ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the description of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian hymns in Books IV and V of Paradise Lost and with their significance for Milton's articulation of prayer. It then focuses on the postlapsarian prayer of Adam and Eve in Books X and XI and suggests that the Fall does not initiate an altogether different model of worship; but it reconfigures the performance of prayer found in prelapsarian Eden, sharing the interdependence of the body and the spirit that features in the prelapsarian hymns. The chapter explores the power dynamics of the encounter shift, since prayers in the postlapsarian world widen the scope for human contribution and empowerment. It examines to what extent sighing and groaning in early modern religious writing, and in the Garden of Eden, is passive and to what extent it bears the potential for a voluntary and autonomous relationship with the divine.
