John Milton’s blank verse

Milton’s Blank Verse

Milton’s Use of Rhymed-Verse-His Early Verification

Milton was a great metrical artist, one who used a number of metres and verse forms with great art and skill. In his Preface to Paradise Lost he expresses his contempt for rhyme and says that rhyme is, “no necessary adjunct or true ornament of a poem or good verse, in longer verse especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre.” However, his early or minor poems are in rhyme and are read with greater interest by the reader than his great works in blank verse. The lilting, dancing measure of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the delicate songs of Arcades and Comus, and the ‘rich and sonorous harmony’ of Lycidas—are all ultimately derived from the music of the Elizabethans, which Milton never ceased to admire in spite of his indictment of rhyme. Milton’s early poems, as Raleigh points out, “grew on Elizabethan soil, and drank Elizabethan air.” L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as well as Lycidas, bring out his skill in the handing of rhyme in short lines of four, even three or two, stresses and his sonnets reveal his mastery over the sonnet form. The sonnets are in rhyme, too, though Milton departs from the Elizabethan convention in following the Petrarchan pattern of dividing the sonnet into an ‘Octave’ and a ‘Sestet’.

Use of Blank Verse: Milton’s Originality

>Milton’s early poetry reveals his mastery over the use of rhyme; his later poetry including Paradise Lost brings out his skill in the handling of blank verse (Iambic Pentametre line without Rhyme). Before him, blank verse had been effectively used by dramatists, like Marlowe and Shakespeare, but it had not been used, with any success, by the poets. Milton’s originality is seen in his boldly adapting blank verse for the purpose of poetry. In these hands of the dramatists themselves, the blank verse had become degenerate and loose and was hard to be distinguished from prose. At the time when Paradise Lost was written, Heroic Couplet was in fashion and it was considered as the only fit metre for poetry. Milton showed great originality and boldness in going against the current vogue of the Heroic Couplet and using blank verse for his masterpiece. Says Raleigh in this connection, “At the time when the blank verse was yielding to decay, Milton took it up, and used it neither for conversational nor for rhetorical purposes. In the interests of pure poetry and melody, he tightened its joints, stiffened its texture, and one by one gave up almost all the licenses that the dramatists had used. By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended, the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy epic metre.” The Nature of Blank Verse: Need of Variety

A blank verse line is a line of ten syllables or five feet without rhyme, with the accent falling on the second syllable in each foot, and with a pause or “caesura” about the middle, i.e., after the fourth or the fifth syllables. There is also a longer pause at the end of each line, equivalent to the full stop in prose. This is the norm but if the norm is strictly followed, especially in long narrative poetry, it results in monotony and lack of interest. Therefore, to impart variety and avoid monotony, variations are introduced, and Milton’s greatness as a metrist is seen in the skill with which he imparts variety to his blanks verse.

Variety in Pauses and Stresses

First of all, Milton imparts variety by varying the stresses and accents, and the placement of the Pause or Caesura. He continually varies the stresses in the line, their number, their weight, and their incidence letting them fall, when it pleases his ear, on the first as well as on the second syllable of the line. The pause or Caesura he permits to fall at any place in the line, usually towards the middle, but on occasion, even after the first or ninth syllables. His chief care is to vary the word in relation to the foot, and the sentence in relation to the line. No other metre allows of anything like the variety of blank verse in this regard, and no other metrist makes so splendid a use of its freedom. He never forgets the pattern, yet he never stoops to reach it by the repetition of a monotonous pattern.

Overflow of Sense

Secondly, the sense does not end with each line but overflows from one line to the line or lines which follow. There is enjambment or overflow and in Milton’s own words, “the sense is variously drawn out from one verse into another.” This gives us the famous Miltonic verse paragraphs. The meaning the poet wants to convey is for the most part conveyed not in single lines, nor in rigid couplets, but for the most part in combinations of verses, which are flexible and allow the thought to be merged in the expression. These combinations or paragraphs are informed by a perfect internal rhythm or harmony. Milton’s constant practice is to have this overflow and this gives us his long verse-paragraphs. The result of this practice of Milton is a great variety produced in the groupings and there is such a poise between language and thought, that there is never even an approach to monotony.

