Sophie Read

One thing we know for sure about Milton’s paradise is that it smells nice. Its wonderful flowers and plants, together here – though they’re later scattered across the globe – bloom and fruit at the same time, in an eternally perfect season. Eden is planted with fragrant trees and flowers, thickets of living incense: there are ‘Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm’, (4.248) and ‘groves of myrrh, | And flowering odours, cassia, nard, and balm; | A wilderness of sweets’ (5.292-4). Adam and Eve’s bower, too, is decorated with ‘flowers, garlands and sweet-smelling herbs’ (4.709). One plant in particular demands a little further investigation – and that is balm. Milton mentions it fourteen times, which makes it one of the most frequently cited botanical substances in his works: only pine (fifteen mentions), oak (sixteen mentions) and rose (a whopping thirty-four mentions) appear more often. In the early modern period, balm is a confusing word, because it could mean a few different things. Originally, it was something called an ‘oleo-resin’ – that is, a mixture of sticky, sappy gum and aromatic oils – that came from a species of tree found chiefly in Egypt, Palestine and Peru. To harvest the balm, workers would slash the bark of the trees, and wait for the resin to drip down and harden; it was then collected and sold to dealers who would take it across the world, to be used as a medicine and a perfume. Because balm was expensive, people looked for alternatives closer to home. The plant that is now named bee balm or lemon balm, with soft little variegated green leaves, was also in known in this period just as ‘balm’: sometimes it isn’t clear which of the two kinds of balm – the exotic resin or the native leaf – writers are referring to. A herbalist and a botanist called John Parkinson described both kinds in his books; he thinks that they share a name because they can both be used in healing medicines. ‘I verily think’, he explains, ‘that our forefathers, hearing of the healing and comfortable properties of the true natural Balm, and finding this herb to be so effectual, gave it the name of Balm, in imitation of his properties and virtues.’[1] These medicinal powers prompt a further extension of the word’s meaning: ‘balm’ and ‘balmy’ also began to be used to mean something soothing and healing, like balmy air; Shakespeare uses the word several times in connection with sleep, most famously when Macbeth calls sleep (which he fears he will never have again) the ‘balm of hurt minds’. Balm, then, could mean an aromatic resin from an exotic tree; a fragrant native herb; or something that comforts, restores, or eases pain: a medicine. 

Balm was also the name of a fabled tree, described in the Bible and by classical authors, but now lost: the balm of Gilead. It was thought to have almost magical powers, able to heal all infirmities of the mind and body, and to restore lost youth; explorers who went to the new world were always looking to see if it could be rediscovered. Many people thought the ‘true balm’ tree of the ancients was just a myth; it is probably this tree that grows so abundantly, and smells so sweetly, in Milton’s paradise. Balm still features in perfumes today, although usually as a synthetic chemical copy; balm resin possesses a distinctive spicy-soft smell, somewhere between cinnamon and vanilla, with a woody, green-leaf backnote almost reminiscent of celery or fennel.

We first hear of balm when the devils regroup after their banishment from heaven. Beelzebub outlines a plan for them to escape the sulphurous depths of hell, which must smell pretty dreadful; in this new place he imagines – ‘some mild zone’ – he tells his fallen companions that 

                         the soft delicious air, 

To heal the scar of these corrosive fires

Shall breath her balm. (2.398-400)

He means, of course, the newly-created earth, and within it the garden paradise of Eden. Satan volunteers himself for the job of scouting out the new territory and, with luck tempting the people who live in it. He promises to return quickly, and guide the others to this fabled place of ‘buxom air, embalmed | With odours’ (2.842-3). When he finally arrives, however, Satan finds that the balm has no effect. Though he can on some level understand the beauties of Eden, that ‘delicious paradise’ (4.132), the gulf between his fallen nature and the perfection of God’s creation is too great to be spanned. Milton’s lines hold out a taunting vision of peace and plenty that Satan cannot experience, and therefore must destroy: 

                               of pure now purer air

Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires

Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair: now gentle gales

Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense

Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole

Those balmy spoils. (4.153-9)

But, as a critic called Karen Edwards points out, ‘Satan’s sadness is despair’: even a miraculous all-heal must work within its own structures of belief, in this case the economy of sin and salvation which excludes Satan absolutely.[2] He is, it turns out, a creature categorically and definitionally impervious to the soothing, healing effects of balm.

