Off the cuff discussion

Paradise Lost

https://youtu.be/N7gqErYW0K0.

To begin this discussion, I read from Harold Bloom's, The Poems of the English Language (207), where the critic responds to Milton's apparent Protestant aesthetics in Paradise Lost:

Criticism from the start regarded Satan as a perversion of the heroic, but from childhood on I have agreed with Blake and Shelley, rather than with the editorializing Milton, who emerges frequently to damn his superbly rhetorical hero. If you love poetry, then you love Satan. Iago, an even greater creation, frightens me, but Iago is endless to meditation as a psychology, while Satan is closer to Melville's Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick or Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, three grand figurations but lacking the fascinations of Iago's personality.

Milton's Satan is cast as a typical storyline antihero, reminiscent more of a character in a novel than a real spiritual entity. Meanwhile, his God is characterised, according to Bloom, as a tyrant who only belatedly---perhaps as afterthought or act of repentance---proffers to humanity His gift of the Holy Spirit (205). All this characterisation must leave most Christians bewildered, if not irritable.

But at the risk of making Christians irate, Milton's characterisation of God as "only a secondary representation of the divine" and the Christ "only tertiary," has the "primary transcendental agent in Paradise Lost" as the Holy Spirit, says Bloom. That resonates somewhat with the Garden of Adonis in Edmund Spencer's "The Faerie Queen," a primordial source of fecundity, what might be thought of as the "fertile crescent" of the Enchanted Forest.

In The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Sanders argues of Milton's "avoidance of precise definition" as significant of the poet laureate's own acceptance of the limitations of human knowledge. Sanders quotes from Book IV of Paradise Lost, were Adam is visited by the archangel Raphael who says:

To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav’n
Is as the Book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learn
His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Years:
This to attain, whether Heav’n move or Earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right, the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scannd by them who ought
Rather admire ...

So what? Milton is averse with the Hebrew name for Sinai. What to make of that poet's fame? This is how he starts:

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

Ok. The scene is set. The Fall. A sunset clause. The clock now ticks. There's no turning back. A one way ticket onward. Sing, heavenly muse. Sing of that.