Analysis of Paradise Lost by John Milton

The epic is about Adam and Eve, how they were created and how they lost their place in the Garden of Eden (Paradise). Milton took the theme from the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible which also includes the story of the origin of Satan (or Lucifer, as he was often called), an angel in heaven who led his followers in a war against God and was ultimately sent with them to hell. Thirst for revenge led him to cause man’s downfall by turning into a serpent and tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

The first words of Paradise Lost state that the poem’s main theme will be man’s first disobedience. The poem itself represents two moral paths that one can take after disobedience: the downward spiral of increasing sin and degredation, represented by Satan, or the road to redemtion, reperesented by Adam and Eve. Milton narrates the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, explains how and why it happens and places the story within the context of Satan’s rebellion and Jesus’ resurrection.

The first two senteces are extremly compressed, containing information about Milton’s reasons for writing his epic, his subject matter and his attitudes towards it.

Narrator opens Paradise Lost by formally declaring his poem’s subject: humankind’s first act of disobedience toward God and the consequences that followed from it. The act is Adam and Eve’s eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, as told in Genesis. In the first line Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve’s sin as the fruit of the forbidden tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative fruits of their actions. He asserts that this original sin brought death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our home in Paradise until Jesus restores humankind to its former position of purity.

Milton’s speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source of poetic inspiration, to sing about his subjects through him. His muse is the Holy Spirit whom he asks to fill him with knowledge of the beginning of the world, because the Holy Spirit was the active force in creating the universe. Milton’s approach to the invocation of the muse sets the pattern for all of Paradise Lost.

Milton’s speaker announces that he wants to be inspired with sacred knowledge because he wishes to show to man that the fall of humankind into sin and death was part of God’s greater plan which is justified.