What Sort of World before Them?: Paradise Lost and the Song of Moses
At the end of Milton's poem is Paradise lost, or found? Apparently, Adam and Eve will ascend "Up to a better covenant" (12.301), but, meanwhile, they are entering a world in which even the elect are only "Part good., part bad" (12.336). The "foul idolatries" catalogued by Milton at the end of Book XII suggests a mediated and uncertain future. Throughout the poem the ascent, rebellion, and punishment of Satan has mirrored the progress of the human pair and, at the end, the poem also highlights the eerie similarities between good and evil. When ravenous wolves follow closely on the heels of the
Lamb of God, one must look to the poem's innate dialectic in order to formulate the kind of Paradise Adam and Eve have lost, or gained.
According to Northrup Frye, bartered rhetoric characterizes not only Paradise Lost, to which he continually refers, but the Bible as well. Frye characterizes the dialectic between the Old and New Testaments as a "double mirror reflecting only itself to itself' (Myth and Metaphor 312). Paradise Lost mirrors The Song of Moses, which ends the Five Books of Moses, in just this self-reflexive manner.
Reading Books II and XII of the poem in conjunction with the end of Deuteronomy casts light on the images and reflections provided by both texts.
In thematic and close readings, these texts share location, plot, perspective, and resolution. As Robert Alter has explained, the Psalms, and most other Old Testament poems are written in syllabically-matched halves of a line, broken at a caesura and repeating both syllables and content, although sometimes with ironic and homophonic twists. These poetics characterize the Song of Moses and the end of Paradise Lost,
most prevalently in Book 12, where conflicting views of the future and the role of humanity in that future are juxtaposed much more closely. Reading the end of Paradise Lost and the Song of Moses together, then, will help a reader connect the Paradise that is lost, or found, at the end of the poem to a dialectical and mediated future in which an exodus always implies a genesis, perfection always contains corruption, and
promises often go unfulfilled.
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