ABSTRACT
In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, exile and fallenness are synonymous: to be fallen is to be banished, be it from Heaven or from the more earthly paradise of Eden. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that Milton’s epic should both begin and end with profound laments over exile following the respective falls of Satan and of Adam and Eve. Just as Satan, in the passage from Book I (quoted above), mourns the loss of heaven’s ‘happy fields’ when surveying hell’s dismal ‘soil’ (a word which encapsulates the degraded nature of the fallen angels’ state of banishment), so too do Adam and Eve stand aghast in Book XI at the prospect of eviction from a Paradise which also becomes physically and rhetorically ‘soiled’. While the fallen Eve grieves selfishly over what she perceives as the loss of her own Eden, her ‘native soil’, for Adam the prospect of being expatriated to ‘fitter soil’ provides more than a timely reminder of a newly gained mortality: they are, after all, being exiled to dust - ‘The ground whence thou wast taken’. Rather, Adam also fears what Satan himself suffers - banishment from the ‘Presence divine’ in ‘places’ which ‘Inhospitable appear and desolate,/ Nor knowing us nor known’ - a veritable ‘hell’ indeed.2
