The Verse · John Milton

The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in

Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; 3 rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true

great son,) in Euripides' Alcestis. She is veiled and to the garden to pronounce punishment upon the

must remain silent until ritually cleansed. humans, and Sin and Death create a broad high-

ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention

of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter; graced indeed

since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but

much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint, to express many

things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have

expressed them. Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish

poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works,

as have also, long since, our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all

judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in

apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from

one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault

avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This

neglect then of rhyme, so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may

seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example

set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the

troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

Book 1