The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Milton · an epic poem in twelve books · 10,565 lines of blank verse · the second edition (1674)
Mode
Biblical epic as theodicy; the classical machinery turned to a new heroism of patience
Mythos
Rebellion, fall and expulsion; the adversary in glory and in decline, the first marriage, the paradise within
Phase
From the fall of the angels to the expulsion; the war and the creation told back by one angel, history foretold by another
Presentation
Poem; twelve books and 10,565 lines of unrhymed verse in the second edition (1674), redivided from ten books (1667)
Register
From the council in Hell to the hymn to light; about a quarter of the poem told inside it by an angel or by Adam
Scale
Heaven, Hell, Chaos and the world; two people, one garden, one act
Governing Proposition
Two people lose their garden by one act freely chosen, and the angel who brought them to it finds that the freedom he claimed has become his prison. The wager of the poem is that the law which lets a rebel make his own Hell is the same law by which good is brought out of evil, and it sends the pair out into history hand in hand.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The first sentence of the poem is twenty-six lines long. It names its subject, “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the World, and all our woe”; promises “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”; asks the Spirit, “what in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support”; and only then reaches its purpose: “And justify the ways of God to men.” The whole poem is folded into it: one act and its consequence for everyone, a voice that knows both its ambition and its darkness, and an argument it means to win.
The verse is unrhymed, and the rhyme is avoided, not merely absent: in the 1667 text the reading measured, adjacent lines end alike less often than lines drawn at random. The metre holds almost without exception, and inside it the sense runs free. More than half the lines end with no punctuation, and verse paragraphs average nearly thirty lines. The syntax carries what it describes. Satan is “Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky, / With hideous ruin and combustion, down / To bottomless perdition”, and the sentence falls with him across the lines before it lets him land.
The poem first appeared in 1667 in ten books. For the second edition of 1674 Milton divided the seventh and the tenth, so that it stands in twelve, and added fifteen lines, bringing it to 10,565. Eight of them are bridges, written where an angel’s long narration had been cut in two; the rest fill out the angels’ feast, a catalogue of diseases and a reply of Adam’s. Otherwise the text is the same poem, and the order of events does not change. What the redivision changes is the shape: six books and six, the war in Heaven closing the first half and the creation opening the second.
Movement II
The poem opens in Hell, and the reader meets evil first as glory. Satan rises from the burning lake and claims the place: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” He ends: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” His followers raise a palace that “Rose like an exhalation”, built by the architect the classical poets called Mulciber, whose fall from Heaven they told as a summer’s day, “from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve”. The poem tells it beautifully, then corrects it in one word: “Erring”.
In the council Belial argues against annihilation, for “who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity”. Beelzebub asks who will go to the new world, “whom shall we send”, and Hell falls silent until Satan offers himself. He crosses Chaos, “The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave”, and the line labours with him: “And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.” In the next book Heaven faces the same question, “Which of you will be mortal”, and “all the heavenly quire stood mute” until the Son answers. The two councils are built to one plan.
On Niphates, in sight of the garden, the claim of the first book comes back to Satan reversed: “Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell”. From here the poem shows his decline in plain sight. He sits on the tree of life “like a cormorant”, is found “Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve”, and, rebuked, “felt how awful goodness is”. The sight of Eve alone leaves him for a moment “Stupidly good”. Back in Hell he expects applause, hears “A dismal universal hiss”, and is turned into a serpent. The reader is tempted, then made to watch the tempter shrink.
Movement III
The poem’s maker is inside it. Book III opens with a blind man addressing light: “Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn”. He names his loss, “Seasons return; but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn”, and turns it into a prayer: “So much the rather thou, celestial Light, / Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate; there plant eyes”. At the head of the seventh book he sings “though fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues”. The poet was blind, the revolution he had defended had failed, and his prose had just been burned.
