By this you find I am to Millaine neer
Ally'd; but more to tempt your fury on
My life, know 'twas my valiant father took
Your brother prisoner, and presented him
Where he receiv'd his death, my father that
So oft hath humbled you in war, and made
His victories triumph almost upon
The ruines of your state.
Davenant, Love and Honour, V, iii.
When Milton composed Comus in 1634 it was natural for him to model his blank verse on the best of Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's, rather than on that of the contemporary playwrights; for his finer taste, his more delicate ear, and his classical training and tendencies would at once lead him to reject the metrical laxities of Ford, Shirley, Davenant,and the other writers of 'broken down' blank verse. And though his language shows great familiarity with the later plays of Shakespeare, especially The Tempest, he admitted comparatively few of their metrical licenses and followed in the main the versification of the Midsummer Night's Dream and the earlier tragedies. There is generally a tendency to make the line the unit—but the verse paragraph or stanza effect is also present in nearly fully developed form, as witness the opening lines of the poem—weak or feminine endings are not frequent, alexandrines very few. The 'short fit of rhyming' (ll. 495 ff.), disapproved by Dr. Johnson, would be explained partly by the tradition of the masque and partly by the model of Shakespeare's comedies.
But the great Miltonic blank verse of Paradise Lost is not a copy of any master; it is a development and a consummation of two influences, the slow maturity of Milton's mind, deepened and broadened by the Commonwealth controversies "not without dust and heat," and the exalted sublimity of the yet unattempted theme of justifying God's management of human and divine affairs. His maturity brought him his great familiarity both in matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea—for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was for rime and described it, in words not altogether clear, as consisting "only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another."[68] Apt numbers, that is, appropriate rhythms, Milton's verse certainly has; but it is the last item, the great variety of movements subordinating the line-unit, and running-on of verses into longer periods, for which his blank verse is famous. Every page of Paradise Lost contains examples; some of the finest occur in the rhetorical display of the Pandemonic Council in Book II. Note the position of the pauses in the following passage, and then compare the specimens of early blank verse given above.
Or could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heaven's purest light, yet our great enemy
All incorruptible would on his throne
Sit unpolluted, and the ethereal mould
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire,
Victorious.
II, 134-142.
On its formal side, what makes Milton's versification as unique as it is admirable, is the instinctive and yet prescient skill with which the pause is continuously varied so as to keep the whole metrical structure in movement. There are no dead lines. There are no jerks or stoppages. His movement may best be described by quoting a passage which, like many others, is at once a description and an instance. It is a
Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere
Of planets and of fixt in all her wheels
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular
Then most, when most irregular they seem,
And in their motions harmony divine.
I ask the reader most particularly to notice that these six lines, like almost any short quotation that can be made from the poem, are broken from their context. They begin in the middle of a sentence, and end in the middle of a clause. The continuous periodic movement cannot be really shown by examples, just because it is continuous and periodic. If we except the speeches, each of which by the necessity of the case is more or less a definite and detachable unit, the periods flow into one another. Like the orbit of a planet, the movement of the verse never closes its ellipse and begins again. Each of the twelve books is a single organic rhythmical structure. But one cannot very well quote a whole book.
Within that structure, the variation of pause and stress is similarly in continuous movement. As a general fact, this is instinctively felt in reading the poem; how rigorously the law of freedom is observed comes out even more surprisingly when brought to the test of figures. For movement of stress one instance may serve as a typical example. In Michael's description of the plagues of Egypt in the twelfth book, beginning—