[Milton-L] Milton and Gardens: queries on JM's aesthetics

[Kim Maxwell]

I feel some surprise that no one sees some paradoxes in the way labor is treated in the poem.  It seems to me that (a) Adam and Eve have different reactions to the Garden and labor in it; (b) their attitudes are different from God's; and (c) labor is both the purpose for their life in the garden and the source of their crime.  

(a)  Eve's reverie, almost apotheosis, in the garden (alone) in Book XIII to avoid "serious thoughts abstruse" suggests her comfort and love of the garden, a position reinforced by her tiff with Adam when Raphael arrives about where to find food.  She feels comfortable working alone in the Garden, Adam does not (a psychological force in their debate in IX).  Adam's first words on the Garden suggest "toilsome but for thee," a sense that he really does not like it without her.  The poem never shows Adam in the Garden alone before IX, and the only time we see them their together before IX is through the eyes of Satan.

(b) Perhaps the most important feature of labor in the poem from the standpoint of Adam and Eve is that it is not sufficient.  Her justification for separation was efficiency, to catch up with the Garden's excess growth.  On two other occasions Adam complains almost bitterly about the Garden's excesses and wildness, with a powerful image of paths blocked by at 4.630 ff by the same "odorous gums" surrounding their "rural seat of various view" (and I put some weight on the word "various").  Yet the description of Eden in the early parts of IV suggest a self-sufficient system in perfect balance, which I take to be God's point of view.  Now those who think God creates circumstances by which Adam and Eve will inevitably fall can heap this point on the pile--he made the Garden untenable, (or untendable) as soon as Adam and Eve appear.  But I think it is more interesting to wonder both why they see the Garden differently and as unmanageable.

(c) Both God and Adam report man's governance of nature as a divine prerogative with the sole exception of the tree.  The poem shows no interest in man's governance of the animals.  The poem then asserts that man's ability to govern the Garden is constrained by the capacity of their labor relative to its needs.  I think (in a way too complicated to go into here) that the Garden is an epistemic metaphor, that labor is somehow related to knowledge, which knowledge, like labor, is insufficient to understand enough to perpetually avoid sin.  Thus labor is both the requisite path to living and the almost certain path to death as the poem gives it.

Kim Maxwell
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