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"Meanwhile": Paradisian Infinity in Milton's Paradise Lost

Abstract:This essay argues that the temporal adverb "meanwhile" marks a series of key moments in Paradise Lost, in which an endless succession is built into the present moment. Hitherto overlooked by the critics, this duration is represented in the poem as a concrete, coherent, and intelligible form, which opens the possibility of transformation implicit in the monistic scale of "one first matter all." Milton models this structure on Aristotle's theory of the infinite presented in Physics III, yet he goes beyond Aristotle in representing the infinite as the distinctive feature of moral life. In the poem's representation of hell or the postlapsarian condition, "meanwhile" serves as a mere indexical adverb, the function of which is to designate temporal or spatial shifts. The possibility of transformation, which "meanwhile" opens in the present moment, is reserved in Milton's poem to the prelapsarian or repentant mind.