The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Milton · a brief epic in four books · unrhymed iambic pentameter, about a fifth the length of Paradise Lost · first published in 1671, with Samson Agonistes · scored on the poem as printed in 1671, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Brief epic on the model of the Book of Job; an epic of refusal, in which the action is a debate and the victory a standing
Mythos
The second Adam in the wilderness, undoing the Fall by obedience; the riddle of the name, answered at the pinnacle; Hercules and Antaeus, Oedipus and the Sphinx drawn into the scriptural frame
Phase
From the baptism at Jordan to the return home: the end of the forty days’ fast, three temptations in Luke’s order, the night of storm, the pinnacle and the angels’ feast
Presentation
Poem in four books of unrhymed iambic pentameter, published in 1671 in one octavo volume with Samson Agonistes, which is a separate work; second edition 1680
Register
Deliberately plainer than Paradise Lost: long periods for Satan, short replies for the Son, with the banquet, Athens, the storm and the pinnacle rising above the level of argument
Scale
Two voices in a wilderness over a few days, with Israel, Parthia, Rome and Athens offered and refused, and Heaven watching
Governing Proposition
After forty days in the wilderness a man not yet sure what his sonship means is offered bread, a feast, wealth, glory, the throne of David, the empires of Parthia and Rome and the learning of Athens, and refuses each in a few words; then, set on the pinnacle, he stands, and the tempter falls. The wager of the poem is that the heroic act may be a refusal, that rule over others is worth nothing without rule over oneself, and that the garden lost by one man’s disobedience is raised again in the waste by another’s being tried and holding.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem opens by naming the first one. “I who erewhile the happy garden sung” (I), the poet begins, and in the same breath turns that poem round: now he sings “Recovered Paradise to all mankind” (I), won by “one man’s firm obedience fully tried” (I), “And Eden raised in the waste wilderness” (I). The parallel is exact. One man’s disobedience lost the garden; one man’s obedience will regain it, and in the place furthest from a garden. The design of the whole poem is folded into its first lines: a second Adam, a second temptation, and a different answer.
The matter is the temptation in the wilderness after the baptism at Jordan, and Milton takes the three temptations in Luke’s order, bread, kingdoms, pinnacle, not in Matthew’s, where the kingdoms come last. The choice puts the pinnacle at the end, and the poem is built toward it. The middle temptation is opened out across two and a half books into a banquet, wealth, glory, zeal for the throne of David, the host of Parthia, Rome and Athens. Every lure of the world is offered, and the order of the offers rises from appetite to empire to the mind.
The form is the brief epic, on the model Milton had named, the Book of Job: a hero who does nothing, an action that is a debate, a victory that is a refusal. The poem is in the unrhymed pentameter of Paradise Lost, at about a fifth of its length, in four books. It was published in 1671 in one octavo volume, under the title “Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes”, and a second edition of the two followed in 1680. The tragedy bound with it is a separate work. The desk scores the poem alone, in Milton’s English, as printed in 1671.
Movement II
The first book begins at Jordan. The Son is baptised and proclaimed, and Satan calls a council in mid-air: he does not know in what sense this man is the Son of God, and he means to find out. In Heaven God speaks to Gabriel of the trial to come. The heavenly frame and the earthly test are one action, and the poem says so from its first book: the tempter believes he is choosing his ground, and the ground has been chosen for him.
The Son goes into the wilderness, and the poem gives him a soliloquy on his youth, in which he goes back over his childhood and does not yet know fully what his sonship means. Forty days pass. He has entered the wilderness not knowing, and the action of the poem is the discovery. That is the riddle of the name, and it bears the weight of the poem: the tempter and the tempted are asking the same question, and neither can answer it by argument.
Satan comes as an old countryman and offers the first temptation, to turn stones to bread. It is refused in few words, and the pattern of the poem is set: the offer at length, the answer short. The book closes on an exchange over the pagan oracles. Already the shape the poem knows is plain. Satan has abundance, the Son has spare replies, and the form is the asymmetry between them. The obedience is to be tried, as the opening said, fully, and the trial is in words.
