Milton, as Professor Thompson has said, “realized that form is determined not by rule or precedent but by the thought to be expressed. Hence he adapted the pattern of the epic to his own ends, and wrote as a creative artist.”¹

From its opening invocation Paradise Lost invites attention to this process of adaptation and transcendence. The initial statement of the threefold subject (disobedience and woe, till restoration) immediately suggests specific comparison with the opening statement of the Aeneid (Troy fall and wandering, till the new city be founded). This suggestion is reinforced periodically throughout; so also is the opening invocation's adventurous claim to no middle flight above the Aonian mount, no mere description of the loss and restoration of an earthly city. And one of the chief pleasures of the student of Milton has always been to watch, under the guidance of skilled commentators from Addison to Professor Thompson, how Milton expressively modifies the conventions and the pattern of epic to suit the meanings of his theme.

So guided, most of us readily agree with Addison's observation that Paradise Lost does not fall short “of the Iliad or Aeneid in the beauties which are essential to that kind of writing”; and it is to be hoped that the tradition so established may somehow be continued in spite of the difficulties of increasing unfamiliarity with Milton's classical models. The process of adaptation was in fact one of Milton's chief instruments of expression. Each of his important poems assumes as one of its points of departure a tradition of interpretation and a convention of form, and in each of them successful communication depends very largely on a recognition of likeness as the basis for expressive variation. Nor is this the case merely with conventional detail. It may be doubted whether the total force of Paradise Lost can ever be felt by a reader who does not recognize how its total pattern reproduces while modifying and modifies while reproducing the total pattern of the Aeneid.

It is not difficult to win from a modern reader half of this recognition. But when one has shown that the Aeneid has indeed a significant structural pattern—six Odyssean books of wandering balanced by six Achillean books of war and establishment, three distinct movements of four books each, six groups of two books apiece, with the structural weight so made to fall on a series of prophecies of glory to be won from apparent failure—when one has indicated by simple arithmetic the controlling structural pattern of Virgil's epic and has turned to Milton's awareness of it, one is almost certain to be met by the complaint that Milton does not imitate it adequately. Before long one is likely to find oneself dealing, like Professor Thompson on another occasion², with the implications of Addison's remark that the tenth book of Paradise Lost “is like the last act of a well-constructed tragedy, in which all who had a part in it are drawn up before the audience, and represented under those circumstances in which the determination of the action has placed them.” Are not the succeeding books, it is asked, superfluous, or at any rate (as Addison notes) “not generally reckoned among the most shining books of the poem”? And does not this mean, among other things, that Milton's imitation of the Virgilian pattern is inadequate?

It is difficult to convince a modern reader that Milton's intention was not merely to copy but to adapt the Virgilian pattern, to use the classical models as bases for variations which would assist in the expression of the Christian theme. The paradox of the Christian theme is itself difficult enough to express convincingly. Milton already found it so. But it is perhaps just here that the comparison and contrast with Virgil may be of most effect. We have at any rate a suggestive point of contrast in the attitudes of the two poets towards their work. The Roman poet on his death-bed, we are told, gave direction that his beautifully patterned epic should be burned; the blind Milton, in the year of his death, produced a “revised and augmented” edition of his poem, correcting errors in spelling and punctuation and even tinkering with its division into books in order to change what the title-page of 1667 had described as “a poem written in ten books” into “a poem in twelve books.” This tinkering is Milton's last recorded comment on his poem.

II

At first sight this change in numeration seems of little moment. Editors usually draw our attention to the fact that, by the simple process of dividing roughly in half the two longest of his 1667 books, Milton accomplished a redivision ever since regarded as perfectly just. The change involved no shifting about of material whatsoever, and only the slightest of additions. Four lines were added at the beginning of the new book VIII to provide the appearance of a new departure; they indicate, it is said, no change in direction; our first parent is merely represented as guilty of a momentary lapse of attention in the middle of Raphael's lecture. Similarly, five lines were added for the beginning of the new book XII (and the Argument was slightly revised); Michael is merely made to pause for a moment in his partially illustrated address, “betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd.” That is all. Milton has perceived that a poem which invites comparison with the ancient epics, and particularly with Virgil, ought to have twelve books, not ten.

