- Sep 2018
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hee as a vail down to the slender waste Her unadorned golden tresses wore [ 305 ] Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
In the Bible, long and disheveled hair is associated with eroticism.
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Of sympathie and love; there I had fixt [ 465 ] Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow staies
Eve's self-reflection amid this male cosmology is interrupted and she's urged into the arms of waiting Adam.
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Mean while at Table Eve Ministerd naked,
This certainly goes against a Puritans' view of modesty.
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consult
In seventeenth-century usage, the term is associated with secret meetings for plotting insurgency. Was there ever a more secret and more insurgent meeting!
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Chaos
I've always been confused over whether or not "Chaos" referred to here is the same as the character Chaos in the poem.
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Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
Aeschylus' Prometheus expresses the same sentiment and a favorite saying of Julius Caesar was that he would rather be the first man in a village, than the second in Rome.
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Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd
Unlike Dante's well-structured Inferno, the topography of Milton's Hell is muddled and uncertain; conveying more a state of mind than a sense of place.
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As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flamesNo light, but rather darkness visible
Milton's Hell is a chaotic, ill-defined region of turbulent darkness as opposed to the brilliant light that illuminates the orderliness of Heaven.
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and by what best way, [ 40 ] Whether of open Warr or covert guile, We now debate
Satan is nothing if not incongruous…or, more specifically, ridiculous. One would've assumed that he, and by extension, the rebel angels, had learned that rebellion (overt or covert) against God supremacy was useless. But here they are again, this time plotting to avenge the perceived wrongs of their own rebellion.
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