Notes on John Rogers' Yale open courses Milton lectures

June 01, 2026

I actually came across this prior to even reading Paradise Lost, while I was waiting for my copy of the book to be delivered. I was impressed by it on first view/listen, and my impression was not diminished after reading a number of other secondary sources as well. Rogers is engaging and erudite and his passion for Milton is fairly catching. Some of his interpretations may be a bit tendentious but they are always well-considered, and the picture he paints of other critics seems well-balanced.

• https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-220/lecture-1
  • Milton was first to publish an article providing a justification for armed rebellion against a monarch, to dethrone them through execution. Milton largely responsible, in a cultural sense, for armed rebellion that lead to Charles I’s execution. One of the first to argue for right of divorce, on ground of incompatibility; also right to polygamy. Branded as a radical by contemporaries. His later blindness was argued by some detractors as evidence of God’s punishment.
  • Modern picture of Milton’s conservativism derives largely from Woolf’s Room of One’s Own.
  • Milton had entered the literary canon within ~20 years after his death, by early 18th century.
  • Satan, even in defeat, refuses to deify the power of his enemy, to grant it omnipotence; in this resembles Milton’s own attitude towards Charles I. How to distinguish “genuine” strength and power from that granted by custom and tradition.
  • The parallel Rogers is drawing here: is Milton’s greatness in the canon of a similar sort, his literary power granted only through tradition? Satan resembles us in our reading of Milton, or dissection and exploration of Milton’s “power”.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62G9yIN5Wk book 1
  • Milton decided early to write an epic, but decided the subject matter only much later. Had initially conceived this as being something along nationalistic lines, like Spenser’s Faerie Queen, or Virgil’s Aeneid.
  • During the restoration, many of his puritan revolutionary friends were hanged and quartered, he was imprisoned for a while, probably for his treatise advocating regicide. It was at this point that he chose the subject of the fall of Adam and eve, and the rebel angels for his epic poem. Why does he associate the just revolution of the puritans with the unjust rebellion of the angels under Satan.
  • The poem is late not just in that it took Milton decades to get the point where he began it, but also by the time he begins the epic, the form is more or less aesthetically passé. It is also late from the pov of “he is now blind”, and poem begins with a discussion of lateness and firsts.
  • The very first line rebels against poetic tradition, violating iambic pentameter, with the first “first”. The opening lines imagine the author prior to all other epic poets, prior even to Moses (who would have been thought of as the author of the pentateuch), invoking heavenly muse. Image of heavenly spirit “brooding” on an egg/nest of the world, then depicts the spirit as hermaphroditic, big aesthetic/religious risk, violating theological dogma.
  • “huge risk” “shocking image”, establishes theme of “radical theology”, Milton’s monism (also vitalism, animism), absence of distinction between spirit and body/matter. all matter has a potency, infusion of divine spirit. argues that monism is also linked to his aesthetics: this was the most immediately shocking aspect of the poem. “milton’s paradise lost is the first narrative poem in English that didn’t rhyme”, blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. was used in theater, but not poetry. The printer asked the poet to explain “why the poem rhymes not”. rhetoric of poetic liberation parallel to political liberation. “bondage of rhyming”. Statistically, Milton’s lines are more “enjammed” than any other poet, the lines run into one another, “syntactical units are continually spilling out and into the next line”. Like the angels via their anatomy, the poem is also charged with erotic freedom.
  • Milton’s style resists our effort to get to the end. for the poem to be successful, as readers we cannot see everything as predetermined. infusion of angelic liberty into the verse itself, into the argument of the poem.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyG91mziBoA God and Mammon: The Wealth of Literary Memory
  • Milton claims for divine authority, so must in some sense reject the reliance on memory. Rogers takes Milton’s claims at face value here, is that reasonable? Milton’s assertion here is in fact an allusion to another such claim, i.e. self-undermining. “literary fantasy of forgetfulness”, these first books are more heavily allusive than the later books. Sometimes takes pains to avoid parallels with predecessors, e.g. tortures of the damned (Homer, Virgil, Dante). Image of Lethe, could this free Milton like the fallen angels wish to purge their memories? Impossibility of forgetfulness. Medusa is here, what is greek figure doing in Christian hell? She is the only such one that appears, others are allusions or “later manifestations of fallen angels”. Femaleness and Greek-ness here are aberrations, surprising. Think of Medusa as Milton’s counter-muse, she is a daughter of mnemosyne, she prevents Milton from being able to forget.
