Milton’s Abstract Music

MILTON'S ABSTRACT MUSIC IAlbert Cook The poets of the recent past have often wanted their personal rhythms to resemble the spoken language, or a prose not too far from cultivated speech. The bias if strong enough can lead to the rejection of blank verse itself as improper to American English. But one need not go so far as William Carlos Williams in pleading for the primacy of speech in a personal voice in order to feel cool towards Milton, whose verse is easily recognized as based on some personal rhythm quite remote from speech (or so he may seem to us; to Dr. Johnson, Milton'S blank verse was too close to the spoken langnage, verse for the eye). Milton's imperious lulling of diction and syntax towards Latin has been pondered and assessed; since sound and sense wed indissolubly in a poem, we sbould expect to find, fusing Milton's invented sense, some general harmonics of sound beyond Bridges' discrimination of his syllabic laws or Arnold Stein's subtle analysis of tone colour in Paradise Lost. A speaking voice will give varying emphasis to the accents of verse, and an accomplished poet will orchestrate these variations: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; . .. The second "cause," rising against Othello's attempt to stifle it by logically needless repetition, will be emphasized over the first "cause," as both over "soul," though these three accents stand out against (and gain firmness by contrast with) the indecision in the hovering accent on the first "it" and the second "is." The dramatic setting of this line, and the mastery of Shakespeare, enlivens the play among these accents beyond the pattern of the metre, in which all the accents are theoretically equivalent (or at least patterned more regularly than speech rhythms allow). Yet normally, in fact almost always, one can distinguish one major accent, and often three "more important" accents, in a line of verse : Vol. XXIX, No.3, April, 1960 MILTON'S ABSTRACT MUSIC Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. . . . [Possibly "bare" or "choirs," depending on interpretation.] Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Or suck'd on country pleasures, childishly.. . . Like a patient etherized upon a table... . In the gloom the gold gathers the light against it.... [Possibly "against," or even "gloom."] 371 It is a great mark of Milton's rhythm that, contrary to the practice of almost any other verse writers in English, including his own imitators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Milton carries his verse so far away from speech that one can seldom find in Paradise Lost a line where only three of the accents stand out over the other two, and never, I believe, a line in wbicb one can distinguisb a single major accent alone. Who first seduc'd them to that fowl revolt? The infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring To set himself in Glory above his Peers, He trusted to have equa!'d the most High, If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battle proud With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie With hideous ruine and combu.stion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms. If sense is necessarily the guide to the major accents, a single word cannot bere be settled on as definitely more prominent in ·stress than the otbers. Even allowing latitude of interpretation for more usual poems, primacy is still assigned to a single accent at the expense of others: if one argues tbat the first "cause" receives most stress in the line from Othello, tben the second receives less; if one argues that they both receive the same, a persuasive interpretation, tbe line is given a strikingly abnormal reading, and "soul" is stilI put into the background...