PARADISE LOST, BOOK XIII
Transcribed and annotated
by David Lake
(Milton, describing the departure
of Adam and Eve from paradise,
ends Paradise Lost, Book XII,
with these words:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
Now read on…)
No solitary way indeed they took --
I was beside them. Do not close the book
Yet, audience fit; though Milton’s voice is stilled,
He’s left one trifling promise unfulfilled:
“To justify” – Book One, line twenty-six –
You know the tag? – the Almighty’s darker tricks.
Well, now, while blind John’s fictions give delight
To Heaven and earth, they leave God’s ways in night,
Or seem more to impugn than justify –
Defending God is hard, though many try. 10
John stands excused: that more than mortal task
I shall take up. But who the devil, you ask,
Am I to try it? One it much concerned;
One whose left ear through twelve books often burned;
For this great argument the one sure source:
Who knows the horse-race better than the horse?
Who can expound the mysteries of evil
To human readers, better than the Devil?
Father of lies, you murmur? I object:
I’ve had a bad press from the other sect. 20
That I’m a liar is a thumping lie:
But I shall come to that point by and by.
Meanwhile you will observe – my numbers show it –
I lack one grace of fiction: I’m no poet;
No Milton soaring in blank verse sublime:
Excuse me, but the Devil’s form is rhyme,
With language prompted by no Heavenly Muse,
But clear and blunt to state my honest views.
To justify to men the ways of God
That Satan should attempt, you may think odd. 30
You’ve been misled: let this truth set you free –
I never was the Father’s enemy.
His second son I am, of God’s blood royal,
No rebel, but legitimate and loyal.
That most uncivil war that Heaven split –
My elder brother was the cause of it
Through his ambition and intolerance.
When he piped, all creation had to dance!
Such sickly tunes, too, and smug harmonies!
Simple C major – he banned all black keys, 40
The tasteless tyrant! Half of life denied –
My half, the equal truth, the darker side.
I’m sorry, sirs; my task must be corrective,
And to that end I’ll try to be objective.
Where shall I start? No artist, I’ll begin
Ab ovo, with the origin of Sin,
So called – Book Two, I think. Be not deceived:
Sin was a name my brother’s brain conceived,
So, if you will, you may call her his child –
But so he nicknamed our sweet, undefiled 50
Immortal Nature, eldest child of God,
My sister and my wife, who with me trod
In the beginning the eternal glades
And bore our son, the mighty King of Shades.
Brother was jealous, would not recognize
Our boy, who seemed a bastard to his eyes;
Revengeful he, all kindred ties forgotten,
Set up his standard as God’s Sole-Begotten,
Not suddenly, but after plotting long –
Oh yes, they plotted – Raphael tells it wrong, 60
But what would you expect? He, my dear readers,
Was one of that high faction’s highest leaders.
Just turn the Seraph’s story upside down
And you’ll get the true outline. Were we thrown
By heavenly power to bottomless perdition?
Nonsense! the war was ended by partition.
Father had stood quite neutral, as was right,
And never sent his chariot to fight,
But at the treaty used his car divine
To draw between our fronts the cease-fire line. 70
These were the terms: each host ruled where it stood;
God’s mount, an enclave in the zone of Good,
Was neutralized for ever; there I sent
My messengers, or under truce-flag went
Myself from time to time, as you may read
In Job, when filial duty called, or need.
Big Brother’s zone was South; to my lot fell
The North’s deep lakes and chasms, which you call Hell
(A district dark, to shallow eyes a waste,
But black and comely to our finer taste). 80
Between the two, just on the southern side,
They quickly built a Wall, huge, strong, supplied
With massive gates well locked to keep us in –
And, doubtless, stop their cherubs seeing Sin.
This cut us, by uranographic quirk,
Off from the staircase to the Lord’s last work,
Your universe, where time was due to start,
And we had orders sealed to play our part.
