ABSTRACT
Moral meaning and temporality are interdependent in Paradise Lost. The Nativity Ode portrays the return to paradise as an illusory possibility suggested by music. When Satan enters the consciousness of the dreaming Eve, to work upon 'the organs of her Fancy', he reshapes the world around her, beginning with the song of the nightingale. The problem appears to lie in Satan's account of the nightingale's song rather than in the song itself. In Paradise Lost, the narrative voice presents the music of Hell to the reader in terms of sound. Indeed, most of this music is explicitly or implicitly nonverbal: flute music to the Dorian mode, the sounds that accompany the creation of Pandaemonium. Mammon describes angelic song as 'warbling', incapable of understanding that hymns are serious and profoundly meaningful, not just pretty sounds. In final lines, Raphael echoes Comus's description of the Lady's song, her notes 'at every fall smoothing the raven down / Of darkness till it smiled'.
