Satan in Eden — First sight of Paradise and its inhabitants

Book 4 of Paradise Lost by John Milton

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.