Talk:Bridges' Analysis of Paradise Lost
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I have just a brief note on some of the lines mentioned.
(1) Of high collateral glorie: him Thrones and Powers.
I see no way to scan this, according to modern linguistic templatic rules, than to have a feminine ending mid-line:
Of high collateral glorie: him Thrones and Powers.
w s w s w s <> w s w s <>
yes, "teral" in collateral is elided. Then, strong must fall on "glo" of glorie. If we were to assume that "rie" were not extrametrical, then we'd get an ungrammatical scansion as shown below:
Of high collateral glorie: him Thrones and Powers.
- w s w s w s w s w s w s
First of all, you have six feet, which is no longer pentameter. Then, the next problem is that "Pow" of Powers is a stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word; therefore, it must go in a strong position, NOT a weak position. I don't know what Bridges argues is elided other than "teral," but, according to linguistic stress, there is no where else you can have elision here, except for maybe "Powers," but that wouldn't really help his case, since "Pow" still needs to be in a strong position. Therefore, I think Bridges is wrong in his analysis, unless there's something that wasn't represented in this article. Milton's iambic pentameter practices are no different than those in earlier works.
(2) Rocks, Coves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death.
Alright, first of all, there are only five strong positions in this line. But, there are more than five -stresses- in this line. It's a linguistic distinction. "Strong positions" refers to the template, the fact that it only matters that a main-stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word is mapped into a strong position. We don't have any polysyllabic words here, so no need to worry about anything. There are, however, eight lexical stresses in this line, since each of those content words/nouns carries stress. So Bridge is using the wrong terminology.
(3) The last thing I have to comment on is about inversion. As a linguist, I would almost never expect inversion to occur in the second or fifth positions--they just aren't at the left most boundary of a higher-level metrical constituent like a cola. And it's perfectly fine that at feet 3 and 4, inversion may occur because in pentameter, this is where the cola split! That makes perfect sense; it's really no new revelation. And then I have a real problem with the claim that inversion at the beginning is for "the freshness of the rhythm." This has probably nothing to do with freshness and everything to do with the fact that it's just natural for languages to mark the left-most boundaries of higher level constituents and there's really nothing special to that. Even if there is some sort of aesthetic value, I can pretty much assure you that it's NOT for "freshness."