The war in Heaven, told to Adam by Raphael, is the poem’s most uneven passage. On the second day the rebels bring up cannon and pun on them, “terms of weight, / Of hard contents”. On the third the Son goes out: “Forth rushed with whirlwind sound / The chariot of Paternal Deity”. Here the poem turns, and it turns by count. The middle line of the 1674 text, the 5,283rd of 10,565, is the sixth book’s 766th: “Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire”. In the ten books of 1667 the centre fell four lines earlier, on the word with which the Son mounts the chariot: “Ascended”.
“Half yet remains unsung”, the seventh book begins. In 1674 that line opens the second six books, though by lines the first six are longer, 5,429 against 5,136. Raphael tells the creation: “The tawny lion, pawing to get free / His hinder parts”. The angels’ hymn gives the law the whole poem obeys: “his evil / Thou usest, and from thence createst more good.” Where the 1674 text cuts Raphael’s narration in two, Milton wrote three lines to cross the gap: “The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear / So charming left his voice, that he a while / Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear”.
Movement IV
Before the Fall the poem gives its two people a world and a memory each. Eve remembers waking beside a pool and bending to the face in the water, until a voice tells her, “What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself”. Adam remembers waking under the sky and asking how he came there, “And feel that I am happier than I know”. At the creation of Eve he says, “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself”. They walk “hand in hand”, and Eve tells Adam their morning: “Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet, / With charm of earliest birds”.
The Fall begins with a domestic argument about work. “Adam, well may we labour still to dress / This garden”, Eve says, and proposes that they work apart. Adam lets her go. Alone, she listens to the serpent, and the act takes two lines: “So saying, her rash hand in evil hour / Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat! / Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat, / Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe, / That all was lost.” Adam chooses to fall with her: “flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state / Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.” He eats “not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm.”
The book ends not in punishment but in a quarrel: “Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning; / And of their vain contest appeared no end.” In the tenth book Adam lies awake through the night, “O Conscience! into what abyss of fears”, wishing he could lie down in the earth “As in my mother’s lap”. Eve breaks the deadlock, at his feet: “Forsake me not thus, Adam!” He relents and proposes that they confess and ask pardon. The book closes on the deed, told in almost the words in which he proposed it.
Movement V
Michael is sent to lead them out, and first to show Adam what will follow: the first murder, a house of disease, a smith at his forge, the Flood. In 1674 Milton lengthened the diseases by three lines, “Demoniack phrenzy, moaping melancholy, / And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, / Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence”, and opened the new twelfth book with a pause: “As one who in his journey bates at noon, / Though bent on speed; so here the Arch-Angel paused / Betwixt the world destroyed and world restored”. Then the visions stop, because Adam’s sight is failing: “Henceforth what is to come I will relate”.
What Michael relates is politics as well as sacred history. When Nimrod makes himself king, Adam answers for the poem: “man over men / He made not lord”. Michael adds that true liberty “always with right reason dwells / Twinned”. The survey of Israel that follows turns to summary. Then Adam hears of the redemption and speaks his last wonder: “O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good”. Across the whole poem it answers Satan’s programme in the first book, “out of good still to find means of evil”. For the garden he is promised “A Paradise within thee, happier far”.
The poem ends on a road, not a verdict. “Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; / 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.” They walked “hand in hand” in the fourth book, in innocence, and they walk so now in exile. The last line is quiet after twelve books of war, council and argument, and it leaves them outside the garden, together, with a choice to make.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged partly on Milton’s verse, which barely yields to the subtractive test. In the 1667 text read, 0.35 per cent of words sit inside a repeated six-word sequence, and the whole lines that recur are deliberate. The scale is compelled: a poem of “Man’s first disobedience” (I.1) must show the first disobedience in Heaven before the second on Earth, with Chaos between. The devils’ catalogue (I.376–521) survives the test. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what does not: the Paradise of Fools (III.444–497), the puns of the war’s second day, “terms of weight, / Of hard contents” (VI.621–622), and the survey of Israel (XII.111–269). Together they come to perhaps three per cent of the poem.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the self that refuses its dependence makes its own prison. Satan claims “The mind is its own place” (I.254) and learns what that means: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (IV.75). The Fall is disclosed as the failure of a marriage. Adam eats “not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm” (IX.998–999); Eve reasons from rank, “for, inferiour, who is free” (IX.825); the book ends “in mutual accusation” (IX.1187). That holds without the theology. Held below the summit by what does not: the theodicy God argues in Book III, a brief rather than a disclosure, and the order “He for God only, she for God in him” (IV.299).
