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‘SERVICE IS PERFECT FREEDOM’: PARADOX AND PROSODIC

STYLE INPARADISELOST

by john creaser

Traditional foot-substitution prosody is demonstrably unable to do justice to therhythm of the less straightforward lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and this essayargues for an approach based on the prosodic theories of Derek Attridge.Through comparison with excerpts from early narrative blank verse by Surrey,Gascoigne and Marlowe, and a broader comparison with the verse ofShakespeare’s later plays, it is shown that the prosody of Paradise Lost is adeliberate fresh start, characterised by a paradoxical combination of austerityand liberty. For example, in Milton, unlike Shakespeare, the integrity of theindividual line is heightened, while Milton’s strict metrical norms are disruptedin a mere handful of lines, and other aberrations are few. In the laterShakespeare, one line in ¢ve is prosodically aberrant, in Paradise Lost one linein 265 (and in the course of the discussion, every single aberrant line in thepoem is examined). Nevertheless, the appeal to freedom in Milton’s note onthe verse is justi¢ed, by the unusual £exibility of movement the poet ¢ndswithin the prosodic norms, by the expressive aptness of this rhythmic variety,by his readiness to push the rhythms to, and occasionally beyond, the limits,and by the unprecedented freedom of his enjambment. The treatment of thefall in Paradise Lost grows out of great, traditional paradoxes where bondageand liberation interact: the felix culpa, the reconciliation of free will withdivine foreknowledge, and ¢nding freedom in service of the divine. In thevery detail of its rhythms, the epic brings alive the central paradox of freedomthrough service.

In his pioneering account of Milton’s prosody, Robert Bridges faces up squarely tothe challenge of Paradise Lost, 3.586,‘Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep’, thatrhythmically exceptional line on the ‘gentle penetration’ of the sun through theuniverse.1 Bridges has no doubts how the line should sound, because he insiststhat ‘the intended rhythm in P.L. is always given by the unmitigated accentuationof the words of the verse as Milton pronounced them’ and he marks the stresses(here and throughout indicated by capitals) as follows: ‘SHOOTS in-VIS-ibleVER-tue EVen to the DEEP’.2 Yet when it comes to scanning the line, he can

1 Quotations are from the Scolar Press facsimiles of Paradise Lost, 1667(Menston, Yorkshire, 1968), with line-numbers corrected and adjusted to the subsequentdivision into twelve books, and from Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1968), Poems1645 (1970), and Poems: Reproduced . . . from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge (1970).2 Robert Bridges, Milton’s Prosody (Oxford, revised ¢nal edition, 1921), 35.

The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 58, No. 235� The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserveddoi:10.1093/res/hgl150 Advance Access published on 14 June 2007

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¢nd no way but this: ‘Shoots in- j visi- j ble ver- j tue even to j the deep’ (p. 32),with the italics in the fourth foot indicating elision.

The line as Bridges sees it is indeed, as he says, ‘very bold’ (p. 35), since thereare not only inversions of stress in three of the ¢ve feet, but in the fourth foot anextraordinary elision is added to inversion: j -tue EVen to j. Three syllables aresupposedly elided into one: reduction to monosyllabic ‘ev’n’ comes readilyenoughçit is easily uttered and Milton invariably reduces the adverb, unlikethe adjective, to one metrical syllable in the poemçbut it would be grotesqueto crush ‘-tue ev’n’ against the preceding stress on ‘ver-’. Nowhere else is the^ue diphthong so awkwardly elided, and on the sole occasion it is elidedwith a stressed syllableçat 10.884, ‘Rather than solid ver-tu, all but a Rib’çtheintervening pause makes for little more than a virtual elision, easy to utter.More typical elisions occur, for example, at 4.848 (‘Ver-tue in her shapehow lovly, saw, and pin’d’) and 6.703 (‘Can end it. Into thee such Ver-tueand Grace’), and the trickiest is at 10.372 (‘Thine now is all this World, thyver-tue hath won’).

Bridges’ scansion is duly adopted by the most thorough and authoritative oflater students of Milton’s prosody, Ernest Sprott and Edward Weismiller,3 eventhough it relies on an intolerable tongue-twister, whereas Milton elsewhere workswithin what were familiar and melli£uous patterns of verse-elision.4 In fact,Bridges himself did not really believe in it; it is no more, he says, than ‘a prettysti¡ ¢ction’ (p. 36), a classic instance of his notorious assertion ‘that Milton cameto scan his verses in one way, and to read them in another’ (p. 35).5 As he says,‘the rhythm overrides the prosody that creates it. The prosody is only the meansfor the great rhythmical e¡ects, and is not exposed but rather disguised in thereading’ (p. 36). This is a vicious principle: although there is much more nuancein the performance of a line of verse by a skilled reader than the binary simpli¢ -cations of scansion can recordçfor example, meaning can change dramaticallywith the relative weight given the stressed syllablesçthe way is left open tosubjective whim if scansion is overridden, and rhythm will soon fall apart.For example, Paradise Lost would end in a ridiculous gallop if in the last line‘solitarie’ were, against metre, given only three syllables, as: ‘Through Eden tookthir solit’rie way’. To draw a parallel from music: in playing a Chopin waltz,a pianist with the skills of Artur Rubinstein employs endlessly subtle rubato and

3 S. Ernest Sprott, Milton’s Art of Prosody (Oxford, 1953), 84, 105; Edward R. Weismiller,entry on ‘Versi¢cation’, in W.B. Hunter, Jr. (gen. ed.), A Milton Encyclopedia (Lewisburg,9 vols., 1978^), 8.131.

4 Weismiller, ‘Studies of Style and Verse Form in Paradise Regained’, in Walter MacKellar(ed.), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 4, Paradise Regained (1975), 293,359. It is misleading of Roger Fowler to claim that half of them are unpronounceable(The Languages of Literature: Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism (1971), 162).5 This has been endorsed by leading prosodists such as John S. Diekho¡,‘Milton’s Prosodyin the Poems of theTrinity Manuscript’, PMLA, 54 (1939), 153^83: 159, althoughWeismillerdistances himself from it, arguing that elision in Milton as in other verse of the period wasnot merely theoretical (Encyclopedia, 8.127).

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modulations of rhythm, tone, and emphasis, but always retains the shape of theindividual phrase as notated and the guiding pulse of the 3

4 time signature, themusical equivalent of the metre. In both music and verse, the sense of the under-lying beat cannot be lost if the force of expressive variation is to be felt.

The prosody that Bridges sees as obscured in the process of reading is thetraditionalçand still surviving though now moribundçdivision of English verseinto so-called ‘feet’, modelled roughly on classical quantitative verse. It has beenevident to acute observers since at least Puttenham that the ‘foot’ is merely anotional presence in English verse, and indeed Bridges begins his treatise bysaying that ‘the disyllabic units [of the English blank verse line] may be calledfeet’ (p. 1, my italics).6 Nevertheless, he is led to mangle Milton’s audacious lineon the in£uence of the sun by insisting on a strict sequence of feet. This is anegregious case of what T.V.F. Brogan has termed the ‘serious disadvantage’of thinking about English verse in feet: ‘This device, so useful in scansion,naturally tends to become rei¢ed, so that readers come to believe thatpoets actually make verse foot by foot . . .Description would be ¢ne if it didn’talways quietly reify itself and then come to replace the thing it set out only todescribe.’7 On the one hand, Bridges imagines Milton’s prosody as implausiblyfreeçsince it ‘allows him to invert the accent of any foot and make free use ofhis ¢ction of elision’ (p. 35)çand yet, on the other, he ties it to strict disyllabicgroupings.

Another of Milton’s audacitiesçat 6.866, when ‘Eternal wrauth’ expelledthe rebel angels from heaven and ‘Burnt after them to the bottomless pit’çhasgiven rise to the opposite but complementary error of imposing metre onrhythm. For example, Mrs M. Whiteley gives the line the implausible rhythm,‘BURNTAF- j ter them j to the j BOTtom- j less PIT’, with a ‘slight dwelling’required on ‘to the’ to mark the third foot.8 Insisting on a distinction betweenrhythmic and metrical structure, Edward Weismiller, the doyen of Miltonprosodists, says that the rhythmic structure of the second half of the line,the last six syllables, ‘would destroy the meter if we did not prevent it fromdoing so; we accomplish this by thinking of the six syllables as constitutingthree groups instead of two (not permitting the syntax to confuse us), and byreading in such a way as to make su⁄ciently audible as three the three duple

6 InThe Art of English Poesy (1589), book 2, chapter 3, Puttenham distinguishes between thefoot of classical verse and the ‘short portion’ of two syllables in English verse, of whichhe says in a dismissive aside: ‘(suppose it a foote)’. Cited from G. Gregory Smith,Elizabethan Critical Essays, (Oxford, 1904, 2 vols.), 2.70.7 Article on ‘Foot’, in Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (edd.), The New PrincetonEncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 419. See also Robert Beum,‘So Much Gravity and Ease’, in Ronald David Emma and John T. Shawcross (edd.),Language and Style in Milton (New York, 1967): ‘The error of our ultra-orthodox metristshas been to take terms for realities, and a convenience of scansion for a fact of the verse’(p. 346).

8 M.Whiteley,‘Verse and its Feet’,The Review of English Studies, 9 (1958), 268^79: 274. She isappraising the prosodic theorising of F.T. Prince in The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse(Oxford, 1954).

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measures our metrical sense tells us are required’.9 So, against syntax and sense,we are supposed to think of the swiftly running phrase and its two prominentstresses as three feet: ‘j to the j bottom- j less pit j’, even though there is no clearstress in the ¢rst of themçsuch as there is will tend to go against the £ow on‘to’çand a clearly reversed stress in the second. The line presumably emerges,uncomfortably, as: ‘Burnt AF- j erTHEM j TO the j BOTtom- j less PIT’ (with amoderate stress on ‘to’). Weismiller is aware of the dangers of ‘foot-thinking’,of confusion between the English foot and the classical quantitative foot,yet here is a blatant rei¢cation of the English foot, of metrical ¢ction supplantingrhythmical fact.10

This pair of examples shows how the traditional foot-substitution prosodywith which Miltonists are familiarçalthough it has not been taken seriouslyby metrical theorists for several decades11çfails to cope with lines of markedirregularity. In e¡ect, the movement of Milton’s verse has been probed with arather blunt instrumentçeven though it can still reveal valuable ¢ndings in thehands of such skilled readers as Bridges andWeismiller.This is why it has becomecustomary to regard analysis of rhythm as unsatisfactory, as a process eithermechanical or merely subjective.12 As Brogan writes:

One may cheerfully admit that traditional metrics, taken over wholesale from classicalprosody as once understood, did not work. The weakness of foot theory was that it classi-¢ed feet as distinct rhythms and presumed meters were mere accumulations thereof, sothat change of foot meant change of meter . . .Meters are whole line-forms, not foot-typesstrung together.13

Take, for example, two potent nine-syllable lines: ‘Self-fed, and self-consum’d,if this fail’ (Comus, 597)14çthe only such ‘broken-backed’ line in all Milton’s blankverseçand Marlowe’s ‘One drop would save my soul, half a drop’.15 These aber-rant lines might easily have been made regular, as for example: ‘Self-fed,

9 Variorum Commentary, 4.272.Weismiller’s italics.10 Variorum Commentary, 4.273, and Milton Encyclopedia, 8.120^1 and 125. The phrase‘foot-thinking’ is cited by Weismiller from Beum, 342.

11 Brogan,‘Foot’, Princeton Encyclopedia, 418.12 For the persistence of such views, see F.R. Leavis, ‘The Verse of Samson Agonistes’,Revaluation (1936, rept. Harmondsworth, 1964, 58; Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style(Oxford, 1963), 24^6; and Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge,MA, 1997), 11.13 ‘Meter’, Princeton Encyclopedia, 773. Cf. George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art(Berkeley, 1988), 188: ‘We do not hear the syllables two by two . . .We do normally hear asuccession of relatively lightly and relatively strongly stressed syllables, but to divide thatstream into pairs of syllables is to distort our experience of the line.’14 The text as printed in Poems (1645) under-punctuates the pause represented by afour-letter space in theTrinity Manuscript: ‘selfe fed, & selfe consum’d if this faile’.

15 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-text (1604), 5.2.79, cited from David Bevington and EricRasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus (A- and B-texts (1604, 1616) (Revels Plays, Manchester,1993). One of the speech’s several hypermetrical cries,‘Ah, my Christ!’, is added to the line.



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and self-consume' d, if this fail’; ‘Self-fed, and self-consum’d, if this should fail’;‘One drop would save my soul, but half a drop’; ‘One drop would save my soul,half any drop’. But as they stand, the linesçin order to compensate for themissing syllablesçinvite exceptional weight on ‘if ’ and ‘half ’: the Elder Brotherthinks it so preposterous that evil will not destroy itself that the ‘if ’ is chargedwith scorn, while, in his desperation, Faustus snatches at the impossibility of halfa drop, for what is half a drop but a smaller drop? To perceive this, there is noneed to divide the lines into ¢ve discrete feet and ¢nd short measure in one ofthem. Even though on arriving at ‘if ’ and ‘half ’ there is initially nothing moreunusual than a reversed stress, the extreme emphases are at once perceptible,because they are sensed within the lines as wholes. For practised readers, the eyedarts ahead and the mind, largely intuitively, shapes the words rhythmically wellbefore a particular syllable is uttered, or made conscious to the mind’s ear.This practice is easily shown at the turn of a page, but also in the spontaneousway readers adopt or ignore possibilities of elision. At 3.130^2,

Man falls deceiv’dBy the other ¢rst: Man therefore shall ¢nd grace,The other none: in Mercy and Justice both . . .

the ¢rst ‘the other’ is elided and the second not.‘Mercy and . . .’ elide here, but notat 12.346: ‘Remembring mercie, and his Cov’nant sworn’. Only a reader preoccu-pied with strict sequences of disyllabic feet would be liable to trip up.

To do more justice to those lines of Milton cited so far, and to hundreds of lessdeviant but still somewhat irregular lines, requires a prosody more attuned tothe rhythms of English speech, independent of methods descending from thequantitative foot-prosody of the ancients. In classical verse, the prosodic footcan be felt as a metrical presence because it is in touch with temporal reality:a foot of one long syllable and two short, for example, can be held equivalent to afoot of two long syllables, and practised readers can sense an interplay betweenquantity and stress. But in English poetry the foot is no more than a conveniencein scanning verse that is rhythmically straightforward. Once verse has rhythmicalmodulation and subtlety, the foot is clearly seen as a mere ¢ction and abstractionbecause it lacks a consistent presence in time, as is evident from lines such as:

x x / / x x / / x /And in j thick shel- j ter of j black shades j imbowr’d (Comus, 62)

and

x x / / x x / / x /On the j ¢rm brim- j stone, and j ¢ll all j the Plain (PL, 1.350)

In an utterance at once natural and expressive, the paired stresses of thesecond and fourth ‘feet’ here take up four- ¢fths of the time given to utteringeach line, while the time given the mere function-words in the ¢rst and thirdfeet is negligible (apart from the grammatical pause after ‘brimstone’).The danger

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of ‘foot-thinking’ (to adopt Beum’s term) is that it will turn appropriate emphaseson the key words into a stilted regularity:

x / \ / x / \ / x /And in j thick shel- j ter of j black shades j imbowr’d16

and

/ x \ / x / \ / x /On the j ¢rm brim- j stone, and j ¢ll all j the plain.

One sees this tendency, for example, in Sprott when he claims (p. 100) there isinversion in the fourth foot here: ‘Came sing- j ly where j he stood j on the j barestrand’ (1.379), so giving ‘on’ a meaningless stress at the expense of ‘bare’.

While it is true that such foot-prosody can, after a fashion, record the rhythmof any metric verse, it does not establish criteria for discriminating between versethat is so free as to be aberrant and verse that is free and yet fundamentallyregular, between, say, ‘Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep’ and ‘Shoots farrinto the bosom of dim Night’ (2.1036). Nor can it appraise those lines whereA Milton Handbook ¢nds it ‘almost impossible to recognize the normal numberof accents in any intelligent reading’, lines such as: ‘Light-arm’d or heavy, sharp,smooth, swift or slow’ (2.902).17 A prosody without rational criteria for both accep-table and aberrant deviation is a compass without a magnet. It is typical,for example, that Mrs Whiteley has to rely on what is felt ‘by any experiencedand moderately sensitive reader of verse’ as her touchstone.18 Nor, to move awayfrom Milton, can it cope with rhythms as diverse as the simple emphases of‘Three blind mice’ or the verse that ascends from informality to grandeur inYeats’s ‘Easter 1916’. Traditional prosody merely records all but the simplest verseas an arbitrary sequence, so that of the lines just cited 2.1036 emerges meaning-lessly as spondee, trochee or iamb, iamb, pyrrhic, spondee, and 2.902 as spondee,iamb, iamb, spondee, iamb. Crucially, it does not indicate the beats, rather thanstresses, upon which the rhythm of a line is based, or indicate the degree ofmetrical tension or disruption in a line.19 Moreover, the rei¢cation of the footleads to the assertion that moving from one syllable or word to the next betweenfeet is di¡erent in kind from moving between syllables or words within a singlefoot. So Weismiller asserts that there is a di¡erence between ‘There on j Beds of jViolets j blew (x)’ and ‘(x) There j on Beds j of Vio- j lets blew’ because ‘we aresensitive to the position of particular syllables in the foot of particular meters’,20

16 Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 8.122, shows himself well aware of the inadequacy of such anoutcome.17 James Holly Hanford and James G. Taa¡e, A Milton Handbook (5th edn., EnglewoodCli¡s, NJ, 1970), p. 263.

18 ‘Verse and its Feet’, 270.19 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), 141^3.

