It’s wonderful when Milton does this kind of thing: he tries to represent this punishment with as much scientific specificity as he possibly can. So you’ll remember that after the Fall, Adam and Eve are punished with bad weather. It’s with a great amount of imaginative literary gusto that Milton enumerates the mythic consequences, which he does at some length in Book Ten.

First, you have the mythic consequences that take place or are imagined to take place in the physical world and then there are also the psychic, the psychological, consequences that take place somewhere within the consciousnesses of Adam and Eve. The Fall is imagined in Books Nine and Ten to have, as you can – of course, this is the event heralded in the title, so it’s a big deal – it’s imagined to have an enormous range of consequences, and Milton divides these consequences in to essentially two categories. The angel Michael will continually criticize and correct Adam’s talk, and the general feeling, I think, of the last two books can be quite uncomfortable for just this reason: after the Fall, Adam and Eve live in a world in which mere speech itself can be blamed or, in some cases, it can be prohibited altogether. It means “allowable” or “permissible.” Milton’s suggesting that the Fall brings with it certain restrictions, specifically restrictions of language, and there start to arise constraints on speech or what Milton calls here “talk.” When you read the last two books of Paradise Lost, which we’ll be doing for the next week, you’ll begin to see just what kinds of restrictions Adam’s speech will be subjected to. With the departure now of Raphael, man will never again be permitted to enjoy “venial discourse unblam’d,” and “venial” here has a special meaning. With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us’d For example, it’s going to be impossible after this point for human beings to enjoy a friendly conversation with an angel. The narrator is lamenting the fact that Raphael has just departed the garden and that soon, not long after Raphael’s departure, Adam and Eve will fall, and this fall is going to have an impact – and this is something that the narrator is really emphasizing here – on the way they talk.

It’s a curious feature, I think, of Book Nine that it begins with a consideration of talk. Professor John Rogers: So the first thing I want you to do is turn to page 378. Introduction: The Fall, Language and Literature Milton ENGL 220 - Lecture 18 - Paradise Lost, Books IX-XĬhapter 1.

Paradise lost book 10