ABSTRACT
Paradise Lost deals most directly with this basic theme, the recognition of lost possibilities of joy, order, health, the contrast between what people who can imagine as human and what is so here and now; the sensuous import of the myth of the lost Eden. The syntax of the poem is a powerful counter logical agent. The necessary deformation of language, which is both grave and pleasant, reflects the deformation of the faculty by which Adam named the beasts and Eve the flowers; it shows, though with delight, the difficulties under which poetry who labour to repair the ruins of our first parents. Yet Adam is still under the shadow of death, and his restatement of the theme Venus-Eve-Mary is very properly deprived of the sensuous context provided for Raphael's salutation; and since the second passage cannot but recall the first, poetry who may be sure that this effect was intended.
