In Book 7, Raphael recounts to Adam and Eve how God created the world, using striking imagery and personification to depict the origins of the natural world, while also foreshadowing Eve's eventual fate:
...Let th’ earth
Put forth the verdant grass, herb yielding seed,
And fruit tree yielding fruit after her kind;
Whose seed is in herself upon the earth.
He scarce had said, when the bare earth, till then
Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorned,
Brought forth the tender grass, whose verdure clad
Her universal face with pleasant green,
Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow’red
Op’ning their various colours, and made gay
Her bosom smelling sweet: and these scarce blown
Forth flourished thick the clust’ring vine, forth crept
The swelling gourd, up stood the corny reed
Embattled in her field...
By personifying the natural world as a woman—one who gives birth to nature, and is then clothed by nature—Raphael is drawing attention to the fecundity and beauty of the natural world, God's most impressive creation. Additionally, Raphael creates a parallel with Eve, foreshadowing the ultimate consequences of her disobedience. The natural world is "Desert and bare," "unadorned," or naked—like Eve before the fall—and must be clothed in order to be "made gay." Eve, too, will be clothed by the Son of God (in "skins of beasts") after she eats from the Tree of Knowledge and loses her innocence.
Additionally, Raphael's monologue highlights the central role of women in the world. Eve was created after Adam—from a part of his body—and is implicitly inferior to him. Adam serves God, while Eve serves Adam ("He for God only, she for God in him"). But Eve, the "general mother" of humankind, has the capacity to give birth, just as nature gives birth to more nature: "fruit tree yielding fruit after her kind." (In Book 5, Eve is described as having a "fruitful womb" that will "fill the world more numerous with thy sons/Than with these various fruits the trees of God/Have heaped this table.") As Milton makes clear throughout the poem, this capacity lends Eve a kind of supreme power, justifying her position alongside Adam as representatives of God on Earth.
