Milton is talking to the Heavenly muse and he wants the heavenly muse to guide him

understand what happened in the beginning, how the story unfolded itself. It is very
interesting that he is not even considering the bible as a source of his knowledge. It is
surprising because a devoted Christian holds the bible as a very valuable document.

Here he is rejecting any literary piece as the source of his knowledge. Milton is not just
discarding Classical body of knowledge as source of information but he is also rejecting the
Christian bible itself.

It is as if the heavenly muse is telling the story for the first time. Even the words which
heavenly muse spoke to Moses have got lost in translation, so he wants to recreate that
literary grandeur un attempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Line 27-34

 Say first- he is setting his priorities, he is asking the heavenly muse to follow an order,
 Grandparents- common ancestors of human beings, according to the Christians it is
Adam and Eve. They were in a very happy state in Paradise in company of each other
enjoying the fruits of life. So, what cause made them fall from that grace?
 What was the one restraint, one prohibition? The forbidden fruit.
 What cause made them go against God’s will?
 The first two words that he deliberately uses in connection with Satan are seduced and
infernal. There is nothing glamorous about seduction if you think from a moral point
of view. The moment we hear the word seduced we begin to associate Satan with
something which is not morally correct but extremely attractive because unless
something is attractive why would you be seduced by it?
 There are many critics who begin to question the way Milton is presenting Satan
whether he is supporting Satan. He is not denying the attractiveness of evil, he is not
saying that evil looks bad. Evil looks very tempting. Why would it be tempting if it
not good to look at?
 From the very beginning he is creating the dubiousness of Satan, the destructiveness
of Satan and he is associating Satan with inferno.
 Inferno is very similar to hell. It is Dante’s hell in Divine Comedy. It is the Greek
hell.
 From the beginning he is trying to say that he is not going to be inspired by the
classical muse. He is not connecting his knowledge to the knowledge to the Greek
mythologists or Greek body of literature but we find using him words which refer
directly to Greek mythologies.
 Therefore, when he says infernal, he is borrowing the term from Dante’s Divine
Comedy although he chose to reject classical literature just a while ago.
 Serpent- Satan took the form of a snake to tempt Eve.

Line 34-36
 Gule is the quality of a very negative person who has no value or appreciation of
honor or loyalty. Guile is like an envy, more wrong that envy.
 Here Satan’s quality is re-established as a guileful creature not a heroic creature.
 Milton is not establishing the character of Satan in a very positive light.
 Satan is not established as something which a morally correct person will aspire to
follow.

Line 35-37

 Now he is bringing us to the storyline. He has posed certain questions to the muse
and then while answering those questions the muse will give us a timeline. The
muse will start with the fall of Satan and then eventually talk about the fall of
man.

Line 36-39

 What was the driving force behind Satan’s action? It was ambition.
 Satan was supported by his followers rebelled to set himself above his peers
(people of the same status)

Line 38-40

 God is always referred as the highest as the most glorious. Satan wasted to go
against this powerful force.

Line 40-44
  Vain here has a double sense to it. It is like a pun. On one hand it is something
which is full of pride, false pride which Satan has and vain also means
fruitless.
 The battle which Satan started in heaven was a fruitless one. It was a vain one.

Line 44-48

 He is weaving a picture of God throwing Satan down and transfixing him into
the deepest tract of Hell.
 It is like an image of a comet falling down from the sky. Comes have a
negative association in different cultures.
 After God threw Satan down to hell he was bound up in adamantine chains
and penal fire.
 The image of these chained up spirits in fire it is the image of Inferno from
Dante’s Divine Comedy.
 Milton does take a lot from the Greek epics more than he wants to.

Line 49-52

 He is talking about time in terms of space. Nine days and nine nights. Milton
is giving information and while giving the information he is deliberately
making us pause to rethink what he is talking about.
 When we talk about heaven and hell and such cosmic states of existence you
are not sure whether it is even an actual space or is it something beyond space,
we don’t know whether it can be measured in space.
 This is how Milton is introducing hell as a spatial entity as well as a temporal
entity.

Line 50-53

 Satan being an angel cannot die. If you are a man and you die and your soul goes to
hell even that is immortal. Anything that goes to hell is immortal.

Line 53-54

 Wrath means legitimate anger of God. The anger which has in store for Satan more
punishment.