I lodged strong protests, claimed our natural right
Of access corridor or overflight; 90
South would not budge, and mounting confrontation
Soon threatened Heaven with new desolation
Till I received by God’s own carrier pigeon
(A bird not quite unknown to your religion)
The following message in the Father’s hand:
Son, yield the point; I have the matter planned.
My power has dealt with locks and weakened chains;
As a peace-keeping force, though South complains,
I Nature and Death sole guards have nominated;
Verb. sap.; I think you will not long be gated. 100
Nor was I – read Book Two. The bard was blind
Here only to one trifling point, I find:
The adamant chains were on the gates, not me;
As I approached, they fell, and I was free,
Free once again to take part in God’s plan,
The shaping and the tempering of Man.
Oh yes, I helped. Insert throughout Book Seven
The active presence of our half of heaven,
Maintained quite adequately by us three,
The Almighty’s former sentinels and me. 110
We’d built our causeway some few years before
The business with the tree, you may be sure.
Unseen accomplices at every birth
Of worm, fish, bird or beast upon the earth,
Beside me, as the blood rose, or the breath,
Stood God’s child Nature and his grandchild Death.
The other sect ignored us, turning eyes
In carefully blind raptures to the skies.
We were, the party song declared, not there:
First Son made all things, and he made them fair. 120
“All creatures wise and wonderful.” Death gaped,
And swallowed all the dinosaurs we’d shaped;
Nature smiled sweetly, and by way of answer
Invented sharks and syphilis and cancer,
The sea-wasp, scorpion, lion, tiger, snake,
And gave them guts no good for grass or cake.
So six or sixty billion days went by,
Till all but man had learnt to live – and die.
Now come we to the crux, sage audience dear;
Some mysteries I can’t explain, I fear; 130
Above all, in whose image who made who:
Did gods make men, or were we made by you?
Heaven only knows the way it seemed to heaven.
To metaphysics I was never given,
But the profound philosophers of Hell
Assure me, either tale will do as well.
I’ll say just this: through all eternity
We knew we shared with Man one destiny.
All the great hosts, archangel, cherub, elf,
Imp, gnome – who knows? perhaps the Lord himself -- 140
When Adam was, we felt redoubled life;
Still more when Eve completed man with wife.
The Almighty claimed he made them; all I know
Is that they were – we’d better let it go;
I therefore give the Father this high glory
(And anyway, it simplifies the story).
They were at first quite helpless things, unfit
For me, God said, and I acknowledged it;
He made them therefore wards of my great rival,
Who, I agree, looked after their survival 150
With guards and garden well supplied with fruit –
But childish propaganda tales to boot.
They were his children; he would keep them free
From pain – and thought – if they kept clear of me.
I’d tell them lies to make them falsely clever;
But trust him, and he’d see they lived for ever!
Still in his churches this sweet tale, forsooth,
While I am called a liar, is called a truth.
Immortal innocence! eternal play!
The playthings never to be put away -- 160
Then what of sex? Man was to multiply
His kind, like every creature born to die;
Should earth become elastic, to extend
As numbers grew, or choke them in the end?
Neither. Know, readers: God’s and Nature’s plan
Made Love and Death inseparable in man.
in every coupling kind, each fertile flower,
Sweet Lust renews what Death must soon devour;
No death, no change; no progress; no new birth;
Could man be the one monster of the earth? 170
Sole cold immortal, passionless as stone,
Not marrying nor giving – but, I own,
This takes me from my story. To return:
My brother taught that pair how not to learn,
Then sent his henchman Raphael to make sure
That they would tread his narrow path demure,
Refuse the fruit of knowledge good and evil,
Look at no stars – above all, shun the Devil.
I knew what I must do: I could no other
But win my younger from my elder brother, 180
Turning him from a child-ape to a man
Aware of me – besides, such was the plan,
The purpose sealed, not mine but in the heart
Of the Supreme Enigma from the start.
If proof were needed for this claim, pray look
How, when outnumbered (end of the Fourth Book)
I risked arrest from Gabriel and his bands,
The Father saved my mission from their hands.
