PL Quotes Flashcards
Narrator - the invocation
‘No more of talk’
‘I now must change / these notes to tragic’
Heroic description of Satan L54
‘now improved / In meditated fraud and malice, bent / On Man’s destruction, mature what might hap / Of heavier on himself, fearless returned’
Satan compared to Achilles
‘Argument / Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued / Thrice fugitive about Troy wall’
Satan - ‘thrice the equinoctial line / He circled
Narrator setting the scene for Satan’s soliloquy
‘from inward grief / His bursting passion into plaints thus poured:’
Satan on Pleasures and Torment + the reason he destroys
the more I see / Pleasures about me, so much more I feel / Torment within me’
‘For only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts’
Satan’s disguise
‘The serpent sleeping, in whose mazy folds / To hide me’
‘in at his mouth / The devil entered’
‘Circular base of rising folds, that towered / Fold above fold a surging maze’
‘carbuncle his eyes, / With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect / Amidst his circling spires’
Compared through epic simile to jewels
Satan on revenge
‘Revenge, at first though sweet, / Better ere long back on itself recoils; / Let it’
‘Whom us the more to spite his maker raised / From dust: spite then with spite is best repaid’
Pathetic fallacy in the Garden of Eden
‘humid flowers that breathed / Their morning incense’ - pastoral imagery sets quiescent mood of Paradise
‘Sky loured, and muttering thunder, some sad drops / Wept’ - dark imagery reflects consequences of the fall
Adam and Eve praying to God in the morning compared to Eve’s offer to the apple
‘forth came the human pair / And joined their vocal worship to the choir / Of creatures’
similar to Eve’s offer to sing the apple ‘a song, each morning, and due praise / Shall tend thee’
Separation debate - Eve’s ‘Parable of the talents’ work ethic vs Adam’s ‘parable of the vineyard’ argument
Eve:
‘Let us divide our labours’
‘Looks intervene and smiles’
Adam:
‘Sweet intercourse / Of looks and smiles’
‘For not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us’
Suggestion of Eden’s unsustainable nature
‘much their work outgrew / The hands’ dispatch of two gardening so wide’
‘till more hands / Aid us, the work under our labour grows, / Luxurious by restraint’
‘with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild’
Separation debate -‘domestic Adam’’s weakness to exercise his authority
says Eve is ‘above all living creatures’ - goes against God’s hierarchy of chain of being
‘but if much converse perhaps / Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield’
‘could’=modal auxiliary verb
Separation debate - Adam’s weak, impersonal aphorisms
‘nothing lovelier can be found / In woman, than to study household good’
‘short retirement urges sweet return’
‘The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks, / Safest and seemliest by her husband stays / Who guards her, or with her the worst endures’
Separation debate - Adam focusing the argument on him
‘I from the influence of thy looks receive / Access in every virtue… why shouldest not thou like sense within thee feel’
Separation debate - Eve recognising Adam’s fear
‘fear that my firm faith and love / Can by his fraud be shaken or seduced’
‘what is fat, love, virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?’
Eve refuting Adam’s ‘foul esteem argument’
Adam: ‘he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses / The tempted with dishonour foul’
Eve: ‘his foul esteem / Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns / Foul on himself’
Eve exposing Eden’s flaws
‘How are we happy, still in fear of harm?’
‘Eden were no Eden thus exposed’
Adam’s accurate warning
Warns of ‘some fair appearing good’
‘fall into deception unaware’
Recurring motif of hands emblem
‘our joint hands / Will keep from wilderness with ease’
‘from her husband’s hand her hand / Soft she withdrew’
Classical simile used in Eve’s description
Eve compared to ‘Ceres in her prime, / Yet virgin of Prosperina from Jove’
Foreshadowing (Eve flower metaphor)
‘O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve, / Of thy presumed return! event perverse!’
‘fairest unsupported flower, / From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh. / Nearer he drew’
(ambiguity of pronoun he)
Satan’s exciting present tense movement
‘Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen’
Epic simile making Satan relatable as a ‘gentleman’
‘As one who long in populous city pent’ - consonance
‘conceives delight’ - assonance
Satan’s reaction to seeing Eve
‘Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed’
However she is a ‘pleasure not for him ordained’
Satan’s obsequious behaviour as the serpent
‘licked the ground whereon she trod’
Satan’s opening line in his ‘fraudulent temptation’ compared to Eve’s opening line to Adam
Satan to Eve: ‘Wonder not, sovereign mistress’
Eve to Adam: ‘Hast thou not wonder’d’
Satan’s seduction - flattery
‘Fairest resemblance of thy maker fair’
‘Celestial beauty’
‘Queen of this universe’
Satan’s seduction - making her discontent with Paradise
Suggests Eve is looked upon by ‘Beholders rude, and shallow’, she ‘shouldest be seen / A goddess among gods, adored and served / By angels numberless’
‘Of all these garden trees ye shall not eat, / Yet lords declared of all in Earth or air?’
