Satan’s march on Heaven’s high Throne is halted mano-a-mano by Abdiel who, cutting short the parley, gets the party started —
‘So saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,
Which hung not, but so swift with tempest fell
On the proud Crest of Satan, that no sight,
Nor motion of swift thought, less could his Shield
Such ruin intercept: ten paces huge
He back recoild; the tenth on bended knee
His massie Spear upstaid’ (VI:189-195)
Satan’s vulnerability is exposed before both sides of Heav’n’s divide. The shock of real pain stabs Satan to the soul, and is Satan’s baptism to the outcomes of rebellion — pain and suffering, major themes of the text.
‘Arms on Armour clashing, bray’d
Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles
Of brazen Chariots rag’d; dire was the noise
Of conflict; over head the dismall hiss
Of fiery Darts in flaming volies flew’ (VI: 209-213)
The high-paying patrons of our theatre production will be receiving ‘fiery Darts’ deep down their aural drums. The equally high-paying patrons of our Hollywood blockbuster will be expecting a jolly good sword fight — in the sylie of Star Wars — and by Jove, they’re going to get it:
‘… but the sword
Of Michael from the Armorie of God
Was giv’n him temprd so, that neither keen
Nor solid might resist that edge: it met
The sword of Satan with steep force to smite
Descending, and in half cut sheere, nor staid,
But with swift wheele reverse, deep entring shar’d
All his right side; then Satan first knew pain
And writh’d him to and fro convolv’d; so sore
The grinding sword with discontinuous wound
Pass’d through him, but th’ Ethereal substance clos’d
Not long divisible, and from the gash
A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow’d
Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed,
And all his Armour staind ere while so bright’ (VI 320-334)
Satan, devoid of grace, Plan B, parachute, propelled by Jesus’ big boot from the Elysian Fields of Heaven — protesting —
down —
down —
down into the lava lakes of Hell.
‘Nine dayes they fell; confounded Chaos roard,
And felt tenfold confusion in thir fall
Through this wilde Anarchie, so huge a rout
Incumberd him with ruin: Hell at last
Yawning receavd them whole, and on them closed’ (VI:871-875)
Satan writhes in a ‘Dungeon horrible, on all sides round/As one great Furnace flam’d’ (I:61-62) roasting with ‘obdurate pride and stedfast hate’ (I:58).
No amount of face-paint is gonna fix this gaff.
‘O foul descent! that I who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind
Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime’ (IX:163-165)
‘Bestial slime’ will remind the reader of Salt Lake City or Highbury Fields.
Milton intires the reader in the dire, iry, fiery mire of Satan’s new drum, and takes the reader up the Arsenal:
‘Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d’ (I:65-69)
More pain and suffering than a meeting of Opus Dei.
‘To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe
Counfounded though immortal: But his doom
Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him’ (I:51-56)
Satan and his Star-Wars rebels are mutating from the charming to the chimeric:
‘But O how fall’n! how chang’d
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth’d with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright’ (I 84-87)
Our Stage or Screen production of Paradise Lost will be firing the full Dolby surround-sound for this next scene. Here lie Satan’s lackeys on a lake of fire like limp licentious lizardy insects. Hear that rustle!
‘Thick swarm’d, both on the ground and in the air,
Brusht with the hiss of russling wings. As Bees
In spring time’ (I:767-769)
Satan ‘Majestick though in ruin’ (II:305) soothes his mercurial mind with the balmy resolution to continue his ‘Errands in the gloomy Deep’ (I:152), ‘Which if not Victory is yet Revenge’ (II:105), to ‘suffer and support’ his pains, and to work in the ‘heart of Hell’ a ‘mightier service’. Honeyed poetry slips from the split-tongue of the abuser, and dulls the senses of his doleful dollards:
‘That with sad overthrow and foul defeat
Hath lost us Heav’n, and all this mighty Host
In horrible destruction laid thus low,
As far as Gods and Heav’nly Essences
Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains
Invincible, and vigour soon returns,
Though all our Glory extinct, and happy state
Here swallow’d up in endless misery’ (I:135-142)
The Artist Formerly Known as Satan and his swinging soul band of lizardy mutants conspire against the common cause with the caustic bile of a Conservative Party conference:
‘Fall’n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist.’ (I:157-162)
Hamlet — ‘the king of infinite space’, ‘bounded’ in a ‘sterile promontory’ and festering in a ‘foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ ‘in which are many confines, wards and dungeons’ (Hamlet II ii) — honeyed words from Elsinor Castle that could easily pass for Hell.
Milton softens Satan with an armoury of the best lines:
‘The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n’ (I:254-255)
And when the best battle-lines come, they come not single brother-in-arms but in battalions:
‘To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n’ (I:262-263)
Satan conjures lines that could have come from Hamlet at the court of King Claudius:
‘... how wearisom
Eternity so spent in worship paid
To whom we hate’ (II:247-249)
The world’s a prison but the players are free to strut their stuff on the Stage of Life:
‘Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp’ (II:253-257)
Earth’s abandoned casualties of the War in Heaven will welcome the relief of the crumbs and the drippings from an absent father’s high table, but the giving of grace is rationed:
[God]: ‘Man therefore shall find grace,
The other none: in Mercy and Justice both,
Through Heav’n and Earth, so shall my glorie excel
But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine.’ (III:131-132 &134)
The reader discovers in a private moment with God the reason for having been farm-raised like the baby-pods from the film Alien:
‘What thinkst thou then of mee, and this my State,
Seem I to thee sufficiently possest
Of happiness, or not? who am alone
From all Eternitie, for none I know
Second to mee or like, equal much less.
How have I then with whom to hold converse
Save with the Creatures which I made, and those
To me inferiour’ (VIII:403-410)
Meanwhile, downtown at the heavy-metal head-bangers’ drum, the band leader Satan leads the Great Escape from Hell. The ‘fatal key’ to the front door has been entrusted by God to the ‘Snakie Sorceress that sat/Fast by Hell Gate’ (II:724-725). Satan the action man, hot barium meal of courage coursing his veins, faces one small step to hunt man, one giant leap for Satan-kind:
‘Th’ unfounded deep, & through the void immense
To search with wandring quest a place foretold’ (II:829-830)