He swung the sign of Justice in the sky,
And Gabriel knew his orders, let me fly, 190
With double-talk, of course, to save his face,
While I withdrew to help the human race.
Above all else, if God had really meant
To keep your primal parents innocent,
Why did he give each such a character –
She vain, he weak enough to worship her?
Milton, of course, maintains the vain pretence
That they, being perfect, fell from innocence.
Perfect they were not, even if perfection
Means, as it must here, childish tame subjection. 200
Do we call perfect any dog tonight
That without warning may tomorrow bite?
A perfect child, who will your voice obey
Today indeed, but no succeeding day?
A perfect bridge, that suddenly will shiver
At the next wind, and fling you in the river?
So from the event in this case you can tell
The pair were never perfect, since they fell.
“Sufficient to have stood” – the phrase is grand;
But if so stable, why did they not stand? 210
God made them what they were, that is, quite human:
Doting the man, vainglorious the woman.
Had Adam been made kingly, Eve made meek,
My task would have been hopeless, truth to speak.
Praise be to God! His mercy planned it thus,
Making Eve proud, her spouse uxorious.
Yes, I played on their weakness, though their friend,
Using the only means to my great end,
Deluding Eve at first to clear her eyes,
And causing Adam’s fall that Man might rise. 220
Book Nine is mostly fact, I’d have you know:
I in the snake helped Eve’s ambition grow.
Milton failed only here: his party’s line
Reduced the Fruit’s effect to less than wine.
Your Bible tells you better: Eve’s dim sight
Was cleared with knowledge, and the effect was fright.
At once she saw the contraries appear:
Life, Death, good, evil, me and my confrere.
Her eyes were opened, and she knew that she
Was naked, to all harm and misery. 230
Poor creature! that first truly human moment
Destroyed her animal peace. Do you need comment,
Fit audience, on my meaning? Think: you all
Have lived these moments of the dawning fall;
Each child must live them when he learns that breath
Will cease at last, and starts to dream of death.
This was my gift to Eve. She rushed to share
With her mate what alone she could not bear;
He tasting too, God’s greatest work was done:
Man stood on earth, his history begun. 240
Well, what remains? I did return to Hell
To give the news that all had turned out well.
Of course, that we were punished is a lie:
Like eagles, not like snakes, we soared on high,
Then swarming through the empty gate attained
Our causeway, and in earth’s air lastly reigned.
I stood close by when Michael coldly drove
His erstwhile charges from their garden grove;
When he and all his minions disappeared,
Nature and I the faltering humans cheered. 250
Nature made Eve a mother; I taught skill
To Adam in that needful art, to kill,
Since kill he must who means to save his life
On earth, and feed his children and his wife.
Thus I through Eden led their prospering way:
I was their Providence; I’m your today.
I, the eternal power of God’s left hand,
Led you into that happy fault first planned
By the All-Father, whose mysterious ways
I still promote, and justify, and praise. 260
I and my children forged for you through strife
Your present princedom over earthly life;
Death was the spur to fame, immortal prize,
And power that soon may raise you to the skies.
For this we get no thanks; all praise is given
Officially, to the other side of heaven
In all your churches. Why? I do deplore
This worldly widening of the gods’ cold war,
Your pious leaders’ pure hypocrisy,
Praising the good Lord, making use of me. 270
Why should the right hand still affect to shun
What left hand must do, and has always done?
But be it so: some sages claim that peace
Would cause at once the universe to cease.
Without my darkness and my brother’s light
All would be gray: what’s day without some night?
Could you love land, if there were no more sea?
Believe in your god, disbelieving me?
Can good be good, but for the chance of evil?
Give me my due, your necessary Devil. 280
Notes
l. 33. His second son.. Cf . Paradise Regained,
IV.518, where Satan makes this claim.
The general philosophy of this “Book XIII”
is similar to that of Blake, and of Heraclitus.
l.209. “Sufficient to have stood.”
See Paradise Lost, III.99.
l.225. Your Bible tells you better.
See Genesis, III, 5-7.
l. 277. No more sea. Cf. Revelation, XXI, 1.