The Sound of Paradise Lost

Why you should read Milton aloud

I’ve just finished Paradise Lost, following Sympathetic Opposition's reading schedule. I began by mostly wading through it silently, but from about halfway through, I spent more time listening to it read aloud, and reading it aloud myself. And it has become clear to me what should have been obvious beforehand—how superior the poem is when you can hear it.

I’m not the only one to have come to this conclusion. Here’s Ian McKellen, speaking about a BBC radio adaptation in which he played Milton:

I’ve always found that Paradise Lost gives me indigestion. Other poets too—Tennyson etc. But, I have to say, one of the great rewards [of acting in this adaptation] is a renewed faith in this. This is a great poem, and of course, written by a blind man, it has special relevance to a radio audience. It is all in the sound of the words, not in the look of the words on the page. And I think that’s the revelation to me—that if you speak Paradise Lost out loud, you’ll begin to recognise what a great poem it is.¹

But why should McKellen or I be surprised? It was, as he says, dictated by a blind man, it is (as all Western epic verse must be) a conscious response to the oral poetry of Homer,² and above all it takes the form of blank verse, the natural language of the English stage.³ Of course it should be better aloud, free to drift, elastic, and rising on occasion to great heights of rhetoric.

I will try here to understand not just why it should be, but why it actually is better as an oral rather than written poem. But first, here’s Ian Richardson to demonstrate that it is, with Milton’s invocation to his muse at the very start of Book I:

‘The sound-board breathes’

This much is clear as soon as you hear certain passages: Milton chooses words whose sounds reflect the story. He uses chewy words when he wants you to chew, and smooth words when he wants you to glide. Look first at his description of the opening of the gates of heaven:⁴

Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving⁵

Vowels and soft consonants: we hear that very ‘harmonious sound’ he’s talking about. Now examine his description of the opening of the gates of hell:

On a sudden open fly,
With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.⁶

More and harsher consonants: combinations of letters much harder to fit your mouth around—if you don’t believe me, try. In bringing explicit attention to this ‘jarring sound’, he perhaps loses some subtlely. But he does demonstrate the consciousness of such techniques, which, reading the poem in your head, are easy to miss.

‘To extend his sentence’

If you listen to rhyming verse, it is very easy to tell where each line break is—not only does it follow the ‘jingling sound of endings’,⁷ as Milton puts it, but more often than not it is end-stopped (that is, the written line coincides exactly with the unit of sense). This is almost never the case in Paradise Lost, where the text can rarely be sensibly divided into units of equal length, and where the most natural divisions tend to come mid-line. However, the line is still there. You can see it, and you can (just) hear it—even in the great interpretations, you will note that, despite the constant enjambement, there is often a subtle gap before the first word in a line, and a subtle emphasis on it. The effect this has is one of syncopation. There is a gentle pulse, slow but regular, created by the line breaks. The stronger audible rhythm—that marked by the gaps between phrases—is less regular, and generally misaligned with this pulse. But sometimes, either by the necessity of the end of a paragraph, or to mark out some specific idea, they synchronise, creating a resolution of sorts:

Did I request thee, maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious Garden? As my will
Concurred not to my being, it were but right
And equal to reduce me to my dust,⁸

Each of these lines has a natural caesura (i.e. pause), until the final one, which stretches out the clause to the last syllable, unifying in the one word ‘dust’ the end of phrase, and line, and man.

‘Hallowed feet, and warbling flow’

When English-speaking schoolchildren are first introduced to formal metres, they learn about the iamb (that is, a pair of syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second stressed), which, put alongside four other iambs in a line, forms the pentameter we call blank verse. If they study Latin or Greek (or possibly Longfellow), they may learn their anapests, dactyls and spondees, but otherwise it’s mostly iambs, iambs and more iambs, with the main exception being the fabled ‘trochaic inversion’. A trochee is the opposite of an iamb (stressed-unstressed), and, so established wisdom goes, sometimes replaces the first iamb in a line to create emphasis. For instance,

What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;⁹

Here, Juliet makes the standard metre extremely clear by the five repeated ‘nor’s on the unstressed syllable of five successive feet, and it stays clear right up until it’s broken with ‘What’s in a name?’, a phrase you might have heard and, notably for us, one which starts with a stressed-unstressed pair. Shakespeare sets up and then breaks the rhythm of her speech so that you pay attention to this cry of social anguish, the central question of the play.

