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Milton's Participial Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Seymour Chatman
Seymour Chatman*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The English participles, present and past, are best interpreted grammatically as transformations from underlying sentences in which they were regular predicates. Interesting ambiguities and quasi-ambig-ities sometimes occur in Milton as a result of these and related transformations. Present participles tend to be active, narrative-furthering devices; past participles, expository, historical devices. Milton's practice changed from a heavier use of the present to a heavier use of the past participle. This is clear evidence of his growing Latinity. One esthetic consequence was a more compact exposition than had characterized earlier narrative poetry, with a greater density of historical implication. The heavy use of past participles also coincided well with the philosophical intention of Paradise Lost of explaining God's ways to man, since many times the implicit (but deleted) subject of the past participle is “God.” Thus God tends to be grammatically, as well as philosophically, omnipresent though hidden.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968, pp. 1386 - 1399
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1957, rev. ed. 1964), pp. 5–6, 11.

2. Miles, Eras and Modes, pp. 13, 16.

3. H. Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English (Gronin-gen, 1928), I, 504, calls them “intermediate between verbs and adjectives.”

4. The suffix -al in this word and others like it (nominal, verbal, adverbial) refers to the parts of speech as syntactically rather than morphologically marked.

5. See the work of Noam Chomsky for definitions of this grammatical concept, especially Syntactic Structures ('s-Gravenhage, 1955), and “A Transformational Approach to Syntax,” in Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English (Austin, 1962). An introduction to the subject can be found in H. A. Gleason, Linguistics and English Grammar (New York, 1965), pp. 222–298.

6. Chomsky, “Transformational Approach,” p. 148.

7. Compare Cloth'd with transcendent brightness (l.86), rackt with deep despare (I.126), Thunder / Wing'd with red Lightning (i.174-175), but also swallow'd up in endless misery (i-142), amerc't / Of Heav'n (i.609-610), etc.

8. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1955), p. 89; cf. pp. 88–93.

9. A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), p. 46. He cites other examples at ii.557 and viii.291.

10. O. Jespersen, Modern English Grammar (London, 1946), v, 45 ft, reviews the history of this form in English. Up to 1660 it “was used but sparingly by authors whose style was essentially English… . But after 1660 when English prose style developed a new phase, which was saturated with classical elements, the construction rapidly gained ground and was finally naturalized in the language.”

11. Poutsma, i, 973.

12. Jespersen, v, 49.

13. Werner Behrens, Lateinische Satzformen im Englischen: Lalinismen in der Syntax des englischen Humanismus (Münster, 1937). Behrens seems to count only participial phrases, not single modifiers.

14. Ronald Emma, Milton's Grammar (The Hague, 1963), p. 109.

15. Satires through v, “The Good-morrow,” “Song,” “Woman's Constancy,” “The Undertaking,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Computation.”

16. “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “The Wheel,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Demon and Beast,” “On a Political Prisoner,” “The Rose Tree,” “Sixteen Dead Men,” “Easter, 1916,” “Two Songs of a Fool,” “Upon a Dying Lady,” “Memory,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman,” and “The Wild Swans.”

17. “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Preludes,” “Gerontion,” and the first sixty-three lines of “Burnt Norton.”

18. See M. Majorie Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid (Oxford, 1931), and the opposing article by Walter Allen, Jr., “The Epyllion: A Chapter in the History of Literary Criticism,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, LXXI (1940), 1–26.

“E.g., Qu. My gratious lord, I come to bring you newes.
Edw. That you haue parled with your Mortimer.
Qu. That Gaueston, my Lord, shalbe repeald. Edw.
Repeald, the newes is too sweet to be true.
Qu. But will you loue me, if you finde it so?
Edw. If it be so, what will not Edward do?
Qu. For Gaueûon, but not for Isabell (II. 617–623).

[Hamlet] Did slay this Fortinbras; who, by a seal'd compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seiz'd of, to the conqueror (i.i.86-89);

or

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress of this warlike state,
Have we as it were with a defeated joy,—
With one auspicious and one dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage In equal scale weighing delight and dole,—
Taken to wife (i.8-14).

For this did th'Angel twice descend? for this
Ordaind thy nurture holy, as of a Plant
Select, and Sacred, Glorious for a while,
The miracle of men: then in an hour
Ensnar'd, assaulted, overcome, let bound
Thy Foes derision, Captive, Poor, and Blind
Into a Dungeon thrust, to work with Slaves? (SA, 11. 361–367).

22. See how he lies at random, carelessly diffus'd,

With languisht head unpropt,
As one past hope, abandond,
And by himself giv'n over;
In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds
Ore worn and soild (SA, 11. 118–123).

It shall be my delight to tend his eyes,
And view him sitting in the house, enobl'd
With all those high exploits by him atchiev'd,
And on his shoulders waving down those locks,
That of a Nation armd the strength containd (SA,ll.490-94).

