10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8615
Questo articolo prende in esame la distribuzione di monosillabi grammaticali nel pentametro giambico inglese. Qui mostro che, nel Paradise Lost di Milton, la parola OF compare con frequenza maggiore all'inizio del verso di quanto ci si potrebbe normalmente aspettare; 27% di tutte le occorrenze si trova nella prima delle 10 posizioni metriche, e il 5% dei versi comincia con OF, rendendola così la parola più frequente all'incipit del verso. Questo potrebbe riflettere, suggerisco, il modo in cui Milton adopera l'enjambement nel poema. Ciò significa anche che OF potrebbe funzionare come indizio dell'inizio del verso, nel contesto di altre evidenze per la divisione del poema in tale unità, essenziale se il pubblico deve determinare la forma metrica del poema. Al contrario, nel verso sciolto del 1700 di Thomson e Cowper, è la parola AND a essere relativamente frequente all'inizio del verso. Eppure Wordsworth usa sia OF che AND come all'inizio dei propri versi, fondendo la pratica di Milton con quella di altri scrittori. L'articolo propone infine una riflessione sulla relazione tra le caratteristiche statistiche di un testo, e gli aspetti probabilistici della nostra conoscenza della forma letteraria.
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Nigel Fabb
Umanistica Digitale
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“Of” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line
Text.Serial.Journal
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
Articles
2019-09-03
2018-10-10
2019-09-03
2020-05-19
Um. Dig.
Nigel Fabb
2019/09/03
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8615
University of Strathclyde
2532-8816
6
Wordsworth
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Zwicky Arnold, M. and Ann D. Zwicky. 1987. Patterns First, Exceptions Later. In Robert Channon and Linda Shockey (Eds.), In honor of Ilse Lehiste. 525-538. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
“Of” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/8615/9376
     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019
N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8615


 “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

                                                Nigel Fabb

                                          University of Strathclyde
                                         n.fabb@strath.ac.uk




       Abstract. In this paper I discuss the distribution of grammatical monosyllables in the
       iambic pentameter line. I show that in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the word OF appears with
       greater than expected frequency at the beginning of the line; 27% of all instances of OF
       are in the first of the ten metrical positions, and 5% of all the lines begin with OF,
       making it the second most frequent line-initial word. I suggest that this might reflect the
       way that Milton uses enjambement in the poem. It also means that OF may function as a
       clue to the beginning of the line, in the context of other evidence for lineation, essential if
       the audience is to establish the metrical form of the poem. In contrast, in the eighteenth
       century blank verse long poems of Thomson and Cowper, the word AND is relatively
       frequent at the beginning of the line. But Wordsworth uses both OF and AND as
       frequent line-initial words, merging Milton’s formal practice with the practice of other
       writers. The paper concludes by reflecting on the relation between statistical
       characteristics of text and probabilistic aspects of our knowledge of literary form.
       Questo articolo prende in esame la distribuzione di monosillabi grammaticali nel
       pentametro giambico inglese. Qui mostro che, in Paradise Lost di Milton, la parola OF
       compare con frequenza maggiore all’inizio del verso di quanto ci si potrebbe
       normalmente aspettare; il 27% di tutte le occorrenze si trova nella prima delle 10
       posizioni metriche, e il 5% dei versi comincia con OF, il che la rende così la seconda
       parola più frequente all’incipit del verso. Questo potrebbe riflettere, suggerisco, il modo in
       cui Milton adopera l’enjambement nel poema. Ciò significa anche che OF potrebbe
       funzionare come indizio dell’inizio del verso, nel contesto di altre evidenze per la
       divisione del poema in tale unità, essenziale se il pubblico deve determinare la forma
       metrica del poema. D’altro canto, nel verso sciolto del 1700 di Thomson e Cowper, è la
       parola AND a essere relativamente frequente all’inizio del verso. Invece Wordsworth usa
       sia OF che AND all’inizio dei propri versi, fondendo la pratica di Milton con quella di
       altri scrittori. L’articolo propone infine una riflessione sulla relazione tra le caratteristiche
       statistiche di un testo, e gli aspetti probabilistici della nostra conoscenza della forma
       letteraria.




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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019


       Introduction

      This paper is an exercise in word-counting, involving John Milton’s long seventeenth
century poem Paradise Lost and a selection of long verse texts. Word-counting is a standard
practice in much digital humanities research, but this paper adds a contextual feature not often
considered, and specific to verse, defined as text which is divided into lines. I count OF, AND,
and some other common non-referential grammatical monosyllables, and I focus specifically on
whether these monosyllables are in line-initial position or some other position. This question is
particularly interesting for Paradise Lost (PL), a poem whose first two lines begin with the very
frequent word OF, and in which 5% of lines overall begin with OF. The statistic on which I
focus is that 27% of all instances of OF are line-initial. I look at a selection of other iambic
pentameter poems after PL, such as Thomson’s The Seasons and find in contrast that OF is not
relatively frequent at line-beginning, but that instead the highly frequent word AND is
relatively frequent at line beginnings (unlike PL). Wordsworth in the 1805 Prelude uses both
OF and AND frequently at line beginning, thus merging Milton’s OF pattern with the AND
pattern of other predecessors who influenced him such as Thomson.
      It is likely that these distributions are side-effects of another practice: that certain words
appear at the beginning of the line because of the syntactic or discourse structure of the text,
relative to the poet’s enjambement practice; that is, OF may be particularly frequent in PL
because noun phrases are easily split across lines, while AND may be particularly frequent in
other poets who favour a more paratactic sequence with less radical phrase-splitting
enjambements. However, even if the distributions of these words at line-beginning are side-
effects of linguistic and poetic structure, it is also possible for them to function as clues to the
line boundary. That is, if a word is relatively frequent at the beginning of the line, then it offers
evidence for where the line boundary falls (evidence which is weak on its own, but
strengthened in the context of other evidence). A hearer of the text (and a reader) must be able
to establish line boundaries in order to parse the metre of the poem, which I suggest is a
necessary part of the poem’s reception.



       The distribution of grammatical monosyllables in iambic
       pentameter poetry


      The iambic pentameter line, and grammatical monosyllables in books 8-9 of
Paradise Lost
All the poems to be considered here are in the metre iambic pentameter. The iambic
pentameter line is matched to a metrical template of ten positions, alternating weak and strong.
The line can also be thought of as a sequence of five iambic feet, each a pair of weak followed
by strong.
 W         S         W         S        W         S         W        S         W         S


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                                      N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

