Poetry

Satan’s Character in Paradise Lost—Hero or Anti-Hero:

One of the most enigmatic and elusive figure in English Literature is Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton has magnified arch-enemy of God and Man to heroic proportions. Though he is evil incarnate, he is shown to be embodiment of obdurate pride and unconquerable will. Milton’s Satan is an unsurpassable leader albeit a defeated military figure, whom his legions would follow even unto the gates of hell. He is readily comparable to the heroes of classical epics—he is a variant of Achilles, who equates honour with own status and who has ability to rally his troops by the magic of his eloquent speeches.

Milton’s Satan is such an emotionally complex character that we can never completely understand him. He is, by common consent, one of the greatest artistic creations ever portrayed in literature. There has been great controversy on the ambiguity of this character. Yet it is true that his character engages reader’s attention and excites his admiration too. Though the action of poem turns round Man’s first disobedience, but the character that gives epic qualities to the poem is that of Satan. In the words of Addison:

“He is the most heroic subject ever chosen for a poem, and the execution is perfect as the design is lofty.”

In fact the most appropriate observation about Milton’s Satan was put forward by William Blake: “The reason, Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

In fact, all the poetic powers of Milton are shown in delineation the arch-enemy of God and humanity. Milton has endowed him the tragic grandeur of classical heroes. Some of the classical heroic qualities of Milton’s Satan are his physical might, his injured pride; his indomitable will, his leadership, and his appeal to human nature.

Hazlitt remarks:

“Whatever the figure of Satan is introduced, whatever he walks or flies rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air, it is illustrated with the most appropriate image,”

                            

Milton’s first description of Satan is intended to impress us with his super-human dimensions. He is of gigantic appearance as in the words of Milton, “In bulk as huge/As whom the fables name of monstrous size.” He is compared to the monstrous size of mythical Titans, or Briareos or Typhoon or that sea-beast Leviathan, “…which God of all his works/Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream.” Then, Satan’s shield is compared to the moon as seen by Galileo through his telescope and his spear is compared to the tallest tree on the hills of Norway.

                            

One the towering aspect of Satan’s character is his “obdurate pride” and “study of revenge”. Self exaltation is the motive of his conduct. He suffers from a sense of “injured merit”. He vaunts aloud his tragic hubris; overweening self-confidence and his superior foresight. Even when he sees destructive gloom all around him, his pride accompanies him:

“Round he throws his baleful eyes

That witnessed huge affliction and dismay

Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.”

He reveals his intellectual pride in his address to Hell:

“And thou profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor, one who brings

A mind not be changed by place or time.”

S.T. Coleridge very aptly remarks:

“The character of Satan is pride and sensual in indulgence, finding in self sole of motive action…But around this character (Milton) has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance and a ruined splendor.”

Another key aspect of Satan’s personality is his outstanding courage and indomitable will. He, though, may be wrong-headed but has extraordinary courageous personality. Heaven is lost to him and his legions forever but he does not lose heart and inspires his comrades with new zeal:

“What though the field be lost?

All is not lost—the unconquerable will

And study of revenge and immortal hate.”

Milton’s Satan is endowed with the unique qualities of a great leader. He has courage, resourcefulness and unyielding spirit. He knows how to command and inspire his followers in the times of distress. As a leader Satan has great anxiety for his followers, feels sorry for their miserable condition, appreciates their loyalty and sheds tears of sympathy for them. He stirs his followers by bombastic and rhetorical language:

“Peace is despaired/For who can think submission.”

“Princes, Potentates/Warriors, the flower of Heaven, once yours now lost.”

“Awake, Arise or be forever fallen.”

His dictum is, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” As a result of his fiery speeches, millions of rebel angels drew their swords and “Highly they raged/Against the Highest.”

Regardless of the fact that millions of rebel angels Satan has at his command, however, such faithfulness does not diminish his resentment over his defeat in Heaven, “For the thought/Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/Torments him.” He makes conscious attempts to preserve his calm demeanour for the sake of his followers. While he plots his revenge against God, Satan struggles from an inner turmoil that he hides from his legions. He cannot allow his feelings of regret to show to his followers because this kind of uncertainty would be interpreted as weakness. To him weakness is a crime:

“Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable/Doing or suffering.”

Finally, Milton plays to human nature in his description of Satan and rebel angels. The angels are represented as rebels because of their strong allegiance to dark prince. Both Satan and angels exhibit very human traits and succumb to the common temptations and sins. That is why audience often catch a glimpse of themselves in portrayal of these ethereal figures.

From the above discussion, it becomes clear that the character of Satan is a blend of noble and ignoble, the exalted and the mean, the high or the low; and therefore it becomes extremely difficult to declare him a hero or a villain.