It seems a strangely retarded perception. Someone should ask at least for once the eminently simple-minded question. “What cause … ?”

With almost any other poet, though blind, this question might well be left unasked. English Renaissance poetry is a major field of bibliographical activity because of infinitely numerous revisions of more extensive importance than this. Yet the meticulousness with which the blind Milton revised Paradise Lost for the 1674 edition, with the absence of any other major changes of any kind, suggests the desirability of contemplating even this shred of evidence as to the author's intention in a poem so vast and variously interpreted. And there are two characteristics of Milton's major poems which suggest that the question may not be unprofitable. One is his habit of using a conventional form as a point of departure; the other his architectonic skill. Both depend in considerable measure for their success on simple clarity in the initial massing and division of material.

The effect of balance more or less characteristic of any work of art frequently arrives in Milton at a mathematical plainness almost suggestive of the counting of lines. We need not suppose that his muse worked quite so mechanically or laid so lowly a burden on herself; but Milton's mind operated at ease only when he perceived in or imposed on his material a precise mathematical division of some sort. No doubt such precision gave him a much-needed sense of security and control. At any rate, it is certainly a fact (of which I once tried to make something …) that much of the force of the “Hymn” of the Nativity Ode and also of Lycidas is derived from the modulation of three equally and precisely balanced movements, similar in figurative (or structural) pattern, yet evolving a cumulative effect through variation. At the other end of Milton's career, Samson Agonistes, it is well known, consists of five perfectly regular and almost mathematically equal “acts,” each reproducing and developing towards its completion the basic pattern of trial and triumph in defeat. Milton did not always reach such precision. The genre of Comus could perhaps hardly have sustained such rigorous definition as is possible in other forms, though its much revised structure deserves closer analysis from this point of view; implicit in Paradise Regained there is such a structural pattern, though handled in a way unusual with Milton. But it is obvious that this simple effect of balance was of importance to him, and one can sometimes watch him striving to impose a pattern of exact balance where none perhaps existed. A large example (upon which I have commented at length elsewhere) is to be seen in his attempt in Defensio Secunda in 1654 to see in his controversial activity a consistent threefold pattern; in the 1640's, he says, he perceived that there were three species of liberty; the chronological blocks of his prose deal with them in an orderly and (it is implied) predetermined sequence. It is curious that a mind so bent on well-balanced hinging should feel it desirable to change the book divisions of its major production after a seven-year interval.

The habit of taking as an expressive point of departure some traditionally fixed or even highly conventionalized form (sonnet, masque, elegy, epic, tragedy), and the instinctive habit of dealing with poetic material in clearly defined and precisely balanced blocks held together and given extension by their reproduction of some basic pattern, are not of course merely Miltonic habits. They are only more obvious in him than they are generally in the poetic art of the Renaissance—or of any highly conscious creative period. They contribute to one of the uses of poetry which was of the utmost importance to him. As Professor Woodhouse and Professor Tillyard among others have indicated, Milton's major poems seem to have performed a cathartic function for the poet himself: each seems in its creation a process whereby the poet resolves a paralysing tension. This is obvious in the cases of Lycidas and Samson Agonistes; and, properly handled, the obvious need not divert us for long from the poem to the poet. It would seem that in moments of tension Milton found a secure point of departure in the fixity of some traditional form (and, of course, though it is not in question here, some traditional complex of ideas), and that the precise balancing of blocks of poetic material afforded him a secure and regularized channel within which to resolve the tension by the working out of variations.

