'Service is Perfect Freedom': Paradox and Prosodic Style in Paradise Lost

Abstract

Traditional foot-substitution prosody is demonstrably unable to do justice to the rhythm of the less straightforward lines in Milton's Paradise Lost, and this essay argues for an approach based on the prosodic theories of Derek Attridge. Through comparison with excerpts from early narrative blank verse by Surrey, Gascoigne and Marlowe, and a broader comparison with the verse of Shakespeare's later plays, it is shown that the prosody of Paradise Lost is a deliberate fresh start, characterised by a paradoxical combination of austerity and liberty. For example, in Milton, unlike Shakespeare, the integrity of the individual line is heightened, while Milton's strict metrical norms are disrupted in a mere handful of lines, and other aberrations are few. In the later Shakespeare, one line in five is prosodically aberrant, in Paradise Lost one line in 265 (and in the course of the discussion, every single aberrant line in the poem is examined). Nevertheless, the appeal to freedom in Milton's note on the verse is justified, by the unusual flexibility of movement the poet finds within the prosodic norms, by the expressive aptness of this rhythmic variety, by his readiness to push the rhythms to, and occasionally beyond, the limits, and by the unprecedented freedom of his enjambment. The treatment of the fall in Paradise Lost grows out of great, traditional paradoxes where bondage and liberation interact: the felix culpa, the reconciliation of free will with divine foreknowledge, and finding freedom in service of the divine. In the very detail of its rhythms, the epic brings alive the central paradox of freedom through service.

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