Balm also makes another appearance in Paradise Lost, this one more surprising. There is a curious passage in which Adam, in conversation with the angel Raphael, recalls the first moments of his existence. Remembering your own birth is ordinarily – as Adam points out – rather difficult; but the unusual circumstances of his creation are a help here, as is his eagerness to gratify the curiosity of his angelic guest (he explains: ‘Desire with thee still longer to converse | Induced me’ (8.252-3)). After the first breath of life, Adam stirs, alone: 

As new waked from soundest sleep

Soft on the flowery herb I found me laid

In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun 

Soon dried, and on the reeking moisture fed. (8.253-6)

What is being described here is the first ever moment of human consciousness: this first time anyone, anywhere, has ever had a thought. The strangest thing here is the description of Adam’s sweat as ‘balmy’ – which means here ‘sweet-smelling’ – not a word usually associated with perspiration. Adam jolts into the first moment of life as if from sleep, though he does not yet know what that feels like. He discovers himself lying prone on the grass, bathed in this ‘balmy sweat’, a sort of amniotic film. When Raphael and Adam began their conversation (three books ago!) we were told about how food works in paradise: Adam asks Raphael if he’d like some lunch, and then worries that perhaps he doesn’t eat human food. Raphael reassures him that he does, and that all things in God’s created world absorb nourishment from somewhere and pass it on, in a kind of cycle. Even, the angel explains, the sun: who ‘receives | From all his alimental recompense | In humid exhalations’ (5.423-3): that is, it participates in the cycles of nourishment ordained for the created world, and its food is the watery vapours exuded by all things. Lying on the grass, then, wet with ‘balmy sweat’, Adam takes his place in this exchange: the sun ‘feeds’ on the ‘moisture’ of his body.

Although it is balmy, that moisture is also ‘reeking’. While that word does not necessarily come with the pejorative sense of ‘stinking’ it carries now, it is still an interesting choice: it is used of smoke and of steam, and figuratively of spilt blood – in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony tells the conspirators their hands ‘do reek and smoke’ after the murder. It signifies strength or intensity – a smell that is, or feels like it ought to be, so strong that is can be seen or touched, as something warm and wet.[3] This whole episode shows us that all the world is connected together before the fall; and also that everything – even the sun – has a bodily reality, and depends on the other elements of creation to survive and grow. The balm here, that sweet-scented, healing fluid, takes on yet another meaning. Paracelsus was an influential doctor, astrologer and alchemist who died in 1541; he developed a theory that every body had inside it a vital liquid or universal life force that was responsible for healing wounds and preventing decay. If this force seeped out, the person would die; unless some medicine could be found that would replenish the vital liquid, which Paracelsus called balm or (in Latin) balsamum. New-born Adam has inside him so much balm that it seeps out to feed the sun.

That Milton is thinking of Paracelsus’ idea of balm as a self-generated preservative becomes more likely is we pay attention to a conversation Adam has with a different angel. After the fall, God sends Michael to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and to tell Adam about the subsequent history of humankind. The first shocking images he sees are of violent and miserable death: Cain’s murder of Abel, and the sick-house where his descendants perish in poverty, disease and desperation. Weeping, Adam asks if these are the only ways to die: the angel Michael then comforts him with the possibility of a more peaceful, natural death – a life well lived ‘till like ripe fruit thou drop | Into thy mother’s lap’ (11.535-6). He says this may be how Adam himself dies, eventually; but he warns that it comes at the price of old age: the loss of youth, vitality and pleasure. ‘In thy blood’, Michael tells Adam,

                                          will reign

A melancholy damp of cold and dry

To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume 

The balm of life. (11.543-6)

The fragrant balm that new-born Adam offers abundantly up to the sun, to be recycled in the Great Chain of Being and regenerated in his own exemplary body, will eventually be exhausted, leaving only the mortal husk behind.

Balm, therefore, is a more complicated substance that it might at first seem. It is a tree, planted by God in the forests of Eden, that gives off a wonderful smell and a magical resin; it is also a humble little herb that Milton and his readers might have found in their own gardens, and used for domestic cures. These real, material identities (as resin or herb) are important, but nonetheless secondary to an understanding of balm as a salve, fluid and vital essence – a thing somewhere between medicine and magic; touched, too, with intimations of divinity. The devils find they cannot, after all, be cured by the balm of Eden’s air; but it runs in Adam’s veins, and is part of the way he communicates with God and participates in the cycles of life that exist in Paradise. When the fall happens, the difference is instantly felt in the air; the narrator explains how Death, ‘with delight’, ‘snuff’d the smell | Of mortal change on Earth’ (10.272-3). The balmy scent, and all its ideas of harmonious exchange and preservation from decay, is gone.
 

[1] John Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestri (London: Humphrey Lownes, 1629), p. 480 

[2] Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 183. 

[3] See OED, ‘reek, v.’, senses 2, 4, 6, 7 & 8.