Does this generalization hold for Paradise Lost as well as for Lycidas and Samson Agonistes? If one's first (though not one's final) observation about “a true poem” is that it is “a composition and pattern,” why did Milton in 1674 find himself dissatisfied with the composition and pattern implied by the division of the material of Paradise Lost into ten books? Is it possible that the simple redivision into twelve books (“differently disposed,” as Edward Philips tells us, “… by his own hand, that is by his own appointment”) indicates that the process of resolution had not quite clarified itself when Milton published the poem in 1667, that subsequently he saw in it a pattern which the ten-book division tended to obscure?

III

The original ten-book division immediately suggests comparison with the drama. It inevitably recalls Davenant's projected structure for Gondibert. It also implies that the structure of Paradise Lost owes much to the neo-classical theory, formulated by the Italians and of great force among Milton's English predecessors, which closely associated the tragic and the epic forms and resulted in a long series of abortive five-act epic experiments.³ The relation of Milton's theory to this tradition deserves closer attention; the redivision of Paradise Lost seems at first to suggest that he never quite made up his mind as to whether “the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed. …”

However that may be, the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost presents a firmly organized five-act epic, perfectly exemplifying what were thought to be the Aristotelian requirements for structure. It successfully achieves what Sidney had earlier attempted, and it certainly out-Gondiberts Davenant. Its plot is seen at a glance to consist of five “acts” (with appropriate “scenes”), and the cumulative effect of these acts is exactly what Davenant said it should be.

Act I presents Satan's revival in Hell, and the council's sketching out of the plot against man with Satan's voyage to the universe; books 1 and 2. (Throughout, in order to reduce the exposition to the very nadir of simplesse, Arabic numerals will be used to indicate the books of 1667, Roman for those of 1674.) Act II, having opened with a scene in Heaven firmly focussed on the curve of Satan's flight, carries him to earth and leads to his first attempt to put the plot in operation; books 3 and 4. Act III, with that freedom which is one of the recognized advantages of epic, returns us in actual time to events in the past, the war in Heaven and Satan's defeat; books 5 and 6. In terms of formal development—the subject of actual and apparent time is far too complex for attention here—it gives a decided turn to the plot's development: Satan is twice temporarily defeated. Act IV is the crucial act. It consists of books 7 and 8: book 7, Raphael's account of the Creation and the colloquy on astronomy and woman, now known to us as books VII and VIII; and book 8, the book of the Fall, known to us as book IX. This act decisively changes the direction of the action: Satan has at last succeeded; and this “counterturn” is confirmed by the final act, books 9 and 10. Act V presents the immediate consequences of the Fall (book 9, now known to us as X), and the scriptual vision of misery, Michael's prophecy, with the expulsion from Paradise (book 10, now known to us as XI and XII).

The ideal formal requirements for five-act epic set forth in the Preface to Gondibert could hardly be more adequately fulfilled. Says Davenant:

The first Act is the general preparative, by rendring the chiefest characters of persons, and ending with something that looks like an obscure promise of design. [So in Paradise Lost Satan, and the first sketch of the design against man which provides the poem with its plot.] The second begins with an introducement of new persons [God, the Son, the angels], so finishes all the characters [Adam and Eve], and ends with some little performance of that design which was promis'd at the parting of the first Act [Satan inducing Eve's dream of evil]. The third makes a visible correspondence in the underwalks, or lesser intrigues, of persons [Satan's conflict with God], and ends with an ample turn of the main design and expectation of new [Satan's temporary defeat in Heaven, from which, as we know, he has already partially recovered]. The fourth, ever having occasion to be the longest [so indeed it certainly is in Paradise Lost, 1667] gives a notorious turn to all the underwalks [the Creation], and a counterturn to that main design which chang'd in the third [Satan's successful achievement of man's fall]. The fifth begins with an intire diversion of the main and dependent Plotts [the penitence of Adam and Eve, the Son's intercession, Satan's return to hell—though perhaps here alone Milton faults in his design], then makes the general correspondence of the persons more discernible [Michael's implied commentary on the action], and ends with an easy untying [in Paradise Lost, uneasy tying?], of those particular knots which made a contexture of the whole, leaving such satisfaction of probabilities with the Spectator as may perswade him that neither Fortune in the fate of Persons, nor the Writer in the Representment, have been unnatural or exorbitant.⁴

