Thomas Hood wrote: Speaking of the dead, Sir Walter's prose could be used by the CIA
for verbal waterboarding

Way to hoist him on his own petard!, with a wicked phrase.

Robert Tulip wrote: No way! This book may be a grind to read, but it is intense and powerful. I finished it yesterday, and found it tough but compelling. We get Satan asking himself why destroy something of such beauty as the earth, and rationalising his purpose of revenge on God by placing man in thrall to himself. We get the dumb angels, easily tricked by the wily demon. We get the question why God needed to place military guard on earth, when they all thought the battle of heaven was over and Satan was safely locked behind the gates of hell.

Something for everyone, is how I look at PL. It has action, argument, and psychological drama. It can be wearying, but the reason probably does have something to do with us, rather than Milton's faults entirely, as Walter Raleigh said.

Pardon the bad joke, but I have to think Milton thought of Satan as a Godsend, artistically, for his poem. If I were doing a movie of PL, I'd need to convery the sense of Satan's inner conflict, the most powerfully described emotion in the poem. Maybe the only way to do this would be to give him his soliloquy as Book IV starts. I'd have him somehow confront his own image, maybe in a pool of water, and talk to himself. He briefly lapses into the second person at line 66, and I'd have him continue this mode of address.

Hadst thou the same free Will and Power to stand?
Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,
But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all?
Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe. [ 70 ]
Nay curs'd be thou; since against his thy will.

Satan's speech in this section went a long way toward creating the view of him as a type of tragic hero, the villain who confronted his own evil nature. He also seems a bit like Prometheus in struggling against God. Of course, this view can be called a misreading, but it is partly understandable through Satan's eloquence and his honest emotional struggle with what he, unable to will it otherwise, is. It is also understandable in relation to the character of God. We as readers also might feel like rebelling against such a fellow. We also can see in Satan how powerful for Milton was the idea of the inner Hell. He didn't deny that Hell was a physical place, but his imagination is more inspired by Hell as a condition of inner torment one suffers from.

Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; [ 75 ]
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

Satan's dilemma has another dimension, that of the public man who has committed himslef to a position and now cannot back down even if he wanted. He is a prisoner of politics.

Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduc'd
With other promises and other vaunts
Then to submit, boasting I could subdue [ 85 ]
Th' Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vaine,
Under what torments inwardly I groane:
While they adore me on the Throne of Hell

What does everyone reading this poem think of the portrait of Adam and Eve? Women may have the strongest reaction to how Eve is depicted.

Once again, I'm going to put my 2 cents in before I read what others have posted. What to say about the comment I am about to make, humm -- I guess this is where the feminist in me comes out.

Here is the lines from bk IV:

To whom thus Eve repli'd. O thou for whom [ 440 ]
And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh,

It seems impossible that anyone, anyone before John Milton, John Milton and every person who had a hand in creating the multiple copies of the bible that exist, could write these lines without thinking, "There must be some mistake. New life comes from women, not men." It defies logic and the simple observation of nature. I am not making any commentary on the role of the male in the process of procreation, but rather that observation would/should lean one in the direction of assigning genesis to the female. In fact, in many primitive and tribal groups the belief is that the fetus begins to grow without the aid of a male, his role is only to feed the growing life.

I guess my comment is how strange this idea is to me, that woman was created from man. The only explanation I can come up with is that it is a deliberate co-opting of power -- the power of creation for the purpose of subjugation. Have I gone too far? I am sure there are quite a few heads shaking, but I think not. There is an anthropologist, Riane Eisler, that has written extensively about the emergence of patriarchy. Her book Sacred Pleasure she explores the Adam and Eve myth and its role in patriarchy.

Saffron wrote:To whom thus Eve repli'd. O thou for whom [ 440 ]
And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh

It seems impossible that anyone, anyone before John Milton, John Milton and every person who had a hand in creating the multiple copies of the bible that exist, could write these lines without thinking, "There must be some mistake. New life comes from women, not men." It defies logic and the simple observation of nature. I am not making any commentary on the role of the male in the process of procreation, but rather that observation would/should lean one in the direction of assigning genesis to the female. In fact, in many primitive and tribal groups the belief is that the fetus begins to grow without the aid of a male, his role is only to feed the growing life.
I guess my comment is how strange this idea is to me, that woman was created from man. The only explanation I can come up with is that it is a deliberate co-opting of power -- the power of creation for the purpose of subjugation. Have I gone too far? I am sure there are quite a few heads shaking, but I think not. There is an anthropologist, Riane Eisler, that has written extensively about the emergence of patriarchy. Her book Sacred Pleasure she explores the Adam and Eve myth and its role in patriarchy.

