Construction of space, time, and free will through sound in Paradise lost

John Milton's Paradise Lost makes frequent reference to sound and music in its descriptions of heaven, Earth, and hell, and substantial research has been dedicated to dissecting how the poem's descriptions develop a figurative and literal hierarchy between these realms and their inhabitants. Much consideration has also been devoted by scholars toward examining the poetic and aural qualities of the text and how they relate to the material world depicted by Milton. The goal of my thesis is to synthesize these two concepts by considering how the sonorous aspects of the poem reflect the hierarchy proposed by the denotative and connotative meanings of the poem's words. In other words, I will examine how the sound of Milton's poem reflects the temporal and spatial relations between its realms and characters and argue that even without recognizing the meaning of the poem, one could understand these relationships just by listening to the text.