Milton's "Eco-Eden": Place and notions of the "Green" in Pradise Lost

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Pici, Nick

Smells play a particularly strong role throughout Milton's program of imagery. "The fragrance of the Garden more than any other traditional feature communicates a sense of intense and inescapable sensuous delight," contends Knott, who feels that "Milton goes far beyond the customary brief reference to rich odors. Fragrance ... is for [Milton] synonymous with delight" (1971, 38). Meanwhile, foregrounding the sense of touch are descriptions like those of Adam and Eve's "mossie seats" and table "Rais'd of grassie terf" (5.391) within their bower; and this is while images of sight and sound still probably dominate the poem's overall sensory matrix.

Pastoral descriptions-rich, lavish, and often dream-like-inundate Milton's poem.While it would be ponderous (and unnecessary) to catalogue all of the poem's pastoral images and references to the natural world, outlining a few more of the most striking pastoral "events" of the poem will help to show the prominence and evocative powers of these images. For instance, lively taste images are elicited by descriptions of nectar-filled fruits and sweet liquid drink, all those bounties yielded to Adam and Eve by "Earth all-- Bearing Mother" (5.338)-a turn of phrase not too unlike the language of Native American mythic imagination, which conceives of a maternal and giving nature. Rivers of milk and honey cut through the landscape of Eden. Halcyon breezes blow from "Aurora's fan" and birds sing sweetly as Adam awakes with the "rosie steps" of dawn at the beginning of Book V A few passages later, Adam and Eve celebrate in their morning prayer the "Mists and Exhalations" that arise from "Hill or streaming Lake" to either "deck with Clouds the uncolourd skie/Or wet the thirstie Earth with falling showers" (5.185-190). The following extended description and overview of Eden's physical landscape perhaps best encapsulates Milton's pastoral vision:

Thus was this place,

A happy rural seat of various view;

Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,

Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde...

Betwixt them Lawns, or level Down, and Flocks

Grassing the tender herb, were interposed,

Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap

Of some irriguous Valley spred her store,

Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:

Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves

Of coole recess, ore which the mantling vine

Lays forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps

Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall

Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake....

The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires

Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune

The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance

Led on th'Eternal Spring. (Milton 1998c, 4.246-67)

Thus, enveloping Adam and Eve is a sumptuous, lazy beauty that emanates from the "florid Earth" (7.90) in which they dwell, an Earth offering pastoral bliss to its human tenants.

Other descriptions of the physical demeanor of Eden contribute to the poem's pastoral character and will in certain ways help to locate Milton's Eden in its ecological contexts. Geographically, according to Milton's vision of the Christian mythic world, Eden lies at the Earth's equator. The Garden sits eastward in Eden atop "a Rock/Of alablaster, pil'd up to the Clouds/ .... The rest was craggie cliff, that overhung / Still as it rose, impossible to climb" (4.443-- 449). The "steep" sides of the mountain of Paradise sustain a "wilderness, whose hairie sides / With thicket overgrown, grottesque and wild / Access deni'd" (4.135-137) to all but Adam and Eve and their fellow creatures. Thus, in terms of J.B. Jackson's landscape paradigm, which distinguishes between the significations of "wilderness" and "landscape," Milton's Eden spans two categories of earthly terrain: the Garden plateau qualifies as "middle landscape" or "soft pastoral"; while the sides of the Edenic mountain qualify as true "wilderness" or "hard pastoral." The climate of Eden, where the seasons run concurrently and are bounded together, supports an "ecosystem" of endless harvests where all creatures can live harmoniously together in a non-- predatory environment. "The climate is so nearly perfect," Roy Flannagan writes, "that all vegetation or all animal life can exist happily in the same place" (1998, 449). As a result of this ideally and flawlessly designed universe and nature, Adam and Eve, though they still must care for the Garden in other ways, are essentially freed from cultivating the Earth for sustenance or doing any real hard labor (another common characteristic of the Arcadian world).