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:
“We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“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)
“We envy not the warmer clime, that lies
In ten degrees of more indulgent skies,
Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine,
Though o’er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine:
‘Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia’s Isle,
And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)