. In other words,
the great gods of the classical world have become—according to Milton—fallen
angels. His poem purports to tell of these gods’ original natures,
before they infected humankind in the form of false gods. Through
such comparisons with the classical epic poems, Milton is quick
to demonstrate that the scope of his epic poem is much greater than
those of the classical poets, and that his worldview and inspiration
is more fundamentally true and all-encompassing than theirs. The
setting, or world, of Milton’s epic is large enough to include those
smaller, classical worlds. Milton also displays his world’s superiority
while reducing those classical epics to the level of old, nearly
forgotten stories. For example, the nine muses of classical epics
still exist on Mount Helicon in the world of Paradise Lost, but Milton’s
muse haunts other areas and has the ability to fly above those other,
less-powerful classical Muses. Thus Milton both makes himself the
authority on antiquity and subordinates it to his Christian worldview.
The Iliad and the Aeneid are
the great epic poems of Greek and Latin, respectively, and Milton
emulates them because he intends Paradise Lost to
be the first English epic. Milton wants to make glorious art out
of the English language the way the other epics had done for their
languages. Not only must a great epic be long and poetically well-constructed,
its subject must be significant and original, its form strict and
serious, and its aims noble and heroic. In Milton’s view, the story
he will tell is the most original story known to man, as it is the
first story of the world and of the first human beings. Also, while
Homer and Virgil only chronicled the journey of heroic men, like
Achilles or Aeneas, Milton chronicles the tragic journey of all men—the
result of humankind’s disobedience. Milton goes so far as to say
that he hopes to “justify,” or explain, God’s mysterious plan for
humankind. Homer and Virgil describe great wars between men, but
Milton tells the story of the most epic battle possible: the battle
between God and Satan, good and evil.
