ABSTRACT
The last act that Adam and Eve commit in Eden, after they have drawn sustenance from it, nurtured it, defiled it, and caused its destruction, is an act of a different category: they look at it. They look at it indirectly, however, “looking back” (12.641; my emphasis),1 with Eden behind them and “the World . . . before them” (646). The final lines of Paradise Lost describe a contrast between two places at two very different points in their histories: Eden in the moment of its destruction and the outer world at the point of its first discovery. Surprisingly, however, Milton introduces into the description of Eden a third place: a metaphorical landscape-the mist at eveningused to describe not Eden itself but the angels who are destroying it. The place within the metaphor is clearly modern (that is, postlapsarian)—it has a laborer, so labor must be long-familiar within it-and clearly static and quotidian. Milton uses figuration to evoke one context even while narratively portraying another.