These ten positions are filled by ten syllables. Sometimes two syllables can fit a single position,
and sometimes there is an extra syllable at the end. There is a characteristic rhythm, with
stressed syllables tending to fall in the S positions, and unstressed or weakly stressed syllables
tending to fall in the W positions. This rhythm is rarely completely periodic (i.e., alternating
unstressed and stressed syllables across the line). The precise constraints on what rhythmic
variations are possible have been much discussed in metrical theory; Robert Bridges [1] wrote a
book on Milton’s prosody, and recent theoretical approaches include Hanson and Kiparsky
[12], Fabb and Halle [10], and Hayes, Wilson and Shisko [14].
In this paper, I focus on thirteen grammatical monosyllables. These include the ten words
which Ingram and Swaim ([16]: ix) omitted from their printed concordance of Milton because
they were of such high frequency: A, AND, BY, FOR, IN, OF, ON, THE, TO, WITH. To this
I have added the preposition AT (the next most common of the prepositions in PL), and OR
and BUT (more common in PL than some of the words listed by Ingram and Swaim). I have
treated both A and AN as a single word. All of these words - prepositions, articles and
conjunctions - tend to be unstressed, and they are much more likely to appear in W positions
than in S positions. They are thus good candidates for the first position in the line. I have not
included grammatical monosyllables which can carry reference, the pronouns and
demonstratives, both because they are easily stressed and also because they carry significant
semantic meaning, and thus their distribution is likely to be subject to different factors than the
prepositions, articles and conjunctions under consideration here.
This paper centres on the distribution of OF in PL. Bruce Hayes has prepared a version of
books 8 and 9 of the 1667 edition of PL in which syllables are separated into metrical
positions, thus making it easy to discover how the grammatical monosyllables are distributed
across the ten positions of the iambic pentameter line, as shown in Table 1. At 2,293 lines,
these two books constitute just over a fifth of the whole poem. 1


              W        S        W        S        W         S       W        S        W        S
              1        2        3        4        5         6       7        8        9        10     total
    AND       122      6        80       46       114       34      115      53       76       0      646
              19%      1%       12%      7%       18%       5%      18%      8%       12%      0%
    TO        109      36       47       40       56        31      79       75       73       0      546
              20%      7%       9%       7%       10%       6%      14%      14%      13%      0%
    THE       82       11       115      4        75        4       100      4        127      0      522

1    These books correspond to 9 and 10 of the second 1674 edition. In Hayes’s preparation, the text of
     the two books is laid out on an Excel spreadsheet, where each column contains all the syllables in a
     particular metrical position. I further distinguished actual monosyllables from syllables which are part
     of a larger word, to separate e.g., the grammatical monosyllable ‘for’ from the syllable ‘for’ as part of
     the word ‘forget’. Then I used the COUNTIF function to count instances of a particular word in the
     column.



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            16%      2%       22%      1%      14%       1%      19%      1%      24%      0%
 OF         128      19       53       23      80        21      62       23      46       0        455
            28%      4%       12%      5%      18%       5%      14%      5%      10%      0%
 IN         51       29       34       24      22        17      41       32      34       1        285
            18%      10%      12%      8%      8%        6%      14%      11%     12%      0%
 WITH       49       18       30       15      38        14      36       16      26       0        242
            20%      7%       12%      6%      16%       6%      15%      7%      11%      0%
 OR         36       1        24       17      22        9       28       14      31       0        182
            20%      1%       13%      9%      12%       5%      15%      8%      17%      0%
 BUT        44       1        10       12      21        8       19       16      20       0        151
            29%      1%       7%       8%      14%       5%      13%      11%     13%      0%
 ON         19       15       8        11      13        15      7        13      4        4        109
            17%      14%      7%       10%     12%       14%     6%       12%     4%       4%
 FOR        36       4        5        9       20        3       10       4       10       0        101
            36%      4%       5%       9%      20%       3%      10%      4%      10%      0%
 BY         26       8        9        8       12        9       12       6       5        1        96
            27%      8%       9%       8%      13%       9%      13%      6%      5%       1%
 A/AN       13       2        20       0       15        0       17       0       18       0        79
            15%      2%       24%      0%      18%       0%      20%      0%      21%      0%
 AT         9        6        6        4       7         3       5        9       17       0        66
            14%      9%       9%       6%      11%       5%      8%       14%     26%      0%
 total      724      156      441      213     495       168     531      265     487      6        3480
            21%      4%       13%      6%      14%       5%      15%      8%      14%      0%
Table 1: The distribution of the thirteen words in books 8 and 9 of PL (1667), ordered by overall
frequency

The top two rows of Table 1 show the ten metrical positions of the iambic pentameter line, and
whether that metrical position is weak or strong. The left-hand column shows the thirteen
grammatical monosyllables under examination. The right-hand column shows the total
number of tokens of that word in the text. The cells show the number of tokens in each
position, and the percentage relative to the total for that word. In this table, the monosyllables
are ordered vertically by order of frequency of each word in these two books of the poem. For
comparative purposes, I will retain the same order throughout this paper (though the frequency
order is not the same in all the poems).
Because the grammatical monosyllables tend to be unstressed or weakly stressed, the metrical
rules for iambic pentameter mean that they tend to fall in W positions, and this can be seen in
Table 1. Table 2 illustrates this, by showing nine lines, each with OF in a different metrical


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                                     N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

position; the rightmost column indicates the overall percentage of OF in that position in PL as
a whole. OF strongly tends to be in W positions rather than S positions.
                                                                  Book:line      Position     S/W          %
    Of Man, with strength entire, and free will arm’d,            9: 9           1            W            28
    Shorn of his strength, They destitute and bare                8: 1062        2            S            4
    From out of Chaos to the out side bare                        9: 317         3            W            12
    O fairest of Creation, last and best                          8: 896         4            S            5
    Deep to the Roots of Hell the gather’d beach                  9: 299         5            W            18
    Satan in likeness of an Angel bright                          9: 327         6            S            5
    Wondrous indeed, if cause of such effects.                    8: 650         7            W            14
    Above all Cattle, each Beast of the Field;                    9: 176         8            S            5
    O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears                        9: 842         9            W            10
     (NO EXAMPLES)                                                               10           S            0
Table 2: OF in the ten metrical positions in iambic pentameter in Books 8 and 9 of PL 1667 (equivalent
to books 9 and 10 of PL 1674)


For comparison, Table 3 shows ten distinct lines from books 8-9 with ON in each of the ten
positions. ON can be unstressed, weakly stressed or stressed, and even in the very strong tenth
position. ON appears overall 46% in weak positions and 54% in strong positions.
                                                                     Line #      Position     S/W          %
    On what thou hast of vertue, summon all,                         8: 374      1            W            17
    Till on a day roaving the field, I chanc’d                       8: 575      2            S            14
    Chiefly on Man, sole Lord of all declar’d,                       9: 401      3            W            7
    The evil on him brought by me, will curse                        9: 734      4            S            10
    To Beasts, whom God on thir Creation-Day                         8: 556      5            W            12
    Bitter ere long back on it self recoiles;                        8: 172      6            S            14
    Shall with a fierce reflux on mee redound,                       9: 739      7            W            6
    There dwell and Reign in bliss, thence on the Earth              9: 399      8            S            12
    Meanwhile ere thus was sin’d and judg’d on Earth,                9: 229      9            W            4
    Like a black mist low creeping, he held on                       8: 180      10           S            4
Table 3: BY in the ten metrical positions in iambic pentameter in Books 8 and 9 of PL 1667

The grammatical words may thus differ in how likely they are to occupy various positions.
Iambic pentameter lines are sometimes considered to have a ‘caesura’, not a strict rule but an
expectation that there is a major pause mid-way through the line, typically after the fourth or
sixth syllable. I now consider whether placement of grammatical words is sensitive to this
probabilistic mid-line boundary. Consider for example the use of OF after major pauses, as
marked in the printed text by a comma or period in Books 8 and 9 of PL.2 As Table 4 below
shows, where OF appears after these major pauses, the pause is most likely to be after position
4 (the position of one of the ‘caesurae’).

2     This again uses Bruce Hayes’s annotated text of books 8 and 9, marked for five levels of juncture.
      Here I focus on OF after a level 4 or 5 juncture, typically a comma or period in the printed text.


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         Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019


                                 W       S     W      S      W       S     W      S       W      S
                                 1       2     3      4      5       6     7      8       9      10     total
                                 12      2                           2
    OF                           8       0     53     24     77      0     62     23      46     0      453
                                 28      4     12            17      4     14             10
                                 %       %     %      5%     %       %     %      5%      %
    OF after major pause         17      1     4      3      16      1     10     4       3      0      59
    % of total OF in this        13      5            13     21      5     16     17
    position                     %       %     8%     %      %       %     %      %       7%            13%
Table 4: OF after a strong juncture in 1667 PL books 8 and 9

The interpretation of this finding is difficult, though it weakly supports the relevance of the
caesura. It might suggest that where OF does not come at the beginning of a line, it is still
drawn to the beginning of a half-line, thus marking out or responding to a metrical boundary,
even if not the line boundary.
The bottom two rows of Table 1 show that taken as a group the grammatical words have a
relative distribution of 21% in first position and 79% in other positions. It is also notable that
these words are almost never line-final: only 6 instances out of 3,480 are in tenth position. For
all the poems discussed in this paper, for this set of grammatical words, a similar distribution is
found: in the full Paradise Lost 20% of these grammatical words are line-initial, Milton Paradise
Regained 22%, Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra 20%, Dryden Aeneid 21%, Thomson Seasons
23%, Cowper Task 23% and Wordsworth 1805 Prelude 22%. This a striking cross-textual
correlation, given the multiple and varying causal factors which are probably involved.
In order to test statistical significance, I assume that a word belonging to this set of
grammatical words has an expected distribution of 21% at the beginning of the line and 79%
in the remaining nine positions, and I check actual distribution in any poem against this.
Other alternatives might have been considered; for example, we might have assumed that these
weakly stressed monosyllables appear at chance level in any of the five weak metrical positions,
but this is not a realistic expectation because of the various other factors involved in
determining the distributions of this kind of words. It remains unclear why these grammatical
words tend to appear between 20%-23% of the time in first position. We might have expected
a lower percentage, because grammatical words can appear in any of the first nine positions,
and thus we might have expected several percent less than 20% in first position. I assume
therefore that multiple factors conspire to make grammatical monosyllables of this kind appear
21% of the time in first position.
For each of the poems I examine in this paper, I produce a table as in Table 5, here illustrated
by the findings for Books 8 and 9 of PL (1667 edition),3 after preprocessing on available

3     For the determination of statistical significance I used R, using a version of this short program written
      by Chamil Rathnayake:
      exp <- c(0.21,0.79) #defines the expected distribution of 21% of a word in initial position and 79%
      in other positions


                                                       6
                                    N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line


digital editions.4

    Word        Total     Position 1                Other Positions                  χ2           p

                          n               %         n                       %
    AND         646       122             19%       524                     81%      1.741        0.187
    TO          546       109             20%       437                     80%      0.354        0.552
    THE         522       82              16%       440                     84%      8.809        0.003
    OF          455       128             28%       327                     72%      13.950       0.000
    IN          285       51              18%       234                     82%      1.657        0.198
    WITH        242       49              20%       193                     80%      0.083        0.774
    OR          182       36              20%       146                     80%      0.163        0.686
    BUT         151       44              29%       107                     71%      6.030        0.014
    ON          109       19              17%       90                      83%      0.837        0.360
    FOR         101       36              36%       65                      64%      13.055       0.000
    BY          96        26              27%       70                      73%      2.142        0.143
    A/AN        79        13              16%       66                      84%      0.983        0.321
    AT          66        9               14%       57                      86%      2.157        0.142
    total       3480      724             21%       2756                    79%
Table 5: Books 8 and 9 of Milton: Paradise Lost (1667 edition)

The χ2 test used here examines differences between the observed distribution of each word in
first position vs. other positions, compared with the expected 21%-79% distribution
(determined as described above). I constructed two categories (similar to a Yes-No scale) to
report whether an observation occurs in the first position or not. Table 5 reports the
distributions for two books of PL. It reports the specific χ2 value and significance is based on
(p<0.05), i.e., based on a 95% confidence interval. A p values below 0.05 indicate significant
differences, either greater than expected frequency or lower than expected frequency. Values in
the χ2 and p columns are rounded to three decimal points.




      obs.of <- c(557, 1494) #defines the observed distribution of a specific word, here OF in all of PL
      lapply(mget(ls(pattern=“^obs.*”)),chisq.test,p=exp)
4     In the analysis of the whole of PL and other whole texts, I counted the total number of instances of a
      word, and the number of instances of that word at the beginning of a line. I found digital version of
      the texts and stripped off everything except the lines of poetry. Line boundaries were marked by
      replacing paragraph marks (showing ends of lines) with a random symbol, here the percentage sign %.
      I used AntConc to search either for e.g., ‘of ’ to count all instances of OF in the text or ‘% of ’ to
      count the line-initial instances of OF.


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            Paradise Lost
Now consider Table 6, which expands Table 5 to show the distribution of initial vs. non-initial
words in the all 10,565 lines of Paradise Lost (1674 edition, from [21]).5

    Word        Total       Position 1                Other Positions                   χ2           p

                            n               %         n                       %
    AND         3336        578             17%       2758                    83%       27.141       0.000
    TO          2227        446             20%       1781                    80%       1.271        0.260
    THE         2752        399             14%       2353                    86%       70.117       0.000
    OF          2051        557             27%       1494                    73%       46.873       0.000
    IN          1365        273             20%       1092                    80%       0.823        0.364
    WITH        1162        277             24%       885                     76%       5.642        0.018
    OR          714         134             19%       580                     81%       2.145        0.143
    BUT         588         171             29%       417                     71%       23.149       0.000
    ON          536         86              16%       450                     84%       7.933        0.005
    FOR         466         120             26%       346                     74%       6.341        0.012
    BY          515         137             27%       378                     73%       9.742        0.002
    A/AN        563         107             19%       456                     81%       1.350        0.245
    AT          272         46              17%       226                     83%       2.740        0.098
    total       16547       3331            20%       13216                   80%
Table 6: Milton Paradise Lost 1674

In PL, four words have a distribution in first position, which (at 26-29%) is significantly higher
than the expected distribution of 21%: OF, BUT, FOR and BY. Of these four words, only OF
is a highly frequent word in the text as a whole, a factor which will be important in my
suggestion that OF is a clue to the location of the line boundary: the more frequent the word,
the better it functions as a clue. In contrast, the overall highly frequent word THE shows a
distribution in first position significantly lower than the expected distribution; I do not focus
on such significantly low distributions in this paper, since it is not clear that they play any
function in communicating the line boundaries to the audience.
Of the 2,051 instances of OF in PL, 557 are at the beginning of the line, 27% of the total.
This is a statistically significant difference from what I have suggested is the expected 21% for a
grammatical non-referential monosyllable in this position. 5% of the 10,565 lines in PL begin
with OF, and with 557 instances this makes OF the second most frequent line-initial word in

5     Note that this shifts from the 1667 edition used (based on Hayes) for the two books to the 1674
      edition (which has a different division of books), the latter being the digital edition provided by
      Project Gutenberg.


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                                    N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

the poem.
I propose that OF provides the reader (or listener) with evidence for line boundaries, evidence
which is interpreted in the context of other evidence offered by the text. This enables the
audience to establish lineation, and hence process the metre of the text. OF can perform this
function because of its combination of high overall frequency and high initial frequency.
Furthermore, the word OF is the first word in the first two lines of the poem, which might
further contribute to its being taken as evidence of a line boundary. The first six lines of the
poem are quoted below:
        Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
        Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
        Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
        With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
        Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
        Sing Heav’nly Muse, …


Here we see what Zwicky and Zwicky [32] refer to as ‘patterns first’, the tendency for
regularities to be established at the beginnings of poems. Because PL refers to the Aeneid in its
beginning, it is interesting to compare the beginning of Thomas Phaer’s translation of Virgil’s
Aeneid [22] in iambic heptameter rhyming couplets. When completed by Thomas Twyne after
Phaer’s death, this became the first full translation of the poem into English. Here are the first
six lines (with several new lines before the translation proper begins in line 4):
        I that my slender Oten Pipe in Verse was wont to sounde
        Of woods, and next to that I taught for husbandmen the ground,
        How fruite unto their greedy lust they might constraine to bring,
        A work of thankes: Lo now of Mars, and dreadfull warres I singe,
        Of armes, and of the man of Troy, that first by fatall flight
        Did thence arrive to Lauine Land, that now Italia hight.
        (Lally, 1987: 7)


Two of the first six lines begin with OF, and the fifth line has three instances of OF. 6 Virgil’s
Aeneid is relevant because the beginning of PL alludes to the beginning of Aeneid in various
ways and specifically with reference to the first three words of that poem: “arma virumque
cano”, literally “arms man-the-and sing-I”, whose second and third words are picked up in the
first six lines of the poem (quoted above). ‘Arms’ and ‘man’ are in the accusative case in Latin,
and some of the English translations choose to translate this literally as “Arms and the man I
sing who first did come” (John Ogilby, 1649), or “Arms, and the Man I sing, who, forc’d by
Fate” [5]. Milton is of course not translating Aeneid in PL, but his use of OF in “Of man’s ...”
echoes Phaer.
Milton’s distinctive placement of OF at the beginning of the line is amplified by John Philips in
6   Apart from this striking beginning, OF does not have any special status at the beginning of the line in
    their translation. In the first hundred lines, there are four lines which begin with OF, out of a total of
    25 uses of OF overall; though this is a small sample, it shows a distribution of 16% line-initial OF.


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his 1701 parody of Milton, ’The Splendid Shilling’, a poem of 141 blank verse lines ([15]:
112), in which 7 of the 21 uses of OF are line-initial. This is a higher proportion than in PL,
but we might expect distortions in a parody. The poem is so small as a sample that significance
tests are unreliable.

 Word         Total     Position 1               Other Positions              χ2        p

                        n                  %     n                 %
 AND          33        4                  12%   29                88%        1.568     0.211
 TO           15        4                  27%   11                73%        0.290     0.590
 THE          41        8                  20%   33                80%        0.055     0.815
 OF           21        7                  33%   14                67%        1.926     0.165
 IN           19        3                  16%   16                84%        0.311     0.577
 WITH         25        9                  36%   16                64%        3.391     0.066
 OR           23        5                  22%   18                78%        0.008     0.931
 BUT          4         3                  75%   1                 25%        7.031     0.008
 ON           4         1                  25%   3                 75%        0.039     0.844
 FOR          2         0                  0%    2                 100%       0.532     0.466
 BY           5         1                  20%   4                 80%        0.003     0.956
 A/AN         20        4                  20%   16                80%        0.012     0.913
 AT           6         0                  0%    6                 100%       1.595     0.207
 total        218       49                 22%   169               78%
Table 7: Philips ’The Splendid Shilling’

If we return now to Paradise Lost, what might we say about other grammatical words? In terms
of relative distribution in first position compared with other positions, BUT and BY are both
about as relatively frequent as OF, and WITH and FOR are slightly less frequent than OF.
These words might also constitute evidence for the line boundary, but because they are much
less frequent overall, their status as evidence is weak. It is worth noting the relatively low
percentage (17%) of instances of AND at the beginning of the line; this is interesting, because
we will see that in non-Miltonic blank verse, AND is in contrast quite frequent at the
beginning of the line.
I have suggested that the effect of having a higher than expected distribution of OF is that it
allows OF to be evidence for the line boundary, if combined with other evidence (as discussed
below). But this effect might arise from a reason unconnected from the cause: OF may appear
with higher than expected distribution at the beginning of lines in PL as a side-effect of some
other characteristic of the poem, such as its enjambements. For example, it is entirely plausible
that Milton favours a kind of enjambement which splits a noun phrase across the line
boundary, after the line-final noun, such that the next line begins with a preposition phrase


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                                    N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

including an OF-phrase. Table 8 shows the first twenty instances of line-initial OF in PL; all
but two have the OF-phrase as the complement of a noun, within a noun phrase. 7
                                                                                               line
    / Of Mans First Disobedience                           not a complement within an NP       1
    the Fruit / Of that Forbidden                                                              2
    on the secret top / Of Oreb                                                                7
    with all his Host / Of Rebel Angels                                                        38
    now / Of force believe Almighty                        not a complement within a NP        145
    from the Precipice / Of Heav’n                                                             174
    the force / Of subterranean wind                                                           231
    the shatter’d side / Of thundring Aetna                                                    233
    the sole / Of unblest feet                                                                 238
    their liveliest pledge / Of hope                                                           275
    on the perilous edge / Of battel                                                           277
    the Mast / Of some great Ammiral                                                           294
    on the Beach / Of that Inflamed Sea                                                        300
    all the hollow Deep / Of Hell                                                              315
    the potent Rod / Of Amrams Son                                                             339
    a pitchy cloud / Of Locusts                                                                341
    th’ uplifted Spear / Of their great Sultan                                                 348
    the greatest part / Of Mankind                                                             368
    with blood / Of human sacrifice                                                            393
    to the stream / Of utmost Arnon                                                            399
Table 8: Phrasal contexts for line-initial OF in PL

Corns ([3]: 37) discusses the organization of sentences relative to lineation in PL and other
poems by Milton and other writers: “Milton’s practice in organizing the arrangement of
sentences within the ten-syllabled line may be distinguished generally from the norms
contemporaneously obtaining and his practice in Paradise Lost is singularly unusual.” 20% of
the sentences in PL overlap both beginning and end of the line, compared with 11.3% in
Paradise Regained, and none at all in the samples Corns takes from three other poems from the
1640s-60s, Cowley’s Civil War, Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis and Fanshawe’s translation of the
Lusiads. This difference relates to Milton’s “generally freer notion of the relationship between
lineation and all syntactic structures down to the intraclausal level”, and this in turn may have
as one of its consequences the relatively larger number of lines beginning with OF in PL.
However, even if, as seems likely, the distribution of line-initial OF is related to the author’s
willingness to split a noun phrase across a line, such a cause may be unconnected to the effect.
That is, the enjambement practice or whatever else causes OF to appear at the beginning of the
line with such frequency may have no bearing on the use of OF as evidence of a line boundary.



7     To produce a list of all the lines containing OF, in sequence, I used Alpha
      (https://sourceforge.net/projects/alphacocoa/) and the ‘Find matching lines’ command.


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         Poetry which does not show the PL pattern of line-initial OF
In this section I examine three other long blank verse poems, and one poem in rhyming
couplets, and show that they do not have the distribution of OF found in PL.
I begin with Milton’s other long poem in blank verse, Paradise Regained (1671) (2070 lines in
total, text from [21]).



 Word        Total     Position 1              Other Positions                χ2          p

                       n              %        n                     %
 AND         695       146            21%      549                   79%      0.000       0.996
 TO          478       113            24%      365                   76%      2.008       0.156
 THE         554       92             17%      462                   83%      6.446       0.011
 OF          435       88             20%      347                   80%      0.156       0.693
 IN          243       50             21%      193                   79%      0.026       0.871
 WITH        179       35             20%      144                   80%      0.226       0.635
 OR          167       36             22%      131                   78%      0.031       0.860
 BUT         120       48             40%      72                    60%      26.112      0.000
 ON          94        22             23%      72                    77%      0.328       0.567
 FOR         92        36             39%      56                    61%      18.229      0.000
 BY          130       45             35%      85                    65%      14.526      0.000
 A/AN        147       25             17%      122                   83%      1.413       0.235
 AT          71        16             23%      55                    77%      0.101       0.751
 total       3405      752            22%      2653                  78%
Table 9: Milton: Paradise Regained

Here OF is at the beginning of the line for 20% of its instances, which is roughly the expected
frequency for a grammatical monosyllable, and hence OF is not able here to function as
evidence for the line boundary. Note that FOR (39%), BY (35%) and BUT (40%) show a
significant initial distribution, just as they do in PL, though they are not overall frequent. In
this poem there are no grammatical words which combine both a high overall frequency and a
high line-initial frequency, and hence there is no good reason to think that grammatical words
here function as evidence for the line boundary. Note incidentally that the overall distribution
of monosyllables in first position is about the same as in PL (at 22%).
Now I consider one of Milton’s major influences, Shakespeare’s blank verse, an example of what
Milton in the second edition of PL called “our best English tragedies”. Shakespeare’s blank
verse in general does not make prominent use of line-initial OF. Antony and Cleopatra is the
first play to rise in the use of line-initial OF, with 11% and all of the subsequent plays also have


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                                N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

between 9-11%.8 Table 10 shows the results for Antony and Cleopatra (the text used includes
some prose and some non-iambic pentameter lines, so it is not exactly comparable to the blank
verse poems discussed in this paper).



    Word      Total    Position 1              Other Positions               χ2          p

                       n              %        n                    %
    AND       600      166            28%      434                  72%      16.074      0.000
    TO        554      115            21%      439                  79%      0.020       0.889
    THE       829      168            20%      661                  80%      0.270       0.604
    OF        433      46             11%      387                  89%      28.102      0.000
    IN        258      33             13%      225                  87%      10.481      0.001
    WITH      182      35             19%      147                  81%      0.343       0.558
    OR        61       19             31%      42                   69%      3.786       0.052
    BUT       181      50             28%      131                  72%      4.788       0.029
    ON        95       7              7%       88                   93%      10.641      0.001
    FOR       190      34             18%      156                  82%      1.104       0.293
    BY        102      23             23%      79                   77%      0.148       0.701
    A/AN      341      59             17%      282                  83%      2.811       0.094

8    For this finding, I used LIWC, dividing the complete dramatic texts (including some prose
     and non blank verse) into sections, and ran it through a custom dictionary consisting of the
     grammatical words. The outputs of LIWC are in percentages of words per section not
     numbers of words per section as in ANTCONC, but proportions can still be established
     reliably. The results for OF are as follows, with plays in date order and the percentage of
     line-initial OF in parentheses: The Taming of the Shrew (4), The Second Part of King
     Henry VI (2), The Third Part of King Henry VI (3), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (5),
     Titus Andronicus (5), The First Part of King Henry VI (4), The Tragedy of King Richard
     III (4), The Comedy of Errors (6), Love’s Labour’s Lost (6), A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
     (6), Romeo and Juliet (7), The Tragedy of King Richard II (6), The Life and Death of King
     John (6), The Merchant of Venice (7), The First Part of King Henry IV (7), The Second
     Part of King Henry IV (3), Much Ado About Nothing (1), The Life of King Henry V (4),
     As You Like It (5), Julius Caesar (5), Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (6), The Merry Wives of
     Windsor (2), Twelfth Night; Or What You Will (3), Troilus And Cressida (5), Othello, The
     Moor of Venice (6), Measure For Measure (5), All’s Well That Ends Well (6), Timon of
     Athens (8), King Lear (4), Macbeth (7), Antony and Cleopatra (11), Coriolanus (9),
     Pericles, Prince of Tyre (9), Cymbeline (10), The Winter’s Tale (11), The Tempest (10), The
     Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII (11).



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 AT          74        16             22%     58                   78%     0.017       0.896
 total       3900      771            20%     3129                 80%
Table 10: Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra

The word AND combines high frequency with high initial position (a pattern we will see in
most other blank verse other than PL). But in stark contrast to PL, the word OF is the second
least likely word to appear at the beginning of a line. Milton’s blank verse PL is thus not
imitating a Shakespearean model in this regard. Note that the aggregate frequency of these
grammatical words at the beginning of the line is 20%, which is comparable to the frequencies
found in blank verse in general.
Next I consider a poem not in blank verse (which is always unrhymed), but instead in rhyming
iambic pentameter (in the pattern of heroic couplets). This is Dryden’s 1697 translation of the
Aeneid in 13,700 lines. I have chosen this for comparison because it is a long poem within the
same century as PL, as well as being a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem which in its
original form has links to PL.

 Word       Total      Position 1             Other Positions              χ2          p

                       n              %       n                   %
 AND        5042       1724           34%     3318                66%      528.970     0.000
 TO         2194       375            17%     1819                83%      20.197      0.000
 THE        7657       1306           17%     6351                83%      71.783      0.000
 OF         2007       181            9%      1826                91%      173.670     0.000
 IN         1586       195            12%     1391                88%      72.441      0.000
 WITH       1929       413            21%     1516                79%      0.196       0.658
 OR         327        137            42%     190                 58%      86.065      0.000
 BUT        526        336            64%     190                 36%      582.930     0.000
 ON         752        69             9%      683                 91%      63.377      0.000
 FOR        531        136            26%     395                 74%      6.808       0.009
 BY         581        88             15%     493                 85%      12.000      0.001
 A/AN       1538       177            12%     1361                88%      83.519      0.000
 AT         351        72             21%     279                 79%      0.050       0.823
 total      25021      5209           21%     19812               79%
Table 11: Dryden: Aeneid

The overall pattern presented here is very different from that seen in the Milton’s poems.
Though the overall distribution of grammatical monosyllables in first position is 21%, the
same as PL, there is a great deal of variation away from this, with many of the words showing a


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                                 N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

statistically significant variation above or below. Here, unlike PL, OF (9%) is at a very low
frequency at the beginning of the line. Again unlike PL (but like Shakespeare) AND (34%) is
the word which most combines overall frequency with relative frequency in first position.
Furthermore, as in other poems BUT (64%) and OR (42%) are also relatively frequent at the
beginning of the line, and here at a higher degree than in PL. It is likely that the major
differences from Milton, including the much lower percentage of line-initial OF, come from
the different form of the poem, where the rhyming couplets lead to a different kind of syntax
with less enjambement. All the remaining poems to be discussed are in blank verse.
         Table 12 shows the results for James Thomson’s 1746 The Seasons, a blank verse poem
in 5,541 lines [29].

