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Paradise Lost is replete with food metaphors, alimentary and scatological. In Raphael's words of admonition to Adam, for example, the sociable spirit cautions against an excessive craving for knowledge:
"But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind." (7.126-30)1
Milton compares the folly of curiositas to the fetid wind resulting from gluttony. In this instance, the metaphor of flatulence is intended to generate a proper disgust in Adam and in the reader, and the limits of eating and of knowing are thereby reinforced. Images associated with gluttony and digestion collectively support the theme of temperance over physical and intellectual appetite, clarifying the significance of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the place of Reason in human action, and Milton's poetic objectives in writing Paradise Lost.
Throughout Paradise Lost, descriptions of things infernal or sinful employ figures of speech based upon one of the less glorious aspects of the human body--its digestive system. For example, as God the Father decrees Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise, he personifies Eden as a nauseated dyspeptic who can no longer contain the tainted Adam and Eve:
"Those pure immortal Elements that know
No gross, no unharmonious mixture foul,
Eject him tainted now, and purge him off
As a distemper, gross to air as gross,
And mortal food, as may dispose him best
For dissolution wrought by Sin, that first
Distemper'd all things, and of incorrupt
Corrupted." (11.50-57)2
Perhaps because these words are put into the mouth of God, or perhaps because the eventual redemption of Adam and Eve is in the background (foretold as early as the fourth line of the poem), the diction here is gentle compared to that used to describe the machinations of Satan and his minions in the war in heaven. There, Mammon's devilish engines are fully operational digestive systems, as fire and cannonballs
From those deep-throated Engines belcht, whose roar
Embowell'd with outrageous noise the Air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul
Their devilish glut. (6.586-89)
This "devilish glut" is soon corrected, however, and heaven excretes and cleanses itself of all...