Milton's Prosody, with a chapter on Accentual Verse and Notes is a book by Robert Bridges. It was first published by Oxford University Press in 1889, and a final revised edition was published in 1921.
Bridges begins with a detailed empirical analysis of the blank verse of Paradise Lost, and then examines the changes in Milton's practice in his later poems Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. A third section deals with 'obsolete mannerisms'. The final section of the book presents a new system of prosody for accentual verse.
Bridges had been asked by Henry Beeching, his local vicar, to write a preface for an edition of Paradise Lost that Beeching was preparing for sixth-form pupils. Beeching wanted something to counter the prevailing da-DUM-da-DUM style of reading, that artificially distorted words to fit the regular pattern of the iambic pentameter rhythm. When Gerard Manley Hopkins visited Bridges in mid August 1886, they discussed Bridges' work on the preface.[1] The contents of the book evolved over decades through several published versions:[2]
(A combined revision of the 1887 & 1889 works.)
(Classical Meters in English Verse is not directly related to Milton's Prosody, but was appended to the book because of Bridges's interest in the topic and "as a memorial to Stone's untimely death".[3])
(3 brief papers which grew out of the study.)
(The definitive edition, revised, with Classical Meters... removed, and a new chapter on Accentual Verse.)
Bridges shows that:
Thus according to Bridges' analysis Milton was writing a form of syllabic verse. At the time this was a controversial thesis. George Saintsbury disagreed with Bridges, and stated that Milton had simply been using standard extra-metrical liberties, but Bridges was able to answer this objection by showing that every single instance in the poem of such a variation from the norm could be explained by his natural definition of elision; this would be extremely unlikely to be the case if the poet had simply been allowing himself extra-metrical variations as described by Saintsbury. Bridges took the very restricted range of Milton's variations to be a proof of his thesis.
Bridges showed that Milton further broadened his concept of elision in his later works. Bridges' investigation of Milton's twelve syllable lines led him to ideas of prosody embodied in his own Neo-Miltonic syllabics.
Bridges discusses the obsolete practice of recession of accent. The rule being that "disyllabic adjectives and participles accented on the last syllable will shift their accent back if they occur before a noun accented on the first syllable."[4]
Bridges bases much of his account of Recession of Accent on the work of Alexander Schmidt's analysis of Shakespeare's practice. Schmidt takes, for example, an adjective such as 'complete' and shows that it is used with the normal accent on the second syllable in lines such as:
He is complete in feature and in mind (Gent. ii 4.73)And then proceeds to find numerous examples where the stress is changed according to the rule, thus:
A maid of grace and complete majesty. (L.L.L. i. 1.137)and
Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st. (Rich 3rd iv. 4.189)
Bridges lists a number of clear example of recession of accent in Milton's earlier work, such as:
The sublime notion, and high mysterybut then goes on to note the very frequent occurrence of the rhythm ⌣ ⌣ – – (that is, xx//) in Milton's verse, a rhythm that Milton would have taken from Shakespeare, as at the end of the following line from A Midsummer Night's Dream:
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green cornMilton's frequent use of this rhythm undermines any case for supposing recession of accent played a role in Milton's later metrical practice. Bridges argues that Milton excluded the 'licence' of recession of accent because it would have given rise to uncertainty about where a stress should lie. He observes that the words complete, extreme, serene, and sublime occur twenty-four times in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, and in each case the accent is on the second syllable, whereas each of these words appears only once in Comus and there 'suffers' recession of accent.[5]
In this final section, Bridges describes a prosody of accentual verse.
Bridges classifies the following types of syllable (alternative symbols have been added for browsers that do not display symbols correctly):
| Symbol | Alternative | Syllable Type | Description | |
| ⋀ | ^ | Stressed | Syllable carries the stress | |
| – | – | Heavy | Is genuinely long, slows down the reading. For example: broad, bright, down. | |
| ⌣ | ~ | Light | All syllables with short vowels, even those that would be long 'by position' in Classical terms. That is, if the consonants around a short vowel do not genuinely retard the syllable then it will be counted 'light'. Light also includes all classically short syllables. For example the second syllables of 'brighter' and 'brightest' are both light, despite the consonants in the latter. |
Bridges also has a shorter version of the 'Light' symbol for 'very short' syllables. We can use ⌵ ('.').
Bridges lists six "rules" for accentual verse. He states (p. 89) "These 'laws' are merely the tabulation of what my ear finds in English stressed or accentual verse". The rules are as follows:
Bridges lists the common stress units or feet:
| 1st | Bare Stress | ⋀ | ^ | |
| 2nd | The 2 falling disyllabic feet | ⋀– | ^- | |
| ⋀⌣ | ^~ | |||
| 3rd | The 2 rising disyllabic feet | –⋀ | -^ | |
| ⌣⋀ | ~^ | |||
| 4th | The britannics or mid-stress trisyllabics | ⌣⋀⌣ | ~^~ | |
| –⋀⌣ | -^~ | |||
| ⌣⋀– | ~^- | |||
| –⋀– | -^- | |||
| 5th | The falling and rising trisyllabics | ⌣⌣⋀ | ~~^ | |
| ⋀⌣⌣ | ^~~ | |||
| 6th | The quadrisyllabics | ⌣⋀⌣⌣ | ~^~~ | |
| –⋀⌣⌣ | -^~~ | |||
| ⌣⌣⋀⌣ | ~~^~ | |||
| ⌣⌣⋀– | ~~^- | |||
| 7th | The five syllable foot | ⌣⌣⋀⌣⌣ | ~~^~~ |