Bridges' Analysis of Paradise Lost

In his book Milton's Prosody, Robert Bridges undertakes a detailed analysis of the prosody of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Bridges shows that there are no lines in Paradise Lost with fewer than ten syllables, and furthermore, that with a suitable definition of elision, there are no mid-line extra-metrical syllables. He also demonstrates that the stresses may fall at any point in the line, and that although most lines have the standard five stresses, there are examples of lines with only three and four stresses. All this amounts to a statement that Milton was writing a form of Syllabic verse. Bridges explains this in historical terms by observing that Milton followed the practice of Geoffrey Chaucer, who — in Bridges' view — adopted the Romance prosody of French verse, which was syllabic, having itself derived from the practice of Latin poets who through a corruption of Greek quantitative meters also counted syllables. Bridges notes that the approach Milton takes in Paradise Lost represents a certain tightening of the rules, compared to his earlier work, such as Comus, in which he allowed himself the Shakespearian 'liberty' of a feminine ending before a caesura.

Bridges' Approach

Bridges takes an empirical approach to his analysis of the blank verse of Paradise Lost, and tabulates all the exceptions to the regular iambic pentameter line, although he avoids this classical description of the line, preferring to describe it as a 'decasyllabic line on...
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