Score: 9.3 / 10
Height and frequency both stand near the ceiling, and the music is the poet’s own. Terror and grandeur: “darkness visible” (I.63); Pandaemonium rising “like an exhalation” (I.711); Mulciber falling “from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve” (I.742–743); the anarchy of Chaos (II.890–1033). Beauty: a blind man’s “there plant eyes” (III.53); Eve’s “Sweet is the breath of Morn” (IV.641); the lion “pawing to get free / His hinder parts” (VII.464–465). Dread: “Earth felt the wound” (IX.782). Held off the top by a God who argues in Book III where he should awe, a war whose second day turns to slapstick, and a last book with no “As when” simile.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The poem does not allude to the Fall; it is the Fall, and it stays particular. Adam and Eve argue over dividing a morning’s gardening (IX.205–384). Eve’s first act is to mistake her reflection: “What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself” (IV.468). Satan becomes the archetype of fallen light, by turns cherub, cormorant, toad and serpent (IV.196, IV.800), and remains a voice with a grievance. Sin and Death are load-bearing: they build the bridge to Earth (X.293–305). Classical myth is absorbed and corrected: Mulciber’s fall is told, then marked “Erring” (I.747). Held short of the top by the seam where allegorical figures act beside literal persons.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The inheritance is chosen: Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Genesis, the whole epic machinery. The departure comes from inside the form. The argument is “Not less but more heroick” than Achilles’ wrath (IX.14), setting aside “Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroick deem’d” (IX.28–29) for “the better fortitude / Of patience” (IX.31–32). The adversary has the epic virtues. It is the first English heroic poem in blank verse, “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (I.16), and its angels eat “with keen dispatch / Of real hunger” (V.436–437). The stake was real: a blind poet whose prose had just been burned writes “fallen on evil days” (VII.25). The frame is inherited, not invented, and that holds the axis below the top.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the 1674 work. The subject is freedom within law, and the line enacts it. The metre holds, with about 96.5 per cent of lines between nine and eleven syllables by estimate, and inside it the sense runs free: in the 1667 text read, 58.3 per cent of lines end unpunctuated and rhyme falls below chance. Opening in Hell, the poem makes the reader meet evil first as glory. Hell’s council and Heaven’s fall silent before the same question (II.402, III.214–217). The 1674 centre, line 5,283 of 10,565, falls in the chariot passage (VI.766), four lines after the 1667 centre at “Ascended” (VI.762). Michael’s turn from showing to telling enacts fallen sight failing (XII.8–11).