  • Mammon represents Milton’s ambivalence towards secular literature, esp classical, its temptation. “Milton may not be able to forget Homer” but he is able to preempt him, or correct him. Presents a true origin story, the prior history of the pagan deities.
  • Mammon is a sort of parody of Milton’s own puritan sensibilities. Out of nowhere, Milton engages in “Spenserian allegory”. Samuel Johnson complains that Satan, a “real” character interacts with a merely allegorical character, sin, and the result is one of the greatest faults of the poem, an “unskillful allegory”, an “awkward collision of artistic modes”. Rogers suggests the allegory is itself a “critique of allegory”. For Milton, sin cannot have independent reality, violates free will. The awkward allegory, the confusion, is Milton’s point, wants to brand Spenserean allegory as an erroneous literary practice. Milton aims to forget not just the classical influences, but also Spenser. Compare Dante’s placement of the pagan philosophers (even Virgil) in limbo.
• https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-220/lecture-11 Lecture 11 - The Miltonic Simile, Books 1 and 2
  • wide critical consensus that the epic similes in Paradise Lost are different from other epics, and that they enable us to see something the rest of the poem doesn’t show. His similes are notoriously difficult. Hartman/Coleridge note characters/elements that tend to stand “ab extra”, to stand outside the work, as Milton’s narrator does too frequently.
    • simile: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41818888, https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/milton-studies/article-abstract/14/1/135/263455/THE-LIMBS-OF-TRUTH-MILTON-S-USE-OF-SIMILE-IN?redirectedFrom=fulltext, https://ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR19W1721.pdf
    • Milton’s similes are stuffed, overdetermined.
  • the simile of Satan’s shield and spear, a = a’, but then a = a’x where x is the “tuscan observer”. evoking someone standing from without trying to get a sense of the size of satan, but who is the observer?
    • moon was thought to be a perfectly heaven body, but disproved by Galileo who saw its spots, its imperfections, no longer a fiery heavenly body.
    • “or”: the most important word in Paradise Lost, where is Galileo observing from? indeterminate, proliferation of possible perspectives.
    • Milton met Galileo as an old man, also blind, and under house arrest, Galileo is only 17th century contemporary in the poem, both rebels in a sense like Satan.
    • the similes unleash theological and political tension/confusion that the rest of the poem sets up. at first spear seems tremendously large, then 2nd line makes it seem small and satan old/frail, but then actually immeasurably larger.
  • Simile of the leaves, around lines 300 of Book I. The shady space, autumnal leaves of Vallombrosa have “proven the bane of scholars because they cannot be squared with the rest of poem’s theology”, specifically free will and divine providence. Hartman on simile, plot and counterplot: wind god Orion is first identified with Satan, but then identified as the thing that destroys Pharaoh who was also identified with Satan, embedded within the simile is Satan’s self-destruction.
  • Both Hartmann and Fish skip over the first part of the leaves simile, which have been distinguished for their beauty. Homer, Virgil, Dante, all use simile of leaves to describe the number of the dead. Dante first to equate fallen leaves with man’s fallenness. The shade trees in Milton’s simile is a bower, a little paradise on the verge of being lost, as the trees lose their leaves, but have not yet lost them all, image of beauty of falling leaves. Then Rogers disagrees with Fish and Hartman here, who see the similes as more or less reinforcing the main themes of the poem, but they do not (cannot) discuss the aestheticization of the fall.
  • Rogers stresses the how the similes have us struggle with the theological picture that is otherwise presented clearly and unambiguously through the rest of the poem.
  • Complicated image of the moon, first seen in comparison to Satan’s shield, then in Galileo simile, he who saw its physical imperfections. Hartmann says it is to represent the perfection of divine providence, but it seems the similes as a whole encourage us to question that.
  • conclusion in book 3 is god has foreknowledge but no causal power, even though god knew A&E would eat the fruit, we must still be able to say that they ate of it freely.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFwh5WecOiM 12. The Blind Prophet book 3
  • Milton’s public defense of his blindness, says his eyes look fine to outward appearance, have merely “forgotten” how to see, also calls them signs of his grace, says they were the price of his devotion to the revolutionary cause. he also imagines it as the result of something he ate, “the story of an evil meal”.
