November 15, 2024

By chance, I have been teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost in the week of the election and its aftermath.  No work could have been more appropriate to this moment, starting with the thematic word “lost,” which tolls forlornly like a bell throughout the text.  We have lost the election, and with it we have lost a world.  Like Adam and Eve, we are now in exile in the wilderness, and must learn how to cope with that situation.  What hope Milton has to offer has nothing to do with being a believing Christian in any conventional sense.  Milton wrote Paradise Lost, along with his two other major works, the “brief epic” Paradise Regained and the tragic verse drama Samson Agonistes, at the end of his life, after spending 20 years in midlife working for the Puritan revolution in the name of “liberty,” and watching that revolution, once the source of wild excitement and expectation, come crashing down in ruin, and the old system of authority restored.

When Milton wrote his major works, he was old, blind, and his life’s hopes shattered. He was in fact lucky even to be alive.  Briefly imprisoned when the monarchy returned to power, he was freed by means of the intervention of his friend the Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, who no doubt argued for clemency given the poet’s age and disability.  Everything Milton had worked for had definitively failed, with no chance of a comeback.  That is what, behind the scenes, Paradise Lost is all about.  The twin falls of Satan and of Adam and Eve are the paradigm of all failed attempts at human betterment, and it sometimes seems as if that cycle of failure, of rising hopes bitterly dashed, is simply the human condition, with no prospect of ever breaking free.  “Liberty” turned out to be what Freud called the arts:  a “narcosis,” an escapist drug.  And, most bitter of all, the cause of liberty had failed, not because of the superior force of its enemies, but from within.  Most of the human race does not want liberty, but only what Milton called “license,” and they are tempted by any authoritarian who promises to give it to them.  License means absence of restraint and therefore permission to indulge one’s darker, selfish impulses. 

Trump’s rabblerousing campaign speeches were entirely about license, validating an electorate’s desire to hate, destroy, and dominate.  I think the Democratic party’s present self-lacerating mood is completely wrongheaded. Everyone is being blamed except the millions who voted for evil, knowing it was evil.  They were not naïve victims of a huge misinformation machine, not this time.  They were exactly in the position of Adam and Eve.  They were not sealed in a bubble.  They knew there was an antithetical narrative offered by credible news sources, but they chose to disbelieve it, just as Adam and Eve chose to believe the serpent’s sales pitch over the warnings of the angel Raphael.  And for the same reason:  they wanted to believe the serpent, because he appealed to their darker impulses, specifically to the will to power.  Those who voted for Trump have to be held responsible for that choice, especially when the consequences come down.  Absolving them out of a desire for “dialogue” or a wish not to appear self-righteous is wrong, and Democratic wallowing in self-blame is neurotic.  Liberals are the only ones interested in dialogue.  If anything is to change for the better in the long run, it will have to begin with the cold, hard realization by a large number of the American people that there are consequences for delusional thinking.  Trump voters have had real grievances, but that is no excuse for going over to the dark side.  They say that only Trump can bring change, but they have no excuse for not knowing that he in fact is the agent of their billionaire oppressors, the ones who have “rigged the system,” as they often put it.  They must know on some level that he will not change the system.  What he will do is give them license to vent their fear, frustration, and fury on scapegoats of all types.  It is a nihilistic impulse, even as it is masked as patriotism, as saving America. 

Milton was the great influence on William Blake, and Blake was the great influence on Northrop Frye, whose book Fearful Symmetry awakened me when I was 19 years old.  Fearful Symmetry was not published until 1947, but it was written in the years prior to 1945, in other words during World War II, in the shadow of the Nazi and fascist movement, the same movement towards authoritarian mob rule that we are saying again right now.  When asked in a late interview how the war affected the composition of Fearful Symmetry, he answered, “Well, I think if you look carefully at the book, and even more at the footnotes, you’ll see it’s a very anxious, troubled book.  It’s written with the horror of Nazism just directly in front of it all the time” (765).  In March of 1969, just before I read it for the first time in May, 1970, Frye wrote a preface to Fearful Symmetry in which he said of Blake, “He hailed with delight the apocalyptic element in the American and French revolutions, the glimpse of eternal freedom that they gave.  But he also say growing, in France and England alike, a ‘Deism’ of self-righteous mob rule…I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake’s time which were useful for understanding Blake’s attitude to the world.  Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say” (7).  If I add to the influence of Milton, Blake, and Frye that of Jung, whose work also arose out of an attempt to understand and cope with the collectivist uprisings that led to two world wars in a row, followed by a Cold War, I begin to feel that my entire intellectual life has revolved around the issues that have produced the present crisis. 