20 Weismiller, ‘Studies of Verse Form in the Minor English Poems’, in A.S.P.Woodhouseand Douglas Bush (edd.),Variorum Commentary: the Minor English Poems (1972), 2.3.1030.



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but I suggest this is a distinction without a di¡erence. Rhythmically, the twoversions are identical. With freer lines than this, the supposed transition fromfoot to foot becomes even less perceptible.

As I have argued elsewhere, surer guidance on verse rhythm is to be found inthe theories of Derek Attridge, who bases his methods not on classical precedentbut on the nature of English speech.21 The major prosodies of metric verse inEnglish descend from two tendencies in the spoken language: towards isochronyor the equal timing of stress, and towards the alternation of stressedand unstressed syllables (as is evident in any polysyllable and audible in carefulutterance). Leaving aside pauses for clarity or emphasis or breathing, nativespeakers tend to utter stresses at equal intervalsçand even more to perceivethem as falling equally. This tendency leads to accentual verse, where the struc-tural principle is simply the number of beats in a line. In ‘Three Blind Mice’, forexample, the total of syllables per line varies from the three of the opening toeleven (‘Did you ever see such a thing in your life?’) but all lines are four-beatverseçso strong is the rhythm that a fourth, silent beat is observed after theopening lines: ‘Three blind mice [/] j See how they run [/].’ Failure to grasp thedistinctiveness of accentual verse has caused prosodists much confusion, sinceneo-classical scansion, with its place for every unstressed syllable, is barelyapplicable. In the case of Milton’s prosody, however, it impinges only in thatL’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as I have shown elsewhere, are an agile and almostunique blending of two diverse and even antagonistic prosodies, the accentualand the accentual- syllabic (or stress and syllable-stress).22

Accentual- syllabic verse, the dominant prosody in Milton and throughoutliterary rather than popular verse, combines stress-timing with the duple ten-dency. Now not only the beats but also the o¡-beats have a structural function andremain consistent in regular verse. The prevailing movement is duple, and theprevailing line, eluding the simple symmetries of four-beat accentual verse,is the iambic pentameter. Strikingly, Attridge is able to show that the incalculablevariety of movement in regular iambic verse since the sixteenth century isreleased by only three deviations from duple alternation. When three stressedsyllables occur together, careful utterance tends, through isochrony, to give thesecond the time of a stress but slightly less emphasis than the others, as in‘JOHN BROWN’S BOD-y’, or at least the second is felt as slightly less empha-sised. It would be picked out for primary emphasis only to make a correction orother unexpected statement: ‘No, I meant JOHN SMITH’S BOD-y’. In verse,this becomes the demotion of the second of three consecutive stresses, as in:‘Say ¢rst, for HEAV’N HIDES NOTH-ing from thy view’ (1.27). On a careful

21 ‘‘‘Through Mazes Running’’; Rhythmic Verve in Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso’,The Review of English Studies, 52 (2001), 382¡. of 376^410. See especially Derek Attridge,The Rhythms of English Poetry (English Language Series 14, 1982), and also his Poetic Rhythmalready mentioned. However, Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning:An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (2003) is probably too limited for experienced readers.

22 ‘Through Mazes Running’, 394¡.

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reading, ‘hides’ will probably be given very much the same time and weight as‘Heav’n’ and ‘noth-’, but it is felt as slightly less emphatic. A demoted syllable is astressed o¡-beat, an addition to the line’s ¢ve metrical beats (which here are ‘¢rst’,‘Heav’n’, ‘noth-’, ‘from’, and ‘view’); it makes therefore for a slower and moreweighty line. Rhythm depends at least as much on perception as on measurablesounds, but the audible reality of demotion is borne out by the experimentsof Ada L.F. Snell, who timed each syllable in three readers’ performances of2.604^28.23 At the famous line 621, ‘Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens,and shades of death’ça line of eight stresses, with demotions on ‘Rocks’, ‘Lakes’,and ‘Bogs’çthe demoted stresses were usually given slightly less time than thefull stresses but the line as a whole was given more than twice the time of the lessabnormal 611 with only four full stresses, ‘Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards’.These lines demonstrate the norms, but of course the process is not mechanical:at 607,‘The tempting stream, with one small drop to loose’, all speakers, respond-ing to the sense, actually gave more time to the demoted ‘small’ than its accom-panying full stresses, indeed as much as they did to the last word of the line.24

The obverse of demotion is the promotion of the second of three non-stressesby a lengthening or pause, as with ‘from’ in ‘NOTH-ing FROM thy VIEW’.A promoted syllable is a syllable such as a pronoun or preposition naturallygiven only subsidiary emphasis that, by its placing, is allotted the timeçor feltas having been allotted the timeçof a metrical beat. In the line ‘Invoke thy aid tomy adventrous Song’ (1.13), the poet’s emphasis is clearly on the adventurousnessof the song; nevertheless, as the central of three unstressed syllables, ‘my’ ispromoted and given a little more time and weight than ‘to’ or ‘ad-’. If one did notdo this, ‘my’ would elide into the following vowel, the line would lack a metricalbeat and would collapse into four-beat accentual verse: ‘In-VOKE thy AID tomy’ad-VENT-rous SONG’. This exempli¢es how the popular, and indeed almostworld-wide, four-beat accentual rhythm is always a lurking danger for writers andreaders of iambic verse. As stated above, ‘solitarie’ must be given its full foursyllables (with a promotion on the third) in the last line of the epic, or four-beatverse takes over. At 8.402, however, ‘No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitarie’,the trisyllabic utterance is possible (and even invited, in view of the rarity offeminine endings in the poem).

The last of the three deviations from the regular iambic line is pairing, wherethere are only two adjacent stresses, both of which are beats. Two stresses do notpermit demotion, and as they disrupt the duple £ow of iambic verse and push a

23 Ada L.F. Snell, ‘An Objective Study of Syllabic Quantity in English Verse’, PMLA, 33(1918), 396^408. All timings are cited from her evidence on 397^400. Although Snell’ssample is small, the ¢ndings are impressively consistent, and are borne out by the practiceof skilled readers.24 Sprott, 109^10, is so committed to his strict, traditional prosody that he denies a linecan have more than ¢ve spoken stresses. Even so, being aware of Snell’s ¢ndings,he acknowledges that the rhythm in lines such as 2.621 can be retarded through ‘unstressed’syllables being given the time of stressed syllables.



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line o¡ balance so conspicuously, the imbalance is kept as brief as possible byimmediately preceding or following the pair with two (and only two) non-stresses.See, for example, the end of the line ‘Favour’d of Heav’n so high-ly to FALLOFF’(1.30), or the central syllables of ‘For one re-STRAINT, LORDS of the Worldbesides’ (1.32). (From this point, as well as stressed syllables being indicated byroman caps, demoted and subordinated stresses will be indicated by italic caps,promoted syllables by small roman caps, and the four syllables of a pairing byunderlining. Elided syllables are indicated by lower-case italics.) The x x / / or / / x xpatterns of these stress-¢nal and stress-initial pairings are incompatible withtraditional prosody, and have often aroused resistance from those who think interms of two-syllable groupings.25 Soon after making the statement that ‘Miltonseldom has two pure lines together’, Samuel Johnson ¢nds these lines with theirpairings ‘remarkably unharmonious’: ‘For us too LARGE, WHERE thy a-bun-dance wants/Partakers, and un-CROPT FALLS to the ground’ (4.730^1).26

The second line in particular he thought a ‘vicious verse’.27 Modern readersare less likely to disparage such roughness, especially as Adam and Eve are hereevoking the still unperfected state even of paradise in their current childlessness,and the harsh cluster of consonants and stresses at ‘uncropt falls’ focuses on theclearest sign of waste. But as so often, Johnson’s Augustan taste anticipates latertendencies with striking clarity. Some modern prosodists who think in termsof two-syllable groupings attempt a dull and uncolloquial smoothing out ofstress-pro¢les. There is, for example, clearly a stress- ¢nal pairing inShakespeare’s line ‘When to the sess-ions of SWEET SILent thought’, but forW.K. Wimsatt, thinking in feet, ‘of ’ is more prominent than ‘sweet’.28 GeorgeWright emphasises ‘as’ more than ‘earth’ in ‘And lards the lean earth as he walksalong’ (I Henry IV, 2.2.109) and ‘in’ above ‘deed’ in ‘So shines a good deed in anaughty world’ (Merchant of Venice, 5.1.91).29 For O.B. Hardison, Jr., the line fromGorbudoc ‘My father? Why, I KNOW NOTH-ing at all’ makes little sense exceptby syllable-count.30

Keith Hull ¢nds this tetrameter line in the ¢nal chorus of Samson Agonistes‘most mysterious’ in its rhythm with the two adjacent stresses: ‘And ever best

25 Attridge’s stress-initial and stress-¢nal pairing (Rhythms of English Poetry, 175^86) becomerespectively the less precise terms falling and rising inversion in his later work (Poetic Rhythm,117¡.).

26 Line 730 could be made regular by giving the stress to ‘thy’ rather than ‘where’,but Adam and Eve are here addressing the nature of the place.27 Rambler, no. 86, 12 January 1751,Yale Edition of the Works (New Haven, 1969), 4.90 and 92.The second line would appear even more ‘vicious’ to Johnson if both syllables of ‘uncropt’are stressed. It would then be an instance of the rare ‘triple pairing’ discussed later.

28 Cited Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 10.29 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 199.30 O.B. Hardison, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore, 1989), 176.Compare his di⁄culty with pairings at 141^2.

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found in the close’ (1748). He thinks the metre ‘nearly chaotic’ and imagines thatregular feet have been abandoned, whereas there is simply a stress-initial pairing:‘BEST FOUND in the’.31 Sprott denies the existence of stress- ¢nal pairing(in his terms, adjacent stresses within a single foot),32 and is able to allow adjacentstresses only if they fall in separate feet. Consequently, he is driven to suggestimplausibly that 12.409 should be spoken: ‘ImPUTed BEcomes THEIRS byFAITH, his MERits’, with recession of stress on ‘becomes’, when there is clearlya stress- ¢nal pairing: ‘Imput-ed be-COMES THEIRS’.33 This is an extremeinstance of the tendency to evade paired stresses by positing ‘recession ofaccent’, a phenomenon never certainly present in Milton and much rarer earlierthan some prosodists have envisaged.34 Being both incompatible with traditionalprosody and yet very common in Paradise Lost, pairing readily resolves variouslines thought to have been problematic, such as 1.202: ‘CreATed HUG-est thatSWIM TH’O-cean STREAM’ (the de¢nite article is marked for elision in themanuscript and early editions alike).

A signi¢cant nuance within Attridge’s theory is that, under precise conditions,the pause of the line-turn may itself act as a stressed or unstressed syllable andmake deviation possible, so that two rather than three stressed or unstressedsyllables may permit promotion or demotion, and a single stress may permitpairing. In iambics, promotion occurs at the end of the line in what has mislead-ingly been termed a pyrrhic foot: ‘That to the highth of this great ARG-u-MENT

[x]/I may assert Eternal PROV-i-DENCE [x]’ (1.24^5). Although such endings arecomparatively rare in Paradise Lost, it is easy to adjust to them, since all practisedreaders slightly mark the end of a line with some emphasis or drawing out ofthe ¢nal beat. Conversely, demotion occurs at the start of the line in what hasmisleadingly been termed a spondee: ‘[/] BROUGHT DEATH into the World,and all our woe’ (1.3). The reality of such demotion is especially clear inthe triple demotions of this line: ‘HIM FIRST, HIM LAST, HIM MIDST,and without end’ (5.165). Finally, pairing occurs as the common reversal of stressat the beginning of a line: ‘[/] ROSE out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill’ (1.10). In eachcase, the line-turn stands for the implied stressed or unstressed syllable preced-ing or following the ten syllables of the line.

It is vital to appreciate that the line-turn does this, not the end or beginning ofan adjacent line. Sprott, for example, thinking of two adjacent lines as a sequenceof ¢ve feet followed immediately by another ¢ve, imagines that prosodically one

31 Keith N. Hull, ‘Rhyme and Disorder in Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies, 30 (1993),179^80.

32 Art of Prosody, 106. 33 Art of Prosody, 139.34 Bridges (who denies the presence of such recession in PL) prints ¢fty-four possibleexamples from Shakespeare and eight from early Milton (68^70). Of these only oneç‘Open their CON-gealed mouths and bleed afresh’ (Richard III, 1.2.56)çis not readilyexplained as a pairing, because second-syllable stress on ‘congealed’ would encouragepromotion of ‘their’ and create a six-beat line. See also Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry,266^7.



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line can interact with the next. He seeks to diminish the already limited presenceof feminine endings by tentatively suggesting elisions across the line-boundary,such as the running together of ‘the Bodie properly hath neith-er./All of me thenshall die’ (10.791^2), ‘to warn all Creatures from thee/Hence-forth’ (10.871^2),and line-end ‘evil’ made monosyllabic by the following vowels at 9.697^8 and774^5 and at 10.963^4, even if a mark of punctuation intervenes.35 Similarly,he asserts that Milton avoids inversion in the ¢rst foot unless there is a break atthe end of the preceding line,36 whereas exceptions are easy to ¢nd (there arethree in the poem’s ¢rst paragraph alone, at lines 10, 12, and 21). Returning tothe lines just cited,‘brought’ in ‘Brought Death . . .’ is not demoted as the secondof three stressed syllables after ‘tast[e]’ closing the previous line; it would still bedemoted if that line had a feminine ending, such as ‘whose mortal poison’.Similarly, the ¢nal syllable of ‘Providence’ would remain promoted even if thefollowing line began with a stress and read: ‘Justifying the wayes of God to men’.Actual examples in the poem are easily found: here, for example, the promoted¢nal syllable of trisyllabic ‘violet’ is followed not by an o¡-beat but a reversedstress:

Mosaic; underfoot the VioletCrocus, and Hyacinth with rich inlay (4.700^01).

Similarly, the implied stress-initial pairing of the reversed opening to 10.1044,‘Rancor and pride, impatience and despite’, cannot be caused by the ¢nal beatof the preceding line, since this has a feminine ending: ‘and savours onely’,while the line-start demotion at 2.256, ‘Hard liberty before the easie yoke’, isnot begun by the preceding beat, since line 255 ends with the word ‘preferring’.The pause of the line-turn creates an absolute metrical barrier betweenneighbouring lines, however £uid the syntax. This is why Gerard ManleyHopkins’s experiments in stretching the rhyme-sounds across the line-turnseem so eccentric:

But what black Boreas wrecked her? HeCame equipped, deadly-electric (The Loss of the Eurydice, 23^4)37

The analysis so far has signi¢cant consequences. First, it demonstratesthat the line-turn has a real presence and function in English verseçina way incompatible with foot-theory. The shaping into lines has not merely atypographic but a rhythmic presenceçaudible when the poem is read aloudor perceptible by the silent readerçand blank verse, in particular, cannot be,as the ‘ingenious critic’ cited by Johnson in his Life of Milton complained, ‘verseonly to the eye’. In fact, the line-turn is doubly marked by Snell’s readers, sincethey not only make a pause but also draw out the ¢nal syllable. At 2.611^12,

35 Art of Prosody, 59^60, 95, 143.36 Ibid., 99, mentioning 10.164-5 as a ‘rare exception’.

37 The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie (4th edn.,1967), 72.

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for example, ‘Medusa . . . guards/The Ford’, all speakers make ‘guards’ the longestsyllable in its line, despiteçor because ofçthe enjambment to come.Three lineslater, ‘Thus roving on/In confus’d march forlorn’, the turn is weighted bymaking the mere preposition ‘on’ much the longest syllable of the line.Across the whole passage, the speakers average 0.73 of a second for the¢fth footçeven before the pause marks the end more clearlyças againstan average of 0.64 of a second for the other feet.38 This is a reminder thatetymologically ‘verse’ descends not only from Latin versare, to turn, but alsofrom versus, furrowçon the page as in the ¢eld, the line only becomes itselfat the eventual turning.

Second, the analysis so far alerts readers to the presence of pairings in Milton’sverse. Although modern prosodists have tended to smooth out Milton’s pairings,I estimate that the potent deviation of the four-syllable patterns occurs in over1,300 lines throughout the epic. As reported below, my analyses suggest thatinitial and ¢nal pairings occur in one eighth of the epic’s 10,565 lines; add theimplied initial pairings of reversed openings and they occur in almost a third ofthe lines. Openness to pairings brings expressive freedom to many lines thatmight otherwise be more bland, such as: ‘Millions of Spir-its for HIS FAULTamerc’t’ (1.609, stressing ‘his’ responsibility rather than the routine sixth syllable‘for’); ‘By his dona-tion; but MAN OV-er men’ (12.69, stressing the outrage of amere man ruling over other men). The intimate menace of the double pairing at5.82,‘So say-ing he DREW NIGH, and to ME HELD’, would be squandered by aregular reading.

Third, this revised analysis enables us to discriminate among Milton’sso-called spondees and trochees. Weismiller, for example, being aware of thelimitations of classical terminology for English verse, is ready to accept that, inEnglish, spondees do not require two equal stresses. But in lines he cites as‘BROUGHT DEATH j into the World, and all our woe’ (1.3),‘Silence, ye troubl’dwaves, and thou j DEEP, PEACE,’ (7.216), and ‘MAN LIVES j not by j BREADON-j ly, but j EACH WORD’ (Paradise Regained, 1.349), all capitalised stresses areseen as spondaic, whereas the line-opening demotions, containing only onemetrical beat, are rhythmically quite distinct from the two beats of stress- ¢nalpairings.39 Weismiller has been misled by foot-scansion’s inability to distinguishbetween beats and stresses.Wright ¢nds himself compelled to use the nonsense-term ‘trochaic iamb’ because of the emphases italicised in lines such as these:‘A thing like death to chide away this shame’ (Romeo and Juliet, 4.1.74) and‘More than a little is by much too much’ (I Henry IV, 3.2.73), whereas both arestraightforward demotions, although demotions where an actor might well feel ledto give extra intensity to the central stress.40 Since stress in English is a variable

38 Snell,‘Objective Study’, 407.39 Encyclopedia, 8.121. A demotion on ‘THOU DEEP, PEACE’ would be appropriate for7.216.

40 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 203^4.