  • opening to book 3, 10 years after onset of blindness, Milton continues to defend his blindness. “hail holy light”, paean to light, which Milton can no longer see. “most impenetrable lines in the entire poem… and ever written”. light of genesis “or” coeternal to the father? not theologically orthodox. Milton’s descent into and re-emergence from Hell has parallels with that of Satan.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U6pf5v_Fkg 13 Paradise Lost book 3
  • to render god blameless for the various losses the epic depicts. theodicy, justification of the ways of god to man. Johnson and Pope both mistakenly say “vindication” rather than “justify” (which M uses at end of book 1). vindication suggests defense from presumed guilt, in a way that “justify” does not (or less so, perhaps).
  • to justify God, Milton (believes he) must undermine divine predestination: puritans almost all tended to be Calvinist. Romans 8:29 god’s foreknowledge, foredestination, and election. Milton argues with that interpretation for several pages in his “The Christian Doctrine”. Milton was an Arminian.
  • around this time, economic liberalism is also emerging, alongside what Rogers calls Milton’s political-theological “liberalism” (admittedly anachronistically).
  • Milton’s dialog between father and the son: he is not a trinitarian, disputes it extensively in Christian Doctrine. the son is not identical or equal to the father, rather is subordinate.
  • if one of Milton’s goals is to preset a somewhat rationalized Christianity, another element he must justify or reinterpret is the sacrifice of the son, which otherwise appears barbarous even primitive, as an exchange/punishment for adam’s sin. the sacrifice is transformed into a voluntary offer (free choice, Milton’s liberalism again) by the son. for this self-sacrifice, the son will be rewarded (as Milton hopes his sacrifice will also be rewarded). moreover, the ultimate end state envisioned is non-hierarchical, all-in-all, equality. (aside: contrast Dante’s vision of heaven: highly hierarchical.)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00RKB0StzHY 14. Paradise Lost, Book IV
  • challenge of eden is portraying it as completely perfect, unfallen, since god is its architect if there is any hint of fallenness, that impugns god’s perfection and blamelessness. also: how can the fallen truly perceive/understand the unfallen? must characterize eden by what it is NOT like, dis-simile.
  • brooks rolling “with mazy error”, is this a hint of doom? no, Milton employs the word solely to evoke its etymological root sense, solely to say the brook is not moving straight, it is wandering. Milton is attempting to block out the meaning of this word that crept in after the fall.
  • In 17th century, descriptions of eden, Adam/Eve are practically a necessary part of political theory, one starts with the original society, man in the state of nature. Hobbes demonstrates the dangers of the natural egalitarianism due to lack of authority, absence of “common power”. Many signs that Milton is countering Hobbes (aside: not quite sure about this arg, Hobbes does not take himself to be describing eden, IIRC).
  • Milton’s change from the time of areopagitica: less confident in the rationality of everyman; later politics envision a sort of natural hierarchy, aristocracy. the patriarchy is strong in book IV line 299, but the “old, younger, more liberal Milton” also has a voice in Paradise Lost, you can hear these contradictions in this description of the first polity, the line “Not equal, as their sex not equal seemd” (296), seemd to who? this part of the poem is tracing Satan’s perspective. Miltonists liked this pov when it was suggested in the 80s because it gave them an out from the charge of Milton’s sexism. “the passage refuses to establish its own authority, moment of textual instability”.
  • why talk about hair on the head here? our hair is gendered by virtue of the barber, not by nature. Milton mentions their “mysterious parts” but only to dismiss them. “contradictory social formation of paradise is inherently unstable”, principle that Eve is free but also subject to Adam’s authority. Eve’s hair seems to both imply subjection but also freedom. Her coyness, her ability to delay/resist, is not just erotic but also serves as basis for rational consent. Adam’s superiority is not immediately obvious to eve, hierarchy is not a natural fact, it is an “arbitrarily imposed social institution”, though imposed by God, Milton labours to expose the artificial sexual hierarchy that he at the same time champions. The waving/insinuating of the serpent seems to parallel that of eve’s hair, but is also mirrored by the elephant’s proboscis, meant to show these are innocent prior to Satan’s intervention.
  • Satan sees the unstable sexual hierarchy as the key to how he will undermine paradise.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO-V9mAqthQ 15. Paradise Lost, Books V-VI
  • human interaction in this poem is founded on principle of consent, Eve yields to Adam freely–but also apparently in recognition of her inferiority. Satan tells Abdiel that freedom and hierarchy are compatible. Oddly, Satan gives us the only official/authoritative expression of this. but the poem “cannot be reduced to its official positions” such as these. juxtaposing the competing rhetorics of rational consent with that of compulsion or gentle coercion; providing also something like a critique of rational consent.