Line 54-56
  When do we feel sorrow? Sorrow is not something that you feel when you are in a
constant state of pain. We feel sorrow when we go from a state of pleasure to a state
of pain, a state of happiness to a state of sadness, so sorrow comes from a particular
change.
 Thus, Satan’s fall is more sorrowful, more of a punishment because he had tasted
what heaven felt like.
 These are the lines where Milton reveals himself, his condition, a commentary on his
life. We see the man behind the book when we look at these lines- lost happiness and
lasting pain, the memories of that wonderful past when he and Cromwell worked
together and had the high ideals of recreating society.
 Here he is not just talking about Satan’s sorrow but also the sorry of any person who
has memory of something beautiful.
 While Satan is laying on the pool of fire, he is not able to move himself because he is
chained down, he turns his head to look at what is there around him his eyes are
baleful- his repetition of negative adjectives. Baleful is something which a a person
with a lot of envy looks at.

Line 57

 Now you get to see hell through satan’s eyes. Interestingly we do not get to see hell
through any other perspective. We get a glimpse of hell only when we look at it from
the point of view of Satan.
 What did he see? Affliction- means disease, feelings of being hurt that he sees all
around him, various sights which reflect affliction and dismay, hopelessness.

Line 58-75

 Milton’s hell is a psychological place, a state of mind but it is also an actual place, a
dungeon, it is very similar to the places where human beings are kept as prisoners but
it is a flaming one it’s a huge furnace. So, we have these images of fire and
destruction and the entire thing resembles a volcano. If you were dumped inside the
crater of an active volcano, you would experience whatever Satan was experiencing
all around him.
 62-63: This is an oxymoron. How can darkness be visible? How can there be light and
then no light? All flames do not give out light like the gas burner. Milton is not
talking about an impossible situation, so here he creating bit by bit the picture of hell
 as a possibility, a real place because until and unless he does that the place becomes
less of a horror. He is giving us a map of hell not in a geographical sort of a way but
he is painting a picture using real shades which you identify as possible.
 So, hell is a possibility in terms of space and time.
 Another meaning of darkness visible here is whatever is visible through the flame
represents darkness. Darkness here doesn’t mean blackness but spiritual darkness,
sorrow and suffering. The only thing visible in hell is darkness.
 Milton’s obsession with darkness- he is struggling everyday to understand the world
in a new way because now his faculty of sight is gone, all he sees around him is
darkness and through that darkness he can only reach sorrow. For him Hell not just a
place where Satan fell. He feels that the literal darkness all around him is no less
infernal than what Satan felt. Thus, hell is also a metaphoric existence.
 65-67: He is personifying peace, rest, hope which are abstract nouns and he is using
personification to make this scene even more relatable to mythologies.
 Fiery deluge: flood of fire. Not a drop of water in Hell. Water- source of sustenance,
generation, regeneration and purification, something that is used in baptism which is a
very important concept in Christianity where you get elevated in your status in God’s
eyes. Water is absent there, lake and flood all made of fire.
 70-74: Ordained- ruled or passed judgement. Now Milton is talking about real
dimensions. Talks about the location of Hell which is very far removed from God.
 Pole- not the north pole or south pole of the earth. If you look at Milton’s cosmology
the who universe is envisioned to be spherical and it has a center and it has a pole so,
Hell is three times the distance between the center and the pole of Milton’s universe.
 It is out of bounds for any human imagination to even wander.
 75: Distance is also measure in terms of how different the two places are. Hell is so
different from heaven. Poles apart- not the actual physical difference but difference in
the condition.
 76-78: Discerns- seeks. Satan soon locates his companions who are confused by their
fall because they are unable to move their limbs, they are unable to get out of that fire
and at the same time they are conscious of their paralyzed state. Satan looks at his
followers and locates the closest to him.
 78-83: The rebel angel he locates in Beelzebub. The moment Milton uses the word
Beelzebub he redefines the word that the name of the rebel angel when he fell from
 heaven was not Beelzebub, he was called Beelzebub much later by the Philistines. He
was he lord of the Philistines.
 This is where Milton is introducing us to the concept of rebel angels having been
renamed by corrupt human beings. Rebel angels had different names in heaven.
 Heavenly muse did not give any information to Milton about the names used of rebel
angels in Heaven because those names have been erased from the book of life.
 Book of life is a book where God records the name of every person destined for
heaven or for the world to come. When these angels fell from heaven these names
were obliviated.
 Milton is using the name given by human beings so that we can have an idea of whom
Satan was speaking to.

Now we will talk about the conversations that Satan has with Beelzebub after Satan gains
consciousness in Hell.

First speech of Satan which he addresses to his nearest friend, Beelzebub who was also
rolling on that fiery lake.

