But first the lawless tyrant, who denies
To know their God, or message to regard,
Must be compelled by signs and judgments dire—
the detailed roll of the plagues is all threaded on the word must. It recurs nine times, with studied and intricate variation of its place in the line: this is, taken by order, in the first, eighth, fifth, fourth, fifth, fifth, first, third, and fourth syllable. Again, as regards variation, in the whole ten thousand lines of the Paradise Lost there are less than five-and-twenty instances of the pause coming at the same point in the line for more than two lines consecutively. Facts like these are the formal index of what is the great organic principle of Milton's verse. That is, that like all organic structures, it is incalculable; it cannot be reduced to a formula.... His rhythm is perpetually integrating as it advances; and not only so, but at no point can its next movement be predicted, although tracing it backwards we can see how each phrase rises out of and carries on the rhythm of what was before it, how each comes in not only rightly, but as it seems inevitably. This secret he inherited from no English predecessor and transmitted to no follower.[69]
One may surely say that Milton extracted from blank verse all its possibilities of variety and movement so far as his subject matter permitted. He is lyrical, dramatic, didactic, and of course epic, in turn. He even showed that it is possible to imitate hollowly his own "planetary wheelings"—as though the instruments kept on playing and the music ceased.[70]
Since Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, though various poets have adapted it to their own uses, blank verse has shown only one significant development, the conversational, or so-called 'talking,' style. In the eighteenth century Milton's mannerisms dominated nearly all blank verse, both for good and for evil. What freedom Thomson allowed himself he got from Milton; most of Cowper's thin grandiosity he took from Milton; and much also of Wordsworth's false and empty elaboration which make the Prelude and Excursion so dull in places—the whole tribe of verses of which
And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn
is the pilloried example—came from the Miltonic tradition. Keats fell partially into the error, but was wise enough to recognize it. Shelley, with much of Milton's intensity and somewhat too of his sublimity, could successfully follow the great stride and at the same time preserve his own idiom. Tennyson, keeping both the freedom and as much of the "continuous planetary movement" as was consistent with his themes, softened the metre—weakened it, some will say—by his decorative tendency and indulgence in only half-concealed virtuosity.[71] And the famous Oxus ending of Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum is a studied reproduction of the Miltonic music in a lower key. But it was Landor who, taking a hint perhaps from Milton's unadorned didacticism of Paradise Regained and also from the straightforward verse used on occasion by the Elizabethan dramatists, showed the way to what has often been called a strictly contemporary development of blank verse, the talking style. Since this is less familiar than most of the phenomena of blank verse, it will require fuller illustration.
The uneven line which separates blank verse and prose is easily apparent in such a passage as the following from Much Ado about Nothing (V, i)—
Leon.Some haste, my lord!—well, fare you well, my lord:—
Are you so hasty now—Well, all is one.
D. Pedro.Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old man.
Ant.If he could right himself with quarrelling,
Some of us would lie low.