Paradise Lost Language and Communication

The power of Satan's voice is an important theme throughout Paradise Lost. Here, the emphasis is on the actual sound of Satan's voice and how it renovates the fallen angels' despair. At other moments in the poem his voice is just as effective, though it achieves different results; he uses it to trick Eve, for example, in Book 9, whereas in the early books his speeches seduce us (as readers) into admiring him.

Much like Satan, Belial (described here) is a bad dude; he's just as dangerous too because he "pleases the ear" with "persuasive accent[s]." Milton often points out the way in which what is "pleasing" can cause us to ignore someone's love for "vice." The voice, not just Satan's but God's as well, is a very powerful force in Paradise Lost.

Raphael uses similitude to give some idea of what Heaven is like, knowing full well that this is at best an imperfect approximation. Raphael seems a lot like John Milton, who must have faced the same exact problem of trying to explain "spiritual" things in earthly or "corporal" terms.

Adam tells Raphael how sweet is his words are. Satan is another guy whose words can be very sweet; Raphael is clearly not Satan, but we should think about what makes words actually sweet and what makes them problematically sweet.

The act of naming – assigning a word to something – is associated in Eden with understanding the "nature" of something. This suggests that names perfectly correspond with what name, that there is no gap or potential for ambiguity between word and thing as there will be after the Fall. The phrase "sudden apprehension" suggests how automatic or close the connection between word and thing is.

"Articulate sound" is a distinguishing feature of humans, God, and angels; Eve is curious for a moment but then (fatally) forgets about this incredibly strange disruption of God's hierarchies. As part of their punishment in Book 10, Satan (and his angels) will be temporarily deprived of the ability to use "articulate sound" (they will become figuratively "mute"), partly because of his misuse of that gift here.

Because he tempted Eve in the guise of a serpent, Satan and his associates are all transformed into serpents. They are deprived of the ability to speak. It is appropriate that their hissing (a word repeated three times) creates a "din," a word used elsewhere to refer to the unpleasant sound of war (6.408).