Milton and the Making of <i>Paradise Lost<i> by William Poole

Author:William Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Note Milton’s repeated “seemd” (compare the identical repetition at 5.617, the one-line origin of sin); and “but … stayd not” is faintly but undeniably sardonic. Indeed, although Milton returns several times to the notion of alien life in Paradise Lost, his allusions are never unequivocal. Milton accepts that beings might exist “Betwixt the angelical and human kind” (3.462), and he does suspect, I grant, that they, along perhaps with “Translated saints” (Enoch, Elijah), may perhaps live on the moon. But this is an attempt to accommodate types of beings widely accepted in Christian and indeed pagan tradition,44 and it is embedded in a passage otherwise tinted with satire. Raphael also introduces at length the argument from analogy that the moon may well be inhabited, and that this analogy might be applied to other suns (8.144–52). Again, this is in the context of his conjectural discussion with Adam, a discussion curtailed by Raphael’s own injunctions not to think about it too much: “Dream not of other Worlds” (8.175). Satan assumes that in theory all the “shining orbs” might be inhabited (3.670), and with him agree the unfallen angels. Yet crucially they insinuate that such habitation is “destined” (7.622), and so set aside for the future—these are solar systems waiting to be colonized by the expanding populations of the unfallen, should they remain unfallen, not planets inhabited with peculiar and nonhuman realms of life. Milton is worlds away from Kepler, for instance, whose posthumous Somnium (1634) imagined screaming reptiles on the moon, living and dying in a day, like short-lived versions of the dinosaurs of which he could not have known.45 As for Milton’s Galileo, when he descries lands on the moon, they are “imagined lands” (5.263); although Galileo’s observations are not in themselves called into question, his interpretation of them is. The moon he sees is a “spotty globe,” a sign that sin has taken hold in the heavens: new technology confirms rather than challenges the lapsarian universe (1.291). Thus Milton’s own obvious fascination with these ubiquitous questions of seventeenth-century thought is constantly held in check; but although his interest in the new science is self-admonished, it is not effaced.

Milton, perhaps surprisingly, also does not contest the basic truth of astrology: heavenly bodies exert an influence over earthly bodies. Once again, however, this is presented as dismal lapsarianism, at least in its malign consequences: God directs his angels to manipulate the formerly benign heavens so that

To the blank moon

Her office they prescribed, to the other five

Their planetary motions and aspects

In sextile, square, and trine, and opposite,

Of noxious efficacy, and when to join

In synod unbenign, and taught the fixed

Their influence malignant when to shower (10.656–62)

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