Lines Where The Number of Syllables Is Not Ten
Bridges describes the cases where there are:
- less than 10 syllables
- more than 10 syllables
He notes that there are no examples in Paradise Lost of a line having less than ten syllables, other than X.827 as it appeared in the first edition. It was corrected to a ten syllable line in the 1647 edition. He also notes that Milton would have been aware of Chaucer's practice of omitting the first unaccented syllable on rare occasions.
The section on where there are more than ten syllables in a line is mainly taken up with a detailed description of elision; see Robert Bridges' Theory of Elision for more details of this. He does categorize lines with extra syllables thus:
- lines with an extra syllable (or syllables) at the end
- lines with an extra syllable mid-line
Read more about this topic: Bridges' Analysis Of Paradise Lost
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