Direct Address in Paradise Lost

The claim to know and to reach the other is realized in the relationship with the Other that is cast in the relation of language, where the essential is the interpellation, the vocative. The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him.

—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

An extragrammatical, volitional, often superfluous part of discourse, the vocative compels the verbal equivalent of deliberate eye contact. It recognizes the consciousness and subjectivity of another, directly to that other; it signals, however briefly, that one’s attention and language are centered on one’s listener. For Milton, the force of the vocative, of direct address—this essay uses the two terms interchangeably—goes beyond its conventional rhetorical purpose, that of holding the listener’s ear.¹ His sensibility involves a reverence closer to that expressed by the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, or by Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue: “If I face a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-Thou to him, he is not a thing among things.”²

The vocatives of Paradise Lost invite us to focus on the act of direct, reciprocated attention to an interlocutor.³ Its addresses are of unprecedented length and intricacy; speakers often echo, balance, or challenge others’ addresses within their own.⁴ Although extensive vocatives are unsurprising, given the epic’s concern with naming and rhetoric, the care Milton takes with his vocatives has been underexamined.⁵

The following essay takes up both the vocative’s formal effects (such as its setting the tonic note for each new speech) and its theological implications: vocatives are a lens through which our generally accepted views of God’s and Satan’s language can be reexamined. For many readers, Satan holds the poem’s humanity and linguistic allure, and God’s diction, in the words of Arnold Stein, seems “as unsensuous as if Milton were writing a model for the Royal Society and attempting to speak purely to the understanding.”⁶ An almost equally persistent view is that God’s and Satan’s patterns of behavior are not particularly distinct; Michael Bryson, for example, argues that Milton’s God is “obsessed with his own power and glory, manipulative, defensive, alternatively rhetorically incoherent and evasive, and an arranger of political dialogues designed to mold angelic opinion; in short … nearly indistinguishable from Satan.”⁷ But close examination of the vocative—a seemingly insignificant, dispensable grammatical case—presents a counter to such judgments: in Milton’s vocatives, diabolic grammar is exposed as surprisingly predictable, and the grammar of heaven becomes the opposite of colorless impersonality. The vocative magnifies a speaker’s regard or disregard for something essential: what Levinas calls “the one to whom I speak” (69).

I explore the vocative through the epic’s three main groups of speakers—diabolic, earthly, heavenly—but begin with a line that spans most of the poem’s action, and that underscores the vocative’s potential. In the first speech in heaven (at the poem’s chronological beginning, in book 5), God tells his audience to “Hear” his announcement, that he has appointed his Son as head over the rest of the host. God’s beginning with and giving priority to a reiterated command, rather than a title, is paradigmatic; the heavenly speakers use the vocative not in a stock syntactical position, but as it falls naturally.

    Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light,Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers,Hear my Decree, which unrevok’t shall stand.⁸

This address seems to bear out Robert West’s helpful characterization of Milton’s “adroit use of … terms without undue recognition of authority” and “general allusiveness”;⁹ but a more specific assessment exposes the salutation’s oddness. The speech begins with two common designations: “Angels,” the lowest of the nine traditional orders,¹⁰ and “Progenie of Light,” not of the nine at all. It continues with specific titles, almost straight out of Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or...