His Prospect High: The Nunc Stans in Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is a prospect poem. This is not only true of Book 11, in which Adam enjoys a panorama of biblical history from the highest hill in Paradise. Book 11 is Milton’s most obvious adaptation of the prospect poem, a nascent and mainly Royalist genre that had been inaugurated by John Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642). But the whole of Paradise Lost can, and should, be understood as an experiment in the prospect poem, because we are told that everything relayed in the poem occurs within the sight of God the Father, watching from his elevated position in Heaven, as well as within the sight of Milton’s muse, from whose high ‘view’ ‘Heav’n hides nothing’ (I.27). The first three books of Paradise Lost all open with a high eminence from which characters survey. In Book 1, the muse is located on the ‘secret top’ (6) of various mountains, and Milton’s own poem is projected to soar ‘Above th’ Aonian Mount’ (15). This opening, establishing the prospect poem’s common method of analogy between literal and figurative heights, echoes that of Coopers Hill, in which Denham imagines his poetic ‘flight’ from the hill’s ‘auspicious height’, ‘Through untrac’d wayes’. At the start of Book 2, Satan is placed ‘High on a Throne’ in Hell (1), raised to a ‘bad eminence’ (6). And in Book 3, we are introduced to God as the definitive surveyor and surveillor, whose prospect view informs and enables that of Milton’s muse because it encompasses all the places and times described in Paradise Lost, from the Creation to the composition of the poem and beyond: