he speaks directly to us in the first person and he expresses something very like fear and even self-pity, the distress of the poet, seeing himself as a kind of natural victim, and it may be the distress of the puritan living on after the restoration and afraid of the wild route, which is charles the second's court, though i think we can be a little sceptical of this and we certainly don't know with sufficiently accuracy when paradise lost was written.