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amalgam of pitch, length, volume, and tone-colour41, it is quite possible for anactor or reader to make a syllable at once demoted and distinctive.

Fourth, such an unclassical prosody, based on the rhythms of English speech,creates meaningful norms for accentual-syllabic verse, guides readers throughrhythmically uncertain lines, and makes judgments of a new ¢nesse possible.A reader attuned to the norms will intuitively grasp that the line ‘Glide underthe greenWave, in Sculles that oft’ (7.402) begins with a line-start demotion andgive a little more weight to ‘und-’ than to ‘glide’, because a reversed opening stresson ‘glide’ would lead to a straggle of three o¡-beats; the reversed opening couldnot be completed by stressing ‘the’, nor a promotion created by stressing ‘-der’.Similarly, at 4.74, ‘In¢nite wrauth, and in¢nite despaire’, the attuned reader willsense that the ¢rst ‘in¢nite’, a reversed stress opening the line, contains only onemetrical beat, while the second contains two, since its ¢nal syllable is promoted.We are invited to feel the illimitability of Satan’s despair by drawing out thesecond ‘IN- ¢n-ITE’. The need for such guidance is clear from Robert Beumçanacute earlier reader liberated from ‘foot-thinking’ but without a developed alter-nativeçwho believes the poem to be ‘severely restricted in its use of metricalunits other than ‘‘iambic’’’, and is unable to discriminate with precision abouta passage of what he believes to be ‘exceptional’ and ‘irregular’ lines, the settingand talk in Eden as Raphael approaches, 5.302^10.42 In fact, it is simply arepresentative passage working within the deviation rules, with a few pairingsand a cluster of line-start demotions.

In essentials, if the rhythm of a line is explicable in terms of Attridge’s threedeviation rules, then it will not be felt as aberrant, however far it may divergefrom a simple iambic tread.43 Hart Crane’s evocation of a madman teeteringon the parapet of Brooklyn Bridgeç‘Tilting there momently, shrill shirt balloon-ing’44çis deliberately an eccentric pentameter, yet with a reversed opening stress,a stress- ¢nal pairing (‘-mently, SHRILL SHIRT’), and a feminine ending it is avirtuoso taking of standard deviations to an extreme. Like the madman himself,the verse teeters on the brink rather than falls. In Donne’s Satires, on the otherhand, the extreme rhythmic tension comes from the readiness to push over intoaberrant rhythms. In the famous passage on the hill of truth, reading the line‘Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night’ (3.84) goes so much againstthe grain because the early pairing on ‘Soule rest’ is not resolved until the lateo¡-beats ‘in that’ and almost the whole line is out of balance.45 In this way, a linethat disrupts the deviation rules will seem rhythmically licentious rather than

41 Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 227^8.42 Language and Style in Milton, 346^8. Even so, there is a perceptive brief account ofMilton’s prosodic style on 348.

43 The distinction between irregular and aberrant verse is clearly set out in Poetic Rhythm,134^5.44 ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’, Hart Crane, Complete Poems, ed. Brom Weber (Newcastle uponTyne, 1984), 63.

45 John Donne,The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed.W. Milgate (Oxford, 1967).

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free, and will appear a clumsy dislocation unless justi¢ed by some expressivepurpose. A Milton Handbook (p. 263) cites four lines as rhythmically extremeand inexplicable:

To the Garden of bliss, thy seat prepar’d (8.299)In the Visions of God: It was a Hill (11.377)Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death (2.621)Light-arm’d or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow (2.902)

In fact the third of these, while exceptional in the density of its stressingand clustering of consonants, is prosodically straightforward, with (as alreadymentioned) demotions on ‘Rocks’, ‘Lakes’ and ‘Bogs’, though an expressivereader is likely to give these syllables virtually full weight and draw the line outto the crack of doom. The fourth line has the implied line-turn pairing of areversed stress on ‘Light’ (in apposition to ‘heavy’), and a demotion on ‘smooth’,though again an expressive reader is likely to give it a very full weight,and perhaps di¡erentiate it by a change of vocal colour. The slightly unusualmovement here is appropriate in an evocation of the swarming warriorsof chaos. But the ¢rst two, almost identical in rhythm, are more problematic.Their ¢rst clear stresses are delayed until the third and sixth syllables, andit would be all too easy in reading them to slip into the alien prosody of four-beat accentual verse: ‘To the GAR-den of BLISS, thy SEAT pre-PAR’D’.The lines are saved for pentameter verse only by a somewhat unnatural weightingof the opening prepositions ‘to’ and ‘in’, making them in e¡ect the secondstresses of two line-turn, stress-initial pairings. But such pairings are normallyfollowed by two o¡-beats with the line returned to balance at the fourth syllable(as in ‘ROSE out of CHA-os . . .’), whereas here major stresses intrude at thethird and the lines are not in balance until the sixth syllables, ‘bliss’ and ‘God’.According to Bridges, this ought not to be a problem, for he believes Milton’sprosody ‘allows him to invert the accent of any foot’ (p. 35),46 but Attridgeis a surer guide when he says ‘second-foot inversion’ is a diabolus in prosodia.47

Such dual deviation from prosodic normsçline-start pairings on weak syllables,unbalanced by separation from their matching o¡-beatsçcreates a disruption ofthe norms that is a striking clumsiness, unless justi¢able by expressive gain.In these lines it can be argued that the markedly unusual movement is indeedjusti¢ed, since it invites a sustained dwelling on the key phrases ‘Garden of bliss’and ‘Visions of God’ to compensate for the weak beginnings of the lines.Moreover, the parallel rhythms evoke decisive changes of state: in the ¢rstthe newly created Adam is suddenly called from drowsiness to bliss by aheavenly presence, and in the second the newly fallen Adam is beingguided by Michael away from the everyday level of the garden to the ‘top ofspeculation’ (12.588^9). It must be conceded, however, that such analysis is in

46 Sprott concurs: Art of Prosody, 99. 47 Rhythms of English Verse, 209.



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danger of special pleading, and at ¢rst a reader is very likely to go astray withthese lines.48

We are now ready to return to the exceptional lines from which this discussionbegan. Why does the rhythm of ‘Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep’ (3.586)disturb, while ‘Shoots farr into the bosom of dim Night’ (2.1036) does not?The second, while rhythmically striking, is free rather than aberrant: it beginswith the line-turn demotion of ‘Shoots’, continues with a stress-initial pairing on‘FARR IN-to the’ (this is much more propulsive than stressing ‘into’ on the secondsyllable), and concludes with a stress- ¢nal pairing,‘-om of DIM NIGHT’.There isboth gentleness and supernal power in ‘the sacred in£uence/Of light’ (2.1034^5)here, with the touching intimacy of ‘bosom’ isolated in mid-line and ¢vestresses clustering at the beginning and end. But 3.586, the line that has exercisedBridges and others, is not so readily assimilated to the deviation rules, since itseleven metrical syllables (after accepting ‘even’ as monosyllabic) cannot be smoothlyreduced to ten. Bridges’ jaw-breaking elision has already been rejected. It may seemtempting to reduce ‘invisible’ to ‘invis’ble’, but elsewhere in the poem ‘-ible’ endingsare always disyllabic, unless elided with a following vowel (as ‘Son in whose faceinvisi-ble is beheld’, 6.681). This leaves the possibility of ending the line: ‘ev’n to th’deep’, a compression occasionally found in the early verse, such as Comus, 622:‘That spreds her verdant leafe to th’morning ray.’49 There is, however, no secureparallel in the later verse, and Weismiller denies that it occurs there at all.50

The nearest equivalent comes with the di⁄cult line, 10.198: ‘Because thouhast heark’nd to the voice of thy Wife’, where, even after the elision ‘thou’hast’,there are again eleven syllables. The alternatives, if Milton’s decasyllabic norm isto be reached, seem to be either: ‘Because thou’st heark’nd TOTH’ VOICE of thyWife’ (a stress-initial pairing with ‘to the’ forcibly elided as an unusually weak ¢rststress), or ‘Because thou’st heark’nd TO the voice of th’Wife’ (with promoted ‘to’ and avery forced elision of ‘thy’ and ‘Wife’). Both here and at 3.586, the real or virtualelision of ‘to th’ ’ seems the least implausible option, even though here the elidedwords have also to serve as a beat in the pairing.51

At 3.586, therefore, Milton adopts either an almost unique mode of elision heno longer favours or, equally rare, settles for an eleven-syllable line. Moreover,as with the more di⁄cult of the lines found puzzling in A Milton Handbook, theline opens with eccentric stressing on the ¢rst and third syllables, so that balanceis not established until the sixth: ‘SHOOTS in-VIS-ible VER-tue’. Yet here the

48 Further lines on this pattern are discussed subsequently.49 See also ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, 38, ‘On Shakespeare’, 9, and Lycidas, 80 (noted byWeismiller,‘Blank Verse’, in A Milton Encyclopedia, 1.184).50 Encyclopedia, 8.130. The more marked reduction of ‘in the’ to ‘i’th’’ clearly survives at1.224 and 11.432.51 In 1667, which is often superior in detail to 1674, the elision ‘th’Field’ occurs at 10.204:‘Unbid, and thou shalt eate th’Herb of th’Field’, but if both elisions here are adopted, theline has only nine syllables. The 1674 reading, ‘Unbid, and thou shalt eate th’Herb of theField’ gives the better alternative, althoughçto English earsçthe elision seems awkward.

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licence is undoubtedly justi¢ed. Milton is describing the sun’s ‘Magnetic beam’ asit ‘gently warms’ the universe with ‘gentle penetration’ (583^5). Here is a force atonce potent and mysterious, evoked in abnormal rhythms that stress the energyand depth of an in£uence both palpable and unfathomable.

The norms are also dislocated in the di⁄cult line on the falling angels men-tioned earlier, when eternal wrath ‘Burnt after them to the bottomless pit’ (6.866),another line that earlier prosodists have sought to normalise. As I have writtenelsewhere,52 it has its ten syllables and its ¢ve potential stresses (‘burnt’,‘af-’,‘them’,‘bot-’, ‘pit’), but only four of the stresses can be realised as metrical beats in oneorthodox reading: if ‘AFter’ is stressed then ‘burnt’ is demoted and cannot carry abeat; if ‘burnt’ is given the full stress and also the beat that it seems to require,there is a reversed opening, with no beat on ‘after’. Either way, there is nosequence of three non-stresses to make a promotion and so a ¢fth beat possible.It would have been very easy for Milton to have produced an orthodox ¢ve-beatline such as ‘BURNT after THEM to HELL’S BOT-tomless PIT’, but the onlyway to give the actual line ¢ve beats in a pattern compatible with the norms wouldbe through an absurd emphasis on ‘the’, creating a stress-initial pairing:‘BURNT after THEM to THE BOT-tomless PIT’. Slightly less orthodox andonly a little less preposterous would be to read with Weismiller: ‘BURNT afterTHEM TO the BOTtomless PIT’, with an unnatural emphasis on ‘to’ and a pairof beats detached from the matching o¡-beats. Consequently, the line is mostlikely to be read by insisting on ¢ve beats in abnormal sequence,‘BURNTAFterTHEM to the BOTtomless PIT’, or read with only four beats: ‘BURNT afterTHEM to the BOTtomless PIT’, both of which work expressively. The gratingagainst metrical norms in the ¢rst is apt for the unimaginable horror of the fallfrom heaven. In the second, once the absence of the third beat is felt, the linemakes an aptly vertiginous climax to a passage evoking a fall through ‘a spaciousGap disclos’ed/Into the wastful Deep’ (861^2). Alternatively, the four beats of theline can be read as accelerating throughout, with only two stresses in the last sixsyllables, before coming to an abrupt and early haltças if echoing the unnaturalpace of the rebels’ descent through chaos before its terrible ending. These raredislocations at 3.586 and 6.866 must be deliberate, not least because both dealwith cosmic motion and because there is a very similar e¡ect in ParadiseRegained, when Satan recalls how ‘leagu’d with millions more in rash revolt’ hewas driven ‘With THEM from BLISS to the BOTtomless DEEP’ (1.359^61).

��

The argument so far establishes that analysis on Attridge lines can do morejustice than traditional prosody to the rhythms of Paradise Lost, and we are nowin position to take a broader view.

52 ‘Through Mazes Running’, 384^5.



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The virtue of blank verseçrepeated unrhymed ¢ve-beat lines in rising,duple rhythmçis the extreme simplicity of the form, as opposed, for example, tothe more intricate requirements of the classical hexameter or the rhymed stanzasof romantic epic. The apparent monotony of the simple line encourages £exibil-ity; poets were quick to develop modulations. First and foremost of these, thereare the innumerable permutations of rhythm and shifting tempo that can becreated by the fundamental deviations of promotion, demotion, and pairing.Milton’s regular pentameter may have, for example, as few as two full stresses,as at Paradise Regained, 1.156: ‘To EX-ercise him in the WILD-erness’(with promotions on the second, third and ¢fth beats), and as many as nine, asin the opening of Lycidas if stressed: ‘YET ONCE MORE, O YE LAUR-els,AND ONCE MORE’ (with demoted stresses on ‘yet’, the ¢rst ‘more’,‘ye’, and thesecond ‘once’).53 One feels a £ow of energy through the whole line, not a series of¢ve feet treading out a verse, and the hierarchy of stress can be in constant mod-ulation. Second, the frequency and placing of pauses within the line can alsomove the verse between cadences that are predictable and unpredictable, or har-monious and harsh. They are commonest at the fourth and sixth syllables, wheretheir familiarity, and the harmonious 4/6 syllable groupings they create, fosterrhythms that are familiar and poised, while pauses towards the extremes of theline, or so-called ‘lyric caesuras’ after o¡-beats (which are usually the odd-num-bered syllables) make for verse that is more restless and eager to move on.Varyingthe placing and the weight of the caesura is another way to create modulation,setting unpredictable and sometimes asymmetrical segments of verse against oneanother. Third, there is the possibility of local licences such as the ‘epic caesura’,the insertion of a supernumerary, unstressed syllable at a caesura, as in Comus, 615:‘And crumble all thy sin-ews. Why prethee Shepherd’. Fourth, the movement ofthe verse is similarly coloured by the presence or absence of elisions. The glidingin of extra syllables, for example, can enliven and vary movement like a grace notein music, as in ‘To man-y a youth, and man-y a maid,/Dancing in the Chequer’dshade’ (L’Allegro, 95^6). This packing in of more syllables may also make for a linemore charged with meaning, or for a colloquial £ow, or, on the contrary, for anuncolloquial violence of utterance. In Donne, for example, there are elisionssuch as ‘now out-wore’, ‘deep-ly hath’, ‘my hum-ility’, ‘na-ture hath’, and ‘by one’.As George T. Wright says, ‘the e¡ect is of impassioned speech, too urgent tohonor the usual breaks that separate phrase and phrase.’54

Finally, a line of verse is determined by the versus of its ending, and itfollows that the strongest point of a line of blank verse is the word given the¢nal beat, and that the handling of the line-turn colours the whole movement of

53 The line could also be read with a stress- ¢nal pairing in the last four syllables, andeight stresses in the line as a whole. Other lines unusually heavy with stress include: ‘RESTthat GAVE ALL MEN LIFE, GAVE HIM his DEATH’ (‘Another on the UniversityCarrier’, 11), and ‘That THESE DARK ORBS NO MORE SHALLTREATwith LIGHT’(Samson Agonistes, 591).54 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 265.

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the verse. A ¢rm ¢nal stress, for example, maintains a sense of the prosodicintegrity of the individual line, especially if it coincides with a unit of sense.A weaker ending, such as a line-ending promotionçand all the more the extraand uncompleted movement of a feminine endingçlessens that sense of integrityand isolation, and encourages a sense of the passage rather than the individualline.These e¡ects may or may not coincide with the syntactic over£ow of enjamb-ment, that punctuation by form that is distinctive to verse. When the line-turnfalls between clauses or phrases and therefore coincides with a slight syntacticpause, it remains relatively unmarked, but it becomes the more marked andstrong as it falls between the segments of a single phrase (‘the Fruit/Of thatForbidden Tree’), and then within the segment of a phrase, where there would beno pause in natural speech (‘Th’ Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held/Gods’, 1.508^9),and ¢nally within even a single word (as with Herrick’s evocation of delay:‘On then, and though you slow-/ly go, yet, howsoever, go’).55

Slight as such modulations may seem when sketched out with suchbrusque simplicity, they are the fundamentals shaping the incalculable varietiesof movement in over four centuries of English iambics, and they shade into morestylistic features, such as the interplay of monosyllables and polysyllables within aline, the prevailing length of a poem’s sentences and paragraphs and the regularityor irregularity of this length, the syntactical density of the writing, and the degreeof syntactic energy pervading a passage.