At the end of Paradise Lost, Milton provides two consolations to the bereft Adam and Eve as they are evicted from Eden.  One is long-range, a vision of a counterforce working within history’s ironic cycles of rise and fall.  This vision, which takes up Books 11 and 12 of the poem, adopts the vocabulary of Biblical typology, recreated in terms of Milton’s progressive vision.  But the other consolation is not delayed and in the future but immediate.  The archangel Michael tells Adam that he and Eve with carry with them a paradise that is “happier far” then the literal Eden that they have lost.  What in the world can that mean that is not just delusional happy-talk?  Isn’t that like saying, as my mother did to me when the neighbor girl told me that Santa Claus didn’t exist, that he is real if you want him to be?  Haven’t we had far too much magical thinking?  Worse, isn’t this kind of delusional thinking what Satan displays when he defiantly claims in hell that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”?  It is not even a genuine delusion but a lie in order to con his followers, as we realize later, when we finally learn Satan’s mind from his first soliloquy, in which he admits,

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven  (4.75-79)

A heaven within seems wishful thinking, but a hell within is self-validating truth.  When I took Frye’s Milton seminar in graduate school at the University of Toronto, he provided a list of topics for the final essay and class presentation.  I signed up for “The internalization of paradise,” not because I understood it but because I didn’t.  I have no idea what I said at that time, but I have kept trying, and this is one more try.  I will only add a little anecdote from that class, mischievously but seriously intended as a parable.  In one class session, there was a power failure, and, since our classroom was internal, with no windows, we were suddenly plunged into “darkness visible,” Milton’s famous phrase about hell, unable to see a single thing.  Frye’s response was to keep lecturing.  The memory of Frye’s voice floating upon the darkness like the spirit in the opening of Genesis still amuses me.  Teachers have to cope with any eventuality.  But I now think it is a small parable.  When the lights go out, as they went out all over Europe according to a famous statement when World War II began, what you do is keep on talking, keep on studying and thinking, keep on having the conversation.  Milton’s affinities were with the far left wing of Protestantism, with the Inner Light movement that saw God less as an external figure than as an illumination within.  Milton’s portrayal of the externalized God the Father in Book 3 of Paradise Lost is by common agreement the weakest part of the poem.  His real God was the inner presence to which he speaks and to whom he listens in the four movingly personal invocations throughout the epic, one of which laments his blindness, the external power failure that was permanent.  Yet he kept writing. We do this.  I once lectured on the myth of the Bible during a tornado warning.  I couldn’t dismiss class because the building was the only safe place to be, so I moved the class to a windowless internal room and kept going.  The lecture was on paradise.  You can’t make these things up.  The only thing funnier would have been if I had been teaching the Book of Job, in which God shows up in a whirlwind. 

We have Trump because we lost what made the American Dream possible, namely, the New Deal.  What we had before the New Deal was what we have again now:  a Gilded Age of income inequality and exploitation of the lower classes by an oligarchy whose complacent grandiosity finally overreached itself and gave us the Great Depression.  The New Deal put in place two things:  restraints on capitalism in order to prevent exploitation and income inequality, and a social safety net.  For the middle and working classes, this provided security and a good way of life, with a possibility of further improvement for later generations.  Common people are only open to liberalizing social progress if they feel relatively secure.  The progressive movements of the 60’s were rooted in the soil of postwar American stability:  it is no mystery why the civil rights movement, feminism, the sexual revolution, gay rights, and so on blossomed when they did.  The kind of paranoia that is attracted to authoritarianism existed, but was projected outward in the form of the Cold War, and the attempt to internalize it in the form of McCarthyism failed, replaced in the Sixties by the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement. 

