Ill-timed births were a bad omen in classical myth

Even Mary, who is “pure” and never thinks bad thoughts, is worried when her son doesn’t come home after he said he was going to hang out with John by the river. He’s like 30 though, so maybe she should chill.

A lot of Milton’s literary project involves filling in the gaps in the Bible…improving on God’s word, basically.

Milton, doing Rap Genius' work himself, identifies the “new-baptiz’d” as the disciples Andrew and Simon.

Talking about the body as a microcosm of the larger natural or political order was a common Renaissance (and classical) trope. Here, the turmoil within Adam and Eve’s bodies is analogous to bad weather and tyrannical government

The homology between government of the body and government of the state is made most famously in Plato’s Republic

Milton’s contemporaries saw a connection between “winds within” (like, digestive problems) and overly emotional behavior

Experts believe the forbidden fruit might have been a fig (apples didn’t grow in the Middle East; but the Latin words for “apple” and “evil” are, as it happens, very similar)

But Milton makes it clear that the leaves for Adam and Eve’s garments came from a tree that didn’t bear fruit, or at least not very tempting fruit

A big theme of this poem is that we can only know innocence retrospectively, as something we’ve lost. As Marcel Proust would put it a few hundred years later, “The only paradise is a paradise lost.”

Veils are usually sinister for Milton; they’re usually hiding something

So even though it’s “innocence” that’s being compared to a veil, Milton might be suggesting that pre-Fall Paradise wasn’t so great – that untried innocence might be, as he describes in Areopagitica,

a blank Vertue, not a pure; her whiteness but an excrementall whiteness.