A glance at some of Milton’s predecessors in the light of these basicmodulations will illuminate the distinctiveness of Paradise Lost. In preparation,I have examined in detail the ¢rst 200 lines of each of the odd-numbered booksin Paradise Lost, plus the ¢rst 200 lines of each of the following: Surrey’s translationsof Virgil’s Aeneid, Books 2 and 4, written about 1540 and the earliest Englishblank verse; Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass, the ¢rst original English poem inblank verse, published 1576; and Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, Book 1,the most accomplished epic blank verse in English before Milton, written by 1593.56

In Gascoigne, for instance, there is a determinedly cautious establishing of norms forwhat Surrey’s ¢rst printer had termed the ‘straunge metre’ introduced in the Aeneidtranslation.57

That age is deade, and vanisht long ago,Which thought that steele, both trusty was & true,

55 ‘A Nuptiall Song’, in L.C. Martin (ed.),The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford, 1956),113. For degrees of enjambment, see Roger Fowler, ‘‘‘Prose Rhythm’’ and Metre’, in Fowler(ed.), Essays on Style and Language (1966), 87¡., and John Hollander,‘‘‘Sense Variously DrawnOut’’: on English Enjambment’, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York,1975), 91^116.

56 Editions used: Emrys Jones (ed.), Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1964); John W. Cunli¡e (ed.),George Gascoigne: The Complete Works, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1910); Stephen Orgel (ed.),Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (Harmondsworth, 1971); C.F.Tucker Brooke (ed.), The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910). For a survey of earlyblank verse, see O.B. Hardison, Jr.,‘Blank Verse before Milton’, SP, 81 (1984), 253^74.57 Cited Surrey, Poems, 132.



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And needed not, a foyle of contraries,But shewde al things, even as they were in deede.In steade whereof, our curious yeares can ¢nde,The cristal glas, which glimseth brave & bright,And shewes the thing, much better than it is,Beguylde with foyles, of sundry subtil sights,So that they seeme, and covet not to be. (p. 148)

This is verse where everything has its predictable place; stress, beat, phrase,and line all coincide. Every single pair of syllables is in rising rhythm and so ¢tsthe iambic metre without awkwardness or tension; every line falls into a pattern offour syllables followed by six, with a caesura indicated after the fourth even wheresyntactically it is redundant; almost every line is end-stopped; the contour ofstress within the lines is consistent, and the rhythms encourage us to give¢ve full and even stresses to every line, especially as the verse is prevailinglymonosyllabic. The value of writing like thisçand it does have a sti¡ distinctionof its ownçis that it made the new prosody secure, and established a clear norm.For Gascoigne’s early readers, poetry had by de¢nition been rhymed, and rhymeindicated the end of the line. In response to this expectation, he writes hisunrhymed verse as a series of discrete lines, each shaped so that readers andlisteners know where they are and where the line ends.

The quotation above is representative. Of the ¢rst 200 lines inThe Steel Glass, asmany as 182 are end-stopped by punctuation, and of 180 caesuras marked inthe passage, as many as 163 fall at the fourth syllable, whereas there are no morethan ¢ve lyric caesuras in all. Deviation from the iambic norm is usually viapromotions, the least intrusive variation, and there are thirty- ¢ve promotions inmid-line and sixteen at the line-end. There are only a dozen demotions,and the iambic norm is so dominant that there is not a single clear instanceof pairingçthough there are ¢ve reversed openingsçand similarly not asingle feminine ending. The formal cautiousness of the verse is enhanced by theinfrequency of elisionsçthere are no more than nine in all58çand the consequentfull syllabi¢cation of words such as ‘mysteries’and the frequent use of syllabic ‘-ed’.

Surrey’s somewhat earlier blank verse, being based onVirgil and less concernedto establish a model, is in fact more adventurous, as well as more rough,especially in Book 4, where, within the same overall prosodic style, the rhythmsare consistently somewhat more varied than in Book 2.59 Although promotions

58 Despite the odd elision indicated at line 59: ‘My sistr’ and I, into this world were sent’.

59 Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance, 127^47, argues for the superiorityof the Day^Owen text of Book 4 (c. 1554) over theTottel text of 1557 on the basis of a singlepassage. This is not borne out by a more extended comparison. TheTottel text cannot beseen merely as a cautious tidying up of a more adventurous draft. It does smooth out¢fteen of the twenty- ¢ve aberrant lines in the Day^Owen text of 4.1^200, but, as well asleaving the ten others aberrant, at various points it produces lines not only more expressivebut more deviant than in Day-Owen (e.g. 4.32, 53, 149). I agree with Emrys Jones (p. 133) onthe general superiority of Tottel. This was, moreover, the text by which Surrey’s workbecame known.

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are no more common than in Gascoigne, demotions and reversed openings arenow signi¢cant presences (16 and 26, respectively, in Book 2 and 27 and 41 inBook 4), while pairings make the movement decidedly more £exible (26 in Book2, 29 in Book 4). Forty- ¢ve lines run on in Book 2 and sixty-one in Book 4.Moreover, Surrey is capable of expressively irregular rhythms, such as the chias-mic pairings of ‘In the DARK BULK they CLOSDE BOD-ies of men’ (2.26).Nevertheless the rigidity of the pioneer remains evident. There is a distinctsameness of movement: most lines are unvaried by the presence of caesuras (123in Book 2, 94 in Book 4), with the great majority of the caesuras falling afterthe fourth or sixth syllables.60 In 400 lines there are only two or three feminineendings,61 and the handful of elisions are greatly outnumbered by extended formssuch as disyllabic ‘i-on’ and syllabic ‘-ed’, diluting the sense and making for a self-consciously artful movement, especially in phrases such as ‘arm-ed sold-i-ars’(2.28). Moreover, as C.S. Lewis noticed,62 there is a syntactical sti¡ness: sentencesare short, with an average length of only three lines in each passage as opposed toseven in Gascoigne.

As in the drama, epic blank verse begins to emerge in something like its fullresourcefulness with Marlowe, since the opening 200 lines from his Lucanemploy a wider range of expressive modulation than Surrey or Gascoigne,and at its best the verse does achieve grandeur.While his use of promotions (40)and pairings (21) is little di¡erent from Surrey’s, he has ¢fty-nine demotionsçmore than in the 600 lines of Gascoigne and Surrey combinedçmaking for amuch more packed and emphatic verse. Moreover he has thirty-eight reversedopenings, two of which (71: ‘Under great burdens . . .’; 138: ‘Bearing old spoils . . .’)exploit a weighty variant that does not occur in Gascoigne and only once inSurrey (at 4.146), the pattern epitomised in Pope’s ‘COUNT the SLOWCLOCK’, and found in Milton’s ‘HE for GOD ON-ly’ and ‘PLEAS’D me LONGCHOOS-ing’, where the rhythm is drawn out by a secondary stress on the secondo¡-beat, often an adjective before its noun.63 Marlowe is also prepared to use thispattern later in the line, as at 56: ‘If any ONE PART of VAST HEAVEN thouswayest’. 64 He also introduces as many as thirty-three feminine endings,and makes freer use of elisions (43) than both his predecessors, while his caesurasare spread across the line: although seventy-three fall at the fourth or sixthsyllable, the other sixty are found in the other seven positions, thirty-nine

60 Tottel’s punctuation, with the heavy use of the colon, is somewhat lightened and ratio -nalised by Jones.61 This seems a principled avoidance; the Tottel text of 4.1^200 reduces the six or sevenfeminine endings of the Day-Owen passage to two or three.

62 Oxford History of English Literature: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford,1954), 234.63 Pope,‘Epistle to Miss Blount’, line 18; PL, 4.299, 9.26.64 For Attridge on this phenomenon, which he terms metrical subordination, see TheRhythms of English Verse, 230¡.



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of them after odd syllables (as opposed to ¢ve in Gascoigne and a total of twenty-three in Surrey). Unlike the best of Marlowe’s dramatic verse, however,the translation retains a somewhat muscle-bound feeling. There is relativelylittle enjambment (41), and the verse still moves largely a line at a time.There are also fewer caesuras and the sentences (averaging 5.7 lines) are shorterthan in Gascoigne. The exceptional total of demotions, unmatched by an equalbody of promotions, makes for a slow-moving verse, since a demotion bringsvirtually the time and weight of an extra beat to the line. The translation hoversbetween weight and sti¡ness.

Between these pioneers in heroic blank verse and Milton himself intervened,of course, the £ourishing of drama, which, appropriately for its spoken medium,brought with Marlowe a new freedom and £exibility to blank verseçandwith Shakespeare, a new expressive licentiousness. Broadly speaking, metregoverns rhythm in sixteenth-century blank verse and the rhythms of thelanguage are adapted to the metrical pattern, but with mature Shakespearerhythm governs metre, and the phrase, the sentence, and the speech becomepredominant.

Consequently, as George Wright records in detail, in Shakespeare’s later playsabout one line in ¢ve is in some way aberrant.65 There are many short lines,for example. Even some scenes, as of course many speeches, end in mid-line.The short lines ending speeches are often left uncompleted by the next speaker,or only apparently completed by a rhythmic unit that turns out to be merelythe beginning of a new, ¢ve-beat line.66 There are various other licences,such as headless lines (with the initial o¡-beat omitted), broken-backed lines(with an o¡-beat omitted at the caesura), and triple rhythms where duple wouldbe orthodox. When, for example, Iago suggests to Othello that his insinuationsabout Desdemona have ‘a little dashed your spirits’ (3.3.214), Othello’s response,‘Not a jot, not a jot’ is incompatible with iambic metre; he is asserting his calm ofmind in language that is too troubled to ¢t into the verse line, while Iago, with hisdiabolic self-command, is given regular iambic lines.67 Long as well as short linesoccur: although in the blank verse of the whole oeuvre only one line in sixty-nineis a hexameter, the proportion in the seventeenth-century plays can be as high asone line in twenty-one (as it is in the verse of Measure for Measure), while fromTwelfth Night onwards, one line in twenty-one also contains an epic caesura.68

Inevitably, feminine endings are common, rising from about one line in ten inthe early work to about one in three in the late plays.69 The integrity of theline frequently yields to the immediacy of dramatic passion, with the ending

65 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 105.66 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 103, 129, for such ‘squinting lines’.67 Shakespeare is cited from the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al.(Boston, 1984).68 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 292^3, 165 (after E.K. Chambers).

69 Ibid., 160^1 (after Marina Tarlinskaja).

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apparently thrown away on a weak word, such as an unstressed ‘and’ or ‘that’.70

As Wright says: ‘He feels a freedom at any pointçin midspeech, betweenspeeches, at the hingesçto vary the meter, shorten or lengthen the line, introducehypermetrical syllables, place lines in ambiguous metrical relation to each other,or break the meter altogether for a prolonged excursion into prose or just for amomentary disruption of the verse.’After the early plays, Shakespeare is no longercontent to write sequences of regular pentameters, and his basic principle is thatsomething irregular is happening all the time. Still, even though idiosyncraticdislocations are frequent enough to ‘jeopardize our sense of the pentameter’ orsense of the iambic, the norm is never quite lost, because even in the laterplays four out of ¢ve lines are still regular. Hence, ‘the metrical principle under-lying the art of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is that of great freedom withingreat order.’71

Against so diverse a backgroundçfrom the prosodic rigour of Gascoigne tothe licentiousness of the later Shakespeare and his followersçthe blank verse ofParadise Lost is virtually a new beginning. Its prosodic style is as self-consciousa creation as Gascoigne’s in The Steel Glassças further comparison with theearly blank verse of Comus will make clear in due course. From the more recentand dominant perspective of the drama, Milton seems strict to the point ofausterity. With the striking exception of the choruses in Samson Agonistes, hedevelops throughout his career towards simplicity of metrical form, from thecomplex innovations of his early odes and lyrics, and the deliberate intricacy ofhis Latin verse, to the blank verse predominant in his major works.72 Moreover,this large body of blank verse shows a respect for prosodic norms muchcloser to the sixteenth-century narrative poets than to Shakespeare and thelater dramatists. To put it bluntly, a hypothetical blank-verse poem the lengthof Paradise Lost in the manner of the late Shakespeare would have over2,000 aberrant linesçtetrameters, hexameters and other deviations from thepentameter, broken-backed or hypermetrical lines, and rhythms out of stepwith the norms. In Paradise Lost, as will be discussed subsequently, onlysome forty lines are at all aberrantçnot one line in ¢ve, as in Shakespeare, butone in 265.

70 For example,‘These our actors,/(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and/Are melted intoair, into thin air’ (TheTempest, 4.1.148^50), and ‘Purple the sails, and so perfumed that/Thewinds were love-sick with them’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.193^4). Such audacious casual-ness contains a cue for the actorça graphic gesture from Prospero at the spirits’ disap-pearance, and expressive haste over the line-boundary from Enobarbas. This is to bedistinguished from the sheer negligence with which lesser dramatists, notably Tourneur,sometimes chop up their prose into ten-syllable lengths.71 Citations and paraphrases from Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 136, 247, 106, 105,respectively.

72 For the consummate metrical artistry of the Latin verse, see Steven M. Oberhelmanand John Mulryan, ‘Milton’s Use of Classical Meters in the Sylvarum liber’, MP, 81 (1983),131^45.



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In particular, only a handful of lines are markedly aberrant through fallingbelow or exceeding the norm of ¢ve metrical beats and ten metrical syllables(that is, allowing for elisions and discounting feminine endings). Not a singleline falls below the syllable-count of ten (although I argue below that, throughtheir reversed endings, two decasyllabic lines are each one metrical syllable short).Scarcely any lineçelisions and feminine endings apartçexceeds the norm.Leaving aside the two lines discussed above that metrically are hendecasyllablesunless ‘to the’ is elided to a single syllable (3.586 and 10.198), the trickiest instanceis probably this eleven-syllable line: ‘Without Mediator, whose high O⁄ce now’(12.240), which, with normal syllabi¢cation, would have six beats primarily infalling rhythm: ‘WITH-out MED-i-A-tor, whose HIGH OFF-ice NOW’.The easiest way to adjust this line to metrical norms is to treat it as openingwith a double instead of single o¡-beat, so that ‘without’ is the metricalequivalent of a single syllable. This is a licence occasionally found in works withless exacting prosodies, for example: ‘If you let slip time, like a neglected rose’(Comus, 743)çwhere the ¢rst beat falls on ‘let’ and ‘if you’ is almost reduced to‘few’çand two lines from Samson Agonistes: ‘Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse’(81)73 and ‘As a petty enterprise of small enforce’ (1223). But this would be aunique licence in Paradise Lost. Alternatively, and less comfortably, ‘Mediator’might be elided into three syllables: ‘med-ia-tor’. (Compare the elision of ‘ia’into a single stressed syllable at 10.1092: ‘Of sorr-ow un-feign’d, and humil-ia-tion meek’.) This leaves the awkward possibilities: (a) ‘WithOUT MED-IA-tor,whose high O⁄ce now’ (demoted stress on ‘med-’ and primary stress on the ‘ia’elision), or (b) ‘With-OUT MED-ia-tor, WHOSE HIGH OFF-ice now’;or (c) ‘Without MED-IA-tor, whose HIGH O¡-ice now’. So the line either con-forms clumsily or is uniquely licentious. There are also the eleven syllables of9.1072,‘Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got’. This line can be normalisedmetrically by treating the ¢rst ‘Evil’ as monosyllabic, but elsewhere in Milton‘evil(s)’ is a monosyllable only by elision, as in: ‘Thrive under ev-il, and work easeout of pain’ (2.261). This practice is so consistent that Bridges proposes reversingthe ¢rst ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ in 9.1072, so permitting the elision of ‘Evil’ with ‘and’.74

It is not, however, a disturbing line to read, because the word ‘evil’ is so often metas a monosyllable through elision, and because a monosyllabic pronunciation wasthen available.75 Another way to read this aberration would be as an epic caesura,

73 Bridges, 56, reduces this line to ten syllables, but also creates a somewhat aberrantrhythm, by adopting the modern stressing ‘IR-re-COV’ra-bly’, but this loses the secondarystress given ‘A-ble’ endings by Milton: ‘Irre-COV-er-A-bly DARK, TO-tal e-CLIPSE’.The older, longer syllabi¢cation gives more weight of anguish to the adverb.74 Bridges, 32^3.

75 John Dover Wilson (cited by Sprott, Art of Prosody, 142) records that ‘evil’ is always amonosyllable in Sir Philip Sidney. See also Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 1.185.

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with the second syllable of the ¢rst ‘evil’ a supernumerary o¡-beat at the pause,but if so it would be unique in the poem. Epic caesuras are not infrequent inComus and are commonplace in Shakespeare,76 but the strict prosodic disciplineconsciously adopted by Milton virtually excludes them from Paradise Lost.At ¢rst sight, there may appear to be an exception at 8.649, ‘Thy condescension,and shall be honour’d ever’, but the elision of ‘be’ and ‘hon-’ as the second beat ofa stress- ¢nal pairingç‘-sion, and SHALL BE’HON-our’d’çreduces the lineto regularity.