It seems a pity that the Satanic interpreters of Paradise Lost have not generally been familiar with the five-act epic theory, or with Davenant's preface, or with the 1667 edition, when such satisfaction of probabilities might have been theirs. For the implications of the ten-book division of the poem are too plain to need much comment. The five-act structural emphasis comes down heavily on the crucial fourth act: Satan's successful counterturning of God's creative design when man's fall is accomplished. The “main design,” artfully left doubtful at the end of the first two acts, and given a “turn” at the end of the third, receives its definitive pattern through the counterturn at the end of the fourth (book 8, or IX). What follows in the final act, the vision of unending earthly misery and the expulsion from Paraside, serves only to make clear the pattern of woe which makes the contexture of the whole.

Was it Milton's aim in the redivision of the poem in 1674 to shift this weight of emphasis from the book of the Fall, and so to offset the not merely dramatic but tragic implications of the counterturn in what looked like Act IV? The redivision does not change the actual structure of his poem in any way. Does it, however, by suggesting a different structural pattern, bring out implications muted in the earlier division?

IV

A poem is not, in spite of Davenant and neo-classicism, a “building”; it moves in time, it does not stand in space. Yet a poet may not unjustifiably say, with Davenant, “you may next please, having examined the substance, to take a view of the form, and observe if I have methodically and with discretion disposed of the materials.…” Under some circumstances he may even be justified in imitating some of the architectural tricks, so popular in the seventeenth century, whereby an appearance of considerable extension is given to an unavoidably narrow edifice.

If the term “baroque” is applicable to Milton, it can certainly be used to describe the most obvious effect he achieved by turning books 7 and 10 into books VII and VIII and books XI and XII. Did he remember at this point, one wonders, the baroque illusion which offsets the narrowness of the Laudian chapel at Peterhouse (where flowing curves along the short horizontal much extend the facade) or the great curve of the collonade of St. Peter's? However that may be, the effect of the redivision in this respect is no mere illusion. It gives to the material of his poem following the defeat of Satan in Heaven an appearance of extension equal to its actual original weight in number of lines. The total number of lines in the last four books of the original poem is some three hundred—but only some three hundred—less than that of the first six books. The division of this material into six books gives the poem the just balance demanded by the treatment its theme has received. It is the ten-book division which, in this respect, is an illusion. Is the five-act pattern an illusion also?

The division into twelve more than modifies the five-act scheme. By presenting an arrangement reminiscent of Virgil's it induces a pattern of emphasis very different from that examined in the preceding section. Obviously the twelve books of 1674 fall into six groups of two books each. The first three groups remain as they were, with the decision of the action left temporarily in the balance. But the fourth group now presents, not the Creation and Fall (7 and 8), but the Creation and Adam's progressive understanding of his situation through his colloquy with Raphael (old 7 become VII and VIII). The fifth group now presents in combination Adam's fall and penitence (the second half of old Act IV with the first half of old Act V; old 8 and 9, new IX and X). And the sixth the vision of human misery, and Michael's prophecy of the Messiah with the expulsion (old 10 become XI and XII).

The shift in grouping is so simple, involving as it does mere numbering, that the importance of the result may pass unrecognized. The mind of a responsive reader does rest, consciously or unconsciously, at the end of each book of a long poem, and at the end of each pair. The reader is induced so to rest in Paradise Lost by the invocations and the new departures in subject matter in the first three pairs of the poem. This rhythm will be continued to the end. In the 1667 arrangement the mind will come to rest on the Fall and the expulsion; looking backward, it will see its rests at the ends of the first three groups as premonitions of these events. In the 1674 version, it will come to rest on Adam's understanding of his situation (and of love), reached under Raphael's direction, on the contrition of Adam and Eve and their hope of mercy, and consequently on the Messianic prophecy of final victory as well as on the expulsion from Paradise.

