88 chapter 3
commentators) frequently misunderstood rules of Milton’s prosody in Pa ra-
dise Lost. As a guide to the young student the poetical elisions are marked in
the text by an apostrophe.”^22 To mark how Bridges imagined Milton pro-
nouncing his text aloud, he, like Hopkins, used an additional mark on the
poem so that the student could perform the poem as Bridges imagined it. But
it was not only an apostrophe that Bridges provided to aid with reading. In his
first attempt at classifying Milton’s system, Bridges gave a list of typical extra-
metrical syllables as well as four examples of the way that Milton’s prosody fell
under a rule that corrected and standardized the variety of elisions found in
Shakespeare. He wrote, “[t]hese, which were common under Shakespeare,
Milton in P. L. reduced, and brought under law”(3, emphasis mine). Bridges’s
first goal in this early version of the text is to assert that a metrical law can be
extrapolated from an intense reading of Milton’s prosody; as a pedagogic prac-
tice, therefore, Bridges is showing students that a poet’s use of meter adheres to
his or her own laws rather than a larger, inherent design in the language.
By writing that Milton was aware of and practiced his own law of elision in
Paradise Lost, Bridges was engaging directly with John Addington Symonds,
whose essay “The Blank Verse of Milton” had appeared in The Fortnightly Re-
view^23 as well as in his collection Sketches and Studies of Southern Europe in
- Rather than defining blank verse, Symonds’s argument resembles that of
Saintsbury, asserting (without much investigation):
[b]lank verse has been the metre of genius, that it is only used success-
fully by indubitable poets, and that it is no favorite in a mean, con-
tracted, and unimaginative age. The freedom of the Renaissance created
it in England. The freedom of our own century has reproduced it. Blank
verse is a type and symbol of our national literary spirit—uncontrolled
by precedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection
at intervals by an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration.^24Symonds reclaimed Milton from Samuel Johnson’s accusation of “haste” and
concluded that his erratic substitutions must be read “for the sense” and that it
would take “the work of much study and prolonged labor.”^25 Bridges’s pro-
longed labor produced, in this first instance, four detailed laws of elision and
two laws of contraction as well as a detailed summary of the stress patterns of
Milton’s verse and the possibilities of inverted feet, plus a list of all the possible
positions of the caesura. Taken together, all of these details provide the rules
under which the poem should be read,^26 each verse contracting in specific ways
to the particular rules that, taken together, make the verses seem much more
syllabic in nature than the free-substitution, foot-based model that Symonds
proposes. Like Bridges’s own poems, his evaluation of Milton shows that the
genius of the poet proceeded according to a series of laws, of difficulties over-
come, and it was this genius that symbolized the beauty of the national meter.