Prosody Paradise Lost

‘SERVICE IS PERFECT FREEDOM’: PARADOX AND PROSODIC
STYLE IN PARADISE LOST
by john creaser
Downloaded from http://res.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela on September 15, 2016

Traditional foot- substitution prosody is demonstrably unable to do justice to the
rhythm of the less straightforward lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and this essay
argues 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 of
Shakespeare’s later plays, it is shown that the prosody of Paradise Lost is a
deliberate fresh start, characterised by a paradoxical combination of austerity
and liberty. For example, in Milton, unlike Shakespeare, the integrity of the
individual line is heightened, while Milton’s strict metrical norms are disrupted
in a mere handful of lines, and other aberrations are few. In the later
Shakespeare, one line in ¢ve is prosodically aberrant, in Paradise Lost one line
in 265 (and in the course of the discussion, every single aberrant line in the
poem is examined). Nevertheless, the appeal to freedom in Milton’s note on
the verse is justi¢ed, by the unusual £exibility of movement the poet ¢nds
within 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 the
fall in Paradise Lost grows out of great, traditional paradoxes where bondage
and liberation interact: the felix culpa, the reconciliation of free will with
divine foreknowledge, and ¢nding freedom in service of the divine. In the
very detail of its rhythms, the epic brings alive the central paradox of freedom
through service.
In his pioneering account of Milton’s prosody, Robert Bridges faces up squarely to

the challenge of Paradise Lost, 3.586,‘Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep’, that
rhythmically exceptional line on the ‘gentle penetration’ of the sun through the
universe.1 Bridges has no doubts how the line should sound, because he insists
that ‘the intended rhythm in P.L. is always given by the unmitigated accentuation
of 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-ible
VER-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 subsequent
division into twelve books, and from Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1968), Poems
1645 (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
ß The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/res/hgl150 Advance Access published on 14 June 2007
paradox and prosodic style in PARADISE LOST 269
¢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 there
are not only inversions of stress in three of the ¢ve feet, but in the fourth foot an
extraordinary elision is added to inversion: j -tue EVen to j. Three syllables are
supposedly elided into one: reduction to monosyllabic ‘ev’n’ comes readily
enoughçit is easily uttered and Milton invariably reduces the adverb, unlike
the adjective, to one metrical syllable in the poemçbut it would be grotesque

to crush ‘-tue ev’n’ against the preceding stress on ‘ver-’. Nowhere else is the
ûe diphthong so awkwardly elided, and on the sole occasion it is elided
with a stressed syllableçat 10.884, ‘Rather than solid ver-tu, all but a Rib’çthe
intervening 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 shape
how lovly, saw, and pin’d’) and 6.703 (‘Can end it. Into thee such Ver-tue
and Grace’), and the trickiest is at 10.372 (‘Thine now is all this World, thy
ver-tue hath won’).
Bridges’ scansion is duly adopted by the most thorough and authoritative of
later students of Milton’s prosody, Ernest Sprott and Edward Weismiller,3 even
though it relies on an intolerable tongue-twister, whereas Milton elsewhere works
within 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 pretty
sti¡ ¢ction’ (p. 36), a classic instance of his notorious assertion ‘that Milton came
to 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 means
for the great rhythmical e¡ects, and is not exposed but rather disguised in the
reading’ (p. 36). This is a vicious principle: although there is much more nuance
in the performance of a line of verse by a skilled reader than the binary simpli¢ -
cations of scansion can recordçfor example, meaning can change dramatically
with the relative weight given the stressed syllablesçthe way is left open to
subjective 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 took
thir 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 Prosody
in the Poems of the Trinity Manuscript’, PMLA, 54 (1939), 153^83: 159, although Weismiller
distances himself from it, arguing that elision in Milton as in other verse of the period was
not merely theoretical (Encyclopedia, 8.127).
270 john creaser
modulations of rhythm, tone, and emphasis, but always retains the shape of the
individual phrase as notated and the guiding pulse of the 34 time signature, the
musical 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 the
traditionalçand still surviving though now moribundçdivision of English verse
into so - called ‘feet’, modelled roughly on classical quantitative verse. It has been
evident to acute observers since at least Puttenham that the ‘foot’ is merely a

notional presence in English verse, and indeed Bridges begins his treatise by
saying that ‘the disyllabic units [of the English blank verse line] may be called
feet’ (p. 1, my italics).6 Nevertheless, he is led to mangle Milton’s audacious line
on the in£uence of the sun by insisting on a strict sequence of feet. This is an
egregious 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 that
poets actually make verse foot by foot . . . Description would be ¢ne if it didn’t
always quietly reify itself and then come to replace the thing it set out only to
describe.’7 On the one hand, Bridges imagines Milton’s prosody as implausibly
freeçsince it ‘allows him to invert the accent of any foot and make free use of
his ¢ction of elision’ (p. 35)çand yet, on the other, he ties it to strict disyllabic
groupings.
Another of Milton’s audacitiesçat 6.866, when ‘Eternal wrauth’ expelled
the rebel angels from heaven and ‘Burnt after them to the bottomless pit’çhas
given rise to the opposite but complementary error of imposing metre on
rhythm. For example, Mrs M. Whiteley gives the line the implausible rhythm,
‘BURNT AF- 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 between
rhythmic and metrical structure, Edward Weismiller, the doyen of Milton
prosodists, 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 from
doing so; we accomplish this by thinking of the six syllables as constituting
three groups instead of two (not permitting the syntax to confuse us), and by
reading in such a way as to make su⁄ciently audible as three the three duple
6 In The Art of English Poesy (1589), book 2, chapter 3, Puttenham distinguishes between the
foot of classical verse and the ‘short portion’ of two syllables in English verse, of which
he 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 Princeton
Encyclopedia 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 metrists
has 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 is
appraising the prosodic theorising of F.T. Prince in The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse
(Oxford, 1954).
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 prominent
stresses as three feet: ‘j to the j bottom- j less pit j’, even though there is no clear
stress 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 er THEM j TO the j BOTtom- j less PIT’ (with a
moderate 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 supplanting
rhythmical fact.10
This pair of examples shows how the traditional foot- substitution prosody
with which Miltonists are familiarçalthough it has not been taken seriously
by metrical theorists for several decades11çfails to cope with lines of marked
irregularity. In e¡ect, the movement of Milton’s verse has been probed with a
rather blunt instrumentçeven though it can still reveal valuable ¢ndings in the
hands of such skilled readers as Bridges and Weismiller. This is why it has become
customary to regard analysis of rhythm as unsatisfactory, as a process either
mechanical or merely subjective.12 As Brogan writes:
One may cheerfully admit that traditional metrics, taken over wholesale from classical
prosody 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, so
that change of foot meant change of meter . . . Meters are whole line-forms, not foot-types
strung 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 blank
verseçand 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 a
succession of relatively lightly and relatively strongly stressed syllables, but to divide that
stream 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 a
four-letter space in the Trinity Manuscript: ‘selfe fed, & selfe consum’d if this faile’.
15 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-text (1604), 5.2.79, cited from David Bevington and Eric
Rasmussen, 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.
272 john creaser
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 the
missing syllablesçinvite exceptional weight on ‘if ’ and ‘half ’: the Elder Brother
thinks it so preposterous that evil will not destroy itself that the ‘if ’ is charged
with scorn, while, in his desperation, Faustus snatches at the impossibility of half
a drop, for what is half a drop but a smaller drop? To perceive this, there is no
need to divide the lines into ¢ve discrete feet and ¢nd short measure in one of

them. Even though on arriving at ‘if ’ and ‘half ’ there is initially nothing more
unusual than a reversed stress, the extreme emphases are at once perceptible,
because they are sensed within the lines as wholes. For practised readers, the eye
darts ahead and the mind, largely intuitively, shapes the words rhythmically well
before 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 spontaneous
way readers adopt or ignore possibilities of elision. At 3.130^2,
Man falls deceiv’d
By 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 not
at 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 less
deviant but still somewhat irregular lines, requires a prosody more attuned to
the rhythms of English speech, independent of methods descending from the
quantitative foot-prosody of the ancients. In classical verse, the prosodic foot
can 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 a
foot of two long syllables, and practised readers can sense an interplay between
quantity and stress. But in English poetry the foot is no more than a convenience
in scanning verse that is rhythmically straightforward. Once verse has rhythmical
modulation and subtlety, the foot is clearly seen as a mere ¢ction and abstraction
because 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 the

second and fourth ‘feet’ here take up four- ¢fths of the time given to uttering
each line, while the time given the mere function-words in the ¢rst and third
feet is negligible (apart from the grammatical pause after ‘brimstone’). The danger
of ‘foot-thinking’ (to adopt Beum’s term) is that it will turn appropriate emphases
on 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 is
inversion in the fourth foot here: ‘Came sing- j ly where j he stood j on the j bare
strand’ (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 rhythm
of any metric verse, it does not establish criteria for discriminating between verse
that is so free as to be aberrant and verse that is free and yet fundamentally
regular, between, say, ‘Shoots invisible vertue even to the deep’ and ‘Shoots farr
into the bosom of dim Night’ (2.1036). Nor can it appraise those lines where
A Milton Handbook ¢nds it ‘almost impossible to recognize the normal number
of 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 experienced
and moderately sensitive reader of verse’ as her touchstone.18 Nor, to move away
from 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 in
Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’. Traditional prosody merely records all but the simplest verse
as 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 than
stresses, upon which the rhythm of a line is based, or indicate the degree of
metrical tension or disruption in a line.19 Moreover, the rei¢cation of the foot
leads to the assertion that moving from one syllable or word to the next between
feet is di¡erent in kind from moving between syllables or words within a single
foot. So Weismiller asserts that there is a di¡erence between ‘There on j Beds of j
Violets j blew (x)’ and ‘(x) There j on Beds j of Vio - j lets blew’ because ‘we are
sensitive 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 an
outcome.
17 James Holly Hanford and James G. Taa¡e, A Milton Handbook (5th edn., Englewood
Cli¡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. Woodhouse
and Douglas Bush (edd.), Variorum Commentary: the Minor English Poems (1972), 2.3.1030.
274 john creaser
but I suggest this is a distinction without a di¡erence. Rhythmically, the two

versions are identical. With freer lines than this, the supposed transition from
foot to foot becomes even less perceptible.
As I have argued elsewhere, surer guidance on verse rhythm is to be found in
the theories of Derek Attridge, who bases his methods not on classical precedent
but on the nature of English speech.21 The major prosodies of metric verse in
English descend from two tendencies in the spoken language: towards isochrony
or the equal timing of stress, and towards the alternation of stressed

and unstressed syllables (as is evident in any polysyllable and audible in careful
utterance). Leaving aside pauses for clarity or emphasis or breathing, native
speakers tend to utter stresses at equal intervalsçand even more to perceive
them 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’, for
example, the total of syllables per line varies from the three of the opening to
eleven (‘Did you ever see such a thing in your life?’) but all lines are four-beat
verseçso strong is the rhythm that a fourth, silent beat is observed after the
opening lines: ‘Three blind mice [/] j See how they run [/].’ Failure to grasp the
distinctiveness of accentual verse has caused prosodists much confusion, since
neo - classical scansion, with its place for every unstressed syllable, is barely
applicable. In the case of Milton’s prosody, however, it impinges only in that
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as I have shown elsewhere, are an agile and almost
unique blending of two diverse and even antagonistic prosodies, the accentual
and the accentual- syllabic (or stress and syllable- stress).22
Accentual- syllabic verse, the dominant prosody in Milton and throughout
literary 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 and
remain consistent in regular verse. The prevailing movement is duple, and the
prevailing line, eluding the simple symmetries of four-beat accentual verse,
is the iambic pentameter. Strikingly, Attridge is able to show that the incalculable
variety of movement in regular iambic verse since the sixteenth century is
released by only three deviations from duple alternation. When three stressed
syllables occur together, careful utterance tends, through isochrony, to give the
second 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 or
other 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 Rhythm
already 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¡.
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 a
stressed 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 more
weighty line. Rhythm depends at least as much on perception as on measurable
sounds, but the audible reality of demotion is borne out by the experiments
of Ada L.F. Snell, who timed each syllable in three readers’ performances of
2.604^28.23 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 the
full stresses but the line as a whole was given more than twice the time of the less
abnormal 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- stresses
by 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 naturally
given only subsidiary emphasis that, by its placing, is allotted the timeçor felt
as having been allotted the timeçof a metrical beat. In the line ‘Invoke thy aid to
my adventrous Song’ (1.13), the poet’s emphasis is clearly on the adventurousness
of the song; nevertheless, as the central of three unstressed syllables, ‘my’ is
promoted and given a little more time and weight than ‘to’ or ‘ad-’. If one did not
do this, ‘my’ would elide into the following vowel, the line would lack a metrical
beat and would collapse into four-beat accentual verse: ‘In-VOKE thy AID to
my’ad-VENT-rous SONG’. This exempli¢es how the popular, and indeed almost
world-wide, four-beat accentual rhythm is always a lurking danger for writers and
readers of iambic verse. As stated above, ‘solitarie’ must be given its full four
syllables (with a promotion on the third) in the last line of the epic, or four-beat
verse 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 of
feminine endings in the poem).
The last of the three deviations from the regular iambic line is pairing, where
there are only two adjacent stresses, both of which are beats. Two stresses do not
permit 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’s
sample is small, the ¢ndings are impressively consistent, and are borne out by the practice
of skilled readers.
24 Sprott, 109^10, is so committed to his strict, traditional prosody that he denies a line
can 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.
276 john creaser
line o¡ balance so conspicuously, the imbalance is kept as brief as possible by

immediately 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 FALL OFF’
(1.30), or the central syllables of ‘For one re-STRAINT, LORDS of the World
besides’ (1.32). (From this point, as well as stressed syllables being indicated by
roman caps, demoted and subordinated stresses will be indicated by italic caps,
promoted syllables by small roman caps, and the four syllables of a pairing by
underlining. Elided syllables are indicated by lower-case italics.) The x x / / or / / x x

patterns of these stress-¢nal and stress-initial pairings are incompatible with
traditional prosody, and have often aroused resistance from those who think in
terms of two - syllable groupings.25 Soon after making the statement that ‘Milton
seldom has two pure lines together’, Samuel Johnson ¢nds these lines with their
pairings ‘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 readers
are less likely to disparage such roughness, especially as Adam and Eve are here
evoking the still unperfected state even of paradise in their current childlessness,
and the harsh cluster of consonants and stresses at ‘uncropt falls’ focuses on the
clearest sign of waste. But as so often, Johnson’s Augustan taste anticipates later
tendencies with striking clarity. Some modern prosodists who think in terms
of two - syllable groupings attempt a dull and uncolloquial smoothing out of
stress-pro¢les. There is, for example, clearly a stress- ¢nal pairing in
Shakespeare’s line ‘When to the sess-ions of SWEET SILent thought’, but for
W.K. Wimsatt, thinking in feet, ‘of ’ is more prominent than ‘sweet’.28 George
Wright emphasises ‘as’ more than ‘earth’ in ‘And lards the lean earth as he walks
along’ (I Henry IV, 2.2.109) and ‘in’ above ‘deed’ in ‘So shines a good deed in a
naughty world’ (Merchant of Venice, 5.1.91).29 For O.B. Hardison, Jr., the line from
Gorbudoc ‘My father? Why, I KNOW NOTH-ing at all’ makes little sense except
by 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) become
respectively 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.
found in the close’ (1748). He thinks the metre ‘nearly chaotic’ and imagines that
regular 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 adjacent
stresses only if they fall in separate feet. Consequently, he is driven to suggest
implausibly that 12.409 should be spoken: ‘ImPUTed BEcomes THEIRS by
FAITH, his MERits’, with recession of stress on ‘becomes’, when there is clearly
a stress- ¢nal pairing: ‘Imput- ed be-COMES THEIRS’.33 This is an extreme

instance of the tendency to evade paired stresses by positing ‘recession of
accent’, a phenomenon never certainly present in Milton and much rarer earlier
than some prosodists have envisaged.34 Being both incompatible with traditional
prosody and yet very common in Paradise Lost, pairing readily resolves various
lines thought to have been problematic, such as 1.202: ‘CreATed HUG-est that
SWIM TH’O- cean STREAM’ (the de¢nite article is marked for elision in the
manuscript 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 and
make deviation possible, so that two rather than three stressed or unstressed
syllables may permit promotion or demotion, and a single stress may permit
pairing. 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 are
comparatively rare in Paradise Lost, it is easy to adjust to them, since all practised
readers slightly mark the end of a line with some emphasis or drawing out of
the ¢nal beat. Conversely, demotion occurs at the start of the line in what has
misleadingly been termed a spondee: ‘[/] BROUGHT DEATH into the World,
and all our woe’ (1.3). The reality of such demotion is especially clear in
the triple demotions of this line: ‘HIM FIRST, HIM LAST, HIM MIDST,
and without end’ (5.165). Finally, pairing occurs as the common reversal of stress
at the beginning of a line: ‘[/] ROSE out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill’ (1.10). In each
case, 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 of
an adjacent line. Sprott, for example, thinking of two adjacent lines as a sequence
of ¢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 possible
examples 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 readily
explained as a pairing, because second- syllable stress on ‘congealed’ would encourage
promotion of ‘their’ and create a six-beat line. See also Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry,
266^7.
278 john creaser
line can interact with the next. He seeks to diminish the already limited presence
of 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 then
shall 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 and
774^5 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 at
the end of the preceding line,36 whereas exceptions are easy to ¢nd (there are

three in the poem’s ¢rst paragraph alone, at lines 10, 12, and 21). Returning to
the lines just cited,‘brought’ in ‘Brought Death . . .’ is not demoted as the second
of three stressed syllables after ‘tast[e]’ closing the previous line; it would still be
demoted if that line had a feminine ending, such as ‘whose mortal poison’.
Similarly, the ¢nal syllable of ‘Providence’ would remain promoted even if the
following 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 reversed
stress:
Mosaic; underfoot the Violet
Crocus, 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 beat
of 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’, is
not begun by the preceding beat, since line 255 ends with the word ‘preferring’.
The pause of the line-turn creates an absolute metrical barrier between
neighbouring lines, however £uid the syntax. This is why Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s experiments in stretching the rhyme- sounds across the line-turn
seem so eccentric:
But what black Boreas wrecked her? He
Came equipped, deadly-electric (The Loss of the Eurydice, 23^4)37
The analysis so far has signi¢cant consequences. First, it demonstrates

that the line-turn has a real presence and function in English verseçin
a way incompatible with foot-theory. The shaping into lines has not merely a
typographic but a rhythmic presenceçaudible when the poem is read aloud
or perceptible by the silent readerçand blank verse, in particular, cannot be,
as the ‘ingenious critic’ cited by Johnson in his Life of Milton complained, ‘verse
only to the eye’. In fact, the line-turn is doubly marked by Snell’s readers, since
they 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.
for example, ‘Medusa . . . guards/The Ford’, all speakers make ‘guards’ the longest
syllable in its line, despiteçor because ofçthe enjambment to come. Three lines
later, ‘Thus roving on/In confus’d march forlorn’, the turn is weighted by
making 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 against
an average of 0.64 of a second for the other feet.38 This is a reminder that
etymologically ‘verse’ descends not only from Latin versare, to turn, but also

from versus, furrowçon the page as in the ¢eld, the line only becomes itself
at the eventual turning.
Second, the analysis so far alerts readers to the presence of pairings in Milton’s
verse. Although modern prosodists have tended to smooth out Milton’s pairings,
I estimate that the potent deviation of the four- syllable patterns occurs in over
1,300 lines throughout the epic. As reported below, my analyses suggest that
initial and ¢nal pairings occur in one eighth of the epic’s 10,565 lines; add the
implied initial pairings of reversed openings and they occur in almost a third of
the lines. Openness to pairings brings expressive freedom to many lines that
might otherwise be more bland, such as: ‘Millions of Spir-its for HIS FAULT
amerc’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 a
mere man ruling over other men). The intimate menace of the double pairing at
5.82,‘So say-ing he DREW NIGH, and to ME HELD’, would be squandered by a
regular reading.
Third, this revised analysis enables us to discriminate among Milton’s
so - called spondees and trochees. Weismiller, for example, being aware of the
limitations of classical terminology for English verse, is ready to accept that, in
English, 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’d
waves, and thou j DEEP, PEACE,’ (7.216), and ‘MAN LIVES j not by j BREAD
ON-j ly, but j EACH WORD’ (Paradise Regained, 1.349), all capitalised stresses are
seen as spondaic, whereas the line- opening demotions, containing only one
metrical beat, are rhythmically quite distinct from the two beats of stress- ¢nal
pairings.39 Weismiller has been misled by foot- scansion’s inability to distinguish
between 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 are
straightforward demotions, although demotions where an actor might well feel led
to 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 for
7.216.
40 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 203^4.
280 john creaser
amalgam of pitch, length, volume, and tone- colour41, it is quite possible for an
actor 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 through
rhythmically uncertain lines, and makes judgments of a new ¢nesse possible.
A reader attuned to the norms will intuitively grasp that the line ‘Glide under
the green Wave, in Sculles that oft’ (7.402) begins with a line- start demotion and
give a little more weight to ‘und-’ than to ‘glide’, because a reversed opening stress