Movement III
The second book leaves the wilderness for the world that waits. Andrew and Simon, the new disciples, wait for the one who has gone from them; Mary meditates on her son at home. Neither knows what is happening. These passages show the human world that waits on the trial without knowing it, and they set the domestic scale to which the last line returns. Then Satan holds a second council. Belial counsels him to set women before the Son, and Satan scorns it: the tempter is defined by what he knows will not work.
What he offers instead is a banquet, laid out in the wilderness for a man who has fasted. The feast is not in scripture, and it earns its place, since it answers the first lure of Eden, appetite, on the scale of a world. Then wealth. Each is refused. In the third book Satan offers glory, and then zeal: the throne of David and the liberation of Israel, a just cause to be won by force. The Son refuses that too, and gives the poem its sentence: “Who best / Can suffer, best can do” (III).
The poem was written after the Restoration by a defeated republican, and it turns political failure into an account of power as patience: it refuses the shortcut of force even for a just cause. Whether that is withdrawal from politics or a politics of patience after 1660 has never been settled. From a mountain Satan then shows the Son the host of Parthia, its cities and horsemen in a long review, and here the poem runs past its argument. The point, worldly power refused, is made before the catalogue ends.
Movement IV
The fourth book turns to Rome, the power that holds Israel, and Satan shows it at length and offers its empire. The description again runs past what the argument needs, and the answer is the one the poem has been building since the first refusal: rule over others is worth nothing without rule over oneself. The man offered the world has nothing he wants from it, and the tempter, who has measured every man by what he wants, has no measure left for him.
Then Satan offers the last thing, the mind: Athens, “the eye of Greece, mother of arts / And eloquence” (IV), and its schools. The verse rises as it describes what it will refuse. The Son refuses it, and in one line sets aside the reader who brings nothing of his own to his books: “Deep versed in books and shallow in himself” (IV). A poem woven of classical allusion has its hero dismiss classical wisdom as needless to one who has light from above. This is the poem’s hardest place.
It can be read as dramatic: the Son refusing learning as a road to power, as he has refused everything else, and not learning itself. The poem allows that reading, and it sits with every other refusal. But the strain is felt, and the truth about inwardness that the rest of the poem holds becomes, here, a dismissal. Then the night: Satan raises a storm round the Son in the wilderness, and he sits through it unshaken. The morning that follows is quiet, and the poem rises with it before the last trial.
Movement V
Satan sets the Son on the pinnacle of the Temple: the last temptation, presumption, and the last test of the name. After some two thousand lines of words, the poem gives one act. “Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (IV). The half-line lands the whole action in four words. It is the only deed in the poem, and everything before it has been preparing for it by withholding: the hero who has sat, walked and answered now stands, and the tempter falls.
Satan’s fall is piled with similes, of Hercules and Antaeus and of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The classical frame is drawn into the scriptural one, and the second is apt: a riddle has been answered, and the riddle the tempter set himself in the first book is answered without a word of doctrine. Whether the Son is revealed at that moment as divine or stands there as man, the poem allows both ways of seeing it, and the question has stayed open since.
Angels come and lay a feast, which answers Satan’s banquet, and sing a hymn to the “Queller of Satan” (IV). Then the poem makes the quietest close of any English epic. The hero goes back “unobserved”, “Home to his mother’s house private returned” (IV). The man who refused every kingdom of the world returns to the house where Mary waited, and the last line sets him at the domestic scale the second book prepared. The victory is a standing, and nothing anyone sees follows it.
Act III · The Twelve
The poem is about the shortest Milton could make a trial of this kind: one encounter, two voices, a few days at the end of a fast. Nearly every part survives the subtractive test. Mary’s meditation and the disciples’ waiting in Book II are not ornament: they show the human world that waits on the trial without knowing it, and set the domestic scale to which the last line returns. Belial’s counsel of women, which Satan scorns, defines the tempter by what he knows will not work. The banquet, an addition to scripture, earns its place. What holds the axis down is the panoramas: the Parthian host in Book III and Rome in Book IV run on past a point made before the catalogue ends.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds outside its doctrine: that the heroic act may be a refusal; that rule over others is worth nothing without rule over oneself; that a self is found by being tried, not by being told what it is. The Son enters the wilderness not knowing fully what his sonship means, and the action is the discovery. Its sentence is “Who best / Can suffer, best can do” (III). Written after the Restoration by a defeated republican, the poem turns political failure into an account of power as patience, and refuses force even for a just cause. Held off the top by Athens: “Deep versed in books and shallow in himself” (IV) turns a truth about inwardness into a dismissal that holds less well.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Milton chose a lower style for this poem, and the axis records the choice. Long passages are argument and the Son’s replies are kept plain, so elevation comes less often than in the first epic. The heights are real. The pinnacle is one of the great climaxes in English verse: after some two thousand lines of words, one act, “Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (IV), and Satan falls under the similes of Antaeus and the Sphinx. The night of storm, with the Son sitting through it unshaken, rises, and so does the morning after. Athens lifts even as it is refused, and the banquet is lush. But much of Books II and III moves on the level, and the axis weighs frequency as well as height.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is the reversal of the Fall: one man’s disobedience undone by “one man’s firm obedience fully tried” (I). Each temptation answers a lure of Eden: appetite in the bread and the banquet, power and glory in the kingdoms, presumption at the pinnacle. The second Adam stands where the first fell, and the wilderness becomes the garden by being endured. The load-bearing myth is the riddle of the name: Satan does not know in what sense this man is the Son of God, nor at first does the Son, and the pinnacle answers it in one action without a word of doctrine. Held below the top because the archetype is given rather than made new, and the man is thinly drawn as a man.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the classical and Renaissance epic, Milton’s own grand style, and the line of biblical poems on Christ: Vida’s Christiad and Giles Fletcher’s Christ’s Victory and Triumph (1610), which treats the same temptation. The turn is a brief epic on the model Milton had named, the Book of Job, where the hero does nothing, the action is a debate and the victory a refusal: an epic that rejects arms, empire, glory and, in Athens, the learning epic was made of, in a style plainer than its poet’s own. The stake was paid: after Paradise Lost Milton wrote against what it had taught readers to want, and they have found this poem bare ever since. Held below the top by precedent in biblical verse, and by the reuse of its predecessor’s metre and machinery.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What the poem knows is in its form. Its subject is the power of not acting, and the form withholds action for some two thousand lines: the hero sits, walks and answers. Every offer is narrated at length and refused in short, and the form is that asymmetry, Satan’s abundance against the Son’s spare replies. Turned into a narrative of deeds, it could no longer say that the deed is the standing. The one act comes at the pinnacle, and the form has made it inevitable and enormous. The close knows itself: after the hymn the hero goes home “unobserved” (IV), the quietest end of any English epic. Held a step down because the panoramas loosen the tension, and the four books sit less exactly on the action than the temptations do.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: three and a half centuries of argument without a settlement. The cruxes are real. Whether the Son at the pinnacle is revealed as divine or stands as man, since the poem allows both; what he knows of himself, and when; whether the rejection of Greek learning is Milton’s or the dramatic Son’s, and how it sits in a poem full of classical similes; whether the quietism is withdrawal from politics or a politics of patience after 1660. The twentieth century found new depths, in Northrop Frye’s essay on its typology (1956) and Barbara Lewalski’s Milton’s Brief Epic (1966). Held a step lower because the returns have been mostly scholarly, and the human texture gives the general reader less to come back to.