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
Famous quotes containing the words lines, number, syllables and/or ten:
“There they lived on, those New England people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.”
—Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)
“I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for
her.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt ... [ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)