Language: the Site of a Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost maps the fall of Man. Although the text employs the language of Christian dualism and invokes a long-established epic tradition to place itself within a tradition of religious texts, the signifiers in the text become emptied of their religious weight. Thus the text too, enacts the fall of Man through the fall of language.

A radical instability is produced when pagan influences seep into the text, suggesting the infiltration of the pagan upon the religious in the text, and pointing to a culturally conflicted world. The speaker calls upon Urania, the patroness of astronomy and one of the nine Muses of Greek tradition, reflecting upon a departure from orthodoxy.

The theological notion of poetry is the site of God’s presence upended by the voice of individual subjectivity. When the speaker writes, “invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (13), the word “adventure” suggests restlessness, curiosity, the desire for knowledge—that which was the cause for the Fall. One of the ambivalent moves of the poem is how the poet calls upon the spirit of God to “pursue [...] Things unattempted yet in prose and rhyme” (15-6). The appeal to the divine to steer one away from tradition seems an appeal to God for the permission to transgress established boundaries. The emphasis on original artistry on the poem is the privileging of the self or art above God. Poetic authority lands in the hands of the poet over the God, by the end of the poem, completing the coup d’etat that the poem enacts, “I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (25-6). The ars poetica in the preamble cleverly rationalizes why the lack of rhyme signifies a return to tradition, rather than the departure from tradition that is denotes: showing the ability of reason to rationalize any deviation from tradition. The absence of rhyme is a move towards the reclamation of “ancient liberty [...] to the heroic poem.” It is important to note how the meaning of “liberty” becomes altered in the poem from the original religious meaning of “liberty through sacrifice of individual freedom to God” to “liberty in individual freedom,” showing the privileging of the self over God.

Milton’s Paradise Lost shows how the religious word itself is fallible and characterized by its fundamental instability. His poem reveals the operations by which the signification of the word can become emptied. Like the barren religious landscape he seeks to depict, Milton’s poetic language is itself a kind of “paradise lost.” The question that the text begs is this: is a poem that is composed of fallen language able to portray the theological without enacting its fall? Language becomes implicated in the destruction of ideology. The next question to ask is then this: what comes first, the fall of language or the fall of religion? The text thus shows how, a worldview is structured by language and both challenged by language.