on ‘glide’ would lead to a straggle of three o¡-beats; the reversed opening could
not 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 will
sense that the ¢rst ‘in¢nite’, a reversed stress opening the line, contains only one
metrical 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 the
second ‘IN- ¢n-ITE’. The need for such guidance is clear from Robert Beumçan
acute earlier reader liberated from ‘foot-thinking’ but without a developed alter-
nativeçwho believes the poem to be ‘severely restricted in its use of metrical
units other than ‘‘iambic’’’, and is unable to discriminate with precision about
a passage of what he believes to be ‘exceptional’ and ‘irregular’ lines, the setting
and talk in Eden as Raphael approaches, 5.302^10.42 In fact, it is simply a
representative passage working within the deviation rules, with a few pairings
and a cluster of line- start demotions.
In essentials, if the rhythm of a line is explicable in terms of Attridge’s three
deviation rules, then it will not be felt as aberrant, however far it may diverge
from a simple iambic tread.43 Hart Crane’s evocation of a madman teetering
on 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 a
virtuoso 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 other
hand, the extreme rhythmic tension comes from the readiness to push over into
aberrant 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 against
the grain because the early pairing on ‘Soule rest’ is not resolved until the late
o¡-beats ‘in that’ and almost the whole line is out of balance.45 In this way, a line
that 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 of
Milton’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 upon
Tyne, 1984), 63.
45 John Donne, The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford, 1967).
free, and will appear a clumsy dislocation unless justi¢ed by some expressive
purpose. A Milton Handbook (p. 263) cites four lines as rhythmically extreme
and 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 stressing
and clustering of consonants, is prosodically straightforward, with (as already
mentioned) demotions on ‘Rocks’, ‘Lakes’ and ‘Bogs’, though an expressive
reader is likely to give these syllables virtually full weight and draw the line out
to the crack of doom. The fourth line has the implied line-turn pairing of a
reversed 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 unusual
movement here is appropriate in an evocation of the swarming warriors
of chaos. But the ¢rst two, almost identical in rhythm, are more problematic.
Their ¢rst clear stresses are delayed until the third and sixth syllables, and
it 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 weighting
of the opening prepositions ‘to’ and ‘in’, making them in e¡ect the second
stresses of two line-turn, stress-initial pairings. But such pairings are normally
followed 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 the
third 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’s
prosody ‘allows him to invert the accent of any foot’ (p. 35),46 but Attridge
is 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 of
the 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 indeed
justi¢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 ¢rst
the newly created Adam is suddenly called from drowsiness to bliss by a
heavenly presence, and in the second the newly fallen Adam is being
guided by Michael away from the everyday level of the garden to the ‘top of
speculation’ (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.

282 john creaser
danger of special pleading, and at ¢rst a reader is very likely to go astray with
these lines.48
We are now ready to return to the exceptional lines from which this discussion
began. 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 begins
with 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 second

syllable), and concludes with a stress- ¢nal pairing,‘-om of DIM NIGHT’. There is
both 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 ¢ve
stresses clustering at the beginning and end. But 3.586, the line that has exercised
Bridges and others, is not so readily assimilated to the deviation rules, since its
eleven metrical syllables (after accepting ‘even’ as monosyllabic) cannot be smoothly
reduced to ten. Bridges’ jaw-breaking elision has already been rejected. It may seem
tempting to reduce ‘invisible’ to ‘invis’ble’, but elsewhere in the poem ‘-ible’ endings
are always disyllabic, unless elided with a following vowel (as ‘Son in whose face
invisi-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 secure
parallel 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 thou
hast 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 is
to be reached, seem to be either: ‘Because thou’st heark’nd TOTH’ VOICE of thy
Wife’ (a stress-initial pairing with ‘to the’ forcibly elided as an unusually weak ¢rst
stress), or ‘Because thou’st heark’nd TO the voice of th’Wife’ (with promoted ‘to’ and a
very forced elision of ‘thy’ and ‘Wife’). Both here and at 3.586, the real or virtual
elision of ‘to th’ ’ seems the least implausible option, even though here the elided
words have also to serve as a beat in the pairing.51
At 3.586, therefore, Milton adopts either an almost unique mode of elision he
no 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, the
line opens with eccentric stressing on the ¢rst and third syllables, so that balance
is 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 by
Weismiller,‘Blank Verse’, in A Milton Encyclopedia, 1.184).
50 Encyclopedia, 8.130. The more marked reduction of ‘in the’ to ‘i’th’’ clearly survives at
1.224 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, the
line has only nine syllables. The 1674 reading, ‘Unbid, and thou shalt eate th’Herb of the
Field’ gives the better alternative, althoughçto English earsçthe elision seems awkward.
licence is undoubtedly justi¢ed. Milton is describing the sun’s ‘Magnetic beam’ as

it ‘gently warms’ the universe with ‘gentle penetration’ (583^5). Here is a force at
once potent and mysterious, evoked in abnormal rhythms that stress the energy
and 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 written
elsewhere,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 one
orthodox reading: if ‘AFter’ is stressed then ‘burnt’ is demoted and cannot carry a
beat; 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 no
sequence 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-beat
line such as ‘BURNT after THEM to HELL’S BOT-tomless PIT’, but the only
way to give the actual line ¢ve beats in a pattern compatible with the norms would
be through an absurd emphasis on ‘the’, creating a stress-initial pairing:
‘BURNT after THEM to THE BOT-tomless PIT’. Slightly less orthodox and
only a little less preposterous would be to read with Weismiller: ‘BURNT after
THEM TO the BOTtomless PIT’, with an unnatural emphasis on ‘to’ and a pair
of beats detached from the matching o¡-beats. Consequently, the line is most
likely to be read by insisting on ¢ve beats in abnormal sequence,‘BURNT AFter
THEM to the BOTtomless PIT’, or read with only four beats: ‘BURNT after
THEM to the BOTtomless PIT’, both of which work expressively. The grating
against metrical norms in the ¢rst is apt for the unimaginable horror of the fall
from heaven. In the second, once the absence of the third beat is felt, the line
makes an aptly vertiginous climax to a passage evoking a fall through ‘a spacious
Gap disclos’ed/Into the wastful Deep’ (861^2). Alternatively, the four beats of the
line can be read as accelerating throughout, with only two stresses in the last six
syllables, before coming to an abrupt and early haltças if echoing the unnatural
pace of the rebels’ descent through chaos before its terrible ending. These rare
dislocations at 3.586 and 6.866 must be deliberate, not least because both deal
with cosmic motion and because there is a very similar e¡ect in Paradise
Regained, when Satan recalls how ‘leagu’d with millions more in rash revolt’ he
was driven ‘With THEM from BLISS to the BOTtomless DEEP’ (1.359^61).

The argument so far establishes that analysis on Attridge lines can do more
justice than traditional prosody to the rhythms of Paradise Lost, and we are now
in position to take a broader view.
52 ‘Through Mazes Running’, 384^5.

284 john creaser
The virtue of blank verseçrepeated unrhymed ¢ve-beat lines in rising,

duple rhythmçis the extreme simplicity of the form, as opposed, for example, to
the more intricate requirements of the classical hexameter or the rhymed stanzas
of romantic epic. The apparent monotony of the simple line encourages £exibil-
ity; poets were quick to develop modulations. First and foremost of these, there
are the innumerable permutations of rhythm and shifting tempo that can be
created 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, as
in 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 the
second ‘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 also
move the verse between cadences that are predictable and unpredictable, or har-
monious and harsh. They are commonest at the fourth and sixth syllables, where
their familiarity, and the harmonious 4/6 syllable groupings they create, foster
rhythms that are familiar and poised, while pauses towards the extremes of the
line, 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.Varying
the placing and the weight of the caesura is another way to create modulation,
setting unpredictable and sometimes asymmetrical segments of verse against one
another. 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 of
the verse is similarly coloured by the presence or absence of elisions. The gliding
in of extra syllables, for example, can enliven and vary movement like a grace note
in music, as in ‘To man-y a youth, and man-y a maid,/Dancing in the Chequer’d
shade’ (L’Allegro, 95^6). This packing in of more syllables may also make for a line
more charged with meaning, or for a colloquial £ow, or, on the contrary, for an
uncolloquial violence of utterance. In Donne, for example, there are elisions
such 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 to
honor the usual breaks that separate phrase and phrase.’54
Finally, a line of verse is determined by the versus of its ending, and it
follows 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, and
eight stresses in the line as a whole. Other lines unusually heavy with stress include: ‘REST
that GAVE ALL MEN LIFE, GAVE HIM his DEATH’ (‘Another on the University
Carrier’, 11), and ‘That THESE DARK ORBS NO MORE SHALL TREATwith LIGHT’
(Samson Agonistes, 591).
the verse. A ¢rm ¢nal stress, for example, maintains a sense of the prosodic
integrity 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 extra
and uncompleted movement of a feminine endingçlessens that sense of integrity
and isolation, and encourages a sense of the passage rather than the individual
line. 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-turn
falls between clauses or phrases and therefore coincides with a slight syntactic