84-87:

 Satan is telling Beelzebub that he has changed a lot because of his fall, he was a very
bright angel but now has turned smoky and dark.
 Satan is focusing on the fact that their transformation is a physical one and not a
spiritual one.
 He continues by saying that God is proven to be superior force. God has been able to
defeat them because he had a weapon called thunder. It is as if he is saying that if God
didn’t have thunder Satan would have won.
 This is a very peculiar way of trying to justify his actions. Satan is trying to hold on
to his followers because the first instinct of the supporters is to question the leader.
 Here Satan wants to think about which questions can come to the minds of his
followers so he is saying this was lost only because of thunder.
 Now they know they are better equipped if they wage any war against God in future.
 This is a very warped logic that Satan is trying to establish here but this is a desperate
effort on Satan’s part to win back the confidence of his followers.
 92-98: The potent victor, the powerful winner can inflict upon us more punishment
than what is already given to Satan and his peers. His not at all going to repent or
regret what he has done.
 Though I have changed in my outward appearance but from inside I have not
changed.
 Why was Satan so bent on taking on this war? Because his greatness was challenged
by God’s decision not to choose Satan as his next-in-power so he had his ego hurt
when God made that decision and that sense of injured merit will sustain in him even
after his fall.
 The transformation that Satan is focusing on is the transformation of the body.
 103-109:
 Dubious battle- battle which Satan waged against God is referred to as a dubious
battle. Something which is doubtful where you do not have any guarantee that one
side is going to win.
 Satan is trying to convince Beelzebub that they are as powerful as God. By calling it
a dubious battle Satan is equating his power with God.
 That one moment of loss is not everything. Satan still has the desire to win therefore
he is not defeated. Satan says if his unconquerable will, his desire to win is still there
in him then his is not actually defeated. Satan’s soul is undefeated.
 He still has the desire to gain back the power which he has lost and even more and
study of revenge, immortal hate.
 When you look at the Christian doctrine the most valued virtue is submission to God
is repentance, confession and will to change.
 Why do people confess? First you acknowledge your guilt second, you surrender to
the will of God. But Satan from the very beginning is banking on the virtue of what he
calls the virtue of fixity, the virtue of remaining adamant in his position.
 110-128:
 God’s wrath will not take away from Satan these qualities so he does not submit and
does not surrender although he is totally vanquished.
 Are you expecting me to beg for mercy with bent knee? That is how a person goes to
church and prays before God and Satan does not want to do that. He is not ready to
deify God’s power. Deify means to call somebody a God.
 He is referring to his strength that God feared. These are all his assumptions because
he desperately wants to convince Beelzebub that his calculations were not totally
wrong. He is telling Beelzebub that he had legitimate reason to go against God
because they are as powerful as God. He is saying that God had doubted his own
strength because of Satan so bowing before God would be humiliating.
 Ignominy- I have been thrown down to hell but to surrender before God would be a
greater downfall. He is now talking about a spiritual defeat which is not ready to
accept.
 He is trying to hold on to the hope that by direct warfare or by guile he is going to
take revenge.
 84-124: Satan’s first speech. He is justifying his battle against God. Their defeat is
only a matter of chance simply because God had a better weapon. His spirit is intact
and he will take revenge soon.
 Satan’s first speech does not establish him as a heroic character. What is heroic in a
non-christian way of thinking may not be heroic from the perspective of a puritan
Christian.
 Heroism is a matter of perspective. We cannot judge Satan only by his words, we also
need to assess his deeds.
 Satan is trying to project his heroism. He is trying to convince Beelzebub to uplift his
spirit. He is using words like guile, immortal hatred. If these are the driving forces of
a person, how can we call him a hero.

 Beelzebub’s Questions: very legitimate questions.

