Milton and the "intelligible flame": "Sweet converse" in the poetry and prose

During the separation scene in book nine, prelapsarian conversation reaches its vertex (200-430). The fullest implications of individual freedom (350), choice (355), and trial by what is contrary (366) are on display, and it is the knowing reader who sees sinister foreshadowing in the tensely innocent exchanges between Adam and Eve. Their "dialectic," more than a debate but less than a quarrel, could be progressing to a higher level through the exercise of right reason and right choice (352). The fact that Eve begins no longer to cherish such conversation as she once did signals a shift in her values; for example, in a demonstration of how "almost" to fight, she tactlessly degrades to "Casual discourse"(223) the conversation which once was the "chief delight" of Adam's presence and which she now sees as a distraction to performing those domestic chores wisely avoided in four and eight. Adam's "mild answer" (225) is an echo of Christ's rebuke to Martha (Luke 10.38-42), and also a chiding reminder that " . . . not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us, and delight to Reason join'd" (3.242, 243), and that labor was not so strictly "impos'd ... as to debar us when we need / Refreshment, whether food, or tal; between" (235-37). Now it is Adam who places labor in perspective and values "this sweet intercourse / Of looks and smiles," all summed up in "converse" (247). With "converse" the metaphoric hinge, Adam describes something ultimate, a "consubstantiation" in the blur of refreshment, food, talk, mind, sweet intercourse, looks, smiles, reason, and love-a pre-Fall Eucharist of body, mind, and soul. Yet at this extraordinary moment of insight into communion, Adam's values are also changing.

With a toss, he capitulates to Eve's arguments, and the "converse" he so recently believed central to marriage is easily dismissed:

But if much converse perhaps

Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield.

For solitude sometimes is best society (247-49)

Pretending to give Adam the last word, Eve "Persisted, yet submiss, though last" reassures him that for "our trial" she has been sufficiently "forewarn'd" by "his own last reasoning words," and her "hand / Soft she withdrew" (377-86). It is revealing to compare this parting with an earlier pre-Fall scene:

Thus talking hand in hand alone they pass'd

On to thir blissful Bower;(4.689-90)

and with the postlapsarian quarrel that ends book nine:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent

The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,

And of thir vain contest appear'd no end. (1188-90)

and with the final lines of the epic, when Adam and Eve

hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitary way. (12.667-68)

The conversation of marriage precipitously degenerates from exquisite, intimate communion into crude, vituperative accusation. "Alone" in book four is an affirmation of the First Pair's uniqueness in all creation and an acknowledgment of their independent personal existences. After the Fall, each is truly alone, and they quarrel in strange mutual isolation. A part of what has been lost is caught as Eve, in despair and contemplating suicide, rehearses the sequence of desire-"conversing, looking, loving"-that leads irresistibly to Love's rites and would now result in a doomed race (10.989-1000). Sherry notes how tragically interrupted is the conversation of God and Man after the Fall, and how ironic the disputes between Adam and Eve in the light of Adam's fear that he would lose her "sweet converse" if he were to remain unfallen (258-61).10