Brushed with the Hiss of Rustling Wings
First, I would like to pause for a moment to fully appreciate our reading Paradise Lost...yay!
That said, I confess it was a bit difficult for me to craft a coherent entry concerning just one or two aspects of Book I--so I decided that coherency is overrated. This entry hopes to put forth a few ideas concerning select passages, forming, I hope, a kind of outline for larger thought. This is the second time I have read Book I, and I must confess, I missed so much the first time (a statement that will be repeated, no doubt, each time I return to the text). The first and most striking "theme" (for lack of a better term) that I encountered in this reading was the character of sound in Book I, a theme that remains throughout the entirety of the work. I realized that in my first reading, I painted hell with sound, with clashing and bestial growling and the shaking of chains, imagining the screams and cackles inhabiting many contemporary conceptualizations of the place of suffering.
Milton's hell provides a shocking and somewhat more terrifying vision: a noiseless hell, where speech is courageous because it dares to "[b]reak[ ] the horrid silence" (11). When the demons are eventually roused (by the power of Satan's voice, a different and more fascinating thread of this concern with sound), their hateful and martial sounds assault me not so much because they originate in barbarous and evil beings, but because they are so very loud. There is much to be thought and said about the aural quality of Paradise Lost, and I hope to explore it more in our class discussions.
A second point I wish to address is the conceptualization of the nature of evil. Satan tells us that
"To do aught good never will be our task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight, / As being the contrary to his high will / Whom we resist" (13). Are we to believe that evil is only that which "contrary" to the will of God? In some ways, this proclamation seems to make evil simultaneously more benign and malignant.
Satan's role as historian, as (auto/)biographer of the Fall is especially intriguing. When he recounts the swarm of angels that "Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid/ The fiery surge, that from the precipice / Of heav'n received us falling, and the thunder / Winged red with lightening and impetuous rage" (13), I wonder at his interjection of the thunder's aesthetic beauty in his tale. Though it can be argued that all of Paradise Lost is comprised of beautiful, bordering on sublime (it is, after all, a epic about unimaginable things) imagery that invests even hell and Satan with immense beauty, I am made curious by Satan's relationship to sublimity and to his role(s) of author and documentor.
That said, I confess it was a bit difficult for me to craft a coherent entry concerning just one or two aspects of Book I--so I decided that coherency is overrated. This entry hopes to put forth a few ideas concerning select passages, forming, I hope, a kind of outline for larger thought. This is the second time I have read Book I, and I must confess, I missed so much the first time (a statement that will be repeated, no doubt, each time I return to the text). The first and most striking "theme" (for lack of a better term) that I encountered in this reading was the character of sound in Book I, a theme that remains throughout the entirety of the work. I realized that in my first reading, I painted hell with sound, with clashing and bestial growling and the shaking of chains, imagining the screams and cackles inhabiting many contemporary conceptualizations of the place of suffering.
Milton's hell provides a shocking and somewhat more terrifying vision: a noiseless hell, where speech is courageous because it dares to "[b]reak[ ] the horrid silence" (11). When the demons are eventually roused (by the power of Satan's voice, a different and more fascinating thread of this concern with sound), their hateful and martial sounds assault me not so much because they originate in barbarous and evil beings, but because they are so very loud. There is much to be thought and said about the aural quality of Paradise Lost, and I hope to explore it more in our class discussions.
A second point I wish to address is the conceptualization of the nature of evil. Satan tells us that
"To do aught good never will be our task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight, / As being the contrary to his high will / Whom we resist" (13). Are we to believe that evil is only that which "contrary" to the will of God? In some ways, this proclamation seems to make evil simultaneously more benign and malignant.
Satan's role as historian, as (auto/)biographer of the Fall is especially intriguing. When he recounts the swarm of angels that "Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid/ The fiery surge, that from the precipice / Of heav'n received us falling, and the thunder / Winged red with lightening and impetuous rage" (13), I wonder at his interjection of the thunder's aesthetic beauty in his tale. Though it can be argued that all of Paradise Lost is comprised of beautiful, bordering on sublime (it is, after all, a epic about unimaginable things) imagery that invests even hell and Satan with immense beauty, I am made curious by Satan's relationship to sublimity and to his role(s) of author and documentor.
posted by alh at 7:58 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home