Milton's sequence of clauses "His state /Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed" is exceptionally difficult to perform rhythmically. The shorter a phrase, the more it resists being stretched over a prosodic boundary. The sentence "His state is kingly" contains only five syllables, but is stretched over a line boundary, assigning two very short syntactic fragments to either side. The sequence "thousands at his bidding speed" is stretched over a caesura, that intrudes upon it after the second syllable ("thousands"). In his reading of this hard-to-perform poem, Sean Barrett offers satisfactory solutions to most of the enjambments (as, for instance, in "Who best / Bear His mild yoke"). However, regarding the sequence "His state // Is kingly: thousands / at his bidding speed" his performance is quite disappointing. He isolates the sentence "His state is kingly" from both the preceding and the ensuing sentences by longish pauses. The word "state" is brief, and subordinated by a low intonation contour to the predicate "is kingly", suppressing any suggestion that "state" may end a versification unit. Likewise, the subsequent longish pause and the absence of any cue for discontinuity after "thousands" suppresses any suggestion that we may face here an iambic pentameter line articulated by a caesura. We simply perceive two unmetered prose utterances "His state is kingly", and "Thousands at his bidding speed". Listen to his reading of these lines.
With the audio processor Praat I reduced the tempo (=lengthened the duration) of "state", to indicate discontinuation at the line boundary, and generated a rising-falling intonation contour on the vowel of "state", loosening the perceptual subordination of this word to the predicate. This yielded a fair indication of line boundary after "state", without having recourse to a straightforward pause. For good perceptual reasons, verse lines longer than seven syllables must be articulated into quasi-symmetrical hemistichs by a caesura. The brief sequence "is kingly" forces a 3+7 division on the verse line, upsetting its balance. The obtrusive break after the third position demands an obtrusive caesura after the fourth, fifth, or sixth position of the pentameter line (in this case, after "thousands"). So, I considerably shortened the ensuing pause, but still retained a part of it, so as to indicate discontinuity after "kingly" but allow, at the same time, to perceive the first five syllables of the line as one coherent hemistich. To achieve this, I also had to indicate discontinuity after "thousands", without having recourse to a straightforward pause. For this end, with the audio processor Audacity I reduced the tempo (=lengthened the duration) of "thousands", and lengthened, in addition, the duration of the /n/. This yielded a fair indication of an obtrusive caesura, without having recourse to a straightforward pause. Listen to the doctored version:
To foreground the change, listen to two tokens of "His state", excised from the genuine and the doctored readings, respectively.
Figure 1 Wave plot and F0 contour of the genuine and doctored tokens of "his state".
Now listen to two tokens of "Thousands", excised from the genuine and the doctored readings, respectively.
Finally, listen again to a reading of the sestet, with the doctored section inserted in it.
The foregoing exercise does not presume to prescribe which one is the "correct" performance of Milton's hard-to-perform verse lines. Its purpose is to demonstrate that a performance can be imagined or secured in which the conflicting patterns of language and versification are simultaneously perceptible. The theory underlying the present work offers a psychological definition of "rhythmical performance", and predicts that certain performances are more rhythmical than others. To confirm or refute such predictions there are no other criteria than to submit the readings to the judgment of flesh-and-blood listeners. Pairs of imagined performances, however, cannot be submitted to panels of flesh-and-blood listeners. They can be tested (in principle, at least) only by comparing two actual performances, if available, in which rival conceptions are thought to be actualized; or by comparing a genuine recording with an electronically-manipulated version of it—manipulated in accordance with explicit theoretical considerations.
Recording
On His Blindness by John Milton read by Sean Barrett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0RrfIEmYj0
Audio processors
SoundScope 16/3.0 (ppd)
Praat 5.0.43
Audacity 1.3.7
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