Ambiguity of Political Metaphor in Paradise Lost Anonymous College

The potential for political meaning in the metaphors, allegories and allusions of Paradise Lost is rich for interpretations due to the shifting associations of political ideologies with various sides, in order to prove a spectrum of arguments. The initial depictions of a disappointed revolutionary force in Book I appears to reflect Milton’s real disillusionment over the collapse of the post-Civil War Republic, but the shifting nature of his metaphors also uses Lucifer’s troops to display his ideological oppositions to the tyranny of kings, and resolves in an optimistic long term view of his current situation as ‘Betwixt the world destroy’d and the world restor’d’ (XII.3).

The description of Satan observing his army in Book I has an association with Charles I as well as the defeated republicans:

'As when the Sun new ris'n

Looks through the Horizontal misty Air

Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon

In dim Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the Nations, and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs. Darkn'd so, yet shone

Above them all th'Arch-Angel.' (1.594-600)

As both Joan Bennett and John Gorecki point out, in Eikonoklastes Milton describes Charles I ‘as an impotent, darkened sun’ and compares the former king as...