This is all very fine, but my contention is that we have a fuller way to describe that metric break than as a trochaic inversion. For Shakespeare hasn’t built up just to the first two syllables of the line, but to all four, a (stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed) foot that is called a choriamb.

The Harvard Guide to Prosody has the choriamb on its list of feet that ‘are found in Greek and Latin verse, but are much more rarely used to describe English prosody’¹⁰ and that’s right, but it’s also unfortunate. English verse gets so much more intelligible when you treat trochaic inversions not simply as an inversion of stress, the equivalent of a Scotch snap in a strathspey,¹¹ but as part of larger units, often choriambs, that mark the beginning, end, or zenith of a portion of text, and mark it not just by rhythmic inversion, but also by their length. Note therefore, that I am not talking merely about matching the scansion to the semantic units (although to think they are entirely separable is naive), but about reflecting the larger contours of metre—those that stretch beyond the foot and even beyond the line. And it is precisely these larger contours which you miss if you aren’t reading the poem aloud.

Milton uses choriambs over and over again to mark the beginning and ending of larger phrases and sentences, or to draw out important asides.¹² Indeed, he does this at the very beginning, as we just heard.

OF man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heav'nly Muse[...]

Milton has been noted for his unorthodox word order, and starting sentences (let alone whole epics) with ‘Of’ certainly is an example of that. But it serves a clear function: it sets up a tension that needs to be resolved.¹³ What of man’s first disobedience? What of the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world? The resolution, when it arrives after five lines of iambs,¹⁴ takes the form of a choriamb: ‘Sing, heav’nly Muse’. The rhetoric, of course, is Homer’s, but ‘ἄειδε’ and ‘ἔννεπε’, the Homeric equivalents for ‘sing’, are the second and third word of the Iliad and Odyssey respectively, while Milton has left it until the sixth line. What he’s done is create a sense of anacrusis, an extended ‘upbeat’ to the whole poem, and he marks the ‘downbeat’ proper with the strike of those four syllables. ¹⁵

And again, he uses this technique at the precise moment of Eve’s fall:

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate;
Earth felt the wound[…]¹⁶

Milton marks this cosmically jarring moment with two lines whose sounds insist on a slow, angular reading. The second of these ends with two repeated ‘she’s, a parallel device to the repeated ‘nor’s in Romeo and Juliet, that serve to highlight the iambs just before we hit the fateful choriamb: ‘Earth felt the wound’

‘Some orator renowned’

I think I will make no great claim if I say that good rhetoric works better when spoken. Since much of Milton’s life spent writing radical political tracts, you will consider it no great claim either that Paradise Lost is full of good rhetoric. There are magnificent speeches made by everybody from God downwards, but the best of all are those made by Satan. Listen to Richardson read the first such, spoken to fellow fallen angel Beëlzebub:¹⁷

I will not draw attention to the initial choriambs at ‘Myriads though bright’, ‘Joyned with me once’ or ‘All is not lost’. But I will draw attention to the overall shape of the speech, the build up and climax, heightened by the anaphoric (repeated) ‘And’s at the beginning of adjacent lines (‘And study of revenge’, ‘And courage’, and ‘And what is else’), but tempered with the pitiful asides (‘that were low indeed,/ That were an ignominy and shame’), and despairing questions ‘[W]ho knew/ the force of those dire arms?’. And I might tentatively suggest that the prevalence of certain similar adjectives —’innumerable’; ‘unconquerable’; ‘immortal’; ‘irreconcilable’—serve to characterise the speaker in his impotence. This is merely the first speech of many in the work, and not only do they all together have a different, dramatic, tone, but the different personae have distinct voices that you might miss in the comparative monotony that is your internal realisation.

(If you are particularly fond of capital-R Rhetoric, see Appendix II).

‘The glory may be thine of ending’

I will admit that much of this is aspirational. The natural contours in a given passage can be hard to recognise, the first time you attempt to read Pārádíse Lōst. I have come across several professional readings that frequently miss the mark, and those that don’t, such as Richardson’s and McKellen’s, have the benefit of being easily rehearsed fragments. Moreover, I am not under the illusion that most people have the time and space to devote to reading the whole poem aloud. But if you are only reading a bit, perhaps to try to find out what the whole deal is with Milton, you should read it aloud. And if you are reading the whole poem, you should at least start off reading it aloud, so your mental imitations will more closely resemble what he was going for. And when you get to really colourful moments, you should stop and read it aloud. Sometimes you will go wrong and find yourself off-metre, or stranded with a hanging fragment of a sentence you had thought ended. But at other times you will find yourself in total alignment with Milton, and, for a moment, you will feel yourself soar.

