Girl and brothers get lost in the woods. Comus, a debauched man, stumbles upon the girl and tries to seduce her. She resists him by means of “right reason.”
Notable lines:
“Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud,
And disinherit chaos” (334).
A brother makes the suggestion that his sister’s virtue is not in danger while she maintains “the constant mood of her calm thoughts” (371).
Milton rejects the hermeneutics of suspicion:
“Yet where an equall poise of hope and fear
Does arbitrate th’event, my nature is
That I incline to hope, rather then fear,
And gladly banish squint suspicion” (410ff).
Conclusion: The original problem is quite interesting: can virtue and right reason withstand sexual temptation? That’s not the solution, though. The solution is appealing to a fairy spirit who can come up with some herb and free the Lady. Milton’s conclusion doesn’t follow from his problem.
I think there is more to the poem than from what I’ve gleaned. I probably need to reread the secondary literature.
Logical Investigations 