Judgment, the highway from Hell, repentance

News of the Fall reaches heaven; the Son comes down to judge. The judgment is brief and exact: the serpent will crawl; the woman will bear children in sorrow; the man will earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. But before he leaves, the Son does something Milton inserts that is not in Genesis: he clothes Adam and Eve himself, with skins, "as a Father." The gesture changes the judgment's weight.

Meanwhile, at the gates of Hell, Sin and Death feel the Fall happen and know their hour has come. They build, in a passage of strange dark grandeur, a great causeway across chaos from the gates of Hell to the new world — Milton's image of how death actually enters history, as an engineering project undertaken by allegorical figures. Satan meets them on his way back and praises their work. In Pandemonium he ascends his throne expecting acclaim; what he gets instead is the dry hiss of his army turning into serpents below him, and then he turns into one himself. The Satan of Book 1 has become a snake on a throne of snakes.

On Earth the long dark night of grief begins. Adam, in the longest soliloquy of the poem, curses his existence, curses Eve, curses his own descendants who will inherit this. Eve, refused at first, finally breaks through to him — she offers to take the whole curse on herself. Adam refuses; he comes to himself; he remembers that the curse fell on the serpent, and that some "seed of the woman" was promised to bruise it. Hope returns. They go together to the place where the Son judged them and kneel down and confess and ask for pardon. The book ends with them on their knees, weeping.