The 19^th century Romantics considered Satan as the chief figure of Paradise Lost as Romanticism envisages that a hero should have a towering personality and capable of exercising his influence over others. He should be eloquent speaker and advocate of freedom. Shelley, for example, considered, “Milton’s Devil as a moral being far superior to his God.”

According to classical school of thought a hero should be a noble person. He should neither be perfectly virtuous nor consummate villain. Hence we cannot treat Satan as hero of Paradise Lost as he is essentially a wicked character and a personification of evil. He may have some heroic qualities but he cannot be a hero but an anti-hero; for in the end he himself realizes his impotence. As the poem proceeds, the towering figure of Satan degenerates; he loses his foothold and reclaims his common reputation—of deceitfulness.

We can Sum up above discussion in the words of C.S. Lewis: “From hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret-service agent and thence to a…toad, and finally to a snake—such is the progress of Satan.”      

         The Theme of Paradise Lost:

In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Milton announces that he is going to tackle a lofty theme of Man’s first disobedience and fall from grace.

“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe.”

In his Invocation to Heavenly Muse, Milton states the theme and purpose of his epic. “…I may assert Eternal Providence/And justify the ways of God to men.”  Indeed, Paradise Lost was, for Milton, the fulfillment of his long cherished ambition.  Milton chose a towering theme for his epic which ranks it with the great epics like those of Homer, Virgil and Dante. In his Invocation Milton resolved that his “adventurous song” intended to soar “with no middle flight”. Accordingly, he invoked Heavenly Muse to inspire him so that he might be successful in undertaking, the like of which had yet not been attempted “in prose or rhyme”.

Raleigh remarks:

“The theme of Paradise Lost is vaster and more universal. It concerns itself with the fortunes not of a city or an empire but the whole human race, and with that particular event in the history of race which has moulded all its destinies.”

The story of Paradise Lost is Biblical and theme falls into three parts—theme of disobedience, manifestation of Eternal Providence, and justification of Divine ways. The first part of theme implies that the obedience to God’s commandments is imperative at all costs. In Paradise, God imposes only one condition on Adam and Eve—not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The prohibition is not so much a matter of fruit of a tree as it is obeying God’s ordinance. By not obeying God’s commandment, Adam and Eve brought calamity into their lives, and the lives of all mankind.

Milton’s theme of Paradise Lost, however, does end with the idea of disobedience—Milton says that he will assert Eternal Providence. If man had never disobeyed God, death would have never entered the world and Man would have become lesser angel. Because Adam and Eve gave into temptation and disobeyed God, they provided an opportunity for the manifestation of God’s love, mercy and grace so that fall ultimately produces a greater good than would have happened otherwise.

A.C. George remarks:

“We can state essential theme of Paradise Lost as the sustained opposition between love and hate; God responds to the destructive challenge of Satan with the creative expression of love…The former theme is the direct conflict of Celestial battle and the latter is Satan’s challenge of God—indirectly through his own creation, Man. The second theme arises out of the first.”

The doctrine of free will is such an idea which has been insisted on consistently throughout Paradise Lost. God does not interfere with the free will of individuals though He has free knowledge of everything. In case of Satan too, God allowed him his freedom and;

“Left him at large to his own dark designs

 That with reiterated crimes he might

 Heap on himself damnation…”

The third part of Milton’s argument is justification of God’s ways. Touching upon this theme, Milton emphatically declares that the nature of God is such that to turn everything, even evil, to good as when He creates earth and men to replace rebel angels, or when He sends Christ to redeem fallen humans. This clearly differentiates God from Satan, the great egotist, who thinks only of his own interest; and who had vowed to revenge himself on God by turning all good to evil. Everywhere Satan spreads his lies about God’s tyranny and his own “injured merit”. He pretends that laws are made by God to keep Him in power and subjugate others.

Regarding the theme of Paradise Lost Coleridge remarks:

“It represents origin of evil and the combat of evil and good, it represents matter of deep interest to all mankind, as forming basis of all religion and true occasion of philosophy whatsoever.”

Has Milton succeeded in justifying Divine ways?

Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, had set forth the professed idea of asserting Eternal Providence and justification of God’s ways in boldest possible manner. So it hardly surprising that argument has undergone vigorous scrutiny by the critics. Is Milton able to accomplish his avowed objective? Critics are divided on this issue. One group says that Milton has succeeded in justifying the Divine ways in the creation of Man, subsequent fall and final redemption.  The other group reverts back to ideological dimension: Is Milton really putting himself where he can vindicate God’s perspective on things? How can he justify God’s perspective while singing amid violence, taking love into hell, readying himself for sacrifice, to be destroyed by the blind desires of angry mob? For them, it is a piece of poetical trespassing on divine ground, a hubris that fails and deserves to fail. David Daiches points out:

“Milton’s heart was not in that sort of justification, whatever he might have consciously thought.”