Another possible eleven-syllable line is: ‘Innumerable before th’ AlmightiesThrone’ (5.585). Elsewhere in Milton, the su⁄x ‘-able’ is given two syllables, witha secondary stress on the ¢rst, so that the Nativity Ode rhymes ‘table’ and ‘stable’with ‘insu¡erable’ and ‘serviceable’.The only de¢nite exceptions are in words suchas ‘mutable’, where the su⁄x follows directly on the word’s main stress, in whichcase a secondary stress falls, as now, on the ¢nal ‘-ble’. A modern pronunciation ofa line such as ‘Innumerable force of Spirits arm’d’ (1.101)çwith the ¢rst word asfour rather than the ¢ve syllables ‘in-NUM-er-A-ble’çdisrupts the rhythm byreducing the line to four-beat accentual verse. Other lines, such as 4.73 and 5.745,would retain their ¢ve beats but be reduced to nine syllables. At 5.221, ‘Raphael,the sociable Spirit, that deign’d’, the rhythm falls apart unless ‘SOC-i-A-ble’ isgiven its full four syllables (with two each for ‘Raphael’ and ‘Spirit’).But ‘Innumerable before th’ Almighties Throne’ has eleven syllables and a veryawkward rhythm unless the adjective is uttered, as nowadays, ‘i-NUM-’ra-BLE’.Bridges consequently believes there is again a textual error here (p. 32).However, contemporary pronunciation was variable, as is evident from the word‘variable’ itself in Shakespeare: in the line ‘Whiles he is vaulting variable ramps’(Cymbeline, 1.6.134) the adjective requires its four full syllables, while Coriolanus,2.1.212, ‘With variable complexions, all agreeing’, is awkward unless it is given the‘modern’ three syllables. At 5.585, therefore, it seems likely that, for once,Milton is expecting what has survived as the modern syllabi¢cation. Indeed,this need not even be unique in the poem, for many lines make either syllabi¢ca-tion possible. A line such as ‘Abominable, inutterable, and worse’ (2.626),for example, reads easily with modern pronunciation, while Milton’s standard‘-Able’ works only through eliding ‘-ble’ with the following vowel, elisions thatcan barely be more than notional because of the intervening punctuation.77

In sum, there are a mere handful of possible exceptions to the norm of tenmetrical syllables, and the rarity of them proves the rule. It is also in keeping withMilton’s prevailing rigour that the poem, unlike any typical passage of matureShakespeare, has no tetrameters or hexameters, but for one possible exception.

76 On epic caesuras in Comus, see Sprott, 61^2, and Weismiller, Variorum Commentary,2.3.1042^4, and in Shakespeare,Wright, Metrical Art, 165, 292^3. See also Samson Agonistes,834: ‘All wickedness is weakness: that plea therefore’.

77 It goes without saying that Milton maintains regularity by exploiting other alternativesyllabi¢cations.Words such as ‘Raphael’ and ‘conqueror’, for example, vary between two andthree syllables.



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At 10.989^90, as printed in both 1667 and 1674, a line of four beats and eightsyllables is followed by a line of six and twelve:

Childless thou art, Childless remaine:So Death shall be deceav’d his glut, and with us two . . .

This lineation was not normalised until 1695, and, as Alastair Fowler suggestsin his edition, it ‘may mime the de¢ciency of childlessness . . . and the glutdenied to death’.78 It is questionable, however, whether the e¡ect is clear andpotent enough to justify such a striking, and unique, aberration. Moreover,it would work better if only the ¢rst line were defective, for, in the second,an excess of length cannot aptly mime an absence of glut. The abnormalityçwhich would have been di⁄cult for the blind poet to detectçmay simply resultfrom scribal or compositorial error, as seems to have happened (as Fowleracknowledges) at Samson Agonistes, 496^7. Here, in the middle of almost 300 linesof unvaried blank verse, we read

The mark of fool set on his front?But I Gods counsel have not kept, his holy secret . . .

This would be more telling as two pentameters, since an appalled and sardonicstress would be laid on ‘I/Gods’ at the line-turn.

It is also in keeping with the prosodic rigour that very few lines whichdo have ¢ve metrical beats and ten metrical syllablesçbarely more than thirtyout of some 10,560çtrespass even slightly beyond the Attridge normsand cannot be scanned precisely in terms of promotion, demotion, andpairing (provided seventeenth-century stressing and syllabi¢cation arerespected).79 It goes with the brazen provocations of Donne that, especiallyin his Satires, he sets the reader knotty obstacle courses through his verse:

And what th’hills suddennes resists, winne so;Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night. (Satires, 3.83^5)

Each line here has its ten syllables and ¢ve major stresses, but each is expressivelyat strife with the metrical norms. It is symptomatic of Milton’s stringentdiscipline, however, that there are no clashes as extreme as this and that veryfew lines require such conscious rather than intuitive scanning, at least by areader familiar with seventeenth-century English. The telling exception provingthe rule here is the line ‘Spirits odorous breathes: £ours and thir fruit’ (5.482).This is di⁄cult to read at ¢rst sight because it opens in multiple metrical uncer-tainty: ‘spirit(s)’ is usually monosyllabic in Milton, but can be disyllabic; ‘odorous’is a disyllable stressed on the ¢rst syllable in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, except

78 Alastair Fowler (ed.), Paradise Lost (Longman Annotated English Poets, 2nd edn., 1998),592.

79 Some stressings which read awkwardly to modern ears, such as ‘inDISsolUbly’ (6.69)and ‘inEXpliCAble’ (10.754) are readily paralleled in contemporary verse.

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for the trisyllable in ‘An Amber sent of odorous perfume’ (SA, 720). The initialtendency of a practised reader is, therefore, to follow the usual syllabi¢cationsand begin with a line-start demotion. But this leaves the line two syllablesshort: ‘SPIR’TS OD’rous BREATHES: FLOURS and thir FRUIT’. If ‘odorous’is expanded into a trisyllable unique to the poem, creating the stress- ¢nalpairing: ‘OD-orous BREATHES; FLOU-’, the line is still a syllable short,unless ‘£ours’ is read as a disyllable, so the line would end: ‘FLOWers AND thirFRUIT’ (with ‘and’ promoted). But everywhere else in the poem the spellings‘£our(s)’ and ‘£owr(s)’ indicate monosyllables, while at 4.709, ‘With Flowers,Garlands, and sweet-smelling Herbs’, the full spelling is used of a disyllable.80

One is forced, consequently, to the reading: ‘SPIR-its OD-orous BREATHES;FLOURS and thir FRUIT’, where there are ten syllables but where two unusualsyllabi¢cations are combined with a rhythmic aberration, a dual reversed stresson the ¢rst and third syllables, leaving the line out of balance until the sixthsyllable.81 No other ten-syllable line in the poem requires such intricate andconscious scanning; in almost every other line the rhythms can be realized atsight by competent readers, though they need to be constantly on the alert andready to abandon a steady iambic tread.

It follows from the strictness of Milton’s prosody that there is a marked stress onthe integrity of the individual line. Shakespeare, as suggested above, is prepared tosacri¢ce the line to the speech. For example, Prospero’s greatest and most disturbedspeech begins with a nine-syllable line incompatible with iambic verse: ‘You dolook, my son, in a mov’d sort’ (TheTempest, 4.1.146), and soon there is a line which,while metrically regular, is rhythmically shapeless in isolation: ‘(As I foretold you)were all spirits, and’ (149). The opening of Macbeth’s soliloquy: ‘If it weredone when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly. If th’ assassination . . .’(1.7.1^2) makes a show of pragmatic reasoning, but profound confusion is revealedin the hovering uncertainty of the lines, which might be realised in several ways.The ¢rst sentence turns, for example, on the threefold ‘done’, yet only one of theselies in a metrically strong position. In contrast, the verse of Paradise Lost maintainsa driving clarity, line by line, even when ‘the Anarch old’ speaks ‘With faultringspeech and visage incompos’d’ (2.988^9), or when the newly fallen Adam respondsto the divine calling: ‘Whence Adam faultring long, thus answer’d brief ’ (10.115).Even when Adam is uneasy at heart through Eve’s absence and ‘hee the faultringmeasure felt’ (9.846), the verse maintains its steady measure. The anarch’s speech,similarly, is metrically regular as well as syntactically coherent, and each line isfelt as an independent rhythmical presence: in particular, each of its twentylines is rounded o¡ with a ¢rmly stressed ¢nal syllable, all but three ofthem monosyllables. This is essential to the poem’s movement; of the 1,200 lines

80 The only inconsistency in this poem, though there are others elsewhere, is at 4.501,‘That shedMay Flowers: and press’d her Matron lip’, where the caesura has encouraged theuse of the full form for a monosyllable.

81 Bridges, 118, again suspects that the text here is corrupt.



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examined in especial detail for this study, only ¢fty-one have a line-end promotion(on words such as ‘argument’ and ‘providence’ in the opening invocation); inthe other 95.75 per cent. of the lines, the ¢fth beat falls either on a stressedmonosyllable or a disyllable with second-syllable stress (usually the former).82 Suchcontinuity is apt for the poem as narrative, because this is an art of presentation.Permeating our response to the characters and situations, however passionate, is aconstant awareness not so much of the narrator as of the narration. These are notthe characters of drama living in apparent autonomy; they, even God, arethe poem’s creatures and speak in its manner. For all the sophistication of this‘tertiary epic’, the radical remains the vocal continuity of the singer of tales, notthe versatility of the theatre.

Furthermore, it is in keeping with the disciplined procedures of the verse thatevery single paragraph ends at the end of a line. Similarly, most speeches openand close at line-boundaries, and the exceptions are absorbed into the prevailingregularity by a narrative introduction or conclusion, not exposed in dramaticcut and thrust, as in Shakespeare, where many speeches run from mid-line tomid-line.

In such ways, the poem keeps us conscious of its simple prosodic form.For this reason, feminine endings, with the dissolution of the line-boundarythat they tend to bring, are virtually absent from long stretches of the poem;only eight (or 1.33 per cent) of the 1,200 selected lines have them, and all butthree of these occur (for reasons to be discussed below) in the ¢rst 200 lines ofBook 1. In contrast, in 1,200 lines of the later Shakespeare there would be about400 feminine endings, and even the relatively sti¡ epic verse of Marlowe hasthirty-three in his 200 lines. This is clearly a principled choice on Milton’s part,because feminine endings are much more common in the blank verse ofComus and Samson Agonistes.

��

The analysis so far has concentrated on the pervading austerity, order, and closureof the prosody, despite very occasional aberrant lines. Is this compatible withMilton’s note on ‘The Verse’, added in 1668 to the fourth issue of the ¢rst edition,with its appeal to liberty? There he rejects ‘vexation, hindrance, and constraint’,and presents his verse as ‘an example set, the ¢rst in English, of ancient libertyrecover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing’.The Steel Glass is in itself evidence that verse freed from rhyme can still remain inbondage.Was F.R. Leavis, after all, onto something in his distaste for ‘the routinegesture . . . of the verse’, ‘the foreseen thud’, and the ‘automatic ritual’?83 Or wasThomas Gray, writing in 1760, more justi¢ed in his delight in how Milton ‘gives

82 Prince, Italian Element, 53, conjectures that Milton learned this technique from Tasso’spractice of following the ¢nal stressed vowel of his hendecasyllables with doubleconsonants.

83 Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936, reprint Harmondsworth,1964), 43^4.

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that enchanting air of freedom and wildness to his versi¢cation, uncon¢ned byrules but those which his own feeling and the nature of his subject demanded’?84

A response can begin from the omnipresence of the standard deviationswithin Milton’s lines. These permit innumerable varieties of local realisation,even within the norms. Metrically regular lines in Paradise Lost vary betweenthree words and ten and also between three full spoken stresses and eight(‘Im-MUT-a-BLE, im-MORT-al, IN- ¢n-ITE’; ‘ROCKS, CAVES, LAKES, FENS,BOGS, DENS, and SHADES of DEATH’).85 In the six 200-line passages ana-lysed, there is an average (rounding the ¢gures up or down slightly) of ¢fty-sevenpromotions in each passage, as opposed to totals of thirty-one to thirty-seven inthe 200-line passages of Surrey, Gascoigne and Marlowe. Consequently, the verseof Paradise Lost is more often light and £eet than its predecessors.86 On the otherhand, Milton’s insistence on a ¢rm ending to the line means that he has onaverage fewer line-end promotions (8.5 per 200 lines) than the eleven and four-teen in Surrey, sixteen in Gascoigne, and nine in Marlowe. Moving to the moreintrusive and weighty deviations, Milton has an average of twenty-two demotionsand sixteen line-start demotions per 200 lines, decidedly more than in Surrey(14:2 and 23:4) and Gascoigne (11:1), but fewer than the unusually dense and evenclotted writing of Marlowe’s Lucan (36:23). As for the marked rhythmic deviationof pairing, Milton has an average of twenty- ¢ve, plus thirty-three reversed open-ings, as opposed to an average of 27.5 plus 33.5 in Surrey, twenty-one plus thirty-six in Marlowe, and a mere couple of possible pairings and ¢ve reversed openingsin Gascoigne. Similarly, the ‘COUNT the SLOW CLOCK’ version of thereversed opening, with a subordinate stress on the third syllable, is somewhatcommoner in Milton than in Marlowe (3.66 as opposed to 3.00 per 200 lines),while it occurs only twice in the two Surrey passages and not at all inGascoigne. The most signi¢cant di¡erence here, however, is that Milton iscompletely at home with stress- ¢nal pairings; in him they are little lesscommon than the stress-initial version (11:14). In the earlier poets, they arecommon only in the rougher rhythms of Surrey’s Book 4 (with 14 as opposed to

84 John T. Shawcross (ed.), Milton 1732 1̂801: the Critical Heritage (1972), 250. Gray was writ-ing of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.85 Sprott maintains that there can be no more than ¢ve accents or spoken stresses in a line(Art of Prosody, 109).86 Bridges makes this disapproving comment in passing: ‘The conjunction and oftenoccurs in stress-places in Milton’s verse, where stressing it would make the verse ridicu-lous. See P.R. I. lines 99^109’ (p. 39). Indeed, there are at least seventy-six instances of‘and’ promoted to bear a beat in the 1,200 lines of Paradise Lost excerptsçalmost one everysixteen linesças against a total of only nine in the 800 lines of the other poets (two inSurrey, two in Gascoigne, ¢ve in Marlowe). It is signi¢cant, however, that four of the ¢vepromoted ‘ands’ in the lines cited from Paradise Regained follow immediately on the caesuraand are preceded by a comma (e.g.‘He ended, and his words impression left . . .’).The sameis true of three-quarters of such promotions noted in Paradise Lost (¢fty-eight of theseventy-six). This means that most of the promoted beats fall at sense-breaks, and thetime required for them emerges naturally from the shaping of the sentence. This is oneof the nuances that enable Milton to blend exalted style and colloquial utterance.



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15 stress-initial pairings). Surrey’s Book 2 has only four as opposed to twenty-twostress-initial pairings, while Marlowe has only ¢ve and Gascoigne none at all.

Why is the stress- ¢nal pairing unusual in the earlier writers? The stress-initialform gives the reader ample time to adjust to the deviation: the ¢rst beat falls on aregular even syllable, and through isochrony there is a pause before the rhythmicdeviation begins at the second. Very often, moreover, there is a syntactic breakbetween the two, frequently marked by punctuation, and this is followed by asmooth return to the norm through the two o¡-beats: ‘After short blushof MORN; NIGH in her sight/The Bird of JOVE, STOOPT from his aerietour,/Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove’ (11.184^6). Sprott goes sofar as to assert that ‘there must be a diaeresis between the inverting and thepreceding foot, and the stress syllable of the preceding foot must be stronglyaccented or followed by a de¢nite compensatory break.’87 In fact, exceptions arenot rare. Of the sixteen stress-initial pairings in the Book 3 excerpt, for example,¢ve (those at lines 15, 66, 108, 129 and 161) lack such a pause in the phrasing, and atline 66 both stresses even fall in a single word,‘mankind’. Even so, a pause betweenthe beats is common, and this leads on naturally to the familiar pattern / x x /,with the second stress £owing into the following beat (‘. . .what is LOW, RAISEand sup-PORT’, 1.23).

In a stress- ¢nal pairingç‘He trusted to have e-qual’d the MOST HIGH’(1.40)çthe four-syllable grouping begins with a regular o¡-beat and an instantdecision has to be made whether to continue or deviate from the norm of duplemovement. In many linesçsuch as ‘That with NO MID-dle £ight intends tosoar’çthe temptation merely to continue an iambic alternation has to beresisted.88 Although it is usual in stress- ¢nal pairings for the two stressed wordsto belong in the same syntactic segment, for example as adjective and noun, againthere are exceptions (of the fourteen such pairings in the Book 3 excerpt, there areexceptions at lines 5, 78 and 181). It seems, therefore, that at ¢rst the subsequentlymore common stress- ¢nal form was felt as making more demands on the readerand seemed a more edgy deviation from the norm, and it is telling that all fourinstances in Surrey’s Book 2 (at lines 26, 84, 102 and 134) give the reader a momentto prepare, since the four syllables of the pairing follow a line-turn or a comma.89

On the other hand, an adequate reading of Milton’s verse requires openness tothese pairings, as numerous lines come expressively alive through registering thepairing rather than continuing the iambic march:

I sdeind subjec-tion, and THOUGHT ONE step higher (4.50)None left but by submiss-ion; and THAT WORD (4.81)Descend from Heav’n Uran-ia, byTHAT NAME (7.1)

87 Art of Prosody, 100, rea⁄rmed, 134.Weismiller con¢rms this, Encyclopedia, 8.122.88 See, for example, 3.50, 145; 4.81; 5.82, 102^4; and 11.59.

89 For a di¡erent view, see Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 183^4, and Carper andAttridge, Meter and Meaning, 83^4.

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The relative frequency of stress- ¢nal pairings in Paradise Lost bears out thegeneral pattern that deviations there are more numerous and more various thanin the earlier poets (except for Marlowe’s extreme reliance on forms of demotion,which in fact contributes to the verse’s lack of resilience).

Although the overall ¢gures for all three of these deviations are some-what crude, they do bear out subjective responses: Milton has an average of 166deviations per 200 lines (meaning that on average only one line in six scans as anormative iambic pentameter), while Surrey’s Book 2 has only 113 and Gascoigneas few as sixty-nine. Surrey’s Book 4 is more varied, with 150 deviations, but thewriting is often somewhat clumsy, while thirteen lines are aberrant as opposed toonly ¢ve in Book 2, and none at all in Gascoigne and Marlowe.90 Through his¢fty-nine demotions, Marlowe’s total of 159 approaches Milton’s, but, asexplained, this leaves his verse less varied and resilient.

