PARADISE LOST: Satan

Question 1

Satan’s SOLILOQUY: (1)
1. “O earth, how like to heaven, if not preferred”
2. “seat worthier of gods”

Answer 1

1.
a) Apostrophe (“O”) - addressing something that can’t hear
-> self-dramatising
-> soliloquy - Renaissance individuality
b) Ironic - we learn of Paradise’s beauty from the one who destroyed it:
* “Sweet interchange of hill, and valley, rivers, woods and plains”
-> Sensory, Pastoral
* “With what delight could I have walked thee round”
-> “what” - language fails, beauty beyond expression

2. “gods”
   * lower case, plural
   -> Classical epic
   -> leaving space for himself
   …
   “herb, plant, and nobler birth”
   * Tillyard’s “Chain of Being”
   -> Satan admires the order, as long as he’s at the top
   - Introduction of first person pronoun -> places himself at centre of soliloquy… and order?

Question 2

Satan’s SOLILOQUY: (2)
3. “the more I see // Pleasures about me, so much more I feel // Torment within me”
4. “But neither here seek I, no nor in heaven to dwell”

Answer 2

3. Parallelism in lines
   -> Cause and effect
   (- Joy in Heaven is directly proportional to Satan’s (internal) pain in Hell)
   -> Soliloquy shifts between…
   * declamatory, rhetorical rant…
   * …and outpour of emotion
   -> Shift from appreciation to dejection
   - Stanley FISH: PL = a poem that re-enacts the fall:
   - We ‘fall’ for Satan (this time, without being deceived)
   - We can see ourselves in the poem - what we had, and what we lost
   - “all summed up in man”

4.
a) Awkwardness - Satan disrupts order (‘literally’ demonstrated linguistically)
+ “linked in weal or woe”
- Connected (alliteration) but contrasting
b) Repeated (often double) negation
-> No space for Satan, doesn’t fit

Question 3

Satan’s SOLILOQUY: (3)
5. “In one day to have marred // What he Almighty styled, six nights and days”
6. “With heavenly spoils, our spoils”
7. “Flaming ministers” vs. “This man of clay”
8. His plan for REVENGE:
a) “Wrapped in mist // Of midnight vapour glide obscure”
b) “Revenge, at first though sweet, // Bitter ere long back on itself recoils”

Answer 3

5. Undermining God, aggrandising/elevating himself
   6.
   a) “spoils” also = snakeskin
   b) Repetition - like a speech, persuading an audience
   c) “our” - addressing an audience (like rhetorical “O indignity!”
6. Fire working to serve clay
   -> Rejecting order/his position, his subservience to man
   -> Grand vs. simple, monosyllabic
7. Snake-y revenge
   a)
   - Visceral, disgusting, wet, snake-like
   b)
   - Images of ‘tasting’ - THE FALL!
   - Snake-like imagery

Question 4

Satan as a SNAKE:
1. “cárbuncle [gem stone] his eyes; // With burnished neck of verdant gold”
2. “Erect // Amidst his circling spires”
3. “With tract oblique”

TEMPTATION

Answer 4

1. Beautiful, almost regal -> a disguise, appearance vs. reality
2. Both phallic, and like a decorated church
3. He does not approach directly, both literally and in terms of his persuading speech:
   - Obsequious, dramatic, like an admiring Courtly Lover - HILL
   - Described with an extended Epic simile:
   -> Sailing against the wind - “As when a ship…wrought nigh river’s mouth…where the wind veers oft…and shifts her sail; so varied he”