"Thy perfect image viewing": Poetic Creation and Ovid's Narcissus in Paradise Lost

[T]he poet is always Narcissus.

— Schlegel

[A]ll creation is essentially an exercise in Narcissism.

—Havelock Ellis¹

Milton's poem on the Creation represents the cosmos as a chain of creative energy beginning and ending with the divine creator. God makes the world in his own image, creating creative creatures: Eden is a poet's paradise in which Adam and Eve are natural artists, and nature itself is inspired to join in their morning hymn of praise to the heavenly originator.² All creativity is therefore fundamentally narcissistic because it begins in God's self-love and the copying and multiplying of his own image. Appropriately perhaps, given his own interest in "self esteem" (Paradise Lost, 8.572) and reputation as a sublime egotist, Milton draws on a tradition in which God and the Son are celestial narcissists.³ Milton emphasizes that the Son is a reflection of the Father, "The radiant image of his Glory" (3.63) in whom "all his Father shon / Substantially express'd" (3.139-40). As creator of the world, the Son reflects and extends his Father's creativity, finally making man, as Raphael tells Adam: "in his own Image hee / Created thee, in the Image of God / Express" (7.526-28).The creativity of divine narcissism comes full circle when it is reflected back to God by Adam and Eve through praise and finally by the poet himself, whose reflection on God's creative act generates his own poetic creation.

In its linking of the natural, human, and divine realms, creativity appears as a unifying energy that works against the forces of division and dissonance that emerge in the Fall.⁴ As critics have noticed, however, Milton's creation also involves separation and divorce;when Christ sets out to make the world, he begins by dividing chaos.⁵ The chain of divine creativity in fact requires a balance of individuation and identification: it begins with God's self-division, which makes one into two who then further multiply God's image. However, the ultimate goal of creative division is the restoration of unity; as Raphael tells Adam, "O Adam, one Almightie is, from whom / All things proceed, and up to him return" (5.469-70). Separation from God allows his creatures to become creative in their own right, which means, for Milton, to make independent choices and exercise free will. But differentiation therefore also allows the possibility of perversion. The chain of creative copying, of differentiation and reunion, is parodied in Satan's rebellion against God, which generates his "perfect image" (2.764), Sin, with whom he incestuously reunites.⁶ Through the Fall, Satan hopes further to remake man in his own image; as he admits, "Nor hope to be my self less miserable / By what I seek, but others to make such / As I" (9.126-28).

This foregrounding of different forms of creativity suggests Milton's self-consciousness about his own poetic creation. He is particularly aware of the potential for his imitation of divine creativity to turn into satanic parody. In the invocations especially, Milton expresses his concerns about his undertaking, most obviously perhaps in the invocation to book 7, when he sets out to retell the story of the creation of the world from Genesis. The unusual foregrounding of the poet's voice has its own narcissistic edge to it, and the speaker who describes himself as "fall'n on evil dayes. . . . In darkness, and with dangers compast round" (7.25, 27) sounds strikingly like his infernal creatures. While "fall'n" links the narrator with Satan, the language echoes Sin's earlier description of her own situation, "With terrors and with clamors compasst round" (2.862). The terrors are her creations, the hellhounds that writhe around her belly, preying on their source. Sin, produced by Satan's love of his own image, is caught in a vicious circle of destructive creativity. The parallel between her situation and that of the narrator suggests his fears lest his own creations, born of narcissistic energy that originates not in God...