I suppose there are also audiobooks.

With thanks to Sympathetic Opposition, and everyone following her schedule on Twitter, without which circle I would still be putting off this read.

Appendix I—How to read Paradise Lost aloud

I am not remotely qualified to give advice here, so feel very free to ignore it, but it seems a little churlish to say ‘you must by all means do this thing, but I cannot tell you how’.

1. Try some of it on your own. Of course, you should read it to other people as well if they want to listen, but the added complication of playing to the crowd—though it certainly has its merits—does make it harder to get at the real essence of the text. At least spend some time with some of the text in an empty house or on a deserted river bank or train platform. Listen to yourself. Where there is high rhetoric, act it out fearlessly. And where you haven’t given a passage justice the first time around, or want to understand it better, or simply enjoyed it that much, you can do it all over again.

2. Pay attention to the metre (but don’t overemphasise it). The metre is your guide to the natural shape of Milton’s words—where the flow of iambs is interrupted, it is usually for a reason. More than that, simply by paying attention, you can start to appreciate the simple melodiousness of his language. On the other hand, you will destroy that very quality the moment you start to make artificial the natural sway of the poem.

3. Find a natural pace, then vary it (quite a lot). Remember that the text largely tells you when to pause (with punctuation and meaning), and when to slow down (with word choice), and you should follow those implicit directions exactly. When it is doing neither of those, use a relatively free-flowing speed. This is the backdrop from which those slower moments are brought out.

4. Find a natural volume, then vary it (just a little bit). In the fallen angels’ speeches, you can vary it more, but if you think how long the poem is overall, you may realise that dramatic second-to-second crescendos can become tiring, as does non-stop shouting.

5. Scan (and scan) a line ahead. Try to note where the current phrase is building. Is there a stress on the first syllable of the next line? Spot any elisions¹⁸ and contractions¹⁹ that might catch you off guard. Whether you pronounce them in accordance with the strict metre or with modern usage is up to you, but if adding the extra syllable you should still keep the intended contour of the phrase.

6. Don’t be afraid to take long pauses. If you keep up a natural flow in between them, longer pauses can sound natural, and not only provide rhythmic variation, but also give you a moment to take in the meaning of the words.

7. Create shapes within shapes. The contours of a phrase are contained within the contours of a sentence. The contours of a sentence may be contained within the contours of a speech. And the lines may have their own contours. They should all be audible, differing only in scale—the longer contours afford you greater variation than the shorter ones.

8. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything.²⁰ Paradise Lost is semantically dense, with very few filler phrases. Sometimes it is ambiguous, and sometimes simply complicated. Working out the precise relationship of each word to the others is good, but best done separately to experiencing the sound. It will be rare that you miss anything truly vital on first hearing. If you are finding yourself completely lost, then choose a passage and work out precisely what it means before reading it aloud—actually, everyone should use this method, but it may not be realistic to apply it to the whole poem.

Appendix II—An example from a speech in Paradise Lost of every rhetorical device listed by Wikipedia

Unless you’re reading this to help with school, you should almost certainly ignore it. The strength of Milton’s text is not in fact that you can label it in Greek, and in any case this list gives no indication of which techniques he uses once and which you’ll find a thousand times. Nonetheless:

Sonic devices

• Alliteration: ‘Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote’ (Adam, Bk IX, l. 901)

• Assonance: ‘Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,/ Though thither doomed?’ (Satan, Bk IV, ll. 889-90)

• Consonance: ‘over fields and waters, as in air/ Smooth sliding without step’ (Adam, Bk VIII, ll. 301-2)

• Cacophony: ‘fate shall yield/ To fickle chance, and chaos judge the strife’ (Mammon, Bk II, ll. 232-3)

• Onomatopeia: ‘and his altar breathes/ ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers’ (Mammon, Bk II, ll. 244-5)

Word repetition

• Anadiplosis: ‘will and reason (reason is also choice)’ (The Father, Bk III, l. 108)

• Conduplicatio: ‘God saw the light was good;/ And light from darkness by the hemisphere/ Divided: light the day, and darkness night,/ He named.’ (Raphael, Bk VII, ll. 249-51)

