How to Read Paradise Lost: A Beginner's Guide

In brief: Paradise Lost is difficult for a few clear reasons, and each has a remedy. Read it aloud, a book at a time, beginning with Books 1, 2, 4 and 9, and let the sentences carry you.

Why it feels hard

John Milton's epic first appeared in 1667 in ten books, and was redivided into twelve for the second edition of 1674, the year he died. It tells the story of the Fall from the first chapters of Genesis: Satan's rebellion and defeat, the creation of the world, and the temptation of Adam and Eve. Most readers know the outline before they open the book. What stops them is the verse.

There are three main difficulties.

The syntax. Milton writes in blank verse, unrhymed lines of ten syllables, but he builds them into long verse paragraphs in which a single sentence may run for a dozen lines or more. The main verb is often held back, and clauses are inverted on the Latin model. The poem's first sentence runs for sixteen lines, its main verb, "Sing", does not arrive until the sixth, and the sense spills from one line into the next:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe

The allusion. Milton had read nearly everything, and the poem assumes you have too: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, the Church Fathers, Renaissance geography and astronomy. A single simile may move from Galileo's telescope to the coast of Norway. You do not need to catch every reference. Most of the time the music and the drift of the sentence tell you enough, and a glance at a note can follow later.

The diction. Many of Milton's English words keep their Latin sense. When the streams of Eden run with "mazie error", the error is wandering, not mistake; when he writes of the "secret top" of a mountain, he means set apart. The effect is a language slightly to one side of ordinary English, and once you notice the habit it becomes one of the poem's pleasures.

One more thing to know about the text on this site: it gives the 1667 spelling, so expect forms like "tast", "then" for "than", and "thir" for "their". The study guide explains the edition and follows the standard line numbering of modern editions.

How to read it

Read it aloud. This is the single most useful piece of advice. Milton was blind when he composed the poem and dictated it in passages to whoever was at hand, so it was made for the ear. Read aloud, the long sentences find their shape, and the pauses that look confusing on the page become phrasing.

Read book by book. Each of the twelve books is between about 600 and 1,200 lines long, a good evening's reading. Each is preceded by Milton's own prose "Argument", a summary of what happens. Read the Argument first and you will never be lost for long.

Start with Books 1, 2, 4 and 9. If you cannot face all twelve at once, these four give you the heart of the poem. Book 1 opens in Hell, with Satan and his followers lying stunned on a burning lake. Book 2 is the great council in Pandaemonium, where the fallen angels debate what to do next and Satan volunteers to travel to the new world. Book 4 brings Satan to Eden and shows us Adam and Eve for the first time. Book 9 is the temptation and the Fall. Read these four, and the rest of the poem will feel like a homecoming.

Do not stop at every difficulty. Keep going. Understanding grows by rereading, and on a second pass a passage that baffled you will often open at once.

The shape of the twelve books

Milton follows the epic custom of beginning in the middle of things. The poem opens after the war in Heaven has been lost, and the earlier events are told later as a story within the story.

• Books 1–2: Hell. The fallen angels wake, build their capital and hold their council; Satan crosses Chaos towards the new world.
• Book 3: Heaven. God foresees the Fall, and the Son offers himself to redeem mankind.
• Book 4: Eden. Satan sees Adam and Eve and is discovered at night by the guardian angels.
• Books 5–8: The angel Raphael visits Eden to warn Adam. He narrates Satan's revolt (Book 5), the war in Heaven (Book 6) and the creation of the world (Book 7); Adam tells in turn of his own creation and of meeting Eve (Book 8).
• Book 9: The temptation and the Fall.
• Book 10: Judgement, the building of a bridge from Hell to Earth, and the first steps of Adam and Eve towards repentance.
• Books 11–12: The angel Michael shows Adam the future of the world, and the pair leave Paradise.

The poem ends quietly, with one of the most famous closing lines in English:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide

Satan and the reader

Every first reader of Paradise Lost meets the same surprise: Satan is magnificent. In the first two books he has all the best speeches, and some of them sound like defiance in a noble cause:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

Readers have argued about this for centuries. William Blake famously said that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it. Other critics, notably Stanley Fish in Surprised by Sin (1967), have argued that the poem means us to be seduced, and then to catch ourselves in the act.

Whichever view you take, watch Satan change. His boast in Book 1 that "The mind is its own place" turns, in his soliloquy on the edge of Eden in Book 4, into confession:

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell

Satan shrinks as the poem goes on. He enters Eden as a cormorant, a toad and a serpent, and in Book 10 he and his followers are turned into hissing snakes. Following that decline is one of the best ways to read the whole poem.

Eve and Adam

Milton's Eden is not a static picture of innocence. Adam and Eve work, talk, argue and make love; Milton insists that their love is part of Paradise, and in Book 4 the narrator breaks off to praise it: "Haile wedded Love, mysterious Law". Their relationship is hierarchical, and Milton states the hierarchy plainly, in Eve's own words:

God is thy Law, thou mine

Yet the same speech turns at once into one of the most beautiful love poems in the language, beginning "With thee conversing I forget all time". Modern readers have argued hard about Milton's Eve: some see in her the poem's subordination of women, others the most fully human figure in it, curious, eloquent and independent. Book 9, where she proposes that they garden apart and then meets the serpent alone, is where the argument is sharpest. When she falls, the poem slows to a few plain words: "she pluck'd, she eat". Adam's choice to fall with her, out of love rather than deception, is just as searching.

What to read alongside

• The Bible. Genesis 1–3 first, which Milton expands from a few pages into twelve books.
• The Aeneid and the Iliad. Milton measures his poem against them, and in Book 9 he says outright that his subject is more heroic than the wrath of Akhilleus or the wars of Aeneas.
• Paradise Regained. Milton's short sequel, published in 1671, in which the Son resists Satan's temptations in the wilderness.
• Samson Agonistes. Milton's tragedy on the Greek model, printed with Paradise Regained.
• Comus. His masque of 1634, an early treatment of temptation and virtue.

Where to begin

Open the text of Paradise Lost, find a quiet room, and read the first two hundred lines of Book 1 aloud. If the voice takes hold of you, keep going; if it does not, turn to the study guide for a summary of each book, its characters, themes and key passages, and try again. Few readers finish Paradise Lost on the first attempt. Almost everyone who does finish it goes back.