CC - VII: John Milton: Paradise Lost: Give a description and comment on the Hell in "Paradise Lost" [Book-1]. do you find any inconsistency in it

 

The description of he is a favorite them with the epic poets. We see it in Dante's La Divine Comedia, Virgil's Aeneid and even in the Indian epic The Mahabharata of Vyasdeve. Everywhere hell is murky, everywhere the description of hell produces in the reader the terriblest effect of fright. The horror of Milton's hell, as we find it in a classical epic, lies in the torments [pain] of being plunged into fire and ice alternately. The stress falls on endless misery. The stress falls on endless misery. The phrases "bottomless perdition" well testify to the state of "eternal dying and not death", as Ian Fletcher's observation goes.

                                      According to Milton's cosmology, hell lies in the depths of chaos, a fall of nine days and nine nights from heaven [the uppermost layer of Milton's universe, the second and the third being chaos and our world]. The description of hell circles "a lake of liquid fire [the firey gulf' which is constantly fed with firely liquid by four rivers, Acheron, phlegeton, Styx and cocyfus], the circle of solid fire on which Satan rising from the firey flood with his crew, alights and on which pandemonium is constructed. Beyond this solid land of fire is the circular region of "waste and wilde", "full of rocks, cares, lakes, fens, bogs dens and shades of death" This region is encircled by the river Lethe. Then there is the last circular region the region of extreme cold "a frozen continent, dark and white" hit with perpetual storms of "whir/winds" and "dire hell". The air of hell is fire. Thus the entire hell burns like a brust furnace offering no relief from pain and suffering.

                   More important than structure of the hell is its texture. It is like a dark and underground hell in a prison.  Instead of that there is "darkness visible" a glimmering darkness in which painful sights ["sights of  woe"] regions of sorrow, shadowy object I ["doleful shades"] lying about are dimly visible to the inmates of the Dungeon. The reference is to Job X. 22; "a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death without any order, and where the light of the physical hell adds to the mental hell, as if makes him conscious of the spectacle of misery all round. The next few lines as quoted below would well testify to it.

               This is a dark and gloomy place "where peace/and rest can never dwell, hope never comes,/ That comes to all [u-66-67]. Understandably, this hell is objective as well as subjective. however, veiled allusion to Euripides, the great Greek dramatist who wrote-"even hope which remains to all mortals is not here", as well as to Dante's Inferno -"all hope abandon ye who enter here". Dante relied on eternal horrors; Milton  combines it with inner suffering and this psychological admixture relieves particularly the gruesomeness (horror) of Milton's description. It has a greater tragic intensity than that of his predecessors.

                  In a word, Dante's hell is various and fragmentary divided into innumerable components, Milton's is immerse and indeterminate, producing an incomparable total effect with " an indistinct but solemn and tremendous imagery" as Macaulay say. Obviously, the purpose is two fold; first, to indicate the torments which the fallen angles will now have to endure in contrast to the beautiful joy which they have lost forever, and secondly, to infuse a feeling of horror in the readers.

                                  Several critics have complained of various kinds of inconsistency in the description of Milton's hell. It is odd, for example, to suggest that although it burns like a furnace no light comes there of. It is also strange to know that the Devils are doomed to "adamantine chains" and "penal fire" and that Satan himself is changed in the burning lake, while a few lines later they are able to fly to dry lands and before long they are engaged in all kinds of activities. Wedlock points out that Milton was trying to "accomplish, two incompatible things", namely, to depict a hell which was a place for perpetual torment and one which was a base for military operations. But Milton makes it clear that the tortures are intermittent, and there is no reason why we should not assume that they are partly symbolic.