• Anaphora: ‘Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more;/ Go in thy native innocence’ (Adam, Bk IX, ll. 372-3)

• Epistrophe: ‘the sun’s orb, made porous to receive/ And drink the liquid light, firm to retain/ Her gathered beams, great palace now of light./ Hither, as to their fountain, other stars/Repairing in their golden urns draw light.’ (Raphael, Bk VII, ll. 361-5)

• Symploce: ‘How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost’ (Adam, Bk IX, l. 900)

• Epanalepsis: ‘So man, as is most just,/ Shall satisfy for man’ (The Father, Bk III, ll. 294-5)

• Epizeuxis: ‘never from my heart; no, no’ (Adam, Bk IX, l. 913)

• Antanaclasis: ‘whose fruitful womb/ Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons,/ Than with these various fruits’ (Raphael, Bk V, ll. 388-90)

• Diacope: ‘And to our seed (O hapless seed!) derived’ (Adam, Bk X, l. 965')

Word relation

• Antithesis: ‘Friendly to man, far from deceit or guile’ (Eve, Bk IX, l. 772)

• Antimetabole: ‘Man is to live, and all things live for man’ (Adam, Bk XI, l. 161)

• Chiasmus: ‘no unharmonious mixture foul,/ Eject him, tainted now; and purge him off,/ As a distemper’ (The Father, Bk XI, ll. 51-3)²¹

• Asyndeton: ‘Hear, all ye angels, progeny of light,/ Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers’ (The Father, Bk V, ll. 600-1)

• Polysyndeton: ‘Anger, and obstinacy, and hate, and guile’ (God, Bk X, l. 114)

• Auxesis: ‘hours, or days, or months, or yeares’ (Raphael, Bk VIII, l. 69)

• Catacosmesis: ‘In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den’ (Raphael, Bk VII, l. 458)

• Oxymoron: ‘But I shall die a living death?’ (Adam, Bk X, l. 788)

• Zeugma: ‘What hinders then/ To reach, and feed at once both body and mind?’ (Eve, Bk IX, ll. 778-9)

Discourse level

• Amplification: ‘who reason for their law refuse—/Right reason for their law, and for their king’ (The Father, Bk VI, ll. 41-2)

• Pleonasm: ‘man disobeying,/ Disloyal, breaks his fealty, and sins’ (The Father, Bk III, ll. 203-4)

• Antanagoge: ‘well may we labour still to dress/ This garden, still to tend plant, herb and flower,/ Our pleasant task enjoined, but till more hands/ Aid us, the work under our labour grows’ (Eve, Bk IX, ll. 205-9)

• Apophasis: ‘I would not cease/ To wearie him with my assiduous cries’ (Adam, Bk XI, ll. 309-10)

• Aporia: ‘Did I request thee, maker, from my clay/ To mould me man?’ (Adam, Bk X, ll. 743-4)

• Diasyrmus: ‘Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey’ (God, Bk X, l. 145)

• Derision: ‘O loss of one in heaven to judge of wise’ (Gabriel, Bk IV, l. 904)

• Enthymeme: ‘God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;’ (Satan, Bk IX, l. 700)

• Hyperbole: ‘thou to me/ Art all things under heaven’ (Eve, Bk XII, ll. 617-8)

• Hypophora: ‘Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand?/ Thou hadst;’ (Satan, Bk IV, ll. 66-7)

• Innuendo: ‘such joy thou took’st/ With me in secret that my womb conceived’ (Sin, Bk II, ll. 765-6)

• Metanoia: ‘thou didst not much gainsay,/ Nay didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss’ (Eve, Bk IX, ll. 1158-9)

• Procatalepsis: ‘But perhaps/ The way seems difficult and steep to scale/ With upright wing against a higher foe./ Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench/ Of that forgetful lake benumb not still,/ That in our proper motion we ascend/ Up to our native seat’ (Moloch, Bk II, ll. 70-6)

• Understatement: ‘I miss thee here,/ Not pleased’ (God, Bk X, ll. 104-5)

Irony and Imagery

• Irony: ‘Courageous chief’ (Raphael, Bk IV, l. 920)

• Metaphor: ‘O sacred, wise and wisdom-giving plant’ (Satan, Bk IX, l. 679)

• Personification: ‘that this new comer, Shame,/ There sit not, and reproach us as unclean’ (Adam, Bk IX, ll. 1097-8)

• Simile: ‘I led her blushing like the Morn:’ (Adam, Bk VIII, l. 511)

• Metonymy: ‘to alarm,/ Though inaccessible, his fatal throne’ (Moloch, Bk II, ll. 103-4)

• Synecdoche: ‘till younger hands ere long/ Assist us’ (Adam, Bk IX, ll. 246-7)

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0NvauAHMnk

2. Virgil’s Aeneid, which is not oral poetry, is the closer model, but I think the point is still valid—and even in Virgil various Homeric devices make clear the influence of the spoken word.

