Milton's Inferno

Moreover, the importance of freedom has been glorified as well in the consequences of Satan’s failure. Milton describes Hell, where Satan is punished, with vivid and effective pictures. It is the “infernal world” of horrors. He presents Hell as a concrete place through Satan’s eye “dry land”, “burning lake”, “gate”....etc. At once as far as Angels kenn he views The dismal situation waste and wild,

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great furnace flam’d, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

That comes to all; but torture without end

Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed

With ever

He uses the symbols of light and darkness to express the difference between Hell and Heaven. Satan speaks about his days in Heaven as illuminated ones, happy ones as well, and describes his painful fall in Hell as a fall in darkness. It is clear that Milton is expressing his personal sufferance through Satan’s words, because he lost his sight and spent his late dark years, before the restoration and after, blind. It was a very painful experience that Milton tried to overcome by accepting God’s will and considering that God has deprived him from the world’s light, which leads through weakness, to illuminate him another inner one, which leads to greatest strength. His most famous words are: “what in me is dark”.

In the same way Milton’s courageous character, Satan, uses all his powerful qualities to overcome his despair, but in the bad side. He resists and reaffirms that:

“The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (PL, 1: 254-255)

With pride and courage, Satan decides to keep on his devilish way and declares that he prefers “to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven” (PL, 1: 263). He declares war on the omnipotent, God, and asks his falling angels to go on to build Pandemonium, the capital of Hell and the house of liberty. The first book of Paradise Lost ends then with Satan and his angels sitting for a council to speak about

She thinks that the whole poem needs to be a justification of God’s ways. The poem is based on Milton, with a heart which is not pure and upright as he would like, whose eye is full of darkness. She thinks that God is a character that Milton needs in his story. From this analysis, I can conclude that Milton’s characters and story are declared to be inspired from the Bible, but there is a complexity and paradox in the poem that let us think that they are just created characters that Milton imagined for his story. So, it is hard to say that has achieved his task to defend God’s way, It depends on how we interpret his allusion and symbols and to what reality we can relate