Or, Give after Milton's Paradise Lost Book I, a description of hell.
Answer: In the opening scene of Paradise Lost, Milton describes Hell as a place of immense but mysterious forces. It is a place of burning fire where we find Satan and his horrid crew rolling and stupefied. Milton's description of Hell in Paradise Lost creates an impression of its vastness and nature. According to Milton's Cosmology, Hell lies equally distant from Heaven to Earth's Southern pole. It is a dismal wild waste, a horrible dungeon filled with flames, which shed no light but only make darkness visible. It is the infernal world of horrors, infernal the place of never-ending torture, as there is no release from this punishment for the fallen angels.
The lack of visual clarity increases the evocative power of the poet in giving an account of Hell. We, at once, realise Hell is a state of mind as well as a place, as it is evident from Satan's speech,
“A mind not to be changed by place or times evoca
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a
Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
We understand that Hell has no limits, nor is it circumscribed in one place where the evil spirits dwell or where the evil thoughts are, is Hell.
Milton, however, tells about three distant physical Hell in Paradise Lost in addition to the moral or spiritual Hell. The first Hell is a place of darkness which the lurid flickering light of fire serves only to make more dark. Geologically it is a volcanic region, fed with ever-burning sulphur unconsummed. Satan and his followers have fallen there. Perhaps Milton has drawn upon visual memory as well as upon imagination and combined actual sense impressions with literary reminiscence. In his blindness, Milton possibly went back to an occasion during his Italian journey when he visited the Phlegraean Fields lying close to Naples. The Solfatara called the Forum Volcani is the crater of a half-extinct volcano, destitute of vegetation. On the right, there is still a pool of hot water, other pools have formed and disappeared. It is also likely that Milton compares his Hell with the burning Aetna, the great volcano in the centre of Sicily.
The idea of the second Hell comes to our mind at the end of Book I, with the building of the Pandemonium. There are striking parallels between Pandemonium and St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. The most striking of all the similarities between Pandemonium and St. Peter's is the fact that there is evidently another building close to Pandemonium. While the hosts of lesser angels throng into the temple, Satan, Beelzebub and other more important angels enter a council chamber apparently attached to but somehow separate from the Cathedral. This is obviously the Vatican, the library of which, Milton visited when he was in Rome.
These first two hells are alike in that they occupy a limited area. In Paradise Lost Book II we are informed of a quite different conception of the size of Hell. After the council is dissuaded, some of the angels take part in the Olympic games. One group of angels set out to › explore their new domain and find that Hell is not a limited part of a world but a world in itself. Parts of it are very hot, as the angels had already discovered, but some parts of it are intensely cold. There is a frozen continent with perpetual storms with hail that ever melts. But Hell is much more than a continent, it is a world, topographically 'much like our own world with rivers and seas, mountains and valleys with a "gulf profound" into which the whole armies might have sunk.
So, Milton's third Hell is a place of "fierece extremes." Its cold is colder than anything on Earth, and its heat is more torrid. Milton's Hell is no such limited place as Satan and his followers first believed when they rose from their stupor on the burning lake.
To sum up, Milton through the speech of Satan gives the idea of Hell which is a state of mind as well as a place by his accurate fitting of the mind to the place. The mind is the source of happiness or misery because the mind is capable of turning Hell into Heaven and of making Heaven of Hell. So, Milton's Hell is not bound by time and space. It exists in the mind as Satan says, "Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell."
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