The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar

This paper examines the relationship of verbal expression, political engagement, and historical progress in a poem which has traditionally been labelled undramatic and read as an allegory of Milton's post-revolutionary resignation to quietism. While "Paradise Regained" consists primarily of a debate between two speakers and thus appears hostile to multivocality, the verbal combat, E. Sauer contends, transforms the poem into a historically engaged, politically charged text in which the Son challenges the oppressive homogeneity of Satan's opposing discourse and reemplots the events of his master-narrative. In part 2, the author argues that Satan's fall from the temple pinnacle-Nebuchadnezzar's reconstructed tower of Babel, the site of contending voices and contested identities in "Paradise Regained"-represents the silencing of the monological, negating voice and the symbolic collapse of monarchy (Prose, 3: 405).