pause, it remains relatively unmarked, but it becomes the more marked and
strong as it falls between the segments of a single phrase (‘the Fruit/Of that
Forbidden Tree’), and then within the segment of a phrase, where there would be
no 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 such
brusque simplicity, they are the fundamentals shaping the incalculable varieties
of movement in over four centuries of English iambics, and they shade into more
stylistic features, such as the interplay of monosyllables and polysyllables within a
line, the prevailing length of a poem’s sentences and paragraphs and the regularity
or irregularity of this length, the syntactical density of the writing, and the degree
of syntactic energy pervading a passage.
A glance at some of Milton’s predecessors in the light of these basic
modulations will illuminate the distinctiveness of Paradise Lost. In preparation,
I have examined in detail the ¢rst 200 lines of each of the odd-numbered books
in Paradise Lost, plus the ¢rst 200 lines of each of the following: Surrey’s translations
of Virgil’s Aeneid, Books 2 and 4, written about 1540 and the earliest English
blank verse; Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass, the ¢rst original English poem in
blank 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 for
what Surrey’s ¢rst printer had termed the ‘straunge metre’ introduced in the Aeneid
translation.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 Drawn
Out’’: 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 early
blank verse, see O.B. Hardison, Jr.,‘Blank Verse before Milton’, SP, 81 (1984), 253^74.
57 Cited Surrey, Poems, 132.
286 john creaser
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 ¢ts
the iambic metre without awkwardness or tension; every line falls into a pattern of
four syllables followed by six, with a caesura indicated after the fourth even where
syntactically it is redundant; almost every line is end- stopped; the contour of
stress 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 prevailingly
monosyllabic. The value of writing like thisçand it does have a sti¡ distinction
of 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 rhyme
indicated the end of the line. In response to this expectation, he writes his
unrhymed verse as a series of discrete lines, each shaped so that readers and
listeners know where they are and where the line ends.
The quotation above is representative. Of the ¢rst 200 lines in The Steel Glass, as
many as 182 are end- stopped by punctuation, and of 180 caesuras marked in
the passage, as many as 163 fall at the fourth syllable, whereas there are no more
than ¢ve lyric caesuras in all. Deviation from the iambic norm is usually via
promotions, the least intrusive variation, and there are thirty- ¢ve promotions in
mid-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 instance
of pairingçthough there are ¢ve reversed openingsçand similarly not a
single feminine ending. The formal cautiousness of the verse is enhanced by the
infrequency of elisionsçthere are no more than nine in all58çand the consequent
full syllabi¢cation of words such as ‘mysteries’and the frequent use of syllabic ‘- ed’.
Surrey’s somewhat earlier blank verse, being based on Virgil and less concerned
to 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 rhythms
are 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 superiority
of the DayÔwen text of Book 4 (c. 1554) over the Tottel text of 1557 on the basis of a single
passage. This is not borne out by a more extended comparison. The Tottel text cannot be
seen merely as a cautious tidying up of a more adventurous draft. It does smooth out
¢fteen of the twenty- ¢ve aberrant lines in the DayÔwen text of 4.1^200, but, as well as
leaving the ten others aberrant, at various points it produces lines not only more expressive
but more deviant than in Day-Owen (e.g. 4.32, 53, 149). I agree with Emrys Jones (p. 133) on
the general superiority of Tottel. This was, moreover, the text by which Surrey’s work
became known.
are no more common than in Gascoigne, demotions and reversed openings are
now signi¢cant presences (16 and 26, respectively, in Book 2 and 27 and 41 in
Book 4), while pairings make the movement decidedly more £exible (26 in Book
2, 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 distinct
sameness of movement: most lines are unvaried by the presence of caesuras (123

in Book 2, 94 in Book 4), with the great majority of the caesuras falling after
the fourth or sixth syllables.60 In 400 lines there are only two or three feminine
endings,61 and the handful of elisions are greatly outnumbered by extended forms
such 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: sentences
are short, with an average length of only three lines in each passage as opposed to
seven in Gascoigne.
As in the drama, epic blank verse begins to emerge in something like its full
resourcefulness with Marlowe, since the opening 200 lines from his Lucan
employ 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 demotionsç
more than in the 600 lines of Gascoigne and Surrey combinedçmaking for a
much more packed and emphatic verse. Moreover he has thirty- eight reversed
openings, two of which (71: ‘Under great burdens . . .’; 138: ‘Bearing old spoils . . .’)
exploit a weighty variant that does not occur in Gascoigne and only once in
Surrey (at 4.146), the pattern epitomised in Pope’s ‘COUNT the SLOW
CLOCK’, and found in Milton’s ‘HE for GOD ON-ly’ and ‘PLEAS’D me LONG
CHOOS-ing’, where the rhythm is drawn out by a secondary stress on the second
o¡-beat, often an adjective before its noun.63 Marlowe is also prepared to use this
pattern later in the line, as at 56: ‘If any ONE PART of VAST HEAVEN thou
swayest’. 64 He also introduces as many as thirty-three feminine endings,
and makes freer use of elisions (43) than both his predecessors, while his caesuras
are spread across the line: although seventy-three fall at the fourth or sixth
syllable, 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 seven
feminine 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 The
Rhythms of English Verse, 230¡.
288 john creaser
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 relatively
little 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 shorter
than in Gascoigne. The exceptional total of demotions, unmatched by an equal
body of promotions, makes for a slow-moving verse, since a demotion brings
virtually the time and weight of an extra beat to the line. The translation hovers

between 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 verseçand
with Shakespeare, a new expressive licentiousness. Broadly speaking, metre
governs rhythm in sixteenth- century blank verse and the rhythms of the
language are adapted to the metrical pattern, but with mature Shakespeare
rhythm governs metre, and the phrase, the sentence, and the speech become
predominant.
Consequently, as George Wright records in detail, in Shakespeare’s later plays
about 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 merely
the 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 would
be orthodox. When, for example, Iago suggests to Othello that his insinuations
about 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 of
mind in language that is too troubled to ¢t into the verse line, while Iago, with his
diabolic self- command, is given regular iambic lines.67 Long as well as short lines
occur: although in the blank verse of the whole oeuvre only one line in sixty-nine
is a hexameter, the proportion in the seventeenth- century plays can be as high as
one line in twenty- one (as it is in the verse of Measure for Measure), while from
Twelfth 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 in
the early work to about one in three in the late plays.69 The integrity of the
line frequently yields to the immediacy of dramatic passion, with the ending

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).
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, between
speeches, at the hingesçto vary the meter, shorten or lengthen the line, introduce
hypermetrical syllables, place lines in ambiguous metrical relation to each other,
or break the meter altogether for a prolonged excursion into prose or just for a
momentary disruption of the verse.’ After the early plays, Shakespeare is no longer
content to write sequences of regular pentameters, and his basic principle is that
something irregular is happening all the time. Still, even though idiosyncratic

dislocations are frequent enough to ‘jeopardize our sense of the pentameter’ or
sense of the iambic, the norm is never quite lost, because even in the later
plays 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 within
great order.’71
Against so diverse a backgroundçfrom the prosodic rigour of Gascoigne to
the licentiousness of the later Shakespeare and his followersçthe blank verse of
Paradise Lost is virtually a new beginning. Its prosodic style is as self- conscious
a creation as Gascoigne’s in The Steel Glassças further comparison with the
early blank verse of Comus will make clear in due course. From the more recent
and dominant perspective of the drama, Milton seems strict to the point of
austerity. With the striking exception of the choruses in Samson Agonistes, he
develops throughout his career towards simplicity of metrical form, from the
complex innovations of his early odes and lyrics, and the deliberate intricacy of
his 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 much
closer to the sixteenth- century narrative poets than to Shakespeare and the
later dramatists. To put it bluntly, a hypothetical blank-verse poem the length
of Paradise Lost in the manner of the late Shakespeare would have over
2,000 aberrant linesçtetrameters, hexameters and other deviations from the
pentameter, broken-backed or hypermetrical lines, and rhythms out of step
with the norms. In Paradise Lost, as will be discussed subsequently, only
some forty lines are at all aberrantçnot one line in ¢ve, as in Shakespeare, but
one in 265.
70 For example,‘These our actors,/(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and/Are melted into
air, into thin air’ (The Tempest, 4.1.148^50), and ‘Purple the sails, and so perfumed that/The
winds 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 be
distinguished 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. Oberhelman
and John Mulryan, ‘Milton’s Use of Classical Meters in the Sylvarum liber’, MP, 81 (1983),
131^45.
290 john creaser
In particular, only a handful of lines are markedly aberrant through falling

below or exceeding the norm of ¢ve metrical beats and ten metrical syllables
(that is, allowing for elisions and discounting feminine endings). Not a single
line falls below the syllable- count of ten (although I argue below that, through
their 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 hendecasyllables
unless ‘to the’ is elided to a single syllable (3.586 and 10.198), the trickiest instance

is probably this eleven- syllable line: ‘Without Mediator, whose high O⁄ce now’
(12.240), which, with normal syllabi¢cation, would have six beats primarily in
falling 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 opening
with a double instead of single o¡-beat, so that ‘without’ is the metrical
equivalent of a single syllable. This is a licence occasionally found in works with
less 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 a
unique 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 of
9.1072,‘Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got’. This line can be normalised
metrically 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 ease
out of pain’ (2.261). This practice is so consistent that Bridges proposes reversing
the ¢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 met
as a monosyllable through elision, and because a monosyllabic pronunciation was
then 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 aberrant
rhythm, by adopting the modern stressing ‘IR-re-COV’ra-bly’, but this loses the secondary
stress 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 a
monosyllable in Sir Philip Sidney. See also Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 1.185.
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 in
Comus and are commonplace in Shakespeare,76 but the strict prosodic discipline
consciously 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 of
a stress- ¢nal pairingç‘- sion, and SHALL BE’HON- our’d’çreduces the line
to regularity.

Another possible eleven- syllable line is: ‘Innumerable before th’ Almighties
Throne’ (5.585). Elsewhere in Milton, the su⁄x ‘-able’ is given two syllables, with
a 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 such
as ‘mutable’, where the su⁄x follows directly on the word’s main stress, in which
case a secondary stress falls, as now, on the ¢nal ‘-ble’. A modern pronunciation of
a line such as ‘Innumerable force of Spirits arm’d’ (1.101)çwith the ¢rst word as
four rather than the ¢ve syllables ‘in-NUM- er-A-ble’çdisrupts the rhythm by
reducing 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’ is
given its full four syllables (with two each for ‘Raphael’ and ‘Spirit’).
But ‘Innumerable before th’ Almighties Throne’ has eleven syllables and a very
awkward 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 that
can 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 ten
metrical syllables, and the rarity of them proves the rule. It is also in keeping with
Milton’s prevailing rigour that the poem, unlike any typical passage of mature
Shakespeare, 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 alternative
syllabi¢cations.Words such as ‘Raphael’ and ‘conqueror’, for example, vary between two and
three syllables.
292 john creaser
At 10.989^90, as printed in both 1667 and 1674, a line of four beats and eight
syllables 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 suggests
in his edition, it ‘may mime the de¢ciency of childlessness . . . and the glut
denied to death’.78 It is questionable, however, whether the e¡ect is clear and

