O fairest of creation! last and best
Of all God’s works! creature in whom excell’d
Whatever can to sight or thought be form’d,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defac’d, deflower’d, and now to Death devote?

These lines occur in John Milton’s epic poem *Paradise Lost* (1667), in the aftermath of the Fall. Spoken by Adam as he beholds Eve after she has eaten the forbidden fruit, the passage registers his shock and grief at the sudden change he perceives in her—spiritually and morally rather than physically. Milton’s poem retells the Genesis story in elevated blank verse, exploring obedience, temptation, and the catastrophic consequences of disordered desire. Adam’s lament comes at the moment when innocence gives way to knowledge of sin and mortality, and the couple’s previously harmonious relationship begins to fracture under guilt and blame.

Adam’s exclamation fuses adoration with elegy: Eve is praised as the pinnacle of created beauty and goodness, yet in the same breath declared “lost.” The repetition (“lost… lost”) and the sequence of verbs (“Defac’d, deflower’d”) dramatize how sin is imagined as a kind of desecration—an inward ruin that stains what was “holy” and “divine.” The final phrase, “now to Death devote,” underscores Milton’s theology that disobedience introduces mortality into human experience. The passage also reveals a tension central to the poem: Adam’s idealizing gaze toward Eve, and how that idealization collapses into despair when she no longer fits the image of unfallen perfection.