“Plain” and “Ornate” Styles and The Structure of Paradise Lost

Abstract

Milton uses the contrast between “plain” or “unpoetic” speech and “ornate” or “obviously poetic” speech as an important resource for presenting to the reader of Paradise Lost the difference between perfection and imper fection, innocence and corruption. The poem associates rhetoric, oratory, and most ornamental verbal contrivances with Satan and the fallen angels, and the contrast between their style and the bare and unemotional dialogue in Heaven is intended to make the reader suspect the arts of language as devices for concealing or manipulating the truth instead of stating or revealing it. The speeches of the unfallen Adam and Eve treat words as a set of counters for the truths of the created universe, but after the fall they, like the fallen angels, use language in ways which imply that its correspondence to the “truths” of the universe is a matter for speculation. When Adam and Eve are reconciled with each other and to God, their speeches contain striking reminders of the style of the Son in Book in. Of course, all the effects of Paradise Lost, both plain and ornate, are artful, but the criticism of reliance on persuasive and immediately appealing styles implied by the structure of the poem may help to explain Milton's deliberate forgoing of such effects in Books xi and xii and in Paradise Regain'd.

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