Paradise Lost (Modern Library Classics) (26 page)

813.
dint
: blow, stroke.

825.
pretenses
: claims; the meaning “false claims” was equally current in Milton’s time.

827.
uncouth errand sole
: unknown mission alone; cp. line 407.

829.
unfounded
: bottomless, unestablished.

833.
purlieus
: outskirts. “A French word (as most of our law terms are) of
pur
pure and
lieu
a place, and denotes the ground adjoining to, and being accounted part of any forest, by Henry II and other Kings, was … separated again from the same and adjudged
Purlieu
, that is pure and free from the Laws of the Forest” (Hume).

836.
surcharged
: overburdened.

837.
broils
: tumults, riots. Without once mentioning God, Satan insinuates that humanity’s location outside Heaven is a security measure aimed at crowd control.

842.
buxom
: pliant, yielding (cp. 5.270);
embalmed:
balmy, aromatic; also, “preserved with balm and precious spices, as princes and great persons are at their death, a word well applied to caress the ugly phantom” (Hume).

861–62.
Sin’s plight is echoed in Milton’s account of his situation at the Restoration (7.25–28).

868.
gods who live at ease
: translates Homer’s epithet for the Olympian gods (
Il
. 6.138).

869–70.
Milton has Sin prophesy in phrases burlesquing the Nicene Creed (“Christ … sits on the right hand of the father … [his] kingdom shall have no end”). Milton scorned prescribed statements of faith and thought the doctrine of the Trinity articulated in the Nicene Creed especially contemptible. In his epic, the closest thing to the orthodox Trinity is the incestuous unity and variety of Satan, Sin, and Death.

872.
all our woe
: repeats 1.3. Sin provides the instrument that permits Satan to seduce humanity to the
first disobedience
(1.1).

876–79.
then … Unfastens:
Cp. Homer’s description of Penelope opening the door to the storeroom where Odysseus’s bow is kept: “Straightaway she quickly loosed the thong from the handle and thrust in the key, and with sure aim shot back the bolts … quickly they flew open before her” (Od. 21.46–50).

877.
wards
: corresponding ridges or grooves in a lock and key.

880–82.
With … thunder:
“Grating on harsh, jarring hinges, the infernal gates open” (
Aen
. 6.873–74).

883.
Erebus
: darkness, the underworld.

889.
redounding
: surging, rolling upward in superabundance.

891.
secrets
: places, parts, or causes unknown, perhaps intentionally concealed; cp. 3.707. The realm of Chaos and Night is described as a womb (see l. 911, 10.476–77), impregnated by the Spirit during creation (1.21–22). Satan’s trespass could thus be construed as sexual prying or a violation of the maternal (cp. 1.684–88, 2.785ff).
hoary:
white-haired and thus old or ancient.

894–910.
where … all:
Milton describes
eldest Night
as
eternal
, like the
anarchy
over which she and
Chaos
preside (e.g., l. 150, 3.18, 10.477). His presentation of Chaos is indebted to Ovid and Lucretius (
Met
. 1.5–20;
On the Nature of Things
2). Commenting on Ovid, Sandys objects that “by not expressing the original, he seems to intimate the eternity of his
Chaos”
(1632, 49). Only God is eternal. The attribution of eternal being to Chaos and Night thus renders Milton’s account of primordial matter heretical in one of two ways: either Chaos represents a realm distinct from God and, like him, eternal and existentially independent, or Chaos represents an aspect of eternal God himself. The discussion of matter in
Christian Doctrine
indicates that Milton endorsed the latter heresy (1.7). Cp. 915–16n.

898.
Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry
: These had long been considered the four fundamental qualities that combine to constitute all created phenomena: humors, elements, planets, or bodies in general. Thus, earth was dry and cold, water moist and cold, air moist and hot, fire dry and hot, et cetera.

900–903.
embryon atoms … unnumbered:
indivisible units of primal matter, undeveloped and unformed; cp. line 913. The relative weights, shapes, motions, and textures of these countless (
unnumbered
) “seeds of things,” the
semina rerum
of Lucretian atomist philosophy, account for the phenomenal variety of the world (
On the Nature of Things
2.62–833).

904.
Barca or Cyrene’s
: desert region of Northern Africa notorious for sandstorms.

906.
To whom these
: The referents of
whom
are the
four champions fierce
of line 898;
these
refers to the atoms.

907–10.
Chaos … all:
On the rule of
Chaos
and
Chance
in relation to fate and God’s will, cp. lines 232–33, 915–16, and 7.172–73.

911.
Except for the insertion of
perhaps
, the line loosely translates Lucretius’s portrayal of the Earth (
On the Nature of Things
5.259).

915–16.
Milton allows that God could use the
dark materials
of chaos to create more worlds (universes, not simply planets), provoking the complaint that Milton heretically “supposes the Deity to have needed means with which to work … [though] the very word
creation
implies existence given to something which never before existed” (Cowper). As Milton recognized, however, the Hebrew verb
create
implies the opposite of what Cowper claimed it does (
CD
1.7; see 894–910n).

919.
frith
: firth, channel.

920.
pealed
: assailed, rung. 921–22.
to compare … small:
Cp. 6.310–11, 10.306;
PR
4.563–64, where Milton uses the same formula, borrowed from Vergil (
Ec
. 1.24,
Georg
. 4.176).

922.
Bellona
: Roman goddess of war, sister to Mars.

924.
frame
: that which supports the sky. Cp. Horace’s admiration of “the man tenacious of his purpose in a righteous cause”: “Were the vault of heaven to break and fall upon him, its ruins would smite him undismayed” (
Odes
3.3.1, 7–8).

927.
vans
: wings. Milton persists in linking Satan to a sailing ship.

930.
cloudy chair
: car formed of clouds.