  • book IV dealt with hieararchy between sexes, book V deals with that between humans and angels. back to Milton’s monism, he envisions creation as being ex deo, not ex nihilo. angels are superior to humans, but are not made of different stuff, we are all made of the same god-stuff, just angels are more rarefied, humans are grosser. Milton also imagines angels as having a digestive tract, and even being regular!
  • origin of satan’s fall is in some ways the central mystery of the poem. Milton relies on the text of 2nd psalm: “God has begotten me this day”, paradoxical, how could the Christ remember this? Luther says of this, “But here, when the eternal Father, who is a Spirit, speaks this word about His own Son, it cannot be understood”. The account given in Book V imagines as Satan as maybe the first, and greatest, most exalted, but then Jesus is begotten as the one and only son. the motives are unclear, inscrutable as to why the father has done this, done it now, chosen this one, etc. how are we to reconcile the image of an “indivisible egalitarianism with a competing image of an unyielding, rigorously enforced angelic hierarchy”. God tries to soften the blow to Satan, as Adam sort of tried to do with Eve by emphasizes unity; but monistic indivisibilty is only evoked at the crisis moments. Abdiel asks how Satan can dare to question God’s justice, emphasizes that it was only through the Son that all angels were created. Book V line 855 Satan insists they were self-begot, self-raised. Satan’s argument has some echo in Uriel’s from book 3, and also the account in book 7, of divine matter taking shape (somehow) through its own power of self-organization and elaboration, resembles what Raphael says Adam and Eve could have attained to, raising to greater levels of ethereal/spirituality through their own virtuous action (and eating!).
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQY_Dfm0iLo 16. Paradise Lost, Books VII-VIII
  • MIlton surrounds all of the most important events of the poem with metaphors of digestion.
  • Book 7, numerological significance, 7th day of creation, is account of creation. Milton’s use of the word “dregs” is metaphysically hard to reconcile, shouldn’t all of creation have been infused with divine matter/energy? what needs to be purged? the “tartareous dregs”, Paracelsus considered these to be the sediment of wine, he identified it with metaphysical evil. Paracelsus’ contemporaries mostly rejected this, as it implied that God had created something evil.
  • Milton is claiming divine truth of thousands of lines of PL that have no scriptural foundation, hence his appeal to the scientific muse in book 7. the lines basically taken from genesis (mostly KJV) are flat, apparently one of Milton’s first editors, Bently, argued they were so bad they should just be removed from the poem; in fact he suggested that Milton wasn’t even responsible for these lines, it was his amanuensis. Milton replaces the “and it was so” with a more naturalistic explanation.
  • Both Adam and Raphael are unclear as to whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, apparently God has made this somewhat illegible. Raphael’s uncertainty in the scientific realm suggests we have some skepticism about his authority in the human sexual relations realm.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ByQMQ5o7AM 17. Paradise Lost, Book IX
  • Book 9 makes the contradiction between the dominant/official language/stance of the poem with the subversive undercurrents.
  • prior to this book, there hasn’t really been any real conversation, e.g. god is all knowing. conversation before this has been “ritualistic, ceremonial”, they are now speaking with intentions and purposes that are foreign to each other. now they are sort of arguing with each other, as the poem has sort of been arguing with itself. now adam represents the “nervous voice of the poem’s orthodoxy”, eve represents the critique, the polemicist, she quotes the younger Milton. their stances parallel those of two parables on work that Milton earlier struggled with, identifying with the positions of both. Milton’s own poem has been “long in choosing and beginning late”, Eve’s voice chides Adam and Milton, represents protestant work ethic. their work isn’t really productive, the fruits just fall into their laps, their work is ornamental, somewhat superfluous. though, the growth is out of control, “wanton growth”. Rogers suggests the wildness is a result of the cultural/unnatural ordering of the garden, maybe it would grow fine without human intervention. “the imposition of law doesn’t control disorder, it produces it”, Eve’s subversive theory is not, cannot be the official stance of the poem. as if Eve were suggesting there was a natural necessity to the fall, pruning a tree forces new growth and the father’s prohibition encourages the disorder/fall.
