The attempt to reconcile the spiritual qualities of the divine world with the physical properties of this, necessarily introduces some unavoidable incongruities. How can a material conception of the immaterial be given save through the symbols of the real! How else can the unknown be ascertained save through the equation of the known! How else, save by visual and sensuous images, express such impalpable thought!
"Thus measuring things in Heaven by things on earth,"
the poet gives us a finite picture of the infinite; a picture which yet, by means of shadowy outlines and an artistic vagueness, impresses us with the awful sublimity of the illimitable and eternal. The physical immensity of the poem is unsurpassed.
Humanized gods and Titanic passions shadowed by fate upon the immaculate canvas of sacred legend--this is the play. The personality of the author is never seen; yet when we know the man and his life, we cannot but see therein the reflex of his own experience. The scene is in Heaven and never leaves it. When actions occur elsewhere, they are described.
Infinities above the scene of contention, far beyond "Heaven's blazing archipelagoes," where no imagination dares to soar, reigns He
"Before whose face The universe with its eternity Is but a mote, a moment poised in space."
"Stand the hidden springs of life revealed, The wondrous mechanism from earth concealed. There Nature's primal premises appear In simple grandeur, deep and crystal clear, Flowing from out the heart of boundless ocean Of the eternal Now. With rapt devotion A myriad ministering forces there await The summons of His awful eyes of fate, The mandates of His all-compelling voice."
Far, far below those empyrean vaults is Earth, with its pristine inhabitants. God and man--the Creator and the thing created, the First Cause and the last effect--are both judiciously only introduced into the drama by hearsay.
Deep in the vague immensity lies Chaos, the uninhabited, through which the vanquished rebels are to be hurled to their endless doom.
"Where meteors glare and stormy glooms invest;"
as, leaving Elysium's fields of light, he views
"Hell's punishments and horrors dire, Its gulfs of woe and lakes of rayless fire, Where demons laugh and fiends and furies rage Round writhing victims whose parched tongues assuage No cooling drops of hope."