What killed the society of the New Deal and the American Dream was the loss of high-paying blue collar jobs that had enabled non-college educated men to become useful and self-respecting members of society.  Ironically, it is the loss of those jobs that enabled women to enter the workforce in great numbers, which, over the course of a generation or so, gave women the means of financial independence, which in turn enabled them to leave bad marriages or, if they stayed, to demand changes in marital roles.  The push to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment failed, but its goal was achieved anyway because men had to allow their wives to work.  One income was no longer enough to sustain a family.  However, the influx of women into the job world was bought at a twofold price, resulting in some of the conditions fueling social unrest right now. 

First, it demoralized men by robbing them of their chief means of self-respect. This is a complex and risky area.  It is true that the patriarchal family is the basic building block of an authoritarian society.  Rule by the dominant male, who in turn provides security, is social conditioning designed to make offspring accept authoritarianism as the “natural” way of life.  It could be replaced by a non-traditional family in which the spouses form an equal team, as feminists urged at the time, for example Dorothy Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, but men are not conditioned to be interdependent and egalitarian as women are.  They are only conditioned by three forms of competition—war, sports, and business.  In these, men are taught that they can be team players—but to be a team player is to accept secondary status.  The team exists to serve the alpha male, and alpha males are not team players.  Elon Musk is not a team player.  Donald Trump is not a team player.  Unquestioning obedience to an all-powerful leader or else ruthless domination is the choice.  And it is the alpha male who gets all the women and the trophies. 

Americans romanticize the myth of the Western frontier and the male rugged individualist. However, most men are not rugged individualists but corporate employees controlled by their middle manager bosses.  The union movement, which was adjunct to the New Deal, managed to procure some amount of independence and self-respect for blue collar men, but it was the Reagan revolution, which first began abolishing the New Deal, that broke the power of the unions, symbolized by Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers.  Men who choose not to go to college are not for the most part too stupid to do academic work.  But they may be underprepared because doing well in school is not a male goal, and they may feel insecure about operating in a world for which their upbringing has not conditioned them.  The horrible misogyny that has been on display recently comes from insecure men who might be less toxic if they had a social role that granted them more self-respect.  Blue collar work provided that, though of course at the price of forcing women to remain stay-at-home housewives.  That is the second way in which the loss of blue collar work has led to the present catastrophe.  The entry of women full-time into the job world put a terrible strain on family life.  The average family with children today live in a chronically frazzeled condition, trying to provide adequate childcare while the parents are juggling career demands. 

Who has responsibility for subverting the New Deal?  Let us blame those who are really to blame.  I weary of the endless bashing of Bill Clinton and neoliberalism, when in fact the real culprit was the Reagan revolution and its yuppies.  People have forgotten how utterly disillusioned the country was with traditional liberalism, which, especially after the troubled presidency of Jimmy Carter, was regarded as so completely obsolete that it became a joke, “the l-word,” so negative that political candidates would end their careers by being associated with it.  Bill Clinton and his New Democrats invented “neoliberalism” as a way of saving the Democratic party, and it succeeded.  Neoliberalism was a centrist compromise: it shifted because that was the tenor of the times, what the common people wanted, and wanted emphatically.  Traditionally liberal candidates could not even win respect, let alone elections, starting with Jimmy Carter himself but also including George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Al Gore.  Clinton pragmatically pulled back somewhat on social issues, ending “welfare as we know it"; he became more hawkish abroad, to counter fears that Democrats were “weak on defense”; and he embraced globalism by championing NAFTA and ended the Glass-Steagall Act that had separated commercial from investment banking, thus laying the groundwork for the meltdown of 2008.

But I still feel that if he had not done so, the Democratic Party would have become a splinter party getting maybe ten percent of the vote, like some European green party.  The election in which Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter was a “vibes” election.  The American people were irrationally depressed, pessimistic, and sour, just as they have been lately.  The parallels with Biden are startling: Carter had “stagflation” and the oil crisis, with gas rationing, where Biden had inflation from the pandemic; Carter had the Iranian hostage crisis where Biden had Gaza.  Not all “joy” is good:  Ronald Reagan proclaimed that it was “Morning in America,” and America bought it.  People have forgotten all this, but I was there.  Of course, this is not to deny that Clinton made a deal with the devil, and the devil has come to collect.  Globalism and its offshoring of industries, the rise of billionaires unconstrained by regulations or unions about how to treat their employees—this has led to the “vibes” today that have produced a populist uprising directly against the interests of the populace.  Obama was elected in 2008 out of another upsurge of “joy,” yet he governed very much on the model of cautious Clinton centrism, compromising as if he feared to lose what mandate he had, especially when he allowed the perpetrators of the 2008 meltdown to go scot free while ordinary people lost their homes. 

Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor was Robert Reich, an unrepentant true liberal that I have admired ever since. Reich saw that the job world was being remade.  Blue collar jobs were disappearing and would never return.  What would replace them, he foresaw, were two other kinds of work:  service jobs, that could not be outsourced but which paid poorly and were not socially respected, and the work of those he called “symbolic analysts.”  These are jobs demanding a college education teaching the manipulation of symbols, that is, numbers and words.  The people we call educated professionals are those who would thrive in the brave new world.  If you want to survive, let alone thrive, you have to go to college and become some sort of educated professional, a symbolic analyst.  The Democratic Party since then has become the party of the educated professionals, but it has nothing to offer to the former blue collar workers or those in low-paying, low-prestige service jobs.  Since then, Reich has sounded the alarm that the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class spells potential disaster, and now we can eliminate the word “potential.” 

What could have been done instead?  There is nothing about blue collar work in itself that should evoke much nostalgia.  A lifetime of hard physical labor, often in an environment of noise, pollution, and extremes of temperature and bad weather, breaks down men’s bodies—that is what happened to my dad’s generation.  It is one of the political stupidities of our time that there should be a hillbilly elegy for coal mining, one of the nastiest jobs imaginable, one that crushed the leg of my grandfather after giving him black lung.  The age of retirement, now raised, was originally set to 65 because a good number of men were too debilitated after that age to go on.  Instead of romanticizing manual labor, what could have been done is to transform the service sector in the way that, after all, blue collar work had been transformed in the earlier days.  Unions fought for better pay, for better working conditions, for shorter hours and time off, for generous pensions and job security, and in the spirit of the New Deal the battle was won.  This is exactly what needs to happen:  educated professional jobs demanding a college degree need to be supplemented by working-class jobs that provide the features of what used to be called the American way of life, back when it actually was.  In other words, Bernie Sanders was right.  But, regrettably, his cause was doomed because, first, he was too old (and perhaps too Jewish), and, second, he self-destructively insisted on calling himself a “socialist.”  If we are looking for common ground on which to meet Trump voters, looking for a basis for solidarity, it is this:  they have every right to be fearful, frustrated, and furiously angry, to feel that the present system is rigged and has to be changed, perhaps even overthrown.  Where they are devastatingly wrong is in choosing Trump and his hatred, scapegoating, and strongman bullying as the means accomplish that revolution. 

As people become fearful and feel vulnerable, they are increasingly tempted by and sucked into what Jung called the shadow, the dark other side of ourselves where we repress our selfish and antisocial impulses.  Racism, homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia are always latent in people, but under normal conditions they are repressed and controlled.  But these are anything but normal conditions, and the collective shadow has possessed the general population.  I’m afraid I cannot accept the idea that Trump voters were deceived by the right-wing information bubble.   I read an interview with a Trump voter who grieved that “Democrats think I’m stupid,” and it’s true that a lot of pundits and people on New York Times discussion boards right now are cursing the stupidity of a supposedly naïve crowd for being taken in by a man they know is a liar and con artist.  But I don’t think they are stupid.  I think their ignorance was willful, that they know quite well that Trump is a rapist, crooked businessman, con artist, racist, and would-be insurrectionist.  That only makes him a better instrument for their revenge.  He is their weapon, and the nastier the better in order to inflict maximum pain and damage on their enemies.  A civilized and restrained weapon is a contradiction in terms. 

