The question of Miltonic humor is something we should take seriously. What William Kerrigan calls Milton's “almost unremitting sublimity” disposes us toward the larger and more obviously dramatic moments in the epic. The well-known line in which the elephant “wreathed his lithe proboscis” for Adam's and Eve's amusement is usually adduced by critics who believe Milton had a sense of humor, but the very fact that those defenders resort so often to the same citation simply reinforces the charge of humorlessness. Worse still, we have the testimony of Milton's early biographer John Aubrey, who reports that Milton had a satirical temperament whose effect was aggravated by the way Milton pronounced his “r”s—very hard, we are told. (Perhaps this makes Milton one of the founders of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”— but would Milton have gotten the joke?)

Yet, for all that, one may also detect a certain unusual playfulness at times, not only in the puns but in the way Milton takes what appear to be direct philosophical or theological propositions and phrases them with a double negative or in a piquant oxymoron. A sacred and homefelt—and surprising— delight may emerge from the experience of Milton's arts of saying, unless one has already decided that these are no laughing matter.

I myself once came under some friendly fire on the Milton listserv for identifying one of these artful moments as potentially conveying a certain hard-r’sed humor in the midst of a theologically foundational assertion. The moment is the one in which Raphael, the ever-patient explainer, unfolds for Adam and Eve one of the core tenets of the poem, that we are free only if we obey God. Apparently without a shred of self-awareness—it is Raphael, after all—the angel confidently proclaims to Adam and Eve a ringing declaration of the position of every sentient being in this universe in relation to their Great Author, God Almighty: “Our voluntary service he requires” (Paradise Lost 5.529).

The line has always made me laugh, though not in derision. How then? The sense of the line expresses a central paradox of Milton's version of the Christian faith, yes, but it does so in a peculiar fashion that becomes even odder in the context of this poet's life, work, and temperament.