 What if God has decided to punish us even further? What is the purpose that we are
going to serve in hell? He is talking about two purposes- If they are in hell that will
give God some satisfaction that he has defeated the rebel angels and they are in hell
now or are we supposed to run errands for God? What is our next step going to be.
 Satan’s response- We will definitely not do what God has asked us to do. Satan is
disturbed by the questions that Beelzebub has because those questions contain some
doubt about their future course of action and he needs to provide his followers with a
clear direction and this is going to be our course of action.
 Second speech: Clear direction- no matter what we do we will always try to undo any
goodness. We will always be the opposite to god, that is going to be the purpose of
our existence.
 Out of our evil- important lines. What is the purpose of evil? Why does God need evil
to be there? So that whenever evil corrupts man, he can come and save amn and claim
the glory. You need evil in the world so that good looks better.
 He says that if god had decided to appear good because we are bad we will make God
look even worse. Our job will be to continuously oppose God.
 169-179: He is talking about the surroundings and he sees that the hailstorms have
stopped so he decides to explore the area more so he tells Beelzebub that it would be
better to get up from the lake of fire and approach the land.
 180-191- Up till now we were looking at hell as a place of liquid fire, now he is
describing hell as a land of solid fire but it is equally forlorn and sad and full of
suffering. But atleast it will give them some convenience as floating on that lake of
fire is not a very convenient situation.
 Important aspect of Paradise Lost- Convention of Epic similes. Just as he stops
speaking, he lifts himself up and goes and reaches the land of hell.
 Before that Milton describes Satan. Up till now we were looking at Satan through his
words but now we will look at Satan through an outsider’s point of view. Description
is done by Milton which means the Heavenly muse is giving us details about the size
and stature of Satan.
 192-208: His head is uplifted, his eyes are sparkling and the rest of his body is almost
paralysed lying on the pool. The body floating in a paralytic way was huge.
 Milton is giving us some names of gigantic creatures from classical fables to compare
with Satan’s huge size. Satan’s size is as huge as the Titanium or the Titans. Titans
were children of Earth and Jupiter. They were not fully divine because their mother
was earth they were considered to be second great citizens and not heavenly enough
they declared war against their father Jupiter (Jove).
 Milton is comparing the size of Satan to the size of Titans and at the same time there
is parallel comparison between their rebelliousness of Titans with the rebelliousness
of Satan and the fact that they share a kind of empathy of sin that Satan is a sinner in
rebelling against his father figure just like the Titans wrongfully rebelled against
Jupiter.
 This is epic simile where you compare one thing to another. This goes beyond one
level of comparison and tis becomes an important tool in the hand of Milton because
he is also trying to expand the horizon of the main story line.
 He is trying to take you away from the main story line and think about titans, their
word their problems. This is what a simile does, it offers a primary line of comparison
then it gives you a secondary line of comparison, which is more subtle through which
character of Satan is revealed here and third, it widens the horizon in front of your
eyes it makes the epic really epical.
 Most important epic simile here is that of leviathan who was a beast from Jewish
mythology. It is not itself a vicious creature it’s like a whale.
 Its size is compared to the size of Satan. Swimming on the Norwegian part of the
ocean. Skiff is a small boat. Sailors mistake it for an island and fix their anchor to it
and decides to spend the night on what he thinks is an island.
 Lee- In a mountain there are two sides. One side which faces the wind or the
windward sire and the opposite is the lee which is the shade away from the direct
wind.
 They spend the night there, but the morning never comes in their life.
 Why is Milton giving us this story? Leviathan is not deliberately sinful. It is not
devouring the pilot maybe it is not even noticing the pilot but it is deceiving the sailor.
He feels safe anchored on that island but his feeling of safety is not at all a stable one.
 Similarly if a man choses to place his own trust on Satan, he is destined to drown.
 209-220: Satan was chained down we know so how did he go up to the land? It was
God who set Satan free. Why? So that with repeated crimes he could be punished
further because God knows that Satan is going to do more evil. The more he becomes
Satanic the more reasons God will have to show justice to the people whom Satan is
going to corrupt.
 Evil is also part of God’s design. God’s grace allowed Satan freedom which also
shows that God believes in giving choices but he also knows which choices Satan is
going to make.
 He goes flapping up his wings to the land which is described in another set of epic
similes.
 Subterranean wind- underground wind. If an underground wind with all its force can
take a part of those active volcanos out and place it somewhere, it will be the land of
hell.
 Entrails= insides, internal organs of human beings. He it means the insides of a
volcano which is rich in minerals.
 Comparison is with the heated surface of a volcano with hell’s land but there is also a
secondary comparison is with a volcano which might have a lot of mineral content in
it, but it can only bring disaster.
 Sole- part of your feet but sounding similar to the word soul as Satan does have a
body, he only has his spirit.
 They thought they could escape that lake of fire because they had recovered their
strength.

Lines 283-521: Rebel Angels who came up one by one as if in a roll call

 283-287: Begins with epic similes.