Such incessant modulation means there can be no ‘automatic ritual’ in themovement of the verse, despite the ¢rm parameters. There is nothing ‘foreseen’about these prosodically regular lines, except the weight given the line-turn.For example, an iambic pentameter normally pivots around the fourth syllableçthe point where the line returns to balance after the common reversed openingand where there is often a caesuraçbut through stress-initial pairings Milton isprepared to ignore this pivot: ‘A MIND NOT to be chang’d by Place or Time’(1.253); ‘The FIRST SORT by thir own suggestion fell’ (3.129); ‘For WHATGODafter better worse would build?’ (9.102).

Moreover, all this unpredictable variety of movement is not mere variety forvariety’s sake. Unlike the lulling sameness of Gascoigne, it enforces attention, andit is inexhaustibly there for expressive reasons. In the lines just quoted, for exam-ple, the early, unusual placing emphasises the second beat, bringing out Satan’sstubborn de¢ance, or the derision in God’s dismissal of the fallen angels, or theyearning of Satan’s ‘inward griefe’ and ‘bursting passion’ (9.97^8) when, as early inBook 4, he ¢nds his dedication to evil temporarily displaced at exposure to God’screative love. To take a very few further examples out of literally thousands ofpossibilities: the densest cluster of demotions in all the 1,200 selected linesoccurs in the course of Adam and Eve’s morning psalm to ‘HIM FIRST,HIM LAST, HIM MIDST, and without end’ (5.165) as they ‘Varie to OURGREAT MAK-er STILL NEW PRAISE’ (184). In the score of lines from 164there are as many as eighteen demotions, almost as many as would normallyoccur in a passage of 200 lines. Milton here adopts a slow and weighty movement,as close as he gets to Marlowe’s Lucan, because this is a rare passage in its lack ofnarrative energy; it evokes a creation of changeless bliss, uttering universal and

90 At the apparent exception, Marlowe’s line 114, ‘And all bands of that death-presagingalliance’, the ¢nal word is a disyllable with ¢rst-syllable stress. Compare ‘A gentleman ofantike stocke/By alliance very good’ in the rigid common metre of Matthew Grove, ‘TheGrievous Complaint’ from The History of Pelops and Hippodamia (1587), and ‘The links ofLove and Alliance, quite defaceth/The libertie of Nature, and disgraceth . . .’ from WilliamLithgow,‘Scotland’s Welcome to . . .King Charles’ (1633).



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unending praise of him who is ‘without end’. Compare the similar but all too briefcluster of demotions when Satan poignantly evokes the timeless joy he would loveto have felt in God’s paradise and the ‘nobler birth’ (9.111) of creatures‘Of GROWTH, SENSE, REAS-on, ALL SUMM’D UP in Man./With whatde-LIGHT COULD I have WALKT THEE ROUND/If I COULD JOY inAUGHT, SWEET IN-terchange/Of Hill and Vallie, Rivers, Woods andPlaines,/NOW LAND, NOW SEA, and Shores with Forrest crownd,/ROCKS,DENS, and Caves’ (9.113^18). By contrast, Milton has just evoked Satan’s week ofwanderings with a di¡erent but equally distinctive movement: of the twelve linesat 9.71^82,‘WhereTigris at the foot of Paradise . . . thus the Orb he roam’d’, as manyas eight begin with a reversed stress and all but two run on, evoking the relentlessmonotony of this ‘narrow search’ in darkness, night after night. A completelydi¡erent rhythmic e¡ect cuts strangely into Adam’s soliloquy of despair in book10: ‘O £eeting joyes/Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes’ (741^2)çtheapostrophe, with a phrase of four beats followed by a phrase of three, brings apoignant echo of the common metre of hymns and psalms into the tragic blankverse. Di¡erently again, an untypical lack of rhythmic clarity becomes expressivein the account of the indeterminate and warring causes within chaos,‘mixt/Confus’dly, and which thus must ever ¢ght’ (2.914): the rhythm meandersambiguously through ‘and which thus must’ and is unstable until the eighthsyllable.

Milton not only handles the orthodox deviations with consummate skill but isalso prepared to take them to the limits of the acceptable. For example, at 3.589,‘Astronom-ER in the SUN’S LUC-ent Orbe’, and 8.505, ‘The more desira-BLE,or to SAY ALL’, the rhythm feels slightly odd because the o¡-beats ‘in’ and ‘or’that complete the promotions have also to do duty as the ¢rst o¡-beats of thestress- ¢nal pairings; the licence is tolerable largely because of the pause followingeach of the promoted syllables.91 A very few lines, moreover, would collapse intofour-beat accentual verse unless a syllable normally given only a light stress ismade to do duty as a beat in a pairing.92 For example,

Not farr o¡ HEAV’N, IN the Pre-cincts of light (3.88)This knows my punish-ER;THERE-fore as farr (4.103)Hereafter, join’d in HER POP-ularTribes (7.488)Delecta-BLE BOTH to be-hold and taste (7.539)Still glor-ious be-FOREWHOM awake I stood (8.464)

At times, however, this is not simply a rare licence but an invitation toexpressive emphasis. Book 6 ends with a stern warning to Adam and Eve fromRaphael after his account of the fallen angels:

. . . ¢rm they might have stood,Yet fell: remember, and fear to transgress (911^12).

91 See Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 179. 92 Ibid., 258^9.

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The last line has only four beats (‘fell’,‘-mem-’,‘fear’,‘-gress’) unless ‘and’ is madethe ¢rst beat in a stress-initial pairing (‘AND FEAR to trans-’); Raphael’s author-itarian urgency is there in the emphatic ‘and’. There is a similar moment ofinsistence at 7.261^3: ‘Again, God said let ther be Firmament/Amid the Waters,AND LET it di-vide/TheWater from the Waters.’93 At 8.292, the line is notionallykept regular by having the unemphatic preposition ‘at’ do duty as the second beatin a stress- ¢nal pairing (‘When sudd-enly STOOD AT my Head a dream’),but on a straightforward reading the line emphasises the suddenness by acceler-ating into four-beat accentual verse (‘When SUDD-enly STOOD at my HEAD aDREAM’). While someone speaking the poem aloud must choose to utter oneversion or the other, so that any listeners would hear only that version, those withthe text before their eyes can sense the coexistence of both rhythms. Practisedreaders can feel various valid possibilities even as they read aloud or as if aloud,with the mind’s ear alert.

Milton also has pairings take place across elisions, as in:

Hypocrisie, the ON-LY’EV-il that walks (3.683)Of rain-bows and STAR-RY’EYES. The waters thus (7.446)With spots of Gold and PUR-PLE, A-zure and green (7.479)

A further very occasional licence, showing Milton’s Shakespearean con¢dencein handling his rhythms, is a paradoxical three-beat pairing, a sequence of threebeats (beats and not stresses, so there can be no demotion), where the ¢rst twocomplete a stress- ¢nal pairing and, pivoting on the second, the ¢nal two open astress-initial pairing94:

When the FIERCE FOE HUNG on our brok’n Rear (2.78)With the FIXT STARRS, FIXT in thir Orb that £ies (5.176)Invest-ed with BRIGHT RAYES, JOCond to run (7.372)His mirr-or, with FULL FACE BORR-owing his Light (7.377)Glad eevn-ing & GLADMORN CROWND the FOURTH day (7.386)95

The clusters of beats in the ¢rst two of these lines aptly stress the relentlessnessof the enemy angels and the ¢xity of the stars. The other three linesoccur togetherçan extraordinary and unique cluster. Coming from the climacticpassage on the creation of the heavenly bodies, they add to the marked crescendoof the writing here, capped by the seven stresses of the last line. A similar patternoccurs in a line from Paradise Regained that is often cited as a line without an iamb:‘Hail Son of the MOST HIGH, HEIR of BOTH worlds’ (4.633).96 There is apotential con£ict in such lines between pairing and demotion and Milton is

93 Reading line 262 with only four beats, Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 8.120, ¢nds such apattern scarcely acceptable in English verse.

94 See Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 178^9.95 ‘Fourth’ is italicised to indicate it takes a subordinate stress, as in the ‘COUNT theSLOW CLOCK’ pattern.

96 Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 8.129.



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careful not to take this licence too far: unlike in demotion, the pivotal second beatnaturally takes somewhat more emphasis than the ¢rst and is always followed by apause or syntactic break. Such unorthodox lines are to be distinguishedfrom similar yet less irregular lines such as: ‘Of fut-ure, in SMALL ROOMLARGE HEARTenclos’d’ (7.486) and God’s emphatic end to his speech at 11.125:‘With WHOSE STOL’N FRUITMAN ONCE MORE to de-lude’, where, in the¢rst, ‘room’ completes a stress- ¢nal pairing and opens a demotion, and inthe second ‘once’ completes a demotion and opens a pairing. Here there is nopotential clash between diverse deviations.

It follows from such examples that Milton is no slave to his prosodic norms,despite what I have termed his austerity. Beum (who also uses the term austerity)is justi¢ed in referring to his ‘very rare wild lines’.97 Some of Milton’s more strik-ingly expressive aberrations have been discussed above, notably those at 3.586and 6.866. Indeed, Milton’s independence is made clear to the alert reader in thevery ¢rst line of the epic: ‘Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit . . .’ Thesecond to fourth syllables are all stressed, and this would conventionally lead tothe demotion of ‘First’. But precisely because this is the ¢rst and all-changing sin,the word demands a full stress. There might, therefore, be a stress-initial pairingon ‘MANS FIRST diso-’, but the negative pre¢x ‘dis-’ also demands emphasis,and we are left with a six-beat line through an abnormal sequence of three fullstresses, unparalleled elsewhere (except in the three beats together in ¢ve-beatlines through the very occasional overlapping pairings just mentioned). As I havewritten elsewhere,98 the ¢rst moral and spiritual dereliction by man is re£ected ina slight but disquieting prosodic dislocation, the more disquieting because itcomes before readers can be attuned to Milton’s ‘strange metre’.

It cannot be assumed that all Milton’s occasional aberrant lines are in this waydefensible as expressively apt, since even Homer nods. The stubborn clumsinessof a very few lines, notably 10.198,‘Because thou hast heark’nd to the voice of thyWife’, and 12.240, ‘Without Mediator, whose high O⁄ce now’, has alreadybeen discussed. Twice in the poem, despite the weight given the line-endingselsewhere, Milton seems to reverse the ¢nal beat, leaving a stress-initial pairingunresolved:

Which of us who beholds the bright surface (6.472)Beyond all past example and future (10.840)99

How much more comfortable the rhythm of the lines would be if they read:‘Which of us who beholds the brighter surface’ and ‘Beyond all past example and

97 Language and Style, 362, 348. 98 ‘Rhythmic Verve’, 385.99 Sprott, 102, also cites 6.841 and 10.186, ending in ‘prostrate’ and ‘triumpht’, but Miltonhimself regularly stresses ‘triumph’ as a verb on the second syllable, while ‘prostrate’ couldbe uttered with second-syllable emphasis.‘Prostrate’ is rhymed with ‘asseverate’ byThomasPowell (The Passionate Poet, 1601, lines 529^30) and with ‘mercy-gate’ by Arthur Warren(The Poor Man’s Passions, 1605, 217^9), and the stress clearly falls on the second syllable inthe insistently iambic fourteeners of A.N., A Warning to all Traitorous Papists (1586), line 125:‘With bowed backes and broken heartes, prostrate before him fall’.

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the future’. The actual deviation is felt as clumsy because metrically an iambicpentameter ends on its ¢fth beat, and anything beyond that is hypermetrical.This is why the marking of the line-turn cannot stand for the second o¡-beat ofa stress-initial pairing, as it often does for the ¢nal syllable of a promotion.Metrically, therefore, these two verses are the poem’s only nine-syllable lines,and this is so disconcerting that ¢ne editors such as Fowler, and John Leonardin his Penguin English Poets volume,100 mark both ‘surface’ and ‘future’ foremphasis on the second syllable. No doubt the stressing of Latin super¢cies andfuturus, French surface and futur, and a cognate English word such as ‘futurity’,might be adduced in their support. But the stubborn fact is that no matchingemphases of these words can be traced in Milton or elsewhere in Renaissanceverse. At least Bridges, insisting on the colloquial stressing of the words, thoughtit well used because it imparted strangeness to the lines (p. 41), with the ¢rstdescriptive in e¡ect and the second very beautiful (p. 42). It can indeed beargued of the second that the unsettling disruption of rhythm is ¢tting for theendless misery and ‘Abyss of fears’ (842) envisaged by Adam in his despair. But itwould, I suspect, be a misplaced critical ingenuity to produce a matching argu-ment that at 6.472 Satan is out to dislodge the super¢cial perceptions of hisfellows with an odd rhythm that brings the word ‘surface’ into question.

Here, to take another di⁄cult example, is as awkward a blank-verse line asany in the poem, a clear line of four-beat accentual verse despite its ten syllables:‘Be-FORE thy FELL-ows, am-BIT-ious to WIN’ (6.160), a more disquieting lineeven than that discussed earlier, ‘When suddenly stood at my Head a dream’(8.292), because there is nothing equivalent to the ‘at’ that might be given anarti¢cial emphasis. Sprott’s expedient is to take supposed ‘recession of accent’ toan extreme and stress ‘ambitious’ on the ¢rst and third syllables, which is not onlyout of step with the sixteen other instances of ‘ambitious’ and ‘ambition’ inMilton’s verse but also unparalleled in Renaissance poetry.101 Nor will it do toread ‘am-bit-i-ous’ with four syllables,102 since, as Weismiller points out,103

Milton eschews such extended syllabi¢cation in his later verse. It would anywayleave an intolerable elision of ‘fell-ows’ and ‘am-bitious’. But here, in the £ytingbefore the war in heaven, it seems plausible to claim that, as Satan is accusingAbdiel of thrusting himself prematurely in front of his old leader, the allegedpresumption of the act is evoked in the disrupted rhythm, as the line, lacking itsthird or fourth beat, hurries to an abrupt conclusion.

Most of Milton’s aberrations are, however, more mild than these, beingversions of unbalanced pairings, where the paired o¡-beats are brie£y detached

100 The Complete Poems (1998). 101 Art of Prosody, 139.102 As in Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, 1.324: ‘Whom I would be ambitious to serve’.103 Encyclopedia, 1.184. See also Ants Oras, Blank Verse and Chronology in Milton (Universityof Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 20; Gainesville, 1966), 14¡. for the increasingrarity of extended forms in Milton.While uncommon in Paradise Lost Books 1^6, they areeven rarer in Books 7^12, Paradise Regained, and Samson.



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from their matching beats. In the whole poem, out of well over a thousandpairings, there are barely more than half a dozen straightforward instances of this:

His OWNWORKS and THEIR works at once to view (3.59)As a de-SPITE DON against the MOST High (6.906)Things not re-VEAL’D,WHICH th’ invis-ible King (7.122)Created THEE, IN the Im-age of God (7.527)On th’ other SIDE, AD-am, soon as he heard (9.888)And dust shalt EATALL the days of thy Life (10.178)Shalt eate there-OFALL the days of thy Life (10.202)

No expressive purpose is evident in the third and fourth of these, and theyare left as slightly awkward lines: the second halves are out of balance and lightlystressed words are doing duty as the second beats in the pairings. But the ¢rstof the group points up the antithesis of ‘his own’ and ‘their’, while in thesecond, the imbalance of the multiple stresses heightens the perversity ofSatan’s stubborn hatred of God. In the ¢fth, the advancing of the stress on‘soon’ emphasises just how quick Adam is to respond, and the echoing biblicalphrases of the ¢nal pair draw together serpent and man in sinfulness andthe threatened endlessness of their punishment.

Somewhat less rare is what may be termed the 1-3-6 sequence.104 As explainedearlier, the common reversed opening of a line is a stress-initial pairing with theline-turn pause as the implied ¢rst beat, and conventionally such lines return tobalance at the fourth syllable, after the two o¡-beats (‘ROSE out of CHA-os . . .’,1.10). But if the second beat also comes early, on the third syllable, then the line isout of balance until the sixth syllable. This is a mild aberration compared,for example, to Donne’s line, ‘Striv’st to please, for hate, not love, would allow’,a line that is out of balance until the ¢nal syllable.105 Even so, Gerard ManleyHopkins makes clear that it is a potent disruption: ‘If . . . the reversal [of emphasisin a foot] is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include the sensitivesecond foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculatede¡ect.’106 Although the pattern does occur occasionally in poets of the period,it remains so unusual that Alastair Fowler seeks to avoid it when at 5.874,‘Through the in¢nite host, nor less for that’, he implausibly marks the word‘in¢nite’ for emphasis on the second syllable. I have observed no more thantwenty-three lines in the whole epic with this abnormal variation, as opposed toabout 1,750 standard reversed openings, and even so a more orthodox alternativestressing is possible for several of the twenty-three.

No one would accuse Milton of a ‘great want of ear’, and most of his 1-3-6 linesare clearly ‘calculated’. For example, the raw alienation of the newly fallen Adamand Eve when they emerge reluctantly into the divine presence at 10.111 is marked

104 Attridge’s terms for these two aberrations are, respectively, ‘postponed pairing’ andinitial inversion with ‘postponed compensation’ (Rhythms of English Poetry, 184^5 and 191).105 Donne, Satires, 3.34. 106 Poems, 46.