As one looks back over a poem in which the rests have come as they do in the 1674 division, one sees that the structural stress has throughout fallen with increasing weight on the foreshadowings of the Son's ultimate triumph, on the operations of the divine mercy and love. It is here that Paradise Lost reproduces while modifying the large structural pattern of the Aeneid, with its steadily repeated prophecies of Roman glory. The correspondence is not exact. How could it be? But the expressive reminiscence is clear in 1674, as it was not in 1667. Indeed, whereas the prophecy sounded most clearly by Virgil at the end of books two (Creusa), four (Mercury), six (the Sibyl), and eight (Vulcan), dies away in the fury of the struggle with Turnus, the prophetic note of Paradise Lost swells from the ambiguity of Satan's view from the steps that link Heaven and Earth, and of the scales seen aloft, through the victory of the Son in Heaven to Michael's final prophecy. Moreover, in the new pattern, implications lost in the tragic structure of 1667, are underlined for the memory. One example must suffice. We are in error when we see the discourse on love at the end of book VIII and of the fourth group merely as prelude to and motivation for the Fall; it is also prelude to man's restoration and to the reconciliation of Adam and Eve at the end of book X and of group five. Adam in fact falls in imagination when he speaks wildly of Eve's beauty in book VIII; he is restored to sanity by the intervention of Raphael before the book ends. When at the end of the next two-book group we come to rest on the reconciliation of Adam and Eve, we shall look back across the Fall, not so much to Adam's imaginative lapse as to the sanity Raphael taught. And we shall look forward to Adam's restoration to something more than mere sanity at the end of the two-book group to come.

Such is Milton's discretion in the new disposition of his materials. The purpose of the redivision is to reduce the structural emphasis on the Fall of man and to increase the emphasis on his restoration. And this shift in emphasis is underlined by other structural effects of the redivision which combine to shift onward the poem's centre of gravity.

V

The ten books of 1667 will divide in but two ways: into five “acts” and into two blocks of five. The twelve books of 1674 (such is the force of simple arithmetic) divide in three ways.

Like the Aeneid, the Paradise Lost of 1674 consists of three movements of four books apiece. As with the “Hymn” of the Nativity Ode and with Lycidas, the three movements develop variations on a basic pattern. Virgil's first movement of four books turns upon Dido (and Creusa); his second carries Aeneas from Carthage to the moment when Turnus is about to attack, by way of the Sibyl; his third describes the war with the Latins. No correspondence to this pattern of three large and equally balanced movements is suggested by the ten-book division of 1667. In 1674 the three movements are clearly defined: one turns upon Satan, one upon the Son, one upon Man. The curve of the first is defined by Satan, reviving and frustrated, of the second by the Son as avenging justice and as creative love, of the third by Adam's fall and restoration. The rests at the ends of the first two movements fall upon the scales seen in heaven and on the delicate balance of Adam's original perfection, of the third on the balance to be made up at the last.

Each of these movements pauses and turns, as do Virgil's, upon its centre. It is not merely the direction of Satan's actual flight which changes between books III and IV; the apparent revival which has brought him to the verge of heaven's light now becomes a clear process of degeneration marked by God's comments, Satan's soliloquy, and his discomfiture in the garden. So the second turns with the Son from avenging justice to creation. So the third turns from sin through penance towards regeneration.

However one looks at the structure of Paradise Lost in its new division, attention is focused firmly on one point, variously indicated from different angles. The ten-book division presents a five-act structure, and that structure is tragic. Its centre, if it has one, lies between books 5 and 6; that is to say, in the midst of the War in Heaven, with evil at its most arrogant height. But that centre is an illusion which obscures the halving of the poem by actual number of lines. The redivision of 1674 presents a poem which in structural pattern, however viewed, hangs self-balanced on its centre. That centre is between books VI and VII, with evil on the one hand frustrated, and on the other creation and recreation. Every structural subdivision in the poem is so aimed.