 Milton is describing the shield of Satan. Shield= a broad piece of defensive armor
carried on the arm. Shield is carried by a soldier to protect him against any attackers.
 Satan’s shield is a huge shield compared beautifully to the moon. Build with
something ethereal, something which is not very earthly.
 Compared to a special kind of moon.
 287-291: orb= orbit, optic glass= telescope, Tuscan artist= Galileo Galilei (1564-
1642) was the first to view the surface of the moon with his telescope. Milton visited
him in 1638 in Florence, Italy.
 Galileo represents not just one single individual but an entire community of scientific
thought. He discovered the telescope and also the movements of different celestial
bodies, moon and the stars.
 When Galileo looked at the moon through his telescope, he observed shades and spots
on the moon. It does not look as pristine. Satan’s shield is also full of spots as it has
undergone the war against God and has incurred heavy damage.
 Spear= a weapon with a pointy tip. Satan’s spear is so big that even the tallest pine
tree on the Norwegian hills (that makes a mast of a great warship) appears as small as
a stick when compared.
 Milton is not giving an exact size but is describing objects by comparing proportions.
 His similes end up making things vaguer because he does not give exact proportions.
 302-313: Comparing rebel angels with autumnal leaves and then with scattered sedge.
 Vallambrosa- beautiful valley with trees forming an arch, Brooks- autumn season
leaves fall and scatter around. Rebel angels being compared to the fallen leaves.
Autumnal leaves represent decay, loss of glory, sadness. Emotional aspects also come
into play.
 The leaves also choke the flow of water, a symbol of life. Rebel angels are being
marked by evil because Milton is comparing them to the leaves who choke the water
and they are wasted.
 Satan calls the Rebel angels one by one and they lift themselves up from the Lake of
Fire to the Land of Hell.
 1st Rebel angel- 392-405: Moloch
 Biblical name of a Canaanite God associated with child sacrifice. Worshipped in
Rabba, Argob and Basan by the Ammonites. He wanted to expanded his territory so
he corrupted the wise King Solomon.
 King Solomon built a temple of Moloch on the mount of Olives near the temple of
God.
 Temples are very important- they not just have religious meanings, they have social
and political meanings too.
 Building a temple for Moloch becomes a step against the true God which in Milton’s
eyes is something very punishable.
 He transformed the beautiful valley into hell by corrupting Mankind.
 2nd- Chemos 406-418:
 Chemos is the national deity of the Moabites. His other name is Peor. Peor seduced
the Israelites away from the Real God when Moses was away to collect the
commandments.
 Chemos was worshipped around Aroar, Nebo, Hesebon, Eleale and Asphaltic pool.
 He is worshipped through lustful orgies as rituals. King Solomon built his temple on
Mount of Olive beside Moloch’s.
 While Moloch represents violence and murder Chemos represents lust and sexual
rituals.
 Milton is giving concrete representations of abstract vices, symbols translated into
agents.
 419-437: Baalim and Ashtaroth. They did not have any fixed gender.
 They are the same category of angels. Baalim was male and Astharoth was female.
They can interchange their sex. Israelites and Egyptians worshipped them in
Euphrates to Syrian border of Egypt.
 They were evil not because they could change their sexual identities but also because
they corrupted the Israelites from the true worship of the real God.
 Sin in Milton’s eyes as he is strictly religious.
 437-446: Astoreth, also known as Astarte, the moon goddess has moon shaped horns.
 She is the fertility goddess worshipped by Sidonian virgins and Phoenicians. King
Solomon built her temple on Mount of Olives.
 Non-christian form of worship is dismissed. They were not Gods of any cults or evil
tribes, they were Gods of ancient nature worshippers who believed in building a
community, goodness of the community but they were not Christians so they were
dismissed.
 Idolatry is prohibited in many regions.
 446-457: Thammuz
 Also known as Dammmuz or Tammuz, when still a young man, was killed by a wild
boar.
 The women mourned for 40 days, and he came to life again.
 He was loved by Ishtar, the amorous Queen of Heaven.
 Worshippers believed that his wound renewed every year and flowed through Adonis.
The weeping ceremony was connected with agricultural rites. He was worshipped by
Syrians at Lebanon.
 It is a very common phenomenon in different parts of the world some rivers turned
purplish due to the deposit of iron oxide due to lack of water.
 It is the tendency of folk culture to transform these geographical phenomena into
something very mysterious and religious.
 457-166: Dagon the Sea monster
 Dagon, the chief deity of the Philistines, worshipped in Gath, Ascalon, Accaron and
Gaza in the third millennium BC, was a half-man, half-fish creature.
 He was the father of Baal and possibly the provider of grain.
 God destroyed the idol by chopping off its limbs and making it fall facedown on
ground establishing that Dagon is a false God.
 467-476: Rimmon, Osiris, Isis, Orus no detail. They had corrupted the Egyptians.
The fault that these Gods had was that they didn’t have human form.
 Belail: The God of lawlessness and corruption.
 No temple was built for him. He ruled the hears of corrupt courtiers, drunk, unruly
people and atheist priests.
 His followers are called Sons or Daughters of Belial.
 Hearts of rioters are controlled by Belial. Belial controls the soul of man. Spiritual
control that Milton is connecting Belial with. People who walk at night, drunk and
have no sense of morality are ruled by Belial.

