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PARTISAN REVIEW
tensions of the poem parallel in their decline the decline of man from
a dualistic pastoral condition of humble rank yet typical importance
to a literal, unsymbolic, unshadowed status. The ontogeny of the
poem's structure recapitulates the phylogeny it describes; the prevail–
ing melancholy which Mr. Tillyard notes in the final books is thus a
function of Milton's feeling that the age of miraculous and mythical
events--the age of sympathy-is over. This feeling, profoundly am–
biguous since the
Nativity Ode,
is now tinged with unqualified regret;
what man has lost is hope as well as poetry, a chance of swift re–
demption as well as of picturesque error. Thus the telling of the myth
culminates not in a mythical truth but in a truth of the audience; not
in the Second Coming but in things as they are, the human condition
as the reader must know it. Relegated to that recital which for Adam
concerns only a distant future and for the reader an equally remot.::
past, the Second Coming is cramped into the farthest perspective of
a vast and tangled panorama. It lacks all energy and dramatic sig–
nificance; the true conclusion of the poem is in the languid movement
of humanity, abandoned and aimless, which the last two lines present:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Bentley found this last distich altogether too mopish for Queen Car–
oline's taste; especially the adjectives troubled him.
Why
wand'ring?
Erratic steps? Very improper: when in the Line before,
they were
guided by Providence.
And why
slow?
when even
Eve
pro–
fess'd her Readiness and Alacrity for the Journey, 614: ... And why
their
solitary Way?
All Words to represent a sorrowful Parting? When
even their fonner Walks in Paradise were as solitary, as their Way
now... .
But it's exactly the "solitary" state of man that keynotes the passage.
By the end of Book XII all the supernatural personages are with–
drawn or reduced to attendant, symbolic roles. The Devil is in Hell,
a snake; Sin and Death, losing even their allegorical personalities,
have resolved into conditions of human existence; the angel faces,
barricaded far away, are remote and "dreadful"; only man is left
to carryon the story of history, and his significance is no longer pas–
toral. Indeed, he is no more than a wanderer, a seeker after signifi-