 Word       Total     Position 1              Other Positions                χ2           p

                      n              %        n                     %
 AND        1598      516            32%      1082                  68%      122.790      0.000
 TO         724       149            21%      575                   79%      0.077        0.782
 THE        3479      500            14%      2979                  86%      92.126       0.000
 OF         1113      257            23%      856                   77%      2.933        0.087
 IN         629       157            25%      472                   75%      5.946        0.015
 WITH       444       149            34%      295                   66%      42.210       0.000
 OR         234       104            44%      130                   56%      77.526       0.000
 BUT        131       64             49%      67                    51%      61.267       0.000
 ON         243       31             13%      212                   87%      9.952        0.002
 FOR        119       42             35%      77                    65%      14.656       0.000
 BY         236       54             23%      182                   77%      0.504        0.478
 A/AN       441       110            25%      331                   75%      4.134        0.042
 AT         138       30             22%      108                   78%      0.045        0.831
 total      9529      2163           23%      7366                  77%
Table 12: Thomson: The Seasons

The distribution in initial position of OF (23%) is not significantly different from the expected
distribution. However, again we see that AND is both highly frequent overall and also has 32%
of its instances at the beginning of the line; 9% of the lines in the poem begin with AND. This
makes AND a possible cue to the line boundary. We saw the same in Dryden’s poem, and will
see a similar pattern in the next poem as well. We can also see that the relatively infrequent
overall words BUT, OR and FOR are all common at the beginning of the line, which we saw
also in Milton and does not seem to vary much between poets.
Table 13 shows William Cowper’s 1785 The Task, a blank verse poem in 5,184 lines (text from


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Cowper [4]).

 Word       Total     Position 1            Other Positions              χ2           p

                      n             %       n                    %
 AND        1948      604           31%     1344                 69%     117.560      0.000
 TO         771       200           26%     571                  74%     11.343       0.001
 THE        2225      434           20%     1791                 80%     2.995        0.084
 OF         1121      196           17%     925                  83%     8.351        0.004
 IN         661       96            15%     565                  85%     16.713       0.000
 WITH       502       121           24%     381                  76%     2.915        0.088
 OR         238       68            29%     170                  71%     8.224        0.004
 BUT        278       125           45%     153                  55%     96.232       0.000
 ON         136       17            13%     119                  88%     5.923        0.015
 FOR        227       48            21%     179                  79%     0.003        0.957
 BY         209       68            33%     141                  67%     16.765       0.000
 A/AN       796       108           14%     688                  86%     26.503       0.000
 AT         225       22            10%     203                  90%     17.080       0.000
 total      9337      2107          23%     7230                 77%
Table 13: Cowper: The Task

Here OF, the third most frequent word overall, is distributed 17% in line-initial position,
hence at a significantly low frequency. This is a pattern more in line with Dryden or Thomson,
and not at all like PL. As in Thomson and Dryden, the word AND combines high frequency
with a 31% possibility of being at the beginning of the line, making it a potential alternative
marker of the line boundary. BUT, BY and OR are also frequent at the beginnings of lines (but,
as elsewhere, not very frequent overall).
The conclusion to the discussion of Paradise Regained, the three non-Milton iambic pentameter
poems, and the Shakespeare play, is that OF is not used with a significantly high frequency at
the beginning of the line: thus, they differ from PL. However, in the three poems published
after Milton, AND is used with unexpected frequency at the beginning of the line, and since it
is also a very common word it might function as a line-initial marker. It is possible that the
differences in the uses of OF and AND arise from causal factors relating to the difference in
how enjambement works, and this is the difference between PL and the other poets discussed
here. OF is often found mid-way through a noun phrase, and if line-initial may involve the
more extreme forms of enjambement characteristic of PL, while AND can be clause-initial or
phrase-initial rather than splitting a phrase.




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                                  N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line


         Wordsworth
In William Wordsworth’s short 1798 poem in blank verse usually titled ’Tintern Abbey’ 38% of
the instances of OF are at the beginning of the line (edition from Wordsworth [31]).

 Word        Total     Position 1                Other Positions               χ2          p

                       n               %         n                   %
 AND         60        15              25%       45                  75%       0.579       0.447
 TO          18        5               28%       13                  72%       0.498       0.480
 THE         71        12              17%       59                  83%       0.719       0.397
 OF          61        23              38%       38                  62%       10.261      0.001
 IN          23        7               30%       16                  70%       1.234       0.267
 WITH        18        7               39%       11                  61%       3.472       0.062
 OR          6         1               17%       5                   83%       0.068       0.794
 BUT         4         1               25%       3                   75%       0.039       0.844
 ON          6         1               17%       5                   83%       0.068       0.794
 FOR         11        3               27%       8                   73%       0.261       0.610
 BY          5         1               20%       4                   80%       0.003       0.956
 A/AN        27        5               19%       22                  81%       0.100       0.752
 AT          1         0               0%        1                   100%      0.266       0.606
 total       60        15              25%       45                  75%
Table 14: Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey

More than half of the 159 lines of the poem begin with one of these grammatical words, while
OF is used at the beginning of 23 lines. 14% of all the lines begin with OF, and in a possible
echo of PL, it initiates the second line of the poem:
 Five years have past; five summers, with the length
 Of five long winters! and again I hear


Perhaps in this poem overall, Wordsworth is imitating Milton’s line-initial use of OF. It is also
possible that Wordsworth is imitating some aspect of Milton’s enjambement of phrases such
that OF appears frequently at the beginning of lines as a consequence. McCully ([20]: 209)
describes the extensive influence of Milton on Wordsworth, including on subtle aspects of his
use of iambic pentameter.
If we now consider Wordsworth’s long blank verse poem The Prelude in 8,483 lines (1805
version, text from Wordsworth [31]), we see not only the same distribution of OF as in PL
(27% at line beginning), but significantly that it is now combined with the same frequent use
of AND (28% at line beginning) which was seen in eighteenth century poets such as Thomson.

