Rhetoric of Punishment and Consolation: A Reading of the Metaphor of Seed in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Rhetoric of Punishment and Consolation: A Reading of the Metaphor of Seed in Milton’s Paradise Lost

  This paper explores Milton"s use of the multiple implications of the metaphor of seed in Paradise Lost as part of the poet"s rhetorical strategy to fulfill the aim of the poem stated explicitly at the outset of the poetic epic: The aim is to "assert Eternal Providence/And Justify the ways of God to men." The plurality of meaning inherent in the metaphor of seed in Paradise Lost can be listed in the multiple sets of opposing referents such as death and regeneration, singularity (individuality) and multiplicity, stoppage and continuity, beginning and end, guilt and grace and the list goes on. In Paradise Lost Adam and Eve before the Fall are presented as everlasting flower or fruits. Yet these grand parents of mankind are stripped of their immortality and paradise and take on the image of seed as they fall and become subject to the power of death. Yet the metaphor of seed in which the sinful couple are invested, alludes to not only the fallen possibility but also the promises of a new life. With the dual meaning of life and death, the metaphor of seed in Paradise Lost help us to articulate the shifting reality and paradoxical nature of Mankind before and after the Fall.   In addition, it is with the masterful deployment of the metaphor of seed throughout the poem that Milton shows how mercy and the justice of God, two quint-essential attributes of the Deity, are working together harmoniously for fallen mankind, The frequent use of the metaphor of seed in the final two books of Paradise Lost justifies the rational of Milton"s inclusion of the final two books of the poem, which has often been criticized as the bathos of the poem, by making the poem into a poetic epic of punishment and consolation.