And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares. And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands; And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes (Matthew Arnold: "Sohrab and Rustum.") So let us not think that when we have learned what such names signify we have thus got everything. We must know something of them; in i. 381-505, we should lose a great deal if we knew nothing of the places mentioned. But if they do not appeal to us in the other way too, we should try to cultivate the appreciation of them. We shall thereby enjoy Milton the more, and other poets, too, for, as we have seen, the habit of Milton in this particular was not peculiar to himself.1 V. ON THE METRE. We are very apt to read with the eye only, but in poetry, and especially in Milton's poetry, we must think of the ear as well; we must read aloud, or rather, when we read to ourselves, we must read as if we read aloud. Toward the end of his life Milton was blind, and so could never see how his poem looked when written or printed. He had to dictate it, to be written down by others, and when he 1 The passage best illustrating this matter is xi. 385-411. read it, so to speak, he had to listen to others who read it to him. So he was like the poets of less civilized peoples, poets who recite their own productions, poets who know their own poetry only as it is given form by the voice. Thus we must read Milton's poetry aloud, or at least appreciate the qualities which belong especially to reading aloud, of which the chief is the metre. Concerning metre much that is pedantic has been written, so that some people regard any consideration of it as a useless and futile incumbrance to their enjoyment. But if one cannot read this poem aloud, one loses a great deal, and one cannot read it aloud well, without having some idea of the metre. We will try to look at it in as practical a way as possible. There are in this case two considerations, which we must bear in mind in getting such an idea of our poem as will serve our purpose. First we want to know the way the poem ought to sound, the way it sounded when Milton dictated it, or when it was read to him; or, let us say, the general principles actually governing the flow of English blank verse in the minds of poets and readers alike. such study as this is important with every poem if we would know how to read it; we must know something about rhythm and apply it to the particular poem. Some But with "Paradise Lost," as with other poems, we have another matter. Milton was a deep student of the classics and of Italian literature; he was familiar with their systems of metre, and with the attempts, more or less successful, to accommodate English verse to them, or to accommodate them to English verse. We must then know what was the metrical system which Milton had in mind in writing his poem. It is nearly certain that he had a somewhat definite metrical system in mind, with which the verses of "Paradise Lost" were in good accord. But in all probability the rhythmical flow of the poem was guided chiefly by the poet's ear, and was indeed not always in keeping with the metrical system, or rather was in keeping with it only by what we may call metrical fictions, as will appear later. 1 We have, then, in the metre of "Paradise Lost" both a condition and a theory. Milton dictated his verses, probably, according to his ear, which, we are told, was very delicate; but he made his poem conform to a system of versification which was in great measure founded upon classical usage and which to some degree was not represented in the pronunciation. So, first, as to the rhythmical character as apprehended by the ear. Rhythm means, with us, a more or less regular recurrence of stress or accent, generally in a sound. When we listen to the noise of the sea, and hear the continual roar broken at recurrent intervals by the fall of the breakers, we call it a rhythmical noise. As applied to poetry, the rhythm is formed by the recurrence of syllables more strongly accented than the others. For example, take the line, 66 "O Prince! O chief of many throned Powers!" (i. 128.) In this line, the syllables Prince, chief, man, thron, Pow, are more strongly accented than the others, which makes a regular recurrence of accented and unaccented syllables. If we indicate the accented syllables by a and the unaccented syllables by x, we can write out the recurrences thus, хахахахахах. Now, it is known that when we get such a sequence of accented and unaccented syllables in mind, and hear a sequence of words in which the regular accents approximate to that order, we take up the rhythm in our imagination and impose it upon every line that comes along, imagining the right stress at the proper place, even if it be 1 The contractions and elisions (see lower, pp. lv.-lvi.) in which the vowels omitted in the scansion are, in reading, actually pronounced. not actually there. So in the line following the one just quoted: "That led the emba tled Seraphim to war" (i. 129), the last syllable of Seraphim is not really accented to the same degree as the first, out, having the rhythm in mind, we impose it, as it were, upon the line. We even accept lines like or, "Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf" (i. 329), "The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld." (i. 309.) Although the words to and of in the first line, and the syllable -ers and who in the second, are not in good reading especially accented, we have the rhythm in mind, and a slight additional emphasis is sufficient to make the line harmonious; or even if not accented by the voice in reading they are accented by the mind. So also if there be a slight variation of the rhythm, provided it be such as makes no serious difference in the time between stress and stress, either we do not notice it, or, if we do notice it, our attention is especially directed to the word in question so as to give it emphasis. In the line "Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues" (i. 15), we hurry over the A so quickly, and over -ian, that the two vowels in each case seem.no longer than one, and the rhythm goes on as usual. The extra syllable may come at the end of a line, as in i. 128, quoted above. In the line "Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky" (i. 45), the word hurled must evidently be accented, which makes the rhythm run a xx a xa instead of x a x a x a. But here the break in the rhythm is so slight that it merely concentrates our attention for an instant upon hurled, where it may well rest, for it is an inportant word. Thus we have a long recurrence of unaccented and accented syllables. Out of convention we print ten syllables to a line, but it would be blank verse even were it not so printed, just as it would be blank verse even without the capital letter with which modern habit begins each line. The poem is not divided into sets of ten syllables as we read it; the pauses come almost anywhere. Such is the main structure of English Blank Verse; it is language so arranged that every other syllable is accented, so that a rhythmical effect is produced. Variations in the rhythm occur often, serving sometimes to emphasize a word, sometimes merely to hasten our utterance, which may in itself have a harmonious effect, and these variations serve also to break what would be otherwise rather a monotonous recurrence. The variations, however, are never such as to break the flow of the rhythm, which is both pleasing in itself and effective of a sort of glow of interest on the part of the reader. But the classical verse, having been carefully studied by grammarians and others, had proved to have a system, just as English blank verse may have, and Milton was too good a scholar not to be aware of the first point and to aim at the second. So along with the simple rhythmical effect of blank verse of which we have been speaking, we have the following systematic arrangement which we may call the metre. A. The basis of the metre is a verse of five feet, called iambic, in imitation of classical usage, each consisting of two syllables; the first unaccented, the second accented.1 In this scheme certain exceptions are allowed, and, indeed, occur frequently, thus breaking what might otherwise seem a monotony. 'The classical iambic foot was a short syllable followed by a long. |