‘your eyes that seem so clear, / Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then / Opened and cleared’
Satan’s seduction - passion ruling her reason
‘Into the heart of Eve his words made way’
‘Not unamazed’
‘Yet more amazed’
‘his words replete with guile / Into her heart too easy entrance won’
Satan seducing Eve with maternal image, appeal of lust and appeal of knowledge
Smell of fruit is likened to ‘the teats / Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even’
Sexual semantic field, e.g ‘Sated’
‘Thenceforth to speculations high or deep / I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind / Considered all things’
Gives him Aristotelian ability to ‘discern / Things in their causes’
Satan anti-authoritarian sentiments
‘to keep ye low and ignorant, / His worshippers’
‘The gods are first, and that advantage use / On our belief, that all from them proceeds, I question it’
‘Or is it envy, and can envy dwell / In heavenly breasts?’ (theologically flawed - God cannot be envious)
Satan and then Eve’s blasphemy with the fruit
‘O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant, / Mother of science’
‘Fruit divine’
Satan affecting Eve’s logic
Satan: ‘ye shall not die: / How should ye? by the Fruit? It gives you life / To knowledge. By the Threatener? look on me’
‘in her ears the sound / Yet rung of his persuasive words, impregned / With Reason’
Eve: ‘we shall die. How dies the serpent? he hath eaten and lives’
Eve then Adam on forbidden pleasures
E: ‘his forbidding / Commends thee more’
A: ‘such pleasure be/ In things to us forbidden’
Eve’s naivety
Says Satan ‘envies not’, he is ‘author unsuspect, / Friendly to Man, far from deceit or guile’ - reversed foot reveals perverse irony of her statement
Sexual semantic field associated with fruit
Satan says he is ‘Sated’
The fruit ‘Solicited her longing eye’ - solicit has connotations of prostitute offering services
Moment Eve eats the fruit
‘So saying, her rash hand evil hour / Forth reaching to the Fruit, she plucked, she ate’
‘Greedily she engorged without restraint’
Postlapsarian Eve adopting Satan’s logic
‘opener mine eyes, / Dim erst’
Refers to God as ‘Our great Forbidder, safe with all his spies / About him’
Postlapsarian Eve considering equality
‘keep the odds of knowledge in my power / Without copartner’
‘render me more equal, and perhaps / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior’
lying to Adam: ‘godhead, which for thee / Chiefly I sought’
Adam’s reaction to Eve’s story
‘amazed, / Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill / Ran through his veins’
flowers ‘ Down dropped, and all the faded roses shed: / Speechless he stood and pale’
Adam’s d alliteration about postlapsarian Eve
‘How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, / Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote?’
Adam’s reason for eating
‘we are one, / One flesh, to lose thee were to lose myself’
‘he scrupled not to eat’
‘not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm’
Satan’s closing line compared to Eve’s closing line
Satan: ‘reach then, and freely taste’
Eve: ‘Adam, freely taste’
Overindulgence
Satan: ‘eat my fill’
Adam: ‘eating his fill’
Satan: ‘Sated’
Eve: ‘Greedily she engorged without restraint’
Eve: ‘dilated spirits, ampler heart, and growing’ - suggestion of obesity
Eve’s reaction to Adam eating
O glorious trial of exceeding Love, / Illustrious evidence, example high!’
‘This happy trial of thy love’
‘So saying, she embraced him, and for joy / Tenderly wept’
Adam and Eve’s actions immediately after the fall
‘They swim in mirth’
A:’Carnal desire inflaming’
‘inflame my sense’
E: ‘eye darted contagious fire’
‘in lust they burn’
Postlapsarian long term effects
‘found their eyes how opened, and their minds / How darkened; innocence, that as a veil / Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone’
‘destitute and bare / Of all their virtue’
‘Their guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike / To that first naked glory’
‘shook sore’ their mind, ‘tossed and turbulent’
‘nor only tears / Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within’
Postlapsarian Adam
‘O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear / To that false worm’ - phonologically associating Eve with evil
‘cover me ye pines, / Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs / Hide me’
Postlapsarian argument
Adam: ‘Would thou hadst hearkened to my words’
Eve: ‘why didst not thou the head / Command me absolutely not to go, / Going into such danger as thou sadist’
Says if he had done this ‘ Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me’
Ending in postlapsarian argument
‘Thus it shall befall / Him who to worth in women overthrusting / Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook’
‘Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours’
