Paradise Lost is a long epic, based on Genesis of the Old Testament, with 12 volumes and more than 1, lines, and written in blank verse. Paradise Lost vividly reflects the life, mood and fighting spirit of the revolutionaries after the failure of the British bourgeois revolution. It also embodies the poet's rebellious spirit of cynicism and longing for freedom. Through the fall of Adam and Eve, it is pointed out that the root of human misfortune lies in lack of rationality, indulgence of lust and vulnerability to external influences. At the same time, the author also uses the ancient times to satirize the present, suggesting that the failure of the British bourgeois revolution is due to the moral degradation of revolutionaries and their arrogance and extravagance.
Lucifer, an angel, couldn't stand the supreme authority of God, and led the angels to rebel. After failing, he was thrown into hell. Lucifer was renamed Satan, and failed angels were also called demons. Satan refused to admit defeat, gathered many fallen angels to hold a devil meeting and vowed revenge.
There was a dispute over the way of revenge. Piersell, the deputy leader of the mob, said that it was predicted that God would create a new world, in which there would be a creature called man, and he suggested looking for an opportunity to avenge himself. Satan stepped forward and took on this difficult and dangerous task.
The devil's daughter "sin" and son "death" opened the door to hell for him, and Satan flew into a chaos that had no distinction between time and space and discovered a new world that had just been created. Satan came to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve, the ancestors of mankind, lived, and marveled at the perfect shape and happy scene of mankind. He eavesdropped on Adam and Eve's conversation and was determined to seduce them to fall in order to get revenge on God. God ordered Adam and Eve not to steal the fruit of the tree of wisdom in paradise, and Satan turned into a toad to manipulate her dreams by sleeping Eve's ear and tell her the benefits of the fruit of wisdom. When she woke up in the morning, Eve told Adam that she really wanted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge in her dream, so she was very upset. Adam comforted her.
God saw that the human disaster was near, so he sent Rafael to teach them not to break the dogma. After Raphael left, Satan turned into a snake, complimented Eve and told her that it could talk because it ate the fruit from a tree. Eve asked it to take her to see it, and found that it was the fruit of the tree of wisdom. Eve picked the fruit and ate it, which was delicious, so she took one to Adam. Adam was shocked when he saw it, but he thought that Eve loved him so much that they should be fated, so they also ate it. Sure enough, they immediately became smart and knew the shame, so they found something to cover their bodies.
God was so angry that he sentenced Eve to suffer from childbirth and obey Adam forever, and Adam had to work all his life, sweating like a pig. They originated from dust and eventually returned to dust. Satan has succeeded. He returned to hell and sent his children "death" and "sin" as ambassadors to the world. In order to punish mankind, God also created four seasons instead of spring, created storms, hail and cold, floods and earthquakes, and let everything in the world devour each other. God sent Michael to expel Adam and Eve from paradise.
Adam and Eve wept for their misfortune, and Michael showed them the future scene: after generations of life and death, there will be a flood, and all creatures will die. Only Noah's ark will keep human life, and then sin will return to the world until Christ, the son of God, is born, tortured and resurrected, and ascended to heaven as a redeemer of mankind.
Adam and Eve calmed down. They saw that although the future was full of sin and bloodshed, human beings were finally saved. They reviewed the lost paradise, wiped their tears and walked hand in hand to the barren plain.
In the 17th century, the British bourgeoisie and feudal forces fought for power for half a century, and Milton lived in this era. Milton is a staunch * * faction representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, and joined Cromwell's government as a secretary. In 166, the government of the Republic of China was paralyzed and the king was successfully restored. It was in this difficult and dark time that Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
The whole poem is grand in scale, magnificent in momentum and boundless in environmental atmosphere. It depicts the magnificent background of hell, chaos, human life and so on, and quotes a lot of allusions, which is extremely rich in imagination. The structure intentionally imitates the ancient Greek and Roman epics, coupled with the sonorous pronunciation and intonation, which makes people see things in a blur and is full of revolutionary passion. In particular, the depiction of God's battle with Satan reproduces the scene of the English Civil War in the 17th century, which is magnificent.
Paradise Lost embodies the poet's full revolutionary passion and unique artistic talent, and is worthy of being an immortal masterpiece in world literature. It not only won a high reputation for British poetry, but also had a far-reaching influence throughout Europe. It was not only the echo of the British bourgeois revolution in that year, but also the prelude to the thunder of the French Revolution a hundred years later. It was regarded as the "model of literati epic" in the history of world literature. Shelley called him a great epic poet with Homer and Dante.