John Milton's Paradise Lost

There is no cause to request up to date ideas to Milton if we do not care if Milton remains alive. However, if we desire him to be more than a historical artifact, we should do more than just study him against the backdrop of his time. We should reinterpret him in lightweight of the germane thought of our own age.

Images and allusions to sex and death are intermingled throughout John Milton's Paradise Lost . The character of Satan serves as not only an embodiment of death and sin, but furthermore insatiated sexy lust. The blend of sex and lust has significant philosophical implications, especially in relative to topics of creation, decimation, and the nature of existence. Milton, in Paradise Lost, sets up that with sex, as with belief, he is of no specific hierarchical establishment. However, Milton does not desire to be confused with the stereotypical puritan. Milton the bard, appears to commemorate the perfect of sex; yet, he deplores concupiscence and alerts against the ills of lust, insisting lust leads to sin, aggression and death.

From the beginning, Satan, like fallen humanity, not only blames other ones; but furthermore makes comic and grandiose reasons for his bad behavior. Yet, despite his reasoning to search revenge against God, 'his factual motivation for escaping from torment and perverting paradise is, at smallest partially, certain thing more basic: Satan desires sex' (Daniel 26).

In the unfastening publications of the verse, Satan is cast into a fiery torment that is not only is miserable, but devoid of sex. As Satan describes when he has got away to Eden, in torment: 'neigh delight nor love, but fierce yearn, / Among our other torments not the smallest, / Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pine' (Book IV, 509-11). The phallic implications of 'pain of yearning pine' is quite clear. In this metaphor, Milton expresses that sex itself is not a sin; to be without it is a 'hellish' punishment. However, Milton rejects the ethics of lusting for sex, equating it with: death, sin, aggression and Satan. Milton elucidates the lustful yearns of Satan all through the first couple of books. For demonstration, fluid, a common emblem of femininity is depicted seven times in the first two books in the form of a lagoon' (Daniel 26). The 'lake' serves as a metaphor to the waters of the womb. Further metaphors to feminine anatomy and the womb are made through references of hell as a 'pit' (Book I, 91). Therefore, Satan's fall into hell is an allusion to being thrust back into the womb(hell) where Satan and his rebels are sexually inhibited. As Daniels states, 'These images suggest that Satan has been, in regard to the perfect sex that he enjoyed in Heaven, emasculated, rendered impotent but burning, in a feminine, inactive in hell.' (27). Similarly, Frank Kermode comments, 'Milton boldly hints that the fallen angel [Satan] is sexually deprived . . . the price of warring against omnipotence is impotence (114). This is exemplified in ...