Satan
The fallen archangel whose rhetoric of liberty later readers could not unhear.
Baroque & Neoclassical · Epic poem · 1667
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Satan wakes in Hell, crosses Chaos, and brings about the Fall. Milton justifies the ways of God to men by giving rebellion a terrible eloquence.
Sacred epic
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe…
Characters
Eve
First woman, whose curiosity and isolation the poem treats with uneasy sympathy.
Adam
First man, who chooses companionship over an unfallen solitude.
Themes
Freedom
Obedience is meaningless unless the alternative is real.
Pride
The refusal to serve becomes a cosmology of exile.
Motifs
Hell’s darkness visible sets the epic’s moral weather.
Eden is labor and delight before it is a lost address.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.