Reading selections from Paradise Lost; Milton's Prosody

Book I: all

Book II: all

Book III: lines 1-415; Next: Satan, disguising himself as a young angel, gets directions from the archangel Uriel and spirals down to a mountain top overlooking the site of Paradise.

Book IV: lines 1-775; Next: Uriel, suspicious of the disguised Satan, reports to Gabriel, who sends two angels to watch over Adam and Eve's bower. The angels find Satan, "squat like a toad," whispering into the ear of the sleeping Eve; thus discovered, Satan flees.

Book V: lines 1-135; Next: Raphael, sent by God to remind the humans of their danger, comes to lunch; to emphasize his point, he begins to tell the story of Satan's revolt.

Book VI: Summary: the war in Heaven continues; Satan is wounded; the Son is victorious.

Book VII: ll. 1-39 (the 3rd invocation in the poem); Next: Raphael narrates the creation of the earth and humans.

Book VIII: ll. 249-end; In this excerpt, Adam tells the story of his own creation

Book IX: all

Book X: ll. 414-584; 706-end; These excerpts narrate Satan's report of his success to the fallen angels and the reconciliation of Adam and Eve.

Book XI: none; In Book XI, the angel Michael takes Adam to a mountain top to show him the future of mankind, that is, to narrate the Old Testament stories through the story of Noah and the flood.

Book XII: ll. 465-end; this excerpt comes when Michael, having told the rest of the story of human history through the death and resurrection of Christ, prepares Adam and Eve to leave Eden.

Milton's Prosody

Metaphoric Structures: Paradise Lost is a richly structured poem; I point out here only two of the most pervasive patterns that are so common they become structural elements.

• rising and falling: Spatial movement occurs continuously throughout the poem, as settings move from the lowest depths of hell to the heights of heaven to the various terrains of earth (plains and mountains); as characters are prone ("stretched out huge in length .../ Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence/ Had risen .... [1.210-12]) or erect ("God-like erect, with native honor clad" [4.289]); and as characters express an intellectual and/or spiritual posture ("what in me is .../ ... low, raise and support" [1.22-23]).

• light and darkness: Light and darkness permeate places, characters, minds: "yet from those flames/ No light, but rather darkness visible" (1.62-63); "Thus Adam to himself lamented loud/ Through the still night .../ ...with black air/ Accompanied, with damps and dreadful gloom" (10.845-47); "what in me is dark/ Illumine" (1.22-23).

Prosody: The meter of PL is blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Such a scheme calls for 5 feet with a stress pattern of unstressed to stressed (x -). However Milton avoids regularity (and therefore tedium) in a number of ways, some linguistic, some metric. This subject is too complicated for me to do more than suggest a few devices for you to look for: rise/fall and dark/light imagery; number, kind, and placement of the caesura; enjambed and end-stopped lines; the interplay of polysyllabic and monosyllabic words (often rendered in the interplay of Latinate and "plain English" words); echoes of lines; creation imagery.

• the caesura (pause): Pick any passage in the poem, and you will find Milton ordering the pace across the blank verse line/lines-speeding it, slowing it, chopping it into small units or stretching it out into a long, seemingly unending movement. Look at the numbers of cæsuras in a line (none, as in 1.45-46; and many, as in 1.316), and look also at quality in a given line or set of lines (comma, semi-colon, period, question mark, exclamation mark).

• end-stopped and enjambed lines: Pick any passage in the poem, and you will find Milton controlling the movement through the verse paragraph by stopping at the end of the line (end-stopped) or running on into the next (enjambed). Look at the effect in the example below of sequential enjambment, coupled (in this case, as often) with fewer-than-normal cæsuras:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

• mono- and poly-syllabic words: Milton has a reputation in some quarters for his Latinate words-especially the poly-syllabic ones-but for me the remarkable feature of his word choice is his very plain vocabulary (often mono-syllabic words). The simplest words-fruit, plant, root, tree, woe, fall, stand, light, dark, soul, grace, free, loss, restore, man-reverberate throughout the poem, expanding in meaning, texture, and resonance. For me as reader, some of the most breathtaking moments in the poem are those in which the Latinate and simple vocabularies come together: "Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" (3.99), "Me miserable! which way shall I fly/ Infinite wrath and infinite despair?" (4.73-74), "So glistered the dire snake, and into fraud/ Led Eve our credulous mother, to the tree/ Of prohibition, root of all our woe" (9.642-45).

• echoes of lines: In addition to "simple" words expanding, phrases expand as they recur throughout the poem. In the trickiest of these echoes, we think we are hearing the lines "straight" the first time, as when Satan says "Here at least/ We shall be free; / Here we may reign secure, and in my choice/ To reign is worth ambition though in hell:/ Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n" (1.258-63). We are therefore shocked and more than a bit chagrined (at having been deceived by the rebellious energy of Satan's cry) when we hear Abdiel deliver the lines "straight": "This is servitude,/ To serve th' unwise, or him who hath rebelled/ Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee,/ Thyself not free, but to thyself enthralled; / Reign thou in hell thy kingdom, let me serve/ In heav'n God ever blest" (6.178-84). We realize, belatedly, that Satan has twisted a genuine pronouncement of freedom (God's service is perfect freedom) into a perverse declaration of self-imposed subjection to his own envy and hatred.

Note the effect when a creative use of the cæsura, enjambment, and syllabic variations occur together, mixed further with rise/fall and dark/light imagery, the mocking echoes of Moloch's just-concluded militant speech; and the interplay of simple (often mono-syllabic) words and poly-syllabic Latinate words (I love in particular the effect of an enjambed line that rushes on to "hover" and end abruptly on a poly-syllabic Latinate word, as in ll. 130-31 and ll. 141-42 below):

First, what revenge? The tow'rs of heav'n are filled
With armèd watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bordering deep
Encamp their legions, or with óbscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of Night,
Scorning surprise.  Or could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heav'ns purest light, yet our great enemy
All incorruptible would on his throne
Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mold
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire
Victorious.

						(2.129-42)