From hence began that Plot, the Nation's Curse,
Bad in it self, but represented worse.
Rais'd in extremes, and in extremes decry'd;
With Oaths affirm'd, with dying Vows deny'd.
Not weigh'd, or winnow'd by the Multitude;
But shallow'd in the Mass, unchew'd and Crude.
Some Truth there was, but dash'd and brew'd with Lyes;
To please the Fools, and puzzle all the Wise.
Succeeding times did equal folly call,
Believing nothing, or believing all (11. 108–117).

Achilles heard, with grief and rage oppress'd,
His heart swell'd high, and labor'd in his breast;
Distracting thoughts by turns his bosom ruled;
Now fired by wrath, and now by reason cool'd
That prompts his hand to draw the deadly sword,
Force through the Greeks, and pierce their haughty lord;
This whispers soft his vengeance to control,
And calm the rising tempest of his soul.
Just as in anguish of suspense he stay'd,
While half unsheathed appear'd the glittering blade,
Minerva swift descended from above,
Sent by the sister and the wife of Jove (i.252-263).

Forth fly the tepid airs; and unconfined,
Unbinding earth, the moving softness strays.
Joyous the impatient husbandman perceives
Relenting Nature, and his lusty steers
Drives from their stalls to where the well-used plough
Lies in the furrow loosened from the frost.
There, unrefusing, to the harnessed yoke
They lend their shoulder, and begin their toil,
Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark (“Spring,” U. 32–40).

It may seem strange that Thomson's descriptive mode should increase the number of present participles, which had been a traditionally narrative device. The answer is that for the eighteenth century the form was a useful adjectivization of the timeless, categorizing simple present. The natural processes described in “Spring,” for example, have been, are, and will be the same, generally and iteratively. Each year the air unbinds the earth, each year softness strays about, each year the farmer sees nature relent, and so forth. The present participle, like the ubiquitous -y adjective, had become very useful for expressing quality and category. A standard example is the rising ground, which tells us not what the ground does but what it is like. (This use of the present participle as categorizer or qualifier explains the greater number of single-word, as opposed to phrasal, occurrences, a matter to be discussed in detail below.) At the same time, things have happened to Thomson's people, animals, and objects, and so the past participle is no less necessary: the plow has often been used, the yoke often harnessed to the oxen, and the oxen often cheered by the songs of birds.

Oh, what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence!
What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest to mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness!
(“Meditations in Time of Civil War,” 11. 25–40).

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad tight a carved dolphin swam.

29. See John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth Century Poetry (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1949), Geoffery Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (London, 1950), and Donald Davie, The Language of Science and the Language of Literature, 1700–1740 (London, 1963).

30. See Ivan Fonagy, “Informationsgehalt von Wort und Laut in der Dichtung,” Poetics ('s-Gravenhage, 1961), pp. 591–603, for a demonstration of how the relative redundancy of poetic and other forms of discourse may be measured by guessing techniques.

31. Shelley, like Spenser, the early Milton, and Keats, was fond of hyphenated compound forms. For a discussion of this interesting subject, see Bernard Groom, The Formation and Use of Compound Epithets from 1579 (S.P.E. tract No. 49, 1937), and Ch. vi of Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction (London, 1924).

32. Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton, N. J., 1962), pp. 9–10.

33. As quoted in Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), pp. 79–80.

34. Lewis, p. 43.

35. R. M. Adams, Ikon: John Milton and his Modern Critics (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955), p. 193, argues that in Samson Agonistes (11. 521–531) the stringing of clauses “loosely and episodically together,” without complete predicates, achieves effects of empty bluster and wavering resolution and “turbulent, pell-mell rush.” But neither of his examples quite proves the point; doesn't the sentence contain two perfectly well-formed predicates, excelled and walked about? It is not so much that Milton deletes predicates but that, as Adams elsewhere observes, he heaps up constructions so repetitively that one can lose track of the predicate. The effect is one of overloading rather than of throwing out “glancing” epithets and modifiers.

36. “Syntax and Music in ‘Paradise Lost’, ” in Frank Kermode, ed., The Living Milton (New York, 1961), pp. 74, 83. The remark was made with particular reference to Paradise Lost ?.677-678. See also Ricks, pp. 90 and 96, n., citing Donald Davie and John Wain on modifying words that “radiate both ways.”

37. “Adam Unparadised,” in The Living Milton, p. 94.

38. Ricks, p. 85.

39. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, as quoted by Ricks, p. 85.

40. Lewis, p. 41.

41. P. 66.

42. Answerable Style (Minneapolis, Minn., 1953), p. 123.

43. Stein, p. 124, feels that Milton's practice of commenting directly on the action in this way is not intrusive. The use of participle rather than predicate helps to minimize the prominence of these commentaries.

44. Mimesis (New York, 1957), p. 9.