Poetical Works | Page 5

to discover, though roughly it is clear the reduplication was
intended to mark
emphasis. For example, in the speech of the Divine
Son after the battle in heaven (vi. 810-817) the pronouns which the
voice would naturally emphasize are spelt with the double vowel:
Stand onely and behold
Gods indignation on these Godless pourd

By mee; not you but mee they have despis'd,
Yet envied; against mee
is all thir rage,
Because the Father, t'whom in Heav'n supream

Kingdom and Power and Glorie appertains,
Hath honourd me
according to his will.
Therefore to mee thir doom he hath assign'd.

In the Son's speech offering himself as Redeemer (iii. 227-249) where
the pronoun all through is markedly emphasized, it is printed mee the
first four times, and afterwards me; but it is noticeable that these first
four times the emphatic word does not stand in the stressed place of the
verse, so that a careless reader might not emphasize it, unless his
attention were
specially led by some such sign:
Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life
I offer, on mee let thine
anger fall;
Account mee man.
In the Hymn of Creation (v.160-209) where ye occurs fourteen times,
the emphasis and the metric stress six times out of seven coincide, and
the pronoun is spelt yee; where it is unemphatic, and in an unstressed
place, it is spelt ye. Two lines are especially instructive:
Speak yee
who best can tell, ye Sons of light (l. 160);
and
Fountains and yee, that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs,
warbling tune his praise (l. 195).
In v. 694 it marks, as the voice by its emphasis would mark in reading,
a change of subject:
So spake the false Arch-Angel, and infus'd
Bad influence into th'
unwarie brest
Of his Associate; hee (i. e. the associate) together calls,
&c.
An examination of other passages, where there is no antithesis, goes to
show that the lengthened form of the pronoun is most frequent before a
pause (as vii. 95); or at the end of a line (i. 245, 257); or when a foot is
inverted (v. 133); or when as
object it precedes its verb (v. 612; vii.
747), or as subject follows it (ix. 1109; x. 4). But as we might expect
under
circumstances where a purist could not correct his own proofs,
there are not a few inconsistencies. There does not seem, for example,
any special emphasis in the second wee of the
following passage:

Freely we serve.
Because wee freely love, as in our will
To love or
not; in this we stand or fall (v. 538).
On the other hand, in the passage (iii. 41) in which the poet speaks of
his own blindness:
Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, &c.
where, if anywhere, we should expect mee, we do not find it, though it
occurs in the speech eight lines below. It should be added that this
differentiation of the pronouns is not found in any printed poem of
Milton's before Paradise Lost, nor is it found in the Cambridge
autograph. In that manuscript the
constant forms are me, wee, yee.
There is one place where
there is a difference in the spelling of she,
and it is just possible that this may not be due to accident. In the first
verse of the song in Arcades, the MS. reads:
This, this is shee;
and in the third verse:
This, this is she alone.
This use of the double vowel is found a few times in Paradise Regain'd:
in ii. 259 and iv. 486, 497 where mee begins a line, and in iv. 638
where hee is specially emphatic in the concluding lines of the poem. In
Samson Agonistes it is more frequent (e.g. lines 124, 178, 193, 220,
252, 290, 1125). Another word the spelling of which in Paradise Lost
will be observed to vary is the pronoun their, which is spelt sometimes
thir. The spelling in the Cambridge manuscript is uniformly thire,
except once when it is thir; and where their once occurs in the writing
of an amanuensis the e is struck through. That the difference is not
merely a printer's device to accommodate his line may be seen by a
comparison of lines 358 and 363 in the First Book, where the shorter
word comes in the shorter line. It is probable that the lighter form of the
word was intended to be used when it was quite unemphatic. Contrast,
for example, in Book iii. l.59: His own works and their works at once

to view with line 113: Thir maker and thir making and thir Fate. But
the use is not consistent, and the form thir is not found at all till the
349th line of the First Book. The distinction is kept up in the Paradise
Regain'd and Samson Agonistes, but, if possible, with even less
consistency. Such passages, however, as Paradise