  • Eve deploys the central argument from Areopagitica, critique of Adam’s censorship: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed that never sallies out and sees its enemy”, what is virtue if it is never tested? When Satan tempts Eve, it will be with all of those things that the hierarchy of Eden was designed to suppress. The denial of Eve’s pleasure in her pool seems to have sparked a self-love, narcissism rather than being such itself; that is now used by Satan. compares the forbidden fruit to milk, invokes daughter/mother relationship that is structurally lacking. Adam is initially enchanted by Eve’s “female self-sufficiency”, Raphael cautions Adam against it. Denied in Eden, it returns here with Satan. Eve even imagines being some time superior; the imposition of hierarchy induces the desire to be superior, to be “more equal”. Official doctrine is of edenic perfection and freedom, and the freely chosen eating of the apple marks the fall and the rupture, but the “narrative employs to illustrate this official doctrine seems to continually to be questioning that assumption”, countering the belief in edenic perfection and freedom, always burdened by constraints, prohibition is only the most outrageous of these.
  • the fall is first called a “darkening” but then they are also enlightened. we would expect their innocence would now be covered by a veil of guilt or shame, but he says the opposite, that their innocence was the veil. the image of veil also occurs in book 4, Eve wore her hair as a veil, implication of shameful nakedness even prior to the fall. As though Milton has also torn off the veil of the poem’s official dogma and is aligning with Eve’s position.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3jOqlmqoeQ 18. Paradise Lost, Books IX-X
  • M emphasizes the consequences of the fall for language, specifically literary language
  • we only find out now in book 9 that Milton finally gets around to explaining why he wrote this book.
  • M dumps on the chivalric romance a bit but isn’t doing justice to Spenser et al, the central theme of that genre is the wandering of the hero and their finding adventure. Satan tempts Eve to think of her in those terms, countering obedience with demonstrating her courage. PL is littered with images of wandering; when M rejects that, he “begins to alter the poem’s sense of significance of the poem’s wandering”.
  • “wander” appears 32 times in PL, another example of tension in the poem between its official doctrine and a subversive thread. “wander” itself wanders in meaning throughout the poem. Book 2, Belial the consequence he imagines as most terrible from the destruction of the fallen angels would be his loss of ability for mental/intellectual wandering, seems to be quoting M himself from Areopagitica, “God gives us minds that wander beyond all limit”. The rivers of paradise also wander, but do so purely innocently. The activity of free will and wandering are intimately connected. By book 9 “wander” loses its innocence and becomes associated with error, morally pejorative. Adam blames Eve’s wandering. words lose their suppleness after the fall; contrast M’s envisioniong of the freedom of his words in the beginning, comparison to the free movement of the angels’ bodies. by end of book 9, the greys that Rogers was painting are gone, less and less an alternative to Raphael’s insistence on sexual hierarchy. Adam denounces Eve’s “pride and wandering vanity”; but not just Adam, also the poem/narrator. Narrator says he falls because he was overcome by Eve’s female charm; but that is a misreading of the text. Imaginative shrinkage of language affects Adam and the narrator.
  • “Meanwhile” structure, re-introduces allegory/simile. Allegory is itself a sort of reductive mode of literature, 1-1 meaning. Rogers hates this scene! “one of the most bathetic, preposterous”. grotesque parody of genesis.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpF34q9h7qc 19. Paradise Lost, Books XI-XII
  • change in style of the last 2 books. in the past critics (Rogers says erroneously) attributed this to Milton’s age and waning powers. we are disappointed with the style, with Michael vs Raphael, and also with the content. Critics often attempting to defend the last 2 books against the reader’s disappointment. but R maintains these books are disappointing.
  • Milton’s “one just man” theory, in war in Heaven it was Abdiel. Life post fall seems pointless like the war, but Rogers suggests there is still some room for heroism.
  • PL appeared more than 20 years after Areopagitica, up to 1640/50s M was confident in the people, that God had imbued them with reason, this was the source of his political optimism, faith in their ability to self-rule (1649 treatise on regicide). Unfortunately, the real English people did not live up to this, most actually in favour of the monarchy. By 1651 Milton loses some confidence in this, now argues for new importance on parliament vs the people, an elite group of the people (ideally puritan). By end of 1650s, even now a majority of parliament “desiring to resubject the English people to the tyranny of monarchy”. So by PL he has very little confidence in his prior view, very few people have this divine wisdom infused into them, refers to people as “rude and inconsiderate multitude” in last political treatises. England should be goverened by an even smaller elite, “Council of Saints”, small group of like-minded puritan revolutionaries. Treatise “Readie and easie way”, M says the people must be forced at gunpoint to govern themselves and realize their freedom!
