SATAN’S SPEECH:

The extract belongs to Book I from Paradise Lost by John Milton in which the protagonist is Satan who is a tragic but epic hero and a symbol of the rebel against authority, God.
The speech starts with an open quote: this means that it is a dialogue or a soliloquy, in which the protagonist, explained only in the second verse, compares Heaven, celestial light, with Hell, mournful gloom.
In addition, the speech explains the passage from Heaven to Hell by Satan with a comparison between the happy place he has to leave and a dark one that is waiting to him.

The discussion goes on with a description of God by the archangel who considers him, with a positive connotation, like “a sovran who can dispose and bid what shall be right”, so Satan knows his inferiority to God. Moreover, he mentions “happy fields” that are probably happy places in Heaven and starts to describe horrors, Infernal World in which he’s this “new possessor”.

After that, Satan considers himself like a “new possessor” of a place far away from God’s power: indeed he describes not his physical appearance but his interior and moral characteristics.
Moreover, his mind “can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” and in this case, differently from as he said firstly, he compares his authority with the God’ one; but he turns to consider himself inferior that God who has more strength thanks to the thunder bath. God is like the “almighty”, someone who has an unlimited power.

Finally, in the last lines the protagonist describes how he feels about his situations with God, because he refuses to accept God’s superiority: but with the expression “better to begin in hell that serve in heaven” he refuses the idea of the inferiority and underlines his superiority.