“Farewell happy fields / Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail / Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new possessor” (Milton 1.249-252).
This passage is uncanny in its reminiscence to “Il Penseroso,” especially in the invocation of religious imagery to characterize supposedly empowering pain. Just as Milton tells us to “hail divinest Melancholy” in his poem on depression, Satan tells his comrades to “hail horrors, hail / Infernal world.” Horrors and Melancholy are glorified as liberating, but the reality is much more nuanced -- as demonstrated in Satan’s inner struggles and “L’Allegro’’’s role as a counterpoint to “Il Penseroso.” Milton seems acutely self-aware of such contradictions and irrational appeals to horror or depression. I am also fascinated by the demons’ subversive use of a term like “hail” -- they no longer hail God, but rather the presumed antithesis of divinity as constructed in Christian theology. It is also notable that, rather than saying they can be happy or joyful in Hell, Satan asserts that they can find what they’re looking for in the horror. Freedom in hellish autonomy, apparently, supersedes joy. Like the narrator in “Il Penseroso,” is their freedom in their pain? How will this concept be interrogated (or supported) throughout the epic?