  • Fall of man paralleled by Milton’s own development of political consciousness. After the fall, people show surprisingly few signs of internalized divine reason.
  • The last 2 books do not feel inspired as the previous 10, M’s “enactment, in some way, of the birth of what we can think of as moden poetry”, poietry of excess, the amplitude/copia, “poetics that is given to puritan austerity and simple declaration of moral facts”. So “Adam must be chemically induced to see Xian history cuz all other inspiration is lost”, he must be “compelled”. M’s troubled relationship to Adam.
  • We get sense now of how suspicious puritans were of aesthetics, faculties of perception now linked to deception. (Contrast, though, earlier the mention of how Satan was undelighted by the delights of Eden.)
  • Michael tells Adam that the internal paradise is/will be the true one, and we must take Michael at his word here, but does that really “undo our investment, the reader’s investment, in this place”. we cannot help but look back with regret. We experience MIchael’s pedagogy as a disaster, we experience the loss as well.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8gskiUoYyU 20. Paradise Lost, Books XI-XII (cont.)
  • Samuel Johnson says PL is one of those books you read and lay down and forget to take up again. Not just that it is not a page turner, but that we also know its end.
  • Milton quotes some of the verses of the bible most inimical to free will, and then basically says “this can’t be so, otherwise men would not have agency”. M is largely constrained by the already written biblical text, e.g. the expulsion is already written in Genesis, another case where God’s actions appear as unjustifiable, or at least hard to justify. God must force them out of the garden to keep them from achieving his status, privileges. E.g. Calvin forced to conclude that God was speaking ironically. Rogers takes the God we see here are basically the type of God that M is trying to counteract, personal, vengeaful, intervening directly to overpower human lives. But in God’s conversation with the Son, the father justifies it in a completely different way, the garden itself purges them, deliberately runs counter to the traditional Xian God, counters the explanation God gives to the angels. Rogers says this runs towards science fiction! M takes this risk for the sake of his theodicy. The reason for expulsion is benign, almost impersonal. Another set of contradictions. Michael presents theory of scripturla interpretation of called “typology”: characters and events in old testament are seen as types of characters/events in the new testament. Allowed Xians to assert some superiority over Judaism, reconcile contradictions. E.g. Joshua prefigures Jesus, type -> antitype, see William Madsen’s From Shadowy Types to Truth, Studies in Milton’s Symbolism. OT law gives way to NT faith. Rogers contends that Michael’s scriptural interpretation also gives some clues/hints (maybe not quite a “key”) to reading PL, e.g. repeating accounts of creation, or expulsion. The rational explanations in PL emerge as the truths/anti-types of the literalist events/stories.
  • Rogers says you can see M doing exactly this in the final simile, line 625 Book 12. The cherubim come down to effect God’s punishment; but immediately after that he gives us a simile that undoes that, juxtaposes descent of angels with the ascent of mist, a naturalistic image, ejecting A/E by “atmospheric reaction”. Guided by providence they yet take their solitary, wandr’ing way. Confusing and surprising! 18th c critic/editor Richard Bentley first reader to spell out the difficulties of these, found the conclusion so conflicted he said it mustn’t have been Milton, “clearly the garbled product of the confused secretary to whom Milton was dictating”. Rogers says B gets almost everything wrong, but has a good nose for tension/conflict. How can God’s foreknowledge be reconciled with man’s free will? This is M’s last chance to reconcile. Rogers suggests the choose Providence, perhaps within them. B provides his own last lines, more of a Sunday school picture, B is more orthodox. The world of PL by the end is “almost entirely secular” says Rogers! Prepares us for modernity, they can choose an alternative image of Providence, not the personal intervening God. M attempts to reassert the innocent meaning of “wander” in the last words. “Wandering can be seen as something innocent, sanction now because it is predicated on an internalized providential guide. Eve was right: “wandering is in the end perfectly allowable in Milton’s universe”, ends on a chivalric romantic note. Callback to Book 1 line 25, M’s desire to “assert Eternal Providence”, Rogers suggests it we look at the root sense, Latin asserere, “to remove from service, to declare a slave free”. Liberating a conception of providence by doctrinaire/orthodox readers of Genesis, as Milton is liberating poetry.