Speech in “Paradise Lost”

ABSTRACT In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several treatises (religious, philosophical, and rhetorical) discussed the Fall of Man as involving a corruption of mankind's speech. In Paradise Lost we witness a dramatization of that corruption. Adam and Eve lose what Thomas Wilson, in his Arte of Rhetorique (1560), calls the “Eloquence first giuen by God”; their speech is confounded in the way Godfrey Goodman describes fallen man's speech in The Fall of Man (1616). This confounding of their utterance is particularly noticeable in Adam and Eve's speech rhythms, which in the context of Paradise Lost are transformed from a celestial to an infernal resemblance. Adam and Eve's conversation also suffers an impairment, so that by the close of the poem they have inaugurated what Richard Allestree in The Government of the Tongue (1675) calls “our rusty drossy Converse.” Their conversation with each other has been changed and limited, their converse with God and the angels virtually lost. The poem itself, however, curiously makes up for this fall in Adam and Eve's speech. The poet projects himself as a fallen man, a son of Adam and Eve, but as a man conversing freely with God and graced with an eloquence given by God. The poem itself is in fact the result of the poet's converse with God.