933.
pennons
: pinions, wings.

935–38.
Down … aloft:
Satan’s escape from oblivion owes to the
rebuff
(counterblast) of a cloud
instinct with
(moved or impelled by)
fire and niter
, ingredients of gunpowder, Satan’s signature invention from chaotic materials (see 6.478–83, 511–15). Phenomena like shooting stars, comets, and lightning were attributed to the atmospheric ignition of such vapors. Cp. other instances of Satan’s luck (4.530; 9.85, 421–23).

939.
Syrtis
: The Syrtes are two shallow gulfs (Sidra and Cabes) off the north coast of Libya, a region dreaded for its quicksands (e.g., Acts 27.17). Milton echoes Lucan’s
Pharsalia
(9.364ff) in describing it as neither sea nor land.

942.
both oar and sail
: all possible force, might and main. Galley ships when pressed used both oars and sails; cp.
Aen
. 3.563.

943–45.
gryphon … Arimaspian:
The
gryphon
(or griffin) is a mythical guardian of gold, with the upper half of an eagle and lower of a lion. It can thus speed over varied terrain
with wingèd course
(with wings and feet) in pursuit of the
Arimaspian
, legendary one-eyed people who steal the guarded gold. See Herodotus 3.116; 4.13, 27.

948–49.
The extended series of disjointed monosyllables and breakdowns in iambic meter express the difficulty of negotiating the helter-skelter of chaos.

951–54.
universal hubbub … vehemence:
Cp. the curse of Babel, 12.53–62.

954.
vehemence
: mindlessness;
plies:
alters course, tacks (see 637–42n).

960–61.
Of Chaos … deep:
“He made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies” (2 Sam. 22.12; cp. Ps. 18.11).

961.
wasteful
: vast, desolate. Milton is prone to repetition of initial
w
sounds, and especially to alliterative compounds with
wide
. See 1.3, 2.1007, 6.253, 8.467, 11.121, 487;
Nat Ode
51, 64;
Il Pens
75,
Lyc
13;
Sonnet 19
2.

962.
sable-vested Night
: translates Euripides’ epithet for Night,
Ion
1150 (literally, “black-robed Night”). She and Chaos preside over a court of accessory personifications.

964.
Orcus and Ades
: Latin and Greek for the underworld and its ruler (the Greek word is usually spelled
Hades
).

965.
Demogorgon
: Boccaccio copied the
dreaded name
from a medieval manuscript’s gloss of an allusion in Statius (
Thebiad
4.516). The reference is to a deity whose name alone terrifies infernal powers. Boccaccio applied it to the primeval deity in his
Genealogy of the Gods
. Subsequent authors followed suit and often made Demogorgon master of the Fates. See, e.g., Spenser,
FQ
1.1
.37
, 4.2.47. Cp. Milton’s
Prolusion 1
in
MLM
787.

967.
Milton transfers to
Discord
a trait ordinarily found in personifications of fame or rumor, as when Shakespeare has
Rumor
“painted full of tongues” speak the prologue to
2H4
. In
PL
, rumor seems to originate in God and is aligned with prophecy, though it does inspire conflict (see,
e.g.
, ll. 345–53, 831, 1.651, 10.481–82).

977.
Confine with
: border on.

980.
this profound
: the deep (adj. for noun). The punctuation and dodgy syntax of lines 980–86 suggest that Satan is improvising as he speaks.

982.
behoof
: advantage.

982–87.
if I … revenge:
Satan is setting up a double cross. Cp. 10.399–418.

988.
Anarch
: anarchy’s head of state.

989.
incomposed
: without composure or orderly arrangement; cp. “increate” (3.6).

993–98.
I saw … Pursuing:
Cp. 6.871–74.

1001.
our
: In light of lines 908–9, some editors substitute “your,” construing
our intestine broils
as a reference to the War in Heaven rather than to the constitutional strife of chaos. Cp. Henry IV’s account of the “intestine shock / And furious close of civil butchery” involving opponents “all of one nature, of one substance bred” (
1H4
1.1.11–13).

1004.
heaven
: not the abode of God and the angels, as in line 1006, but the sky. The
world
of which Chaos speaks is in modern usage called the “universe.”

1005.
golden chain
: Homer’s Zeus boasts that the combined strength of the other gods could not prevent him from pulling them and the world up to heaven by a golden chain (
Il
. 8.18–27). Milton endorsed the traditional interpretation of this chain as a symbol of cosmic design and order (
Prolusion
2
, Yale 1:236).

1007.
walk
: distance to be covered; course of conduct or action.

1008.
danger
: As with much of what Chaos says, the meaning is difficult to pin down. Is Satan approaching danger, or is danger, in the person of Satan, approaching the world?

1013.
“The pyramid is the solid which is the original element and seed of fire” (Plato,
Timaeus
56b). In sharp contrast to the anarchy of
embryon atoms
(l. 900), Satan through sheer force of will launches himself toward creation in the atomic form of his own element (Kerrigan 1983, 138–39).

1017.
Argo
: the ship of Jason and his crew (Argonauts). They encounter the clashing (
jostling
) rocks of the
Bosporos
(the Strait of Constantinople) (Apollonius 2.552–611).

1019.
larboard
: left side of a vessel, port.

1020.
Charybdis
: dreaded whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, just opposite man-eating Scylla (see 659–61n). Ulysses avoided the total destruction that
Charybdis
threatened by sailing nearer to Scylla (Homer,
Od
. 12.234–59).

1024–30.
Sin … world:
For construction of this
broad and beaten way
(cp. Matt. 7.13), see 10.293–305.

1024.
amain
: in full force, numbers.

1033.
special grace
: Cp. 3.183–84. See
Masque
36–42, 216–20, 453–63.