Paradise Regained

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Milton's sequel to Paradise Lost, published in 1671, takes as its subject not the fall of man but the refusal to fall. Its action is the temptation in the wilderness: Satan, defeated in the earlier poem but undeterred, approaches the Son of God during forty days of fasting and offers him, in turn, food, wealth, glory, the kingdoms of the earth, and finally the learning of Athens itself.

Where Paradise Lost is vast and turbulent, this is spare, argumentative and interior — a contest conducted almost entirely in speech between two formidable rhetoricians. Satan is at his most plausible here, reasoning rather than raging; and the answers he receives are quiet refusals that reject not only the bribes but the premises behind them. Milton's own politics are close to the surface: this is a poem about a man who will not take power on the terms offered.

Written after the Restoration had destroyed everything Milton had worked for, by a blind man dictating to whoever would take the lines down, it is the work of someone who had thought hard about defeat. This is an unabridged recording in modern accessible English.