potent 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 abnormalityç
which would have been di⁄cult for the blind poet to detectçmay simply result
from scribal or compositorial error, as seems to have happened (as Fowler
acknowledges) at Samson Agonistes, 496^7. Here, in the middle of almost 300 lines
of 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 sardonic
stress would be laid on ‘I/Gods’ at the line-turn.
It is also in keeping with the prosodic rigour that very few lines which
do have ¢ve metrical beats and ten metrical syllablesçbarely more than thirty
out of some 10,560çtrespass even slightly beyond the Attridge norms
and cannot be scanned precisely in terms of promotion, demotion, and
pairing (provided seventeenth- century stressing and syllabi¢cation are
respected).79 It goes with the brazen provocations of Donne that, especially
in 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 expressively
at strife with the metrical norms. It is symptomatic of Milton’s stringent
discipline, however, that there are no clashes as extreme as this and that very
few lines require such conscious rather than intuitive scanning, at least by a
reader familiar with seventeenth- century English. The telling exception proving
the 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.
for the trisyllable in ‘An Amber sent of odorous perfume’ (SA, 720). The initial
tendency of a practised reader is, therefore, to follow the usual syllabi¢cations
and begin with a line- start demotion. But this leaves the line two syllables
short: ‘SPIR’TS OD’rous BREATHES: FLOURS and thir FRUIT’. If ‘odorous’
is expanded into a trisyllable unique to the poem, creating the stress- ¢nal
pairing: ‘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 thir
FRUIT’ (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 unusual
syllabi¢cations are combined with a rhythmic aberration, a dual reversed stress
on the ¢rst and third syllables, leaving the line out of balance until the sixth
syllable.81 No other ten- syllable line in the poem requires such intricate and
conscious scanning; in almost every other line the rhythms can be realized at
sight by competent readers, though they need to be constantly on the alert and
ready to abandon a steady iambic tread.
It follows from the strictness of Milton’s prosody that there is a marked stress on
the integrity of the individual line. Shakespeare, as suggested above, is prepared to
sacri¢ce the line to the speech. For example, Prospero’s greatest and most disturbed
speech begins with a nine-syllable line incompatible with iambic verse: ‘You do
look, my son, in a mov’d sort’ (The Tempest, 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 were
done 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 revealed
in 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 these
lies in a metrically strong position. In contrast, the verse of Paradise Lost maintains
a driving clarity, line by line, even when ‘the Anarch old’ speaks ‘With faultring
speech and visage incompos’d’ (2.988^9), or when the newly fallen Adam responds
to 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 faultring
measure 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 is
felt as an independent rhythmical presence: in particular, each of its twenty
lines is rounded o¡ with a ¢rmly stressed ¢nal syllable, all but three of
them 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 shed May Flowers: and press’d her Matron lip’, where the caesura has encouraged the
use of the full form for a monosyllable.
81 Bridges, 118, again suspects that the text here is corrupt.
294 john creaser
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); in
the other 95.75 per cent. of the lines, the ¢fth beat falls either on a stressed
monosyllable or a disyllable with second-syllable stress (usually the former).82 Such
continuity 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 a
constant awareness not so much of the narrator as of the narration. These are not
the characters of drama living in apparent autonomy; they, even God, are

the 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, not
the versatility of the theatre.
Furthermore, it is in keeping with the disciplined procedures of the verse that
every single paragraph ends at the end of a line. Similarly, most speeches open
and close at line-boundaries, and the exceptions are absorbed into the prevailing
regularity by a narrative introduction or conclusion, not exposed in dramatic
cut and thrust, as in Shakespeare, where many speeches run from mid-line to
mid-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-boundary
that 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 but
three of these occur (for reasons to be discussed below) in the ¢rst 200 lines of
Book 1. In contrast, in 1,200 lines of the later Shakespeare there would be about
400 feminine endings, and even the relatively sti¡ epic verse of Marlowe has
thirty-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 of
Comus and Samson Agonistes.

The analysis so far has concentrated on the pervading austerity, order, and closure
of the prosody, despite very occasional aberrant lines. Is this compatible with
Milton’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 liberty
recover’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 in
bondage. Was F.R. Leavis, after all, onto something in his distaste for ‘the routine
gesture . . . of the verse’, ‘the foreseen thud’, and the ‘automatic ritual’?83 Or was
Thomas 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’s
practice of following the ¢nal stressed vowel of his hendecasyllables with double
consonants.
83 Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936, reprint Harmondsworth,
1964), 43^4.
that enchanting air of freedom and wildness to his versi¢cation, uncon¢ned by

rules but those which his own feeling and the nature of his subject demanded’?84
A response can begin from the omnipresence of the standard deviations
within Milton’s lines. These permit innumerable varieties of local realisation,
even within the norms. Metrically regular lines in Paradise Lost vary between
three 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,
85
BOGS, DENS, and SHADES of DEATH’). In the six 200-line passages ana-

lysed, there is an average (rounding the ¢gures up or down slightly) of ¢fty- seven
promotions in each passage, as opposed to totals of thirty- one to thirty- seven in
the 200-line passages of Surrey, Gascoigne and Marlowe. Consequently, the verse
of Paradise Lost is more often light and £eet than its predecessors.86 On the other
hand, Milton’s insistence on a ¢rm ending to the line means that he has on
average 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 more
intrusive and weighty deviations, Milton has an average of twenty-two demotions
and 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 even
clotted writing of Marlowe’s Lucan (36:23). As for the marked rhythmic deviation
of 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 openings
in Gascoigne. Similarly, the ‘COUNT the SLOW CLOCK’ version of the
reversed opening, with a subordinate stress on the third syllable, is somewhat
commoner 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 in
Gascoigne. The most signi¢cant di¡erence here, however, is that Milton is
completely at home with stress- ¢nal pairings; in him they are little less
common than the stress-initial version (11:14). In the earlier poets, they are
common only in the rougher rhythms of Surrey’s Book 4 (with 14 as opposed to
84 John T. Shawcross (ed.), Milton 1732^1801: 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 often
occurs 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 every
sixteen linesças against a total of only nine in the 800 lines of the other poets (two in
Surrey, two in Gascoigne, ¢ve in Marlowe). It is signi¢cant, however, that four of the ¢ve
promoted ‘ands’ in the lines cited from Paradise Regained follow immediately on the caesura
and are preceded by a comma (e.g.‘He ended, and his words impression left . . .’). The same
is true of three-quarters of such promotions noted in Paradise Lost (¢fty- eight of the
seventy- six). This means that most of the promoted beats fall at sense-breaks, and the
time required for them emerges naturally from the shaping of the sentence. This is one
of the nuances that enable Milton to blend exalted style and colloquial utterance.
296 john creaser
15 stress-initial pairings). Surrey’s Book 2 has only four as opposed to twenty-two

stress-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-initial
form gives the reader ample time to adjust to the deviation: the ¢rst beat falls on a
regular even syllable, and through isochrony there is a pause before the rhythmic
deviation begins at the second. Very often, moreover, there is a syntactic break
between the two, frequently marked by punctuation, and this is followed by a
smooth return to the norm through the two o¡-beats: ‘After short blush

of MORN; NIGH in her sight/The Bird of JOVE, STOOPT from his aerie
tour,/Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove’ (11.184^6). Sprott goes so
far as to assert that ‘there must be a diaeresis between the inverting and the
preceding foot, and the stress syllable of the preceding foot must be strongly
accented or followed by a de¢nite compensatory break.’87 In fact, exceptions are
not 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 at
line 66 both stresses even fall in a single word,‘mankind’. Even so, a pause between
the 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, RAISE
and 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 instant
decision has to be made whether to continue or deviate from the norm of duple
movement. In many linesçsuch as ‘That with NO MID-dle £ight intends to
soar’çthe temptation merely to continue an iambic alternation has to be
resisted.88 Although it is usual in stress- ¢nal pairings for the two stressed words
to belong in the same syntactic segment, for example as adjective and noun, again
there are exceptions (of the fourteen such pairings in the Book 3 excerpt, there are
exceptions at lines 5, 78 and 181). It seems, therefore, that at ¢rst the subsequently
more common stress- ¢nal form was felt as making more demands on the reader
and seemed a more edgy deviation from the norm, and it is telling that all four
instances in Surrey’s Book 2 (at lines 26, 84, 102 and 134) give the reader a moment
to 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 to
these pairings, as numerous lines come expressively alive through registering the
pairing 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, by THAT 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 and
Attridge, Meter and Meaning, 83^4.
The relative frequency of stress- ¢nal pairings in Paradise Lost bears out the
general pattern that deviations there are more numerous and more various than
in 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 166
deviations per 200 lines (meaning that on average only one line in six scans as a
normative iambic pentameter), while Surrey’s Book 2 has only 113 and Gascoigne

as few as sixty-nine. Surrey’s Book 4 is more varied, with 150 deviations, but the
writing is often somewhat clumsy, while thirteen lines are aberrant as opposed to
only ¢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, as
explained, this leaves his verse less varied and resilient.
Such incessant modulation means there can be no ‘automatic ritual’ in the
movement 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 syllableç
the point where the line returns to balance after the common reversed opening
and where there is often a caesuraçbut through stress-initial pairings Milton is
prepared 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 WHAT GOD
after better worse would build?’ (9.102).
Moreover, all this unpredictable variety of movement is not mere variety for
variety’s sake. Unlike the lulling sameness of Gascoigne, it enforces attention, and
it 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’s
stubborn de¢ance, or the derision in God’s dismissal of the fallen angels, or the
yearning of Satan’s ‘inward griefe’ and ‘bursting passion’ (9.97^8) when, as early in
Book 4, he ¢nds his dedication to evil temporarily displaced at exposure to God’s
creative love. To take a very few further examples out of literally thousands of
possibilities: the densest cluster of demotions in all the 1,200 selected lines
occurs 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 OUR
GREAT MAK- er STILL NEW PRAISE’ (184). In the score of lines from 164
there are as many as eighteen demotions, almost as many as would normally
occur 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 of
narrative 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-presaging
alliance’, the ¢nal word is a disyllable with ¢rst- syllable stress. Compare ‘A gentleman of
antike stocke/By alliance very good’ in the rigid common metre of Matthew Grove, ‘The
Grievous Complaint’ from The History of Pelops and Hippodamia (1587), and ‘The links of
Love and Alliance, quite defaceth/The libertie of Nature, and disgraceth . . .’ from William
Lithgow,‘Scotland’s Welcome to . . . King Charles’ (1633).
298 john creaser
unending praise of him who is ‘without end’. Compare the similar but all too brief
cluster of demotions when Satan poignantly evokes the timeless joy he would love
to 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 what
de-LIGHT COULD I have WALKT THEE ROUND/If I COULD JOY in
AUGHT, SWEET IN-terchange/Of Hill and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and
Plaines,/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 of

wanderings with a di¡erent but equally distinctive movement: of the twelve lines
at 9.71^82,‘Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise . . . thus the Orb he roam’d’, as many
as eight begin with a reversed stress and all but two run on, evoking the relentless
monotony of this ‘narrow search’ in darkness, night after night. A completely
di¡erent rhythmic e¡ect cuts strangely into Adam’s soliloquy of despair in book
10: ‘O £eeting joyes/Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes’ (741^2)çthe
apostrophe, with a phrase of four beats followed by a phrase of three, brings a
poignant echo of the common metre of hymns and psalms into the tragic blank
verse. Di¡erently again, an untypical lack of rhythmic clarity becomes expressive
in the account of the indeterminate and warring causes within chaos,
‘mixt/Confus’dly, and which thus must ever ¢ght’ (2.914): the rhythm meanders
ambiguously through ‘and which thus must’ and is unstable until the eighth
syllable.
Milton not only handles the orthodox deviations with consummate skill but is
also 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 the
stress- ¢nal pairings; the licence is tolerable largely because of the pause following
each of the promoted syllables.91 A very few lines, moreover, would collapse into
four-beat accentual verse unless a syllable normally given only a light stress is
made 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-ular Tribes (7.488)
Delecta-BLE BOTH to be-hold and taste (7.539)
Still glor-ious be-FORE WHOM awake I stood (8.464)
At times, however, this is not simply a rare licence but an invitation to

expressive emphasis. Book 6 ends with a stern warning to Adam and Eve from
Raphael 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.

