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1、本文档为精品文档，如对你有帮助请下载支持，如有问题请及时沟通，谢谢支持！ Book I, lines 126Summary: Lines 1-26: The Prologue and InvocationMilton opens Paradise Lost by formally declaring his poem s subject: humankind s first act of disobedience toward God, and the consequences that followed from it. The act is Adam and Eve s eating of
2、 the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the first line, Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve s sin as the 1forbidden tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative fruits of their actions. Milton asserts that this original sin
3、brought death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our home in paradise until Jesus comes to restore humankind to its former position of purity. Milton speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source of poetic inspiration, to sing about these subjects through him, but he makes it clear
4、 that he refers to a different muse from the muses who traditionally inspired classical poets by specifying that his muse inspired Mo ses to receive the Ten Commandments and write Genesis. Milton muse is the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Christian Bible, not one of the nine classical muses who res
5、ide on Mount Helicon the “ Aonian mount 1 5f He says that his poem, like his muse, will fly above those of the Classical poets and accomplish things never attempted before, because his source of inspiration is greater than theirs. Then he invokes the Holy Spirit, asking it to fill him with knowledge
6、 of the beginning of the world, because the Holy Spirit was the active force in creating the universe.Milton s speaker announces that heto be inspired with this sacred knowledge because he wants to show his fellow本文档为精品文档，如对你有帮助请下载支持，如有问题请及时沟通，谢谢支持！man that the fall of humankind into sin and death w
7、as part ofGod s greterplan, and that God s plan is justified.AnalysisThe beginning of Paradise Lost is similar in gravity and seriousness to the book from which Milton takes much of his story: the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The Bible begins with the sto ry of the world s creation,
8、 and Milton s epic begins in a similar vein, alluding to the creation of the world by the Holy Spirit. The first two sentences, or twenty-six lines, ofParadise Lostare extremely compressed, containing a great deal of information about Milton reasons for writing his epic, his subject matter, and his
9、attitudes toward his subject. In these two sentences, Milton invokes his muse, which is actually the Holy Spirit rather than one of the nine muses. By invoking a muse, but differentiating it from traditional muses, Milton manages to tell us quite a lot about how he sees his project. In the first pla
10、ce, an invocation of the muse at the beginning of an epic is conventional, so Milton is acknowledging his awareness of Homer, Virgil, and later poets, and signaling that he has mastered their format and wants to be part of their tradition.But byidentifying his muse as the divine spirit that inspired
11、 the Bible and created the world, he shows that his ambitions go far beyond joining the club of Homer and Virgil. Milton s epic will surpass theirs, drawing on a more fundamental source of truth and dealing with matters of more fundamental importance to human beings. At the same time, however, Milto
12、n invocation is extremely humble, expressing his utter dependence on God s grace in speaking through本文档为精品文档，如对你有帮助请下载支持，如有问题请及时沟通，谢谢支持！ him. Milton thus begins his poem with a mixture of towering ambition and humble self-effacement, simultaneously tipping his hat to his poetic forebears and promisi
13、ng to soar above them for Godfic atisong.loriMilton s approach to the invocation of the muse, in which he takes a classical literary convention and reinvents it from a Christian perspective, sets the pattern for all of Paradise Lost . For example, when he catalogs the prominent devils in Hell and ex
14、plains the various names they are known by and which cults worshipped them, he makes devils of many gods whom the Greeks, Ammonites, and other ancient peoples worshipped. In other words, the great gods of the classical world have become according to Milton fallen angels. His poem purports to tell of
15、 these gods original natures, before they infectehumankind in the form of false gods. Through such comparisons with the classical epic poems, Milton is quick to demonstrate that the scope of his epic poem is much greater than those of the classical poets, and that his worldview and inspiration is mo
16、re fundamentally true and all-encompassing than theirs.The setting, or world, of Milton s epic is large enough to include those smalleclassical worlds. M ilton also displays his world ssuperiority while reducing those classical epics to the level of old, nearly forgotten stories. For example, the nine muses of classical epics still exist on Mount Helicon in the world of Paradise Lost, but Milton s muse hnatsu other
