Him the Almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.

These lines open John Milton’s epic poem *Paradise Lost* (1667), in the narrator’s early account of Satan’s fall. Milton, a learned Puritan and former polemicist for the English Commonwealth, composed the poem after the Restoration, when he was politically marginalized and fully blind. The poem retells the biblical story of the Fall in elevated epic style, beginning *in medias res* after the rebel angels have been cast out of Heaven. The quoted passage describes the Almighty’s decisive overthrow of the arch-rebel and frames the cosmic stakes—divine sovereignty versus created pride—before the poem turns to Satan’s awakening in Hell.

Milton compresses a theology of rebellion and judgment into a single, kinetic image: Satan is “hurl’d headlong” from the “ethereal sky” into “bottomless perdition.” The violent downward motion dramatizes the moral logic of the poem—pride and defiance against omnipotence result in catastrophic self-ruin. The language of “adamantine chains and penal fire” emphasizes not only punishment but confinement: the rebel’s freedom becomes bondage. At the same time, Milton’s grand, martial diction (“defy…to arms”) casts the revolt in epic terms, setting up the poem’s enduring tension between Satan’s rhetorical grandeur and the narrator’s insistence on the justice of divine order.