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 Word        Total     Position 1              Other Positions                χ2           p

                       n              %        n                     %
 AND         2333      643            28%      1690                  72%      60.537       0.000
 TO          1243      275            22%      968                   78%      0.946        0.331
 THE         2916      386            13%      2530                  87%      105.920      0.000
 OF          2130      570            27%      1560                  73%      42.605       0.000
 IN          1152      260            23%      892                   77%      1.710        0.191
 WITH        753       208            28%      545                   72%      19.908       0.000
 OR          415       108            26%      307                   74%      6.314        0.012
 BUT         304       104            34%      200                   66%      31.979       0.000
 ON          304       60             20%      244                   80%      0.292        0.589
 FOR         393       108            27%      285                   73%      9.950        0.002
 BY          451       107            24%      344                   76%      2.019        0.155
 A/AN        1424      292            21%      1132                  79%      0.210        0.647
 AT          256       31             12%      225                   88%      12.197       0.000
 total       14074     3152           22%      10922                 78%
Table 15: Wordsworth: The Prelude, 1805

Wordsworth appears to be combining the practices of Milton in PL with eighteenth-century
predecessors such as Thomson. His frequent line-initial uses of both AND and OF are evidence
for the line boundary. This is true even if the appearance of these words in line-initial position
is a result of Wordsworth mixing the enjambement practices of Milton and Thomson.
Different authors have different versions of iambic pentameter; they all use the same basic
template, but control the matching of syllables to positions in different ways: this is true for the
difference between Shakespeare and Milton, for example, as Kiparsky [17] and Hayes [13],
among others, have shown. McCully argues that Wordsworth merges elements of Shakespeare’s
practice with elements of Milton’s practice in his iambic pentameter. This is an example of
Wordsworth’s poetic hybridity, parallel to his hybrid use of line-initial grammatical words.


         The determination of the line boundary


         Evidence for the line
In this part of the paper I explore the possibility that in Paradise Lost the word OF functions as
a clue to the location of the line boundary, when combined with other evidence. The word may
function in this way, even if its appearance at the beginning of the line is caused as a side-effect


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                                 N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

of enjambement.
The audience needs to know where the line boundaries are in order to establish the metrical
form of the text. Metre is dependent on the division of a text into lines: the line is the linguistic
material which is matched to the fixed-length and fixed-shape metrical template (ten syllable
line fitting a ten-position template, in the case of the iambic pentameter). So if the metre is to
be established by the audience, they must also establish line boundaries. Once the metre is
established, experiential effects can arise which depend on the relation of metre to rhythm;
these can include the variations in relative regularity or irregularity (in the relation of rhythm to
metre) which for example produce the closural effects described for poems in general by Smith
[15], or for PL in particular by Corns [3]. Once the text is divided into lines, then the
mismatch of syntactic structure and lineation can produce particular effects, as argued for
Milton’s enjambements by Hollander [15]. Fabb [8] also argues that metrical form is processed
in working memory, which requires the text to be processed one line at a time, and in turn this
should influence how the poem is experienced. Division into lines may also aid long-term
memory for the text [30], which is a further motivation for identifying the line boundary.
There are various kinds of evidence for the line boundary in a poem (as discussed in detail by
Fabb ([7]: chapter 5)). An audience relates to a poem by reading it, hearing it, or remembering
it. The audience can find evidence for the line boundary from either textual or non-textual
sources. There are several non-textual kinds of evidence. If read, the visual presentation of the
poem shows the line boundaries. If heard, the poem can be performed in a way which indicates
the line boundary, for example by pausing distinctively at the line boundary. If recalled from
memory, both the visual and aural experience of the poem might be recalled as part of the
evidence.
The kinds of textual evidence for the line boundary are either linguistic or poetic. Poetic
evidence can come from line-final rhyme, in rhyming poems (but not in the unrhymed blank
verse poems discussed here). Poetic evidence can also come from the metre, if the metre can be
established by the audience. In iambic pentameter texts, line-final syllables are ten syllables
apart and must be word-final, so if the poem is parsed correctly, each ten syllable sequence
forming a line must end at the end of a word. The first position of the line has a distinctive
metrical/rhythmic potential, which is that although it is a weak position, it is more likely than
any other weak position to be occupied by a stressed syllable (‘trochaic inversion’), so that
rhythmic aperiodicities are most likely to arise at the beginning of the line. The last syllable in
the line is almost always stressed, and as in many metrical traditions, the line tends to be more
rhythmically regular in its later part; this is noted for example by Corns ([3]: 92), who notes for
a particular coherent passage in PL that the concluding lines have fully periodic rhythm in the
last four positions, but a more variable rhythm in the first six (passages I: 730-7 and IV: 935-
45). In this paper I also argue that there is linguistic evidence for the line boundary, in the
deployment of particular words such as OF with greater than expected frequency at the
beginning of the line. These kinds of poetic and linguistic evidence may play a relatively small
role if the poem is read on the page, a larger role if heard (particularly in a performance style
where there are no line-final pauses), and an even larger role when the poem is held in memory.
The remembering of the poem has a particular relevance for Milton, who was losing or had lost


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his sight while he was composing PL, and would have needed to develop ways of remembering
and keeping track of the lineation of stretches of the text when he was composing it, so that he
could later dictate it. The use of OF as partial evidence for line boundary may have played a
function for him during this early period of blindness, different from that of his previous
poems, and also different from the later Paradise Regained, which was composed more quickly
after he had been blind for a while.9
OF, as evidence for the line boundary in PL, combines a 27% probability of being at the
beginning of a line with a high frequency of overall occurrence (there are 2,051 instances of OF
in the whole poem). It is possible to find a grammatical word with a higher probability of being
line-initial, but at much lower frequency. For example BUT is relatively more frequent at the
beginning of the line in PL (29%), but relatively infrequent overall in comparison to OF, with
588 instances of BUT in the poem. If BUT is also sentence-initial, there is a 68% probability
of its being line-initial, but it is even less frequent in this instantiation: 73 instances in the
poem. Here we balance two issues. On the one hand, the word OF or the word BUT are both
probabilistic clues to the line beginning, irrespective of how many lines actually begin with
these words. On the other, the clues will be more useful if more lines begin with these words,
hence the overall frequency of the word in the text plays a role; of the 10,565 lines in PL, 557
(5%) begin with OF and 171(2%) begin with BUT. The addition of context to a word such as
its being sentence-initial also requires greater processing effort. In the case of OF, we can
increase the reliability of the word as a line-marker by excluding all cases of OF which are
preceded by an unstressed syllable, on the fairly reliable assumption that the preceding line-
final syllable will always be stressed; but this contextual information requires more processing
effort and hence is less useful.
Previous authors have shown that a grammatical word can be used to mark a boundary in a
literary text (see summary in Fabb ([6]: 193-212)). For example, Ghezzi [11] argues that in
Ojibwe narratives, the overall narrative is divided into sections (in twos and fours, some as
small as a clause), which can be referred to as ‘lines’ (following the approach to North
American indigenous oral literatures proposed by Dell Hymes). Here, some but not all of the
‘lines’ begin with the word ninguting (‘now presently’), a word with little contribution to the
meaning of the text and which functions primarily as a boundary marker. Rubin, Wallace and
Houston ([25]: 447) discuss the frequent use of AND at the beginning of the line in ballads
(almost a fifth of the ballad lines begin with AND in their small corpus); they suggest that
AND functions usefully as an unstressed word which fits into a metrically weak initial position,
and can be used as a relatively meaningless filler which allows the next word to be a stressed
and important content word. Their experimental subjects who had to remember and recall the
corpus ballads and compose new ballads also tended to use AND at the beginning of lines:
“after learning only five ballads, the subjects did begin their ballad lines with the word AND”.
This suggests that the experimental subjects learned that AND had a relatively high probability
of being line-initial.
Several kinds of evidence can be combined to give stronger overall evidence. For example, on
9   Thanks to Thomas Corns, personal communication, for suggestions relating to Milton’s blindness; see
    also Lancashire ([19]: 89).


