Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all.

These lines are from John Milton’s epic poem *Paradise Lost* (1667), spoken in the early books as the poem establishes the infernal setting after Satan and the rebel angels’ defeat and expulsion from Heaven. Milton lingers on the geography and atmosphere of Hell—its “regions” and “shades”—to convey not only physical darkness but a moral and spiritual condition defined by the absence of divine presence. The passage belongs to Milton’s larger project of dramatizing the consequences of rebellion against God and setting the cosmic stage for the temptation and fall of humankind.

Milton compresses Hell’s punishment into a paradox of deprivation: it is not merely pain, but the permanent exclusion of what makes life bearable—“peace,” “rest,” and above all “hope.” The phrasing suggests a realm where even the ordinary consolations that “come to all” in human experience are suspended. By emphasizing the negation of hope, Milton underscores the theological idea of damnation as final separation from grace. The lines also work rhetorically to heighten the epic’s moral stakes: the reader is made to feel the chilling finality of a world in which renewal and reprieve are structurally impossible.