Twine Poetry: Satan's Triumph

Satan's Triumph

Long before there was Walter White or Michael Corleone, there was Satan, the original fallen angel. I chose Satan’s iconic monologue from Paradise Lost to recreate because it is interesting to think about the journey and processes of a man’s fall from grace. I have always loved the aural quality to Milton’s language and I thought that the imagery in his writing would naturally lend itself to experimentation. Milton’s poem contains rich descriptions of the scenery, landscape, and environment of both Heaven and Hell. My first task was to come up with some way to create those descriptions visually so that the visual component could prop up Satan’s simmering language. Not only did I rely on popular illustrations of Paradise Lost and one illustration of Dante’s Paradiso, I also considered their locations spatially in the poem.

A common theme in Paradise Lost is the way that Satan organizes Hell as perversion of the pattern of Heaven. I represented that symmetry by having the exploration of Heaven and Hell be the same with look, listen, and act links. The illustration of heaven in all its glory is mirrored by the crooked fire because in Hell there is “no light, but rather darkness visible.” The text-picture flames are my attempt at creating “darkness visible.”  I used the color of the background, text, and links to contribute to the mood of and contrast between Heaven and Hell. On the screen where Satan is cast out of Heaven I used a transitional color and had the reader descend down the page as if they were being cast with Satan. Injecting movement into the poem was a great way to bring dynamics to an otherwise rigid contrast.

I love the idea that Twine gives the user agency. I think that is the main feature that makes Twine unique as an art form, so I wanted to lean into that. I did that by having the poem address the reader immediately at the beginning. In this way they become Satan and they experience the sensation of crashing into Hell for the first time. I wanted to keep the heart of Satan’s monologue mostly intact, so I kept most of my features and multi-media elements isolated from one another and had them function primarily as world building. On the last page I finally have my three types of media, text, picture, and sound, converge to click the final mood of the poem into place.

This project was a ton of fun to do. I found that my ideas and my creativity grew alongside what I learned I was capable of with Twine. This immediately taught me something about the creative process: my ideas can only get as big as my ability to execute them. Another immediate lesson at the heart of this project is the value of remixing. I got a fresh new understanding of a 400-year-old poem by running it through modern media.