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by the aberrant rhythm: ‘LOVE was NOT in thir LOOKS, either to God’.In context, a similar expressiveness is there in these lines:

PRU-dent, LEAST from his RES-olution rais’d (2.468)HELL-born, NOT to con-TEND with Spirits of Heav’n (2.687)WITH im-PET-uous re-COILE and jarring sound (2.880)107

THROUGH the IN- ¢nite HOST, nor less for that (5.874)UN-i-VERS-al re-PROACH, far worse to beare (6.34)ALL are NOTof thyTRAIN; there be who Faith (6.143)THREAT-n’d, NOR from the HOL-ie One of Heav’n (6.359)SAVEwhat SIN hath im-PAIRD, which yet hath wrought (6.691)TEMPT-ing, STIRR’D in me SUDD-en appetite (8.308)AD-am,WELL may we LAB-our still to dress (9.205)FARR toTHE’IN-land re-tir’d, about the walls (10.423)

Satan’s deft cutting short of debate at 2.468 and his disdain for Death at 2.687,the violent and terrible opening of the doors of hell at 2.880, the swift penetrationof Satan’s words at 5.874, and the completenesss of obloquy borne by Abdiel,as recalled by God at 6.34çin ways like these, all are enhanced by the emphasesbrought by rhythmic licence. More subtly, the presumption within Eve’s appar-ently reasonable proposal at 9.205 of gardening apart is revealed not only by herspeaking ¢rst for the ¢rst time and addressing Adam bluntly, without any of theloving periphrases of the unfallen world, but also by the abnormal rhythm,a rhythm pitilessly reiterated when they are dragged back into conversationat 10.111. Only God uses this rhythm with authority and without disturbance,when he sends the archangel down to the newly contrite human pair:‘MICH-ael, THIS my be-HEST have thou in charge’ (11.99). As happens in afew other instances, a pause after the second syllable makes the rhythm easier toassimilate.

In the remaining small group of 1-3-6 lines, the aberrations are less obviouslycalculated:

AND Tir-ES-ias and PHIN-eus Prophets old (3.36)AND cor-POR-eal to IN-corporeal turn (5.413)SPIR-its OD-orous BREATHES: £ours and thir fruit (5.482)SANGuin, SUCH as cel-LEST-ial Spirits may bleed (6.333)OV-er FISH of the SEA, and Fowle of the Aire (7.533)TO the GAR-den of BLISS, thy seat prepar’d (8.299)LAB-our, AS to de-BAR us when we need (9.236)IN the SWEATof thy FACE shalt thou eate Bread (10.205)BY the WAT-ers of LIFE, where ere they sate (11.79)IN the VIS-ions of GOD: It was a Hill (11.377)

Seven of these ten begin with prepositions or copulatives that would normallytake little stress, and it is noticeable that the prepositions are followed by two

107 I now withdraw my earlier suggestion that ‘With im-’ should be regarded as a singlesyllable. See my ‘Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell’, in Graham Parry and JoadRaymond (eds.), Milton and theTerms of Liberty (Cambridge, 2002), 37^55: 41.



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nouns linked ‘the a of b’, and the copulatives by a pair of terms in appositionor opposition. While all of these lines could be read as four-beat accentualverse, the alert reader will resist such a £urry of unstressed syllables andcompensate either by dwelling somewhat unnaturally on the weak ¢rstbeat or, more sensitively, o¡set its weakness by dwelling on the linked secondand third beats and so on the key phrase, such as ‘the visions of God’ or‘the waters of life’. Of the other lines, the ‘such’ of 6.333 links with ‘celestial’to emphasise that angelic ‘humour’ is distinct from human blood, whilethere is little disruption at 9.236, since ‘as’ is little emphasised and might besubordinated to the fourth syllable ‘to’. While 5.482 has already been analysedas a uniquely di⁄cult line to scan, once the rhythm is grasped the phrase‘spirits odorous breathes’, isolated in its rhythmic aberrancy between theline-turn and the colon, does make a striking culmination to Raphael’s crescendoof phrases swinging from line to line:

So from the rootSprings lighter the green stalk, from thence the leavesMore aerie, last the bright consummate £oureSpirits odorous breathes: (5.479^82)

This essay has now touched on every single markedly or mildly aberrant lineobserved in the epic, and, despite the prominence unavoidably brought by suchnotice, it should also be clear how few they are, even though their very presence isa signal guarantee of Milton’s creative freedom. The key point is that thesefew lines are exceptions,108 and there is no need to try to create a prosodic systemthat will accommodate and seek to normalise them all by asserting, for example,that Milton can reverse any foot and that therefore there is nothing exceptionalin the 1-3-6 sequence, despite its rarity and its risk of awkwardness.Bridges asserts (p. 57) that the 1-3-6 pattern is ‘one which we should expectto ¢nd’ merely because it exists, but a prosody is meaningless if it cannot becontravened.

This versatile handling of rhythm within and occasionally beyond theprosodic norms is not the only mode of freedom in Milton’s versi¢cation.In the lines that introduce and begin Eve’s account of her satanic dream,for example, the rhythms as scanned are straightforward and yet her unease isfelt as well as stated:

Such whispering wak’d her, but with startl’d eyeOn Adam, whom imbracing, thus she spake.O Sole in whom my thoughts ¢nd all repose,

My Glorie, my Perfection, glad I seeThy face, and morn return’d, for I this Night,Such night till this I never pass’d, have dream’d,If dream’d, not as I oft am wont, of thee,Works of day pass’t, or morrows next designe,

108 Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 191.

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But of o¡ence and trouble, which my mindKnew never till this irksom night; methought . . . (5.26^35)

The places established for the caesura by poets and critics such as Gascoigne,Puttenham, and Campion, were after the sixth and, especially, after the fourthsyllables, and these became so entrenched that Johnson was in The Rambler,no. 90 (26 January 1751) to decree them ‘the noblest and most majestic’pauses. Indeed, since he also proclaimed that pauses should fall after evensyllables and should not fall within three syllables of the beginning or endof the line, the fourth and sixth were for him the only approved places.But in the account of Eve’s dream, with its numerous hesitations, pauses comeat the fourth and sixth syllables only twice, at the moments of relativecomfort (lines 30 and 33); of the other eleven, six fall after odd syllables and theothers at the extremes of the line, after the second or eighth. Thanksto the shifting and somewhat unorthodox caesuras, the e¡ect is anxious andspontaneousçdespite the epic formality of addressçwith Eve eager for therelief of spilling out her thoughts to Adam. But when she moves on to recallingSatan’s words, the e¡ect is quite di¡erent:

Why sleepst thou Eve? now is the pleasant time,The cool, the silent, save where silence yieldsTo the night-warbling Bird, that now awakeTunes sweetest his love-labor’d song; now reignesFull Orb’d the Moon, and with more pleasing lightShadowie sets o¡ the face of things; in vain,If none regard; Heav’n wakes with all his eyes,Whom to behold but thee, Nature’s desire,In whose sight all things joy, with ravishmentAttracted by thy beauty still to gaze. (5.38^47)

Of the ten caesuras in these lines, where Satan seeks to spread an alluringcalm over the night-scene, six fall after the fourth or sixth syllables, and onlyone after an odd syllable.

As these passages suggest, an untraditional £exibility in handling thecaesura is another of Milton’s creative freedoms. Gascoigne and Surreyestablished the conventions that were to lead to Johnson’s prescriptiveness,and had few pauses after odd syllables. In the Gascoigne passage, almostevery line has its fourth-syllable pause. Three-quarters of Surrey’s caesurasfall at the fourth or sixth syllable, but in addition his verse reveals theopposite in£exibility of having such pauses in only a minority of the lines.Marlowe is again more £exible, with little more than half of his caesuras fallingafter the fourth and sixth syllables and three in ten falling after odd syllables.Milton goes further even than Marlowe, and in him caesuras are bothmore common (leaving aside Gascoigne’s mechanical, fourth-syllable pause)and more variedly placed, making for a verse at once more weighty and more£exible. He averages some 156 per 200 lines and the placing of the 939 instances



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in the selected 1,200 lines of verse is as follows: Iç13; IIç94; IIIç99; IVç219;Vç108;VIç219; VIIç88;VIIIç94; IXç6.109 The conventional fourth and sixthpositions with their identical scores now make up less than half the total (46.6 percent). Otherwise, there is an even spread across the second to eighth places, withfully a third of the total falling after odd syllables.110 This variety gives the verseenergy as well as weight and £exibility, since verse that is straightforward inrhythm and moves forward regularly a line at a time lacks the propulsiveness oftension.111 The exception proving the rule in Milton is Samson’s nadir of despairat 590^598 (‘All otherwise to me my thoughts portend . . .’), where the emotional£atness is expressed in a sequence of nine end-stopped lines varied by merelytwo caesuras, one each at the fourth and six syllable.

Another sign of Milton’s £exibility is his readiness to deviate from theconvention of ending a sentence at the end of a line. Gascoigne ends all hissentences this way, and of almost 140 short sentences in Surrey all but two inBook 2 and six in Book 4 end with the line (setting aside a few mid-line breaksin clusters of repeated questions or exclamations). Even Marlowe ends only oneof his thirty- ¢ve sentences in mid-line. So Milton’s readiness to end inmid-line thirty-eight or a little over a quarter of the 147 sentences in his sixexcerpts (even though he always ends a paragraph at the end of a line) is amarked departure from his predecessors in narrative (and even from Surrey’soriginal, the Aeneid ), and an indication of his response to Shakespeareandrama. This, together with his frequent placing of heavy pauses within theline, puts Milton at the opposite extreme from Gascoigne in theunpredictable modulation of cadence. This is established from the outset:in the strong momentum of the opening invocation there are twelve lyriccaesuras, plus one after an eighth syllable, as opposed to only six in the twoconventional positions.

Another source of the continuous variety within Milton’s apparently strictsystem is the pervasive use of elision. As noted above, this is rare in Surrey andGascoigne, and, although much commoner in Marlowe, is commoner still inParadise Lost, occurring an average ¢fty-two times in each 200-line excerpt.112

Elision adds new permutations of rhythm, since usually the elided syllable isglided into its neighbour rather than cut out. On a full count, for example,

109 These ¢gures are in line with those for the whole poem given by Sprott, Art of Prosody,126 (though the fourth syllable total of 18.8 per cent is there misprinted as 8.8), and byOras, Blank Verse and Chronology, 59.110 Of the numerous texts (including a cross- section of Shakespeare’s plays) surveyedby Oras, Blank Verse and Chronology, 45, Paradise Lost has a more even distribution ofpauses across the line than all except the colloquial verse of Jonson’s comedies, Volponeand The Alchemist.111 Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 308.112 This average, equivalent to 260 elisions per 1,000 lines, is lower than the ¢gures of 351per 1,000 in Books 1^6 and 279 per 1,000 in Books 7^12 given in Robert O. Evans, Milton’sElisions (University of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 21, Gainesville, 1966), citedWeismiller,Variorum, 2.3.1044.

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the line ‘Embryo’s and Idiots, Eremits and Friers’ (3.474) has thirteen syllables.Although the metre entails elisions at bry-o’s, i-ots, and i-ers, no syllable is quitelost; the i-glides remain audible presences and so add rhythmic nuance. Similarly,when the word ‘highest’ is metrically monosyllabic, as in ‘Satan with thoughtsin£am’d of highest design’ (2.630), it is not to be pronounced as ‘heist’;the second syllable retains a subsidiary presence, even though metrically theword is felt as quite di¡erent from the full disyllable at 2.429: ‘Conscious of highestworth, unmov’d thus spake’. In this way, Milton frequently varies his decasyllableswith £eeting hypermetrical presences.

There is all the more variety because some of Milton’s elisions can be no morethan notional, a ‘mental ¢ction’ as Sprott says.113 The word ‘higher’, for example, isalways metrically a disyllable, except on the sole occasion it falls at a caesura:‘Of wisdome: hope no higher, though all the Starrs’ (12.576; italics to indicate‘elision’). Repeatedly, the ‘-able’ su⁄x is supposedly elided with a following voweleven when a syntactic break intervenes, as in: ‘Innumera-ble. As when the potentRod’ (1.338) and ‘Of depth immeasura-ble: A-non they move’ (1.549).While it maybe objected that this anomaly might be avoided by using the ‘modern’ pronuncia-tion of such words, this does not apply to lines like 10.762, ‘Wherefore didst thoubeget me? I sought it not’, or 10.874,‘I had persisted happ-ie, had not thy pride’, or11.336,‘Not this Rock on-ly; his Omnipresence ¢lls’. Oddly enough, such hypothe-tical elisions are in e¡ect epic caesuras, in an epic that rejects epic caesuras.At 7.411, ‘Wall-owing unweild-ie, e-normous in thir Gate’, Milton even exploitssuch elisions to evoke the galumphing sea-creatures. These virtual elisions arenot always found at the caesura, as is clear from the line: ‘Him or his Childern,ev-il he may be sure’ (11.772). Such examples epitomise how Milton squares thecircle of combining austerity with licence.114

The feminine ending is another instance. Although there are none of these inGascoigne and scarcely any in Surrey, Marlowe’s opening up of blank verse meansthere are as many as thirty-three in his 200 lines, while they become very commonin mature Shakespeare. But this is the oneMarlovian innovation thatMilton chosenot to adopt: in the 1,000 lines of passages selected from Paradise Lost, Books 3^11,there are no more than three feminine endings, and the poem as a whole averagesonly about one every hundred lines.115 The restraint is clearly deliberate, sincethese endings are far more evident in Comus and Samson Agonistes.116

113 Art of Prosody, 69.114 The seminal study of elision remains that of Bridges, 9^37, despite his dubious divorceof scansion (and therefore elision) from rhythm. See also Sprott, Art of Prosody, chap. 6.115 For this ¢gure and related studies, see especially J.C. Smith, ‘Feminine Endings inMilton’s Blank Verse’, TLS, 5 December 1936, 1016; Sprott, Art of Prosody, chap. 6; andAndre¤ Verbart, ‘Measure and Hypermetricality in Paradise Lost’, English Studies, 80 (1999),428^48, to all of whom I am indebted.116 Smith, ‘Feminine Endings’, ¢nds, respectively, over 9 per cent and 17 per cent of fem-inine endings in the blank verse passages of Comus and Samson. Sprott ¢nds between 7.1%and 9.2% of such endings in the Comus lines and between 15% and 18.9% in those ofSamson. In Paradise Regained he records between 3% and 4.7% (Art of Prosody, 57).



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Indeed, sixty-one of the 270 lines in the vehement exchange between Samson andDalila have themças Samson becomes more agitated they become more and morecommon in his speeches, while, after many earlier, there are none in Dalila’s lastthirty lines, as she moves from pleading to de¢ance. Even so, though these endingsare far less frequent in Paradise Lost, from the outset they make their mark on thealert reader, because there they are just frequent enough to be noticed as some-thing unusual. Early in the ¢rst book, one ¢nds three of them:

Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring (38)And high disdain, from sence of injur’d merit (98)That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring (102)

From the outset, then, the feminine ending is associated with over-reaching andwith opposition to the law of God. The wretched and terrible consequences arealso implied in the other two such endings early in the book:

Fall’n Cherube, to be weak is miserable (157)Of Heav’n receiv’d us falling, and theThunder (174).

In contrast, there is not a single feminine ending in Book 3, the ¢rst scene inheaven, until the signi¢cant line: ‘But yet all is not don; Man disobeying’ (203).This discriminating use of the licence prepares us for the clusters of such endingsat the crisis of the fall. There are, as Weismiller has pointed out, more feminineendings in Books 9 and 10 than in the rest of the poem put together.117 In the‘alterd stile’ (9.1132) of the ¢rst quarrel, for example, there are three feminineendings in the last twelve lines of Book 9, while almost half of the poem’s wholetotal occurs in Book 10, most of them in Adam’s desperate soliloquy and recrimi-nation that precede the couple’s reconciliation (720^965). Even so, as Andre¤Verbart has argued,118 the ‘disobeying’ of God by man at 3.203 is capped later inthe scene by the Son’s ‘merit’ and ‘enjoying/God-like fruition’ (290, 306^307),and this anticipates how, after the reconciliation of Adam and Eve to one anotherand to God, feminine endings take on a new and positive resonance, notablyat 12.407^10:

Proclaming Life to all who shall believeIn his redemption, and that his obedience119

Imputed becomes theirs by Faith, his meritsTo save them.

That Milton gives so much signi¢cance to such occasional nuances shows boththe minuteness of his concern for prosodic e¡ect and the liberated use he makesof the strict system he has established for himself.

So much for Milton’s freedoms within the line. If we now consider how theverse moves on from line to line, then its expressive freedoms become still more

117 Encyclopedia, 1.186. 118 ‘Measure and Hypermetricality’, 438^48.

119 In context, this line scans best as: ‘In HIS re-DEMP-tion, and THAT HISo-BED-ience’.

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unmistakable. The verse of Paradise Lost is distinguished by the sustained lengthof its sentences. Despite his frequent use of short sentences for rhetorical e¡ect,Milton averages twenty-one sentences per 200 lines in the selected passages, asopposed to twenty-nine in Gascoigne, thirty- ¢ve in Marlowe, and almost seventyin Surrey. And the verse is even more distinguished by what Milton’s note drawsto our attention as the sources of ‘true musical delight’. The ¢rst two elementsnamed, ‘apt Numbers’ and ‘¢t quantity of Syllables’, resemble so many common-place and ambiguous expressions in early modern poetics that Milton’s preciseintentions can only be conjectured,120 but in identifying the third as ‘the sensevariously drawn out from one Verse into another’ he is more speci¢c and moreinnovative. First, he is identifying the pervasiveness of enjambment.The selectedpassages of Milton average 111 run-on lines out of 200, as opposed to an averageof forty-one in Surrey, Gascoigne, and Marlowe. It is calculated that in ParadiseLost as a whole the proportion is a little higher still, with just under 60 per cent.of the lines enjambed.121 Moreover, it is a sign of freedom and variety of move-ment that Paradise Lost has far more mid-line pauses than end-stops (an averageof 156 as opposed to 89 in the 200-line excerpts), quite the reverse ofthe ¢gures for the earlier writers (Surrey 77/155 and 106/139; Gascoigne 180/182;Marlowe 133/159). Milton has brought the unprecedented freedoms of matureShakespeare into the relative formality of epic verse. Because the verse is nolonger moving line by line, syntax is released from metrical regularity;word order and syntactical sequences can be endlessly varied.