Thank you for kicking off this discussion, often the most active one that PL produces. I think that feeling of strangeness you mention is exactly what happens when we step back from stories or ideas we've heard for years (though I suspect this one has seemed strange to you for quite a while). The strangeness of the Christian belief in expiation of sin through the sacrifice of Christ impressed me anew as I read Book III.

My head is nodding, not shaking. As you say, the creation of the future child-bearing human from the man is strange indeed. As you've read by now, Eve's subjugation to the male goes beyond her physical origin. She's portrayed as a peg or two below her husband in brainpower, and that's the way it was meant to be, says Milton, no dinosuar in his own day but possibly relatively liberal. Well, myths do serve a defintie social purpose, don't they?

Saffron wrote: It seems impossible that anyone, anyone could write these lines . . .

Saffron, the prehistoric paradigm for sexual reproduction was the agricultural sowing of seed. According to this view, since the male possessed the seed, he was the originator of life. Everything else follows from this paradigmatic assumption.

Tom

Thomas Hood wrote:

Saffron wrote: It seems impossible that anyone, anyone could write these lines . . .

Saffron, the prehistoric paradigm for sexual reproduction was the agricultural sowing of seed. According to this view, since the male possessed the seed, he was the originator of life. Everything else follows from this paradigmatic assumption.

Tom

Tom,
Not all peoples have been agrarian. There definitely have been groups that do understand human conception to be the planting of a seed or at least not the male as the source of the seed.

Thomas Hood wrote:

Saffron wrote: It seems impossible that anyone, anyone could write these lines . . .

Saffron, the prehistoric paradigm for sexual reproduction was the agricultural sowing of seed. According to this view, since the male possessed the seed, he was the originator of life. Everything else follows from this paradigmatic assumption.Tom

Tom, I'm sure Saffron will respond, but are you saying there is just one paradigm that can be drawn from myth concerning the source of procreation? I'm no expert in myth, but it seems that many do take the other side in the matter. The point in regard to Genesis is that it issued from a patriarchic culture; therefore, no surprise it would bend over backward to give the male primacy after God.

Saffron wrote:Not all peoples have been agrarian. There definitely have been groups that do understand human conception to be the planting of a seed or at least not the male as the source of the seed.

True, but isn't it true that every culture that has persisted and developed has had an agrarian base? Most people today (I imagine) have no idea of the importance of seed. Once the main task of life was getting food -- not sex, shelter, clothing, . . . . If no seed were saved and carried through the winter, then starvation. Seed were the family's treasure. The seed paradigm is a consequence of the real importance of seed.

Tom

DWill wrote:. . . are you saying there is just one paradigm that can be drawn from myth concerning the source of procreation?

Yes, to the best of my knowledge the seed paradigm was dominant over all major cultures -- those I've looked at anyway. Actually, the seed paradigm probably originated with women because the preservation of the seed was a woman's task. In traditional Chinese culture, seed were stored in Kun, the sector of the mother in the southwest corner of the house.

Tom

Thomas Hood wrote: Saffron, the prehistoric paradigm for sexual reproduction was the agricultural sowing of seed. According to this view, since the male possessed the seed, he was the originator of life. Everything else follows from this paradigmatic assumption.

With respect to the cultures that claim intellectual descendance from ancient Greece, one of the most power evocations of this basic idea was Plato. Here is a link to Timaeus where the following passage is taken. (note: for those of us who come from cultures that do not claim descendence from Plato et al, there are other stories that explain the relationship between mind and matter very differently, and with very different results.)

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/7/157 ... tm#2H_SECT

"Wherefore also in men the organ of generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the desire and love of the man and the woman, bringing them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the tree, sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is completed."

This stuff goes along with Plato's idea of matter as empty without what is "really real" - that is Form (reason being the only way to perceive Form). Aristotle expressed this concept of matter as materia prima. The basic idea for Plato is that women are essentially materia prima, dumb to the higher calling of reason and essentially an animal vessel for the growth and embodiment of form as it descends into the earthly plain. This "seeding," of course, is the role of men, who are, according to Plato, capable of reason. A good article about the concept of prime matter viz Aristotle is "Aristotle and Prime Matter: A reply to Hugh R. King" by Friedrich Solmsen. I originally got it from JSTOR so I can't provide a link to the text.