The Fall

Milton opens with a third invocation: he must now "change those notes to tragic." It is morning in Eden. Eve proposes a small efficiency — that she and Adam should garden separately, since each is distracted by the other. Adam objects: the angel warned us about an enemy; we should stay together. Eve hears the objection as a doubt about her steadfastness. Her answer becomes the poem's first marital argument: if she cannot stand alone against temptation, what is her virtue worth? Adam, against his better judgment, lets her go.

Satan, in the form of the serpent, finds her at the tree of knowledge. He flatters her at length: her beauty deserves a wider audience; she should be "a goddess among gods." He claims he himself ate this fruit and gained speech. He invites her to do the same. He has timed and constructed the temptation to a degree no later seducer in literature equals. She hesitates, reasons, eats. The Earth, Milton says, "felt the wound." Nature gave a sign of woe; the leaves wept.

Eve returns carrying a branch of the fruit. Adam has been making her a garland of flowers; he sees her face and understands at once. The garland drops, the flowers fall. The crisis that follows in his mind is one of the great soliloquies in English. He chooses her. "How can I live without thee, how forgo / Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined, / To live again in these wild woods forlorn?" He eats. They make love in a new way, frantic and lustful — the body discovering shame for the first time. They sleep heavily, wake angry, and the first quarrel after the Fall begins, each blaming the other for what they together did.