Themes/Quotes - Paradise Lost Flashcards
Heaven
S - “O Earth, how like to Heaven, if not preferred / More justly, seat worthier than gods, as built / With second thoughts, reforming what was old!” - exclamatory sentence and use of apostrophe displays Satan’s sensitivity and eye for beauty
S - “Terrestrial Heaven, danced round by other heavens / That shine, yet bear their bright officious lamps, / Light above light, for thee alone, as seems, / In thee concentrating all their precious beams / Of sacred influence” - symbol of circle and centre displays eternal image of earth, prelapsarian/utopian world
E - “Heaven is high, / High and remote to see from thence distinct / Each thing on Earth” - implying that God is far away and that she is out of sight
Descent
S - “O foul descent! That I who erst contended / With gods to sit the highest, am now constrained / Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime, / This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the height of deity aspired” - chain of being
“But what will not ambition and revenge / Descend to? Who aspires must down as low / As high he soared, obnoxious first or last / To basest things.” - chain of being
N - “Thou never from that hour in Paradise / Foundst either sweet repast, or sound repose”
A - “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, / Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote? / Rather how hast thou yielded to transgress / The strict forbiddance, how to violate / The sacred Fruit forbidden” - heavy use of alliteration - loss of innocence, death and decay, repetitions convey the tragedy. the metaphorically sexual transgression with Satan is suggested again, she is offered up to evil
N - “wearied with their amorous play” - on Even and Adam
N - “both in subjection now / To sensual Appetite, who from beneath / Usurping over sovereign Reason claimed / Superior Way”
Disguise
N - “Considered evey creature, which of all / Most opportune might serve his wiles, and found / The serpent subtlest beast of all the filed.”
N - “fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom / To enter, and his dark suggestions hide / From sharpest sight”
N - “together sewed, / To gird their waist, vain covering if to hide / Their guilt and dreaded shame”
N - “night veiled the horizon round” - night covers the earth (first of a succession of ‘disguise’ words) “seven continued nights he rode” - he follows the shadow of the sun as it revolves around the earth to stay hidden
Darkness/Night
N - “the space of seven continued nights he rode / With darkness”
S - “thus wrapped in mist / Of midnight vapour glide obscure, and pry / In every bush and brake, where hap may find […] the dark intent I bring”
N - “Like a black mist low creeping, he held on / His midnight search, where soonest he might find / The serpent”
Treason and Hatred
Main: N - “I now must change/ Those notes to tragic; foul distrust, and breach/ Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt/ And disobedience: on the part of Heav’n”
N - “When Satan who late fled before the threats / Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved / In meditated fraud and malice, bent / On Man’s destruction”
N - “Thence full of anguish driven”
S - “The more I see / Pleasures about me, so much more I feel / Torment within me, as from the hateful siege of contraries; all good to me becomes / Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state” (syntactic parallelism emphasises internal conflict)
Extra:
S - “For only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts; and him destroyed”
N - “Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts / Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites” - Volpone’s enthusiasm
N - “high winds worse within / Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate, / Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore / Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent”
Evil/Discord
N - “Satan involved in rising mist”
N - “in at his mouth / The devil entered, and his brutal sense, / In heart of head, possessing soon inspired / With act intelligential”
N - “Such ambush hid among sweet flowers and shades / Waited with hellish rancour imminent / To intercept the way”
A - “O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear / To that false worm […] and find we know / Both good and evil, good lost and evil got”
A - “Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know, / which leaves us naked thus, of honour void, / Of innocence, of faith, of purity, / Our wonted ornaments now soiled and stained / And in our faces evident the signs / Of foul concupiscence, whence evil store, / Even shame, the last of evils; of the first / Be sure then.”