Is the new absent-mindedness of our first parent, one wonders, after all so insignificant, as he

Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear;
Then as new wak't thus gratefully repli'd … ;

or Michael's medial pause? And is it wholly a flight of fancy to see the simple redivision as changing a tragic pattern into the three-fold pattern of a divine comedy, underlining the intention expressed in the opening invocation by throwing into clearer relief the adaptation and modification of the Virgilian pattern?

Yet it would not be true to say that by the simple act of redivision Milton has repudiated the theory of the five-act epic. Five acts can still be readily discerned in the 1674 poem, though they are not the same as those of 1667. Milton makes no sacrifices; to be “still closing up truth to truth” is for him the golden rule in epic structure as well as in theology and arithmetic. The first two “acts” remain unchanged: books I and II, Satan's revival and the sketching out of the plot; books III and IV, his arrival in Paradise and the failure of his first attempt. But Act III is no longer simply books V and VI, the war in heaven and Satan's defeat; it is now the whole of Raphael's reminiscential narrative, with the commentary, books V to VIII, in the actual time-scheme of the poem one day. Act IV is now books IX and X, the Fall and its consequences ending in penitence, in the actual time-scheme one more day, while Act V has become books XI and XII (old 10), man's misery and redemption or, in terms of Adam himself, the process of regeneration, the work of but another day.

In this dramatic scheme the new Act III provides a most “ample turn of the main design and expectation of new,” but the turn is no longer in Satan's temporary defeat at the hands of avenging justice; it is in the operations of creative love as it acts purposefully, and in Adam's progressive recognition of its meaning. Act IV, still the crucial act, no longer gives “a counterturn to that main design which changed in the third,” for its end is no longer Satan's success but man's penitence and reconciliation; it therefore underlines the turn of Act III and prepares for the final victory to be prophesied in Act V.

The dramatic and epic structural patterns are thus brought into exact alignment by the simple redivision of 1674. Paradise Lost is in fact the consummate example of five-act epic structure. Its author's final tinkering clarified its beautifully coherent epic pattern on the Virgilian model and adjusted its drama to leave with the reader a much deeper “satisfaction of probabilities.”

VI

Did Milton succeed through this redivision in changing “those notes” to epic? That is another question. It is with structural pattern that we have been directly concerned throughout, and with intention as it expresses itself in structural emphasis, not with execution. We have indeed been dealing with an imitation of an imitation several times removed, and with the shadow of a fictional skeleton. The substance (and indeed the actual shape) of the fiction remained quite unchanged in 1674. But the change does alter the light in which it appears, and may suggest that it is at once less questionable and more questionable than has sometimes been thought.

Milton, it is clear, was by no means unaware of what has been called “the unconscious meaning” of Paradise Lost. It may be that in 1667 he was not quite aware of it, or that for some reason or other he was then much inclined towards it; it is certainly emphasized by his having written in ten books. But the 1674 renumbering indicates his consciousness of Satan's power over the poem, and (if it was not simply a trivial toying) the new disposition was meant to strengthen Satan's chains. Its motive was to shift the poem's emphasis and its centre in a way that would point more clearly to its stated intention. Paradise Lost was always meant to be a poem whose beginning is disobedience, which middle is woe, and whose ultimate end is restoration. It may be that the intention was clouded in 1667, or that Milton's view of restoration was obscured. The 1674 revision is at any rate an effort to clarify the poem's ways.

It is also clear that Milton's control over his vast material never wavered, though he may not always have been clear as to what he was doing or had done with it. He renumbers his books; he does not change his argument. The masses have been set in their places, though they have not been properly identified. And yet one must pause. If the disposition of the masses was patient of a tragic pattern of structural interpretation in 1667, the unmoved masses remain patient of it after the tinkering of 1674. If they were patient of a Virgilian patterning in 1674, they were already so in 1667. No amount of arithmetical ingenuity can obscure this fact. One must read both poems and see both patterns, for the two patterns suspend the theme between the horns of a paradox. This is the chief function of its structure.

