Milton’s Poetics of Supplication

Halfway through Satan’s opening speech in book 1 of Paradise Lost, the rhetoric of his address takes a thrilling turn: putting aside the bewilderment of defeat and his dismay at his grim new surroundings, Satan shifts into a tone of renewed determination and defiance. This passage, which Empson admired for its “sheer splendor,” and which many readers continue to see as a high point of satanic charisma,¹ has received considerable attention from Miltonists interested in situating the politics of Paradise Lost in the context of the English civil wars and their aftermath.² In framing his opposition to God in terms of resistance to physical gestures of submission, Satan notoriously evokes the antisupplicatory rhetoric of Milton’s prose pamphlets:

What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? That glory never shall his wrath or might Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deify his power Who from the terror of this arm so late Doubted his empire, that were low indeed, That were an ignominy and shame beneath This downfall.³

(PL 1.105–16)

When Satan refuses “to bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee,” he appeals to the same opposition between the erect posture of free people and the crouching of slaves that Milton deploys throughout his political writings. In Eikonoklastes, Milton argues that the English people show their propensity for servitude in their eagerness to “to fall flatt and give adoration to the Image and Memory” of their former king.⁴ In The Readie and Easie Way, he famously points to the “perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people” as one of the many horrors of monarchy (YP 7:426). Critics have eschewed direct parallels between Satan and specific historical figures, insisting instead that Satan’s shifty politics make him impossible to pin down to a specific historical analogy.⁵ Critical consensus sees Satan’s bursts of republican rhetoric as part of Milton’s effort to demonstrate the importance of maintaining a rigorous distinction between the spheres of earthly and heavenly government. Satan’s antikneeling diatribe is part of the poet’s program to develop a quality of watchfulness in the reader; as David Loewenstein argues, Milton “constantly challenges engaged readers by showing them how to discern the treacherous ambiguities and contradictions of political rhetoric and behavior, including their more revolutionary manifestations.”⁶

The difficulty is that Milton makes it as hard as possible to do this work of discernment; the world of Paradise Lost is infinitely and self-consciously misreadable. If Milton ultimately wants his readers to separate the norms of heaven and earth, his strategy of accommodation — “likening spiritual to corporal forms” (PL 5.573) — precisely encourages the conflation of them.⁷ This essay, therefore, approaches the question of Satan’s antisupplicatory rhetoric from a different direction. I argue that in order to understand Satan’s opening speech and his persistent opposition to gestures of subordination, we must consider what it means to be a suppliant — to perform and receive acts of supplication — in the larger economy of the poem. This task requires seeing Satan’s resistance to the “suppliant knee” not only in connection with seventeenth century religious politics, but also as part of Milton’s engagement with the classical epic tradition. Miltonists interested in the classical heritage of Paradise Lost have pointed out that the epic scene of supplication, when a warrior defeated on the battlefield begs his conqueror to show mercy, is among the many epic tropes and conventions that the poem appropriates and transforms.⁸ But just as historicist critics have largely ignored the epic contexts for Satan’s opposition to begging and beseeching, so classicizing critics tend to neglect the seventeenth century reverberations of classical suppliant scenes.⁹ The aim of this essay is to bring these two conversations together, as Milton did in Paradise Lost, in order to shed further light on the poem’s complex negotiation of forms of...