Adventurous Song

Abstract

The din of battle subsides, the Son returns to his Father in triumph, and the first of Milton’s self-appointed tasks, to assert Eternal Providence as the controlling force in the expanded universe has, in effect, ended. Some elements will remain, such as Adam’s enquiry into the seventeenth-century theories concerning the planetary systems; but in the same way as our first view of Eden in the earlier part of the poem formed only an interlude in the major drama of the cosmic conflict between God and the Arch Antagonist, so from now on the primary interest of the poem will focus down from the distant heavens to a single garden situated on earth, and the ways of God to men.