ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Milton’s Eikonoklastes provides an essential foundation for understanding the often examined yet seemingly inscrutable bee simile in Book 1 of Paradise Lost. Specifically, it attends to the governing structures of Pandemonium, the development of hissing and swarming practices within Hell, and the role of the female worker bee in Eden. Through his imagery of the beehive, Milton crafts a metaphor for the distinct contributions of polemic and poetry to the English body politic and the significance of hierarchy to the epic. The chapter intervenes into discourse surrounding Milton’s ecology to argue that his representations of unauthorized consumption and digestion—from Interregnum royalists to the fallen Eve—help to reframe the structure of prelapsarian human and creaturely labor.