Indeed, Milton’s note alerts us not merely to the presence of enjambment butto how ‘variously’ it is used. For instance, he exploits the several degrees ofenjambment, except that he approaches the extreme of dividing a word acrossthe line-boundary only in a compound adjective: ‘Ophion with Eurynome,the wide-/Encroaching Eve perhaps’ (10.581^2). He ranges continually from thebreak between phrases (‘for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view/Nor the deepTract of Hell’), to what, strikingly, is the prevalent break in the poem, that betweensegments of a phrase (‘the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast/Brought Death’, plus over half the lines of the opening invocation), to, much lesscommon, a break within a segment of a phrase (‘Th’originals of Nature in theircrude/Conception’, 6.511^12).122 Such variety at the line-turn blends with ceaselesschanges of movement within the line to create the continuous modulationsof cadence. Milton’s insistence on a ¢rm prosodic ending to the line, usually

120 See, especially, G. Stanley Koehler, ‘Milton on ‘‘Numbers’’, ‘‘Quantity’’, and Rime’, SP,55 (1958), 201^17. For plausible conjecture as to the phrases’ meaning, see Weismiller,Encyclopedia, 1.187. For the contemporary failure to understand the classical concept ofquantity and therefore the misleading nature of the word as then used, see DerekAttridge, Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974),passim, especially 61¡.121 Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 8.133.122 That the break between segments of a phrase is prevalent in Paradise Lost is in linewith statistics given in Thomas N. Corns, Milton’s Language (Oxford, 1990), 41.



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through a stressed monosyllable, makes readers aware of all these modulations bygiving them the guidance of a clear norm. Moreover, it leads us to dwell on wordsthat reward deliberation and emphasis. For example, if Satan in his soliloquy onMount Niphates had reached the conclusion:

But say I could repent and therefore couldObtain by grace my former state; how soonWould height recall high thoughts, and I how soonUnsay what feigned submission swore: (4.92^5)

the repetitions of ‘could’ and ‘how soon’ would have seemed mechanical.In Milton’s version, the line-turns are alive to the urgency of Satan’s thinking athis most sincere:

But say I could repent and could obtaineBy Act of Grace my former state; how soonWould highth recal high thoughts, how soon unsayWhat feign’d submission swore: (4.92^5)

Such prosodic variety brings with it a matching variety of e¡ect. The markedenjambment at 1.508^9, ‘Th’ Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held/Gods’, creates asardonic pause, while as Adam advances to greet Raphael at 5.351^3, ‘withoutmore train/Accompani’d than with his own compleat/Perfections’, the enjambmentfrom the second to the third line encourages one to dwell on his admirableself-possession and yet, with the double vision that pervades the poem, not toforget that his ‘own’ perfections, though complete in themselves, are far fromcompleted. The ¢rst two paragraphs of Book 11 are a signal instance of Milton’squiet audacity: all but nine of these forty-four lines run on. Apart from theparagraph endings, only one line ends with a full stop; otherwise there are fourcommas, a semi-colon, and a bracket closing a parenthesis. The verse £ows onwith ease, especially the ¢rst paragraph, which comprises a single sentence oftwenty-one lines, end-stopped before the close by a mere two commas. This issustained within the lines, since there are numerous promotions but only twopairings, while, until the last few lines of the second paragraph, more of theforty-two caesuras indicated by punctuation are lyric rather than ordinary or‘masculine’.

These two paragraphs mark the transition from human penitence to divinecompassion. Adam and Eve are suspended in prayer, while the Son makes theremarkable proposal to God that there is after all something fortunateabout their fall, for their prayers are ‘Fruits of more pleasing savour fromthy seed/Sow’n with contrition in his heart, then those/Which his ownhand manuring all the Trees/Of Paradise could have produc’t, ere fall’n/Frominnocence’ (26^30). As the poem hovers for the ¢rst time ‘Betwixt the worlddestroy’d and world restor’d’ (12.3), the ease of movement empties this tremen-dous turning from the ¢rst to the second dispensation of human history ofany dramatic tension. The £uidity of the verse prepares us for the spontaneous

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outpouring of divine grace, and the compassion within unavoidable judgmentthat will be shown the erring pair in God’s answering words and the rest of thepoem.123

The other expressive freedom as the verse swings from line to line is lessinnovative but also, after Milton’s note on the verse, more surprising. Havingpresented his blank verse as ‘ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from thetroublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’, Milton adds to the aural densityof his already packed verse with occasional rhymes.124 To take another momentof transition, Book 8 opens with the pause that follows on Raphael’s account ofthe creation:

The Angel ended, and in Adams EareSo Charming left his voice, that he a whileThought him still speaking, still stood ¢xt to hear.

(1^3)

Adam’s suspension in absorbed ecstasy is enacted in one of the least tense andprogressive rhymes in the language, a rhyme with only the slightest semantic andaural distinctionçfor what does the ear do but hear (even though the etymologi-cal link between the words is not intimate)? When Eve comes bearing the fruitand with ‘bland words’ (9.855) woos Adam to join her in eating, a sequence ofseven lines at 872^878 includes the endings ‘mee, I, Eyes, thee, despise’,with ‘Tree’ and ‘Serpent wise’ shortly before and ‘degree’ shortly afterwards.The rhymes are not insistent, and it is possible to have read both passages manytimes without becoming conscious of them. There is none of the intenseand manifest rhyming found in Samson’s opening soliloquy with its agonisedrepetitions of ‘light’, ‘sight’, and their rhyme-wordsçgrating against assonancessuch as ‘life’ and ‘prime’çwhile he circles obsessively around the fact he canneither ignore nor alleviate, his blindness.125 Still, even unnoticed, the rhymeshere in the epic are likely to have a subliminal e¡ect, enhancing the brief hiatusin Book 8 and the seductive allure with which Eve presents her supposedlyrational persuasions at the fall. The presence of occasional rhymes epitomises

123 For a fuller account of expressive enjambment, see especially Archie Burnett, ‘‘‘SenseVariously Drawn Out’’: the Line in Paradise Lost’, Literary Imagination, 5 (2003), 69^92,together with the studies cited by him. In addition, Richard Bradford,‘‘‘Verse only to theEye’’? Line Endings in Paradise Lost’, EIC, 33 (1983), 187^204, recounts the emergence of themodern critical awareness of the expressive line-turn in the ‘pause of suspension’ proposedbyThomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading (1775), and shows that the eye can be assensitive to poetic e¡ects as the ear (p. 202).124 For studies of rhyme, see John S. Diekho¡,‘Rhyme in Paradise Lost, PMLA, 49 (1934),539^43; J.M. Purcell, ‘Rime in Paradise Lost’, MLN, 59 (1944), 171^2; Sprott, Art of Prosody,chap. 4; Morris Freedman, ‘Milton and Dryden on Rhyme’, HLQ , 24 (1960^1961), 337^44;Christopher Ricks, ‘John Milton: Sound and Sense in Paradise Lost’, in The Force of Poetry(Oxford, 1987), 60^79; Keith N. Hull, ‘Rhyme and Disorder in Samson Agonistes’, MS, 30(1993), 163^81; and Lawrence H. McCauley, ‘Milton’s Missing Rhymes’, Style, 28 (1994),242^59.

125 See, nevertheless, Ricks,The Force of Poetry, 73^9, on the rhyming of ‘light’ in ParadiseLost.



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Milton’s readiness to establish a strictly de¢ned system and then push beyondits limits. It is an act not of subservience but of mastery, anticipating thehigh-handed virtuosity celebrated by T.S. Eliot: ‘This liberation from rhymemight be as well a liberation of rhyme. Freed from its exacting task ofsupporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater e¡ect where it ismost needed.’126

In sum, the blank verse of Paradise Lost is a deliberate and distinctive creation.This emerges yet more clearly from comparison with the already accomplishedverse of Comus. In fundamentals, there is a marked continuity between themasque and the epic. The ¢rst block of 200 blank verse lines in Comus, 244^443,anticipates the norms of the later work in the patterns of major rhythmicdeviation: the totals of promotions, demotions, and stress-initial pairings arevery much the average for the epic, as is the total of all deviations for the excerpt(168 as against 166). Only the nineteen stress- ¢nal pairings depart far from theParadise Lost average of eleven per 200 lines. Yet the verse of the two works movesvery di¡erently: super¢cially, this might appear to be because of the dramaticnature of Comusçfeminine endings are much more common (ten as against anaverage of 1.33), and the occasional presence of epic caesuras makes for a higherproportion of mildly aberrant lines (there are three in the excerpt), while it iscommon for lines to be split between two speakers. But in Comus the verse isless weighty, as there are many fewer line-start demotions (8/16) and reversedopenings (21/37), and especially because there are many more line-end promo-tions (28/8.5). Moreover, despite the dramatic occasion, the movement of theverse is less free than in the epic: fewer lines run on (84/111), and there aremany fewer caesuras (91/156). Also, there are many fewer elisions, especiallybetween rather than within words (22/50) and Milton is still using occasionalextended forms (such as ‘delus-i-on’) that he rejected later. As a result,syllable by syllable the language of the masque is more cautious and lesscolloquially £uent than the high style of the epic. All these make for morepredictable patterns of cadence. Moreover, sentences are much shorter (averagingabout four rather than about ten lines), so the language has less syntacticenergy.127 Even when set against the more contemporary and very similar blankverse of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, the distinctiveness of Paradise Lostis clear. In Paradise Lost, for example, heavy punctuation is evenly divided betweenthe end of the line and the internal positions, at an average of just over seventeenstops per 100 lines, whereas in the other two works the heavy stops are more often

126 ‘Re£ections on Vers Libre’ (1917), reprinted in To Criticize the Critic (1965), 189. Eliot’sitalics.127 The total of sentences in the Comus excerpt is increased by the fourteen lines ofstichomythia at 277¡., but this is o¡set by the more informal punctuation, which some-times runs together grammatically distinct utterances into a single sentence.There might,for example, have been as many as ¢ve sentences in lines 246^264, which are punctuatedas one.

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than not conventionally placed at the line-ends.128 Overall, the verse of ParadiseRegained is more relaxed and less intense, with fewer caesuras and therefore moreundivided lines, fewer initial pairings, and more promotions. In Samson, as ¢ts itsdramatic nature, there are many more feminine endings, while a high proportionof promotions means that the verse moves more lightly and swiftly. In bothParadise Regained and Samson there is, moreover, less syntactic energy, since sen-tences are shorter and there is less enjambment.129 Such comparisons emphasisehow the distinctive verse of Paradise Lost manages to combine strictness withfreedom, and elevation with informality.

��

The most searching comment in Leavis’s attempt to dislodge Milton is:‘He exhibits a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling throughwords.’130 He can ¢nd praise for Milton only when it is ‘as if words as wordswithdrew themselves from the focus of our attention and we were directly awareof a tissue of feelings and perceptions’.131 Throughout, Leavis is attempting toread Paradise Lost as if it were Shakespearean drama, where the medium is notwords on the page but actors on the stage, and immediate experience is beingre-created. Epic is not re-enactment, however, but an art of presentation.The material presented is fundamental to the culture of poet and audience,and the poet’s command of thisça deeply reassuring way of a⁄rming culturalvaluesçis manifest above all in his conscious re-shaping of it in a distinctivemode and style.

But Milton’s presentation goes even further. Paradise Lost is a poem builtaround paradox. Even the title is paradoxical from the Proustian stance that lesvrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus, and this is not anachronistic, since it isevident from the passion in Adam’s soliloquy of despair when Eve has eaten theapple that he realises his love for her with a new intensity now he seems on thepoint of losing her. The couple never feel their love for the garden so acutely aswhen they are told they must leaveçtheir immediate ‘chilling gripe of sorrow’even obliterates the greater news that, through divine grace, redemptionfrom ‘Deaths rapacious claime’ is now possible (11.251¡.). Satan is acompelling ¢gure in his courage, energy, and resourcefulness, but paradoxicallyhe is one of the great presences of western literature because he knows he isdefeated and now realises what it is he has lost. He is tragic rather than a mere¢end as long as he can be ‘rackt with deep despare’ (1.126) and is able to weep‘tears such as Angels weep’ (1.620). It is because he remains no less than ‘ArchAngel ruind’ (1.593) that in Books 4 and 9 he is most the Devil. Caught unawares

128 Oras, Blank Verse and Chronology, p. 61. Paradise Regained and Samson, have, respectively,only 12 and 12.5 mid-line heavy stops per 100 lines and 22.6 and as many as 28.5 at the line-end.129 This is in keeping with Milton’s thinning out of what Oras terms his ‘gorgeousness ofexpression’ in the later work (Blank Verse and Chronology, 23).130 Revaluation, 48. Leavis’s italics. 131 Ibid., 47.



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by the beauty of God’s creations, he strangles love, pity, and remorse, and compelshimself into actions he ¢nds abhorrent.

Isolated phrases such as ‘darkness visible’ (1.63) have such resonance becausethey condense the poem’s paradoxical vision. Crucial to this are the paradoxes thatto fall is to rise, and that this paradise lost is also a paradise gained. The lovingcontrition of the fallen pair has indeed produced for God ‘fruits of more pleasingsavour’ than they could have produced ‘ere fall’n/From innocence’ (11.26^30), and inreturn ‘a Paradise within thee, happier farr’ (12.587) becomes attainable.The wholenarrative presents this revised version of that great and traditional paradox, the felixculpa. At the very opening, the ‘Fruit’ of the forbidden tree is both literal andmetaphorical, and metaphorically it blends the wages of sin, the culpa, with thefelix, the fruition of salvation. At the conclusion, Adam and Eve are tearful andoptimistic, wandering and guided by providence, solitary and hand in hand,excluded from paradise and a pair of lovers walking through Eden. As they leavethe garden, the poem’s ambivalence is concentrated in an apparent touch of localcolour, the simile of the evening mist gathering ‘at the Labourers heel/Homewardreturning’ (12.631^2). The labourer anticipates the fallen world of sweated toil intowhich they are descending and the eventual return of their bodies to the dust fromwhich they were created, but the heel recalls the bruising of the Saviour’s heel thatis the promise of salvation.

The whole poem is shaped by two other great and traditional paradoxes.The ¢rstis the reconciliation of free will with divine omnipotence and omniscience throughthe ‘Eternal Providence’ that is celebrated in the opening invocation and thatbroods over the human pair in the closing lines. Through providence, God drawsorder out of the chaos of history. In the terms of Four Quartets, he ¢nds ‘pattern’within ‘mere sequence’,132 within an in¢nity of con£icting acts of will, each uncon-strained by divine power.The very shaping of the poem’s narrative, with the chron-ological beginning in Book 5 and with frequent oscillations of time andrecollectionçexcept in the crisis of Books 9 and 10çimitates the workings ofprovidence, ‘Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular/Then most, when most irregularthey seem’ (5.623^4).The poetic as well as the divine maker is manifestly in controlof his creation even while working with given material.

The second paradox is expressed in familiar words from the Second Collectfor Peace, in the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for Morning Prayer:‘O God, . . .whose service is perfect freedom’ (cited by Milton in The Reasonof Church-Government133). The poem exists to do justice to this statement,which is echoed by Abdiel to Satan as the war in heaven is about to commence:

Unjustly thou deprav’st it with the nameOf Servitude to serve whom God ordains,Or Nature; God and Nature bid the same . . .

. . .This is servitude,

132 For ‘mere sequence’, see Dry Salvages, section 2. The term ‘pattern’ recurs throughout.

133 Don M.Wolfe (gen. ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven, 1953^), 1.854.

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To serve th’ unwise, or him who hath rebelldAgainst his worthier, as thine now serve thee,Thy self not free, but to thy self enthral’d. (6.174^81)

To assert the self is to enslave it; to lose the self in service is to gain itçparadoxesembodied at length in the contrasted falls of Satan and the human pair.

Paradise Lost, then, demonstrates the realisation of freedom and individualitythrough order and control, and the metrical austerity of the poem is essentialto its expressive freedom. As Beum writes, ‘freedom is most bracing withina framework of discipline and law’.134 Milton’s awareness of the creativity ofdiscipline is manifest in this sentence from The Reason of Church-Government:‘Nor is there any sociable perfection in this life civill or sacred that can be abovediscipline, but she is that which with her musicall cords preserves and holdsall the parts thereof together.’135 The tight cords of discipline are also the chordsof harmonious expression. It was ‘by the known rules of antient libertie’(my italics) that Milton, in one of his crucial distinctions, sought to bring hometo the unruly mob that ‘licence they mean when they cry libertie’ (Sonnet xii).It follows that Milton’s prosody is at the heart of the poem.The very movement ofhis verse enacts paradox in its fusion of the integrity of the individual line withthe unpredictability of continuous enjambment. Form is not a mere envelope orconveyor belt, but an embodiment of meaning.Writers of free verse have to workhard for expressive variety within and between lines, because they workwith incessant variety: each line is rhythmically unique. A writer in a given formcreates a point of tension with any deviation from the norm, and the stricter andmore demanding the form the more potent even a minor deviation can become.Clear norms make for clear deviations, and the tension created opens up expres-sive possibilities. From this perspective, no English poet can be freer thanMilton.Moreover, command of an intricate form enhances the reader’s sense ofthe author’s virtuosity. In reconciling minute attention to strict prosodic normswith countless local nuances and with syntax of unparalleled energy and expan-siveness, Milton gives a living demonstrationça vivid although unShakespeareanmode of re-enactmentçthat perfect freedom can be found within service.

Mansfield College, Oxford

134 Language and Style, 363. 135 Complete Prose Works, 1.751.



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