Was Paradise Well Lost?

Extract

There are few things in literature so beautiful as the endings of Milton's three long poems. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, the great Puritan poems of sin and righteousness, end, each in its own way, on a quiet note of reconciliation with life. In all three the story tapers off and there is no final climax. In all three the grand style sinks into the simple, the music dies away on the slow chords of a cadence, the mighty pinions on which the poet was lifted in his flight float him gently down to earth again. And in all three, though he does not cry “back into life, back into life” with Groethe, he drops back into it instinctively. Like the skylark, he is true to the kindred points of heaven and home. In Paradise Lost is the finest of these closes, and concerning the meaning of this one there has, of late, arisen some question.