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is English poetry of the later seventeenth century, and the European Christian epic it closes. The intrinsic force is substantial: the poem redefined the heroic as inward, made a debate into an epic, and gave the brief epic its English model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: narrower, and later. The eighteenth century took Paradise Lost and largely passed this poem by, and its readers came after, and fewer. Its idea of a mental victory feeds the Romantic interior epic, but through Milton as a whole more than through this poem. In criticism its afterlife is real, from Frye and Lewalski on. It did not redirect what came after as its predecessor did, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over three hundred and fifty-five years. The text survives whole: printed in 1671, reprinted in 1680 and in every collected Milton since, stable, with no question of loss or fragment. Form is untouched, and fabric is not at issue. The charge is on presence: continuously in print and taught, but read mainly in the academy and in the shadow of Paradise Lost; outside the study of Milton it is little read, and it has been translated far less than its predecessor. It is not long neglected: it has had readers in every century since it appeared, and its surface is not fixed to its moment, since its post-Restoration politics have become a way of reading it, not a reason it dates.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Milton’s command of blank verse is complete here, and differently used. The verse is plainer and more argumentative than in Paradise Lost, with fewer extended similes, short periods in the Son’s replies and long periodic sentences given to Satan: the difference between the two speakers is itself the craft. The making is load-bearing at the pinnacle, where the half-line “he said and stood” (IV) lands the whole action in four words and the similes of Satan’s fall answer it. The opening takes up the first epic in its first line, “I who erewhile the happy garden sung” (I), and announces the reversal in exact parallel. The cost is where plainness reads as flatness, and in the catalogues of Book III.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole: every element is a trial of the Son’s obedience, and every scene is weighed by it. Take the two most distant elements, the sensual banquet laid in the wilderness and Mary’s quiet meditation at home: both obey it, the one offered and refused, the other waiting and keeping. The heavenly frame, God speaking to Gabriel in Book I and the angels at the close, and the earthly test are one action. The strain is learning. A work woven of classical allusion has its hero dismiss classical wisdom as needless to one who has light from above. It can be read as dramatic, the Son refusing learning as a means of power and not learning itself, and the poem allows that; but the strain is felt, and it costs the axis.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held are more than the poem’s size suggests. Consciousness, in the Son’s discovery of himself from his memories of childhood to the pinnacle; the family, in Mary and the house at Nazareth; the state and empire, in Israel under Rome, the Parthian power, Rome itself and the question of the liberating king; history, from Adam’s fall through the kingdoms of the world; learning, in Athens and its schools; the natural order, in the wilderness, the beasts and the storm; and the sacred at the centre. Each is a temptation or the ground of one. Held in the low eights because most of these orders are offered in speech and refused, not lived in; the human world beyond two speakers is a few voices, and labour and the common life are almost absent.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.8. A blank verse plainer than its poet’s first epic and fitted to two speakers, which lands the whole action in four words at the pinnacle; a text whole and in print for three and a half centuries; the Fall reversed, each temptation answering a lure of Eden, and the riddle of the name answered by one act; and a form that withholds action for two thousand lines so that its one act is enormous.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: a real redefinition of the heroic, but a reach narrower and later than its predecessor’s, passed by in the eighteenth century and carried into the Romantic interior epic through Milton as a whole more than through this poem. Above it, The Sublime and The Encompassed at 8.3: a lower style, chosen, whose heights come seldom between the banquet, Athens, the storm and the pinnacle; and orders of reality offered in speech and refused rather than lived in.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls short by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The aggregate, at 8.6, also stands below the summit’s 9.0, so the poem would stand in Tier IV with every condition met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Milton’s Paradise Regained, scored as the poem in four books printed in 1671 (Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes), in Milton’s English. Samson Agonistes, bound with it, is a separate work and is not scored here. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short phrases whose words are certain, given in modernised spelling and cited by book only. No translation is involved. Matters that could not be verified, among them the line count of each book, the share of the poem given to direct speech, an early account of how the poem came to be written, a report of Milton’s own view of it beside Paradise Lost, the names of its Romantic admirers and illustrators, and one later critical study, are not given.