The last line has only four beats (‘fell’, ‘-mem-’, ‘fear’, ‘-gress’) unless ‘and’ is made
the ¢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 of
insistence at 7.261^3: ‘Again, God said let ther be Firmament/Amid the Waters,
AND LET it di-vide/The Water from the Waters.’93 At 8.292, the line is notionally
kept regular by having the unemphatic preposition ‘at’ do duty as the second beat
in a stress- ¢nal pairing (‘When suddenly 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 a
DREAM’). While someone speaking the poem aloud must choose to utter one
version or the other, so that any listeners would hear only that version, those with
the text before their eyes can sense the coexistence of both rhythms. Practised
readers 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¢dence

in handling his rhythms, is a paradoxical three-beat pairing, a sequence of three
beats (beats and not stresses, so there can be no demotion), where the ¢rst two
complete a stress- ¢nal pairing and, pivoting on the second, the ¢nal two open a
stress-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 & GLAD MORN CROWND the FOURTH day (7.386)95
The clusters of beats in the ¢rst two of these lines aptly stress the relentlessness
of the enemy angels and the ¢xity of the stars. The other three lines
occur togetherçan extraordinary and unique cluster. Coming from the climactic
passage on the creation of the heavenly bodies, they add to the marked crescendo
of the writing here, capped by the seven stresses of the last line. A similar pattern
occurs 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 a
potential 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 a
pattern 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 the
SLOW CLOCK’ pattern.
96 Weismiller, Encyclopedia, 8.129.
300 john creaser
careful not to take this licence too far: unlike in demotion, the pivotal second beat
naturally takes somewhat more emphasis than the ¢rst and is always followed by a
pause or syntactic break. Such unorthodox lines are to be distinguished
from similar yet less irregular lines such as: ‘Of fut-ure, in SMALL ROOM
LARGE HEART enclos’d’ (7.486) and God’s emphatic end to his speech at 11.125:
‘With WHOSE STOL’N FRUIT MAN ONCE MORE to de-lude’, where, in the
¢rst, ‘room’ completes a stress- ¢nal pairing and opens a demotion, and in
the second ‘once’ completes a demotion and opens a pairing. Here there is no

potential 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 3.586
and 6.866. Indeed, Milton’s independence is made clear to the alert reader in the
very ¢rst line of the epic: ‘Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit . . .’ The
second to fourth syllables are all stressed, and this would conventionally lead to
the 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 pairing
on ‘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 full
stresses, unparalleled elsewhere (except in the three beats together in ¢ve-beat
lines through the very occasional overlapping pairings just mentioned). As I have
written elsewhere,98 the ¢rst moral and spiritual dereliction by man is re£ected in
a slight but disquieting prosodic dislocation, the more disquieting because it
comes before readers can be attuned to Milton’s ‘strange metre’.
It cannot be assumed that all Milton’s occasional aberrant lines are in this way
defensible as expressively apt, since even Homer nods. The stubborn clumsiness
of a very few lines, notably 10.198,‘Because thou hast heark’nd to the voice of thy
Wife’, and 12.240, ‘Without Mediator, whose high O⁄ce now’, has already
been discussed. Twice in the poem, despite the weight given the line- endings
elsewhere, Milton seems to reverse the ¢nal beat, leaving a stress-initial pairing
unresolved:
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 Milton
himself regularly stresses ‘triumph’ as a verb on the second syllable, while ‘prostrate’ could
be uttered with second- syllable emphasis.‘Prostrate’ is rhymed with ‘asseverate’ byThomas
Powell (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 in
the 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’.
the future’. The actual deviation is felt as clumsy because metrically an iambic
pentameter 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 of
a 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 Leonard
in his Penguin English Poets volume,100 mark both ‘surface’ and ‘future’ for
emphasis on the second syllable. No doubt the stressing of Latin super¢cies and

futurus, 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 matching
emphases of these words can be traced in Milton or elsewhere in Renaissance
verse. At least Bridges, insisting on the colloquial stressing of the words, thought
it well used because it imparted strangeness to the lines (p. 41), with the ¢rst
descriptive in e¡ect and the second very beautiful (p. 42). It can indeed be
argued of the second that the unsettling disruption of rhythm is ¢tting for the
endless misery and ‘Abyss of fears’ (842) envisaged by Adam in his despair. But it
would, 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 his
fellows 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 as
any 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 line
even 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 an
arti¢cial emphasis. Sprott’s expedient is to take supposed ‘recession of accent’ to
an extreme and stress ‘ambitious’ on the ¢rst and third syllables, which is not only
out of step with the sixteen other instances of ‘ambitious’ and ‘ambition’ in
Milton’s verse but also unparalleled in Renaissance poetry.101 Nor will it do to
read ‘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 anyway
leave an intolerable elision of ‘fell-ows’ and ‘am-bitious’. But here, in the £yting
before the war in heaven, it seems plausible to claim that, as Satan is accusing
Abdiel of thrusting himself prematurely in front of his old leader, the alleged
presumption of the act is evoked in the disrupted rhythm, as the line, lacking its
third or fourth beat, hurries to an abrupt conclusion.
Most of Milton’s aberrations are, however, more mild than these, being
versions 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 (University
of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 20; Gainesville, 1966), 14¡. for the increasing
rarity of extended forms in Milton. While uncommon in Paradise Lost Books 1^6, they are
even rarer in Books 7^12, Paradise Regained, and Samson.
302 john creaser
from their matching beats. In the whole poem, out of well over a thousand
pairings, there are barely more than half a dozen straightforward instances of this:
His OWN WORKS 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 EAT ALL the days of thy Life (10.178)

Shalt eate there-OF ALL the days of thy Life (10.202)
No expressive purpose is evident in the third and fourth of these, and they
are left as slightly awkward lines: the second halves are out of balance and lightly
stressed words are doing duty as the second beats in the pairings. But the ¢rst
of the group points up the antithesis of ‘his own’ and ‘their’, while in the
second, the imbalance of the multiple stresses heightens the perversity of
Satan’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 biblical
phrases of the ¢nal pair draw together serpent and man in sinfulness and
the threatened endlessness of their punishment.
Somewhat less rare is what may be termed the 1-3-6 sequence.104 As explained
earlier, the common reversed opening of a line is a stress-initial pairing with the
line-turn pause as the implied ¢rst beat, and conventionally such lines return to
balance 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 is
out 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 Manley
Hopkins makes clear that it is a potent disruption: ‘If . . . the reversal [of emphasis
in a foot] is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include the sensitive
second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated
e¡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 than
twenty-three lines in the whole epic with this abnormal variation, as opposed to
about 1,750 standard reversed openings, and even so a more orthodox alternative
stressing 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 lines
are clearly ‘calculated’. For example, the raw alienation of the newly fallen Adam
and 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’ and
initial inversion with ‘postponed compensation’ (Rhythms of English Poetry, 184^5 and 191).
105 Donne, Satires, 3.34. 106 Poems, 46.
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 thy TRAIN; there be who Faith (6.143)

THREAT-n’d, NOR from the HOL-ie One of Heav’n (6.359)
SAVE what 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 to THE’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 penetration
of 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 emphases
brought 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 her
speaking ¢rst for the ¢rst time and addressing Adam bluntly, without any of the
loving periphrases of the unfallen world, but also by the abnormal rhythm,
a rhythm pitilessly reiterated when they are dragged back into conversation
at 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 a
few other instances, a pause after the second syllable makes the rhythm easier to
assimilate.
In the remaining small group of 1-3-6 lines, the aberrations are less obviously
calculated:
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 normally
take 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 single
syllable. See my ‘Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell’, in Graham Parry and Joad
Raymond (eds.), Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge, 2002), 37^55: 41.
304 john creaser
nouns linked ‘the a of b’, and the copulatives by a pair of terms in apposition
or opposition. While all of these lines could be read as four-beat accentual
verse, the alert reader will resist such a £urry of unstressed syllables and
compensate either by dwelling somewhat unnaturally on the weak ¢rst
beat or, more sensitively, o¡set its weakness by dwelling on the linked second
and 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, while

there is little disruption at 9.236, since ‘as’ is little emphasised and might be
subordinated to the fourth syllable ‘to’. While 5.482 has already been analysed
as a uniquely di⁄cult line to scan, once the rhythm is grasped the phrase
‘spirits odorous breathes’, isolated in its rhythmic aberrancy between the
line-turn and the colon, does make a striking culmination to Raphael’s crescendo
of phrases swinging from line to line:
So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aerie, last the bright consummate £oure
Spirits odorous breathes: (5.479^82)
This essay has now touched on every single markedly or mildly aberrant line
observed in the epic, and, despite the prominence unavoidably brought by such
notice, it should also be clear how few they are, even though their very presence is
a signal guarantee of Milton’s creative freedom. The key point is that these
few lines are exceptions,108 and there is no need to try to create a prosodic system
that will accommodate and seek to normalise them all by asserting, for example,
that Milton can reverse any foot and that therefore there is nothing exceptional
in 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 expect
to ¢nd’ merely because it exists, but a prosody is meaningless if it cannot be
contravened.
This versatile handling of rhythm within and occasionally beyond the
prosodic 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 is
felt as well as stated:
Such whispering wak’d her, but with startl’d eye
On Adam, whom imbracing, thus she spake.
O Sole in whom my thoughts ¢nd all repose,
My Glorie, my Perfection, glad I see
Thy 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.

