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“Darkness Visible” and Milton’s Counterplot

Much commentary on the oxymoron “darkness visible” traces sources for the image in Christian and secular literature and explores the various senses in which the phrase may be understood. Edgar Daniels, for example, accepts John Bradshaw’s view: “Visible seems . . . . to mean ‘that can be seen through’, and darkness visible, darkness through which the sights of woe were discovered” (370). Robert Edgeworth favors a literal reading: “Milton meant what he said: the flames of Hell radiate a positive, palpable darkness which extinguishes light” (97), and in doing so, Milton added, “a new, and very striking, idea to the traditional theological conception of the flames of Hell” (98). Edgeworth then proposes possible sources in The Aeneid and the Zohar. Merritt Hughes suggests “darkness visible” reflects Milton’s conception of Hell as “psychological and non-local”; the phrase should not be understood “in a purely physical sense” (182–83). He further notes that the conception appears in Job 10:22, where the dead are described as dwelling where “the light is darkness” (213). No one, however, has considered the phrase “darkness visible” in the context of what Geoffrey Hartman calls Milton’s counterplot, the reassuring under song heard in the opening books of Paradise Lost. Hartman writes that the primary plot of the first two books of Paradise Lost is the threat to creation posed by “the satanic host’s effort to build on hell,” but a simultaneous, comforting counterplot may be felt in “moments of relief or distancing” readers experience in decorative descriptive passages (1–2). The counterplot is felt, for example, in Milton’s description of the fall of Mulciber who will become the architect of Pandemonium: