Analysis of its versification, with application of different systems.
The accentualists, as such, are not driven to equal straits unless they choose; indeed, though accentual prosody can never give an adequate account of Milton's verse, there is no reason why it should not give a partially correct one. If any one says that Milton employs a verse of five accents—these usually occurring at the even places of a normal line, but not infrequently varied in position, sometimes separated by more than one unaccented syllable, but usually by one only—he will give, in his own language and with his own limitations, a correct, though scanty and jejune, account of the thing. He will, however, in most cases be found going on, and entering upon very disputable matter. He will notice "licences," and will, in some cases, be inclined to deplore, or even denounce, the variation of accent just noted. He will also, in most cases, be found declining to accept the unaccented syllables as they stand—indeed he has no machinery ready for doing so without making them a disorderly crowd,—and will endeavour to dispose of them by some process of "elision," inventing extremely ingenious, but mostly arbitrary and sometimes self-confessedly inadequate, specifications of the employment of this. If he is of the class of accentualists who prefer the term "stress" and its applications, he will probably go much further still, and allow, or insist upon, the widest variation in the number of stresses, lines of five being indeed the average, but four, three, and, in some extreme cases, even two, being allowed.[85] Further intricate subdivisions will be found between believers in these theories who, while ruling out syllables from scansion by an elaborate system of metrical fictions, maintain that they are not to be dropped in pronunciation, and others who, as most people did unhesitatingly in the eighteenth century, as many did in the earlier nineteenth, and as a few boldly and consistently do still, drop the pronunciation altogether, spelling and pronouncing, as well as scanning, "am'rous," "om'nous," "pop'lar," "del'cate," and the like.
The foot system, on the other hand, as it always does, accepts Milton's verse exactly as it stands, takes no kind of liberty with it, and merely strives to discover its characteristics. This system finds (with the exception of a very few daring experiments, no one of which can be called wrong in principle, though there may be different opinions about the success of some of them in practice) nothing different from the general laws of English verse, as observed at all its best periods, and as visible, if only in the breach of them, at all, best and worst. Milton's normal line is a five-foot iambic:
̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄ ̆ ̄
But for these iambics he will substitute trochees or anapæsts, sometimes perhaps tribrachs, very freely; and his use of the trochee for this purpose is more lavish and more audacious than that of any other English poet, so much so that he will allow two to follow each other at the opening of the line, and frequently adopts a choriambic ending by placing one at the fourth foot. On the other hand, he seldom has the final anapæst which we found in Comus, or perhaps the Alexandrine, though sometimes there are fractional lines. By dint of these variations—of which the trisyllabic (generally anapæstic) foot is the most frequent, the most successful, and, despite objections, the most certain—he attains great variety in his line, which he increases and utilises, for one great purpose, by the same devices of pause, diction, etc., formerly noticed in Comus, but in a more accomplished manner and to a higher degree.
The purpose is this, that by these, by equally elaborate and extraordinarily successful variation of the pause, by devices of diction, and by the use of brilliantly coloured and heavily weighted proper names and of others, he may construct a verse-paragraph similar to that which Shakespeare had already accomplished, but without the special characteristics of spoken verse. He altered his methods a little—though perhaps not so much as has been sometimes thought—in Paradise Regained, and still more in Samson Agonistes, where, however, the renewed dramatic intention has to be considered. And, on the whole, especially when taken in combination with his master Shakespeare, he established not merely the freedom and order of blank verse itself, but the whole principle of equivalent substitution in English prosody.
Stanza, etc., in Shakespeare,
But it was not in blank verse only that Shakespeare and Milton played, in prosody, almost more than the part which they played in poetry generally. In their other work it is quite as true of them that, from it, all the principles of English versification could be derived by intelligent study. Shakespeare's early long poems, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece—the one in the six-line stanza, the other in rhyme-royal—rank as the greatest stanza-verse of the last decade of the sixteenth century except Spenser's; while his Sonnets are, not merely for their poetic spirit, the greatest in the English form, exhibiting remarkable individuality in the arrangement of the three quatrains, and an unmatched power of bringing the last couplet to bear suddenly, with the utmost prosodic as well as poetic effect. The largely shortened octosyllabic couplets, scattered about his plays and among the smaller (some of them technically "doubtful") poems, show equal mastery of that form, and have indeed inspired Fletcher, Wither, Milton, and all practitioners of it since. But the songs in the plays are, next to his blank verse, his greatest prosodic triumph. He has got in them all the contemporary variety and much more than the usual contemporary freedom, so that such pieces as those in The Tempest,[86] in Much Ado About Nothing, and in As You Like It[87] might, had they been attended to and understood, have saved the early critics of Tennyson and some other nineteenth-century poets from blunders about the "irregularity," "discord," "un-English character," etc., of their versification.
in Milton,
Except in this last respect (for he does not much indulge in triple-timed measures), Milton's examples are as striking, while they are more numerous. In grave stanza of purely iambic cadence but varied line-length, the ode on the Nativity is unsurpassed in our poetry. The octosyllabic couplets (with catalexis) of the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, and the already-mentioned latter part of Comus, stand at the head of their class. Lycidas, which is written in lines mainly decasyllabic, though sometimes of different length, arranged (except in the last stanza) on no identical principle, is a practically unique combination of rhyme and blank verse—the ends being sometimes left unrhymed, but generally rhymed, though on an apparently irregular system which never violates harmony, but makes—first each paragraph and then the whole poem—a piece of concerted music, a definite prosodic symphony or sonata. And lastly, the choruses of Samson Agonistes, when he had returned to rhyme, apply this system on more extensive principles[88] still, occasionally attempting quite new measures,[89] and getting the utmost possible result out of large variation of line-length in the same or in mixed cadences. Some of the experiments are less successful than others, and, on the whole, Samson displays a harder style of verse than the earlier poems; but it is equally important as exhibiting the true principles of English prosody. Indeed, when Milton had published it, he may be said to have closed the formative period of our versification, not in the sense that he had not left infinite things to be done, but that he had, after Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, almost completely indicated the principles of doing them.