Those critics condemn Milton that by using word justify, Milton is arrogantly asserting that God’s motives and actions seem so arbitrary that they need vindication and explanation. However Milton’s theme of justifying God’s ways is not as arrogant as some critics think. Milton uses the word justify in the sense of showing justice that underlies an action. Moreover because of Satan’s allegations, Milton is compelled to speak God’s case to us or in his own words to “justify the ways of God to men”     

Browning's Dramatic Monologue:

 A dramatic monologue is dramatic discourse usually employing the following elements: a fiction speaker, an implied audience, a symbolic setting, dramatic gestures, and emphasis on speaker’s subjectivity.  Dramatic monologues provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities.

Robert Browning is often considered the master of the form of the dramatic monologue – if not the first to “inaugurate [the first] to perfect this poetic form.” In Browning’s dramatic monologues the speakers lay bare his inner thoughts and feelings –that is why they are regarded as the soul studies. Browning admits: “the soul is the stage; moods and thoughts are characters.” He emphasizes: “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.”

Well-known for his expertise of dramatic monologue, Browning made a special feature of it in his work. The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters. This particular format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could expose evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served as personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories.

Browning’s terrific monologues worked as a tool to examine issues of the day that may not have been examined otherwise, particularly domestic abuse and religious hypocrisy. Browning has popularized dramatic monologue influencing Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many other British poets of the next generations.

The typical speaker of a Browning monologue is aggressive, often threatening, nearly always superior intellectually or socially to the listener, a typically eloquent rhetorician who has complete control over what he speaks and which is capable of lying. The speaker is often attempting to use his words to alter radically his listener’ perception.

 One of the best illustrations of Browning’s psychological analysis can be seen in the depiction of the Duke in My Last Duchess. The combination of villain and aesthete in the Duke creates an especially strong tension, and Browning exploits the combination to the fullest. The crafty duke wants to overwhelm emissary by his meandering insinuation as well as overpowering intimidation.

As a chronicler of “events and incidents in the development of soul” Robert Browning often allows his speaker to reveal or condemn his own behavior. The Duke is authoritarian and expected absolute obedience from his Duchess. Daunted by his wife’s freedom of spirit, he complains that she “was too easily impressed” by anyone and did not appreciate his “gift of nine hundred years old name”. As she did not reserve the singularity of her “earnest glance” solely for him, the Duke was embarrassed by her flirtious nature. When her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; /Then all smiles stopped together.” Although the Duke was unable to control the duchess when she was alive, after her death he is in complete control of her as he puts it: “… none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you but I”, revealing that how he values the most beautiful things he can control. On their descent he points to a bronze bust of Neptune taming a horse–again signifying his controlling nature.

“Porphyria’s Lover” is another shocking example of domestic violence. The young Porphyria, venturing all the social and physical barriers, comes to her deranged lover and makes herself ready for him. The lover, swelled with pride and happiness, decides to capture and eternalize that moment: “I found/A thing to do, and all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around/And strangled her.” He justifies his murder by claiming that she felt no pain – “No pain felt she/I am quite sure she felt no pain” – and that she now is happy – “Her head, which droops upon it still/The smiling rosy little head/ So glad it has its utmost will.”

The dramatic monologue “The Bishop orders his Tomb” is another well accomplished work, notable both for its command of voice and its sharp psychological portrait of the dying bishop. The bishop has obviously broken almost every rule of conduct imposed by the Church on the clergy; yet he deludes himself that he has earned the right to a magnificent tomb in a choice spot in the church.  The bishop admits to his own vanity quoting the Bible in the very first line of the poem: “Vanity, saith the preacher vanity”, yet it is the least of his sins. He has fathered children out of wedlock: “Nephews – sons mine…ah, God, I know not!, covets what others have: “Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;/ Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South/He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!”

The bishop has rejected the scriptural teachings of God and instead embraces his own notion or Paradise, He notes how a magnificent tomb will equate him with “the airy dome where live/The angels.”

As he continues to describe the magnificence of his tomb, he notices that his sons are whispering to each other and comes to realization that they are plotting against him by replacing his precious Lapis Lazuli with ordinary travertine. He pleads them to at least decorate his tomb in jasper and choose an epitaph worthy of his legacy. He tries to evoke their conscience by saying that, “A ye hope/To revel down my villas while I grasp/Bricked over with beggars mouldy travertine/Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at”

When he realizes that his sons will work dishonourably against him, he falls to accusing them of ingratitude He resorts to threats as the monologue concludes: “All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope/My villas!”

E. T. Young observes: “The poem is penetrating study of soul dissection and the emotions which welter in the bishop’s mind.”

