Milton employs his grand style in both
Satan and God’s first speeches with their rhetorical forcefulness; there is
however, a significant difference to how it is conveyed through their respective
styles. Satan’s ‘bold words’, as Milton describes it, employ heightened
language and imagery (‘eternal war’, ‘high disdain’, ‘excess of joy’, ‘glorious
enterprise’, ‘transcendent brightness didst outshine myriads though bright’) to
convey his heightened emotions of ‘high disdain’ for empyreal heaven he has
been banished from. He combats the highest heavens by building up the stature
of his language to match the ‘dire arms’ of God with his ‘glorious enterprise’.
His power and supremacy is asserted through language, there is however also a
hint of excessiveness to his raging rhetoric. God almost seems to be commenting
on Satan’s excessive forcefulness of language when he muses on how Satan’s hate
is that which ‘the main abyss wide interrupt can hold’; his hateful ramblings
have rhetorical force but none of God’s intellect to back it up.
God, speaking from his ‘prospect high’ in
Heaven, uses equally forceful rhetoric as Satan does in describing how his hateful
phrases will ‘redound upon his own rebellious head’, and how he ‘created all
th’ethereal Powers and Spirits’ as ‘sufficient to have stood, though free to
fall’. However unlike Satan whose language is that which God describes as
having ‘all restraint broke loose’, God’s foreknowledge, with which ‘past,
present, future he beholds’, allows him to moderate his rhetoric so as to make
it both forceful, and intelligent. Satan’s overly emotional state of being does
not allow him such moderation. His hatred overflowing the ‘abyss’ is conveyed
through his language overflowing the boundaries of syntax. He is aware that he
lacks the ‘foresight much advanced’ that God has and bemoans it; he is aware
that he has to rely upon the resilience of his ‘unconquerable will…revenge,
immortal hate’, as well as deceit and trickery, to combat the ‘adverse power’
of God and the heavens.
Milton organises the intensities of God’s
rhetoric into bouts of inductive reasoning where he muses over the ‘sole
command, sole pledge’ of man’s ‘obedience’, and explores the themes of free
will defences (‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’ man was with
autonomy to choose between right and wrong), displaying an ability to reason
with his analysis of will and reason, predestination, and defending his own
foreknowledge for ‘their will, disposed by absolute decree or high
foreknowledge’. God is also depicted by Milton as assuredly aware of the
seeming contradictions between his foreknowledge, and the ‘unforeknown’ aspect
of the Fall as an acquittal of his foreknowledge; thus he focuses upon ‘they’
almost exclusively in the second half of his first speech to remove himself
from the picture, focusing on how man ‘decreed their own revolt’ and ‘ordained
their fall’.
David Reid sees this act of keeping oneself
‘out of the picture as long as possible’ as being ‘noble emotion’, which Satan embraces in IV,
366-373, sustaining a noble sympathy for the ‘gentle pair’ and their/’your’
predicaments. However in Satan’s first speech he is more extremely preoccupied
with himself and shows it through his language, through his repeated use of
‘I’, ‘me’, and interlinking the other inhabitants of hell with him (they
experience ‘equal ruin’ as him, they are ‘joined with me’, he and his fellow
mates are in ‘mutual league’ and are ‘united thoughts and counsels, equal hope
and hazard in the glorious enterprise’). He frequently sees himself in others,
but this is due more to narcissism than equivocation with the people. Satan’s
self-absorption is palatably felt, possibly to compensate for the ‘horrid
silence’ of Hell by loudly, extravagantly making his presence felt to fill out
the empty spaces. He is ‘vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair’, raising
his rhetoric in order to film the emptiness his powerlessness leaves him with.
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