But of o¡ence and trouble, which my mind

Knew 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 fourth
syllables, 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 even

syllables and should not fall within three syllables of the beginning or end
of 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 come
at the fourth and sixth syllables only twice, at the moments of relative
comfort (lines 30 and 33); of the other eleven, six fall after odd syllables and the
others at the extremes of the line, after the second or eighth. Thanks
to the shifting and somewhat unorthodox caesuras, the e¡ect is anxious and
spontaneousçdespite the epic formality of addressçwith Eve eager for the
relief of spilling out her thoughts to Adam. But when she moves on to recalling
Satan’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 yields
To the night-warbling Bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-labor’d song; now reignes
Full Orb’d the Moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowie 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 ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze. (5.38^47)
Of the ten caesuras in these lines, where Satan seeks to spread an alluring
calm over the night- scene, six fall after the fourth or sixth syllables, and only
one after an odd syllable.
As these passages suggest, an untraditional £exibility in handling the
caesura is another of Milton’s creative freedoms. Gascoigne and Surrey
established the conventions that were to lead to Johnson’s prescriptiveness,
and had few pauses after odd syllables. In the Gascoigne passage, almost
every line has its fourth- syllable pause. Three-quarters of Surrey’s caesuras
fall at the fourth or sixth syllable, but in addition his verse reveals the
opposite 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 falling
after the fourth and sixth syllables and three in ten falling after odd syllables.
Milton goes further even than Marlowe, and in him caesuras are both
more 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
306 john creaser
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 sixth
positions with their identical scores now make up less than half the total (46.6 per
cent). Otherwise, there is an even spread across the second to eighth places, with
fully a third of the total falling after odd syllables.110 This variety gives the verse
energy as well as weight and £exibility, since verse that is straightforward in
rhythm and moves forward regularly a line at a time lacks the propulsiveness of
tension.111 The exception proving the rule in Milton is Samson’s nadir of despair

at 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 merely
two caesuras, one each at the fourth and six syllable.
Another sign of Milton’s £exibility is his readiness to deviate from the
convention of ending a sentence at the end of a line. Gascoigne ends all his
sentences this way, and of almost 140 short sentences in Surrey all but two in
Book 2 and six in Book 4 end with the line (setting aside a few mid-line breaks
in clusters of repeated questions or exclamations). Even Marlowe ends only one
of his thirty- ¢ve sentences in mid-line. So Milton’s readiness to end in
mid-line thirty- eight or a little over a quarter of the 147 sentences in his six
excerpts (even though he always ends a paragraph at the end of a line) is a
marked departure from his predecessors in narrative (and even from Surrey’s
original, the Aeneid ), and an indication of his response to Shakespearean
drama. This, together with his frequent placing of heavy pauses within the
line, puts Milton at the opposite extreme from Gascoigne in the
unpredictable modulation of cadence. This is established from the outset:
in the strong momentum of the opening invocation there are twelve lyric
caesuras, plus one after an eighth syllable, as opposed to only six in the two
conventional positions.
Another source of the continuous variety within Milton’s apparently strict
system is the pervasive use of elision. As noted above, this is rare in Surrey and
Gascoigne, and, although much commoner in Marlowe, is commoner still in
Paradise Lost, occurring an average ¢fty-two times in each 200-line excerpt.112
Elision adds new permutations of rhythm, since usually the elided syllable is
glided 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 by
Oras, Blank Verse and Chronology, 59.
110 Of the numerous texts (including a cross- section of Shakespeare’s plays) surveyed
by Oras, Blank Verse and Chronology, 45, Paradise Lost has a more even distribution of
pauses across the line than all except the colloquial verse of Jonson’s comedies, Volpone
and 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 351
per 1,000 in Books 1^6 and 279 per 1,000 in Books 7^12 given in Robert O. Evans, Milton’s
Elisions (University of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 21, Gainesville, 1966), cited
Weismiller, Variorum, 2.3.1044.
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 quite
lost; the i-glides remain audible presences and so add rhythmic nuance. Similarly,
when the word ‘highest’ is metrically monosyllabic, as in ‘Satan with thoughts
in£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 the
word is felt as quite di¡erent from the full disyllable at 2.429: ‘Conscious of highest
worth, unmov’d thus spake’. In this way, Milton frequently varies his decasyllables

with £eeting hypermetrical presences.
There is all the more variety because some of Milton’s elisions can be no more
than notional, a ‘mental ¢ction’ as Sprott says.113 The word ‘higher’, for example, is
always 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 vowel
even when a syntactic break intervenes, as in: ‘Innumera-ble. As when the potent
Rod’ (1.338) and ‘Of depth immeasura-ble: A-non they move’ (1.549). While it may
be 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 thou
beget me? I sought it not’, or 10.874,‘I had persisted happ-ie, had not thy pride’, or
11.336,‘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 exploits
such elisions to evoke the galumphing sea- creatures. These virtual elisions are
not 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 the
circle of combining austerity with licence.114
The feminine ending is another instance. Although there are none of these in
Gascoigne and scarcely any in Surrey, Marlowe’s opening up of blank verse means
there are as many as thirty-three in his 200 lines, while they become very common
in mature Shakespeare. But this is the one Marlovian innovation that Milton chose
not 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 averages
only about one every hundred lines.115 The restraint is clearly deliberate, since
these 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 divorce
of 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 in
Milton’s Blank Verse’, TLS, 5 December 1936, 1016; Sprott, Art of Prosody, chap. 6; and
Andre¤ 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 of
Samson. In Paradise Regained he records between 3% and 4.7% (Art of Prosody, 57).
308 john creaser
Indeed, sixty- one of the 270 lines in the vehement exchange between Samson and
Dalila have themças Samson becomes more agitated they become more and more
common in his speeches, while, after many earlier, there are none in Dalila’s last
thirty lines, as she moves from pleading to de¢ance. Even so, though these endings
are far less frequent in Paradise Lost, from the outset they make their mark on the
alert 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 and
with opposition to the law of God. The wretched and terrible consequences are
also 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 in
heaven, 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 endings
at the crisis of the fall. There are, as Weismiller has pointed out, more feminine
endings 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 feminine
endings in the last twelve lines of Book 9, while almost half of the poem’s whole
total 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 in
the 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 another
and to God, feminine endings take on a new and positive resonance, notably
at 12.407^10:
Proclaming Life to all who shall believe
In his redemption, and that his obedience119
Imputed becomes theirs by Faith, his merits
To save them.
That Milton gives so much signi¢cance to such occasional nuances shows both
the minuteness of his concern for prosodic e¡ect and the liberated use he makes
of the strict system he has established for himself.
So much for Milton’s freedoms within the line. If we now consider how the
verse 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 HIS
o -BED-ience’.
unmistakable. The verse of Paradise Lost is distinguished by the sustained length

of 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, as
opposed to twenty-nine in Gascoigne, thirty- ¢ve in Marlowe, and almost seventy
in Surrey. And the verse is even more distinguished by what Milton’s note draws
to our attention as the sources of ‘true musical delight’. The ¢rst two elements
named, ‘apt Numbers’ and ‘¢t quantity of Syllables’, resemble so many common-
place and ambiguous expressions in early modern poetics that Milton’s precise

intentions can only be conjectured,120 but in identifying the third as ‘the sense
variously drawn out from one Verse into another’ he is more speci¢c and more
innovative. First, he is identifying the pervasiveness of enjambment. The selected
passages of Milton average 111 run- on lines out of 200, as opposed to an average
of forty- one in Surrey, Gascoigne, and Marlowe. It is calculated that in Paradise
Lost 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 average
of 156 as opposed to 89 in the 200-line excerpts), quite the reverse of
the ¢gures for the earlier writers (Surrey 77/155 and 106/139; Gascoigne 180/182;
Marlowe 133/159). Milton has brought the unprecedented freedoms of mature
Shakespeare into the relative formality of epic verse. Because the verse is no
longer 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 but
to how ‘variously’ it is used. For instance, he exploits the several degrees of
enjambment, except that he approaches the extreme of dividing a word across
the line-boundary only in a compound adjective: ‘Ophion with Eurynome,
the wide-/Encroaching Eve perhaps’ (10.581^2). He ranges continually from the
break between phrases (‘for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view/Nor the deep
Tract of Hell’), to what, strikingly, is the prevalent break in the poem, that between
segments 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 less
common, a break within a segment of a phrase (‘Th’originals of Nature in their
crude/Conception’, 6.511^12).122 Such variety at the line-turn blends with ceaseless
changes of movement within the line to create the continuous modulations
of 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 of
quantity and therefore the misleading nature of the word as then used, see Derek
Attridge, 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 line
with statistics given in Thomas N. Corns, Milton’s Language (Oxford, 1990), 41.
310 john creaser
through a stressed monosyllable, makes readers aware of all these modulations by

giving them the guidance of a clear norm. Moreover, it leads us to dwell on words
that reward deliberation and emphasis. For example, if Satan in his soliloquy on
Mount Niphates had reached the conclusion:
But say I could repent and therefore could
Obtain by grace my former state; how soon
Would height recall high thoughts, and I how soon

Unsay 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 at
his most sincere:
But say I could repent and could obtaine
By Act of Grace my former state; how soon
Would highth recal high thoughts, how soon unsay
What feign’d submission swore: (4.92^5)
Such prosodic variety brings with it a matching variety of e¡ect. The marked
enjambment at 1.508^9, ‘Th’ Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held/Gods’, creates a
sardonic pause, while as Adam advances to greet Raphael at 5.351^3, ‘without
more train/Accompani’d than with his own compleat/Perfections’, the enjambment
from the second to the third line encourages one to dwell on his admirable
self-possession and yet, with the double vision that pervades the poem, not to
forget that his ‘own’ perfections, though complete in themselves, are far from
completed. The ¢rst two paragraphs of Book 11 are a signal instance of Milton’s
quiet audacity: all but nine of these forty-four lines run on. Apart from the
paragraph endings, only one line ends with a full stop; otherwise there are four
commas, a semi- colon, and a bracket closing a parenthesis. The verse £ows on
with ease, especially the ¢rst paragraph, which comprises a single sentence of
twenty- one lines, end- stopped before the close by a mere two commas. This is
sustained within the lines, since there are numerous promotions but only two
pairings, while, until the last few lines of the second paragraph, more of the
forty-two caesuras indicated by punctuation are lyric rather than ordinary or
‘masculine’.
These two paragraphs mark the transition from human penitence to divine
compassion. Adam and Eve are suspended in prayer, while the Son makes the
remarkable proposal to God that there is after all something fortunate
about their fall, for their prayers are ‘Fruits of more pleasing savour from
thy seed/Sow’n with contrition in his heart, then those/Which his own
hand manuring all the Trees/Of Paradise could have produc’t, ere fall’n/From
innocence’ (26^30). As the poem hovers for the ¢rst time ‘Betwixt the world
destroy’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 of
any dramatic tension. The £uidity of the verse prepares us for the spontaneous
outpouring of divine grace, and the compassion within unavoidable judgment

that will be shown the erring pair in God’s answering words and the rest of the
poem.123
The other expressive freedom as the verse swings from line to line is less
innovative but also, after Milton’s note on the verse, more surprising. Having
presented his blank verse as ‘ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the
troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’, Milton adds to the aural density
of his already packed verse with occasional rhymes.124 To take another moment