N - “Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning / And of their vain contest appeared no end”
N - “compassing the earth”, “thrice the equinoctial line / He circled” - the significance of him moving in circles highlights how he is locked in error and evil
S - “in whose mazy folds / To hide me, and the darken intent i bring”
Power
S - “To me shall be the glory sole among / Th’infernal powers, in one day to have marred / What he Almighty styled”
Injustice
S - “O indignity! / Subjected to his service angel wings, / And flaming ministers to watch and tend / Their earthly charge” - apostrophe displays his anguish
S - “O foul descent! That I who erst contended / With gods to sit the highest, am now constrained / Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime, / This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the height of deity aspired” - apostrophe displays his anguish
Physical World
“O foul descent! That I who erst contended / With gods to sit the highest, am now constrained / Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime, / This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the height of deity aspired”
Harmony
Main:
E - “Our pleasant task enjoined”
A - “For not irksome toil, but to delight / He made us, and delight to Reason joined”
A - “I feel / The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh, / Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state / Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe”
A - “we are one, / One flesh; to lost thee were to lose myself”
Extra:
A - “These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands / Will keep from wilderness with ease
N – “Of the to her his charge of quick return, / Repeated, she to him as oft engaged”
A - “How can I live without thee, how forgo / Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined, / To live again in these wild woods forlorn”
E - “One heart, one soul in both”
Free Will
E - “let us divide our labours, thou where choice/ Leads thee”
E - “Our task we choose”
A – “But God left free the will, for what obeys / Reason, is free, and Reason he made right” – does this contradict itself? God sets out the reason for man to follow
A – “Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;”
S - “ Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste”
E - “Adam, freely taste, / And fear of death deliver to the winds”
N - “She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit / With liberal hand”
A - “beyond this had been force, / And force upon free will hath here no place”
Self-control
A - “Not diffident of thee do I dissuade / Thy absence from my sight, but to avoid / Th’attempt itself”
Love/Faith
“while I / In yonder spring of roses intermixed / With myrtle, find what to redress till noon”
S - “Empress, the way is ready, and not long, / Beyond a row of myrtles” - showing how Eve must go beyond her faithfulness if she is to eat the fruit
The Female
A – “for nothing lovelier can be found / In woman, than to study household good” – patriarchal view
A – Go in thy native innocence, rely / On what thou hast of
virtue”
A – “The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks, / Safest and seemliest by her husband stays”
E – “With thy permission then”
E - “Was I to have never parted from thy side? / As good have grown there still a lifeless rib”
E - “Being as I am, why didst not thou the head / Command me absolutely not to go”
E - “Hadst thou been firm and fixed in thy dissent, / Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me”
A - “Thus it shall befall / Him who to worth in women overtrusting / Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook, / And left to herself, if evil thence ensue, / She first his weak indulgence will accuse”
N - “So rose the Danite strong / Herculean Samson from the harlot-lap / Of Philistean Dalilah” - allusion to the Samson and Dalilah classical myth suggesting Eve is all to blame, anti feminist reading
God’s Will
A – “For not irksome toil, but to delight / He made us, and delight to Reason joined / Who guards her, or with her the worst endures”
E - “But of this Tree we may not taste nor touch; / God so commanded, and left that command / Sole daughter of his voice; there set, we live / Law to our selves, our Reason is our law”
E - “But of the Fruit of this fair Tree amidst / The garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat / Thereof
Lies/Deception
A - “Since Reason not impossibly may meet / Some specious object by the foe suborned, / And fall into deception unaware”
N – “O much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve, / Of thy presumed return”
N - “Into the heart of Eve his words made way” - penetrating words / “into her heart too easy entrance once […] impregned with reason”
S - on the Apple: “ere long i might perceive, / Strange alteration in me, to degree / Of Reason in my inward powers, and speech / Wanted not long”
E - “thy overpraising leaves in doubt / The virtue of that fruit, […] But say, where grows the tree, from hence how far?”
S - “Queen of this Universe, do not believe / Those rigid threats of death; ye shall not die: / How should ye? by the fruit? it gives you life to knowledge”
Antithesis
“What hither brought us, hate, not love, nor hope / Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste / Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, / Save what is in destroying, other joy / To me is lost”
Allusions
- “Of stern Achilles on his foe persued/ Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage/ Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused, / Or Neptune’s ire of Juno’s, that so long / Perplxed the Greek and Cytherea’s son”
- “And lovely, never since of serpent kind / Lovelier, not those that in Illyria changed / Hermione and Cadmus, or the god / In Epidaurus; nor to which transformed / Ammonian Jove, or Capitoline was seen, He with Olympias, this with her who bore / Scipio the height of Rome.”
Seduction/Lust
N - “Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, / To lure her eye” - sexual imagery
E - “this Fruit divine, / Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste”
N - “he on Eve / Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him / As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn”
A - “For never did thy beauty since the day / I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned / With all perfections, so inflame my sense / With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now / Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree”
N - “Of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire”
Good
A - “His violence thou fearst not, being such, / As we, not capable of death or pain”
N - “her every air / Of gesture overawed / His malice”
N - “That space the evil one abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good”
Gullibility
E - “Thee, serpent, subtlest beast of all the fuel / I knew, but not with human voice endued; Redouble then this miracle, and say, / How cam’s thou speakable of mute”
N - “into fraud / Led Eve our credulous mother”
Reason
S - “God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just / Not just, not God; not feared then, nor obeyed: / Your fear itself of death removes the fear”
Greed
N - “greedily she engorged without restraint, / And knew not eating death”
Ascent
E - “Till dieted by thee I grow mature / In knowledge , as the gods who all things know”
E - “have also found / Th’effects to correspond, opener my eyes/ Dim erst, dilated spirits, ampler heart,/ And growing up to godhead”
N - “they swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings”
