Milton had carried his epic around inside him for many years, and any number of calamities—including the outbreak of bubonic plague from 1664 to 1665, which killed seventy-five thousand Londoners—might have prevented him from getting it all down on paper. Its very completion must have seemed like divine Providence to Milton. Even while writing it, he believed that he shared a muse with Moses and King David and that she visited him nightly in his dreams; he woke up and dictated his poem in seemingly preformed stanzas. The palpable exhilaration of the poem’s composition, and the heavy burden of its complex meanings, contributes to the thrilling tension of “Paradise Lost.”