3. The Victorian scholar Walter Raleigh writes this:

His courage and originality are witnessed also by the metre that he chose for his poem. To us blank verse seems the natural metre for a long serious poem. Before Milton’s day, except in the drama, it had only once been so employed—in an Elizabethan poem of no mark or likelihood, called A Tale of Two Swannes. While Milton was writing Paradise Lost the critics of his time were discussing whether the rhymed couplet or some form of stanza was fitter for narrative poetry, and whether the couplet or blank verse better suited the needs of drama. (Milton, 1900, p179)

4. This particular example is lifted straight from Raleigh again, but it is so clear I couldn’t not use it.

5. Book VII, ll. 205-7

6. Book II, ll. 879-82

7. This is from a preamble to the poem. I’ll put the full text here, because it makes my argument for me. The poet is explicit that what he cares about is how his verse sounds:

THE measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial, and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

8. Book X, ll. 743-8

9. Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene ii, ll. 42-5

10. https://poetry.harvard.edu/guide-prosody

11. A strathspey is a Scottish dance tune characterised by inverted (i.e. short-long) dotted rhythms. Think of the ‘bonnie, bonnie’ in ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’.

12. At other times he uses a slightly different construction, such as a trochee and an amphibrach (‘Dove-like, sat’st brooding’; ‘Winged with red lightning’), and really this system should include all the ways in which he creates longer metrical units that start with a stressed syllable, but I’m erring on the side of clarity here.

13. Musically speaking, I think what this ‘of’ resembles most clearly is a dominant pedal, hanging underneath the rest of the phrase so that the listener doesn’t feel home until we can make grammatical sense of it.

14. Some people like to stress the ‘first’ in line 1, which means you’d only have four and a half lines of iambs, but those people are mostly wrong. ‘Man’ is the key word, referring here to Adam and then later to Jesus in contrast, and setting the poem in time after the angelic fall.

15. Virgil also leaves the invocation to his muse until a few lines in, but he starts ‘arma virumque cano…’ (‘I sing of arms and the man…’), so there isn’t the same tension.

16. Book IX, ll. 780-2

17. Book I, ll. 84-124

18. An elision is when two syllables with adjacent vowels (or sometimes with a soft consonant such as ‘l’ between them) scan as one. For instance, in line 18 of Book I (‘Before all temples the upright heart and pure’), ‘the up-’ scans as one stressed syllable. If you are using an unmodernised edition, it may actually be written as ‘th’up-’, in which case you need not worry about missing it, although you still need to decide how to read it.

19. There are a few words which were usually one syllable for Milton but two for us, and even for non-poetic use in his day. ‘Heaven’ and ‘spirit’ are almost always ‘heav’n’ and ‘sp’rit’. Again, they may already be marked in your edition.

20. This was a sore point for noted Milton detractor TS Eliot, who said

‘To extract everything possible from Paradise Lost, it would seem necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely for the sound, and second for the sense. The full beauty of his long periods can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with the meaning as well; and for the pleasure of the ear the meaning is hardly necessary, except in so far as certain key-words indicate the emotional tone of the passage’. (Source)

But I think CS Lewis understood Milton better when he wrote in his magnificent ‘Preface to Paradise Lost’ of

this melting down of the ordinary units of speech, this plunge back into something more like the indivisible, flowing quality of immediate experience. (p46)

This idea is in turn best understood in the context of Lewis’ rejection of all kinds of line by line dissection:

In the sweep of recitation no individual line is going to count for very much. The pleasure which moderns chiefly desire from printed poetry is ruled out anyway. You cannot ponder over single lines and let them dissolve on the mind like lozenges. That is the wrong way of using this sort of poetry. It is not built up of isolated effects; the poetry is in the paragraph, or the whole episode. To look for single, ‘good’ lines is like looking for single ‘good’ stones in a cathedral. (p20)

21. 'Distemper’ literally means ‘bad mixture’.