 Mammon In the Bible, Mammon is often presented as a king or demon who is the
personification of wealth. In Paradise Lost, he is called the "least erected" of the
fallen angels because he always has his eyes downward looking for gold or money. In
the council, he proposes exploiting the wealth of Hell to create a comfortable
existence rather than warring against God.

 Moloch: Moloch was an idolatrous deity worshipped by some Israelites. The chief
feature of his cult seems to have been child sacrifice. In Paradise Lost, he argues at
the council for total war against God. He is neither subtle nor effective in his speech.

 Mulciber Fallen angel who is the chief architect for Pandemonium. The character
seems to be derived from Hephaestus in Greek mythology

 The pandemonium is that creation in hell designed for infernal conclaves which
would rival in its splendour the greatest of human creations and perhaps even divine
architecture. It is a word formed by the union of two Greek words, pan, all, and
daemon, demon, but the compound word did not exist in the Greek vocabulary, and
Milton formed it out the analogy of ‘pantheon’, the abode of the gods. The pantheon
at Rome was a temple containing statues of all the gods. Milton’s pandemonium is the
capital of hell built to receive all the devils.
 The pandemonium is built in a corner of hell, the place of a horrible dungeon, of
‘darkness visible’ which in its turn had been created by God as punishment for their
rebellion of Satan and the fallen angels in heaven.
 Immediately after the inspiring words of Satan in his fifth and last speech, ‘a
numerous brigade’ hastened to a hill ‘where grisly top/belched fire and rolling
smoke’.
 The brigade is compared to those 'pioneers' in the army who advance before the king
or commander to make troupe or prepare a camp.
 The add is provided by mammon who is described as ‘the least erected among all the
spirits who fell from heaven. This look is always ‘downward bent’, and this was so
even in heaven where he admired the trodden gold of which heaven’s pavement was
made.
 Qualitatively this stooping also suggests his moral nature, since it also suggests a
grilling or base spirit.
 He is denied the ‘vision beatific’ a theological tern for the happiness of seeing God.
‘Mammon’ is a archaic word meaning ‘wealth’, and this name is used both by
Matthew and by Spenser in Faerie Queene, though there does not seem to have been
any god called Mammon worshiped by the nations bordering on the territory of the
Israelite.
 But later Milton uses the name of another architect, Mulciber. Muliciber is a surname
of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire who was identified with the Greek Hephaestus.
 Soon the crew, working under Mammon, began to dig the centre of the earth for
hidden minerals. They opened up the volcanic hill which was covered with a glossy
scurf indicating that the metallic are of sulphur was concealed within
 They dugout veins of gold, while a second group sluiced liquid fire from the lake of
fire to help in the construction. A yet third group used the fire to melt the ‘messy ore’
and separate each kind, taking special care to extract ‘bullion’ on solid gold.
 Pandemonium is a miraculously produced marvelous creation:
 And here let those
 Who boast in mortal things, and wondering tell
 Of Babel, and the work of Memphian kings,
 Learn how their greatest monument of fame,
 And strength, and art, are easily out done
 By spirits reprobate -- - - - - - - -

 If the Egyptian pyramids had taken 3,60,000 men twenty years to construct, they are
able to create a greater architectural marvel in an hour.
 It was built like a temple and was decorated with numerous architectural designs:
architraves, Doric pillars, cornice, frizz and embossed sculpture.
 The roof was made of gold, and the building was of a stately height. The structure was
so massive as to have huge brass doors which, when opened, revealed a pale space
and level pavement. The miracle of rare device was lit by rows of starry lamps and
cressets which hung from the arched roof by ‘subtle magic’ since there were no
supports.
 Milton declares that neither Babylon, nor could great Alcaero boast of such wealth
and luxury, such splendor and magnificence.

 Thus, pandemonium, ‘the high capital of Satan and his peers’ is both itself
architectural and the product of a miracle. Yet Milton presents such magnificence as
inimical, and does this not merely because it is inhabited by the rebel angels but
perhaps also because the puritan in him militated against such vain splendor.