Browning expanded the idea of multiple perspectives by writing poems that work together such as 'Andrea del Sarto' and 'Fra Lippo Lippi'. These poems demonstrate how different people respond differently to similar situations. Andrea del Sarto" is unique in Browning's dramatic monologue in that it has incredibly melancholic tone and pessimistic view of art. Andrea tells his wife Lucrezia, that though many praise him for creating flawless paintings, he is aware that his work lacks the spirit and soul that bless his contemporaries Rafael and Michelangelo. Considering himself only a "craftsman", he knows they are able to glimpse heaven whereas he is stuck with earthly inspirations. "Fra Lippo Lippi”, on the other hand, contemplates on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. Probably the most resonant theme in the poem is Lippo's dialectic on the purpose of art. Basically, his dilemma comes down to two competing philosophies: where he wants to paint life as it is, thereby revealing its wondrous complexity, his superiors want him to paint life through a moral lens, to use his painting as an inspirational tool.

Another beautiful illustration of interior monologue is the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”, in which a splenetic monk grumbles against his fellow monk. It begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” for a fellow friar. Presenting himself as the model of righteousness, the speaker condemns Friar Lawrence for his immorality; but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence are in fact his own. Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make with Satan to hurt Lawrence, which reveals the malevolence and hypocrisy on his part.

On the whole, it can be safely said that Browning uses his dramatic monologue in the most peculiar and exemplary fashion to yield an unfamiliar and unheard of art product that was to glorify his legacy for generations to come.

Apocalyptic Vision Of Yeats' The Second Coming:

William Butler Yeats, the celebrated Irish poet, in his 1919 epoch-making poem, “The Second Coming” shows us a vision of full of apocalyptic, ritualistic and mystical symbolism. Drawing on the image of a falcon that has flown too far and on the notion of a catastrophic flood, the speaker sums up the spirit of his age, which is characterized by anarchy, violence, and the inversion of values. “The Second Coming", in its entirety, is an astounding encapsulation of Yeats' idea of the gyre and his fears about the future of mankind; it is expertly woven with threads of prophetic literary reference and impressive poetic techniques.

The speaker of this poem is someone capable of seeing beyond the things. He is a poet-prophet of sorts. Yeats uses a bunch of metaphors and to evaluate the present state of affairs.

The first stanza is a powerful description of apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that soon it is out of earshot.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The falcon representing man and the falconer representing God is symbolizing a man turning away from God and of the chaos that was there at the end of the World War-I.

Over the course of his life, Yeats created a complex system of mystical philosophy, using the image of interlocking conical gyres, to symbolize his philosophical belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. With the image of the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in his poetry that stood for his entire philosophy of history and spirituality.

The Second Coming drenches the reader in a storm of language and imagination. It dazzles and penetrates with a force rarely seen in English poetry. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer” paints a vivid image of the natural order coming apart. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” describes an onslaught of destruction matter-of-factly. Yeats luminous language paints the human world in its arresting beauty and jarring turmoil:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But after the eight lines of the first stanza, the poem suddenly becomes “oracular.” Like the Delphic oracle, the speaker speaks cryptically. “Surely the Second Coming is at hand”.  He has a prophetic vision of the violence that is engulfing all the society as a sign of "the Second Coming". It is a revelation, of something which is unveiled. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation:

“Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” than he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind.

“When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

The speaker has a weird vision. He sees something approaching in the distance from the sands of the desert and it doesn’t look friendly:

“A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
The figure of sphinx is a fundamental mystery—“A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”. Stock observes: "the only thing we [or the speaker] know of it for certain is that it will appear monstrous and terrifying to those whose traditions it supersedes". It does not answer the questions posed by the outgoing domain—therefore the desert birds disturbed by its rising, representing the inhabitants of the existing world, the emblems of the old paradigm, are “indignant.”

So, the speaker is left with a strong prophetic vision. Yeats’ bleakly apocalyptic vision is simply irresistible.  At the end of the poem, he asks a rhetorical question which really amounts to a prophecy. The beast—a harbinger of the new epoch—is on its way to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, to be born into the world. For Yeats, the Second Coming was not a literal return of Christ, but the arrival of savage, atavistic forces: the death and birth pangs of an old epoch making way for the new.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Stock remarks: “Yeats sets his own age in the perspective of eternity and condenses a whole philosophy of history into it so that it has the force of Prophecy”.

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’ most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. Though "The Second Coming" is short, it is packed with symbols and visions that are hard to untangle. It has been said that the essence of great poems is their mystery, and that is certainly true of “The Second Coming.” It is a mystery, it describes a mystery, it offers distinct and resonant images, but opens itself to infinite layers of interpretation.