Not all Trump voters are equally possessed.  The hardcore MAGA people are openly malicious, whereas somebody’s nice old grandma may be more gullible.  But grandmas are easy to scare, and fear leads to hate of other people that grandma does not know and will never meet, which makes hating them all the easier.  So watch your back around the nice old ladies.  It is the “respectable” people that tilt the vote when the malicious ones don’t have the numbers.  And they genuinely believe in their own niceness, are hurt when you doubt it and accuse you of lacking Christian charity, accuse you of elitist snobbery and looking down on them.  It is true, moreover, that they genuinely are nice, filled with Christian love and forgiveness—within the limits of their tribe, and where people who are “different” do not freak them out.  But beyond that, it is often just willful ignorance.  Fox News gives them a cover—really, who could believe that a whole news network would systematically lie?  Low-information voters are giving themselves an excuse.  If I remain low-information, I can’t be responsible.  Those who voted for him know Trump is going to be cruel, going to be anti-democratic.  They don’t think it’s just performative rhetoric, as some commentators are now saying. They voted for a strongman who will crack heads, make no mistake.  That’s what it will take, they feel, because the system will not respond to anything less.  You can tell them all day that no president can simply dictate lower grocery prices, but they count on Trump disregarding laws and getting renegade law enforcement to back him up.  Go in there and act like a mob boss to the grocery stores and food manufacturers.  That’s what they mean when they say that Trump is a “leader,” and no one else has the strength or the guts.  He will get stuff done.  When he doesn’t, it will somehow be blamed on Joe Biden.  I may sound harsh and arrogant, but they have seen that for Trump there are never any consequences for deception and self-deception, and they have faith that that will be true for them too. 

It's going to be ugly for four years, and when it all goes bad, those who voted for him will never admit they were wrong, which would necessitate confronting their own shadow.  That is excruciatingly difficult even for those of us who are only confronting our shadow’s potential for evil but have not actually let him (or her, or them) off the leash to do damage that we are partly responsible for.  What we may hope is that in four years, if conditions are bad enough, a sufficient number of voters may secretly repudiate the Republican Party and, in the privacy of the voting booth, renounce their allegiance to evil.  If we have elections:  Trump makes no secret of his plan to establish a military dictatorship. 

But even repudiating the fascist regime will still leave us the task of confronting the billionaires who manipulate the political puppets.  Harris and the Democrats are being blamed for not offering any real change.  Exactly what would “real change” look like?  It would entail overthrowing the control of the 1%, and we should demand of anyone who sneers at the Democrats exactly what that would look like, and exactly how it would be brought about.  It is easy to complain and make demands to “fix it,” to sneer at liberal “lack of courage.”  Joe Biden pursued a plan of slow amelioration, which did help ordinary people in countless ways but could not address the plight of people who live precariously and in constant financial anxiety.  However, no one else has a better solution—no one.  There is a lot of intellectual dishonesty and virtue signaling hiding the hard truth that, if we reject moderate amelioration over time as a method, the only alternative is radical reform—which means a social revolution.  I will grant Trump voters the big compliment that they see this more clearly than some of the pundits and the establishment.  That is why they want to smash the system. 

The best we might hope for is a charismatic leader who marshals a coalition of educated professionals and that part of the working class who is repelled by fascism in order to take on the oligarchs, as FDR did.  But, arguably, FDR only succeeded because the Great Depression did the work of the social revolution for him—it smashed the power of the robber barons, so that he was able to put the New Deal in place.  The Trump regime is perfectly capable of producing a depression, and much will depend on whether a long-delayed confrontation with inequality will finally take place because of it.  If that happened and there was reform restraining unregulated capitalism and guaranteeing a decent life for ordinary people, it would be our version of the progressive future that Michael shows to Adam in Paradise Lost.  Blake refined on Milton’s vision in his own work, portraying the work of the imagination in the cycles of history, expanding horizons, waking people up.  This is not a naïve hope.  It has happened in a series of waves throughout my lifetime, and it is happening now. The New Deal itself was an awakening, a radical change in the direction of economic fairness of a sort that the country had never seen before.  And the security and prosperity it brought made Americans open to cultural changes in the direction of social justice. I have to inform my students that in his first term Obama had to pretend he believed that marriage was between a heterosexual man and woman.  The fact that we have widened our empathy and understanding so far beyond that in only a short time is remarkable—and is what is throwing the “anti-woke” crowd into a panic.  They can persecute and legislate, but they cannot stop the progressive widening of sympathies. 