Among the Miltonic virtues we have lately been taught to question—from organ music and amplifying imagery to simple honesty—architectonic skill is not yet numbered. Every interpreter, of whatever colour, will allude to it, even if it be only of purpose to imply in passing that this is a virtue typical of rigid Puritan neoclassicism. Both the devoted enthusiast and the iconoclast underline his claims to consistency and therewith his claim to having raised his great argument to a solid architectural height. The enthusiast would see him as a noble Colossus, last of some titanic race of Renaissance poets, towering in splendidly integrated certainty above the New Atlantis and the mutable flood engulfing it. The iconoclast chooses to see him either as inflexibly imposing his rigorous and suffocating will on paradise, or as hypocritically pretending to an assurance which nevertheless only reveals the confusion of his motives. Milton has, to be sure, himself invited such interpretations; but it might be better if we ignored them and saw him more often (as Carlyle saw a lesser poet) as one “carrying a bit of chaos about him … which he is manufacturing into cosmos.” He is not profitably to be identified with any of these monsters of our distraught imagination—or of his own.

Nor are his great poems, for all their regularity of structure, to be regarded as rigidly static compositions of the architectural order appropriate to Victorian tombs and monuments. They are works of poetic art, the pattern of their evolution in time beginning usually as a reminiscence of some pattern established in the past, and nearly always controlled by easily recognizable structural balance, but always in process of development through conflict and resolution towards a harmony which is dynamic because it is the result of tension released in a creative act. This harmony they by no means always perfectly achieve, less frequently than Milton himself wished to believe. Nor need they so achieve it. They do not represent or express or entomb an unutterable perfection; they indicate a direction in which perfection may be achieved. At their best they pause, like Michael, betwixt a world destroyed and world restored; and the creative act for poet and reader often comes afterwards, while the poem is “thought … still speaking,” like Raphael.

Paradise Lost (Professor Bush has made one certain) is to be regarded as no mausoleum of decayed classicism. It is rather to be read as a metaphor of spiritual evolution. Its structural pattern is neither rigidly fixed nor shifted; it is shifting. The firmness with which Milton defines his structural blocks serves chiefly to sustain the Christian paradox on which the metaphor is hinged. It would seem that in the redivision of 1674 Milton underlines the direction of the shifting. Whatever the cause, it indicates what Professor Thompson himself has so well illustrated: he remained intent on the perfect adaptation of the pattern to the end.

Notes

1. Essays on Milton, 1914, pp. 83-4.

2. “For Paradise Lost, XI-XII,” Philological Quarterly, XXII (1943), 376-82.

3. On this theory before Milton, see R. H. Perkinson, “The Epic in Five Acts,” Studies in Philology, XLIII (1946), 465-81.

4. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Spingarn, II, 17-18.

   [EDITOR'S NOTE. For other comments on the structure and patterns of Paradise Lost, see E. E. Stoll, UTQ, III (1933-34), 3-16; B. Rajan, “Paradise Lost” and the Seventeenth Century Reader, 1947; A. S. P. Woodhouse, UTQ, XXII (1952-53), 109-27; R. Colie, JWCI, XXIII (1960), 127-38; J. B. Stroup, TSL, VI (1961), 71-5; H. F. Robins, JEGP, LX (1961), 699-711; O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument, 1962; on classical models and principles, C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 1945; D. Bush, CJ, XLVII (1952), 178-82, 203-4; J. Richardson, CL, XVI (1962), 321-31; K. Svendsen, PQ, XXVIII (1949), 185-206; J. M. Steadman, SN, XXXI (1959), 159-73; on the dramatic element, J. H. Hanford, SP, XIV (1917), 178-95; R. Durr, JAAC, XIII (1955), 520-26; D. Knight, SAQ, 63 (1964), 44-59.]