Use of Extra Syllables

There are a number of other ways in which variations are in- produced with great art and skill. Sometimes, though not frequently, we get an extra syllable at the end of a line as in the following:

Cornice or frieze with bossy sculptures graven

In this line, the extra syllable is ‘en’. Sometimes these extra syllables are inserted not at the end, but somewhere inside the line. At other times, he makes use of anapests (a foot of two unaccented syllables followed by a third accented syllable) as in the following from Book II:

As at the Olympian games or Pythian games

Variation in Stresses

At still other times, though rarely, both the syllables in a foot remain unaccented. One of the very frequent variations in the use of a trochee, i.e., a foot in which the stress is laid on the first syllable instead of the second. Then there is the use of a Spondee (in which both the syllables in a foot are stressed) as in the following:

Rocks, Caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death. By such variation in stresses, Milton modulates the pace of his versification to the requirements of thought and emotion and this is the sign of perfection.

Use of Spondees

To impress slowness of action or struggling or vacillating thought, Virgil expresses, himself by means of Spondees, and Milton, the most Virgilian of all English poets, has captured the trick. Thus, in the following passage, the upward progress of the Son of God and his companion is skilfully conveyed by the movement of his verse:

The heavens and all the constellations rung,

The planets in their station listening stood, 

While the bright pomp ascended jubilant.

In the last line, the first four words marshal the great procession in the solid array; the last two lift it high “Let anyone attempt to get the same upward effect with a stress, however light, laid on the last syllable of the line, or with words of fewer than three syllables apiece, and he will have to confess that, however abstruse the rules of its working may be, there is virtue in metrical cunning.”

Use of Elision and Contraction

Elision (the slurring over of an unaccented syllable) is frequently used by Milton. Thus labouring’ becomes ‘labring’ and ‘adventurous’ becomes ‘advent’rous’. Similar to Elision is contraction, another metrical device frequently used by Milton. By all these devices Milton avoids monotony and weariness and imparts a rare flexibility and ease to his versification. As Raleigh says, “His verse, even in its least admirable passages, does not sing, nor trip with regular alternate stress; its movement suggests neither dance nor song, but rather the advancing march of a body of troops skilfully handled, with incessant changes in their disposition as they pass over broken ground.” He can furnish his verse with wings or make it move slowly as it pleases. His blank verse is the verse of an inspired artist and no analysis of his prosody can do justice to the wonders of his workmanship. In the choruses of Samson Agonistes, where he reaches the top of his skill, Milton varies even the length of the line, “So he was hardly a rule left, save the iambic pattern, which he treats merely as a point of departure or reference, a background or framework to carry the variations imposed upon it by the luxuriance of a perfectly controlled art.” 

Verbal Melody

“By his deliberate attention to the element of verbal melody,” says Raleigh, “Milton gave a new character to English blank verse”. Verbal melody is a characteristic of his diction as well as verify- cation. Words are carefully chosen with reference to their sound. As already, noted above (in connection with diction), he uses long catalogues of sonorous melodies proper names. Often a proper name is modified or contracted to make it more musical. Alliteration and assonance are constantly used with this end in view. ‘Battering- engine’ and ‘beat’, ‘pennous’ and ‘plumbdowns’, ‘vast vacuity’ and ‘cloud chair’, are all examples picked up randomly from Paradise Lost. More may be gathered from practically every page of the epic. Repetition is another musical device frequently used by Milton. Thus the repetition of ‘Sweet’ in the following line,

‘Sweet is the breath of morning, her rising sweet

creates music all its own, and serves to impress the sweetness of Eve’s idyllic life. Many of Milton’s Latinisms also result from Milton’s ear for sweet-sounding, sonorous words. Thus ‘resounding alchemy’ is used for its sonorousness instead of the ordinary, “trumpets of brass”. The figure called Onomatopoeia in which the sound of words echoes their sense, is also used for the same reason. The following are good examples of Milton’s use of Onomatopoeia, as well as of his exploitation of vowel music by the use of monosyllabic words:

1. Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death.

2. Over bog, or steep, through strait or rough, dense or rare. 

3. With head, hands wings or feet, he pursues his way

And swims, or sinks or wades, or creeps or flies.

In the last two lines, especially, Onomatopoeia has been used with masterly effect.

Conclusion

In short, Milton is an inspired metrical artist who uses his chosen verse form as a master, with perfect ease and command, subordinating it to the effects he wants to create. By his use, he demonstrated the possibilities of blank verse for poetry, and in this field, none has ever excelled or even equalled him, just, as none has ever equalled Shakespeare in the use of blank verse for dramatic purposes Milton is unique in the sure and flawless perfection of his diction and versification.