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                                 N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

its own the distribution of OF cannot tell us where the line boundaries fall in PL because only
27% of instances of OF are line-initial, and OF comes at the beginning of only 5% of the lines
in the poem. However, in the context of other evidence, whether textual or non-textual, OF
may offer some additional evidence to strengthen the judgment of where the line boundary
falls. The ‘patterns first’ fact that OF is used at the beginning of the first two lines of the poem
may be interpreted also as an indication that OF should be taken as a (weak) clue in this way.


       Probabilistic judgments of literary form
Fabb [7] argues that for many aspects of literary form, the literary text has that form by virtue
of the form being attributed to it by its reader or hearer, with a certain degree of probability.
This includes the attribution of the form ’line’ to a sequence of words. The balance of evidence,
each with its own probability, can lead to the decision that a sequence of words is a line.
A different but compatible approach to probabilistic literary form is offered by current theories
of generative metrics such as Hayes et al. [14] or Kiparsky [17]. In the Hayes et al. [14] theory,
iambic pentameter involves a template to which a line is matched. Successful matching depends
on the prosodic structure of the line, including the pattern of syllables and stress, and the
division into words and prosodic phrases. Shakespeare and Milton both use a slightly different
metrical grammar for iambic pentameter; the different grammars constrain the matching of
line to template in slightly different ways, even if they are all using the same general metre, e.g.,
iambic pentameter. This means that the distributions of prosodic variants of the iambic
pentameter line are different for the different poets. The prosodic variants can be described in
statistical terms for the different authors’ corpora. Each specific line of the poem belongs to a
set of lines which all have the same prosodic structure, and the probability of that prosodic
structure fitting the metrical template is assessed by the specific metrical grammar used by the
poet. The probability of the match correlates with the frequency with which lines of each
prosodic type will appear in the text. Highly probable matches will describe the prosodic
structures of highly frequent lines. In this way, the statistical characteristics of the text
correspond to the metrical grammars which guide the psychological processes by which the
poems are produced. Hayes et al. focus on the authorial production of these regularities, but it
is possible that an audience, too, can learn to distinguish the different forms of iambic
pentameter used by Shakespeare or by Milton, and so may internalize the statistical properties
of the data as mental metrical grammars. Thus, McCully [20] argues that Wordsworth
internalized a metrical grammar by learning from the distribution of metrical variants in
Shakespeare’s and Milton’s poems.
There is good reason to think that our interactions with the world in general can be understood
in terms of probabilistic psychological processes and states (in ways inaccessible to
introspection). This is the basis for example of Clark’s [2] account of the predictive brain. It is
also seen in statistical learning, where subjects are able to learn statistical characteristics of the
data presented to them. Thus there is precedence for the claim that, in the right circumstances,
an audience can learn the statistical characteristics of a text. For our purposes, the two key
distributions are that we generally expect the grammatical monosyllables to appear 21% of the



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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019

time at the beginning of the line, and that we learn that in PL, OF appears 27% of the time at
the beginning of the line, hence more than expected, given that it is a grammatical
monosyllable. The right circumstances might involve some strong clues (e.g., the use of OF at
the beginning of the first two lines of PL), and will depend on what the audience is exposed to,
and able to learn. It may be that the first time an audience hears PL, it is hard to learn that OF
is a statistically frequent line-initial word, but poems like PL can be encountered several times
and on re-reading, or re-listening, an increased familiarity with the poem will enable the
audience better to learn the statistical characteristics of it.
These discussions all raise the question of how the audience for poetry acquires these sorts of
probabilistic understandings of textual form. This might arise in part from inherent biases or
from explicit learning (e.g., learning about the iambic pentameter), or, most interestingly, from
exposure to texts. Exposure to texts with particular statistical characteristics may result in the
audience learning how to predict the properties of the text, including for example learning that
OF has a 27% likelihood of being at the beginning of the line in PL, or (following Hayes et
al.), that there is a higher probability of some line types in PL than others. If an author engages
consistently in a particular textual practice, then they have internalized a probabilistic system,
which can also in part come from learning (e.g., learning from other poets, learning from their
own practice). These considerations in turn raise two further interesting questions. Consider
first the possibility that these predictions are acquired by statistical learning. Siegelman and
Frost [26] show that an individual can vary in their ability to learn statistically, depending on
what is learned; and furthermore that there is inter-individual variation in the ability to learn
statistically (with some experimental subjects entirely unable to learn statistically, for specific
kinds of learning). Individual authors and individual audience members might thus vary in
their ability to learn the properties of a metre, or the distributional characteristics of words. If
the individual is a poor statistical learner, then they may produce inconsistent texts (and hence
have an attenuated stylistic fingerprint), or they may be unable to learn textual regularities. The
second question relates to surprise (or more technically, surprisal): one of the basic claims of
many literary critical approaches to metre is that the changing relation between the metrical
template and the rhythmic line of poetry can be experienced. Thus the listener can experience
‘tension’ if the prosody of the line is not exactly matched to the template. And, following Smith
[28], the listener can experience ‘closure’ if relative irregular rhythms give way to regular
rhythms at the end of a poem (or irregular gives way to irregular, as Fabb [9] argues). If,
however, the listener has internalized the range of possible variations, with probabilities
attached to them, this might mean that no variation is surprising or has any experiential effect,
because all the variations are already predicted. This raises some difficult but also very large
questions about the relation between variations in literary language, the knowledge of variation,
and the ability to be surprised by variation.


       Conclusion

Much digital humanities work, for example in stylometrics, focuses on the ‘small’ words, such
as the grammatical monosyllables discussed here. This paper has explored the distribution of


                                                22
                                N. Fabb - “Of ” in Paradise Lost as evidence for the metrical line

these words relative to position in the metrical line. The distribution of these words may tell us
about aspects of the syntax of the poetry, as regards syntactic structure across line boundaries.
The distributions also characterise different works, and different traditions of composition, and
Wordsworth combines two different traditions in his poetry. I have also shown how the
findings of textual analysis can be understood in terms of probabilistic judgments of literary
form, here using the statistical behaviour of a grammatical word as evidence for the line
boundary. This is part of a broader project of exploring the statistical properties of texts as they
relate to human psychology and the possibility of statistical learning.


       Acknowledgments

Thanks to Achim Barsch, Stefan Blohm, Mark Bruhn, Thomas Corns, Elizabeth Finnigan,
Bruce Hayes, Arthur Jacobs, Elspeth Jajdelska, Barbara MacMahon, Chamil Rathnayake,
Stefano Versace. Thanks in particular to Rocco Coronato and Sara Gesuato for organizing the
conference from which this paper emerged, and for comments on the paper. I also thank two
anonymous referees. This article draws on my Major Research Fellowship titled Epiphanies in
literature: a psychological and literary linguistic account, which was funded by the Leverhulme
Trust.


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Last URLs access: 17/06/2019




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