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: Addison’s Spectator papers (1712), Bentley’s emendations (1732), Johnson’s Life (1779), Blake, and Lewis (1942), Empson (1961) and Fish (1967) still arguing. The text keeps yielding because its pairs are left unexplained: Sin from Satan’s head and Eve from Adam’s side; Eve’s dream (V.30–93) and the temptation it rehearses; Hell’s “whom shall we send” (II.402) and Heaven’s “Which of you will be mortal” (III.214); “Bone of my bone” in delight (VIII.495) and in the choice to fall (IX.915). God’s justice, Satan’s glamour, and whether Adam fell for love or for idolatry stay open. The record spans half the Comedy’s, and that holds the axis a tenth below the ceiling.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Intrinsic force: the poem reorganised English poetry. It made blank verse the medium of the highest matter, built a native sublime, invented the glamorous adversary, and set patience against martial heroism inside the epic itself. It pressed as weight too: Keats abandoned Hyperion under it. Across languages its reach is narrower than the Comedy’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: quick and lasting, through Dryden’s State of Innocence (1677), the blank verse of Thomson, Young and Cowper, Klopstock’s Messias, Haydn’s Creation, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, the Romantic Satan, Frankenstein, whose epigraph is X.743–744, and Pullman’s “dark materials” (II.916); very wide and continuous in English, substantial in German and French.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated by three and a half centuries of reprinting, from the 1688 subscription folio onward. The poem has outlived the cosmos it hedged on: Raphael leaves the heavens open, “What if the sun / Be center to the world” (VIII.122–123), and the poem names Galileo (V.262). An undecided frame ages better than a decided one. The surface fixed to its moment still costs: the anti-papal Paradise of Fools, with its “Cowls, hoods, and habits” (III.490); the Restoration “sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine” (I.501–502); more than five hundred proper names, most of which now need a note; a doctrine of gender that dates the poem. That annotated surface pays a step.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on Milton’s own English, and the making is load-bearing. In the 1667 text read, verse paragraphs average 29 lines and sentences 51 words, the longest 332. The syntax enacts its matter: “Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (I.44–45) falls across the line; “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” (II.621) is ten monosyllables; “she plucked, she eat” (IX.781) is the Fall in four words. The costs are real: Latinate knots, “Nor did they not perceive the evil plight” (I.335); the puns of the war’s second day (VI.609–627); God’s syllogisms (III.80–134); the slack summary of XII.111–269. The line itself does not fail.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The two most distant elements obey one law. Satan’s programme, “out of good still to find means of evil” (I.165), and Adam’s last wonder, “That all this good of evil shall produce” (XII.470), are joined by a law stated halfway: “his evil / Thou usest, and from thence createst more good” (VII.615–616). One physics governs the whole, “one first matter all” (V.472): it lets angels eat, bleed once they have sinned (VI.332), and feel pain “Till now not known” (VI.432). Even the war’s comedy obeys it, since pride makes the proud ridiculous. The law strains twice: spirits that “limb themselves” (VI.352) are crushed in their armour (VI.656), and allegorical Sin and Death share ground with literal persons.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The orders are held in one structure. Consciousness: Eve waking (IV.449–491), Adam waking (VIII.253–282), Satan’s soliloquies. Marriage and the family: the first wedding, the first quarrel, Cain and Abel. Labour: the gardeners’ work is the occasion of the Fall (IX.205–225), the curse is “with labour I must earn / My bread” (X.1054–1055), a smith stands at his forge (XI.564–573). The state: the infernal council, Nimrod’s tyranny, liberty “Twinned” with “right reason” (XII.84–85). History from Abel to the Judgment; creation, astronomy, the seasons tilted by the Fall (X.668–687). One act of disobedience reaches them all. Held short of the ceiling because the world beyond two people is seen in vision, not lived.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 9.7, with The Sublime, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.6. A myth built rather than evoked, three and a half centuries of argument that has not closed, and every order of reality reached by a single act of disobedience.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 9.1, held by the passages the poem could lose: the Paradise of Fools, the second day of the war and the survey of Israel in the last book, perhaps three per cent of the whole. Above it, The Unconcealment at 9.3, held by the God of Book III, who argues a brief where the rest of the poem discloses.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.7, Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.4 and The Unconcealment at 9.3 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 9.1, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of Paradise Lost in the first edition of 1667, Project Gutenberg e-text #20 — ten books, 10,549 lines and 79,840 words of verse as transcribed. The measured figures for line endings, rhyme, sentences, paragraphs and repetition are taken from that text. The page presents the poem as the second edition of 1674 gives it, in twelve books and 10,565 lines. Book divisions and the numerical centre are given for 1674, and quotations come from Project Gutenberg e-text #26, a modernised-spelling text of the twelve-book poem, cited by 1674 book and line. That e-text runs one line short in Book IV, where it runs IV.918 and IV.919 together as one line, and its III.33–34 is corrupt; neither passage is quoted, and line numbers after IV.918 follow the standard count.