4

Satan stands upon Mount Niphates and delivers the most psychologically revealing soliloquy in the poem. O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams — the words burst from him as the sight of celestial light triggers a cascade of self-knowledge he can no longer suppress. For the first time we hear Satan admit, in private, what he would never concede in council: that God was not tyrannical, that his service was not onerous, that the rebellion was born purely from pride and ingratitude. He confesses that the same pride that caused his fall now prevents his repentance — even if God forgave him, he would rebel again, for submission is intolerable to his nature. Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell — the line demolishes his earlier claim that the mind can make a Heaven of Hell.

Satan resolves to embrace evil as his good, making a conscious and deliberate choice that seals his damnation. So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; evil, be thou my good. This is the poem's darkest moral pivot — not a fall through weakness or deception, but an act of pure will that chooses malice with full knowledge of what it costs. His face contorts through a sequence of passions — doubt, despair, rage, false composure — and Uriel, watching from the sun, catches this telltale disturbance. The keen-sighted angel realizes he has been deceived and hastens to warn Gabriel, who guards the gates of Paradise.

Milton now presents Eden for the first time, and the description is among the most lavish set-pieces in English poetry. Paradise sits atop a steep wilderness of wild thicket and tangled undergrowth, crowned by a wall of verdure. Satan leaps over this wall with contemptuous ease — as a wolf leaps into a sheepfold, as a thief climbs into God's fold. The garden within is a paradise of unfallen nature: trees weep aromatic gums and balm, flowers of all hue paint the unadorned ground, brooks wander with mazy error through groves of myrrh and nard. Milton weaves classical references — the gardens of the Hesperides, the groves of Enna where Proserpina gathered flowers — into his vision of Edenic perfection, then declares that the true Paradise surpasses them all.

Satan, perched in the Tree of Life like a cormorant, looks down and sees Adam and Eve for the first time. Milton describes the first humans with careful attention to their unfallen dignity: they are erect and tall, godlike in their native honor, clad in naked majesty. Adam's brow declares absolute rule; Eve's beauty is adorned by her unadorned golden tresses that fall in wanton ringlets to her waist. Yet Milton specifies their relationship in terms that have generated centuries of debate: he for God only, she for God in him. Their inequality is presented as natural and harmonious in the unfallen state, though the poem itself will complicate this hierarchy as the drama unfolds.

Adam speaks to Eve of their blessed condition, reminding her of the single prohibition that governs their freedom. They may eat of every tree in the garden save one — the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This sole restraint, Adam reasons, is easy and light, a small sign of obedience that acknowledges their debt to their Creator. Eve responds with loving deference, recalling her own first moments of consciousness: waking beside a lake, seeing her own reflection and being drawn to it, until a voice guided her to Adam. Her narrative of self-discovery is one of Milton's most psychologically subtle passages, foreshadowing her vulnerability to the temptation of knowledge and self-regard.

The newly married pair engage in their evening devotions, raising their voices in a hymn to the Creator that celebrates the beauty and order of the natural world. The evening hymn catalogues the glories of creation — the stars, the nightingale, the elements, the seasons — in language of extraordinary musicality. This is prayer as it was meant to be: spontaneous, unmediated by institution or ritual, flowing directly from the heart's gratitude. After their worship they retire to their bower, a natural canopy of flowers and interwoven branches, where Milton provides his celebrated defense of wedded love against the ascetic tradition that treated sexuality as inherently fallen.

Satan watches all of this — their beauty, their love, their innocent pleasure — and is wracked by a complex anguish that mingles envy, hatred, and something that might almost be pity. He addresses the sleeping pair with bitter tenderness: he could love them, he says, in any other circumstance. Their gentle innocence stirs memories of what he himself once was. But pity is swallowed by his fixed resolve; tenderness hardens back into purpose. He has discovered what he needs: the prohibition against the Tree of Knowledge. Here is the point of attack — their obedience depends on ignorance, and knowledge is the bait that will draw them to destruction. Satan begins to plot his approach.

Gabriel, forewarned by Uriel, sends his angelic patrols to search the garden. Ithuriel and Zephon find Satan in a startling posture: crouched like a toad at Eve's ear, whispering into her sleeping mind, attempting to reach her fancy through a dream and taint her imagination with discontented thoughts. When touched by Ithuriel's spear, Satan springs up in his true form, revealed and enraged. The two young angels do not recognize him at first — so changed is he from the radiant being he once was. When they realize who he is, they are more contemptuous than afraid, and their scorn wounds Satan's pride more than any weapon could.

Satan is brought before Gabriel at the western gate of Paradise. The confrontation between them is tense and nearly violent. Satan sneers at Gabriel's vigilance — a fine guardian, who let him enter unchallenged and only found him through a subordinate's tip. Gabriel retorts that Satan's own faithlessness makes his words worthless, and demands to know why he has left the punishment appointed him. Satan swells with wrath, his form growing vast and terrible as the infernal legions press close. For a moment, open war between the angelic hosts seems imminent in the very garden they are meant to protect.

God intervenes by hanging his golden scales in the sky — the same cosmic balance that appears in Homer's Iliad when Zeus weighs the fates of heroes. In these scales, God sets the consequences of Satan's choice: fighting against fleeing. The scale of flight kicks upward, light as air, signaling that battle would mean Satan's destruction. Satan recognizes the sign and, for once, yields to prudence over pride. He flees from Paradise, murmuring threats as he goes. Dawn breaks over Eden as Book Four ends, the first humans still sleeping in their bower, unaware of the danger that has come and gone. But Eve stirs in troubled sleep, for Satan's whisper has planted a seed that will germinate in dreams.