However, we cannot live entirely for the future.  It is a curious paradox that for the imagination to transcend time by living in the future, and also in the past, it has to be grounded in the here and now.  Those who are so much dedicated to a future vision that they forget to live in the present are getting ahead of themselves, as we say.  Delayed gratification is the mark of maturity, but we must become as little children again, and for us, as for children, there must be not just some promise of future reward but fulfilment right now.  Which brings us back to “paradise within.” 

The Classical parallel to the internalization of paradise is a famous passage at the end of Plato’s Republic in which Socrates is asked whether his ideal republic could ever be realized.  Socrates replies, probably not, but the wise man will live in it internally no matter what society he lives in outwardly. 

As for Christianity, it became the stereotypical pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die religion of delayed gratification, the religion that is always waiting for a Godot who never comes.  But that was a political decision of the early Church.  The orthodoxy of the institutional Church in fact repressed an alternative form of Christianity, that of Gnosticism, that made individual spiritual experience the goal and purpose of the religion, rather than right belief and obedience.  Individual illumination, or gnosis, was—and still more or less is—regarded as spiritual pride, a form of egocentric individualism, and a dangerous invitation to psychosis.  Besides, if people could have their own redemptive experiences, they would not need the Church any longer.  Yet it is by no means contradictory to the teachings of Jesus, who said that the kingdom of heaven is within you.  This is close to what Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, that the kingdom of heaven is laid upon the earth, but men do not see it.

To speak cautiously, there seem to be Eastern parallels to this idea.  One is the Mahayana Buddhist saying that “Samsara is nirvana.”  Samsara is the cycle of birth and death and suffering, and the goal of Buddhism is, in one way of understanding, to escape from it through enlightenment into nirvana, which means liberation or release.  Mahayana denies the dualism implicit in such an understanding and says there is nothing to escape to.  Nirvana is within or in the midst of samsara. The most famous variant of Mahayana is Zen; both it and the mindfulness movement stress being in the present.  As Wordsworth says, it is here we find our happiness or not at all. 

To say that that paradise or the kingdom is within us might imply that it is merely subjective, in which case it would be mere wish fulfilment.  Scholars suggest that the phrase “within you” might also be translated “among you,” so that the kingdom is then both within and without.  Paradise is everywhere.  Blake has a poem called “Auguries of Innocence.” An augury is an omen or sign, and the famous opening lines speak of the possibility that everything we perceive may open out into a different mode of being, a state that Frye calls “interpenetration,” in which everything is everywhere at all times: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

But insofar as we remain identified with ordinary ego consciousness, this still sounds like comfort food.  The ego is defined by the subject-object split that Blake calls the “cloven fiction,” the fallen state in which everything is separate and alienated from everything else. We cannot break out of that state through mere thinking or by force of will.  Nevertheless, in moments of extremity, the walls sometimes break down, the doors of perception are cleansed, and we see everything as it is, infinite, as Blake also said.  Such moments, which Maslow called peak experiences, are utterly unpredictable, occurring for no apparent reason.  They are characterized by what Maslow, borrowing from Freud, called the primary process of the unconscious, and the unconscious is as unaccountable as God himself.  In fact, as Jung scandalized the conventional by saying, go down to a deep enough level and you cannot tell them apart. When we desperately need a taste of paradise, as most of us do now, we may taste nothing but the dry dust of the wasteland.  We may pray in grief and need, and hear only silence.  It is not fair, it is not reasonable.  The wicked prosper and the good people, like Job, are afflicted as if by a malicious devil. Where is that paradise within, for all we know is despair? 