of transition, Book 8 opens with the pause that follows on Raphael’s account of
the creation:
The Angel ended, and in Adams Eare
So Charming left his voice, that he a while
Thought him still speaking, still stood ¢xt to hear.
(1^3)
Adam’s suspension in absorbed ecstasy is enacted in one of the least tense and
progressive rhymes in the language, a rhyme with only the slightest semantic and
aural 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 fruit
and with ‘bland words’ (9.855) woos Adam to join her in eating, a sequence of
seven 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 many
times without becoming conscious of them. There is none of the intense
and manifest rhyming found in Samson’s opening soliloquy with its agonised
repetitions of ‘light’, ‘sight’, and their rhyme-wordsçgrating against assonances
such as ‘life’ and ‘prime’çwhile he circles obsessively around the fact he can
neither ignore nor alleviate, his blindness.125 Still, even unnoticed, the rhymes
here in the epic are likely to have a subliminal e¡ect, enhancing the brief hiatus
in Book 8 and the seductive allure with which Eve presents her supposedly
rational persuasions at the fall. The presence of occasional rhymes epitomises
123 For a fuller account of expressive enjambment, see especially Archie Burnett,‘‘‘Sense
Variously 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 the
Eye’’? Line Endings in Paradise Lost’, EIC, 33 (1983), 187^204, recounts the emergence of the
modern critical awareness of the expressive line-turn in the ‘pause of suspension’ proposed
by Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading (1775), and shows that the eye can be as
sensitive 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 Paradise
Lost.
312 john creaser
Milton’s readiness to establish a strictly de¢ned system and then push beyond
its limits. It is an act not of subservience but of mastery, anticipating the
high-handed virtuosity celebrated by T.S. Eliot: ‘This liberation from rhyme
might be as well a liberation of rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of
supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater e¡ect where it is
most 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 accomplished

verse of Comus. In fundamentals, there is a marked continuity between the
masque 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 rhythmic
deviation: the totals of promotions, demotions, and stress-initial pairings are
very 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 the
Paradise Lost average of eleven per 200 lines. Yet the verse of the two works moves
very di¡erently: super¢cially, this might appear to be because of the dramatic
nature of Comusçfeminine endings are much more common (ten as against an
average of 1.33), and the occasional presence of epic caesuras makes for a higher
proportion of mildly aberrant lines (there are three in the excerpt), while it is
common for lines to be split between two speakers. But in Comus the verse is
less weighty, as there are many fewer line- start demotions (8/16) and reversed
openings (21/37), and especially because there are many more line- end promo -
tions (28/8.5). Moreover, despite the dramatic occasion, the movement of the
verse is less free than in the epic: fewer lines run on (84/111), and there are
many fewer caesuras (91/156). Also, there are many fewer elisions, especially
between rather than within words (22/50) and Milton is still using occasional
extended 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 less
colloquially £uent than the high style of the epic. All these make for more
predictable patterns of cadence. Moreover, sentences are much shorter (averaging
about four rather than about ten lines), so the language has less syntactic
energy.127 Even when set against the more contemporary and very similar blank
verse of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, the distinctiveness of Paradise Lost
is clear. In Paradise Lost, for example, heavy punctuation is evenly divided between
the end of the line and the internal positions, at an average of just over seventeen
stops 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’s
italics.
127 The total of sentences in the Comus excerpt is increased by the fourteen lines of
stichomythia 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 punctuated
as one.
than not conventionally placed at the line- ends.128 Overall, the verse of Paradise
Regained is more relaxed and less intense, with fewer caesuras and therefore more
undivided lines, fewer initial pairings, and more promotions. In Samson, as ¢ts its
dramatic nature, there are many more feminine endings, while a high proportion
of promotions means that the verse moves more lightly and swiftly. In both
Paradise Regained and Samson there is, moreover, less syntactic energy, since sen-
tences are shorter and there is less enjambment.129 Such comparisons emphasise
how the distinctive verse of Paradise Lost manages to combine strictness with

freedom, 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 through
words.’130 He can ¢nd praise for Milton only when it is ‘as if words as words
withdrew themselves from the focus of our attention and we were directly aware
of a tissue of feelings and perceptions’.131 Throughout, Leavis is attempting to
read Paradise Lost as if it were Shakespearean drama, where the medium is not
words on the page but actors on the stage, and immediate experience is being
re- 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 cultural
valuesçis manifest above all in his conscious re- shaping of it in a distinctive
mode and style.
But Milton’s presentation goes even further. Paradise Lost is a poem built
around paradox. Even the title is paradoxical from the Proustian stance that les
vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus, and this is not anachronistic, since it is
evident from the passion in Adam’s soliloquy of despair when Eve has eaten the
apple that he realises his love for her with a new intensity now he seems on the
point of losing her. The couple never feel their love for the garden so acutely as
when they are told they must leaveçtheir immediate ‘chilling gripe of sorrow’
even obliterates the greater news that, through divine grace, redemption
from ‘Deaths rapacious claime’ is now possible (11.251¡.). Satan is a
compelling ¢gure in his courage, energy, and resourcefulness, but paradoxically
he is one of the great presences of western literature because he knows he is
defeated 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 ‘Arch
Angel 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 of
expression’ in the later work (Blank Verse and Chronology, 23).
130 Revaluation, 48. Leavis’s italics. 131 Ibid., 47.
314 john creaser
by the beauty of God’s creations, he strangles love, pity, and remorse, and compels
himself into actions he ¢nds abhorrent.
Isolated phrases such as ‘darkness visible’ (1.63) have such resonance because
they condense the poem’s paradoxical vision. Crucial to this are the paradoxes that
to fall is to rise, and that this paradise lost is also a paradise gained. The loving
contrition of the fallen pair has indeed produced for God ‘fruits of more pleasing
savour’ than they could have produced ‘ere fall’n/From innocence’ (11.26^30), and in
return ‘a Paradise within thee, happier farr’ (12.587) becomes attainable. The whole

narrative presents this revised version of that great and traditional paradox, the felix
culpa. At the very opening, the ‘Fruit’ of the forbidden tree is both literal and
metaphorical, and metaphorically it blends the wages of sin, the culpa, with the
felix, the fruition of salvation. At the conclusion, Adam and Eve are tearful and
optimistic, wandering and guided by providence, solitary and hand in hand,
excluded from paradise and a pair of lovers walking through Eden. As they leave
the garden, the poem’s ambivalence is concentrated in an apparent touch of local
colour, the simile of the evening mist gathering ‘at the Labourers heel/Homeward
returning’ (12.631^2). The labourer anticipates the fallen world of sweated toil into
which they are descending and the eventual return of their bodies to the dust from
which they were created, but the heel recalls the bruising of the Saviour’s heel that
is the promise of salvation.
The whole poem is shaped by two other great and traditional paradoxes. The ¢rst
is the reconciliation of free will with divine omnipotence and omniscience through
the ‘Eternal Providence’ that is celebrated in the opening invocation and that
broods over the human pair in the closing lines. Through providence, God draws
order 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 and
recollectionçexcept in the crisis of Books 9 and 10çimitates the workings of
providence, ‘Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular/Then most, when most irregular
they seem’ (5.623^4). The poetic as well as the divine maker is manifestly in control
of his creation even while working with given material.
The second paradox is expressed in familiar words from the Second Collect
for Peace, in the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for Morning Prayer:
‘O God, . . . whose service is perfect freedom’ (cited by Milton in The Reason
of 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 name
Of 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.
To serve th’ unwise, or him who hath rebelld

Against 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 itçparadoxes
embodied at length in the contrasted falls of Satan and the human pair.
Paradise Lost, then, demonstrates the realisation of freedom and individuality
through order and control, and the metrical austerity of the poem is essential
to its expressive freedom. As Beum writes, ‘freedom is most bracing within

a framework of discipline and law’.134 Milton’s awareness of the creativity of
discipline 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 above
discipline, but she is that which with her musicall cords preserves and holds
all the parts thereof together.’135 The tight cords of discipline are also the chords
of harmonious expression. It was ‘by the known rules of antient libertie’
(my italics) that Milton, in one of his crucial distinctions, sought to bring home
to 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 of
his verse enacts paradox in its fusion of the integrity of the individual line with
the unpredictability of continuous enjambment. Form is not a mere envelope or
conveyor belt, but an embodiment of meaning. Writers of free verse have to work
hard for expressive variety within and between lines, because they work
with incessant variety: each line is rhythmically unique. A writer in a given form
creates a point of tension with any deviation from the norm, and the stricter and
more 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 than Milton.
Moreover, command of an intricate form enhances the reader’s sense of
the author’s virtuosity. In reconciling minute attention to strict prosodic norms
with countless local nuances and with syntax of unparalleled energy and expan-
siveness, Milton gives a living demonstrationça vivid although unShakespearean
mode of re- enactmentçthat perfect freedom can be found within service.
Mansfield College, Oxford
134 Language and Style, 363. 135 Complete Prose Works, 1.751.

Prosody Paradise Lost

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‘SERVICE IS PERFECT FREEDOM’: PARADOX AND PROSODIC

STYLE IN PARADISE LOST

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In his pioneering account of Milton’s prosody, Robert Bridges faces up squarely to

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9 Variorum Commentary, 4.272. Weismiller’s italics.

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In an utterance at once natural and expressive, the paired stresses of the

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but I suggest this is a distinction without a di¡erence. Rhythmically, the two

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21 ‘‘‘Through Mazes Running’’; Rhythmic Verve in Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso’,

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line o¡ balance so conspicuously, the imbalance is kept as brief as possible by

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Similarly, the implied stress-initial pairing of the reversed opening to 10.1044,

The analysis so far has signi¢cant consequences. First, it demonstrates

35 Art of Prosody, 59^60, 95, 143.

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38 Snell,‘Objective Study’, 407.

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41 Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 227^8.

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

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48 Further lines on this pattern are discussed subsequently.

licence is undoubtedly justi¢ed. Milton is describing the sun’s ‘Magnetic beam’ as

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52 ‘Through Mazes Running’, 384^5.

The virtue of blank verseçrepeated unrhymed ¢ve-beat lines in rising,

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And needed not, a foyle of contraries,

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65 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 105.

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

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In particular, only a handful of lines are markedly aberrant through falling

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that enchanting air of freedom and wildness to his versi¢cation, uncon¢ned by

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15 stress-initial pairings). Surrey’s Book 2 has only four as opposed to twenty-two

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At times, however, this is not simply a rare licence but an invitation to

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

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A further very occasional licence, showing Milton’s Shakespearean con¢dence

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97 Language and Style, 362, 348. 98 ‘Rhythmic Verve’, 385.

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100 The Complete Poems (1998). 101 Art of Prosody, 139.

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