In a perverse parallel to Milton’s own situation, the serpent receives supernatural inspiration in his sleep.

Instead of saying that the serpent is innocent, Milton predicts the harm it will cause in the future by talking about it in negative terms. It’s not dangerous yet, but it will be.

Kind of like a snake!

See Revelation 10:9

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take [it], and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

In causing suffering, Satan is also spiting himself. The satisfaction will not last long. (This is borne out in Book 10.)

Satan hasn’t gotten the memo that the sun, not Earth, is the center of the solar system

To be fair, it’s still basically the beginning of the world, and Copernicus hasn’t even been born yet..

Milton had, on his travels, met Galileo and was aware of his findings- Galileo discovered that the real structure of the universe was not, in fact, the geocentric model as commonly believed, but the heliocentric model. Milton dismisses Galileo’s findings in order to emphasise the importance of Earth and directly align it to God.

“Subtle” had a negative connotation; it’s hard to say if Satan chose the serpent because the serpent was subtle, or if it was Satan’s choice of the serpent that gave “subtle” a negative connotation in the first place.

These kinds of chicken-and-egg etymological questions are everywhere in Milton.

Original sin made Eden no longer Eden – or made us no longer able to access Eden.
“Wrought” often refers to shaping through industry or metalwork, very far from the unthinking nature of Eden.

Milton’s old and useless, and England’s depressing as fuck, but the spry and cheery Heavenly Muse who visits Milton every night is doing all the heavy lifting in getting this poem written.

For all the seeming arrogance inherent in the poem’s purpose (I mean, the dude seeks to justify God to men), there’s an admission of humility and limitations here.

Still, the whole spiel about not being “skilld” or “studious” enough to write a conventional epic or chivalric romance is bullshit. After all, he did just write about the biggest damn war ever, and in his youth, he may have planned to write (or at least briefly considered writing) a national epic based on Arthurian legend.

Going on about earlier martial epics (Virgil, Homer, and all those guys) and piling on the martial paraphernalia used in chivalric romance, Milton’s showing us how boring epics about knights and warfare are. Or course, there are plenty of shields and feasts in Paradise Lost too.

Nevertheless, Milton stresses that he intends to sing of “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom.” Arguably, he’s done that in this poem by focusing on the Son and Abdiel (and on figures appearing in Books 11 and 12). But he would also take a longer, closer look at this alternative form of heroism in Paradise Regained and (maybe) Samson Agonistes. The latter certainly has martyrdom in it, but what it means is anyone’s guess.

By the way, this is part of what Milton meant waaaay back in Book 1 when he proclaimed his intent to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Yeah, a bunch of dudes before him sang of warriors and battles and all that comes along with them (armor, swords, shields, terrible Brad Pitt movies), but how many of them did THIS?

Milton claimed he was visited every night by a Muse who dictated verses of poetry to him. He was blind and couldn’t write it out himself, so in the morning, he would bolt out of bed and scream “I need to be milked!” and his daughters or secretary-helpers would come take his divinely inspired dictation.

Milton is old (and blind) by this point, so yeah, he probably should have started sooner, but he just wasn’t really feeling it. Then again, he probably enjoyed the irony of “beginning late” a poem about what happened “In the beginning.” He was also pretty busy with the English Civil War, writing pamphlets against King Charles I and almost getting killed for it.