Gryphons

Gryphons are invoked as a simile during Satan's journey through Chaos, where their hybrid form and fierce pursuit illuminate the speed, difficulty, and violence of his passage. They do not enter the action as independent agents; instead, their legendary image becomes a measure of Satan's determination as he crosses a realm where ordinary distinctions between land, water, air, and fire have broken down.

Appearance and Classical Image

Gryphons are presented through the image of a winged predator pursuing an Arimaspian who has secretly stolen guarded gold. The comparison joins aerial power to terrestrial pursuit: the creature moves over hills and marshy ground with a winged course, while its prey carries away something precious under the protection of vigilant custody. The image therefore combines speed, vigilance, violence, and the recovery of treasure, even though the poem uses it only as a figure for Satan's movement.

The hybrid nature of the Gryphon suits the unstable world through which Satan travels. Its body and motion belong neither exclusively to the ground nor to the sky, just as Chaos contains no settled sea, shore, air, or fire, but holds their raw causes in confused mixture. The creature's mythic form thus echoes the environment's refusal of stable categories: it is an image of power operating across incompatible elements.

Function in Satan's Journey

The comparison begins when Satan has been thrown into Boggy Syrtis, a region that is neither proper sea nor firm dry land. He must advance by alternating among walking, flying, swimming, sinking, wading, crawling, and creeping. Against that shifting terrain, the Gryphon supplies a concentrated image of purposeful pursuit. Satan moves over bog and steep ground, through spaces that may be straight, rough, dense, or rare, using head, hands, wings, or feet according to the demands of the passage.

The contrast is important. The Gryphon pursues a thief across wilderness with a clear object and direction, whereas Satan's movement is forced through an abyss whose geography itself seems hostile to orientation. Yet the simile makes his disordered progress appear equally energetic. His route lacks the clean trajectory of a hunt, but his exertion repeatedly converts impediment into motion, giving the fallen spirit the stubborn momentum of a predator following stolen treasure.

Relation to the Poem's Hybrid Cosmos

Gryphons belong to the poem's larger catalogue of creatures and forces that blur the boundary between recognizable natural forms and mythic invention. In this passage, the creature is not described for its own history or character; its value lies in the exact pressure exerted by the comparison. The image makes Satan's struggle legible by placing it beside a familiar pattern of pursuit, while the strange environment makes the comparison unstable enough to retain the strangeness of Chaos.

That instability also extends the poem's moral and cosmic imagery. The Arimaspian has taken guarded gold, so the classical scene carries an association with theft and contested possession. Satan is likewise traveling toward a region he intends to penetrate and, if possible, reclaim for darkness. The Gryphon simile therefore resonates with the poem's recurring language of guarded realms, trespass, seizure, and pursuit, without making Gryphons participants in Satan's rebellion.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Gryphons' chief narrative role is to intensify the description of Satan's crossing. The passage does not merely say that he proceeds with difficulty; it stages his movement as a relentless chase through a wilderness that alternately resists, swallows, and lifts him. The image gives bodily form to a journey whose scale is otherwise nearly unimaginable, translating cosmic travel into the recognizable action of a predator pressing after stolen treasure.

At the same time, Gryphons help express the poem's tension between order and confusion. Their pursuit presupposes a guarded object, a watchful keeper, and a direction of travel; Chaos offers none of these securities. By placing the image of focused predation inside an abyss governed by conflict, Chance, and tumult, the poem makes Satan's will appear both powerful and precarious. The Gryphon is consequently less a character than a compact emblem of determined motion within a universe where even the elements have not yet been fully ordered.