Milton’s Twilight Zone: Analogy, Light, and Darkness in Paradise Lost

Culturally, associatively, and naturally, light brings with it reference to darkness, as day to night and life to death. The symbolic valences of night and light, together with their phonic likeness, occupied Milton throughout his writing, but especially after his blindness, as his blind protagonist eloquently testifies inSamson Agonistes. Various half-lights, such as twilight, dusk and dawn, shade and shadow, enter the picture, too. These belong neither to light nor to darkness, neither exclusively to day nor to night; in them, light and dark combine suggestively. InParadise Lost, Milton’s figure of Death is recurrently called a shade or