During World War II, Dylan Thomas’s home town of Swansea in Wales was firebombed by the Nazis, as of course was London, the famous blitz.  What seems to have haunted Thomas was the death of children, for he wrote two poems about it.  The more famous is “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” but “Ceremony after a Fire Raid” expands the notion of a paradise within so that the dead child becomes a microcosm, and its death repeats the Fall.  Yet at the same time, the raid, which breaks down walls and levels buildings, breaks through deeper barriers as well, starting with the barrier between the poet and others with whom he is united in grief to become “Myselves / The grievers.”  He goes on to say,

I know the legend
Of Adam and Eve is never for a second
Silent in my service
Over the dead infants
Over the one
Child who was priest and servants,
Word, singers, and tongue

The child and those who grieve for it are thus identified.  But the child’s death breaks through time and space to become the death of Eden itself, and of Adam and Eve:

I know not whether
Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock
Or the white ewe lamb
Or the chosen virgin
Laid in her snow
On the altar of London
Was the first to die. 

And then abruptly, without explanation, the falling fire of the bombs is counterbalanced by the upsurge of “the infant-bearing sea,” whose waters

Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter forever
Glory glory glory
The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.

Genesis’ thunder is the creative Word, and in this moment of a final “sundering” there is somehow a return to the first moment, and it all begins again.  It is impossible right now not to think of all the dead children in Gaza and Ukraine.  The ceremony of this poem, written for another war, reaches out to include them.

Such moments of vision, of grace, happen as they will:  the wind of the spirit bloweth where it listeth.  But that does not mean that we are merely helpless.  Milton defined education as the attempt “to repair the ruin of our first parents,” and education, creativity, love, and social connection all open windows to paradise.  We refuse to live in hell.  The worst aspect of hell is its hopelessness, the feeling that there is no possibility that it will ever change.  This is what dictatorships try to produce, as Orwell tried to show in 1984, because it makes people passive and helpless.  But we are not helpless, and, even without special grace, we can insist on living in paradise internally.  If we lived in the garden externally but did not have Eden in our hearts, we would be strangers in paradise, denizens of the wilderness.  The final chapter of Frye’s book on Milton, The Return of Eden, is called “The Garden Within.”  In it, Frye writes,

God’s sovereignty, therefore, has its earthly model in the mind of Enoch or Noah or Samson who refuses to compromise with evil, refuses to admit any of the arguments that evil advances in favour of compromise, and who, faced with the supreme test, can produce out of some unknown depth the power to suffer and die.  This power suffers alone…Something of this lonely fight comes into Milton’s personal statements in Paradise Lost:  the cold climate, the late age, blindness, the loss of touch with literary fashions evidenced in the old-style blank verse, the religious and therefore conventionally unheroic subject, all suggest a last-ditch desperateness.  (109-10)

Yet he adds, “but it is hard to think of Paradise Lost as some kind of consolation prize.  An original purchaser, standing at a bookstall with the surge and thunder of the mighty poem breaking over him, might well have asked, ‘But this is a blind, defeated, disillusioned, gouty old man: where did he get all this energy?’ It is a fair question, even if it may not have an answer.” (110)

Writing his poems, refusing the last temptation, which is to give up because it is too hopeless and too hard, Milton was in the situation of Christ tempted by Satan in the desert in Paradise Regained.   But Christ’s victory, a purely internal victory over Satan, though it was witnessed by no one, produced the result described in the poem’s opening as “Eden raised in the waste wilderness.”  It is our job to raise it over the next four years, and, though in one way we have to do it alone, when the walls break down we may find ourselves members of a noble company that includes the likes of Milton, Blake, Thomas, Frye, and all the nameless children who are waiting for us in paradise, now and always. 

References

Frye, Northrop.  “Preface to the 1969 Edition.” In Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.  Edited by Nicholas Halmi.  Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Frye, Northrop.  Interviews with Northrop Frye.  Edited by Jean O’Grady.  Volume 24 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Frye, Northrop.  The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics.  In Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake.  Edited by Angela Esterhammer.  Volume 16 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2005.  Originally published by the University of Toronto Press, 1965.